A Knife Edge (38 page)

I recalled the trip to her house and the stump of what must once have been a very big tree in her front yard. I wondered whether its roots had been the ones responsible for clogging her
drains. If so, its revenge for being turned into firewood had been sweet.

The search of Amy McDonough's home also turned up a spare key to Ruben's on-base accommodation—the quarters I'd been occupying. Amy could quite easily have gained access to the base with someone carrying a DoD ID—someone like Butler, for example—and not have had her name recorded at the base's entrance security checkpoint. No one would have raised so much as an eyebrow.

While it was pure speculation on my part, I was convinced Amy had planted that single pill under the fridge after Ruben's death, knowing it would eventually be found when the investigation got under way. The discovery would lead to the fact that he had MS, then to Dr. Mooney, on to Ruben's therapist, Judith Churcher, from there straight to a plausible theory that Ruben Wright had been unstable enough to take his own life. I asked myself why had it been important for Amy to lie about her knowledge of Ruben's condition. The plan had been to give the impression that Ruben was depressed and secretive, cut off and alone—suicidal—and it had worked, at least up till now. Her ignorance allowed her to play dumb on the question of his condition, which reinforced her assertion that her relationship with Ruben was over.

I dragged myself off the cot and scratched my head. So what about the other theory, the one that had Ruben killing himself and making it appear that Butler had done the job? Aside from the fact that I knew for sure Amy and Butler had been lying from the start, what did I have? Nothing concrete, though I now had a solid lump in my gut telling me that when Ruben jumped out of the aircraft with Butler and his men that night, he had every expectation of walking away from the landing.

I took a breath and stared up at the cracked and peeling ceiling plaster, looking for something. Maybe it was for a way out. I couldn't see one.

W
e rode out to Kandahar International Airport in the back of a banged-up covered truck left behind by the Soviets that smelled like an old barn. We were all in our gear, half a dozen or more layers of it, plus body armor and helmets, weapons, ammunition, food, water, electronics, batteries, survival gear, first-aid, oxy supply and mask, MC-5s, reserve chutes, nav boards, and so on. There wasn't enough room left over in the truck to squeeze out a fart. The mood was tense; at least, mine was. I had a list of quesbody ar-mortions for Staff Sergeant Butler, but they'd have to wait. Some eyes were shut, others were focused on their feet as the truck bucked and rolled down the ancient roads of the city.

Ten minutes later we turned into the airport access road and the ride immediately improved. The truck eventually pulled up with a grinding shriek of Soviet metal on metal. We got out into cold night air heavy with the smell of jet fuel and snow. My boots crunched on a mixture of gravel and ice. I took a look around. To the west, the lights of the distinctive Kandahar International “wagon train” terminal blazed white and yellow on the far side of the open field. Spill from the lights bounced off the sky, turning it the yellow of stomach slime. A little to the north, over against the perimeter razor wire, a snowplow was clearing a taxiway, but I couldn't hear its engine. We'd pulled up
fifty feet from a C-17 Globemaster, and its auxiliary power unit was screaming, drowning out any ambient sound, keeping the plane ready for a quick start.

Behind the C-17 sat a low-vis gray U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowler. I could see its four-man crew through the Plexiglas, small flashlights in their mouths, going through the preflight. The Prowler's job was to precede us into hostile air space and blind the enemy's radar with waves of microwave energy so that, while the Pakistanis were stumbling around in the dark, we'd just glide on in and then float on down. At least, that's how a major from the transport squadron explained it in his best Chuck Yeager drawl.

Issues and problems splashed around inside my head like the contents of a cocktail shaker. Boyle murdered Tanaka—Cooper failed to crack case. Butler murdered Wright—Cooper failed to crack case. Cooper, failed investigator, sent with murderer Butler to capture and perhaps kill murderer Boyle. One failed cop and two monsters mixing it up together. Hell, all we needed was an olive.

There was no time to think about that mountain of fear, as Sergeant Fester described my flying phobia, although my fingertips were suspiciously numb and my heart rate was racing like a bilge pump in a sinking ship. We assembled behind the C-17's ramp and organized our gear. I kept my distance from Butler. In my mind's eye, I kept seeing Amy McDonough back in the hospital, after the abortion. Her getting pregnant by Butler gave Ruben a powerful motive to set the SAS staff sergeant up for his murder. Following this thought through, it occurred to me that maybe Butler and Amy had been going at it like rabbits so as to make the pregnancy as likely as possible. And if
that
were the case, then perhaps terminating the pregnancy was also part of the plan.

I recalled that meeting between Amy and Butler at Miss Palm's. Could the unhappiness between them—along with the subsequent rift—have been caused by her announcement that she intended to go through with the pregnancy?

I wrenched my concentration back to the job at hand, gave my oxygen bottle and mask a final inspection, tested the tactical radio set, and then checked that the goggles sitting atop my helmet were still clear and clean. I attached the heavy para-ruck carrying most of my gear onto the front of my chute harness, making sure the rip cord handle wasn't fouled, then clipped in the M4. I felt myself being checked over and suddenly I was looking into the eyes of Staff Sergeant Butler. They were smiling eyes, confident eyes, the eyes of a winner. I fought the urge to poke them. It was a complete fuck of a situation. I'd had the opportunity to have Butler taken off active duty, and I'd blown it. But I intended to set that right when this mission was concluded.

I followed the SAS up the ramp and into the C-17. The Ski-Doos and trailers were sitting on pallets down the center of the aircraft, their drogue chutes linked by static lines to a cable running down the side of the fuselage. The loadmaster pointed to seats he wanted us to take on either side of the Ski-Doos. Butler sat opposite; his deputy, Corporal Billy Dortmund, beside me; Mortensen on his right. Brian Wignall sat beside Butler. Norris sat on Wignall's other side. All nice and cozy.

Coming from a long way off, but more precisely from somewhere beyond the skin of the C-17's fuselage, I could hear the Prowler roaring down the runway on its takeoff roll. The Globemaster's ramp came up and the interior of the aircraft was bathed in red light that wouldn't mess with our night vision. My small and large intestines twisted themselves into clove hitches. I followed Butler's lead, pulled my goggles over my eyes and fully attached the oxygen mask. I listened to my own Darth Vader breathing, and closed my eyes.

I tried the technique of focusing on all the good things going on in my life to get me through the takeoff, but they only took me as far as the first taxiway. And it was a short taxiway. So instead I thought about how I would keep myself alive on this mission. It wouldn't benefit Butler if I somehow ended up dead.
With the facts Clare now had, a ten-year-old kid could piece together the case against him, McDonough, and Demelian, and Clare was a lot older than a ten-year-old, thank the Lord. I had the feeling Butler thought he'd outsmarted us all. If he intended to kill me, handing me the task of standoff sniper was going to make that task more difficult than it would otherwise have been. That thought worried me. Why had Butler given me the job of watching his back? In a sense, it meant he was turning his back on me. I sure as hell wouldn't do the same to him.

The C-17 seemed to go vertical as it left the runway. It climbed hard, turbofans angry, or maybe frightened. The pilots were eager to get as far away from the ground as possible. I knew the reasons—those missile rumors—but I'd rather I hadn't. I felt the landing gear seat home and the flaps retracting. The power dropped back a little and the nose came down. I sensed the continuous climbing turn to the left somewhere in my ears. I knew from the briefing that the Globemaster would reach its cruising altitude of 24,000 feet over Afghanistan.

The minutes ticked by.

In their goggles and oxygen masks, Butler and Wignall looked like a couple of flies. I got nothing from them, and gave nothing back. It wouldn't be long till we crossed into Pakistan's airspace, the flight time to the drop zone just twenty-five minutes. With the EA-6B Prowler somewhere out front, radar screens from Quetta to Peshawar would be snowed under by electron blizzards.

*   *   *

The plane had stopped climbing. The red light came on, the signal for us to switch on our oxygen supplies. The ramp came down and the aircraft filled with a swirling partial vacuum. It might have been cold, but the gear I was wearing made me impervious to it. The noise, though, was deafening. More minutes ticked by. I watched Butler stand. I saw him throw something down toward the flight deck. I wondered what. And now there
was a Beretta in his other hand. I asked myself why. I watched him push the muzzle into Wignall's neck. I saw the gun jolt.

Wait… what? I blinked a couple of times. Was this a hallucination of some kind…

Half of Wignall's neck and shoulder were now plastered all over Norris, the man to his left. Red blood on white. I didn't understand. And suddenly, everything forward of the wings was engulfed in a fireball. Grenades. That's what Butler had thrown—grenades. I felt movement to my right, or sensed it. It was Dortmund, shooting. Everything above the bridge of Mortensen's nose disintegrated, flipped back like the top of a hard-boiled egg removed with a knife.

The plane's wings folded. The plane was breaking up. I was thrown to the floor. I saw Butler. He was shooting. He was shooting at me. The slugs slammed into the Ski-Doos as they slid past, going backward. They dropped down the ramp, out of what was left of the C-17. The shifting weight caused the floor to tilt vertical. I fell backward, after the Ski-Doos, through burning wreckage. The aircraft's fuel had caught fire. Aluminum and composite materials were burning. Fire, intense heat, dripped like orange rain through the blackness around and above me.

I dropped away from the worst of it. Falling. Escaping. It all happened so fast, I wasn't even sure what had happened. Butler and Dortmund. They'd completely lost it. Snapped. Killed everyone. Everyone except me.

I fell through the night. The altimeter on my wrist read 20,000 feet. I had survived. I had a chute. I wondered who else had made it out, if anyone. Maybe I could—

A huge weight suddenly slammed into me, punching the air from my lungs. I'd been struck by something, maybe a piece of plane. No, it was one of the men. Something gave way beneath me. I looked into the face of a giant black fly. It was Butler. I knew it was Butler because he held a long thin dagger in front of my face, where I could see it, so there'd be no misunderstanding, no doubt. A Fairbairn-Sykes. Wright's missing knife.
Ruben Wright.
That sensation—the one of something giving way
beneath me? Butler had cut through the thigh straps of my chute harness. A flash of memory took me back to Clare Selwyn's office and her explanation of exactly what had happened to Ruben—how he'd died.

And then Butler continued with the practical demonstration of how he killed Wright. He reached for my rip cord, and pulled it.

I only had a few seconds. The drogue chute snapped out of the bag and crackled in the slipstream behind my back. It began to pull the main foil out of the bag. I grappled with Butler, fighting, grabbing, clawing for straps, webbing, anything. My hand found something as my main chute deployed, coming open with an almighty
bang.
The sudden deceleration ripped me out of the chute harness, just as Ruben Wright had been ripped out of his. It also nearly tore my hand off, the one holding on to Butler. I tumbled, spinning, disoriented, for a thousand feet or so. When I regained control, I saw Butler in the high arch close by, following me down. Behind the oxy mask, I'd be willing to bet he was smiling that smile, the one I saw as he checked my gear earlier. Now I knew what the smile meant. He waved goodbye as he pulled his rip cord, just like he did when he left Hurlburt Field—the “fuck you” wave. I watched his drogue chute appear and drag the foil out of his chute bag. It opened with a
bang
and Butler instantly disappeared somewhere into the black sky above, while I was left alone to plunge without a chute toward certain death.

T
he altimeter told me I had around thirty seconds of free fall, plenty long enough for the life flashing before my eyes to go into reruns. Somewhere below, the big end was rushing toward me at around a hundred and twenty. No way to fight it. Nothing to do but wait. This was it. The Death Fall that powered my flying phobia had arrived.

The seconds dragged by like the wind tearing at my helmet and filling my ears with a roar. When it happened, it would happen quick. I'd be alive, then not. Solid, then liquid, a splash on the earth. I was falling through cloud, buffeted by windborne snow. Ten seconds left. Dying's not so—

*   *   *

As I swam in and out of consciousness, I became aware of a series of loud bangs nearby—gunshots—then familiar voices. I tried to speak, but then the blackness welled up from beneath and dragged me back to nothingness.

*   *   *

I was numb. Floating and, at the same time, sinking. Conscious, but not. A trickle of ice water ran down the back of my neck, between my shoulder blades. I was aware of the pain
in my chest. Jesus, my hand hurt. And then the blackness gobbled me up.

*   *   *

Every muscle ached. I coughed the icy wetness out of my mouth and opened my eyes. The light hurt. White all around—above and below. I couldn't move my arms or legs. I lay there motionless until I recognized that the whiteness above was cloud. In fact, it wasn't white. It was low and gray, and full of snow. I lifted my head and discovered I was encased in snow. I couldn't feel my toes. I tried to roll. The snow gave a little. I moved, rolled some more. The snow tomb collapsed, releasing me. I lifted my knees, then my arms. My face was numb, my oxygen mask ripped away. One of my hands was numb. I'd lost a glove. I looked at my fingers. They were blue; two were dislocated, poking up at odd angles like the broken teeth of a cheap hair comb. My brain was starting to function. I remembered the fall. I remembered Butler. My fingers had been mangled trying to hold on to him. Why wasn't I dead?