“Exfil is only a couple of minutes out,” Mickell said.
“That’s not important right now,” Turcotte said as he stepped forward into the room. There were six men in the white coats. All dead, their faces contorted in agony. All were middle-aged. Hemstadt — the Dulce Nazi — wasn’t here.
There was a lot of complicated equipment in the room along with several highspeed computers. Yakov had a difficult time getting through the hole, singeing his shoulder on the cooling metal but not seeming to notice it. Kenyon followed him.
“Are we too late?” Yakov asked.
“I don’t know,” Turcotte responded.
“The payloads.” Yakov ran over to a large door on the left side of the room. A crane was bolted lo the ceiling. He threw the door open. A tunnel beckoned, a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks bolted to the floor. A lone lightbulb every thirty feet dimly lit the way.
Yakov pounded his fist against the rock wall. “They got the payloads out!” Turcotte oriented himself. The tunnel led to the west. Toward the ocean. “The patrol boat!”
“The cure!” Turcotte grabbed Kenyon’s shoulder. “Is it in here?”
Kenyon unlatched a large freezer door and swung it open. Turcotte looked over his shoulder. There were rows and rows of rubber-lined slots designed to hold test tubes. They were all empty.
Kenyon read the labels below the empty racks. “The first batches of Black Death are gone, along with the cure.”
Yakov was staring down the dark tunnel. “There is no time. We must go after them.” He headed down the tunnel, shoulders hunched to keep his head from hitting the ceiling.
Turcotte turned to Colonel Mickell. “We need to get to the pier.”
Turcotte pushed a man trying to get into the lab out of the way as he bullied his way through the breach in the doors, Colonel Mickell behind him, Kenyon following. They took the stairs up two at a time. Sergeant Gillis was standing guard in the main foyer.
“What’s going on?” Gillis demanded as Turcotte sprinted past him. “Follow me,” Turcotte yelled over his shoulder.
Entering the courtyard, Turcotte saw the OH-58. He ran to the passenger side. “Get us in the air!”
Corsen was staring at him. “Who the hell—” He paused as Gillis, Kenyon, and Colonel Mickell crowded into the backseat of the chopper.
“Get us down to the docks as quickly as possible.” Turcotte forced himself to speak more slowly.
“Now!” Colonel Mickell added from the backseat.
Corsen turned the generator and fuel switch on, then rolled the throttle. The engine began to whine.
Turcotte felt time ticking away. The blades began to slowly turn overhead. “You have a chopper coming in for exfil?” he asked Mickell.
The colonel nodded. “HH-53 Pave Low.” He checked his watch. “Only a minute out.”
Turcotte grabbed a headset and put it on. “What’s the call sign?”
“Hawk,” Mickell said.
Turcotte keyed the radio. “Hawk, this is Wolf. Over.”
The pilot of the Pave Low flared the chopper to slow it as he got his new orders from Turcotte. He banked hard right and followed Devil’s Island’s western coastline.
“I’ve got one vessel — patrol boat size — moving west, two hundred meters from shore.” the pilot informed Turcotte, seeing the ship clearly on his low-light television. He turned slightly, adjusting the camera mounted under the nose of the craft. “Second, smaller one is preparing to get under way.”
“Stop the patrol boat!” Turcotte ordered.
The pilot frowned. “Yes, sir.” All he had were door-mounted 7.62mm Gatling guns.
He rolled throttle, increased pitch, and headed in for a run, telling his left door gunner to be ready.
The gunner pulled the trigger as they passed the ship, two hundred meters off its port side. The electric drive ran the belt of ammunition through the gun, the barrels rotating, spewing out hundreds of rounds per second. The bullets ripped into the superstructure of the patrol boat, killing and maiming.
The ship retaliated a second later as a surface-to-air missile leapt out of a tube and headed for the Pave Low’s hot exhaust.
“Evasive manuevers!” the pilot screamed as he banked hard left, directly into the oncoming missile, reducing both his target profile and his heat signature. The missile flashed by to the right, narrowly missing.
Two more missiles were launched.
The pilot saw them coming and knew he had run out of options. They both homed in on the exhaust coming out of the engine.
The Pave Low exploded in a ball of fire.
Turcotte saw the explosion as the OH-58 finally lifted off the concrete pad and cleared the prison walls. “Goddamn,” Colonel Mickell exclaimed.
Yakov heard something ahead. Voices. Speaking in German. His hands tightened down on his submachine gun. The tunnel was narrow, less than six feet wide and the curved ceiling just under six feet high, causing Yakov to walk with knees bent. It went down at a steady angle toward the ocean.
He caught a glimpse of light reflecting off metal about fifty meters ahead and increased his speed.
“What do you want me to do?” Corsen’s voice was worried; he had just seen the Pauk-class patrol boat take out the HH-53.
A red light went on and a warning tone sounded.
“What’s that?” Turcotte asked.
“Fuel warning light,” Corsen said. “We have only a minute or two of fuel left.” It took Turcotte less than ten seconds to tell Corsen his plan.
A voice echoed back up the tunnel, inquiring in German who was there.
Yakov had the butt of the MP-5 nestled tightly in his shoulder. He could see two men now, with something metal in front of them on the rails. He pulled the trigger once, then twice. Both men flopped backward.
Yakov continued down the tunnel, then paused briefly when he recognized the metal object that was reflecting light — a wheelchair with a bald old man sitting in it.
Corsen headed straight into the first SAM launch, evading the first missile at the last second using his flares. The distance between the chopper and the Pauk patrol boat closed rapidly even as the helicopter gained altitude.
“They’re going to launch again!” Colonel Mickell warned,
Corsen reached up and flipped a switch. The sudden silence was startling as the engine emergency shutoff activated.
With a burst of light, another missile launched. And a third. Both flew by the OH-58, unable to find an infrared source because the engine had stopped putting out hot exhaust.
The blades whooshed by overhead as the chopper autorotated, the blades being turned by the air passing through them, in turn providing some lift, enough to keep them from gaining terminal speed.
Corsen was struggling with his controls, manhandling the hydraulics now that he didn’t have power from the engine to assist, pushing forward, trying to direct the fall.
He made it as they slammed into the rear deck of the Pauk, the blades cutting into the superstructure with a glitter of metal-on-metal sparks. The landing struts crumpled, and the helicopter ended up precariously perched on the deck, tilted hard to the right.
“General Hemstadt,” Yakov whispered, keeping the muzzle of his MP-5 centered on the old man as he slipped past the wheelchair and turned to face his enemy.
“Who are you?” Hemstadt asked in German.
“Where is the cure?”