Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (26 page)

Back aloft, Lola circled the rig twice. Spires of metalwork, drilling derricks, and cranes sprouted like a heli-pilot’s worst nightmare. She stayed well clear as she continued her inspection. The infrared imaging was wonky with all of the heat streaming from the control room and the machinery, but she didn’t spot any lurkers in the rigging.

On her next circuit she spiraled the DAP Hawk down along one of the submersible rig’s pylons to the boat dock. Definitely empty.

She pulled to hover on the north side of the rig.

“Which way?” The whole Gulf Coast spread before them. Alabama to the right, Mississippi and Louisiana close enough to straight ahead.

“I’m guessing that Florida Panhandle and Texas are too far,” Tim spoke slowly over the headset.

“Why?” She aimed the question at him.

“The size of the runabout they left behind.”

“Good. But what the hell are we looking for?” That earned Lola silence from the crew.

The baddies had clearly planned to use the small boat. Smart. Low and slow to avoid attracting attention. But they’d changed plans. Changed them recently enough that there was a still-warm body at the dock.

“They left in an awful hurry.” It was the only thing that would explain everything.

“Why?” This time Tim was hitting her with the question.

“Because… Oh! Damn it! I know what we’re looking for. A goddamned police boat.” She aimed the chopper’s nose down and slammed the cyclic forward. In moments they were rocketing toward the coast.

“I don’t get it.”

“Simple, Tim. Dad was ticked that there was something important enough going on that his estranged daughter would actually get in touch with him. I caught him on his cell phone, so he must have been out here and decided to swing by and see if he could horn in on the action.” She started sweeping arcs side to side, slowing to check any small boats she overflew.

“He must have told them we were inbound, so they hijacked him and cut out so fast that they cut the ropes rather than untie them.” Lola was afraid that he was dead already, though for the life of her she couldn’t think of why she cared. Maybe because it would deny her the chance of gunning him down herself.

“Would he go straight to land? Or another ship?”

Tim was still thinking. And at the moment she was glad for the second mind sitting next to her. All hers could see or think about was the blinding red of a desire to murder the SOB if he wasn’t already dead. If he’d stayed out of the way, they’d have captured the baddies flatfooted at the rig or in a little runabout that couldn’t break twenty miles per hour.

“He’s an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. Dangerous, but he’ll trust his strength. If they give him a choice, he’s going for shore.”

She traced arcs back and forth across the ocean to make sure she didn’t miss any of his most likely routes back. Keeping her attention split between looking for a small police boat with enough biocide to kill millions and not running headlong into a container ship was making her head hurt. Normally the tasks would be divided between pilot and copilot, but Tim wouldn’t have the honed skills of a trained copilot. This meant she had to fly even more slowly.

Each mile from the rig, she had to swing wider and wider to make sure she didn’t miss his possible paths back to the shoreline. At this rate, he’d be there while she was still carving aerial arcs back and forth over the waves.

A glance over showed Tim checking his weapons, getting his hands used to the unfamiliar position of the forward weapon controls. Clearly, he’d practiced a lot because his hands settled rapidly without applying more than stray pressure to the flight controls.

She returned her attention to the Gulf. This was familiar. This she could do. With the Air National Guard she had flown hundreds of missions over the Gulf traffic. The subtle bob-and-weave of boat tracks as they crossed the rolling waves. The rigs as brightly lit as cities, dotting across the surface of the ocean, promising oil and prosperity to the region.

A bit of relief eased over her as she fell into the practiced regimen of the search part of search and rescue. Lola hadn’t been aware of her own shock at Beale’s reaction. It was like waking up one morning to discover that the sky was purple and the earth was made of cream cheese, simply too wrong to comprehend.

Yet it made some sense, as Lola made her turn from a northeasterly track to a northwesterly one. It was like a flight crew. Any one of them would rather be shot than see a crewmember shot. Command was crazy, the baddies were crazier, but your crew lay as close as your heartbeat.

Lola had felt it before, but never like this. Could she imagine standing in front of Big John or Captain Stevenson and telling them their wives were dead? Could she face Cara and Jackson to report Tim’s demise? She’d rather take the round herself any day. No one to tell. No one to care if she died.

Except maybe this crew. And Tim.

She turned back northeast, continuing her shoreward sweeps. The widening out of each pass would soon have her running farther side to side than forward. Damn it! Nothing.

Beale. It was impossible to imagine that anything could make Beale fold. This crew was her lifeblood.

But it wasn’t. Or rather she’d discovered a higher call, the life growing within her. No wonder the woman had gone catatonic. Her world had shifted far more suddenly than Lola’s. In one instant she went from one of the top fliers in SOAR to feeling absolute terror for her child’s life. Having crossed the threshold, she might have been safe to fly now, but her reactions would still be dulled, hesitant, and they couldn’t afford that right now.

Would that happen to her someday? If she were carrying a child? The shock of the thought was only exceeded by a clear image of it being Tim’s child. If it was Tim’s child, she might well react as Major Beale had.

“Look!” Tim called out. “Two o’clock going north-northwest.”

Lola stared ahead, glanced over at Tim, and looked forward again.

Nothing.

“Look through the visor.”

Lola’s attention had been wholly focused on the camera feed across the inside of her visor. The projected view of the dark night world outside the helicopter as if she flew free of any mechanical structure. The illusion was broken by tactical readouts, targeting information, radar and satellite feeds, and a submenu of the Hawk’s mechanical well-being.

She shifted her focus through the visor and saw it clear as day. A long line of phosphorescence striking northwest like an arrow. No need to check her instruments to see that it drew a straight line from the Pikes oil rig to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Algae, a cold light, so no heat signature to show up in her visor.

“Good one, Tim.”

Now that she had a path, she climbed to five hundred feet to clear any boat traffic and lay down the hammer. The DAP Hawk leaped forward like an eager dog hot on the scent.

Her father had clearly hot-rodded his boat for him to have gotten this far. But the track continued, growing brighter every minute due to the fresh turbulence exciting the algae.

“Okay, everyone. Game time. Get ready to burn ’em.”

“Chief Warrant?”

Her title sounded strange in Tim’s voice. “What?”

“We should try to take them alive.”

“Why?”

There was an awkward silence.

“Why?” All she could think about was the excuse to bury the bastard in a couple thousand feet of cold ocean.

“We need the information. Maybe to make sure this is the only shipment.”

He was right, and she hated that he was right.

She took a deep breath and did her best to let it out slowly.

“Okay.”

But it still wasn’t. She could feel she was holding on too tight and loosened her hands on the controls. But she couldn’t shake out the knot between her shoulders.

“Okay. Kee, get out that rifle of yours and get over to Connie’s side. Tie yourself in there. You’ll try it the nice way, but Connie, you be ready to bury their asses with your minigun. Tim, keep your finger on that Hellfire. If it gets ugly, we’ll need to incinerate this chemical but good. If it goes aerosol, it could still sweep ashore in an invisible wave of death.”

Five more long minutes before anything showed. She followed enough phosphorescent tracks over the years to know this was unusual. Even the big cigarette boats should have been in view by this time. When she finally spotted the boat, it took another two minutes to catch up with it.

Then she saw why it had taken so long to catch. Painted the blue and white of the Harbor Patrol, the offshore race boat was skipping wave top to wave top in a mad dash for shore. He was running toward a lost bayou backwater.

“Tim, lay some fire across his bow.”

Tim chose a trio of FFAR Hydra rockets that augered into the waves just ahead of the boat and fountained three geysers of water fifty feet into the air. The boat powered right through the spray as Lola swung wide to get clear of the towering columns of sea water.

As she came clear of the water and could see the boat once again, Tim shouted.

“RPG!”

Even before the threat detector went off.

What the hell? No time to think.

She slammed the cyclic forward and down and rammed in the left pedal. In a moment they were tumbling and the black ocean was coming up fast.

Connie and Kee were squawking in protest, trying to compensate.

Lola slammed the cyclic back and right, presenting a minimum profile, most importantly aiming the whirling rotor disc edge on. The RPG flew by so close to the cabin that Lola could almost taste its bad breath.

She managed to recover before they plunged into the waves. Tim’s sharp lookout had saved them.

So, they were playing it that way.

They?

Her father might be a maniac, but there was no way he’d shoot at an Army helicopter. So there was definitely someone on the boat with him. If he was still alive, he might well be captive.

Whoever they were, they thought shooting at a U.S. Army helicopter was fair game.

She climbed back into the air until she had a little space to maneuver.

The boat had clearly opened its throttles wider, had pulled ahead once again, and was slaloming side to side.

“Kee, watch for shooters aboard. At least one…” No, there was the RPG shooter and whoever was either driving the boat or, more likely based on the driver’s obvious skill, keeping her father at gunpoint while he drove.

“There are at least two shooters, and Dad’s the driver. Baddies have had time to reload. Tim, I’m going to roll in and set you up to take out his propellers. And if you hit a gas tank, I won’t complain.”

Three massive outboard engines were positioned across the stern of the weaving boat, an almost impossible shot. But Tim was right—they needed information almost as badly as they needed to stop them.

She popped up over a thousand feet and then did a rolling dive just like the final one on the range. The DAP snap rolled with far more willingness than the Huey. Sure enough, another RPG roared upward, but nowhere near the blacked-out helicopter. The roll made them a really lousy target.

At the last moment Lola steadied the chopper into a nose-down-and-diving-hard attitude. Tim lit off with the minigun mounted on the weapons pylon inboard from the Hellfires and poured the flying fusillade into the water barely a foot off the boat’s stern. He’d read her move as if they’d flown together for years.

The boat stumbled, then nosed in hard at the abrupt loss of all three screws. Nose down, it kicked the stern into the air. Two propellers were gone and the third was dangling; Tim had sheared all three in a single pass.

The bow dug in so deep that a wave rolled down the length of the boat. Nothing new for an ocean racer, still impressive to see.

A sharp crack sounded over the intercom as Lola recovered from the dive barely feet over the boat.

“I nailed one,” Kee reported. “But that’s all I saw other than the driver.”

Maybe Lola had miscalculated. She circled to face the now wallowing boat head-on, staying well clear of the oily smoke swirling upward from the ruined engines.

Small-caliber fire pinged against her windscreen.

He always was a persistent bastard.

“Tim.” He laid into the 30 mm cannon, dropping the inch-and-a-quarter shells at ten rounds a second in a blazing arc that encircled the boat.

Lola flipped on the outside speaker when he stopped.

“Stop being stupid. Put down the gun and come out with your hands up.” She could feel the bile rise, the rage swelling from every bone of her past. Every bit of it that she’d thought long since laid to rest.

“Just do it, Dad!”

A big man slowly rose out of the boat’s cockpit, his hands not raised, but both holding the upper edge of the windshield. In plain sight.

She fingered the control. One 30 mm round through the center of his chest. So close. So easy.

“Don’t do it.” Tim’s voice was barely audible over the intercom.

Lola didn’t answer. Her finger actually ached from her desire to end it. Screw the information. Screw the chemical. It didn’t matter if she hit the payload and was caught in the resulting cloud of Soman. At least he’d be dead. Once and for all.

“Don’t.” Tim’s voice was gentle. As gentle as when they made love. “You’re better than that, Lola. We’d cover for you. No question. But he’s not worth it. You’re better than that.”

She knew there was no need for anyone to cover for her. She’d seen the Presidential Order granting her full authority to blow the bastard back to hell.

She held the hover tight, her whole hand now aching with the desire, the need to finish him off. A scream ripped up from her belly, hurt her ears amplified by the intercom. Now she knew how an animal denied her fair kill must feel.

Well, she wouldn’t be denied. Maybe if the Major was here aboard
Vengeance
, maybe she could stop this, stop what had become inevitable from the moment in the desert when the D-boys found the chemical lab.

The
Vengeance
.

The moment before she plunged down the trigger, Lola remembered a small voice. The voice of a young girl sitting in a gunner’s chair and deciding that vengeance “just make everybodies sad.”

She screamed again as she released her hold on the safety. The scream twisted inward and nearly choked her, coming out as a single sob when she eased her finger clear of the trigger.

A sharp double crack sounded over the headset. Kee’s rifle.

“What the—”

The windshield next to her father exploded. A bright muzzle flash flared skyward from close beside him.

She’d been right the first time. There had been a second shooter, he’d just been hidden.

Lola slid the Hawk around until they could look down into the racer’s cockpit. A man with an AK-47 still clenched in his hand lay sprawled on the deck; one shot had shattered the windshield, and the second had bored a neat hole where his temple should be.