Deep Sky

He opened the door and got back out. The train had already passed, churning away to the north, its clatter going with it. It’d faded for another second when Travis’s skin began to crawl again.

Now he knew why.

He could hear the sound even over the grumble of the Taurus’s engine. A sound that’d been perfectly masked by the passing freight.

Rotors.

He spun and looked around wildly, but for a few seconds he couldn’t pin the direction. The staccato hammering of the chopper’s blades seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the broad storefront and from the panels of every nearby vehicle.

Then he saw it. A quarter mile south. Coming in right out of the sun glare.

For a moment he thought it was a police chopper. It was black and there were bulky shapes hanging off the sides that might’ve been cameras or loudspeakers.

An instant later he saw he was wrong—he recognized the flattened, broad profile of a Black Hawk. But not the standard transport model; it was some special variant with stub wings jutting off the fuselage.

And missiles clustered beneath them.

Travis turned and sprinted for the Humvee, screaming Paige’s name. Screaming Get out, over and over. He could see her through the heavy glass, seated in back on the side facing him.

She couldn’t hear him.

He screamed louder, the soft tissue lining his throat going ragged.

In the direction of the chopper, high in his peripheral vision, white light erupted and something shrieked.

He was thirty yards from the vehicle now, moving as fast as he could move, screaming as loud as he could scream.

Paige turned toward the sound of his voice at last, centering her focus on it so perfectly that, for an instant, Travis forgot she couldn’t see him. She was looking right into his eyes when the missile hit the Humvee.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The vehicle simply vanished. One millisecond it was there, and the next it’d been replaced by a hurricane of flame and shrapnel and whipping soot. The air shattered and a superheated wind slammed into Travis. It picked him up and threw him backward eight feet. He landed off balance and tumbled and ended up lying on his chest, staring straight ahead at the roiling fire.

He was curled on the grass way off the edge of the lot. He couldn’t remember getting there. He was still in the suit. There were police and fire vehicles all around the blackened shell of the Humvee. The flames were gone and there was a thick gray column of smoke coming off the wreck, trailing almost sideways in the shore breeze.

He realized he was crying. Holding his knees against his ribs and saying No with every fractured breath. Some deep, barely flickering, analytical part of his brain understood that he was bargaining more than denying. He wasn’t just saying no; he was looking to actively undo what’d happened, as if the right thought—the right string of words or maybe the right mental image—could take it all back if he focused on it long enough. He couldn’t say why, but his mind stuck on that notion for a minute or more while he lay there, and while the clot of emergency vehicles grew and the traffic on the front street congested.

64?.

2:18 P.M.

64?.

2:18 P.M.

The sign at the edge of the little bank parking lot kept alternating, flashing its message at him. He stared at it from the bus-stop bench. He could recall walking to this spot, but only vaguely. He remembered the crowd of onlookers around the supermarket getting too thick. People edging in on the grass where he was lying. No choice but to move.

The bank was four blocks inland from the market. Sometimes the wind shifted just right and he caught the stink of diesel smoke and tire rubber from the Humvee.

64?.

2:19 P.M.

He was no longer crying. He’d gone numb for a while, but he was no longer numb, either. Some other feeling was coming in, heavy and cold as a glacier. He hadn’t felt it in a very long time.

64?.

2:20 P.M.

Oakland International Airport.

Air Force One would be there in about an hour and a half.

He could be there sooner.

In some fold of his thoughts, dulled almost mute, the idea of getting to Richard Garner still tolled.

Much closer, keening like a siren against his eardrum, was the idea of getting to Stuart Holt.

Chapter Forty

He got another screwdriver from a hardware store down the block, tucked it under the suit and walked out. He got a survival knife with a sheath from an outfitter across the street, hot-wired a ’93 Blazer with tinted windows and headed south on the highway.

He saw from the long-term lot at Oakland exactly where Air Force One would situate itself. A cluster of CHP cruisers already half encircled the huge apron on the tarmac, behind the cargo terminal and far from any active runway. Patrol officers stood at their open doors. The crackle and hiss of their radios carried in the calm between takeoffs.

Travis had the sheathed knife clipped to his waistband under the suit. He walked right through the crescent of police units, close enough to hear one of their radiators ticking as it cooled. He found a spot in the shade under a FedEx plane seventy feet away, and sat waiting.

A C–5 Galaxy lumbered down out of the sky at around 3:20. It rolled onto a nearby apron and dropped its tail ramp, and its crew offloaded the large, boxy helicopter known as Marine One. Then they offloaded another, identical to it, rolled out a few specialized lift vehicles, and got to work setting up the rotors, which had been folded back for transport.

Travis could tell by the body language of the waiting police that Air Force One was inbound, even before he saw it. A quick burst of speech crackled over every radio, and every pair of eyes turned south and skyward.

For the first five minutes after the giant aircraft rolled to a stop on the apron, nothing happened. Then Air Force personnel in dress uniforms drove a motorized stairway to the plane’s door, and one ascended the steps and stood at attention just left of the access.

The door was sucked inward an inch and then swung fully out of sight into the shadowy interior.

Two men in suits and ties emerged and stood on the landing atop the staircase, their hair and clothing flapping in the wind as they talked. They watched the Marines working on the two choppers, still hard at it, and then stepped back inside the 747. No one else came to the door. The dress guard stayed rigidly in place.

Travis stood.

He left the shadow of the FedEx plane and crossed to the foot of Air Force One’s staircase. He saw no movement inside the doorway at the top.

He climbed just slowly enough to keep his footsteps silent.