A Soldier's Revenge: A Will Cochrane Novel (20 page)

Tom would remain alive if I stayed on the run. That was the deal.

It was one I had to comply with.

There were two possible reasons why my tormentor was telling me Tom was in D.C. The first was that it was complete bullshit. Tom wasn’t there and his kidnapper wanted to throw me off the scent. The more likely scenario was he wanted to lure me there. As soon as I was spotted, he’d kill Tom and dump his body in the city. Having us in the same city would remove any doubt as to whether I’d kidnapped him.

But aside from that, the kidnapper just knew I had to go to D.C.

I quickly scanned the front-page headline about the massacre at Robert and Celia Grange’s home. The article cited a police briefing this morning wherein crucial new information would be revealed about the crime. The paper said it would publish full details in tomorrow’s edition of what emerged from the briefing. I decided I had to get tomorrow’s paper to read that article.

All night I’d considered calling the police and giving them the three license plates I’d seen at the Granges’. The problem was, cops probably wouldn’t take the information seriously. But they’d still make a routine check on the vehicle owners. That would spook the shit out of them. The risk to Tom’s life would be severe. I had to find another way to trace the plates.

I gathered up my things, left the remainder of my cash on the table, stood to leave, and froze.

The waitress and her manager were at the far end of the diner, standing together behind the counter. Both were looking at me, the waitress with her hand to her mouth, the manager talking fast to her with a look of total concern. The manager stopped talking when he saw me looking at them.

He raised his hands, eyes wide, and called out, “We’re not going to stop you walking out of here. We mean you no trouble.”

Other diners in the establishment stopped eating and stared at me. Some started screaming, others shouted.

“Dear God, that’s him!”

“That man on the news.”

“The murderer!”

“Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Let him walk!”

I moved through the diner slowly, looking at everyone I passed, seeing the terror in their faces as mothers clutched their children and sweethearts hugged each other. A huge trucker was staring at me, no fear in his expression. He had hostility on his face as he pressed his hands against the table as if he was about to launch himself to his feet. No doubt what he was thinking.

I shook my head and said, “Don’t.”

I maintained eye contact with the man as I moved past him toward the exit. The momentary sound of exertion behind me was followed a split second later by me spinning around, blocking the trucker’s punch, stepping into the man, placing a foot behind his heel, using the flat of my hand to smash the man’s nose, and punching him in the jaw with sufficient force to lift the three-hundred-pound beast off his feet and force him to crash on the table behind him.

The man moaned as he clasped his face. And he couldn’t get up.

Making no attempt to hide my English accent, I shouted to everyone, “I’m going to walk out of here. You don’t touch me, I don’t touch you. And you don’t touch your phones until I’m gone.”

I turned, walked out of the diner, and sprinted down the street past a row of stores. One minute later I heard sirens.

T
he NBC News helicopter was preparing for takeoff, its rotors moving slowly as the pilot made last-minute checks in the cockpit. A cameraman and audio specialist were making sure their equipment was securely fastened to the sides of the hold and doing dummy tests of their transmitter to be certain that anything caught on camera would be relayed to anyone tuning in to the network.

The only person missing before takeoff was Patty Schmidt, and she was walking fast to the craft, cell phone fixed to her ear as she spoke to her editor. “No doubt it’s him. Virginia’s putting in more cops. Lynchburg’s where this will end. Question is whether he’s going down with a fight.”

It is always difficult for a woman to enter a high-sided chopper when she’s wearing a skirt suit and heels, but Patty had done this so many times she could clamber on board with the same panache as the numerous times she’d walked onstage to collect journalism prizes garnered during her two decades working for CBS, Fox, CNN, and NBC. And her blond hair, lacquered to the point that it was as solid as rock, was not going to budge despite the downdraft from the aircraft’s blades. Microphone in hand, she looked every inch the consummate pro that she was.

She gripped a handrail as the craft ascended, shouting to her film crew, “We’ve got the airspace scoop on this. Cops have only allowed NBC in the air above Lynchburg. So let’s not fuck this up. And we may only have one shot. Every possibility that Virginia PD helos tell us to get out of their way.”

The two men gave her the thumbs-up. Both of them were also seasoned veterans, and between them they’d reported from the sky more than three hundred times.

The chopper was now moving at speed, its nose tilted down. But this didn’t prompt Patty to sit down and buckle up. Instead, she poked her head into the cockpit. “ETA?”

The pilot told her forty-five minutes to an hour.

Her cell phone rang. When the call ended she shouted at the pilot above the craft’s noise, “Gunshots have just been heard in Lynchburg. You better make it no more than thirty minutes!”

She sat down and nodded at the cameraman. “Let’s get an en route report out.”

After checking his equipment, the cameraman put three fingers up, two, one, then his thumb.

“This is Patty Schmidt reporting live from NBC. I’m heading to Lynchburg, Virginia, where I’ve just received reports that wanted fugitive Will Cochrane has been sighted by multiple witnesses. He’s assaulted a man and is now being pursued by police. There are unconfirmed reports of gunfire, though we don’t know whether the weapons fired belong to Cochrane, the police, or a combination. In thirty minutes we’re going to give you a view of the city and the pursuit of Cochrane. Other networks might be on the ground. But only NBC will be your eye in the sky.”

E
dward Carley watched his laptop showing the NBC report as he called Viktor Zhukov. “He’s in Lynchburg. I’m assuming you can be there very quickly. Listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you.”

I
sprinted around a corner into a street in Lynchburg’s inner suburbs. Placing my hands on my knees, I sucked in air before racing up the street. The sirens were drawing closer. There was a bullet hole in my jacket—the result of a cop who’d fired two warning shots at the ground near me, one of the bullets ricocheting off the pavement and penetrating my jacket but missing my flesh.

As I raced onward, darting down a side street before turning onto a larger suburban road, I desperately hoped I’d lost the cops. Just then a police car tore around a corner and came hurtling toward me. I pulled out one of the Roanoke detectives’ handguns, stepped forward, and fired three rounds into the car’s engine block and front tires, causing it to swerve and judder to a halt.

The cops leapt out of their vehicle, using their doors as shields as they prepared to return fire. From one hundred yards away, I fired again, smashing the windshield and putting warning shots into the doors, inches from their bodies. I kept my handgun at eye level and trained on the cops as I walked backward. It was my silent warning to them that if they broke cover and tried to gun me down, they’d lose.

B
ehind the cover of their vehicle, veteran officers Ken Chen and Simon Carter were focused. The man down the street was walking slowly backward but seemed calm as he kept his pistol pointing at them. In his second volley, he hadn’t hit them, but his first volley had been precise and had made their vehicle obsolete. He knew exactly what he was doing and was prepared to let the officers live. For now.

Chen got on his radio and relayed updates. “We have him in our sights. Where the hell’s our backup?”

The police controller replied, “Just hold that end of the street. Multiple mobiles and on-foot units are flanking the road. Get closer if you can.”

The man was now too far away to risk a shot that could miss and enter one of the homes that lined the suburban street. Chen and Carter glanced at each other, gripped their guns, and ran after Cochrane down the center of the street.

D
oors of the houses I passed were opening and closing fast—people glancing out to see what was going on. They saw me sprinting down the street, leaping over a picket fence, and running down the alley between two houses.

Gun in hand, I didn’t slow as I bolted through a backyard with a swing set and other children’s paraphernalia, leapt onto a stack of firewood, and jumped over the rear hedge into another backyard. I repeated the same process three times, my pack and the guns inside banging against my back. Breathing fast, I ran along a small arterial road, desperate to get out of Lynchburg.

O
fficers Chen and Carter had to slow to a jog so that Carter could speak on his radio.

“We’ve lost visual. Last seen on Rivermont Avenue, heading west. Please advise.”

The controller immediately responded. “Stay on him. We need your eyes. All units, all units—I need a perimeter around Rivermont.”

Chen led the way through the alley between two houses, shouting at a woman who opened her window, “Get back inside!”

They entered the yard containing the swings, moving carefully in case he was hiding here.

Neither of them were wearing adequate gear to protect them from a handgun powerful enough to stop their car dead.

T
he pilot of the NBC helicopter called out, “Okay, here we go.”

The outskirts of Lynchburg were visible.

Patty Schmidt was on her cell to NBC’s office. “What do you mean they fucking lost him? What’s the last location?” She hung up and desperately scoured a map of Lynchburg on her lap. To the pilot, she said, “Got it. Rivermont Avenue. Runs northwest in the city. He’s got to be around there somewhere.”

The pilot adjusted course, his craft now moving fast over Lynchburg’s outer sprawl.

T
he success of escape and evasion depends on four factors: the skill of the pursued operative, the amount of lead time, chance, and mistakes made by the pursuers. Even with all four factors in place, it is still an awful undertaking. On multiple occasions, I’d needed to extract myself from hostile locations, including Russia and Iran, and each time I’d finally reached safety I’d felt mentally and physically debilitated.

This was infinitely worse.

Lynchburg PD was a professional force, and I was running out of places to run to. There was nothing but danger wherever I went.

But I kept moving, just trying to put as much ground as possible between me and the cops. Partly it was professional pride in my skills that made me do this. Mostly, though, I just had to find Tom.

As I zigzagged along different streets and yards, my gun in hand, I saw a helicopter in the distance. Cops, I instantly thought as I clambered over a fence. No, news crew, I decided, as the shape of the craft became more distinct. But behind the news helo was a Lynchburg police chopper. Matters had just gotten terrible.

“Stop! Police!”

The voice was behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the two cops I’d earlier shot at heading toward me from the street.

Shit.

A
longside a police helo, the NBC helicopter was over Rivermont Avenue, one of the cameras pointing down at the city, the other capturing Patty Schmidt.

She began her broadcast. “We’re here live from Lynchburg, Virginia. Below us is Rivermont Avenue and its surroundings. Somewhere down there is Will Cochrane.” She glanced at the monitor showing the city in real time. “I’m going to tell you what you’re seeing right now.” Viewers of NBC would be watching a split screen of Patty and what was happening at ground level. “The police are putting up a perimeter. I’d say about a mile, maybe a mile and a half wide. Must be about thirty squad cars down there. Looks like they’re erecting barricades on the north of Rivermont. I can see two, no, three ambulances. Got more police cruisers moving across the city. Probably a combination of city, state, and county. Officers on foot. And we’ve got . . . Now, I can’t confirm this, but south on Rivermont, looks like we’ve got a fifteen-man SWAT team moving along the road. These guys don’t look like regular cops.” Like all good broadcasters in live situations, Patty was telling her story as she saw it. She turned to her cameraman. “Eddie—can you zoom in on these guys?” A moment later the unit was in plain view, the initials
SWAT
emblazoned on their black paramilitary outfits and Kevlar. “So there you have it. In light of recent terrorist threats, SWAT and other elite firearms units have changed tactics. Faced with a situation like this where civilians are at severe risk, officers are now tasked to always step toward the threat. Gone are the days of standing back. Instead they close in for the kill, and ignore any injured or dying in their path. These guys will be heading straight for Cochrane.”