by Noah Mann
“But what?” I pressed her.
She eyed us with wonder, I thought, a not entirely antagonistic look upon her face.
“But I did think it would also bring you to me,” Lana said.
We’d been right about our belief behind what the naked man with the grenade had said before ending his life. Someone had foretold our arrival. A woman. This woman.
“I wanted so much to meet you both,” she said. “Your names were always among those mentioned when the powers that be discussed why Bandon had survived. Just...seeing you, it explains so much. Except...”
“Except what?” Schiavo asked.
“I’m surprised he didn’t come with you,” Lana said.
“Who?”
She answered my question with a reply neither Schiavo or I could have anticipated.
“Martin Jay,” Lana said. “He was the architect of Bandon’s survival, and I didn’t think he’d let his loving wife out of his sight.”
Schiavo didn’t react. Neither did I. What the woman had just let us know, through a simple statement of ignorance, was that Martin had not been taken by them. And, more important, they didn’t seem to be aware that he had come aboard with us.
“So you’ve seen us,” I said, speaking before Schiavo would have to. “What happens now?”
“What happens now is that you get the best seat in the house,” Lana said. “When we sail to Bandon, you will be the very first to witness the end. It won’t register, of course. We’re talking milliseconds. But up until that very fraction of a second, you will know what’s about to transpire before your eyes.”
“You’re going to wipe out our town,” I said. “Because you want the world to end?”
“Eric, Angela, if you haven’t realized it by now, you never will,” Lana said.
“What?” Schiavo asked, humoring the calm and crazed woman.
“That we are the blight on this planet,” Lana answered. “Humanity. People. And we always have been.”
She looked past us, into the shadows, and nodded. The two masked men who guarded us came forward and pulled us up out of our chairs.
“We won’t be seeing each other again,” Lana said. “Mother nature needs a clean slate.”
Schiavo eyed her for a second, glaring at the apparent architect of Bandon’s final destruction.
“Go to hell,” Schiavo said.
Lana didn’t react, but the guards did, jerking us roughly away from the table and marching through the shadows to the door.
Twenty
A minute later, after passing through the wasting space that had served as some kind of greenhouse, Schiavo and I were pushed face first against the wall of a corridor and ordered to be silent. One of the two men guarding us told his partner to keep a watch on us while he retrieved the key. Whatever key he meant, and whichever lock it might be for, I didn’t care. For a moment, we outnumbered the people who had taken us.
“Can you get out of the cuffs?” I whispered to Schiavo, angling my gaze along the wall to see her reaction.
She shook her head slightly, almost imperceptibly. I’d tried already to wrench my wrists up and through the plastic bindings, to no avail. Now any hope that Schiavo might be able to do what I hadn’t was gone.
“She’s lying,” Schiavo said in a hushed tone. “She didn’t hope the signal would bring us out here. She needed it to.”
“Why?”
“The same reason she expected Martin to be with us,” Schiavo answered. “To get as many decision makers out of the equation as possible.”
“Why not just sail the Vinson in without warning and detonate?” I wondered quietly, my breathy words hot against the cold steel wall before me.
“What if one of the fishing boats spots them?” Schiavo theorized. “Or a flight? Or the Rushmore coming from Hawaii?”
I understood now what she was saying.
“It had to be coordinated and we had to be in the blind,” I said.
“Quiet!”
The order came sharp from behind, and a few seconds later the guard who’d left returned. He and his partner pulled us away from the wall and pushed us so that we were ahead of them in the corridor.
“Walk,” the one directly behind us ordered.
We did, moving through the ship, following the directions of our two captors, travelling down steps and along passageways. Making our way toward a place where Lana had said we would be the first to witness the hell she had planned. There was only one place that could be—where the nukes were.
I flashed back to what the President had shown us on the upper floors of the skyscraper in Columbus. That was a single weapon, with 400 kilotons of explosive energy, would be dwarfed by what was carried by the Vinson.
If Lana wasn’t lying.
There was no reason to believe that she was. No benefit existed for her, or her apocalyptic vision, if bluff and bluster was all she wielded. Our lives could be ended at any moment by those who followed her orders, but an empty vessel sailing toward Bandon would be of no strategic value—unless it held exactly what she claimed.
“Straight ahead,” the nearest guard behind me said as we came around a corner.
There was no point in attempting any resistance. We couldn’t. Not at the moment. When we reached where they were leading us...maybe. It might be our last stand, but at least we would be taking one.
As it turned out, someone else took that stand for us.
Twenty One
The shots came from behind us. Two. Schiavo and I dropped to the floor when the first rang out, hearing a thud and the metallic clunk of a weapon falling behind us. The second shot rang out almost immediately, the same pair of sounds following. Bodies and guns had hit the floor of the passageway.
But not our bodies.
We looked behind and saw both guards lying in heaps, blood gushing from massive head wounds in each. And beyond them, crouched low just outside a compartment we’d passed only seconds before, was Martin, M4 in hand, wisps of smoke rising from its barrel.
“Martin...”
Schiavo’s relief, her joy, was softened only by the surprise at what had just happened. At who we were seeing.
“Let’s get you out of those,” Martin said.
He slung his rifle and stepped past the bodies as we stood. He used a knife to cut the plastic cuffs from our wrists. As soon as she was free, Schiavo put her arms around her husband.
“You have a hell of a lot of explaining to do,” she told him as she clutched him in her embrace.
“I’ve got plenty to tell,” he said. “But we have to move, first.”
I crouched and took the guards’ shotguns in hand, keeping one for myself and handing the other to Schiavo as she eased back from Martin.
That was when we both noticed the blood covering the front of his shirt and gear vest. Lots of blood.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“No,” he assured us. “I’ll explain. But we’ve got to get away from this.”
“Sergeant Hart was with us,” Schiavo said, worried about yet another missing member of our group. “He’s got to be back with that woman.”
“Woman?” Martin asked.
I took a brief moment to explain who, and what, we’d witnessed. When I was done he nodded, as if relieved he’d been handed pieces of some nagging puzzle.
“This is all making more sense now,” Martin said.
“We have to go back,” Schiavo told him, bringing the semi-auto shotgun up to a low ready position.
To that order, Martin shook his head.
“Trey’s not back there,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Schiavo pressed him. “Where is he?”
“Follow me,” Martin said.
He led off, favoring his left leg.
“You are hurt,” Schiavo said.
“Dropping through a hole in the floor isn’t good on the ankles,” Martin told us.
He had fallen through, exactly as we’d suspected. And he’d survived. And he’d saved
us.
Now, all we had to do was save everyone else that we knew and loved.
* * *
Martin took us along a maze-like path through the corridors that cut across the length of the lower deck we’d been taken to.
“There,” Martin said, gesturing with a nod.
A watertight door lay ahead, slightly open, and just outside it to one side of it a body was piled against the corridor’s wall, a pool of blood spread beneath it. For an instant I saw Schiavo’s color go ashen. But just for an instant. Almost immediately she realized that her worst fear at the moment had not been realized—Martin had not led us to Hart’s body.
“He was guarding that door,” Martin explained. “I had to use the knife. Gunshots echo through this ship, from deck to deck. And explosions.”
“We’ve been up close to a couple of those,” I said.
“That’s what I was afraid of when I heard them.”
“Why did you take off?” Schiavo asked him, more than a hint of impatience in her question.
“Right after I fell, there was movement outside the compartment where I landed,” he said. “Three armed men. They passed by without looking.”
“Hockey masks?” I asked.
Martin shook his head.
“Helmets and top notch gear,” he said.
“Like the ones who tried to hit us on the hangar deck,” Schiavo said.
“They weren’t pros,” Martin said.
“Neither were the ones we took out,” I told him.
“I knew I could either fight, maybe with an advantage because I’d be behind them, or...”
“Or you could follow them,” Schiavo said.
“There’s only one way that connects this part of the ship to the side they cut off with those welded walls,” Martin said. “I know where it is.”
“So we can get back to the others,” I said.
Schiavo reached out and tapped her husband firmly on one shoulder.
“Where is Trey?”
Once more Martin motioned to the door. This time, though, he stepped toward it and leaned close to the narrow gap between it and the steel frame that surrounded it.
“We’re coming in, Trey,” he said.
The door swung inward, pulled from within. We stepped through and Sergeant Trey Hart, wielding a shotgun caked with dried blood from the dispatched guard, stood at the ready.
“Good to see you again, ma’am.”
Schiavo stepped close and put a relieved hand on her soldier’s arm.
“You, too, Trey.”
Martin closed the door behind, sealing it completely now, cranking an interior lever which locked it in a full watertight position.
“Angela,” I said, noticing a series of chains looped over a thick pipe that ran high along the wall of the large space, handcuffs at each end.
“I think these were for us,” I said.
“And that’s for everyone else,” Hart said, pointing to a stack of grey crates that bisected the room, a narrow way past on one end. “On the other side.”
Schiavo went first, Martin and I right behind as Hart remained to cover the door. It only took us a minute to make it to the other side.
Lana, as I’d suspected, was not lying. At all.
Twenty Two
The bombs and warheads rested in steel racks, with electrical cables snaking from each to a central control box that was welded to the deck.
“This look familiar to you, Fletch?”
I knew what Schiavo was referencing. The sandbagged upper floor of the skyscraper in Columbus, Ohio. There the President of the United States had shown us one weapon.
This was not one weapon.
“Times fifty,” I said. “Maybe sixty.”
That’s how many weapons I estimated were held in the latticework of steel supports.
“Armored elevator to the hangar deck is back beyond them,” Martin said.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Welded shut.”
He nodded.
“They brought them down and sealed them in,” he said.
“Just like they sealed themselves in,” Schiavo added.
“I don’t imagine that just cutting all this wiring would disarm these,” I said.
“That’s not a chance we can take,” Schiavo said.
It was the cliché—the red wire or the green wire. Or the white wire. Or any wire. The truth was, we had none of the required skillset necessary to even consider attempting what I was wondering about.
“Can these all be detonated simultaneously?” Martin asked. “Won’t one going off destroy the others before they can go boom?”
Schiavo stepped close to the collection of megatonnage and put a hand on one of the bomb casings.
“More than one won’t be necessary if this ship gets close to Bandon,” she said, looking to me and Martin. “We can’t let that happen.”
“Agreed,” I said, lifting the shotgun I’d acquired up for display. “We won’t do it with these.”
“I know,” Schiavo said, turning to her husband next. “Can you get us to the flight deck?”
He shook his head.
“Hangar deck,” he said.
Schiavo accepted that limitation with a nod.
“We’ll rope it from there,” she said.
* * *
A few minutes later we were in line behind Martin, following his lead along corridors and up steep stairs, some of which we’d traversed while cuffed and under guard. The further we progressed, the clearer it became to me that we were nearing the starboard side of the Vinson. Soon after that realization I felt the cool wash of ocean air.
“Through here,” Martin said.
He pushed the door to a compartment open, revealing a narrow opening to some sort of balcony hanging over the water.
“We have to be just below the island,” Hart said, his map keeping skills estimating our location.
“Two decks below,” Martin said. “But all access into the island is blocked. This is the only way to move up. There’s another balcony adjacent to this one. Maybe a five-foot gap. We just have to cross, step inside, and there’s a short set of stairs up to the hangar deck. It lets out behind a wall in the shadows. I’d imagine that’s how the ones who tried to hit you got access.”
I stepped to the edge of the space, where solid flooring ended and the steel mesh balcony began. In the weak starlight I could barely make out the next balcony over, just as Martin had described it. Above, running from one to the other, a pipe was mounted on thick supports.
“You can use that for balance,” Martin said, noting where my attention had shifted.
Below, the ocean churned, slapping the side of the Vinson with ten-foot waves, rocking the ship. Any hand or foothold would be precarious. But it appeared to be our only way back to the rest of our group, and to our way off the carrier.
“Sergeant Hart, secure that door,” Schiavo ordered.
Hart did that, stepping back to cover the entrance. Schiavo looked to Martin and me.
“Who’s first?”
Martin stepped past me.
“I’ve done it already with a bum leg,” he said. “And come back.”
“You cross and spot the rest of us,” Schiavo said.
Martin slung his M4 and hopped awkwardly onto the waist-high railing that surrounded the small balcony, which now appeared to be some access to the exterior of the carrier for maintenance purposes. He pushed with his uninjured leg and gripped the pipe above, using his hold on it to pendulum his body across the short distance to the other balcony. When he had one foot planted solidly on its railing, he slid his hands along the pipe until he was in a position to jump down.
“That’s all it is,” Martin said once he landed on the balcony floor.
“Sergeant Hart...”
The medic heeded his commander’s call and took his turn crossing over as I maintained a watch on the door.
“They’re not coming after us,” I said.
“She’s running out of li
ve bodies to do her dirty work,” Schiavo suggested as Hart reached to the pipe overhead.
I looked to the door again, unnerved by the truth of what Schiavo had said.
“Angela...”
“What, Fletch?”
“If she’s out of people, who’s going to sail this ship toward shore?”
Schiavo didn’t react, but I knew that she hadn’t considered that very simple requirement of finishing what she’d started.
“She’s gotta have a crew to do that,” I added.
“Maybe she does,” Schiavo suggested.
More people hidden away, waiting for their turn to serve the greater purpose. It was possible, I thought, but something didn’t feel right about that. Lana hadn’t seemed worried about our presence as a force to stop her, which we would have a chance to do by eliminating those waiting to crew the Vinson.
“Something’s not right,” I said, looking to the door once more.
Hart finished crossing and stood next to Martin. Schiavo looked to me, my turn at hand.
“Fletch, we can’t analyze her plan right now,” she told me. “We’ve gotta get back with the others.”
I only hesitated a second, then climbed onto the railing, tossed my shotty over to Martin, and reached for the pipe.
That was when the rogue wave struck the carrier, thirty feet of foaming water that slammed into the starboard bow, shifting the position and angle of the handhold I was reaching for. I missed and slipped, my body tipping forward and away from the ship.
“Fletch!”
Martin called out to me at the same time he reached for my falling body. I was groping for his outstretched hand at the same instant.
And I missed.
There was only water below me. And no hope of avoiding a certainly fatal fall into it. That’s what I believed in that split second. But I was wrong. The solid grip suddenly circling my right ankle made that wonderfully clear.
It was Schiavo. She’d seized my leg and prevented me from plunging into the swirling sea. Instead, my body pitched forward and swung, smashing into the railing, upside down.
“I’ve got you,” Schiavo assured me.
I grabbed the bottom of the railing, my injured finger afire as I gripped the handhold, and twisted my upper body back toward safety, getting my free leg back onto the edge of the balcony. The Vinson continued to pitch wildly as I climbed back over the railing and stood next to Schiavo.
