Part 11 Questions #3
Before I went out to join him, Garrett touched my shoulder, holding me back.
‘Sam, for what it’s worth, good luck with Yasmina Ivanova, although I think that’s gonna be a tough climb.’
‘I believe her, Merritt. I think someone set her up.’
He cocked his head. ‘I hope you’re right. ’Cause you just might’ve rejected the offer of your life.’
We shook hands.
‘See you later, pal,’ he said.
Ten minutes later, I was back in the Bell 525 with Murph—once again sitting up front beside him—flying back to Manhattan, the dunes and scrub of the Sandy Hook peninsula rushing by beneath us.
‘How’d your meeting go with the big man?’ Murph asked.
‘I don’t think he was happy with the outcome.’
‘How so?’
I looked out through the chopper’s bubble.
To my right was the Atlantic Ocean.
Directly ahead, beyond the peninsula and the bay, loomed the skyline of New York City, hazy in the afternoon light.
‘Mr King made me an offer and I refused. I don’t think Mr King has heard the word “No” in a long time.’
Murph shrugged. ‘Hey, you seem like a nice guy so I’m sure you got your reaso—what is that?’
He squinted, peering forward.
I followed his gaze.
There was something in the air ahead of us.
Something small and black . . .
. . . flying toward us.
I reared back in my seat as I realised what it was.
‘Oh, shit,’ I said.
It was a Spiderhawk aerial drone.
Then—braaaaack!—two long tongues of flame flared from the drone and a wave of 7.62mm rounds hammered into our helicopter and my world went to Hell.
Our chopper was hit all over by machine-gun fire.
The windshield shattered.
I ducked as a bunch of rounds sizzled over my head and slammed into my seat’s headrest.
‘Argh!’ Murph shouted in pain.
I spun to see the whole front of his body slicked with blood.
Murph slumped forward, held in his seat by the seatbelt. I couldn’t tell if he was unconscious or dead.
The chopper lurched sickeningly as I reached for the secondary control stick in front of my seat.
Alarms squealed.
Warning lights flashed.
The chopper veered toward the ground.
Smoke belched from the rotor housing above me.
I couldn’t see it, but I was pretty sure our engines had been hit by the drone’s gunfire.
I wrestled with the control stick. The helicopter was maybe two hundred feet off the ground.
I needed to get it down before the engines failed—
Braaaaack!
More gunfire impacted all around me as the drone swung into a lateral hover to my left and continued firing.
I turned my chopper’s flank to it and the bullets assailed the port-side windows of the rear passenger section.
I was a sitting duck. I had to get on the ground and get to cover, or at least prepare for an autorotation landing before my engines cut out—
Kachunk!
My engines cut out . . .
. . . there was a brief moment of silence . . .
. . . and then my helicopter began to fall out of the sky.
Autorotation.
With my engine’s last gasp of power, I raised the chopper’s nose, levelling the rotor blades . . .
. . . causing them to spin the other way as we fell . . .
. . . to autorotate . . .
. . . and we ‘glided’ down.
To say we glided would be kind. We shoomed downward at a shallow angle, really fast.
A bank of high sand dunes rushed toward me.
Positioned in front of them, half-buried in the sandy ground, was a huge concrete gun emplacement, one of the abandoned batteries that dotted the peninsula. The part of it that was above ground was the size of a two-storey building.
If we hit it, we were dead.
We were coming in too fast and an impact with it would cause the chopper to explode.
I gripped the stick, keeping the rotors level, hoping to clear the battery. With a whoosh, we roared low over it, missing its roof by inches, and slammed nose-first into a sand dune just beyond it.
Sand splashed all over the windshield.
The chopper came to a violent halt.
Beside me, the unmoving Murph lurched with the force of the landing, held in place by his seatbelt.
Crash-landing into the dune had probably saved our lives, because it had cushioned the blow.
And suddenly we were on the ground, the nose of the chopper buried in the sand, its tail angled up.
I hurriedly unbuckled my seatbelt, peering out the cracked windshield, searching for the drone.
It was nowhere to be seen.
Looking out my side window, I could see the concrete battery behind us, about twenty yards away across open sand.
If I could get there, I might have a chance—
A moan made me spin.
It was Murph.
He was alive.
‘Murph!’ I leaned over, unclipped his seatbelt—
—just as the drone swooped into a hover right in front of our crashed chopper.
And in that split second, I got a look at it.
I saw the bullet holes and scratches from the gunshots it had received at the cemetery.
It was the drone from December 21st.
It fired again.
Braaaaack!
The already-cracked windshield of our chopper exploded into a zillion shards as I yanked Murph into the luxurious rear section an instant before a shit-ton of machine-gun rounds tore his seat apart.
We tumbled onto the plush carpet of the rear section, in between all the leather chairs.
‘Murph! Can you walk?’
‘I don’t kn—urgh . . .’ He groaned, clutching his bloodied chest.
More bullets rushed into the chopper, sizzling over our crouched bodies, shredding the leather seats.
Murph grimaced in pain.
I checked his wound. It was a ragged bloody hole.
‘The good news is the bullet went right through your pec,’ I said. ‘The bad news is it was a big damn bullet.’
‘That’s one of the boss’s drones . . .’ Murph gasped. ‘Why would he . . .?’
‘It may not be your boss controlling it,’ I said.
Or maybe it could be. I wasn’t yet sure of Aristo King’s role in the events of December 21st.
‘We can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘Have you got a gun on board?’
‘In the cockpit . . . under my seat . . .’ Murph grunted.
I lunged forward, reached under the pilot’s seat and extracted a Glock 9mm pistol from under it. Compared to the firepower of the drone, it was a peashooter.
I slid back into the rear hold, searching. I needed something to—
Then I saw them.
Under the leather seats: emergency kits.
In each of them were life jackets.
Ration packs.
A tent tarp with ropes.
And flare guns.
A few seconds later, the drone swung into a hover on the left side of the chopper, searching for us—
—just as I kicked open one of the doors and fired a flare gun right into it.
The incandescent flare slammed into the drone’s nose, spitting white-hot sparks.
A flare isn’t a bullet.
It’s a cartridge containing a plasticine-like slug of pyrotechnic material—usually a composite of magnesium, Teflon and Viton called MTV—that is designed to soar into the sky and blaze with phosphorescent light.
When you fire it into something at close range, that same goopy pyrotechnic material can adhere to a target.
Which is what it did now.
The flare slammed into the drone’s nose and, as the flare blazed with sparks, it stuck to the drone, scrambling the aerial vehicle’s visual sensors, causing the drone to reel back in the air and glitch . . .
. . . giving Murph and me our chance.
‘Let’s go!’ I slung Murph over my shoulder and, gripping his Glock in my spare hand, hauled him out the door onto the sand.
My shoes sank deep into the soft sand.
Our goal: the huge derelict concrete gun battery twenty yards behind our helicopter.
It was a squat solid structure, its crumbling grey walls shot through with cracks and weeds.
As soon as we started running toward it, however, Murph fell heavily.
‘I can’t!’ he cried, his eyes squeezed in pain.
‘I’m not leaving you!’ I called.
And so I heaved him onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry and—slipping and sliding in the shifting sand—carried him toward the gun battery.
Behind me, the drone yawed and bucked, trying to dislodge the blazing flare stuck to its nose.
I staggered toward the battery with Murph on my shoulders, trudging forward, one deep step after another, breathing hard.
We came to the battery—
—just as the drone dislodged the flare, righted itself, spun, and unleashed a devastating burst of gunfire at the now-empty chopper.
The chopper exploded in a gigantic fireball.
Twisted panels and pieces of the rotors were flung every which way, some of them clanging into the gun battery’s concrete walls near me.
Then the drone—it seemed almost angry now—spun again and found me in its sights.
It fired.
I dived forward, tripping over a thick chain that spanned a sunken trench leading into the concrete structure, a small metal ‘keep out’ sign dangling from it.
Murph and I tumbled clumsily over the chain and into the trench as the volley of bullets slammed into the concrete above us, chewing a line of chunks that rained down on my head like hailstones.
I rolled onto my butt.
Took in my new surroundings.
The original function of the gun battery had dictated its form: mighty cannons had once sat atop the battery’s huge concrete base, while tight tunnels, passageways and open-to-the-sky trenches and stairways connected those cannons to a reinforced arsenal below ground, where dangerous ordnance had once been kept.
A sharp-cornered maze of narrow passageways—like the one we were now in—curved and bent throughout the structure; designed to stop any explosion from spreading too far.
I rolled Murph under a set of concrete stairs.
‘Stay hidden! Don’t let it see you!’ I yelled.
Then I ran off into the concrete maze.
I took two sharp turns and—
—came to a dead end.
Shit!
I backtracked, dashed down another trench.
A second later, the drone dropped into the dead-end trench, its four rotors almost form-fitting inside the narrow concrete walls, a moment too late to see me.
I bounded up some stairs and sprinted across the roof of the giant gun emplacement.
I actually had a plan but I had to move quickly.
I needed to get over, around and behind the drone as it prowled through the battery’s open-to-the-sky passageways.
I reached the far edge of the roof and saw the drone directly below me, moving menacingly through a narrow trench, searching.