They were over the old military airbase, Page realized. Floating, he tried to hold off landing as long as possible, not only because that made for a theoretically softer impact but because as long as they were still in the air, they remained alive.
He couldn’t help thinking about the unexploded bombs below him.
70
Blood dripped from Halloway’s nostrils. He stopped dancing long enough to wipe the back of his right hand across his mouth. Seeing the red liquid on his knuckles, he felt troubled, but only for a moment. That blood didn’t matter anymore than the blood trickling from his ears did.
The woman in his arms mattered.
The glass of vodka and orange juice, always full-that mattered.
Most of all, the music mattered. Halloway remembered his youthful dreams of becoming a rock star, of having the world at his feet, of being able to give orders and do anything he wanted. He’d practiced with his guitar until his fingers had calluses. He’d written song after song. He’d followed rock bands from city to city, doing his best to be indispensable, buying drugs for them, getting girls for them, trying to persuade them to listen to his songs and maybe record them and maybe even let him sing in the background because good buddy Earl deserved repayment for all the favors he’d done.
Pretty soon, he’d be the guy people followed and got girls and drugs for.
But one city became another and another, just as one band became another and another, and one day Halloway realized that nobody was ever going to record his songs, just as they damned sure weren’t going to let him sing. What was he, some kind of moron, that he didn’t grasp that they were laughing at him and using him?
He went back to Providence, worked as a busboy in a restaurant, got his girlfriend pregnant, and joined the Army. The next thing he knew, he was killing people instead of singing to them.
The sadness of his life spilled over him as he danced to the heart- breaking music. His eyes blurred with tears. When he used his right hand to wipe them, he managed to see that there was a lot more blood on his knuckles than there’d been a minute ago. Frowning, he used his left hand to wipe his eyes. Seeing red liquid on those knuckles, he realized that blood was streaming from his tear ducts as well as his ears and his nose, but that didn’t matter, either-because then it occurred to him that his eyes were blurred for another reason.
He smelled something other than the cinnamon hair of the woman. Coughing, he looked toward the hallway beyond the open door, but he couldn’t actually see the hallway.
A haze filled it.
71
Lockhart piled more dead grass and tumbleweeds on the fire he’d built over the air-circulation pipes. The area around him blazed from spot- lights that had been activated at sunset, casting a grotesque glare over the huge dishes. The lights were so powerful that he felt their heat.
Or maybe it was the heat from the fire, which rose about five feet into the air now. After shooting every surveillance camera Lockhart could find, he’d searched the area for another way to get into the complex.
Damn it, the place is airtight, he’d thought.
Immediately he’d realized that of course the facility couldn’t possibly be airtight. There had to be pipes to pump the air in and out. Otherwise people inside would suffocate.
In the end, Lockhart discovered three sets of them, hidden among the dishes.
He didn’t have matches. Muzzle flashes from his M4 had done just fine, however. First he’d piled dead grass and tumbleweeds over the pipes. Then, shooting into them, he’d had no trouble starting fires.
The trick was to keep hurrying from one fire to another, constantly adding more brush. It quickly became obvious which pipes were which. Smoke was sucked into one and blown upward from another. Even though the night air was pleasantly cool, the effort soaked his shirt with sweat, but he’d never felt more satisfied by exertion.
Thinking of the corpses in the truck and the threat the bastard in- side was to the mission, he inwardly chanted, Come on, baby, burn.
He imagined the crazy prick trying to breathe through a wet towel while he coughed his guts out. Sooner or later, the outside door would open. Lockhart had a distant view of it as he rushed from fire to fire, focusing exclusively on the intake vents, throwing on more dead brush. Lumber left over from a construction project made the flames dance higher. He kept looking at the door. The moment Halloway showed himself, Lockhart would teach him why it was a bad idea to ruin things for the colonel.
The fires roared. But Lockhart now heard a louder sound. Staring toward the west, he saw the lights of a swiftly approaching Black Hawk helicopter. Finally, he thought. The colonel said the equipment would arrive that would get me through that door.
He grabbed his M4 and ran. The landing pad had been destroyed by the wreckage of the exploding chopper. He stood under a flood- light and waved both arms to get the pilot’s attention, then motioned toward the area just beyond the open gates. Soon the Black Hawk settled onto the lane, its nose pointed through the gates toward the steel door of the concrete-block shed.
“What took that chopper down?” the pilot shouted as the Black Hawk’s rotors whistled to a stop.
His face tightened as Lockhart explained.
A special-ops team leaped from the side hatch, assault rifles in hand.
“You’re telling me that truck has corpses piled in the back?” the pi- lot demanded. Seeing three coyotes leap from the truck, things dangling from their mouths, he shook his head in disgust.
“The colonel said you’d bring equipment we could use to get through that door,” Lockhart said. “What have you got? Claymores? Detonator cord?”
“For this guy, I’ve got something better.”
A minute later, the chopper lifted off, hovered a hundred feet above the lane, and fired a rocket.
From a safe distance, Lockhart watched with joy. He’d wanted something to get him through the door. But this was so much better. With a satisfying roar, the rocket blew the whole damned concrete shed into pieces.
72
Brent stood on the motor home, describing the chaos of the crowd below him. Mindful of what had happened the night before, he’d al- most decided to do his commentary from the ground or from some- thing modestly higher.
But how the hell would that look? I’m supposed to be the toughest re- porter in the business, and I do my spot on a picnic table?
Even so, every time the crowd jostled the motor home and forced him to correct his balance, he remembered what it had felt like to plummet to the ground. No camera operator had enough of Anita’s determination to be willing to get on the roof with him. The producer had finally put a remote camera up there. It and the handheld cameras among the crowd, as well as the nose camera on the chopper, would provide ample coverage. But there wasn’t any question where the viewers’ attention would be-with the guy risking his life on the mo- tor home’s roof while all the other television reporters looked like wimps, doing their spots from the ground.
When the floodlights went out, Brent made a dramatic moment of it.
“Did somebody sabotage the lights?” he asked before realizing that his own lights had gone out, also-not to mention the lights on the cameras, the cars, and the choppers.
Jesus, don’t tell me I’m off the air.
Blinded by the sudden darkness, he groped toward the ladder at the side of the motor home. People banged against the vehicle, shouting in panic. He wavered, reached the ladder, started down, and froze as helicopters plummeted to the ground, bursting into flames.