Flying with Skippy had been a lot easier back before he was willing to talk to me so much. Now that we were part of the family and he’d opened up about his piloting and maintenance methods, it was frankly unnerving. But the rattling did seem to taper off a bit. Trip began to breathe again. Edward lifted one hand, extended his pointer and pinky fingers and threw the horns, then went back to his talk radio. Milo grinned. “See? Told you so! Orcs are great at fixing things…And I’ll admit, I did help a little.” He sounded rather proud of himself. “I sort of had to. Orcs think welding is black magic.”
And to think, Julie had been upset that Earl had wanted her on the jet, a new vehicle which was serviced by actual mechanics, not a thirty-year-old Soviet flying tank that had been out of service for the last year due to a terrible crash, kept together by a mystical orc, whose wife, the medicine woman, had shaken some chicken bones over it to pronounce it fixed. My poor wife.
Since Julie was our best shot with a rifle, she usually rode in the chopper anytime there might be a need for air cover. It was kind of odd that Earl had ordered her to go with him, but he’d seemed rather overprotective of her lately. Now that Earl had finally relented and told us the rest of the story about what had happened in Copper Lake, I thought I could understand why. He had filled in the rest of the details during the ride to the airport. Earl had been afraid to let anyone else know about Special Task Force Unicorn, but with Stricken showing himself to so many Hunters, the cat was out of the bag.
Why that cat had decided to let itself out was another question…
At least we knew why Earl had been extra sullen since he’d gotten back, with his girlfriend being drafted into a covert group of government-sponsored monsters doing who knew what. Earl wasn’t even able to contact her. He had to go to sleep each night without knowing if she was alive or dead. I’d be pissed off too. And now with Heather Kerkonen in danger, assuming Stricken was telling the truth, Earl had launched us on this mission for personal reasons. I was more than glad to go into harm’s way to help a friend, but ten million bucks was a very nice added incentive.
Once the Hind’s shaking had subsided enough that we could actually read without our eyeballs jittering out of our heads, Milo pulled a map out from his armor and held it between me and Trip. He pointed to where we were heading. “This is the spot of the last attack.” He moved his gloved finger. “This is the closest airfield to the target. They’re a couple hundred miles an hour faster than we are, but they’ll still need to procure ground transport. Ticked as Earl seemed, I figure that won’t take too long…He’s liable to hijack somebody. They should be on site at least half an hour before us.”
“Cops and MCB are already there, so whatever it is has already moved,” Trip pointed out.
“I know, and I’m going to be really upset if I’m missing SHOT Show and this thing has just up and flew away, or ate a big lunch and now it’s going back to sleep for another hundred years, so we waste our time screwing around in the desert while it hibernates and dreams happy monster dreams. That happens all the time…I don’t get to test drive killer robots very often.”
All Hunters hate going into a situation without good intel. There was no doubt Stricken knew more than he told us, and whatever he wasn’t saying was certainly bad news. “If this thing is on the move, and if it really is ten million dollars worth of nasty, then someone else is bound to run into it.”
Holly couldn’t see the map, but she could listen to our conversation. “I’ve been flipping through the radio and the police bands. If I hear anything I’ll let you know.”
“We might get lucky. All the Hunters in airplanes will get there fast to the wrong place, and everybody else in a car will be too slow, but if the creature makes a move in that window, we’ll be in the right position to catch it. They’re too fast or too slow, we’re just right.”
“We can be Team Goldilocks!” Milo exclaimed.
“I like it,” Holly said. “Goldilocks. It has gravitas.”
I ignored them. “If it shows up somewhere else, we’ll be the first to swoop in on it.”
“Us and the MCB,” Milo said. “A bunch of them bailed out of the conference too. Just because Stricken sent all the Hunters doesn’t mean that MCB answers to him.”
“Maybe they do.” Since Myers was gone and Agent Franks wasn’t being shown much love, I had my suspicions about who was actually calling the shots. “MCB will be too busy keeping snoopers out of the area and lying to the press.” I didn’t know if my guess about their internal politics was right or not, but I really didn’t want to get in Franks’ path if I could help it. “If only we had a clue what it was, we might be able to figure where it was heading, how fast, or if it’ll just hunker down. Anything interesting on the map?”
“Nothing major in the area…Pretty desolate. Some little towns here and there. Not very much farming, some mines. It snowed a few days ago, and the desert gets really cold, so there probably won’t be campers to pick off. It would be nice if it was cold-blooded and sleepy…You go out further, Wendover is north. Lots of nothing to the west. I hope it doesn’t go east.”
“Why?”
“Dugway Proving Grounds, where the Army stores all of its nastiest chemical and biological weapons. North of that is the test range where the Air Force does bombing practice. The whole thing is bigger than some states. I’m guessing a Russian attack helicopter flying over will raise some eyebrows. I don’t think Skippy wants to get shot down.”
“Skip no like crash again. Just fixed Hind. Crash bad.”
“Regardless of where it’s going, I’m worried about what happens when we find it,” Trip said. “That gigantic dollar figure making you guys nervous? That’s more than master vamp money. What the heck is this thing?”
“Beats me, but I do like the idea of sleeping on a gigantic pile of money,” Holly answered.
“You totally should try it. It’s awesome. I sleep like a baby.” I could get away with saying crap like that in this crowd. Even by MHI standards, I had been the primary on some very impressive bounties, but my closest friends knew that I’d donated most of my Lord Machado money to the families of the Hunters that had died at DeSoya Caverns. Not that I was hurting financially. I’d married a Shackleford.