“Car or a truck,” said Rankin, spotting the headlights as they came up over the hill. “This may be it. Hang tight.”
He hopped back over the wall to wait. The vehicle came forward at a steady pace, no more than twenty-five miles an hour.
It was an truck, an army vehicle.
So there was a defector, Rankin thought. Hopefully he was important enough to justify the risk they’d taken.
Rankin started to get up but then stopped, realizing the vehicle wasn’t slowing down.
“Shit,” someone said as it drove past.
“What the hell we do now, Stephen?” said Sergeant Barren. He might just as well have spit the words from his mouth.
Rankin checked his watch. It was oh-thirty, a half hour past midnight.
“All right. Load ’em up,” he said. He leaned over the wall, gazing up and down the road. The whole mission was a washout, in every sense of the word.
Had Thera screwed up? Had the people in Washington? Had something happened to the defector?
Most likely, no one would ever know. No one would care, probably, unless something else screwed up—if the choppers couldn’t make it back because of the weather.
A good possibility, Rankin thought, giving one last glance toward the road. The he turned and ran for the Little Bird.
Inside, he pulled off his sodden campaign hat and looked at the pilot.
“Ready, Skip?”
“Let ’er rock.”
The rotor blades began churning above his head. The other helicopter took off first, twisting backward toward the ship they were supposed to rendezvous with to the south.
Rankin held on as the Little Bird bucked forward, stuttering in the wind. The wall loomed in front of them, suddenly taller than it was in real life, a trick of the shadows dancing in the rain. As Rankin stared at it, something seemed to shoot across their path.
“Flip the searchlight on,” Rankin told the pilot.
“Searchlight?”
“I think there was something back by the wall, near the road.”
Silently, the pilot complied, circling back.
There was nothing by the wall. Rankin had seen an optical illusion, a shadow thrown by the helicopter, but further down the road, a tiny figure appeared, waving its hands.
“There,” he told the pilot, pointing. “There. Let’s get him.”