Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

“Away from here! Toward the LZ.” He brought the truck under control and looked back in the mirror. Two figures had crawled from the wreckage of the helicopter. “They had us dead to rights back there, General. Bastards knew exactly where we were.”

Middleton propped Excalibur between them. “An old chopper like that with no markings. Must have been mercs.”

Kyle left the truck in four-wheel drive as they sped along the pavement because he might have to go off-road again at any time. He agreed with Middleton. “Yeah, I’d bet on the Frankensteins, too. And I’ll also bet there are more of them converging toward us.”

“Want me to call the Fleet and get some fast-movers in here?” Middleton reached for the sat phone.

“No, don’t do that. We would have to give a precise location, and it could be picked up by the bad guys. Not much time before the scheduled pickup anyway, so we have to play hide and seek until then.”

“Where?”

“Beats me, pardner,” Swanson said with a cowboy twang. “I’m a stranger in these parts.”

Middleton threw back his head and laughed.

THE PLAN IS NOT YET FINISHED, Ruth Hazel. There are still things we can do.” Gordon Gates IV had lost none of his silkiness, none of his controlled modulation. He might well have been discussing a high school football game.

Senator Reed did not see it that way. “It is for me, Gordon. It is not every day that I, me, myself, personally am threatened by the President of the United States of America. It was not pleasant.”

They were in the privacy of the manicured flower garden behind Gates’s holiday home in Aspen, Colorado. He talked while scraping the honed blade of a fighting knife back and forth across a sharpening stone. “He’s bluffing. If he had anything, you would be in custody by now and not making this visit.”

“Why do you think the game isn’t over?”

“You don’t need to know that.” Stroke, stroke the blade, a comforting feel in the routine for a man very familiar with how to use a knife. “Just remember that Middleton and the sniper have not yet been rescued. A fatal accident may befall them before they are.”

“What do I do, then? Gerald Buchanan will name both of us as accomplices when he is subpoenaed, just to save his own skin. He is a stupid man and we were mistaken to bring him in on this.”

“Leave Gerald up to me. He poses neither of us any threat, although he may think otherwise. He really was stupid, wasn’t he? An arrogant and stupid man. We should have found someone else.”

Reed’s voice had a quaver in it as she recalled the chewing-out on Air Force One. “The President was absolutely thunderous. He yelled at me! I never saw him show anger like that.”

“What did he say?”

“The short version is that there will be a full investigation by the attorney general, and the President does not care who gets taken down. Also, the privatization bill is dead because they figure the Middleton kidnapping was part of a plan to keep him from testifying. The President swore that he would hold a national press conference to veto it should the bill come before him.”

That stopped Gates in his tracks. “Interesting.” He sharpened his knife and decided to abort Operation Premier. The kiddies could go safely to the latest animated blockbuster this weekend. No use pissing off the Prez even more by blowing up a couple of multiplexes. The guy had brains, but he would also leave office someday, and Gates Global would still be around, bigger than ever. “Well, that just means we put it off for a couple of years and try again. Try to get someone in the Oval Office who will be friendlier to the business community and private enterprise. Someone like you, Senator. It’s the job you wanted, isn’t it?”

Ruth Hazel closed her political career in that beautiful yard filled with blooming flowers. “No longer. I’ll leave at the end of the year when my term is up, go home to California, and undertake a very low-profile life. The choice between my house in Del Mar and prison is a pretty easy one.”

“Have you left any loose ends, anything with my name attached?”

“Not a one, Gordon. There is nothing in my files or notes or on my computer that mentions you in any questionable fashion whatsoever. I never had a whispered conversation with a lover, nor a private chat with an aide about our plans.” She looked him directly in the eyes. “Even if I have to go on trial for something, I would never mention you. I’ve always understood that you would have me killed by a Shark Team if I put you in jeopardy.”

“Now that’s where you are wrong, my dear.” Gates grinned at her, then whirled and threw the knife with force; it spun, end over end, and the point stuck deep into the trunk of a tree ten feet away. “It would not be a Shark Team. I would do it myself.” He walked to the tree, pulled the blade free, and resumed sharpening it. “We do understand each other, then?”

“Oh, yes. Quite,” she said. She reached into her shoulder bag for a tissue, and let her hand brush against the 9 mm pistol she had begun to carry. I’ll be waiting.

THEY SPED SOUTH DOWN THEhighway, to the point where it intersected with a major east-west road. An unfenced area of tired old cars, wrecks, and abandoned mechanical devices and farming equipment was off to one side, a mechanical graveyard that had probably begun many years ago with someone’s car breaking down on the road and being pushed to the side and abandoned. It had become a tangle of junk that spread over about ten acres, and Swanson steered into it, driving around until he found a crumbled old Mercedes cargo van that had rolled over in an accident and been hauled to the junk pile to rust in the punishing sun and wind.

Swanson stopped the Toyota next to the wrecked vehicle. “End of the line, General,” he said. “We hump the rest of the way to the LZ, a few more kilometers.”

“Why not just drive?” Middleton was out of the truck.

Swanson emptied his pack and picked out only a few things for them to carry. Water, more ammo, a few grenades, smoke grenades, and the sat phone. Each of them had a rifle, and he kept Excalibur over his shoulder and gave Middleton the pistol. It was time to lighten the load for the final dash, and if something would not fit on his web gear, he would leave it behind. When the pack was empty, he reloaded the computers in it, along with the sat phone, and gave it to the general to carry. “They will be looking for the truck now in a pretty narrow area, so we have to dump it and stay off the road.”

Kyle had a drink of water and moved out, heading into the fields, and General Middleton followed. Swanson figured they were only about three kilometers from the landing zone, but could not go directly to it. He was considering how to circle wide around and come in from the side or the rear while keeping the sun behind him, when he found a small footpath that had been pounded out by generations of goats, sheep, and other animals and their keepers. Probably leads to water. “ We’re pretty near a population center now, so keep a sharp eye out for people moving about. We don’t want to be seen.”

One step at a time, he led them into the field and moved parallel to the path so as to leave no bootprints. The monotony of taking the slow steps helped him consider how the helicopter knew where to find them. There had been a Syrian army search going on, but that chopper flew in straight and was carrying mercs, and the more he thought about it, the more Kyle believed the Frankensteins knew where he was. He had to assume that someone had sold them out, just as the Force Recon rescue mission had been compromised.