Chapter 30
827 Words
Chapter 30
The helicopter pulled sharply nose up and Daniel felt that forward motion had ceased.
At some point in the flight, he had dropped into a meditative fog, letting the helicopter simply fling his body back-and-forth as it deemed fit. He’d stopped thinking of the long flight since D.C., of the travesty he’d be faced with for having been several days away from his desk. He didn’t even think of Alice much. Not as some separate thought. She simply nestled there in the corner of his mind. Giving him a reason to come out of this alive.
It took him a moment to tune into the report that Major Henderson was giving.
“Small building, perhaps five or six rooms. Two outbuildings. Only one vehicle. Coordinates and conditions match. Drone shows no other heat signatures within three miles, though it is not a good night for observing.”
Drone. A remote-controlled drone must be patrolling the area, forty pounds of plane flitting through the overhead clouds taking quick peeks below with its infrared camera.
Daniel managed to pull off his gloves and slide up his sleeve enough to see his watch. They were ten seconds from the time that Beale had insisted they’d be arriving. How she nailed ten seconds after a half hour flight across unknown terrain was a good trick indeed.
“Rolling in slow,” Emily announced.
The crew chiefs opened their side windows and leaned out. Neither actively grasping the handles of the mounted guns, but he could see them poised to do so.
Daniel unclipped his belt and moved forward between the crew chiefs until he crouched between the pilots’ seats. Through the front windshield, he could see very little. A small house, a porch light.
The porch door opened and Emily brought the helicopter to a halt once again, now hovering barely a hundred feet from the building.
One figure stood on the stoop and scanned the night. Clearly hearing the Black Hawk, but having trouble seeing it, a blacked-out bird on a foul night.
A second figure joined the first, a machine g*n held across his chest, pointed toward the sky. The second figure took only a moment to pinpoint them in the dark and swing his rifle to bear on their position.
That the second man held a small rifle and Daniel sat behind a bullet-proof windshield in one of the toughest weaponized vehicles ever sent to war, did little to calm his nerves.
“I thought you said just one.” Beale’s question was clearly meant for him.
Daniel considered Alice’s final conclusion during the briefing she’d given him in the back of the car as he’d been driven to the airport.
“If the first man is who we think it is, the guy with the g*n is probably his version of Frank Adams.”
“You better be right about this.” Beale began easing the helicopter forward. “Be real quiet about it boys, but be ready for steel.”
Daniel wanted to protest. He knew what that meant. They were in a DAP Hawk, a Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk, the nastiest weapons platform ever launched into the night sky. The DAP’s motto was “We Deal in Steel.” A call for “Steel” meant the unleashing of a nearly unimaginable amount of firepower.
But it wasn’t his flight. He was only there for the meet-and-greet moment, not for the danger of fifty million dollars worth of highly classified weapon invading the planet’s single most paranoid nation.
Beale eased forward until the rotor was mere feet from the eaves of the house and settled to the manicured lawn. Daniel could feel that she was barely letting the wheels touch, still technically flying and ready to maneuver at a moment’s notice.
She left the helicopter’s nose pointed directly at the two men on the porch. All weapons to bear.
“You’re on, Ace.” Henderson leaned into the space between the pilots’ seats and nodded his helmet in Daniel’s direction.
Right. He moved toward the cargo bay door being opened by one of the crew chiefs, Tim Maloney. Tim snapped a line to the large ring on the front of the vest they’d made Daniel put on.
“In case we have to bug out quickly. Wouldn’t want to be leaving you behind.”
Daniel stepped down onto the hard-frozen ground and tried not to picture himself dangling beneath a speeding helicopter, then accidentally being smashed into the side of a stray cow.
He stopped at half the distance to the two men, at the limit of his tether, doing his best to ignore the rotors spinning just three feet over his head. They’d told him not to raise his hand above his head if he chose to wave.
He and the two men held the tableau for the better part of thirty seconds. Daniel seriously considered giving the bug-out signal that they’d taught him.
Then the man without the machine g*n came forward. He was silhouetted by the porch light behind him. Not until he stopped just a pace away was Daniel able to see his face.
Alice had been absolutely right.
Daniel reached out his right hand to greet North Korea’s Supreme Leader, the Supreme Commander of her Army and the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Kim Jong-un.
- Writer
