Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Do you think they’ll take this route?”
I lifted my hands. “I would. They can’t be sure the roadblock is for them but they must know they’re caught if it is. An interstate with a full median and guardrails doesn’t give a sports car a lot of options. When they see the gate open at the trooper exit, they’ll wonder if it’s a trap. But really, what choice do they have? Getting onto a country road at least gives them a chance of escape.”
“And why are we giving them a better chance to get away?”
“We’ve got two very dangerous men in that car. They’re armed and they’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to blow things up. If they realize they’re caught, they may decide that death by cop is a better option than being sent to prison as white supremacist terrorists. A lot of people could get hurt.”
“Is this personal?” Nichols took her eyes off the road to look at me. “Do you want to be the one to take Harmon down?”
“I do, but not for the reason you think. Most of these state guys have never seen men like him and Greenwald.” Alpha had forwarded highlights from Greenwald’s file to me. He’d spent six years on SEAL Team Two.
The police radio in the center column crackled just then. “Suspects turning off of I-76. I repeat: we have a red Mustang exiting the interstate onto Huckleberry, copy.”
Nichols picked up the radio. “This is Special Agent Nichols with the FBI. Please stay dark until we light him up. If you stop this vehicle, DO NOT APPROACH. We have two suspects who are interstate fugitives and both will be armed and dangerous.”
Ten seconds later the Mustang screamed by.
The driver saw us. I knew he would. Two state police cruisers sitting off the road just after dawn stick out, even when they’re trying to be inconspicuous. The moment he spotted us, he put his accelerator to the floor. The Mustang made a sound like God’s own trumpet and left two black streaks on the damp pavement as it peeled off. I couldn’t see inside the car to tell who was driving, as the windows were tinted far beyond the 35% allowed in West Virginia. The front windshield was almost entirely reflective, and I caught a glimpse of swirling clouds where the driver’s head should have been.
Nichols gunned the Taurus and we swung out onto the road behind the Mustang as it receded into the distance. I found the switch for the siren and the lights and flicked them on. Behind us I heard Captain Lee’s cruiser follow suit. The modified Taurus picked up speed smoothly, and soon we were up over a hundred miles an hour. Small intersections flew by, and the lights of State Police cruisers blocking the side roads seemed to bend along with the Doppler shift of the sirens as we passed.
I glanced down to the speedometer, something that Nichols certainly wouldn’t risk. We were pushing 130mph and the Mustang was still pulling away from us. Red brick farmhouses rushed by in a blur. Cows in a field stood alongside tremendous round bails of hay saturated with wind-driven water. Even with four-wheel drive, the speed felt perilous. The roads were still damp. Swirling winds threatened to push us into a ditch. Even a substantial puddle could send us into the next county as we plowed straight down the middle of the two-lane road. In the distance, we watched the Mustang blaze through the intersection with Corner Stone Road. It was the one we’d been worried about because it led to the only major cluster of inhabited buildings in the area: the small town of Shanksville. The police had managed to get two John Deer tractors and a cruiser in front of that intersection, and the driver could only have made it past them by running into a fallow field, which would have been a ballsy move with a $60,000 Mustang.
We weren’t losing any more ground to the Mustang as we crossed Corner Stone, which meant that he was going as fast as he dared. I was relived to see that the troopers had managed to close off the next few small roads leading to subdivisions around Lake Stonycreek with a combination of cruisers and more commandeered farm equipment. Three miles further down the road, the Mustang hit the first trap.
The goal was to slow him down, and the staties had managed to pull campers across Huckleberry and the eastbound side of Lincoln Highway. Other than turning back straight into us, the Mustang’s only choice was a sharp turn left to head west on Lincoln. He must have slowed down to sixty or so to make the turn, but he still slid the rear out and slammed into a vintage aluminum Airstream camper with the back end of the Mustang. That cost him a rear quarter panel and precious seconds, and we’d nearly caught up as he cleared the intersection.
Nichols managed to put the Taurus into a masterful drift right through the turn, clearing the broad side of the crumpled aluminum camper by inches. Four wheels bit as we pressed forward on Lincoln Highway, passing a red barn posing as a country market and a battered colonial advertising BBQ. Just as the Mustang’s driver tamed its wandering rear axle and started to pull away from us again we saw a puff of smoke, and the red-striped hot-rod started spinning.
46
Hitting spike strips at high speeds can create the kind of accident most people only see in Formula One racing. The Mustang didn’t give us that kind of show, though, because we’d slowed him down at the turn. But the momentum the speeding car carried was still impressive. It spun three times then rolled over, doing a complete turn over its roof before finding its wheels again. The car ended up facing us from the oncoming lane of traffic, with the trunk busted up against a wooden power line pole and the rest of the car pressed against a guardrail.
We narrowly avoided the same fate. The trooper who’d dropped the spike strip was just a hair slow in retrieving it. Nichols hit the brakes as soon as the red Mustang hit the spikes, and swerved as she saw the trooper trying to gather in the strips in a hurry. We still grazed the strip with our right rear tire and it blew out, but Nichols worked with the stability control system and anti-lock brakes to keep us from hitting the Mustang head-on.
I heard the pop of pistol fire just as I noticed holes sprouting in the windshield of the Taurus. Three rounds in a fairly tight group had struck the driver’s side.
The driver’s door started to swing open and Nichols, who had ducked down when the windshield was struck, plowed the Taurus right into the Mustang, pushing the car backward, smacking the opening door with our steel brush guard and pinning the Mustang to a side rail. I jerked against my seatbelt as the Taurus came to an abrupt stop, then I was out the door. Pulling myself up with one hand on the roof and another on the door, I popped onto the hood of the cruiser and leapt onto the crumpled roof of the Mustang, trying to land on the somewhat intact c-pillar.
As I hit the roof, a man slid from the passenger window. He was tall and broad shouldered, and when he started running he moved with some grace. The man sprinted through waist high scrub brush toward a stand of chest-high saplings. Beyond them was a vast open field.
“I’ve got the runner,” I yelled to Nichols.
I hit the ground in stride and closed the distance between us in thirty yards. I was good for a 4.4 forty in high school and I’ve only lost a tenth or two since I hit thirty. When he heard my footsteps, the driver half-turned with a Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol, and I juked as he fired twice at me. He took off in a different direction, but had to thread his way through the saplings. I took an angle on him, and caught him about a dozen yards further on, when he started to turn again with the Browning.
I planted my face in the side of his ribcage and wrapped him up, ducking underneath his gun arm as I brought him down. It felt just as good as hitting a scrambling quarterback in high school. He met the wet grass face-first, the air coming out of him in a rush.
His left elbow jabbed back toward my face and as I moved to avoid it, he hit me in the bridge of the nose with the back of his head. My ears rang and I jerked back, then realized he was trying to free enough space to roll and bring the Browning to bear on me. So I slammed my forehead between his shoulder blades and pushed him forward as he tried to rise, grabbing his gun arm at the elbow and pinning it back to the ground.
He rolled left, and I let go of his arm. I splayed my legs out to stop him from pulling me under him and brought my freed hand down on his elbow like a hammer. It was bent at an awkward angle as he tried to twist the Browning to fire at me, and I felt something snap when I hit it. His grip relaxed for an instant and I pulled the automatic from his grasp and rolled away. He started to rise, but thought better of it when he heard Nichols and Captain Lee shout. Nichols had a Glock 23 pointed at the man’s chest and Lee was wielding a shotgun. He dropped back to his knees and I got a look at his face. It was Greenwald.
“Did you get Harmon?” I asked Nichols as I stood. I cleared the chamber of the Browning and ejected the clip, handing them to one of the troopers who’d followed Captain Lee. Two more troopers moved in quickly, cuffing Greenwald and professionally searching him.
Nichols shook her head. “There was nobody else in the car.”
“What?”
“It was empty.”
“How did he get out? Did we confirm that both of them left together?”
“I’ll call the plant right now but I remember the manager—what was his name?”
“Anderson. Mort Anderson,” I prompted.
“Right, I remember him saying that the guard had checked both men out together in a Mustang.”
“We need to look at a map,” I said to Captain Lee.
“I’ve got one in the cruiser.”
An FBI helicopter had braved the weather and was landing a dozen yards down the road from the Mustang and the state police cruisers. It was Hostage Rescue. Alpha had sent the cavalry, after all.
“Be careful with Greenwald,” I told Captain Lee as we walked back toward his car. “He’s dangerous.”
“This field has seen worse,” he replied. I stopped and looked back toward the vast expanse of grass and then at Captain Lee, a question on my face.
“We’re just outside of Shanksville. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in this field on 9/11, about a mile south of here. If you look at that semicircular road, the memorial is just north of it. When the plane hit, they’d just about finished reclaiming the ground.”
Nichols and I looked mutely over the vast green space that spread out as the land gently fell below us. Even Greenwald stopped struggling with the troopers.
“Reclaiming it?” I asked.
“Didn’t you know? This used to be a strip mine.”
47
“Okay, boys, we’ve found your train.” The pilot’s voice came through the comm system on the Blackhawk.
It was good news. The train’s GPS locator had been disabled an hour earlier, and it was running through the rainstorm twenty miles per hour above the track speed. Traveling at nearly seventy miles an hour, the mile-long freight train was near its theoretical maximum speed, less than twenty miles from its destination.
We’d been flying two thousand feet up, in a UH-60 Blackhawk moving at top speed to intercept the train, all the while buffeted by winds and pelting rain. The hurricane was still eight hours from landfall, but its brawny presence was tangible in the wind. The clouds were lying low and moving fast, not settling long enough to become fog. Nichols was as calm and collected a passenger as she had been co-piloting the Gulfstream. She’d spent the better part of an hour trying to convince the Hostage Rescue team commander to let her jump onto the train when we found it. Gatto wasn’t buying it. The famously bald Kip Gatolewicz had been the Master Chief of DEVGRU before a brief and unsatisfying stint in the private sector pushed him back to the government. His wife had prevailed on him to find a stateside job, though she was less than thrilled when that job was leading one of the assault squads of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue team. Gatto and I knew each other from the old days, which was a good thing. I don’t think he’d have let me on his helicopter otherwise, regardless of his orders from Washington.
The argument between Nichols and Gatto ended abruptly with the pilot’s announcement. I looked out the window to the cabin door as the pilot banked the helo. The train briefly appeared between the clouds. Two orange engines pulled 118 tanker cars full of crude oil extracted from tar sands in Canada. It was just minutes from crossing over into New Jersey from Pennsylvania.
Gatto made his way forward to speak with the pilot then came back and knelt down in front of me. “Okay, Orion, I have orders to put you on top of that train. I don’t know how the fuck you managed to get clearance, but you’re first on the deck. The plan was to put you down with three of my guys on a fast-rope but that’s not going to work. We’ve got driving rain and fifty-five knot winds. The only way you’re getting on that train is to jump, you read me?”
“Yes, chief.”
“I’m going to try to get three of my guys down after you. One is going to help you get your man and the other two will uncouple the tanker cars from the engine. This train will take two miles to stop at this speed. If my guys can’t uncouple the cars and you can’t stop that engine, you’re going to have to find a way to get the fuck off, because it’s coming off the rails.”
“The track doesn’t run straight into the refinery, does it? Can’t we just lock the switch to keep it on the main line?”
“It’s an electronic switch and the control center has been disabled by a cyber-attack. There are three other failsafe measures that keep these trains from derailing inside a refinery. Do you wanna bet these dirtbags haven’t found a way around them, either? We’ve fucking gamed this exact goddamn scenario before, but not during a hurricane. If this train blows inside that refinery it’s going to barbecue the whole fucking state of New Jersey.”
“I read you, Master Chief.”
“Be goddamn careful because nobody trains for this kind of shit. There’s rain and wind and two moving objects. This is more like landing a bird on a carrier than jumping into some field in North-fucking-Carolina. I can’t let your partner leave this helo because it will end my cushy life in the government, but she could be more qualified for this than you, do you read me?”