Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) (11 page)

Chapter 23

Beat: H-Hour plus three days, 1989

B
eat flew with SOAR.
They had her in the back of one of the big twin-rotor Chinook helicopters. It was filled with the roar of the massive twin turbines and the sharp, stinging scent of kerosene from the Jet A fuel. Other than the red, night-time lights in the long cargo bay, there was little to see. Even pressing her face to the glass of the small round windows only revealed the stars.

She spent most of the trip sitting on a giant rubber bladder filled with fuel. Cases of rockets and ammunition were stacked at the front of the cargo bay.

She was sitting in a flying bomb.

All of this was part of a FARP, a Forward Arming and Refueling Point. Their destination was too far away for the Little Birds and Black Hawks to make the round trip. They were flying from Panama City down to the Colombian border as part of the Hunt for Elvis. That’s what the Special Forces operators, showing a little more imagination, had renamed the hunt for the Pineapple. Noriega had remained elusive right into day three of the taking of Panama, three days without a single sighting, as rare as Elvis.

They’d gotten a report of a jungle hideaway he often used down near the Colombian border. It was expected to be a dry hole, no one home, or they probably wouldn’t have let her come along. But they’d wanted her expertise on hidden security systems and possible hideaways.

“Engaging now,” the pilot announced over the intercom. There was nothing to see or hear, their chopper was five miles behind the others. They were here for resupply, not part of the battle. Though the crew didn’t act that way. In addition to the four crew chiefs ready to reload and refuel any helicopter, there were the two pilots up front, a pair of chiefs manning M60 machine guns mounted in side-opening windows. The big rear tail ramp had been lowered and a chief wearing a harness, in case he fell during radical maneuvers, stood at the end of the ramp manning another large gun.

The announcements by the pilot occurred on about a thirty-second pulse revealing again how practiced these guys were.

“First team in.”

“Security guards down.”

She fingered her fireworks pendant and wondered what had led her to run from Brooklyn to Fort Sam Houston, and from there to the Panamanian jungle.

“Perimeter secure.”

In some odd way, unable to witness what was occurring in the nearby jungle, she was finally able to see her own actions from a distance.

“Inside cleared. Appears to be a dry hole.”

That was her cue. The Chinook nosed down and roared forward. They’d search the place for any intelligence and possible hiding places, but he wasn’t here.

Neither Elvis nor Frank Adams.

Chapter 24

Beat: Now

Three times the length
of Kate and Leo’s boat.

And what part of Frank’s thick head thought she’d remember the length of the
Titanic?

The three of them were sprinting from shadow to shadow just one block west of the Beast in Bandim road. It was almost perfectly south-southeast of the main airport terminal. But tanks and tacticals were roaring up and down the main road.

At each intersection she’d wait and listen. Listen for the roaring of diesel engines, the high-whine and grinding gears of the pickups. When there was a break, they’d jump the gap and move farther from the airport.

And the idiot assumed that she knew exactly where they were from the airport. Like she’d be carrying a tape measure with her.

Wait, he’d know that. He’d know that she could only approximate. The
Titanic
was way longer than five-hundred feet and definitely less than a thousand. Times three. Call it a third to a half mile. That she could manage and kept heading south by southeast. They still had a ways to go.

Follow Witherspoon and get Blonde.

She froze and Sam and Charlotte actually ran into her.

She leaned against a wall, first light couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes off. In the tropics that meant daybreak within half an hour.

And they’d be dead an hour after that.

At the most.

“Idiot.” She hissed out.

“What?” Sam and Charlotte did their best to shrink into the shadow with her.

A chopper flew overhead heading north fast. Gunfire followed it. Handguns, rifles, and the sharp bark of a tactical’s big machine gun spewing out ten rounds a second.

“I don’t know that reference.”

“Which?”

“Legally Blonde.
I had the flu and never much liked Reese Witherspoon anyway. He went by himself.”

“
Legally Blonde.
Cute movie,” Charlotte gasped, desperately trying to catch her breath and speak at the same time. “She’s all blonde. And empty-headed. Or so everyone thinks. Including crappy. Ex-boyfriend.”

All of the clues had been about places. “What’s the setting?”

“Harvard Law School.”

Sam pointed down the road. “There’s a University about a dozen blocks that way.” His breathing wasn’t much better than his lover’s, or Beat’s own.

“Big empty lot across the street from the school. I think. I was taken there once, tour of the country’s progress. It wasn’t much, but it was a university.”

“That’s it. Last stretch.” She got them running again. Had never reached so deep, hadn’t even known she had reserves that went that far, but she did it. And this had better be it, because it was the last stretch for all three of them.

# # #

“That’s them. Has to be.” The tech called out.

Major Emily Beale flew fast over something which was such a blur on the screen that Frank hadn’t registered anything unusual.

The tech had seen it though. She pulled up the image on the central screen and revealed three figures ducking from house to house, cautiously moving south. So close, but there was no way for the helicopter to get in among the huts and houses to fetch them. Everything was too tightly packed. They needed the open field of at least sixty-feet across for the Black Hawk’s rotors.

“This doesn’t look good.” Major Henderson announced and the tech picked up his helmet camera’s view and set it over General Rogers’ image on the feed from the Situation Room.

The battle for the center of the city had run its course. Tanks and APCs, armored personnel carriers, were moving onto the Fera di Bandim road. They’d be hurrying out to the airport to secure the most significant asset of the country other than the downtown and the port. Indeed some of the traffic turned and raced to reinforce the port, but the bulk of it was heading their way.

And at the rate Beat and the others were moving, they’d reach the empty lot at about the same time as the bulk of the Guinea-Bissau army. There was no way to tell which faction had won and they couldn’t risk waiting to find out.

“Beale!” Frank shouted. “Put me direct to the speakers.”

He yelled out a command.

# # #

Beat heard Frank’s voice roar out of the sky.

It was so loud, the helicopter flew low and fast directly overhead, that it took her a moment to unravel the words from the sheer blast of volume.

Neo! Take the red pill! Now!

The Matrix
. Take the pill of the harsh reality.

“Run!” she yelled at Sam and Charlotte.

She pulled out her pistol and shoved them so hard they almost landed on their faces.

A local looked out their hut door to see what was going on and she fired a shot into the top of the door frame.

They ducked back inside.

As they sprinted, Beat heard the chopper swing over them again. It slowed enough to hover just behind them.

A blast of downdraft shoved at their backs.

She glanced back and saw that a cloud of dust boiled upward beneath the rotor blades. Anyone attempting to follow them would be blinded and choked by the brownout.

A glance up and she could see the bright sparks of small weapon’s fire pinging off the hull.

With a brap like a dragon’s roar, the hovering chopper opened up with their mini-guns. These weren’t the big machine guns on the tacticals firing five hundred rounds-a-minute. The M134 six-barrel Gatling guns rained down lead at eighty rounds-a-second.

They looked like a dark-red whip of God, right on the very edge of vision, but bright in the night-vision gear the chopper crew would be wearing. Twin streams of hell swirled and slashed down from the heavens and across the street behind them and to either side. Anyone stupid enough to fire at the chopper wouldn’t last long under such an onslaught.

Something exploded. A car. A truck. She didn’t wait to see.

With a shove against their backs, she got Sam and Charlotte moving even faster.
Another local in a doorway to her right, this time with a rifle.

Her first shot drilled him in the forehead, the second in the heart before he even knew he was dead. They were past him before he even had time to collapse.

A second helicopter swooped low, passing through the raking gun
fire from the ground and dropping down to street level a hundred feet ahead of them.

They’d reached the empty lot.

The two crewmen on the miniguns were pouring lead back over Beat’s head so hard and close she could feel the heat of their passage.

She clapped a hand on Sam’s and Charlotte’s heads to keep them below the swing of the rotors and the slash of the gunfire.

They dove through the wide-open door of the Black Hawk’s cargo bay in unison, almost tumbling out the far side with their momentum.

Charlotte screamed, and the chopper roared as it clawed back into the sky.

Several FFAR rockets sizzled from the other helicopter in rapid formation and then a Hellfire missile roared down into the road. The nasty war cry of its rocket motor like nothing else in the sky.

The shockwave knocked their own chopper aside as they scrambled for distance. A hand on her back was all that kept her from tumbling out the door as the helicopter struggled through the turbulence, and then, as suddenly as a light switch being thrown, they were above it.

A glance down at the fast receding ground showed a massive crater in the middle of the main road. Parts of a tank burned in the center of the crater even as another tank drove right in on top of it. People began pouring out of the hatches even as it too began to burn.

The hand on her back that had saved her belonged to one of the crew chiefs.

“Just the three of you?” A woman. The gunner was a woman. How cool was that?

Beat nodded, it was all she had the breath for.

The choppers climbed into the lightening sky. Within moments they cleared the city. Before Beat could even think clearly that she’d survived, they were passing over wide mangrove swamps and finally off the coast.

As they climbed toward a refueling tanker, Guinea-Bissau was certainly a place she was glad to be leaving behind.

“You know that you’re bleeding?”

She knew that her knee hurt like hell. Twisted, maybe torn. And her ribs, she’d escalated her assessment from sore to cracked.

It was only when the woman took her arm that Beat hissed with pain. The crew chief pulled out a long knife and carefully slit the bloody
dashiki
then folded it back from Beat’s arm. A long scrape from shoulder to elbow, a graze that had removed a narrow line of skin before continuing on its way.

Beat turned to look at the others. Sam was sitting on the deck, still had his burlap sack tied across his back. Charlotte lay with her head in his lap as the other crew chief was binding her leg. Charlotte had pressed her lips white, but she was being brave about having a hole shot in her thigh.

Charlotte gave them both a thumb’s up which were returned with thankful nods.

The crew woman who’d just finished bandaging her arm tapped her on the good shoulder.

“Welcome aboard. I’m Connie Davis. That’s Kee Smith helping your friends. There’s someone who wants to speak to you.” Connie was holding out a headset.

Beat pulled it on.

“Beatrice Belfour here.”

“So,” she knew that rumbling voice better than she knew her own. “So,” she could hear the smile and the relief as Frank Adams repeated himself.

“So, you’ve got skills.”

Six Days and Seven Nights.
She’d escaped the pirates alive because both she and Frank had skills.

“I’ve got skills.” She closed her eyes against the brightness of the rising sun and listened to his gentle laugh.

“You’ll be at the airport?” She had to know.

“I’ll be there.”

And he would be.

“I didn’t get you a present.”

It would be their anniversary. This was July third, she’d probably be landing back at Dulles or Andrews Air Force on the fourth.

“You never remember.”

And she didn’t. But she still wore the little silver firework around her neck as her only jewelry after twenty-five years together.

“But I’ll be there.”

And he always had been. After every single mission she’d returned from since Panama, he’d been waiting for her at the airport gate.

She’d radioed him from Panama City after they’d taken Noriega. He’d given himself up at the gates of the Vatican embassy and they’d shipped him to the U.S. for trial and incarceration.

Beatrice had asked Frank to be there in San Antonio and he had been. She’d asked him to marry her as she stepped off the jetway and into his arms. He hadn’t even let her leave the airport. He’d bundled her on a plane for Reno and married her later that day because he didn’t want her to get away. It had been plenty romantic. Though after the hunt for Noriega, she’d turned down his repeated offer to have Elvis be best man.

“I’ll be there for you,” his voice the sweetest sound Beatrice Ann Belfour had ever heard.

“And I for you.” The words she’d promised that day from a country in flames to the man she loved.

A promise they’d both kept ever since.

About the Author

M. L. Buchman’s romances
have been named Booklist Top 10 of the year and NPR Top 5 of the year. He also has published both science fiction and fantasy under the name Matthew Lieber Buchman and a foodie thriller as Matthew J. Booker. He is happiest, no matter how cliché it may seem, when walking on the beach holding hands with the mother of his awesome kid… or when he’s writing. In among his career as a corporate project manager, he has rebuilt and single-handed a fifty-foot sailboat, both flown and jumped out of airplanes, designed and built two houses, and bicycled solo around the world. He is now making his living full-time as a writer, living on the Oregon Coast. You may keep up with his writing at www.mlbuchman.com.

Where Dreams Are Born (excerpt)

Russell locked his door
as the last of the staff finally went home and turned off his camera.

He knew it was good. The images were there, solid. He’d really cap
tured
them.

But something was missing.

The groove ran so clean when he slid into it. The studio faded into the background, then the strobe lights, reflector umbrellas, and blue and green backdrops all became texture and tone.

Image, camera, man became one and they were all that mattered; a single flow of light beginning before time was counted and ending in the printed image. A ray of primordial light traveling forever to glisten off the BMW roadster still parked in one corner of the wood-planked studio. Another ray lost in the dark blackness of the finest leather bucket seats. One more picking out the supermodel’s perfect hand dangling a single, shining, golden key. The image shot just slow enough that they key blurred as it spun, but the logo remained clear.

He couldn’t quite put his finger on it…

Another great ad by Russell Morgan. Russell Morgan, Inc. The client would be knocked dead, and the ad leaving all others standing still as it roared down the passing lane. Might get him another Clio, or even a second Mobius.

But… There wasn’t usually a “but.” The groove had definitely been there, but he hadn’t been in it. That was the problem. It had slid along,
sweeping his staff into their own orchestrated perfection, but he’d re
mained untouched. Not part of that ideal, seamless flow.

“Be honest, boyo, that session sucked,” he told the empty studio. Everything had come together so perfectly for yet another ad for yet another high-end glossy.
Man, the Magazine
would launch spectacularly in a few weeks, a high-profile mid-December launch, a never before seen twelve page spread by Russell Morgan, Inc. and the rag would probably never pay off the lavish launch party of hope, ice sculptures, and chilled magnums of champagne before disappearing like a thousand before it.

He stowed the last camera he’d been using with the others piled by his computer. At the breaker box he shut off the umbrellas, spots, scoops, and washes. The studio shifted from a stark landscape in hard-edged relief to a nest of curious shadows and rounded forms. The tang of hot metal and deodorant were the only lasting result of the day’s efforts.

“Morose tonight, aren’t we?” he asked his reflection in the darkened window of his Manhattan studio. His reflection was wise enough to not answer back. There wasn’t ever a “down” after a shoot, there had always been an “up.”

Not tonight.

He’d kept everyone late, even though it was Thanksgiving eve, hop
ing for that smooth slide of image, camera, man. It was only when he saw the power of the images he captured that he knew he wasn’t a part of the chain anymore and decided he’d paid enough triple-time expenses.

The single perfect leg wrapped in thigh-high red-leather boots visible in the driver’s seat. The sensual juxtaposition of woman and sleek machine. An ad designed to wrap every person with even a hint of a Y-chromosome around its little finger. And those with only X-chromosomes would simply
want to be her. A perfect combo of sex for the guys and power for the
women.

Russell had become no more than the observer, the technician behind the camera. Now that he faced it, months, maybe even a year had passed since he’d been yanked all the way into the light-image-camera-man slipstream. Tonight was the first time he hadn’t even trailed in the churned up wake.

“You’re just a creative cog in the advertising photography machine.” Ouch! That one stung, but it didn’t turn aside the relentless steamroller of his thoughts speeding down some empty, godforsaken autobahn.

His career was roaring ahead, his business fast and smooth, but, now that he considered it, he really didn’t give a damn.

His life looked perfect, but—“Don’t think it!” —but his autobahn mind finished, “it wasn’t.”

Russell left his silent reflection to its own thoughts and went through the back door that led to his apartment, closing it tightly on the perfect BMW, the perfect rose on the seat, and somewhere, lost among a hundred other props from dozens of other shoots, the long pair of perfect red-leather Chanel boots that had been wrapped around the most expensive legs in Manhattan. He didn’t care if he never walked back through that door again. He’d been doing his art by rote, and how God-awful sad was that?

And he shot commercial art. He’d never had the patience to do art for art’s sake. No draw for him. No fire. He left the apartment dark, only
a soft glow from the blind-covered windows revealing the vaguest out
lines of the framed art on the wall. Even that almost overwhelmed him.

He didn’t want to see the huge prints by the art artists: autographed
Goldsworthy, Liebowitz, and Joseph Francis’ photomosaics for the mod
erns. A hundred and fifty more rare, even one of a kind prints, all the way back through Bourke-White to his prize, an original Daguerre.
The collection that the Museum of Modern Art kept begging to bor
row for a show. He bypassed the circle of chairs and sofas that could be a
playpen for two or a party for twenty. He cracked the fridge in the stain
less steel and black kitchen searching for something other than his usual beer.

A bottle of Krug.

Maybe he was just being grouchy after a long day’s work.

Milk.

No. He’d run his enthusiasm into the ground but good.

Juice even.

Would he miss the camera if he never picked it up again?

No reaction.

Nothing.

Not even a twinge.

That was an emptiness he did not want to face. Alone, in his apart
ment, in the middle of the world’s most vibrant city.

Russell turned away, and just as the door swung closed, the last sliver of light, the relentless cold blue-white of the refrigerator bulb, shone across his bed. A quick grab snagged the edge of the door
and left the narrow beam illuminating a long pale form on his black
bedspread.

The Chanel boots weren’t in the studio. They were still wrapped around those three thousand dollar-an-hour legs. The only clothing on a perfect body, five foot-eleven of intensely toned female anatomy, right down to her exquisitely stair-mastered behind. Her long, white-blond hair, a perfect Godiva over the tanned breasts. Except for their too exact symmetry, even the closest inspection didn’t reveal the work done there. One leg raised just ever so slightly to hide what was meant to be revealed later. Discovered.

Melanie.

By the steady rise and fall of her flat stomach, he knew she’d fallen asleep, waiting for him to finish in the studio.

How long had they been an item? Two months? Three?

She’d made him feel alive. At least when he was with her. The
image of the supermodel in his bed. On his arm at yet another SoHo
gallery opening, dazzling New York’s finest at another three-star restau
rant, wooing another gathering of upscale people with her ever so soft, so sensual, so studied French accent. Together they were wired into the heart of the in-crowd.

But that wasn’t him, was it? It didn’t sound anything like the Russell he once
knew.

Perhaps “they” were about how he looked on her arm?

Did she know tomorrow was the annual Thanksgiving ordeal at his
parents? That he’d rather die than attend? Any number of eligible wom
an floating about who’d finagled an invitation in hopes of snaring one of
People Magazine
’s “100 Most Eligible.” Heir to a billion or some such, but wealthy enough on his own, by his own sweat. Number twenty-four this year, up from forty-seven the year before despite Tom Cruise being available yet again.

No.

Not Melanie. It wasn’t the money that drew her. She wanted him. But more, she wanted the life that came with him, wrapped in the man package. She wanted The Life. The one that People Magazine readers dreamed about between glossy pages.

His fingertips were growing cold where they held the refrigerator door cracked open.

If he woke her there’d be amazing sex. Or a great party to go to.
Or…

Did he want “Or”? Did he want more from her? Sex. Companionship. An energy, a vivacity, a thirst he feared that he lacked. Yes.

But where hid that smooth synchronicity like light-image-camera-man? Where lurked that perfect flow from one person to another? Did she feel it? Could he… ever again?

“More?” he whispered into the darkness to test the sound.

The door slid shut, escaped from numb fingers, plunging the apart
ment back into darkness, taking Melanie along with it.

His breath echoed in the vast darkness. Proof that he was alive, if nothing more.

Time to close the studio. Time to be done with Russell Incorporated.

Then what?

Maybe Angelo would know what to do. He always claimed he did. Maybe this time Russell would actually listen to his almost-brother, though he knew from the experience of being himself for the last thirty years that was unlikely. Seattle. Damn! He’d have to go to bloody Seattle to find his best friend.

He could guarantee that wouldn’t be a big hit with Melanie.

Now if he only knew if that was a good thing or bad.

# # #

JANUARY 1

If you were still
alive, you’d pay for this one, Daddy.” The moment the words escaped her lips, Cassidy Knowles slapped a hand over her mouth to negate them, but it was too late.

The sharp wind took her words and threw them back into the pine trees,
guilt and all. It might have stopped her, if it didn’t make this the hun
dredth time she’d cursed him this morning.

She leaned into the wind and forged her way downhill until the muddy path broke free from the mossy smell of the trees. Her Stuart Weitzman boots were long since soaked through, and now her feet were freezing. The two-inch heels had nearly flipped her into the mud a dozen different times.

Cassidy Knowles stared at the lighthouse. It perched upon a point of rock, tall and white, with its red roof as straight and snug as a prim bonnet. A narrow trail traced along the top of the breakwater leading to the lighthouse. The parking lot, much to her chagrin, was empty; six, beautiful, empty spaces.

“Sorry, ma’am,” park rangers were always polite when telling you what you couldn’t do. “The parking lot by the light is reserved for physically-challenged visitors only. You’ll have to park here. It is just a short walk to the lighthouse.”

The fact that she was dressed for a nice afternoon lunch at Pike Place Market safe in Seattle’s downtown rather than a blustery mile-long walk on the first day of the year didn’t phase the ranger in the slightest.

Cassidy should have gone home, would have, if it hadn’t been for the letter stuffed deep in her pocket. So, instead of a tasty treat in a cozy deli, she’d buttoned the top button of her suede Bernardo jacket and headed down the trail. At least the promised rain had yet to arrive, so the jacket was only cold, not wet. The stylish cut had never been intended to fight off the bajillion mile-an-hour gusts that snapped it painfully against her legs. And her black leggings ranged about five layers short of tolerable and a far, far cry from warm.

At the lighthouse, any part of her that had been merely numb slipped right over to quick frozen. Leaning into the wind to stay upright, tears streaming from her eyes, she could think of a thing or two to tell her
father despite his recent demise and her general feelings about the use
fulness of upbraiding a dead man.

“What a stupid present!” the wind tore her shout word-by-word, syllable-by-syllable and sent flying back toward her nice warm car and the smug park ranger.

A calendar. He’d given her a stupid calendar of stupid lighthouses and a stupid letter to open at each stupid one. He’d been very insistent, made her promise. One she couldn’t ignore. A deathbed promise.

Cassidy leaned grimly forward to start walking only to have the wind abruptly cease. She staggered, nearly planting her face on the pavement before another gust sent her crabbing sideways. With resolute force, she planted one foot after another until she’d crossed that absolutely vacant parking lot with its six empty spaces and staggered along the top of the breakwater to reach the lighthouse itself. No handicapped people crazy enough to come here New Year’s morning. No people at all for that matter.