Breaking Point (41 page)

Daria smiled, and the smile was somewhere between charming and predatory. “I find it easier if you categorize it into Good Guys and Bad Guys.”

Tommy said, “And you are…?”

“Today?”

He nodded.

“Good Guy.”

Kiki wasn't all that sure she agreed. “Okay. Now Calendar knows you killed his men?”

“He does.”

“So you're his primary target?”

Daria perched on the edge of a product-display table and rubbed her bruised knee. “That's the line between madman and good soldier. He's not so crazy that he let himself stay in a pincer between our guns. He still possesses self-preservation instincts. Also, he and I work in a very small world. If he wants me dead, he can track me down in six months or a year. No, I think he … how do you say, slides back. Chutes and Snakes, yes?”

Tommy said, “Chutes and Ladders, and I follow you, but I got a better metaphor. In video games, you get boxed down or killed, you hit Reset. He went full-on nut-job after finding his guys killed. He needs to find out whodunit. That accomplished, he goes back to the plan.”

Kiki said, “The speech. The saddlebag. He's going back to the auto-parts store?”

“No. Petey ordered the guys on the structure team to load everything back on board the Claremont fuselage and to get it outta harm's way. Again. And we saw the fuselage floating to never-never land after the flood. We find the Claremont, we find the speech. We find the speech, maybe we find the silver-haired prick.”

Kiki turned to Daria. “If we find a car that's right-side up, can you hot-wire it?”

“I could do that at age five.” She laughed and limped out into the street.

The three of them sloshed out onto the soggy streets, looking for a car that was right-side up. Before they could, Kiki pointed to the southwest. “The airship!”

It hung, unmoving, maybe five blocks from their position. At least it seemed unmoving. As they watched, the rear end of the blimp swung in their direction, paused, then swung back.

“The fuselage,” Tommy said. “It's stuck on something. C'mon.”

Daria slung her backpack. “There are fires between us and the aircraft.”

“Yeah, but the airship's engines are still working. If it works the Claremont free, this chase'll get a lot more complicated.”

Daria spotted an overturned white van and deftly scrambled up on its side. She scanned the battle-scarred street in both directions, then the columns of oily black smoke. Three of the Ilyushins had crashed on the west end of the town, with a fourth to the east, closer to the forest fire. From her perspective, every direction looked perilous.

“We head south, toward the edge of town. That should keep us well away from the fires.”

Kiki said, “Will Calendar pick the same route?”

“No. He's less sane than I. He'll move between those two fires.” She pointed to two of the three raging hot spots that demarcated the western portion of the town.

Tommy said, “How much less sane?”

Daria turned and gave him a sloe-gin smile. Then she seemed to spot something at her feet. She frowned.

“You okay?” Tommy called up.

“Microwave transceiver. This is a surveillance truck.”

As she climbed down, Tommy tried the back door and it fell open. Sure enough, it was crammed with surveillance equipment. Plus a little blood.

“It wasn't empty when it fell over,” Tommy said, and glanced around the soggy street, looking for a survivor. Kiki ducked into the van. Daria hopped down onto the street.

“Tommy?” She picked up a flash drive, one of several stuffed into USB ports. M
ANCINI
was written on the side. She grabbed another:
KITCHEN.

Tommy picked up a sodden sweater. It belonged to a woman.

“Shit. Looks like Calendar had more backup than them two guys Daria capped. This is how they kept ahead of Peter's crashers. He didn't just have their comms, he musta had their headquarters, too. Sumbitch.”

Daria eyed the smoke columns again. “Come,” she said, and started south. The crashers exited the van and followed her.

*   *   *

Half a block away, Jenna Scott watched the three who had discovered her surveillance van. She used one hand to unbutton her overshirt and shrugged out of it. When the van toppled, one of the surveillance racks had gouged a nasty-looking tear in her left shoulder. She used her sleeve to wipe blood away and realized it was a flesh wound, the muscle beneath unscathed.

She used a pocketknife to rip the shirtsleeve and turn it into a fair-to-passing bandage, using her right hand and teeth. She adjusted her camisole, checked to make sure her Sten submachine pistol was fully loaded. She'd jammed a second magazine into the back pocket of her jeans. She stepped out into the now-deserted street and looked around at the carnage.

She spotted the hovering airship. That would be Calendar's target. No question. Same for the crash investigators.

Jenna couldn't believe that the psychotic mercenary had actually used the EMP device on four firefighting planes. No one could have predicted he would act so insanely. Oh, sure. The Agency more or less understood that sweaty dynamite lined the inside of his brainpan. The Agency rolled the dice that Calendar could keep his psychosis in check. After all, he'd been a reliable freelancer for close to a decade.

Clearly, things had changed.

That left Jenna a couple of missions. First and foremost, make sure Calendar was good and dead, and could never tell anyone who he freelanced for. And second, find Andrew Malatesta's saddlebag.

CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

Barry Tichnor had backed up files of his communications with the Infrastructure Committee on Deferred Maintenance on a server at the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office—the folks responsible for the nation's spy satellites. If he were to go down, it would not be alone.

He stepped out of the elevator into the third-floor lobby and saw that three staffers had gathered around a flat-screen TV tuned to CNN. Barry peered through his thick glasses and saw an aerial view of a town. Somewhere flat. He could see smoke in the air and what looked to be a flood in process.

He stepped closer and the caption came into view: T
WIN
P
INES,
M
ONTANA.

Barry cleared his throat. The receptionist turned and blushed. “Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't realize you were—”

“What happened?” Barry nodded toward the TV.

One of the young analysts in a white shirt and tie, sleeves bunched up, answered without taking his eyes off the screen, “A bunch of air tankers just crashed in some small town in Montana. Weirdest thing. CNN says there were, like, three or four of them on the ground.”

Three or four airplanes had crashed. Simultaneously. In the town where Calendar was operating.

Another analyst said, “You know why the CNN crews were on the scene so fast? This is only a couple miles from that Polestar crash last week.”

The receptionist crossed to her desk and bent at the waist, reaching for the receiver and hitting one of the buttons. She paused. “Mr. Gelfer? You have an appointment with Mr. Tichnor?”

She turned, smiled brightly. Her smile guttered. “Hey. Where'd that guy go?”

The two analysts glued to CNN shrugged their shoulders.

TWIN PINES

One could not say that Captain Maryssa Loveless was inexperienced. She had been commissioned through the Montana State University Army ROTC and held a bachelor's degree in political science. Upon completion of the Field Artillery Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, she had been assigned to the second battalion, 175th Artillery at Camp Hovey in South Korea. After that had come Iraq. A lot of Iraq. Including an IED that had shredded her Stryker and cost her the use of her left hamstring for almost nine months. Despite her experience, when her Chinook dropped down on Main Street, landing as quick and hard as a sucker punch, she looked around at the buildings on fire, the flooding, the oncoming forest fire, and said, honestly, “What the almighty fuck?”

The rotors created perfect, concentric waves in the ankle-deep water. The captain's boots splashed down and she raced over to a cluster of men who seemed to be in charge. One of them, a civilian, was tall and put together, with a bandage on one cheek and an empty holster on his hip. She picked him. “Sir? Captain Loveless, Montana National Guard. What is your situation, sir?”

Without moving his mouth much, he said, “Shit storm. You guys didn't waste any time getting here.”

“Yessir. A woman named Susan Tanaka told us to get airborne ASAP. Guess she knew what she was talking about.”

*   *   *

The jet-fuel-fed fire at the auto-parts store looked like it would burn for hours. Eleven of Jack's airframe team had been outside with the fuselage and survived with nothing worse than a couple of broken arms. Four other guys inside had died with Reuben Chaykin.

There didn't appear to be any reason to wait, so Jack, Hector, and the remains of the airframe team started walking toward the police station.

*   *   *

Gene Whitney found some rope, and Peter, ever the engineer, rigged it to the hood of the Honda, turning it into a sled. Soon they were trudging up the debris-littered street, Peter limping on his wound, Beth towed behind, her leg elevated on the plastic pail they'd found.

Three blocks from the police station, Gene said,
“Travois.”

“Yes! Right. Thank you. Trying to remember that word was driving me nuts.”

*   *   *

Casper the Friendly Airship had been ordered to fly, and fly it did. But with Ginger LaFrance dead and her remote control destroyed, the airship meandered aimlessly, pushed this way and that by the winds.

Fortunately, the same winds that blew the forest fire toward Twin Pines pushed the airship to the west—away from the fire.

That ended at the southwest tip of Twin Pines, as Casper dragged the Frankenstein version of a Claremont VLE through the heavy-duty fence surrounding the Helena Valley Energy Co-op substation. It held the flight deck of the dead ship, forming a shape like a soccer net, binding it in place. As the forward-thrust engines of the airship struggled, the nose of the Claremont edged within a foot of the substation's massive step-down transformers. But the thick fence held, and, with a metal-on-metal groan, the Claremont slid backward three feet.

Above it, Casper began oscillating, its butt end swinging left, then right.

*   *   *

Daria set a grueling pace but got them around the three west-side fires. The southern edge of Twin Pines was defined by two perfectly straight lines of railroad tracks, elevated on an eight-foot berm. Tommy was winded and his head ached but he kept quiet about it. Kiki limped on her wounded leg. The three of them snuck behind a ranch-style home with peeled aluminum siding and a vast array of broken and disheveled children's toys in a yard of packed dirt, gorse, and a curved trail, front to back, pounded into the ground by a largish dog that had paced incessantly for years.

Daria went to one knee, motioned the others to pause, and glanced around the corner of the house.

The graceless, battered airplane fuselage hung four feet off the ground, its nose cone jammed under the top bar of a sturdy security fence that surrounded a power station. The fence's top bar had been horizontal but now curved upward over the shattered windows of the flight deck, the coiled razor wire atop the fence looking like a crown of thorns.

Above the substation, the bulbous white airship groaned and struggled, its tail end swinging, trying to obey the last orders of its mistress:
Fly
.

Kiki whispered, “You see him?”

Daria shook her head. She scanned the street, mostly residential save for the energy substation. The houses were identical, each a mid-1970s design. Four of nine homes had For Sale signs in the yards. The signs were sun-faded. Not much water from the massive tankers had made it out this way but the smoke from the downed air tankers was drifting west and swirled among the low-slung, single-story homes. The street was abandoned.

Tommy glanced around. “You gals cover me. I'm going in.”

Kiki said, “Why you?”

“First, 'cause I always wanted to say that. Second, 'cause Dee here doesn't know what we're looking for. And third, 'cause the way you been holding your side, you cracked open that rib again. Plus, your leg's bleeding.”

Daria said, “Calendar could be inside already.”

“I don't think so. Guy makes his presence known, y'know?”

Daria nodded. She pointed the Browning Hi Power in her left fist toward another house, the next one to the north. “Kiki. Stay here. I'll head that way. If Calendar comes from between the two nearest fires, he'll emerge between us.”

With that, Daria darted around the corner and disappeared. When she was gone, Tommy said, “There are times I'm glad she's on our side.”

Kiki said, “And yet…”

“Yeah. You ready?”

He stepped out from the shadow of the ranch house and jogged across the dusty, poorly paved street toward the substation. Tommy had served as a field surgeon in Kuwait, and while the idea of running while knowing that someone might shoot you wasn't new to him, it was as sickeningly horrifying as it had always been. He bit back the surge of panic, the acidic taste of adrenaline at the back of his tongue making him want to wretch.

*   *   *

Bedraggled and limping, Jack, Hector, and the remains of the airframe team arrived at the police station, walking from the east, coughing in the smoke, just as Peter and Gene arrived from the west, Beth Mancini's leg elevated on the travois.

News media helicopters circled the scene, although all the smoke was making their job difficult. Chief Paul McKinney hadn't been found yet and a sergeant had gathered the surviving, noninjured officers. But all three said they planned to go find loved ones and inspect their homes.