The Archimedes Effect

15

Eastern Seaboard Airlines Flight 1012

In the Air Somewhere over Tennessee

Carruth leaned back in the first-class jet seat and sipped at his drink, ice with one of those little bottles of bourbon. He smiled. It had been a banner week for him, at least when it came to capping people. First, the two Metro cops, then those two terrorist wannabes in New Orleans. It was good to know that, when push came to shove, he still had the moves. Yeah, training on the range was all well and good, and VR was getting more and more realistic, but there was nothing quite like the real thing: There was the sudden rush of adrenaline, the pucker-factor going from zero to full. The recoil of a rifle butt against your shoulder, the smell of gunpowder, the sharp crack! as the bullet zipped from the barrel and broke the sound barrier, loud even past the earplugs he wore . . .

Squeeze the trigger, work the bolt, squeeze again, and the bad guys went poof!

He knew Lewis wouldn’t count those three down on the Mississippi as a great victory—except that she had walked away alive and they hadn’t—but that’s why he’d been there as backup, and he’d done his job. She put two into the buyer—bam-bam! quick as you please—and he already had the scope dot lined up on the one who thought he was hiding a few meters away. Carruth cooked the sucker before he got his pistol into gear.

The second guy Carruth hadn’t seen until he started moving, but he had a good idea of where the guy should be, if he was there, and sure enough, he was almost spot on when the guy stepped into view.

Two shots, two up, two down—couldn’t do much better than that.

Three dead men on the ground and it was time to leave!

Lewis headed for the boat she’d set up. Either she’d make it or she wouldn’t, that was her concern. He cranked the van’s motor and took off.

He had three routes worked out, but the first one had been all he’d needed. It was as if God smiled upon him—the lights all turned green, there weren’t any traffic accidents, nobody working on the roads, it couldn’t have been any smoother. Some days, you got the bear, and he was happy this was one of them.

He crossed the Mississippi on the Highway 90 bridge, into Gretna, drove west, and took a dirt road to the south. He stopped at a big sludge pond near the railroad tracks—they had plenty of water down here—ponds, bayous, canals, lakes, and more.

He made sure nobody was watching him before he got the rifle out of the van.

He wasn’t attached to the deer rifle. He slung the .30-06 into the pond. He got back in the van and continued west, past the St. Charles Parish Hospital, veered to the north and east on I-310 to the Airline Highway, and then back to the airport. If anybody ever found the weapon, which was unlikely, it was clean, no prints, and there was no way to trace it to him—it had been bought by one of his men at a gun show in Orange County, California, from somebody who didn’t have a table but was walking around with a “for sale” sign stuck in the barrel. A cash transaction—Carruth’s man didn’t give a name, nor did he know the name of the man who had sold it to him. Perfect.

He’d turned the van back in, sans the magnetic sign, buried his gloves in a garbage bin, and gone to catch his flight, with two hours to spare. Slick as a spray of Break Free on a glass tabletop.

With the Winchester at the bottom of the pond, Carruth was more or less unarmed. He hadn’t wanted to risk shipping his BMF revolver anywhere, so it was locked in his gun safe at his house.

He sipped the liquor. Well, he wasn’t totally unarmed. He had a briefcase—one of those big, heavy, aluminum jobs, and it held two hardback books so thick he could barely close the case. He was fairly sure that the case and books would be enough to stop or at least slow down a common pistol round, enough so it wouldn’t kill him if it did get through. So if some would-be hijacker tried to take over the plane, that would give him some protection when he rushed the guy. If all the guy had was a knife? Then that wasn’t gonna be enough against a trained Navy SEAL swinging five kilos of metal briefcase. Carruth would pound that fool like a man driving railroad spikes.

There hadn’t been a successful hijacking of a U.S. commercial jet in a while—those maniacs who’d attacked the Towers had made hijacking a dangerous business. Before, people would sit still and wait for the authorities to deal with it; now, somebody stood up and announced that he was taking over the plane? Everybody and his old granny would jump the guy—he’d be hit with everything that wasn’t nailed down. If you figured you were going to get plowed into a building, then a guy with a box cutter didn’t seem so scary. People survived being stabbed all the time—hitting a skyscraper at a couple hundred miles an hour and being turned into a jet-fuel fireball didn’t leave any survivors.

Carruth finished his drink. He thought about getting a second one, and decided against it. He needed to stay sober, just in case. Terrible, that you had to worry about such things in the United States of America.

Well, Carruth was prepared. Nobody was taking this jet anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go, not on his watch.

FBI/Net Force/Marine Corps Obstacle Course

Quantico, Virginia

There were days when Abe Kent felt like he had at nineteen. He’d get out of bed rested, no aches and pains anywhere, and if it weren’t for the bathroom mirror, he could almost forget for a minute that nineteen was more than forty years behind him.

This wasn’t one of those days. Normally, as part of his warm-up before he ran the obstacle course, he’d do ten or twelve chins, fifty push-ups, some crunches and stretches, to get the blood flowing and his joints limber. But a front was moving in, there was a cold and nasty drizzle falling, a little snow and a few ice pellets in the mix, and after eight chins, he knew he wasn’t going to get another rep without pulling something.

He managed forty push-ups before he ran out of steam, and one set of crunches where he normally did two. After which, he was tired enough so that actually going through the course seemed to be a lot more trouble than it was worth.

The devil on his shoulder said, Hell, Abe, you’re a general now, you can delegate things. Nobody expects you to be out in the cold rain running the obstacle course like some raw recruit! You don’t need to be able to beat men young enough to be your grandchildren! Bag this! Go home, take a hot shower, catch a few more winks—you earned it!

Kent smiled. Yeah, that’s how it started. Listen to that voice and pretty soon, you’re sitting in front of the television most of the time, drinking beer and thinking about how tough you were in the good old days. He might fall over dead from a heart attack, but if he did, at least it was better to do it here than sitting on his butt at home.

He headed for the course.

Only a few people out here this early, in the cold and wet. One of them looked familiar, just ahead of him. . . .

“John?”

“Morning, Abe.”

The two men shook hands. “I didn’t know you still came out here.”

“Got to,” Howard said. “Too easy to turn into a couch potato, now that I’m a civilian.”

“You could join a nice warm gym.”

Howard laughed. “When I can come here for free? Nah. Besides, there are too many sweet young things in tight spandex at the gym my wife doesn’t want me staring at. Gets hard to keep your mind on your workout. Not a problem out here with old jarheads in dirty sweats.”

Kent laughed.

“I thought for a minute there you were going to turn around and leave,” Howard said.

“For a minute there, I was. There are days when inertia is really hard to overcome.”

“I hear that. You want me to give you a head start?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I expect an old jarhead can keep up with a fat and out-of-shape ex-Army civilian, even if I have twenty years on him.”

Both men laughed.

Richmond, Virginia

“Trust me, Tommy, it couldn’t have gone any better. Compared to Ruth and Amos, my parents—if they ever get back from their Canadian vacation—will be a walk in the park.”

Thorn nodded. “I liked them.”

“Good thing.”

“So, when are we going to do this wedding?”

She shrugged. “We could do it Friday, if it was just me, but my mother will want a big church to-do. Even though I am getting long in the tooth for a white dress. I don’t think she ever really expected it would happen, so that’s the least I can do.”

“So, you figure it’ll take a couple months to set up?”

She laughed. “A couple months? Lord, even a shotgun wedding would take that long. A regular wedding takes at least a year to plan.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You keep saying that when you know I’m not.”

“What’s to plan? Get a church, buy a dress, print some invitations, hire a preacher.”

She laughed again. “So much to learn, so little time . . .”