“Not exactly my best choice, but I think it’s the only one.”
“Why not the best choice?”
“Every time we contact him through unsecured lines, that’s one more potential way someone can track where he is, or where we are.”
Omega grabbed the paper plate with his slices of pizza and followed Gia back to the office. She turned the phone over to him and dialed him an outside line code.
Apparently the first number didn’t work. He tried a second.
And then a third.
“No answer?” she asked, a bad feeling congealing in her gut.
Frustrated, Omega put the phone back on the desk. “If Bubba’s not answering, I don’t know what the hell else to do except go back out there and find our unit. If you can give us an official vehicle, that might speed things up.”
“You don’t even know if they’re still where they were when you left,” she said.
“But we can keep trying them on the radio,” Echo countered. “Eventually we’ll get close enough we can reach them on our frequency.”
Gia didn’t want to let them head out there alone. For starters, she wasn’t sure they’d make it there and back.
Secondly, she really didn’t want to let them go.
Which she knew was a totally stupid way to feel, especially under the circumstances.
Great. I meet a couple of guys I actually feel a little hot after, and it’s the end of the world. Just my luck.
Omega started to finish his pizza, his gaze focused out the window, when he sat up. “Hey, what about that?” He pointed out the window.
“What?” She stood and walked over to the window. This office looked out onto the U-shaped courtyard formed by the building. Just beyond it, inside the secure fenced area, sat one of the department’s smaller helos on a concrete pad. Equipped with FLIR and night vision cameras, the little two-seater Bell was mostly used to shuttle Chief Baynes back and forth to MP for meetings, and to run searches for missing persons and escaping suspects in their areas, or do spotting for wildfire fighting operations.
“That,” he said. “It’s a two-seater, right?”
She snorted. “Dude, I don’t know what you think I am, but I am no pilot.”
“But you got one for it, right?”
“Yeah…” She hesitated. “Well, we have a few that rotate duties throughout the county. I don’t know if the guy who lives here in Santa Clarita came in today or not.”
He smiled at her. “Then I suggest you go find out, Chief.”
“Don’t call me that,” she groused as she headed for the door. “I’m not the chief.”
“You are now, lady,” he said.
Gia walked out to the lobby. “Did Sanghvi make it in today?” she asked the clerk on duty.
She tapped a few keys on her computer. “Nope. Want me to call him in?”
“Try. Don’t know if you’ll get him. Pull his address for me, too, please.”
“Roger, Chief.”
Gia had to bite her tongue not to rebuke the woman. Yes, technically she was now a chief. The station chief.
An impostor to the throne, in her mind. Not that she wasn’t qualified or deserving, but there were officers in the force who’d been there longer, put in more years, and were just as deserving if not more so.
Officers who would have been called “chief” now if it wasn’t for the damn shitstorm bearing down on them.
No answer on Sanghvi’s home phone, or on his personal or official cells. Louanne wrote the address on a piece of paper and handed it to Gia. “Good luck finding him.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
Gia first polled the National Guardsmen on the off-chance one of them could pilot it and struck out. A quick call-out to her other officers, and no one else had a license or skills, either. Then she collected the two men from the break room. “Come with me. We’ve got a pilot to hunt down.”
First, she led them to the evidence room so they could retrieve all their gear. Then she grabbed the keys for one of the marked SUVs still parked in the garage and handed them over. “Fuel pumps are out back. Let’s top off before we leave. They’re solar hybrids, but I’d rather drive them with full tanks.”
After that, she shuttled them out through the secure gates and led them across Santa Clarita toward the pilot’s address. It was nearly four in the afternoon by now, and she felt time ticking, slipping through her fingers, growing shorter by the minute. Shadows were lengthening in the valley, the thick smog and smoke choking out the blue sky and leaving a grungy haze behind.
Sure enough, the driveway of Nadir Sanghvi’s small house sat empty when they pulled up. She knocked on the door but got no answer.
Omega and Echo followed her around the back side of the house. Looking in through a small gap between the blinds of a kitchen window, they could see it looked like the family had packed and left.
“Dammit.”
“Hey,” Omega said, smacking Echo on the shoulder. “Weren’t you working with Victor on helo lessons before TMFU?”
“Uh, yeah, on our Exhart. Not on a little Bell like that thing.”
“It’s smaller.”
“So’s a coffin.”
“Shouldn’t it be easier to fly if it’s smaller?”
“No, it just turns you into a smaller smear when you hit the pavement and the rotors grind you into hamburger.”
“Look, can you at least take a look at it, see if you can fly it? If you can, that would save our asses.”
“It might also kill us, did you think about that?”
Omega cocked his head at him and gave him a look Gia suspected bore a story behind it.
Echo threw his hands up in the air. “Fine! Signing my death certificate, but sure. I’ll try.”
The next-door neighbor stepped out her back door. “You looking for Nadir?”
Gia walked over to the older woman. “Yeah. You seen him?”
“He and his whole family packed up and left a little while ago. Me and my husband aren’t far behind them.”
Gia let out a little sigh of aggravation. “Okay, thanks.”
“I know they were heading over to his brother’s house. Maybe you can still catch them there.”
“Do you know where?”
“Yeah. I housesat for them last year and he gave me all that info. Hold on.”
“Thanks.”
She disappeared into the house and returned a few minutes later with the paper. “Here you go. Good luck finding him.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.”
With Omega and Echo on her heels, the three of them returned to their vehicles and Gia once again led the way. The address was on the north end of Santa Clarita. She breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted several cars parked in the driveway, and two more on the street. It looked like the whole family was gathering there before they left.
Nadir Sanghvi walked out and met her halfway up the sidewalk. “I quit, Gia. Sorry, but I’m not risking my life out there.”
“Look, this is important. I need you to run one of these guys to Altadena.”
He let out a snort. “Are you out of your farking mind? There are people shooting at choppers. I heard the other pilots who are usually stationed out of Hooper talking about it yesterday on the aviation band. No way. I’m done. I’ve got a family to take care of.”
Said family, including wife and kids, were now huddled in the doorway and listening. Hooper was the official LAPD heliport smack downtown, and probably deserted by now.
She grabbed him by the upper arm and dragged him farther down the driveway to talk, quite a feat since he was taller than her by nearly a foot.
Dropping her voice, she said, “Look, these guys are military. They’re special ops. They are on a mission I can’t talk about, and I’m under orders to reunite them with their unit. I need your help.”
“Sorry. Your orders, not mine.”
Echo and Omega had walked up to join them. Omega spoke up. “Can you at least give him
a, haha, crash course in flying that chopper back at the station?”
The pilot laughed until he realized Omega was serious. “Look, buddy, I don’t know what they pounded into your heads in special ops training, but flying one of these things isn’t like a video game.”
“I’ve got about five hours on an Exhart 850,” Echo said.
The pilot’s eyes widened. “Holy shit. Really? Those fuckers are huge.”
“Yeah. And when I was a kid, my uncle used to crop-dust back in Kansas with a Eurostar. I spent a couple of summers riding with him because Mom didn’t have a babysitter. I didn’t get to fly a lot, but I did a few takeoffs and landings. I’m no expert, I just need to know how to take off and land that thing you all have back at the station without, you know, dying in the process.”
Gia didn’t want to cuff the guy and arrest him and force him to go to the station with her, especially not in front of his kids. “Please, Nadir,” she begged. “Can you at least come show him how to fly it? He doesn’t need to know how to do anything in it but fly. No radar, radio, cameras, none of that stuff, nothing.”
“It’ll be a one-way trip anyway,” Echo groused.
When she glared at him, he added, “We’ve got a helo guy in our unit. If I can get there safely, he’ll fly it back.”
“Oh.”
The man ran a hand through his jet-black hair. “This is wrong for a number of reasons, but not like the FAA’s going to come crawling up my ass over it. I guess if you’re willing to get yourself killed, I can help you do that much.”
Relief filled her. “Thank you.”
“But I need a ride over to the station and back. Let me tell my wife. I want to be well out of here before full dark.”
It was a little after four in the afternoon. “Just an hour or so, however long it takes,” she promised. “I’ll have someone bring you back.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
He walked back to the house and Gia could tell the talk wasn’t going well from the way his kids started crying and his wife leaned around him to shoot death glares at Gia.
It made Gia want to hide behind Omega and Echo.
Finally, he kissed his family and walked back down the driveway to Gia and the men. “Let’s get moving.”
“Thank you. I promise you won’t regret this.”
“No, he won’t,” Echo griped, “but I’m sure I will.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nadir rode with Gia. “So what the hell is so important that I’m risking my life?”
“You’re just giving him a quick flying lesson. That’s not risking your life. No one’s going to shoot at you in Santa Clarita.”
She hoped.
“Okay. Let me rephrase the question, then. What’s so important that I’m going to be teaching a guy how to kill himself? Not sure I’m good with that guilt on my hands.”
Gia gripped the SUV’s wheel a little more tightly. “If I tell you, it needs to stay a secret. Not even your wife.”
“Fine.”
She gave a very brief description of what the unit was up to, but not the full details that she knew.
When she finished, he still looked stunned. “Holy crap. Seriously? A vaccine for Kite?”
She nodded. “That’s what they’re hoping. Oh, and you all weren’t heading for Barstow, were you?”
“Not on your life.”
“Good.”
Heavy silence filled the vehicle’s cabin. “You’re really going to blow the 5?”
“Yep. They’ve got two guys who can do it.”
He slumped back in his seat. “And they’re in Altadena?”
She didn’t dare glance over at him. “If he follows the highway, he can fly that, what, in less than an hour? Especially if he detours over the hills—”
“He better not do that. This time of year, the updrafts and air currents are whacked. Not good for any newbie pilot to fly in those when he’s not familiar with the landscape to start with.”
“Then make sure he knows that.”
Nadir fell into a dark silence she hoped meant he was rethinking his refusal. She could almost follow his train of thought, if it was departing from the same station hers was. By air, it was only thirty miles or so to Altadena. The helo could easily fly sixty miles an hour. Fly there, drop Echo, pick up the men’s pilot, and get back, in the same amount of time it would take for Nadir to try to teach Echo to kill himself in the helo.
She didn’t say a word about that, though. If he wanted to do it, it needed to be his idea, not hers.
When they returned to the station a few minutes before five, they parked the vehicles just outside the secure garage and walked around to where the helo sat on the pad.
Nadir started a pre-flight inspection, removing and stowing ground straps and rotor ties in a nearby storage box that was securely bolted to the ground. “It’s full of fuel,” he told Echo. “I topped it off last week after the run, and I know it hasn’t been out since.” He checked cowlings and external hatches to make sure they were secure, then opened the cockpit door. “You sure you want to do this?” Nadir asked Echo.
“No, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to do it, but we can’t afford to waste half a day getting back to our group. Especially this close to dark. Finding them will be easier from the air, anyway, in case they’ve bugged out. We know an extraction team will be on the move sooner rather than later to get us out, so I’ll be looking for them, too, along the way.”
Gia shared a glance with Omega, who seemed to be thinking exactly the same thing she was, if the man’s body language was any indication. Nadir was definitely hovering on the mental fence about flying Echo there himself.
The two men climbed into the helo and closed the door behind them. Gia and Omega moved back to the safety of the building and watched while Nadir went over pre-flight checks with Echo. Then the engine began spooling up, the rotors slowly starting to rotate.
Gia leaned in and rose up on her toes so she could speak into Omega’s ear. “You think he’ll end up flying him?”
Omega slowly nodded. “I think so. Especially if he gets the shit scared out of him trying to teach Echo to fly. Boy can be a little melodramatic.”
“You think he’ll pretend he’s worse than he is to scare Nadir?”
A slow grin spread across his face. “Oh, you can count on that. We’ll just have to see if it works or not.”
They shielded their faces from the prop wash with their hands as the helicopter slowly lifted up and peeled away from the station and its radio tower in the front. They walked out and turned to follow its path over the landscape, until they lost sight of it.
“If Nadir doesn’t agree to go, you think Echo can pull it off?”
Omega shrugged, the rolling of his large shoulders beneath the fabric of his shirt stirring more pleasantly uncomfortable feelings inside her. “Echo has a pretty healthy sense of self-preservation. If he really thinks he can’t do it, he won’t. And I won’t force him. Neither of us have suicidal tendencies. But if he thinks he’s got a decent chance of doing it, for the sake of the mission, he’ll give it a shot.”
“You’ll go with him?”
He snorted. “Hell, no. He wouldn’t let me anyway. He wouldn’t want to risk my life. And Victor can bring Yankee or Oscar back with him.”
“Who are they?”
He grinned. “Our guys who make things go boom in big ways.”
“Ah.”
“That church facility that exploded a few days before the quake hit?”
“Yeah?” she asked. When he grinned, she said, “Oh, that was you guys.”
“Yep.”
“Reports blamed it on looters.”
“Nope. We cleaned out the Kite samples they were working on before we lit it up.” His smile faded. “There were a lot of bodies stored in a cooler there, too. Euthanized, from the looks of them. No trauma.”
“What?”
He filled in some details he’d left out in his earlier telling.
; As a cop, she felt more than a little ill that someone had been doing that in the middle of Los Angeles and gotten away with it. “So that’s why Seattle? To see if you can track down people the volunteer might have infected?”
“Not exactly. Canuck has a contact there, and so does one of our guys. It’s a logistics move more than anything else.”
“This isn’t one of those ‘you told me so now you have to kill me’ kind of things, is it?”
“Nope. Not interested in creating any more collateral damage than necessary. Besides, you’re on our side now, right?”
She stared up into his brown eyes. Like sweet chocolate, intense, piercing. “Yeah. I’m definitely on your side.”
* * * *
They returned ten minutes later. Once the rotors started spooling down, Nadir waited until it was safe to wave them over.
“Screw this, Gia. He’s going to get himself killed. I’ll take him. I could have had him halfway there by now.”
“You don’t have to do that,” she told him. “That wasn’t our deal.”
“I know, but I can’t handle the guilt. Just don’t tell my farking wife, all right? She’ll kill me if she finds out.”
“It’s our secret.”
“Let me run grab some of my gear to take with me,” Echo said.
Nadir waved him out of the cockpit. “Okay. Make it fast.”
Echo got out and Gia led the men inside the building through a back entrance, punching her code to get in.
“So what’d you do?” she asked.
Echo grinned. “I nearly rolled us in a 360. Hey, my uncle was a showoff. He loved to do tricks in his old thing, when the tanks were empty, of course.”
“Of course.”
Echo rummaged through his bag, getting his sidearm, a rifle, and some ammo. The rest he left for Omega. “In case you need it,” he said. “I’ll get more at camp.”
The men hugged, which surprised her a little. “See you soon,” Omega told him.
Echo shot her a playful salute. “Chief.”
She flipped him off. “I’m not your farking chief.”
“I don’t think she likes that title,” Omega warned him.
“So I love to live dangerously.” They returned to the helipad. Echo climbed in and Nadir got the engine cranked again. Gia and Omega watched from just outside the station’s back door as the two men lifted off.