Black Rain

Moore turned to face Sven, his back to the railing. He was tempted. He and Gibbs had planned for this eventuality. The two cars would be able to track him, follow him to whatever site Sven had in mind, but it felt rushed. Moore declined. “Not until I know who I’m dealing with.”

Sven shook his head and looked down the road. Moore realized it was vacant. “Wrong answer,” Sven said, pulling a slim pistol from his coat.

Before Moore could react, Sven fired twice into his chest. Moore fell back against the railing and then stumbled forward. Sven caught him as his knees buckled, holding him up and shoving him backward against the railing and then forcing him up and over the top.

Moore tumbled toward the river, his coat fluttering like a cape, until he plunged into the icy, black water and disappeared beneath the surface.

Back up on the bridge, Sven watched for several seconds. The foam of the impact receded, smoothed over by the flow of the river. Only Moore’s orange scarf reappeared, floating to the surface and twirling in the current before passing out of sight underneath the bridge.

Satisfied, Sven turned back to the street. A shiny black Audi pulled up and the rear door opened. He jumped in and the car sped off.

Farther away, Stuart Gibbs listened through headphones that issued nothing but static now. He turned to the control panel, found the switch for Moore’s wire and flicked it off.

Moore was gone. Blundin was gone. And within twenty-four hours the entire team in the Amazon would be gone. Vanishing with them would be the last evidence of the NRI’s Brazil project.

CHAPTER 24

Mark Polaski’s face turned ashen at the news. The message from NRI headquarters had come directly from Stuart Gibbs. Polaski’s daughter had been struck by a car while jogging. She’d been taken to the ER with severe head and neck injuries and wasn’t expected to regain consciousness. A ticket had been purchased in his name on a direct flight from Manaus to Miami, where a private jet would meet him. The Manaus flight left at 9:43 A.M., if he could get there in time.

He looked at Hawker. “Can we make it there in time?” he asked, quietly.

“If we leave now,” Hawker said.

As Polaski climbed aboard the Huey, the others wished him well. Devers handed him his pack and McCarter, suddenly reminded of his own losses back in the real world, promised to look him up on their return to the States.

Polaski barely acknowledged them. He sat in the copilot’s seat, staring blankly at the deep, azure sky, fumbling in his backpack for something.

Beside him, Hawker ran through a short version of the checklist, pressing the ignition switch and waiting for the needles to come up. The blades above them wound up slowly. As they began to hum, Hawker pulled back on the collective and the helicopter’s weight came off the skids.

Once they became airborne, the helicopter pivoted to the east, lowered its nose and began to move off, gathering speed and altitude as it went.

Before long, they were cruising, droning along at five thousand feet and 120 knots. In three-and-a-half hours they would cover what had taken the group ten days by boat and foot.

Inside the cockpit Polaski had lapsed into a state of silence. Hawker let him be. What could one say that would matter anyway? He busied himself with a pilot’s routine, checking the instruments and scanning, his eyes settling on one section of the sky, focusing for a moment to make sure it was clear, and then switching to the next in a constantly repeating pattern. Scanning was a process ingrained in pilots from the day they begin flying and Hawker fell into it out of habit, not expecting to encounter any aircraft. But he spotted something just the same.

A tiny black dot appeared in the sky at the Huey’s two o’clock position. Like a smudge on the windshield, it was motionless, showing no relative movement—the unmistakable sign of a converging path.

Hawker adjusted his course slightly and put the Huey into a shallow climb.

The other helicopter continued on its path. Before long, Hawker could make out the type, a Hughes 600, commonly called a NOTAR, an acronym that stood for No Tail Rotor, because it used funneled exhaust from its turbine for directional control instead of the standard rear blade. More ominously, this particular NOTAR was black, devoid of any markings and carrying a pair of external pods on either side.

“What’s wrong?” Polaski asked, coming out of his trance.

“No markings,” Hawker said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hawker replied. “But it can’t be a good thing.”

The NOTAR passed beneath them, off to one side and heading in the opposite direction. Hawker kept his eyes on it, craning his neck around and slewing the Huey to the right in an effort to keep the target in view. Just before it passed from sight, he noticed something else: the NOTAR had banked into a turn. It was coming back around.