“Hang on,” McGarvey said. He tapped Cox on the shoulder. “We’re looking for a black Chevy Impala.”
“The campground is just around the next bend. Sixty seconds.”
“We’re just about there,” McGarvey told Otto. “Is Alex behaving herself?”
“She never showed up.”
“Shit,” McGarvey said. “Get us the hell out of here!” he shouted to the pilot.
At that same instant, Cox was already hauling the chopper in an almost impossibly tight turn to the left. “We have an incoming missile,” he said calmly.
“The son of a bitch led us into a trap,” McGarvey told Otto. “We’re being fired on. He and Alex were working together all the time.”
“Hang on. This will be close,” Cox said. He could have been discussing the weather.
“Find them,” he told Otto, and rang off.
Flying just off the surface of the creek, Cox jinked farther left toward the highway at the last moment, into an opening in the trees just a few feet wider than the diameter of the main rotor’s blades.
A second later the man-launched missile that had been fired exploded in the trees so close to them, Cox nearly lost control of the chopper.
But then they were out and over a clearing.
“Someone down there doesn’t like you, Mr. Director,” Cox said. “That was a Stinger.”
“Circle around. I want you to put me down at the edge of the woods,” McGarvey said. “I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
“Pardon me, sir, but shouldn’t we get the hell out of here, or at least call for backup?”
“Drop me off and go,” McGarvey said.
Cox hauled the chopper around and into another tight turn, setting them down with a flourish at the edge of the clearing.
McGarvey popped the hatch and jumped out, but before he could close it, Pete, pistol in hand, jumped out beside him.
“They were shooting at me, too,” she said before he could object.
McGarvey hesitated for just a moment before he closed the hatch. He and Pete, keeping low, headed into the woods and in the direction of the campground as the Sea Ranger lifted off and headed northwest, in the clearing and below the level of the treetops.
In a few minutes they got to a point where the woods abruptly thinned out, beyond which was what looked like a parking area, and they held up.
Behind them on the other side of the clearing was the interstate highway, and ahead, just beyond the parking area, was the creek. A plain white windowless van was parked off to the right. Nothing else was out there that McGarvey could see, but he smelled the characteristic odor of burnt solid fuel, almost like Fourth of July fireworks. The Stinger had been fired from somewhere along the edge of the creek.
“It’s not Tom,” Pete said, her voice barely a whisper.
“He sent someone,” McGarvey told her. “Camp Peary was just a diversion to get me down here.”
“Alex warned us.”
“Yes, she did.”
“How many?”
“At least two, a shooter and a spotter.”
“They must have figured out by now that the chopper dropped us off,” Pete said. She was mostly hidden behind the bole of a tree.
A piece of the thick trunk just at her chest level suddenly exploded, shoving her backward off her feet, and an instant later they heard the whipcrack of what sounded to McGarvey like an M16.
He dropped to his knees and scrambled over to where Pete lay on her side. Blood soaked the side of her polo shirt from a gash just above her left collarbone. She was in pain but conscious. No major blood vessel had been hit.
“That felt like a freight train,” she said, grunting.
McGarvey felt her forehead; it was cool but not clammy. “They know you’re down, but they’ll want to know where I am. Pretend like you’re in shock.”
“That won’t be so tough.”
“God damn it, Pete, hang in there,” McGarvey said. He wanted to pick her up and get her the hell out of harm’s way.
“I’ll be okay, honest injun’, darling.”
“I know,” he said. He checked over his shoulder toward the parking area, where he figured the shot had come from, but there was no movement. “I’ll be close.”
Keeping very low, he hurried away, deeper into the woods. About twenty feet out he pulled up behind a tree that gave him a decent sight line to Pete.
Seconds later a stocky man, dressed in jeans and a dark jacket, came from Mac’s left, stopped for a second several feet from Pete, and then, keeping his short-barreled Colt Commando pointed at her, said something McGarvey couldn’t make out.
Mac rose up on one knee and, steadying his pistol hand against the tree trunk, fired two shots, one missing, the second hitting the guy in the chest, causing him to stagger to the side but not go down.
Something moved in the woods off to his right, and McGarvey turned that way when the muzzle of a rifle touched the back of his neck at the base of his skull.
“Drop your gun, and get slowly to your feet, Mr. Director,” a man said.
McGarvey did as he was told, and turned to face the rough-looking man, somewhat short, square face, a serious look in his pale eyes. He had to be in his early forties, and the way he stood, it looked as if he favored his right hip. Ex-GI. Probably special forces. By the time guys like him got out, their knees and hips were usually mostly shot. Still, many of them went to work for contracting companies. They knew how to kill people and blow up stuff.
“Clear!” his captor called out.
The man standing over Pete was holding the assault rifle on her, evidently not wounded. He was likely wearing a vest under his jacket.
“What do you want?” McGarvey asked the contractor standing in front of him.
“How much you’ve figured out.”
“You mean about Tom Calder killing just about everyone who’d worked for him in Iraq? Or how he became a raving lunatic?”
A third man also carrying a Colt Commando came through the woods from the right.
McGarvey glanced over at him. He was dressed like the other two, in jeans and a dark jacket that gave his torso some bulk. Even from fifteen feet away, McGarvey could tell he carried himself like a field operator.
“Or do you want to know about the nuclear demolitions device buried in the hills above Kirkuk?” McGarvey asked. “Maybe your boss wants to know if we have the GPS coordinates?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you can kiss my ass, you little prick,” McGarvey said.
In one deceptively slow movement, he batted the muzzle of the assault rifle to one side, the weapon firing a three-round burst, stepped in close, hooked his right arm under the shooter’s left, and forced the man to turn even farther to the right, the assault rifle firing another three-round burst, this one catching the contractor coming up on them in the chest, knocking him backward.
Drawing his pistol cross-handed, he used his left to shoot his captor in the side of the head, and as the man collapsed, McGarvey turned and fired three shots at the contractor to the right, who’d been staggered, two of the rounds hitting the guy in the face.
At that instant three shots from an assault rifle came from behind him, and he swiveled in time to see Pete fire one shot into the shooter’s face at nearly point-blank range, and as he went down, she fell back.
McGarvey’s heart hammering, he crashed through the woods to her side. Her eyes were open but fluttering, and her breath came in ragged gasps. She was pale, white. But she hadn’t lost her grip on her pistol.