From the looks of it, the old refueling station hadn’t been used in years. It was located on a tiny tree-covered island 100 feet off the shore of Minnebago Lake, a large body of water 50 miles south of Green Bay. There was an old log shack located on the bank of the half-acre island, though it was barely standing, battered by too many long winters and hot summers. There were two gas pumps next to its dilapidated dock. They looked to be vintage 1950s; they even had an old Cities Service green emblem on them. The place had once serviced floatplanes, as well as recreational boats. The cabin itself looked more like a hunting lodge than a gas station, though. Make that a very old, very small hunting lodge.
The Minnebago water was high now, which worked out well for the ghost team. They avoided having to land the Sky Horse in the middle of the lake. Instead they were able to put down next to the island and float the big copter right up to the dock. Incredibly—or not—the old pump’s tank was full of fresh aviation gas, just the drink the copter needed.
This refueling stop began with a message from Finch back at Cape Lonely. He’d continued to be the copter team’s intermediary for this mission, their “cutout,” if you will. Via a quick coded phone conversation, he’d told them where and when they could find the precious gas. After hiding out most
of the day back at the foggy Minnesota lake, they flew here, landing just after 5:00 A.M, their fuel tanks dropping below reserve, never a good thing. Before they activated the gas pump, though, Ryder and Fox stepped onto the island and checked it out thoroughly with their M15s. It was a wise move, a necessary caution, but not really needed. It appeared no one had been on the island for decades.
But then, appearances could be deceiving.
They soon had the gas pump’s extra-long hose stretched out to the floating copter. Their tanks were so dry, they could hear the fuel gushing down into them. Though the team was now in possession of at least a dozen packs of cigarettes, thanks to Bates’s quick thinking while on the ground at the theme park, they had to remind themselves not to light up while the refueling operation was going on.
Plus, they all had jobs to do. Puglisi watched the lake via the chopper’s FLIR device. Gallant oversaw the fueling on the copter’s end. And, as always, Bates stayed glued to his Eyeball Machine. Meanwhile Ryder and Fox checked out the interior of the cabin, as suggested by Finch. It was just one room, maybe 20 feet by 15, a combination kitchen, bunkhouse, and business operation. The floors were covered with soot; the ceiling was a canopy of cobwebs. The windows had indoor moss growing on them.
“I know those pumps look like they come from the fifties,” Fox said. “But this place? I’m thinking more like Roaring Twenties.”
Ryder scrapped some of the grime off the service desk. It was about a half-inch thick.
“Yeah, the eighteen-twenties maybe …” he said drily. “That looks like the last time anyone was in here.”
But no sooner were the words out of his mouth than he knew he was wrong. Sitting in a wooden box on the service desk, partially covered by an ancient yellowed newspaper, were a bunch of MREs, the field rations they’d been subsisting on since leaving Cape Lonely. Beside them a dusty box containing eight one-gallon jugs of spring water, plus essentials like toothpaste and deodorant.
“Check it out,” Ryder breathed, realizing the lengths someone had gone through to leave these supplies for them. Whoever had done it was fanatical in making sure it looked like no one had set foot in this place for years. Just like the gas still pumping into their fuel tanks, someone had bravely provided them the necessities of continuing the mission, cleverly disguising these necessities so they could hide in plain sight, so to speak.
The two men just stood there, astonished by the handiwork. The floor was so thick with dirt, they were making dozens of footprints, yet none were here when they’d arrived. The service counter was dirty and greasy, too, as if no one had touched it in a very long time. Yet it had been made just to look this way, for obviously whoever put all this stuff here had to have moved some of the dust and grime around.
“I don’t think a special effects crew for a big-budget movie could have done a camo job this good,” Fox said. “Unless …”
“Unless what?” Ryder asked him.
“Unless our friends have some kind of a top-secret teleport device and they just beamed these things in here,” Fox replied with a half-smile.
Ryder just shook his head. “Don’t even joke about that,” he said.
They continued exploring the kitchen area. They found more MREs and things like flashlight batteries, extra modem cords, more “safe” cell phones, and a small combination TV and AM/FM radio set.
“This will come in handy,” Fox said wryly. They had heard from both Finch and Ozzi, in very hasty phone calls, about how the copter team had made the headlines. It came as no surprise, especially after the theme park episode.
But Ryder brushed past all these things to explore the last box on the counter. It was his nose that led him to it. Inside he discovered a family-size jar of instant Chase & Sandborn coffee. It was like finding a pot of gold. Now that he had coffee and cigarettes, what else did he need?
But then it suddenly went through Ryder’s mind that this really was like the Roaring Twenties—or maybe more like
the Depression years. Leaving this larder for them out here, so cleverly hidden, was not unlike the help provided by some people to the gangsters of the thirties, the Dillingers and Pretty Boy Floyds, bank robbers who became folk heroes and were aided and abetted in their efforts to evade the police by ordinary citizens. Strange times back then, indeed. But this wasn’t a romantic notion now for Ryder. It was a scary one. Is this what the country has come to … again? he wondered. That ordinary people were so disillusioned with the nonsense in Washington that they were willing to help outlaws? Federal outlaws?
That’s exactly what was happening—that and the person who did this for them, they could only assume, somehow knew the ghost team’s guardian angel, Bobby Murphy.
Fox was thinking the same thing.
“He sure has a lot of friends,” he said. “For someone hardly anyone knows.”
Just then, they heard a commotion on the back porch. It was Gallant.
“Get back aboard quick,” he told Ryder and Fox. “Bates just got a lead on another missile.”
They were soon back on the floating chopper, gathered around the Eyeball Machine.
One of the mook phones was ringing. Bates had all his tracking gear already turned on; all he had to do was pick the phone up and answer it to get a location. He did so, and all they heard was dead air as usual. But again, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important that anything be said during the call, only that the call was being made in the first place.
Bates got his laptops working and in just a few seconds had his pong blinking on a GPS screen, indicating where the call was coming from.
But there was a problem here. Although the circle highlighted a point on the map that was very close to the Milwaukee airport, the pong wasn’t flashing over land. Rather, it was pointing to a spot over Lake Michigan.
This had never happened before. Usually they were looking for mountain peaks, the tops of buildings.
“Could that thing be wrong?” someone asked Bates.
“It hasn’t been before,” he replied. “I mean everything matches up. It’s near a place where the soccer team was set to play. It’s near an airport, and it’s a ‘real’ phone call, just like all the others. It’s just that the location is wacky. So, is my gear broken? Maybe?”
Ryder thought a moment. “Unless,” he said, “the mooks got themselves a boat … .”
Matt Ring was an unusual type of fisherman. He was trained to catch gilltails and cold perch, his gear configured to haul up these fish that tended to stay down near the bottom of Lake Michigan. This meant his 35-foot boat carried extra-large nets, long poles, and a deep holding pool full of ice water for his catch.
But truth was, Matt Ring hadn’t caught a fish in years. This had to do with underground economics and the fact that Lake Michigan was an unusual body of water. A few hundred miles up from Milwaukee, through the Mackinac Straits, the lake just touched the edge of Canada, only for 50 miles or so, around the Manitoulin Island region. This toe step into another country was significant, though. Things were so much cheaper up there. Liquor. Cuban cigars. Cigarettes. But mostly prescription drugs—the newest “hot” commodity of the twenty-first century. Ring could pack his boat with more than 50,000 dollars’ worth of eproximin, dicodin, and lobrutrin and still haul another 10,000 dollars’ worth of cigars and booze and still not give a hint to an unsuspecting observer that he was catching anything more than fish.
Again halfway down the western shore of Lake Michigan was Milwaukee. Not far inland was Mitchell Field, the beer city’s airport. This proximity worked greatly to Ring’s advantage, too. Many of the people who would eventually buy his contraband lived nowhere near Milwaukee. He had a deal with the manager of an overnight air delivery service based at Mitchell Field though. Ring would get his stash from his Canadian associates, make the journey 350 miles down to Milwaukee, and unload said stash into air shipping
boxes waiting for him at the nearby marina. The boxes would then be flown out—without inspection—to places all over the United States, to people Ring did not know, who would split up the pharmaceutical booty from there. For every trip he made Ring earned himself $20,000, paid to him by the owner of the airfreight service. Ring made one trip every two weeks. He lived the good life of a smuggler. At 55 he’d once smuggled pot. But the way the drug companies were gouging Americans these days, moving pharmaceuticals was a lot more profitable.
Still, it was a risky business. There was always a chance the law might stumble upon you.
That’s why Ring was so concerned this particular morning to wake up and find a Coast Guard helicopter coming right across the water at him.
He’d spent the night anchored here, just off the marina, close to the shores of Milwaukee itself.
He was waiting for his air-shipping contacts to show up at 8:00 A.M. It was now 7:30. The airport nearby was rumbling with flights ready to take off, a typically noisy start to its busy day. Nearby, the expressways were starting to fill up with commuters trying to get a leg up on the early-morning traffic. There were even people beginning to stir in the marina itself. None of them knew Ring was sitting on top of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of cheap prescription drugs just a stone’s throw from the dock.
But what the hell was the Coast Guard doing here?
He’d slept up on deck, as he usually did on warm nights, and woke up just in time to see the huge white helicopter coming, flying so low to the water, it was actually leaving a wake behind.
Before Ring could even think about it, the big copter went right over his boat—and, thankfully, kept right on going.
He let out a gasp of relief. But what he saw next bordered on the inconceivable and made him wonder if he was still asleep and just dreaming.
The copter was not interested in him. But it was interested
in the next boat over, a beaten-up yacht, with very dirty windows, moored about two hundred feet off Ring’s port side. This boat had reached the marina’s confines about an hour after Ring had, meaning about 3:00 A.M. He recalled hearing many voices talking at once over on the other boat, this as he was falling back to sleep. Foreigners, he remembered thinking.
Now this copter was circling the yacht like a bird of prey. He watched as it quickly pulled up into a hover. The aircraft wasn’t making much noise, which struck Ring as being strange, too. But its engines were so powerful, the air itself around Ring’s boat seemed to be shaking. His ears began to hurt immediately.
As this was happening, he saw a rope ladder fall out of the cargo bay of the chopper, and suddenly heavily armed men were coming down it. Ring was not just sleepy but also a bit hungover. He was trying to figure out if this was a real thing he was looking at, happening so fast, and in the bright early-morning daylight. Was this the Coast Guard’s way of showing him what they could do—a kind of real-life, in-your-face warning? Or were they shooting an episode of Cops nearby? Or was this part of some reality show?
These were the thoughts going through his head as the first two men from the copter landed on the yacht’s rear deck. Both were dressed in black camo and rigged up like SWAT team members. Big helmets, face masks, body armor. From Ring’s point of view, they looked more like cops than Coast Guard guys.
The people on the yacht were now just coming to life. Two burst from the cabin door. The two armed men shot them down like dogs. Ring was stunned. Two other men appeared from the front of the yacht at just about the same time. They were armed with pistols. A gunfight broke out, and suddenly bullets were flying. Ricochets, glowing rounds zinging into the water, some even perforating Ring’s boat.
Ring hit the deck. He happened to fall right next to a docking hole, so he still had a good view of what was happening not 200 feet away.
The gunfight went on unabated. The guys in the black uniforms were using tracer ammunition. It looked like a fireworks display gone wrong. When one of the people on the boat started moving toward the rear deck, a man in the copter’s cargo bay opened up with a huge gun. The noise from it was so loud, Ring involuntarily put his hands to his ears.
The gun on the helicopter began tearing the boat in half. One of the boat’s crew foolishly turned his pistol toward the hovering helicopter. That’s when another person in the cargo bay opened up with another big gun. In the blink of an eye, the man was shredded to pieces.
Now there appeared to be only one person left among the boat’s passengers. The two men from the helicopter advanced on him, this while the copter came down even lower. The man didn’t know what to do. It appeared the guys in black were trying to converse with him. Put up your hands, they were telling them. Throw away your gun and we won’t hurt you. The man finally compiled.
At this point, Ring could see the commotion had caused so much attention, people had stopped their cars on the expressway and were witnessing the unexplainable event. The same with the marina, people running out to its docks to see what all the ruckus was about.
Ring turned back to the yacht. The man was now having an animated conversation with the guys in black. They were asking something—this as the boat was starting to burn fiercely around them. Another man jumped down from the copter and went directly below. He emerged just a few seconds later, with a weapon that Ring was almost sure was a missile launcher. This man went back up the ladder as quickly as he’d come down. He was a strange-looking soldier, though, rail thin and wearing a goatee. He looked very weird in the SWAT-type combat suit.
This done, his colleagues turned their attention back to the lone remaining passenger. They were asking him for something else. He reached in his shirt, reluctantly at first, but then came up with two cell phones. He gingerly passed them over to the gunmen in black, then raised his hands
above his head, smiling now that he’d done everything his attackers asked and had saved his own life.
But no sooner were the cell phones in their possession than the men raised their weapons and shot the man, six times, right in the throat. He stood there for one surreal moment, his face screwed up in disbelief that the men had lied to him. Then he toppled right off the side of the burning boat.
That was it. The two armed men climbed back up to the copter. It started to move away even before they were safely inside. The aircraft turned a 180; then someone onboard hit the gas—and off it went, in a burst of exhaust and power.
Just like that, it was gone.
In all, the entire incident had lasted less than two minutes.
Ryder and Gallant pushed the big copter up and to the left. Their escape plan was all set. They would pass over South Milwaukee and then back around to the north, to the Rock River beyond. They’d already scoped out its banks for some good hiding places, of which it had many, as it turned out. The most ideal was a grove of willow trees overhanging an isolated portion of its banks. With the pontoons inflated, the crew could maneuver the Sky Horse under the covering flora, where they would wait until dark or until they heard someone coming and had to leave in a hurry.
And everything was going well toward that aim. They went up and over the expressways and over the working-class neighborhoods of South Milwaukee. The more wooded areas lay just over the horizon. Milwaukee air traffic controllers were frantically trying to contact them, but they ignored these calls. This looked like it was going to be another clean escape.
Until …
“Shiiiiiit …” Gallant said slowly.
Ryder didn’t like the sound of that.
“What’s up?” he asked Gallant, quickly glancing at the control panel. Everything was green. Their power plant was OK.
But Gallant wasn’t looking at the control panel. He was
looking at the bank of TV monitors for the handful of video cameras placed around the Sky Horse. There was nothing directly in front of the helicopter. Nor was there anything off to their sides or above them, looking down. But the monitor showing the view behind them was not so empty.
In fact, it was turning a very bright blue.
“Damn,” Ryder whispered.
A TV news copter was coming right up behind them.
It was a Bell Textron, a very fast, very modern, very nimble, if smallish, helicopter. It was really bright blue with the logo TV3 Sky Eye painted on it so large, it could be seen from a mile away. Even before the pilots noticed the other copter on the TV monitor, the swift little aircraft was moving up on their left side.
“Get rid of the guns!” Ryder hastily yelled back to the three men in the cargo bay. But Fox had already taken care of that, just in time, too, as the news copter was now right beside them, matching their speed. A man belted into its open bay was catching everything on a video camera.
“First the newspapers, now TV,” Ryder said. It was happening so fast, neither he nor Gallant had taken any evasive action.
“Hang on!” Gallant yelled as he was about to kick the S-58’s engine into overdrive.
“Wait!” Fox yelled though from the cargo bay. “Now that they’re here, it’s not a bad thing if they see us! Just for a few seconds … .”
Ryder looked over his shoulder to see the three men in black had lowered their ski masks over their faces and were holding their large Revolutionary War flag, the one given to them by the Doughnut Boys back at Cape Lonely. The three of them were waving and giving the camera the V-for-Victory sign.
Puglisi went halfway out the hatch so the cameraman could get a good shot of his shoulder patch, the unit’s talisman, the drawing of the World Trade Towers with the initials NYPD and the FDNY and their motto, We Will Never Forget.
“Get a good shot of that baby!” Puglisi was yelling at the cameraman now. “Remember 9/11!”
Then Fox cried out, “OK—time to go!”
Gallant pushed the copter’s throttle forward and the oversize engine kicked in. It was like hitting the afterburner in a fighter jet. Suddenly they were pulling away from the news chopper at very high speed, literally leaving it in a cloud of exhaust.
It was the first time the pilots had really put the S-58 into high gear, simply because it used so much gas. But now both were very impressed.
“Those doughnut heads really knew what they were doing,” Gallant said.
Ryder was watching the news chopper fade in their rearview monitor. He could barely move his head, though; the Gs were that high in the suddenly accelerating copter.
“You got that right,” he replied.
They were quickly a couple miles ahead of the news copter when they finally laid off the throttles. They could see the other aircraft, now just a bright blue smudge in the sky turning away, heading back toward the city. No doubt the Sky Horse’s unexpected acceleration had served as a fitting end to what was probably a dramatic piece of news footage, ensuring all of America would finally know about the team by the time the evening news aired that night—if they didn’t know about them already.
“No such thing as bad publicity,” Gallant said. “Now maybe someone in Washington will wake up.”
Ryder just shook his head. “That’s what I’m afraid of … .”
Now all the team members had to do was make good their escape, heading for the next hiding point, without any interference.
But that was not to be, either.
Because just seconds after the TV copter turned away, Ryder heard another commotion back in the cargo bay. Instinctively he knew something else was wrong.
He looked up from the GPS map he and Gallant were
reading, trying to find the coordinates of the next hideout, and turned to see that all three of the guys in the back had their noses pressed up against the cargo door window. They were shouting and swearing. Instead of yelling down to them or checking the TV monitor, Ryder simply turned and looked out his window.
That’s when he saw the two fighter jets coming right at him.
This was not good … .
It was strange, because the jets were flying so fast and so dead on, all Ryder could really see was the two trails of exhaust pouring out behind them. They went over the copter just a second later, one clearing the top of the rotor by no more than 50 feet. The other plane went right by the nose of the Sky Horse, and for the first time Ryder could see exactly what type of plane they were: A-10 Thunderbolts … More attack planes than fighters, they were essentially flying cannons, the weapon being the fierce GAU-8 gun. One of these babies could tear up a tank or an APC in about three seconds. While they were not really dog-fighters, the two A-10s would certainly have no trouble blowing the Sky Horse out of the sky.
“We’re screwed now …” someone moaned from the back.
“Just make sure all those goddamn guns are out of sight!” Gallant yelled.
Luckily, Bates had the presence of mind to yank in the forward gun before the two A-10s went over. There was no way they wanted these guys to see them carrying those big fifties.
The Thunderbolts went way out and turned, slowly, almost as if the two pilots were talking about what their next move may be.
“The most they can do is force us to land!” Bates yelled.
“Don’t be so sure,” Fox replied. Again, they had to realize the pilots were operating under rules written after 9/11. Shoot first, ask questions later.
The two jets approached them again. This time much slower, as if in attack mode.
“Shit!” Bates yelled. “They’re going to pop us!”
But at the last moment the jets split off, did a wide half-loop, and were soon riding off the right side of the copter.
Everyone aboard the copter breathed a sigh of relief. At least for a second or two.
“If they blink their lights we’re going to have to follow them,” Gallant said dejectedly. Blinking one’s navigation lights was the universal aeronautical sign for Follow Me. Implied in the message was that the nonresponding party would get shot to pieces if they didn’t comply. “And that will be the end of this little party … .”
But the A-10s didn’t blink their lights. The two planes simply pulled a little closer to the copter, and on cue, both pilots saluted.
Then they gave the team members a thumbs-up.
Then they banked sharply and disappeared.