Chapter Twenty-nine
They were taking one-hour shifts, perched on top of the pile of air conditioners, keeping watch on the Missile Park. Gordy’s blue F-150 arrived at the bar and parked around back. Nina and Broker marked time, sitting side by side in a mist of mosquito repellent. She lit a cigarette to discourage the bugs. He got out his rough wraps.
“When did you start smoking again?” he asked.
“About the time this thing picked up speed.” She put out her hand in the graying light and squashed a mosquito on his cheek. It left a small dot of blood. Then she patted his waist. “So, where’s your club?”
Personal joke. He was at best a competent shot with a handgun, and usually packed a.45 for its utility as a hefty “tamer,” for close-in thumping. “Don’t say anything,” he said softly, “but I think your Indian lifted it from under the front seat when I was parked across from the bar.”
She laid her palm along his cheek. “Broker, Broker.”
“Yeager brought an extra shotgun, in the back,” he said.
“You won’t need it. Holly’s crew will handle any rough stuff.” She leaned back, then said, “So, did Kit get home okay?”
Broker grimaced. “You know, I never called once this rolled out.”
Nina nodded. “We’ll call tonight, if it’s not too late.”
Just ordinary talk, like little building blocks. Repair work. Due diligence. Broker nibbled lightly on his cigar. After several false starts, he said softly, “I’m glad you’re all right.”
She turned away, almost nervous to be close to him after so long. What if he really did see her in the window with Ace? She turned, faced him. Jesus, Broker. Impulsively she reached over and squeezed his hand.
“Ouch.” He drew back.
She cringed. Wrong hand. Story of my life, she thought.
“You were never one for hand jobs,” he quipped.
“Not like Jolene, huh?” she came right back.
“Jolene, as I recall, had three hands.”
They moved closer to each other so their legs and shoulders touched.
Yeager passed around water bottles and energy bars from Jane’s bag. They ate, they smoked, they were bitten by mosquitoes as the light faded to dusk and then to darkness.
Then Jane’s urgent whisper cut through the bug-spray stink: “He’s on the move.”
She hopped down from her perch and said, “Okay, I’ll drive. Yeager rides shotgun. Nina and Broker can neck in the backseat.” They walked swiftly to Broker’s Explorer that was parked in the tall weeds a few yards away. As they got in they could see the headlights on Ace’s Tahoe swing as he turned onto the highway.
Yeager said, “Give him a hundred-yard lead, then pull on the road. No lights.”
“What’s the deal?” Nina asked.
“Yeager is guide. He knows the roads,” Broker said.
“But how do we follow a guy in the dark on a deserted road without being seen?”
“Trust me,” Yeager said. “Let’s go.”
Jane put them on onto the road, following the tiny red dots of Ace’s running lights. Then he hit his break lights and turned left just before he came to the town limits. North.
“Keep going, past where he turned,” Yeager said.
“We’ll lose him,” Nina said.
“We keep going,” Jane said.
“I don’t know about this,” Nina said. They drove for minutes, too long. Ace was gone.
“Take the next left,” Yeager said.
They swung left and accelerated down a two-lane blacktop. Yeager pointed to the left. “We’ll parallel him. See? Those are his headlights.” A mile away across the black fields they saw his beams cut the night.
Nina looked around, noticed they were losing the light from town, headed into total blackness. “He’s speeding up. We can’t keep pace with our lights off,” she said.
Jane reached down. “How soon you forget. Remember? We own the fucking night.” She reached for a set of night-vision goggles on a webbed elastic headband. In a fast, practiced move, she yanked them over her head and adjusted them to her eyes. Broker made out her profile in the dim spill light from the dashboard-part insect, part unicorn.
Yeager said, “That’s what I need, a pair of those…”
Then Jane dialed the dash lights down to a bare flicker, stepped down hard on the gas.
“Ohhhhh shit!” Broker and Yeager reached for the handholds above their doors as the Explorer bucked, hurtling forward through the rushing darkness. No road in front of the car. No center line. No shoulder. No control. Lots of stars, though.
Jane glanced to the side, her head and the protruding goggles grotesque and alien in the faint glow of the dash. “How we doing, Yeager? Better than lights and sirens?”
Yeager, his feet braced, leaned back and grinned through clenched teeth, enjoying the carnival ride of his life. The headlights to the left fell off behind as they pulled well ahead.
Oh, Jeez. Broker didn’t like this. There were going sixty, maybe faster. Maybe seventy. Three, four minutes of it, more…
“In about two miles we take a left. We should be able to beat him to Richmond Corners. There’s a tree line we can pull into. When he goes by, we’ll fall in behind,” Yeager said.
“He won’t see us?” Nina said.
“Don’t think so,” Yeager said. “He’ll kill his lights when he hits the gravel. What they usually do is creep up to their pickup point. Since there’s hardly any moon, he can’t spot landmarks, so he’ll be going by his odometer. He won’t be scared off by anything but headlights.”
“Not bad,” Nina said. Yeager knew his stuff. Never could’ve done this on their own. And if they’d gone through channels, there’d be a mob of cops and feds out here cluttering up the road. But this, so far, was just right. She reached over, found Broker’s good hand in the dark this time, and squeezed it.
“What do you want?” he feigned wariness.
“Hold your hand, asshole,” she said.
He returned the squeeze. Felt good, too. After all this time. Then Jane stabbed the gas and Broker tensed, pressed back in his seat by imaginary G-forces.
Jane, her augmented eyes fixed on the road, had an adrenaline frog in her throat as she shouted over her shoulder: “Don’t get your hopes up, Nina. Holly ran this Khari guy through all the databases. His dad was with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But that was twenty years ago. Khari immigrated here to live with his uncle after his folks died in 1982. He comes off pretty clean. And his uncle was a decorated Korean War vet.”
“We’ll see,” Nina said.
“It gets worse. Homeland Security sent a honcho in to watch over us tonight. One of those serious prayer-breakfast types. Same old same old. He wants to shut Holly down for exceeding his authority.”
“Aw, Christ,” Nina said. “It’s Afghanistan all over again.”
“You got it,” Jane said.
“What happened in Afghanistan?” Broker asked.
“Holly and some of his regular Army pals tried to commit a couple U.S. battalions on the Pakistani border to seal the routes out of Tora Bora. Washington was afraid of taking U.S. casualties on the ground. They nixed the plan and relied on the B-52s and the Afghan warlords. Holly got in a lot of trouble and bin Laden got away,” Nina said.
“That’s our Holly-fighting a two-front war against terrorism and Washington. Then there’s the hawk,” Jane said.
“The hawk?” Broker asked.
“The Black Hawk at the radar base,” Nina explained. “The people trying to shut us down are saying Holly stole it.”
Hearing this, Broker smiled in the dark. I’m starting to like this Holly guy…
“Wait a minute,” Yeager said nervously. “You guys stole a helicopter?”
“Whoa, hold on,” Nina said. “It’s this gray area. Justice and the FBI want to arrest people and charge them with civil crimes, right? But if these guys are the real thing tonight, we’re going to snatch them as enemy combatants. Naturally, they’re a bit more sticky about procedure. We didn’t ask permission, we just took the bird and went.”