Primary Valor, Jack Mars [black female authors .txt] 📗

I’m notgoing to stay here.”

He shooed her away.

“Run!”

She gave him a last look, then wasgone in the night. He worked his way to his feet, and bounced a bit on his goodleg. He took a deep breath. Then he was running, in a crouch. Each step waspain. He kept going. If he made it, he was going to pay for this.

He reached the wide open clear cutand started across. This was the most dangerous part. He was a sitting duck outhere.

It was hard to see his feet. Hestumbled over a cut log. He lost his balance and fell. He scraped himselfagainst cut and ruined wood.

“Unh-ah!”

He lay there for a few seconds,breathing deeply. The rain poured down on him.

He could hear the chopper. It hadcircled around and was coming in again, a dark shadow against the night.

Behind him, the shooting startedagain. Maybe he should just crawl the rest of the way. The chopper was comingdown, dead ahead. Then he was up and running for it. He didn’t rememberclimbing to his feet. He ran and ran, groaning with every step.

“Ah, ah, ah, ah…”

Gun shots fired from somewhere.

Please don’t let them hit me!

The chopper was down. No, it wasthree or four feet above the ground. The ground was uneven, soaked, litteredwith junk. There was nowhere to land. The bay door was open. Bullets whined allaround.

THUNK. THUNK. THUNK.

They were hitting the skin of thechopper.

He screamed.

He slid inside the door headfirst, like stealing home base.

The girl was here, and Ed washere, both on the floor. Ed was strapping the girl to the metal slats.

“Go!” Ed screamed. “All in! Go!”

The chopper lifted off.

Gunfire ripped into the side ofit. A rocket flew, whistled, glanced off the metal.

BANG!

Then they were up and out, bankinghard, zooming.

Luke lay there breathing, justbreathing.

The gunfire was increasingly faraway, nothing up here but rain and wind. Luke gripped the floor. The chopperwas still banked. To his left, the dark jungle passed, well below them now.

After a long moment, the chopperleveled out.

“Welcome aboard,” a female voicesaid. Rachel.

Ed lurched to his feet and pulledthe bay door closed. He slumped in one of the seats and looked down at Luke,where he was still sprawled on the floor. It had been quite a night so far. Lukethought he might spend the rest of it right where he was.

“Hot,” Ed said. “That was hot.”

Luke nodded. He could hardlyspeak. “Hot.”

Ed shook his head. “I said youwere gonna want me with you. Right? When you left me behind on the plane, Isaid that?”

Luke didn’t answer.

Ed turned to the girl now. Hername was Charlotte. That was her name. Maybe she would give an objective rulingon the situation.

“I told him, but did he listen?”

She looked at Luke, lying acrossfrom her. Luke looked back at her. She tried to suppress a sheepish smile, butcouldn’t. For a split second, her smile brought him a surge of images,memories, feelings. The images passed so fast he couldn’t catch them all. Highschool football games. Backyard barbecues. A summer day on a lake somewhere.

In just that instant, she was anormal kid, an all-American girl. After everything that had happened, would sheever be a normal kid again?

“I doubt it,” she said.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

March 30, 2006

3:05 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

Dark Waters International, LLC

Boca Raton, Florida

Lie down with dogs, get up withfleas.

They called the man Max.

Max Impact. Max Resistance. MaxPressure.

It wasn’t his name, or anythingclose to his name. Although he was American born and bred, his real last namewas Zivojinovic, a Yugoslavian brick wall of a name that most Americans hadtrouble biting off and chewing on.

Nobody cared what his real namewas. He didn’t even care.

He was a brute, larger than thevast majority of men. And he was smarter, too. At least he thought so. Hissense was that the urge people had to put him in charge of things was notbecause of his size, but because of his brains. He was a plumber, in a sense,and they had called him here because a pipe had sprung a leak.

“Here” was a nondescript brickbuilding in a suburban office park, the headquarters of the private securitycontractor Dark Waters International. The logo on the building simply read DWI.It could be an insurance company.

He was sitting in an undecoratedconference room, several people around the table with him. He recognized a fewof them. One was a retired four-star general, down here in Florida most of theyear because he liked to play golf. Another was an active duty major assignedto Central Command in Tampa. Tampa was four hours away by car. How the man hadarrived here at something like a moment’s notice was outside of Max’sresponsibility. Everyone in the room was dressed in civilian clothes.

There was a pot of lukewarm coffeeon a narrow table along one wall. There were also sugar packets and a containerof that fake powdered creamer that everyone hated, but people continued toinsist on buying. There was a pile of napkins. There was a small coffee spillon the table, which no one had bothered to deploy the napkins against.

The coffee was swill. Max hadalready drunk two cups of it since he got here.

There was a black rectangularspeakerphone device at the center of the conference table. Everyone stared atit. Max couldn’t tell if they were staring in disbelief, or if they werestaring at something anyone could have seen coming a mile away.

A voice squawked out of the box. “Theyleft the country,” it said.

Max had no trouble placing thevoice. It was a man named Darwin King, a man who had become so well placed overthe years that he had decided he was allowed to do anything he pleased.

He was a necessary evil, or maybehe was a friend, or maybe you owed him a favor, or maybe he had something onyou. Whichever it was, and that depended on the individual, everyone had turneda blind eye to what he was doing. Worse than a blind eye, people had coveredfor him. They’d been doing it for so long, that what had once been damagecontrol had long ago become policy.

“And who are they again?” ayouthful middle-aged man at the table said. He