Sanctuary (29 page)

“What…dude, what are…” he stopped and started, his eyes peering at me as if from a distance. “I don’t…this is weird…”

I lowered my voice to the Outlaw growl and said, “Lee! I need help retaking the Chemist’s plane. Tonight!”

“WHOA!” he yelped, and he actually fell backwards over his chair. “Whoa whoa WHOA! DUDE WHAT??”

“Hah!” Puck laughed.

“Lee!” I snarled. “Now, Lee!”

“No!” He cried, stumbling up again. “What! No! You? You? YOU?” He climbed into the chair and started hopping. “You? You? What! You! You’re the Outlaw?? Chase Jackson is the OUTLAW?!”

I yanked the mask down and said, “Shhhh. Lee. Hush. Your parents.”

“You! You! No! Really? Really dude? No. You’re messing with. Aren’t you. This is a joke.” His face was flushed with pleasure and doubt.

“Lee, I’m sorry. I should have told you. This thing just got out of hand, and dangerous people have threatened my friends. I feel bad about deceiving you.”

He leapt off the chair and landed on me, like a squirrel jumping trees. He started yelling in my ear, “It’s you! It’s you! It’s yooooouuuuuuu!!”

The door at the top of the staircase opened and Lee’s mom called, “Lee, please! It’s the middle of the night!”

“Sorry mom,” he said. “Just having a good time. Everything is okay. I’ll be quiet.”

“Thank you,” she said curtly and she closed the door again.

“THIS IS AWESOOOOOOOOME!!”

“Okay, Lee.” I placed him onto the floor. “Now I need your help. The plane flies overhead in sixty-five minutes.”

“Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh this is really happening, my best friend is the Outlaw, ohmygosh ohmygosh.” He marched in place and chewed on all ten fingers at once.

“Lee, focus.”

“Dude. Dude. I have so many questions, dude.”

“Later.”

“Okay. Later. But how high can you jump?”

I set my phone flat on the table. “I’m going to put a friend on speaker. You two should really get along.” I pushed a button on the phone and the sounds in my ear began pumping out of the phone’s speaker instead. “Puck? You still there?”

“Yeah dummy. I’m here,” the speaker replied.

Lee frowned at the phone and asked, “Puck? Puck who?”

“He’s a friend that-”

“PuckDADDY?!”

I said, “Well, yes, actually.”

“Oh man! PuckDaddy, I’m a huge fan, bro!”

The speaker said, “Ah my adoring public. You are clearly a man of sophisticated taste.”

“PuckDaddy, I know all about you. Your takeover of the Swiss Banking Interfaces was Hacktivism at its best!!” Lee was hopping from one foot to the other, shouting at the phone.

“Thank you, thank you. A mere dalliance, really.”

“I read that article about how you used their own cameras to identify the keystrokes which…” His reminiscences stopped mid-sentence. His face went blank. “…huh.”

I said, “What?”

Lee stomped over to his computer and yanked out the power cord. The computer, as well as several other devices, blinked off.

“What the…” Puck grumbled. “What just happened? Hey! I was using that!”

“You mean you were snooping through my files, dude,” Lee retorted.

“Obviously.”

“And you were spying through my camera.”

“Duh. Have been for months.”

“Guys,” I cried. “This is a super weird. We need to focus.”

Lee rubbed his lower lip in thought. “I’ll need to purchase a better firewall.”

“Hah! Good luck, little man. I break those to kill time. I don’t need your stupid camera anyway.”

I sighed, “Okay. You guys done? Now, here’s-”

Lee’s face went blank again. He stomped over to his X-Box.

Puck shouted, “No no no! Not the X-Box! No! Getaway!”

Lee shut down his game console, including the attached Kinnect camera. “Suck on that, computer nerd.”

“Dang it,” Puck groaned through the phone. “This sucks. It’s like I’m blind.”

Lee shoved a big pile of stuff off a table. It landed with a crash, revealing a clean workspace and whiteboard underneath. “That cargo plane is a Grumman Greyhound, a twin-prop almost solely operated by the United States Navy. The Chemist found one of the very few not on a carrier. This one is probably a decommissioned model sold and overhauled for private use.” He leaned over the table on his elbows and started sketching lines on the whiteboard with a dry-erase marker.

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“I looked it up as soon as the news broke. Duh. You have three immediate problems. The Greyhound has a cruising speed of 250 miles per hour. Your suit won’t go that fast. You’ll fly forward at hundred miles per hour, and fall vertically around twenty-five.” He was drawing red and blue lines and numbers, the markers squeaking. “This means you can’t catch up to the Grumman Greyhound. It’s faster. Make sense?”

“Yes. This is super cool.”

“The second problem is altitude. The cargo plane is almost certainly cruising above 20,000 feet. Maybe over 30,000. Far too high for you. Your helicopter turbines will start to complain around 10,000.” He drew the earth with dotted lines to represent altitude. “Your suit won’t let you fly upwards to reach the Greyhound. It’ll be far above you. Making sense?”

“Yes.”

“Your only chance is to capture it during approach. The plane will descend and reduce speed as it nears the runway. But even then, it’ll be flying around 150 miles per hour. Fifty miles per hour faster than you.”

“No sweat,” I grinned.

Puck said, “Oh my gosh, Shooter’s going to kill me.” He used Samantha’s codename to preserve her identity.

Lee asked, “Who is Shooter? How strong are you? Like, could you pick up my house?”

“What? No. No way. That’s insane.”

“Does Katie know?”

“No,” I groaned. “I’ve been waiting to tell her.”

“She’s going to freak, bro.”

“I know. I want to wait until we’re dating, so she’ll have to forgive me.”

“But seriously, dude. Are you joking? Is this a prank?”

“No,” I grumbled. “Get back to your numbers.”

“The third problem is those big propellers. They’ll mess you up, even if you
are
Superman.”

“Which I’m not.”

“But kinda.”

“Nope.

“You’ll be forced to let the plane slide underneath you, and then land on it. Like jumping from a bridge onto a speeding train. But a train with big metal propellers of death.”

“Sounds fun.”

Puck said, “I’ve decided this is a bad idea.” We ignored him.

Lee continued, “If you think there’s even a remote chance those rotors are messing with your wind, then you should bank out of there, dude. Live to fight another day. You follow? I’ve got it!” He snapped his fingers. “When you’re in position, and the plane is almost underneath you, close the wings! You’ll still be moving forward at the same speed, but the wind won’t be able to manipulate your wings. You’ll be a rock, instead of a leaf. Make sense? Might be easier to land that way.”

“Good idea,” I nodded.

“Wow.” He pulled at his lip in thought, one of his constant habits. “You’re definitely going to die.”

“No I’m not!”

Puck said, “Yes you are.”

“I have no idea how you’ll get
into
the plane.” Lee shook his head and dropped the marker onto the board.

“We’re hoping he won’t have to,” Puck said. “Five years ago this plane was outfitted with advanced autopilot. I can access it remotely.”

“That’s so cool!!”

“Agreed. Puck rules,” the speaker rattled. “We’re hoping Chase landing on the plane will spook the pilot. He’ll parachute out, and I’ll engage the autopilot and chart a different destination.”

“This is the best night of my life. What if it doesn’t spook the pilot?”

I said, “Then I’ll improvise.”

“How?”

“No idea. But I need to go. I’m low on time. Can you figure out the numbers on helicopter altitude, when I need to jump in relationship to the plane’s approach, and all that stuff?”

“Sure, bro. I can get close. But no promises.”

“Check this out.” I handed Lee my new rod, the gift from the Chemist. He immediately dropped it, and I was forced to catch the rod before it made a crater on his hardwood floor.

“Dude!” he gaped. “How is that so heavy?? Like a baseball bat made out of lead.”

“Not sure. It’s a gift from the Chemist.”

“………” he said. “…say that again?”

“I’ll explain later.” I had to laugh. My life sounded so weird when I tried explaining it. “In the meantime, maybe I can beat open the plane’s door with it.”

“You’re capturing the Chemist’s plane with the gift he gave you. You should call it the Rod of Karma. Or the Betrayal Stick.”

Puck offered, “Stick of Treachery.”

At 12:30am, Isaac Anderson and I were in the rear passenger cabin of an FBI A-Star, whose rotors were screaming and pulling us higher over Newport Beach. The sky was black and so was the Pacific Ocean to the west.

“This is a terrible idea!” Anderson yelled. His usually handsome face was stony and lined with worry. The bay doors were open and the wind threatened to suck us out.

“Those are my favorite kind!”

“You’re definitely going to die!”

I was wearing my motorcycle helmet to provide eye-protection from the wind and so Puck and I could still communicate. The phone was in my pocket, connected via bluetooth to the helmet. If I ended up in the ocean (which I almost certainly would) then both would short-circuit.

“Remember!” Anderson called. “Once you hit the water, we won’t be able to see you. You must activate the beacon!”

“Got it!”

Puck was monitoring the cargo plane via the FAA’s radar, and he had Lee’s calculations. “The Greyhound has shifted westward,” Puck reported. “You need to be farther out to sea. It’s descended to 15,000 feet.”

I relayed the instructions to the pilot and we changed heading, soaring away from the coast. The pilot called back, “We’re at 10,000 feet. The air’s too thin to go higher! We’re barely hovering!”

Isaac barked, “Roger that! Hold position!”

I grabbed the handhold beside the door. The metal vibrated and complained with effort. Below us was nothing.

Puck spoke into my ear again, and I said, “Ten miles out! Altitude 13,000. Speed one hundred seventy-five!”

“Special Agent Anderson!” the pilot called. He was a silhouette, surrounded by incomprehensible lights. “We can get this helicopter up to one-fifty! Why don’t I fly above the Greyhound and match his speed? The Outlaw could just hop off?”

“Negative! We don’t want to alert the Greyhound pilot. He’d identify us too far in advance!”

We heard the pilot say, “I’m going to get fired for this.”

“You and me both,” Anderson mumbled.

I asked, “Did you get clearance for this operation?”

“Hell no. You think they’d authorize this?”

A thought occurred to me. Whoops!!! I forgot to tell Katie I wasn’t coming over! I texted her.

Sorry. Something came up. I can’t come over.

>> =( =( =(

>> Maybe for the best. I was feeling…deviant.

“Darn it,” I said. That could have been fun.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Puck said, “Three miles. 10,000 feet.”

“Bingo! I got a visual!”

Anderson ordered, “Lights out! We’re flying dark. Converge with the Greyhound’s course, but keep your distance!”

“Roger, wilco!” The pilot dipped the helicopter’s nose and we surged forward. My heart’s RPMs sped up too. Isaac’s phone lit up in his shirt pocket.

“That’s PuckDaddy calling you,” I said. “He wants to be on a three-way call.”

“Understood.” He answered it.

“Outlaw,” Puck said. I could tell through the headset he was anxious. “Prepare to jump. Going by the numbers, you’ve got thirty seconds.

Through our wide door we saw the big cargo plane lumbering down through the sky to the south. Jeez it was big. And loud. And fast. A winking behemoth swaying out of the heavens.

Puck said, “In roughly twenty seconds, the Greyhound will drop below 10,000 feet. Tell the pilot we need to match his speed, as closely as possible, and remain roughly five hundred yards above him.”

I did. The helicopter banked and roared.

Anderson shook my hand grimly and said, “Good luck, Outlaw.”

Soon we were half a mile ahead of the cargo plane, but we turned and it disappeared behind our tail. I’d be jumping blind.

“In position!” the pilot called. Our helicopter was really moving now, overtaxing the engines to keep up with the decelerating Grumman Greyhound.

“If you’re in position, then you’re free to jump,” Puck said. He was breathing heavily. “Wow this is nuts.”

I hooked the gloves onto my wings and connected the leg-webbing. Anderson watched without comment. I hadn’t really thought much about the actual jump, because I would chicken out.

Don’t think.

Don’t think.

I began counting to three, but I jumped on two. Out into the empty cosmos. The air was a painful wall which hurled me away from the invisible helicopter. The swirling gales snatched and pulled on the wings and I was instantly lost, tumbling in circles. The helmet rattled around my ears, the visor buzzing, my exhalations hot and loud. The distant city lights spun into my vision over and over again. I felt like a marble in a dryer.

I forced my arms forward and my legs wide. The effects of the wind increased and I was tossed like scrap paper in a storm. But I didn’t release the position. I ground my teeth and held. I found the glowing electric horizon and made small corrections until the twisting leveled. Finally! A quasi-stable surface of air to ride.

I was panting. Where?? Where was the plane?

There! I was hurtling straight at it!

I rotated my shoulders, arms shifting like wheel-spokes, and executed a rapid 180-degree course correction, a dramatic turn that displaced my blood and made me light-headed, until the lights of the city settled to my right. Now the plane was behind me and I fled before it. I hunched over, head bent down, hunting for the Greyhound between my legs. The visor was foggy, but I located the flashing collision lights approaching fast.