Tears of Abraham

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Good Guys

Henry lost track of time while he tried to cut through the plastic ties binding his hands behind his back. All was dark, thanks to the hood over his head. There were no sounds beyond that of his own breathing and the steady chaff of plastic against metal as he wiggled his hands. It felt like he’d been there a long time. He heard a door open and footsteps on the concrete floor.

The cage door rattled open. Someone pulled the hood off. Simmons. He and Wallace stood over Henry looking down at him with something like sympathy.

“This isn’t right,” Henry said. “Simmons, you know me. I’m no traitor.”

“It doesn’t feel right to me,” Simmons agreed. “Unfortunately, I follow orders. I’ll make it quick.”

“These people are evil, man. You’re taking orders from Stryker?”

“From an admiral, actually. I’m sorry, Wilkins. Duty first. Hood on or off?”

“Look me in the eye when you do it,” Henry growled. “I want you to remember my face.”

“Fair enough.”

Simmons reached for the holster strapped to his thigh.

Henry did not close his eyes. He straightened his back, knees burning, and thrust his jaw forward. Defiant.

It was quick.

Wallace, who hulked just behind Simmons, grabbed Simmons’ wrist, twisting his arm into a hammerlock. There was the sound of twigs snapping and Simmons opened his mouth to scream.

Before he could make a sound, Wallace’s right arm was around the man’s neck, squeezing. His left hand came up and locked around the soldier’s head in an unbreakable choke hold. Simmons lashed out with his feet as Wallace lifted him from the ground. Henry ducked.

Wallace released Simmons, who fell facedown, crashing into Henry.

“Bloody hell,” Wallace said, hauling Henry to his feet.

“Who are you?”

“Turn around so I can cut you loose.” Wallace had dropped the New York accent. He sounded foreign. Maybe Scottish. Henry complied.

“Take his weapon,” Wallace said.

Henry took the dead man’s pistol, a SIG Sauer.

“We’ve got to get to the surface,” Wallace said. “It’s about to get dodgy.”

Henry shook blood into his arms and hands, stretched his aching legs, and followed his new friend out the door.

He heard shouts, shots, and screaming. The sprinkler system came on, and the lights went out.

Henry activated his ICS contacts.

Wallace must have done the same, for when a uniformed soldier burst through a briefing room door, Wallace shot him in the chest.

They skirted the Rat Maze and jogged for the stairway.

Wallace fired again on the move. Two-handed grip, steady, knees bent, the sound of the shots amplified by the close space. Henry bounded after Wallace up the stairs.

They cut through the maintenance shed, and Henry saw that it was already dawn outside when Wallace cracked the door of the building. Wallace said, “Cut behind this building and make for the fence. The extraction team should be there.”

“Wait,” Henry said.

“No time,” Wallace grunted. He opened the door enough that Henry could squeeze through.

“Covering fire,” Wallace said, leaning into the scope of his assault rifle.

Henry ran through the early morning rain.

He put the concrete building behind him, aware of the shots ringing out from various places around the base. Leaning forward, he crossed the open grassy field toward the fence. He darted between empty helicopters. Behind him, the rattle of machine guns increased in intensity.

He spotted the flare of a muzzle flash ahead. He prayed those were the good guys. He lengthened his stride, sprinting full out now, the need for speed greater than the idea of making himself small.

The heavy thump of rotors echoed from the buildings. Henry couldn’t see it, but there was a helicopter inbound for sure.

A soldier in tan fatigues was waving him forward.

An MH-6 Little Bird swept overhead. Henry could see soldiers firing from the open side of the helicopter, feet dangling over the side. The bird landed on the other side of the fence.

He felt a round pass just over his head, close enough that his hair moved.

One of the men ahead pulled at the fence, revealing an opening. Henry threw himself down and went the rest of the way on his elbows, squirming through the hole.

“Where’s Wallace?” said a commando who looked like another lumberjack. Bearded, bulky, wind-beaten, probably in his forties, hair down to his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “He told me to run.”

“Fookin’ bollix,” the lumberjack said.

“McCoy, Riley. On me. You,” he said, peering directly into Henry’s face, “hop on that bird.”

Henry ran to the waiting helicopter, and soldiers reached for him, pulling him onto the tiny flight deck as the bird lifted off.

He held onto a strap mounted to the side as the nimble aircraft banked and dipped. They flew for maybe a mile before landing in the middle of a high school football field.

There were several helicopters on the ground, along with about twenty soldiers.

An officer was shouting orders and gesturing with his hands while several men leaned in to listen. The man turned, and Henry saluted.

Henry walked forward and grasped the man’s hand.

“Henry Wilkins,” Colonel Bragg said. “Glad you made it.”

“Sir,” Henry said, “We thought you were dead.”

“So did I, truth be told.”

“How did you escape?”

“I doubled back into the bunker because May was taking her sweet time. When the bombs hit we were trapped in the tunnel. Took me a couple of days to dig us out. May made it. She’ll hate me for the rest of my life.” He chuckled.

“Who are these guys?”

“I’ll brief you ASAP,” the colonel said, turning away to men awaiting orders. “The situation is fluid. They’re SAS.”

Henry wondered what the hell was going on. He agonized about Carlos and Martinez. And he choked on the thought of Suzanne and Taylor a thousand miles away with an enemy team watching them through rifle scopes, and more than anything, he wanted to shoot the bastards. He wanted to find them and their families and hunt them down and kill them.

Henry reeled at the insidious effects of the venom of retribution choking his soul, clogging his veins in the way hatred does, slow and mean and consuming. His gratitude was overcome with anger. A terrible man, teeth barred in the way of a wolf at that last moment before the bear swipes his paw, the wolf snarling and snapping and dodging.

Henry was a warrior, and he wanted to fight.

“Get yourself squared away,” Colonel Bragg said. “Change out of those civvies and kit up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re wheels up in ten.” “Copy that, sir.”

Another helicopter lifted off while Henry changed into fatigues. He stripped down to his briefs in the chill rain, letting the water wash away some of the sweat, rank with fear and stress, clinging to his body.

A hard-eyed soldier with a pale complexion and square jaw handed Henry body armor and an M4 carbine with eight extra magazines.

Henry placed the mags in the webbing of his vest, examined his weapon, broke it down and cleaned it.

Someone gave him a few energy bars, and he consumed these without tasting them.

“On me, Wilkins,” Colonel Bragg said.

Henry followed his commanding officer onto a bird, pulled on the headset that the colonel offered him as the helicopter took off, straight up, with the feeling of being in a fast elevator.

“There is an armistice right now,” Colonel Bragg said without preamble. “We’ve got a limited window now to put an end to this business once and for all.”

“How—”

“Don’t talk. Listen.”

“I managed to get a hold of some old friends, and now we’re working directly with the Special Air Service guys. We’re going to try to take down as many of these Directors as we can. They’re running to ground.”

“We tracked you the same way they did. You showed up on the web in Colorado, and then in Tennessee when you did what you did. I got here not long after you did. I wanted to catch Stryker. Also, I wasn’t sure if I could trust you.”

Henry kept his mouth shut.

“Sergeant Martinez managed to upload the data from the flash drive I’d given him. It’s worldwide now. He died doing it. I couldn’t get to him fast enough. Two problems. One, here in the US more than half of the population doesn’t have electricity. Folks aren’t connected. They don’t know what the hell is going on. Two, the data is incomplete. It’s damning, shows that there has been a massive conspiracy, but we need more information. We don’t have the people at the top. The politicians, the CEOs. Those are the people that need to be taken to the mat. They probably didn’t know what we had on them. They might even be relieved right about now.”

“Congress is in session in Boston,” the colonel went on. “There’s talk of reunification, but some of the factions are stonewalling, from what I know. The cease-fire is tenuous at best. The international community is terrified of lost nukes and the economic collapse that has been happening around the world because of this damn war.”

“My priority now is apprehending Stryker and your son of a bitch of a father-in-law. They are direct links to the command and control of the Directors. I have no idea where they might be headed, or whether they are even together. I suspect not. What that means for you is that you’re going to go home to your wife. There’s a remote chance Stryker will go after her because he’s vindictive to a fault. I’m going to send you home, Wilkins, along with three of these operators, in the unlikely event Stryker does make a try for your wife.”

“Sir, he already has. I saw the video feed.”

“We know. We hacked their system. Suzanne is in the wind now, though. She made it away from your house. There’s no reason Stryker ought to care one way or another about her now. She should be safe. Except he is a psychopath.”

“I’m putting you on a C-130,” the colonel said. “You leave in two hours for Homestead. I’m working on requisitioning either a helo or a Coast Guard vessel for you, but that’s not a done deal. Things are changing from minute to minute. There is a whole lot of shit hitting the fan.”

The helicopter landed on a runway at Nashville International Airport, which had been transformed into a military base. Commercial aircraft squatted in jumbled rows on fields and next to hangers, while fighter jets, transport planes, and attack helicopters occupied the runways. Henry had a sick feeling in his stomach, looking at a vital civilian hub taken over by the military.

Bart was dying, and there was nothing Suzanne could do to save him. The lightweight Boston Whaler skipped over the glassy water, up on a plane, the bow elevated and the engine humming along smoothly beneath a sky streaked with orange and pink as the sun rose in the Florida Keys. Their wake spread out behind them, foaming white and almost luminescent against the reflection of cloud and light.

She’d hauled Bart, who was barely conscious, into the boat and they let the tide take them for a few minutes before starting the engines and making the run through a maze of canals and then out into open water. They headed away from the channel and skimmed the flats, relying on Bobby’s encyclopedic knowledge of the local waterways. The boat was designed to draw almost nothing. Bobby adjusted the engine, tilting it up so that it did not protrude far into the water. This reduced their speed, but it meant they could go places most boats could not.

They wound through mangrove channels in the darkness, heading north and east. Now Suzanne wondered whether Bart would see afternoon.

A bullet had torn through his side from front to back, a hollow-point by the size of the exit wound. She’d packed the wound, given him morphine, and cradled his head in her lap while Bobby steered the boat. Bart’s breathing was shallow, and he was unconscious, his skin waxy and washed out.

The deck of the boat was awash in blood, as though they’d enjoyed a glorious day of fishing for dolphin or kingfish and were coming home with coolers loaded and bursting.

Taylor and Ginnie were curled up together in front of the center console, sleeping and no doubt cold. The blood gathered at the stern, mixing with seawater.

“We can make the turn west in another hour,” Bobby said. “Cut Florida Bay. There’s a lot of mangrove islands, places we can hide if we have to.” They’d been staying close to the larger islands, hoping to throw pursuit off.

“Okay,” Suzanne shouted back. The wind whipped around the boat and sea spray, salty and fresh, peppered her face.

“How’s he doing?”

“Not good,” Suzanne said.

“He gonna make it?”

“No. Maybe if he had a doctor and a hospital.”

“He’s a damn hero,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” Suzanne said.

Two specks on the horizon behind them grew closer. Suzanne watched intently, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sun on the water.

“Bobby,” Suzanne said. “Better make for one of these islands.”

Bobby turned his head and looked back, squinting, his beard and shaggy hair blowing. The boat turned, a sweeping arc toward a nearby pair of islands. The aircraft kept getting closer.

Bobby cut the engine. They used poles to propel the boat over mere inches of water into a canopied channel between the two islands, a space of less than twenty feet, the current swift between them. Bobby tossed the anchor out to keep the boat in place, and the Boston Whaler swung on the current, winding up against a tangle of branches. A few birds twittered angrily at them.

Minutes later two helicopters grumbled a few hundred feet over the water, perhaps a mile distant, and then disappeared in the direction of the mainland.

Suzanne checked on Bart again. His eyes were open. He groaned. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey. Water. I’m parched.”

“Okay,” she said. She helped him drink some bottled water. He could not lift his head.

“I’m done,” Bart said. He sounded far away. Like he could already see things Suzanne could not.

“You’re gonna make it,” she said. “You’re a fighter. Come on, Ranger.”

“No. Don’t bother lying,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”

“Thank you for what you did,” she said, leaning close to his face, her wet hair brushing against his forehead.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Bart said. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”

“I want to be remembered as one of the good guys.”

“You are. You saved us. You did that, Bart. You saved Taylor and me.”

“I should’ve gone after you,” Bart said. “A lifetime ago. Instead of her. Damn. Maybe things would’ve been better. What if I’d run you over instead of Mary? Don’t you ever think about that?”

“Sure,” she lied.

“I’ve always loved you,” Bart said. His eyes lost focus and he smiled and was silent for a time. Gentle waves lapped against the hull. A great blue heron speared a fish in the shallows and took flight, graceful and beautiful. “Maybe I married her just to be close to you,” Bart said. “I don’t know. If only…”

His eyes stayed open, and a last breath escaped his lungs and his chest did not rise again.

Suzanne held him for a few minutes, and she shut his eyelids. Bart died with a wistful smile on his face.

They had nothing to weigh his body down with. Ginnie and Taylor kissed Bart’s cold face, crying. It felt like a crime when they put him overboard. He floated into the shallows on his back under the shade of the mangroves. Soon the crabs would come for him, and the mangrove snapper and sharks.

“We’d better go,” Suzanne said. “I’ll take the helm for a while.”

“All right,” Bobby said. “I could use some sleep.”

They poled the boat back out into deeper water and Suzanne turned the key. The boat surged forward and the sun was warm on her face. Taylor came around the console, and Suzanne held her on her lap and let Taylor help steer.

Taylor’s face was pensive, her natural sunniness diminished and clouded by death. It was a day Suzanne knew her daughter would never forget. She shouldn’t have to see any of this. She doesn’t understand. I’m not protecting her like I should. I can’t shield her from this world, this crazy mean world.

I’m not worthy of this child.

There was the feeling of desolation in her, mingled with soul-wrenching regret.

She could never be the person she wanted to be, for she was not the woman she believed she had been. The lies she told herself had formed their own kind of reality, and she’d built her life upon a kind of delusion, perceiving the world through glasses tinted to filter what she wanted to see, rather than truth. Suzanne had looked at herself in the mirror and liked the person smiling back. Proud, arrogant perhaps, and dishonest. She’d overlooked her flaws, excused her own bad decisions, blamed others, and never recognized the pattern of truth. Her life was marred by betrayal and selfishness. There was good in her she could acknowledge, potential that was real, and she knew she was decent at heart. She was never the heroine she imagined herself to be, though, self-sacrificing, long-suffering and devoted.

The apple didn’t fall from the tree, I guess, after all.

There was a kind of freedom in recognizing the truth, and she inhaled a lung full of fresh, salty air, grateful for her daughter sitting on her lap at the wheel and the idea that perhaps she would get a second chance.

“What’s that, Momma?” Taylor said, pointing.

“That’s a storm, you know that.”

“We’re going toward it,” Taylor said. “Maybe we should turn around. That’s what Daddy does.”

“I wish we could, baby,” Suzanne said.