Move the Sun (Signal Bend Series) (18 page)

Off the grid.
Isaac took another couple of steps toward his leather chair at the head of the gleaming ebony table—his own design and creation—and stopped in his tracks as a whole slew of pieces he’d had no idea connected suddenly fell into place.

Wyatt and his younger brother, Ray, were off the grid and had been for more than a week. Ray was an Army vet.
Jesus, now that Isaac thought about it, he was pretty sure Ray had been a pilot. He’d done a couple of tours in Afghanistan, and he’d come back pissed and deeply weird. Mostly, these days, he was a hermit and a drunk.

Motherfuck. Was Lilli gunning for Wyatt’s brother? Isaac couldn’t believe he hadn’t made the connection before. He’d spent no small amount of time trying to work out who Lilli was chasing, and Ray had never even fucking entered his consideration. But Ray was club family. When Lilli told him she wasn’t interested in the club, and he’d believed her, he guessed he just stopped thinking about anyone having to do with the Horde.

Oh, Christ.
Christ
. How could he let her kill a brother’s brother? How could she let him stop her? Had she known all this time that he had a connection to the Horde?

No. No way. He refused to believe she’d known. No.

“Boss?” Show put his hand on Isaac’s shoulder, and Isaac looked around to see everyone sitting, looking at him with varying expressions of curiosity and concern. He cleared his throat and sat down. He was going to need to go back to Lilli as soon as this meeting was over. They needed to fucking
talk
. But for now, he had to set that aside and focus his attention on the problem of Lawrence Ellis and the coming visit of Kenyon Berry.

They hadn’t met as a full table in a couple of weeks. In quiet times, they only had a scheduled business meeting once a month. The brothers knew their roles and had their schedules, and Isaac and Show dealt with adjustments on a case-by-case basis. But the quiet times were ending, and it was time to clue everybody in officially to what they’d all come to learn informally.

He explained about Ellis’s pressure on Will Keller to sell, and he described Will’s new hostility to Isaac. Everybody knew that Isaac and Will were friends from way back, so they understood that Will shutting Isaac down was a very bad sign.

Len spoke up. He was only a couple of years older than Isaac and Will, and he and Will had played on the church baseball team together
for years. They were friends, too. “I’ll give him a run. Been awhile since I had the boat out. I’ll see if he wants to take a cooler and a couple of poles.”

Isaac nodded. “Len,
it’s crucial, brother, that Will holds out. He needs to know we got his back. And he needs to know there’s more at stake here than money. He needs to be
sure
of that.” Len nodded.

Isaac looked around the room, the faces of his brothers reflected in the
gleaming, dark surface of the table he’d made with his own two hands. The wood was a special import and had been expensive. He was proud of the work—lustrous wood pieced precisely together, the seams all but invisible, with a turned braid forming an oblong center. The table was surrounded by red leather chairs. The rest of the room was typical biker bullshit—plaques and trophies, framed photographs and carved platitudes. But the table was class.

He faced his brothers around that table and cleared his throat. “Look. The hard truth here is we’re getting dragged into a war. Hell, we’re the main enemy, looks like. This is more than
the Northsiders gettin’ chippy. This is about big time money. I am doing what I can to get backup, bringing Dandy and Becker on board, meeting with Kenyon tomorrow. Dandy and Becker are gonna want something from us, cuz they’re not keen on bringing this down on them. I explained that if we fall they’re next, but I’m thinking we’re gonna need to break off some of our piece, share it with them. Show and I are working those details out, and we’ll bring it to you when we have a plan. For now, we need to focus on the town. Ellis is making some noise already. With Kenyon coming to us, my bet is things are about to get a lot louder. We need to keep everybody here steady.”

CJ spoke up. The oldest active member, he had a long club
memory. “Sounds like you’re thinking this is gonna be like ’87 again.”

Isaac
had been fourteen in 1987. He knew it mainly from stories, but he knew that what was about to happen was nothing like it. “No, man. ’87 was nothin’ but a turf war. Horde took the Dusty Riders down. Bloody, but brief. What’s coming is big money, connected money, on a bulldozer. Ellis is looking to turn Signal Bend into his company town, cooking meth on a mass scale. And he’s looking to flatten the Horde to do it. This won’t be a turf war. It’ll be a fucking extermination.”

The room was thick with quiet as the Horde contemplated the weight of Isaac’s words. He’d sounded hopeless. He was feeling hopeless. But he had to give them hope. “Let’s focus on what we know, what we can do. If we stand strong, we can fight this back. We just need the town behind us. Everything as normal, but we up our presence. You’re in town, you’re in your kutte. And you’re carrying. No exceptions. We protect our people.”

Havoc shook his head. “Can’t while we’re workin’, boss.” A club with day jobs outside had its complications, definitely.

“Keep ‘em
close, then. And I’ll talk to Don. Any other concerns?” The table was quiet. “Okay, I’ll know more after the sit down with Kenyon tomorrow.” Isaac gaveled the meeting to a close and stood.

Show asked, “You want to talk about tomorrow’s meet?”

“Later. I have something I need to deal with first.” Isaac slapped Show on the arm and left the clubhouse. He needed to see Lilli
now
.

~oOo~

When he got to her place, she was walking toward the garage, apparently on her way somewhere. She looked surprised to see him pulling up, and not what one might call thrilled. She pulled her phone out and looked at it; no, he hadn’t called first.

She stayed where she stood as he parked the bike and dismounted. “
Baby, we have to talk.”

“You didn’t call.”

“No. Lilli, are you after Ray Hobson?”

INTERLUDE
: 2010

“Alright boys, don’t make me pull over.”

Goldman snorted. “Hey, he started it, Major.”

Lilli shook her head and amped the tunes. She liked some Rancid when she flew a mission. This was a big one, bringing her squad into a firefight, already engaged. Lilli was flying in a backup squad, called in when the estimates for enemy combatants on the scene had turned out to be grossly miscalculated. The mission was serious and deadly, but the atmosphere in the cabin was not. Everybody knew they were headed into fire and might not come back. The adrenaline in the cabin was so thick it had smell and taste. The troops were giddy with it and acting goofy. That was just how things worked. When danger was looming, soldiers often got rowdy. They’d be plenty serious when they were in the thick of it. Now, though, the gunners, pilots, and crew chief were the only ones fully down to business.

It wasn’t her squad, not entirely—
or at least not completely, not the way she thought of it; injuries on another squad and a couple of troops rotating out recently had shuffled the squad rosters. Three of the men she thought of as hers were on the ground now, engaged in the firefight already: Miller, Okada, and Scarpone.

Actually, she thought of them all as hers, her family, almost everyone on base. But she had become very close with the men
who flew with her consistently, and things felt fractured since the roster shift.

She had a brand new co-pilot, too. Captain Mendez,
with whom she’d flown for two rotations, had taken his out and gone home. Now she had a shiny new Chief Warrant Officer at her right, Bill Newell, fresh out of training and looking terrified. Everything felt slightly
off
for Lilli, but she shoved her unsettled feeling aside and focused.

“Your music SUCKS, sir!”
Lopez yelled over the lyrics to “Time Bomb” and the roar of the rotors. Her guys knew she hated “ma’am”; they all called her “sir.” It had at first raised some eyebrows with Command, but it was an approved term of address.

She laughed. “Fuck you, Lopez. Fine—you wanna pick, be my guest.”

His eyes went wide; she never turned over control of the tunage. “I need me some Angus!”

“Christ, you’re such a cliché.” She rolled her eyes and
put “Highway to Hell” up instead. The men all reacted favorably, hooting and shouting. No class, no taste.

Just then, the
cyclic got gummy, and Donna shimmied hard, rolling slightly to the left. What the fuck? The men shouted their surprise, and in her periphery, she saw Lopez give her a look of sharp concern. Newell looked shocked. Great. Fucking noob.

“We’re cool, boys. Donna just got some gum on her shoe.” But it happened again, and this time the copter tipped more
violently. A copter wasn’t a plane. Off its axis, it didn’t roll and resettle. It crashed. Period.

Lilli was calm. She was not someone who panicked. “Mr. Newell, take your cyclic. You clear?”

The kid swallowed hard and put his hands around the stick. What skin Lilli could see on him was running sweat, and Lilli was fair certain it was flop sweat, not heat sweat. God DAMMIT. The kid was going to choke. She turned off the tunes.

“Hey, be cool, Newell. Just need to know if you’re feeling a fight in the cyclic, too. If you’re not, you’re going to take over, but we’re all right here with you.”

Newell maneuvered, and Donna rocked hard, losing noticeable altitude. Now the cabin was quiet but for the sounds of the engine. Everybody was paying attention to what was going on up front.

“Was that you or Donna dancing, bud?”

“I—I don’t know, ma’am. Sir. I think I feel something.”

Lilli carefully reached over and manipulated the co-pilot cyclic. She felt the same catch. It wasn’t the stick, then, it was something deeper. In the engine itself. Donna wasn’t taking anyone to the front today. She called it in.

The response from Command was terse and direct. “Negative. Squad on the ground is overrun. Get those troops forward, Major.”

She had
fourteen men on her ride. She gave it another couple of tries, but Big Donna was getting angrier every time. She barely reclaimed control the last time, and a few of the men actually screamed as the rotors skipped and the engine coughed. “No can do, Colonel. Donna won’t fly. Putting her down.”

“That’s a NEGATIVE, Major. Those troops are needed
now!”

She knew full well they were needed. She knew full well what they would all likely lose by not carrying out her mission. But her mission had already failed, and she wouldn’t risk these men, too. “Sorry, sir. Mechanical failure. Putting her down. Need new transport.”

~oOo~

Within ten minutes, another copter was on the scene, but they were too late. The squad on the ground was wiped out. All of them—Okada, Scarpone, Miller, and the rest, KIA.

Lilli had disobeyed a direct order. She’d done it to save her squad, but she was relieved of flight duty as soon as she hit camp, pending investigation. Captain Ray Hobson, the senior pilot but for Lilli, was put in charge of the investigation. Hobson had never stopped gunning for her—in fact, he’d recently gotten much worse. He’d been passed over for promotion to Major, a promotion Lilli had gotten below the zone. Hobson had one more go, next year. If he was passed over again, he’d be forced out of the service.

Lilli knew
his being in charge of the investigation made things even dicier for her, but she didn’t care. She’d let a whole squad of men—friends of hers, brothers—die violently, their bodies desecrated. She’d done it to save another whole squad, but it didn’t ease the loss. And she’d lost more. She’d lost Colonel Corbett’s respect. She’d lost the respect of everyone on base. The men who’d been flying with her, most of them understood. But not all of them. Some had been livid that she hadn’t pushed on.

Everyone was questioned. She had no idea what the men with her
had said; she had no intention of asking. For her part, she’d told the truth. She went easy on Newell, who’d been no help to her at all, but he was green. She’d been shaky on her first mission, too, and she hadn’t been headed to a firefight.

Lilli pushed her papers and waited for the investigation report. For the most part, she kept to herself. For the most part, everyone left her to herself.

The investigation turned up no mechanical faults. Nothing. The cyclic was smooth. Everything worked as it should. Lilli read the report three times and then went straight to Chief Pettijohn, who glared at her as she approached. He saluted, and then nodded curtly. “Ma’am.”

“Chief, is this right? No fight in the cyclic?”

“Checked it myself, Major. Donna’s healthy as a horse. No failure.” He turned back to his work.

Lilli didn’t know what to think. She
knew
there’d been a bad—a potentially catastrophic—failure. She’d never have landed and disobeyed an order otherwise. She
knew
it. But Chief was good. He was thorough. And he’d once been on her side.

Had she fucked up? Had she gotten men killed?