Red Leopard (The Vistaria Affair Series) (32 page)

A patio extended for twenty feet or so, edged by thick balustrades identical to those on the second floor of the building, the balustrades she had climbed and sat upon, only a few short nights ago. Nick strode toward a set of stairs in the middle. She paused on the top step, her eyes widening. An expanse of concrete stretched out below, and on it sat a neat row of cars and trucks in front of a couple of helicopters.

Nick reached the concrete and headed towards the cars and Calli quickly followed him down the stairs. A soldier stood at parade rest at the end of the row of cars and as Nick approached him, a second soldier emerged from a metal door set into the foundations of the balcony and saluted to Nick.

Nick held up his hand and the soldier threw something metallic and shining. Keys. Nick caught them with a downward flick of his wrist and turned on his heel, just as Calli reached the end of the row of cars. “Which one?” she asked.

“That one,” he said, nodding over the top of the cars. He threaded his way between two of them...right past them and over towards the smaller helicopter.

Her heart jumped a little and she hurried to catch up with him again. “The
helicopter
?” she called.

“There’s nothing else that can get us there faster today.” He opened the rounded glass door of the helicopter and indicated that she should do the same.

“You can fly these?”

“I thought I’d just wing it,” he said, settling into the seat.

Even as her jaw dropped, she realized he was teasing. She scowled at him and sat in the other seat. There was a bench seat behind them, quite narrow, but clearly designed to carry two more people, or perhaps even three at a pinch. There was room for Minnie and Duardo.

“Strap in. This will be a rough trip,” Nick said, buckling the H-style belt over his chest.

While her heart skittered along, coping with the series of little surprises Nick had handed out in the last few minutes, she fought with the belts and finally got the buckle fastened. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Nick insert the key into something that looked suspiciously like the ignition slot on a domestic car and turn the key. Nothing happened.

“Flat battery?” she asked sweetly.

He grinned and prodded a green button, and she heard the engine grind and start to rev up. Shadows moving overhead caught her attention. The extended bubble of glass let her see the sky above and the rotors slowly starting to turn as the engine cranked.

Nick tapped her knee and held out a pair of headphones. They were attached to the console by a curly lead. He already wore a similar pair. She slipped them on and immediately the noise of the engine muffled down to almost nothing.

“Can you hear me?” Nick’s voice sounded in her ear.

“Yes.” She adjusted the voice pickup so it was closer to her mouth.

Very quickly, the blades above became a blur, and she could feel the helicopter shivering beneath her.

Nick had his hands on the controls, and he sat listening and watching his readouts. He adjusted the stick between his knees and played with the pedals under his feet and just like that, they were airborne.

The ground dropped away from them quickly. Calli watched the lawn recede from beneath her feet for the glass curved right over the nose and stopped about four inches from where her feet rested.

With another small adjustment of the controls, Nick turned the helicopter slowly around to face the north. It settled motionless in midair for a moment, then he pushed the controls forward.

She caught her breath, alarm seizing her, as the nose of the craft dipped sharply and the tail came up. They slid through the air, the already-muffled “thwock-thwock” of the blades dimming further under the rush of wind.

“You’ll get used to it,” Nick assured her, his voice issuing softly in her ear. It was like a whisper.

She looked down at the view in front of her feet.
Las colinas
looked very small, and already she could see the outskirts ahead and green tree canopy beyond that. “How fast are we going?”

“One hundred and fifty knots.”

She wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember what knots meant. “Can you put that in terms I can relate to? How long will it take us to get there? Where
is
there, anyway? Are we going to pick up Duardo? How did he get to phone you? I thought he was with his unit somewhere, fighting the rebels.”

Nick held up his hand. “Enough. I promised you an explanation. I had not forgotten. Now I have time to spare—a small amount. We’re heading for a place southeast of the Pascuallita base, which is where the front line is estimated to be. We should reach there in just over ninety minutes. Yes, we’re going to pick up Duardo. With luck, Minnie, too.”

“How? How did he get through to your cell?”

Nick shrugged a little. “He phoned. How else?” He seemed puzzled.

“I thought the army were scattered and on the run. He carries a cell phone with him?”

“They’re scattered, yes, but not entirely on the run. They will try to regroup into units, to find each other and build guerilla bands to impede the progress of the rebels until they can make contact with the proper chain of command and receive fresh orders.”

“That was what Duardo was doing? Where was he?”

“On the coast. There’s a fair number of seaside villages that are relatively untouched. He simply found a working phone and called headquarters. Because you had specifically named Duardo in your efforts to enter the building, that information and your presence there got passed along to him for feedback and he was transferred to my cell.”

“What did you tell him? Is he all right?”

“He’s cut off from his unit, but he’s fine. He’s almost directly south of the base, which puts him in an ideal position to quarter the area around the coast road. He will be able to find Minnie’s car and track her from there. Southwest of the base, where we’re heading, there’s a campground. It’s not used much because the jaguars like the area, too, but Duardo knows it and it has an open, flat area I can get this beast into and still maneuver.”

“That’s where we’re meeting him? It’ll take him hours!”

“Duardo knows his limits. He estimated he was only twenty minutes away from the campground. That gives him ninety minutes to look for Minnie before he has to make for the camp.”

“But she could be anywhere!”

Nick shook his head. “It might seem that way to you, but there’s a very limited number of places Minnie could safely move to. She’ll be sent back towards the city if she tries to go north or west into the mountains and the easiest route south, the route she will be forced to take, is the road she used to get there. She’ll have to go by foot. If Duardo finds her car, he will find her shortly after that. He’s an excellent tracker.”

Calli sat back in her seat, feeling a huge swell of relief. “Are all your officers so useful?”

“Duardo is a good sample,” Nick said judiciously. “He will do well.”

She rubbed her forehead and let her eyes close. They were gritty with lack of sleep.

“It may not be as straightforward as that, though,” Nick added.

“Why?” she demanded, opening her eyes.

“There are rebels throughout the hills in that area and Duardo is wearing a uniform. If he is seen, he will have to fight his way out of it.”

“But if Minnie is with him...”

“Then she will be fair game too.”

She closed her eyes again, ill with fear, and felt Nick’s hand on her knee. “Now you know why I tried so hard to avoid this outcome, Calli. Politicians do not count the innocent amongst their victims.”

“But we will have to, won’t we?”

He didn’t answer her and Calli felt a heavy, dark weight settle in her heart and mind.

* * * * *

Nick held a steady course north, following the spinal mountain chain for another hour. Then carefully, he adjusted their course for a northeasterly direction and the mountains fell away to their left. For the first time Calli saw evidence of war: black smoke spiraled up into the air to the north of them and spread into a gray haze across the sky. As they got closer, she could see tiny orange lights flickering.

“Fire,” Nick said, pointing to them.

“Oh God....” she breathed.

He pointed again, this time toward the coast ahead of them. “The coast road.”

She could just make out a thin smooth line, merely an indentation in the tree line, running parallel with the coastline. “I can’t see people on it.”

“We’re too far away. Keep watching,” he said.

Abruptly, he yanked on the controls and the helicopter tipped sideways, as if a giant hand had pulled an invisible rug out from under them.

Calli gasped and gripped the sides of her chair, looking over her shoulder at the ground that seemed to be sloping up towards her. “What’s happening?” she yelled.

“Tracers!”

“
What
?”

Nick pulled back on the stick, slowing the helicopter, but they were still sliding down that invisible chute towards the ground. The engine made a peculiar whining noise, clearly overtaxed. He tugged at the controls again, throwing all his weight into it. The helicopter jigged sideways and was suddenly climbing up into the air. Calli took a deep breath as her stomach flipped and dug her fingers into the upholstery.

Slowly their ascent smoothed out once more and she saw mountains directly in front of her. Somehow they had become completely turned around, but the one-eighty degree turn meant that this time she saw what had alarmed Nick the first time. From the forest at the foot of the mountain came a flashing and a line of white dashes that reached out through the sky towards them.

“Ohmigod, that’s gunfire. They’re shooting at us!”

Nick wrenched on the controls again and the helicopter once more slid down the sharp slope in the sky, only this time the forest rolled past Nick’s shoulder. Calli swallowed hard, not sure whether it was fear or the aerobatics that made her stomach cartwheel. She hung on grimly.

“I’m going to get down lower and use the trees as cover,” Nick said. His voice was calm and remote. He might have been discussing using milk instead of cream in his coffee. He eased the helicopter level and pushed the nose down to increase their forward speed. “We’re almost there.”

He guided the craft along the treetops and it seemed like she could lean down and snag leaves in her hand, they looked so close. It gave her stationary objects to measure their speed against. They were going very fast.

Ahead, she could see the coast road again and this time they were close enough that she could see a long row of vehicles and a thick stream of people alongside them.

Refugees.

The helicopter turned and the road slipped underneath her and out of her view. They were heading northwest, but Nick eased the controls and they began to bank in a curve to the left. He looked out past Calli’s shoulder.

“That’s the campground down there,” he said.

She looked. There was a bald spot amongst the treetops—pale green intersected by a thin strip she assumed was a road. “Do you have to circle to let Duardo know you’re here?”

“No need. He’ll hear the helicopter for miles. If he’s here, he’ll make sure we spot him.”

“But you’re circling anyway?”

“I’m not going to land unless I have to. I’d be a sitting duck down there and I’ve got far too valuable a cargo to take such a risk.”

It took her a moment to realize he was referring to her and she felt her cheeks bloom with an unusual heat. She could think of no suitable response and anyway, her silence had already extended far too long to make a snappy answer possible. Finally, she looked away to her left and down to the ground, scanning the visible area of the campsite.

“There,” Nick said, pointing to the northern edge of the site.

Calli peered. She could see nothing.

But Nick was already bringing the helicopter around, bringing it lower, towards the campsite.

Then she saw a small dot, moving out from the rim of the trees and realized her perspective had been skewed: she had been looking for something much larger because there had been nothing to give her a sense of scale. The small dot must be Duardo, which made the campsite larger than she had thought. They were higher than she had guessed, too.

The helicopter dropped almost vertically now, turning on its axis. She lost sight of Duardo’s figure and leaned forward to watch past Nick’s chest for Duardo to come back into sight as they swiveled full circle. Then she saw him. They were at treetop height now and Duardo waved towards the trees behind him. He wore jungle fatigue pants and a black sleeveless stretch tee-shirt that didn’t look anything like army issue. In his right hand he held an automatic pistol, down by his side, while he waved with his left.

From between two trees, Minnie appeared, dressed in jeans and a torn tee-shirt, running for her life. Calli caught her breath as relief, shock and fear speared her chest.

Duardo let Minnie pass him then began to run behind her, a slow lope that covered the ground as quickly as Minnie’s all-out sprint.

“There’s trouble,” Nick said, very quietly. He put the helicopter down on the ground, but she could tell by the way he juggled the pedals with his feet that he was keeping it poised for immediate take off. “Open your door and get in the back. Quickly.”