Days of Rage (38 page)

W
e got caught in the traffic next to the Arena da Baixada, at least a thousand people in the street, feeding into a stadium that held over thirty thousand. The death toll made me nauseous, but the crowd had no sense of urgency. Like lambs being led to the slaughter, they continued on with their unwitting lives. I began cursing. “Fucking soccer pussies. Get out of the way!”

Driving, Aaron said, “It’s football, if you’re going to scream like that. And it’s your team playing, so I’d think you’d show a little more decorum.”

“That
is
my decorum.” I would have gone on a diatribe about Jennifer to relieve the angst I was feeling, but knew it would be wasted breath on Aaron. He couldn’t get in touch with Shoshana either, and I could tell it was grating on him.

We needed to get the hell out of this city, but both of them refused to answer their damn phones, forcing us to drive from the airport to their last known location. I didn’t know what they were up to, but they were about to kill us all. I started to give another colorful description of the fairer sex when my phone rang. It was Jennifer.

“Pike, we’ve got it. I’m looking at it right now.”

I swallowed my aggravation. “And?”

“And that damn NEST doc finally came in handy. He says it’s an atomic demolition munition. Made to blow up dams or bridges or the seat of government-type stuff. It’s a tactical weapon, not a giant nuke.”

“Does that help us at all?”

We broke through the crowds around the stadium and started screaming up Buenos Aires Street.

“Only a little. It’s probably one kiloton, so it’s not like a TV show atomic bomb that destroys everything for miles. On the downside, he says the thing will have a multitude of dead-man switches all designed to detonate if anything is tampered with. It isn’t a ballistic missile flying through space. Since it had to sit somewhere until it went off, it had built-in fail-safes. In other words, once it’s set to go off, it’s going off.”

Aaron hit the parking garage and ignored the drop bar, our SUV shattering it in four pieces, people diving out of the way like they were in a Mountain Dew commercial. I said, “What floor?”

“Third.”

“Ten seconds.”

Aaron saw them before I did. Three people huddled over an open trunk in the corner of the garage like they were looking at a dead body. Which, if there was a mirror in the trunk, I suppose they were.

I leapt out before we’d even stopped, running to them. Jennifer saw me and smiled, relief on her face. The expression made me feel sick to my stomach.

Way too much faith.
We should have left twenty minutes ago, when we stood a chance.

I projected a confidence I didn’t feel, saying, “Okay, so what’s the countdown? What are we dealing with?”

Shoshana said, “It looks like he wanted it to go off at halftime for the game, so we caught a break. We have thirty-two minutes until detonation.”

Some break. An additional thirty minutes to live
. I looked at the device, an innocuous egg laid in a bed of Styrofoam, two ancient LED displays counting down in synchronicity. I leaned in close and saw the broken keys in their holes. Saw the permanence built into the system.

“Doc, I know you said tampering with the system would cause detonation, like cutting a wire here or smashing the display, but what about killing the whole thing?”

Jennifer picked up on where I was going immediately, running to the Pelican box in the trunk of her sedan, shouting, “Yeah! The Stiletto.”

Shoshana said, “What’s that?”

“It’s an experimental EMP device. It’ll fry every bit of circuitry in that weapon. Kill it all at the same time. Doc? Would that do it?”

He was staring at the weapon like he was hypnotized, his left leg trembling. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Doc? Did you hear what I asked?”

Jennifer handed me the Stiletto and he said, “NO! No. You can’t. Look, I’ve checked it out, and it
is
a nuclear device. It’s plutonium, and it’s armed. It was purpose-built. If the Russians designed it, they built in safeguards. The initiator for this device is a flow of current that’s already been created, like a wall of water behind a dam. Killing the device with your EMP will do nothing but destroy the dam. Whether the timer kicks off in thirty minutes or you disable it, the current is flowing.”

“So we can’t shut it down? At all?”

“Not with those keys broken off.” He broke down and put his head in his hands, crying like a little girl. “We’re all going to die.”

I smacked him in the back of the head, saying, “I don’t have time for that shit. Solve the problem. We have twenty-eight minutes. Now twenty-seven.”

He stopped sniveling and actually looked at me with a little steel, analyzing the problem scientifically without his life in the balance. He said, “Distance. Get this thing as far away from population as possible. The farther you get, the less people will die.”

I said, “Fuck. That’s it? No magic NEST shit?”

He said, “It’s not an Iraqi IED. It’s a booby-trapped bomb built by a state. The only difference is that there’s a nuclear core. There
is
no magic. Distance is it.”

Jennifer said, “We can drive it. If we hauled ass right now, we’d get it out of the center of the city. The blast radius will be half as bad, maybe a third depending on traffic.”

The unspoken command was that someone would die with the device.

I said, “That’s bullshit. No way is driving this thing out of here the answer.” I watched the countdown continue, my stomach churning, then said, “We have the rock-star bird.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. Aaron said, “I agree the aircraft would be a solution. It could get the weapon clear easily, but who will fly it? Are you a pilot?”

I knew the hitch even before I’d finished my sentence. Before he’d opened his mouth. “No, I’m not, damn it. But that thing could get it out of here.”

We all looked at each other, waiting for some miracle to pop up. It did, but not in the manner I expected.

Shoshana said, “I’ll do it. I’ll fly the plane.”

Aaron snapped his head to her and said, “You’re a helicopter pilot. You can’t fly that aircraft.”

“Oh yes, I can. In the air, it’s all the same. The hardest part is landing, and I won’t be doing that. I can, and I will.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Jennifer looked at me, and I realized she was waiting for me to do something. Pull a miracle out of the mess we were in and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of people, without it costing the death of one in particular. She trusted me so much that it hurt. I caught her eyes and shook my head. It wasn’t coming. I had never let her down before, and now I would. People were going to die. The only question was how many.

Aaron said, “Where will you go?”

“Over the ocean. The Gulfstream flies at over five hundred miles an hour. I can get out of range within minutes.”

“And then what?”

She gave a bitter smile. “And then I fulfill Daniel’s prophecy. I prevent Munich. Remember? He talked about this very thing before you ever left to Europe. He was right in the end.”

“Damn it, Shoshana, no. No, no, no.”

“What else is there? You want to run now, in a car? Even if we could get outside of the blast radius, what would it get? Our national team will be slaughtered. Thousands of Israelis will die. Daniel is already dead. All for what? My life? Your life?”

Aaron looked at me for help. One more person thinking I could prevent the inevitable. I said, “If I could fly the plane, I would.”

Shoshana said, “Will they charge you for the loss of the aircraft?”

I gave a rueful grin and said, “Yeah, they probably will.”

“Then it will be worth it. Let’s go.”

I saw Jennifer’s eyes water. She looked at me one more time for a miracle. I said, “Get in.”

We loaded the car with the weapon, then drove to the airport, once again fighting through the traffic, the partying and happiness of the people on the street a stark contrast to what we were carrying in our trunk. Jennifer called Brett along the way, giving him the warning order that the pilot was going to have to give a crash course to someone on the aircraft. She ended by telling him that if the pilot had an issue with it, he could fly the plane himself.

We passed through the general aviation cantonment area and showed our passes. They waved us forward, and we were on an airfield with a nuclear device. I would have been pissed except they were now saving lives with their lackadaisical attitude. I saw Brett on the tarmac, then the pilot going through preflight.

We got to the plane and all four doors of the SUV opened, like we were going to a wake. Which I suppose we were. Shoshana glanced at me and I smiled, attempting to show courage. She tried to return it, but what came out was a broken thing. I felt my gut drop again.

What am I doing? Letting her die for me?

I started to help with the weapon when Brett pulled me aside.

“There’s no other option here? She’s got to go?”

“Unless you can talk that pussy cover pilot into flying. I’m not sure we have enough per diem to get him through eternity.”

“Yeah, I know, but what about jumping? Can’t we get the bird out over the ocean then parachute out?”

I said, “You can’t jump a Gulfstream. You can’t open the door in flight. You know that.”

Brett scrunched his brow, looking at me like I was an idiot. I said, “What?”

“What?
What?
That damn bird is built for jumping.”

“What do you mean? I’ve flown that thing forever. It’s built to hide shit. It’s got no operational capability.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know where the fuck you’ve been, but since I’ve been with the Taskforce, it’s had an infiltration capability. There’s a hatch at the back of the tail. A clamshell comes out, like a seven twenty-seven. Instead of walking down stairs, you just inch your ass into space.”

I said, “Are you serious?”

He squinted his eyes and said, “You really didn’t know?”

Right then, in the heart of the mission I learned another downside to being a “commercial” Taskforce entity. Nobody bothered to tell you about operational capability because you had no need to know. If you were just an infiltration platform, it was irrelevant, only in this case, it was fucking critical.

I said, “Are there chutes on the bird?”

“Yeah. Civilian Javelins. Rigger packed, with Cypres AAD.”

I saw Shoshana in the cockpit with the pilot and shouted, “Aaron! Get over here.”

He jogged up, his face expecting me to tell him that I’d managed to turn off the device with my charm. I disabused him of that notion.

“We have parachutes on the plane. Shoshana can get it out over the ocean, then jump out.”

He took that in, then nodded absently. “Yeah, yeah, that’ll work. She might make it.”

I said, “What does that mean? She’s a damn commando. All we have to do is show her the exit procedures.”

“She’s not jump qualified.”

I heard the words and felt a final kick to the gut. I had just assumed she was a paratrooper. In movies like
Point Break
, any idiot can strap on a parachute and free fall like a master, floating through the air as if it was second nature. The truth of the matter was that jumping out of an aircraft, free-falling, opening, and then landing a parachute successfully was incredibly difficult. There were plenty of military members in HALO operations—after being trained—who ended up pounding the unforgiving earth with their bodies. Without any training, I gave Shoshana about a fifty percent chance of survival, and that was even with the Cypres automatic opening device. It would fire at a predetermined altitude, but if she was upside down or tumbling the parachute would do nothing more than snarl into a ball of nylon, wrapping around her body.

Jennifer had heard the conversation and said, “We have nineteen minutes.”

I said, “Brett, get me a rig. Lay it on the ground.” To Jennifer: “Get her out here. I’ll show her what to do, then Brett can show her how to open the door.”

She said, “Shoshana won’t live through this, will she?”

I said, “Yeah, she will, because I’m going out with her.”

T
he rock-star bird hopped down the runway as if we were testing its shock absorbers. Buckled into the copilot seat, I shouted, “I thought landing was the hard part?”

Shoshana said nothing, working the flaps and the yoke. We bounced one more time, then lifted off for good. I thanked my lucky stars that there were no obstacles after the runway, because Shoshana flew about eighty feet off the deck forever, the aircraft slowly—oh so slowly—rising in the air. Eventually, we got high enough that I would actually call it “flying.”

I said, “Way to go. Christ. If that’s how you fly in Israel, remind me to stay away from El Al.”

She turned the aircraft to the coast, putting the bird at full throttle. She continued to climb to fourteen thousand feet, then leveled off. She engaged the autopilot and said, “Fourteen thousand feet, as you asked.”

I unbuckled, saying, “Let’s get our chutes on.”

The bird broke the coastline with twelve minutes left. I wondered if we were going to get out in time. The NEST doc had said three miles distance for an atmospheric blast would be safe, but I wasn’t putting my life on that. At five hundred miles an hour, the bomb would be about twenty miles away after three minutes. That was my cut line. Exit with three minutes left. I hoisted the parachute on her back, then helped her with the leg straps. She stepped through, saying, “I understand your relationship now.”

What. The. Fuck
.

“I’d love to hear your bipolar Spock assessment of my life, but we have more pressing concerns.”

I started putting on my own chute as she crouched in the back, breaking the seal on the paneling that hid the clamshell. She smiled, and I saw a genuine spark of happiness. Odd as it was, a ray of something that had been hidden was now revealed under the stress.

She said, “We have less than ten minutes. And I’m about to die. I told you earlier that you were like every other male, but you’re not. You didn’t have to do this. Why did you?”

I peeled back an innocuous covering near a coffee machine in the galley and grabbed the winch handle for the clamshell. I began to crank, a sliver of light that turned into the whole sky. Huge and close.

I said, “Jesus, Shoshana, you’re not about to die. Believe me, if I were going to get killed doing this, I wouldn’t be here.”

She said, “Yes, you would. Same as me.”

I shook my head, working the clamshell open. When I looked up, she was staring at me intently, reading my mind again. Unconcerned about her fate.

For me, I was petrified. I was sure
I
would live, but not sure at all that I could save her life. If she exited and flipped out, it would be like a lifeguard trying to reach a drowning man in a storm. I’d work it as long as I could, then cut the drowning man free, leaving her fate to the emergency Cypres automatic opening device. Maybe it would save her, or maybe it would wrap her in a burial shroud.

I said, “You ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

I pointed to the floor inside the kitchen galley, the gaping maw of the open sky feet away. “Have a seat.”

She did so and I got in behind her, pulling her into my groin, my legs outside of hers. I looked forward at the small opening and thought that Brett saying this plane was “built for jumping” was a little bit of an exaggeration. The clamshell was nothing more than an add-on. In order to exit, we had to scoot forward on our butts, then basically fall face-first out of the aircraft through a minuscule hatch.

I said, “Remember, all you have to do is fall flat and stable. I’ll reach you. I’ll pull the ball. I’ll do everything. You just arch your damn back as hard as you can. It’ll keep you from flipping. When you hit the water, don’t let the chute get on top of you. Start working out of the harness immediately. If—”

She put a finger to my lips and said, “We’re running out of time. I’m not worried.”

I thought she was lying, but when she turned around, she showed no fear. I said, “You should be, because I’ve never done this before.”

She said, “Your name is Nephilim.”

I ignored that bit of uselessness. “Time to go.”

She leaned back and kissed me on the lips, shocking the hell out of me. She pulled away and said, “Don’t get an erection. I just wanted to show you what you were missing. In case we got in the air, and you decided that saving my life was too big of a challenge.”

I gave a fake smile, now believing that she really
could
read my mind. “Don’t worry. I’ve got Jennifer waiting, and for some reason she likes you. Coming on to me isn’t going to help your chances of survival.”

She started scooting forward, the hatch growing bigger, me right behind, my adrenaline ramping up now that all that remained was to exit. Setting my body on fire. She reached the end, her legs dangling into space. She stretched forward with her hands and grasped the edge of the aircraft.

She leaned back, as if to get away from the hole, and I prepared to shove her out, knowing the average human would never exit an aircraft while in flight on their own. It was just wired into our brains not to commit suicide. She screamed something, and launched into space, taking me off guard.

Crazy woman.

I scooted forward as fast as I could, seeing her tumble away end over end, which would guarantee her parachute would wrap around her in a death shroud when the Cypres fired. I fell out, tumbled once, then went stable. I executed a 360 and saw her below me, still doing somersaults. I tucked my arms into my sides and began screaming head down at over two hundred miles an hour, gaining on her.

I shot under her and flared, getting back to her level. I grabbed her harness at chest level and her pant leg at the thigh, fighting against the wind buffeting her body. She went rigid and stopped tumbling. All I needed was her flat and facedown for the parachute to successfully open, and I had that. I let go of her leg and grabbed the leather ball attached to the pilot chute at the bottom of her container. I threw it into the wind and she was ripped out of my hands by the opening shock.

I fell two more seconds, getting clear of her, then pulled out my own pilot chute. I gained control of my canopy and circled around, spotting her above me, a beautiful square of nylon over her.

I tried to find the rock-star bird, but it was already out of sight. I began turning to get behind Shoshana to follow her in when a brilliant flash split the air. I closed my eyes and felt a thermal rush. Two minutes later, the thunderclap of the explosion reached me, whipping my canopy and making me swing like a pendulum.

I stabilized just as the water approached. I flared, sank into the surf, and shucked my harness. I started swimming toward Shoshana while she was still in the air, watching her skimming above the waves. She didn’t know how to flare and hit the water running with the wind, going about thirty miles an hour and smacking down like a water-skier out of control. I got to her as she started to get dragged facedown by the chute. I jerked her cutaway pillow and the canopy floated free, racing across the ocean like a giant bird.

I pulled her upright, getting her head above the surface. She coughed out water and said, “You didn’t tell me I’d hit that hard.”

I initiated the beacon in my pocket, saying, “You didn’t listen to my class on controlling the canopy.”

She wrapped her arms around my neck and started laughing, kicking her legs to tread water, her entire body trembling with the fallout of adrenaline. Glad to be alive.

She said, “You know, if I swung that way you’d be in serious trouble.”

I said, “I know. Trust me, I know.”