Flightsuit (3 page)

Hack squeezed
Rudolfo's fingers tightly around the trigger.  Without thinking, Rudolfo jerked away from Hack's pinching grip, leaving the trigger entirely in Hack's hand. 
Good
, was all Hack had time to think, before jamming his right elbow hard into Rudolfo's throat.  Hack pressed the bigger man backward like a linebacker with a good low angle on a running back.  Rudolfo was off-balance and they both fell heavily against the barrels that hadn't yet been loaded.  The hard metal rim creased painfully into Rudolfo's back.   Hack held him against the barrels with his elbow, and kept the trigger out of his reach. 

Lightning cracked the sky.

This distance from the fire, Rudolfo's eyes were small red reflections of firelight.  "You!  You after all!  I knew that you weren't right," Rudolfo said through clenched teeth.  "I knew you were one of them."  Hack said nothing.  He'd given up months of his life for this moment.  He'd never get those months back and whatever happened in the next minutes, he'd never have a second chance at this either.  He was all in and he focused everything on anticipating Rudolfo.

Like Rudolfo, Hack was a watcher.  Rudolfo learned to watch people in prison and became expert by necessity.  Hack was a natural watcher, always on the outside and looking for what everyone else missed.  He watched for the little things, like who tended to speak first after someone else – sometimes that indicated hidden disagreement.  Hack watched people listening when others spoke, and he analyzed their reactions.  While Rudolfo watched everyone in his "family", Hack focused
exclusively
on Rudolfo. 

Hack thought strategically about anything he did.  Now
he needed to outthink Rudolfo because he'd learned to fight in prison and he'd not been going hungry for the last three weeks.  He had thirty pounds of advantage and full stores of energy.  Hack had only adrenalin and desperation.

The sky unloaded a deluge of water, and the cacophony of raindrops striking leaves and earth rose
into a deafening roar.  The campfire flickered quickly into darkness as the agents crept forward.  Without the firelight, lightning and muzzle flash was the only illumination.  The shocked and exhausted men around the fire ran to the tents and trailers.  A crack of thunder that sounded too much like a rifle shot started the firefight.

Inside the trailers silhouettes appeared momentarily at the windows before the lights were shut off behind them.  Rifle shots popped from within and the agents dropped to ground.

Behind the semi, Hack was losing ground.  Weeks of poor rations tipped the scales against him.  He felt the strength draining from his arms as he fought to keep Rudolfo down.  Soon he would be spent and Rudolfo would take the trigger.

He fought in complete darkness but for an occasional lightning flash. 
He wrestled Rudolfo by feel alone.  Blindly, he leaned into a rattling blow to his jaw at the neckline while a second drove his head back.  He felt Rudolfo grabbing for his left arm to pull the trigger toward him and fought harder to keep it back.

The blows to his head made him draggy
and he felt himself moving slower.  He was losing.  Rudolfo landed three more blows in succession.  In the darkness, there was no forewarning, no opportunity to pull away.  Hack focused on the trigger, keeping his arm up and back, but it was dropping closer to the ground.  He gripped Rudolfo's collar in his right hand and extended once more, pressing away, but Rudolfo sensed opportunity and adjusted for more leverage against the barrel. 

Unable to see
in the darkness, or hear over the din, Hack felt himself slipping away from exhaustion and the head blows.  He searched inside for any remaining reserves. 
He gets the trigger and we're all dead.  He'll just blow it up as soon as he gets it.  He's got nothing to lose now.  He knows he can't get to the school after this, but he'll be satisfied to kill all the agents. 

But there was nothing left.  He was just too exhausted to fight him off.

Hack clenched his fist tighter around the trigger and closed his eyes, trying desperately to think of a way out.  The repeated blows
made it hard to think so he concentrated on holding his fingers tight around the trigger and on the place where he imagined Rudolfo's jaw would be – just above his grip on the collar.  He roared in frustration, that all the months of pretense, of staying on guard every moment, all of the planning and hard work would come down to a moment that left him no choices.  Hack put one last squeeze into the trigger and swung it forward into Rudolfo's face.

The blow broke Rudolfo's jaw free, twisting it sharply askew.  He stopped raining blows on Hack's face and moved his hands to protect his shattered face.  Neither man could se
e the impact of their efforts, so Hack jabbed again, holding the trigger tight.  The second punch didn't connect squarely.  It grazed down the side of Rudolfo's shattered jaw, and scraped against bone.  Rudolfo screamed in agony.

Hack pulled his knees underneath to get better leverage.  He turned loose of the collar, and brought his right fist back, before launching it directly into the mess of Rudolfo's face.  He felt
his body go limp. 

He
sat back on his heels gasping for air.  The river of rain still poured down.  He tilted his head down and breathed cool air through his mouth to avoid inhaling water.  He held the trigger up as much as his drained strength permitted and rested his chin on his chest.

A bright white flash reflected off the truck in front of him
and he felt a hard slap of a bullet on his forearm.  The sound of the shot registered as he cradled his arm. 
Broken
, he thought dully, feeling the sharp broken edge of bone with his working fingers.  There was a tearing sensation and a sharp sting in his elbow as a partially-severed tendon snapped.  The fingers holding the trigger opened.  He pulled the trigger in closer to his body to maintain pressure without the fingers and worked his right hand around the open useless fingers of his left.  He squeezed his right fingers tight around the unfeeling left fingers and the trigger underneath and held on.  Hack rolled to his side, and pressed his legs until he'd scooted up against two of the barrels.  He closed his eyes and tried to think only about keeping his fingers closed. 

Other shots
cracked around him with agents crawling through the grass, relying on darkness for concealment more than hard cover.  There was just grass and an occasional stump in the clearing.

The last two surviving members of the group were in a small camper.  They conserved ammunition, firing when they spotted muzzle flash.  The agents wanted to be sure there were no children in the camper before they moved in on the holdouts.  At this point,
they felt time was on their side.

The rain felt colder as Hack huddled against the explosive tanks.   He focused on his fingers.  As he tried to flex the fingers of his left hand, they didn't respond at all.  In the darkness, gripping the trigger, drained of his last reserves and bleeding out
, Hack kept thinking that his grip might be gradually releasing.  Unable to see, he flexed and very slightly released his grip every few seconds to be sure he was still holding the trigger.  The more he concentrated on it, the less natural the control of his hand felt.  He lost track of the sounds around him in the squeeze-relax repetition.

The last terrorist surrendered.  The past weeks had diminished all of them and they had little fight left. 

When a flashlight waved across him, Hack saw his fingers around the trigger covered with dark mud red with his blood.  More flashlights came, dancing all around him and then settling on his hand and his face.  "It's him," the closest agent told the others turning slightly so they could hear through the downpour.  "It's Agent Samuels and he's still alive!  Get the medics over here and call in the copter for evac."  The agent looked at the trigger held in the bloody hand and moved the light up the sides of the chemical drums.  "And get the bomb squad over here too.  ASAP!"  He bent down carefully, closer to Hack.  "Hack.  Hack, can you hear me?"  Hack's head nodded twice.  "Ok.  That's great.  You did great Hack.  You're going to be fine," the agent told him.  "I'm going to put my hand around your fingers, so you will be able to turn loose, ok?"  Hack turned his eyes up to see the agent and mouthed "ok".

The hospital room was dim when Hack awoke.  A clock on the wall beneath the television showed 2:30, and a groggy glance to the window suggested it was early morning rather than afternoon.

His left arm was in a cast.  Lifting it up he could see four fingers, all strapped to the cast with rubber bands
to keep tension off tendons as they healed.  He knew this from past experience. 
Months of rehab ahead
. 
Great.

Scanning the room, he saw
a mirror over the sink.  From the bed, it faced the wrong direction.  Nothing else reflected back at him so he lifted his right fingers to his face to assess the damage by touch.  There was tenderness, but no wires or patches. 
Ok, that's good
, he thought, surprised.  He pressed carefully on sore cheekbones gauging damage. 
Surprised there's not more swelling
.  His face was sore, but he was relieved there seemed to be no serious damage.

After a few minutes, he
felt a little more awake.  He patted around in the sheets for a remote control, and finding it, turned on the television.  The banner at the bottom was a week after the date Rudolfo planned to blow up the school.  Hack anticipated it for months.  It was burned indelibly into memory.  Seeing it was a week in the past washed ice water through him.  He worked to sort out his jumbled memories.  
No
, he thought,
we got him
.  He hoped Rudolfo was in a hospital room close by. 
Maybe I'll visit him in the morning
.  He aborted the grin too late to avoid the sharp pain it sent to both cheek bones.  He decided grinning wouldn't be a good idea for several days yet. 

The banner changed to "Cane Creek Plot Thwarted"
.  Hack turned up the sound. 

"…twenty three members of the terrorist group killed in the raid on Thursday," the newscaster read from her teleprompter.  She'd quickly become serious in the transition from the
previous report.  Rudolfo's mug shot flipped onto the screen with her.  Hack almost smiled again at the sight of Rudolfo's gigantically swollen jaw and the purple-and-yellow bruises covering the right side of his face. 
Ouch.
  "Representatives of the NSA say the scale of the explosion would have been devastating."  A video of the School Superintendent replaced the anchor.  "I'm told their plan was to park the truck in the space closest to the gym overnight.  In the mornings, we collect all the children in the gym as the buses arrive in order to give teachers time to get their rooms ready," he said.  "There would have been 600 students in there.  These are very young children.  It would have been beyond imagining."

The anchor returned, adding "
NSA representatives report that the explosion would have completely demolished the gym, likely killing everyone inside." She continued, "Three federal agents were wounded in the attack, one fatally." Hack swallowed, recognizing the agents.  "Hospital representatives indicate that Agent Henry "Hack" Samuels is expected to regain consciousness today."  Hack's eyes went wide as he looked at his own face on the newscast.  "Agent Samuels infiltrated the group for months and fought terrorist leader Eduardo Rudolfo during the raid, single-handedly wrestling the detonation device from him in the firefight." 

The
mug shot returned as she concluded, "Rudolfo is under heavy security and expected to be moved this week into the prison infirmary at Louisiana State Penitentiary." 
Have fun at "The Farm"
, Hack thought smiling in spite of the pain it caused. 
Going to be a lot harder to work under cover with this going on
. 
Who gave them my name and how did they get details about the raid?  Somebody screwed up big time.  Hopefully, it'll just blow over.

Unfortunately, t
he Agency needed a political diversion from recent fraud and waste scandals.  Hack was more valuable as a hero than as a terrorist infiltrator so they continued trickling additional details to the press, keeping the story alive while they waited on Hack to recover adequately for a full press conference.

He'd hoped to be released quietly in the night, but they went out the front door of the hospital at 10 AM
to give the media setup and coffee time.  They led him through questions while an Agency media rep stood alongside for "no comment" replies for ones he wasn't permitted to answer.  He rode home in a limo the Governor's office provided. 

The week he was in the hospital, reporters interviewed all of his neighbors.  All three local channels had satellite trucks at his apartment.
  Once inside, he ignored the knocking and stayed locked inside until they moved on.  Over the next six months, he was recognized everywhere he went.  He started wearing hats and dark glasses as if he were dodging paparazzi.  He felt exposed.  Watched.  There were a lot of other domestic terror groups besides Rudolfo's.  Any of them would achieve instant notoriety if they could kill, or worse, capture him.  He put in for a transfer.  As it turned out, that worked right into the Agency's plans.

They staged him in a DC office for six months, monitoring him.  He dyed his hair and grew a short beard. 
They had a new assignment for him.  He met with twenty Representatives and five Senators over the next four months.  He knew he was being interviewed for a highly secret assignment, but no one told him what it was. 

Hack picked up pieces of information from the questions.  He learned enough to guess that the Agency wanted to leverage their high-profile hero to pul
l a project away from the FBI.  The project had something to do with an alien artifact that someone found in Tennessee.