Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (294 page)

Just cling to that hope
, he told himself. Nick was bringing the state police, the Merrimack police, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the freaking CIA and the NSA. The U.S. Marines and a few Navy SEALs would be okay, too.

That thought gave him a moment’s hope, but then he refocused on the digitized target representing Air Force One, now less than twenty miles from the airport and approaching three thousand feet in altitude. Soon the pilot would expect a turn onto the final approach course, and the zealot standing right behind his chair holding a gun to his head would be expecting him to issue a further descent clearance to the airplane.

Jesus Christ, Nick, hurry up. Please
.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Nick moved quickly to close the distance between himself and the man pressing the gun to Larry’s head. The terrorist appeared completely engrossed in what was happening on the radar scope.

Saying a silent, hurried prayer of thanks to the God he had always believed in but most recently had been castigating for taking his wife away from him, Nick was surprised to discover he made it nearly the entire fifteen feet without tripping over a chair or scuffing his feet on the floor or alerting the man to his impending attack. He was going to make it!

As he rushed forward, Nick saw Air Force One on the radar scope turning northwest, dangerously close to Logan. He feared he had cut it too close and that the worst-case scenario would be played out. He could see it all clearly in his head. He would disarm the terrorist, taking him down and thinking he had saved the day, and then the huge Boeing 747 jumbo jet would be blown out of the sky anyway. One moment the target would be there on the radar scope, and the next it would simply have disappeared.

Who knew where the coconspirators with the missiles were actually located? They had to be fairly close to the airport, but that was exactly the problem—Air Force One was even now fairly close to the airport.

Nick reached a point roughly three feet behind Fitz and the terrorist, the two of them clumped together watching the scope like it held the secret to life. Nick supposed that at the moment it did. He raised the heavy nail gun to his shoulder, holding it exactly like he had seen hundreds of movie and television heroes hold their guns: with both hands, aiming it under his right eye with his left eye squeezed shut.

Nick fired, but as he did, the terrorist dropped to the floor and rolled. Somehow the man sensed his presence and at the last second performed an evasive maneuver more rapidly than Nick would have ever dreamed possible. Maybe Nick made some almost imperceptible noise; maybe he caused some minute change in the air currents. Maybe it was nothing more than sheer dumb luck on the part of the terrorist. Whatever it was, the man had felt him coming and reacted like a gazelle.

Vaguely aware of a
humph
noise coming from the man as he hit the thinly carpeted floor and jarred the air out of his lungs, Nick heard the heavy nail strike the screen of the radar scope located to the right of Larry. He knew then he had missed the terrorist. The scope imploded with a loud pop, and instantly the acrid metallic smell of frying electronic circuitry filled the air.

Everything was going to shit, and even worse, it was happening way too fast. Desperately trying to readjust his aim and fire another nail at the terrorist, Nick could see plainly that he was going to be too late. He felt like he was trying to maneuver under water while the other man was moving with the grace and speed of an elite athlete. Before Nick could squeeze off another shot, the man rolled over, sprang up into a shooter’s crouch, and aimed his weapon at Nick. The gun was big and black and terrifying.

Nick heard a scream, and he realized it was coming from him. He barely registered Fitz diving out of the way, hitting the floor to his left, as he pulled the trigger on the nail gun before he could even take proper aim. He simply turned it in the general direction of the terrorist and squeezed, panic coursing through his body as he waited to die.

The terrorist’s bullet slammed into Nick’s shoulder and spun him to the floor, and as he fell, he heard another scream, a high-pitched one that he was almost certain was not coming from him. Was it Fitz? Had Fitz been hit, too? Was it possible that the terrorist had shot both of them with one bullet, or had Nick been so freaked out he had missed the sound of the man pulling the trigger on his weapon more than once?

Nick had failed. He waited for the end, for the man to put him away with a second bullet, this time between the eyes. One second passed. Another. Nothing happened. Nick realized he had squeezed his eyes tightly shut in anticipation of the kill shot that had never come.

He opened his eyes and saw the terrorist stretched out on the floor six feet away, unmoving. The man was lying flat on his back with a thick nail protruding from the middle of his forehead like the top half of an exclamation point. An inch and a half of the nail was visible under his shock of unruly black hair; the remainder was buried in his skull. Blood flowed freely and heavily from the wound, already forming a near-perfect circle around his head as it pooled on the carpet.

Nick leapt to his feet, barely noticing his own warm, sticky blood oozing down his chest and soaking his shirt. He trained the nail gun on the terrorist and approached slowly, and when he was close enough, he kicked the man’s pistol out of reach. It was surprisingly heavy, and it skittered and bounced across the floor, eventually coming to rest against the back of the supervisor’s console in the inner ring. The man still hadn’t moved.

Somewhere in the recesses of his consciousness, Nick heard Larry keying his microphone. “Air Force One, climb
immediately
and maintain one-four thousand! I say again, max climb to fourteen thousand feet; do it now! Turn right
immediately
to a heading of one-three-zero degrees! An
immediate
right turn! Again, do it right now!”

Still focusing on the prone, unmoving body of the terrorist, Nick knelt and placed one shaking hand on the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He was irrationally afraid that the man would do what villains in horror movies always did—grab his hand and begin fighting again. Even though he knew it only happened in Hollywood, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the man’s eyes would spring open and he would close one viselike hand around Nick’s wrist and then somehow rise like a zombie, or like Glenn Close splashing out of the bathtub at the end of
Fatal Attraction
, and come after him again.

Nothing happened.

Nick pressed two trembling fingers to the man’s neck where the carotid artery was located and where there should have been the steady throb of a pulse. He was both relieved and sickened to discover there was none. Nick Jensen, who had not so much as been involved in a fistfight in twenty-five years, had just killed a man.

In the background, Nick could hear the pilot of Air Force One shouting, “What the hell is going on down there?”

But Nick knew the pilot would be comply with the urgent instructions he had been given. He was angry but alive.

They had done it.

They had saved the president.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

It all went down so fast that it was nearly over before Larry even realized what was happening. The radar scope to his right imploded, its surface disappearing in an impressive shower of glass into the machine’s circuitry followed immediately by a sizzling noise as the components were zapped and destroyed, and his survival instinct kicked in.

He half felt, half saw a blur on his right and registered it as the terrorist diving to the floor to escape the bullets being fired by whoever had come to save them. Or maybe he had been hit by one of them; he couldn’t say for sure. All Larry was certain of was that he had to get out of the line of fire—
now!

He pivoted left and dived onto the carpeting like an Olympic swimmer hitting the pool. His left arm struck the floor and scraped across it as his body followed, skidding along the carpet and instantly raising an ugly red rash from his wrist to his shoulder. His head smashed into the floor, and for a second, he had the absurd vision of tweeting birds circling his head like they always did in cartoons when the characters fell off a cliff, got run over by a truck, or were held hostage by crazy, fanatical terrorists fighting a gun battle in the middle of someone’s supposedly secure workplace.

Then his head cleared, and he struggled up onto his hands and knees, prepared to take cover behind the cops or FBI agents or SWAT teams that had come to rescue them. He looked up and froze, his jaw nearly hitting the floor again, so unbelievable was the sight that greeted him. It was Nick, good old Futz, and he was taking on this terrorist, this professional killer, with what looked like…a nail gun.

Larry watched, openmouthed, seeing everything in what seemed like the Super Slo-Mo that the networks sometimes featured during football games. The terrorist tumbled onto his back and flipped right over his shoulder, landing on his hands and knees. It looked like something you might see in the circus. The man got up into a shooter’s crouch with a speed and dexterity that Larry found almost impossible to believe, bringing his pistol to shoulder height and opening fire.

Nick went down in a heap, spinning almost one full revolution from the force of the bullet that struck him somewhere in his upper body. A gush of blood blossomed, soaking through Nick’s shirt almost instantaneously.

Horrified, Larry watched as Nick fell to the floor, and then he turned his head to see who the terrorist was going to finish off first. What he saw he almost could not believe. The terrorist lay on his back on the floor, a shiny silver nail protruding from his forehead.

Somehow Nick had managed to fire a nail—a fucking nail!—dead center into the man’s head as he had been preparing to kill them both. The man remained unmoving as Nick leapt off the floor, walked over to him, and kicked his gun away.

Larry only then remembered Air Force One and rushed to his handset, frantically calling off the approach of the Boeing 747 and telling the flight crew to climb and turn as rapidly as possible. The next few minutes were a blur as he called Boston Center and handed the president’s airplane off to them. He didn’t realize he was shouting into the landline until he terminated the call. The poor controller at Boston Center probably thought he was dealing with a raving lunatic. At that point, maybe he was.

Air Force One and President Cartwright would be returning to Andrews Air Force Base. There would be no ceremony in Boston today. The crew had filed no flight plan to return to Andrews, but that was Boston Center’s problem. They could clear Air Force One to its destination and give the flight whatever route they chose; at least the pilot would be alive to fly it.

After that, working almost in a daze, Larry called the controllers inside Logan Tower and told them that Boston TRACON was not accepting any traffic; they were closed and out of business until someone much higher up in the FAA food chain than he could decide how to proceed from here. One thing Larry knew for sure was that he was in no condition to separate airplanes. Neither was Ron or Nick, who was bleeding from the shoulder where he had been shot.

Larry looked at Nick, who was grimly shoving the terrorist’s pistol into the waistband of his jeans, and suddenly remembered that this man lying on the floor had not been working alone; this nightmare wasn’t over yet.

“This guy’s dead,” Nick muttered hollowly.

Larry didn’t answer because there was nothing to say.

Nick fished a small handgun out of an ankle holster just above the terrorist’s combat boot and handed it to Larry. “If any more of these fuckers come waltzing through the door, send them straight to hell. Don’t forget to take off the safety.”

Larry couldn’t believe this was Nick, the man he had known and worked with for so long. He seemed more like Rambo. Only skinnier and a lot paler.

“You’ve been shot,” Larry said, shoving the gun into his waistband like Nick had done. It was a stupid thing to say. Undoubtedly Nick knew he had been shot; the leaking blood was a dead giveaway. The pain undoubtedly was, too.