“I believe Human Resources, Incorporated may have reached its expiration date,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re right as rain, Mr. Zhen.”
For the life of me, I could not think who our mystery enemy could be. With both Bobs out of the way, I would somehow need to get that information out of Zhen. But I would have to deal with that later. As we drove on in silence, I was paying close attention to the landscape outside, racking my brain on how to communicate with Alice. If I went for my phone, they would blow my brains out. Short of smoke signals through the sunroof, I was SOL.
We appeared to be heading north, upstate, and into a remote area. The road was narrowing and we were climbing much of the time. I could also see a stone safety wall on the side of the road with a significant drop on the other side. Then I recalled several car commercials I had seen that were shot on this road. We were on the scenic byway near Port Jervis and Hawk’s Nest, New York. The drop on the other side of the stone wall was probably forty to sixty feet, with the Delaware River at the bottom.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said quietly and lit a cigarette.
No sooner did the words and smoke exit his tobacco-stained lips than I heard the distant sound of helicopter rotors.
“I’m wondering if there’s an alternate route.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because my first duty as your employee is to inform you that you are about to be ambushed by what sounds like an Mi-24 Russian attack helicopter.”
45
Zhen looked out the windows, searching the skies.
“I don’t see anything.”
“She won’t parallel us until she’s ready to engage,” I offered. “My guess is that she’s about twenty or thirty clicks east flying below radar, striping us with GPS.”
“She?”
“My wife.”
“How would she know our movements?”
“That’s what she does. What you need to worry about right now is the fact that this road is a death trap for the next twenty miles and all we have to look forward to is a long suspension bridge, which absolutely defines the phrase sitting duck.”
“We will stop and go on foot into the forest.”
“Infrared will track us and the .50 caliber miniguns will shred us in less than sixty seconds. This car is our best line of defense.”
“Against antiaircraft missiles?”
“Yeah, well, we still need to make sure those don’t come into play or we’ll be proper fucked.”
“How do we stop them? With small arms? Don’t be ridiculous.”
I could hear the chopper more clearly now.
“May I use my phone? I’m going to try to call her.”
Zhen considered this and then nodded in agreement. I pulled my phone out and tried over and over to call and text Alice, but to no avail, and I wasn’t surprised. If you think texting and driving is deadly, try texting and flying a combat helicopter.
“Do you have a police or military radio?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Looks like Plan B.”
I put my phone away and went to open my briefcase. Zhen’s men immediately put their guns in my face again. The whole scene was starting to play like a Mel Brooks musical. Christmas with Chairman Mao!
“What are you doing, Mr. Lago?” Zhen said.
“If you want to live, we need what’s in this case,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Let me show you.”
“Open it,” he said to his men. “What is the combination?”
“Triple zeroes.”
One of them opened my case. Inside was a flight control stick, additional controls, and avionics displays and gauges.
“What is this?” Zhen asked.
“It’s a portable flight console for a Wing Loong drone.”
Zhen raised an eyebrow.
“Funny, right? It’s the knockoff of the U.S. Reaper drone your government built based on hacked U.S. military tech stolen by you. Kind of like the almost-Nike shoes you’ve been selling for years. Got it for a good price, actually.”
“Why would you bring that to meet with me, Mr. Lago?”
“Because, Mr. Zhen, until about five minutes ago, I was using you as bait to draw Alice out and kill her.”
“What?!” he screamed.
“Yeah, sorry about that. But after what you told me, things have gotten exponentially complicated because I don’t want to kill her anymore.”
He put his own gun in my face.
“If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”
“Mr. Zhen, that’s not the best motivator for me. And if you shoot me, there will be nothing to stop her from putting an antitank missile in your glove compartment and turning this thing into a five-hundred-thousand-dollar Crock-Pot.”
He was seething but realized threats were futile and put his gun away. He had no choice but to trust me. He started speaking to his men in Chinese, isolating me. But I knew they were talking contingency plans. I was just hoping that didn’t involve group suicide. I had heard that Chinese agents were big on punching their own ticket to avoid capture or if they were facing disgrace. I laughed to myself, thinking I might actually have to protect Zhen from himself, along with everything else.
“How soon can you get the drone here?” he asked me.
“Ten minutes or less once I deploy. We may not even have that much time.”
“Do it,” he said.
His men handed the drone console to me. I fired it up and bounced the telemetry signal to its command satellite. It came online immediately. I pulled up the LCD display with video and data feed and commanded the drone to our location, and we watched the video from the nose-cone camera as the drone flew inland from the Atlantic. While it vectored itself to us, my mind was working overtime to solve the world’s most deranged word problem: “John is traveling north at 90 mph in a car. Alice is capable of closing on John from 20 miles away in a Russian attack chopper traveling east at 150 mph. A Wing Loong drone is flying toward John and Alice from the south at 350 mph. Who will reach John first? (a) The chopper, (b) The drone, or (c) All of the above.” I’ve never been great at math, but statistically speaking, we were probably all going to come together and die at once.
Chasing the ultimate long-shot bet—save Alice and Zhen and ride off into the sunset—I fired up the drone video feed on my console and switched through all camera angles, seeing it had a full 360-view around itself. While the drone hauled ass to our position, we heard the chopper rotors much louder. It sounded very much like Alice had decided to move on us, which made sense due to the fact that our position on the road gave us zero escape options. As that thought crossed my mind, the first pass of Alice’s .50 caliber minigun rocked our world. If you’re unfamiliar with a minigun, think one of those old-school Gatling guns but about a thousand times more powerful, firing rounds as big as the head on a lucky Chinese cat statue. The blazing hot meteorites of lead and metal hit the car with such force that Zhen’s driver could barely keep it on the road. I was quietly impressed that the bulletproofing could withstand munitions that large, coming in that hot.
Zhen took cover on the floor of the limo. I looked out the window and laid eyes on the chopper as it turned to come back for a second pass. I was banking on Alice wanting to avoid a U.S. military response and to use her missiles only as a last resort. I checked the drone-targeting screen. GPS put it in striking distance and I had a visual of the chopper. Then I had a visual of the drone through the car window. Decision time.
46
I immediately thought of the time Bob initiated me into HR, how he subjected me to a merciless onslaught in the middle of the woods until I had no fight left in me. He wanted me to be willing to accept death. That was the lesson. And I never would have l
earned the lesson without Bob’s total commitment to making me feel like I had no control over the situation and death was imminent. That’s what I decided I needed to do with Alice in that moment. Evading and defending would only incite her predatory instinct more. She would assume weakness and do whatever she had to do to exploit it. I didn’t want to kill her. In fact, I had never been more motivated to protect her in our lives. However, I needed her to believe that I not only wanted to kill her, but that I also had complete control and her destruction was imminent. She still had a much stronger survival instinct than me, so I believed she would retreat if need be. That was the goal. But until then, I had to walk the tightrope, with killing her for real on one side and getting myself killed on the other. The thought of never being able to tell her the truth fueled me to the core and I deployed every ounce of skill, experience, and intelligence to ensure that did not happen.
I pointed the drone right at her and gunned it. She immediately took evasive action. I whipped through the air like a cobra head and opened up on her with my own minigun, being careful not to hit her but attempting to get close enough to make it feel real. Despite its age, the Mi-24 is more nimble than it looks, and she dove out of the way of my fire. I made another aggressive pass. Alice banked hard right and tried to fly low to get the drone to overshoot and pass overhead. Nice idea but I anticipated that move and the drone glided back in just behind her. You do not want a drone on your ass under any circumstances. That’s the tactical equivalent of dropping the soap in the shower of a Turkish prison. I fired up the drone’s advanced weapons systems. My targeting grid started tracking Alice’s chopper, working to execute a missile lock. I’m sure this lit up her radar board and she banked hard left and flew right at the limo, strafing us again with her miniguns.
The impact shook the car so violently that the driver smashed his head on the bulletproof window and was knocked unconscious. When it rains, it pours! All hell broke loose as the big tank of a car started swerving all over the road, pitching Zhen and his men and their guns all over the place. I had to get Alice off our ass so I could regain control of the car, so I deactivated my target locking systems and fired a missile in her general direction. The missile wasn’t locked on her, but it came close enough for me to achieve my objective. While she took evasive action, I blew open the driver partition with one of the assault rifles and climbed into the driver’s seat. I drove the car with one hand and operated the drone with the other. Now that’s multitasking!
As the missile I had fired plowed into a hillside and exploded, blowing a hundred-foot burning black dust cloud into the sky, Alice turned to come in for another pass. I flanked her with the drone, forcing her to engage with it and not the limo. Every time she tried to maneuver to get a clear shot, I mirrored every move she made. This really pissed her off and she aggressively tried to peel away with a diving side turn. The tail yawed wildly and she nearly went into a death spin, but after a few harrowing moments Alice righted the ship. And when she did, the drone was right next to her again, mirroring the chopper’s every move, flying within a quarter mile of it at all times. Her overtaxed engine began to spew black smoke but Alice kept pushing it, so I backed off.
Bad idea. Next thing I knew, Alice’s chopper had disappeared into a ravine. I pursued her with the drone but lost her briefly around the high tree canopy. I slowed my air speed and switched it to a search mode. Still no sign of her. I didn’t like that at all. Then I remembered why the helicopter is superior in combat to a fixed-wing aircraft: a chopper can hover. She was behind that tree cover somewhere, watching me, waiting for me to slow my drone’s air speed and come looking for her—which I had done. The drone doesn’t have an actual pilot with the ability to hear the rotors and triangulate location. My video feeds had nothing but the drone’s own engine sounds coming over audio.
I tried to accelerate and get the drone out of there, but it was too late. Alice knew this was her only chance to kill my drone and she took it. She rose straight up behind me and opened fire with everything she had. The drone was peppered with .50 caliber rounds and my warning lights started to flash. She had missile lock on me. I switched to my rear camera in time to see her fire a 9M17 Skorpion missile. The good news is that the Mi-24 is more of a tank buster, so this type of missile is usually reserved for fixed targets on the ground. It has a minimum range of 500 meters and a max of 2,500—not one of your sophisticated antiaircraft missiles. The bad news is that I was not even 1,000 meters from the chopper when she fired it.
I turned the nose on the drone to the sky and maxed the throttle. It went straight up through the clouds and the missile followed it. Drones are very difficult to hit, even with a hard missile target lock. They’re agile and able to make moves a human pilot in a much heavier aircraft couldn’t pull off or physically endure. So, I pulled out every evasive maneuver I could think of and sent that missile on a wild-goose chase, hoping to shed it like a cheap suit. After threading the needle between two massive oak trees with a sideways vertical pass, the missile hit a grove of trees and exploded.
Meanwhile, I steered the Rolls-Royce tank through the winding roads and saw what was ahead—the Roebling Delaware Aqueduct suspension bridge. The limo would never make it across that bridge because Alice would simply blow it and send us plummeting into the drink, where she could pound us until there was nothing left. I estimated I had about three minutes before reaching the bridge. Then she put all of her cards on the table. She target locked the limo and the drone and fired two Skorpions at once.
The way I saw it, I had two choices: either ditch out the driver’s-side door of the limo and lose any chance of getting a name out of Zhen, or attempt to shoot down the incoming missile with my drone missile. Since my missiles were ten times more sophisticated than hers, I decided to go for the latter. It took me forever to lock on to the limo-bound missile because my drone was simultaneously evading one missile while trying to target lock and destroy another.
I finally locked it and fired but I wasn’t even sure my missile would hit the Skorpion before the Skorpion stung us. I was about a hundred yards from the bridge when I saw both missiles come raining down toward the limo, their warheads pointed like the end of a middle finger right at my face. Then we hit the bridge, way past the point of no return. When both missiles were less than a quarter mile from impact, I slammed on the brakes. Within seconds of that move, my drone missile hit the Skorpion head-on and scrubbed it.
The problem was that this impact took place less than 300 yards from the limo. The explosion lifted the front end of the car so far off the ground it must have looked like a dog begging on its hind legs. When it came down again, it smashed into the concrete bridge wall and stalled. I was thrown up against the dash and rolled down onto the floor. With one hand, I was trying to pull myself back into the driver’s seat. With the other I was clutching the joystick on the drone flight module. I could see the second missile closing the gap on the drone as I hung there, totally useless.
When I finally got back into the driver’s seat, I looked out and saw that the second missile was dangerously close to the drone. So, I pinned the throttle on the drone and ran continuous 360-degree loops around the chopper, maintaining a distance of no less than 200 yards. As the drone dropped into orbit around the chopper with the missile on its tail, Alice opened fire, blasting her heavy guns in a futile attempt to slow down the drone. I knew immediately that Alice had made a fatal mistake because the much stronger heat signature coming from her machine guns and her overheated chopper engine caused the missile to lock on to her as its new target.
It went straight at her and it was way too close for her to evade it. I hit the afterburners on the drone and chased the missile, unloading my miniguns at it, doing everything in my power to get it off Alice’s ass. Alice attempted to move to a lower altitude near the forest to try to lose the missile in the trees but that did nothing. It was headed straight for her cockpit. I had no choice but to try to shoot i
t down, even though Alice was directly behind it in my line of fire. I hit the miniguns again and managed to blow the tail off the missile. Without its tail wings, it veered wildly off course. I hoped it would just fly past her but it clipped Alice’s rotor head fairing and blew off two of her five rotor blades, stopping the main rotor dead and turning the chopper into a lead balloon that plunged straight down into the forest. After it disappeared into the trees, its fuel tanks exploded on impact, setting the forest ablaze and filling the sky with black smoke.
I got out of the car and tried to see it but it was gone.
Alice was gone.
47
I sent the drone crashing into the river below and looked into the back of the limo. All of Zhen’s men were dead. Judging from the bright red color of their skin, they had swallowed cyanide capsules. Zhen was nowhere in sight.
I looked back at the flames and the loss of Alice hit me like a bullet in the chest. She was dead. In trying to save us both, I had killed the woman I loved. I had risked my neck so many times to show her I loved her. The only thing that had been important to me was loving her. It was even more important than living. It was what made me truly strong, even if for a brief time in my life. The rest of me, the violence and destruction, the soullessness and depravity, were what made me weak. With her, I was solid as a rock. Without her, I was nothing.
How had I lost that? At what point did I decide to abandon my conviction, my truth? In her own moment of weakness, she falsely accused me of betraying her, and even tried to kill me as a traitor, but I should have seen right away that we’d been set up. And I should have demanded she allow me to prove her wrong. I should have done everything in my power to make her trust me again. Instead, my ugly, vicious ego stepped in and I did what I do best. Kill things. Even when I’m trying to do right, I kill things.