10:00 A.M., Pacific Standard Time
March 1st, 2013
Studio City Consulting Services
“We’re in serious shit,” Chuck told the team. “I believe that Max Calijo has taken on the title of the Ring of Fire, and I think his backing organization is Fulcrum.”
“Shit,” John Casey breathed.
“According to Bryce’s intelligence, he’s got the backing of probably one hundred members of Fulcrum who are still loyal. Of the original core, as we all know, General Beckman is dead. Six others have refused to go anywhere near Calijo, which leaves Lou DeBlasio.”
Chuck paused for a moment. “DeBlasio was seen coming out of St. John of God Catholic Church in Norwalk six months ago after Alberto Calijo’s funeral.”
“Shit,” Casey said again.
“I don’t feel safe about using any of our vehicles to get out of here,” Chuck told them. “I’m pretty sure that they’re all compromised. So, Will and Mitch have gone to Bob Hope Airport using the Burbank bus system. They’re going to pick up the Black Hawk, fly back here, pick us up, and then fly us back to the airport. We’ll get onboard Casey’s Learjet and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Ellie looked shocked. “We’re just gonna leave Los Angeles?” she asked in disbelief.
“If the alternative is getting dead, then yes,” Chuck replied.
“Shit.”
“Thank you, Casey.”
“Hey, I’m leaving Maya behind, buddy. She doesn’t have a CLUE that I’m not going to be back tonight. So I’ll say ‘shit’ all I damn well please.”
Chuck held his hands up. “Fair enough.”
“Yeah,” Morgan chimed in. “You get to take Sarah with you, but I have to leave Anna behind. Does that seem fair to you?”
“Morgan, Fulcrum wouldn’t know who the hell you were!” Chuck exclaimed. “Anna’s not in any danger!”
“She better not be.”
Chuck shook his head – and his cell phone rang. “Yeah?” he answered it.
“Chuck, it’s Will,” he heard. “We just got clearance to take off. We should be there in ten.”
“Fantastic,” Chuck replied. “Call me again when you hit the 101.”
“Roger.”
And the phone disconnected. “Here’s the plan,” Chuck said. “We fly to Bob Hope Airport, like I said. From there, we take the Lear to San Felipe. In San Felipe, Casey has a contact who will deliver a van to us, and from there, we go to his safe house in Ensenada. It’s circuitous, yes, but it’ll help throw people off.”
Devin shook his head. “How’d this happen, man? I thought this was all settled a year ago – we threw off Fulcrum, you all saved the country, so on and so forth.”
Chuck sighed and hung his head. “It’s my fault,” he replied quietly. “I decided to form the company at the request of Director Tyler and Senator Graham, and then we decided to take on the Slayers.”
“Wait a second, no!” Casey rebuked him. “This is NOT your fault! You decided to take on a noble goal, to be a force for good in the United States. You couldn’t have possibly expected that a domestic terror group would target you!”
“He’s right, Chuck,” Sarah said quietly. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys,” Chuck replied. But his face spoke volumes as he headed out into the office area.
He sat down heavily in a chair – not even checking which desk he was at. He just sat there for the next five minutes.
Then his phone rang. “Crossing the 101, Chuck!” Will Williamson called into the phone. “We’ll be there any minute!”
The call spurred Chuck to action. “Alright, everybody!” he shouted into the conference room. “Let’s get up to the roof!”
He headed for the stairwell. He was followed by Bryce, Carina, Rachel, Morgan, Casey, Ellie, Devin, and Sarah, each of the last three carrying a two year old.
When they hit the roof, Chuck looked east – and there it was, the Black Hawk helicopter coming down Ventura Boulevard, toward the SCCS building. It began to slow in preparation for landing on the roof of the building –
And that’s when a streak of smoke shot out from behind the Washington Mutual bank on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura. The Stinger missile impacted directly on the Black Hawk’s exhaust, exploding and tearing the engine apart.
The helicopter’s transmission instantly froze, bringing the rotor to a screeching halt. However, the blades of the rotor didn’t stop so easily, and tore themselves off of the helicopter.
“GET DOWN!” Chuck roared as shrapnel flew. The entire group threw themselves to the rooftop behind the ledge. Chuck could hear a piece of rotor whistle overhead.
The fuselage of the helicopter plummeted like a stone, dropping into the middle of Ventura Boulevard just west of Laurel Canyon. There was a massive explosion.
Chuck poked his head up over the edge of the building. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Will… Mitch…”
Casey had poked his head up over the edge as well. “They’re gone, Bartowski,” he said gruffly. “We’ve got to get out of here, right now.”
“Agreed,” Sarah said. “Come on! Move!”
Following her lead, everybody dashed back into the stairwell. Sarah didn’t stop till she hit the garage. “Casey, you take the Suburban – Chuck, Morgan, me, and the kids are with you. Bryce, take the Land Cruiser – you’ve got Carina, Ellie, Devin, and Rachel!”
There was no arguing. Everybody went to their assigned vehicle, Ellie handing Katie off to Chuck and tearfully begging him to keep her safe. “I will die long before she does,” Chuck swore to his sister.
Chuck rode shotgun in the Suburban. Ever the nerd, he knew almost exactly the layout of the back streets in the Hollywood Hills, and was going to be Casey’s navigator. “Turn right out onto Vantage,” he ordered Casey. “Stay on Vantage till you reach Laurel Terrace, and then left!”
When the garage door opened, there was a black sedan blocking the driveway. “Oh, hell no,” Casey growled, punching the gas.
The Suburban hit the Fulcrum-owned Honda at twenty-seven miles an hour, shoving it out into the street. Casey took a right, with Bryce right behind him.
He followed Chuck’s directions down to Laurel Terrace. As they came around a bend, though, Casey saw a red light at Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “What now?!”
“Lights and sirens!” Chuck shouted. “Lay on the horn, but whatever you do, don’t stop!”
Casey followed Chuck’s instructions exactly. As they blasted through the intersection at Laurel Canyon, they could see black sedans on either side of the intersection. Then there was another sound.
“Oh, fuck!” Casey growled. “Fulcrum’s got their own helicopter!”
Maximillian Calijo was onboard the retired Phoenix Police McDonnell Douglas MDX helicopter that hovered over Sunshine Terrace east of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “Ah, my little insects, there will be no escaping me!” he said with a grin.
He turned to the man beside him. “Fire!”
A golden beam of light punched into the street in front of the Suburban, creating a hole. “What the HELL was that?!” Chuck shouted in terror.
“Directed energy weapon,” Casey replied through gritted teeth, steering around the hole. “They’ve been in the US Army inventory for five years now.”
“Wait, wait!” Chuck yelled. “You mean Fulcrum’s fuckin’ got PHASERS?!”
“Please, do me a favor, try to actually hit the vehicle,” Calijo said, no small amount of displeasure in his voice. “I want to see them dead, not play with them.”
“Yes sir,” the US Army Ranger seated beside him said. He lined up the weapon again.
Casey actually saw the weapon line up a split second before it fired. He slammed on the Suburban’s brakes, with Bryce fishtailing to a stop behind him, and the DEW put a hole through the Suburban’s bumper.
“I have had quite enough of this,” Casey growled. “Walker, there’s a fifty caliber rifle underneath your husband’s seat. You want to take care of this?”
“With pleasure,” she replied, anger in her voice.
“Better, but I would prefer it if you hit, say, the engine compartment, or the passenger compartment,” Max Calijo growled.
“Not a problem, sir.”
“Obviously, it is!”
Sunshine Terrace had turned into Fruitland Drive. Casey had just flown across Vineland Avenue, causing a three car accident as he went, Bryce just barely avoiding the Land Cruiser being the fourth car. Sarah had her shot lined up on the helicopter –
“Shit! Turn left!” Chuck shouted.
There went her shot. Sarah kept a tight grip on the rifle as the Suburban swung left onto Riverton Drive. “Oh, hell,” Casey groaned. “That’s Ventura Boulevard!”
“FOLLOW THEM!” Calijo shouted. Then he realized. “Wait, we can be patient,” he said with a smile. “They’ll have no chance of getting across Ventura Boulevard.”
Casey breathed deeply. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and slammed his foot to the floor. The Suburban shot across Ventura Boulevard.
“He’s out of his goddamn mind!” Bryce said in astonishment. And yet, he did the same thing. The Land Cruiser followed the Suburban across Ventura onto Campo de Cahuenga Way, the rear bumper coming inches from the front end of a speeding Rapid 750 bus.
“Now what?” Casey asked Chuck as the Suburban approached Lankershim Boulevard.
“Into Universal Studios!” Chuck shouted.
“WHAT?!”
“JUST DO IT!”
Calijo couldn’t believe the cojones on the drivers of the two vehicles below. “They’re both driven by madmen,” he said, with a small amount of admiration in his voice as they approached Lankershim Boulevard.
He watched as the Suburban and the Land Cruiser shot across into Universal Studios. He was so fixated on the driving that he didn’t notice the barrel sticking out of the Suburban’s right rear window until –
POP
“Oh, shit!” yelled the pilot. “They just put a round through the oil compressor!”
“What?!” Calijo shouted back in anger. “WHAT?!”
“Helicopter’s done, man,” the pilot replied, jerking the bird around to attempt a landing at the Universal City park and ride lot. “You’re on your own.”
“FUCK!”
“Good shooting, Walker,” Casey grunted as he watched the helicopter in his rearview mirror. Trailing black smoke, it came in for a hard landing in the middle of the Universal City bus terminal.
“Take a right at Hotel Drive,” Chuck ordered Casey. A moment later, Casey complied. “Now take a left on Buddy Holly.”
Casey looked at Chuck strangely. “Our helicopter got shot down, we just shot down another, and you’re having me go down a street named for Buddy Holly? Do you not believe in bad luck?”
Chuck laughed – and then started singing. “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie... drove my Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry…”
“You’re nuts!”
Max Calijo jumped out of the smoking helicopter, the three Fulcrum men right behind him. He ran up to a Rapid bus that was idling by the curb.
He ran through the open door and up the steps. “Hey, buddy, bus doesn’t leave for –“
Calijo put a bullet through the head of the bus driver. “Get rid of him,” he ordered the helicopter pilot.
Now Casey and Chuck were both singing. “THE GOOD OLD BOYS WERE DRINKIN’ WHISKEY AND RYE, SINGIN’ THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE!”
“It really is going to be if you don’t both SHUT UP!” Sarah growled from the back seat.
“Sorry,” Chuck said meekly.
Sarah growled something unintelligible, then turned around to check on the kids. She looked out the back window and saw something behind Bryce’s Land Cruiser.
“Oh my God…”
“Hello, bitches!” Max Calijo cackled. The North American Bus Industries Model 42-BRT really had quite a lot of power. He was gaining on the two black SUVs rapidly.
Suddenly, though, they both increased speed. “Oh, I guess they must know that I’m here,” he said, pretending to pout.
“We’re being chased by a BUS?!” Casey exclaimed.
“Oh my God, and we’re going the wrong way,” Chuck added, his stomach leaping up his throat.
Sure enough, the instant they had crossed over Universal Studios Boulevard, Buddy Holly Drive became one way northwest – and they were headed southeast. “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” Casey bellowed as the Suburban, still running with lights and sirens, plunged into oncoming traffic.
“Oh, foolish move,” Calijo said. It had been much easier for drivers to get out of the way of John Casey and Bryce Larkin than it was for them to get out of the way of Calijo and his bus. He laughed with glee as he bulldozed cars straight off the road.
“I need to get me one of THESE!” he shouted maniacally.
“Turn left at Barham!” Chuck shouted.
“Thank God,” Casey breathed, as they came off the one-way street and onto the six wide lanes of Barham Boulevard. The Land Cruiser followed – and so did the LACMTA Rapid bus, wreaking havoc as it went.
“That’s gonna be a mighty big cleanup bill,” Morgan observed. It was the first time he’d spoken since they left the SCCS building.
“We’ll charge it to the federal government,” Casey replied. “Without them, Fulcrum wouldn’t exist in the first place.”
“Oh, Senator Graham’s gonna LOVE that,” Chuck grumbled.
“Enough of this bullshit,” Carina growled in Bryce’s Land Cruiser. Crawling out of her seat, she crawled between the Woodcombs in the back seat, pausing just long enough to “accidentally” run an admiring hand over Devin’s pecs, and over the seat into the cargo area.
She lifted up a cover mat – and there, indeed, was a TOW anti-tank missile, all ready for use, in the back end. Carina smiled grimly and turned on the power.
As the TOW warmed up, she removed her gun from its holster. Holding the weapon by the barrel, she shielded her eyes with her left hand and struck the back window with the butt of the gun. It shattered and fell outward.
Picking up the TOW launch missile, she aimed it at the Rapid bus following them. She smiled again.
“Arrivederci, bitch,” she muttered as she got a lock on tone. She pressed the launch button.
Max Calijo’s eyes widened when he saw the missile launch. He stood on the bus’s brakes.
It wasn’t designed to go from sixty to zero in a rapid amount of time. The back end fishtailed, swinging out across traffic as the bus decelerated. Calijo flung open the door and dove out – just as the TOW missile hit the bus dead center.
The explosion flung him through the windshield of a Ford Windstar that had stopped when the bus swung out. “Jesus, man, are you okay?” the driver asked in concern, ignoring the fact that he now had half a windshield.
Calijo shook his head to clear the cobwebs, and then drew his gun. “Get out.”
“What?!” the driver said in alarm.
“GET THE FUCK OUT!”
“YEAH!” Chuck shouted as he watched the missile blow a hole in the bus.
Casey kept the pedal down, though. They needed to get to Bob Hope Airport, and rapidly. It was only a couple more miles.
Calijo backed the Windstar up, smashing a Toyota Yaris in the process. He whipped the Windstar around the end of the now blazing bus, pushing his speed up to seventy-five.
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. “This is Trash Hauler One,” he heard.
“All steps have been negative,” Calijo growled. “Take them down!”
A cheer went up in the Suburban when they reached Thornton Avenue. Casey even allowed himself a little smile as he took the next left hand turn onto the grounds of Bob Hope Airport.
The Suburban pulled up to the hangar where the two jets and the two Hummers were kept, the Land Cruiser pulling up next to it. The adults quickly jumped out, with Chuck and Sarah retrieving John and Lisa and Ellie getting Katie.
Casey hit the remote control button to open the doors of the hangar, when he heard something.
“What the hell is that noise?” It sounded familiar, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Commander Rachel Harrison was absolutely sure of what it was, though. “RUN!” she screamed. “GET AWAY FROM THE HANGAR!”
Lieutenant Roger Mantle was flying the F/A-18 Hornet known as Trash Hauler One. He had departed MCAS Yuma an hour beforehand. One of the few to remain loyal to Fulcrum, he had been told that he was to orbit Los Angeles and await orders.
Not that he’d had much choice in remaining loyal. He had been contacted by Lou DeBlasio a few months earlier and informed that if he didn’t do exactly what he was told, the entire world would be told that he was the one who had put an AGM-84E SLAM into the Arland D. Williams Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC, the previous February. The explosion had resulted in the deaths of 150 people.
But there was the hangar. Two black SUVs parked outside, just as he’d been told. And as the people standing outside heard the noise of his jet, they started running.
John Casey looked back over his shoulder as the F/A-18 dove toward Bob Hope Airport. The M61 Vulcan gun under the nose opened up. Bullets bit into the hangar, the tarmac, the SUVs.
The Hornet swooped back up into the sky, and a moment later, the Suburban and the Land Cruiser exploded. Those were followed by a pair of much larger explosions as the Falcon and the Learjet parked inside the hangar went up.
“We’re screwed,” Casey muttered. But he pressed on.
A moment later, the group reached an open gate door at the terminal. The passengers who were supposed to be going inside from Southwest Airlines flight 1746 all instead stood, astonished, as they watched the SCCS hangar burn on the edge of the airport.
Chuck, Sarah, Casey, Bryce, Carina, Rachel, Morgan, Ellie, and Devin ran inside the airport, the three kids in Chuck, Sarah, and Ellie’s arms. Chuck breathed a sigh of relief and slowed to a walk.
“My God,” Casey muttered. “We might make it after all.”
Bryce was leading the group when they reached the exit doors from the terminal. They opened automatically, and he strode out – and almost immediately went down.
The sound of the gunshot echoed across the terminal. Bryce collapsed, his hands grasping his stomach.
And Assemblyman Maximillian Calijo walked into the terminal, his gun raised and leveled at Chuck’s forehead.
“Hello, Mr. Bartowski,” he growled. “Are you ready to die?”
Chuck’s eyes had gone wide, and he was trembling. “N-no, not really!” he replied. “I mean, can’t you see I’ve got my son here?!”
Calijo shrugged. “And this should matter to me why?”
“Because you’re a human being and so am I!”
Max Calijo narrowed his eyes. “It’s too bad you forgot that when you wiped out the Firestone Boulevard Slayers,” he replied. “It’s too bad you forgot that when you blew up a house in Redlands.”
Then he smiled. “But you know, you gave me the justification I needed to kill my incompetent failure of a brother. You gave me a good reason to become El Anillo del Fuego. You gave me good reason to reactivate Fulcrum. They all hate you, by the way. They hate you for destroying their master plan and leaving the President in office.
“But that’s not why you have to die, Mr. Bartowski,” Calijo said. “You have to die because you’re a PAIN IN THE ASS. Whether by amazing skill or dumb luck, you have managed to thwart every plan that Fulcrum has had in the last FIVE YEARS! And as Fulcrum’s leader, I say ENOUGH! You will DIE, and we will be UNSTOPPABLE!”
Chuck raised his eyebrows – and then he started to laugh. Calijo looked at him in disbelief. “What the fuck could possibly be so funny?!”
Chuck smiled. “Oh, Max. You think you’re all big and bad. But you know what? You forgot the number six rule for being an Evil Overlord.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“No monologuing,” came a voice from behind him. Max Calijo whirled around, to see Bryce Larkin standing, a gun pointed directly at his forehead.
That was the last thing that Max Calijo saw, as Bryce pulled the trigger. The bullet discharged directly into Calijo’s forehead.
His corpse fell to the floor of the Bob Hope International Airport terminal. “He made a crappy evil overlord,” Bryce grumbled.
Chuck set John down on the floor and crossed to Calijo. He felt for a pulse – none. That’s when Calijo’s phone started to ring.
He pulled the phone from Calijo’s pocket. The display told him that Lou DeBlasio was calling.
Chuck grinned and pressed the talk button. “Senator DeBlasio, this is Chuck Bartowski,” he said. “Max Calijo is dead. I would seriously suggest that Fulcrum go back to being dead and stay there. If you don’t, my people will hunt you all down, and you will be very sorry you EVER crossed me.”
There was no noise on the other end for a moment. Finally, DeBlasio spoke. “That’s fair,” he replied slowly. “We’ll shut everything down. But there’s something you should know, Mr. Bartowski.”
“Oh, and what’s that?”
“Max Calijo’s wife died three months ago in childbirth. You just orphaned a three month old baby girl.”
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