Striker came in fast and hot, his door gunner spraying a shield of lead that kept the bad guys’ heads down.
Jonathan had been in enough firefights and bloodbaths to know that the tales of glory in combat were all bullshit, but there was something strikingly beautiful about the living portrait of people risking death for others. It was an image that transcended cynicism, and triggered yet again his sense of pride that the things he and his team accomplished were bigger than who they were, whether individually or collectively.
He was jarred from his reverie by the glancing blow of a bullet against the front of his body armor. It didn’t hit him so much as it took out a half a rack of magazines that he had stored there. He started climbing again.
He got to the top of the roof just as the chopper skidded in to accept them.
“You first!” Jonathan yelled to Boxers. “Give us cover fire.” Becky was doing as good a job as she knew how, but with Boxers’ finger on the trigger, bad guys would start falling down for good.
Striker never actually touched down on the roof. Instead, he hovered with the starboard skid just three inches off the surface.
Boxers hoisted himself in first, and charged directly to the far side to start pouring more firepower into the people on the ground. Within seconds, the incoming fire decreased by ninety percent. Jonathan heaved Alexei in first, and then lifted Nicholas into the doorway. The first glimpse of the blood smear on his back showed a critical injury. Joey was next, though he pretty much scaled the skid by himself, and then Yelena brought up the rear.
Jonathan checked one more time to make sure that he hadn’t left anyone, and that there were no immediate threats that could hang off the side of the chopper, and then he heaved himself onto the deck.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled to Striker, and then to the others, “Keep your heads down. Lie flat on the floor.” As the words left his mouth, he took up a position next to Boxers in the doorway and he opened up on to ground on full auto. The MP7 sounded positively anemic next to the pounding pulse of Boxers’ HK 417.
Striker pulled pitch, and they climbed like a rocket, pivoting out of harm’s way, and then dropping again like a stone to treetop level when they were out of range.
Jonathan felt someone pounding on his shoulder, and he turned to see David, extending a headset to him. “It’s Striker,” David yelled. “He wants to talk to you.”
With the doors off, there’d be no direct communication with this much power poured into the engines. Jonathan slipped the headset over his ears. “Scorpion here,” he said.
“I’m making a dash straight back to Vermont,” Striker said. “I’m abandoning everything we left at the staging area. You okay with that?”
This was exactly why it was important never to leave fingerprints or DNA behind. “Roger that,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go home.”
In Striker’s world, treetop flying meant the actual collection of treetop material in the skids of the helicopter. He flew at full throttle, and as Jonathan watched the world pass inches below him, he envied those who had no goggles and therefore could fly without stress.
The Mishin family had found itself in the darkness. They sat clustered together amidships at the aft end of the aircraft. Boxers, one of the best combat medics Jonathan had ever known, had done his best to treat Nicholas’s wound, but the fact was that the man needed a trauma surgeon right now, and they were not in the position to provide him with one.
“Thirty seconds to the US border,” Striker said over the radio.
Jonathan knew he should breathe a sigh of relief, but thirty seconds could be an eternity when things were running against you. Still, there was something about being back on American soil, where contacts had influence, that made life easier.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you back to the United States of America,” Striker said over the intercom.
Jonathan yelled to the PCs over the engine noise, “We’re almost home.”
If they cheered, he couldn’t hear it.
“Hey Scorpion, we have a problem,” Striker said over the intercom. “Take a look at eleven o’clock high.”
Jonathan moved to the door, with Boxers right behind. Looking up and above the left-hand side of the helicopter, he saw the well-defined outline of a Blackhawk helicopter, fully lit.
“He’s got a friend at six o’clock level, and he’s squawking on one twenty one point five megahertz for us to put down immediately.”
Jonathan’s heart sank.
“You know my rule on incarceration,” Boxers said. It was a simple one: he’d die first, but he wouldn’t die alone.
“He just threatened to shoot us down,” Striker said.
Jonathan’s mind screamed. With the NVGs in place, he looked over to Yelena and her family. The blood from Nicholas’s back showed white in the infrared glare. This guy needed help a half hour ago. In another hour, he might be beyond hope.
“Tell you what,” Jonathan said over the intercom. “Let’s make a deal with them.”
While Striker bargained to keep them from being shot out of the sky, Jonathan worked through Wolverine to make a few phone calls. There’d no doubt be a lot of guns when they touched down, but if everyone stuck to the script, none of them would be fired. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes.
Jonathan stood conspicuously unarmed in the starboard doorway as they flared to land on the heliport of the trauma center at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, and Boxers occupied the other door. Striker settled the chopper with such ease that there wasn’t even a bump.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Striker said over the radio.
“Me, too,” Boxers added.
Well, Jonathan thought, we’re all about to see together.
Striker shut the engine down, but the rotors were still turning as a dozen cops approached in SWAT gear, their weapons drawn and at the ready. This was a twitchy group that needed to be handled carefully.
Keeping his hands visible, Jonathan pivoted to the side and said, “Okay, Mrs. Darmond, you’re on.”
The First Lady of the United States made her appearance in the doorway just as the floodlights erupted to illuminate the scene. The crowd of police and medical personnel had been told to prepare themselves for her, but from what Jonathan could see through the glare, they were nonetheless shocked by her presence. She even waved, and in that moment, Jonathan realized that he’d seen that very wave from the steps of Air Force One.
“I need you to help my son!” she called to the crowd. “He’s been stabbed.”
They’d been prepared for that, too, and as her words rolled into the night, a trauma team moved forward, pushing a cot that was loaded with all kinds of high-tech gear.
“You!” one of the cops yelled to Jonathan. “You in the doorway! Step out and keep your hands where I can see them.” Behind him, on the other side of the aircraft, he could hear similar orders being delivered to Boxers. Because of his size, Big Guy would have to be particularly careful not to spook these guys.
As the doctors piled into the helicopter, Jonathan climbed out, first to the skid, and then down to the pad. “I’m unarmed,” he said to the first man who approached him.
“But only recently, as I understand it,” the cop said. He was approaching fifty, and he wore parallel bars on his collar that would have indicated a captain in the army, but could have many meanings in the civilian world. By any meaning, though, the bars meant rank, and rank meant seniority.