Hot Point (25 page)

Denise felt about as useful as a bump on a…rotor blade. She was glad she hadn't found a way to sabotage the guns, though she'd felt awful while mounting them on her precious chopper's frame.

If this was the “home team” working under the scope of the second contract, she could afford to relax. She'd been trying to scheme a way to break the chopper without getting them both killed.

Now it sounded like if she just appeared completely cowed for a while, they'd be fine. There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask Vern, twice that many ideas of why their chopper had been painted presidential blue and what might be going on, but he'd already made it clear that they were to keep chatter to a minimum.

For lack of any other way to look useful, she rested her hands on her set of flight controls and took comfort in Vern's smooth corrections.

The museum job was suddenly looking very, very good. Vern was sweet, but she couldn't drag him away from MHA to follow her to the museum. That was ridiculous. He sounded sincere now, but a year from now? Two?

She almost laughed at the absurdity of her thinking. She was used to such a limited scope.

They had both spoken about a “lifetime.” Not two years but twenty. Forty. She couldn't imagine such a thing, someone wanting to be with her for a lifetime.

Yet she didn't doubt Vern for a second. The more she thought about it, the more confusing the whole situation became—not even counting being hijacked in a foreign country on the brink of a coup.

They hadn't even cleared the national park when she noticed something on the screen in front of her. She'd been tinkering with screen modes during the last couple fires and found one she liked. The layers of information were far more complex than something she could have understood two months ago, but now they made sense.

She had two large LCDs in front of her matching the pair Vern had in front of him. There was also one in the center that gave them both a display of the terrain immediately ahead of them.

She'd set her left-most screen to give her engines, pressure, and HUMS status. Everything she wanted in a single glance—from operating temperature on the turbines to flight hours on this set of rotor blades. On her second screen, she'd set up an overlapping image of flight corridors and other air traffic, which had proven very useful over fires. She'd also overlaid the infrared image from Steve's drone so that she could see hot spots.

Now, as they entered the standard flight corridor south of Palmerola toward the capital of Tegucigalpa, the readout was abruptly overlaid by an image of hot spots. The strip of paved road to the west became a shining strip on her display. In moments, she could see the heat signature of their own helicopter as it rushed south.

Denise kept her voice to a whisper. “Vern. IR readouts.”

She saw him glance in front of her, then he started clicking through screen modes using the controls on his collective until he brought up the feed from Steve's drone.

“What's that?”
El
jefe
stuck his head up between the seats.

Damn him!

“Nothing,” Vern responded.

Good. Served the man right for hijacking them.

Then the man growled. It was low and feral, and left her wondering if he really was the “home team.” He sounded as if he just might cut their throats and fly the mission himself.

“Infrared feed. From above,” Vern answered.

His voice wasn't steady. Denise stared at him. Vern's jaw was clenched and his hands were white-knuckled on the controls. Vern never flew with a tight grip. Even in crisis his touch on the cyclic was light and quick, mostly wrist action. At the moment he looked as if he was preparing to rip out the joystick by brute force and beat someone with it.

“Civilians with drones. Shit!” And then he was gone again.

“Vern?” she whispered over the intercom. He glanced over at her but offered no reassuring smile.

Denise's pulse rate escalated to a pounding in her ears. Vern knew something. Knew they weren't safe and just out flying some little secret errand.

He was scared!

Anything that scared a man with Vern's vast experience terrified her. They really were in horrible danger.

“Easy on the controls, Wrench.”

She jerked her hands off the controls she'd been gripping so hard her hands ached.

They were at risk of—she swallowed hard—dying. And Vern had made a joke for her sake. If they got out of this, she was marrying him and to hell with the consequences.

The man reappeared between them so abruptly that she cried out.

“
Aquí!
Here!” He jammed a scrap of paper into her hand. Coordinates had been scratched on it in a hasty scrawl.

Her hands were shaking so badly that she could barely key the latitude and longitude into the navigation system. She also hit a switch that sent the data feed up to the drone.

In moments, Steve was flying ahead of them. They'd been hijacked a twenty-minute flight from the capital, and ten of that was already gone. But any advantage the drone could give them, she'd take.

It only took a minute before Steve was zooming in on the target and sending the data feed back to them.

Sometimes Denise hated being right.

They were carrying a half-dozen mercenary soldiers on a helicopter painted in the presidential colors. And they were flying to the Honduran presidential residence.

They weren't in the middle of a coup d'état. They
were
the coup!

“
Jefe!
” Vern shouted out.

Denise flinched.

When the man stuck his head forward between the seats, Vern wanted to hit and strike and beat him for what was about to happen. But he knew that even if he could surprise this man, the half-dozen others aboard would make sure neither he nor Denise survived. So he clamped down on his rage and did his best to keep his voice steady. “We did
not
sign up to kill the president of a foreign nation.”

The blond man clapped him hard enough on the shoulder that Vern almost bobbled the controls. “We no here to kill him,
señor.
We here to save him.”

Vern had to process that one, but not Denise. She got it right away and was already nodding her head by the time he saw through his haze of red fury.

They weren't the coup. They were a rescue mission! That he understood. He'd flown hundreds of them in far worse conditions than a clear afternoon. Though this was the first time he'd done it with a gun to his head. “Well, I think we may be arriving too late.”

Even as he spoke, Steve's feed showed dozens of vehicles quickly converging on the massive edifice of the presidential residence. It was a two-story structure with a traditional red-tile roof. It was built in the form of two connected boxes with open courtyards in the middle of each, forming a large, red figure-eight from above.

A tall office building occupied the far end of the compound with a parking lot and a barren field in between. In the field was a large square with a giant
H
painted in the middle to indicate a helicopter landing area.

A perimeter wall encircled the whole area, which was tight between roads on every side.

Two of the racing vehicles parked in the middle of the H, blocking his landing zone. He'd lay good money that these weren't the good guys. He could easily land, it was a big field, but he'd wager they'd shoot him dead before he could shut down the engines.

“
Mierda!
How good are you, Coast Guard?”

“He's the best!” Well, at least Denise believed in him.

“We'll see. Put us inside the north courtyard.”

“We have an incoming helicopter.” Denise was paying more attention inside than he was; the incoming craft showed on the edge of the radar screen—five miles out and it was moving fast.

Vern appreciated the extra set of eyes because his were too busy bugging out as he flew into the heart of the capital.

“
No
problema!
” the man insisted. Easy for him to say.

Steve's feed showed that the square north courtyard was completely within the building. It was perhaps a rotor-and-a-half across. While he could technically fit in there, a Firehawk was not only the size of its rotor disk.

The tail rotor of the chopper stuck out another eleven feet.

He'd have to land diagonally and make sure the rear rotor lined up into a corner of the square courtyard. Even five feet out of place, and they'd clip a wall and plummet to the ground in a spray of shattered helicopter.

And he couldn't be sure of the necessary precision if another helicopter was coming in to help. Any blast of downdraft from above could send him veering into a side wall. Then they'd be lucky if any of them could so much as crawl away.

The man had given Denise another radio frequency. “Do you have encryption?”

They did, which he'd always thought strange in a firefighting helicopter. It sure made sense now.

Denise, who of course knew everything about everything, locked in the encryption circuit. Then she did a trick that took him a moment to figure out. She tied the second radio signal into the first so that they'd be transmitting encrypted to Mark at the same time.

Yet another reason to appreciate the woman.

“Two kilometers out,” Vern announced.

“Transmit,” the blond man said, “Desert Girl. Arrive hot. Going hot.”

A microphone click was the only response he received.

Vern wanted to warn Denise but didn't have time. The man had just ordered weapons live in both helicopters.

Battle was imminent.

Most of the chopper's armor had been stripped off when it had been decommissioned from the Army. They weren't wearing bulletproof vests.

He had to protect Denise as much as he could.

So, rather than coming in high to the presidential residence and then descending into a hail of gunfire, he put the chopper down on the deck and opened up the throttle.

He roared up the street, slaloming around buildings and hopping up just high enough to clear his wheels over the electrical lines crossing the four-lane road.

The Firehawk was moving at close to two hundred miles per hour when he popped over the residence's perimeter wall and descended until his wheels were barely above the cars in the parking lot.

By the time any gunmen saw him, he'd be gone before they could take aim.

Denise's “Yikes!” as she braced her hands against her seat made him smile. This wasn't flying to a fire, at least not the kind of firefight she'd been exposed to. But he'd flown to gunfire more than a few times, sneaking up on unhappy drug runners racing for the coast through rough seas.

The first rounds pinged off his windshield when he was a hundred yards from the President's residence. It was painted in white with dramatic, rounded white arches down the whole side.

The harsh
brap
of the M240s mounted in the cargo bay answered the gunfire, but he was too busy to do more than register the noise.

He flared the nose up hard. The helicopter climbed abruptly, dumping speed for height.

If he did this right—

He shoved the nose back to level right as he lost all forward speed.

They were hovering fifty feet above the north courtyard. Kicking the rudder pedal to shift the rear rotor to line up with a corner, he settled down into the area shadowed by the westering sun.

The gunfire ceased as he dropped below the roof peak.

One story down. One to go.

“Vern, there's a fountain,” Denise called out.

“Where?”

“About to clip you on the port-side cargo bay.”

He looked at the walls of the tight courtyard, his rotor disk an invisible shining circle with indefinite edges.

Dirt, plants, a stray towel, all whorled violently in the enclosed space. He could hear the roar of the turbines off the walls, echoing until it was deafening.

Five feet? That was his best estimate of the distance from his rotor tips to the mezzanine-level walkway's railing.

He shrunk it to three…and they didn't hit anything. “We clear?”

“Barely, yes,” Denise called out.

He descended the final story blind in his own dirt storm. The air was so turbulent that it was a miracle he was still flying.

That's what had happened to the stealth Black Hawk that crashed in the bin Laden compound. The weather had been hot, and they'd been at high altitude and heavily loaded. Then, as they flew down into the courtyard surrounded by a towering wall, any smooth air had turned into a maelstrom and the rotor blades had lost all lift.

He sagged in the seat once the wheels hit.

He'd made it down.

“Keep it spun up,” the blond man shouted while his men jumped off the helicopter. He raced after them.

Vern had made it down.

But he had no idea if he'd be able to take off again.

The relative peace was shocking.

Denise could feel her ears popping as she tried again and again to adjust to the sudden stillness. The turbines still roared and reverberated off the walls, but it was a calming, steady sound after the violence of their passage.

Vern's voice was a visceral shock over the headphones. “You okay?”

“I think so. A bit too much to process.”

Vern had flattened the rotor blades so they were simply whirling without moving any air. The detritus in the courtyard that had been blowing in their own personal tornado had slowly settled back to the terrazzo floor. Small chairs and tables had been slammed against walls or sent skittering down long hallways.

“You better add some negative lift.” At least some part of her mind was still functioning.

“I'm worried about being able to take off, not staying in place.”

“Vern. Your exhaust is currently 580 degrees centigrade. That's”—she paused to do the conversion—“1,076 Fahrenheit. You're going to be igniting walls soon if you don't circulate the air.”

“Oh.” He lowered the collective. By giving the rotor blades a negative tilt, they sucked up air from any open passageway in the building and drove a column of hot air upward.

It wasn't enough to do more than stir everything scattered across the courtyard, but she could feel the air temperature dropping in the cabin. It was only after the reek of the exhaust fumes was being forced up and out that she noticed its absence. Her senses were moving through thick mud.

“Why does it feel so peaceful?” She really felt quite content to sit here with Vern all afternoon if that's what it took. Beyond the laminate windshield was a very ornate and stately building. Doors of rich mahogany led to rooms that she imagined to be well-lit, professional, and cozy by turns. Wide, open-plan hallways led off in various directions, looking cool and inviting with dark tile and arched white passages.

She glanced back into the cargo bay. The edge of the large, open door was actually inside one of the cascading levels of the fountain. A cheerful stream of water washed through the cargo bay and out the far door as if it had been designed that way.

It was actually quite pretty. Maybe they should add it to every chopper design so that—

“Maybe it seems peaceful because no one is shooting at us.”

“Someone was shooting at us? Really? It was just—” Choking her by the throat.

“Easy there, Wrench. Easy. They're done with that now.” Vern had taken her hand.

She could feel him holding it, but it was far away.

His voice was fading until all she could hear was a distant call of, “Hey! Hey. Hey…”

When she came back, she'd have to remember to tell Vern that he sounded like a scarlet macaw winging through the jungle and squawking to others that there were humans swimming in their private pool below the waterfall.

A bright, sharp sensation pierced the warm cocoon she'd been pulling around herself.

It was Vern.

Kissing her.

Hard.

“Ow!” She pushed him back and rubbed at her lips. “What was that for?”

“Seemed better than a slap.” He was grinning at her.

She was sitting in Firehawk Oh-Three in the middle of the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa during a coup d'état. And they were shooting at her.

Very slowly she turned to look at the two guns she'd mounted in the rear of their craft. The fountain's flow through the cargo bay was washing a dirty, rattling clutter of spent brass bullet casings out the door and scattering them all over the palace's terrazzo floor. These were added to the hundreds more that had spilled down while the Firehawk was flying and firing above the courtyard.

Holes. There were holes in the hull where daylight was filtering through places it wasn't supposed to filter through.

Boeing
Museum
Restoration
Center, here I come.

“Vern. I—”

A rattle of gunfire cut her off. She spun to face forward. The gunfire was coming from a hall directly in front of the helicopter. She flinched and ducked down, trying to make herself smaller in her seat.

A group was rushing toward them down one of the corridors. A small man, a big woman, and three girls in their teens ran at the front. A half-dozen others raced close behind. Then at the rear, the mercenaries led by
el
jefe
were doing a staged retreat.

“Hang on, honey.” Vern's voice was steady over the intercom. “This is where it gets rough.”

Denise turned to Vern, aghast. “
Now
it gets rough?”