Zero Hour nf-11 Page 3

  Kurt had no idea what was going on, but even from up on the platform he could see two people trapped in the boat’s wreckage and smell leaking fuel.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs, ran a short distance, and hopped over a wall onto the promenade. As he raced up to the mangled craft, the still-spinning prop touched the concrete walkway. A shower of sparks lit out from it. They flew into the gasoline vapors, and a flashover roared outward.

  In the wake of this small explosion, a sea of flames rose from where the ruptured fuel had spilled.

  Despite the conflagration, Kurt rushed forward.

  * * *

  Four hundred feet above and a mile away, the Eurocopter made a steep turn above the outskirts of Sydney.

  Even though he was strapped in, the sniper put a hand out and held on.

  “Take it easy,” he shouted.

  He was already wrestling with the long-barreled Heckler & Koch sniper rifle, trying to attach a high-capacity fifty-round drum. The last thing he needed was to be dumped out the side.

  “We have to make another pass,” the pilot called back. “We have to make sure they’re dead.”

  The sniper doubted anyone could have survived the crash, but it wasn’t his call. As the helicopter leveled out, he gave up trying to attach the drum and jammed a standard ten-round magazine in the weapon.

  “Keep it steady this time,” he demanded. “I need a stable platform to shoot from.”

  “Will do,” the pilot replied.

  The sniper eased toward the open door, folding one leg underneath him and stretching the other leg down to brace himself on the step that was just above the copter’s skid.

  They’d come around now and were approaching the sails of the Opera House more slowly. He racked the slide and readied himself to fire.

  * * *

  By the time Kurt reached the shattered boat, fire had engulfed its stern. A hunched-over figure in the passenger seat was trying to get free. Kurt pulled him loose and dragged him over the side, ignoring the cries of pain.

  Fifty feet from the boat, Kurt laid the injured man down, noticing the strange way his hands and fingers curled up. It was an odd enough sight to stick in Kurt’s mind even as he raced back to help the driver.

  Fighting through the acrid smoke, Kurt clambered onto the boat. By now, flames were licking at the driver’s back.

  Kurt tried to pull the man upward, but he was held in place by the crushed-in section of the control panel.

  “Leave me,” the man shouted. “Help Panos.”

  “If that’s your passenger, he’s already safe,” Kurt shouted. “Now, help me get you free.”

  The man pushed and Kurt pulled, but the crushed panel held him tight. Kurt knew they needed leverage. He grabbed a harpoonlike boat hook that lay in what remained of the bow and wedged it in between the trapped driver and the mangled wreckage.

  Leaning on it with all his weight, Kurt forced some space between the driver and the panel. “Now!” he shouted.

  The man shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t feel my—”

  In a sudden recoil, the driver’s head snapped back, and blood spattered across the dashboard. The smoke swirled with new abandon and the rising flames danced in odd directions as gusting wind from the helicopter’s downwash swept over them.

  Realizing the driver was dead and that he was probably next, Kurt dove over the side of the boat and tumbled out.

  Shells hit left and right as he scrambled for cover.

  Hidden in the smoke, Kurt looked up. The Eurocopter hovered sixty feet above. He could see the sniper searching for a target, moving the long barrel of his rifle back and forth. Then the helicopter drifted to the left and turned away.

  The sniper must have seen the injured passenger limping down the promenade. He opened fire with abandon.

  Ricochets hit all around the man until a shell found its mark and dropped the poor soul to his knees. Before the shooter could finish him off, another bystander rushed in. It was Hayley. She dragged the limp figure behind a large concrete planter and ducked down.

  The sniper opened fire once again, the shells digging chips out of the concrete and throwing up chunks of dirt. But the planter might as well have been a giant sandbag. It was too thick for the bullets to penetrate.

  The helicopter began to drift sideways. Kurt had only seconds before the sniper found a clear line of fire.

  He grabbed the wooden boat hook once again, the business end of which was now in flames. He gripped it near the center, ran forward, and hurled it like a javelin.

  The helicopter was broadside to him now, and the fiery lance tracked toward the open cargo door like a heat-seeking missile.

  It hit the target dead center, missing the sniper by inches but lodging in the cabin and spreading a wave of fire in the process. In a moment, smoke was pouring from the helicopter’s side door. Kurt saw the sniper’s body erupt in flames, and he could only guess that he’d hit a fuel or oxygen line.

  The orange firelight surged through the helicopter as it began to turn. For a second, it looked as if the pilot would regain control and speed off across the harbor, but the angle of his turn tightened, and the helicopter began to corkscrew back toward the Concert Hall. By now, the interior of the cabin was an inferno, smoke billowing from it in all directions.

  Burning and falling and accelerating at the same time, the Eurocopter flew right into the famous glass wall of the Concert Hall, shattering the fifty-foot panes of clear glass. Shards from the impact burst inward, while other sections dropped in huge sheets and exploded into thousands of fragments when they hit the ground.

  The helicopter dropped straight down along with them, its rotors gone and its hub turning like a weedwacker that had run out of string. It landed with a great crunch. In moments, it was a barely recognizable hulk at the center of a small inferno.

  By now, emergency units were arriving. A squad of patrolmen raced up on foot. Fire trucks were pulling in. Workers from the Opera House came running out with extinguishers. Another group opened a fire hose from a stanchion in a wall.

  Kurt was pretty sure it wouldn’t help the occupants of the helicopter, neither of whom had managed to get free of the blaze.

  He made his way over to Hayley and the lone survivor from the boat. The man was lying in Hayley’s arms. His blood had soaked her white dress. She was trying desperately to keep him from bleeding out where two bullets had hit him.

  It was a losing battle. The shells had gone right through him, entering his back and coming out through his chest.

  Kurt crouched down and helped her keep pressure on the wounds. “Are you Panos?” he asked.

  The man’s eyes drifted for a moment.

  “Are you Panos?!”

  He nodded weakly.

  “Who were those people shooting at you?”

  No answer this time. Nothing but a blank look.

  Kurt lifted his head. “We need help over here!” he shouted, looking for a paramedic.

  A pair of men were running toward them, but they weren’t first responders. They reminded Kurt of plainclothes policemen. They stopped in their tracks as he looked their way.

  “I brought… what was promised,” the injured man said in an accent Kurt thought might be Greek.

  “What are you talking about?” Kurt asked.

  The man grunted something and then extended a shaking hand in which he clutched several bloodstained sheets of paper.

  “Tartarus,” the man said, his voice weak and wavering. “The heart… of Tartarus.”

  Kurt took the papers. They were covered with odd symbols, swirling lines, and what appeared to be calculations.

  “What is this?” Kurt said.

  The man opened his mouth to explain but no sound came out.

  “Stay with us,” Hayley shouted.

  He didn’t respond, and she began to perform CPR. “We can’t let him die.”

  Kurt felt for a pulse. He didn’t feel one. “It’s too late.”<
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  “No, it can’t be,” she said, compressing the man’s chest rapidly and trying to force life back into him.

  Kurt stopped her. “It’s no use, he’s lost too much blood.”

  She looked up at him, her face smeared with soot and tears, her white dress stained red.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You tried.”

  She sat back and turned away, looking exhausted. Her hair fell around her face as she looked to the ground. Her body shook as she sobbed.

  Kurt put a hand on her shoulder and gazed at the damage surrounding them.

  The wreck of the boat still burned on the promenade, while the blazing hulk of the Eurocopter lay where the shattered façade of the Concert Hall should have been. Volunteers were hosing it down, desperately trying to keep it from setting fire to the building, while onlookers poured from the keynote address on underwater mining, half of them gawking as the rest moved quickly in the other direction.

  It all happened so fast. Chaos sprung on them from nowhere. And the only man who might have known why lay dead at their feet.

  “What did he say?” Hayley asked, wiping the tears from her face. “What did he say to you?”

  “Tartarus,” Kurt replied.

  She stared. “What does that mean?”

  Kurt wasn’t convinced that he’d heard the man correctly. Even if he had, it made little sense.

  “It’s a word from Greek mythology,” he said. “The deepest prison of the underworld. According to the Iliad, as far below Hades as Heaven is above the Earth.”

  “What do you think he was trying to tell us?”

  “No idea,” Kurt said, shrugging and handing her the papers. “Maybe that’s where he thinks he’s going. Or,” he added, considering the grime, dust, and stench that covered the poor man, “maybe that’s where he’s been.”

  FOUR

  Red and blue lights flashed across the famous sails of the Opera House in series of intersecting patterns, while blinding white spotlights illuminated the wreckage of the powerboat and the charred shell of the dark blue helicopter. They remained where they’d crashed, smoking and smoldering, as fire trucks poured waves of foam onto both vehicles to prevent any chance of reignition.

  The spectacle drew a crowd from both the land and the water. Police tape and barricades kept the shore-based onlookers at bay, but the number of small boats crowding the harbor had grown to more than a hundred. Cameras and flashes snapped in the dark like fireflies.

  From the shadows of a doorway, Cecil Bradshaw of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation studied the man responsible for all the damage.

  An aide handed him a dossier.

  “This is awful thick,” Bradshaw said. “I need only the highlights, not every bloody clipping on the man.”

  Bradshaw was a stocky man in his mid-fifties. He had pile-driver arms, a thick neck, and a short buzz cut. In a way, he resembled a giant human bulldog. He liked to think of himself in similar terms. Get on my side or get out of my way, he often said.

  The aide didn’t stammer in his response. “Those are the highlights, sir. If you’d like, I have another fifty pages I could print out for you.”

  Bradshaw offered a grunt in response and opened the file. He leafed through the pages quickly, studying what the ASIO knew about Mr. Kurt Austin of the American organization NUMA. His activities read like a series of high-stakes adventure novels. Before that, he’d apparently had a successful career in the CIA.

  Bradshaw couldn’t imagine what strange permutations of fate had brought Austin to this very spot at this precise moment, but it just might have been a break the ASIO desperately needed.

  Austin might do, Bradshaw thought to himself. He might do very nicely.

  “Keep an eye on him,” he ordered. “If he’s as smart as the file shows, he’ll be trying to get information out of Ms. Anderson in no time. He does that, you bring them both to me.”

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  Bradshaw glared. “Did you get a promotion I’m not aware of?”

  “Um… No, sir.”

  “And you’re never going to if you keep asking stupid questions.”

  With that, Bradshaw slapped the file back into the agent’s hands and moved off down the hall.

  * * *

  Across the plaza, Kurt sat beside Hayley as a paramedic treated her for a number of scrapes and abrasions and then checked them both for shock.

  In the midst of this treatment, a ranking detective from the Sydney Police Department grilled them about the event. What did they see? What did they hear? Why on earth did they do what they did?

  “Look at the damage,” the captain said, pointing to the ruined façade of the Concert Hall. “You’re lucky the building was empty.”

  Indeed, Kurt felt very lucky on that score. But he also felt he had little choice but to act. “Would you rather I’d just let them keep shooting?”

  “I would rather…” the detective began, “… that both of you had stayed inside until proper tactical units arrived.”

  Kurt understood that. Police were no different than any other group of trained individuals. Leave it to the professionals. Something Kurt would have been glad to do except there hadn’t really been any time. Besides, he was getting the feeling there had been other professionals on-site anyway.

  “Next time,” he said, “I promise.”

  “Next time?” the detective muttered. He shook his head, closed his book, and moved off to check with another witness.

  Left alone for a moment, Kurt studied Hayley. “You’re a brave woman.”

  She shook her head softly. “Not really. I just… Never mind.”

  “You ran right through a hail of bullets to rescue a guy you’ve never seen before,” Kurt said. “That’s pretty much the definition of brave.”

  “So did you,” she pointed out.

  “True,” Kurt said. “But I thought the helicopter was out of the picture. You dragged that guy behind that planter while they were actually firing at him.”

  She looked away. She’d been able to clean her face with a water-soaked cloth, but her dress remained tattered and covered in blood. The victim’s blood.

  “A lot of good it did,” she said.

  There was definite sadness there. More regret than one usually felt for an unknown man.

  “How long were you waiting for him?” Kurt asked.

  “What are you talking about?” she replied.

  “You were sitting out here all by yourself,” he reminded her. “As soon as I showed up, you tried to get me back inside. I’m guessing you didn’t want me in the way because you were waiting to make contact with our friends in the boat. More than likely, they chose a public place where they figured they’d be safe. You chose a white dress so you’d be easy to spot when everyone else was wearing black or gray for the gala ball tonight. You sat out here on the wall so you could watch anyone approach.”

  She tried to smile, but it looked forced.

  “Either you hit your head very hard or you have an active imagination,” she said. “I’m here for the conference. The Muldoons are old family friends. I chose white because I like to stand out, and because it’s summer here, and because someone recently told me white is the new black.”

  He shrugged and turned away. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe it is just an overactive imagination. Tell me, though, whatever happened to the papers?”

  “What papers?”

  “The bloodstained pages our dead friend was grasping when he spoke his last. I notice the police haven’t asked us about them. Me and my overactive imagination think someone might have misplaced them before the police arrived. Maybe even handed them to the two guys in suits who came running toward us but stopped when they realized it was too late.”

  The false smile vanished, replaced by a look of surprise and then almost tears. Kurt sensed her reaching out to him. “I didn’t—”

  Before she could say anything more, a young man in a dark suit
appeared on the steps beside them. Kurt could see the bulge of a shoulder holster under his jacket and the earbud in his right ear.

  “Could your timing be any worse?” Kurt muttered.

  The man ignored him. “Ms. Anderson, Mr. Austin, come with me.”

  Hayley looked as miserable at this suggestion as she had about the possibility of answering Kurt’s question, but she stood dutifully, and Kurt did the same.

  Two minutes later, they were inside one of the undamaged structures. One of the agents, who’d run their way and then stopped during the incident, let them into a conference room.

  Kurt followed Hayley inside. There, two other men and a woman stood around the table, examining the bloodstained pages. They used tweezers and wore gloves. One of them seemed to be taking photos of the contents under a UV light. In the far corner, a second woman tapped away on a laptop.

  “Nothing on that,” she said, answering some question that had been asked before Kurt and Hayley entered. “Next line, please.”

  The group froze at Kurt and Hayley’s arrival.

  A stocky man with rolled-up sleeves and a buzz cut stood at the head of the table. “Clear the room,” he grunted.

  This was the boss, Kurt guessed. He looked none too happy.

  The others began to move, putting down whatever they were working on and filing out one by one. The last one to leave pulled the door shut.

  “Are you okay?” the burly man asked Hayley.

  “No, I’m not okay,” she said. “People are getting killed right in front of me now. You said nothing like this would happen.”

  “I thought this would be the last time,” the man said.

  Kurt had guessed right. Some kind of rendezvous was in the works, but the way Hayley was acting, she didn’t sound like an operative.

  “Don’t mean to be rude,” Kurt said, “but would someone clue the dumb foreigner in as to just what’s going on here?”

  The boss man turned toward Kurt. “You’ve walked yourself into a dangerous situation, Mr. Austin.”

  “You’d be surprised how often that happens.”