They were taking one-hour shifts, perched on top of the pile of air conditioners, keeping watch on the Missile Park. Gordy’s blue F-150 arrived at the bar and parked around back. Nina and Broker marked time, sitting side by side in a mist of mosquito repellent. She lit a cigarette to discourage the bugs. He got out his rough wraps.
“When did you start smoking again?” he asked.
“About the time this thing picked up speed.” She put out her hand in the graying light and squashed a mosquito on his cheek. It left a small dot of blood. Then she patted his waist. “So, where’s your club?”
Personal joke. He was at best a competent shot with a handgun, and usually packed a.45 for its utility as a hefty “tamer,” for close-in thumping. “Don’t say anything,” he said softly, “but I think your Indian lifted it from under the front seat when I was parked across from the bar.”
She laid her palm along his cheek. “Broker, Broker.”
“Yeager brought an extra shotgun, in the back,” he said.
“You won’t need it. Holly’s crew will handle any rough stuff.” She leaned back, then said, “So, did Kit get home okay?”
Broker grimaced. “You know, I never called once this rolled out.”
Nina nodded. “We’ll call tonight, if it’s not too late.”
Just ordinary talk, like little building blocks. Repair work. Due diligence. Broker nibbled lightly on his cigar. After several false starts, he said softly, “I’m glad you’re all right.”
She turned away, almost nervous to be close to him after so long. What if he really did see her in the window with Ace? She turned, faced him. Jesus, Broker. Impulsively she reached over and squeezed his hand.
“Ouch.” He drew back.
She cringed. Wrong hand. Story of my life, she thought.
“You were never one for hand jobs,” he quipped.
“Not like Jolene, huh?” she came right back.
“Jolene, as I recall, had three hands.”
They moved closer to each other so their legs and shoulders touched.
Yeager passed around water bottles and energy bars from Jane’s bag. They ate, they smoked, they were bitten by mosquitoes as the light faded to dusk and then to darkness.
Then Jane’s urgent whisper cut through the bug-spray stink: “He’s on the move.”
She hopped down from her perch and said, “Okay, I’ll drive. Yeager rides shotgun. Nina and Broker can neck in the backseat.” They walked swiftly to Broker’s Explorer that was parked in the tall weeds a few yards away. As they got in they could see the headlights on Ace’s Tahoe swing as he turned onto the highway.
Yeager said, “Give him a hundred-yard lead, then pull on the road. No lights.”
“What’s the deal?” Nina asked.
“Yeager is guide. He knows the roads,” Broker said.
“But how do we follow a guy in the dark on a deserted road without being seen?”
“Trust me,” Yeager said. “Let’s go.”
Jane put them on onto the road, following the tiny red dots of Ace’s running lights. Then he hit his break lights and turned left just before he came to the town limits. North.
“Keep going, past where he turned,” Yeager said.
“We’ll lose him,” Nina said.
“We keep going,” Jane said.
“I don’t know about this,” Nina said. They drove for minutes, too long. Ace was gone.
“Take the next left,” Yeager said.
They swung left and accelerated down a two-lane blacktop. Yeager pointed to the left. “We’ll parallel him. See? Those are his headlights.” A mile away across the black fields they saw his beams cut the night.
Nina looked around, noticed they were losing the light from town, headed into total blackness. “He’s speeding up. We can’t keep pace with our lights off,” she said.
Jane reached down. “How soon you forget. Remember? We own the fucking night.” She reached for a set of night-vision goggles on a webbed elastic headband. In a fast, practiced move, she yanked them over her head and adjusted them to her eyes. Broker made out her profile in the dim spill light from the dashboard-part insect, part unicorn.
Yeager said, “That’s what I need, a pair of those…”
Then Jane dialed the dash lights down to a bare flicker, stepped down hard on the gas.
“Ohhhhh shit!” Broker and Yeager reached for the handholds above their doors as the Explorer bucked, hurtling forward through the rushing darkness. No road in front of the car. No center line. No shoulder. No control. Lots of stars, though.
Jane glanced to the side, her head and the protruding goggles grotesque and alien in the faint glow of the dash. “How we doing, Yeager? Better than lights and sirens?”
Yeager, his feet braced, leaned back and grinned through clenched teeth, enjoying the carnival ride of his life. The headlights to the left fell off behind as they pulled well ahead.
Oh, Jeez. Broker didn’t like this. There were going sixty, maybe faster. Maybe seventy. Three, four minutes of it, more…
“In about two miles we take a left. We should be able to beat him to Richmond Corners. There’s a tree line we can pull into. When he goes by, we’ll fall in behind,” Yeager said.
“He won’t see us?” Nina said.
“Don’t think so,” Yeager said. “He’ll kill his lights when he hits the gravel. What they usually do is creep up to their pickup point. Since there’s hardly any moon, he can’t spot landmarks, so he’ll be going by his odometer. He won’t be scared off by anything but headlights.”
“Not bad,” Nina said. Yeager knew his stuff. Never could’ve done this on their own. And if they’d gone through channels, there’d be a mob of cops and feds out here cluttering up the road. But this, so far, was just right. She reached over, found Broker’s good hand in the dark this time, and squeezed it.
“What do you want?” he feigned wariness.
“Hold your hand, asshole,” she said.
He returned the squeeze. Felt good, too. After all this time. Then Jane stabbed the gas and Broker tensed, pressed back in his seat by imaginary G-forces.
Jane, her augmented eyes fixed on the road, had an adrenaline frog in her throat as she shouted over her shoulder: “Don’t get your hopes up, Nina. Holly ran this Khari guy through all the databases. His dad was with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But that was twenty years ago. Khari immigrated here to live with his uncle after his folks died in 1982. He comes off pretty clean. And his uncle was a decorated Korean War vet.”
“We’ll see,” Nina said.
“It gets worse. Homeland Security sent a honcho in to watch over us tonight. One of those serious prayer-breakfast types. Same old same old. He wants to shut Holly down for exceeding his authority.”
“Aw, Christ,” Nina said. “It’s Afghanistan all over again.”
“You got it,” Jane said.
“What happened in Afghanistan?” Broker asked.
“Holly and some of his regular Army pals tried to commit a couple U.S. battalions on the Pakistani border to seal the routes out of Tora Bora. Washington was afraid of taking U.S. casualties on the ground. They nixed the plan and relied on the B-52s and the Afghan warlords. Holly got in a lot of trouble and bin Laden got away,” Nina said.
“That’s our Holly-fighting a two-front war against terrorism and Washington. Then there’s the hawk,” Jane said.
“The hawk?” Broker asked.
“The Black Hawk at the radar base,” Nina explained. “The people trying to shut us down are saying Holly stole it.”
Hearing this, Broker smiled in the dark. I’m starting to like this Holly guy…
“Wait a minute,” Yeager said nervously. “You guys stole a helicopter?”
“Whoa, hold on,” Nina said. “It’s this gray area. Justice and the FBI want to arrest people and charge them with civil crimes, right? But if these guys are the real thing tonight, we’re going to snatch them as enemy combatants. Naturally, they’re a bit more sticky about procedure. We didn’t ask permission, we just took the bird and went.”
“Uh-huh,” Yeager said, sounding unconvinced. He turned in the front seat. “What do you think, Broker?”
“I think they probably borrowed the helicopter…”
“Yeah, borrowed. Along with a Delta team and an NBC response tech,” Jane said.
“NBC?” Yeager said. “Christ, we got televison in on this?”
“That’s a nuclear, biological, and chemical responder from Department of Defense,” Jane said with a twist of humor in her voice.
“Oh shit!” Yeager said.
“Yeah, see? Now you know who you’re running with? No wonder they’re so strung out,” Broker said.
“Hey, people. Turn should be coming up,” Yeager said.
Jane slowed the Explorer, pulling up hard on a gravel road. They completed the turn and she accelerated again. Off to the left the headlights were almost a mile away.
Several minutes passed. The headlights drew closer. “You should see a clump of trees on your right, and the road intersection,” Yeager said.
“Got ’em,” Jane said.
“There’s a shallow shoulder and a dip, just ride it into the trees and stop,” Yeager said.
Jane didn’t respond, intent on driving. The tires left gravel, then bit into dirt and vegetation. Weeds and shrubs snapped against the chassis, whipped in the dark through the open windows. Broker still couldn’t see anything but an orange glow back toward Langdon. A big clump of brush hit the door. Milt’s Ford was going to need a visit to the body shop.
“Good…stop,” Yeager said.
They stopped, killed the motor, and held their breath as the night air turned loud with insect buzz and the cooling ticks of the engine. The headlights came closer and they only caught the barest flicker of a vehicle a hundred yards away as it passed. Then Ace turned off his lights.
“It’s him all right-a new Tahoe,” Jane said.
“Okay, give him another hundred yards,” Yeager said. Jane did. “Now get on the road.” She drove to the intersection, turned right. Much closer now. “Okay, when he turns off, you turn off into the fields, but the minute he stops you stop. And kill the motor. We play dead. He’ll probably shut down, too, and listen before he does the pickup.”
“Christ, this is like a submarine movie,” Broker said.
They all giggled to break the tension.
“Oh shit,” Janey said. “He just turned again.”
“We’re cool, he’s just turned on a prairie road that runs toward the border. Get ready. Won’t be long now,” Yeager said.
Jane followed the Tahoe through one last turn and they all breathed in sharp when she cranked the wheel and drove into the waist-high field. Damp splatters pelted the sides of the Ford and a heavy, pungent scent came in through the open windows. Tiny wet blossoms tickled Broker’s face.
“Canola,” Yeager said. Then: “Kill it, now!”
They jerked to a halt and the motor stopped. Dead quiet. Just the oily reek of the crushed canola, the engine ticking down, and the whir of mosquitoes.
Jane leaned out her open window, straining her body into the night.
“He’s out, he walking. Walking…Barely see him, more’n a hundred yards. Shit, now he’s walking around in a circle, like he’s lost. Ah, wait. Okay. He stopped. Oh boy, he’s bent over and he’s dragging something heavy, dragging it back to the truck.”
“All right,” Nina said. Sitting next to her, Broker could feel her shift gears as a wave of exhausted tension drained out of her. And the adrenaline afterburners kicked in.
“That’s it, he popped the hatch and he’s manhandling it into the back. He’s done. Hatch is down,” Jane said.
“I thought it would be more of a load,” Yeager said.
“There’s some small packages that pack a hell of wallop,” Nina said slowly.
“Jesus-NBC, huh?” Yeager said.
“Yeah,” Nina said.
They all saw his brake lights as he backed up.
“What do we do?” Janey said.
“Give him some room. We know where he’s going, don’t we?” Yeager said.
“Fine with me.” Jane flopped back in her seat and took a few deep breaths. Then she got on her cell. “Holly, this is Jane. We have a confirmed pickup.” That’s all. She put the phone down.
“Let’s take a minute to work out the ground rules,” Nina said, her voice exploring the darkness in Yeager’s direction.
“The way I explained it to Yeager, he wants in, he accepts that the rules are pretty fluid,” Broker said.
“Yeager,” Nina said, “you got your badge and gun on you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And this place they’re planning to meet, it’s in your county?”
“Yep.”
“You aren’t thinking of like-arresting anybody, are you?” Janey asked.
“How far would I get?” Yeager’s voice was respectful but with just an edge of testing.
Broker joined in. “There’ll be other people where we’re going, people who work with Jane and Nina. I got a feeling that Jane and Nina, they’re the nice ones.”
“What? You’re saying I could disappear?” Yeager said evenly.
No one answered.
“Okay, at least tell me what I’m not a part of here.” Yeager said. “Is Ace Shuster meeting some terrorists? ’Cause that’s what you’re putting out between the lines.”
“This is just my gut read on him,” Nina said, “but I don’t think he knows if he is. I don’t think he has any idea what he just dragged into his car.”
“So what did he just drag to his car?” Yeager said.
“They can’t say,” Broker said, “ ’cause they ain’t here, are they? But I can speculate…”
“Like, you mean, just you and me talking,” Yeager said.
“Just you and me talking.”
“And?”
“They have some pretty good intelligence it could involve a tactical nuclear device.”
Another interval of silence.
Then Nina said, “Yeager, if you or me disappear, well, that’s not cool. But if a big chunk of Chicago or Kansas City disappears…”
“Start the car,” Yeager said, his voice trembling with excitement.