Kinninmore got the map out and started making notes, placing units where Frankowski described them. He pointed at Madison Avenue. "Fifth Cav got anyone on this?"

Frankowski shook his head. "Not near as I can tell."

"Get me a commo dog over here who knows his shit. Anyone. I don't care who they are or what branch."

"I'm on it," Frankowski said.

Kinninmore tossed his map onto the ground and pointed to his scratch collection of trigger pullers. "All of you with me. We're moving fast, and we're killing anyone who gets in our way."

"Where are we going, Colonel?" one of the marines shouted.

"Over to Madison," he shouted back. "It ain't Iwo, but it'll have to do. Let's move out!" Kinninmore ducked behind an overturned trash truck, and gathered a few of his team members around him. The rest of the scratch team engaged the vehicles, not waiting for a dramatic command or any heroics from their commander. Looking back the way they had come, the colonel could see a thin, scrawny figure running down the sidewalk toward him, a radio antenna prominent on his back. Two other men flanked him, watching for fire from above. There were snipers everywhere.

"Over here!" Kinninmore shouted. He tapped the female military police trooper next to him. "Hold this position, Sergeant. No matter what."

"I've got it!"

Kinninmore ran toward the commo dog and shoved him through a doorway. One of the two rangers escorting him actually bulled Kinninmore out of the way.

"Watch where you going, ignorant shithead," he shouted in a thick Polish accent. "We have had enough of being pushed around today."

"Anybody teach you to use cover, son?" Kinninmore shouted back. "What's your name? Do I know you?"

A tuft of blond hair poked out from under the first soldier's Kevlar helmet. "It ain't son, sir. It's Sergeant Bonnie Gardener. USAF TAC. Someone said you needed a rainmaker. Well, I'm it."

52

New York Motherhood was making her soft. There was no way, in her salad days, she would have bothered helping out a couple of losers like these two. She didn't need them to get the documents back to G2. She could've dialed up a chopper to swoop in and grab them any time she wanted. But as the three of them hunkered down against the blast of the rotor wash from the descending Blackhawk, Caitlin told herself she was just acting rationally. Their lives might not mean much to her, but they weren't hers to throw away, either. Not nowadays.

These two might be a pair of idiots, but they weren't bad people, just inept smugglers. And they hadn't been lying about rescuing a special forces team a day earlier. There were a couple of rangers and a forward air controller who were drawing breath today because Balwyn and Ross had put themselves in harm's way on their behalf. They hadn't had to do that, the same way she didn't have to do this.

The chopper came down quickly, much more quickly than she was used to when working with the military, but the chances of getting an RPG up the ass increased exponentially the longer a pilot hovered around squeezing his johnson and taking in the view. The smugglers had taken themselves off a few yards away and were clutching all the documents they'd gathered up downstairs in a couple of packages like they were carrying newborn babies and feared they'd be snatched away and blown over the edge of the roof. It was a long way down to the street. Caitlin couldn't fault them for that. Those documents were probably going to keep them out of a federal prison if they could find themselves a good lawyer and cut a plea bargain for running the zone. Assuming, of course, they didn't just disappear in the old-fashioned way inconvenient people used to disappear. This guy Cesky they were talking about, he was a big name back west. A heavy hitter plugged deep into the administration. Nothing they had to say about him was going to make anybody very happy. In fact, the more Caitlin thought about it, the better off they would be jumping out of this chopper at the other end and running as hard as they could for the horizon.

Oh, well, not her fucking problem.

She turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut as the Blackhawk landed and blew a stinging cloud of dust and grit up from the roof. When she looked up again, the chick was there-Jules, she called herself, even though she was entitled, as in genuinely entitled, to be known as Lady Julianne.

"Look," Jules yelled out. "We got off to a bad start, but I just wanted to say thanks for everything. If you hadn't taken out Cesky's guys… well, you know. Thanks. And for this, too," she shouted, jerking a thumb back over her shoulder at the helicopter.

Caitlin nodded and waved her on board, but she wasn't really paying attention. She had been working out how she was going to get herself into the ruins of the Saks department store on Fifth Avenue, where she was almost certain Baumer was holed up. But she stopped worrying about that when she saw the man who hopped out of the chopper and hurried across to her, bent over and squinting against the storm of dust.

It was Wales. Her old controller. Wales Larrison, a deputy director now, coordinating all the Echelon branches from the new headquarters in Vancouver. Her heart swelled at the sight of him, the closest thing she had to a father in what was left of the world, but she winced, too. Wales wouldn't fly into New York just to wish her good luck. Like her, he was smiling, but sadly, as he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a fierce, protective hug.

"I'm sorry, Caitlin," he said. "Not this time."

"No, Wales. No. You can't!"

Her cry was so pitiful, so heartfelt, and so loud that the Balwyn woman hesitated with one foot raised to hop into the cabin of the chopper. A cavalry trooper brandishing a shotgun pulled her up, anyway.

"I'm this close, Wales. Just give me an hour and I'll put my fucking hand inside his chest and squeeze off his heart. An hour, Wales, that's all I'm asking."

He shook his head unhappily.

"Not this time, I'm afraid. They sent me to make sure you got on the chopper. President Kipper sent me. Rang me himself and told me to get my ass over here to make sure you got out. I barely made it."

"But Wales," she cried in anguish. "My family. You know what he tried to do to my family. I have to finish this. I'm the only one who can do this and be sure."

Wales took her by the arm and began to lead her across the roof to the helicopter. They both knew she was more than capable of resisting him.

"You don't have time, Caitlin. There's a storm front coming in from the west. They've moved everything forward ahead of it. Air cav is assaulting into Central Park right now. As soon as they're down, air force is going to hammer the city flat. Or at least that part you want to head into. You don't have an hour, Caitlin. They are in the air now. Bombed up and inbound."

He was right. She could see the leading edge of the air assault coming in over his shoulder. Small black dots for now but growing larger every second, resolving themselves into an airborne armada of UH-60s and their gunship flankers. There looked to be about a dozen in the first wave and another two waves stacked up behind them, probably formed up in one of the new, stripped-down regimental combat teams the army was testing. Say, four hundred men on the ground within a quarter of an hour.

Wales almost had her into the cabin when she finally dug her heels in. She could see the smugglers and the cavalry troopers in the helicopter staring at her as though she were mad. But she didn't care.

"Wales, if we let him get away this time, he will be back in our faces worse than ever. You know that. He will come back at me. I know it's not personal, but it is. If that makes any fucking sense. You have to let me go. You have to let me get him."