by Keith Taylor
“Archer, thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you every two minutes! I was worried you might have changed your number.”
Jack stopped on the sidewalk, oblivious to the sheets of pouring rain. He jammed a finger in his ear to block out the traffic noise. “Ram, what’s going on? What happened? Is she OK?”
“Don’t worry,” Ramos replied, “she’s going to be fine. It looks like maybe just a couple of fractured ribs and a mild concussion. She’s been admitted for observation but she’ll be back on her feet in no time at all.” Ramos coughed, embarrassed. “I’m sorry I scared you. Probably jumped the gun a little on those calls. It’s just that she still has you listed as her emergency contact, and I figured you’d wanna know as soon as possible.”
Jack swallowed the lump in his throat, and he felt his heart wind down from a hum as he waved an arm to flag down a cab. “No, no, I’m glad you called. You did the right thing. What happened?”
“Well, I’m only hearing it third hand, but as far as I know she got rear-ended on the highway.” He could already guess the next question, and he jumped in before Jack had the chance to ask. “Don’t worry, Emily wasn’t in the car. We have someone heading out to the school to bring her in now. It’s all gonna be fine.”
Ramos fell silent for a moment, and in the background the muffled voices of the ward began to fade, as if he was moving away from them. When he returned his voice was hushed, and it had a slight echo. Has he moved into the stairwell? “Hey Jack, where are you? Are you in town?”
Jack wiped the rain from his face and looked both ways down the street. Plenty of cabs, but none with their lights on. “No, I’m in…” For a moment his brain struggled to keep up with his mouth. “I’m in Seattle. I’m due on a flight down to Vegas in a couple hours. Why?”
Again Ramos took a moment to respond. It almost seemed as if he were afraid. His voice dropped to a near whisper. “Look… I don’t want to freak you out. I don’t know if I should even be telling you this, but there’s something weird going on down here. We have cops hanging around the entrance, and I’m hearing there are military trucks out on the street. One of the nursing staff told me they're being asked to prepare for Condition Black. Have you seen anything on the news?”
“The news? I haven’t looked in a few hours.” Jack cursed himself for stopping off at a bar to block out the world after his first meeting. He’d already been teetering on the edge of drunk when he arrived at lunch.
“We’ve heard nothing down here, but something’s definitely going down. Maybe it’d be a good idea for you to get back as soon as you can. I don’t like the thought of Karen and Emily getting caught up in something without you here.”
“Yeah, absolutely.” Jack shook back his sleeve and looked at his watch. “OK, look, I’m gonna catch the next flight home. I’m headed to the airport right now. Can you keep an eye on the girls until I get there?”
“Of course, Jack,” Ramos assured him. “I’ll make sure they’re OK.”
“Thanks, Ram. And call me the second you hear anything. The phone’s right next to me.”
With a quick goodbye he hung up, returning to his search for a cab with a little more urgency now. The road was crowded with slow moving traffic but still there were no empty cars passing by, no doubt because of the driving rain. It was really coming down now, bouncing up from the sidewalk and soaking the bottom of his suit pants.
Jack scurried back for the cover of the awning at the door of the hotel, wiped the water from his phone and fired up his Uber app, impatiently waiting for what felt like an eternity for the map to load. When it finally appeared on screen he tapped in the address and clicked the closest car. A notice flashed up.
9X surge pricing? What the hell? Jack had never seen a surge that high back home, even at 1AM on New Year. What the hell was going on?
He waved away the thought and clicked to accept the ridiculous fare. He’d charge it to the company card, and if Baxter kicked up a fuss… well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. Getting home was more important than his expenses right now. His phone buzzed with a confirmation.
Your Uber is on the way. Andrei (4.4 stars) will arrive in 3 minutes.
OK, three minutes. Maybe another twenty, thirty to get to the airport, then a little more than two for the flight, plus check in, security, waiting at the gate, cab to the hospital… if the stars aligned he could probably be there in not much more than four hours.
Jack didn’t want to admit it even to himself, but Ram’s call had seriously spooked him. Cesar Ramos absolutely wasn’t given to paranoia or flights of fancy. The man had always been so sober and level headed he’d make an accountant look like a stand up comedian. If Ram was worried something bad was going down it was a safe bet he was right, and if he’d heard talk of Condition Black being declared…
Jesus. Just the thought of it gave Jack the shivers.
Condition Black was infamous among those few people who knew about it. It was an emergency contingency, one of the hundreds set up by Homeland Security in the years after 9/11 back when they realized we weren’t all that prepared for the new threats that faced the country. There were whole binders full of emergency procedures in every hospital around the country, but Condition Black was… well, it was something special.
Black was part of a citywide military evacuation order. The idea was that as soon as the condition was declared patients were to be rushed from hospitals within the evacuation zone, with the help of the police and any military units within range, to a designated safe zone somewhere outside the city center, far beyond the perimeter of what the government considered would be the likely target area of a terror attack.
Condition Black had never once been declared at Saint Francis, or at any hospital for that matter. It had been threatened a couple of times, once in Boston after the marathon bombing, again in San Diego after a tsunami warning that turned out to have been caused by a faulty sensor buoy, but both had resulted in inquiries into why it had been threatened at all. Folks had lost their jobs over both incidents. Even a warning, a simple hint that Black might be called, was so disruptive to the functioning of a hospital – and so stressful for the staff – that few hospitals dared even run drills for it.
Evacuation orders weren’t unusual, of course. There were plenty of reasons why a hospital might need to be evacuated, from a gas leak to a power outage to a hazardous outbreak. Evacuations happened all the time, but what made Condition Black so uniquely horrifying wasn’t just the scale of the evacuation – it wasn’t just moving patients out to the parking lot, but out of the city itself – but that not everybody got to be evacuated.
Black had been designed as what the government euphemistically called a resource management strategy. It was intended for use when those in charge foresaw the kind of national emergency that might stretch the country to its very limits… the kind of existential crisis that would force the government to start making determinations as to how to best distribute scarce resources.
There really was no delicate way to put it. Condition Black was a cold, calculated, premeditated cull of American citizens. It was a strategy designed for no other reason than to weed out the weak so the strong stood a better chance of survival. It was a policy so breathtakingly callous that its very existence was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, because there would be uproar if regular people learned that there was a contingency on paper somewhere that meant grandpa had to die for the greater good.
The moment Condition Black was called every patient reliant on life support systems, whether it was a full blown ventilator or a simple portable oxygen tank, was written off for dead. If you couldn’t breathe without assistance you were left behind. The same went for anyone suffering from an illness that required specialized treatment. Leukemia? Out. Diabetes? You’re on your own. There would be no insulin waiting at the safe zone.
Patients on the organ transplant list were also excluded, and anyone suffering from a potentially contagious disease mig
ht as well be euthanized right away. The government would never risk welcoming contagious illness to a crowded refugee camp. Even something as simple as the flu could decimate a population living on the edge.
Whether or not these decisions could be morally justified, there was no denying that Condition Black was brutal. Only the walking wounded would be evacuated, those patients who could heal on their own without placing a strain on resources, and the worst thing – the thing that gave clinical staff nightmares whenever they thought about it – was that these determinations wouldn’t be made by doctors but by a damned checklist. There was no wiggle room, no space allowed for compassion or even professional judgment. A cancer patient could have officially gone into remission an hour before Black was called, but if their chart hadn’t been updated and properly filed they were out of luck. No exceptions. No flexibility. No humanity.
Doctors who knew about Condition Black were always prompt with their chart work. They were too afraid of what might happen if they let it fall behind.
That’s what was worrying Jack. Black was supposed to be held in reserve for the day the sky fell in. It was an end of days scenario, the last resort after the last resort had failed. The idea that Ramos had heard it mentioned at all…
Jesus, what the hell’s happening down there?
A late model white Camry pulled to a stop in front of the restaurant, an Uber sticker in its windshield, and the driver honked the horn to attract Jack’s attention. He shook himself out of his fearful reverie, scurried quickly through the rain and climbed in the back, exchanged the usual half hearted mumbled greeting with the driver, and returned to his phone as the car pulled out into traffic.
The news on his homepage looked just as tediously horrifying as always. Political assassinations in the Philippines. A failed coup in one of the sub-Saharan African countries that only ever gets a mention when something awful happens. Some kind of high stakes economic standoff between Italy and the European Central Bank.
Back home there was just the usual tiresome political sideshow, Republicans and Democrats yelling at each other, fighting for column inches while achieving nothing for regular people. Jack scrolled through two screens of news, but there was nothing at all that might suggest that anything out of the ordinary was happening today.
He clicked the local feed for San Francisco, and if anything it was even more humdrum. A campaign for better access to childcare for working parents. A trial of a four day work week at a local tech firm. An op-ed about unfilled potholes in West Oakland. A beach beautification project at Bonita Cove gone massively over budget. It was just another regular day.
Jack felt a moment of nervous indecision as the Camry approached the turnoff for his hotel. He’d left his luggage in the suite, including his iPad and three new dress shirts, and he’d never forgive himself if a light-fingered maid decided to help herself to them instead of shipping them back. For a moment he thought about ordering the driver to take a right, but then he looked down at the seat beside him, frowning with confusion, and it occurred to him that something else was missing.
Damn.
In his haste he’d left his briefcase beneath the table at the restaurant. There was nothing of value inside, just a bundle of literature for the Sentrax he was selling, but the briefcase itself was one of the few nice things he still owned. It was a polished chestnut leather Berluti, a graduation gift from his father, and every block the Camry moved further from the restaurant the thought of losing it gnawed deeper. There was no way he could ever afford to replace it. It would cost him a month’s rent, and at San Francisco prices that wasn’t something to take lightly.
He turned over the back of his seat and looked longingly out the rear window, trying to stop himself from ordering the driver to turn around. Was he being stupid? Would he arrive back in San Francisco only to find that Karen had already been discharged with a bottle of aspirin? Would he find Ramos standing red faced, apologizing for scaring him with a false alarm? Would he find himself fielding angry calls from his supervisor, demanding to know why he wasn’t at the Vegas convention schmoozing a hundred drunk doctors?
He forced himself to push those concerns aside. He knew all of that was almost certainly what would happen. He was sure he'd make a fool of himself when he arrived out of breath at the hospital lobby, but he also knew he’d never forgive himself if something serious really was going down.
He’d already abandoned Emily once before. He’d failed miserably as a father more times than he cared to remember. He’d let his little girl down so many times that it had gouged a hole in his heart so large it was a wonder it was still pumping, and he’d be damned if he’d do it again for the sake of a briefcase and a few gadgets.
No. He had to get home.
He had to keep Emily safe.
΅
CHAPTER FOUR
MOVE WELL CLEAR
THE SLATE GRAY Sikorsky King Stallion seemed to skip across the chop like a skimmed stone, its belly perilously close to the frothing tips of waves that threatened to engulf the helicopter with the slightest error. It flew so low that the windshield wipers had to clear the salt spray from the glass every few seconds.
The pilot, Captain George McGuinness, was unconcerned. He gazed out through his aviators at the horizon ahead without a hint of fear, his years of training leaving him so confident in his skills that he could reach out the door and scoop up a glass of water at two hundred knots without breaking a sweat, or spilling a drop. He knew exactly what he was doing, and his mind was firmly on the mission.
The only thing that puzzled McGuinness a little was why he’d been ordered to fly under the radar, especially as he’d been assured this wasn’t a training exercise. He’d never received such an order in peace time, and certainly not just a couple hundred miles from the California coast. Why would he need to evade radar detection almost within sight of his own coast line? What was there to fear out here?
He tried not to let it bother him too much. He knew it wasn’t his job to ask questions, and he had no intention of starting now. He’d been trained – and trained extremely well – to accept orders without question, complaint or hesitation, and his orders were crystal clear.
He was to intercept a freighter sailing under a Panamanian flag and, if possible, set down on deck and deposit the squad of 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing crowded into the back, along with the wiry, jittery civilian who seemed to be along for the ride, and not at all happy about it. If landing turned out not to be an option he’d been instructed to hover above deck and allow the Marines to rappel down before returning to base to refuel for the extraction. No radio contact, no sighting passes and no warnings before insertion.
He’d also been warned that he could expect to face heavy fire. This had come as a surprise, but such a warning was hardly unusual in his line of work. Even training exercises often came with a live fire warning, and it was always safer to assume that you’d take fire than assume you wouldn’t.
McGuinness peered through the windshield at the rough seas ahead, scanning the water ahead for a flash of color. The clouds were hunkered down and dark, visibility down to just a mile or so in the leaden murk, but he didn’t have much trouble sighting his target in the distance. At the limits of visibility he picked out the red and white ship against the midnight blue ocean, long and riding low in the water, fighting the swell on an easterly bearing that would lead it to landfall around fifty miles north of Santa Barbara if it remained on course.
He guessed the ship to be around eighty meters in length, a fair sized long range freighter, and even at this distance he could tell that landing wouldn’t be a safe option even if the ocean was calm. The deck was loaded down with dozens of Cosco shipping containers, all of them stacked haphazardly atop one another like loose Lego bricks. None of them offered a large enough surface to set down the enormous Sikorsky. Some looked like they’d topple into the sea at the lightest touch. God knows what kind of cowboy operation would allow one of its freighters to head out to
sea in such a condition.
Over the radio his co-pilot, Lieutenant Maya Chen, called back to the Marines, giving the order to prepare for insertion as McGuinness slowed the King Stallion. He heard the bay door slide open over the low thump of the rotors, and over his headset the gunner announced he was taking up his position at the entrance.
In an instant the back of the Sikorsky was suddenly alive with action, a dozen men taking this as their cue to check their gear, limber up and perform their last minute rituals before going into action. The Captain turned back in time to see the gunner tie a blue ribbon and a St Christopher pendant to the hand grip of the M134 Vulcan, and beside him a Marine tapped his helmet four times against the inner hull of the Stallion and twice against his left boot before placing it on his head.
McGuinness tried not to laugh. It may seem funny to a civilian, but he knew there was a reason for these superstitions. He knew the little rituals helped bring the chaos under control, even if it was only an illusion, and he knew that nothing on earth makes a man believe in these things like watching a hail of bullets pass him by and walking away without a scratch. Every Marine had a story like that. Hell, so did McGuinness. There was a reason he touched the Purple Heart that hung from his collective every time he climbed into the Stallion, and it had nothing to do with common sense.
He turned back to the cockpit and looked out at the ship, still five hundred yards ahead. At this distance it was still hard to tell, but on deck he could only see the containers, and close to the bridge some kind of equipment he didn’t recognize, a steel frame around the size of a small car. “You see any movement down there?” he asked.
“Nothing yet,” Chen replied, peering out the spray soaked window. “Maybe it’s nap time.”
