Final Winter

by Brendan DuBois

  Now she looked at herself in the room’s mirror. Presentable. That was all. Just presentable. She could not believe how tired she was. Ever since coming back to Memphis, after the death of Darren and the shunting aside of Victor, Monty and Brian - and truth be told, how often had she thought of that strong man’s tender touch these past few nights? - she had hardly slept at all. The only reason she was coherent was because of a CIA-issued drug cocktail that allowed her to rev on for a few days at peak performance despite the exhaustion she was now experiencing.

  But it was close. Oh so close. Just one more session with the AirBox boys and in just a few hours the jets would be taking off to bomb the heartland of this country, the very first time it had been bombed since a few futile efforts by the Japanese more than a half-century ago. And she purposely didn’t count 9/11 and the few spastic attempts that had followed. She and the Japanese of the 1940s had one thing in common: an overwhelming desire to see the death and destruction of America.

  Adrianna grabbed a light jacket, looked again in the mirror. The CIA cocktail was still working, but Jesus, there would be a price to pay once this was over. Two days of bed rest, if not more, while the body recovered ... And then something struck her. One decision she had yet to make.

  For where should she go after the aircraft took off? The continental United States was not going to be a particularly fun place to be within the next twenty-four hours, and she had no desire to be stuck here while Mexico and Canada - panicked about what was happening to their north and their south respectively — closed the borders. So where to go in the next few hours? Mexico or Canada? Canada had better government, better amenities, but in Mexico you could get things done quickly, especially certain illegal things, by the judicious passing of folding money to the right people.

  Still, she would decide shortly. And she knew it would only be a temporary arrangement in any case, for she had no doubt that in a couple of weeks the entire North American landmass, from Acapulco to the Beaufort sea, wouldn’t be a particularly fun place to be either. France, perhaps. Provence. Nice weather, great food, and even if the politics were self-centered and corrupt, well, at least France had never murdered her family.

  She looked at her bag on the bed, ready to be packed when she got back from a meeting at the airport. Her very last meeting, ever.

  Adrianna went out of her hotel room, shutting the light off behind her.

  ~ * ~

  At his condo unit at 11:30 at night, Victor Palmer was playing music from the late 1930s, swing band stuff - he couldn’t have identified who was playing what, for all he cared for were the sounds, not the composers or the bands - as he went through his Doc Savage collection, leafing through the brittle pages of the pulp magazines, trying to imagine himself alive and well during those magnificent times. Oh, he knew that the times weren’t that special - the Great Depression was roaring along and the black clouds of fascism and communism were looming fast over the horizon - but there was just such an innocence highlighted in these pages. The diplomas by mail. The truss supports. The pamphlets that promised ‘secrets of the ages’.

  And, of course, the stories, the grand, brawling, pulse-pounding, improbable and wonderful stories of Doc Savage and his great adventures. Victor found himself sighing with pleasure as he turned the pages, saw the rough illustrations, and breathed in the unique scent of the old pulp paper. To have been alive back then, to have been innocent of the Bronze Warrior’s exploits and to have seen them fresh, month after month.

  Ah, it had been pure delight. A few days ago the Princess had given him a week off, and he was enjoying every single minute, and during all those hours the phone jack had stayed unplugged, and the batteries had remained removed from his pager and government-issued cellphone.

  Victor Palmer was currently living in 1935, and he had no plan to leave it anytime soon.

  ~ * ~

  Alexander Bocks felt himself draw up to his full height as his CFO roared up to him. Woolsey started speaking before the ambient noise died down so the first thing Bocks could hear was ‘. . . fuck you doing?! ?’

  Bocks leaned into Woolsey, saying, ‘Say again, Frank?’

  ‘I said, what the fuck are you doing?’

  Bocks said, ‘Working. And what are you doing, besides gumming up the works?’

  ‘The works?!? You think I’m gumming up the works? Besides what you did the other day with the labor contract...what the hell is going on now? I’ve checked the maintenance schedule. You had six aircraft scheduled all week for maintenance. Six! So how come you’ve had thirty-plus airplanes in there in the past three days? The overtime budget alone has been blown for the quarter. Already! And what the hell is so vital that you had to have thirty planes cycled through in three days?’

  ‘Something important,’ Bocks said.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Important. That’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘Fine,’ Frank said. ‘And this is all I’m going to say. I’m out of here and on the phone to a majority of the board of directors, and in a half-hour, you’re out and the locks are put on everything. AirBox isn’t going to be yours in an hour, and everything’s grounded. Got it? Everything’s grounded. I’ve got a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders and the board, because you’ve lost it. Lost it big time.’

  Frank spun around and stamped away so hard over the catwalk that the floor grille rattled. Bocks looked over at Randy, who was looking right back at him. Randy came over and said, ‘Can he do it?’

  ‘Yeah. He can. Hate to say it.’

  Randy said, ‘In less than two hours, you’ve got to start dispatching aircraft. You got any suggestions?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  Randy said, ‘Yeah. Let me and a couple of guys take care of him. Until the flights are gone.’

  ‘There’ll be hell to pay.’

  Randy said, ‘In a few days, we’re going to be attacked by anthrax. And the only way to save this nation is to get those planes down on the floor out the door. Right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then we’ll do it,’ Randy said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’ve flown this long with you, General. I’ll see it through. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a CFO to catch.’

  Bocks watched his former Chief Master Sergeant stroll purposefully off the catwalk, and then he shifted his gaze down to the hangar floor. His people. All of them. Working to defend what was right.

  He checked his watch. Time was still slipping away.

  ~ * ~

  It was near midnight when Brian Doyle looked out the window of the descending American Airlines aircraft over Memphis. His stomach felt sour and there was a sour taste in his mouth too. It had taken a while to get here, but he hoped it would be worth it. From New York to BWI and now to Memphis. He had spent a couple of hours at the Tiger Team installation in Maryland that was staffed only by a couple of support people, picking up a few things and trying to get to talk to the other team members. But Monty was gone and neither Darren nor Victor answered their phones or pagers. And the Princess was here, in Memphis.

  So Memphis was where Brian went.

  The ground seemed to rise to meet the plane, and there was just the quickest thud-thud as the aircraft landed. He made his way through the departing passengers, carrying a soft black duffel bag, remembering the last time he’d seen Adrianna, the time he’d spent in Cincinnati, and the touch and taste of her flesh ...

  He was angry at himself. Letting the little man overrule the big man.

  Typical male.

  Outside the terminal, Brian got a taxi, gave the cabbie the address, and sat back, the duffel bag across his lap.

  ~ * ~

  At 12:05 a.m., Deputy Sheriff Kyle Thurgood of the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department hesitated for a moment, sitting in front of a computer terminal at a substation where he worked. Before him on the screen was a digital photo of a dead man, found late yesterday afternoon in a turnoff from a
country road about six miles from where he was sitting. The young guy - Arab, Jew, Mediterranean, Mexican, who the hell could tell - was a homicide victim, and even with Thurgood’s minimal experience on the job that had been an easy call. Three to the chest and one to the forehead sure in hell hadn’t been a suicide. Thurgood hadn’t been the lead investigator on the case - he hadn’t even been part of the investigating squad. He had been working perimeter security, just making sure that the media and the curious didn’t trample in, destroying whatever traces of evidence might have been there. Of course, with a goddamn Freightliner parked there it sure didn’t seem like it would take too long to figure out why this guy had been taken to that place and murdered.

  But. . . there was one more thing. Before being relieved, Thurgood had snagged a photo of the dead guy with a small Olympus digital camera, something...well, ‘souvenir’ wasn’t the right word, but he wanted to have some sort of memento from his very first homicide. And coming back to the station he had had another thought. The department two months ago had gotten a directive from Homeland Security, about some new security initiative or something. Called the Physical Characteristic Comparison Program - or Characteristic Physical Program for Comparison, who the hell could remember - it requested that all law-enforcement agencies submit digital headshots of certain ‘individuals of interest’ so that they could be compared with whatever files the Feds had on hand. There were a whole lot of definitions that made up an individual of interest, and one that Thurgood remembered was an open homicide of an individual with no accompanying identification or notable physical characteristics.

  So. A dark-skinned guy with no ID, next to a vehicle whose license plates didn’t match and had no paperwork or registration ... that seemed to fit the profile pretty well. But when Thurgood had suggested to his shift commander that it should be followed up, the shift commander had looked at him and said, ‘Son, our boss is up for re-election this fall, and you want to give his ACLU opponents ammunition like this? Screw that shit... we got enough to do.’

  Which was true. Yet. . . Thurgood felt funny about what was back up there. Theft? Hijacking? What in hell had happened up there in that turnaround? He knew what he should do. Close the file and go home. Forget it. Not his case. Not his problem.

  He got up from the desk, reached down, whispered, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ and sent an e-mail to a Homeland Security Office contact, complete with attached photo.

  Thurgood left, went to the locker room, got into his civvies. Just as he was heading out the locker-room door to the station’s parking lot, it seemed as though every phone in the building started to ring.

  ~ * ~

  Adrianna came onto the floor of the maintenance hangar at AirBox. It was nearly one a.m. Past the entrance into the hangar there were three offices off to the left. The door to the first one was closed, and over the noise of the machinery and ventilation equipment she could hear people shouting. She couldn’t make out the words, but she sure could make out the emotions. Somebody was extremely upset.

  The door suddenly opened. She stepped back. The General stepped out, his face flushed. Adrianna could make out a tumble of bodies behind him, gathered in one corner of the office, and then the door was shut.

  ‘Miss Scott,’ he said.

  ‘General,’ she said. She gestured at the closed door. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Nothing you should worry about.’

  Something fell over in the office. ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s just say a few machinists are having a frank and open discussion with my chief financial officer. What can I do for you?’

  Adrianna said, ‘Just one last status check.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘From what I know, we’re not going to make the schedule.’

  Oh, God, no, she thought. Her feet seemed to merge with the cement floor.

  Then the General smiled.

  ‘We’re ahead of schedule. First flight due to take off at two a.m., followed by thirty-nine others, at sixty-second intervals. Sound good to you?’

  ‘Sounds...sounds great, General.’

  ‘Good. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to follow up on a few things.’

  She shook the General’s hand, idly thought of how long he would live when this was all over, and then she said, ‘The same here. I’ll be back east by the morning, monitoring your aircraft, monitoring the efforts to capture the terrorist teams before they strike. Thank you again for what you’ve done, General. You’ve done a great service to your nation.’

  The General went back to the closed door. ‘Service not done yet, Miss Scott. Have a good night.’

  ‘You, too, sir.’

  And when Adrianna left, she felt as light as a feather.

  ~ * ~

  At the Northwest Homeland Security office, Jason Janwick looked over his people, looked down again at the printout on the conference-room desk. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Just to make sure we got this straight, the Yemeni boy who’s been on our watch list has been found dead outside Memphis. Three to the ten circle, one in the forehead. Think somebody was pissed at him?’

  Some smiles from his crew. Janwick said, ‘What does this tell us?’

  His new girl from Customs looked around, as if to see if anybody else was going to step up to the plate. Tanya Mead said, ‘Silence.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Somebody wanted the boy silent. Somebody wanted to make sure he didn’t talk about what he was doing there, what he was up to, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Suspects?’

  Another voice from the other side of the table. ‘His companion. The Russian.’

  ‘Simple. But probably true.’

  Janwick drew a hand through his thin hair. Another late night in a series of late nights. What had to be done to protect this country.

  ‘Any word on the trailer that was supposed to have been attached to that Freightliner?’

  ‘No, sir,’ came the answer.

  ‘Lots of things we still don’t know,’ he said. ‘Don’t know for certain why the Yemeni got whacked, though we do have our suspicions. Don’t know where the Russian is. Don’t know where the cargo went. Those are the unknowns.’

  Those quiet, curious faces, looking at him for guidance. He took a breath. ‘But this is what we do know. We know that the Yemeni - with links to al-Qaeda - crossed into this country illegally nearly a week ago. We know the Yemeni crossed the border in the company of a Russian scientist with biowarfare experience, whose past history includes working with unsavory types in Southwest Asia. We know they crossed the border with a trailer filled with something that they didn’t want examined by Customs. We know the trailer is now missing. Conclusions?’

  ‘Biowarfare attack,’ came a voice from the other end of the table.

  ‘Sure,’ Janwick said. ‘But where? Memphis? What does Memphis have besides Graceland?’

  ‘Cargo,’ came another voice. ‘Lots and lots of cargo. Every major air freight company in the nation has its hub there. DHL, FedEx, AirBox...you name it.’

  Then there was a buzz of voices, as scenarios were presented, argued, debated. One voice - Logan, an ex-Marine recon who had lost an arm in Baghdad some years back -said, ‘Sounds like an attack on the airport, chief. Remember how DC was in such a cluster-fuck back in ‘01 when they thought a couple of post office centers and the Senate mail room was contaminated? What do you think would happen if all of the airfreight in the nation got contaminated somehow? Christ, the stock market would crash in a heartbeat.’

  More discussion and Janwick raised his hand. ‘All right. Our place isn’t to find all the answers. Just the right one. And the right answer is that the evidence is showing that something is going to hit the airport in Memphis. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. My recommendation is a priority contact to Memphis Airport. Ground and seal, until that missing tractor-trailer unit or the Russian is located. BOLO for the Russian dispatched a hundred-mile radius from Memphis. Any questions?’

&nb
sp; No questions.

  ‘Good. Let’s start making the calls.’

  Jason Janwick looked at the clock. It was 10:10 p.m. -1:10 in the morning in Memphis.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  At the AirBox dispatch center at the Memphis Airport, Carrie Floyd looked up from her early-morning paperwork to see her co-pilot approach. ‘Looks like we’re going to the Great Northeast today, lady.’

  ‘Really? Where?’

  ‘Boston, Massachusetts. It’s not London, but it’ll do.’

  ‘Sure will,’ she said with a smile. ‘If we’ve got time, I’ll buy you lunch at the waterfront. Fresh Maine lobster.’