Джеймс Паттерсон - The Summer House

Sanchez looks at his iPhone. In the upper left-hand portion of the screen, small letters now announce, where they didn’t before: No service.

The cops are blocking his cell phone.

No matter.

Sanchez settles in for a long wait, and looks up to York and says, “Hang in there, boss. We need to know what you know.”

Captain Allen Pierce is driving their rental Ford sedan right behind the dark-brown van of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department when his phone chimes, and so does Huang’s.

He says, “What’s up, John? Who’s trying to talk to us? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ?”

Huang holds his phone close to his face. “It’s from Sanchez.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, Still guarding York. Pierce in charge. Protect the Rangers.”

“Text him back.”

“And tell him what?”

Pierce takes a look in the rearview mirror, sees the line of rented cars and vans belonging to the news media streaming behind them like some ghoulish parade.

“Tell him message received,” Pierce says. “Nothing else. Poor guy’s got his hands full.”

Huang’s fingers start working on the handheld’s screen. “So do we. Shit, why haven’t we heard from Major Cook?”

Pierce says, “Maybe he’s gotten held up in some carpet bazaar. Forget Cook for the moment, John. We’re on our own.”

Gus Millner is a maintenance worker and transport assistant at the Memorial Health University Medical Center, and he’s having a busy day. When the ER is busy, he’s busy, and right now he’s carrying a heavy plastic bag that holds the belongings of a female gunshot victim who was admitted yesterday. There was some sort of foul-up yesterday in delivering this bag, so he needs to bring the bag up to the ICU’s nurses’ station. Afterward, there’s a restroom on the third floor that needs attention.

He’s alone in an elevator, going up, when something starts ringing in the bag.

It keeps ringing.

He opens the bag, looks inside. Black slacks, shoes, and—

A heavy phone with a big keypad and a thick, stubby antenna. Not a type of cell phone he’s ever seen.

What to do?

Answer it?

He closes the bag, and when he gets to the right floor for the ICU, it stops ringing.

Good.

Last month one of his buds got shit-canned for answering some patient’s phone in a bag of possessions like this, and Gus isn’t about to lose his job over something so simple and silly.

Chapter 88 Afghanistan

I SWITCH OFF my Iridium phone and put it back in my rucksack. Chief Warrant Officer Cellucci is standing to the right of the Little Bird helicopter and waves me forward. It’s windy out on the airstrip, hitting us with dust and gravel.

“No answer, Major?”

“None,” I say, walking to him as best as I can without my cane, rucksack in my right hand. I’m dressed in a dark-green flight suit, carrying an oversized crash helmet in my left hand.

He shrugs. “Happens sometimes, the signals don’t go through. Cosmic rays, sunspots—the atmospherics around here are pretty strange. Here, I’ll take your bag.”

Cellucci grabs it with little effort, tosses it into the rear, which is used for storage. I go to climb in and hesitate, my left leg screaming at me how stupid this is, and then Cellucci says, “Here you go.”

He grabs two fistfuls of my flight-suit fabric and pushes me in, the fabric from the one-piece suit jamming into a very sensitive area, and I sit down in the small, tight canvas seat. Cellucci helps strap me in and then walks around the bubble-glass front, eases himself into the pilot’s seat.

“Put your helmet on. Let’s get the comm set up so we can chat with each other.”

He helps me put the borrowed helmet on, adjusts the mic in front, hooks up the communications cable. I feel like I’m being put into a carnival ride by some smug traveling carnie who secretly hopes I piss myself when the ride ends.

After he buckles himself in, Cellucci starts working the switches, and I try to take it all in. There’s a control stick in front of me, with an identical one in front of Cellucci. Large pedals are on the floor, and I keep my feet away from them. Between us is a large console with a square screen and round dials, and I think I recognize a compass, and that’s about it.

Cellucci adjusts something, and his voice crackles through the helmet’s earphones. “Hear me, Major?”

I adjust the mic in front of my mouth and say, “Just fine, Chief.”

“Good,” he says. Overhead the engine starts to whine, and he says, “Okay, quick safety demo before we get airborne. If we’re up there and I get hit or disabled, so you’re the only one conscious, this is what you’re going to do. Okay? Pay attention.”

Earlier I was warm in my borrowed flight suit, but now I’m near shivering with apprehension. “Paying attention, Chief.”

“Good,” he says. “If I’m slumped over and you can’t revive me, and we’re heading to the ground, you unsnap your harness, here, here, and here”—he slaps at my torso—“and slip off your helmet quick as you can, and do your best to kiss your ass good-bye before we hit.”

He laughs and maneuvers the control stick in front of him, the collective control by his seat, and working the pedals, he lifts us off from FOB Chadwick.

I’ve flown other times in helicopters—military and NYPD—and they are Cadillacs compared to the Little Bird, which feels like a Volkswagen Beetle with helicopter blades overhead. Cellucci turns another dial, and I can hear him broadcast. “Tower, this is November Sierra Four,” he says. “Clear for departure to the south?”

“Roger that, November Sierra Four,” comes the female voice of the airstrip’s flight controller. “You are clear.”

He takes us up, and my stomach does a few loop-de-loops, for in front of us is a huge Plexiglas bubble, which gives me the feeling that at any moment I could slide out of my seat and break through the window. The fading afternoon sunlight flickers overhead, from the spinning blades casting shadows over the curved bubble. The control stick in front of me moves whenever Cellucci moves his stick.

I swallow twice and look at Cellucci, who smiles at my discomfort and gives me a thumbs-up.

“Doing all right, Major?” he asks, voice strong and confident through the earphones.

I swallow again. “Chief, I know you’re an elite flier. The Army knows you’re an elite flier, and so does everyone else in the Night Stalkers. Just a favor, all right?”

“What’s that, Major?”

I say, “Please don’t feel like you have to prove anything to me. Let’s just skip that step.”

A laugh comes through. “Roger that, Major.”

It doesn’t take long for us to leave the flat plain that holds the city of Khost and FOB Chadwick. The southern part of the Hindu Kush range, separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, rises straight up before us, left to right, huge stony peaks riven with valleys and ravines containing trees and small forests. Twice I spot a small village, stone and brick homes built on the steep slopes of the lower range.

“Pretty remote down there, ain’t it?” Cellucci says.

“It looks like the ends of the earth.”

He says, “Maybe so, but there are eyes on us down there, tracking us. Right now cell phones and handheld radios are ringing in every direction for about fifteen or twenty klicks, saying the Americans are coming.”

“You ever get shot at?”

“All the time, Major, all the time,” he says. “But usually we’re moving too fast. The T-men love to track the Chinooks and hit them when they’re landing or taking off. That’s one of the good things about the Little Birds.”

Higher and higher we go, my ears popping, and Cellucci says, “This is the God’s honest truth, Major, but last year I inserted a team into a real remote and deep valley, the kind of place where it looks like you have to pipe in the sunshine, and the villagers there, they thought we were the Russians. Can you believe that?”