Redemption

by Ever N. Hayes

  “Girl, you don’t have the gun.” Lazzo waved the rifle in front of her. “I have it. Neither of you has a choice here. This is my—”

  “We’re letting her go.” Keeping my eyes on Lazzo, I lowered my hand down to the girl and she took it. I helped her up and continued to stand between her and Lazzo.

  Suddenly I felt a knife blade pressed up against my throat, and the girl’s other hand gripped my left arm with surprising strength.

  “Damn it, Hayley.” Lazzo pointed the gun at the girl’s head.

  “Easy,” I whispered back to the girl.

  “You’re letting me go.”

  I knew she was talking to Lazzo, and I watched him shake his head. “Lazzo—”

  “Hayley, this is wrong.”

  Then we heard a voice calling down the hallway. “Flynn, where are you?” I didn’t dare move. Her name is Flynn?

  “I’m leaving now,” Flynn whispered in my ear. “That’s Chase.”

  I nodded slowly. “Go.”

  “Hayley—” Lazzo objected. The girl didn’t move.

  “Go,” I repeated. This time she obeyed, removing the blade from my throat and slipping quickly from the room. I spun and listened to her run off down the hall.

  Lazzo stomped his foot but didn’t say anything when I held a finger to my lips. I was listening to Flynn’s conversation with Chase.

  “Where were—what the hell happened to your face? And where’s your gun?” her brother asked.

  “I was stupid. I was standing on a rail and slipped. I hit my face and dropped the gun over the side. It’s gone.”

  Not bad. She hadn’t given us up yet, at least. The last voice I heard was Chase’s. “Dad is going to kill you.”

  I listened to their voices and footsteps fade away and turned back to Lazzo, who was pacing and scratching his head. He kicked the steel frame of a bed. “That was stupid.” He glared at me.

  “Maybe.”

  “Is no ‘maybe,’ Hayley.” He was fuming. “It was stupid. She could have killed you. And if she tells anyone, they’ll come here. They come here … they die. Then I will have to shoot you too. We all die.”

  This is getting old. “I know, Lazzo.” My only hope was to trust Flynn.

  My only hope was to trust Captain Baker’s daughter.

  FOURTEEN – Two Down (Ryan)

  ---------- (Monday, August 1, 2022.) ----------

  Redemption Island, Hawaii.

  Careful what you wish for—I’d heard it said a thousand times. In this case, Danny’s request to make Redemption Island a black hole on the Area 52 surveillance system was the wish we were going to regret. We didn’t need a satellite to see the USS George Washington from Redemption, but we also weren’t really watching it. The governor had asked us to keep an eye on it—since it was in the satellite “black hole”—and we did that during the day. But at night—when we went to bed—its security and occupants weren’t on our mind.

  Danny knocked on my door around nine thirty Monday morning. “Is Hayley here, Dad?”

  I rubbed my eyes. It had been a long night, thanks to Ollie’s restlessness. “No. You just woke me up.”

  The calm on my son’s face flickered to something else. “Huh. She wasn’t at Blake’s either. No one has seen her or the girls, or Sam, since last night, and the boat they took out to the carrier is still gone.”

  I heard footsteps walking up behind me. “What’s going on?”

  Danny was looking down at the cove then out toward the open water.

  “No one’s seen Hayley or …” I stopped myself.

  “Wait…what?” Tara pushed past me.

  Idiot. “Tara—” Too late.

  “Danny. They didn’t come back last night? Emily…” Panic was evident in her voice. “No one’s seen Emily?”

  “That’s why I came over here.” Danny placed his hand on Tara’s shoulder. “You’d told her to be back in an hour. I thought maybe she’d checked in—”

  “We just went to bed.” I interrupted my son.

  Tara was grabbing his arm now. “Danny … No one has seen any of them since last night?”

  Danny shook his head. Tara pushed past me again and into the house. Danny turned back toward the tree house. “Tell her we’ll find them. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

  “Please do.” I watched him walk away then followed Tara inside. She took her nightshirt off and stepped out of her underwear. She slipped into her black bikini and a pair of board shorts, threw on a light hooded sweatshirt, and brushed past me once more.

  “Tara, what are you—where are you going?”

  “You stay with Ollie.”

  I couldn’t really argue. Yes, Hayley was out there too, but Emily was much younger, and Tara had been against letting her go along last night. I’d had to convince her it was okay. I had a feeling some of Tara’s emotions right now involved a certain degree of anger toward me as a result.

  Ollie was sleeping now—of course. Right when I wanted him to be awake so I could keep up with what was going on. Screw it. I grabbed a T-shirt, pulled it on, and went into his room. I lifted him out of his crib and hurried out the front door. By the time I reached the tree house it was empty. Figuring they were at Blake and Kaci’s, I almost sprinted there, Ollie bouncing—sound asleep—in my arms the whole way. I found everyone crowded around the computer in the office. Danny was on a direct line with one of the operatives in Area 52. It sounded like the governor was there too.

  Keena was going through the security feeds on our end hoping to pick up something beyond the satellite black hole—anything out of the norm. Tara and Kate squeezed in beside her. Someone at Area 52 was scanning screens as well. Finally a female voice said she’d found something. “I’m patching it through to you.”

  The feed came up on our screen, and we saw a small red dot heading from the general vicinity of our island toward Kauai. It entered Waimea Bay, stopped there, stayed there for almost an hour, and then reappeared a few miles off the Kauai coast heading back toward our island. The voice at Area 52, now identified as Nicole, said, “Danny, it looks like they headed back to your island … if indeed that was them.”

  “Can’t we get a better feed of that?” Danny stared intently at the screen. “Can’t we see that dot a little closer? Don’t we have infrared or something?”

  Nicole replied slowly, “Danny, I’ll do what I can, but there’s some kind of interference seemingly coming off of the carrier, affecting everything around it. Give me twenty minutes to run the feed through all our filters, okay?”

  We didn’t have a choice. That dot alone didn’t tell us for certain it was our boat. “Go ahead.”

  Those twenty minutes felt like two hours, and when Nicole’s voice came back on she didn’t sound happy. In fact, she sounded kind of scared. “Danny, I don’t know what to say—”

  “Did you find anything?”

  There was a long pause, and before Danny repeated his question she answered, “Yes.”

  “Play it.”

  The feed came up on our screen.

  “Danny, this is just beyond the black hole—about a mile from your beach best as I can tell.”

  The feed was fuzzy and scrambled, but with the enlarged infrared filter we could see seven red blobs on the screen. We watched in horror as one of the seven blobs was left behind out in the open water. What the heck? Tara muffled a scream—hand over her mouth—and grabbed onto Blake, who was standing beside her. I watched, stunned, as the dot they left behind completely disappeared, and another dot in the middle of the screen slowly faded. Was one of those Hayley? Emily? Why in the world didn’t they stop?

  Four of the remaining five blobs seemed to be huddled at the front of the boat, and the fifth dot appeared to be driving it. There was only one plausible explanation for what we’d seen. The dot that had fallen overboard hadn’t done so by choice. There was no telling if that dot—person or dog—was still alive. The other blob that had faded away in the middle of the boat had
to be dead or their dot wouldn’t have disappeared. This was terrifying to watch.

  Reaching shore, the five dots disembarked, moved across the Waimea Bay parking lot, then disappeared. The screen went completely black.

  “Nicole … what happened?”

  “Danny, I don’t know. Our aerial feed shows them getting into a vehicle in the parking lot, and then they vanish. There’s no trace of where they went or of anything moving in that entire area for a full two hours.”

  “We don’t have any cameras down there either?”

  “We did.” She sounded as bewildered as Danny. “We do. But they all went down at the same time, again for about two hours.”

  “EMP?” Keena asked.

  “Maybe.” Nicole’s reply sounded more like a yes.

  An electromagnetic pulse? Here? “Wouldn’t that knock out the whole island?” Everyone turned to look at me.

  “No,” Nicole answered. “Not necessarily. This EMP—if that’s what it was—could have been isolated to the west side of the island. I’m sending you a map of the blacked-out area. It appears to cover roughly a twenty-mile radius from Waimea. But hang on a second. I need to play the rest of the boat feed for you.”

  The boat had reappeared, coming back toward our island. We watched it emerge from Kauai’s blind area into the open water, and we were subjected to another shock before it again disappeared into our island’s “black hole.” There were only two dots in the boat.

  “That’s all we’ve got?” Danny asked.

  “Afraid so,” was the soft reply on the other end.

  But who was who? “And we can’t see who they are any better than that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Nicole confirmed.

  Keena spoke up then. “Nicole, is it just me, or did that boat coming back not look like it was heading to our island?”

  What does she mean by that?

  Nicole understood the question. “No, I thought that too. It almost looks like the line of the boat’s path is headed about a mile south of your island.”

  Son of a bitch. Toward the USS George Washington.

  Danny was already on it. “Governor, that boat had to have been heading for the Washington then.”

  “It’s possible. But they’re too far out to reach now. They’ve been gone since four or five this morning, and at forty miles per hour or so, they’d be 250 miles out—easily.”

  “We can’t even reach them from Area 52?” Kate asked.

  Governor Barnes and Nicole spoke at the same time but with two different answers. Nicole’s “Well…” was the response we chose to hear.

  “What, Nicole?” Danny asked.

  “We could try sending them an ELF.”

  “An ELF?” Tara asked.

  EMP… ELF… Sometimes I hate military language.

  “Extremely low frequency message,” Keena explained. “Russia, India, and America are the only countries with systems to send them, and we have three transmitters—in Wisconsin, Michigan, and across the Kaneohe Bay from us at the Marine Corps Base Station. If the carrier has a Reed-Solomon code page in its book, and someone catches it coming in…it could work.”

  She didn’t sound confident.

  “Danny, why can’t we just call them?” Tara asked.

  “We could, but they’re in an open communication zone. Any message we send toward the mainland could be intercepted and put the entire ship at risk. If Qi Jia learned we had a boat out there, the mission would already be over. We’d be sinking our own boat.”

  Tara didn’t like his response, but she was smart enough to know Danny would be pushing for calling the ship if it were even a reasonable option. Of the two most important people to him in the world, Kate was standing right beside him…and the other had been in that boat last night, too. Everyone knew Danny would do anything for Hayley.

  I could see the wheels spinning in his head. He and Keena were going to work on putting a coded message together for Nicole to send. Best-case scenario, we’d have some form of response from the carrier in an hour or two. The governor promised to stay at the Hexagon all day, and he insisted Danny contact him for anything he needed.

  Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out the answers to a dozen questions. Who or what fell overboard? Based on the heat signature sizes the fuzzy infrared feed had shown us, it didn’t appear to be either of the kids, but we couldn’t be certain. Still, that deduction had been a little settling to Tara. Her eyes and voice communicated hope that Emily was alive.

  That left Reagan, Hayley, Sam, and Lazzo. None of us believed it was Hayley, as Sam surely would’ve gone overboard to save her, even risking his own life. But wouldn’t Hayley have done the same for anyone—everyone—else? Though none of us wanted to say it aloud, I was pretty sure we were all of the same mindset. Sam hadn’t done this, and Reagan would have never put her little sister in danger. If someone had hurt one of the others and taken the rest prisoner, the offender had to be Lazzo.

  So where did he take them? The other members of the Pack had maps of Kauai spread out across the tables in Blake’s office. According to the areas Nicole had told us were blacked out, there were only three main roads they could have gone on and stayed out of sight. It could take days to search that area, and by then the aircraft carrier would be halfway to the mainland. We don’t have that much time. And what about that boat with the two people in it? Who was that? Lazzo and …? Or was it not Lazzo at all?

  Danny, Blake, and Keena joined the other Pack members at the tables. They were dividing everyone up into search groups. Keena was going to stay in Blake’s office with Jenna to monitor the computer and keep in touch with Area 52. Axel was going to take the rest of the Pack and Tara—who insisted on going—over to Kauai so they could begin their search. Then he was going to come back for Dad and me to go searching for the missing boat, even though none of us thought we’d find it. Kate and Kaci volunteered to stay with Ollie.

  Before heading out, Danny reconnected with Nicole. “Nicole, here’s the ELF I want you to send. USS GW. Two stowaways on board. Potential terrorists. Identities unknown. Search and report.”

  I was a little uneasy about Danny using the word terrorist—what if Hayley was one of them—but I understood he wanted the carrier to take the threat seriously. Surely they wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later.

  Nicole read the message back to him, and Danny confirmed it. Then everyone split. We all had important jobs to do and no time to waste doing them.

  FIFTEEN – Hide and Sleep (Hayley)

  ---------- (Monday. August 1, 2022.) ----------

  The last thing we wanted was for anyone on the carrier to know we were on board. The second-to-last thing we wanted was to hear the long shrill blasts of the alarm sounding throughout the ship. This can’t be normal. This can’t be good.

  Lazzo immediately jumped to the worst conclusion. “Damn it, Hayley. I told you we couldn’t trust her.”

  I didn’t say anything at first, and when I finally opened my mouth to speak, a loud voice boomed over the intercom, cutting me off. “Everyone report to the main deck immediately. Gather beneath the tower. Right now.” Captain Baker. Danny and Blake’s disdain for the guy made perfect sense to me now.

  To be honest, I was kind of surprised. Even though I thought I’d pegged Flynn better than that, I couldn’t fault her. I probably would have done the same. Why should she have covered for us? It was, however, curious it had taken this long for the alarm. It was almost 7:00 p.m. now, and she’d left here almost ten hours ago. If she’d been intent on outing us no matter what, wouldn’t she have gone directly to her dad? Had she eventually confided in her brother, and he’d turned us in? The timing of this wasn’t quite right.

  Lazzo was fuming though, cursing me and shaking his fist, muttering over and over how we should have killed Flynn—and how he wasn’t going to listen to me again. I finally turned to him and snapped, “Will you shut up?”

  “Don’t—” He raised a finger and pointed it at my face.<
br />
  “Well, what do you want me to say? If I was wrong about her, then yes, it was a stupid move. You think I don’t know that?” He looked angry, but what was he going to do? Hit me? “On the other hand—”

  “There is no other hand.” He didn’t let me finish, and I rolled my eyes. “We need to move somewhere else, Hayley.”

  “Lazzo, will you stop being so damn stupid?” I knew I was pushing it, but I almost wanted him to hit me. I wanted him to give me a reason to hate him more than I already did, if that was even possible. “If she went to her dad, don’t you think he would have come directly to where we are with all his men? Jeez, think about it.” I could see I’d finally gotten through to him.

  “So—”

  “No, I don’t think she said anything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If she told her brother, he’d know where we are too. They both would know exactly where to send people.” I let that sink in. “They’d have been here a loooong time ago. No, I think this is something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I still think we should move.”

  “Lazzo, we’re in the darkest corner of the ship, as far away from the tower as possible. We have three potential escapes within a hundred yards of our door. There aren’t many better places we could be.” When he didn’t argue, I told him I was tired and needed to rest a little. I crawled beneath the steel bed frame in the far corner of the room—onto the thin mattress I’d slid under there—and closed my eyes.

  A hard poke in the arm and a sharp whisper woke me a short while later. “Hey. Someone’s coming.”

  I froze. I could hear steps approaching, and a light went on in the hallway outside our dark room. Crap. I was wrong. She did give us away. There were voices now, too—several of them. A male voice said, “We’ll check in here,” and the light came on in our room. I could see Lazzo clearly now, under the bed next to mine. He was ready to shoot if he had to. Based on the rhythm of the footsteps, it sounded like there were two people in the room with us. Stacks of boxes and mattresses blocked most of my view of the rest of the room, including whoever was in here with us. Strangely, no one checked under the beds. The light went back off, and the people left the room. I could hear them talking to someone else outside our door.