Frank's Independence Day

by M. L. Buchman

  “Or I’ll name Beat the head of my detail when she gets back and put you somewhere you can be of use like an Alaskan sewage treatment plant.”

  Damn he liked working for this man. He took a joke and built in a ray of hope and confidence that Frank sure wasn’t feeling.

  “Kim-Ly Geneviève Beauchamp, mixed French and Vietnamese descent, French side came to Vietnam in the 1930s. Traditional plantation owners. Had to leave to avoid the War and the Reeducation Camps, but the ties were too deep and they came back almost right away. She was born there. Educated John Hopkins and Cambridge, the one in England.”

  “A Cambrian?”

  “Cambrian, sir?”

  “If it weren’t a proper noun it would be a good Scrabble word, with the C, M, and B it’s worth thirteen points and is eight letters long, a good length. If you can find just one letter to play off, you can score an extra fifty point Bingo for clearing your tray. Cambrian is from an old story at Oxford. We always said Cambridge was found by some Oxfordians who couldn’t cut it. So they were banished to the fens, the marshes, and founded a silly little school named Cambridge. Cambrian is an ancient geologic age, out of date, slow. Worse, she’s probably a Cavendisher, one of the all-women colleges at the University.”

  Frank had no idea what he was talking about, but he seemed pretty pleased by it all. Frank turned back to his report. “Straight to UNESCO, now Chief of Unit for World Heritage of Southeast Asia. Very determined lady. Cavendisher by the way is a also proper noun, so you don’t get to use that one either.”

  President Matthews nodded his head and kept his silence as they continued down the corridor. At the stairs they went down one flight to get to the United States Security Center.

  The President was thinking some pretty serious thoughts when he didn’t even smile at a Scrabble-based tease.

  Frank knew that silence. Knew it from deep inside when he’d waited in Texas wondering when he’d get to see Beatrice Belfour again.

  He offered the President the next layer.

  “Thirty-two years old, married once, didn’t stick. Broke off with last boyfriend two weeks after being named Chief of Unit last year. Word is he didn’t like that her career was dusting his, a German named Klaus of all things.”

  That actually got the President to stop right before they went through the outer security door. That caused the other agents up and down the hall some consternation, but Frank flickered an “all okay” sign and just waited.

  Nothing.

  President Matthews’ face was normally intensely expressive, man couldn’t play poker to save his life as his friend Mark Henderson kept proving to him time and again. And right now it was very carefully showing nothing.

  Frank whistled quietly to himself. How long had the President been in conference with her? An hour, a little more.

  He thought back to the day he’d met Beat. Once around the nose of her BMW, he could easily have run. Cops might have laid chase, but he’d have a pretty good chance of making it clean. She probably had expected him to. But something about her made it so that he got in the car. He’d stood there for three heartbeats, then trusted her with his life. It had been that fast. At least for him. He’d seen that lady with the dark, dark eyes and just had to know more.

  “I bet, Mr. President, that she’d be glad of a chance to do a lecture series at George Washington University or something like that.”

  “Are you trying to matchmake me, Frank?”

  “No sir, Mr. President. Just thinking out loud, sir.”

  They walked through the outer door of the basement security offices together, Frank flashed a hand signal clearing the other agents in the hall to close the distance from either end of the hall and to take up station on the door.

  While the outer and inner door bolts were shifting with their sharp metallic buzzes, the President spoke without looking up at him.

  “So, maybe I’ll keep you around after all. Now let’s go see about getting Agent Belfour in from whatever limb she’s stuck out on.”

  Frank followed him in with the first feeling of hope he’d had all day.

  “By the way, Frank, ‘cavendish’ is a sweet tobacco cake. So I can use it. Seventeen points.”

  # # #

  “The problem we have, Mr. President, is that we have no way to contact any assets on the ground, or even determine if they’re still alive to do so.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Brett Rogers stared at them out of their screen which linked to the White House Situation Room.

  So much for hope. Frank resisted the urge to lay his head down on the table.

  Once again, the President sat at the head of the table. Frank and Hank sat to either side. Frank had sat, ’cause otherwise he’d pace and that wouldn’t help anything.

  In the hour since they’d been gone to the U.N. meeting with Southeast Asia, the staff in the room had been sharply upgraded. The left-hand seats along the wall were now filled with Army, Navy, Air Force, and Special Operations Forces reps, all officer ranks. They each had direct links to their superiors sitting to either side of General Rogers in the Situation Room as well as to whatever other points of contact they needed.

  The screens which had held a few photos of the plane, garage, and burning liaison office in Guinea-Bissau were now filled with images of the center of downtown Bissau. Dozens of buildings were on fire. Two dozen tanks were scattered about the town like dropped toys, except several of them were burning as well.

  “Intramural. The Army is fighting itself,” the President observed.

  “That and probably worse. Only the core of the town has ever had cell phone service, but Guinetel pulled the plug on that, or someone pulled it for them, about six hours ago. Phones aren’t exactly common either, especially not outside the core. There aren’t more than a couple dozen Internet lines for public use in the whole city, fastest thing they’ve got wouldn’t run my four-year-old grandkid’s MathWiz game. But they pulled the plug on those too. So not even Twitter to give us ground intel as there would be in any other disaster of a nation. The only people with satellite phones are the drug lords, and they’re all lying low or engaged in the battle. We’ve kicked a Global Hawk drone into the air and it should be on site shortly. We’re hoping we can grab some radio chatter. The Raptor we sent earlier was an imaging bird, doesn’t have the heavy intel-gathering package.”

  It was all still a jumble.

  Frank looked about the room and tried to spot why. Everyone was doing their thing. The screens to either side of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were alive with data. But it didn’t feel right.

  He’d ridden out enough of these with the President now to know that when they were on the track of a solution, even if it wasn’t there yet, you could taste the crackle of it in the air.

  This air tasted of nothing but air conditioning and worry.

  He looked at the satellite photo of Bissau taken on the last pass before darkness had fallen.

  It was midnight there now.

  It was time to be on the move.

  But each time she moved, Beat would become harder to find. Clearly, going back to the airport hadn’t been her first choice. Couldn’t blame her since she’d already lost two people there. By now Beat would know that downtown wasn’t worth risking either. Not even on the chance of finding a working cell tower.

  “Cell phones.”

  “What?” The buzz of conversation dropped. The others had been talking about something else. Mapping patterns of unexpected thermal movement. Like that would work in a city of a couple hundred thousand people with a coup going on.

  “They’ve shut off the cell towers, Frank.” General Rogers and he had become friends over their last few years serving together at the White House.

  “Right,” Frank could see the idea forming in his head. “But maybe Agent Belfour hasn’t shut off her own phone. Do the Raptor or Glob
al Hawk have cell phone scanners? Can we piggyback it onto a radio and talk to them?”

  One of the techs on the left-side of the U.N. security office must have put up a request to join the conference. The Marine Corps intelligence officer who was running the conference popped an image of the tech’s face into the lower corner of the main screen. Navy Lieutenant, cute Asian woman, sitting third down the left-wall row.

  “Sir, the Global Hawk drone as rigged can only receive calls for monitoring purposes. But the Raptor bird already on site for imaging had been previously tasked for alert broadcast to all cell phones in an area. That hardware is still aboard. It will take some time to set up, but we should be able to transmit with one bird and receive with the other.”

  “Get it built. You’ve got twenty minutes until everything is on site.”

  Twenty minutes. Frank closed his eyes and tried to do one of those telepathy things like in the movies. He’d be the first one ever to successfully send a telepathic message and save a life.

  “Stay low, be careful,” he thought as loudly as he could.

  # # #

  “Why can’t we just steal the plane?” Ambassador Green whispered from close beside Beat. At least he’d learned to keep his voice down.

  They squatted close beside the wreckage of the garage. Still no one had come to clean it up. The flesh of the pieces of the two embassy personnel killed in the explosion had started to go putrid in the tropical heat. There was a slight land breeze headed out to sea, so she moved them to the upwind, east side of the garage to cut the smell.

  When Charlotte and Sam had asked what that stench was, she hadn’t answered. Thankfully they already knew to never ask her something a second time. They’d learned that she always heard them and when she didn’t respond it was because they didn’t want to know. Not the screaming of a burn victim, nor the wailing of half the family as they were told the other half was now dead.

  “Can you fly a plane?”

  “Always meant to learn, but no. Can’t you?”

  Like she was some sort of miracle girl. Actually, she’d be willing to try if it weren’t for the two tacticals parked at the other end of the main terminal. Their crews might be asleep and/or drunk, but they’d snap to the moment she tried cranking over the plane’s engines. Two turret-mounted machine guns would make a real mess of the plane and any passengers long before they reached takeoff speed.

  No, she had a different plan.

  “Wait here.” While she’d been out prowling earlier, she’d traded her blue pagne and skirt for a dark dashiki and loose pants that would allow her move well.

  She slid up to the bottom of the plane’s fold-down steps and waited. She’d found a cooking knife during her prowl and held it hidden in her hand, the blade held flat against her wrist. While it was no K-bar survival blade, it would be quieter than her Sig Sauer. Though she made sure that too was close to hand.

  The pilot’s large blood stain at the base of the steps had dried, not even the flies could find anything more there. She spotted his body shoved under one of the wings.

  The lights were out over the whole airport, only the moonlight had revealed the tacticals. The steps were still hanging down and the inside of the plane was pitch dark. The third of the four steps creaked and the plane rocked ever so slightly on its shocks as she climbed aboard. Up the narrow aisle between the facing pairs of armchairs with the little tables between them to either side. Not even the smell of stale peanuts remained.

  The cockpit was quiet and the moonlight through the windshield let her see enough to find the switch for the panel lights.

  She turned them on with a flick and saw that she was screwed.

  The pilot must have been trying to radio for help after the garage blew up, before being dragged from the plane. Whoever took him had shot the radios. Five neat shots right through the faces of each radio and transponder. No calling for help from here. She shut off the panel lights.

  She knew the King Air had an ELT in the tail, but she wasn’t exactly sure where. Emergency Locator Transmitters triggered for crashes. They must have manual switches. If not, she would beat it with a length of steel pipe until it decided to cry for help.

  It would be a messy call, ELTs were designed to scream long and loud on common radio frequencies, but at least it would tell someone to come looking for them.

  She was halfway back through the plane when an alarm burst out in the cabin.

  Not an alarm!

  Her cell phone.

  It rang again so loudly in the plane she almost wanted to cover her ears. It vibrated harshly against her rib cage, under the dashiki in the pocket of the shirt she’d kept on beneath her native clothes.

  She bent over to dig for it under the layers of cloth.

  As she did so, a roar and flash slapped at her, knocking her sideways into a seat with the sheer force of the concussion.

  Another burst and she saw the origin.

  Bending over had saved her life.

  Someone had been asleep in the back of the plane, probably after raiding the tiny galley. Someone with a rifle.

  Woken by the cell phone, he’d fired wildly at her inside the plane. Her ears still rang, the only thing she could hear, though the cell phone buzzed once more against her rib cage.

  Blinded by his own rifle fire, the man stumbled forward down the aisle.

  Go just one more step, she coaxed him forward.

  He fired at the cockpit again, shattering the windshield. The spent cartridge casing ejected right past her head, fast, and pinged off one of the windows. Had to be a Czech VZ with that kind of ejection. Amazing that the thing still worked, it should be in a museum.

  In the light of the muzzle flash, he saw his mistake. She was lying mostly in one of the seats, now right beside him.

  As he turned, she struck.

  She’d kept the blade despite the shock and with a single stroke she dragged it across his jugular vein and throat.

  Hot blood splashed her face and arm. She was moving before he hit the floor. He was still trying to gasp his final breath when she dove out the door and hit the tarmac. With a fast roll she regained her feet and sprinted back to the protection of the garage.

  Sweeping up Sam and Charlotte, she raced into the night.

  Behind them the tacticals opened up on the plane even as their drivers raced the Toyotas to redline, sprinting down the field.

  There was a low cough, like the world catching its breath, and Beat dragged her two charges to the ground.

  The plane blew with a deafening roar that lit the night sky like a torch a dozen stories high.

  One of the tacticals, its driver still too drunk or hung over or asleep to compensate, twisted the wheels on his truck sharply while traveling too fast. The vehicle rolled into the burning airplane taking its driver and gun crew with it.

  Their screams didn’t last long.

  While the other tactical was distracted by the mayhem, the three of them slipped further into the night.

  # # #

  “What the hell happened?” Frank’s roar filled the room. It wasn’t his place, but he couldn’t help himself. One moment they’d had a clear ring tone on Beat’s cell phone and the next it looked like the airport had blown up.

  “Someone get me a clear shot of the airport,” General Brett Rogers snarled out. Frank had never heard that tone from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs before and decided he’d better shut up.

  A tech sent the command to some obscure bunker, probably in Utah, and the remote pilot sent his command over satellite to turn the Raptor’s camera. Moments later it centered on the flame. One tactical had rolled in and also burned, they could see the bright sparkles of the ammunition firing off in the intense heat at the heart of the fire.

  The other truck was backing off slowly, being beaten away by the heat.

  “Som
eone roll back the footage.”

  Moments later they were staring at the long view with the airport off in the corner of the picture. It was a ghostly image of greens and blacks that came from infrared cameras for night vision. Cooking fires flared bright in some of the surrounding neighborhood. No streetlights or houselights. Power was out in the largest city in the country.

  “Zoom and enhance,” Rogers ordered. “C’mon people. Think ahead. Work the problem.”

  The resolution was lousy, but in moments the little embassy plane filled the screen, a dull green cross a couple-dozen image pixels square against the cooler black of the airport parking area.

  “There!” Frank pointed. A lone figure, about ten pixels big but large enough to see how carefully they were moving, sidled up to the plane.

  “That’s got to be Beat. No one moves like that but a trained agent.” She was alive. Frank had never been so glad to see a heat trace. Or she’d been alive three minutes ago.

  The silence in the room echoed as the video spooled in real time.

  The three pixels at the nose of a plane brightened.

  The Navy tech whose face had remained in the corner of screen reported, “Brightness change approximately equal to control panel lights.”

  Before he could wonder if Beat was going for flight or radios, the brightness disappeared. She’d made it to the cockpit and either found what she’d wanted, or what she’d hoped to find wasn’t there. He knew the pilot was dead. He also knew she didn’t know how to fly.

  “Radios. She went after the radios. They must not have been usable. That’s why—”

  “Here’s where her phone rang,” the tech cut him off.

  Nothing.

  “Agai—”

  Before the tech could finish, a flash of light, and another. The brightness shone out all of the side windows on the side facing the Raptor’s camera flying far overhead.

  “Brightness change indicates gunfire. Single rounds.”

  One more.

  Their phone call had gotten her shot. Someone asleep on the plane, and they’d woken him with a goddamn phone call. His idea had gotten her killed.