High Treason

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Boxers clearly was pissed to be consigned to firearms instruction while Jonathan checked out the aircraft, but even he knew that it was the best choice. Despite the fact the Big Guy didn’t particularly like people — or perhaps because of it — he was a terrific instructor when it came to shooting. In the few hours that he would spend with David and Becky and the First Lady, they would know how to operate a Colt M4 and a Beretta M9 pistol with their eyes closed. That wouldn’t necessarily make them good marksmen — that was a skill that took years to develop — but they would know enough to keep up a steady stream of fire without shooting each other.

Or, even better, they would know to keep the safety engaged until there was no choice but to shoot.

Carl led Jonathan through the snow across the expansive lawn toward the barn-hangars.

“How many aircraft do you have?” Jonathan asked.

“In total?” Striker looked toward the sky as he considered the question. “Right now, as we speak, I’ve got six on hand, but not all of them are in as good working order as the others.” His cane seemed to be particularly important to him in the knee-deep snow.

“Where do you get them?” As he asked the question, Jonathan tried to modulate his tone to be conversational, when in fact the line about not all being in as good a shape as others had spooked him.

“All kinds of places,” he said. “You just need to know where to look.”

“Such as?”

“Company secret, Dig. A good businessman never shares company secrets.”

Their trajectory was taking them directly toward the UH-1 Jonathan had seen poking through the door on the way in. “We’re not taking a Huey, are we?” Jonathan asked.

“One of the best choppers ever made,” Carl said.

“With all the stealth of a brass band,” Jonathan countered.

Carl chuckled. “That sound scared the shit out of the Viet Cong back in the day.”

In fact, the Viet Cong called that distinctive wop-wop sound “muttering death.” Even battle-hardened NVA were known to dump their weapons in a ditch when they heard the sound, unaware of the swarm of copper-jacketed bees that were on their way.

“Well, you know, this mission of yours is a tough nut,” Striker said. “You want to fly a heavy load, yet you want to be stealthy, and you have a lot of people.” They arrived at the front door and Carl pulled on the left-hand door.

“Need me to pull the other one?” Jonathan offered.

“Nope, just need enough space to get through.” He led the way inside.

Jonathan followed. The difference between the snow glare and the darkness of the hangar’s interior left him momentarily blind. Reflexively, he moved his hand closer to his .45. Blindness was never an advantage.

“Easy there, cowboy,” Carl said. “Weapons down. How long you been out of the unit?”

“A while,” Jonathan said.

“You guys always were quick to draw down.” Carl chuckled. “I remember flying some of you guys into some Golf Foxtrot and as we touched down, one of your Unit brothers pickled a round past my ear and out through the windscreen to kill a skinny who was running right at us. Scared the shit outta me and saved my life all at twenty-three hundred feet per second.”

Jonathan knew exactly who that unit guy was. He stared back at him from the mirror every morning. “You’re welcome.”

Now that Jonathan’s eyes were adjusting, he could see Carl just well enough to note the smile. “No shit, that was you?”

“It was,” Jonathan said. He reminded him of the exact location on the world map.

“Well, then hell yeah. Thanks. Anyway, we’ve got this logistical problem of invading a friendly nation, snatching some good guys, and getting out without getting tagged.”

Jonathan could make out the developing silhouettes of the various aircraft.

“For quiet, you can’t beat the Little Bird,” Striker said, patting the skin of the MH-6 that lurked just behind the Huey. “But you’re talking a two-fifty roundtrip with a heavy load. If she’s got it in her, it isn’t by much, know what I mean?”

“You don’t want to break your record of zero crashes.”

“Exactly. And even the Huey you’re worried about. While it can handle the mileage and the load with change on both ends, look at the size of the son of a bitch. You need half a football field just to set her down. Plus, she’s got some serious gray in her hair.”

Anything that made Striker nervous scared the living shit out of Jonathan.

Carl wandered to the front wall and flipped a switch, igniting some intense floodlighting. “Given all of the variables, I think this bird is our best bet.”

The two-handed reveal pose Carl struck reminded Jonathan of a television model from The Price is Right. The chopper he presented looked like a Little Bird that had taken a deep, deep breath. It still had the pregnant-mosquito look, but this one took up twice the footprint.

“European Helicopter?” Jonathan guessed, naming one of the world’s most respected chopper-makers.

“The EC135,” Carl said.

Jonathan planted his fists on his hips. “That’s a new aircraft, isn’t it?”

“This one is looking forward to her eighth birthday.”

“That must be a million-dollar aircraft,” Jonathan said. What he didn’t say was, where did you steal this from?

“Actually, she’s more like four million new,” Striker said. “But I got a real deal on her.”

Warning bell. “How?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Jonathan steeled himself with a breath. “Given the stakes,” he said, “I think I do.”

“Let’s just say that this one landed kind of hard,” Carl said.

Shit.

“But don’t worry,” Striker went on, “I’ve done all the repairs myself. She’s like new.”

The chopper looked like it just rolled off the factory floor, except for the rust-brown primer coat where there should have been paint.

“Note the shrouded tail rotor,” Carl said. “That takes out a lot of the engine noise. You’re still going to get some whopping from the main rotor disk, but against the night sky, we’ll look like a medevac chopper. A lot of jurisdictions use these as medevacs. She’s fast, and I sprung for SOTA FLIR.”

Jonathan recognized SOTA as state-of-the-art, and FLIR as forward-looking infrared, which meant that the bird could fly full-throttle at treetop level.

“What do you know about US-Canada air defense?” Jonathan asked.

“Not a thing.”

He appreciated the honesty, even if it didn’t help him. Jonathan said, “I’m betting that the Canadians are less worried about people invading their air space from the US than America is worried about invasions from the north.”

“If you feel good believing that, I’ll feel good believing it, too.”

In the distance, a ripple of gunfire rattled the otherwise still morning air. Boxers’ students had taken their first shot.

“So, is this really what you do, Dig?” Carl asked. “I’ve heard rumors through the Community, but you know how reliable they are.”

“Exactly,” Jonathan said, being deliberately obtuse. “Company secrets.”

Striker seemed to understand the gentle rebuke. “Well, for what it’s worth, I heard that you did some very cool, very noble work on behalf of Boomer Nasbe. I won’t ask you to verify, but if it’s true, and I assume it is, I bow at your friggin’ feet. If that’s the shit you’re doing to pay your bills, I want you to know that I’m part of your team any time you make the phone call.”

Jonathan kept a poker face. He had, in fact, helped the Nasbe family out of a jam a while ago, but it made no sense to confirm the rumor.

“I’ve made you uncomfortable,” Striker said. “I’m sorry. That’s the polar opposite of what I wanted to do. You’re still working for the Community, and I don’t think there’s a greater calling than that.”

“Tell me that this bird is airworthy,” Jonathan said.

“And then some,” Striker said. “And like I said, she’s quiet.” He pointed again like a proud father to the shrouded tail rotor.

Unlike most helicopters, in which the tail rotor was open to the atmosphere and therefore noisy, the shrouded tail rotor provided the most basic of QTR — quiet tail rotor — technology, knocking the noise signature down by fifteen decibels, three times the sound pressure, as registered from the ground. That might just give them the edge they needed to get across the border and back without being reported by someone who was pissed because their rerun of Seinfeld was interrupted by aircraft noise.

Jonathan pulled open the side door. It should have revealed seats and restraints, but in fact revealed only open floor space. He cast a glance to Striker.

“Okay,” Striker said. “It’s not the most perfect, safest arrangement of floor space. But the beast will carry you and your equipment there, and you and your precious cargo back.” Carl stood taller. “Is that, or is that not, the point of this exercise?”

Sometimes, you had to choose between the best of bad options. In this case, it was the promise of a sound airframe, despite the lack of seats or seatbelts.

“I promise not to crash,” Carl said, as if reading Jonathan’s thoughts.

“Oh,” Jonathan said. “Well, in that case, you have a deal.” They shook on it.

It was the kind of cold that radiated all the way through David’s waterproof boots and into the bones of his feet. Boxers — Big Guy now because code names were important, though he never said why — had led them on a hike to the edge of the clearing that contained the house and barns. They faced the thick woods. Even with the leaves gone from the trees, you couldn’t see more than thirty feet in.

David, like Mrs. Darmond and Becky, wore a heavy vest — a ballistic vest, not a bulletproof vest, and no, he would never make that mistake again — that looked like the ones he saw on the news coming from war zones. Its surface was covered with all kinds of patches and pockets into which Big Guy had jammed maybe a dozen ammunition magazines — oh, good God, not clips because clips are a specific kind of magazine designed for the M-1 rifle — each of which had been loaded with a single bullet.

They’d already learned that they were shooting Colt M4 carbines, the same rifle that was standard issue to active-duty soldiers. They’d been introduced to the safety and to the switch that allowed them to change from single shot to automatic, which would turn the weapon into a submachine gun. That was the DFWI switch, according to the Big Guy — the don’t fuck with it switch. Automatic mode was bad. It wasted ammunition.

The whole session was a waste as far as David was concerned. He’d fired his own M4 on the range countless times. Granted, it was a semiautomatic version, but Big Guy was telling them not to use full-auto anyway.

“I don’t give a shit if you can hit your targets tonight,” Big Guy said. “If it comes to that, so much shit will be broken that your marksmanship probably won’t make a difference. Just don’t shoot each other, and for God’s sake, don’t shoot me. And if you do shoot me, go for a head shot because if you shoot me and I live, you will die with a rifle up your ass. Are we communicating?”

Personable guy. David nodded while Becky said, “Yes, sir.”

“The easiest shot you’ll ever get at an enemy is when he’s reloading. The best rifle in the world is just a glorified club when it’s empty, and the guy who brings a club to a gunfight always loses.”

From there David learned more than he ever thought he’d need to know about the technical aspects of reloading.

“You only have one round in your magazines because we don’t need to practice pulling the trigger. The way these weapons are designed, when you fire the last round in a mag, the bolt locks open. You don’t have to keep count of how many rounds you’ve fired. When that puppy locks open, you’ll feel it. And if you don’t feel it, you’re going to know because the next time you pull the trigger, the weapon’s going to say click instead of bang. Bang is good. Click is bad. Anybody need to take a note on that?”

By the time David realized that the Big Guy was trying to be funny, the moment had passed.

Big Guy brought his own weapon to his shoulder. His gun looked similar yet different from theirs, as if born of the same mother but with different fathers. He fired a shot at the woods, and then turned to face the class, his muzzle pointed toward the sky. The bolt was clearly locked open.

“Here’s what I want you to do.” He demonstrated that the mag release button was just above the trigger on either side of the weapon. “Let the mag drop to the ground. In the shit, don’t worry about it after you drop it. Here in training, take care of it, because it’s one of the ones you’ll be using later if we’re in the shit.”

He fingered the release, and the empty mag dropped away.

“Take a new one from a pouch—” He demonstrated in live slow motion. “Put your forefinger along the nose of the bullets just to make sure they’re in alignment, and insert it till it clicks.” He did those steps. “Now what’s wrong with the weapon?”

David raised his hand, happy to have something to contribute. “It won’t fire. The bolt’s still open.”

“Jimmy Olsen gets a point,” Big Guy said.

“He was a photographer,” David said.

Big Guy fired off a glare that would have been funny if it wasn’t so friggin’ scary. “Don’t cross me, son,” he said. Then he winked.

Big Guy demonstrated the bolt release button on the left-hand side of the breech. “If this isn’t closed, the weapon won’t fire.” With the bolt closed, he turned and fired another round into the woods.

“So, that’s the exercise,” Big Guy said. “One round, drop the mag, insert a new one, seat the bolt, fire a round and drop the mag and seat a new one. We’re going to do this until you’re really tired of doing this.”

Truer words had never been spoken.

By the time the exercise was done, David’s “dead time”—the interval between the last shot fired from one mag and the first shot fired from the next — was down to three seconds. Big Guy pronounced that to be survivable.

Who would not feel confident with such gushing words of encouragement?

“Dad, I’m scared,” Josef said.

“I know,” Nicholas said. The boy had only been awake for maybe fifteen minutes. Thankfully (tragically?), the drugs they’d used to knock them out were far more effective on a child than on an adult. “Try not to be.”

What a stupid thing to say. Try not to feel what every sane person in the universe would feel under the same circumstances.

“Why are they doing this?”

“Because they’re bad people,” Nicholas said. Was that an acceptable response from a father who cares?

“They’re going to hurt us, aren’t they?”

Nicholas looked at his son. Josef had chosen to place his face in the single shaft of light — single shaft of warmth — that invaded their shell. With his dark eyes and dark hair and bruised cheek and filth-streaked face, he looked like a picture from a movie poster. Gavroche from Les Misérables, perhaps, or the Artful Dodger from Oliver!

“They’re going to try to hurt us,” Nicholas said.

“Just as they already hurt us. But we need to be brave and not let them do that.”

The boy stared back at him, his face a giant question mark.

“Have you ever been in a fight, Joey?” It ripped at his heart to ask such a question. He was the boy’s father, for heaven’s sake. He should know every momentous event in his life. He had no doubt that Marcie did.

“Not many,” Josef said. He looked down when he spoke, exuding shame.

“Look at me, Joey,” Nicholas said.

The boy resisted.

“Please. Look at me.”

Those huge Bambi eyes, with the eyelashes to match, rocked up to meet his. Nicholas had never seen him look more like his mother.

“I don’t know what they have in store for us,” Nicholas said, “but if they’re left to their own means, I don’t think it can be good.”

The eyes reddened. “Do you think they’re going to kill us?”

Nicholas shook his head and moved closer to his son on the floor. He offered his arm for a hug, but the boy refused. “No, I honestly don’t think they’re going to kill us. What I think they’re going to do is take us to Russia.”

Josef recoiled. “Why?”

“Because that’s where your babushka is from. I think this is about her.”

“Because she is the president’s wife?”

“I think so. I think they are using us to get something from the Americans.”

“But we’re Americans.”

Nicholas nodded. “Yes, we are.” Once you start hearing the words spoken aloud, they become so complicated. “But these people who took us. I do not think they are.”

Josef’s eyes folded into a scowl. “But the police will rescue us,” he said. “Babushka is the First Lady. She’s the president’s wife. They have to rescue us.”

“I certainly hope they will try,” Nicholas said. Josef knew nothing of his father’s refusal to accept protection, but he’d felt the animosity from Tony Darmond. “But if that doesn’t happen,” Nicholas continued, “it will be up to you and me to determine our fate.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means that we may have to fight.”

“But they’re bigger than us,” the boy said. “And stronger.”

“They seemed stronger than they really are because we were surprised at the house. We were asleep. If we had been awake—”

“The people who grabbed me were very strong,” Josef said. “I tried to dig my fingers into his arm, but his skin felt like stone. He was very strong.”

Nicholas lowered his voice. “But they have balls,” he said.

Josef gasped. It was not the kind of thing he heard from his father every day.

“Testicles,” Nicholas clarified, as if it were necessary. “And they have eyes and they have noses and knees. These are all very sensitive areas. If they come to take us away, I think we need to fight.”

Those beautiful Bambi eyes clouded with fear, but Nicholas pressed on.

“If they drug us again, or take us onto another airplane, I don’t think we’ll ever see home again. We might not even see each other again. I don’t want that to happen.”

“I don’t want that to happen, either.”

This was the opening Nicholas had been hoping for. “Then we’ll have to fight,” he said.

“But they’re big.”

“They’re not that big. And I don’t think they’re very smart. In fact, I think that we’re smarter than they are.”

The fear in the boy’s eyes deepened.

“Didn’t you hear the way they were talking?” Nicholas donned a comically heavy Russian accent. “You must come with us or we will hurt you. You must help me scratch my butt because I cannot find it.”

The word “butt” was always a sure thing. Always elicited a giggle.

“I mean, think about it,” Nicholas went on. “They were so scared of you that they had to pump you full of drugs so that you couldn’t fight them back.”

A smile bloomed.

“Look,” Nicholas said, “Maybe it will never come to this. Maybe I’m wrong and this will turn into some kind of vacation—”

“A vacation in a prison?”

“Okay, a really shitty vacation.”

Another laugh.

“But if it turns out that they want to take us away, or if they come at us with drugs again, I want you to know that I’m going to fight them.”

“But they might kill you.”

“They might. But if it comes to that, I’m going to die fighting. If we allow ourselves to be knocked unconscious, or if we allow ourselves to be put on an airplane, our lives as we know them will stop. Do you understand that?”

Josef started to cry, but Nicholas didn’t think he was aware. “I really don’t know how to fight grown-ups.”

“Balls,” Nicholas said. He pointed to his own.

“Every man has them, and it doesn’t matter how strong they are. A kick in the balls stops everyone.”

“And the eyes?” Josef asked. “You said something about the eyes.”

“A strong man who has a finger in his eye is not very strong anymore,” Nicholas said.

“But they’ll hurt me.”

Nicholas took a deep breath. He’d been rehearsing this speech in his head for a while. “Maybe,” he said. “I hope not, but they might hurt you. You’ve been hurt before, right?”

“Not like—”

“Hurt is hurt, Joey. When you broke your arm doing the trick on the skateboard, was it worth it?”

“That hurt a lot. I had to get surgery.”

Five screws and a plate, Nicholas didn’t say. He could still see the X-ray in the viewer, still feel the sense of helpless hopelessness in his gut. “Of course it hurt. You broke your arm. If broken arms didn’t hurt, people would break them every day.”

He got the smile he was trolling for.

“But it didn’t stop you from skateboarding, did it?”

Joey shook his head.

“In fact, weren’t you back out there skateboarding with a cast on your arm?”

A giggle. “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the Joey I’m talking to right now,” Nicholas pressed. “The one who’s tough enough to face his fears.”

“But they could kill us.”

“They could kill us anyway. We could get hit by lighting.” He reached out and pulled Josef’s hand out from under the blanket. He held it, and then covered it with his other hand. At whisper, he said, “You need to know that if they come for us, I’m going to fight. In fact, I’m going to fight all the way. What you do is up to you, and I know this is a crappy kind of choice to have to make at your age, but I want you to know that I’ll be able to use all the help I can get.”

Josef nodded. “Okay,” he said. “When do you think they’ll come?”

Nicholas turned to look out the window. Purple hues had begun to infuse the perfect blue of the sky. “I would guess after dark,” he said. “But I don’t know.”

“Suppose I fall asleep again?”

Nicholas waved away the concern as it were a pesky fly. “If you need to sleep, sleep. Who knows, but maybe you will need the rest. I’ll stay awake.”

As the boy settle back into his covers and closed his eyes, Nicholas thought about taking back the entire conversation. For sure, going along was the quickest way to stay alive in the short term, but in the long term, captivity meant only misery.

In less than a minute, Josef’s breathing became rhythmic, and then there was the slightest trace of a snore.

As he watched his son sleep, he tried to come to grips with how desperately he hated Tony Darmond.