Code of Honor

by Alan Gratz

  AALIYAH DROPPED THE MIC, GRABBED THE FLOOR manager by the shirt, and slammed him up against a stack of boxes. “Why are those hot dog boxes filled with C-4?”

  Fred Sorenson collapsed into a sobbing, spluttering heap. He was afraid. Really afraid. And his fear was contagious. I had never seen a grown man cry like that, and it scared me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” he blubbered. “I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t—They told me if I went to the police, they’d kill her.”

  “Kill who?” Aaliyah asked.

  “My daughter,” he said, sobbing. “They have my daughter.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  A shot rang out, startling me. A red stain spread across Sorensen’s shirt, and with horror I realized he’d been shot. His eyes went wide and his mouth opened like he was trying to say something, but he was dead before he hit the floor.

  Before I had time to gasp, Aaliyah grabbed me and yanked me down to the ground. Bullets ripped through the boxes above us. My heart thudded as we scrambled to safety behind the boxes while Dane returned fire from the protection of a tractor trailer. The other employees, the skeleton crew who’d been loading the trucks, leaped off their forklifts and ran for the exits.

  I ducked as guns fired, not sure where the bullets were even hitting. “Who’s shooting at us?” I cried.

  “Whoever kidnapped Sorenson’s daughter,” Aaliyah said. “Whoever arranged for those explosives to end up on those trucks.”

  She pulled a small gun from the inside of her suit jacket. Bullets tore into the metal wall behind us, pinging like hail on the roof of a car. I wanted to disappear. But Aaliyah popped up from behind the boxes and squeezed off a couple of shots. She dropped back down and put a finger to her ear. “Jimmy, we’re under attack!”

  “I know!” came his response. “I was watching the parking lot security cameras. These guys didn’t drive up. They were already here.”

  Bullets pinged off the tractor trailer where Dane was hiding, and I flinched.

  “They’re going to set off the explosives!” I said.

  Aaliyah stood, fired, and ducked again. “Plastic explosives don’t work that way. It takes a blasting cap.” She put her finger to her ear again. “Dane, I make six hostiles with body armor and automatic rifles along the south wall. Maybe more.”

  “Roger that,” Dane’s voice said in my ear. “Four more are making their way around the stacks on the west wall.”

  Bullets chewed up the boxes all around us. Aaliyah returned fire with her pistol, but it was nothing compared to the firepower our attackers had.

  “We can’t beat ten guys!” I cried.

  “Jimmy,” Aaliyah asked, “can you do anything for us?”

  The fire alarm suddenly went off, red lights flashing and sirens shrieking.

  “Great,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “It’s all I can do,” Jimmy’s voice said. “Nothing else here is automated. Wait—I hear somebody. They’ve found me!”

  “Get out of there!” Dane said. “You too, Aaliyah. It’s our only option.”

  “Where?” she said. The attackers blocked the way we’d come in, and were along the wall with the emergency exit, too.

  “Where the trucks come in and out,” I said, thinking fast and pulling Aaliyah in that direction. “That’s how I got out of the DHS building—”

  The boxes right by my head exploded, spraying us with frozen French fries. Aaliyah yanked me back down.

  “Or not,” I squeaked.

  “Back exit’s covered,” Aaliyah told Dane.

  “Then we go up,” Dane told us.

  “UP?” I SAID, LOOKING AT THE ROOF. THERE WAS A skylight there, partially obstructed by the towering stacks of food boxes.

  “Up,” Aaliyah said. She tucked her pistol back in her jacket and took off her high heels. She stood for a moment, eyeing them regretfully. “Do you know how hard it is to find a good pair of heels?” she asked me, then tossed them aside. With a nimble leap, she was up and wiggling over the stack of boxes. She held out a hand to help me up after her. I was still so shaken up by what I’d just seen—Sorensen dying, the bullets coming at us—that I forgot to get flustered by the fact that I was holding Aaliyah’s hand.

  We moved around behind the next stack to give us more cover, and kept climbing. The ceiling was one more pallet-height away. I glanced over the edge. Two black-clad SWAT-looking guys were creeping through the stacks, automatic rifles held at the ready. They were going for where we had been, but when they discovered we weren’t there anymore, they would be able to sneak up on Dane. I looked around for something to drop on them, then realized I was standing on what I needed. Boxes. Boxes and boxes of frozen food. I pushed at one with my feet, but the boxes were wrapped in a thick plastic, like industrial-strength plastic wrap, and wouldn’t budge.

  “Kamran,” Aaliyah whispered. “Kamran, come on!”

  I signaled for her to wait and ripped and tore at the plastic wrap. I barely made a dent in it. I wished I had a knife. I managed to yank a V-shaped slit in the plastic wrap at last, put my sneakers to the box at the top, and pushed with all my strength. The box tore free of the plastic wrap and tumbled down between the stacks, slamming into the head of one of the black-clad guys with a satisfying crunch and knocking him flat on the ground. The other guy flinched, looked up, saw me, and opened fire. My stomach went to my throat, and I scrambled back as bullets shredded the boxes and plastic wrap. The guy below me stopped shooting long enough to shout something that sounded like Arabic. I kicked at another box, sending it toppling over the side, and took Aaliyah’s outstretched hand. I didn’t look back to see if the second box had hit the guy below us.

  We climbed onto the last pallet, and Aaliyah stood on her toes to reach the skylight. She unlatched the window. It gave a rusty groan as she pushed it open, but there was just enough room for us to slither out. I hefted her up until most of her weight was on the roof and her feet left my hands.

  I turned just in time to see a guy in all-black body armor stand up behind me. He had just climbed up over the side. We stared at each other for half a second, both of us surprised, and then suddenly, there was a gun in his hand. I grabbed for it, twisting, pushing down and away, doing everything Dane had taught me, but the guy was strong. Stronger than me. He twisted the gun back toward me, and then—bang!—it was all over.

  I FLINCHED, BUT THE SOLDIER HADN’T SHOT ME. Blood trickled from his mouth and the tension in his arm went slack, and then he was falling into me. I caught his body out of instinct, and just as quickly pushed him away, heaving him over the side. I tried to ignore the sound of him hitting the boxes as he fell, and then the thud of his body as it hit the concrete floor.

  I shook uncontrollably. I had almost been shot. Point-blank. And I hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

  Dane stood on the stack of pallets straight across the aisle, his pistol in both hands. I looked up at him, still dazed.

  “Move,” he said.

  Dully, I understood that he needed me out of the way, and I moved aside as much as I could. Dane got a running start and leaped across the chasm between the pallets, landing with so much momentum he almost went over the other side. He saw me standing there blinking like an idiot and grabbed my arm. Not hard, but rough enough to shake me out of my stupor.

  “You all right?” he asked me, his brown eyes finding mine and bringing me back.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  He put his hands on my waist and lifted me to the window like he was picking up a toddler. I grabbed on, pulled myself up, and there was Aaliyah to help me the rest of the way. We both reached down and helped Dane up.

  We were on the roof of a warehouse in the middle of the night with no one else around but terrorists, who were probably at that moment swarming up the pallets and out the exits, meaning to trap us.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  We ran to the edge of the roof. It was too far to jump. We’d break our legs, or worse. The sound o
f the man hitting the floor from the top of the pallets came back to me suddenly, unbidden. I stepped back, feeling sick.

  “There has to be a ladder down somewhere,” Aaliyah said.

  “Which they’ll be taking up,” Dane said. Behind us, another black-clad man had hauled himself halfway out the same window we’d crawled out of. Dane shot twice, and the man went limp and slid back through the window.

  Dane put a finger to his ear. “Jimmy, you there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah!” Jimmy said. Jimmy! In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about him.

  “Where you at?” Dane asked.

  “Uh, in the van. In the parking lot,” Jimmy said.

  “South wall of the warehouse,” Dane said. “Now.”

  “On it!” Jimmy said. We heard tires squeal, and in what seemed like an eternity but was probably only seconds, the white van was parked right beneath us.

  “You here?” Jimmy asked. “Dane? Where are you?”

  “Don’t move,” Dane said. “We’re coming to you.”

  Before I could even ask what Dane planned to do, he jumped. He landed with as much grace as he could, slamming into the metal roof of the van and landing on his butt.

  “Holy frak!” Jimmy yelled in our ears. “What was that?”

  “Don’t move, Jimmy,” Aaliyah said. “We’re coming down.”

  “A little warning would be nice, is all!” Jimmy cried.

  Dane got to his feet, apparently none the worse for having fallen twelve feet onto the roof of a van. He signaled to Aaliyah, and she jumped. She half landed, was half caught by Dane, and she slithered down the windshield. Dane waved for me to follow.

  I looked down, seeing the twenty feet to the ground, not the twelve feet to the top of the van. Twelve feet was still a lot of feet to drop, and if I missed …

  A gunshot behind me made me duck. One of the guys was half out the window, his gun pointed at me. He was struggling to aim and keep his balance, but soon enough he was going to get one of them right enough to shoot me.

  “Come on, Kamran! You can do this!” Dane yelled. “Your brother jumps out of airplanes!”

  My brother had a parachute, I thought.

  The soldier fired again, and I jumped.

  FOR A HORRIFYING MOMENT I WAS FALLING, MY body numb and weightless, and then Dane’s big hands caught me and my feet crashed into the metal roof, my legs crumpling underneath me.

  “Down the windshield,” Dane told me before I’d even caught my breath. He rolled off the side of the van while I struggled down the windshield, which is a lot harder to do smoothly than you’d think. Dane pushed me inside the van, and we took off. Bullets hit the back of the van as we peeled out of the parking lot, and I flattened myself against the floor again, praying a bullet didn’t catch me. The van swerved, the bullets stopped, and we were away.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. The fire department. Jimmy had set off the alarm.

  “Those guys back there—they’ll kill the firefighters!” I said.

  “The firemen ain’t going to find anyone back there,” Dane said. “Just a really big fire.” He pulled a little black box out of his pocket, extended an antenna out the top of it, and pressed buttons on it with both thumbs.

  I’ve never been in an earthquake before. Or a tornado. Or a hurricane. But I have to think that the explosion Dane set off was worse than all of them combined. We were already minutes away at high speed, but the shock wave lifted the van onto two wheels and shook my insides so much I thought I was going to rattle to pieces. Jimmy slammed on the brakes and swerved, and when the van’s wheels hit the ground again and it rocked to a stop, we could see the place that used to be Kendall Food Services.

  It was now a flaming volcano of fire and ash.

  “Left a little C-4 of my own back there,” Dane said. “Only, mine had a detonator.”

  Fire engines roared by. Three, four, five. It wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough.

  And all I could think about as I watched the flames was all those explosives leveling University of Phoenix Stadium during the Super Bowl.

  “That was almost us,” Aaliyah said. “After those terrorists killed us, they would have blown it up to cover their tracks.”

  “Yeah. The small army of terrorists, if you’ll remember,” Jimmy said from the front seat. “You know what this means?”

  “We just saved a hundred thousand people?” I said.

  “No,” Jimmy said. He turned to look at us, the bright yellow and orange flames of the burning warehouse silhouetting him. “It means one of us ratted out the team to the terrorists. One of us is a traitor.”

  “DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,” AALIYAH SAID. “NOBODY IN this van is a traitor.”

  “Oh no?” Jimmy shot back. “Then tell me why exactly there was a strike team waiting on us back there.”

  We were on the move again, speeding away from the explosion. We couldn’t stop, not even to argue. Not until we were far, far away from Nashville and the swarm of government agents that were about to descend on the Kendall Food Services distribution center. Jimmy was driving, and the rest of us sat in the back, on the benches.

  “They were guarding the C-4,” Aaliyah said. “They were there in case somebody like us did come along, that’s all.”

  Dane shook his head. “Jimmy’s right. There were too many of them. You don’t leave twelve armed and armored terrorists in a warehouse to guard hidden boxes of C-4. They would be easier to spot than the explosives.”

  “And they were lying in wait for us,” Jimmy said. “Because they knew. I’m telling you, man, they knew we were coming.”

  Jimmy’s opinion I could discount, but not Dane’s. I looked at him, but he just sat there like a statue.

  “And just which one of us do you think told them?” Aaliyah said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “How about the ex–Green Beret who got drummed out of the service on an other-than-honorable discharge and still holds a grudge?”

  Other-than-honorable discharge? Dane? I knew that if you retired from the military after your full tour of duty with a good or excellent rating, you got an honorable discharge. If you weren’t around long enough and had to leave for something like medical reasons, you got a general discharge. That was still fine. But to get an “other-than-honorable conditions” discharge meant you did something wrong and got kicked out of the army. Sometimes something really wrong. Like fighting, or doing drugs, or stealing. It was worse than never joining the military in the first place. It was a black mark on your life you never got rid of. You were stripped of your rank, you lost all your veteran’s benefits, and it made it way harder to get a job.

  Had that really happened to Dane? Had he done something bad and been thrown out of the army? I couldn’t believe it. Dane was a rock.

  But if he was so good, why wasn’t he a Green Beret anymore?

  “That’s right,” Jimmy said. “You think I didn’t hack into all your files before I took this gig? I know everybody’s dirty little secrets.”

  The air in the van felt like it had just gotten ten degrees colder. Dane turned his head as slow as an owl watching a mouse crawl by.

  “Don’t,” he told Jimmy.

  “What about you?” Aaliyah said to Jimmy. “You’re the one of us who’s only in this for the money.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Which begs the question: why are you really in it? That was a very touching story you told back there about loving America and Justin Timberlake.” Jimmy looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What Aaliyah neglected to mention is that she’s Jordanian. That’s why she can only be an independent contractor for the CIA. She’s not an American citizen. She grew up in the Middle East. She’s an Arab princess.”

  “I am not a princess,” Aaliyah said. “Yes, I am distantly related to the Jordanian royal family. Very distantly. But I’m doing this for exactly the reasons I told Kamran. I’m doing it to make the world better.”

  “Just because she’s from the Middle East
doesn’t mean anything,” I said, bristling. “My mom’s from Iran. You think that makes me a traitor, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “For all we know, your brother’s jerking us all around and you’re in on it with him, like those brothers up in Boston.”

  I scrambled for the front seat. To do what, I didn’t know. Punch him, hurt him, strangle him. I was blind with rage. I thought of my classmates, the people in my neighborhood, the media—right at that moment Jimmy was a stand-in for everybody who’d ever called me a name or thought I was a terrorist just because I was Persian. If I’d done anything to Jimmy, he would have lost control of the van and we’d all have been killed, but Dane held me back.

  Jimmy’s phone beeped in the cup holder beside him. He snatched it up angrily to read a text.

  “It’s Mickey,” he said. “He wants to talk.”

  “Pull over somewhere,” Dane said. I still struggled in his arms, but we both knew I wasn’t going anywhere. “Make the call,” he told Jimmy.

  WE ALL STOOD APART FROM EACH OTHER ON THE quiet dirt road, each of us breathing out hot jets of air in the cold Tennessee night while Jimmy established the secure connection to Mickey on the hood of the van.

  I didn’t have a coat, so I kept my arms wrapped tight around myself. The cold helped calm me down a little, but I was still mad. I knew I wasn’t a traitor. But what about Aaliyah? I hated myself for even wondering. But had she really committed to fighting the good fight after September 11, or had the way the other students treated her turned her against them and their country? The way the DHS said that same prejudice had turned Darius into a terrorist?

  And Dane—what had he done to get an other-than-honorable discharge from the US Army?

  “I got him,” Jimmy said at last.

  We stood close to one another so Mickey could see us on the computer, but not too close.