Dan Simmons - Hard as Nails

Kurtz clicked the button, touching it only gingerly, and shouted the question again.

"God damn it, Joe," cried Angelina over the intercom.

"Hey!" shouted Gonzaga. "Easy!"

"You don't have to shout now," said Baby Doc, his voice crackly but clear and soft on the intercom. "You're asking if I filed a flight plan? If we're flying legally?"

"Yeah," said Kurtz… softly.

"The answer is… sort of," said the pilot. "Up until thirty seconds ago, we were a legal Flight for Life charter carrying two kidneys from Buffalo to a hospital in Cincinnati."

"What changed thirty seconds ago?" asked Kurtz, not sure if he wanted the answer.

Baby Doc grinned, pulled his clumsy night-vision goggles down over his eyes, and pushed the cyclic-thing forward, even as he twisted the throttle.

The Long Ranger swooped from an altitude of five thousand feet to an altitude of about two hundred feet in fewer seconds than it would take for a roller coaster car to drop the steepest descent of its biggest hill.

Kurtz had always hated roller coasters.

Beneath them, the mostly empty four-lane highway had narrowed to an even emptier two-lane road that wound between ever higher hills. Kurtz knew that they must be south of Boston Hills now, deep into the woods. He couldn't see where they were going—the hills and horizon and sky all blended together into a rushing black on black—but he could feel how they were following the ground below. The big chopper banked left and right, then left again, following the valley terrain in a motion that made Kurtz want to roll down the window and throw up. He was fairly certain, however, that these windows didn't roll down with a crank, and he wasn't going to take his hands away from their deathgrips on the side of the copilot's seat long enough to hunt for a handle or slide or switch.

Baby Doc said something to him.

"What?" shouted Kurtz, realizing that he'd shouted again only after the volley of epithets from the back seats.

"I said, do you know what IFR stands for?" Baby Doc said.

"Instrument Flight Rules?" said Kurtz.

"Not tonight," said Baby Doc with another grin. "Tonight it stands for I Follow Roads."

Kurtz didn't really see how, even with those dumb goggles, the big man could see the coming twists and turns and dark hills soon enough and react quickly enough to keep up this swooping, banking game of dodgeball. They passed some lights to the left and Kurtz realized that they must be near the empty Kissing Bridge ski area that Gonzaga had stipulated as Baby Doc's DMZ should he manage to take over the Neola drug trade. More than halfway to Neola. Kurtz decided that he might walk to Buffalo if he survived the next half hour.

Suddenly Angelina's voice in his earphones said, "Skrzypczyk…" pronouncing it correctly as Scrip-zik , "…what happens if there are high tension wires across the valley up ahead?"

"We die," said Baby Doc.

Kurtz closed his eyes and hoped there would be no more questions.

"Do we have our plans clear once we're inside?" said Gonzaga. The mafiosa in the back all had their night vision equipment strapped onto their foreheads. Kurtz hadn't taken his out of the ditty bag yet and he'd be damned if he'd remove his hands from the seat to do so now.

"Campbell and I clear the upstairs," said Angelina. "You and Bobby search the first floor and basement. Kurtz is Rover."

"The doctor… whatshisname… isn't coming in with us?" asked Kurtz over the intercom.

Baby Doc shook his head. "Dr. Tafer. And no, the deal is that he stays in the chopper. But the folding litter is back there. Take that in with you in case the cop… whatshername…"

"King," said Kurtz.

"Is still alive," finished Baby Doc. "There's Neola."

They'd come at the town from the west as well as north. There was no highway beneath them now at all, just dark hills. Even without night vision goggles, the little town looked like a blazing metropolis of lights after the blackness south of Boston Hills.

Baby Doc gained more altitude—thank the Lord—so that he flew north to south above the main street at a height that wouldn't wake people from the noise.

"You have to help me find this house," said Baby Doc. "You'd better put your night vision on."

"Maybe I won't need it," said Kurtz. "Just follow Main Street south over the river and bank left… there it is."

They'd passed over the starlight-rippled ribbon of the Allegheny River on the south end of Neola—Baby Doc having them gain altitude all the time so they couldn't be heard—and now the county road running east from Highway 16 became visible. Powerful sodium vapor lamps illuminated the base of the ziggurat cliff and there were security lights all along the mile-and-a-half twisting driveway rising through checkpoints to the large house at the summit of the hill. There were no lights visible in the house itself, but more exterior lights illuminated the top of the driveway, the rear of the house, and the terrace.

"Come at it from the south," said Kurtz. He was wondering if Cloud Nine would be visible in the dark.

Baby Doc nodded and made a wide circle, swinging a mile or two to the east, and came at the estate from the south and east, away from the road. Even without night vision goggles, Kurtz could see the starlight gleaming on the rails of the little railroad far below. But rather than land, Baby Doc hovered about a thousand feet off the ground and two-thirds of a mile from the house. He rotated the nose of the Long Ranger until it pointed ninety degrees to the left of its alignment with the estate.

Gonzaga undid his seat belt, lifted a long, bolt-action rifle with a heavy scope from beneath his seat, and went to the side door. His man, Bobby, undogged that door and slid it on interior rails to the left. Gonzaga went to one knee and braced himself against the rear bulkhead, moving the rifle in slow circles as he looked through the scope.

"I see one man at the barrier at the top of the drive," Gonzaga said, still hooked to the intercom circuit, "and another closer, in that little open cupola Kurtz said was heated."

"Do you have a shot?" asked Baby Doc.

"Not on the far guy. But I'll take out the one in the cupola."

Kurtz raised his hands to his ears before he remembered that he was wearing the headphones.

The sniper rifle had some sort of suppressor on it. It spat once, twice… a lull… then a third time.

"He's down," said Gonzaga. He slipped onto the rear bench next to the doctor and fastened his seat belt. He was still holding the long gun.

"Did the other guard notice?" asked Angelina.

"No."

"All right everyone," said Baby Doc. "Hang on. I'm going to put it down on that flat, grassy area about forty feet south of where the Huey is tied down. That wind sock is going to help."

"Wait," said Kurtz. "How you going to land this thing without the noise waking everybody."

"I'm going to use a technique called autorotation," said Baby Doc. He was throwing switches.

Kurtz turned to look at him. "Isn't that just sort of a controlled crash, just using the turning rotors without the motor on?"

"Yeah." Baby Doc killed the twin turbines. The night grew silent except for the slowing rush of rotors and the rising sound of the wind.

"Arlene? Are you there? Arlene?"

It was her sister-in-law, Gail DeMarco, calling. Arlene answered in a whisper, although it was doubtful that the burned man could hear from this distance.

"Is everything all right?" asked Gail. "We were going to talk after the weather…"

The two women spoke almost every night after the Channel 4 weather, before the sports, before going to bed. Arlene had been looking forward to tonight's conversation because they were going to talk about Rachel's fifteenth birthday later in the week—although Arlene was dreading being asked if Joe was going to attend. Rachel looked up to and adored the occasional dinner visitor, Joe Kurtz—the girl's real father, Arlene was absolutely sure—and Joe seemed oblivious to it all. It had reached the point where Gail almost couldn't stand Joe—"a jerk" Gail had called him during a recent conversation with Arlene—but Gail understood the situation, and wanted Rachel to know the man who was probably her father.