She did it. That was the inescapable truth. That goddamn Doctor Hall. She was not only Raab’s enemy, she was the enemy of everything they wanted to do to save the country. How did she turn Keegan? He really wanted the answer to that. He was never one of her patients. That’s why he was sent to snatch her and get her to bring Metzler in.
Then something occurred to him that he’d never put together before. Keegan’s disastrous crash in Afghanistan and Doctor Hall’s time at the hospital in Bagram. Was it possible? He tried to remember the dates when both were there. For the first time, he put together a potential connection between Keegan and Hall. Maybe she was one of the surgeons who put him back together.
If that was true, things started to make sense. They had a connection. And she was not only a brilliant neuroscientist, the creator of the Z-chip, but she was also known for using psychotherapeutic techniques along with brain enhancers to help serious TBI and PTSD patients.
Tessler believed he might have finally figured out what happened to Keegan.
“Seneca, dammit!” Tessler said, over the high-level encrypted channel he knew Keegan could hear. “Whatever you’re doing, and I know why, it can’t work. Stop this. I need to understand. Listen to me—this doesn’t have to end in a disaster. We can talk through this. Keegan, answer me. You got messed up. That damn doctor. She’s bad news. She hates Raab and will destroy the program. Raab was a fool to think she was going to save him by fixing the problem. Whatever you think you know, it’s not right. Talk to me, soldier. I know the connection. I know about Bagram. Talk to your commanding officer. That’s an order.”
Tessler prayed that he would get an answer. That Keegan would respond.
Nothing.
Dead silence.
Yet the signal feedback reception indicated the message was reaching its intended destination.
He glanced to the upper right of his goggles, where he now had a locator image of Raab’s chopper behind the walls of a compound half a mile from the facility that belonged to Doctor Mike Vereen, a neurosurgeon who worked closely with Doctor Raab.
Was Vereen involved? Had he betrayed them as well?
Just as they were making the approach to the compound, the chopper rose up in front of them like a flushed bird, so close they had to swerve to avoid a crash.
Raab’s chopper ran down through a ravine of trees and momentarily vanished.
“Get them. They can’t be allowed to escape,” Colonel Tessler demanded, aware that he was sounding a little panicky.
They gave chase through the hills at dangerous levels, diving low through the hollows, hugging the trees, riding just above the roads that curled through the hills toward the ocean. He had a superior helicopter and a great pilot. It wouldn’t be a long chase.
“Seneca, this is your last chance.” Tessler tried not to sound like he was pleading, but in a big way, he was. He wanted them to surrender. That was the only good outcome.
But there was no reply. And something else disturbed Colonel Tessler, and that was the acrobatic nature of the inferior chopper. Keegan had to be at the controls.
“You can’t run. I don’t want to have to kill you and those with you,” Tessler said.
Tessler had no choice. He gave the kill sign to his pilot and they dropped fast along the hillside trees like a bird of prey tracking, closing.
Tessler hated that it had to end this way. The chopper they were chasing was no competition against the highly modified HH60 Pave Hawk. He had superior night vision, state-of-the-art infrared tracking, and extreme stress maneuverability. Nothing could outrun them and nothing could survive their telegenic weaponry.
“Kill them,” he said, quietly, definitively, sadly.
62
As the chopper turned and dropped in a sickening descent, then swung violently around in an impossible reverse direction, Rainee held the strap tight with one hand and Mora’s stretcher frame with the other and tried to drive her feet into the floor metal.
It felt like she was in a kayak on a wild river. A crash was inevitable. The machine couldn’t possibly take this. No pilot could do these acrobatics with impunity.
Trees whipped past the open doors on each side like running a gauntlet of whips as they passed cliffs and villas.
Duran in one door, Metzler the other, both strapped in, feet braced on the sides of the open doors.
Keegan seemed to have no sense of the chopper’s strength and ability to endure stress. Rainee waited for the moment it came apart.
They dropped down almost to the road, jumping over small bridges, weaving up into ravines, and it seemed at times the machine couldn’t escape, yet it did.
A rocket exploded in the trees off to the right as they shot up over them, a cascade of white and red flames.
Another flashed across the front and impacted on the hillside as they dropped violently down into another rocky ravine.
She stared at Keegan thinking the enhanced, upgraded warrior was going to take the chopper apart with his violent moves and them to their doom. Still, she had to marvel at what he could do. Keegan seemed one with the machine, riding the flow of the hills yet able to avoid the rocket fire.
What he was doing reminded her of the snowboarders she’d seen in the Winter Olympics, whose incredible twists, spins, and turns seemed impossible.
Metzler and Duran leaned out their respective doors and, from time to time, fired in bursts at their pursuer.
Keegan took them on yet another gut-wrenching, acrobatic move. They dropped head first down the side of a hill, nearly U-turned into some trees, spun to the right, and rode the hills like they were surfing waves.
When she glanced over at Raab, she saw a man paralyzed with fear, sickly white, locked onto the inevitability of his death and not taking it well. At least she had that to take with her if these were her last moments on this earth, knowing this bastard wouldn’t go on.
Rainee smiled, a smile of disdain, anger, revenge. “I really don’t like that you might be the last person I see on this earth. But at least I know you’re done.”
Raab didn’t respond.
Keegan, apparently determined to further test the limits of the machine, continued to take the chopper on a wild dance, snapping them left and right, then he took them on a hellish dive down the side of a cliff, rolling on the side that sent Duran swinging out of the door, saved by the door-gunner’s strap or he’d be gone.
That’s when Rainee caught a brief glimpse of the chasing chopper as it flashed past the door as they turned over it and then swung down as if to go under. They rolled one way and then the opposite, wildly across a severe angle, nearly over on their back, turned as if looking to crash into the chasing chopper before pulling up and away. Two predator birds locked in a fight, in an embrace of death, spiraling through the hills and then racing out to sea.
This isn’t possible, Tessler thought.
Kill them! Kill them! How can this go on?
In the thin, gossamer dawn, when everything was instrument tasked, they should have made the kill. That their target had escaped seemed impossible. They were chasing a madman with impossible skills.
In a violent swing, the chopper almost on its side, Tessler, nearly delirious from the twists and turns, caught a glimpse of the white tops of waves ahead that looked like long, billowing skirts of dancing Mexican girls.
Then, finally, the alert of a missile lock. They had them dead to rights. No hills to hide in. No trees.
He was amazed, even as he knew he shouldn’t have been, at the flying skills of Keegan. Nobody else could be at the helm of that chopper. An inferior machine with a superior pilot.
But Keegan had no real chance of escape. There was only so much you could do with a machine that lacked the torque, lift, and thrust of the bird chasing them. They were doomed.
His pilot closed in for the kill.
“Bring them down,” Tessler said. “Enough of this.”
As they moved in for the kill, as machine logic dictated the inevitable end, something went wrong. Something happened that should not have happened.
The target vanished. It was as if it dropped off, down into the sea, swallowed.
Tessler strained to see the crash even as the rocket that would have taken it out hit the sea.
He was stunned to see the target reappear, like a ghost, rolling under them, heading back to shore in an acrobatic move that couldn’t be.
“Jesus . . . get that bastard!” Tessler yelled, not only unable to believe the maneuver, but experiencing a fear he hadn’t known in a long, long time.
Tessler’s pilot, one of the best, in a machine that had all the ability, made a radical turn, swinging around in a gut-wrenching 180.
But again, incredibly, they lost their prey. It was as if all their instrumentation, their superior equipment, wasn’t able to deal with this slower, less agile, less capable machine.
And when they heard the warnings, saw the change in direction, the target was riding so low over the waves, it was like a hunting pelican.
“Kill them,” Tessler ordered. “Goddamnit, kill them.”
Finally, it was going to be over.
“Now! Now!” Tessler yelled.
Tessler’s pilot rolled them over on their side. There was a moment when it seemed they were in position to shoot down the fleeing chopper.
But it was the moment when everything suddenly went wrong, when the world spun violently and flipped out of control. It was like sliding off into space, losing the hold on gravity.
That’s when Colonel Tessler realized the bastard, the most brilliant of his enhanced warfighters, had done something really impressive. He’d led them into the rocks. Killed them. That magnificent, enhanced warfighter bastard . . .
63
Rainee, feeling sick from the gyrations, never saw the actual crash, just the aftermath, the debris spinning in red and white fire into the air.
It was almost the same spot where her uncle had kamikazied the other boat only about four hours ago.
She tried to recover from the crazy moment, before this explosion, when they were twisting impossibly, the waves almost slapping the bottom of the chopper, when Rainee looked out the open door past Metzler and saw the white tops and the approach of their end in the rocks. Death upon them. Death rising from her stomach to her throat.
But it didn’t happen that way. They whiplashed in a vicious sideways turn, twisting both Metzler and Duran against the sides of their doors, twisting Rainee to the point of her arms feeling like they would break, then the chopper pulled up and over and she saw sky, the finger of a morning moon, the ripped fog, and the aftermath of the explosion of the chopper chasing them as it impacted on the rocks.
And that’s when air finally came back into her lungs.
Rainee looked at the pilot and just shook her head in disbelief, not that he’d done what he did, but that the damn machine had held together.
As they raced out to sea, Duran and Metzler congratulated Keegan on good work, but they glanced at each other, and at her, with a bit of incredulity.
Rainee connected that moment years ago, when she’d flown out with Keegan’s wrecked body from that crash in the Swat Valley, with this moment, when it was Keegan’s turn to fly her out of harm’s way.
My existence, she thought, is nuts, but then, I was birthed from the womb of a woman who landed F-18s on carriers in choppy seas, a father who operated in the worst of conditions, a family of warriors as far back as the beginning of the Republic. Her life, she thought, wasn’t really her decision. It was her destiny. She just made the small, yet necessary, choices along the way.
She turned to Mora. “How you doing?”
“Other than I’m shot, in a bit of discomfort, and someone who never liked roller coasters, not all that bad. We got them.”
“Yes, Keegan got them.”
“He’s badass.”
“I think so.”
They raced out to sea, away from the coast, and turned north toward Coronado Island.
But they hadn’t gotten far when they were intercepted.
Keegan said something she couldn’t make out.
“What’s happening?” Mora asked.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have company,” Metzler said. “Lots of company.”
“Ours?”
“We’ll soon find out.”
64
They had choppers move in on both sides and Keegan couldn’t evade them even if he wanted. They were marked with no insignias of any kind.
Under whose command and what orders? Rainee struggled to see who it was as Keegan communicated with the choppers on either side of them.
Rainee glanced at Raab. He was now awake, and he had a hopeful expression.
History, Rainee thought, is decided in moments like this.
And then Metzler leaned back from his side door perch and informed them that there were jets overhead. “Gonna get interesting,” he said.
Duran turned to Metzler and Mora. “Whatever happens, it’s been a hell of a ride.” Then he looked over at Rainee. “Okay, I did look. And you were about the most beautiful creature anyone could ever come upon on a lonely road in the middle of the night.”
She said, unable to restrain herself, “That means I wouldn’t look good except in the dark?”
“No. . . I didn’t mean that.”
That got a big laugh from Metzler and the suffering Mora. She felt bad for her remark but didn’t have time to apologize.
Keegan turned, leaned back, and gave her a signal, pointing to the chopper on the right.
Rainee looked out the door and saw a man giving them the thumbs up. It took a moment, but the man wearing a helmet, goggles had certain facial elements—jawline, mouth, nose—that she recognized. Her heart jumped. It was Jason Styles. She returned the gesture.
Had he been closer, she would have kissed the bastard. She said, “That boy sure is pretty.”
A short time later, when they approached the base on Coronado Island, the jets peeled off and headed north toward the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar.
The choppers escorted them to the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado, home of SEAL Team Five.