Moms was on point, appearing out of the surrounding darkness. Nada and Kirk went past and spread out, putting themselves as security between the van and the truck stop, going to a knee, their weapons at the ready. Mac joined Roland along with Nada and Moms.
“Why’d you land on the roof?” Mac asked. “If it’s rigged with a motion detonator, you’d have set it off.”
Roland shrugged. “I like having the high ground. Guess it isn’t rigged with a motion detonator. One less thing for you to check.”
Mac didn’t need to be told what to do. There was a Protocol for a Courier van. He nodded and the rest of them moved away.
Mac moved quickly but efficiently. Running his hands gently everywhere his eyes went, as coordinated as Nada had been with the JMPI. Mac was also sniffing as he searched, and listening, head slightly cocked. Mac had once defused fourteen IEDs along a single stretch of road in Afghanistan in less than six hours. Like Roland and free-fall parachuting, Mac had taken his craft to an art form. He finished the exterior. Then he put on a headlamp and turned it on. He slid underneath, covering the entire bottom, slithering along the ground. Finally he came out from under the van and turned the lamp off.
“No break-in,” he reported. “No triggers. The outside is clean.”
Moms signaled and they moved back to the van. Moms gestured and Roland held out his cupped hands as he squatted. Moms stepped into his massive hands and he easily lifted her up so she could look down in the front.
“Two KIA,” Moms confirmed. “Open her up, Mac.”
“Clear,” Mac said.
Roland put Moms back down and they moved back once more, leaving Mac alone. He took out the remotes he’d programmed on the flight in, using the data from the Depot for this van. One by one he turned off the alarms and locks.
He walked over and put his hand on the driver’s handle. Mac cracked the door, checking for tripwires. Satisfied, he jerked the door open.
The Courier tumbled out and Mac stepped out of the way, letting the body slam onto the pavement as he went up on the step, weapon at the ready. “She’s been double-tapped,” he reported.
He stepped back down and checked the Courier. “Knife up through the jaw. He went quick.”
Mac went around to the back and opened the two heavy doors. “Bad news. Safe is open. The Package is gone.”
Moms and the rest of the team other than the two men on security came up. They all went to the rear first, looking in.
“The van was locked and secure, right?” Moms asked.
“Correct,” Mac answered.
“Fuck,” Nada said. “Inside job.”
“Rig it for sling load and let’s get it out of here,” Moms said, but she was looking about, into the darkness. Because someone out there had done the impossible.
Five kilometers away, in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, Burns was watching through a night-vision scope as the team rigged the van to be hauled away. It had gone down exactly as Burns had experienced numerous times in the past as a member of the Nightstalkers.
According to Protocol.
Nada and his Protocols.
Burns nodded.
CHAPTER 9
In the middle of the southern part of the Bonneville Salt Flats, out of sight of I-80, a convoy of semis and Humvees had circled up. Much like the Donner Party that had crossed this same desert so many years ago. Except the Donners had gotten lost and had to detour to Pilot Peak way off to the north, losing valuable days, resulting in — months later — getting snowed in high in the Sierras. And eating one another.
Nada was in that kind of mood as the Snake came to a hover over the empty space in the center of the circle. Eagle gingerly descended, depositing the sling-loaded van onto the desert floor. Then he sidled the Snake over and set down, opening the back ramp.
They had a few hours before dawn and Ms. Jones wanted this wrapped and brought back to Area 51 before the sun came over the Rockies to the east. Moms had been on the Satcom with Ms. Jones the entire flight and the team had been unusually quiet, the bodies of the Courier and the girl on the deck in the center of the cargo bay. Her ID meant little: a runaway who’d gotten caught up in some bad shit. There was no doubt she’d been the bait, given the way the Courier’s pants had been opened. No one had even made a joke about shrinkage, which indicated the seriousness with which they were viewing this breach of security.
“Best they never know,” Mac said suddenly as Eagle cut the engines and they all got to their feet.
Everyone turned to him in surprise, even Moms. Mac pointed at the girl, her face mangled beyond recognition by the two bullets. “Better the family thinks she’s still out there somewhere. Alive. Hope is better than knowing for sure what the parents don’t want to know for sure. Trust me on that.”
Moms nodded. “Ms. Jones says she’ll be taken care of.”
Mac’s face tightened. “I didn’t mean taken care of. I meant no cop with a badge shows up at her parents’ door, some complete stranger, and tells them their daughter’s head has been blown off ’cause some dickhead couldn’t keep his pants on and some other dickhead wanted a hard drive. Best they not know. Sometimes hope is all you got.”
Mac stomped down the ramp into the desert and out beyond the perimeter into the darkness.
Kirk was surprised, because Moms had kept her mike hot during the last part of what Mac said, and everyone heard Ms. Jones reply on the team net. “I understand, Mister Mac. They will never know.” Then Kirk heard the click as the link went back to just Moms and Ms. Jones.
Nada looked down at the bodies as a Support team with two body bags appeared at the bottom of the ramp.
Nada pointed at the Courier: “He forgot why he was here.”
CHAPTER 10
Doctor “never call me Professor, I earned my degree” Winslow left his lab on the campus of the University of North Carolina into the darkening evening with the hunched shoulders of a man whose day had been less than fulfilling. He occasionally, but not often, wondered if everyone who worked for him in the lab, from the techs to the various levels of graduate students and postdocs aspiring to his own position, ever noticed his bored resignation.
Physics was a young man’s game, and now that he was in his forties, it wasn’t as though his synapses were going to fire more rapidly and come up with a brilliant new theory. He’d seen it in those older than him. It had been a gentle, almost unnoticed slide from original brilliance to his single decent, well-paying idea — now gently fading into the past — to his eventual harrumphing for or against whatever the topic was depending on who was paying him and how much he stood to lose intellectually. Physics was like acting or novel writing or any other venture where one stepped into it with youthful verve and high expectations, but only a handful became Tom Hanks or Hemingway or Einstein.
Winslow found it amusing that so few understood that blinding ambition was the necessary ingredient of any intelligence or talent. He had the ambition, and as he pushed open the building door into the stifling heat of summer and the almost empty parking lot, he thought it was ironic that Ivar, his most talented student, had no ambition at all. It was the reason so many successful scientists stole the work of their lessers. Someone had to do something with it. A mind was a terrible thing to waste.
He walked to his car, the sweat already ruining another good shirt, and thought of Darwin, who’d read Wallace’s letters about evolution; while they shared many theories, Darwin was the one who ran with the big one. How many people knew who Wallace was? Darwin had had the ambition while Wallace had been content to merely be mentioned by the greater man.