High Treason

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Becky was horrified. She was looking right at the prison compound when a chunk of the building erupted in a blast of flame and flying debris.

“Holy shit!” David yelled over the intercom. “Did you see that?”

“Looks like the boys just cut themselves an exit door,” Striker said. As he spoke, the nose of the helicopter dipped, and the engine noise crescendoed. “Yee-hah.”

He said that last part—“Yee-hah”—in a normal conversational tone, and if she read his body language correctly, he was laughing. Laughing! What was wrong with these people? They pretended that this was somehow fun. It was a sickness. People were dying, and they were laughing about it.

The helicopter dropped quickly, like a roller coaster. As they closed to within a hundred feet of the hole in the stone, and then fifty and then ten feet, Becky saw the details of the wound that had been avulsed from the building. At first, the view was dominated by smoke. Or maybe it was dust. An opaque cloud that rendered details undetectable. As it cleared, she saw that the entire wall was gone, and that the roof had collapsed on an angle.

Tink. Tink-tink.

“We can’t stay here,” Striker said over the intercom. “Rooster, take that bag of rope on the floor there and get out on the roof and help them out.”

“What?” David looked terrified. “You mean outside?”

“Yep. And quickly. Before we get shot down.”

Tink-tink.

“Now! Chickadee and I are going to fly cover for you.”

David looked to Becky for advice. “No,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

He nodded. Then he unclasped his harness, grabbed the bag, and jumped.

The instant David cleared the skid, Striker poured on the power and tore away from the building. “We can’t just leave them!” Becky yelled.

“We’re not leaving anybody. Now do me a favor and shoot back.”

She looked out the door at the ground. It was chaos, a mass of people running and shooting. “I don’t know who to shoot at,” she said.

“It’s easy,” Striker said. “If they’re on the ground and they’re not next to a cop car, shoot them.”

The blast launched the cell door across the hall with such force that the heavy wooden door was reduced to shards and splinters.

“Listen up,” Jonathan said. “This is the last step in the mission. If we screw it up, we’re dead.” He paused for a beat to make sure they were all listening. “Follow me, do precisely what you’re told, and we’ll have you out of here in the next couple of minutes. Give me a thumbs-up if you understand that.”

It was important that hostages were actually dialed into what was going on, and there was no better way than to elicit an affirmative action like a thumbs-up. He got three of them. Perfect.

“Big Guy, leave the rucks,” Jonathan instructed as he shrugged out of his own. There was nothing in them that couldn’t be replaced, and perhaps more important, there was nothing in there that would trace back to them. “How many claymores did you set?”

Boxers held up two fingers.

With Jonathan’s two, that made four, and he’d definitely heard four explosions, so they were good to go. If that were not the case, since the next people to pass in front of the motion triggers would likely be good guys, he’d have had to manually trigger them before they left.

Without waiting for instruction, Boxers lifted Nicholas into a one-shoulder fireman’s carry on one side, and held Josef’s hand with his other as he led the way to the ruined cell. Yelena followed, leaving Jonathan to carry the still-unconscious Alexei.

Shattered stone and wood littered the corridor, making footing treacherous. It didn’t help having to negotiate the route with an unconscious man on your back. Lingering smoke and dust stung his eyes.

Jonathan turned the corner into the blasted cell and saw that the explosion had done its job and then some. The wall was gone, but so was half the floor, creating a chasm that dropped to the level below. The roof had partially collapsed as well, creating a cantilevered section of timber that tilted into the cell and presented a kind of ramp that started six feet off the floor and sloped at a steep angle to the roof. Beyond that, they had a clear view of the night sky, marred as it was by flames and roiling smoke.

He laid Alexei onto the floor.

“Now what do we do?” Yelena asked.

Outside, the shooting continued. Rounds weren’t impacting close to him or his team, so Jonathan ignored them.

“We’ve got to get up there,” Jonathan said.

“On the roof?”

“Then Striker will bring the chopper around and we’ll climb aboard.”

Yelena looked at the distance to the edge of the cantilevered ramp, then shook her head. “I can’t reach that.”

“That’s where having Big Guy along becomes a big advant—”

Movement on the roof caught Jonathan’s attention. It was a face, and Jonathan reacted instantly, pushing Yelena away and stepping in front of her as he shouldered his MP7.

“Jesus, no!” the face yelled. “It’s me. David. Christ, don’t shoot.”

“How the hell did you get on the roof?” Jonathan yelled in anger. David would never know how close he came to having his head blown off.

“Striker dropped me off. I’ve got rope.” He displayed a hundred-fifty-foot drop bag of climbing rope.

“There’s a tail of rope sticking out of the end of that bag,” Jonathan said. “See it?”

David looked, then nodded. “Got it.”

“Okay, hang onto that tail and drop the bag down here.”

David dropped the bag, and a length of rope unspooled as it crashed to the shattered wooden floor.

“If I remember my sat photo right,” Jonathan said, “there’s a chimney coming through the roof about a hundred feet behind you.”

David craned his neck and then nodded. “Yes.”

“Take the end of that rope — take as much rope as you need — and tie it around the chimney. Then come back and tell me you’ve done that.”

“I don’t know knots.”

“I don’t care. I give not a shit. Any knot will do.”

David disappeared from view, and the rope continued to unspool. If it came to the point where the end of the rope emerged from the bag, Jonathan would grab it and pull. Otherwise, they only needed enough to climb ten feet.

He figured it couldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Becky didn’t realize that Striker was intentionally trying to draw gunfire away from the roof of the prison until five or six bullets pierced the floor of the helicopter within eighteen inches of her foot.

“You need to shoot back,” Striker told her through the intercom. “Otherwise, we’re just a target in a shooting gallery. Make ’em pay for that shit.”

Becky pointed her rifle out the door and pulled the trigger, launching a string of bullets that may or may not have hit anything. Striker said to shoot, and so she shot. That didn’t mean that she had to intentionally kill. Those people down there were every bit as frightened as she was. From their perspective, they were defending themselves from an attack. And from their perspective, she was the attacker.

Who was she to pass judgment on their lives from three hundred feet above their heads?

Her magazine went dry and she dropped it out, replacing it just as she’d been taught. This one, too, would be sprayed into the night. She couldn’t imagine living with the knowledge that she’d taken another person’s life. Think of the children they’d never have. Of the grandchild—

A bullet passed within an inch of her head, shattering the earphone on her left side. It was a bone-jarring noise, loud enough that it might have deafened her. And as luck would have it, she’d seen the muzzle flash of the gun that had sent it her way.

Using all the lessons she’d been taught from Big Guy, she settled her sights on the spot where that shot had come from, and she emptied a thirty-round magazine into that space.

The monster of a man — they called him Big Guy — lifted Joey under the arms and put him onto the slanting bit of roof that he said led to safety. “Just go to the top,” the man said, “then lie flat against the roof until someone tells you that it’s safe to move.”

Big Guy said that as if it were easy as pie. In reality, there was nothing to hang on to. Big Guy lifted him onto this sagging slab of roof, but after that, it was all about not losing your grip as you did a lizard crawl up to the point where the roof flattened out.

Joey forced himself not to think about the cold or about the noise or about the fires that burned all around him. He forced himself not to think about the stink of what he knew had to be dead bodies.

The men who came to save him had apparently killed a lot of people to deliver him from danger. He decided not to think about that, either, but to concentrate on the fact that he was this close to being out of this terrible place.

He belly-crawled up the incline of the collapsed roof until it flattened out. When he got to that point, a guy he hadn’t seen before put a hand on his shoulder.

“Hi,” the guy said. “I’m David. You’re almost home.”

Within a few seconds, Josef’s grandmother was next to him on the roof. She reached out with both arms to embrace him in a hug. “Josef,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll be safe in a few minutes.”

God, I hope that’s true, Joey thought. Because for right now, everything pretty much sucked.

“You’re next,” Jonathan said to Boxers.

The next step was an engineering challenge. Even though Boxers could easily carry Nicholas on his back to make the climb, there was no guarantee that Nicholas would have the strength to hang on. And the penalty for losing his grip was death.

“You make your way to the top,” Jonathan said, “and I’ll tie the PC into a rescue knot. Once you’re in position, haul him up and send the rope back down for our Russian friend. I’ll bring up the rear.”

Big Guy didn’t respond, but rather eased Nicholas onto the floor and started to climb toward the roof. From a distant part in his brain, Jonathan wondered if the cantilevered roof flap had the strength to hold Boxers, but he realized it didn’t matter. They’d all know at the same time in just a minute or so.

He stooped to go eye to eye with Nicholas. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m hurt,” Nicholas said. “Badly. I think he might have gotten a kidney.”

Jonathan gathered the rope. “Don’t worry too much,” he said. “You’ve got two. That’s a hundred percent overkill.” He’d meant it as a joke, but Nicholas was either not in the mood, or in too much pain. Maybe just plain scared.

The rescue knot is a complex bit of ropesmanship, starting with a bowline on a bite for the legs, and then evolving into an elaborate knot around the chest. It took time, and that was the one commodity of which they were quickly running out. He aborted fancy in favor of simple.

“Listen up, Nicholas,” Jonathan said. “I’m going to slip a rope over your head and under your arms, and then Big Guy is going to lift you to the roof. Do you have the strength to keep your arms crossed under the knot so you don’t slip out?”

“Sounds like I don’t have a choice.”

“Oh, you have a choice,” Jonathan said with a smile. “But the alternatives all suck.” It was nowhere near as secure as the correct knot, but sometimes you just had to take chances. Jonathan tied a simple slipknot into the end of the rope and he slipped it into place around Nicholas’s body. A glance toward the roof delivered a thumbs-up from Boxers, and it was time to go. Within seconds, Nicholas was airborne, his feet dangling as he was hoisted up.

Thirty seconds later, Boxers said, “Heads up,” and the looped end of the rope landed back on the ground next to Jonathan.

Alexei was awake by now, but he wasn’t yet dialed back into reality. His eyes were unfocused, and blood poured at a pretty good clip over his face from a wound somewhere under his hair.

Jonathan slipped the loop over Alexei’s head and shoulders, and then tugged it all the way to the man’s waist to accommodate the hands that were tied behind his back. That done, he cinched the knot, and exchanged another thumbs-up with Big Guy, and watched as Alexei levitated away.

In his ear, he heard Boxer’s voice say, “Striker, Big Guy. We’re ready for dust-off whenever you are.”

And now it was Jonathan’s turn. He didn’t trust his ability to execute the kind of pull-up that would be necessary to follow the path of the others with all his gear in place, so he opted to scale the broken stair-stepped bricks of the broken outer wall. Never a fan of heights, he stayed focused on the view above, and avoided looking at the spot down below where he’d leave a grease spot if he fell.

While he was poised there on the ledge between success and death, his spine launched a chill as he saw the chopper turn on its nose and head back into the maelstrom to do its job. Helicopter pilots continued to be the great unsung heroes of nearly every Special Forces op that Jonathan had ever been on. They rarely took the shot at the HVT — high-value target — and they rarely put their hands on a PC, but without them, thousands of brave operators would have died.

Striker came in fast and hot, his door gunner spraying a shield of lead that kept the bad guys’ heads down.

Jonathan had been in enough firefights and bloodbaths to know that the tales of glory in combat were all bullshit, but there was something strikingly beautiful about the living portrait of people risking death for others. It was an image that transcended cynicism, and triggered yet again his sense of pride that the things he and his team accomplished were bigger than who they were, whether individually or collectively.

He was jarred from his reverie by the glancing blow of a bullet against the front of his body armor. It didn’t hit him so much as it took out a half a rack of magazines that he had stored there. He started climbing again.

He got to the top of the roof just as the chopper skidded in to accept them.

“You first!” Jonathan yelled to Boxers. “Give us cover fire.” Becky was doing as good a job as she knew how, but with Boxers’ finger on the trigger, bad guys would start falling down for good.

Striker never actually touched down on the roof. Instead, he hovered with the starboard skid just three inches off the surface.

Boxers hoisted himself in first, and charged directly to the far side to start pouring more firepower into the people on the ground. Within seconds, the incoming fire decreased by ninety percent. Jonathan heaved Alexei in first, and then lifted Nicholas into the doorway. The first glimpse of the blood smear on his back showed a critical injury. Joey was next, though he pretty much scaled the skid by himself, and then Yelena brought up the rear.

Jonathan checked one more time to make sure that he hadn’t left anyone, and that there were no immediate threats that could hang off the side of the chopper, and then he heaved himself onto the deck.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled to Striker, and then to the others, “Keep your heads down. Lie flat on the floor.” As the words left his mouth, he took up a position next to Boxers in the doorway and he opened up on to ground on full auto. The MP7 sounded positively anemic next to the pounding pulse of Boxers’ HK 417.

Striker pulled pitch, and they climbed like a rocket, pivoting out of harm’s way, and then dropping again like a stone to treetop level when they were out of range.

Jonathan felt someone pounding on his shoulder, and he turned to see David, extending a headset to him. “It’s Striker,” David yelled. “He wants to talk to you.”

With the doors off, there’d be no direct communication with this much power poured into the engines. Jonathan slipped the headset over his ears. “Scorpion here,” he said.

“I’m making a dash straight back to Vermont,” Striker said. “I’m abandoning everything we left at the staging area. You okay with that?”

This was exactly why it was important never to leave fingerprints or DNA behind. “Roger that,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go home.”

In Striker’s world, treetop flying meant the actual collection of treetop material in the skids of the helicopter. He flew at full throttle, and as Jonathan watched the world pass inches below him, he envied those who had no goggles and therefore could fly without stress.

The Mishin family had found itself in the darkness. They sat clustered together amidships at the aft end of the aircraft. Boxers, one of the best combat medics Jonathan had ever known, had done his best to treat Nicholas’s wound, but the fact was that the man needed a trauma surgeon right now, and they were not in the position to provide him with one.

“Thirty seconds to the US border,” Striker said over the radio.

Jonathan knew he should breathe a sigh of relief, but thirty seconds could be an eternity when things were running against you. Still, there was something about being back on American soil, where contacts had influence, that made life easier.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you back to the United States of America,” Striker said over the intercom.

Jonathan yelled to the PCs over the engine noise, “We’re almost home.”

If they cheered, he couldn’t hear it.

“Hey Scorpion, we have a problem,” Striker said over the intercom. “Take a look at eleven o’clock high.”

Jonathan moved to the door, with Boxers right behind. Looking up and above the left-hand side of the helicopter, he saw the well-defined outline of a Blackhawk helicopter, fully lit.

“He’s got a friend at six o’clock level, and he’s squawking on one twenty one point five megahertz for us to put down immediately.”

Jonathan’s heart sank.

“You know my rule on incarceration,” Boxers said. It was a simple one: he’d die first, but he wouldn’t die alone.

“He just threatened to shoot us down,” Striker said.

Jonathan’s mind screamed. With the NVGs in place, he looked over to Yelena and her family. The blood from Nicholas’s back showed white in the infrared glare. This guy needed help a half hour ago. In another hour, he might be beyond hope.

“Tell you what,” Jonathan said over the intercom. “Let’s make a deal with them.”

While Striker bargained to keep them from being shot out of the sky, Jonathan worked through Wolverine to make a few phone calls. There’d no doubt be a lot of guns when they touched down, but if everyone stuck to the script, none of them would be fired. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes.

Jonathan stood conspicuously unarmed in the starboard doorway as they flared to land on the heliport of the trauma center at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington, and Boxers occupied the other door. Striker settled the chopper with such ease that there wasn’t even a bump.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Striker said over the radio.

“Me, too,” Boxers added.

Well, Jonathan thought, we’re all about to see together.

Striker shut the engine down, but the rotors were still turning as a dozen cops approached in SWAT gear, their weapons drawn and at the ready. This was a twitchy group that needed to be handled carefully.

Keeping his hands visible, Jonathan pivoted to the side and said, “Okay, Mrs. Darmond, you’re on.”

The First Lady of the United States made her appearance in the doorway just as the floodlights erupted to illuminate the scene. The crowd of police and medical personnel had been told to prepare themselves for her, but from what Jonathan could see through the glare, they were nonetheless shocked by her presence. She even waved, and in that moment, Jonathan realized that he’d seen that very wave from the steps of Air Force One.

“I need you to help my son!” she called to the crowd. “He’s been stabbed.”

They’d been prepared for that, too, and as her words rolled into the night, a trauma team moved forward, pushing a cot that was loaded with all kinds of high-tech gear.

“You!” one of the cops yelled to Jonathan. “You in the doorway! Step out and keep your hands where I can see them.” Behind him, on the other side of the aircraft, he could hear similar orders being delivered to Boxers. Because of his size, Big Guy would have to be particularly careful not to spook these guys.

As the doctors piled into the helicopter, Jonathan climbed out, first to the skid, and then down to the pad. “I’m unarmed,” he said to the first man who approached him.

“But only recently, as I understand it,” the cop said. He was approaching fifty, and he wore parallel bars on his collar that would have indicated a captain in the army, but could have many meanings in the civilian world. By any meaning, though, the bars meant rank, and rank meant seniority.

As he got even closer to Jonathan, the cop — Jonathan could see now that his name tag read Amen — said, “I’m Deputy Chief Eric Amen. My boss says I’m supposed to treat you like a prisoner, but like a VIP one. I’m not sure what that means, but I know it includes handcuffs, at least until we can figure out all of the details.”

“I’m fine with that,” Jonathan said, moving his hands behind his back, “but if my friend objects, try to reason with him, okay?”

As it turned out, Boxers readily got with the program. As Nicholas Mishin was ushered down to surgery, Scorpion and Big Guy were escorted to a parking garage. True to the stated spirit of things, Amen removed the handcuffs before he ushered his prisoners into the backseat of a cruiser. Boxers had to sit mostly sideways to accommodate his legs.

Once they were settled in, and the cruiser was moving, Amen asked, “So who do you have to be to get the director of the FBI to put in a courtesy call for you?”

The Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington covered a footprint that Jonathan estimated to be about thirty thousand square feet. Deputy Chief Amen escorted Boxers and him into the reception area of the jail, and then sat with them while they chatted about nothing. They accepted coffee when it was offered, and no one got overly stressed when first Boxers and then Jonathan asked to use the restroom, which itself was built like a prison cell, with concrete walls, a heavy door, and no windows.

All things considered, Jonathan was getting tired of concrete walls. When this was over, he thought he owed himself a trip to an island. He was equally tired of being cold.

Overall, the atmosphere of the meeting — if that’s what you could call it — was cordial yet weird. Amen had clearly been instructed not to ask questions about what he’d just witnessed at the hospital, but it was equally clear that he ached to disobey his orders. For Jonathan’s part, he’d have been happy to have been left alone for a nap.

After nearly two hours, a couple of high-and-tight guys in suits arrived and identified themselves as FBI agents. “Thanks for taking care of things, Chief,” one of the agents said. “We’ll pick it up from here.”

They all said some cursory good-byes, and then the Fibbies escorted Scorpion and Big Guy out to a waiting Suburban in the parking lot. As they approached the vehicle, the agent who did the talking inside said, “Mr. Scorpion, and Mr. Big Guy, I am Agent Able and this is Agent Baker. I have been instructed by Wolverine to ask you to come with us. You are not under arrest and you may refuse if you wish.”

Able made no effort to camouflage that as anything but the memorized speech that it was. The code names lent convincing credibility to the words. “What do you say, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.

“It’s been so much fun so far,” Boxers said. “I wouldn’t miss another minute.”

The Suburban drove them to the airport, where an unmarked Gulfstream jet awaited them, all gassed up and ready to go. Able drove them right up to the aircraft’s ramp, and as he approached, he said something into his radio that Jonathan couldn’t decipher.

A few second later, Jonathan’s cell phone buzzed. Caller ID read J. Edgar.

“Scorpion here,” he said.

“Nice job tonight,” Irene said. “The Bureau is supplying you with a nice ride home. I believe you’ll find some surprises in the plane.”

“How is PC One?” Jonathan asked.

“Still in surgery, but the last report I got was that he’ll pull through. Might lose the kidney, might not, but my people tell me that it’s not a huge deal.”

“And Sidesaddle?”

“Not my problem anymore. The Secret Service took jurisdiction over her safety as soon as we crossed the threshold into the hospital.”

“But what about—” Jonathan stopped himself, aware of the additional ears.

“Some things we might never know,” Irene said. “I’m fairly sure that there’s much that ultimately won’t be shared with you at all. Nothing personal, you understand. Just need to know.”

Jonathan’s ears turned hot. He deserved better than this. “You’re a tease, Wolfie.”

“You won the big one tonight, Scorpion. There are a lot of powerful people indebted to you. Put a check in the win column and go to bed.”

“And what about Alexei?” Jonathan pressed. They hadn’t given the Russian a code name, so he had to default to the real one.

“Good night, Scorpion.” She clicked off.

Sometimes Jonathan forgot that Irene Rivers was the ultimate professional. He in fact did not have a need to know the details. All that was important from where she sat was that Jonathan did his job and that the mission was accomplished. As in the past, his was not to reason why.

Still, it sucked.

Climbing into the plane, he had to laugh when he saw the surprise Irene had spoken of. All of their gear had been delivered to the plane and stacked neatly along the last row of seats. In the forward part of the passenger cabin, someone had placed a bottle of Lagavulin scotch for Jonathan and a six-pack of Sam Adams beer for Boxers.

As they squared themselves away, a female voice said over the intercom, “Welcome aboard. Please make yourselves comfortable, sit back, and enjoy the flight.”