Flashback

1.19 Airborne—Saturday, Sept. 25

The only sound was the air rushing over the dragonfly’s airframe and into the open doors. Nick was not seated close enough to the open door to see when they’d flown over the eastern edge of Denver, but his view of the horizon suggested that they were out over open country.

The flight to Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine would take only a few minutes. Ninjas Ishii, ōta, and Okada as well as one other blackclad guard, whom Nick didn’t know, all kept their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed. All of them had tasers hooked on their belts or combat utility vests. The fifth guard, who might have been a medic, had gone over to check on Leonard’s IV after the apparently unconscious man had lolled to his left and pulled out the IV needle.

Nick only wished that he could go back to those few seconds in the parking lot at Six Flags where both he and Val could have reached for their weapons and gone down fighting. It had all happened so quickly, but that was no excuse. Cops were trained to react quickly. And cops were also trained never to surrender their weapons. Not ever. In the movies and TV there were a thousand scenes where the bad guy has some hostage—sometimes the hapless cop’s even more hapless partner—and the hero or heroine cop puts down the gun—Look, I’m putting it down!” Nick remembered when he was a little kid sprawled on the couch watching such a cop melodrama on pre- 3D TV and the Old Man, passing through the room, said, “Never gonna happen.”

Had it been the presence of Val and Leonard this afternoon that had kept Nick from fighting—that had made him grab his son’s wrist to force the Beretta out of his hand? Probably. Nick had more or less come to terms with dying over the past couple of weeks, but he hadn’t been prepared to watch his son die.

Still—you surrender your weapon, you surrender all hopes of ever regaining control of a situation. Cops knew that and at one time Nick’s country had understood that. And then they’d shown the way to peace through one-sided nuclear disarmament, annual budget cuts to the military in order to feed the exponentially growing entitlements…

The most sickening thing about Hiroshi Nakamura’s little history speech was that Nick had agreed with much of it.

Now Nick shoved all such thoughts out of his mind, concentrating on being aware. If the ninjas and Sato gave him a single instant of inattention, Nick was going to take the chance.

And if they didn’t give him a chance, he knew he was going to take it anyway. Sato was standing by the open door, one arm casually hooked through a strap from the aft bulkhead. Nick knew exactly what he was going to try.

For some reason, one of the ninjas was still attending to his captives’ wounds and injuries. Why? It was crazy to fuss over medical stuff with your prisoners when you were going to execute them in a few minutes anyway. Nick assumed that it had something to do with the Japs’ medieval samurai code of bushido. Maybe it wasn’t honorable—that all-purpose Nipponese concept that seemed to cover all sorts of self-imposed insanity—to allow your doomed prisoners to die from their wounds on the way to their executions.

But it didn’t matter why the ninja playing medic was doing so; the only thing that mattered was that it gave Nick an opening.

The fifth ninja had removed the tape from Leonard’s wrist and was preparing to reinsert the IV needle—the bottle hanging from a bulkhead bracket was almost empty—when Leonard kicked the man between the legs, under the armor there, and when the guard doubled over, Leonard was shouting to Val and Nick and on his feet, physically lifting the shorter Jap off his feet and thrusting the ninja and himself forward, blocking all lines of fire.

Another guard jumped at Leonard, clubbing at him and reaching for his taser. Val leaped past his grandfather and began wrestling with a ninja for his submachine gun. Nick propelled himself straight at Sato.

There was confusion and shouting. The weapon Val was struggling for discharged and insulation flew from the forward bulkhead where Nick’s head had been an instant earlier. Perhaps it penetrated the forward compartment and hit one of the pilots, for the dragonfly suddenly listed to the left.

Nick had leaped onto Hideki Sato and was head-butting the big man and pummeling his face with both flex-cuffed fists. Sato lurched backward, shielded his face with his injured right forearm that still had the polymorphic smart-cast on it, and caught a swing-arm girder that was used for hydraulic cable lifts of people and things from below. Sato had his pistol in his left hand and was clubbing at the back of Nick’s head, but Nick was hunched over and the heavy blows fell on his back and shoulders.

A ninja had gone down and Val was straddling him, still trying to wrest a long gun from a second guard. Leonard’s medic was down, writhing, but the larger man he was wrestling with zapped Leonard with a taser. Nick saw his father-in-law drop like a bag of bricks and just had time to wonder if the taser had killed him.

Sato shoved him back, trying to clear a space between them, and for a few perfect seconds, Nick’s back was against his son’s back as he and Val swung and clubbed and butted away opponents and for those few seconds he was so close to his boy that their combined fury and determination to survive became a single force, almost a form of love.

Then there were numerous taser zaps behind him and Val fell away.

Sato squared himself off to finish with Nick but Nick leaped in the air, landing on the broad man’s upper body, head-butting him fiercely again, and shoving both of them out the open door of the wildly banking helicopter.

Sato had grabbed the winch-frame girder again but it had swung out on its heavy hinges over nothing, Sato’s huge weight dangling from it by one hand and Nick clinging and grabbing and hanging on to Sato. He was screaming and clawing, determined to pull the Jap from his perch and make him fall with him.

The dragonfly banked steeply back to its right and Sato’s and Nick’s legs flew high, almost touching the whirling rotors. Sato did a complete three-hundred-sixty-degree swing over the horizontal winch bar—like an Olympic athlete doing his routine on the high bar—and the metal frame was bending and tearing out of its hinge sockets from their combined weight. Nick had no idea how Sato still had so much strength in an arm that had been broken so recently. Maybe the polymorphic smart-cast added strength.

Ninjas crouched in the madly tipping open doorway, aiming their weapons at Nick and screaming in Japanese.

Nick realized that he was snarling, clawing at Sato’s eyes with his nails, and biting at the big man’s huge neck like a wild animal. The two men spun back and forth under the groaning and swinging winch bar, connected to the dragonfly ’copter only by Sato’s right hand.

Nick began chewing Sato’s right upper arm above the cast, biting for muscle, willing to chew to the bone to get the sonofabitch to release his grip. It was more than a thousand feet to the tilting ground below. Nick thought he could already smell the stench of Landfill Number Nine.

All right, I’ll go there, but we’ll go together, you motherfucker, thought Nick through his snarls and chewing and clawing. Terminal velocity, two hundred miles an hour, the both of us.

Sato threw away the pistol he still held in his free hand and clubbed Nick on the side of the head with a giant fist. Nick saw flashing lights and he lost his cuffed grip on Sato’s bleeding neck and head.

He was loose and falling. By himself. Sato still hung on.

Nick screamed his defiance even as he fell away. But the dragonfly banked hard left, the tilted rotors slashing air inches above Nick’s tumbling head, and then he felt Sato’s lunging left hand—impossibly strong—close around his cuffed wrists.

Then, even more impossibly, Sato hung on to the screeching and bending winch girder with his right hand while he swung Nick up and around and threw him—contemptuously, it seemed—back into the open door of the helicopter.

Val and Leonard were sprawled out, either dead or unconscious. Nick smashed against a bulkhead and felt something tear in his leg but leaped up against the dark shapes coming toward him. He could see Sato swinging back into the chopper behind the ninjas. Nick’s teeth were bloody with Sato’s blood and he had flesh in his mouth and he wanted more…

Nick heard the zaps of at least three tasers at once and then he heard nothing at all.