Page 44

Unable to sleep, he left the motel and found a convenience store.

He loaded up on water and non-perishable food, surprised word wasn’t out yet in this area and that there hadn’t already been a run on this little store.

Grateful for small blessings, he took his purchases and headed back to the motel.

Piper was pacing the room restlessly when he unlocked the door. “Thank God!” she cried out. “They’ve cut off all the phones, and the television is out.”

“Is the TV itself not working, or is the cable service down?” he asked with interest.

“Whole cable company is shut down according to the desk clerk. And the phone land lines are out, too.”

“Uncle Sam’s not going to be able to sit on this for too much longer,” Ian commented.

“Which makes me think the PHP will have to make its move soon. As infrastructure is taken off line, doing whatever they’re going to do will get harder,” she replied.

“Stop pacing. You’ll wear a hole in the linoleum,” he muttered. She spun to face him, wringing her hands. Noting the unconscious gesture, he asked, “What’s wrong, Piper?”

“What if this was my family’s plan all along?” she wailed. “To get all these modern services turned off while Las Vegas is quarantined?”

He answered slowly, “I think you father will reach for something larger than merely getting the TV and phones shut down for a while.” He grabbed her hands and forcibly stilled them.

“Breathe, baby. Calm down. I need you thinking on all cylinders. In your estimation, would a telephone and television service interruption be enough for your father to feel like he’d made his point? ”

She exhaled hard a few times. Then looked up at him in distress. One more hard breath out, and then, “No. It’s not enough. He’ll do more.”

Ian spoke soothingly. “It’s heading toward noon now. Why don’t we go over to the airport and get the lay of the land before it gets too hot?”

“Action. That would be good. I need to do something. We need to do something.”

She had as bad a case of pre-mission jitters as he’d ever seen. “Easy, darlin’,” he murmured. “All in good time. The world’s not going to end in the next few minutes.”

Although, truth be told, it might. He had no idea what was going on in the city behind them, and he didn’t want to think about it. More than most people, he knew how fast the veneer of civilization fell away when people thought they and their loved ones were going to die.

He and Piper climbed into the dune buggy and headed out.

He used a combination of side roads and cross-country jaunts to navigate to the municipal airport.

On foot, they climbed a ridge overlooking one side of the facility.

They laid side-by-side in the grit and gravel, scoping out the airfield as the sun climbed overhead, beating down on them mercilessly.

The worst of the day’s heat rolled in fast. It had to be pushing 120 degrees out here.

“What is it with you and hot places?” she griped under her breath.

“Hot chicks. Hot weather. Guess I just like it hot.”

She rolled her eyes and plastered her ruddy, perspiring face to her sniper’s scope.

“See any white choppers with red stripes?” he muttered to her, staring through his own scope.

“They could have repainted it,” she replied.

“Nah. Aviation paint is tricky stuff. Expensive. You have to strip off the old layer first, for weight purposes. Plus, it can’t peel at high speed and has to be anti-corrosive.”

“Over there,” she announced.

He glanced away from his scope to look at her finger.

He followed its trajectory outward to an asphalt parking area wavering behind massive heat distortion in the air.

Sure enough, he spotted a white and red chopper.

Using his scope, he took a closer look at it. “What’s that thing on the side of it?”

“I don’t know. It looks like metal steps up into the passenger compartment.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“Disabled access to a helicopter?” she mumbled. “That is strange.”

“It’s not getting any cooler out here. What say we hike on over there and take a closer look? The airport looks deserted at the moment.”

“I don’t relish sitting here baking all afternoon,” she said by way of reply.

They cut through the hurricane fence with a pair of big wire cutters Ian extracted from one of the go bags. He rolled under the fence first and held it up for Piper to follow him.

They hiked casually across a big field toward the airplanes as if they belonged there. Sometimes, it was best to hide in plain sight. With no cover whatsoever on the field, there was no way they would be able to approach the helicopter stealthily. Today, they just had to brazen it out.

They arrived at the row of small airplanes tied down to steel anchors sunk in the concrete. Dodging under wings and stepping over tie-down ropes, they approached the PHP helicopter.

The first thing Ian noticed was that it seemed fairly hefty for a civilian bird. It turned out the strange metal steps were welded onto the left skid of the helo.

Up close, he saw that two more steps would fold down from the step assembly in flight, extending several feet below the skid. On the ground, of course, the steps couldn’t extend because they would run into the dirt.

“What do you make of this?” he asked Piper, partially unfolding the aluminum extension steps and then replacing them. They’d clearly been welded onto the bird recently.

“Never seen anything like it. Those could only be used in flight. But if you’re going to hover a few feet above the ground, why not just jump down…or go ahead and land the helicopter?”

He tested the back door latch above the weird steps. “Huh. Unlocked.”

“Rats. I was hoping to shoot out the lock,” she remarked dryly.

“Hah hah.” He ducked into the rear passenger seats and sat down in the far one to have a look around.

Piper plunked down in the seat beside him. “Any sign of a bomb?”

“Not at a glance. I’m going to have to check the exterior storage areas, but I don’t see anything like I found on your dad’s fixed wing plane.”

They spent the next half hour searching every nook and cranny of the helicopter to no avail. It was nothing but a one each helicopter replete with all the appropriate helicopter guts. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for those folding steps.

“Convinced it’s just a helicopter?” she asked as she hopped over the welded steps assembly to the ground.

“Yeah. I’m stumped?—“

“You’re also busted,” a pissed off male voice he recognized all too well announced out of the shadows.

“Jesus Christ. Not again,” Ian groaned. How in the hell did these PHP guys keep sneaking up on him like this?

“You didn’t seriously think we wouldn’t have this field under video surveillance did you?” Piper’s father asked as he gestured one of his men to frisk Ian.

Ian threw up his hands in apparent disgust. “Okay, this one’s on Piper. I told her it was a bad idea to see if we could get into this helicopter and leave a note for you, but she thought it would make up for the way we split from your place in Idaho.”

Piper looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he was throwing her under the bus. Too bad he couldn’t explain to her that in his experience, humor was often the most effective way to diffuse otherwise tense or even deadly situations. C’mon, baby. Get with the program, here. Keep it light .

It was a deadly dangerous moment with his life and hers balancing on a razor’s edge.

Only his many years in the field made him able to pretend to a calm he was far from feeling.

Piper didn’t have anywhere near the same experience to draw on.

And worse, she knew these guys and the violence they were capable of.

The deck was doubly stacked against her.

Mentally, he begged her to hang in there, follow his lead, and keep her wits about her.

She stared intently at him for a millisecond more as if trying to read his mind. And then she declared tartly, “Yeah, well, you couldn’t sneak up on a corpse without it hearing you and waking from the dead. How in the hell you manage to hunt for deer is beyond me.”

“I didn’t say I ever kill any deer. I just said I like to hunt ‘em,” he retorted in an aggrieved tone.

She rolled her eyes. “ Now you tell me.”

A youngish guy Ian thought was her brother commented, “When are you gonna quit trying to be just like the boys, Piper? You’re a girl. Get over it.”

Sure enough, she scowled and shot an annoyed sibling glare at the guy.

Ian chimed in. “I keep trying to tell her to let me do the manly stuff. But she insists on trying to keep up with me. I’m the one who wears the pants, baby doll.”

She huffed and threw him a dirty look.

Ian glanced around at the half-dozen assault weapons pointed at him. “Guess I’m not getting any tonight, huh?”

Commiserating smirks erupted all around. There it was. The break in tension. The relaxation of shoulders. The imminent threat of them getting shot was past. For the moment.

Piper whined in a tone he’d never heard from her before, “I’m hot. And thirsty. Can we please go inside where there’s some air conditioning and cold water?”

Joseph Brothers shook his head in disappointment. “And this is why you’ll never be one of us, Piper. You’re too attached to creature comforts. You’re not self-reliant enough.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t live in the Nevada desert if there weren’t air conditioning, either. I’m not stupid .”

Ahh, nicely done. She’d pitched her voice in just the right tone to make it clear that she was, in fact, dumber than a post.

On cue, Brothers rolled his eyes and muttered in Ian’s direction, “You’re welcome to her.”

Ian reached over and looped an arm over her shoulders. “She may be high maintenance, but she’s worth it.” He paused a heartbeat and added, “So far.”

A few chuckles were audible as Brothers ordered, “Take them into the FBO. Get her some water and tie them up.”

Ian had received enough supply shipments at obscure civilian airports to know that FBO stood for Fixed Base Operator, a small aviation company operating out of a local airport. It would provide a variety of services to pilots—weather reports, maps, fuel, and even simple maintenance service.

He and Piper were herded to the one-story building with a cluster of trucks parked in front of it by the PHP gang.

They were, indeed, given bottles of water before he and Piper were parked on metal chairs and tied up.

Their ankles were tied to the chair legs, and their hands tied behind their backs.

“We still on track for this afternoon?” one of the men asked Brothers.

“Yeah,” Piper’s father answered, “See to it the plane is topped off for gas. We want the explosion to be as spectacular as possible.”

Had the PHP already transported their small plane and its bomb all the way down here?

Wow. Those guys weren’t wasting any time putting their plan in motion.

Interesting that his and Piper’s repeat appearance hadn’t disrupted the schedule.

They must be on a timetable dictated by someone else. The shadowy El Noor, maybe?

If a suspicious person turned up twice around the edges of one of his ops the way he and Piper had this one, that would be cause for him to scrap the op entirely.

Or at least to delay the op until the suspicious person was eliminated as a threat.

He would never send his men out on a compromised mission.

But it didn’t seem to be giving Piper’s father the slightest pause.

“We gonna leave a guard on these two?” one of the men asked Brothers.

“Nah. We’ll bring ‘em along and dump them,” Piper’s father replied casually.

Piper glanced over at him in alarm.

She was right. That didn’t sound good. Ian surreptitiously tested the ropes binding him. The Boy Scout who’d tied him up had done a great job of it. He wasn’t going anywhere until someone untied or cut the ropes.

Brothers left the building with several of his men, and Ian took the opportunity to ask one of the other men, “Is tying us up really necessary? She’s the guy’s daughter for God’s sake. He’s my father-in-law. It’s not like we mean you guys any harm.”

The random foot soldier he’d chosen just shrugged back at Ian. But it was clear the other two guys with guns were listening.

Ian continued, “Piper has this bug up her ass to prove that she can do stuff as well as you guys. Obviously, she can’t, but I figured I would never hear the end of it unless I let her try and the get the idea out of her system once and for all.

Gawd. You know how a woman can fixate one thing and refuse to let it go. Dog with a bone, I’m telling ya.”

More commiserating looks from all the guys this time. He glanced over at her sitting beside him. “I love you Piper, but once you sink your teeth into something, you just will not let go.”

She stared at him in shock. Blinked once slowly. Stared some more. What was wrong with her?—

-- Oh. The I-love-you bit . Huh. That had slipped out without him really thinking it through. It had just come out of his mouth. Did he actually love her a little and not even realize it until now?

Nah. Not possible. He didn’t do emotions like love.

Right?

Huh.