"You don't have time, Caitlin. There's a storm front coming in from the west. They've moved everything forward ahead of it. Air cav is assaulting into Central Park right now. As soon as they're down, air force is going to hammer the city flat. Or at least that part you want to head into. You don't have an hour, Caitlin. They are in the air now. Bombed up and inbound."
He was right. She could see the leading edge of the air assault coming in over his shoulder. Small black dots for now but growing larger every second, resolving themselves into an airborne armada of UH-60s and their gunship flankers. There looked to be about a dozen in the first wave and another two waves stacked up behind them, probably formed up in one of the new, stripped-down regimental combat teams the army was testing. Say, four hundred men on the ground within a quarter of an hour.
Wales almost had her into the cabin when she finally dug her heels in. She could see the smugglers and the cavalry troopers in the helicopter staring at her as though she were mad. But she didn't care.
"Wales, if we let him get away this time, he will be back in our faces worse than ever. You know that. He will come back at me. I know it's not personal, but it is. If that makes any fucking sense. You have to let me go. You have to let me get him."
"I can't, Caitlin," he said, looking older and more worn down than she had ever seen him before. "I'm not just following orders. I'm here because I don't want you to die. My daughter died four years ago. And my wife. And my brother and his wife and their kids. Everybody I cared for in the world is gone. Everybody but you. You have your own family now, Caitlin. I understand what that means. I understand the madness and the fear of it, because you are my family. You are all I have left. You are my daughter now, and I can't let you go."
She felt her throat closing up tight and her eyes beginning to water. She turned away so that nobody in the helicopter could see her. Wales Larrison stepped up around in front of her and raised her chin with his forefinger.
"He won't win, Caitlin," he said, projecting his voice through the thudding of the rotor blades. "He won't even get close. And I can give you my personal guarantee that he will never get within a thousand miles of Bret or Monique again. Ever."
"Why? How? Are we going to surround them with traps and razor wire?"
"No, Caitlin," he answered, gently steering her back toward the cabin. "Because he's going to die sometime today, or he's going to die in the very near future when you put your hand inside him and squeeze the life out of his heart. But not today."
She was numb. Numb and exhausted and somewhere out over the edge of things where she might be free-falling or floating or possibly even drifting away from the world.
Caitlin climbed into the chopper and sat in the front of the cabin, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Wales strapped himself into the seat beside her and placed one arm around her shoulders. That was all it took. She fell apart and started crying, covering her face with her hands as the chopper lifted off from the roof. "I believe 'I told you so' would be appropriate at this point, Miss Jules."
The roar of the helicopter's takeoff was loud enough that Julianne could have pretended not to have heard the Rhino, but she was past caring anymore.
"About Cesky and Rubin, you mean?" she said. "You never told me anything about that other than your plans for spending the money."
"No," he insisted as they left the roof of the office building on East 60th Street behind. "I meant that." He pointed out of the cabin behind her, over toward Central Park. Jules had to lean forward to see past the door gunner who was covering their ignominious exit from New York. She had no idea what was going on with Wonder Woman and the old guy up front. She looked like she'd dropped her entire bundle in the last two minutes.
The sky over Central Park was swarming with helicopters just like theirs, Blackhawks full of troops. Sleeker, deadlier-looking gunships weaved through the congested air traffic, protecting the airborne assault, just as the Rhino had predicted. Unlike him, she was not a military enthusiast, and she had no idea how many men were involved or what it meant beyond a dramatic escalation of the war that was tearing the city apart block by block.
"What is that?" the Rhino bellowed over the racket. "One hundred first Airborne?"
One of the soldiers riding shotgun in the cabin-literally riding shotgun, Jules thought as she took in his armament-nodded. "The Screaming fucking Eagles, man," he shouted back. "Playtime is over."
As the helicopters stacked up one behind the other in a sort of layered effect to begin landing their troops, two of the waspish-looking gunships peeled off and began to pour a storm of machine gun and rocket fire down onto an unseen target over on that side of the city. And then Jules's chopper banked around and swung out toward the East River, taking them away from the action, the worst of the danger, and off toward the unknown. She had a package of papers tucked away inside a ballistic vest the flight crew had given her. She hoped they would go some way toward securing her immediate future, even though she had no idea what was in them, just that they had guaranteed her passage out of the trap Henry Cesky had set for her.
Jules ground her teeth and bit back on a throat full of bile when she thought of him. Her father had long ago advised her against investing in any scheme that had vengeance at its heart. But Cesky had invested heavily in his plan to settle up with her for leaving him and his family behind in Acapulco. What side of the equation did that leave her on now? Was she the vengeance seeker or the one upon whom vengeance was to be visited?
She had no idea.
53
Texas Administrative Division Miguel could not shake the creeping fear that wanted to run wild as they mustered the cattle out of the little valley. But at least it was a sensible fear, not like the preternatural dread that had stolen over him back in Leona. This was merely a rational fear of being caught by the road agents he had observed the previous day. The vaquero had no illusions about how such an encounter would go. Oh, they would give a good accounting of themselves for sure, possibly taking down one or two agents for each of their own who fell. But in the end, they would be overwhelmed. Of that there could be no doubt. And then Sofia, if she lived, would be their prey.
And so, in the hours before dawn, they snuck away from Pineywoods Lake. With the agents so far to the west, there was no need for any elaborate displays of subterfuge. Still, he could not help keeping his voice down as he spoke to the other riders and called out to the dogs as they orbited the edge of the herd. Protesting cows, the muffled crunch of thousands of hooves on soft ground, a few whip cracks and whistles, his daughter riding high in the saddle next to him-it was all so familiar yet so alien in this empty landscape.
The coming sunrise had not yet burned off the early-morning fog as they began to move north, heading for the Johnson National Grasslands up near the border with Oklahoma. Miguel's head felt thick and fuzzy with the lack of sleep and the four or five glasses of red wine he had shared with Miss Jessup last night. After finishing the first "corked" bottle, she had produced another and pronounced it perfect. A chilled cerveza would have been perfect for Miguel, but he had to admit that the red wine did go down without too many protests.
"Hungover, cowboy?"
He turned to find that the very woman had ridden up behind him, catching him woolgathering and unaware. She was not a natural in the saddle. Indeed, the gelding struggled a little with its inexperienced passenger. But the strange "manbivalent" woman with the cheeky sense of humor and the warm laugh rode easily enough at this sedate pace. Most folks did nowadays, at least in the countryside.