“A little wobbly,” she replied. “Any sign of pursuit?”
“Nothing visual.”
Britt knew that meant almost nothing. Jennifer had been flying the mountain canyons at night, with only the low-powered terrain avoidance system keeping them from plowing into the sheer rock walls, but they’d had no radar active.
“I’ve spotted Cletus and Jim Bob Billy’s monster truck,” Jennifer reported. “Right where it’s supposed to be. No visual on foot traffic. LZ is on an incline; this is going to be tricky. Get those kids buckled up.”
“Done,” she answered. For once in their lives, her children hadn’t complained about the straps keeping their asses in their seats.
“Tighten up!” she yelled to everyone inside the compartment, and confirmed that Tom was checking their children’s belts. He was wearing the other headset that allowed communication between the cockpit and the rear bay.
The engines kicked up a notch as the wings lost lift, and the craft was kept in the air by thrust alone. It felt like they dropped in free fall the final few feet, just like it always did in these things. The hydraulic landing pads flexed, and then rebounded slowly as the Osprey tilted to the side and began to slide, before coming to a sudden, jarring stop that threw them all against their restraints.
A large bang, sounding like a giant had just slammed a hammer against the aircraft, rang through the cargo bay, followed by a screech of tearing metal as the aircraft shuddered in what Britt knew were its death throes. There was a final roll, as the tail end of the compartment dropped with another sharp clang.
“Everybody out! Now!” Jennifer yelled into her headset. “Get away from the aircraft!” She glanced briefly at Tom; her husband was already moving to the children.
Britt extricated herself from her seat and started screaming at Pete and Grant to get their families out. She slapped the back-ramp actuator with her palm, and nothing happened.
“Jennifer—ramp door won’t . . .”
“Plug your ears, Britt,” Jenn fired back, cutting in. “In five, four . . .
“Plug your ears!” she screamed at everyone in the hold. She tossed the headset aside and plugged her own ears. She had just started a visual check of everyone when Jennifer fired the explosive bolts that blew the door open. The cargo hold filled with smoke for just a moment until most of it was sucked out by the motion of the door flopping open and slamming uncontrolled into the ground with a splash. The landing and cargo load lights were out, either from their controlled crash landing or from the explosive bolts. She couldn’t see anything outside the door except what looked like a rippling reflection of fire on moving water.
She understood what Jennifer had been so excited about; the Osprey was on fire.
“Go!” she screamed, herding Beth and Sharon in front of her. Caleb, Grant’s boy, was the first one off the ramp, and standing in water that hit him below the knees. Tom finally got a flashlight out, and she could see that the tail of the aircraft was lying in a small creek.
“Get to the far edge,” she yelled at her husband. “We’ll get to you.” She got the twins’ attention; “Follow your dad; it’s not deep.”
“Any landing you can walk away from . . .” Sir Geoff had come to his feet next to her.
“Not now, Gramps! Move it!”
A moment later, she saw Jenn and Rich slide down the three steps of the ladder that led up to the flight deck and come running. Jenn was waving her on. “Go!”
That was all the encouragement she needed. She landed in the frigid water next to Sir Geoff, ducked her head under his armpit, and frog-walked him to the far bank of the creek.
She pushed, while Grant pulled, but they got the old codger up onto dry land. She turned back to look at the Osprey and realized Jenn and Rich were already next to her.
“I had to eject the right engine,” Jenn said, gasping for air and pointing up the small rise on the opposite side of the creek. Most of the right wing, including the burning engine at its tip, was still up on the hillside and burning.
Britt knew enough about Ospreys to know a lot of the fuel was kept in bladders in the wing. Jenn had saved all their lives, again.
She turned back around and caught Sir Geoff’s attention by slapping at his feet where he sat crumpled in the tall grass growing alongside the stream.
“Upstream, right?”
Sir Geoff glanced at the cowboy’s monster truck, whose paint job was shining with the reflected light from the growing fire, and then nodded at her. “Correct.”
The first fifty yards moving upstream were difficult. They moved fast, in a panic, in and back out of the stream as the terrain dictated until they’d reached a safe distance from the burning wreckage. By the time Tom had planted Geoff’s ass back on dry land, the old man was shaking his head.
Sir Geoff pointed across the creek. “There is a trail on the other side.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I remember the stream being on our left.”
They made it back across the stream in quick order, with Tom and Grant acting as a human bucket chain over a deep section that reached well above their knees. Britt made it across on her own and continued up the steep embankment, looking for the trail the old man had spoken of. It was right where he had said it would be. With practical proof of at least one part of his story, she found herself hoping . . . far more than she usually allowed that particular emotion to weigh on her thought process. Maybe there was a place they could go and be safe.
She did a quick head count, confirming they had everyone on solid ground. Chagrined, she noted only she and Tom had made it out of the Osprey with long guns. She could count on Grant and Pete for having packed their handguns; Sharon as well, she thought, remembering that Pete’s wife carried a fat Glock 26 in her tote bag, which was with her now. None of those sidearms would help against what she feared was pursuing them. She hoped Denise, Derek, and the Carlisle brothers were still here. If Sir Geoff’s portal machine existed, hopefully Denise had figured out how to send a signal with it. If she hadn’t, she doubted the old man would be of much help. It had taken her three attempts to show him how to work the toaster oven back home.
“Mom.” She felt the tug on her sleeve. “How much further?” Matt looked tired; his twin, standing next to him, had a faraway look of exhaustion in his eyes, staring back at the burning plane wing.
“I’m not sure, honey; I don’t think it’s too far.” She centered around on both of them.
“I hope you two know how proud I am of you both. You’ve been real troopers.”
“’S’OK, Mom.” Craig nodded. “I’ll help him out if he quits on us.”
Matt slugged his brother in the arm. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Hey!” she grunted, bringing them both to a semblance of attention with a gentle shake. “Go help your dad with Sir Geoff.”
A fine, light rain began to spit at them by the time they all made it up to the rough overgrown path and started following the small creek upstream. It was a lot colder here than it had been at the ranch. Sir Geoff’s secret bunker had better be close, and warm. Who knew how long they’d be here?
The explosion took them all by surprise. She spun in place, her M4 coming up in reflex as the Osprey’s fuselage exploded in a fireball big enough to illuminate the bottom of the low-lying rain clouds, and blasting a circle of fiery light that seemed to fill the small canyon.
“Mom!”
She glanced over at Matt, who was facing away from the blast and pointing further up the trail.
She turned to look. Too many people. It was the only thing her brain registered as her rifle came up again. She spotted Derek among the strangers, and the Carlisle brothers as well in the flickering light of the burning fuel.
“Derek?” she shouted in question; her attention stayed focused on the four heavily armed operators mirroring her own posture thirty feet away.
“We’re good!” Derek’s hands were up, and she could see he was smiling. Dere
k was good at a lot of things; acting wasn’t on the list. She took note that he carried his rifle with a magazine inserted. It could have been empty, but with everything taken in aggregate, she slowly lowered the barrel of her gun.
Sir Geoff sidled up next to her, squinting ahead into the dim light.
“Mr. Lassiter? What in bloody hell are you doing here?”
Good to see you, too; Kyle had managed to bite back on his reply. Even in the crappy light that silhouetted the new arrivals, he’d thought the old man looked somewhat diminished. He had remembered thinking that the crotchety bastard was probably in need of a cigar and just worn out from whatever these people had done to get him here.
A half hour later, in the artificial light of the antechamber off the cavern that housed the telephone booth, he could now see there was something seriously wrong with his old boss. Something well beyond the advanced age and the tired look in his eyes.
“You’re going back with the first group . . . Sir,” Kyle said again, shaking his head at the stubborn old man. He ignored the pouty bottom lip that usually meant an argument was forming and turned to look directly at Brittany Souza. He’d quickly discerned the woman was in charge of her team. “It’s not up for discussion.”
“Agreed.” She may have even smiled as she said it.
On the walk back to the abandoned mine, they’d debriefed each other, and he’d quickly reshuffled the team that would be going back in the first tranche with Doc Jensen. Her husband, Tom, was a dark-haired version of Hans, and a fellow Green Beret, although a few years younger than himself. The giant was at the moment on one knee in front of his two boys, saying goodbye. The kids would be going in the first group with their mothers. Tom and the two ranchers, Pete and Grant, along with himself, Jeff, Dom, Hans, and the two cowboy brothers, Josh and Danny, would be staying behind. Joining them would be two of the younger technicians from Jensen’s team who were gathered around each other, drawing straws to see who would stay.
Both Derek and Denise would be going to Eden with the first group as well. Denise for the obvious reason she wasn’t far from having a kid, and Derek at Brittany’s insistence. Both the Bowdens, whom he’d just met, would be staying behind with him as well. They’d insisted they weren’t going to be separated, and they’d made a solid argument that you never knew when you’d have a need or an opportunity to steal another set of wings. He’d warned them that they were going to be on the move, living in the rough until Doc Jensen could get back to them with the telephone booth. Neither one had changed their minds.
“It’s not right.” Sir Geoff sounded like he was almost choked up. “I’m finished; I know it, even if you all are pretending you can’t see it.”
“You just need a new shot of nano, Sir.” Jeff spoke up with more hope than he had. In truth, he agreed with Sir Geoff’s self-assessment. The nanites in their bloodstream did a great job of keeping people healthy and alerting them to possible problems. They weren’t designed for or capable of extending natural life spans beyond the effect of keeping people healthy, and there was clearly something wrong.
Brittany Souza pointed through the hewed stone opening into the chamber that held the telephone booth. “You came here, in that?”
“Not exactly.” He shook his head. “But it’s our way back; Doc can explain it all to you when you get there, or try to. He speaks math.” He glanced around the suddenly crowded stone chamber.
“You need to get going. That crash site is going to get noticed, and if they’re tracking you . . .”
“You need to put some distance between you and this place.” She finished the thought for him.
In the end, it took three of them, Tom Souza, Dom, and himself, pushing at the tangle of bodies inside the telephone booth to swing the heavy door shut. It reminded him of what he’d seen on the platforms of a Tokyo subway station years ago. The door clicked in place, and servo-actuated locks swung into their recesses like a bank vault.
“This doesn’t feel right.” Tom Souza had a panicked look on his face.
“It works,” he said, pulling at the giant’s elbow. “But trust me; we don’t want to standing next to it when it does.”
A rolling orange warning light, mounted above the heavy metal door of the telephone booth, started up, and they all backed away and made for the antechamber. Once there, they moved to the far side of the room, where the rest of the stay-behinds were already gathered.
There was a sudden buildup of a low-frequency harmonic hum that they felt more than heard. The hairs on his arms stood on end. Jennifer Bowden’s long hair was standing out in a fan, looking as if she were about to get hit by lightning. The telephone booth seemed to shimmer for just a moment, like they were looking through a heat mirage, and then it was gone.
A thunderous boom, powerful enough to bring bits of rock off the ceiling, echoed around them.
“That’s normal,” Augustine, one of Jensen’s techs, spoke up after a moment. “Air filling the void.”
“Holy shit!” one of the Carlisle brothers exclaimed from somewhere behind him.
The crowd jostled a little bit and parted as the two brothers walked across the room and down into the now-empty translation chamber.
Kyle turned his head; Tom was staring at him with a look that was less than comforting. “They’d better be alright.”
He gave a nod of encouragement. “Safer than we are.”
“What are they doing?” The other tech, Jeremy, didn’t look at all put off that he’d drawn a short straw and had been left behind. He was pointing at Josh and Danny.
Kyle looked up to see the two brothers walking slowly through the space that had just been occupied by the massive device, hands out, waving like blind men walking through an unfamiliar room.
Josh turned back to them with a look of surprise on his face.
“It’s gone! I mean really gone!”
“Amazing,” Kyle heard the older rancher, Pete, exclaim.
“Quantum wave theory,” Jeremy answered said to Pete, as if that sufficed for an explanation.
“No.” Pete shook his head. “I meant those two morons. It’s amazing they can remember to breathe.”
*
Chapter 19
Wyoming, Earth
Simmons had asked him for his gun as they climbed aboard the ancient Black Hawk helicopter. He’d been polite about it, saying something about how his guys would feel better if the civilian with them wasn’t carrying. Starret knew what the request meant. He’d known it the second Simmons’s team had opened up on the hapless ranch hands before setting fire to every building on the ranch.
They had their orders; sooner or later, he was going to be one more item that Tessa Roberts had to clean up. Any knowledge of Sir Geoffrey Carlisle was being erased. The more he thought about it, he figured the only reason he was still alive was that he hadn’t phoned his friend Archie and offered his condolences on being let go. Archie, if he was still alive, was probably under house arrest. The administration and the ISS had killed General Gannon because he’d known about Carlisle. They wouldn’t hesitate when it came to Archie or himself.
The ISS tactical team had called the Army for a lift, and they’d had to wait for more than an hour for the request to get kicked to Washington. By the time the Black Hawk arrived, the twisted metal remains of the hangar and burned-out carcasses of farm equipment were all that was left above the paved tarmac. The blaze at the main house was still going strong.
Simmons dropped a headset in his lap and put a pair on himself as soon as they were airborne. He’d been kept separate from Simmons and the rest of the team while they were waiting for their lift and the request for information caught him off-guard.
“Any idea where they might be headed?” The leader of the ISS team sounded almost conversational as he asked the question. “We had them on radar headed north, before they turned westward somewhere over Yellowstone. Then we lost them in the mountains. Our drone is playing catch up, repositioning.”
“Do they have the fuel to get to Canada? Into Alberta?” He asked, playing for time. If there was one thing the ISS was more nervous about than their own citizens pushing back, it was the fact that parts of western Canada were making noises about secession and entering into some sort of mutual defense treaty with Australia. The land down under had made it very clear they wanted nothing to do with the “people’s revolution” being run out of Washington and London.
“Possibly,” Simmons barked after a moment. “As low and slow as they seem to be flying it might be a reach. They might be able to make the border.” The thick-shouldered team leader shrugged. “Not that it would stop us.”
No, he didn’t figure it would.
“Spokane area, maybe.” He was making shit up; he didn’t have a clue where Carlisle was trying to get to. He was just trying to buy some time, be useful to the killing machines around him so he could stay alive a little longer. “Calgary is a hot spot,” he continued. “It’s the epicenter for the resistance in Canada,” he added. “The target would definitely have a receptive audience if he could get there.”
Simmons regarded him in silence for a moment before nodding his head in what felt to Starret like a ‘for-the-time-being’ reprieve.
He glanced around him at the other “soldiers,” who looked relaxed, if not bored. The narrow bench seats were taken up by Simmons’s team, their bags on the deck of the helicopter between their feet. One soldier had a ruggedized laptop open on his lap, no doubt interfacing with the ISR drone they had control of.
He caught Simmons’s attention with a wave of his hand. “Why don’t we bring in the Air Force? Director Roberts has the pull to get us some more resources, another drone or two.”
“I tried.” Simmons might have given a little shrug. “We are keeping this in house. The drone we do have is ours and ours alone.”
So, it was just this team, he thought. ISS security concerns and paranoia were overriding the actual mission goal of finding Carlisle and the frustratingly capable TF Chrome.
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