“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.