Blackout

CHAPTER 47

“I can see them to the south,” Arlin Schoen said to the member of his team who could fly, as the Caravan climbed in pursuit. “Get as high as you can but stay with them.”

“We’re faster, Arlin, but not that much.”

The Albatross’s turn to the west was a lucky break. They altered course to intercept the lumbering amphibian and followed it for nearly ten minutes before Schoen tapped the pilot on the shoulder again. “Bring me to his left and stay high so they can’t see us.”

Kat was breathing easier as she sat back to survey the engine instruments. She gave a small prayer of thanks that the weather was clear. Her eyes had just focused on the airspeed indicator when it suddenly exploded in a hail of bullets.

The slugs were stitching their way through the side window from somewhere above and behind. She rolled the control yoke to the right and kicked the rudder hard in the same direction, wheeling the big aircraft out of the way.

More staccato impacts, this time somewhere on the wing. She rolled out of the turn, looked to her left, and was startled to see the Caravan hanging in the left window. Its right side door was open and two figures with guns crouched there.

She rolled left and pulled up sharply, glancing at the only remaining airspeed indicator on the copilot’s side. The Caravan pilot yanked his craft up as well, pulling away just in time, but the shooters still had the Albatross in their sights.

More bullets found their mark on the left engine.

Kat felt the big aircraft yaw dangerously to the left as number-one engine lost power. There was a large red feather button on the overhead for each engine, and she punched at it, hitting it on the second try. She jammed the right rudder pedal forward as the prop streamlined with the wind and the Albatross righted itself. She was searching for the other controls to shut off the fuel when Robert’s voice reached her. “Kat! We’re on fire on the left!” She could already see the orange light of flames cascading from the left engine and smell the stench of burning fuel and oil.

“See if you can find the engine fire extinguisher button!” she called.

Robert searched the overhead panel as she looked left again, spotting the floats of the attacking aircraft above and to the left. To the right, a narrow mountain valley opened up less than 2,000 feet below, and she wheeled the Albatross in that direction, throttling back the right engine. She spotted a substantial river running through it that she could follow. They were less than 1,000 feet above the ground, and she kept descending, leveling a few hundred feet above the trees. She pushed up the right engine again, fed in corrective right rudder to compensate for the absence of power on the left wing, and checked to her left.

The sky seemed empty.

“Robert. Check the right.”

He stopped looking for the fire extinguisher and looked to the right and up. “Nothing there, Kat!”

Bullets stuttered through the fuselage, this time behind them. The plink-plink-plink of the powerful slugs as they punctured the metal skin was unmistakable. She banked sharply left and pulled up, once again exposing the Caravan on the left. But this time the pilot anticipated the maneuver and hung back, close enough to shoot but far enough away to simply follow as she tried unsuccessfully to outmaneuver the more maneuverable aircraft.

The Albatross was heading for the rising terrain on the west side of the valley. She banked sharply to the right to follow the valley again, knowing the Caravan would stay on her tail. More bullets hit them, and a muted cry came from the back. There was no time to look back. As the fire grew, Kat’s confidence sank; she knew the Albatross was simply too big, too heavy, and too damaged to outrun the smaller, turbine-powered craft.

Suddenly the right engine began running rough just as Robert, who had been watching out the right side, yelled, “Kat, something’s wrong. Look at the engine!”

Kat stole a quick glance, and her stomach froze at the sight of a dark stream of oil covering part of the cowling. A check of the oil pressure gauge told the tale.

She looked ahead in the valley, spotting a small dam and a lake beyond. The dam was moving under the nose, and the far end of the lake looked too close to accommodate a large amphibian.

I’ve got no choice!

“Hold on! I’m putting it in that lake!” she yelled, turning her head as far as she could to yell the same warning to Jordan and Dr. Maverick.

The right engine had begun to sputter as she jammed the yoke forward in a stomach-turning near-zero-G excursion. She yanked the right throttle to idle and found the flap handle, pulling it full down as she aimed for the water, gauging her altitude above the surface by the shoreline.

Too fast! she thought as she pulled hard just over the surface, stopping the descent and slowing, letting the nose come up as it settled toward the water.

The end of the lake was coming up rapidly. There was no power to climb, a raging fire on the left side, and no way to slow anymore. She thought of the landing gear too late, just as the fuselage touched the surface.

The Albatross kissed the water at first without slowing, and she tried to pull the yoke back to raise the nose and spoil the lift, as she’d seen seaplane pilots do. But the hull wasn’t far enough into the water, and the Albatross obediently climbed back into the air twenty feet above the surface.

The end of the lake and the bank were less than 500 yards away and coming up fast. Kat relaxed the back pressure and let the Albatross settle heavily into the water. The hydrodynamic pressure sucked the hull down as she yanked back again, this time achieving a cascade of spray and deceleration as the plane slowed.

But they were still moving far too fast at the end of the lake. Traveling at more than sixty knots, the Albatross slammed into the shoreline with the nose up. The fuselage screeched in protest as it slithered up the shallow embankment and spent its remaining energy on a grove of sturdy fir trees, which, one by one, progressively separated the burning left wing from the fuselage, causing the right wing to dig into the ground and spin the fuselage to the right.

“Come around and land. Quickly!” Schoen ordered his pilot as the Caravan flew over the wreckage of the Albatross.

The pilot wheeled around, extended the flaps, and pushed up the prop RPM, setting the aircraft into the water toward the middle of the lake. He dropped to a sedate speed and aimed for the spot where the Albatross’s tail jutted into the forest.

Fed by leaking aviation gasoline, the burning remains of the Albatross’s left wing and engine suddenly exploded, but the force of the explosion merely chewed into the ruined tail section of the aircraft.

Schoen motioned to the man in back to check his weapons before turning to the pilot. “Bring me to shore just to the left and beach her until we finish this. Shut it down, secure it, and follow us.”

The impact of the collision with the trees had slammed Kat’s head into the instrument panel, but not enough to knock her out. She shook her head and looked at Robert as the detached left wing exploded somewhere behind them. He was wiping blood off his face, but seemed okay otherwise.

“We’ve… got to get out of here,” she began. “They’ll be landing.”

Robert unstrapped and stumbled through the cockpit door before turning back to help Kat out. They saw Dr. Maverick kneeling beside a prone Jordan James. “He’s been hit!” Dr. Maverick said, his voice an octave higher than normal.

Kat moved to Jordan, finding his eyes open and his chest soaked in blood. “Oh God, Uncle. What happened?”

He took a breath and shook his head. “Not… that bad, Kat, I think…”

She opened his shirt and saw a major entry wound on the right side of his chest just below the rib cage, the bleeding steady and serious. “Can we move you? We’ve got to get out of here.”

The whine of the Caravan’s turbine engine could be heard outside as Kat and Robert and Tom Maverick struggled to lift Jordan James through the main door to the ground. “My pistol’s in my handbag,” Kat said to Robert.

“I’ll get it and a first-aid kit,” Robert answered.

They laid Jordan in front of the wreckage, by the nose, and Robert scrambled back into the aircraft. He jumped out again with Kat’s handbag and the first-aid kit. Kat grabbed her purse and pulled out her gun as Robert knelt beside James with the kit.

The click of a powerful gun being cocked reached their ears at close quarters, and Kat looked up to see Arlin Schoen step from around the nose.

“Drop it, Bronsky,” the slightly accented voice commanded. She looked into the expressionless face of the man who had tried to pick her up in Portland.

“This is an Uzi,” he said. “You won’t even get one shot off before it rips you to pieces. Put it down.” His men, guns at the ready, moved up to stand beside him.

She sighed and laid the gun on the ground.

“Kick it over here,” he ordered.

She complied, pointing to Jordan. “Do you realize who this is?”

Arlin Schoen smiled thinly. Two others were at his side, weapons at the ready. “Our esteemed acting Secretary of State? Of course. How are you, Jordan?”

“What?” Jordan replied as he winced in pain.

“Oh, come on, Mr. Secretary. As one of the directors of Signet Electrosystems, I’d think you would remember me. After all, we’ve talked many times.”

Kat looked from him to Jordan in confusion. “Jordan, you know this man?”

Jordan James took a ragged breath and looked at Schoen, ignoring the question. “So what are you planning to do, Schoen, kill us all?”

“Of course” was the reply. “What else can I do now?”

Kat knelt at his side. “Uncle Jordan, what’s going on here?”

“MacCabe? Doctor?” Schoen said, gesturing with the gun. “Sit behind Miss Bronsky, please. You people have been an extraordinary pain in the ass. You thought we were trying to kill you, when all we wanted, Mr. MacCabe and Miss Bronsky, was to retrieve a vital piece of classified research stolen from us by a man named Carnegie, whom I believe you knew.” He smiled a serpent’s smile at Kat and Robert.

No one answered.

“You two gained access to the disk we need. If MacCabe hadn’t been so efficient in getting away in Hong Kong, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to shoot down his flight.”

“So you’re admitting to mass murder?” Kat said.

He ignored her and continued. “Oh, by the way, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Arlin Schoen, director of security for Signet Electrosystems Defense Research. I have the responsibility for keeping the vital American secrets away from irresponsible people such as Carnegie and you, Mr. MacCabe. Agent Bronsky’s involvement I can more or less understand. She thinks she’s catching crooks, and ends up stealing classified material. And Dr. Maverick, over there, has a big mouth.”

“What is Signet Electrosystems?” Kat asked, breathing hard.

“You’re insane, Schoen,” Jordan said suddenly.

“Possibly,” he replied. “But my job was to protect this project.”

“Uncle, what is he talking about?”

Her heart sank when she saw tears in Jordan’s eyes. He was in agony. “I tried to stop him, Kat.”

Arlin Schoen turned to the armed men standing beside him. “Go ahead and kill them. I’m not in the mood for confessions.” He turned and walked under the huge right wing, now broken and drooping.

“Schoen?” Jordan called out, summoning all his strength. “I’ve got the whole story on paper… and in the hands of… third parties, ready to blow up in your face. You hurt or kill any of these people, or me, and the whole thing will be exposed.”

Arlin Schoen turned around. “Clever ploy, Jordan, but I know you better than that. You’ve served ten presidents. You’d rather die with your reputation intact.”

“Can you take that chance, Schoen?” James asked with difficulty. “If I’m telling the truth, you’ll end up… in a gas chamber, and the project… as well as the company, are history. All of it’s there. The botched test firing, the cover-up of the MD-eleven shootdown, all of it. And there are four others out there… who know the details.”

“Bullshit. There is no document because you never expected this to happen, James. And we’ve already taken care of those other four witnesses, despite Miss Bronsky’s attempts to hide them.”

“What are you talking about?” Kat asked in alarm.

“I wrote fifty pages of details and… names and documents, Schoen,” Jordan began, and stopped to cough and gasp for breath, “… as soon as I realized you were trying to kill Katherine.”

“If you did”—Schoen shrugged—“we’ll find it.”

“Impossible. You’ll never be able to stop it.”

“Well,” Schoen replied, “I suppose we’ll just have to take that chance.”

“Or… you can let all of us live,” Jordan continued, “knowing that we’ll all keep quiet because you’re still out there.”

Arlin Schoen sighed and turned away, sidestepping a growing pool of gasoline under the wing. He laughed sarcastically. “I’m beginning to see why you’ve lasted so long in Washington, old man.” He turned back to Jordan. “Okay. Let’s see. I refrain from blowing your head off and you won’t talk because you go to jail if you do. I let MacCabe walk, and he’s going to refrain from blowing the cork on this because you asked him to? Give me a break. He’d have his super-liberal, Pentagon-hating national desk on the line in ten minutes and spill his guts. But how about this, James? I kill the rest of them, spare you, and you still have to keep quiet because you’re guilty as sin. In fact, let’s have some fun with this. You seem very fond of Miss Bronsky, there, so what if we start dismembering that cute little blond piece of ass in front of you? How far would I have to go before you’d tell me just where you hid such a document? Rape her in front of you? Cut off her breasts? Shoot her in the spine?” He glowered at Kat. “Nice hairdo, Bronsky. Had me fooled in Portland.”

“If you’ve killed the others,” Kat said quickly, “where were they? Where did I hide them? I think you’re bluffing.”

Thomas Maverick and Robert MacCabe had both been working to stem Jordan James’s bleeding. Ignoring Kat’s question, Arlin Schoen looked at them derisively and turned to walk back under the wing, gesturing for his men to join him. When they reached him, Schoen swung around and fastened his eyes on Jordan.

“No, I think you’re lying, James. And it’s a real shame you and these three were all killed in a plane crash in Idaho and burned beyond recognition. “Fire on my command. READY.”

“This is a fatal mistake, Schoen,” Jordan said, his voice raspy.

“Fatal for you, of course,” Schoen replied. “AIM.”

The gunmen drew a bead on the four of them. In her peripheral vision, Kat saw Robert’s right arm moving up.

“By the way, Bronsky,” Schoen added, “the name of the place is Stehekin.”

Kat felt her insides run cold. She opened her mouth to protest when a loud pop sizzled away from Robert’s direction and the phosphorescent streak of an emergency flare shot forward into the pool of fuel beneath the wing, igniting it instantly.

A wall of searing gasoline-fed flames erupted between the gunmen and their targets, surrounding them in seconds. The gunman on the right of Schoen let out a hysterical yelp as the flames ignited his pants. He stepped backward and tripped into a pool of burning gasoline, screaming for help as his body exploded in flames.

Robert scooped James off the ground in one fluid motion and yelled to Kat and Thomas Maverick to follow as he raced for the safety of a grove of trees.

Arlin Schoen heard his man’s scream and ignored it. He lunged for a small pathway along the fuselage not yet engulfed in fire, with his other gunman right behind him. Before they could reach safety, the trigger finger of the burning gunman involuntarily tightened, and a fusillade of bullets ripped through the fuel tank above.

The monstrous explosion fragmented the wing, the fuselage, Arlin Schoen, and the remaining gunman, spraying flaming shrapnel in all directions. Some of it whizzed harmlessly over the hollow Robert had found, followed by the staccato sounds of large shards of sheet metal and other assorted parts clanging and clunking their way back to earth. The stench of burned hydrocarbons stained the air.

It seemed like minutes had passed before Kat dared to look. What had been the broken fuselage of an Albatross was now a hulk of burning, smoking wreckage indistinguishable as an aircraft. Through the flames and smoke she could see the Caravan sitting undamaged at the water’s edge, its cabin empty.

“Robert?” she called out.

“Right here,” he answered slowly.

“What was that? What happened?”

“I found a signal flare pen in the… first-aid kit. Looks like a fountain pen. It was all I could think of.”

“It was brilliant,” she said.

“Agent Bronsky?” Thomas Maverick raised up from where he’d been examining Jordan James. “The bleeding isn’t slowing.”

Jordan’s eyes were open as he clutched his chest and tried to clear his throat. Kat moved to him, feeling helpless. “Don’t try to talk, Uncle Jordan.”

James shook his head. “No! I must… tell you this. Is he dead? Schoen?”

She nodded.

He nodded in return. “Good. He and Gallagher were crazy. They… they decided there was no price too great to pay to protect the project.”

“The project?”

“Yes. Project Brilliant Lance. Lasers designed to blind and kill. Deep black project. I invested my life savings in Signet Electrosystems, Kat. When I left CIA, I thought… it was the last assignment. I… thought they were a good company, and they had this… this incredible fast-track black-project… contract. It was supposed to be the greatest defense coup yet.”

“Before the nephew of the White House chief of staff lost his eyes?”

Jordan nodded, coughing and wincing. “I was on the board. No one formally told me the… development was… continuing off the books. But I knew it. The arrogance of… an old intelligence hand. ‘We know better than… this stupid President.’”

“Then the weapons were stolen?” Kat asked.

He shook his head, looking at Robert and Thomas Maverick, both of whom were kneeling beside him. “There was no theft. I just let you… follow that… conclusion.”

“And… no leak in the FBI?”

He shook his head no.

“Who is Gallagher?” Kat asked.

“Signet’s CEO,” he replied.

She looked at him in silence for a few seconds. “Schoen mentioned a botched test firing, Jordan. Was the SeaAir crash an accident?”

“Yes,” he said. “They were… doing another… secret test series with an even more powerful version, and someone in… a C-one-forty-one from… Wright-Patterson got trigger-happy and fired… at the wrong radar target.”

“So, the Air Force—”

“Not involved directly. We had the power… to order everything sealed.” He stopped and gasped for breath a few times. “They pulled the test dummy from the F-one-oh-six later… that day, expecting a normal test hit. They knew about SeaAir, but no one… on the test team had any suspicion at all they… might have been involved, let alone responsible. But they looked at… the dummy, and there was no laser hit, even though the cameras showed one. They enlarged the video image… of what the laser had hit, and… two commercial pilots came up, sitting in the crosshairs a microsecond before the laser destroyed their eyes and probably killed them instantly.” He looked at Robert. “This is an incredibly… powerful weapon to be shoulder-fired. It’s… it’s a fearsome thing. I’ve always worried… one could fall into the wrong hands.”

“Such as a terrorist?” Robert prompted.

Jordan nodded.

“But there is no terrorist organization, is there, Mr. Secretary?”

Jordan James looked up at Robert. “Oh, yes, there is. Signet Electrosystems. We… became efficient terrorists, even inventing our own name, Nuremberg.”

“Schoen’s idea?” Kat asked.

Jordan nodded with great difficulty and gasped for breath before continuing. “Under the leadership, if… you can call it that, of our… CEO… Larry Gallagher.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Robert MacCabe said quietly, “are you saying that Schoen did all the rest of this, the Meridian seven-forty-seven, the airport shutdowns, the Chicago crash, just to cover up that accident?”

Jordan closed his eyes for a second and appeared to drift off, then came to. “I… didn’t know what he was doing. I only knew from a phone call to him that something was about to happen… as a diversion. I tried… dear God, I really tried to stop them.” He closed his eyes and panted for breath, forcing himself to stay conscious. “Gallagher… wouldn’t listen. Schoen… wouldn’t. I… suspected Australia or Hong Kong, or even Tokyo, which… is why I had you pulled off that flight, Kat. I knew he was crazy by then. I just didn’t… I… I wanted… you not flying… a few days. Didn’t know…”

He drifted off. Kat could see the pool of blood growing beneath him.

“He’s bleeding out, Kat, and there’s nothing we can do,” Robert said.

Jordan opened his eyes again, fixing his gaze on Kat’s tear-streaked face. She was sobbing silently as she watched his eyes flutter open again.

“I’m so sorry, Kat. I’ve destroyed your faith… and fifty years… of government service. I just… didn’t know what to do. I’d gone from… six hundred thousand net worth to twenty million… all in stock, and it would all be gone. But… if they had time to clean this up… I thought… thought…” He coughed violently and recovered. “I… was too busy being rich and sage. Even had a school… named for me.”

“Who was Schoen, Jordan?” Kat asked softly.

“Former… East German. Defected in the sixties… then CIA. Rewarded for service to the U.S. with a… naturalized citizenship. I hired him at Langley.”

“I’m so sorry, Jordan,” Kat said. Tears flowed down her cheeks, but he had already drifted into a coma.

She sat with him for nearly a half hour as his life ebbed away. A Medivac helicopter summoned by satellite phone sat down nearby at last, but too late.

Kat stood shakily as Thomas Maverick climbed into the helicopter that would carry Jordan’s body back to Hailey, Idaho. “Robert, we’ve got to get to Stehekin,” she said.

“You think there’s any chance he was bluffing?” Robert asked.

She took a deep, ragged breath and looked at him, shaking her head no. “There’s no way he could have guessed the name Stehekin if they hadn’t found them. I’d like to hope they haven’t reached them yet, but I know better. At any rate, we have to find out. And I can handle a Caravan.”

With an in-flight phone call, a park ranger was waiting at the dock with a car when they tied up at Stehekin. They jumped in and roared toward the cabin.

There was a wisp of steam coming from the roof vent, but no smoke from the chimney as they approached the front door. The ranger briefed them on the false alarm the day before. “A local had spotted the front door open with no one around. I checked things out, glanced around inside, noted the remains of a hummingbird feeder and its spilled red syrup on the porch, and then reclosed the door. Everything seemed okay to me.”

Kat tried the door and found it unlocked. She held her gun at the ready as she opened the latch and swung it inward, greeted instantly by the familiar heavy sweet aroma of burned firewood. It was stale, as if the fire had been out for some time.

“Stay here,” she told Robert and the ranger, but Robert stepped inside and stopped, leaving the ranger on the porch.

The door to one of the bedrooms was open. Kat strained to see inside as she moved carefully, calling their names and hearing nothing. “Dallas? Graham?”

The creaking of a floorboard ran cold chills up her spine, but she forced herself to keep moving.

“Anyone here? Steve? Dan?”

There were feet visible through the bedroom door, one pair at the end of a bunk, and an arm hanging lifelessly toward the floor from the side of the bed. Kat felt her heart sink as she moved in that direction, knowing instinctively what she was about to find. They were too late. Schoen had found them after all.

“Who’re you, Darlin’?”

Kat whirled around to see the source of the familiar throaty voice, her mind in confusion. Dallas Nielson was standing on the porch, a load of firewood in her arms, questioning the young ranger, as Robert raced back out through the door to grab her in a big hug.

“Whoa! Robert! Robert, my man!” Dallas yelped, hugging him back.

Kat glanced back at the bedroom in confusion. The feet and arm were gone, and in their place a sleepy Steve Delaney was standing in the door, blinking at her as Graham Tash and Dan Wade followed. “Kat?”

She felt the tears welling up and struggled to control them, but it was no use.