The Tin Man

“Helen at Mather? We’ll get right on it-thanks, love.” Patrick turned to Briggs. “Get everyone on board, Hal, now. Chandler and Helen Kaddiri are out at the alert facility at Mather.” Hal radioed his tactical ground crews to return to the MV-22, then notified the cockpit to get ready for liftoff. “Jon, where’s the suit?”

“In the room over there,” said Masters, and brought Patrick over to where the body of Richard Faulkner lay. They stripped off the suit, hoisted the body on board the MV-22, and were airborne moments later.

Research and Development Facility

Sacramento-Mather Jetport,

Rancho Cordova, California

a few minutes later

“Ja, Herr Oberst! I understand. We will be airborne in fifteen minutes!” The senior officer hung up the secure cellular phone, then got on his handheld radio and ordered everyone to the helicopters and prepared to repel attackers. Then he dashed to the main administration offices and the room where Helen Kaddiri was being interrogated. She was still conscious, but barely, strapped to a chair with a hood placed over her head. She did not look as if she had been injured, but the lieutenant knew there were many ways of torturing a prisoner without leaving visible signs. The screen of the laptop computer on the desk beside her showed lines of error messages, indicating the unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the classified Sky Masters files.

“Get her to the helicopter!” the lieutenant ordered. “Take that computer too!” He drew his sidearm and headed across the corridor to the senior engineer’s office, where the renegade police captain Chandler was being held. His orders were explicit: to execute him immediately.

He unlocked the door and stopped in his tracks. On the desktop, lying faceup, was the body of Thomas Chandler, his hands still handcuffed behind his back, his eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. A streak of black-and-red crossed his neck, and a pool of red spread out across the desk. The dirty work had already been done for him, probably by the guard assigned to watch him-it was a violation of orders, since no one had given the order to kill Chandler until now, but the lieutenant wasn’t going to complain. He turned toward the admin section and brought his handheld radio to his lips…

Chandler brought the metal chair down on the German bastard’s head as hard as he could, and slammed it again and again until he was dead. The trick had worked. He had used a hidden handcuff key to get out of the handcuffs-he had several of them hidden on him and knew how to use them even with his hands behind his back. Then he had opened up the color ink-jet printer in the office and spread the ink on his neck and the desktop to make it look as if his throat had been slit.

He picked up the officer’s pistol and ran out. Through the engineering offices, a security door opened on an upsloping concrete ramp that led to the flight line, the same covered ramp that SAC bomber and tanker alert crews used to run to the flight line and their waiting planes. Chandler didn’t know what was going on, but it was sure as hell time to get out and he was damned if those Nazis were going to leave with a hostage.

The only way he could possibly redeem himself, he figured, and save himself from spending the next ten years in prison, was to start doing his job.

The German-speaking soldiers had left their posts and run to the flight line in front of the half-underground R amp; D facility, where two surplus UH-1 Huey helicopters were waiting for them, rotors turning. When Chandler emerged from the tu

The soldier on the left cried out and fell, clutching his lower back. The other turned toward Chandler and opened fire with his submachine gun, but the shots went high and right. Chandler fired several rounds to throw off his aim, then threw himself back into the tu

“Helen! Kaddiri!” Chandler shouted, his gun poised to fire. “Get up! Now!” He was afraid she would be too weak to act, but she heard him and had enough strength to roll free of the soldier’s grasp. Chandler dropped the second soldier on his first shot.

He ran to her. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going to try to get you away!”

Heavy machine-gun fire rippled the ground not five feet away from them, shot from one of the helicopters on the flight line. Chandler fired two rounds toward the helicopter, picked Kaddiri up, and ran for the rear of one of the hangars. Placing her on the ground behind the hangar, he tried to make a run for one of the submachine guns dropped by the soldiers who had taken Kaddiri, but a burst of gunfire drove him back to cover. Two soldiers had dismounted from the helicopter and were headed straight for them. Chandler took aim and fired but his gun clicked empty. He threw it away, looped one of Kaddiri’s arms up over his shoulder, and ran down the ramp behind the hangars. It was their last, their only, chance.

“I’ve got one of the helicopters lined up!” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft called out on interphone. “Give me permission to shoot!”

“No!” Jon Masters shouted. “Helen might be in one of those choppers!”

“Put me right over the lead helicopter,” McLanahan radioed. “Target the second helicopter’s tail rotor with the ca

The MV-22 was flying about sixty miles an hour in helicopter mode as it swooped across the two parallel runways at Mather toward the R amp; D center. Patrick knew their altitude, about thirty feet above ground, and their speed. He relied on his experience as an Air Force bombardier for the rest.

As the MV-22 swept in on its targets, Patrick stepped out through the left crew door onto the left main landing gear sponson and steadied himself against the left weapon pylon. At just the right moment, he let go and flung himself out into space, jumping right down onto the spi

He looked like a doll tossed from a speeding car onto a busy freeway when he hit the rotor disk. He landed right-shoulder-first onto the left side of the rotor, but the BERP suit protected him from being sliced into hamburger. His body skipped across the rotor disk, hitting again on the blade tips just forward of the cockpit canopy before being thrown a hundred feet into the air.

The helicopter’s blades bounced like palm fronds in a hurricane. One blade snapped and flew off into space; the others dipped so low that they struck the ground and then the tail, snapping off the tail rotor. Unbalanced, the entire main-rotor assembly cracked off the hub and shattered. The transmission screamed into high rpm’s, then it too shattered and disintegrated. The transmission burst into a globe of shrapnel, shelling out the turbine engine with a huge explosion.

Patrick landed up against the steel post of one of the facility’s ballpark lights. He knew he was alive because the ferocity of the electrical surges through the suit had set his entire body on fire. He writhed in pain and tried to relax his muscles, let the energy move through him and dissipate; but the more he tried to relax, the harder the waves of electricity came.

It felt like hours before they stopped. He didn’t dare move at first, thinking he was sawed into pieces. The vision of those rotor blades rushing up to his face was imprinted on his eyeballs. But when he opened his eyes, he saw hangars, lights, and gray cloudy skies. He was alive.