Payback

135

One of the crew members in the cockpit spotted the van backing down the dead-end street a few blocks from the historic district in downtown Philadelphia. Dean went to the side of the Pave Low, peering down through the open door.

“Yeah! Could be it,” he yelled into the interphone. He grabbed hold of the rail near the door and punched the button to the shared police channel, starting to describe the vehicle.

“They’re in the center of the city, not far from Congress Hall and the Liberty Bell,” the pilot of the Little Bird shouted to Lia. “We’re real close.”

“Get us there!” she yelled.

Karr jerked behind her, the whole helicopter seeming to rock as he leaned out the side and looked down. They were maybe fifty feet over the street, so close to some of the rooftops that they could have stepped off onto them. The pilot barked into his microphone, talking to another nearby helicopter.

“That’s got to be it,” yelled Karr. “Watch him — he’s going up Eighth.”

The helicopter veered left, spinning around a building and then running in the direction the van was taking. It went in the direction of 676, the arterial that ran between 76 and 95 north of City Hall. It cut left, then right, veered suddenly, and bashed the end of a police cruiser parked across the entrance ramp to the highway. The van veered onto the sidewalk, careened against the guardrail, and made it onto the roadway.

“Stop him!” Lia shouted to the pilot. “Use the machine-gun.”

“We’re going to.”

The small helicopter bucked and pitched almost straight down, its tail whipping around. The truck veered across the divider as the pilot began to fire; bullets flashed along the roadway and right under the truck. The wheels blew out as the chopper veered off.

“All right, all right, he’s stopping,” yelled Karr in the back. “Get us down! Get us down!”

“We’re in,” said the pilot, gliding for a landing on the roadway ahead.

As they settled down, Dean’s helicopter appeared right above. Lia closed her eyes, sure they were going to hit.

“Oh God, Charlie Dean,” she whispered. “Oh God.”

“Lia, come on!” yelled Karr, jumping from the rear as the Little Bird set down. “Let’s go, let’s go! I got the front; you got the rear. Go!”

Lia, in disbelief, pitched herself out of the cockpit, amazed that they hadn’t collided.

“No offense, but we’ll do better if I use that,” said Dean, putting his hand on the M4 carbine the crew chief had in his hand. It wasn’t a request; Dean took the gun firmly in hand and in the same motion leapt to the ground, running forward as the van slammed to a stop against the concrete road barrier and spun sideways.

Dean took two steps. The driver of the van turned his head toward him.

When you have the shot, fire. That’s the only thing that ever matters, kid. When you have the shot, fire.

The voice Dean heard was Turk’s, muttered in the jungle some thirty years before. It was the one piece of advice no experience had ever contradicted, the one thing anyone had ever told Dean that he knew to be true under any circumstance.

And by the time Dean heard it in his head, he had already pressed the trigger on the automatic rifle. Three bullets struck the driver of the van in the head, taking off a good part of the skull and killing him instantly.

“Charlie Dean!” yelled a voice close to him, and for a second Dean thought it was Turk, back from the dead, back from the war he would always be fighting, congratulating him. But it was Karr, yelling at him, telling him he was going to flank the van and to watch out for the rear.

“I got the back! I got the back!” screamed Lia, appearing to Dean’s right.

Dean covered them, advancing slowly, gun trained on the van.

“Dead guy!” yelled Karr. “They’re both down. We’re OK! We’re OK!”

“We have the bomb here!” said Lia in the back. “Jesus, Charlie!”

“I’m here,” said Dean. He went around to the back of the van. “Are you all right?”

She bent over the large crate in the back. “I love you,” she told him.

Dean stayed still for a moment, frozen. “I love you, too.”

Karr had climbed into the back, pulling off the blanket and wood to expose the guts of the bomb.

“There’s a timer here,” Karr told them. “Moving.”

“The bomb’s set?” said Dean.

“Oh yeah.” Karr got down on his knees next to the warhead. “We need the tool kit. Tool kit!”

Lia jumped from the van to get it. As she did, Dean grabbed her arm. They looked at each other, only for a moment; then he let go and she ran to the helicopter.

Leaving Karr to help her might not have been the right thing to do, Dean realized. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Dean climbed into the back.

“You got a flashlight, Charlie?” said Karr, who already had one out.

Dean took out his penlight and shone its beam on the area where Karr was working. What looked like a large digital clock dial sat at the side of a metal cage with circuit boards in it.

“Tommy, Charlie, Lia, stand by for Mr. Rubens,” said Telach over the communications system.

“We’re here,” said Karr.

“Very good, Tommy,” said Rubens. “What’s your situation?”

“Looks like they grafted a cell-phone type trigger in, along with a backup timer, wired into the trigger section on a bypass. Taking the place of the proximity stuff, that’s gone. Cell phone setup looks like a Chechen IED.”

“The bomb people are on the line,” said Rubens. “What does the timer say?”

“Twenty-two minutes.”

“We can put it in the Pave Low and take it out to sea,” suggested Dean.

“Never make it, Charlie,” said Karr, looking at the circuit boards and describing them to the people in the Art Room.

“Tommy, go directly for the lookout code,” said Rubens.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“You have much more time than you require.” said Rubens. His voice was cold and distant, an accountant adding a long and boring sequence of numbers.

Karr looked up at Dean. “You sure you want to be this close?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not.”

Lia slid the tool kit across the van floor. Dean took out a bigger flashlight and held it for Karr.

Emergency vehicles were arriving around them, and two more helicopters hovered overhead.

Karr took a tiny jeweler’s screwdriver and hex wrench and eased one of the circuit boards up from the assembly, being careful to keep the wire harness attached. He did the same with the second board, revealing a small panel with what looked to Dean like a miniature bicycle tumbler embedded in a long plastic box.

“OK, what I need here is more light,” said Karr. He straightened, blew a big wad of air through his teeth, and then took another long and thin jeweler’s screwdriver from the case. In the meantime, Dean took two of the flashlights from the tool kit and held them over the work space.

“A little closer,” whispered Karr.

Dean lowered the lights. His arms were starting to get heavy and tired. He remembered holding a work lamp for his dad when he was thirteen or fourteen, trying to fix the family car in the driveway one night after dark.

“Ready for the code,” said Karr. He blew another long wad of air from his chest, hunkering over the bomb with his tiny screwdriver.

“Six characters, all the same? That’s their kill code?” said Karr after they were read. “You sure?”

The expert on the other end of the line assured him that he was.

“I’m not arguing with you,” said Kan. “But I really want to be correct here.”

The expert replied that there was no doubt.

“All right. But man, did these Russian guys go to MIT or what?”

Karr — an RPI graduate — moved the tumblers one by one to proper stops.

“Done?” asked Dean as he straightened again.

“Heh,” said Karr, fishing a set of probes connected by a nest of wires from the bag. He placed the needlelike tips of the probes into the board one at a time, then took a small oscilloscope from the tool kit, along with a voltage / resistance meter. He scowled at the interior of the bomb as he found the right places to connect the wires, but otherwise he could have been working on a copy machine rather than a nuke.

“You want the one with the red wires,” said the techie.

“Are you sure?” asked Karr. “I think it’s the yellow.”

“Yellow? Hold on, hold on,” said the techie.

Dean glanced at Lia, then at Karr, who remained bent over the front of the warhead, his head so near the device he could have kissed it.

“Red or yellow?” said Karr.

“It’s red here.”

“Are you positive?”

“I — let me double-check.”

“Don’t bother,” said Karr, straightening. He was grinning. He pointed to the oscilloscope. “Flatline, Charlie. See that? This baby is dead.”

“What?” said the techie.

Karr pointed at the scope. “That’s flat, right?” he asked Dean.

“Yeah,” said Dean.

“It’s disarmed.”

“How did you know which wire?” asked Dean.

“Sometimes you just got to go with your gut,” said Karr. He stretched his neck; Dean heard it crack.

Lia had her arms folded.

“They sent him to school last year to learn how to defuse Russian nukes for a mission we were on,” she said. “He memorized all of the tech manuals. He probably knows more than the experts they have in the Art Room. I’ll bet he didn’t even need them to read their kill code.”

“Still comes down to a guess, Princess,” said Karr, laughing as he hopped out of the van.

Dean looked at the framework of the now-inert warhead. There were no yellow wires to be seen anywhere.

“Tommy can be a real jerk, you know that?” Lia told Dean.

“That wasn’t exactly what I was thinking,” he said, leaning over to kiss her.