The Tin Man

“Helen! They’ve got Helen!” he cried. “We’ve got to find her!”

“Jon!” Patrick McLanahan shouted when he caught up with them. “My God, Jon, are you all right? What’s that about Helen?”

“They got her,” Jon told him. “Townsend and Chandler grabbed her. I don’t know how, I don’t know where, but they’ve got her.”

“We’ll find her,” Briggs said. “Don’t worry. We’ll scour this whole state until we…”

“No! You can’t!” he shouted. “Townsend said he’d kill her if we tried to interfere!”

“That’s exactly why we must go after her,” Briggs said. “They’ll kill her anyway. We’ve got to find her before they try to harm her.”

“No!” Jon shouted. “We can’t take the risk! Oh God, it’s all my fault. I called her after I got out of the jail. I told her… told her I wanted to see her. She must’ve come to Sacramento.”

“Jon, we’ll do everything we can,” Briggs said. “We’ll save her if it’s at all possible. But you’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that she’s dead. I’m sorry, man-I promise we’ll do everything we can…”

Patrick’s earset communications beeped. “McLanahan.”

“General, this is Sky Masters Security Operations Center,” said the caller. Patrick recognized the voice; it was the chief of the company’s security division at their headquarters in Blytheville, Arkansas. “I’m patching an urgent call through to you from Dr McLanahan.” There was a beep; then: “Go ahead, Dr McLanahan.”

“Patrick?” Wendy asked.

“Wendy, are you all right?” Patrick asked. “Is Bradley all right?”

“We’re okay, Patrick,” Wendy said, but he could hear the fear in her voice. “Listen: A few minutes ago, I got a message on my voice mail.” The company voice-mail system automatically notified the recipient via nationwide pager when a message came in. “It was from Tom Chandler, that police captain from Sacramento PD.”

“What? Chandler called you? What did he say?”

“He said he was out at the research facility at Mather,” Wendy said. “He said someone better get out there right away or Helen was dead. He said there were twelve of Townsend’s men out there, going through the company’s computers.”

“Helen at Mather? We’ll get right on it-thanks, love.” Patrick turned to Briggs. “Get everyone on board, Hal, now. Chandler and Helen Kaddiri are out at the alert facility at Mather.” Hal radioed his tactical ground crews to return to the MV-22, then notified the cockpit to get ready for liftoff. “Jon, where’s the suit?”

“In the room over there,” said Masters, and brought Patrick over to where the body of Richard Faulkner lay. They stripped off the suit, hoisted the body on board the MV-22, and were airborne moments later.

Research and Development Facility

Sacramento-Mather Jetport,

Rancho Cordova, California

a few minutes later

“Ja, Herr Oberst! I understand. We will be airborne in fifteen minutes!” The senior officer hung up the secure cellular phone, then got on his handheld radio and ordered everyone to the helicopters and prepared to repel attackers. Then he dashed to the main administration offices and the room where Helen Kaddiri was being interrogated. She was still conscious, but barely, strapped to a chair with a hood placed over her head. She did not look as if she had been injured, but the lieutenant knew there were many ways of torturing a prisoner without leaving visible signs. The screen of the laptop computer on the desk beside her showed lines of error messages, indicating the unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the classified Sky Masters files.

“Get her to the helicopter!” the lieutenant ordered. “Take that computer too!” He drew his sidearm and headed across the corridor to the senior engineer’s office, where the renegade police captain Chandler was being held. His orders were explicit: to execute him immediately.

He unlocked the door and stopped in his tracks. On the desktop, lying faceup, was the body of Thomas Chandler, his hands still handcuffed behind his back, his eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. A streak of black-and-red crossed his neck, and a pool of red spread out across the desk. The dirty work had already been done for him, probably by the guard assigned to watch him-it was a violation of orders, since no one had given the order to kill Chandler until now, but the lieutenant wasn’t going to complain. He turned toward the admin section and brought his handheld radio to his lips…

Chandler brought the metal chair down on the German bastard’s head as hard as he could, and slammed it again and again until he was dead. The trick had worked. He had used a hidden handcuff key to get out of the handcuffs-he had several of them hidden on him and knew how to use them even with his hands behind his back. Then he had opened up the color ink-jet printer in the office and spread the ink on his neck and the desktop to make it look as if his throat had been slit.

He picked up the officer’s pistol and ran out. Through the engineering offices, a security door opened on an upsloping concrete ramp that led to the flight line, the same covered ramp that SAC bomber and tanker alert crews used to run to the flight line and their waiting planes. Chandler didn’t know what was going on, but it was sure as hell time to get out and he was damned if those Nazis were going to leave with a hostage.

The only way he could possibly redeem himself, he figured, and save himself from spending the next ten years in prison, was to start doing his job.

The German-speaking soldiers had left their posts and run to the flight line in front of the half-underground R amp; D facility, where two surplus UH-1 Huey helicopters were waiting for them, rotors turning. When Chandler emerged from the tunnel, he saw two guards no more than fifty feet away, half-carrying, half-dragging Kaddiri through the alleyway between two hangars toward the waiting helicopters. He took cover just inside the doors to the ramp, raised the pistol, aimed, and fired.

The soldier on the left cried out and fell, clutching his lower back. The other turned toward Chandler and opened fire with his submachine gun, but the shots went high and right. Chandler fired several rounds to throw off his aim, then threw himself back into the tunnel as bullets pinged off the outer security doors. Lying on his belly, he peeked out the doors. The soldier had propped up Helen, who looked semiconscious, using her as a shield while he checked his comrade.

“Helen! Kaddiri!” Chandler shouted, his gun poised to fire. “Get up! Now!” He was afraid she would be too weak to act, but she heard him and had enough strength to roll free of the soldier’s grasp. Chandler dropped the second soldier on his first shot.

He ran to her. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going to try to get you away!”

Heavy machine-gun fire rippled the ground not five feet away from them, shot from one of the helicopters on the flight line. Chandler fired two rounds toward the helicopter, picked Kaddiri up, and ran for the rear of one of the hangars. Placing her on the ground behind the hangar, he tried to make a run for one of the submachine guns dropped by the soldiers who had taken Kaddiri, but a burst of gunfire drove him back to cover. Two soldiers had dismounted from the helicopter and were headed straight for them. Chandler took aim and fired but his gun clicked empty. He threw it away, looped one of Kaddiri’s arms up over his shoulder, and ran down the ramp behind the hangars. It was their last, their only, chance.

“I’ve got one of the helicopters lined up!” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft called out on interphone. “Give me permission to shoot!”

“No!” Jon Masters shouted. “Helen might be in one of those choppers!”

“Put me right over the lead helicopter,” McLanahan radioed. “Target the second helicopter’s tail rotor with the cannon. Try to keep it on the ground, but don’t hit it!”

The MV-22 was flying about sixty miles an hour in helicopter mode as it swooped across the two parallel runways at Mather toward the R amp; D center. Patrick knew their altitude, about thirty feet above ground, and their speed. He relied on his experience as an Air Force bombardier for the rest.

As the MV-22 swept in on its targets, Patrick stepped out through the left crew door onto the left main landing gear sponson and steadied himself against the left weapon pylon. At just the right moment, he let go and flung himself out into space, jumping right down onto the spinning rotors of the first UH-1 Huey helicopters.

He looked like a doll tossed from a speeding car onto a busy freeway when he hit the rotor disk. He landed