rationally. Their lives might not mean much to her, but they weren't hers to throw away, either. Not nowadays.
These two might be a pair of idiots, but they weren't bad people, just inept smugglers. And they hadn't been lying about rescuing a special forces team a day earlier. There were a couple of rangers and a forward air controller who were drawing breath today because Balwyn and Ross had put themselves in harm's way on their behalf. They hadn't had to do that, the same way she didn't have to do this.
The chopper came down quickly, much more quickly than she was used to when working with the military, but the chances of getting an RPG up the ass increased exponentially the longer a pilot hovered around squeezing his johnson and taking in the view. The smugglers had taken themselves off a few yards away and were clutching all the documents they'd gathered up downstairs in a couple of packages like they were carrying newborn babies and feared they'd be snatched away and blown over the edge of the roof. It was a long way down to the street. Caitlin couldn't fault them for that. Those documents were probably going to keep them out of a federal prison if they could find themselves a good lawyer and cut a plea bargain for running the zone. Assuming, of course, they didn't just disappear in the old-fashioned way inconvenient people used to disappear. This guy Cesky they were talking about, he was a big name back west. A heavy hitter plugged deep into the administration. Nothing they had to say about him was going to make anybody very happy. In fact, the more Caitlin thought about it, the better off they would be jumping out of this chopper at the other end and running as hard as they could for the horizon.
Oh, well, not her fucking problem.
She turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut as the Blackhawk landed and blew a stinging cloud of dust and grit up from the roof. When she looked up again, the chick was there-Jules, she called herself, even though she was entitled, as in genuinely entitled, to be known as Lady Julianne.
'Look,' Jules yelled out. 'We got off to a bad start, but I just wanted to say thanks for everything. If you hadn't taken out Cesky's guys… well, you know. Thanks. And for this, too,' she shouted, jerking a thumb back over her shoulder at the helicopter.
Caitlin nodded and waved her on board, but she wasn't really paying attention. She had been working out how she was going to get herself into the ruins of the Saks department store on Fifth Avenue, where she was almost certain Baumer was holed up. But she stopped worrying about that when she saw the man who hopped out of the chopper and hurried across to her, bent over and squinting against the storm of dust.
It was Wales. Her old controller. Wales Larrison, a deputy director now, coordinating all the Echelon branches from the new headquarters in Vancouver. Her heart swelled at the sight of him, the closest thing she had to a father in what was left of the world, but she winced, too. Wales wouldn't fly into New York just to wish her good luck. Like her, he was smiling, but sadly, as he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a fierce, protective hug.
'I'm sorry, Caitlin,' he said. 'Not this time.'
'No, Wales. No. You can't!'
Her cry was so pitiful, so heartfelt, and so loud that the Balwyn woman hesitated with one foot raised to hop into the cabin of the chopper. A cavalry trooper brandishing a shotgun pulled her up, anyway.
'I'm this close, Wales. Just give me an hour and I'll put my fucking hand inside his chest and squeeze off his heart. An hour, Wales, that's all I'm asking.'
He shook his head unhappily.
'Not this time, I'm afraid. They sent me to make sure you got on the chopper. President Kipper sent me. Rang me himself and told me to get my ass over here to make sure you got out. I barely made it.'
'But Wales,' she cried in anguish. 'My family. You know what he tried to do to my family. I have to finish this. I'm the only one who can do this and be sure.'
Wales took her by the arm and began to lead her across the roof to the helicopter. They both knew she was more than capable of resisting him.
'You don't have time, Caitlin. There's a storm front coming in from the west. They've moved everything forward ahead of it. Air cav is assaulting into Central Park right now. As soon as they're down, air force is going to hammer the city flat. Or at least that part you want to head into. You don't have an hour, Caitlin. They are in the air now. Bombed up and inbound.'
He was right. She could see the leading edge of the air assault coming in over his shoulder. Small black dots for now but growing larger every second, resolving themselves into an airborne armada of UH-60s and their gunship flankers. There looked to be about a dozen in the first wave and another two waves stacked up behind them, probably formed up in one of the new, stripped-down regimental combat teams the army was testing. Say, four hundred men on the ground within a quarter of an hour.
Wales almost had her into the cabin when she finally dug her heels in. She could see the smugglers and the cavalry troopers in the helicopter staring at her as though she were mad. But she didn't care.
'Wales, if we let him get away this time, he will be back in our faces worse than ever. You know that. He will come back at me. I know it's not personal, but it is. If that makes any fucking sense. You have to let me go. You have to let me get him.'
'I can't, Caitlin,' he said, looking older and more worn down than she had ever seen him before. 'I'm not just following orders. I'm here because I don't want you to die. My daughter died four years ago. And my wife. And my brother and his wife and their kids. Everybody I cared for in the world is gone. Everybody but you. You have your own family now, Caitlin. I understand what that means. I understand the madness and the fear of it, because you are my family. You are all I have left. You are my daughter now, and I can't let you go.'
She felt her throat closing up tight and her eyes beginning to water. She turned away so that nobody in the helicopter could see her. Wales Larrison stepped up around in front of her and raised her chin with his forefinger.
'He won't win, Caitlin,' he said, projecting his voice through the thudding of the rotor blades. 'He won't even get close. And I can give you my personal guarantee that he will never get within a thousand miles of Bret or Monique again. Ever.'
'Why? How? Are we going to surround them with traps and razor wire?'
'No, Caitlin,' he answered, gently steering her back toward the cabin. 'Because he's going to die sometime today, or he's going to die in the very near future when you put your hand inside him and squeeze the life out of his heart. But not today.'
She was numb. Numb and exhausted and somewhere out over the edge of things where she might be free- falling or floating or possibly even drifting away from the world.
Caitlin climbed into the chopper and sat in the front of the cabin, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Wales strapped himself into the seat beside her and placed one arm around her shoulders. That was all it took. She fell apart and started crying, covering her face with her hands as the chopper lifted off from the roof. 'I believe 'I told you so' would be appropriate at this point, Miss Jules.'
The roar of the helicopter's takeoff was loud enough that Julianne could have pretended not to have heard the Rhino, but she was past caring anymore.
'About Cesky and Rubin, you mean?' she said. 'You never told me anything about that other than your plans for spending the money.'
'No,' he insisted as they left the roof of the office building on East 60th Street behind. 'I meant that.' He pointed out of the cabin behind her, over toward Central Park. Jules had to lean forward to see past the door gunner who was covering their ignominious exit from New York. She had no idea what was going on with Wonder Woman and the old guy up front. She looked like she'd dropped her entire bundle in the last two minutes.
The sky over Central Park was swarming with helicopters just like theirs, Blackhawks full of troops. Sleeker, deadlier-looking gunships weaved through the congested air traffic, protecting the airborne assault, just as the Rhino had predicted. Unlike him, she was not a military enthusiast, and she had no idea how many men were involved or what it meant beyond a dramatic escalation of the war that was tearing the city apart block by block.
'What is that?' the Rhino bellowed over the racket. 'One hundred first Airborne?'
One of the soldiers riding shotgun in the cabin-literally riding shotgun, Jules thought as she took in his armament-nodded. 'The Screaming fucking Eagles, man,' he shouted back. 'Playtime is over.'
As the helicopters stacked up one behind the other in a sort of layered effect to begin landing their troops, two of the waspish-looking gunships peeled off and began to pour a storm of machine gun and rocket fire down onto an
