She did not respond.
“Daddy—”
Kelsey. Her voice was barely audible over the wind and rotor noise, which was now deafeningly loud. Rusch turned toward his daughter, whose eyes were flushed with terror. Her thick auburn hair whipped fiercely in the violent wind. Straining against his seatbelt, Rusch reached forward and to his right, across the debris that littered the floor. “Sweetie — take my hand!”
Rusch knew the VH-3 was designed for maximum crash survivability, but logic told him that at five thousand feet, human flesh and bones in a free-falling metal coffin faced longer odds than he wanted to admit. What’s more, there were only two crashworthy seats. And he and his wife occupied both of them.
Washburn’s black suit jacket flapped furiously against his face as he wrapped a bloody arm around the adjacent bulkhead, desperately trying to right himself.
Despite numerous attempts, Rusch could not get hold of Kelsey’s hand. He turned back to his wife, whose neck and shoulders were visibly soaked with blood.
“Macy, can you hear me? Answer me!”
Other than involuntary jostling, she did not move. He again twisted toward Kelsey and stretched as far as he could, but he still could not reach her. Waves of nausea began racking his intestines. He fought the urge to vomit as he reached down to his seatbelt and struggled with the buckle. But the stress of the moment — or the violent movement of the helicopter — made the simple task of releasing the clasp instantly complex.
Washburn was suddenly in front of him. “Do not remove your seatbelt, sir!”
“My daughter—”
“Her belt’s secure,” Washburn shouted over the din. “She’s fine.” Washburn grabbed hold of the two arms of Rusch’s chair to keep himself from tumbling out the gaping hole in the side of the cabin. His face was inches from the president-elect’s.
“Get me out of this damn seatbelt, Sam.” Rusch continued to struggle with the latch. “Now!”
“My orders are to ensure your safety—”
The chopper lurched again, and a cold flash of air blasted against Rusch’s face. The rotor blades roared louder, then the cabin went black. A red emergency light snapped on, but in the dizzying spin, Rusch could not steady his vision long enough to make out what was happening. One thing was clear, though: Washburn was no longer in front of him.
In the dim light, Rusch could barely see the outline of Macy’s still body. Uncontrolled grief struck him in the chest like a powerful blow, evacuating his breath like a vacuum. As he turned toward Kelsey, fire exploded into the cabin. Intense heat seared his cheeks. He instinctively threw his hands up to shield his face, a pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced enveloping his fingers and arms.
Flames sprouted all around him, licking at the spilled champagne along the floor.
Rusch saw Washburn in the fire’s flaring light, his feet suddenly ablaze. The Secret Service agent stumbled backwards as if practicing an awkward dance step, arms flailing the dead air. And before the scream could leave his throat, he was gone, sucked through the jagged opening that used to be the cabin wall.
The rumble of another blast rocked the helicopter. Angry flames devoured the interior. Like a runaway elevator, the craft was suddenly free-falling, and Rusch once again reached for his daughter’s hand. But she wasn’t there.
Her seat — along with that section of the bulkhead — was gone.
A man dressed in a black leather jacket sat on a motorcycle, its muffled engine purring quietly. Somewhere off in his thoughts, Alpha Zulu was aware that the surrounding brush and field straw could ignite against the searing heat of his bike’s exhaust pipes. But none of that mattered. At this point, nothing would sully their plans. They were well past the point of turning back.
Zulu checked his chronograph, then strapped a panoramic night vision device over his eyes. Seconds later, he located his target. The chopper was rocking from side to side and flying erratically, spinning uncontrollably as it fell from the heavens. He yanked the light amplification unit away just as a white flash brightened the sky.
Zulu rooted a tracking device from his pocket and followed a blinking red light as it coursed the grid.
“Acquired the target,” he said into his helmet-mounted encrypted two-way radio.
“Copy that,” came the response.
The man seated behind him with his Timberlands curled over the rear footrests tapped him on his right shoulder. Time to go.
Zulu kicked the motorcycle into first gear as the VH-3 dropped from the lifeless night sky like a shot pheasant — a fiery, dying hulk heading for its final resting place.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Uziel drummed his fingers on the armrest of his boss’s guest chair. The office was finished with tan paisley wallpaper, walnut furniture, and a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall entertainment cabinet. Playing across a forty-six-inch LCD television was ABC News Election Center, their pundits and anchors debating the latest presidential precinct tallies.
Uziel—“Uzi” to his colleagues and friends — stared vacantly at the images scrolling across the screen. A few moments earlier he had pulled his tired body out of the chair to lower the volume so he didn’t have to listen to the repetitive drone of newscasters and so-called experts spinning their party’s take on the evening’s results.
He ran the back of his hand across the black stubble that had accumulated on his face since this morning. His wife had always said it gave him a rugged look, and with the sharp, pleasing angles of his face, he had to agree. He never had difficulty getting a date as a young teen, and the lingering stares he got as his face and lean body matured only numbed him to all the attention. But in the past several years, his face had lost its boyish good looks. Lines crisscrossed his forehead like roads on a street map. Stress lines were one thing: live long enough in today’s type-A lifestyle and they accumulated like larvae on a corpse. But his were pain lines, formed from grief and deep-seated sadness… constant reminders of past tragedy. As if Uzi needed physical reminders. The emotional torment was enough, and it never gave him much of a reprieve.
The door swung open and Marshall Shepard lumbered in. Despite the relentless pressure that accompanied the assistant special agent-in-charge position, Shepard’s ebony skin was the polar opposite of Uzi’s: nearly wrinkle-free. His graying temples and creeping hairline were the sole overt signs of middle age. Shepard paused in front of his desk chair and removed his suit coat with a flourish, then draped it over the seatback.
“Well,” Shepard said, “you pulled a real freakin’ doozie this time, Uzi.”
Uzi rubbed at his dark eyes with a finger. “Are you trying to be funny, or do you always rhyme this late at night?”
Shepard sat down heavily. The large chocolate brown leather chair groaned. “Serious heat’s coming your way.”
“I’m surprised it took this long.”
Shepard massaged his temples. “My life just got a whole lot more complicated. Thanks a freakin’ bunch.”
“Look,” Uzi said, shifting in his chair and pulling himself upright. “I did what I thought was right. Osborn— What he did was dangerous. It wasn’t a little thing, Shep, it was big-time shit. And you know it. Could’ve gotten innocent people killed. It wasn’t the first time.”
Shepard waved a hand. “Yeah, I know the speech—”
“It’s not a speech.” Uzi was leaning forward now, his brow hard. “I did what was right, what I hope every agent would do if he or she was faced with the same situation.” He paused, leaned back, then continued. “It was the right thing to do. I get paid to do a job and I did it.”