Authors: Patrick Lee
Forty minutes later a cargo jet rumbled in out of the south and, from three thousand feet up, offloaded two dozen paratroopers. Travis went to the window—he was unwilling to leave Paige alone in the room—and watched them circle down in tight columns, landing within fifty yards of the building. They were dressed in black, their uniforms bulked out with body armor, their weapons slung on their shoulders as they touched down. By the time the last of them landed, the first had already taken positions around the lodge.
Four of them stood out. One, maybe ten years older than the rest, pointed and gave orders, his sharpness and efficiency apparent even from beyond hearing range.
The last three needed no orders. They were surgeons. They made straight for the building, waved in by the locals, and Travis called them to the room as soon as they entered. They carried packs and duffels loaded with all the equipment a modern ER would have, plugging in two power strips to create enough outlets for the monitors, lights, and other machinery they arranged around the bed. Travis got out of their way and watched them take command of the situation. The specifics of their technical speech went by him, but the meaning came through clearly. They could save her.
Moments later the commander came in the front door of the lodge, carrying a satellite phone like the one Ellen Garner had tried to repair. He was speaking to someone on it already, and as his eyes found Travis in the hall, he said, “I’m here with him now.”
He strode to Travis, but instead of handing him the phone, he paused, listening to the caller. “Of course,” he said. He looked past Travis into the room. “Dr. Carro, status.”
The oldest of the surgeons, Carro, answered without looking up from his work. “She’s stable.”
The commander relayed the message into the phone, then said, “Yes, sir,” and handed the unit to Travis. As he did, for just a moment his eyes held the same curiosity as the old man who’d unbound Travis earlier. Then he walked away down the hall.
“Hello,” Travis said.
The reply came from the man he’d spoken to when he’d called Tangent earlier.
“We have a more secure connection now,” the man said, “but we’re still going to be careful about what you say on your end. Those first responders are military; they’re not cleared for what we’ll be talking about.”
“Okay.”
“First, thank you for intervening on behalf of Miss Campbell. We owe you a great deal. The following questions, I’ll ask you to answer with a simple yes or no. Did you see an object the size of a cue ball, dark blue—”
“Yes.”
“Is it in the possession of the people who were holding Miss Campbell?”
“Not exactly,” Travis said.
“Did she hide it somewhere?”
“Yes. I can tell you where—”
“No,” the man said. “Don’t do that. Just confirm for me whether it’s hidden near the encampment where you rescued her.”
“Yes,” Travis said.
“All right. The F–15 pilot verified that there’s nobody left at that site. The hostiles must’ve all been aboard the chopper when it was hit. So here’s how this is going to work. We have two Black Hawks coming to you, a little over an hour away. The pilots and crew aren’t military; they’re our people, and they’re cleared for this. One of the choppers will evacuate Miss Campbell. The other will take you to the camp in the valley, where you’ll show our people the Whisper’s location. They’ll have the means to contain it for transport. Once it’s secured, you’ll receive further instruction from them.”
“Okay,” Travis said.
“Do you have any questions?”
Travis was on the point of describing the strange attack in Room Three, but found himself unable to frame it in any way that made sense. He hadn’t even done that in his own thoughts yet.
“None,” Travis said.
The man thanked him again and hung up.
Fuck.
It was all Karl could do to keep the curse to himself. The easy version of the plan had nearly worked.
From the open door of the fourth room off the hall, ten feet from where the hiker had stood with the satellite phone, Karl had watched the conversation.
He’d been in this room since just before the helicopter’s demise, after using the sound of its rotors to mask his return down the creaking hallway. The room had proven a fine place from which to listen to the hiker’s phone call, though Karl had been prepared to follow him elsewhere if necessary.
It really should have worked.
With the chopper down in flames, and the fighter pilot’s word that the valley was clear of hostiles, Karl had been certain Tangent would ask the hiker where the damn thing was hidden. He’d even started to tell them, before they’d stopped him.
That knowledge would have ended the game. Karl would have easily taken the key back from the hiker—probably by way of a silent kill in the hallway while the doctors were preoccupied—and left the building. He’d stowed his own satellite phone in the drain trench beside the highway, three hundred yards south. A quick jog, and he could have sent his superiors the location of the hidden Whisper more than an hour ahead of Tangent’s arrival at the site.
It would have been more than enough time. His people had already dispatched another chopper from their own staging point; it was screaming along the Brooks Range at this moment, below radar, toward the valley where the 747 lay in ruins and the Whisper lay hidden. The F–15 had long since turned for home, having spent its fuel inefficiently in the mad scream to reach Coldfoot.
One spoken sentence, and every tumbler would have clicked into place.
Fuck.
Karl waited for the hiker to wander back to the open doorway of the makeshift emergency room. The noise from equipment and voices inside provided ample sound cover. Karl moved past the man, down the hall and out the front door.
By the time he reached his phone, the lodge and the soldiers around it were distant specks, inaudible over the wind. He dialed and waited.
“Tell the chopper to land five miles west of the site and wait there,” he said when it was answered. “It’s going to be complicated.”
By the time the Black Hawks arrived, the wind out of the north had hardened. Travis put his back to it and watched them come in, their shadows rippling over the landscape far behind them. They were still a mile out when Dr. Carro came to the door of the lodge and waved him back inside.
“She’s asking for you,” Carro said.
He followed Carro back to the room and found Paige with her eyes open, though unable to focus. He took her hand, and she dragged her gaze to meet his, like a child pulling a heavy weight. He wondered if this was all she wanted: just to see a face she knew, if only barely. Then she spoke, her voice so weak Travis had to lean close.
“If you have to wake it up,” she said, “then do it. It’s worth it, if there’s no other choice. But let go of it as fast as you can.”
The doctors traded looks, and Carro said, “Confusion is normal for someone under this much sedation. She’ll be fine after—”
“I know I’m on ten milligrams per minute of propofol,” Paige whispered. “Please shut up and let me speak.”
Carro shut up.
Paige fixed her eyes more firmly on Travis and said, “I know Tangent is coming. I know everything seems safe. But we never assume. We can’t afford to. If things go bad . . . if you have to use the Whisper . . . press the key against it to wake it up.”
She faded for a few seconds, then drew a deep breath and said, “Just let go of it as soon as you can. If you wait too long, it won’t let you.”
Then her eyes closed, and her breathing stabilized.
Outside, the Black Hawks came in low over the building. Travis heard pebbles from the gravel parking lot scatter against the front of the restaurant. Then, through the window on the north wall, he saw both aircraft set down on the grass expanse outside. He held Paige’s hand a few seconds longer, then left the room.
By the time he reached the front of the lodge, a man had disembarked from the nearer chopper. One of the soldiers on guard cocked an ear at something the man shouted, then pointed at Travis as he stepped from the building.
Travis had expected the Tangent operatives to ask exactly one question, and otherwise not speak to him. Instead, the man shook his hand, identified himself as Shaw, and thanked him with the same gravity as the man on the phone.
Shaw was outfitted the way Travis imagined Navy SEALs would be. His rifle, modified to the nines, drew looks from the nearest soldiers.
“We’re ready right now, sir,” Shaw said, indicating the open door to the Black Hawk’s troop bay.
Travis followed him to it. It crossed his mind that, even a few days earlier, climbing into a military chopper full of commandos would’ve qualified as a strange thing. He pulled himself in and took a seat on a padded bench at the rear wall. Shaw climbed in beside him. In addition to the pilots, there were six men in the Black Hawk, all equipped for the end of the world. The turbines revved, and a moment later the chopper was high above the lodge and turning west, tinted shafts of sunlight swinging through the interior like spotlight beams. Travis looked over his shoulder through one of the small windows, and saw the surgeons bringing Paige out on a stretcher. He kept his eyes on her until the first ridgeline swept below the aircraft, blocking his view.
Facing forward again, he saw a squat metal shape in the center of the floor: a cobbled-together and much smaller version of the steel box that had contained the Whisper aboard the 747.
Outside, ridges and valleys that had taken hours to cross on foot slipped by like sections of sidewalk.
The encampment had seen heavy traffic since Travis had left it. Staring down from the circling Black Hawk, its starboard door now wide open as the men scrutinized the valley for movement, he saw a broad patch of disturbed ground that had served as the hostiles’ landing pad. Skids had dented the surface in all directions, and the comings and goings of the hostiles had turned the grass there to bare earth.
Satisfied that the valley was clean, the pilot set down on the torn earth, the clearest place in sight. As soon as the wheels touched, the men exited from both sides of the chopper. Travis was the last one out, glancing forward along the fuselage as he stepped from the door.
Something made him stop.
He knew the feeling, though he hadn’t felt it in years.
A supplier he’d known had called it getting your whiskers flicked. A kind of intuition maybe only criminals—or bad cops—could feel, sharpened by years of doing things they couldn’t afford to be caught doing. The slightest thing might trigger it: multiple cars tapping their brakes on the same stretch of road for no apparent reason, hinting at a police presence just out of sight.
As Travis stared forward along the side of the Black Hawk, something flicked his whiskers. Hard.
But he couldn’t place it. He swept his eyes around, and for some reason he kept coming back to the front right wheel, extending down and away from the side of the fuselage on a foot-long strut. There was nothing wrong with it, as far as he could tell. The tire and strut both seemed fine.
Shaw saw him looking. “What is it?”
Travis had no answer for him, and shook off the sensation. He hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—unless he counted the few minutes he’d been unconscious after getting knocked out—and had spent the last two of them wandering around a mass-murder scene. A little jumpiness should be expected.
“It’s nothing,” Travis said, and nodded ahead through the trees. “What you’re looking for isn’t far. Fifty steps past their camp, buried near the biggest tree in sight.”
He took another glance at the wheel, then passed through the group of men to take the lead—
—and stopped again.
He turned back to the Black Hawk.
In the soft dirt on either side of the wheel was a footprint, each one facing outward—the prints a man would make if he were sitting right on the tire with his back against the side of the chopper, maybe holding onto the gun mount above it for balance.
Travis stared at it, part of him expecting the footprints to shift before his eyes. Then he became aware of Shaw standing beside him.
“Tell us,” Shaw said. “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. Tell us what you’re thinking, right now.”
The guy sounded more than just serious. He sounded scared.
“Look at the prints beside the wheel,” Travis said.
Something like a second passed—enough time for Travis to imagine these men laughing when he was compelled to explain himself.
A second later, he understood that he was very wrong in that impression.
Shaw flinched—Travis was sure he saw it, though the movement was swallowed up by the blur that came next, as the man snapped his rifle up and opened fire, putting a burst of half a dozen shots through the side of the Black Hawk, a foot above the tire.
The bullets punched through the metal. No blood. No screams.
“Eyes open for a weapon, all sides!” Shaw yelled; already he was sprinting over the disturbed ground toward the chopper. The men around Travis shouldered their rifles, each choosing a direction. They did it instantly and without discussion, as if they’d drilled for this sort of thing. Travis suddenly felt sure they had. Even the pilots, also out of the chopper, had drawn sidearms and were scrutinizing the sparse trees around them.
Shaw vaulted into the Black Hawk’s troop bay and swept his rifle back and forth inside, in large but efficient strokes. He didn’t so much aim with it as feel with it, like a blind man whose life depended on finding his quarry. Travis’s eyes easily picked out the handholds the enemy could have used to pull himself into the chopper without touching the ground.
Shaw found nothing.
He returned to the door. His gaze fell to the dirt before it, and went cold. Travis saw why: the ground leading from the troop bay was saturated with their own footprints—so many they overlapped—leading off of the bare earth onto the grass. The enemy’s path could be any of them.
One of the men whispered, “Fuck . . .”
That single word, so drenched with fear while coming from someone so hardened, told Travis all he needed to know about the trouble they were in.
He had a second to think about that, and then the pilot took a bullet to the head. There was no sound of a gunshot—just the impact, like a heavy oak panel being split, and then the man was down, already gone. The others were shouting, training weapons and eyes in all directions. Travis saw Shaw jump from the chopper and run to his men, screaming for them to be quiet, and he saw the co-pilot staring around, scared shitless, as a terrible understanding came to him, and even as Travis made the connection himself, the man took the second shot right over his left eye, the entry wound facing Travis so directly that the bullet must have passed right over his shoulder, and now Shaw was looking at him and shouting, “Which way?” and Travis threw his arm out to point behind himself, and in the next instant the world was nothing but machine-gun fire.
They fanned out. Travis got behind them and watched the red tracer rounds carve a wedge of space against the valley wall sixty yards north.
Shaw screamed for them to get more space among themselves. He’d just finished saying it when a bullet hit his throat and came out the back of his neck, making a fist-sized crater. He dropped, his eyes wide and his hands pawing at his collar.
The men broke formation, running and firing at the same time. One of them stooped, grabbed Shaw’s rifle and threw it at Travis; he just managed to get his hands up and catch it.
Then he was running with them—the half that had split in this direction. Running for the encampment, and then through it, his mind only now getting around to what his body had already decided.
The tree stood out like an obelisk, easily twice the width of any other nearby. He pulled up short and swung past it, kicking aside the carpet of needles to expose the gouged surface where Paige had refilled the hole.
Somewhere a man screamed and went down hard as he ran. He lay crying for help, but after only a few seconds Travis heard him gargle as his windpipe filled with blood.
Travis dropped the rifle, fell to his knees beside the hole and attacked the dirt with his bare hands. It was soft, having been torn up and replaced only a day and a half earlier, but the going was—
Not fast enough. No way was it fast enough.
Because the killer knew it was buried here. Travis had given this location out loud, right outside the helicopter.
He heard another head shot, twenty feet to his left, and turned to see a body still plunging forward with its running momentum, but with the top of its skull missing. The shoulder hooked a tree trunk and the body twisted around it, falling in a tangle at the roots.
Travis dug faster, his ears suddenly keening with the rush of blood through his carotid arteries—why could he hear that now?
Then he understood: the shooting had stopped.
He quit digging and looked up.
They were all dead.