Authors: James Patterson
Though seated, he
appeared tall and lanky, wearing camo, a gun propped on the log next to him.
Gripping our cold shotguns, we knelt on the forest floor and watched him for a very long and silent five minutes.
He didn't move. Was he sleeping? Dead? Or was it a trap?
Very slowly I began walking down toward him. When I was about ten feet away, the guy sort of stirred and reached for his weapon.
I closed the gap and put both barrels of the shotgun to the back of his head. “Don't!” I said.
I made him lie on his belly, searched his outer pockets, and found zip ties that I used on his hands. Twenty feet away from where he'd been sleeping, the trees gave way to a clearing I recognized as the firing range I'd seen the day before. Beyond it were the trailers.
We'd done it. We'd made it back to their camp. I told Rosalind to head to the tree line and wait for me there, while I went back to the soldier and lifted his weaponâan actual grenade launcher! Just amazing. These guys had to be CIA or something. You couldn't get grenade launchers at Walmart. I'd never even seen one.
The man remained silent as I removed his camo balaclava. He looked boyish, in his late thirties, a pleasant enough curly-haired guy with a goofy gap in his teeth. His driver's license said his name was Justin De Souza, with an address in San Jose, California.
“Long way from San Jose, Justin,” I said. I found a Clif energy bar in his bag, ripped off the wrapper, and started chewing.
“Where are the others?” I said, spitting crumbs.
“Where the hell do you think they are? Out looking for you.”
“You're the only one here?” I said skeptically.
“Yes. I mean no. Therkelson is in the trailer with a broken back. And the old man is here. They got him locked up.”
“The old guy in the blue truck? He's here?”
“Yes. He's okay. A little roughed up, but okay.”
“Get up and show me,” I said, kicking him.
We walked to the clearing and stopped.
“Rosalind, I'm going to take this guy back over to those trailers. If something happens, I want you and Roxie to try to get to Chapman by yourself. But if it's okay, I'll whistle and you and Roxie run as fast as you can to the trailers, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Where's my grandpa?”
“In one of the trailers, I think. Just let me go check first.”
I turned back to Justin.
“Okay, buddy. Showtime. If you're lying and somebody takes a shot at me, I won't shoot back at him. I will pull this trigger on you, Justin, and we can die together. Now get moving. Fast.”
The twenty seconds it took to run out in the open toward the trailers were the longest of my life. Any moment, I thought I would know what it felt like to take a high-powered bullet to a vital part of my body. But we made it. There were no shots.
We found Joe Walke in the second trailer, sitting against the wall in his orange vest.
“You got the drop on them!” he said, leaping up with surprising energy. “I knew it! Where's Rosalind?”
I whistled.
Their hug moments later on the edge of the firing range was epic. Roxie, who couldn't contain herself any longer, let out a happy bark.
“Okay, Joe. Here's what I'd like you to do. Find some keys, take one of the vehicles, and head down the hill.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My job,” I said, shoving Justin back into the trailer in front of me, “is to end this thing. Now go.”
I made Justin
sit against the wall.
“You ever want to make it back to San Jose in the vertical position, you better start explaining just what in the hell is going on here, Justin. Because I've had a long night, and I'm not in the mood.”
“We're training at the camp.”
“Training for what? The coming alien invasion? I'm a cop, Justin. NYPD. I know what happened to Eardley. How he didn't die in the crash back in '07. How his old buddy Haber is here running a paramilitary operation, and decided Eardley should take a dive off the side of a building. What are you guys? CIA?”
Justin looked at me.
I took a chance. “Look, man. I have no stake in this, except that I tried to solve a murder and now people keep shooting at me. But I was just at the Pentagon, asking how this guy turned up dead again, and the brass are all over this. The secret is out.”
Justin grunted, so I continued. “And this little training camp is gonna look pretty strange when the powers that be start sniffing around. I wouldn't be surprised if Haber took that chopper and flew away. If not, I'm gonna wait here with your weapon to greet him in style. But if you tell me what's going on, I can help you.”
He exhaled and slumped down. “Give me a cigarette, man. They're in my bag. I'll tell you the whole thing. This mission is cursed.”
I lit his Marlboro for him with his Zippo and placed it between his lips.
“Okay, Justin. Now, from the very beginning,” I said.
He took a breath.
“It all started in Iraq. On the night of May 1, 2007, we ran a raid from the Special Forces command in Balad up north all the way down south. Near the shore of the Persian Gulf in Basra.”
“In Eardley's C-130?”
“Yeah. It was a big CIA-run operation. There were Rangers, Green Berets, and SEALs. I was just a weatherman and forward observer.”
“Weatherman?”
“An Air Force weatherman. They bring us out on potentially longer raids to read the sky, just like the guys on Channel 6. Weather's important to pilots and planes. Like life-and-death important.”
I nodded.
“Go on.”
“Anyway, so the top special operators, mostly veteran SEALs, were real jazzed about grabbing some bigwig al-Qaeda asshole they got intel on, so they brought all the toys way down there. Little bird choppers, some Humvees, some dirt bikes. There were about thirty of us altogether.
“So the hot dogs do a recon, to suss out a plan while a contingent of Rangers and B-level folks like myself are supposed to hang back at this remote staging area, as backup in case some heavy-duty shit goes down. While all the hotshots were on surveillance for hours, us peewees were sitting around shooting the shit. And this one Ranger, this guy Toporski, goes exploring on the outskirts of this remote craphole suburb of Basra. After an hour, he radioes us to come running because somebody took a shot at him.
“We run over there, and there's another shot from this hut's window, and we light it up and kick in the door ready to grease Osama, who we hadn't found yet. But it was better than that. A million times better. It was the mother lode.”
I still hadn't
heard the chopper coming back but knew it could return at any second. I nudged Justin to keep him talking.
“Back in 2003 when we came in, the week before we got to Baghdad, a national bank was knocked over by the guards who were supposed to watch it. Three hundred million in cash and gold. Well, I don't know how that loot got there to Basra in some shithole of a hut, but that's where it was.”
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Treasure hunting in Basra?
“There it was in a locked room under a tarp. There were two pallets. On one was millions of dollars in Federal Reserve US hundred-dollar bills, and on the other pallet were stacks of gold bars up to the waist. There were 105 of them in all. Each one twenty-seven pounds of pure gold, with the word
Engelhard
stamped into them. I've seen a few things, but when Toporski pulled that tarp, that took the cake. I mean, it was justâ¦
“Right then and there, we decide to take it. Don't tell the hotshots. Screw them. All six of usâincluding Haber and Eardley, our pilotâgrab it all, load it into the Humvee. We had to take out the seats. The truck was scraping the ground. Then we hauled ass back to the plane.”
“And did what with it? How would you get it out of the country?”
“Eardley comes up with a plan. He's gonna drop this gold- and money-filled Humvee from the plane into this lake he knows up north near the base, just open the back ramp and put it in neutral and dump her out. Mark its location, and we're going to come back and get it.”
“Like sunken treasure.”
“Exactly, man. Like pirate booty. Then he's gonna crash the plane, fake his death, and get out of the country.”
“Nobody stopped him?”
“No way. He was on a desert landing strip. Not like he had to ask the tower for permission. It was war.”
“What did you say when the others got back? Didn't they ask where Eardley and the plane went?”
“What do you think we said? We don't know. Acted like he just went nuts or something.”
“And they bought it?”
“Yep. Didn't find a body, but with the plane downâthey shut the case.”
“So how did he get out of Iraq?”
“He said he put a good chunk of money in a knapsack before dumping the rest in the lake, and found a guy in a pickup to drive him to the border. He bought a fake passport. He was a smart guy. He learned some Arabic. He would joke around with the Iraqis. He was a likable guy, with giant balls. I miss him.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You killed him.”
“Not me. That was that asshole Therkelson. He said it was an accident.”
“So what's all this here?” I said. “The camp and everything.”
Justin smiled.
“You're going back for the rest of the money!”
He nodded.
“Exactly. We were training to go back into Iraq to snatch it. It's in ISIS-held territory now.”
“But at the last second, Eardley bugged out,” I said, thinking about his reaching out to the reporter.
“I guess. He wasn't the same after. He and Haber used to be buddies, you know. We all were. And we looked up to those two. Would have followed wherever they led. But Haber took over the training operation and brought in someâ¦investors. The stakes got higher.”
“And Eardley had regrets?”
“I mean, he'd made this split-second decision to fake his deathâ¦he traveled the world, but he wanted his life back. The money wasn't worth living the rest of his days underground, a war criminal instead of a hero. So he disappeared. Which we knew meant he was gonna blow the whistle on us all. Except the boss man tracked him down. Got to him before he could betray us.”
“And here we are.”
“And here we are,” Justin repeated, as the trill of the helicopter sounded out the open door behind us.
I looked out
the door and saw the little black bird come down out of the sky directly above the firing range, silver tatters of mist trailing behind like a wedding gown's train.
Then the guns on the helicopter's underbelly opened. Wide.
I dove to the plywood ground of the trailer as Justin lunged out the door.
I pressed myself into the corner as the chopper's minigun tore the trailer in half. The sound of it was industrial, the scream of a table saw ripping a two-by-four. The floor I was hugging shook as if caught in a tornado, a violent storm of lead and tracers that tore the roof off the structure like a can opener.
I was still shaking, my deafened ears ringing, when the two guys grabbed me and dragged me out of the smoking, burned metal ruins of the trailer. Out onto the cool grass of the range I was dragged and dropped.
A hunting boot hit me in the face, the little metal lace hooks opening my lip like a razor.
“That's for killing my friend, you son of a bitch,” I heard one of the three camo-clad bozos say through the ringing of my ears. “And crippling the other one. He'll never walk again because of what you did.”
“My pleasure,” I yelled as I thumbed at my lip. “Anytime.”
“Hey,” Justin said, looking around. “The girl and the old man. Where the hell did they go?”
“Girl?”
“Yeah, the damn girl who was with him. She has a gun.”
“We'll find her in a second,” said the slimmest of them.
“You must be Paul Haber,” I said. “The leader of this band of merry asswipes.”
“Now, now, Detective. I have a mission to run, and chasing you all the hell around these mountains has been quite a delay. Good-bye now. You can shoot him, Devine, any time you're ready. We need to get going.”
That's when I
came out and said it.
“Your coordinates are wrong,” I said calmly. “I have them.”
“What?” Haber said, turning back to me.
“Eardley had them in his stomach. In a condom. Twenty-four numbers. He must have known you guys were close, so he swallowed them. You don't have the right ones. I do.”
“You're bluffing.”
“Am I?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Fine. Go over there and get your head chopped off for nothing.”
“You gotta be shitting me, boss,” said the guy who had kicked me. “This mission is doomed, sir. I told you.”
“This mission is not doomed,” Haber said, as a high-pitched beep came through on their radios.
“Come in, you dummies. Dummies, come in. Over.”
I smiled. It was Rosalind.
“What theâ?” Haber said.
“Listen up. My grandpa's got your friend's gun, and he's got a bead on your head, mister. Now drop your gun or he'll blast your head off.”
The sound of the silenced bullet that hit Haber's head as he swung up with his rifle for the tree line beyond the range was insignificant, but what it did to his head was very significant. Half headless, he toppled over backward as if it were a trust team-building exercise. Not surprisingly, no one caught him.
“Now my grandpa's got the bead on you other guys,” the girl's voice said over the radio. “Drop your guns if you don't want to get shot, too.”
They dropped their guns.
I stood and picked one up.
“Mr. Walke, I thought I told you to leave,” I said into Haber's radio, as I saw the good old man emerge from the trees with his granddaughter and dog.
“Yeah, well, I don't hear so well sometimes,” he radioed back.