Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (26 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The city. Out in it, above it. Lights and windows and streets spinning in a wind-tunnel scream of night air. The tower filling up the world beside him. The choppers pounding the darkness with their rotors.

Dryden’s senses stabilized. He turned his head to correct for the spin of his body and locked his eyes on the tower for reference. He and Rachel had fallen maybe ten stories, with seventy yet beneath them. He freed one arm from Rachel, pulled the release for the pilot chute, and had the arm tightly around her again before he felt the line go taut and rip the main chute from the pack.

A second later the straps of the harness wrenched his shoulders back, and the rush of air ceased. The night became silent except for the helicopters circling the tower high above.

Drifting now. The moment was deceptively peaceful. Dryden looked up at the canopy of the chute and saw the wind’s influence at a glance. It was pushing them toward the tower.

“Can you hold on if I let go of you?” he asked.

Rachel nodded, her forehead against the side of his jaw, and tightened her arms over the back of his neck.

Dryden let go of her and grabbed the chute’s steering lines, Velcroed to the straps above his shoulders. He pulled the left line and felt the canopy respond, turning hard counterclockwise, swinging him and Rachel outward like a pendulum. Within seconds they were facing away from the building and gliding just fast enough to beat the wind.

In the relative calm, Dryden considered their situation. It would take ninety seconds or more to reach the street. By then the choppers would spot the chute and report it to whatever ground units Gaul had dispatched along with them. Dryden had no sooner formed the thought than a trio of vehicles appeared to the south, veering fast through the sparse traffic on Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t even necessary to hazard a guess: Those units would be parked below the Hancock long before he and Rachel touched down.

Dryden sought other options. The white marble tower across the street, directly to the south, rose from a base structure wider than itself—a building that occupied its entire block and stood perhaps ten stories tall. The roof of the base building offered a broad and easy landing zone and, more importantly, the tactical advantage of the building itself. Within the labyrinth of its interior, he and Rachel would have at least a fighting chance to evade Gaul’s people. The layout almost certainly extended two or three levels beneath the street, with egress points into service tunnels through which neither satellites nor helicopters could track them.

The parachute’s glide angle was already taking them toward that rooftop. They were a minute above it—they would land on it around the time Gaul’s ground units arrived, or maybe sooner. This could work.

At that moment the parachute’s canopy flared bright, and in the street far below, the circle of a spotlight shone, with the chute’s rectangular shadow eclipsing its center. One of the choppers had spotted them.

The remaining sixty seconds it would take to reach the broad rooftop suddenly felt like an hour. It was enough time for the chopper to do a lot more than report them—it could attack them.

Already Dryden heard its turbines changing pitch and saw the spotlight angle swing: The chopper was coming down to their level.

A minute wouldn’t do. Dryden reached above his head, coiled his hand around three of the chute’s lines, and pulled hard. The effect was immediate. The canopy partially collapsed, dumping air, and he and Rachel began to plummet at twice the chute’s normal descent rate, spinning wildly as they did.

Spinning—and no longer gliding. No longer heading south, toward the rooftop of the white building far below. While in this spin, they were once again at the mercy of the wind; it was shoving them north, back toward the cliff face of the Hancock.

There was a judgment call to make: How long to drop like this before filling the chute again and trying to glide for the white building’s roof? Before Dryden could make the decision, the wind gusted. With each rotation he got another glimpse of the Hancock, and with each glimpse it was closer. A lot closer. They were going to hit it. He let go of the lines and held on to Rachel as tightly as he could. The chute reinflated and stopped spinning just a few yards from the tower’s face, but they were still closing distance with the building at something like twenty miles an hour. Dryden had just enough time to consider that this was about as fast as he could sprint on the ground. Which meant that this impact would be like running full speed into a wall. He spun to take the collision with his own body instead of Rachel’s, and tensed for it.

It felt like being hit by a bus. Every joint screamed. Rachel lost her hold around his neck, and for an instant—the instant that counted—momentum turned her eighty pounds into five hundred, and her body was wrenched from his arms. All pain vanished from Dryden’s mind under a flash of adrenaline. His hands shot out for her, felt one of her sleeves—for a horrible second he imagined getting only her shirt as she fell free of it—and then locked around her wrist.

They were sliding down the glass wall now, her eyes looking up at his, wide and intense. Below her was the abyss, easily forty stories of open space.

There was something else below her as well, rushing up to meet them: a horizontal stretch of the tower’s famous exterior bracing. There were diagonal beams that crossed to form X shapes, and there were lateral beams running sideways through them. One of these flat beams, forming a ledge maybe eighteen inches deep, lay thirty feet below their position. Thirty feet and coming on fast. Dryden looked up and saw the reason for their speed: The chute had partly caved against the building, losing over half of its drag.

Twenty feet to the ledge now.

Ten.

Dryden pulled Rachel up to his level and got his arms around her, once again meaning to take the collision himself first, though in this case there was no reason to think it would help.

They hit.

It was worse than he’d imagined. Once, in a training accident, Dryden had fallen three stories onto concrete. This impact on the ledge was at least that hard. He and Rachel were slammed downward into a tangled mass, his body cushioning her impact only slightly. He heard her breath rush out along with his own. He locked his arms around her before she could roll off him into open space.

She opened her eyes but took several seconds to focus on him, even though his face was nearly touching hers. She held on to consciousness for a moment, then lost it.

The dead chute fell past them, flapping uselessly against the tower in the straight-on wind. Seconds later it began shuddering violently in a different sort of wind, coming from above. Rotor wash.

Dryden looked past Rachel and saw the AH-6 directly overhead. It descended into a hover thirty feet to the side, filling all his senses. Even the taste of its exhaust reached him. It pivoted to give the sniper on its left skid a clear line. The man was close enough for Dryden to look into his eyes just before he raised his weapon.

Assuming Rachel would be the first target, and not willing to spend the last few seconds of his life soaked with her blood, Dryden cradled her against himself and turned inward. He put his back to the chopper, visually shielding her. It wouldn’t save her, but they would at least have to shoot him first. He studied her face, absorbing the details one last time. Even with her eyes closed, she was as beautiful a thing as he’d seen in his life. He kissed the top of her head. Reflected in the windowpane behind her was the chopper, and the man with the rifle. The scope lens gleamed.

Then, from high above, something screamed down out of the night on a vapor trail. It turned the chopper into an inferno, pounding it downward like a sledgehammer striking a child’s toy. Debris rained against the building, lit by the ghostly fire of the now-falling helicopter.

*   *   *

“What the fuck just happened?” Gaul shouted.

The pilot of Sparrow-Four-Two was yelling about a missile, and on the Miranda image, his chopper pulled hard to the west and sped away from the building.

The pilot of Sparrow-Four-One was not responding, probably because Sparrow-Four-One had become a flaming ball of metal. Gaul watched it hit the street with a bright puff of heat on all sides.

*   *   *

Audrey leaned as far out of the empty window frame as she could afford to, with the second FGM-148 Javelin resting in its launcher on her shoulder. The first launcher lay steaming on the carpet behind her.

No good. The other chopper was long gone; pilots were survivor types. She dropped the second launcher as well, held on to the window frame, and leaned farther out into the wind. Dryden’s parachute hung against the building far below.

Audrey retreated ten steps into the bedroom, came forward at a sprint, and leapt.

*   *   *

Dryden took his eyes off the wreckage and set his mind to the only thing that mattered now: getting into the building. The window beside him looked into a darkened office, visible only when he cupped his hand to his eye against the glass.

He had no gun, and nothing heavy with which to shatter the pane. His search for a solution was interrupted by the ruffle and snap of a parachute opening, and not his own. He turned to see a slim figure—it could only be Audrey—hanging from the lines of a second chute. It had opened less than a hundred feet above, and sixty feet out from the tower. Audrey was turning and coming around now, not fighting the wind but seizing it.

It was clear within seconds that Audrey’s control of the parachute was that of a master. While Dryden had made over two hundred jumps in his life, and could land on ground targets with the best of them, Audrey’s movements spoke of a specialized skill level, an acrobatic ability that came from years of narrowly focused training.

There’s one other reason to live here,
Audrey had told him,
but if you’re lucky you won’t have to find out what it is.

He understood. What other type of residence offered such a dynamic and unexpected escape route? All three of them—Audrey and Sandra, at the very least—had probably made a hundred aircraft jumps or more, in every kind of wind, until the controls of a chute were like extensions of their own bodies.

This was about to go bad.

He looked at Rachel again and found her eyes fluttering open, fixing on him. He could tell she’d read the danger in his mind.

“It’s not too late,” she whispered. “You can let me go.”

Her gaze went past him for a moment, beyond his shoulder to the wide-open drop.

Dryden pulled her face against his own, cheek to cheek, and just held on. He felt her tears spilling onto his temple, exactly where the chill always touched it.

A second later he heard the chute ruffle again. He looked up. Audrey had put herself into a dive; she stayed in it until she was almost lateral to their position, then pulled up and swung directly toward them. Twenty feet out and coming in fast.

Dryden readied himself. He’d killed with his hands before, but never while lying on a narrow ledge, forty stories up, with a child in his arms.

Audrey brought her feet up in the final seconds, coming toward Dryden like a battering ram. He raised his arm to block, knowing it would have almost no effect. Audrey’s left boot came into his viewpoint, connecting with his cheekbone hard enough to make the world flash white. Then she was atop him, kneeling right on Rachel, raining blows against Dryden’s face with some heavy steel tool in her hand. Blood everywhere now, in his mouth, his eyes.

With his left arm he blocked one of Audrey’s blows and blindly got hold of her wrist. He sent his other fist into her face; with deep satisfaction he felt her nose disintegrate beneath it in a shower of blood. She screamed. Then she took the tool into her other hand and landed the heaviest blow yet, right behind his ear. His muscles failed almost instantly; he felt like he was buried in sand and trying to move. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

He felt Rachel’s limp weight torn away from him, and then she was gone, along with Audrey.

He blinked, raised one lead-filled arm, and palmed the blood away from his eyes. Audrey had pushed off from the building and was gliding away. She held Rachel in one arm and with the other fastened a strap around the girl and locked her in place. Then she took to the controls again, spilling air out of the canopy and making what looked like a suicidal dive for the street.

Gaul’s three ground vehicles covered the last block on Michigan Avenue and swung around the corner, only to be confronted by the blazing roadblock of the downed AH-6. The vehicles made no attempt to look for survivors in the wreck; they tried to nose around it instead, but the strewn metal covered the entire path, from the base of one building to the other, with pooled fuel burning under all of it. The vehicles could not get through.

Audrey reached the street in less than twenty seconds, pulling up from the dive and flaring the chute for a soft landing. She released the harness the moment her feet touched, and the freed canopy drifted away down the street like a ghost. As Dryden watched, she set Rachel on the pavement, then used the steel tool to pry up a manhole cover. She lowered Rachel inside, followed her down, and replaced the lid behind her. Obviously, she would be prepared. She would have the tunnel system memorized, and a vehicle staged somewhere, ready to go.

Gaul’s vehicles didn’t reach the manhole until nearly a minute after Audrey had entered it. She and Rachel were gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The team that had landed on the building’s roof got to Dryden first. They entered the office, broke the window, and hauled him in. They zip-tied his wrists and ankles. As they did, he got a look at their weaponry: 9 mm Berettas holstered on their hips, but tranquilizer rifles slung on their shoulders. Looking back, he thought the sniper on the helicopter had been aiming the same kind of rifle.

They took him down to the SUVs and shoved him into the back of one. He asked them nothing and they volunteered nothing. He expected the vehicles to swing back south onto Michigan Avenue and return to the Willis Tower, but they didn’t. They went north instead, finally turning west on a street called Division. Three minutes later they got onto I-94 heading northwest out of the city, toward the glow of O’Hare on the horizon.