The Death Trust (2 page)

The three remaining Humvees pulled up behind in a staggered line. The mounted machine guns were manned and the men swept them through the arcs, but there wasn’t anything to shoot at. The rest of Scott’s patrol took up positions on the ground and against an adjacent wall, looking for movement, for something to target. The road was eerily quiet but for the rough idling engines of the remaining Humvees and the groans from the wounded man. Scott felt uneasy. He was unsure how to read the situation. Damn it, he wasn’t even sure there
was
a situation.

Ambrose made his way to the sergeant, staying low. The patrol had stopped in an area protected by a high wall on one side and the wide-open expanse of the Tigris River on the other. “What do you reckon took us out, boss?” he asked.

“Beats the fuck out of me,” said Scott. The area they were in was actually quite peaceful. He glanced at their Humvee. If they had set off a mine, the pattern of damage would have been quite different. It was more likely that a projectile of some kind had hit them. That raised another question: Where had it come from? Tense and not a little baffled, Scott stood and looked around for movement. They’d have to leave the Humvee behind, push it to the side of the road, destroy it, and cram into the remaining vehicles. The wreck would be stripped clean by the locals before it could be recovered the following day. “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here and push on. We’ve got—” But, as Sergeant Scott spoke, Ambrose saw his sergeant’s head turn inside out beneath his helmet and dissolve in a puff of red atomized droplets that sprayed onto him, spattering his face and neck. Ambrose blinked while his mind struggled to process the image burned onto his retinas and the reason for the sudden cool sensation on his skin.

Sergeant Scott’s body continued to stand for several long seconds, M16 at the ready, seemingly unaware that its head had been completely removed. And then, like some kind of incomplete monster of Frankenstein, the grotesque figure took two faltering steps toward Ambrose. The rifle clattered to the ground, and what was left of Sergeant Scott reached out as if searching for support. But then the corpse collapsed to the earth and quivered where it lay. Thick crimson blood oozed from the shredded neck.

The men, having snapped out of the shock of what they’d just witnessed, began spraying the road ahead with full metal jackets. But there was nothing to target and certainly no one to shoot at. Eventually they ran out of ammunition. Bewildered, Alpha company stood and looked around, the barrels of their weapons smoking. The only sound that remained was the uneven thump of a faraway gunship and the lumpy, irregular hum of their transports’ idling engines.

A week ago

G
eneral Abraham Scott felt the shudder through the airframe, but attached no significance to it. He banked the sailplane into the area beneath the fluffy cumulus cloud and sensed the lift of the thermal in the seat of his pants and in his inner ear. When he positioned the aircraft properly and the shaft of rising warm air caressed the long and slender wings, the current acted like an invisible elevator. The needle on the altimeter moved steadily around the face of the instrument and the pressure within his ears built. He swallowed, releasing that pressure, and his hearing returned to normal. The glider shot out of the thermal beneath the cloud and Scott followed another aircraft riding the warm air rising off a wide expanse of plowed field far below.

The general looked about and took in the unobstructed view of the Rhineland as the glider climbed higher. The sky was an iridescent blue on this unseasonably warm day early in May. Winter would undoubtedly return before spring took serious hold. Beneath, Germany was a patchwork of dark forest and green fields dissected by roadways.

With the radio turned off, it was blissfully quiet within the bubble formed by the Plexiglas dome around him. When Scott pushed it, barrel rolling and looping through the perfection of the mid-morning, there was the rush of air, a whistling over the glider’s surfaces, but within, the thermal the aircraft almost seemed to waft silently like a feather, apparently lighter than the air itself. The sun warmed his face, and General Scott allowed himself a moment of peace. And, yes, happiness.

Away to the east lay the broad expanse of Ramstein Air Base, a huge NATO facility, the U.S.’s statement about its commitment to the defense of Europe in the face of an invasion from the Soviets. That threat had passed and now a new foe had stepped forward to fill the gap, but perhaps not the one everyone thought of. The sight of the base, a vast beige and black scar surrounded by greenery, brought the anguish back. Scott frowned and then closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about Ramstein, nor of what he’d discovered. He didn’t even want to think about his son, his beautiful boy, Peyton, a marine sergeant, killed on the streets of Baghdad. He didn’t want to think about the C-130s returning from the Middle East with their cargo of American boys wrapped sightless in black zippered bags, basting in their own fluids, the bags sloshing as they were lifted off the transport plane’s ramp. Those thoughts seemed to desecrate the pristine cleanliness of a world populated by clouds and air currents.

Scott wrenched his mind free of the thoughts and realizations that had changed his politics, his relationship with his wife, his country—everything, in fact—and tried to concentrate on the moment. He scanned the sky above his head. Around five hundred feet above, the other sailplane was circling like a white bird of prey in the invisible thermal. Flying was the solitary corner of his life left untouched by the sickness that had invaded the very core of his being. Here, in this environment with a control stick between his knees, he felt free, unchained, the lead sheath peeled back from his heart. Here, nothing could touch him.

The needle on the altimeter nudged twelve thousand feet. Scott retrimmed the glider for aerobatics as he left the thermal. Away to his right, the other glider circled gracefully. He knew the pilot, Captain Aleveldt, a member of the Royal Netherlands Air Force and fellow soaring enthusiast.

Scott’s sailplane shuddered again, and he blamed the vibration on rough air. The glider climbed and Scott watched the needle on the airspeed indicator drop. When it touched the correct number, he pulled back hard on the stick and then pushed the left rudder pedal to the floor. The glider responded instantly, rolling inverted through a tight barrel before settling into a controlled corkscrewlike descent. Scott’s stomach bounced into his throat briefly as the world went haywire, the blue of the sky and the green of the ground tumbling and rolling together. In the spin, the horizon settled down and rushed from left to right across the Perspex canopy. Scott calmly watched the needle on the altimeter unwind around the dial. The ground was eleven thousand feet away but it was approaching fast. And then the unthinkable happened. The right wing collapsed, folding vertically beside his shoulder. The glider toppled sideways, like a swing with the chain cut on one side, and accelerated. It spun faster to the right. The nose dropped and the cockpit filled with the increasing roar of rushing air as the glider plunged downward. General Scott knew instantly that he was a dead man. The glider spun faster with the uneven forces acting on it. Scott’s head was jammed to one side and he felt his neck would break with the strain. The violence of the airflow suddenly ripped the wing clean away, like an arm wrenched from its socket. The thirty feet of wing began a slow spiral away on a divergent course. With its departure went much of the wind noise inside the cockpit.

General Scott was a religious man. Soon, he knew, he would be joining his son. The thought resigned him to his fate and he took his hands off the control stick. He placed them on his knees, closed his eyes, and waited.

With the departure of the wing, the glider’s wild rotation slowed and its vertical speed increased. It also began to tumble. The massive forces built, and ripped the other wing off. The fuselage of the glider, released from this air brake, accelerated once more. Scott opened his eyes. Only the greenery of the earth now filled the canopy on this endless ride. The vibration made it impossible to focus on the useless instrument panel in front of him. The general’s weight in the nose of what was now a fiberglass missile caused it to roll inverted.

Scott remembered the day his son returned from Iraq in a C-130. At first, he had not the nerve to unzip the bag. If he looked upon the face of his boy in death, would he ever sleep again? But he needed to be sure. The autopsy. He had to look inside that black plastic cocoon. They had given him no choice. The stench of death hung over the bags laid out on the concrete. Scott remembered the sound the zipper made as he pulled it down, like bullets fired from a silenced machine gun. What he saw when he looked within filled him with a pain like none he’d ever known and he howled there as he knelt, bent over the one thing in his life that he truly loved unselfishly.

The missile was now nudging over two hundred and forty miles per hour. The tailplane was next to go. The airflow snapped it, and the missile, now shaped and weighted like a bullet, shot downward at over two hundred and eighty miles per hour.

The vibration smashed Scott’s jaws together and shattered several of his teeth. Blood filled his mouth as the lacerated stumps sliced up his gums. The final memory to flash into his mind with searing clarity was the moment when it had all been made plain to him. The Establishment, its cynical First Convention. Tears streamed from his clenched eyelids. How many sons and daughters, brothers and sisters had been killed because of it? And yet here he was, a four-star general, an overseer for the voracious machine.

General Scott hit the base of a towering pine tree at two hundred and ninety-one miles per hour. There was no pain. He could no longer feel a thing.

ONE

Today

I
had no idea what woke me up early, until I caught a whiff of my own breath. Then my tooth began to ache and I thought it could be that. But it could also have been a premonition of
sleepus interruptus,
because no sooner did my eyes overcome the crust gluing them together than the doorbell chimed, and then chimed again. I got to it on the fourth intonation, when whoever was on the other side of the door decided a bar of “Greensleeves” didn’t perhaps convey the proper desired authority and began underlining the urgency with their fist.

“Vin, c’mon, man. I know you’re in there,” said Major Arlen Wayne, solving the day’s first mystery—namely, who was making all the goddamn noise assaulting my alcohol-poisoned gray matter. Arlen was practically my only friend left on the planet—when my ex-wife moved out, she took most of them with her. Arlen and I had been out on the town drinking, celebrating my divorce coming through as well as the conviction for murder handed down on a case I’d been working on. Arlen knew I was “in there” on account of him being the person who brought me home the previous night. I think.

I opened the door to a sliver of light and he pushed his way in. “Go away,” I said as Arlen threw back the curtains and let in the day. I’m not a morning person. I’ve been known to punch people for waking me before a reasonable hour, which varies according to the time I went to sleep the night before and the condition I was in when my head hit the pillow.

My name is Vincent Cooper, Major Vin Cooper, Special Agent in the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations—the OSI. I work major crime. Homicides, mainly. I’m thirty-four, look twenty-eight, so I tell myself, and occasionally act eighteen, so my ex says.

I shuffled past Arlen, keeping to the protection of the shadows, and lay down on my bed, burying my head under the pillow.

“C’mon, Vin,” he said.

“You already said that,” I told him, my voice muffled by the pillow.

“The big cheese wants you in her office. ASAP. So get your shit together. And I’d bring my passport if I were you.”

“Am I going somewhere?”

“Germany, I think.”

I groaned.

The big cheese is the OSI’s second-in-command. She’s one tough old boot, a major general. Her name is Winifred Gruyere, which explains why we call her the big cheese. But not, of course, to her face. She’s probably the most terrifying person I’ve ever met: short, built like a Buick, eyes that don’t blink, and large pores that remind me of the way a pancake looks when it’s cooking. She’s fifty-five, I think (it’s hard to tell—she could be a hundred and fifty), and is the real power running OSI rather than the four-star general who spends most of his time on the golf course getting his handicap below embarrassing. “What’s it about?” I asked, taking the pillow off my head.

“When you turn on your cell phone, you’re going to hear a few heated messages. You know it’s against the rules to turn it off.”

I shrugged. “Battery ran low.” That wasn’t true. The real reason was that I hate the damn things.

“What about your pager?”

“It got wet.”

Arlen shook his head and changed the subject. “You heard of a General Scott?”

“No. Should I have?”

“He was the CO of Ramstein Air Base. A four-star heavy hitter, married to the daughter of the Vice President of our fair land.”

Like most people, I’m a bit slow on the uptake after a night on the suds, but I’m not stupid. “I’m assuming the past tense you’re using is significant.”

“Yeah. Did you get who he was married to?”

“I got it.” Ramstein AB is a vast NATO facility in Germany, shared by a bunch of other air forces. But U.S. forces have by far the biggest presence there. Pretty much everything going to Europe and to the Middle East transits through Ramstein. It’s a giant military hub. “Do you know how he was killed?” I asked as I shuffled into the bathroom for a shower.

“The wings fell off his glider.”

A shiver ran the full length of my spine and into my legs. I am not good with flying.