Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

The Black Hawk ride had been everything Alice had imagined. They took off low and fast and roared down the Potomac as if they were racing over the Sea of Japan. A winter storm on the Atlantic had kicked up wind and whitecaps on the Chesapeake Bay. The helicopter bumped and dropped in the wind while they flew so low it looked as if the waves were going to claw them from out of the sky.

With a hard slam, they tilted nearly sideways and turned overland. They flew so low that they actually had to bounce upward to clear fences. The silence on the radio was absolute. The heavy helmets they wore offering only the slightest hiss over the built-in headphones to indicate they were latched into the radio and intercom system at all.

Alice could see the infrared projection of the FLIR acro……