Smith ran north along the runway, moving fast despite his fatigue and the terrible punishment he had taken. His jaw was set, held tight against the pain from several cracked ribs grinding under his body armor. He stumbled once, swore under his breath, and pushed himself onward.
Keep going, Jon, he told himself savagely. Keep going or die.
He did not look back. He knew the horror he would see there. He knew the horror he had deliberately set in motion. By now the nanophage cloud was spreading west across the whole southern end of the airfield-drifting on the wind toward the Atlantic.
Smith came pounding up to the grounded Black Hawk. The rotors were still spinning slowly. Torn blades of grass and lingering traces of missile exhaust swirled lazily in the air around the waiting helicopter. Peter and Randi saw him coming. Their worried looks vanished and they moved toward him, smiling and laughing with relief.
“Get aboard!” Jon roared, waving them back to the Black Hawk. “Get that thing spooled up!”
Peter nodded tightly, seeing the shot-up drone careening off the runway out of control. He knew what that meant. “Give me thirty seconds, Jon!” he called.
The Englishman swung himself back aboard the helicopter and scrambled into the pilot's seat. His hands danced across the control panel, flicking switches and watching indicators lighting up. Satisfied, he rotated the throttle, pushing the engines toward full power. The rotors began spinning faster.
Smith skidded to a stop beside the troop carrier's open door. He noticed Randi's left arm dangling at her side. Her face was still pale, drawn with pain. “How bad is it?” he asked.
She smiled wryly. “It hurts like hell, but I'll live. You can play doctor some other time.”
Before he could react, she glared at him. “And you will not make any smart-ass comments. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Smith told her quietly. Hiding the pain from his own injuries, he helped her climb up into the Black Hawk. Then he swung himself aboard. His eyes took note of the two other passengers — recognizing both Hideo and Jinjiro Nomura from their pictures in the files Fred Klein had made him study so long ago in Santa Fe. So long ago, he thought coldly. Six days ago. A lifetime ago.
Randi dropped into a rear-facing seat across from Hideo. Wincing, she cradled the M4 carbine in her lap, making sure its deadly black muzzle was pointing straight at his heart. Jon settled in beside her.
“Hold tight!” Peter called from the control cabin. “Here we go!”
Engines howling, the Black Hawk slid forward across the runway and then lifted off — already turning as it climbed away from the airfield.
Chapter Forty-Nine
At three hundred feet, Peter leveled out. They were high enough now to be safe from the nanophage cloud blowing across the Nomura Pharma-Tech airfield and complex. Or so he hoped. He frowned, reminding himself that hope ran a very poor second to absolute certainty. With a twitch of the controls, he took them up another hundred feet.
Happier now, Peter pulled the Black Hawk into a gentle turn, beginning a slow orbit over the corpse-strewn runway. Then he glanced back over his shoulder into the troop compartment. “Where to now, Jon?” he asked. “After our friend Lazarus' first drone? The one that got away?”
Smith shook his head. “Not quite yet.” He stripped the empty magazine out of his carbine and inserted a fresh clip. “We still have a couple of things to finish up here first.”
He slid out of his seat and lay prone on the floor of the helicopter, sighting along the M4 out through the open door. “Give me a shot at that third drone, Peter,” he called. “It's still trying to take off on autopilot.”
In response, the Black Hawk tilted, swinging back to the south. Smith leaned a bit farther out, watching the huge flying wing grow even larger in his sights. He squeezed the trigger — firing a series of aimed bursts down into the drone rolling determinedly down the runway. The carbine hammered back against his shoulder.
The UH-60 roared past the aircraft and pulled up sharply, already curving back through a full circle.
The carbine's bolt locked open at the rear. Jon pulled out the empty clip and slapped in another — his last. He hit the catch. The M4 was loaded and ready to fire again.
The helicopter finished its turn and flew north, heading back for another pass.
Smith stared down. Battered by thirty rounds of 5.56mm ammunition, the third drone now sat motionless on the tarmac. Whole sections of the single long wing sagged, shattered by multiple hits. Fragments of engine pods and nanophage cylinders littered the concrete paving behind the wrecked aircraft. “Scratch one drone,” he announced in a matter-of-fact voice. “That's two down and one to go.”
Hideo Nomura stiffened in his seat.
“Not a move,” Randi warned him. She hefted the weapon on her lap.
“You will not shoot me inside this machine,” the younger Nomura snarled. Every trace of the amiable cosmopolitan facade he had cultivated for so many long years of deception had vanished. Now his face was a rigid, hate-filled mask that revealed the raw malice and egomania that truly drove him. “You would all die, too. You Americans are too soft. You do not have the true warrior spirit.”
Randi smiled mockingly back at him. “Maybe not. But the fuel tanks behind you are self-sealing. And I'm willing to bet that you're not. Shall we find out which one of us is right?”
Hideo fell silent, glaring at her.
Jinjiro Nomura looked out through the door, smiling calmly as he watched the rapid destruction of his son's twisted dreams. All that Jinjiro had suffered in twelve months of cruel confinement was now being dealt out in full to Hideo.
Guided by Jon, Peter flew the Black Hawk to the north end of the runway and passed low over the two large cargo planes and the much smaller executive jet parked there.
Again leaning out through the open door, Smith fired another series of bursts right into their cockpits — smashing windows and flight controls. “I don't want any survivors leaving this island until we can get Special Forces units and decontamination teams here,” he explained. Randi handed him her spare ammunition.
Now Peter took the helicopter higher, climbing steadily in a tight, spi-raling circle while they searched for signs of Nomura's first drone. For long minutes they anxiously hunted through the skies around them. Randi saw it first — catching a tiny glint of gold-flecked light high above. “There it is!” she cried, pointing out through the side door. “At our three o'clock now. And it's heading due west!”
“Toward the States,” Smith realized.
Hideo smiled thinly. “For Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs, to be precise.”
The helicopter clattered through another turn as Peter swung onto a parallel course. He stared up through the forward windshield with a worried expression on his face. “That damned thing is already devilishly high,” he called. “It's probably flying at ten or twelve thousand feet and climbing fast.”
“What's the service ceiling on this bird?” Smith asked, buckling back into his seat.
“It tops out somewhere around nineteen thousand feet,” Peter replied, frowning. “But the air will be very thin at that altitude. Perhaps too thin.”
“You're too late,” Hideo told them gleefully. His eyes gleamed in triumph. 'You cannot stop my Thanatos aircraft now! And there are enough nanophages aboard that plane to kill millions. You may hold me captive, but I have already struck a blow against your greedy, materialistic country that will live down through the centuries!'
The others ignored his ranting, entirely intent on catching the Thanatos flying wing before it escaped above their reach.
Peter pulled the Black Hawk's nose up as steeply as he could, chasing that distant fleeing speck. The helicopter soared higher, climbing fifteen hundred feet higher with every passing minute. Everyone inside could feel the air growing steadily colder and thinner.
By the time the UH-60 reached twelve thousand feet, their teeth were chattering and it was becoming markedly more difficult to catch their breath. The density of the air around them was now only a little over half the norm at sea level. People could live and work and even ski at this altitude, but usually with a much longer time to
