Flashback

The only sound was the air rushing over the dragonfly’s airframe and into the open doors. Nick was not seated close enough to the open door to see when they’d flown over the eastern edge of Denver, but his view of the horizon suggested that they were out over open country.

The flight to Denver Municipal Landfill Number Nine would take only a few minutes. Ninjas Ishii, ta, and Okada as well as one other blackclad guard, whom Nick didn’t know, all kept their low-velocity automatic weapons aimed. All of them had tasers hooked on their belts or combat utility vests. The fifth guard, who might have been a medic, had gone over to check on Leonard’s IV after the apparently unconscious man had lolled to his left and pulled out the IV needle.

Nick only wished that he could go back to those few seconds in the parking lot at Six Flags where both he and Val could have reached for their weapons and gone down fighting. It had all happened so quickly, but that was no excuse. Cops were trained to react quickly. And cops were also trained never to surrender their weapons. Not ever. In the movies and TV there were a thousand scenes where the bad guy has some hostage—sometimes the hapless cop’s even more hapless partner—and the hero or heroine cop puts down the gun—Look, I’m putting it down!” Nick remembered when he was a little kid sprawled on the couch watching such a cop melodrama on pre- 3D TV and the Old Man, passing through the room, said, “Never gonna happen.”

Had it been the presence of Val and Leonard this afternoon that had kept Nick from fighting—that had made him grab his son’s wrist to force the Beretta out of his hand? Probably. Nick had more or less come to terms with dying over the past couple of weeks, but he hadn’t been prepared to watch his son die.

Still—you surrender your weapon, you surrender all hopes of ever regaining control of a situation. Cops knew that and at one time Nick’s country had understood that. And then they’d shown the way to peace through one-sided nuclear disarmament, annual budget cuts to the military in order to feed the exponentially growing entitlements…

The most sickening thing about Hiroshi Nakamura’s little history speech was that Nick had agreed with much of it.

Now Nick shoved all such thoughts out of his mind, concentrating on being aware. If the ninjas and Sato gave him a single instant of inattention, Nick was going to take the chance.

And if they didn’t give him a chance, he knew he was going to take it anyway. Sato was standing by the open door, one arm casually hooked through a strap from the aft bulkhead. Nick knew exactly what he was going to try.

For some reason, one of the ninjas was still attending to his captives’ wounds and injuries. Why? It was crazy to fuss over medical stuff with your prisoners when you were going to execute them in a few minutes anyway. Nick assumed that it had something to do with the Japs’ medieval samurai code of bushido. Maybe it wasn’t honorable—that all-purpose Nipponese concept that seemed to cover all sorts of self-imposed insanity—to allow your doomed prisoners to die from their wounds on the way to their executions.

But it didn’t matter why the ninja playing medic was doing so; the only thing that mattered was that it gave Nick an opening.

The fifth ninja had removed the tape from Leonard’s wrist and was preparing to reinsert the IV needle—the bottle hanging from a bulkhead bracket was almost empty—when Leonard kicked the man between the legs, under the armor there, and when the guard doubled over, Leonard was shouting to Val and Nick and on his feet, physically lifting the shorter Jap off his feet and thrusting the ninja and himself forward, blocking all lines of fire.

Another guard jumped at Leonard, clubbing at him and reaching for his taser. Val leaped past his grandfather and began wrestling with a ninja for his submachine gun. Nick propelled himself straight at Sato.

There was confusion and shouting. The weapon Val was struggling for discharged and insulation flew from the forward bulkhead where Nick’s head had been an instant earlier. Perhaps it penetrated the forward compartment and hit one of the pilots, for the dragonfly suddenly listed to the left.

Nick had leaped onto Hideki Sato and was head-butting the big man and pummeling his face with both flex-cuffed fists. Sato lurched backward, shielded his face with his injured right forearm that still had the polymorphic smart-cast on it, and caught a swing-arm girder that was used for hydraulic cable lifts of people and things from below. Sato had his pistol in his left hand and was clubbing at the back of Nick’s head, but Nick was hunched over and the heavy blows fell on his back and shoulders.