Any Minute Now

Eric Van Lustbader

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Table of Contents

About the Author

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For Victoria, as always, with deepest love

PROLOGUE

[precise location redacted], Pakistan

The wind came shrieking through the interior of the helo, demonic and vicious, like a cop hell-bent on pursuit.

Greg Whitman, eyes closed, listening to Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine” on his iPod, didn’t hear it. Cole Porter, he thought. A giant among men. So was Hoagy Carmichael. His “Star Dust” would be coming on next, but Whitman knew he’d skip the song. He should have deleted it, but he couldn’t bear to do it. The pilot tapped him on the shoulder, saving him. He opened his eyes, stowed away his iPod, and substituted the helo’s comm unit for his earbuds.

“Rain,” the pilot said in Whitman’s earpiece. “Here it comes.”

He wasn’t kidding. The first burst was like flak hitting the side of the helo. The aircraft banked, and dipped sharply, swinging like a pendulum between the peaks of two mountains, keeping time—the slow, drawn-out minutes before the boots on the ground moment when time accelerated like an arrow shot from a bow. Inside the helo it was like an orchestra warming up, or Hoagy Carmichael at his piano picking out a melody that was not yet quite there.

Before the pilot was able to right the craft, Felix Orteño had taken up his position at the rear of the helo, vomiting into a plastic bag.

Jonas Sandofur smiled as he checked the trio’s weaponry for the sixth and last time, making certain the ammo was as he’d requested it from Armaments: .500 S&W Magnum. He checked every single bullet; there would be no misfires on his watch. Sandofur was smiling because Orteño’s distress was a sign of good fortune. The communications and electronics expert always threw up just before insertion. It was a guarantee of the mission’s success. Not that this trio needed it. In the five years since Whitman had put the team together, when he had been hired by King Cutler, the head of Universal Security Associates, the team had never failed in their ultra-black missions of insertion and termination. Each plastic bag was saved, like a notch in a belt or a scalp on a length of rawhide.