His device beeped again.
“Now I really gotta go,” he concluded.
The two pilots just stared back at him.
“You gotta go?” Delaney said. “Go where? How?”
Angel smirked. “You guys can do one of two things,” he said. “You can go back into the cave and not see what’s about to happen. Or you can hang around out here, get the fright of your life—and then walk around for the next twenty years wondering if someone is going to pop you because you’ve seen something you shouldn’t.”
Delaney was almost laughing now.
“Why do I have the feeling I’m in the middle of a bad spy novel?” he asked with frustration.
Angel smiled. “Because you are,” he said.
With that he punched some buttons on his device and the beeping became more frequent.
Suddenly Norton became aware of a bright light over their heads. This was no shooting star. It was burning bright blue. Then he realized it was getting bigger. Then he realized it was actually descending towards them at a high rate of speed.
For one frightening moment he was sure this was a missile of some kind heading right for the cave. He instinctively threw Delaney and himself to the ground. There was a great rush of wind and dust—and maybe some laughter too. Norton just covered up and waited for the sound of the gut-wrenching explosion to come.
But it never did.
That was how Smitz found them not ten seconds later. Lying face-down, hands over their heads.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” he asked them with much exasperation.
“Getting some air,” Delaney snapped back. They both scrambled to their feet, looking in every direction for any sign of Angel—and finding none.
“Mind telling me what’s happening out here?” Smitz asked them. “You two going round the bend together?”
The two pilots stayed tight-lipped.
“You need us for something?” Norton finally asked him.
Smitz just stared back at them. “Yes, I do,” he said. “Please get your asses back into the cave.”
He started to walk away.
“What for?” Delaney challenged him.
Smitz stopped and slowly turned around.
“What for?” he asked bewildered. “We’ve got to help Ricco and Gillis—that’s what for.”
He began to walk away again.
“Help them with what?” Delaney called after him. Neither he or Norton had moved a muscle.
Smitz was not having a good day. He spun around this time, his face growing red.
“Do you remember what Contingency #2 is, Delaney?”
“Tell us again,” Delaney said.
Smitz looked at them strangely.
“The Pumper?” he snapped. “Mutt and Jeff have to do their refuel rendezvous in one hour, remember?”
“Then what?” Delaney pressed him. “What are your immediate plans after that?”
Smitz was stumped. Why were they acting like this?
“I’ve decided our immediate plans are to get the hell out of here,” he said. “If that’s OK with you and your girlfriend here?”
Delaney looked over at Norton, who just shrugged.
“Yeah,” Delaney finally said. “That’s OK with us.”
Ten minutes later, Norton and Delaney were part of a large team that was pushing the enormous Hook fuel chopper out of the cave opening.
It was not unlike pushing a tractor-trailer truck with a full cargo bay from a dead stop. Of course it would have been harder if the chopper was filled with fuel, but after the long flight to and from the raid site, plus the ingress journey itself, the copter’s fuel bladders were nearly empty. Thus the rendezvous mission called for under Contingency #2.
If it was possible, Norton and Delaney were pushing the hardest on the huge bird. They had silently agreed not to mention to anyone the strange meeting they’d just had out on the cliff’s edge. Who would believe them if they did? They had no clue how the guy called Angel had been able to find them, land on the mountain, and depart again so quickly, so silently. And as he himself had warned them, they didn’t want to know.
Added to this the chilling message he left with them: that the operation had been compromised by either someone very high up or someone very close to it. After the day’s tragic events, it was all getting just a little bit too much to bear.
So, at the moment, their combined frame of mind was focused on just one thing: to get the hell out of their present situation. The harder they pushed, the sooner Ricco and Gills could take off, make their rendezvous, come back with the fuel, and make that dream a reality. That was why Norton and Delaney were sweating like madmen.
It was also why, when the chopper was finally out on the huge ledge, Norton felt the urge to warn the tanker pilots not to delay in the performance of their mission.
“Don’t waste any time up there, OK?” he yelled up to them.
Ricco looked out the cockpit window back down at him.
“What are you? An asshole?” he yelled to Norton.
With that, they began the process of getting their huge engines going.
Chou did a quick check of his picket line; an electronic sweep of the area said no one was around. He gave the Hook’s pilots the signal and seconds later, the engines exploded and the rotor blades began spinning.
There were some last-minute checks, but finally the air techs gave Ricco the thumbs-up. The pilot hit the throttles and the huge beast started ascending, creating a great storm of dust and sand in its wake.
The Hook rose nearly straight up into the night sky. No nav lights, just the exhaust and the flare from the engines indicating its position. Very soon it was hardly visible at all.
Delaney was standing next to Norton, braving the dust storm and watching the chopper disappear into the starry night. Soon they couldn’t even hear it anymore.
“You know something,” Delaney said, resignation thick in his voice.
“What’s that?”
“If those guys fuck up up there,” he said, “then we’re really fucked down here. No matter what Angel told us. No fuel. No way to get out. No way to even get down from this goddamn mountain. And if what Angel said is right, there’s no way they’ll ever send anyone out here to get us.”
Norton shielded his eyes against the bright moonlight, trying in vain to see the last image of the Hook flying away.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said.
Chapter 23
On a playground near Rye, New Hampshire, nine-year-old Ryan Gillis was playing baseball all by himself.
It was early evening. A Friday. The sun was setting. It was still hot. Ryan was hitting the ball off the end of the bat, trying to get it to go straight up in the air. Whenever he was successful in doing this, he would hurriedly put on his glove and attempt to catch the ball as it was coming back down. In thirty minutes of trying, he’d accomplished this complicated feat exactly twice.
All this would have been easier if he had someone to play catch with—God knows he needed the practice. But these days, Ryan had been practicing mostly by himself.
Tomorrow was a big day for him. At noon, he would be playing in his first ever Little League game. He hadn’t slept much just thinking about it. Ever since the coach told him Wednesday that for Saturday’s game Ryan would be in right field for Susan Mantosh because she was getting fitted for braces, his heart hadn’t stopped pounding. He’d made sure his mother had washed and pressed his unused uniform—twice. He’d bought new socks with his own paper route money, and had scrubbed his sneakers clean more than a half-dozen times in the past two days. He knew to play good, he had to look good. Or at least that was what his coach always told him.