Without Warning (27 page)

There was only one other plane on the airfield at the moment, a Cessna 152. That left plenty of room for the chopper to land right near the cars without damaging that plane, or the smiling proprietor of the airfield, one Gerald Hines. There were also two cars, both of which had arrived minutes before. The drivers remained in the cars and ready. In fact, the motors were still running.

Bennett could see Gerald, on the ground, obviously excited at their arrival. He figured that an FBI helicopter landing on this airstrip was a big event for the ground personnel, but he just hoped Gerald would stay out of the way. There would be no time for a formal reception ceremony.

Bennett had no way of knowing that Gerald was hoping that they wouldn’t land on the runway itself, because Jake Robbins was coming in shortly to take the Cessna for a three-hour flight.

Jake was a terrific customer, the best Gerald had, and he didn’t want anything to screw that up.

“His name is Randall Dempsey, not Jimmy Osborne,” I said. Dempsey had invited me to explain it to Katie; he seemed amused by my knowledge. I was doing that for two reasons. First of all, I thought she had a right to know, but more importantly, I wanted to give Bennett and his people time to get there, and they weren’t due for twenty minutes.

I continued. “He was a newspaperman in Afghanistan, embedded with a Marine unit. It was the unit that we found pinned down in the firefight. Some got out; Dempsey here didn’t.”

“You left me there, you son of a bitch. I was wounded, I was yelling for help. But you didn’t give a damn; you were too busy saving your Marine buddies.”

“I didn’t even know that you were there until after we got out,” I said.

The amused attitude was long gone, and his face contorted in rage. “DIDN’T KNOW? YOU PRACTICALLY WALKED OVER ME!” Then, in a calmer voice, he said, “You were making life and death decisions, and I was the one you decided could die.”

I ignored him and turned back to Katie. “You might remember this, it was a big news story at the time. The Taliban imprisoned him, kept threatening to kill him, and finally claimed that they did. Unfortunately, they were lying, because here he is.”

He laughed, but it was totally without humor. “They tortured me for four years. Kept me in a hole in the ground and beat me whenever they felt like it. You have any idea what that felt like, hero? To get beaten within an inch of your life, over and over?”

“Put the gun down and I’ll recreate the experience for you.” I said.

He ignored that. “You know what else they did? They showed me pictures of you, getting medals, being treated like a hero.” He laughed. “But that was good. Thinking about you, thinking about what I was going to do to you, it kept me alive.”

“So how did you get out?” I wanted to keep him talking, but I also really wanted to know.

“They just forgot about me. It was like they stopped caring about where I was. The beating stopped, the guards stopped coming around. One day they left the door unlocked, and I just left. I found out later that the Americans were coming, and they were preparing to abandon their position. So I just walked away, and I made it out of the country.”

“You didn’t go to the Americans for help?” I asked.

Another laugh. “It was their fault, it was your fault, that I was there in the first place. If it was known that I was alive, it would be harder to get my revenge, which I’m doing now, to you and to them.”

An alarm bell went off in my head. “What does that mean? What are you going to do to them?”

He didn’t answer; instead he turned and watched Matt come through the door.

Katie looked stunned to see him; she had no idea what was going on. “Matt…,” she said, probably worried that he was entering a dangerous situation.

Dempsey simply said, “Getting crowded in here.”

“Katie, this is Dempsey’s son. I don’t know what his real name is, but I doubt it’s Matt. We can just refer to him as ‘Asshole, Junior.’”

“It’s going to be a pleasure killing you,” Matt said. Then he turned to Katie, “I’m sorry you have to be a part of this, Katie. But there was no other way.”

I was focused on two things: What did Dempsey mean when he said that before? And where the hell was Bennett?

I decided to use the former to buy time for the latter. “What were you talking about when you said you were going to get revenge on the Americans?”

“You don’t need to tell him,” Matt said. “There’s no reason to do that now.”

“Oh, yes there is, and I do need to tell him,” Dempsey said. “It will make his last moments all the more painful.”

He turned back to me. “You see that car out there? It’s filled with C3 plastic explosives. And, in about ten minutes, I’m going to load them onto a Cessna 152 and personally deliver it to the Nuclear Waste Disposal Plant in Wiscasset. Oh, sorry … did I say I was going to deliver it? My mistake; that’s going to be you. The plane is in your name, just like this cabin. You are going from war hero to the greatest villain in American history.”

“We said we could do it the other way, if it worked out like this,” Matt said.

“Well, we can’t,” was the answer. It was obvious that Dempsey was completely calling the shots.

“What other way?” Katie asked.

“Asshole Junior wants to kill you using my gun, in my cabin, and then make it look like I died in a murder suicide. Asshole Senior isn’t satisfied with that. He wants to kill us here as well, but then take my body and bury it someplace, so it will look like my body was vaporized in the explosion in Wiscasset.”

I could see Katie recoil at the harshness of what I was saying, but I couldn’t worry about that. I needed to talk, to keep them talking, until Bennett could get here. And now, even more importantly, I needed to keep Dempsey from leaving.

He smiled at me. “You died having all the answers.” He then handed my gun to Matt. “Follow the plan,” he said, and then left.

I listened for sound upstairs, some sign that Bennett had arrived to intercept Dempsey, but there was none.

He was going to be too late, if he showed up at all.

Gerald decided to walk to the helicopter when it landed. That way he could welcome them and offer any assistance they might need. Maybe they didn’t know the area, and Gerald could help them with that. Hopefully he could also find out what they were doing there, which would be a great story to tell the guys at the bar that night.

But they didn’t come strolling off the copter, they jumped off and set out on a full run to the waiting cars. The rest of them, except for the pilot, brushed by Gerald like he wasn’t even there. He would have given anything to know where they were going, and even considered following them from a distance.

But he couldn’t leave the airfield, not with Jake Robbins coming. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway: the FBI guys were gone so fast that by the time Gerald got to his own car, they would have completely disappeared.

So Gerald just stayed where he was, manning his post. He thought about talking to the pilot, but decided better of it. Hopefully the FBI guys would be calmer when they got back, having accomplished whatever they set out to do. Maybe then he could find out what it was.

The man he knew as Jake showed up about ten minutes later. He had passed the two FBI cars going in the other direction, and for a brief moment worried that they might be law enforcement, heading for the cabin. But he doubted that they were and realized there was nothing he could do either way. Hopefully, Matt would have finished doing what he had to do by then.

“How ya doin’, Gerald?” Dempsey asked as he pulled up.

“Just fine, Jake. Just fine. Lot of excitement here today.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed. “Well, that’s a chopper over there.”

“So I see. Whose is it?”

Gerald was going to tell him, but then decided that maybe the mission was some kind of secret and he could get in trouble for revealing it. “Don’t know,” he said. “Just some business guys, I guess.”

Dempsey and Gerald went inside to do the paperwork. Just like always, he rented it in the name of Jake Robbins. It was a procedure the two men had shared many times.

And as he always did, when they were finished, Gerald said, “She’s all ready to go. Fly safe, and I’ll see you when you get back.”

Dempsey didn’t answer, just walked behind Gerald toward the door. He grabbed him from behind and wrapped his arm around his neck. Dempsey was a powerful man, and Gerald far from it, so resistance was neither strong nor sustained.

Dempsey probably kept up the pressure for a good forty-five seconds after Gerald was dead, but he had to be sure. He couldn’t have Gerald alive to identify him as someone other than the real Jake Robbins.

Only Gerald had known the truth, and now Gerald was out of the picture.

Gerald had died silently, which had always been the plan. Dempsey would have preferred to just shoot him, but that would have created a problem. Jake’s gun was not available, because it had to be in the cabin, tying Jake to Katie’s death. It would have created a loose end for Jake to have killed Katie with one gun but Gerald with another.

While the plan could not have anticipated the fact that the helicopter pilot would be present at the airport, the lack of a gunshot turned out to be particularly fortuitous. Since the murder happened so quietly, the pilot was unable to hear it.

But that pilot presented another problem; he would be there as Dempsey moved the explosives onto the plane. And he might still be there when Matt came back and replaced his car with Jake’s. But things rarely went perfectly with the best of planning, and these problems seemed relatively easy to deal with.

The helicopter was far enough away from the plane that Dempsey thought it unnecessary to take a risk and kill the pilot. So he drove his car to the plane, parking on the far side outside the helicopter pilot’s line of vision, even if he were to turn and look.

Then Dempsey began the process of transferring the explosives to the plane. It was time-consuming, both because of the amount of material involved and the extraordinarily delicate manner with which it had to be handled.

It took almost a half hour, and Dempsey was sweating and exhausted when he finished, both from the physical work and the tension involved.

When he was done, he climbed into the cockpit, started the engine and said to the plane, “One last flight, pal.”

There was no time to waste. I had no way to prevent Dempsey from leaving: he had a gun and could have shot Katie or me. I also had hoped that Bennett would be there to intercept him, but that obviously didn’t happen. I would have heard the noise, and Bennett would have come in here to disarm and arrest Matt.

So all that was left to deal with was Matt.

Him, I could handle.

I turned to Katie. “We need to get out of here.”

She looked over at Matt, holding my gun, and then back at me. I assumed she wasn’t sharing my confidence.

“How do you want to do this, Matt? You want to give up, or do I need to pound the shit out of your worthless body?”

“One more word out of you, and I put a bullet in her.”

“How stupid are you? If I knew you were going to kill us with my gun, do you think I’d have anything but blanks in it?”

He looked confused for a moment, but quickly recovered. “Well, why don’t we just see about that? Sorry, Katie.” With that he pointed the gun at Katie and fired. It made a loud noise, and she recoiled in fear, which I was sorry about, and which Matt would pay for.

Of course, nothing else happened, because I had replaced the bullets in my gun with the blanks I used to teach the high school class on the use of firearms.

“You okay?” I asked Katie.

Her voice was shaky, but she managed a yes. I then turned to Matt, who was still looking at the gun with some measure of wonder. “It’s show time, Junior.”

He threw the gun at me, and it hit me in the upper left arm. It hurt like hell, but I’d have time to worry about that later. He followed that up by charging at me, which I wasn’t going to worry about at all.

The human body contains ten basic weapons of use in a street fight. They are two fists, two elbows, two feet, two knees, a forehead, and a brain. Others can also come into play at close quarters, like fingernails and teeth, but they wouldn’t be necessary here.

I figured I would only need to utilize two of my weapons, three if you include the brain. I’m still fairly flexible for an aging guy, so rather than moving to one side to avoid his rush, I kicked out and up, like an NFL punter might do.

But I wasn’t kicking a football, I was kicking a groin, and Matt reacted in stunned agony. It straightened him right up, but then when his own mind realized where the pain was coming from, he doubled over.

The doubling over was interrupted by my right elbow, which I threw much like a hockey cross-check across his left temple. He went down like a sack of dirt, out cold. One could argue that I did him a favor; excruciating groin pain is far more bearable when one is unconscious. If he were lucky, he wouldn’t wake up.

At that point, Bennett and two other agents burst into the room.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

“Our flight was delayed. I wouldn’t put my tray table into its upright, locked position. He the bad guy?”

“One of them,” Katie said.

“Let’s go; we need to hurry,” I said.

Bennett turned to one of the agents. “You stay with him in case he wakes up.” Then, to me, “Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you on the way,” I said, already heading for the door.

“Should I stay here?” Katie asked.

“No chance. I am not letting you out of my sight again,” I said, as I grabbed her hand and pulled her along with me.

The four of us jumped into Bennett’s car, and there was a driver behind the wheel. I never caught the driver’s name, but Bennett referred to the other agent as Mitch. This wasn’t a time for formal introductions.

Bennett was in the passenger seat, while Katie, Mitch, and I were in the back. After I told the driver that we were going back to the helicopter and speed was crucial, Bennett said, “Tell me everything that is happening. Leave out nothing.”