HL 04-The Final Hour (22 page)

Milton One rolled his eyes. “The important thing you did is you remembered.”

The images began to clear. It came back to me. I stopped eating. “The laptop. The laptop in the barracks.”

“Prince was apparently showing his friends the route he would take to get to Times Square. You saw a map,” said Milton One. “A map of the New York City subway system with a route through the tunnels illuminated on it.”

“The subways . . . ,” I murmured.

“You were able to trace the route on a map Mike showed you.”

“Yes . . . ,” I said. It came back to me. “That’s right.”

“Security is extra tight,” said the newswoman on television, “but if people are afraid they’re not showing it. They’re coming to the Big Apple in droves . . .”

On the screen, groups of people cheered and waved, celebrating the New Year.

“Well, then, if we know where Prince is going . . . ,” I began to say.

But now Rose walked in. I—and Jim and Milton— turned to look at him.

He was wearing slacks and a wrinkled button-down shirt. He was carrying a battered leather briefcase in one hand. I would say he looked grim, but he always looked grim, his mouth tight, his intelligent eyes alert. He looked at our expectant expressions. We didn’t even have to ask the question out loud.

“I’ve got some assurances from the NYPD that there’ll be a powerful police presence along the route we think Prince will take,” he told us with a sigh.

Slowly, I laid my empty plate down on the butcher-block table. “A powerful police presence . . . ?” I asked. “What does that even mean?”

“Probably?” said Rose. “It probably means it’ll be harder for us to get where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?” I said.

Before Rose could answer, I heard the Cessna engine start up outside. It roared and throbbed.

The next moment, Mike walked into the kitchen.

He nodded once at Rose. “I’ve got the layout down solid,” he said. “I know every inch of the way.”

Rose nodded back. “Good.”

The detective set the leather briefcase on the table. He opened it. Reached in. He brought out a deadly-looking pistol, a 9mm Glock. It was already stuck in a shoulder holster. He handed the gun and holster to Mike. Mike was wearing a dark tracksuit. He pulled the jacket off and slipped the holster on over his sweatshirt. As he did, Rose brought another pistol out of the briefcase. This one he handed to me.

“Waterman gave you some weapons training, didn’t he?” he asked.

“Some. The Homelanders gave me some too.”

“Good. I don’t want you to blow your own head off.”

“I’ll do my best.”

I took off the baseball jacket and strapped the weapon on over my sweatshirt. It felt heavy and somehow dark beneath my arm.

Now Patel appeared in the doorway. We could still hear the plane’s engine rumbling and pulsing outside.

“We’re ready to go,” said Patel.

I looked at them, all of them. Mike, Rose, Patel. Dodger Jim. Milton One. I looked from one face to another.

“What are we going to do?” I asked them.

For a moment, none of them answered. Then, finally, Mike said, “We’re going to stop them, Charlie.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Just us?”

Mike took a long breath. Then he nodded. “We’re all there is,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Dead in the Air

The Cessna flew low over green rolling hills. Then, after a while, Patel found the highway and we followed its winding white path. As the winter sun sank and the pale blue of the sky grew deeper, small cities appeared sparkling below us and then melded into thick forests or faded away into empty fields.

Soon more highways seemed to join the one we were following, becoming a snaky tangle of pavement amid the surrounding foliage. More cities seemed to rise beneath us. In the intervals between them we saw broad highways flanked with gas stations and malls. The dusk gathered slowly and the world turned gray.

I was sitting up front in the passenger seat again, Rose behind me, Patel next to me, Mike behind him. I peered through the side window at the changing light outside and the changing scene below.

“There’s the river,” Patel said to me finally. His voice crackled over the headset and under the thrum of the engine. There were bursts of static and distant voices on the radio, but the volume was very low.

I followed the gesture of his hand, looked ahead through the windshield and saw where the graying landscape reached what at first seemed like a sudden ending. Then the darker gray of the river became visible, a long, thick line. Another little while and I could make out the water, the low December sun behind us sending a fanning, sparkling line across it to the far side.

“And look there,” said Patel, pointing to my side.

I turned and looked. Far off against the deep blue distance, I could make out the Manhattan skyline, a jagged dance of stone. The lights were just beginning to come on in some of the windows.

“Nice, huh,” said Patel kind of wistfully.

“Awesome,” I said. It was. An awesome, amazing city.

“I grew up there,” he went on. “In Brooklyn, over on the other side.”

“No kidding.”

“I miss it now, I’ll tell you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Home, right?”

“Exactly. Home.”

“I miss mine too,” I said—and I felt it. As far away as I’d been, as much trouble as I’d seen, I’d never felt as far from being reunited with my family and friends as I felt just then. Just then, to be honest, it seemed impossible it would ever happen.

“A city like New York,” said Patel. I glanced over at him. He kept one hand resting lightly on the plane’s yoke and the other lying limp on his leg—the way pilots do to keep from oversteering. He gave me a smile, trying to sound relaxed and cool. But I could tell he was feeling the pressure too. We all were. “A city like New York gets into your blood somehow.”

“Does it?” I said doubtfully.

“You don’t like it?”

“New York?” I shrugged. “I like it okay.”

“You’re more of a small-town guy, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess. To me, New York is kind of noisy and crowded and—I don’t know—like, overwhelming.”

I heard Patel laugh a little over the headset. It was sort of a sad sound. He was thinking about home. “I’ve heard people say that,” he said. “I never noticed.”

“In New York, everyone’s always walking around really fast with these serious looks on their faces. What’s that about?”

He laughed again, fondly now. “Everyone thinks he’s very important and has something very important to do. That’s what makes it New York.”

I nodded, smiling, but I wasn’t thinking about New York. I was thinking about Spring Hill, my hometown. I remembered those quick flashing scenes I’d seen last night in the falling panic of my memory attack. Scenes of my life back home, of being a kid. My mom driving me to the mall for my karate lessons. The baseball field in Oak Street Park where I played with Alex when we were still good friends. The path by the river where I walked with Beth when we were just getting to know each other . . . No one rushing around very much or looking very serious or feeling very important. A different kind of place.

“I guess it’s all about what you’re used to,” I said.

“I guess so,” said Patel.

We had reached the river now. Patel banked the plane to the right and started flying over the water, following its flow. The lowering sun sent its pale light pouring in through my window. I could feel the warmth of it on the side of my face. I looked ahead, watching the city skyline growing larger and larger, more and more lights coming on in the windows. Below us, too, and to the left, city streets sprang up on the riverbank, stores and apartment towers, their lights also coming on. To the right, great surging brown cliffs sprang up darkly beside the water. As we flew toward the city, another small plane came toward us, flying just above us and to the left. It passed overhead, not far away at all.

“Almost there,” Patel said after a while. And then—as if he’d been thinking about it all this time—he said, “To me, no matter where I go, New York is always home. When I’m away from sidewalks and tall buildings, I feel like I’m nowhere.”

I smiled, but it was hard for me to imagine feeling that way about such a big city. I had been on the run so long, been trying so hard to get back to my old life, that it felt to me no one could want to be anywhere besides Spring Hill.

“For the last three years, I’ve had to live in Virginia for my job,” Patel went on. “It just about drives me crazy. As soon as I can, I’m planning to bring my wife . . .”

My wife .
. .

Those were the last words Patel ever spoke in this world. The next instant, the plane’s side window shattered. The windshield went scarlet with Patel’s blood and he was dead.

I could only sit there staring as he fell toward me, held in place by his shoulder-strap seat belt, his right hand still convulsively gripping the yoke.

I heard Rose roar out something in my ear. Dazed and horrified, I had only one second to look up and see the chopper that had pulled up alongside us in the darkening sky. A gunman sat balanced in its open door, his automatic rifle trained at our cockpit.

Milton One’s words came back to me:

Prince will know you escaped. You’re the one person
who might know enough to catch up to him, so even though
he hasn’t got a lot of manpower left, he’s sure to be looking
out for you, waiting for a chance to send someone after
you
.

The Homelanders had found us. They were here.

The wind rushed in through Patel’s broken window.

Then, the next moment, Patel’s body fell forward in his harness, pushing the yoke in. The plane pitched down.

We plunged, engine screaming, toward the river below.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Dogfight

There was nothing but noise and motion then, the seconds telescoping together into one endless instant of panic and terror. The roar of the plane’s engine became a shriek. Beneath that shriek, I could hear both Rose and Mike shouting in my ear. The wind through the shattered window battered me as the airplane streaked downward like a meteor. With every endless instant, the river loomed larger and larger in the windshield. I had read once somewhere that hitting water hard from a great height was the same as hitting concrete. That was the thought—the one thought—that was flashing like a warning beacon in my mind.

I was moving before I thought to move. Grabbing Patel’s limp bloody body and pushing him back as I pried his hand off the pilot’s stick, I forced myself upright in my own seat as the plane started to turn into a sickening spiral. I had read a lot about planes while dreaming about being in the Air Force. I’d even read about how to pull one out of spins and dives. It was tricky stuff. You had to get it right or you could lose control completely, drop helplessly out of the sky like a stone.

But there was no choice. I had to do something, try something.

I grabbed the copilot’s stick in front of me. A hundred different ideas flashed through my head, all of them jumbled together with the screaming engine and the confused, jumbled shouts in my headset from Mike and Rose. There was nothing in the windshield now but water, closer and closer with every instant we dove.

I acted on instinct. I pulled the throttle back, bringing the engine to idle so that it wasn’t thrusting us toward the earth. I rolled the wings over level. Patel’s corpse shifted and fell toward me. I had to reach out with one hand and push him away again.

Now I drew up on the stick. It took some muscle to lift the heavy nose of the plane. The Cessna lost speed rapidly as it lifted, the river sinking out of the windshield, the dark blue of the sky and the lights of the city skyline reappearing.

Only at the last second did it occur to me that if we lost any more speed the wings would stall and we would drop again. We were now only a couple of hundred feet above the earth. If the wings stalled at this point, we would never be able to recover in time.