Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (13 page)

*   *   *

The helicopter was close now—closer than either of the ridges from which its echoes rebounded, to the east and west. Because of that, Dryden could finally determine the chopper’s location by sound, even though its lights were predictably blacked out. The aircraft was less than a mile to the south, and in the last minute it had halted its advance to take up a stationary hover.

That, too, was predictable.

There was a big difference between this conflict and those of the previous night: Dryden had had all day to contemplate this one. From the moment he’d settled on the cabin as a destination, he’d been aware that its primary asset was also its greatest vulnerability. The secluded forest made a perfect hideout, but failing in that function, it made a terrible place from which to flee. In a game of cat-and-mouse against satellites, desolation was a fatal disadvantage.

Usually.

That had to be what Gaul was thinking now, in any case. He would also be thinking of Dryden’s background and skill set; he would’ve taken both into account in planning this assault.

It was no surprise, then, that the chopper had gone stationary at a distance, rather than coming in for a sniper kill. Gaul would have to play it safe and assume Dryden had the means to take down any chopper close enough for that; a good .50 caliber with a nightscope would have done the trick, if aimed well enough. Dryden had in fact considered getting one. He’d decided against it on practical grounds: Taking down the helicopter in this scenario would not be a winning play.

As he and Rachel ran, he heard the chopper begin to move again, having hovered in place for maybe twenty seconds. Its new course was neither toward them nor away; it seemed to orbit their position counterclockwise, maintaining its safe distance, and after traveling a few hundred yards it halted again. Obviously men were fast-roping down out of it, probably one to three of them each time it stopped to hover. It would either deposit them in a straight-line pattern, in which they would comb across the wilderness like hunters driving game, or it would off-load them in a giant, constricting circle.

Either way, the fast-roping was also something Dryden had expected. He was counting on it, in fact, though the plan would be far from risk-free. As the chopper resumed movement after its second stop, Dryden considered the fact that there were now at least two soldiers on the ground within half a mile, running straight toward them with satellite techs speaking through their headsets.

Catching his thought, Rachel said, “I think it’s time to open the duffel bag.”

“I think you’re right.”

*   *   *

On-screen, the third specialist was roping down into the forest. Gaul watched. It was hard to make out the details, looking at the scene from such a high angle, with a heat source as bright as a chopper right above the action—

“What the fuck?” Lowry said.

Gaul turned toward Lowry’s workstation. Lowry was tapping the monitor as if it were glitching.

“What?” Gaul asked.

“Dryden and the girl,” Lowry said. “They just disappeared right in front of me.” He keyed the handset through which he communicated with the soldiers on the ground. “Continue on vector, but be advised we’ve temporarily lost the targets.”

“Bullshit,” Gaul said. “There’s gotta be a tree in the way. They’re fucking redwoods.”

“We had four birds on them,” Lowry said. “They can’t all be blocked. Not for this long.”

On the monitor displaying the widest frame, the Black Hawk was moving again, arcing toward its fourth drop point. The three men on the ground continued their sprints inward toward an objective that appeared to have vanished. Gaul’s sense of calm had vanished with it.

*   *   *

The specialty shop in Visalia sold gear for firefighters, including the two remarkable items Dryden had purchased, one large and one small—the smallest in stock, anyway. They were called proximity suits, or more commonly kiln suits. Surprisingly lightweight, at least considering their capability, they were made of several insulating layers, with an outer skin of aluminized fabric to reflect radiant heat. This kind of suit was standard issue for fire crews aboard aircraft carriers or at oil refineries, people whose jobs might at times require them to actually walk into the flames. The material was that good at blocking heat.

The suits Dryden and Rachel had just donned were rated to keep out temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. With any luck they’d keep 98.6 degrees
in
—at least for a while.

They were wearing the suits inside-out, for whatever good it might do. Even the hoods—made of the same fabric as the body, and sporting a flexible plastic face screen—could be reversed. Dryden supposed the suits might’ve hidden them whichever way they’d worn them, but there was a good reason to have flipped them, regardless: Full-body reflective clothing was bad camouflage on a moonlit night. Reversed, the suits were simple black fabric on the outside.

They were also damned uncomfortable to run in. The moment he and Rachel had put them on, they’d turned and sprinted into the trees on a course perpendicular to the one they’d been on. Anyone watching on satellites, no longer able to see them, might assume they were still moving forward on their original path or had doubled back. Any other direction would be a guess.

As it happened, they were running almost straight north, toward a terrain feature Dryden had chosen earlier using a detailed map. The only way out, even if it was a long shot.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gaul sat slumped in the chair he’d nearly thrown through the window. The full team was on the ground now. They’d converged on the spot where Dryden and the girl had vanished, and where Gaul had been certain they would find a mine shaft or natural tunnel of some kind; no other explanation made sense. Yet they had turned up nothing except the same hard ground—too rocky to hold a footprint—that covered the valley for miles in all directions.

“So, okay, let’s work through it,” Lowry said. “They fool the satellites, however the hell that’s possible, and they run. They disappeared twelve minutes ago, figure ten minutes to cover a mile—”

“Figure seven,” Gaul said. “They’re motivated.”

“That puts them almost two miles from where the team is, in which direction, we don’t know. We have a round search area growing in diameter by one mile every three or four minutes—”

Gaul stood, crossed to Lowry’s workstation, grabbed the communicator, and keyed it.

“Put the chopper on the deck,” he said. “Right now. Pick up the team and get airborne. Stow the fucking thermal vision; if the satellites can’t see them, neither will you. I want every man aboard wearing a standard amplified night-vision headset—there’s plenty of moonlight for that. I want all eyes scouring the woods from five hundred feet up.”

He set the communicator down and paced away. When he turned back, he found Lowry staring at him like an idiot.

“I don’t know where the chopper should start its search, sir,” Lowry said. “Which direction to send it.”

“Figure it out!” Gaul said. “People used to do that, before they had computers.”

Lowry knew better than to reply to that. He looked at his feet until Gaul turned away, then faced his monitor and brought up the widest Miranda image of the forest. He broadened it further still, to a width of five miles, and added a topographic map overlay.

“Let’s assume a man like Sam Dryden knows the terrain,” Lowry said.

“Let’s,” Gaul said.

“He’s also going to know we have the local roads blocked. But here’s Highway 198, about thirty miles away. He could figure we’re not expecting him to get that far, so maybe we’re not blocking it. Plus it’s busy; better chance to stop a vehicle and commandeer it.”

Lowry highlighted the path of a narrow waterway on the map.

“This stream bed transits the valley right down to the highway,” he said. “Straight shot, the whole thirty miles downhill. Dryden and the girl could probably make double time if they followed that. To reach the stream, their shortest path would be straight north from where we lost them. They wouldn’t have reached it yet, and right now they’d be right about…” He did the math in his head, then tapped the screen with his finger. “Here.”

He picked up the communicator and relayed the instructions to the Black Hawk’s pilot.

“Copy that,” the pilot said. “I’m setting her down now. There’s a clearing half a klick north of the team’s position, the only one big enough to land in. All boots rendezvous there.”

*   *   *

Captain Walt Larsen took the Black Hawk down into the clearing carefully; descending among sequoias was a first for him. They were about three times the height of any wilderness cover he’d ever landed in.

At twenty feet from the deck he saw that the clearing floor was a mess of ferns and scrub, two or three feet deep everywhere. Probably no risk of snagging a wheel, but he’d be careful on takeoff all the same. The Black Hawk set down as firmly as she would have on a tarmac.

“If you gotta step out for a piss, you got time,” Larsen said to his copilot, Bowles. “Team’s one to two minutes out.”

He’d no sooner said it than he heard one of the soldiers clamber into the troop compartment behind them. He turned.

It wasn’t one of the soldiers.

*   *   *

Dryden and Rachel had been sitting concealed among the brush from the moment they’d reached the clearing, ten minutes earlier. Waiting for the chopper had been the hardest part. Though Dryden had been confident it would land here, there was always the chance things could go wrong.

Then it had thundered in above them, silhouetted like a giant insect against the near-black sky, and set down only a few yards away. Dryden had been up and running before it had even settled on its wheel shocks.

Now he vaulted into the bay, tearing off the hood of his proximity suit with one hand, leveling the SIG at the flight deck with the other. The pilot turned to him with what started as a casual expression, and then paled.

“Sidearms on the console, right now,” Dryden said. “I’d rather not kill you.”

Both pilots were now staring at him, too surprised to comply. Dryden stepped forward and smashed the barrel of the SIG against the copilot’s nose. Blood burst from it in a gush.

“I shoot on three,” Dryden said. “One, two—”

He didn’t get any further. Both pilots carefully withdrew their .45 sidearms and placed them on a flat portion of the console.

Behind Dryden, Rachel climbed into the troop bay.

“Both of you, out,” Dryden said to the pilots.

That surprised them, but they didn’t argue. They opened their doors, dropped to the undergrowth, and ran.

Dryden climbed forward into the pilot’s seat, and Rachel followed, discarding her own hood as she squeezed past him into the copilot’s chair. By habit he grabbed the pilot’s headset and put it on, even as he sat; the heavy ear protectors cut out most of the chopper’s noise. Rachel donned her own pair. Dryden reached to the comm selector switch near the headset jacks and set it to cockpit only—the chopper would no longer transmit audio from the headsets to any outside listener.

“You really would have shot them on three,” Rachel said, not asking, knowing. “That wasn’t a bluff.”

“That’s why it worked,” Dryden said.

His eyes roamed the instrument panel. He’d trained in a standard UH-60 Black Hawk; this was the MH-60K special ops variant, but the panel was nearly identical. It had a few extra bells and whistles, notably an all-purpose display that was currently showing what looked like a satellite feed of the forest—a pretty damn impressive satellite feed compared to the ones Dryden had seen in his day. In the image, the chopper was centered and two bluish white spots of light—the pilot and copilot—were visible at the edges of the clearing, where they’d retreated to. A few hundred yards to the south, the gathered team could be seen, coming north toward the Black Hawk. Fast. Without a doubt, they’d been told what was happening.

Dryden took the controls. He increased the power and felt the Black Hawk shift beneath him. Rachel grabbed the sides of her seat. The rotors reached a scream, and the forest floor dropped away. Dryden hit the master switch for the exterior lights; the encircling wall of sequoias appeared from the darkness as if he’d waved a magic wand. From the cockpit of the helicopter, the clearing suddenly looked a lot smaller than it had from outside. With the trees topping out above two hundred feet, it felt more like a deep well than a clearing. Climbing out of it was going to be the most dangerous part of the escape.

Compounding the risk was the fact that he had to do it quickly. On the satellite feed, the team on the ground had cut their distance from the clearing by half, in less than a minute. They’d be right beneath the Black Hawk in another fifty seconds or so, firing at it with everything they had.

Dryden divided his attention between the trees and the satellite image. He pushed the climb rate to the maximum that he felt comfortable with—then pushed it 10 percent higher. It was a reasonable gamble: risk crashing by going too fast, or guarantee being shot down by going too slow.

He leaned forward and tried to see the treetops. It was hard to judge, but he guessed he had seventy feet to go. On the display, the team was now perhaps fifty yards from the clearing.

Dryden noticed a data tag in the lower left corner of the satellite feed:
SAT-ALPHA-MIRANDA 21.

Miranda. He’d heard whispers of a project by that name, just hitting the drawing boards around the time he’d gotten out of the business.

At that moment the satellite display went black.

“I guess we weren’t supposed to see that,” Rachel said.

“Be glad they can’t shut off the engines. That’ll be on next year’s model.”

The tops of the trees were dropping past them now. Their highest boughs fell away, and suddenly the Black Hawk was in the clear above the forest. The sequoia canopy planed away to the base of the mountains, like a rough carpet in the moonlight. Dryden pushed the stick forward and felt the bird tilt in response. That was when the first bullets hit.