Then it had thundered in above them, silhouetted like a giant insect against the near-black sky, and set down only a few yards away. Dryden had been up and running before it had even settled on its wheel shocks.
Now he vaulted into the bay, tearing off the hood of his proximity suit with one hand, leveling the SIG at the flight deck with the other. The pilot turned to him with what started as a casual expression, and then paled.
“Sidearms on the console, right now,” Dryden said. “I’d rather not kill you.”
Both pilots were now staring at him, too surprised to comply. Dryden stepped forward and smashed the barrel of the SIG against the copilot’s nose. Blood burst from it in a gush.
“I shoot on three,” Dryden said. “One, two—”
He didn’t get any further. Both pilots carefully withdrew their .45 sidearms and placed them on a flat portion of the console.
Behind Dryden, Rachel climbed into the troop bay.
“Both of you, out,” Dryden said to the pilots.
That surprised them, but they didn’t argue. They opened their doors, dropped to the undergrowth, and ran.
Dryden climbed forward into the pilot’s seat, and Rachel followed, discarding her own hood as she squeezed past him into the copilot’s chair. By habit he grabbed the pilot’s headset and put it on, even as he sat; the heavy ear protectors cut out most of the chopper’s noise. Rachel donned her own pair. Dryden reached to the comm selector switch near the headset jacks and set it to cockpit only—the chopper would no longer transmit audio from the headsets to any outside listener.
“You really would have shot them on three,” Rachel said, not asking, knowing. “That wasn’t a bluff.”
“That’s why it worked,” Dryden said.
His eyes roamed the instrument panel. He’d trained in a standard UH-60 Black Hawk; this was the MH-60K special ops variant, but the panel was nearly identical. It had a few extra bells and whistles, notably an all-purpose display that was currently showing what looked like a satellite feed of the forest—a pretty damn impressive satellite feed compared to the ones Dryden had seen in his day. In the image, the chopper was centered and two bluish white spots of light—the pilot and copilot—were visible at the edges of the clearing, where they’d retreated to. A few hundred yards to the south, the gathered team could be seen, coming north toward the Black Hawk. Fast. Without a doubt, they’d been told what was happening.
Dryden took the controls. He increased the power and felt the Black Hawk shift beneath him. Rachel grabbed the sides of her seat. The rotors reached a scream, and the forest floor dropped away. Dryden hit the master switch for the exterior lights; the encircling wall of sequoias appeared from the darkness as if he’d waved a magic wand. From the cockpit of the helicopter, the clearing suddenly looked a lot smaller than it had from outside. With the trees topping out above two hundred feet, it felt more like a deep well than a clearing. Climbing out of it was going to be the most dangerous part of the escape.
Compounding the risk was the fact that he had to do it quickly. On the satellite feed, the team on the ground had cut their distance from the clearing by half, in less than a minute. They’d be right beneath the Black Hawk in another fifty seconds or so, firing at it with everything they had.
Dryden divided his attention between the trees and the satellite image. He pushed the climb rate to the maximum that he felt comfortable with—then pushed it 10 percent higher. It was a reasonable gamble: risk crashing by going too fast, or guarantee being shot down by going too slow.
He leaned forward and tried to see the treetops. It was hard to judge, but he guessed he had seventy feet to go. On the display, the team was now perhaps fifty yards from the clearing.
Dryden noticed a data tag in the lower left corner of the satellite feed: SAT-ALPHA-MIRANDA 21.
Miranda. He’d heard whispers of a project by that name, just hitting the drawing boards around the time he’d gotten out of the business.
At that moment the satellite display went black.
“I guess we weren’t supposed to see that,” Rachel said.
“Be glad they can’t shut off the engines. That’ll be on next year’s model.”
The tops of the trees were dropping past them now. Their highest boughs fell away, and suddenly the Black Hawk was in the clear above the forest. The sequoia canopy planed away to the base of the mountains, like a rough carpet in the moonlight. Dryden pushed the stick forward and felt the bird tilt in response. That was when the first bullets hit.