Unknown Rider полностью

Punky ripped the goggles off her head and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried regaining some of the night vision the park ranger’s flashlight had just ruined. Slowly, she opened her eyes and stared through the side door at the darkness beyond, waiting for her pupils to dilate. But the more she blinked, the more certain was her belief that she would never see the same again.

“Ready,” the park ranger said.

As the pilot activated the powerful searchlight, Punky squinted her eyes and avoided looking down a second time, instead letting her eyes sweep across the blank horizon. The flashing red lights she had noticed earlier at the top of the ridgeline again caught her attention, and she pointed at them. “Hey, Rose, do you see those red lights over there?”

He turned and saw where she was pointing, then nodded. “Yeah, an antenna of some kind.”

She knew the island was largely deserted with few permanent structures, but none of them were on Montañon Ridge. “Why would they put an antenna way out here?”

Rose shrugged. “Line of sight, I guess.”

She rubbed her eyes and groaned, frustrated it had taken her so long to see what had been staring her in the face all along. Of course, TANDY would go to the highest place on the island to set up her weapon. If it was good enough for radio line-of-sight, then it would be good enough for her.

“I need you to get me on that ridge,” she said.

The pilot in the right seat looked back at her. “We’re a little busy at the moment.”

“You don’t understand,” Punky said. “The person I’m looking for is on that ridge somewhere, and if I don’t get there soon, something terrible is going to happen.”

He traded glances with the other pilot, obviously hesitant to jump to the same conclusion. At last, he spoke. “We can’t put you right on top of the ridge, but there’s a finger on the west side that might work. Are you armed?”

She lifted her hoodie and reached back to feel the comforting grip of her service pistol. “I’ve got my handgun.”

“You’ll be on your own. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I’ve got to do this,” she said.

“Okay then,” he said over the intercom before shifting back to the radio. “Ranger Reid, hang tight for a few minutes. We’re going to drop our passenger on the other side of that ridge and will be right back.”

“Oh,” the park ranger said, sounding surprised. “Okay.”

The searchlight went dark, and Punky opened her eyes wider as she stared across the sky at the distant ridgeline. She knew TANDY was down there somewhere, and she was going to make that bitch bleed for what she had done to Rick.

The MH-60R Seahawk nosed over and accelerated north across the island, demonstrating the crew’s tactical proficiency. They were professionals who probably had experience inserting men like her father and Uncle Rick into dangerous places, and they certainly didn’t need her giving them suggestions on how to make their approach as discreet as possible.

As they crossed feet wet over the northern shoreline, her stomach lurched when the pilot dropped the helicopter to just above the wave tops and banked left to return over land at an uncomfortably low altitude. She gripped the frame of her seat with her left hand in a white-knuckled grip, relaxing her right just enough to slip the night vision goggles back onto her head. When she saw the hills and sparse trees rising above the helicopter on both sides, she instantly regretted it.

“Thirty seconds,” the pilot said.

Punky looked forward through the windscreen and saw the terrain rising in front of them, bracing herself to return to terra firma and resume her hunt.

I’m coming for you.

On the east side of the ridgeline below the antenna, Chen watched as the helicopter hovered dangerously close to her position and turned on a searchlight to scan the ground less than half a mile from her hide site. Had she been a jihadist on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan, she might have aimed a rocket-propelled grenade or shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile at the vulnerable machine. But she was off the coast of California. And she had something even better.

When the helicopter turned off its searchlight and raced north across the island, she exhaled slowly, half expecting it to vanish into the night for good. But despite its disappearance, she could still hear the sound of its rotors echoing off the surrounding terrain. It hadn’t left for the mainland or whatever ship it had come from as she’d hoped, but was still searching.

But for who? The hikers? Me?

She glanced down the slope, as if Wu Tian might appear like a phantom in the night and offer his unsolicited counsel. But instead, all she saw was the weak beam of a flashlight searching the area where he had hidden one of the bodies. The sound of the helicopter grew louder, reverberating through the hard ground beneath her, and she set her jaw.