At his words, a pair of muffled shots rang out from Han’s suppressed Sig-Sauer, sounding like hammer blows in the night. The headlights of the pick-up went out almost simultaneously, plunging the airfield into a darkness punctuated only by the eerie orange light of the flares.
The big man swore, reaching inside his jacket, but Harry’s Colt was already in his hand. “Don’t even think it. Light ‘em up, Sammy!”
The SCAR’s laser came flickering out of the darkness, centering on the head of the redneck with the Mossberg. For a moment it looked like he might drop the scattergun and flee.
“Tell your men to put their guns on the ground.” The leader’s hand reached toward his belt, but Harry shook his head. “Left hand. Pull it out with your fingers.”
“What do you want, man?” the leader demanded, his words almost a hoarse scream. He was wearing a long-barreled .44 Smith & Wesson — too long for a good draw. It fell to the ground with a dull thud.
“That depends — what you boys smuggling?” Harry asked, moving in closer, his pistol still leveled. “Marijuana? Hillbilly heroin?”
The man looked momentarily frightened. “None of your business, lawman.”
Movement out of the corner of his eye and Harry saw a pistol materialize in the hand of one of the Hispanics, a report reverberating out through the night as the bullet sliced through the air past his head.
Time seemed to slow down as the Colt came up in his hand. He fired two shots, both of them going wild in the darkness. Pandemonium. Harry threw himself prone. The big man dove for his discarded revolver.
There could be no hesitation — there wasn’t time to second-guess yourself, no matter how much you hated it. Han felt the bile rise in his throat as he lined up the laser sight on the young man’s chest. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, twenty at the most. Not even old enough to drink.
No time.
He knew what to do, his finger curling around the SCAR’s trigger, taking up the slack. A motion as natural as taking breath as he squeezed — once, twice, three times in rapid succession.
The .308 slugs caught the kid high in the chest, smashing through his lungs. The pistol fell from his fingers and he toppled backward, his arms and legs moving spasmodically.
Dear God…
The leader had been elsewhere the day they passed out the brains. He heard the kid cry out and froze, realizing that he was staring down the barrel of Harry’s Colt less than six feet away. He didn’t take his hand off the butt of the S&W.
Harry shot him once, in the left knee, and the man pitched forward, groveling in the dirt as he screamed.
And the firefight was over as quickly as it had started, the rest of the drugrunners shocked into submission. Harry walked over to the groaning man. “Nobody needed to get hurt,” he said, a quiet menace in his voice. “Now, we’re taking your plane.”
“No, no, you can’t do that,” the big man screamed, trying to roll onto his back. Harry kicked the revolver away, out of reach. Remove the temptation. “Manuel’ll kill me.”
“Doesn’t sound like my problem,” Harry responded coldly, tapping the suppressor against the man’s temple. “All you need to worry about is what I’ll do if you get in my way.”
It was moments like this when he questioned how much he really wanted the Presidency — questioned all he’d done to retain this power. Power? He’d never felt more powerless. His fifth phone call — nothing. And Shapiro hadn’t been able to do anything to help.
“Roger — we need to talk.” Hancock slipped the iPhone into his shirt pocket and turned.
His “better half” stood in the doorway of the Residence’s bedroom. At forty-six, Nicole Hancock was several years his junior, a tall, elegant brunette. She looked like a First Lady.
She might have even carried it off with him, if not for the look of steel in those emerald green eyes. God — if there was a God — knew she was twice the political operative he was.
He let out a bitter sigh. Could this night get any worse?
“I don’t suppose this can wait?”
“You’re not the only one keeping late hours, Roger. I just got in from a meeting with Trevor Ellison at the Hay Adams.”
That got his attention. Ellison was the managing editor of The Washington Post. “What did he want?”
She closed the door behind them and gestured to the manila envelope on the Victorian-era writing desk by the bed. His bed — she slept elsewhere in the Residence, a fact that the media had yet to latch hold of. They didn’t call it the Secret Service for nothing.
A premonition seized hold of Hancock as he ripped open the flap. The first picture showed him on-stage at a summit in Cancun the first week of October. Mary Workman was standing at his shoulder, along with the rest of his staff. But her face was circled in red. The second picture, from the same summit, had been taken with a telephoto lens.
Mary, dressed in a black bikini, standing on the balcony of his hotel. She’d been watching the sunset, he remembered. He looked closer at the photo and his breath caught in his throat. A pair of arms were wrapped around her bare waist in a loving embrace, a figure leaning over her shoulder.
The next picture was a duplicate, lightened and digitally enhanced. In it, you could clearly make out the face of her lover. It was him.
He ran a hand over his face and laid the photos down. “I need a drink.”
“It gets better, Roger,” the First Lady observed, standing there against the door, her arms folded across her chest. “The journalist that approached Trevor with the story has established that Mary had no prior history of drug use. He’s speculating that she became an inconvenient paramour. Your paramour.”
“Is he going to run the story?”
She sniffed. “No. No one prizes their access more than Trevor Ellison — he’s not going to give that up just to publish a speculative hit piece.”
Hancock let out a long sigh of relief, but she wasn’t done yet. “When we were first married, we both knew that our union was nothing more than a political alliance. That’s why I agreed that it would be an open marriage. I only had one requirement, Roger. Do you remember what it was?”
He did. All too well. “That my affairs would be discreet.”
She threw the balcony picture down on the desk. “Does that look discreet to you?”
And she was gone.
They still had roughly another hour till the sun was up, but the faint glow of the morning sun had started to creep over the trees. Time to leave.
Harry walked back over to where the four surviving drugrunners lay in front of the hangar, their hands zip-tied behind their backs. “I’m sure Manuel will come looking for you sooner or later, so don’t worry.”
The leader shook his head furiously, but he couldn’t speak past the oil-stained rag stuffed in his mouth. Harry took another look at the bandages Han had applied to his shattered knee and nodded. “You won’t bleed out, but if I were you, I’d lose a few pounds before I put weight on that knee again. Manuel can find his cocaine over in our helo, so don’t worry about him,” he added, turning to leave. “Call it a Christmas gift to my favorite drugrunners.”
Harry paused as if in afterthought, extracting a small black box from the pocket of his leather jacket. His finger pressed down on the detonator, the Sikorsky exploding in flame, a pillar of fire lighting up the sky.