City Under the Moon (32 page)

She led Lon and Ilecko into the forward-facing seats between the empty side cannon stations, got them strapped in, and put on her headset.

“How we doing, boys?” she shouted over the intercom system.

“WETSU!” Mantle hollered, and Jaguar repeated it right on top of him.
We eat this shit up.

“Hooah!” she responded heartily.

“Hooah!” Lon yelled as he put on his own headset.

Everyone laughed. If you didn’t hate this kid, you had to love him.

“Howdy howdy and welcome to your limousine!” said Mantle. “We’ll be cruising at 180 miles an hour today on a luxurious flight to lovely New York City, gonna take the apple back from the big bad wolf.”

They were off the ground before he got to “apple.” Every second counted.

Another chopper lifted alongside them, and when Tildascow saw it she damn near salivated. It was a bulky attack helicopter, dark green, with extended wings loaded with Hellfire missiles and Hydra rocket launchers. A positively impolite 30mm chain cannon was mounted beneath the fuselage, the horse’s hard leg that Tildascow wanted from her air support. UNITED STATES ARMY was stenciled in black text, and someone had hastily spray-painted a name across the broad shaft of its tail boom:
“Silver Bullet.”

“I’d like to direct y’all to our escort,” Mantle said. “That is the United States Army’s preferred delivery method of airborne destruction, the AH-64D
Apache Longbow.
We call that particular one the
Silver Bullet
, I don’t know why. Why do we do that, Jaguar?”

“I must confess, I do not know.” Jaguar responded with the taint-licking placation of a talk-show sidekick.

“Anyways,” Mantle continued, “She ain’t quite as pretty as the Black Hawk, but that there ‘copter could just about turn a city to mush. I could bore you with all the details, but let’s just say when the devil got diarrhea, he put it into a Hellfire missile.”

Confidence restored.

Their friend Beethoven saluted from the pilot’s position, the raised rear seat in the
Silver Bullet’s
tight tandem cockpit. She nodded back as the
Bullet
broke right to escort them northeasterly toward Manhattan.

As Mantle yapped, she wished Beethoven could have been
their
pilot.

“Now we’re gonna make this flight extra smooth for the lovely ladies onboard, so you just relax and sun yourself and we’ll have you on the ground in no time.”

The ride was as smooth as they’d promised, but Mantle and Beethoven’s paltry comedy couldn’t stave off the nerves wafting off Lon. When the Bay materialized on the horizon some eighty minutes later, she could practically hear his heart stomping. By then, she couldn’t blame him.

Apocalyptic plumes of smoke loomed beyond, as if volcanoes had sprouted through open wounds on the Manhattan skyline.

Half a mile from the southern coast, Governor’s Island was a hotbed of military activity. Helicopters flowed in organized traffic patterns; the most striking were the
Chinook
cargo ‘copters, giant green bananas flying under two horizontal rotors.

Her old CO used to refer to them as “Shithooks.” He hated wasting a sentence without slipping in some filth.

A fleet of Coast Guard cutters was in the midst of launching from the southern docks, dwarfing the size of nearby Port Authority and NYPD boats.

And there was the Statue of Liberty on their left. As they crossed through her somber southeastern gaze, it kinda felt like she was crying for help. Tildascow rolled her eyes at the thought.

Can the hyperbole, kill this guy, and let all the biblical consequences eat shit.

Manhattan was so stuffed with clusterfuck that it was almost spilling over the southern tip. A horde of civilians—maybe tens of thousands strong—was massed at the entrance to the Battery Tunnel. It was two after nine, a whopping one hundred twenty seconds after the mandatory curfew lifted. So much for cooperation.

The city proper wasn’t as bad as the outlying regions, but it wasn’t any good, either. Assorted vehicles littered the streets, skewed in every direction and frequently stashed in Matchbox piles. Tanks and APCs were trying to blaze trails through the metal thicket, but most soldiers were on foot. That didn’t bode well for their “start in the middle” plan (which was sure-fire otherwise).

The USAF gave her a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which might’ve been useful if she was trying to pinpoint smartbomb targets in Afghanistan. Here she expected to fare better with her hacked and re-hacked BlackBerry.

Valenkov had been seen at 26 Federal Plaza in the minutes before the government’s virtual private network servers were destroyed—right in her own damn building. He could’ve gone anywhere from there. It was even possible that he’d found a way off the island.

But he didn’t want to leave. If he did, he would have slipped out right after Times Square. In fact, he wanted them to know he was still there. The VPN wasn’t a valuable target—if Valenkov knew about it, he’d also know they had redundancies. They were back to full speed in a couple of hours. No, he just wanted to be seen, and he knew he’d be seen at 26 Fed.

The military was using Columbus Circle as a staging area and command center. It was located at the southeastern corner of Central Park, as close to “the middle” as they’d get. The dual Time Warner Center towers were rapidly approaching, the skyline landmark for Columbus Circle.

Go time.

Lon’s hands trembled. Ilecko had gone stiff. Even Mantle and Jaguar were gazing slack-jawed at the fires and pile-ups and riots. Tildascow kept her eyes on the
Silver Bullet
in front of them.

She kicked the iron divider behind the cockpit. “Got any tunes on this flying coffin?”

A few seconds later, their headsets blasted with an angry trash rock anthem by Kid Rock. Not a bad tune, but she preferred Eminem with her morning meatballs.

She removed her headset and let her ears adjust to the cold. The tinny bangs were still audible above the rotors.

Columbus Circle was surrounded by a mob of civilians, several thousand strong. The five rings of traffic lanes were heavily barricaded in all directions, with riot officers trying to keep the crowd civil. There were two designated landing pads, each wide enough to land Shithooks and off-load vehicles. One was deploying a 6x6 Cougar even now.

Their Black Hawk dropped hard onto the open landing zone, but it touched down gracefully. Her Shadow Stalkers yapped too much for her taste, but the fuckers knew how to fly.

The chaotic frenzy of the city surged into the cabin. Tildascow pulled off Lon’s headset and yelled over the din. “You don’t have to do this!”

“I know!”

“You’ve done enough for your country. We can leave you here, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

“I know!” he said, shaking his head emphatically. “I want to come!” He leaned around her to nod his reassurance at Ilecko. More than anything, Ilecko seemed deeply offended by the nonsense music.

“Lon, look at me.” The kid could never make eye contact and she had to see his pupils dilate to make sure he comprehended what she was about to say: “Within the next ten hours, the United States government is going to level Manhattan. We will not be able to extract. Do you understand?”

He matched her gaze. “I want to go.”

The doors swung open. The freeze rushed in.

“Lon,” she said into his eyes, “we are going to die.”

“No we’re not. We’re going to find Valenkov. We are going to win this.” He seemed to believe it. Maybe more than she did. “So I can come?”

“Go go go!”

Five

Columbus Circle

9:28 a.m.

What a great way to start.

Lon stepped onto the frigid asphalt in Columbus Circle as hundreds of NYPD and military watched, along with thousands of civilians from behind police barriers. Here he was: an important member of the super strike team that represented mankind’s best hope against the doomsday threat of the supernatural.

And he tripped.

This was no minor stumble. It was an epic poem of elaborate, prolonged humiliation, a passionate love letter to the very fiber of his self-loathing and a mighty, terrible, and oh-so-ominous symphony of piss-poor coordination.

He’d made valid contact with the ground and he was capably walking away from the helicopter. Maybe he’d entertained the image of a scowling, slo-mo, Nicolas Cage-worthy stride.

And then he tripped the shit fantastic over some kind of flashing strip they’d set down to mark the landing zone.

One, two, three stumbling steps, his balance slipping further from his grasp with each ridiculous lurch until he finally went full-on horizontal, arms spread like Superman. And then, miraculously, he managed to get his leg out—

—only to smash his sternum into his knee before crashing chin-first into the cement. Cherry on top was the blazing explosion of pain that erupted from his tongue as his jaw clamped down.

“Uhhhggghhhuuuhhh…” he groaned as his lungs emptied.

He rolled over, onto that fucking backpack she’d made him wear, thrashing his legs as if they could pump air into his body. His chin throbbed and his tongue was somehow both numb and pounding. Both palms were pocked with bloody holes. And—goddammit—he’d put a scuff on his beloved replica One Ring, which he wore on “the third finger of his right hand,” as Master J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in—

Ah, fuck. Never mind.

Tildascow peeked into his sky-filled point of view, holding her baseball cap tight against the helicopter’s wind. She yelled something that was probably “Are you okay?” and helped him up.

He nodded a sheepish apology, feeling the fuckingly familiar flush of crimson in his thick cheeks, but he couldn’t stand just yet.

Ilecko arrived, squatting to examine two daggers that Tildascow had strapped to her left thigh. She lifted her arm and looked down, wondering if he’d seen a bug or something.

“Silver?” he asked about the dagger.

She shook her head no. Ilecko took one of the knives and examined it.

They both thought that was weird, but Lon was grateful for the extra breaths before she yanked him to his feet—almost
off
his feet. The fuck did they feed her in the FBI?

Lon put his hands on his knees and shook his head at the ground, searching for the shattered pieces of his pride. When he finally mustered the courage to check just how many people would be smirking at him, it wasn’t too bad.

Because everything else was so much worse.

A civilian mob had surrounded the camp, and they were on verge of a full-scale riot. Gunshots popped in the distance. Military and cops scurried about like crazed ants at a picnic. Shouting. Arguing. Lon was shoved aside by men carrying a refuel hose for their Black Hawk.

Columbus Circle had been repurposed as a massive bivouac. The flowerbeds surrounding the central monument had been trampled by equipment. The commanders hovered close to a communications rig under a tent. Helicopters rose and fell. APCs and light tanks were on standby. A phalanx of unmanned NYPD motorcycles surrounded the Trump International Hotel’s steel globe. At the perimeters, riot police were trying to keep the civilian mob at bay.

Jaguar removed the last of his flight gear. Mantle checked the magazine on his tan-and-black assault rifle. It had a digital ammo counter, just like in the video games. He winked at Lon, and showed him—

Screams erupted, loud enough to hear over the helicopter.

“Jesus Christ!” Tildascow yelled, drawing her pistol at gunslinger speed.

Lon turned, looking for what could possibly have—

Ilecko had used Tildascow’s knife to slice a man’s throat.

Six

Columbus Circle

9:49 a.m.

“Civilian down!” one of the soldiers yelled. Countless others raised their rifles at Ilecko.

“No! Wait!” Lon screamed.

Ilecko supported the man’s chest over his knee, letting his blood pour onto the pavement. He’d dropped the knife and taken to rubbing his victim’s back and whispering into his ear, easing him toward his death.

They were stooped just before the barricade. The man seemed to be a civilian Ilecko had taken from the crowd. Nearby citizens scrambled away from Ilecko and out of the line of fire. Even the riot guards with their heavy shields backed away.

“Blue force! Blue force!” Tildascow yelled, so hard that she spit with each “b” and “f.” It probably meant
he’s on our side.

The victim’s dirty hands fumbled as he tried to extract himself from Ilecko’s odd embrace. His eyes popped as he watched his own blood spill away. He tried to scream, but his throat clicked in gurgling denial, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the gaping wound. Lon wanted to do something to stop the man’s suffering, but he couldn’t move.

Finally, the guy’s shock dimmed. His clutch weakened; his arms dropped. Ilecko somberly stroked his back one last time.

The man’s body was rife with cuts and bruises. He also was barefoot, and his haggard pants were caked in dirt and old blood. Lon didn’t need his Shaman Emeritus title in the International Lycanthropy Studies Association to recognize that this man had been a werewolf last night.

Ilecko glanced up to stave off the officers. His face was grim, and his eyes were wet with sympathy. The look was enough to keep fingers off triggers.

He reached into his pocket and produced his animal skin pouch, the one with the remains from Zaharius Valenkov’s coffin. He balanced the corpse on his thigh and used both hands to open its drawstring and hold it under the bloodfall. When he’d collected enough to make the pouch bulge, he carefully laid the man on the ground. They were both soaked in red.

“The fuck are you doing!” Tildascow shouted, stowing her gun.

But Ilecko was focused on his pouch. He cinched the strings tight and rolled it between his palms, just like he mixed the corpse goo with the soil in the Drăculeşti crypt.

“You just cut a man’s throat open without saying anything! They almost shot you!”

He continued to ignore her, fueling her flame. Lon felt like Mom and Dad were fighting. Because, y’know, Dad had just sliced someone’s throat open.