Jack Mars - Any Means Necessary

Luke was in the Suburban, alone now. He had Brenna’s M1 Garand rifle with him in the front seat. It was loaded with an eight-shot magazine of the high-powered.30–06 armor-busting incendiaries. Ten more mags were on the floor in front of the seat.

In the back seat, the corpse sat where Susan had been. The seatbelt kept the body upright. Its head bobbed and moved with the movement of the car.

Luke rolled slowly through the empty streets near the National Mall and the Capitol. He was right on the edge of the radiation containment zone. Somewhere around here, the DC cops should have the streets blocked off.

There it was, flashing lights, down a side street to his right. He passed the intersection, then pulled over to the curb. There were no cars or people anywhere.

Cops were good. They were a start. But what Luke needed were bad guys. The cops didn’t know anything about what was going on. This car would be meaningless to them. He sat for a minute, thinking about it. Could he have lost them so thoroughly back there on the highway that they had no idea where he was? He didn’t think so.

He still had his cell phone with him. He knew it was stupid to keep it, but he was hoping against hope that he’d get a call or a text from Becca. He brought the phone out and stared at its eerie glow in the darkness.

“Oh, hell,” he said. He speed-dialed her number.

Her phone was off. It didn’t ring at all.

“Hi, this is Becca. I can’t answer your…”

He hung up. He sat quietly for a few moments, trying not to think about anything. Maybe they would find him, maybe they wouldn’t. If not, he was going to have to go out and find them. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He sank into the driver’s seat for a moment.

Gradually, he became aware of a sound. It was the heavy rumble of a large helicopter. It didn’t alarm him. There could be a million reasons why a helicopter, even a military chopper, was in the sky over Washington, DC, right now. He sat up and looked out his windshield. It gave him a view down the wide boulevard in front of him.

The chopper was approaching dead ahead. It was flying low and slow. After a few seconds, its shape resolved into something familiar to him.

It couldn’t be what he thought it was, not here in the middle of the city.

But it was…

…an Apache helicopter gunship.

“Oh no.”

Luke slammed the car into gear and stomped on the gas. He spun the wheel hard to the left and did a giant, screaming U-turn in the middle of the street.

The chopper fired its mini-gun.

Thirty-millimeter rounds strafed the top of the SUV, ripping up the car’s armor.

Luke flinched, but kept driving. He spun another hard left, making the turn down the side street. The chopper passed behind him.

Up ahead, four street cops stood in front of a low concrete barrier. They were watching the sky, their attention suddenly grabbed by the chopper. Two police cruisers were parked on either side, lights silently flashing. Luke took a deep breath.

Real cops! He couldn’t imagine a group of people he’d rather surrender to right now. A hundred yards out, he stomped on the gas. The Suburban picked up speed. He accelerated toward the cops.

The four of them scattered.

Three seconds later, he plowed through the concrete barrier, cracking it in half, driving the two crumbling pieces ahead of him. He skidded to a stop, reversed a few feet, then peeled out around them.

Behind him, the cops had jumped in their cruisers. Seconds later, the familiar siren wail began.

Luke took a left on Independence Avenue. He scanned the sky for the chopper. He could hear it, but couldn’t see it. The Suburban was smoking from the rounds it had just taken. He had badly underestimated them. An Apache! They were going to kill this car and they didn’t care who knew about it.

He pushed the Suburban up as fast as it would go. It had lost some power, and topped out just under 80. He sped along Independence, on the south side of the Mall. The tidal basin was to his left. Street lights shimmered on the water.

Behind him, the cops were coming hard.

The Apache swooped in from his right. It was four stories up. The mini-gun fired again. The bullets hit. It sounded like a jackhammer. The right side rear window shattered, spraying the corpse with glass.

Luke swerved the car crazily, his foot still pressing the gas to the floor. The roadway zipped past him. Far ahead and to his left, he could see the Lincoln Memorial, lit up in the night.

The chopper came back around. It gave up on the mini-gun. It started launching its Hydra rockets instead. A line of rockets whooshed out from the right side of the chopper. Three, four, five.

Ahead of him, the roadway blew up in shades of red and yellow. BOOM… BOOM… BOOOM.

He spun hard to the left. The SUV broke through a chain-link barrier and bounced over the grass. Luke was thrown around in his seat. His hands gripped the wheel. He barely let up off the gas.

More rockets came. One lit up a line of cherry blossom trees. The small hills blew up all around him.

The car took a direct hit, in the back.

Luke felt the back of the car go up in the air. He pushed open his door and jumped.

He hit the grass and rolled away to the left. The car’s rear wheels bounced back down and the car kept going, downhill toward the water.

Luke saw the spark as another Hydra rocket took off. It zipped through the air, penetrated the SUV’s armor, and hit home. Flames shot out an instant before the entire car blew.

BOOOOOM.

Luke hit the deck and covered his head as heavy armor flew. A moment later, he looked back. The car was still rolling, red and orange flames reaching like arms into the night sky. Inside the car, a woman in her late forties burned, unclaimed, a person with no name. Luke could see her silhouette.

The car, utterly on fire, rolled slowly to the edge of the water. The lip of the tidal basin was a drop-off. The car went off the side and in. It hung there for a few seconds, half in the water, half out, before it fell all the way in. It burned, even as it sank.

The chopper veered off and away. Seconds later, it was a dark and distant shadow against the night sky.

Luke lay on the grass, breathing heavily. A Capitol District police car skidded to a halt behind him, its siren howling. Two cops got out, one white, one black. They approached him with flashlights and guns drawn.

“On your face. Arms out.”

Luke did as the man said. Rough hands searched him. They pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists tight.

“You have the right to remain silent,” a cop began.

3:23 a.m.

Municipal Detention Center – Washington, DC

Everything was white.

The walls and the floors were white. The overhead lights were bright and white. The sliding electronic metal gates that slid open and clanged shut behind him were painted white.

They processed Luke and put him in a holding cell with half a dozen other men. The room was large. It was white, with dirty handprints all over the walls. The floor was white, going toward dingy gray from the bottoms of a thousand pairs of sneakers. There was a urinal and a toilet built into one wall. The floor sloped very gradually toward the middle, where there was a small, round open drain.

A dirty white bench ringed the walls of the cell, reaching almost halfway around. Luke paced the cell for several minutes while the other men watched him. He was the only white man in the room. That didn’t bother him. He barely noticed the other men. It was just being trapped in here. It was not being in motion. He couldn’t stand it.

Somewhere out there, Becca and Gunner were in the hands of bad people. Luke might be kidding himself, but he sensed that they were still alive. If so, he needed to get out of here and find them. He would never stop, never, until he found them again. And God help the men who had them.