Wild Card (28 page)

Chapter 29

I’d healed people before. I’d healed Jen when she was badly hurt. But I’d messed up her head and mine when I did it.

My brain was wavering but my hands were working automatically. First things first. Stop the bleeding. Tear the clothes. Open the first aid box. Compression. Bandages. The colonel was working with me, by touch. All the time I felt sick inside that I was just about to make things worse.

Bian was beside me.

“Please, Bian,” I said.

She sensed what I meant. “You’ve done it before, Amber.”

“I made a mistake—”

“You healed Jen.”

The colonel was trying to see us in the blackness. He couldn’t even hear what we were saying over the noise, but he could feel my uncertainty as my hands fumbled the last bandage. He’d be frantic now—he’d seen wounds bleed like this before. Vera didn’t have long. We were miles from any hospital and even if we got her to one, we’d set ourselves up as stationary targets for the Nagas. They’d be looking.

The colonel knew Athanate healed themselves, but he didn’t know about Athanate healing others.

Bian’s hands ran over the bandage, noting the entry and exit position of the wound. She knew how much blood had been lost.

“No,” Bian said. “You’re right, you can’t do that. It’s arterial. I’ve got to work directly with the circulatory system.” She grabbed me and started to push me out of the way, but she paused. “I’m going against Skylur’s orders. Your account—you deal with him. And you owe me big time, Round-eye.”

A hundred arguments flared in my brain. Skylur’s last orders on this were that I had to be responsible for healing my House. Vera wasn’t my House. But Skylur expected us to understand the purpose of his orders and not the letter. Bian was telling me the responsibility for this was on me. Fine, I’d take that.

And she expected something as big in return.

What was I getting myself into?

David flicked on a flashlight and shone it down on Vera. It looked even worse than it had felt.

Bian’s eyes were inches away. The look in them—I’d seen that before. It wasn’t about whether she’d heal Vera. I was sure she’d do that anyway. It was about me and how I’d respond.

I’d trusted her with my life.

“Blank check,” I whispered, knowing she’d read my lips.

I barely had time to register the changes in her face. The eyes widening, the fangs appearing. Then she was bent over Vera.

“What’s she doing?” the colonel yelled. His hands were on the verge of grabbing Bian and wrestling her back. I stopped him.

“It’s her only chance,” I said.

“She’s not…”

“She’s just healing her. Nothing else. You have to trust me.” I gripped his shoulder, leaving more bloody hand smudges on his shirt.

He looked up at me. I don’t know what he saw then, in the thin glow from David’s flashlight. I was different from the last time I’d seen him, obviously. In that time, I’d taken huge steps to becoming Athanate and Were. I was very different inside. From my point of view, the face in the mirror was looking crazier every day. But Colonel Laine saw something different.

I felt the panic drain out of him, as if my touch had somehow provided a conductor for it to flow away. His face sagged and I realized that, for the first time, he was feeling his age.

Then he did something that only he would have thought of. He slipped his hands around one of Bian’s and squeezed gently.

For an instant I could sense all four of us, like something electric passed between us.

David jerked me back. “Apache in the air,” he shouted. He’d retrieved my comms headset from the floor and he’d been listening in.

I ignored the slippery, sticky feel of the blood all over the headset and put it on. I waved David back to his seat.

The colonel pulled his headset back up from around his neck. Much more sensible place to leave it.

The pilot was reporting his IR systems were wasted. He’d put lights on and was doing a sweep near where we’d been, using the low light system. I wasn’t sure if the IR laser would have taken that out as well, but I’d missed my chance. Without the IR, the synthetic view the pilot would be getting wasn’t good. He’d probably see the dust Victor had kicked up at the evac zone, but what then?

If he took a chance and fired up his radar, we’d light up like a beacon on his screen.

We couldn’t outrun the Apache and we sure as hell couldn’t outrun his missiles. I’d hoped they would have been on the ground longer, but the dice seemed to be falling against us this time.

I wracked my brain, but there was no way we would stay hidden if he used all his weapons systems to look for us.

And if he found us, it came down to the biggest gamble of all.

What would that pilot do if the Nagas told him to take us out?

“Victor, head for the I-76, low as you can go,” I said.

“We already there on height, girl,” he grumbled. “Don’t want to trip over no telephone lines.”

But he swung the nose northwest and eased the power up.

“Lower, damn you. Find a road going north and follow it.”

“Crazy bitch.” But he banked and swooped lower and suddenly we were hurtling along a dirt track heading toward the interstate. We’d be kicking up a dust storm behind us, but the Apache would take time to find that in the darkness.

I eased around Bian and Vera, coming up on Victor’s shoulder.

“ETA interstate?”

Victor jerked his head up.

Yeah, look out the window, crazy bitch.

I could see the all-night interstate traffic. The bright lights of Mac trucks swept along west to Denver, east out to Nebraska. The occasional late-night car. Way over in the distance, a haze of dim lights that marked a prairie town.

“Tuck us in behind a big, fat truck, Mr. G.”

He snorted. “You are crazy, like a friggin’ headless chicken.”

“Or a train, if you see one going in the right direction.”

“You have any idea what the slipstream from a truck does to a helicopter?” Victor’s eyes remained firmly fixed on the road ahead, but I knew he wanted to glare daggers at me.

“Prefer a rough ride or Hellfire in your ass?”

He didn’t reply.

On comms, the Apache pilot was arguing with the Nagas.

“Negative, Bravo. I say again, negative. Whatever took out my IR is just waiting for me to fire up my radar.”

“Not a suggestion, Eagle. There are no other military aircraft involved. There’s one civilian helicopter. You have countermeasures. This is Bravo, repeating direct order, commence search on radar.”

The interstate was rushing up out of the night.

So were telephone and power lines.

Victor hauled back and the Bell went up with a stomach-kicking leap. I lost the interstate and hung onto the seatback, looking out at stars. The colonel fell down over Vera and Bian, wedging them into place with his body. Pia, David and Tom were the sensible ones, strapped in.

The Bell tilted and plunged down on the north side of the interstate, then the head swung back up again like a drunken dolphin. The helicopter slowed, swerved in and righted itself. Then we were abruptly holding formation with an eighteen-wheeler heading for Denver, shaking like a speedboat in choppy water as the slipstream buffeted us.

I pulled my mike out of the way. “Everyone okay?” I yelled.

Thumbs from the back. Bian paused to say something I was probably better off not hearing, then took the opportunity to lock herself more firmly against the seats and went back to her task.

“Radar system up,” the gunner’s voice from the Apache said, and I froze.

There was silence on the TacNet.

The colonel turned his head and looked up at me.

I shrugged. There was nothing more we could do.

“Eagle at fifteen hundred feet. Search radius fifty miles. There’s nothing flying, Bravo. Nothing new on the ground between I-70 and I-76.” The pilot was doing his job, but he wanted out.

“Go higher, Eagle. Initiate search pattern west of grid 5-18. Air and ground. They have to be there somewhere. Break. Pursuit cars, return to closest interstate. Monitor channel 1. Report position on channel 2.”

Victor eased in closer. If the Apache kept going up, there was a point at which the radar returns would reveal a double for our shielding truck and us. How hard were they looking?

What if they came this way? We’d slowed to hide behind the truck. The Apache would overhaul us in minutes.

Closer. The juddering increased, and the sweat stood out on Victor’s face as he fought the controls to keep us in place.

He’d made us safe for another few moments, but all it needed was the smallest thing to go wrong. Even the truck driver glancing back and seeing a helicopter sneaking along beside him. He was bound to hit the brakes and we’d overshoot. The Apache weapons control system would have us the second that happened.

“Eagle at three thousand. Commencing sweep to north.”

Victor eased us in even more, then slid us into a position above the truck. The buffeting was less there, and if the Apache was looking straight down, our radar return would merge with the truck. What would we look like at an angle? If he saw a strange return for a truck would he come looking? There was enough light on the interstate for his low light system to show him what we were doing.

And how long could we keep this up? We were about thirty minutes away from the outskirts of Denver at the truck’s speed, if Victor could keep this up. I tried to do the math. If the Apache missed us this sweep, their search pattern would take them down as far as I-70 and back. That’d have to take fifteen minutes this sweep, then maybe ten on the next—the interstates got closer. Five minutes for the next sweep. We had two search sweeps, maybe three, to evade before we got too close to Denver and Petersen called it off.

He would call it off, wouldn’t he? How desperate was he getting?

“Eagle! Pursuit 7 reports helicopter flying along I-76 westbound, three miles west of the town of Wiggins.”

Shit! Our luck just wasn’t holding tonight.

The colonel pulled himself up alongside me, both of us looking out at the expanse of night around us.

“Nothing on our screens,” the gunner said.

“They’re in tight behind a truck. I’m closing.” Different voice. Pursuit 7 must have got on the interstate at just the wrong point.

Damn our luck. We’d have to move. A car on the highway wasn’t an ideal platform for firing, but I didn’t want him firing up into our belly. We were caught between the rock and the real hard place, and we were down to our last gamble.

I tapped Victor and pointed to where I thought Denver was, over the horizon.

Victor lifted us out of the slipstream and poured on the gas. We angled away from the interstate, racing away into the unrelieved blackness of the prairie.

“Got them.” The gunner.

“This is Bravo. Eagle, you are cleared to engage.”

“What? No! Are you crazy?” the pilot yelled. “Negative, negative.”

The colonel’s eyes met mine in the weak glow from Victor’s instruments. I could see the same thoughts in his head as in mine. The last roll of the dice came down to the conscience of a couple of soldiers in the night sky over Colorado.

“Eagle, engage that helicopter. This is a matter of national emergency.”

“Bullshit, Bravo. We came here to spot for you. We’ve got him, and he isn’t getting away. He’s got to land sometime.” The pilot.

“There is no way we’re going to fire on an unarmed civilian aircraft without legal authority.” The gunner.

“Eagle, this is Bravo. We constitute that legal authority. This is a direct order. Fire on the target.”

“Is this some kind of crazy test?” The gunner couldn’t believe his orders, but how long would he hold off? As far as he knew, Petersen was legal authority.

The colonel’s hand played over the switches of his TacNet controller.

“All life is a test, son.”

My head snapped around. He’d patched himself into their comms system. He spoke with his eyes closed, and his face so sad, so tired.

“It’s a decision that comes down to you,” he said quietly, “to your honor and integrity. There are no other guides here. And no good outcome. Do your duty and God bless you.”

There was a second of silence. Bravo started to yell something, but the Apache gunner overrode it all.

“This is Eagle. Weapons locked down.”

He hadn’t said he wouldn’t track us, but it sure as hell beat being blown out the sky. There’d be something we could do to sneak us away on the ground. I wanted to punch the air and shout, but the colonel just dropped his head into his hands.

What the hell?

There was a double flash in the darkness behind us. Victor swore and hauled the Bell into a tight curve. At the far point of the swing, I looked back to the east and saw the remains of the Apache aflame. It seemed to fall so slowly; a huge, red flower floating gently down to the waiting blackness.

Chapter 30

THURSDAY

“Ingram, can you not bypass this DC bullshit?”

“Well, an’ I jus’ might, Ms. Farrell, but for what justifiable cause? Those army folks aren’t going anywhere. You can’t spirit a whole damn battalion from under my nose.” His voice was tinny coming from the speaker.

“They can. They have been, for a dozen years.”

The colonel and I were sitting in the study at Manassah, surrounded by the boards displaying my stalled investigation into the rogue. With Jen’s furniture in mind, we’d changed out of our blood-soaked clothes into the spare sweats we’d gotten from Haven. Both of us looked like extras from a horror movie, with Vera’s blood smudged over our hands and faces.

She was stable and unconscious, lying quietly in a guest bedroom. Bian was with her, waiting for more blood to be delivered from Haven’s emergency supplies. For all the power of Athanate healing, it couldn’t magic blood out of nothing, and Vera had lost a lot.

Jen and Pia were in the living room, getting the story from David. Julie was in the dining room, calling every number she could in Ops 4-10. And we were on the telephone to Ingram in Washington trying to whip him into a gallop without getting slowed down by detail. It wasn’t working.