“Relax,” Clark said. “We just want to borrow a helicopter.”
“Huh?”
“And we want you to fly it.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Nope. You’re gonna help us or I’m going to shoot you in the leg and take your helicopter anyway. Go along, take us where we need to go, and you’ll be back here in an hour. Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Which bird is prepped?”
“Well, none-”
“Don’t lie to me, Marty. It’s a weekend. Prime time for tours and lessons.”
“Okay. That one.” Marty pointed.
“Go tell your receptionist you’re going for a quick spin. Get hinky and I’ll shoot you in the ass.”
Marty opened the door, poked his head through, and did as he was asked.
Jack whispered to Clark, “What’s a rotational bearing manifold?”
“No idea.”
Marty turned back from the door and Jack asked, “Where’re the controls for the side gate?”
“On the outside wall, opposite end of the hangar.”
Jack started walking that way. Clark smiled at Marty. “Let’s go.”
“What’s this all about?” Marty asked as they headed for the EC-130. “What’re we doing?”
“You’re saving the day, Marty.”
As they neared the helo, Jack, Chavez, and Dominic came around the corner of the hangar and walked up. They got in the back while Clark took the front passenger seat. Marty climbed in, buckled up, and began preflighting.
“Where’re we going?” he asked.
Jack said, “Northwest. When you reach Highway Ninety-five and Three seventy-three, head northeast.” He gave Marty the latitude and longitude.
“That’s restricted airspace, man,” Marty said. “That’s Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site. We can’t-”
“Sure we can.”
They were airborne eight minutes later. Clark called Hendley and said, “We’re up.”
“Rick Bell’s on the line, too. More shoes are dropping. CNN, MSNBC, Fox are all over it. An explosion of some kind at a church in Waterloo, Iowa; they’re talking about fifty or sixty dead, maybe twice that many wounded. Something in Springfield, Missouri, too. A local news station was there, covering a statue unveiling; it looked like goddamned Omaha Beach. Some town in Nebraska… Brady… Someone walked into a high school swim meet and rolled grenades beneath the bleachers. Christ almighty.”
“They’re doing what they do,” Clark said. “Terror. The
“Well, there’re gonna be a lot of believers after this.”
“It’s worse than that,” Bell said. “Remember the dive the economy took after Nine-Eleven. Multiply that by a thousand, and that’s what we’re looking at. The Emir and the URC’s trying to finish the job: to get our economy to devour the country from the inside out. They hit our new oil import source, they tried to hit a major port, they killed God knows how many in the heartland, and now they’re trying to go nuke. People
“It makes sense,” Clark replied. “Nothing this guy does is one-dimensional.”
Hendley asked, “What’s your ETA?”
Clark asked Marty, “How long?”
“Twenty-two minutes.”
88
FIFTEEN MILES from the 373 junction, Highway 95 appeared below the EC-130, a straight gray line cutting through the brown desert. “How close is the Nellis Range?” Clark asked Marty.
“Reach out your window and you’re almost touching it. That’s what I’m telling you: As soon as we cut northwest, we’re gonna light up radar screens. These folks don’t fuck around.”
“We need to get to Yucca.”
“Shit. Please tell me you’re not terrorists.”
“We’re the good guys.”
“What kind of good guys?”
“Hard to explain. Can you get us there before they chase us down?”
“Which entrance, north or south?”
“South.”
“If I’m balls to the wall I can get a hundred ninety miles an hour out of her, and if I put it on the deck… Figure four minutes after we turn off the highway. Do me a favor, huh?”
“What’s that?”
“Threaten me again. When they slap the cuffs on me, I want some kind of defense.”
Five minutes later, they saw through the windshield another gray line intersect 95 from the south. “Three seventy-three,” Marty announced. As they swept over the junction, he banked to the northwest and began descending until they were thirty feet off the desert.
A ridge up before them. “Busted Butte,” Marty announced, pulling up, then leveling out. “Three miles. Sixty seconds.” He banked again, first left, then right, and dropped into a shallow valley.
A two-acre-square gravel lot appeared through the windshield. On the lot’s far left side a keyhole shape had been cut into the hillside; at its center, an enormous tunnel entrance.
“Company,” Jack called.
On the north side of the lot, a road extended into the desert. A flatbed truck carrying what looked like a giant stainless-steel dumbbell was pulling into the lot.
“What the hell is that?” Dominic shouted.
“GA-4 cask,” Jack replied. “For transporting spent fuel rods.”
“Thought this place wasn’t open.”
“It isn’t.” Jack scanned the binoculars north up the road to the white phone booth-sized guard shack. He could see two figures lying on the pavement. “Men down at the checkpoint,” he called.
Clark asked Marty, “Can you put down in-”
“Not with that truck in there. I’ll clip a rotor. Down the road about fifty yards I can.”
“Do it.”
“Coming around.”
Marty banked sharply, spiraling back the way they’d come before stopping in a hover over the road. In the lot, the truck had stopped. Men were piling out of the cab.
“I count five,” Dominic called.
As they watched, two of them sprinted down the length of the flatbed toward the EC-130. Still running, the men raised AK-47s and started firing.
“Shit!” Marty shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Those are the bad guys,” Clark told him.
Marty slid the helo to the right, away from the road and behind the hill.
“This’ll do,” Clark said.
Marty brought the EC-130 down in a one-bump landing. Clark and the others climbed out. Clark leaned back through the door and shouted, “Find cover and set down. Stay off the radio, and be here when we get back.”
