“Hey, what the hell are you doing up there?” one of the men shouted.
The doctor wanted to watch the screen of his phone, wanted to stay glued to the feed from the GoPro, seeing the lights of Maracan? Stadium out there in the distance already.
But he turned his head and looked down.
The cameraman had aimed his lens up at Castro. The producer was on a phone talking excitedly.
It doesn’t matter, Castro thought. Nothing matters any—
He heard the thumping of a helicopter in the darkness to his west but couldn’t make out running lights. It was circling and coming closer.
Dr. Castro didn’t try to duck down or hide. He was done hiding.
Using the joystick, flying the drone, the doctor felt totally at peace with his decisions, no fear now, no regrets now.
None at all.
Chapter 97
“SON OF A bitch, there he is,” said Lieutenant Acosta, who sat beside me in the copilot’s seat of the police helicopter looking through high-powered binoculars.
“You have eyes on him?” da Silva demanded over the radio.
“Affirmative, General,” Acosta said. “Right where Mo-bot spotted him.”
“Where’s the rocket?”
“I don’t see any rocket.”
“Then get closer, goddamn it, and throw your lights on him. And put on your radar and the camera, Jack. I want to see what you’re seeing.”
The Brazilian military helicopter had a millimeter-wave radar system and optical and infrared cameras mounted below the nose.
I turned them on and immediately heard blip!
I took my eyes off the statue and glanced at the screen. Blip! Blip! It was small, moving slowly right along the tops of the trees. It vanished then, and I figured it for a big bird of some kind.
“I can’t see any rocket,” Lieutenant Acosta said, drawing me off the radar screen.
“Has he already launched it?” General da Silva asked.
“No, we would have seen it take off,” I said, picking up speed, turning on the spotlight beam, and flying straight at Christ the Redeemer.
I slowed the chopper and hovered one hundred feet from the outstretched arms of the Christ. Even with the gray outfit and the matching paint on his face, you couldn’t miss Castro’s head, shoulders, and torso sticking up out of the arm.
He wasn’t looking our way. His head was down. His hands were busy.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
Pistol drawn and in his lap, Acosta peered through the binoculars. “He’s looking at a large iPhone on the arm in front of him, and he’s using a control of some sort with a joystick.”
I thought of the blips back there on the radar. Small. Slow speed. Right at the treetops. I felt sick.
“It’s not a rocket,” I said. “He’s flying a drone.”
“Shoot him,” General da Silva said over our headsets.
“General?”
“Put a bullet in his head,” da Silva said. “Then get control of that goddamned drone.”
I had a handful of reasons why I thought that killing Castro wasn’t the best idea. I angled the spotlight directly on the doctor before handing the microphone to Lieutenant Acosta. “Call him by name. Tell him to bring the drone back and surrender.”
Acosta said, “Dr. Castro, this is the federal police. Bring back the drone or you will be shot.”
The doctor stared at us blankly, then he nodded and put the joystick down. He touched the screen of his phone with his left hand at the same time he reached below the hatch rim with his right.
Castro came up with a pistol, aimed it at us, and fired three quick times.
All three bullets went through the windshield.
Acosta roared out in pain, “I’m hit!”
Chapter 98
DR. CASTRO SAW the bullets strike the windshield and watched the cop in the passenger seat jerk on impact. He swung his gun toward the pilot, but the chopper pulled away hard. He shot at the rear rotor as it retreated but missed.
Castro glanced at the image from the GoPro on his phone screen; the stadium was much closer. Distance to target: 2.9 miles. ETA: eleven minutes.
He looked up, hoping to see the helicopter heading toward a hospital, but it wasn’t. The chopper was taking a wide loop around the statue, too far for him to shoot. Could he keep them at bay, circling for eleven minutes?
Castro believed he could, though he was certain he would die soon, and not from Hydra-9. He’d shot at a military police helicopter. The men in the helicopter somehow knew about the virus.
They would try to kill him to get control of the drone. But the doctor knew that was an impossibility. There was nothing they could do now to stop it. The statue was locked. They might try to land on the other arm, but no. Who would get out? Not the cop with the bullet in him. And not the pilot.