Dryden took the controls. He increased the power and felt the Black Hawk shift beneath him. Rachel grabbed the sides of her seat. The rotors reached a scream, and the forest floor dropped away. Dryden hit the master switch for the exterior lights; the encircling wall of sequoias appeared from the darkness as if he’d waved a magic wand. From the cockpit of the helicopter, the clearing suddenly looked a lot smaller than it had from outside. With the trees topping out above two hundred feet, it felt more like a deep well than a clearing. Climbing out of it was going to be the most dangerous part of the escape.
Compounding the risk was the fact that he had to do it quickly. On the satellite feed, the team on the ground had cut their distance from the clearing by half, in less than a minute. They’d be right beneath the Black Hawk in another fifty seconds or so, firing at it with everything they had.
Dryden divided his attention between the trees and the satellite image. He pushed the climb rate to the maximum that he felt comfortable with—then pushed it 10 percent higher. It was a reasonable gamble: risk crashing by going too fast, or guarantee being shot down by going too slow.
He leaned forward and tried to see the treetops. It was hard to judge, but he guessed he had seventy feet to go. On the display, the team was now perhaps fifty yards from the clearing.
Dryden noticed a data tag in the lower left corner of the satellite feed: SAT-ALPHA-MIRANDA 21.
Miranda. He’d heard whispers of a project by that name, just hitting the drawing boards around the time he’d gotten out of the business.
At that moment the satellite display went black.
“I guess we weren’t supposed to see that,” Rachel said.
“Be glad they can’t shut off the engines. That’ll be on next year’s model.”
The tops of the trees were dropping past them now. Their highest boughs fell away, and suddenly the Black Hawk was in the clear above the forest. The sequoia canopy planed away to the base of the mountains, like a rough carpet in the moonlight. Dryden pushed the stick forward and felt the bird tilt in response. That was when the first bullets hit.
It sounded like a hailstorm against the armored underside of the craft. Multiple firestreams raking the metal at once. Rachel screamed. One of the lights shattered, and something near the tail rotor gave off a shriek, but the caution advisory panel remained silent.
After what felt like ten seconds but was probably no more than two, the chopper lumbered forward in response to the tilt. In the last moment before it left the airspace above the clearing, the front-right nose window imploded, and Rachel gasped sharply—an involuntary sound that had nothing to do with fear. Dryden had heard men make that sound before.
Leaving just enough of his attention on the controls to keep the Black Hawk climbing away over the forest, he switched on the cabin lights and turned to Rachel. Her eyes were huge, and she was holding her left arm to her side with the other hand. Where the arm met her chest, there was blood everywhere.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They were over open country now, ten minutes west of where they’d taken off. The overspeed indicator was screaming. Dryden ignored it. He ignored everything he could afford to and kept the rest of his attention on Rachel.
There was no way to assess the extent of her injury. He needed both hands—both feet, too—on the controls, and she couldn’t remove the top half of the kiln suit by herself. With the suit still on, Dryden could get only the roughest visual sense of where she’d been hit. The arm, at least; he could see the exit hole the bullet had made near her triceps. He guessed it’d entered on the inward part of the arm, lower down. Whether it’d hit anything else before that—leg, abdomen, upper torso—he couldn’t tell.
“Keep pressure on the arm,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but you have to.”
Rachel nodded, frantic and exhausted at the same time. Losing strength.
“Take another deep breath for me,” Dryden said. “Slow in, slow out.”
She complied. Over the headset, he listened to the sound as she exhaled.
No rattle. No wheeze. Good signs, so far.
“Any pressure?” he asked. “Anything feel like it’s stopping you from expanding your lungs?”
She shook her head.
Also good—but no reason to relax. Damage to the chest could be tricky, as well as deceptive. A bullet could miss the heart and lungs but still cause internal bleeding, slowly building pressure against the lungs until one or both collapsed. In shock, as Rachel certainly was, it was possible to miss the signs.
Dryden had the Black Hawk as low as he felt comfortable flying—two hundred feet off the deck. Out ahead was Fresno, maybe another ten minutes away, though outlying districts of the city were closer.
He looked at Rachel’s arm again. She had her right hand clamped around it above the exit wound—a far cry from a tourniquet, but the best option available for now. There was some blood visible around the hole in the suit, but there was no way to tell how fast she was bleeding. Anything coming out of her was running down her arm inside the sleeve.
So far, she hadn’t cried. Dryden wished he could chalk it up to heroism on her part, but life had taught him better. It was the shock—she simply hadn’t begun feeling the pain yet.
It was coming though. Coming on right now, he guessed, given her body language.
“It’s starting,” he said.
She nodded, moved her hand to reposition her grip on her arm, and winced hard.
A second airspeed alarm sounded, this one telling him he’d descended too low for this rate of speed. He climbed until it went silent again. Beside him Rachel shuddered, fighting the tears but losing.
* * *
Gaul paced, his cheeks and forehead flushed darker than any of the techs had seen them before.
The satellites kept up with the chopper easily. Three feeds were dedicated to it, at varying frame widths. A fourth frame was scaled wide enough to take in all of Fresno, along with forty miles of open country to the north and west. There was a reason for that. There were other airborne objects being monitored. Fast-moving ones.
“How’s the math stacking up?” Gaul asked.
“It’s going to be tight,” Lowry said.
Gaul said nothing more. He continued pacing.
* * *
Watching Fresno rise to meet them, Dryden scanned the outlying grid for a place that met his requirements. It had to be open enough to land the chopper in, but it also had to be crowded with people. The parking lot of a mall might do. He watched for one—then saw something better.
“You like football?” Dryden asked.
“I might,” Rachel said. “I don’t remember.”
The stadium—for a high school, by the look of it—lay a quarter mile ahead, lit up with a night game in progress. The stands looked to be a third full. Dryden pulled back on the stick, slowing the Black Hawk’s forward speed.
Fifteen seconds later they were directly above the field, hovering stationary. Every face below, in the stands and on the turf, was turned up toward the chopper. Dryden dumped it into a breakneck descent, and the players scattered like leaves in the rotor wash.
“I’m going to carry you,” Dryden said, “and it’s going to hurt like hell. But no matter what, you’re going to keep pressure on that arm.”
Forty feet above the deck now. Thirty. Twenty.
“I don’t know how much more it can hurt than this,” Rachel said.
“You will. And if you need to scream, scream.”
He gave it power at the last second to soften the touchdown, and the instant he felt the wheels hit, he was out and moving, rounding the nose to Rachel’s side, opening her door.
“Lean against me when I lift you. I’m going to carry you with one arm.”
“What are you going to do with the other one?” she said, and then she understood—not by mind reading but simply by seeing. “Oh wow.”
“Try to see the humor in it,” he said.
She tilted her body into his own, sucking in a de
ep breath as she did. He got his arm beneath her knees and lifted her.
She screamed.
Behind Dryden, a few dozen gawkers were running from the sidelines toward the Black Hawk. He turned to them, raised the SIG SAUER in his free hand, and opened fire into the dirt far shy of them.
Panic hit the crowd like a rogue wave, turning it, propelling it back. Even those in the stands reacted, surging for the big exit tunnels at each level. As Dryden had seen from the air, the tunnels were huge relative to the crowd that would flow through them. No risk of the kind of dangerous bottlenecks that sometimes happened with stampedes. Just a couple of hundred people hauling ass for the parking lot.
Carrying Rachel, Dryden sprinted to follow the crowd, making for the nearest field-level tunnel.
He was halfway there when the ground came to life with a bass vibration and a pair of F-18 Hornets screamed over the stadium, missing the top seating section by no more than a hundred feet. A heartbeat later the trailing sonic boom shattered the field lights, plunging everything into near-darkness.
Dryden wondered how much closer he could have cut it. He had no doubt the fighters would have turned the Black Hawk into a fireball if it had still been airborne.
He kept moving with the crowd. The darkness and confusion were to his advantage, if anything. He kept the SIG low at his side, ready to raise it and deter any potential heroes, but it turned out to be unnecessary. In the chaos of the tunnel, nobody recognized him as the shooter.
Passing a pay phone at the outer end of the tunnel, he grabbed a directory and yanked it free of its flimsy chain.
A minute later he and Rachel were in the lot, which was clearing out rapidly. He broke the window of an early-nineties model Honda, unlocked it, and set her carefully in the backseat. Her face had lost a lot of color, even since they’d left the chopper.
He got behind the wheel, smashed the ignition with the grip of the SIG, and hot-wired it. Then he handed the phone book to Rachel.
“Look for the letters MD after someone’s name,” he said.
All around them, the lot was mayhem. People were driving over the curbs just to get the hell away from the stadium. He put the Honda in gear and headed out, just another cow in the herd.
* * *
Wind scoured Gaul’s computer room, at times whistling between the shards that still clung to the huge window frame. When it gusted, papers flew, but nobody dared move from his workstation to gather them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dena Sobel was skimming her pool when the Hornets made their second pass over Fresno, this time a few thousand feet up, and not dragging a damn shock wave behind them. Whatever hurry they’d been in the first time, it seemed to have passed. They were heading back in the direction they’d come from earlier, probably going home to Travis Air Force Base, Dena supposed.
Across the golf course, a few of her neighbors were outside their homes, tending to lights and windows that had been damaged by the sonic boom. Dena, a surgeon aboard the USS Carl Vinson for three tours, was familiar with the effects of supersonic flybys, and the one that had shaken her house minutes earlier had been louder than any she’d ever heard. The fighters must have been traveling a lot faster than the speed of sound.
A breeze stirred the white oaks that overhung the pool, bringing with it the sound of sirens from the direction of downtown. Within half a minute there were more, mostly police but a few ambulances as well. They sounded like they were everywhere.
Dena set the skimmer in its clip on the wall and headed inside to call the ER desk. Whatever was happening in town, if there were injuries, word would have reached there by now. As she picked up the phone, headlights washed the front windows, and brakes chirped on the driveway. Not five seconds later, someone pounded on the front door.
* * *
Dryden saw a shadow approach, through the windows that framed the entry. Assuming Dr. Sobel would look out through them before opening the door, he recalled the dying police officer’s words.
Dryden stepped back out of the light and turned toward the Honda to make his features less visible. A woman’s face appeared in one of the small windows, and Dryden waved her out frantically. If there was any recognition in her eyes, it didn’t show.
“Please help me!” Dryden yelled, indicating the car. “It’s my daughter!”
His desperation, every ounce of it sincere, apparently came across. The door swung inward, and a woman in her fifties emerged.
“Are you Dena Sobel?” Dryden asked.
She nodded, eyeing the Honda. Dryden was already running to it, opening the back door.
“She’s hurt,” Dryden said.
In the backseat, Rachel sat holding her now-exposed arm. Dryden had pulled into a parking lot en route from the high school, gotten in back, and helped Rachel remove the top half of the kiln suit. He’d verified at last that the arm was her only injury, but how badly hurt it was, he still couldn’t tell. He doubted the artery had been fully severed—if it had, Rachel would be unconscious or dead by now—but there was some chance it had at least been nicked, or that some different but still significant damage had happened.
Dena was beside him at the door now. She pushed past him, leaned into the backseat, and got her first look at the injury.
“This is a gunshot wound,” she said. “Why the hell did you bring her here? She needs to go to the ER—”
She’d turned back to look at Dryden as she spoke. Now she cut herself off, seeing the SIG in his hand.
He wasn’t pointing it. He held it low at his side, aimed down, his finger outside the trigger guard.
“I need you to help her here,” Dryden said. “In the house. No hospital. No police report.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“You have to. If there’s any official report of where this girl is, she’ll be dead within the hour.”
Dena stared at him. Her eyes went to the gun once more, then returned to his face and stayed there.
“You’re the guy on TV,” she said.
“I’m the guy on TV. But whatever they’re saying is bullshit. We can tell you the truth—we can even prove it—but right now you need to take care of her. Please.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Rachel leaned toward the open door from inside the back of the car. “Think of a four-digit number,” she said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Sources in law enforcement are confirming, just in the past few minutes, that the events in Fresno are tied to the Homeland alert we’ve been reporting on since early today.”
The CNN anchor looked appropriately grave delivering the lines. The thrum of excitement behind her practiced expression was only just discernible.
Dryden was standing in Dena’s living room, watching the coverage on the wall-mounted television. On-screen was a live aerial feed of the high school football field, the Black Hawk centered in the shot. It was sitting right where he’d landed it, angled across the 50-yard line. Flasher-equipped vehicles from what looked like half a dozen state and federal agencies were parked around it on the field.
For the first ten minutes after bringing Rachel inside—and parking the stolen car in a strip mall four blocks away—Dryden had stood in the spare bedroom where Dena was tending to Rachel. Dena had given her 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, then set to work examining the arm. The key points she’d been able to assess immediately. “The bone’s intact. No damage to the brachial artery or the deep brachial. Exit wound’s consistent with a solid bullet coming out—no fragmentation inside.” Each word had fallen over Dryden like the answer to a separate prayer.
“I can clean it up and start antibiotics now,” Dena had said. “Another thirty minutes, the meds will have the pain knocked down a bit—not a lot—and I’ll give her stitches.” She’d given Rachel a long all-over glance then. The two halves of the girl’s kiln suit lay on the carpet, and her clothing was all but pasted to her skin by half-dried blood. The heavy suit had contained nearly all of it, keepi
ng it inside where it could saturate her shirt and pants.
“While we’re waiting on the painkillers, I’ll clean you up,” Dena said. Her tone was softer than it’d been. “My daughters kept a lot of their old outfits. I’ll find something that’ll fit you.”
Dryden had taken this as a cue to step out of the room. Now, half an hour later, he’d seen enough of CNN and Fox to understand what’d been airing all day.
It was bad.
Very bad.
The bullet points, repeated every few minutes, were straightforward enough: Based on solid but still-undisclosed evidence, Homeland Security believed there was a man inside the United States with a working radiological bomb—a dirty bomb. This man had all the knowledge and tools necessary to arm and detonate the weapon, and there was credible intelligence that he intended to do so. The money quote had come from the Homeland secretary himself: We are working in a time frame of perhaps hours. We need everyone looking for this man.
There was no official name for the suspect, but there was a picture. A digital composite, they called it—purportedly a high-tech version of a police sketch, computer generated based on surveillance images that weren’t being released to the public.
The picture was no composite, though; Dryden recognized it at once. Gaul’s people had gotten it from the hard drive of his home computer in El Sedero. It was a picture that had originally contained his wife, Trisha; the two of them had taken a trip to San Francisco, a few months before Erin was born, and had asked a passerby to snap the shot of them standing together on the Embarcadero. Someone had now erased everything in the image except Dryden’s head, reshaped his mouth to turn his smile deadpan, and filtered the whole picture to make it look less like a photo and more like something compiled by software.
For all that, it was a dead-on image of him. It was no wonder Dena had recognized him so quickly.
Others had recognized him, too, it seemed. The salesman he’d bought the used car from in Bakersfield. A clerk at the sporting goods store. The image had gone into rotation on the news probably just a couple of hours after they’d left that city. The car dealership had contacted authorities early in the afternoon, and the vehicle’s description had gone into the news mix immediately. Once the hiker had found the car at the trailhead, it would’ve been an obvious move for police to check the few human-made structures in the surrounding miles.