Forty feet above the deck now. Thirty. Twenty.
“I don’t know how much more it can hurt than this,” Rachel said.
“You will. And if you need to scream, scream.”
He gave it power at the last second to soften the touchdown, and the instant he felt the wheels hit, he was out and moving, rounding the nose to Rachel’s side, opening her door.
“Lean against me when I lift you. I’m going to carry you with one arm.”
“What are you going to do with the other one?” she said, and then she understood—not by mind reading but simply by seeing. “Oh wow.”
“Try to see the humor in it,” he said.
She tilted her body into his own, sucking in a deep breath as she did. He got his arm beneath her knees and lifted her.
She screamed.
Behind Dryden, a few dozen gawkers were running from the sidelines toward the Black Hawk. He turned to them, raised the SIG SAUER in his free hand, and opened fire into the dirt far shy of them.
Panic hit the crowd like a rogue wave, turning it, propelling it back. Even those in the stands reacted, surging for the big exit tunnels at each level. As Dryden had seen from the air, the tunnels were huge relative to the crowd that would flow through them. No risk of the kind of dangerous bottlenecks that sometimes happened with stampedes. Just a couple of hundred people hauling ass for the parking lot.
Carrying Rachel, Dryden sprinted to follow the crowd, making for the nearest field-level tunnel.
He was halfway there when the ground came to life with a bass vibration and a pair of F-18 Hornets screamed over the stadium, missing the top seating section by no more than a hundred feet. A heartbeat later the trailing sonic boom shattered the field lights, plunging everything into near-darkness.
Dryden wondered how much closer he could have cut it. He had no doubt the fighters would have turned the Black Hawk into a fireball if it had still been airborne.
He kept moving with the crowd. The darkness and confusion were to his advantage, if anything. He kept the SIG low at his side, ready to raise it and deter any potential heroes, but it turned out to be unnecessary. In the chaos of the tunnel, nobody recognized him as the shooter.
Passing a pay phone at the outer end of the tunnel, he grabbed a directory and yanked it free of its flimsy chain.
A minute later he and Rachel were in the lot, which was clearing out rapidly. He broke the window of an early-nineties model Honda, unlocked it, and set her carefully in the backseat. Her face had lost a lot of color, even since they’d left the chopper.
He got behind the wheel, smashed the ignition with the grip of the SIG, and hot-wired it. Then he handed the phone book to Rachel.
“Look for the letters MD after someone’s name,” he said.
All around them, the lot was mayhem. People were driving over the curbs just to get the hell away from the stadium. He put the Honda in gear and headed out, just another cow in the herd.
*
Wind scoured Gaul’s computer room, at times whistling between the shards that still clung to the huge window frame. When it gusted, papers flew, but nobody dared move from his workstation to gather them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dena Sobel was skimming her pool when the Hornets made their second pass over Fresno, this time a few thousand feet up, and not dragging a damn shock wave behind them. Whatever hurry they’d been in the first time, it seemed to have passed. They were heading back in the direction they’d come from earlier, probably going home to Travis Air Force Base, Dena supposed.
Across the golf course, a few of her neighbors were outside their homes, tending to lights and windows that had been damaged by the sonic boom. Dena, a surgeon aboard the USS Carl Vinson for three tours, was familiar with the effects of supersonic flybys, and the one that had shaken her house minutes earlier had been louder than any she’d ever heard. The fighters must have been traveling a lot faster than the speed of sound.
A breeze stirred the white oaks that overhung the pool, bringing with it the sound of sirens from the direction of downtown. Within half a minute there were more, mostly police but a few ambulances as well. They sounded like they were everywhere.
Dena set the skimmer in its clip on the wall and headed inside to call the ER desk. Whatever was happening in town, if there were injuries, word would have reached there by now. As she picked up the phone, headlights washed the front windows, and brakes chirped on the driveway. Not five seconds later, someone pounded on the front door.
*
Dryden saw a shadow approach, through the windows that framed the entry. Assuming Dr. Sobel would look out through them before opening the door, he recalled the dying police officer’s words.