The major disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him.
Reinhart turned to his copilot and navigator. “Do we have clearance to go?”
The navigator’s face split in a wide grin. “We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir.”
“All right. Let’s head for home.”
They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the plane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was eight hours away, due north.
Reinhart piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, speckled with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Reinhart turned over the controls to his copilot and got out of his seat. “I’m going to take a walk in back and get stretched out.”
He climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were sleeping on the web seats strung along the side of the plane. The only cargo remaining was the pallet that held the crew’s personal baggage, strapped down in the center of the large bay.
Reinhart walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders and shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot’s seat.
His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu when the number two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture. The C-130 immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock and rolled over onto its right side. Reinhart was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted toward the ocean 25,000 feet below. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself.
His primary thought was to try to crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn’t obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He grabbed at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft, trying to pull himself forward with his hands.
Reinhart was twenty feet from the front of the plane when the surface of the water met the aircraft with the effect of a sledgehammer slamming into a tin can. There was no need for Reinhart to worry about immersion; he was crushed into the floor of the aircraft. He was dead well before his remains began sinking under the dark waves.
The man in the black suit picked up the phone on the first ring. “Peter here.”
The voice on the other end was distorted by both distance and scrambler. “This is Glaston. The final link has been severed. Eternity Base is secure.”
“Did you receive the last package?”
“Yes, sir. The courier brought them in on the final flight, but I don’t understand why—”
The man cut him off. “It’s not your place to understand. Did you secure them?”
“Yes, sir. They’re in the base.”
“The courier?”
‘Taken care of.”
“Excellent.”
Chapter 1
The volley of shots was ragged, five going off at the same time, the other two rifles sounding like a car backfiring shortly thereafter. Riley had expected the sharp crack of the blanks so he wasn’t startled, as were some of the other people surrounding the grave.
His black army raincoat was unbuttoned and the stiff wind was blowing it about, but he didn’t notice. The battered green beret scrunched down on his head was soaked from the freezing drizzle that had been falling for the past half hour, but Riley seemed unaware of it.
The second volley was slightly better — only one shot a split second behind.
To Riley’s left, Col. Mike Pike, U.S. Army Retired, was very aware of both the weather and Riley’s condition, and he didn’t like either. In thirty years in the military, Pike had attended more than his share of funerals, but this one was different. He’d never been to the funeral of a woman killed in the line of duty, and he’d never had to comfort the man she’d left behind. It had always been the other way around.
Not that Pike thought any words could comfort Dave Riley at the moment. Riley’s slight frame was ramrod straight, and his dark eyes were focused on the plain wood coffin suspended over the yawning hole in the ground. The short black hair under his beret was matted and poked out at strange angles around the dark skin of his face, the complexion an inheritance from his Puerto Rican mother, as his name was his inheritance from a father he never knew.
The salute was done, and a police bugler began playing taps. Pike had spent so many years isolated in the military that he had never really considered the fact that the police community was very similar to that of the army — close knit and banding together when one of their own went down. The last notes of the bugle were ripped away by the wind, and then it was over. The coffin was slowly lowered. Riley stepped forward, grabbed a handful of mud, and opened his fingers to let it fall on the coffin, not even noticing that most of the mud stuck to his skin.
The commissioner was the first to walk by, shaking Riley’s hand and saying something that was swirled away by the wind. The line of mourners continued, and Riley greeted each mechanically until there was no one left.
Pike waited. He didn’t mind the freezing rain splashing against his leathery face and rolling down inside his collar. There’d be plenty of time to get warm later. As he’d been told thirty-three years ago as a young buck going through Ranger school, “The human body is waterproof.” He knew that Riley was just as hard, so it wasn’t physical stress that Pike worried about now. It was emotional stress: that was a minefield few warriors felt comfortable traversing.
“Do you want to be alone?” Pike asked.
At first he thought Riley hadn’t heard, but then the other man turned his head slightly, as if considering the question, before speaking. “No. She’s dead. Standing here isn’t going to change that. It’s just making her death seem real — standing here, seeing this. I didn’t believe it when they called me. I didn’t begin to believe it until I saw her body in the funeral home.”
Pike remembered the phone call from Riley three days ago. It had been succinct and to the point: “Donna’s dead, sir. They just called me from Chicago. She walked into the middle of some punks ripping off a deli and got shot.”
That had been it. Pike had driven the five hundred miles from Atlanta to Fort Bragg that evening, making it in time to fly up to Chicago with Riley. They’d learned more about the incident, as the police referred to it, from the detective handling the case. Donna Giannini had been going to lunch at her old neighborhood deli as she had done almost every day at work. There were two teenagers in the store holding a pistol and a shotgun on the owner in the back room, trying to get him to open a small safe. When she called out from the counter to her old friend the owner, her answer was a blast of buckshot to the chest.
It hadn’t killed her outright. She drew her gun, stood back up, and shot the kid with the shotgun three times, killing him. Then she collapsed and died. The second kid ran out the back of the store.
“We’ll get the other one,” the detective had told Riley and Pike. He looked at them and glanced around; then, in the manner of one professional to another, he continued in a lower voice: “He won’t be brought in alive. Everyone on the street knows it, he knows it, we know it, and I just want you to know it. Donna was good people and a damn good cop. We don’t let cop killers walk here or go cry in the courtroom.”