by Dana Fraser
HOME PORT
LONG HAUL HOME
DANA FRASER
CONTENTS
Description
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Copyright
DESCRIPTION
KEEP CALM AND RETURN FIRE
Retired Army Colonel Thomas Sand returns home from Europe in the middle of a national meltdown. It soon becomes apparent that many of the catastrophes hitting America have been orchestrated at the highest levels of government with the support of the elite who haunt the Deep State.
The men in the shadows aren’t content to take over America. They want the entire world under their control.
His country needs him, but Thomas has only one goal—to reunite and protect his family. It won’t be easy. His wife, son and daughter are scattered in two different states. His old comrades have become his enemies. And someone put him on a kill list.
There’s nothing for him to do but keep calm—and return fire.
Home Port continues the story that began in Blind Spot and should be read following books 1-3 in Long Haul Home (available separately or in a collection).
DANAFRASER.COM/ALERTS
CHAPTER ONE
HAVING CANCELED his appearance at a meeting that would make or break his startup company, retired Army Colonel Thomas Sand boarded a flight out of Brussels a little after midnight. He had spent the day at the airport, haunting the ticket desks of international airlines and falling off one standby list after another. Mara Grant, the technical supervisor on his applications build, texted him at one point that the meeting with the working group of the NATO Security Committee never materialized. Not one of the twelve confirmed attendees bothered to cancel.
They just failed to show up.
With a sinking feeling as to why they had all bailed, Thomas didn’t text Mara back. He had warned her once already. The beta of the threat assessment app they had spent two years actively developing showed a country—their country—on the edge of upheaval. Everything that could go wrong was occurring at the same time. A Category 5 hurricane spinning its destruction along the Gulf Coast, an act of sabotage at Hoover Dam with implications for all dams west of the Mississippi, and unprecedented cellular outages.
More ambiguous factors were also coalescing, their gray shapes foreshadowing something sinister. Assault rifle sales had spiked sharply, as had pro-ISIS chatter among American residents and visa holders. Attempts by individuals on the no-fly list to buy tickets had surged and several dozen people of Middle Eastern descent had been ticketed for loitering around airports.
Thomas had pointed all of this out to Mara and she’d looked at him like he was a damn fool. So, yeah, she had been warned.
Now it was time to concentrate on his family.
Already fighting the urge to fidget the instant the plane doors closed, he wanted to peel the fabric off the seat in front of him an hour later when the plane hadn’t left the departure gate.
Stuck in an aisle seat, he twisted and all but laid across the lap of the middle-aged woman next to him to look out the window. The night sky was filled with activity. His brow tightened as he tried to place what was off about the view. After a few seconds of hard staring, he realized the spacing of the lights on the other aircraft was the source of the scraping sensation against the back of his skull.
Ground control was letting smaller, executive-sized jets take off ahead of the Boeing 747 with its three hundred plus passengers.
The woman next to him cleared her throat, her body tensing as Thomas continued to drape his torso over her legs.
“Sorry,” he offered half-heartedly as he settled into his seat. “Just seems odd why we’re still on the ground.”
She offered a blank look. He repeated his words in French, which earned him a bored shrug.
He shrugged back then turned his attention to the flight personnel and other passengers. About ten rows up, one of the attendants had stopped, bent low and was speaking directly into the ear of a male passenger. Her hand rested on his shoulder and Thomas wondered if it was from familiarity or an attempt to keep her balance.
Familiarity, Thomas mused, followed by another thought after a few seconds spent focusing on the passenger.
Gotta be an air marshal.
From what he could see from behind, the man was well within the parameters of what a federal law enforcement officer looked like, especially the kind they stuck on planes, which didn’t happen nearly as often as people thought.
The man’s hair was closely trimmed, he wore a solidly middle-income business suit and he hadn’t removed his jacket in anticipation of the long flight. Probably early forties, Thomas judged by the crinkles at the corners of the man’s eye and mouth visible when he turned his head and replied to the attendant in an equally familiar manner.
For forty something, he was leaner than most businessmen, too.
Sticking his head into the aisle, Thomas looked at the passengers seated in the rows behind him. Some watched the attendant with a hint of anxiety, but they all had the look of regular travelers. Whatever was happening, he doubted they had any knowledge or involvement.
The seat belt light came on and then the captain announced they would begin taxiing shortly. Thomas offended the woman next to him a second time as he dipped his upper body in her direction to see how many of the smaller jets remained in the sky.
“Troubling,” he said, his voice low as he complied with the captain’s order to turn off any electronic devices. In doing so, he gave his phone one last check. The European network was still running, but there was no sign that his family had received any of his messages.
THE FLIGHT over the Atlantic lasted almost as long as the difference in time zones. The time wasted circling Dulles International Airport just outside the nation’s capital promised to stretch longer than the hour spent idling on the Belgian tarmac.
Closing in on five a.m. on the East Coast, they were locked in a holding pattern, his side of the plane facing into the circle they had looped around the airport at least three times. Thomas had flown in and out of Dulles and nearby Reagan National often enough to know that there was an unusual amount of traffic in the pre-dawn sky. But, stuck on the inward side of the plane, he was only viewing a narrow slice of the picture.
He didn’t like what he could see. The airport was running on emergency lighting.
Grabbing his carryon from under the seat in front of him, he pulled out his field glasses then disobeyed the seatbelt sign and unhooked. Moving to the opposite side of the plane where there was an empty row, he pressed the binoculars to the window.
He wanted to see what kind of traffic was still in the air, but t
he first thing he noticed was the absence of lights in the residential neighborhoods surrounding the airport. At ground level, D.C. itself would be beyond the horizon with only its light pollution visible.
At the current altitude of the plane’s holding pattern, the city itself should have sparkled in the night.
It didn’t. The only lights that came within Thomas’s field of vision were those of the same type of small aircraft he’d seen in Brussels and a lot of military helicopters, too.
His grip tightened reflexively on the binoculars as one of the flight attendants came up. The man Thomas had pegged as an air marshal walked a few steps behind the woman.
“Sir, you need to return to your seat.”
The tone of her voice suggested nothing more than irritation and impatience. To her, the delay was a routine annoyance.
She must not have looked out the window or consulted the flight crew.
No way in hell the D.C. airspace at that moment was routine. Nothing about the city was routine.
The woman tugged at his bag when he didn’t immediately comply. Thomas let her have it after a glance at the air marshal’s face and a second one along the tailored lines of the man’s jacket. That split second of observation was all it took to pick out the faint bulge of the air marshal’s holster and the butt of his service weapon beneath the business jacket.
Extracting himself from the row, Thomas followed the stewardess back to his seat, stowing his bag and field glasses after her waspish direction for him to do so. The air marshal lingered for a second, eyeing Thomas as Thomas eyed him in return. The stand off between the men ended with the captain’s voice coming on with a quick note that their flight had finally been cleared for landing.
Securing his seatbelt, Thomas closed his eyes and tried to quell his racing thoughts. The flight had been scheduled to land two hours earlier at one of the Concourse C gates near the Federal Inspection Station, with his connecting flight leaving from the same concourse. Normally, that would mean he could claim and recheck his baggage within the FIS and have a shorter TSA line and maybe, just maybe, not miss the connecting flight to St. Louis he had booked. If he had to use the International Arrivals Building then get back to the C gates, he’d better pray his flight to St. Louis was suffering similar delays.
With the lights out—he just hoped the connecting flight hadn’t been cancelled.
Exhaling, he released a silent prayer that there were still commercial flights leaving the city. If everything was on the verge of chaos, he had to collect his son Ellis and step-daughter Hannah, then figure out his next step in reaching his wife. And, for that, he had to gamble on whether Becca had decided to shelter in place at the vacation rental in South Carolina, return home to Evansville or head for his son’s boarding school.
The plane began its descent at a stomach lifting speed, almost like the aircraft was dropping out of the sky. A few startled cries echoed Thomas’s queasy perception, then the wheels hit the tarmac and everyone was pushed hard into their seatbacks. The minute they reached gate speed, Thomas unhooked his belt and pulled his carryon out from under the seat.
He would have stood up, but he was already on the air marshal’s shit list and tangling with the man would turn a few minutes of delay in disembarking the plane into hours locked in a room somewhere in the vast recesses of the airport, leaving Thomas in the dark in more ways than one.
Sliding his phone from his pocket, he checked the signal to find zero bars. He glanced to the side as his row companion checked her device and offered up a very French sigh.
All around him, similar sighs and a few snarled curses repeated in the recycled air they had all been breathing for at least ten hours.
Angling his head to look out the window, he muttered a thick handful of swear words as he saw the faintly illuminated back of the International Arrivals Building. This was wrong. Even if they weren’t disembarking at one of the C Gates, they should have exited the plane at another concourse then taken one of the airport’s hulking cattle cars they called “mobile lounges” to the IAB.
Just how bad had the situation become? When he had boarded the plane some ten and a half hours before, the Belgian news stations were reporting the same U.S. outages as his threat assessment app had shown—both in power and communications. But that meant the Midwest, New England and other large swatches of the country still had electricity.
Now the capital—the whole damn capital and its suburban tentacles—was pitch black.
The plane stopped, the captain cautioning everyone to remain seated. A dozen or more passengers jumped up and left their rows to stand in the aisle. Thomas joined them, his eyes locked on the back of the air marshal’s head.
When the captain cleared passengers to retrieve their carryons, those already in the aisle surged forward, towing a willing Thomas in their wake.
Someone pushed at his back as he reached the first class area. A glance over his shoulder revealed a woman with an oversized carryon cradled against her stomach and breasts.
Short in stature and looking like she was in her eighties, the woman threw up a look that could have cleaved bone if her appearance suggested anything more than a lifetime of cultivated hostility toward the world. He turned his attention back toward the exit as he heard the stairs clamp into place.
Grinding his teeth, Thomas shuffled along until he reached the open plane door, the old woman and her bag still jabbing at his spine. Her irritating presence faded away when he reached the stairs attached to the jet and saw the formation of Customs and Border Patrol agents lining each side of the back entrance to the building. Battery operated stage lights illuminated a path from the end of the stairs to the doors.
Unintentionally, Thomas locked eyes with one of the two agents closest to the plane. Bulky, with closely cropped hair, the man stared at him for a few seconds as Thomas blindly descended the steps. The agent’s face seemed to settle into some kind of decision then his head swiveled to the black CBP agent on the other side of the line.
They nodded simultaneously and Thomas felt his balls clench. He had no time to wait in a hall in the Pentagon or at the White House to explain why he had sent the warning message out to some of the key government and military officials he had worked with in the past.
“Putain, c’est sombre,” the woman behind him whispered with a twinge of fear in her voice.
Yes, it was dark. So was the inexplicably hostile stare of the CBP agent.
Thomas closed the gap that had opened on the stairs, his body practically stuck to the man in front of him until he hit the last step. That was when Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee peeled away from their spot by the stairs and motioned Thomas to step out of line.
The white agent, the one who had locked eyes with Thomas, gave him an imperceptible nod. “Colonel Sand?”
Checking the man’s name tag at the same time, he nodded back. “Agent Franks.”
The already bunched muscles of Thomas’s shoulders tightened further. With the lights out, resources at the airport and in the city would be strained. He was more than a man with an algorithm who had fired off a bunch of emails. As a retired Army officer, he could be recalled to active duty.
Franks’ partner pivoted and jerked his head at the side of the International Arrivals Building, the direction different from that in which the passengers were being carefully herded.
“We need you to come with us, sir.”
“Of course, Agent Astere,” Thomas answered as he read the man’s name.
The tension in his shoulders began to intensify and spread outward at the phrasing of the request. He had heard Astere’s tone in Military Police dozens of times while waiting to pick up soldiers in dire need of an ass chewing. He had used the same tone hundreds of thousands of times. There was a firm order in the way the agent had spoken to him.
And the man had a hand resting on the butt of his service pistol, the holster unsnapped. A casual glance at Franks revealed the same stance.
They appeared ready
to pull leather and shoot, but why?
Walking with them around the building’s corner, he forced himself to keep a relaxed posture. He even softened it so he looked more like the fifty-six year old he was who had just spent ten-plus hours on a plane in the cramped quarters of business class.
“What’s the issue, gentlemen?” Thomas asked once they were out of hearing range of the other passengers.
Franks lost his stiff-backed demeanor.
“The Department of Defense hasn’t told us anything, sir. Just that they need to talk to you,” the agent answered with an easy smile as his tone moved from cop to friendly conversation. “Someone is on their way.”
In a civilian, Franks’ smile would have been at odds with the heavy tension that seemed to hang in the air. But Thomas was long familiar with the way that military and law enforcement professionals cultivated a relaxed readiness and were capable of finding humor at times regular people would be weeping and puking.
“We’ll have one of the other agents make sure your luggage gets brought down,” Astere added to the explanation as he slid his ID badge through a card reader on the building’s side door. He leaned toward Thomas as he opened the door to reveal a landing and a long, wide flight of subterranean stairs.
