Breaking Point (39 page)

*   *   *

Half the bodies in the morgue had been transferred from Stan's Meats to a school bus when Hotel Juliet 113 hit the U-Store-It across the alley. The explosion toppled the bus and sent it sliding into an empty engraver's office. A fireball rose from the doomed cargolifter.

Its port wing sheared off the roof and most of the second floor of Stan's Meats, sending walls, ceilings, floors, and tons of masonry into the first floor.

Where Beth Mancini and Lakshmi Jain were.

*   *   *

The wall of water was six feet high and traveling at forty miles per hour when it hit the police and firefighters. Tommy, on the ground, locked his arms around Kiki's chest and wrapped his legs around hers as they were swept down First Street.

Ray Calabrese was thrown back into the plate-glass window of the police station. It shattered from the impact.

As he lost consciousness, a third, powerless Ilyushin swept down from above, not thirty feet over their heads, gliding silently, straight toward the auto-parts shop.

*   *   *

Jack Goodspeed, outside in the fenced-off storage yard, saw the first two jets augur into the town, then saw the third vectoring his way, and the fourth lose power and nose over.

He spun to Ginger LaFrance and shouted, “Go! Go! Get the fuselage outta here!”

Ginger hit the toggle and Casper began pivoting counterclockwise. She pushed the joystick and the rear-facing rotors hummed to life.

The Claremont began moving at one mile per hour.

Ginger hit the up-thrusters on the airship, but too late. The Claremont was only four feet off the ground when it bumped into the Cyclone fence. It sat there for a moment. Then, with a sickening groan, the entire south-side fence keeled over.

The whalelike airship and the cadaverous fuselage below it began drifting away.

Just then, Hotel Juliet 112 nosed into the street, fuel igniting a fireball thirty yards wide. The front wall of the auto-parts shop crumbled inward, the roof collapsing.

After the fireball came the tail section, pinwheeling down the street, smashing cars and pickups.

Jack and Ginger, in the back, were buffered from the explosion. They watched, stunned, as the empennage danced down the street, an alien child's game of jacks.

After that came the forty-four-ton wall of water.

*   *   *

From his rooftop, Calendar watched as a fourth Ilyushin zoomed into the town of Twin Pines.

He walked to the edge of the roof, peered down at the blocks of utter devastation.

“Good,” he said. “That's better.”

Movement caught his eye. It was the airship. And the wingless cadaver of Flight 78.

They were on the move.

*   *   *

In the real estate office, Gene Whitney saw the water a half block away. He grabbed Peter Kim by the arm and literally carried him into the break room, shouting,
“Gogogogogogogo!”

The five-foot tsunami smashed the office's windows and ripped out the door, the waves crash-banging together, chopping the hell out of the outer office.

The two crashers were swept off their feet and deluged.

L'ENFANT PLAZA

It was just past 7:30
P.M.
when Susan Tanaka took the elevator to the basement mainframe room. She dashed down the hall and swiped her ID card to gain entrance.

“How is it you can run in stilettos?” Dmitri asked, but his smile faltered as he saw the look on Susan's face.

“The eleven nodes,” she said. “The computers monitoring the crash. Nine of them just went dead.”

Dmitri nudged himself across the room, bent at the waist, and tapped quickly on his keyboard.

“I am seeing this, too. What in hell?”

“I just tried connecting to Beth's comm unit. It's dead. I tried her cell phone, too. No good.”

Dmitri said,
“Bozhe moi.”

TWIN PINES

At Stan's Meats, Beth Mancini tried to rise, keening in pain. She lay on her back. Parts of her body worked and others didn't. She was choking on smoke and dust, and her eyes stung. Coughing felt like it was burning her lungs.

She grunted in pain, found a chunk of masonry that was stable enough to use as leverage, pulled herself up to a sitting position.

As a little of the dust cleared, Beth saw that a piece of rebar had pierced her right thigh and protruded about eight inches in both directions.

She was bleeding badly.

She could not see Lakshmi Jain.

*   *   *

Twin Pines had a nice little park at the end of First Street, with a softly rising, grassy hill, perfect for putting out a blanket and setting up a picnic. The chamber of commerce had hosted live music every Wednesday night, June through August, back before the lumber industry had collapsed. There was even a white-painted bandstand with red, white, and blue bunting.

It was the grassy park that saved Kiki and Tommy; they rolled for close to eighty yards with the horrifying torrent of water, but more than half of that had been over grass in a nice little park at the end of First Street, not asphalt.

Tommy never let go of Kiki—not like the last time, on board the Claremont. When Kiki's arm hit a vertical railing of the park's bandstand, she held on fiercely as the onslaught passed them by.

Soaked, exhausted, coughing up water, they lay on the grass. Tommy reached out, grasped her hand. Kiki squeezed back for all she was worth.

*   *   *

In the yard of the auto-parts store, the water wall hefted Jack off his feet and carried him, at close to fifty miles per hour, into a stack of truck fenders, which toppled under his mass and the blast of water. He barked in pain, getting a mouthful of water for his trouble. His head caromed off a chrome trailer hitch and he lost consciousness.

The same watery onslaught drove an axle from a 1972 Chrysler Town and Country station wagon through the abdomen of Ginger LaFrance. She was dead before she hit the ground.

Her remote-control box shorted and died upon impact with the water.

Casper the Friendly Airship knew none of this. It just crept slowly to the southwest, hitting about three miles an hour now.

Unconscious on his pile of fenders, Jack did not see the twenty-one thousand gallons of jet fuel from Hotel Juliet 112 turn the auto-parts store into an inferno.

*   *   *

Ray Calabrese lay, spread-eagled, on Chief McKinney's desk. The water had shoved him through the plate-glass window etched with the symbol of the Twin Pines Police Department. He was plastered with water and the left side of his face and neck were tacky with blood. A jagged shard of window glass had sliced a four-inch gouge from his ear to his chin line.

He moaned, eyes fluttering.

*   *   *

Inside the auto-parts store, Hector Villareal threw a faux-fur seat cover over himself and dashed through a wall of flames, singeing his lungs. He fell to the poured-concrete floor, hacking, reaching out and turning Reuben Chaykin over onto his back.

Reuben's eyes were open, his mouth agape, a wound the size of his fist where his heart should have been.

Eyes watering from smoke and sorrow, Hector covered himself in the fur seat cover, rose, and sprinted to the back door of the shop. His right pant leg caught fire. He hit the door so hard that it sprang off its hinges and turned into a sled, gliding on the four inches of water that remained on the ground, carrying Hector away from the slaughterhouse.

*   *   *

Kiki's broken rib punished her with every breath. She'd reopened her leg wound, too. A rivulet of blood ran the length of her arm and she hissed as she pulled a rusty three-inch nail out of her shoulder.

Tommy tried to stand, failed, and instead knelt, leaning against the bandstand, hacking up water. “You … okay…?”

She nodded, soaked red hair plastered to her face and skull.

“Calendar,” she wheezed. “Pulse … weapon.”

“Yeah.” Tommy picked a Montana State University T-shirt off the ground, wrung it out, knelt, and dabbed at Kiki's shoulder wound.

“We gotta find the others … see who lived.”

Kiki said, “Look,” and jutted her chin to the south.

Tommy turned. The white airship floated out of town, the fuselage of the Claremont just barely visible from their hillock.

“They … got it out.” He coughed again. “Out-freakin'-standing.”

*   *   *

Daria Gibron waited out the deluge in her Ford Escort, which the water had shoved into the storefront of a yarn-and-beads shop.

When the storm passed, she kicked out the remains of the windshield that Cates had shot out and climbed out. A little burble of a laugh escaped her lips. She couldn't help it.

She grabbed her backpack and splashed out into the street.

*   *   *

The same paramedic who had checked Tommy's concussion cleaned Ray's facial wound, applied sixteen stitches, cleaned it all again, and adhered a wide, white bandage to it. “There. Just sit back and relax.”

Ray checked that he still had his Glock. “Tank you,” he said without moving his jaw. He stood.

“Hey, man. Seriously. You can't—”

Ray said, “'Kay,” through clenched teeth and splashed out into First Street.

HELENA

They directed the call to Sergeant Major Kinnison, the highest-ranking noncom on duty with the Montana Army National Guard. A solid cube of a man, he whisked off his cap and picked up the receiver in the Emergency Protocol Communications Center. “Say again, ma'am?”

“My name is Susan Tanaka. I am a chief investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. I am calling from our headquarters in Washington, D.C. We have a team investigating Thursday's crash of a Claremont aircraft near the town of Twin Pines, Montana. That team has come under hostile assault.”

Kinnison's bushy eyebrows rose. “Hostile assault?”

He could hear computer keys clacking in the background. “You have in your possession a phalanx of Chinook helicopters. I want two of them airborne in five minutes, en route to Twin Pines. I want someone to call me back at this number in three minutes with a status update.”

Kinnison looked at his watch. “I'm not sure I—”

The woman said, “Do it!”

Kinnison gulped. “Yes, ma'am!”

TWIN PINES

Beth Mancini removed her belt, lashed it around her right thigh, and cinched it tight, wincing. The dust had settled. She glanced around, saw a four-foot length of copper pipe. She scooted her butt to the right, reached out as far as she could, fingertips scraping the pipe. It rolled a little. She pulled it her way.

Grunting in pain, she levered herself up onto the bit of masonry, then used the copper pipe to stand on her left leg.

Using the pipe as a cane, she dragged her right leg and its length of rebar after her. A step at a time. She coughed. She touched the top of her head, her fingers coming back wet with blood. She had more injuries than she'd realized, but the twenty inches of rebar in her thigh was the big problem.

She took a fifth step, a sixth. Her copper cane was working. She neared the door to the street. And as she looked down, careful to find a place to set her pipe cane, she saw the remains of Lakshmi Jain. A good portion of her skull was missing.

Beth sobbed. She felt guilty that her first emotion had been self-pity:
I'd hoped Lakshmi would rescue me!
She wiped her eyes with her sooty sleeve, opened the door, and limped out onto the three stairs and the street.

*   *   *

“I know you!”

Daria Gibron stopped and turned at the sound of a deep, male voice.

Calendar stood on a second-story balcony of a building, elbows on the railing, one foot up. He shouted down, “We've met.”

She waggled her fingers at him. “You're Calendar.”

“You're DEA. No … ATF. You used to work with Israeli intelligence.”

She smiled sweetly and waved. “Hallo. I killed your boys.”

The knowing smile on Calendar's face turned chalky and brittle. “Those were good men.”

She grunted a laugh. “It was not difficult.”

His fists tightened on the railing. “Who's paying you? Who's targeting my op?”

“Today, it's—
Boo!
”

The shout and her abracadabra gesture startled Calendar enough that he flinched. And in that instant, she ghosted. The spot where Daria had stood, below his window, was, strictly speaking, Daria-less.

He blinked. He set aside the rocket-launch tube and drew his Heckler & Koch .45 auto, unscrewing the silencer.

*   *   *

Downstairs, in the same building, Daria drew her massive, matte-finished Browning Hi Power autos out of her thigh holsters. Their .45-caliber bullets could stop a Buick.

She grinned, canine teeth exposed, eyes twinkling.

*   *   *

Tommy and Kiki trudged back up First Street, surveying the complete devastation. No storefront was intact, no ground-floor window unshattered. Smoke roiled from four distinct fires throughout the small downtown area; three to the east of them, one to the west.

A block from the police station they saw Ray Calabrese standing in the middle of the street. His shoulders dropped as he spotted them. He waved, then hunched over, hands on his knees, barely staying upright.

Behind Ray, a Sikorsky helicopter touched down.

*   *   *

Gene Whitney said, “Would you stay still? Okay, on three.”

Peter Kim nodded. One-half of a pair of scissors—half the handle and half the cutting surface—had jammed a good four inches of itself into his right calf. He lay in a pinkish puddle of blood and water on the floor of the real estate office's break room, his ever-neat suit a limp rag. Gene knelt by his side, a hand on the scissor, the other on Peter's knee.

“Okay. One. Two—”

He yanked it out. Peter barking, “Aaagh! God! Damn!”