Helius Legacy Page 3

  “Okay, cowboy, in another mile we’ll be in the warehouse district. It should be almost empty now. I’ll pull up behind him and you take out one of the rear tires. Just the tire, Anders. That’s all.”

  Vargas glanced over at the Glock 23 pistol sitting in Anders’s lap. The six-inch suppressor attached to the barrel would make the shots undetectable over the engine noise. One of two things would happen: they’d grab Steinman out of the wreck, or Steinman would be dead and it would look like an accident. Either way worked for Vargas.

  “When the car stops, I’ll pull in front of the Buick. If Steinman’s alive, throw him in the trunk. I’ll go through the car—sixty seconds from start to finish. Got it?” Vargas said, glancing over at Anders.

  Anders just smiled as he slid a magazine into the Glock, chambered a round, and flipped off the safety.

  When Vargas looked back at the road, the Buick was taking a hard right down a narrow alley between two warehouses.

  “Shit! What the fuck is he doing now?” Vargas growled.

  Austin, Texas

  December 3, 1999 / Friday / 8:06 p.m.

  The left side of the car began to lift off the ground as the Buick sloughed through the turn into the alley. For a terrifying moment, Richie thought the car was going to roll, but then it stabilized and he jammed the accelerator to the floor. The Buick raced down the dark alley between the two industrial buildings, bouncing up and down on the uneven road.

  Richie reached over and grabbed the FedEx envelope sitting on the passenger seat, which he’d addressed to Andrea yesterday, quickly glanced ahead, and then pulled a stack of documents out from under his seat. He tried to stuff the documents into the floppy envelope, but the opening closed each time he pushed them together. In frustration, Richie jammed one of his knees against the lower part of the steering wheel to hold it in place, grabbed the documents in one hand and the envelope in the other, and shoved them together. As the documents slid into the envelope, the car drifted against the concrete wall of a warehouse that bordered the alley on the right, throwing a stream of sparks over the hood of the car. Richie dropped the package and pulled the wheel hard to the left, and then pulled it back to the right again to avoid slamming into a loading dock on the other side of the alley. After guiding the car back into the center of the alley and locking the steering wheel in place with his knees again, Richie grabbed the envelope, closed the flap, and dropped the package on the passenger seat.

  At the end of the alley, Richie slowed and took a hard left onto a darkened street and then jammed the accelerator to the floor. Seconds later, he heard the screech of tires and the roar of another engine to his rear. He guessed that he had a sixty-yard lead on the Cadillac, but that wouldn’t last. The other car was faster and more maneuverable than the old Buick.

  Richie looked up and down the street, praying for a FedEx drop, but it wasn’t there. He looked through a gap between two warehouses on the right side of the street and saw a bright yellow DHL truck parked one street over. DHL was a FedEx competitor, but if the driver found the package, there was a good chance he’d drop it in a FedEx box. It might take an extra day to get to Andrea, but he had to take the risk.

  Richie saw an alley ahead. He prayed that it went all the way through to the next street and pulled the wheel hard to the right. The front of the Buick made the turn, but the rear end fishtailed into the building on his left. The impact smashed Richie’s head against the driver’s side window. Pain exploded in his head, blinding him for a second. Rage came with the pain, and he jammed the accelerator to the floor.

  The alley between the two streets went all the way through to the next street. The Buick barreled out of the alley and slid sideways across the wide street to the curb on the far side like a giant ship. Richie could feel the blood dripping down the side of his face, but he focused on the open rear bay of the DHL truck ahead of him. He lowered the driver’s window, which was now cracked and stained with blood, and threw the package into the open bay as he passed the truck.

  Richie looked in the mirror as he raced by the truck. The Cadillac was just racing out of the alley. They didn’t see the package! Richie floored the gas pedal and held it there. Within seconds, the car was doing ninety miles an hour down the empty street. For a minute, the Buick started to pull away from the Cadillac, but the other driver compensated, and the Cadillac began to close the gap. I need to find a busy street. Richie glanced repeatedly to the right and left, hoping to see lights indicating a more populated area. As he passed a low-rise building on his left, he saw what looked to be a small shopping center several blocks over.

  A fraction of a second before the Buick started into a left turn, two nine-millimeter shells ripped into the right rear tire. A third shell missed the tire, ricocheted off the street and ripped a hole in the Buick’s gas tank. As the car slid into the turn, the punctured tire collapsed, putting the Buick into an unstoppable roll. The car flipped over and slid across the street on the roof. The driver’s side door slammed into the fire hydrant on the far side of the street, killing Richard Steinman instantly.

  Austin, Texas

  December 3, 1999 / Friday / 8:08 p.m.

  Vargas jumped out of the car the instant the Cadillac skidded to a stop, and raced over to the overturned car. He tried to get a clear look at the driver through the shattered windshield, but the checkered glass made it impossible. He walked around to the driver’s side and looked through a hole in the window at the broken body of Richard Steinman. Blood was all over the place. The reporter had to be dead.

  “He’s dead,” Vargas said, without emotion.

  “No shit. Check the car and let’s move,” Anders drawled from behind him, a grin on his face.

  As he ran around the rear of the car to get to the passenger side, Vargas caught the smell of gas. He glanced downward. The area under the rear bumper was covered with a spreading black stain.

  Vargas slowly eased open the upside down door on the passenger side of the car, praying that it wouldn’t generate a spark. The reporter was hanging upside down, held in place by the seat belt. The side of his head was a bloody mass.

  Vargas leaned into the car and checked the reporter’s pockets, ignoring the blood spotting the arm of his sport coat. His search yielded a worn brown wallet, a black comb, and a few pieces of paper. As he started to back out of the car, Vargas noticed the outline of a flat square object in Steinman’s shirt pocket. He reached in the pocket and pulled out a black computer diskette.

  Vargas scanned the rest of the car again and spotted a cell phone and a piece of paper resting on the roof of the upside-down car. He grabbed the phone and the paper and shoved them in his pocket. Then he heard a quiet “whoosh” outside and threw himself out the door. The rear of the car was in flames.

  Vargas wanted to check the trunk, but was dissuaded by the flames licking out from under the car. A pall of black smoke was beginning to form over the burning wreck. He glanced up and down the street. It was still empty, but that would change in minutes. They had to get out of there. He threw his sport coat in the back seat of the Cadillac and slid into the driver’s seat. Anders looked over at him, a grin on his face.

  “Not a bad day’s work, Mex.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  San Bernardino County, California

  December 3, 1999 / Friday / 7:30 p.m.

  Caine pulled the Jeep Cherokee into the covered space beside the cabin and looked out on the mountain landscape. The cabin was located about six miles outside the resort town of Snow Valley, California, on five acres of land. A snow-covered alpine forest surrounded the cabin on four sides, with only the incoming dirt road breaking the virgin landscape.

  Caine’s nearest neighbor was about three miles to the south, on the road back to town. Although the surrounding area would eventually be developed, it would take at least another five years. The utility infrastructure would have to be extended before new homes could be built. The lack of utilities wasn’t a problem for Cai
ne. The former owner of the cabin had installed two independent power systems. A large solar panel covered the roof, and a propane generator, which easily could have supplied power to another two homes, was housed in a concrete block-house located next to the cabin.

  The cabin itself was about two thousand square feet. The first floor had a dining room, a master bedroom, and a central living room with a fireplace. The second floor had two large bunk rooms.

  The house was built on a slope. The architect who’d designed the structure had enclosed a part of the rear slope, creating an above-ground basement. The rear door to the basement had been designed to allow the former owner to drive his Arctic Cat directly into the sloped backyard. The door rolled up from the floor to the ceiling overhead.

  Caine had never owned a snowmobile until he’d bought the cabin, but since the Arctic Cat had come with the house, he’d kept it. Although he preferred cross-country skiing, Caine took the big machine for a spin around the adjacent valley several times a season.

  After putting away his supplies, Caine changed into cross-country ski gear and opened the door to the backyard in the basement. A concrete ramp ran from the door to the backyard. The ramp was covered with snow, allowing Caine to glide into the backyard and then make his way toward the valley beyond. The door behind him was on a timer. It would close after a sixty-second delay.

  As Caine skied across the yard, Sam, his golden retriever, raced past him, running easily in the four inches of powder. Caine started out slow and then settled into a fluid rhythm that was fast, but sustainable. As he glided through the giant firs, his mind wandered to another alpine forest seven thousand miles away.

  In December of 1987, an Ariane rocket launched by the European Space Agency had crash landed in the Dinaric Alps region of Yugoslavia. The transport rocket had been carrying a NATO spy satellite—an American-designed wonder that incorporated the most sophisticated surveillance technology in the world.

  In 1987, Yugoslavia was a communist country. Although it was officially “nonaligned,” this status only meant the country didn’t move in complete lock-step with Moscow, like East Germany and the other members of the Warsaw Pact. None of the NATO leaders working on the crisis had any illusions about what would happen if a diplomatic contest developed between NATO and the Soviets over the possession of the downed satellite: the technology would end up in the hands of the Kremlin, erasing a ten-year technological lead.

  The Pentagon had proposed a surgical air strike on the crash site, but this option was vociferously opposed by NATO’s European members. They argued that an overt military action would severely damage the West’s relations with the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies. They also pointed out that there was no guarantee an air strike would destroy the satellite’s most critical components.

  The insertion of a covert team with the capability of destroying the sensitive parts of the satellite was the only other alternative. Since the Soviets would be looking for the downed rocket as well, this option was extremely time-sensitive. Fortunately for NATO, a covert-operations unit within the French Foreign Legion was training in the Italian Alps, across the Adriatic Sea from the crash site. John Caine had been a member of that unit.

  Five hours after the Ariane rocket went down, a military cargo jet strayed into Yugoslav airspace. The five paratroopers on the jet made an HAHO jump at thirty-five thousand feet and glided twenty-five miles inland to the location of the crash site. Caine remembered, as if it were yesterday, floating downward through the frigid Yugoslav air to the snow-covered slopes half a world away.

  When they arrived at the site, one member of the team, Jacques Maltier, established a radio link with a U.S. Navy frigate. The Perry class ship was racing up the Adriatic in order to get close enough to launch one of its two SH-60 helicopters for the planned extraction.

  The leader of the team, Colonel Etienne Ricard, and Sergeant Danny MacBain were tasked with inserting the four explosive devices into the satellite. The fifth member of the team, Joe Vlasky, a squat, muscular Pole, was in charge of cutting the necessary holes for the explosives. Caine was ordered to serve as a lookout on a ridge about a quarter-mile distant from the crash sight.

  The explosives employed by the team were designed to generate a high level of heat, but minimal blast. If they were placed in accordance with the diagram provided by the Pentagon, the explosives would melt the most sensitive parts of the satellite. The process of inserting the explosives should have taken less than thirty minutes, but they were forced to burn another hour digging a trench under the rocket in order to place the last explosive. The delay put them outside their window of safety.

  While the rest of the unit was working on the downed rocket, Caine scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars for incoming aircraft. On his last scan over the northwest sector of his search pattern, he’d spotted an approaching aircraft—a Soviet Mi-28 Hind. The giant, well-armed helicopter was used by the Soviet military to provide both quick transport and devastating attack power.

  The unit had been warned that the Soviets would rush one of their own Spetsnaz teams to the site, from one of their bases in Eastern Europe, once they identified the location. These highly trained commandos formed the tip of the Soviet military spear.

  As Caine watched, a squad of ten men wearing white-and-gray camouflage suits and carrying AK-74U 5.45mm assault rifles, rappelled to the ground about seven hundred feet below Caine’s position. The helicopter, undoubtedly at the end of its fuel capacity, headed off the way it had come, as soon as the soldiers were on the ground.

  As Caine watched, the Soviets established communications and then started to climb up the slope toward Caine’s position. The move was understandable. The knoll was the highest point in the immediate area. The Spetsnaz team would be able to scan the surrounding area for half a mile in every direction from the pinnacle, giving them a clear view of the downed rocket and the Legion unit struggling to destroy it.

  When Caine radioed the information to Ricard, he directed Caine to move to the north side of the slope and draw the enemy toward that position with nonlethal fire. The distraction would give the rest of the team the time they needed to complete the demolition. As he skied through the California forest more than a decade later, Caine remembered racing to the second position and laying down harassing fire on the advancing soldiers. The Soviet team had taken the bait.

  Thirty minutes later, the Soviets realized their mistake when the explosives inserted into the core of the satellite exploded south of their position. Having been denied their prize by Caine’s ruse, the Spetznaz unit was not inclined to let the Legionnaire who’d led them astray escape their grasp. Caine’s race to reach the extraction point had been a close-run thing.

  The sound of Sam’s barking shocked Caine out of the grip of the memory. It took him a moment to realize that he was racing across the snow at a brutal pace. The dog, sensing his agitation, had started barking. Caine slowed to a stop and the dog raced over.

  “Take it easy there, buddy. Everything’s okay. Nobody’s after us tonight.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Austin, Texas

  December 3, 1999 / Friday / 9:45 p.m.

  Andrea finished the trial brief and left it on the table beside Julie’s desk. The birthday card on the edge of the desk caught her attention when she walked back to her office. She stared at the big red “34” for a moment. God, where has the time gone?

  When she started at the firm seven years earlier, Andrea had known what she was buying into: years of long hours, stress, and hard work for a shot at partnership and the big paycheck that came with it. Now that she was reaping the proverbial fruits of her labors, she wasn’t sure the price was fair, particularly since hard work and stress were still her constant companions.

  Andrea turned her chair around and looked through the wall of glass at Austin’s cityscape. So what? I’m thirty-four. I’m not sliding into middle age tomorrow. And what should I be doing right now that I’m
not? Sure, Mr. Right hasn’t come along, but …

  Most men found her attractive. She worked out regularly, and at five-seven, one hundred forty pounds, she weighed only ten pounds more than she weighed in high school. Her social life was limited because she spent twelve to fourteen hours a day in the office, six days a week. That kind of involuntary servitude made it difficult to meet anyone other than her male colleagues, and after the last two disasters, she didn’t intend to date another lawyer any time soon.

  Andrea looked across at the picture of the big Italian man sitting in the center of her credenza. He was holding a steel lunch bucket and wearing a yellow construction hat. There was a big smile on his face. Andrea had the same big brown eyes and light olive skin as her father, but at this point in her life, she wasn’t sure she could manage a smile like that.

  Andrea gently lifted the picture frame. I wish you were around to tell me what I’m doing wrong, Dad. I could use some advice. A small smile came to her face. She remembered running to meet her dad at the door when she was a little girl. Although he was always tired and covered with dust from the construction site, her dad had never complained about being an ironworker. He’d always seemed happy to go to work in the morning. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to know … and maybe I should spend less time analyzing everything. Andrea put the picture back on the credenza and looked at the pile of paper on her desk. That’s it. I’m done for the day.

  CHAPTER

  NINE