Carthager nodded seriously. “Good. I like to see confidence like that.” He passed a look to Meechum, and she took a few steps back before he continued. “Meech and I have talked about this at length, and I don’t see any other way. We have to bring you in on part of our mission. Someone has to get a message to the vice president.”
Kyla chuckled. “Is that why you brought me down here with all this cloak and dagger stuff? I can give you my phone. My uncle and I communicated just yesterday.”
“No, that won’t work. We’re going to use this.” He pointed to a radio sitting on a nearby shelf.
“Why? What’s going on?”
Carthager put one boot on an empty metal chair and peered down at her. “Ma’am, we came on this ship because someone up the chain of command got wind a big event was about to go down. Obviously, that something kicked off before we could report back, but our FAST platoon has been doing its homework over the past twenty-four hours. We now know two things. One, we can’t trust a damned person on this ship. Two, we have to get a message to the vice president, or more people are going to die.”
“Why? Why are they going to die?” she asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” He continued before she could protest. “But it isn’t because I don’t trust you. If you’re captured, they could pry it from you. You’ve got to trust me on this. The enemy is on the ship, and it could be anyone.”
“Even the captain?” she asked lamely.
“Anyone,” he said dryly.
She sat there for a few moments, then peered at the radio. “What do you want me to say to him?”
Carthager rubbed his chin, then motioned for Meechum to go to the radio. Kyla was surprised how much non-verbal communication passed between the two Marines. “We need to know where he is, but you can’t use place names. There will almost certainly be unfriendly ears listening.”
Since she had no realistic idea where he was, it was hard to envision a place she could tell him to go. The last place she’d seen him was in Central Park over twelve hours ago. They could be in Canada by now.
The leader went on. “Once we get him online, I’ll explain how we’re going to do this.”
Meechum invited her to sit at the radio.
She watched as the woman adjusted the frequencies and asked her to call out for her uncle. The first lesson was to use a name only he would recognize, so she had to think it over for a minute or two.
I hope he remembers this.
“This is Reba calling for Hailey-boo, do you have your ears on?” Reba was shorthand for Rebecca, which was Mom’s name, but the nickname also happened to be one of her mother’s favorite singers. It was one of Mom’s many contrasts—the hippy-dippy mother wearing tie-dye dresses singing country songs. Hailey-boo was the name of one of Uncle Ted’s girlfriends; the ‘boo’ was because the woman was terrified beyond logic by ghosts.
Meechum smiled approvingly at her use of the handles. After repeating the call-out a few times, they went to a new frequency. For the next fifteen minutes, they went through the routine until a reply came.
“This is Hailey-boo. Go ahead, Reba.”
Carthager leaned close. “It’s a marine frequency. He might be on a boat or using a boat’s radio. Tell him you’re having a birthday party and need to give him a present.”
Kyla did as instructed. Uncle Ted seemed to understand she was talking in code.
Her uncle’s voice crackled in the radio. “I’ve got a few things going on, but I think a birthday party sounds nice.”
Carthager whispered, “See if you can dial in where he is. Pick a place only he would know, then ask him how many miles he is from it.”
She tried to think, but there was only one spot on her mind. “Hailey-boo, do you remember where we’ve always had birthday parties in the past? How many miles are you from there?”
They waited a few seconds before the reply came back. “We’re about a hundred miles from those birthday parties. We’re also about sixty miles from the place where Hailey-boo’s mother and I took you on your tenth birthday.”
Kyla grinned and spoke quietly to the Marines. “That’s Martha’s Vineyard. It was a big deal because Uncle Ted knew someone in the government who got us a tour.”
Carthager tapped his temple. “It’s an island, right? We can draw a circle around it and see where it meets the circle around the other place. Where was the first location?”
“New York City. Pelham Bay, to be exact. My mom’s house. We always invited Uncle Ted to my parties…” She got a little sad at the memory, though the tough-guy Marine kept talking.
“Right, so he’s a hundred from New York, but only sixty from Martha’s. Any idea where that might be?”
“No,” she replied, “but you said he was on a marine band and might be on a boat. That gives me an idea.”
“Hailey-boo, the birthday party you mentioned. You aren’t by chance using the same type of transportation as we used that day, are you?”
To the Marines in the room, she added, “We took a ferry from New York out to Martha’s Vineyard. It took all day and was the most boring part of the trip, by far.”
“We are, Reba. In fact, we’re a little more than halfway on the same route, if we were going to your tenth birthday party again. I don’t think you’d like how boring it is out here.”
“Yep,” she deadpanned to those around her, “he’s on a boat.”
Carthager let out a sigh of relief. “He’s still alive and on the move. That’s excellent. High marks for your uncle. Now, are there any other places you’ve had birthday parties where we might be able to get to him?”
She had a place in mind right away. “It wasn’t a birthday party, but I did take a field trip he would know about. It was to a lighthouse.”
Off the coast of Long Island, NY
“This is wonderful,” Emily said excitedly. “Your niece is alive, and, it would seem, quite the fighter.”
Emily’s family yacht rocked with the waves. They’d stopped and shut off the motors so no one on the radio would figure out they were on the water. Now, he didn’t want Emily to start it back up until he’d had some time to think it over.
“Yeah, she’s the rebel of the family. Her mom was a pushover. She’d spend an hour to get a fly to exit through the door rather than swat it dead. Up until the past few days, I’d have thought Kyla was cut from the same material. Now I’ve seen her on a helicopter leaving a warzone, and she’s using coded messages on the radio. I’m impressed, but also worried what she’s gotten herself into.”
“Don’t you trust what she said? This rendezvous at the lighthouse?”
Using coded words only the two of them would understand, they’d agreed to meet at the Montauk lighthouse, which was at the easternmost point of Long Island. She’d gone there on a field trip in middle school, and he remembered it because Rebecca called him the night before asking if it was safe to let her go.
Now there was no question it wasn’t safe.
He looked south, toward shore. The skies were overcast, but the thin slice of Long Island was still visible. He couldn’t make out the lighthouse, but it was there.
“I trust her, but she was being coached. I’m wondering who was there with her.”
“How could you tell?”
Ted had spent enough years in the Air Force to know tones of voice while on the radio. Kyla was nervous and cautious and spoke in monotone, as if reading from a script or repeating what was told to her.
“I’ve known her since she was a baby. As much as I’m impressed with her coding, she couldn’t have come up with it on her own. She couldn’t have found us on this maritime frequency. Not unless she’s been taking a lot of classes down at the learning annex I don’t know about.” He smirked to Emily to offload some of his tension.
“So, we can’t really trust her, but we have to go anyway. Right?”
There was no way he could skip on a chance to collect her. If she was with him, he could get Emily
and his niece to safety in Canada. That would be a job well done by anyone’s measure.
He knew what he wanted to do, but she was the president. “You’re driving. What are your orders?”
It was her family’s boat, and she’d driven it before with her husband, so he was content to let her pilot the fifty-foot giant. He stood next to her as she thought about the answer. However, he’d gotten to know her very well over the past two days. Much as he’d done with his friend Frank, he would eat his hat if Emily suggested they leave his niece behind.
She didn’t disappoint.
“Let’s go see that lighthouse.”
San Francisco, CA
Dwight woke up with the feeling of a shoe in his side. Living on the streets for so many years, he’d become accustomed to the unpleasant wake-up call.
“I’m not in a doorway. Leave me be.” It was his standard response.
“Hey, guy, you are supposed to be on the road. What are you doing?” The man sounded anxious, like Dwight was breaking an important rule. When he opened his eyes, he remembered it wasn’t a standard day.
“Oh. I’m sorry, Jacob, I, uh—”
“It’s fine. I need you up. I’m running late, too. We’ve got to get to the rendezvous, or they’ll put us on an even worse duty, you know?” The man was dressed in the same black jumpsuit Dwight had been forced to wear; they could have been on the same pit crew for a racing team. He was average height and build, probably in his forties, with a natural, smiling face and a thin mustache. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, like most men in the black suits.
Dwight picked himself off the small patch of grass he’d found among the downtown buildings. “How did you find me?”
“All the bikes have trackers. One of the team leaders told me to come here and find out why this bike wasn’t moving. I’m not about to go back and explain you were sleeping, so if anyone asks, you had a flat tire and we worked together to get you mobile.”
Poppy swooped down from above, making him involuntarily swat her away. He dearly wanted to ask what the hell she was doing, but he knew better than to talk to the bird when people were around.
“I’m not Jacob, by the way. It’s Bernard. What’s your name?”
“Dwight,” he replied. He’d been lured into the warehouse by a man named Jacob. If this was a new person, there was a chance he hadn’t been discovered as an imposter.
“Well, Dwight. Hop on your bike and let’s go. We have a lot of ground to cover today. Then we’ll have a ton of work on our hands.” He patted the flamethrower machinery attached to the backside of his motorbike.
It took him a couple of minutes, but Dwight managed to get himself upright and on his bike. His only thought was how bad he wanted a drink, but it didn’t seem likely he could find a liquor store with his new friend lording over him. That bummed him out.
“Stick on my back tire, Dwight. Remember, they’re always watching us. We have to go where we’re told, or they send out the work police.” He chuckled in a fashion that sounded anything but funny.
They both cranked over their motors.
Dwight looked up at Poppy, still aloft. “Hey!” he called out to get her attention. “You didn’t warn me he was coming!”
The multi-colored bird seemed to cackle in laughter.
“What?” Bernard asked while cupping his ear.
Dwight shook his head, waving him off. The guy wouldn’t understand his relationship with the bird, nor did he want to explain it. Normal people had a blind spot to the creature, and he didn’t want to answer the questions that invariably came when he revealed his friend.
For now, he would ride his motorcycle and wait for the opportunity to flee.
He hoped Poppy, for all her practical jokes, would help him when the time came.
CHAPTER 3
Off the coast of Long Island, NY
“When were you going to tell me you could fly a plane as well as pilot this big yacht?” Ted stood next to his companion, admiring her transformation to boat captain. She’d unhooked her hair clip, which let long brown hair whip around behind her as they sped across Long Island Sound.
She giggled girlishly and brushed her wild hair aside, as if boating was a way of life. “It didn’t come up organically in our conversation. This is more of a forty-foot boat, anyway, not a yacht. Besides, this is nothing, I also read a manual on how to operate a diesel train engine.”
“No shit?” he said with surprise.
The vice president turned, mischief gleaming in her eyes. “I’m kidding! But wouldn’t you just die if I could drive a train?”
“No. I’d believe it. You’re the real deal. Hell, if we were voting for president again, I’d vote against my party so you’d remain the VP.” He meant it. Her past political affiliation was the only blemish on what he viewed as a pretty solid woman, not that any of it mattered now.
“This was my uncle’s fishing boat. As I said, forty-footer, with an open floorplan so you can hold rods over the side. For all their Washington, D.C. insider bull crap, my extended family never strayed far from the water.”
“Except for your parents,” he replied. She’d told him about her mom and dad operating a flying school somewhere in Montana.
“They fly in retirement. Back in the day, they were here on the East Coast, too. They opened more than a few doors for me.”
He didn’t want to imagine the political maneuverings necessary to get a son or daughter into the right schools, the right internships, and so forth, on the way to elected office. Navigating politics was frustrating enough in the Air Force. It included long stints of boring duty stations on the way to the next level up. His first four years involved lots of foosball playing and goofing around, but little upward movement. Once he left the poor leadership he’d found in Tallahassee, he’d begun to weave his way through the officer ranks.
Emily piloted the boat over a large wave, causing it to crash back down with a satisfying smack. “Wahoo!” she howled with infectious glee.
Ted spent the next couple of minutes outside of his war mentality. For that brief time, he enjoyed the spray of the water shooting up on both sides as the yacht cut through the water. He glanced back at the churn created by the roaring engines. But most of all, he liked being next to the commanding woman behind the wheel.
He wondered if the boat under his feet would be enough to get them up the East Coast, over to Greenland, then to Iceland and Great Britain. It was a route he’d flown many times, and the distance between landmasses didn’t seem too far. If they could collect Kyla, that was their way back to friendlies.
“Ted, I’m getting something on the radar.” She tapped one of her long fingernails on a video monitor inset into the dashboard. The readout was similar to his in-flight collision-avoidance system, but not as sophisticated or detailed. Instead of having blips for each plane in the air, there was only enough information to see the land and islands in their line of sight.
“What’s the range on this thing?”
“Not sure. About fifty miles, I think.”
The point on the screen moved slowly from north to south, as if it was a boat shadowing theirs. However, the color was all wrong.
“The radar tracks birds,” she said matter-of-factly, “because birds lead to schools of fish. However, flocks of birds don’t move that fast.”
That explained the color. It was moving and in the air.
“We’ve got to get to shore right now.” They were already headed back to Long Island, but they were supposed to go to the easternmost end to meet Kyla at the lighthouse. Instead, he directed her to go toward the beach at the nearest point. “We’ll keep the boat near the shoreline and throw out an anchor. It will hide us from the snooping aircraft until we’re ready to escape for good.”
She changed course. They weren’t more than a mile from the pristine sand of the beach. The tall lighthouse peeked above the trees to their left a couple of miles away.
“Do you think it sees us?” Ted asked with
uncertainty, not sure what to make of the unfamiliar radar system.
As she drove them in, the dot on the screen stayed true to its flight path. Emily backed off the engines as they got within a hundred yards from shore. She’d found a tiny inlet, barely big enough for the boat to fit. Beyond it, there was a surprisingly large lake; it was perhaps two hundred yards from one shore to the other and surrounded by forest on all sides except the beach access point.
“Nice and easy,” she said, obviously talking to the boat.
After the yacht cruised through the inlet, Emily let out a breath she’d been holding. “My uncle would kill me if he saw me doing this. He once paid eight thousand bucks to repair a propeller after striking a rock in the shallows. This cruiser is meant for deep water, not little lakes like this.”
“Well, I’m not complaining.” He motioned toward a nearby stand of trees at the lakeshore. As they got away from the beach along the ocean, it became rocky and less uniform on the banks of the lake. Some of the trees hung over the water, giving them the cover they’d been seeking.
“It’s still coming,” she warned.
The dot traveled across the screen, and Ted thought of his Air Force training. Even a weak radar system like this one was broadcasting a signal into the air. That signal could be intercepted and triangulated. “Shit, turn it off. Power everything off!”
Without waiting for an explanation, Emily flicked off the monitor, then hit more switches to shut down the bilge pumps and other accessories.
“Can I drop anchor?” she wondered.
“Do we need it?” he asked quietly.
“If we don’t secure ourselves, we might float into the middle of the lake, or against those rocks.”
He guessed the blip was still a mile or two out, based on where it was when she turned off the radar. It was a risk to operate machinery, but a necessary one.
“Do it,” he said, not so sure of himself.
She powered some of the equipment, flicked another toggle, and they listened as the anchor slid out from a port near the front. It didn’t take long for it to hit bottom, given they were in a shallow lake.
Minus America (Book 3): Rebel Cause Page 2