Stormy Seas

by Ali Vali

  “Will you use your rank to spring me out of here?”

  “Before you answer that, Captain, how about Cletus gives me a night. Then she can return to her quarters,” he said. “Forget about active duty for at least six weeks. You get in that plane and I’ll kill you, if the captain doesn’t beat me to it.” He examined her and changed her bandages, saying everything looked great.

  “Now that we know you’ll live, I’ve got some folks out here that want to talk to you,” Aidan said.

  “Do you usually have this effect on people? You introduce yourself, make small talk, and it ends in gunfire?” Wiley asked as she entered with Baylor, Harvey, and Jin. “You look like shit, Cletus.”

  “And she’s being kind,” Baylor said.

  “It was my turn since Harvey ended up in here the last time,” she said and smiled sympathetically when she saw Jin’s face. The asshole in the North Korean uniform had done a number on her. “You feel okay?” she asked Jin.

  “Your doctor gave me stitches and said I would be okay. I must thank you all for not leaving me behind.”

  “You’re one of us now, and we take care of our own,” Baylor said, placing his hands on Jin’s shoulders.

  “I need to thank you anyway,” she said, glancing between Baylor and Wiley. “I owe you two and the rest of your team, Baylor. You guys kept up and got us out of there before Dick really got ahold of us.”

  “You owe us a beer and we’ll be even,” Wiley said, and pointed to the door. “Come on, you guys. Cletus needs all the beauty sleep she can get. Besides, we have homework,” Wiley said to Baylor.

  “Yeah, but don’t try to stretch this out to avoid work.” Baylor pointed to the bed and shook his finger.

  “Did we get some good stuff?”

  “Let’s hope you can remember the new passwords,” Wiley said.

  “I got it all up here.” She pressed a finger to the side of her head and motioned for Harvey to stay. “You got out without any injuries this time?”

  “I’m okay, but I wasn’t much help,” he said, lowering his head. “I should’ve done more.”

  “You never left her side and avoided getting shot in the head,” Aidan said. “You’re a badass, Junior. Accept it.” Aidan hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “If you weren’t a badass, Corbin wouldn’t have named you after our dog.”

  “Thanks, ma’am, and I’ll come back later.” He waved on his way out, and she smiled at the sweet guy.

  “What happened after I got my egghead scrambled?”

  She listened as Aidan told her about the subs and their new orders. The hum of the engines was comforting, and she fought off a yawn. “We’ll finish this conversation later,” Aidan said, sitting next to the bed. “Go to sleep and get some rest.”

  They had so much to do that Berkley thought about fighting sleep, but her body betrayed her, and she gave in to it. Aidan saw her eyes flutter shut and enjoyed simply watching Berkley drift off. It was something she did whenever she managed to wake before her morning-person lover, who was usually full of energy.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Jin said softly after she entered the room. “I want to make sure she was fine after all she did to keep me alive.” Jin told her about Berkley standing in front of her when Chandler raised his gun and aimed it at her head. “I told her she was an interesting person, but she has also got a courageous and good heart.”

  “You’re right, and she did that because you’re her friend. I realize you’re sad, but that should bring you some comfort.” That Berkley had done that didn’t surprise her, but it also made her nuts. “I almost forgot in all the excitement, but we rescued someone from the house. She won’t speak to any of us, and I thought you could talk to her and at least get a name. If she sees someone from North Korea, it might relax her a bit.”

  “I will help however you need me to.”

  Jin followed her out and across their medical unit to the room where the small battered woman had lain in bed, never saying a word no matter how much their translator tried to communicate with her. “She was found locked in a room in Min’s house and was in bad shape when she got here. The doctor has checked her wounds and said they’d heal fairly quickly, but I’m thinking the mental anguish will take some time,” Aidan said before she opened the door.

  When she cracked the door, Jin stood frozen in place, and the woman on the bed turned her head and stared, crying. “Jin,” the woman said in a small whisper that sounded weak and pleading, almost like she didn’t believe she was seeing Jin.

  “Yong,” Jin said, and her feet finally came to life as she practically ran to the bed and put her arms around the woman. They spoke in Korean for a moment, and Aidan didn’t need a translator to realize that Jin not only knew this woman, but she truly seemed to care for her. “She is still alive,” Jin said to Aidan, and showed more emotion with her tears than Aidan had ever witnessed from her. “She is my Yong Nam. She flew with me and was my friend. I thought she was dead.”

  “I don’t think it would’ve been much longer before that was true,” she said, smiling at Yong to put her at ease as she clutched Jin’s hand. “Does she speak English?”

  “I taught her some, but I have more practice now,” Jin said, turning her eyes back to Yong like something of her old life was still alive and there in front of her.

  “Thank you,” Yong said with a heavy accent as she bowed her head.

  Aidan nodded and smiled. “You can fill me in later,” she told Jin. “Why don’t you sit with Yong and talk to her? I think she really needs a friend to start putting what happened to her in the past.”

  “I asked Berkley if she was not disgusted when I told her what Yong means to me, and she said no. I hope you are the same,” Jin said, taking Yong’s hand and lifting it to her cheek.

  “I’d be the last person on this ship that would be disgusted by what I see,” she said and widened her smile. “Love is love, Jin, and when you find it, do everything you can to never let it go.”

  “Thank you, Aidan, and seeing Yong again made that very true for me.”

  “I’m glad, because it’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” she said, glancing back at the room Berkley was in. “I should know.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The tired almost drugged sensation clouding Berkley’s head didn’t disappear until the next morning, and the doctor gave in to her wish to leave. The nurse who’d checked on her every half hour volunteered to come to her quarters and change the bandages, giving her the green light to return to her room.

  For the next three days she and the team went through the files and hard drives until they uncovered the first important cache of information that could help them find every single person in Chandler’s army. Berkley did a search to see if anyone else on board their ship and the others traveling with them was on Chandler’s list.

  “What did you find?” Rooster asked during their daily briefing.

  “Two more names, not including Dale Whitner and our radio operator. For a ship this big, that’s not a lot, but if they’d killed Aidan, it was plenty. We sent the other captains their potential problems, and they’re taking care of them,” Berkley said, trying to stretch without hurting herself. “But more important—we found the master list buried in their computer files. It appears that Robyn Chandler kept the roster, and he was pretty good at updating the numbers. If this is right, the ten percent estimate is fairly accurate.”

  “Encrypt that and send it to us,” Rooster said, tapping his finger on the desk. “Any name in particular pop out at you?”

  “A few Secret Service agents,” Berkley said, highlighting those to make it easier for Rooster to find. “You might want to check who they’re assigned to. Right now the most shocking are the Speaker and his staff, but FBI Director Chapman had already found them.”

  “It’ll be a huge pain in the ass, but we’ll round up all these people and bring them in. By the time we’re done we might need to lease the rest of Cuba to detain them all,�
�� Carl said.

  “One name sticks out to me, considering how Chandler got out,” Aidan said, motioning for Berkley to move the mouse to the next suspect. “Captain Cruise Liskow. He’s currently on the eastern seaboard commanding a sub with nuclear warheads on board.”

  Rooster and Carl both leaned forward and stared at Preston. “Keep searching, but we’ll have to chance a dump of all these files into the Pentagon’s system. I’ll have my second send you the encryption codes so we can limit access to anyone not having clearance,” Rooster said, putting his hand on the top of his head and running it over his buzz cut.

  “What are you thinking?” Berkley asked, not liking the change in demeanor.

  “I want to be sure Liskow or anyone in his position can’t drop a nuke in a heavily populated area. We have safeguards against that kind of thing, but I’m not taking any chances,” Rooster said and stood up. “Radio in if you find anything else, but we’re headed upstairs with this.”

  “How fast can Chandler make it back?” she asked Aidan after the monitor went black.

  “Faster than us since they won’t have to contend with surface conditions,” Aidan said, making notes and calculations. “If we go top speed, we’ll be half a day behind him.”

  Berkley shook her head and twirled her pen through her fingers. “That’ll be a half a day too late. There has to be someone left on that list who can contact Chandler. If we can do that and feed him the right misinformation, it might slow him down.”

  “If he plans to destroy some place like New York, I doubt he’ll stop to take a call from an old friend,” Aidan said.

  Baylor stared at Berkley, and his eyes widened when he obviously figured out what was on her mind. “Fuck,” he said, then clamped his jaws shut. “Sorry, ma’am, but Cletus is right. He’s not interested in New York.” Baylor got up and put a map of the eastern coast on the screen and pointed to Washington DC. “You park a sub here,” his finger slid to the Atlantic, “and he takes the capital. If he does that, it leaves a huge vacuum of power he can readily step into.”

  “He’s not that crazy, is he?” Aidan asked.

  “We saw him in that uniform with all the shiny stars, even though he’s never served a day in his life,” Wiley said. “He’s that crazy, and my kid is in DC with my wife and parents.” No one in the room gave any kind of shocked reaction to that statement.

  “What do you suggest as far as slowing him down?” Aidan asked Berkley.

  “We keep looking for a contact person, and we contact the sub captains who took out the other four. They missed these two, and we have like ten days for them to rectify that situation,” Berkley said. “I can think of only two for sure he’d stop to talk to.”

  “Jeffery and Rachel,” Aidan said, and Berkley snapped her fingers, then pointed at her. “He’s never going to believe that all of a sudden they were granted radio privileges. They’re both rotting in Gitmo, and Jeffery’s facing the death penalty.”

  “He’ll believe it if we plan it right,” Baylor said.

  “How do you figure?” Berkley asked as she scratched her side where the stitches were.

  Aidan grabbed her hand and shook her head. Her wound was starting that itchy stage, and it was driving her insane, but at least she was able to see a bit out of her swollen eye. The bruise was black and tender, and her eye was so bloodshot she thought it’d never clear, but her vision was back. Without perfect eyesight, her time in the cockpit really was over, and that’s what had worried her the most. Too much was at stake for her career to end.

  “There’s no way the jailbird Chandlers know everyone working for daddy dearest, so we get a SEAL team to break them out. All we need to do is tell the army guys not to be so vigilant,” Taylor said.

  “And how do we keep the escapees from really flying the coop?” Aidan asked.

  “With a little help from a good dentist, we can get it done. They can put trackers in your teeth now,” Baylor said.

  “That’s a lot of moving parts, James Bond,” Berkley said, and Baylor shot her the finger.

  “We agree that we need them out there,” Wiley said, “and with a little teamwork, we can figure it out.”

  “We need them out of their cells, not off the island,” Berkley said, glancing at Aidan, and she nodded as if open to whatever she had in mind. “We’ll need to talk to Director Chapman.”

  “That’s easy enough,” Aidan said.

  “There’s easy, and then there’s luck. We need plenty of luck for this to work.”

  * * *

  Rachel stood and faced the wall as the guards unlocked the door. The game of wits with the interrogators was the only thing she had to look forward to every day, but no matter how long the game lasted, she had no intention of telling them anything. The pain in her arm was about to drive her insane, but fantasies of finding and killing whoever put the bullet through her shoulder kept her grounded.

  “Good morning, Ms. Chandler,” the young woman said. The pressed chinos and golf shirt the woman had on looked cooler than her orange jumpsuit, but what caught her attention was how familiar the newcomer was to her. She just couldn’t place her. “You might not remember me, but we met right after you were brought in.”

  “You’re an FBI agent?” The young agent had been with her for days after her capture but had never pushed her to answer anything. Whoever had assigned her either had too much faith in the agent, or thought Rachel didn’t have much information to offer on her father’s organization. “I forget your name.”

  “Special Agent Erin Mosley,” Erin said, not making eye contact with her. It was something she’d noticed about this woman the first time they’d met. Granted, she’d been drugged stupid at the time, but Special Agent Mosley had always appeared to be busy with something else when she was with her.

  “May I call you Erin?” She’d asked the fucking chief interrogator Walby Edwards the same thing, and it made her wonder what Erin’s answer would be.

  “No, Ms. Chandler, you may not,” Erin said, glancing up from her papers. “We are not friends, we won’t ever be friends, and I’d appreciate the same courtesy and respect I’m showing you.”

  “You have me locked in a cage twenty hours a day in this pit,” she said, placing the hand of her paralyzed arm on her lap. It wouldn’t move on its own, but leaving it hanging made the pain worse.

  “I don’t have you locked in here, Ms. Chandler. Any astute person would realize you put yourself in here by trying to kill the president.” Erin returned to her paperwork as if she hadn’t just called her stupid.

  “You can’t prove that,” she said, her anger flaring.

  “You were shot on a building while holding a high-powered rifle pointed at the president. A chimpanzee could win this case since it’s a slam-dunk compared to your brother’s, and he was found trying to sink the USS Jefferson. Neither of you are what I’d call the Al Capone of crime. After all, it took the IRS to finally bring him in.”

  “Then why are you here, Erin?” she asked in the same condescending tone Erin was using.

  “To give you an update since you don’t have access to news or a phone.” The papers scattered on the table were too far away for her to see what they were, and she refused to embarrass herself by craning her neck. “We found your father’s secret little hideaway.” Erin placed a picture of the North Korean base in front of her. “Four days ago,” the television in the room came on and a video started, “our jets were able to level it, along with everyone in it.”

  The explosions made her wince, and all she could think of was her mother and her brother. “You murdered all those innocent people?” The anger raging inside was a constant companion, but she couldn’t stop the tears at the thought of being truly alone in the world.

  “They weren’t exactly innocent, Miss Chandler,” Erin said, fast-forwarding to the next bombing run. “That was a lot of military hardware for innocent people to have.”

  “You fucking bitch.” She screamed the curse and tried to stand, b
ut Erin squeezed her bad shoulder, making her drop back down.

  “Agent Mosley.” Someone came to the door and held up a note. “You have an urgent call, ma’am.”

  “Here.” Erin handed over the remote. “Entertain yourself.”

  The door closed, and she didn’t have to start the feed again. The damn thing was playing on a loop in her head. How could their contacts in the Pentagon and in Washington not have warned her father so they could get out? They’d shared enough money with them and promised enough power to prevent this exact scenario. Surely she could still do something to find out if her family had survived.

  Erin came back twenty minutes later, and the papers she’d left behind had been tempting, but Rachel was smart enough to know they were always watching. “Now that you realize no one’s coming to rescue you, would you like to answer some questions?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Erin,” she said, getting up again and fighting back the pain to grab this bitch with her good hand.

  Erin made the same move but followed with a hold on her hair. The grip allowed her to smash Rachel’s face into the table. The impact made her light-headed, and when she tried to stand, Erin did it again until Rachel saw blood on the Formica surface. “Guard,” Erin said, not really yelling. “Take her to sick bay.” A man grabbed her and moved her away from Erin, who’d already returned to her paperwork like nothing had happened.

  “Fuck you,” Rachel said, then spit a mouthful of blood at the bitch. It landed close but missed its intended target. Everything went dark when she tried to lunge again and the guard knocked her in the back of the head. It was the only thing that wiped away the images of death.

  * * *

  “It went pretty much like you said it would,” Erin said to Walby as they watched the monitor hidden discreetly in the exam area. “I have to say that felt pretty good, since every so often I just want to smack the hell out of one of these people.” They’d placed the camera for only this consultation, and then they’d monitor every moment of Rachel Chandler’s life until the danger to national security was over.