by Stuart Gibbs
“My orders are to protect you, not them.” With that, Alexander snapped out the gun he’d hidden under his bus driver’s uniform and yanked me off the bus.
I tried to hold myself back, though Alexander was bigger and stronger than me and he was having a major adrenaline rush to boot. I was dragged along in his wake as he raced along the road, leaving the bus behind.
“Agent Ripley!” The voice on the bullhorn echoed through the ravine. “Stop—or we will shoot the bus!”
There was a chorus of panicked screams from my fellow students. Several shouted at me to stop.
Alexander kept pulling me onward, however, his hand clamped around my wrist like a handcuff. “They’re just bluffing!” he said.
I glanced behind us. Now that we were outside the bus, I could get a better sense of what was going on. SPYDER was attacking from above. There seemed to be only two men, perched on a ledge high above the road. They were readying a grenade launcher for another attack on the bus.
“They don’t look like they’re bluffing,” I said.
“Trust me,” Alexander insisted. “I’ve been in this situation plenty of times.”
I didn’t know what to do. I normally wouldn’t have trusted Alexander, but now, in the heat of battle, he certainly seemed sure of himself.
Directly ahead of us, the first explosion had cleaved a massive divot out of the road so cleanly it looked as though a giant ice cream scoop had been used on it. There were only six inches of flat ground left, a narrow ledge above a sheer drop into the ravine. It trembled under our feet as we ran across it, then buckled and gave way just as we made it to the far side. It sheared off the mountainside and tumbled down onto the rocks below.
Alexander and I had made it across safely, however. Now the road heading to the trestle was relatively wide and sturdy. I chanced another look behind us. My fellow students were piling out of the bus onto what remained of the road. As there was no cover and they were trapped, there was little choice but for them to raise their arms in surrender.
Up the mountainside, the two enemy agents had finished loading the grenade launcher and now aimed it down at the bus.
I dug my feet in, wrenching my arm away from Alexander. “Wait!” I yelled. “Don’t shoot! Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do!”
Unfortunately, the enemy agents were no longer paying attention to me. They were focused on my friends.
Before they could fire, however, a single shot rang out from the bus. The SPYDER agents were too protected to be hit—but then, whoever had fired the shot wasn’t aiming for them. The shooter was aiming for the grenade launcher itself. The shot was perfect. The launcher jostled out of the enemy’s hands—and then bounced down the mountainside and clattered onto the roof of the bus.
There was only one person I knew who could make a shot like that.
A second later, Erica Hale bounded onto the bus roof and grabbed the grenade launcher. I had no idea how she’d gotten there; I hadn’t seen her on board. She was dressed in camouflage survival gear, with a bandolier of weapons lashed across her chest. She sprang from the roof, hit the ground running, and charged down the road toward Alexander and me.
The fact that a huge portion of the road was missing didn’t slow her at all.
She whipped a small grappling hook off her bandolier and launched it in midstride. It snagged a tree jutting from the cliff above the gap in the road, trailing a wire behind it. Erica grasped the wire tightly and swung across the gap, landing perfectly on the other side.
It was all very impressive.
I expected Alexander would be beaming with pride at his daughter’s exploits. Or at least thankful that she was safe. Instead, he regarded her as though he’d just caught her sneaking into the house after breaking curfew. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“What you’re supposed to be doing,” Erica responded curtly. “Taking down SPYDER.” With that, she swung the loaded grenade launcher around and aimed it uphill.
The two SPYDER agents had recovered from the loss of their launcher and pulled out their guns. Unfortunately for them, Erica had a much cleaner shot at them now than she had from the bus. The grenade burst from the launcher with a roar and screamed right into the bad guys’ nest. The explosion sent them flying into the ravine.
Everyone back at the bus erupted in cheers.
Erica didn’t even crack a smile. She just slammed the launcher into Alexander’s hands. “Do something useful for once, Dad. Cover our escape.” Then she grabbed my hand and took off, dragging me toward the trestle.
It occurred to me that, although I’d known both Erica and Alexander for five months, this was the first time I’d ever seen them together. I was well aware that Erica had some issues with her father—she was the one who’d told me how inept he was in the first place—but the level of contempt she showed him surprised me. I thought back to our conversation in the morgue a few days before and how angry she’d been. Suddenly, it was all too clear who she’d been angry at—and things obviously hadn’t improved since then.
Rather than do what Erica had requested, Alexander ran after us, lugging the grenade launcher under his arm. “Erica! Wait . . .”
“What part of ‘Cover our escape’ did you not understand?” his daughter demanded.
“You already took out the enemy,” Alexander explained.
Erica sighed in disgust. “You think SPYDER sent only two agents to do this job?”
Before Alexander could answer the question, gunfire rattled from the mountainside above. There were, indeed, more agents. And now they were all shooting at us.
“Dad! Shoot them!” Erica yelled.
Alexander grimaced. “I would, but . . . I don’t know how to work a grenade launcher.”
“What?!” Erica’s usual calm vanished. “I thought Grandpa taught you.”
“He tried,” Alexander admitted. “I just didn’t pay attention.”
“Is there anything you can’t screw up?” Erica snapped.
We reached the trestle bridge. As we raced onto it, a line of bullets tore up the ground behind us.
“You watch your tone with me, young woman,” Alexander ordered. “I was doing a perfectly good job here before you came along.”
“By leading the person you’re protecting out onto an open road in direct line of enemy fire?”
Alexander swallowed, at a loss for words. “Er . . . ,” he said. “Well . . . I . . . uh . . . What exactly would you have done in that situation?”
“If I’d been in charge, I wouldn’t have allowed us to get into that situation,” Erica replied.
We ran along the bridge. Far below us, the rocky cliffs gave way to churning river. More gunfire raked the ground. It was a long way to the far side.
“And what’s your plan here?” Alexander demanded. “There’s even less cover out on the bridge than on the road.”
“We’re not staying on the bridge for long,” Erica explained.
In that moment, I grasped what Erica had in mind. “Oh no,” I said. “Tell me we’re not jumping. . . .”
“Okay,” Erica said. “We’re not jumping.”
Then she ran right off the side of the bridge, dragging me with her.
WATER SAFETY
Shenandoah National Wilderness
June 14
1145 hours
Your perception of time can shift greatly, depending on what you’re doing.
When you’re having fun, a few hours can seem like mere seconds. And when you’re plummeting off a bridge toward a raging river while enemy agents shoot at you, every second seems like an eternity.
Somehow, on the way down, I really did have time to look around and focus on things besides wondering if I was about to die. I glanced at the bus on the exploded road and saw that while the enemy had been distracted by Erica, Alexander, and I, my fellow students appeared to be escaping on foot. I looked up and saw that Alexander, apparently unsure what else to do, had leapt off the trestle an
d was plunging after us. I turned to Erica, who calmly met my gaze and said, “Point your toes and keep your arms to your side so the impact doesn’t break them.”
I did what she told me—and then we hit the water.
Thanks to Erica’s advice, instead of smacking into the surface, we sliced through it and shot downward. I’d expected to feel the pain of impact, but I didn’t really. Instead, I felt the shock of the cold water and the terror that, after surviving the fall, I was now going to drown.
My feet touched the bottom of the river. I glanced upward and saw the surface thirty feet above my head. My ears popped from the pressure of all the water around me.
Then the current yanked me downstream. I was tumbled like a sock in the washing machine, having no idea which way was up. I bounced off rocks and swirled through whirlpools.
During this, every second seemed like an eternity as well. I was desperate for air, but every time I thought I was about to break the surface, the current would yank me back down again. After this had happened five times, I got sucked into an abyss. Darkness surrounded me. The water pressure felt as though it would crush me flat. I could feel myself beginning to black out . . .
And then, by some miracle, the river spit me out. I burst into daylight, gasping for air. I found myself in a calm eddy of the rapids and was able to paddle to shore. I clambered out of the water and collapsed on the grass, hugging dry land.
A second later, Erica jogged out of the water. Rather than looking bedraggled and half drowned, she appeared refreshed, as if she’d just had a dip in the pool. “Wow!” she exclaimed. “That was intense!”
“We nearly died ten times,” I groaned.
“But we didn’t,” Erica told me. “So we’ve got that going for us.”
I took in our position. We’d emerged on the opposite side of the river from where we’d been attacked by SPYDER, but there was no way to cross back; the water was too wide and treacherous. We were just past the mouth of the canyon. Upriver, the rock walls rose steeply on both sides, but here, at least, the banks were wide enough for a fringe of forest. The canyon was too steep and twisty for me to see the trestle we’d leapt from. I wondered how far we’d been washed downstream. A mile? Two? For all I knew, it could have been ten. I was about to ask Erica’s opinion when a cry rang out.
“Help!” The voice was Alexander’s, coming from close by.
I struggled to my feet. Erica was already moving toward the sound. She bounded over a few boulders and I followed.
Alexander was clinging to a rock by the shore while the current tried to drag him downstream.
Erica got to him much faster than I did. She sprang from the shore onto the rock and knelt over her father, but as she reached out to help him, she seemed to think better of it and pulled back. “Before I save you, I need you to promise me something,” she said.
Alexander’s eyes went wide. “Now? I’m in danger here!”
“Seems like the best time to get your attention,” Erica replied. “Promise that, from here on out, I’m in charge of this operation. I get to make the decisions. You follow my orders, no questions asked.”
“Sure,” Alexander said. “Whatever you want. Just help me!”
Erica frowned and fixed her father with a hard stare. “I asked you to promise,” she told him.
Alexander actually wavered, as though making this promise was worse than being swept downstream. Then the current surged and threatened to pull him off the rock. “All right!” he cried desperately. “I promise! You’re in charge of the operation!”
I wondered what a promise from an ethically challenged person such as Alexander was worth, but Erica seemed satisfied with it. “That’s better,” she said, extending her arm.
Alexander grabbed on. Since he was so much bigger than Erica, I had to help pull him out of the water.
He clambered onto the rock, no longer looking anything like the suave, debonair master spy he usually pretended to be. He was disheveled and waterlogged. He’d lost the wig and latex jowls from his disguise in the river, while the fake mustache had somehow migrated to his forehead, where it now looked like a renegade eyebrow. In addition, he was visibly shaken from his near-death experience and peeved at Erica for how she’d treated him in front of me. “I can’t believe you’d risk your own father’s life like that,” he snapped, wringing out his sleeves.
“You wouldn’t have drowned,” Erica chided. “You were ten feet from the calm section of the river.”
This actually made Alexander more upset. “And you let me suffer anyhow? I thought I raised you better than that.”
“You didn’t raise me at all,” Erica said coldly. “Mom did.”
Alexander huffed and stormed off the rocks onto land. “Come along, Benjamin,” he said to me, pausing to shake a small fish out of his trousers. “Let’s find our way to safety.”
Before I could even respond, Erica lashed out an arm, preventing me from taking so much as a step toward Alexander. “Have you already forgotten?” she asked her father. “You’re not giving the orders here. You promised I was in charge.”
“That agreement was legally nonbinding!” Alexander protested. “It was made under duress. Therefore, as the senior agent here, I order you to stand down. . . .”
“You’re unbelievable,” Erica said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a senior agent—or whether the contract is legal or not. We’re not listening to you.”
Alexander flushed red. “Erica! I am your father! You are just a girl! Now, I know you’ve had some minor success in the spy game—”
“Success that you took the credit for!” Erica shouted.
“—but you are not a full-fledged agent yet,” Alexander finished. “You are way out of your league here!”
Erica seethed. She, too, looked nothing like her usual self under the circumstances. It wasn’t just that she was waterlogged like the rest of us. It was that, for once, her unflappable calm was gone. “I’m way out of my league here?” she yelled. “I’m only in this situation because you bollixed everything up! Ben would have been captured by SPYDER right now if it wasn’t for me!”
“That is patently untrue,” Alexander snapped. “I was leading us to safety when you jumped off that bridge like a maniac.”
“SPYDER had an ambush waiting for us on the other side of the bridge,” Erica said. “They would have killed you and taken Ben.”
Alexander gaped, at a loss for words. He closed his mouth, then opened it again. Then he desperately tried to regain his composure. “I knew that,” he said.
“No, you didn’t,” Erica told him. “What you don’t know could fill a library. Come on, Ben. If you really want to get to safety, you know who to listen to.” With that, she hopped ashore and started toward the trees.
I looked toward Alexander, feeling slightly guilty for what I had to do. But the simple truth was, I wouldn’t have trusted him to get me out of a closet. So I followed Erica.
This was probably the most devastating blow to Alexander’s ego yet. He’d known how his daughter felt about him, but it was a shock to see that I felt the same way. His eyes grew big and sad, like those of a puppy who’s just been scolded for piddling on the rug. “Et tu, Benjamin?” he asked. “Et tu?”
I paused at the edge of the woods. “You did take all the credit for capturing Murray Hill,” I said.
“That was for your own good!” Alexander protested. “I didn’t want SPYDER to know of your role in that for fear that they’d retaliate.”
I shook my head, not believing this for a second. “SPYDER knows everything about everything,” I said. “That’s why we’re here right now. The only people you really snowed were the top brass at the CIA.”
Alexander paused again, apparently surprised I’d put all this together. Then, his look of betrayal was suddenly replaced by one of revulsion. “Oh, dear,” he said. “I believe I have a leech in my underpants.”
With that, he quickly undid his pants and scurried behind a tree.
“Do you think this is the right thing to do?” I asked Erica as we trudged into the trees. “Woodchuck just told everyone that it’s not a good idea to split up. . . .”
“We’re not splitting up,” Erica said. “My father will be back with us in five seconds.”
Sure enough, five seconds later, Alexander came crashing through the woods, cinching his belt, looking like he’d just witnessed something horrible. “You should have seen this leech,” he gasped. “It was the size of a cigar. I’ll bet it siphoned a pint of blood out of me.”
Erica shot me a told-you-so look.
“Where were you on the bus?” I asked her. “I didn’t see you board.”
“I stowed away in the back,” she replied. “With all the survival gear.”
“Did you know SPYDER was going to attack us?” I asked.
“No, but I had a hunch they might. It seemed like too good an opportunity for them to pass up.” Erica sighed. “The brilliant minds at spy school played right into SPYDER’s hands. They responded to the threat of you being abducted by taking you off the protected campus and out into the middle of nowhere—where you could be more easily abducted. Plus, they assigned Bozo here to the mission.” She nodded toward her father.
“I’m getting very tired of your tone, young woman,” Alexander snapped.
“Well, I’m getting very tired of you acting like this wasn’t your fault,” Erica shot back.
“It’s not my fault SPYDER ambushed the bus,” Alexander argued.
“It sort of is,” Erica replied. “The moment anyone suggested taking Ben off-property, you should have said no. Instead, you let it happen—and instead of investigating SPYDER like you were supposed to be doing, you decided to tag along so you could play the hero. Then, when the attack finally came, you responded by abandoning an entire busload of students and nearly dragging Ben into an ambush. So now, thanks to you, we’re miles from civilization, we’re soaking wet, all of our weapons and communications equipment have been swept downriver—and SPYDER’s agents are certainly still on the hunt for us.”
