Page 75 of Duke
“I mean, itisa little rustic, I admit, but—” Puck started.
“Rustic?” Thresh echoed. “Rustic is a campground with a communal bathroom, your so-calledhunting shackis a two hundred year old log cabin with an actual outhouse, and by outhouse, I mean a hole in the ground with a hut on top of it.”
Lola cut in. “Look, normally what you’re describing sounds like my idea of hell, but if we have to hide out for a while, then I’ll go with it.” She glanced at me. “But I can’t speak for Temple, obviously.”
I hesitated. “My idea of rustic is a four star hotel, so this sounds…positively primeval.” I swallowed hard, realizing I didn’t have much choice. “But if it’s a choice between a hunting shack and more shooting, I’ll take the hunting shack.”
Harris nodded. “Then we’re agreed.” He clapped his hands together once, sharply. “Thresh, get the women to the helo and start her up. Puck and Anselm, we’re gonna go down to the bunker and gear up.”
Which was how I found myself buckled into a seat in the back of a Vietnam-era ex-military helicopter, complete with the machine gun and a complicated system of winches and cables meant to let people rappel from the hovering aircraft to the ground. Thresh had driven a tank truck over to the helicopter, fueled it up, re-parked the truck, and then went through an extensive checklist for starting up the helicopter, fumbling through each step, especially since he only had one working arm.
Another few minutes, and the other men arrived in a battered, rusted pickup truck. The bed of the truck was full of black bags, each of which looked heavy, meaning they were full of guns and ammunition and other such unpleasant things these men liked to play with. They also had a huge white YETI cooler and a smaller, less heavy duffel bag, which they tossed to us.
I unzipped it, and discovered it to be full of what appeared to be Layla’s clothing.
Harris shrugged when I glanced at him in curiosity. “You’re all of similar size and build as Layla. Might not fit exactly right, but I figured it’s better to have extra clothes that don’t quite fit, and Layla has so much clothing she’ll never miss that shit anyway.” He gestured at the cooler. “That’s got food in it, as Puck wasn’t sure what was at the cabin. Sit tight for now, we’ll be underway shortly.”
By underway, I discovered, he meant skimming the treeline at speeds that made my stomach queasy, the side doors hauled open so the ground whizzed beneath us mere feet away, only the seatbelt keeping me inside the aircraft. Anselm, for his part, had his rifle on the floor beside him and was sitting half out of the helicopter, one foot on the landing strut, not even holding on to anything, looking absolutely at ease.
Once I got used to the speed and the open doors, though, the flight proved boring, and I felt myself nodding off.
Eventually, I gave in and let myself fall asleep.
11: THE BEAST
Motherfuckers weren’t playing around, this time.
I spent a good hour and a half in the back of that Wrangler, broken arm throbbing like a bitch. I wasn’t bound in anyway, but the Wrangler was doing eighty-five on a freeway, and there were two other SUVs full of Cain’s guys behind us, so there wasn’t much I could do just yet.
We pulled into the private aircraft section of a rural airport and parked by a waiting Gulfstream. The line of vehicles maneuvered to a stop around the rolling stairs leading up to the jet, positioned in such a way that I had nowhere to go but up and into the jet. Rayburn yanked open the back door, grabbed me by the collar, and hauled me out of the back of the Wrangler fast enough that I had to scramble to avoid hitting the tarmac. A quick glance around told me that my escape wasn’t happening now, either, as I was surrounded by HKs and M-16s, each one trained on me; I counted a dozen.
Guess they were finally starting to feel a bit of respect for my abilities, huh?
Rayburn gestured at the jet. “Get up there, or die on the tarmac. Your choice.”
Knowing when to cut the bullshit is an important skill to have, and one I’ve not exactly mastered, but in this situation I was prudent enough to know I’d pushed Rayburn as far as I could. If I wanted to keep my body free of unnecessary holes, I’d keep my mouth shut and watch for the lowest-risk opportunity to escape.
Thus, I walked my ass up the stairs and into the Gulfstream. It wasn’t as nice as Harris’s, and certainly not as swank as Roth’s, but it was a nice jet.
It was also stuffed full of more mercs with assault rifles and submachine guns.
I shot a look at Rayburn, who had come up behind me. “Seriously, how many of you fuckers are there?”
Rayburn quirked a grin at me. “More than you know.”
I rolled my eyes as I took an empty seat. “You know, this whole Cain-is-so-mysterious, Cain-is-more-than-you-know bullshit is seriously over the top. Like, dial it back a few notches, ya’ll. This ain’t a Clive Cussler novel, and Cain sure as shit ain’t some super villain.”
Rayburn laughed. “You know, under different circumstances, I think you and I might have gotten along, Duke.” The humor drained out of him, and he stuck the barrel of a pistol against my forehead. “But the circumstances being what they are, you need to shut the fuck up. I’m under orders to bring you in alive, but you keep running that mouth of yours and I’ll put a bullet in your pretty fucking head.”
“Aww, Rayburn, you think I’m pretty?” I winked at him. “I don’t swing that way, but I’m flattered.”
Rayburn thumbed back the hammer of his pistol with an ominousclick. “One more joke, Silver—watch what happens.”
I leaned back in the comfy leather seat and buckled up. “All right, all right. I’m shutting up. Don’t get your panties in a rumple, Stiltskin.”
The door was closed from the outside, and then after a couple seconds I felt the engines spool up; a minute later I was pushed back in my seat as we launched skyward.
I’ve always been a restless, active kind of guy; if I’d gone to school regularly past, like, seventh grade, I’m guessing I would have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, because I just can’t sit still, can’t be inactive, can’t just sit and do nothing, and focusing on boring shit like reading is an act of will—which makes my university degree one of the greatest accomplishments of my life, because that shit washard.I don’t sit still well, which means flights are fucking torture for me. My knee bounces on its own like a motor-driven piston, my hands find something to fidget with, be it a pen I click or a seatbelt latch, or paper I can shred; if there’s just nothing to do, I can get…annoying, let’s just say. The guys in my unit, when we took long flights to deployment or an insertion or something, discovered the best way to keep the peace with me on the flight was to keep me entertained. We’d arm wrestle, play cards, prank each other, immature guy shit like that. It helped that we were usually in the back of a military cargo jet or something like that, maybe an Osprey if it was an in-country insertion, meaning there was more room for me to move around.