The rap on his window startled him. A man wearing a raincoat and a fedora stood there. The man signaled for Keith to roll down his window. Keith panicked, thinking the man was a cop and knowing he couldn’t roll the power window down without power and that the cop would think—
The man placed his hand on the window and slid it down, the glass going with the hand. Which was weird.
“What? Who the—” Keith began, but the man reached in and grabbed him by the throat. With a distant part of his mind, Keith heard and felt his seat belt unbuckle, but that was impossible because the man was holding him by the throat. As he was lifted out of the open window, gasping for breath, Keith saw the terrible scars on the man’s face. The man held him in the air, peering into his eyes as if evaluating him like a side of beef he was deciding whether to devour.
“Don’t drink and drive,” the man said, and then Keith was flying through the air, landing in a drunken tumble.
Being drunk actually saved him from serious injury as his body simply absorbed the contact without the resistance sobriety brings to impacts. He lifted his head, watching the man get in his Prius. The turn signal changed from left to right and then the car drove off, heading for the bridge over the Mississippi.
Roland landed on the very top of the Gateway Arch. Eagle had told him on the flight from the Ranch to St. Louis that someone had tried doing a double jump in 1980: landing on the Arch using a main and then jumping again and deploying his reserve. That person had died, because he’d gotten no purchase on the slick stainless steel. Instead of being able to launch again off the top, he’d slid along the north leg to his death, the reserve never deploying.
Roland had solved that problem by duct taping large magnets to the outside of both his boots. When he clanged down on the top and his main deflated, his feet were locked in place. Roland cut away the main, letting the wind blow it toward the Mississippi.
The riverward side, Roland thought, but that hurt his head so he focused on his mission.
He leaned over and looked below. There was a body on the grass.
Roland sighed, a true believer in Heinlein’s principle that the only capital crime is stupidity, a Nada Yada before Nada even thought of his Yadas. M240 now readied in one hand, he reached for his knife to cut the magnets loose from his boots.
“Sitrep?” Moms’s voice echoed out of the earpiece.
“We’ve got a body,” Roland said.
“Eagle?” Moms asked.
“The body is going cold. Someone walked out of the Arch to the body, grabbed the laptop, went to a car, tossed the driver, and is now driving away. The driver is still alive.”
“Roland, secure the Arch. I’m sending Nada and Mac down to assist. We’re going after the car.”
Moms finished giving orders as Nada and Mac jumped off the ramp in tandem. The second they were clear, Eagle banked the Snake and took chase after the car. The Snake was a prototype of cutting-edge flight technology: similar in design to the tilt-wing Osprey, except instead of rotors, the Snake had powerful jet engines, whose noise was muted by running them through baffles. The outside of the aircraft was also coated with radar-reducing material. It was all angles and flat surfaces, everything designed to lower the radar signature of the entire craft to that of a duck in flight, a comparison that Mac constantly goaded Eagle about.
Not a Snake but a flying duck.
Moms moved forward in the cargo bay until she could lean into the cockpit, looking over Eagle’s shoulder. Moms was a tall woman, almost six feet. She had broad shoulders with narrow hips, making her appear a bit awkward, although she was anything but. Her hair was growing grayer by the year and by the mission. She had a vague Midwestern accent that indicated a childhood anywhere from eastern Kansas to western Kansas, which is actually a long spread, but for a kid, not much different.
“Where’s the target?”
Eagle nodded to the right front. “Going onto the bridge. Red Prius. Someone’s driving it.”
“We’ve got to get containment,” Moms said.
Eagle flipped a switch. “Chain gun deployed.” Underneath the nose of the Snake, a door slid open and a thirty-millimeter chain gun poked its ugly snout out. It was a gun designed to destroy tanks, so the Prius shouldn’t be a problem. Whoever, and whatever, was in it might be more of an issue.
“If it’s not a Firefly, who’s the person?” Moms wondered. “Kirk, get me Ms. Jones.”
“You’re live with the Ranch,” Kirk announced.
“Ms. Jones, we’re losing containment,” Moms said. “At least one human in a car, escaping on the I-70 bridge over the Mississippi. I need to go wet.”
“Authorized,” a voice with a Russian accent replied. “I am mobilizing more support for containment and concealment.”
Eagle hit the throttle and they raced over the dark Mississippi to the Illinois side, beating the Prius across the river. Eagle spun the Snake to face west and descended until they were less than twenty feet above the roadway, the thirty-millimeter pointing directly ahead.
“Pretty desolate here for about two klicks,” Eagle said. “If we want to fire, this is the place.”
There were several sets of headlights on the bridge, but containment took priority. The Nightstalkers and their support had binders full of cover stories for civilians who might get caught up in the action.
“Acquiring target,” Eagle said as he centered the chain gun’s sights right between the headlights of the oncoming car.
Moms was just about to order him to fire when there was a flash of gold. It leapt from the car and hit the Snake at light speed, faster than they could dream to react.
Everything electric on the aircraft shut down.
Eagle jerked the controls with all his strength, using what little altitude he had to manually force the hydraulics to move the Snake to the side of the freeway where it crashed, then rolled.
Nada and Mac hit hard, their bodies instinctively doing what had been drilled into them years ago at Fort Benning in jump school, using the five points of contact: balls of feet, calf, thigh, buttocks, and the pull-up muscle along the side. Then they were on their feet, cutting away their chutes, readying their weapons.
Nada was the longest serving member of the Nightstalkers, which meant he was both good and lucky. His parents were Colombian and his face was pockmarked and scarred. During the Battlestar Galactica marathon, Mac had started calling him Adama, but he’d only done it twice before Nada cut that crap off at the mouth. He had short gray hair, racing Moms to see who could go totally gray first.
“Status, Roland,” Nada demanded over the net.
“One KIA, one wounded,” Roland reported.
They could see Roland standing near a body, his machine gun tight to his shoulder, scanning the area through the scope on top. They could also hear sirens approaching. Sometimes the locals were almost as dangerous as the threats the Nightstalkers had to contain.
Almost.
“Fireflies?” Nada asked, leading Mac over to Roland.
“I didn’t see any,” Roland said. “But someone shot this woman. Double-tap.”
Nada stared down at the body. One round on the side of the head (some blood, so the first shot), one in the forehead (no blood, so she’d already been dead from the first bullet). His skin went cold, because that meant a well-trained professional. The first bullet had done the job, but the second was insurance.
Nada shook the premonition off. “If she’s the scientist who opened the Rift, where’s her computer?”