Frank did very much as he was told as the Land Rover’s over-revved engine roared and they hurtled forwards. But in no time, the black Town Car was closing in on them fast. As the cross streets flickered by, they saw that the gray Crown Victoria was now racing along on a road parallel to their own as well. This was beginning to feel familiar.
Frank’s father swore, and then he grabbed his son by the arm. “Here – drive.”
“What!!?” Frank screamed, as he grabbed the wheel and jabbed at the gas pedal with his left foot. But his father was already half out of the car, standing on the driver’s seat and craning his head around several feet above the roof of the cab. Frank clenched the wheel with both hands, trying to keep the car from swerving as he perched half way between the driver and passenger seats.
“Got it,” his father said as he slid back into the driver’s seat, pushing Frank out of the way. Just before he reached the next intersection, his father slammed on the brakes and cornered onto the cross street on two wheels, fishtailing madly in the process.
“Where are we going now?” Frank asked, eye’s wide as he looked back over his shoulder to see how long it would take the Town Car to follow.
“Generally or specifically?” his father asked, hunched over the wheel. Frank could already see the Town Car closing in on them once again.
“How about specifically?”
“No clue.”
“Okay, okay – generally then?
“Not too sure on that one, either, but I’ll know it when we get there. For starters, it’s some woods I saw over this way. Town Cars and Crown Vics don’t get along with woods too well, but this Land Rover’s pretty friendly with them.”
Frank turned to look behind again, and saw the head and shoulders of someone sticking up through the sun roof of the Town Car. To his horror, he realized the agent was aiming a gun at the Land Rover.
Frank whipped around. “They’re about to start shooting at us!”
He was relieved to see trees now, rising straight ahead above the weeds and cornstalks. But the black Town Car was only a few car lengths behind.
Swooping around a curve, Frank braced himself for what he assumed would be another sharp turn onto a road paralleling the tree line – assuming there was one there, instead of a cul-de-sac. And then he saw it – the gray Crown Victoria, stopped broadside dead ahead, blocking their path. An FBI agent stood at either end, handgun drawn and aimed in their direction.
“Duck!” his father yelled, simultaneously throwing himself down and to the right while throwing the wheel in the same direction. Frank heard the zing of bullets clipping the rear of the car as they hurtled off the road and once again into the weeds.
Corncobs and weed stalks flew in every direction as his father struggled with the wheel. But from behind came the highly satisfying sounds of rending metal as Town Car and Crown Victoria briefly became one, and then dissolved into an impressive array of flying metal and glass, some of which began to fall down around them.
Breathing heavily, his father steered onto a road that did indeed run between the weeds and the woods. He drove more slowly now, and scanned the woods to the side. Only this time he didn’t look pleased with the dramatic escape he’d just pulled off.
“We’ve got to get out of here. Even if there aren’t any more cars on our tail right now, they’ll probably have a helicopter on the way when one of those guys radios in.”
A few minutes later, Frank., Sr. saw what he was looking for – a small, shallow stream running in a culvert under the road. He slowed to a crawl when he reached it, and gingerly turned the vehicle off the road and into the stream. Putting the car in neutral, he jumped out and dragged a large branch a few times over the grass where they had turned off the road until their tire tracks had largely disappeared.
“Hopefully they won’t notice we left the road here.” He climbed back in and began guiding the Rover down the gently flowing stream, working it over the rocks and branches that littered the stream bed. After a few hundred yards, a grassy woods road approached from the left and began running along the stream. His father turned up onto it, and they continued onward, more or less heading southeast.
With their windows rolled down and the sounds of birds in their ears, things had become eerily peaceful as they bumped their way slowly along. Overhead, the new leaves of spring largely blocked them from aerial view.
Frank was still tense, though. He couldn’t help himself from looking back over his shoulder.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Well, that’s it for real roads for awhile. They know where they last saw us, so every cop in Maryland is going to be on the lookout for us. Why don’t you fire up your laptop and log onto Google Earth? We need to figure out where we are, and where we should head to next.”
Frank did so and zeroed in on their approximate location. “Where are we?”
His father glanced at his GPS and gave him the coordinates. “Isn’t there a long park that comes into D.C. from the north?” he asked.
“You mean Rock Creek?”
“That sounds right. Let me know where it goes.”
“Found it. The stream that runs through it empties into the Potomac just west of the White House.”
“Good. Now follow it back the other way. How far does it go?”
“It looks like the park links into a green corridor that winds generally north for miles – well beyond the Beltway.”
“That’ll do. Any chance this stream goes anywhere near it?”
Frank dragged the image around on his laptop, watching the coordinates change and comparing them to their position.
“Matter of fact, we’re less than half a mile away from the greenway now. Once we intersect, it will be woods and fields all the way into town. There should be enough fire lines, service roads, and park lanes to get us all the way there. We’ll have to cross a real road from time to time, but we shouldn’t have to travel on one.”
“Then the way is clear,” his father said. “Now hand me a beer – I’ve earned it.”
They continued on their winding way until they saw a bridge ahead where a secondary road crossed the stream. As they drew closer, they saw that open fields lay just past the bridge, stretching away to the north and south, bordered by trees on both sides.
Frank, Sr. drove the Land Rover under the bridge and stopped on a sandbank. “Nobody’s going to see us down here. Better wait for dark before we go any further.”
Frank got out of the vehicle and stretched gratefully. Then he noticed a young boy, maybe eleven years old, looking at them from beside the stream about thirty yards ahead. Frank nodded in the boy’s direction to his father as he got out of the driver’s seat.
His father studied on the situation for a moment, and then ambled over to the lad and smiled. “Howdy, son. Fish’n?”
The boy hesitated, and then said, “No, mister. Just hanging out and skip’n stones.”
Frank’s father nodded approvingly. The boy continued to stare. “How come you’re driving your car in the creek, mister?” the boy finally asked.
Frank, Sr.’s. face turned serious at the question. He pointed off over the boy’s head, and the boy turned to see that a full moon had just started to rise out of the trees. Puzzled, he turned back to Frank, Sr.
“Werewolves can’t stand water.”
The boy’s eyes grew round as the rising moon. Then he scampered over the bank of the stream and disappeared.
* * *
30
The Death Defying, Incredibly Exciting, Final Chapter!
“Marla, if the FBI has spotted him, we’ve got to get him someplace safe – maybe somewhere in West Virginia if he’s already back east. Where is he now?”
“I don’t know for sure. I just know he’s headed into town.”
“Into Washington? Is he out of his mind?”
“He figures D.C. is the last place the FBI will look for him – they won’t believe he could get past them.”
Washingto
n! If Frank carried that line of reasoning far enough, he’d probably head for his own apartment!
“Listen, Marla – tell him this. There’s a service entrance off 2nd Street behind the Library of Congress. Just inside there’s an unmarked door he’s probably never noticed before. That door leads to a bunkroom, kitchen, and workroom the CIA uses for classified test bed work on the LoC system. Our people put in week-long shifts there a couple of times a year so LoC staff don’t see them coming and going without a good explanation. I could meet Frank there and let him in without anyone noticing. He’d have the place to himself, and all the secret technical facilities, too, using my password. What more could he want?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
“So what do you think?” Frank asked his father.
“Well, the FBI knows what we both look like, so any time we’re anywhere in public someone could spot us and turn us in. We can’t rent a motel room without showing ID. Stands to reason they’ll be watching out for Marla as well, so we can’t ask her to book something for us. So that means we can’t hole up anywhere without risk.”
“And we can’t head back to the boonies, either, because this rig sticks out like a beach ball at a bowling alley. You can bet they’ll have an alert out to all the rental car companies, so no dice on a new set of wheels. We could hotwire a car, but stealing isn’t my style. Anyway, we could still get caught once the owner reported the car missing. And it goes without saying they’re not going to let you pull off that bus station trick a second time. Way I see it, we don’t have a whole lot of choices.”
Frank agreed. “I guess that’s it, then. I’ll let Marla know we’ll meet George tomorrow morning.”
“Tell her 7:30 – we’ll be less noticeable in rush hour traffic than we would be at the crack of dawn.”
Frank, Sr. stepped out from under the bridge to watch the moon as it rose while his son contacted Marla. Out of habit, he started to orient himself. The full moon had risen, of course, directly opposite where the sun had set. At this time of year, that would be about south-southwest, so he was looking north-northeast. If he was really good at this, he could likely determine his course more easily by the moon than he could with a compass, since he wouldn’t have to compensate for....
He turned and walked rapidly back under the bridge. “I think I’ve got it. Or at least the point about the numbers changing. You see, if you’re relying on compass readings instead of, say, star sights or a GPS to establish position, you have to compensate for the fact that magnetic north isn’t in the same place as true north. Unless the magnetic north pole happens to be exactly between you and true north, you’ve always got to add or subtract something to what your compass says to find true north.”
“So? I can see why that would matter if you were moving, because the amount you’d have to compensate would change, but like you said before, locations don’t move. Why would you have to change the numbers of the coordinates themselves?”
“You wouldn’t, at least not necessarily. But there’s another thing that changes, and that’s the location of the magnetic north pole itself – it’s wandering around all the time, maybe because there are currents that move around in the molten core of the earth. So if you were navigating by gyrocompass, you’d always need to know exactly where magnetic north was at that time or you couldn’t adjust for it.”
“So a database of coordinates you carried on board would grow more and more imprecise over time, unless you knew where north was?”
“Right. Unfortunately, you can’t predict the future movement of the magnetic north pole reliably, so you can’t build an adjustment into the database software, either. The next day, magnetic north might just decide to head off in a whole different direction, and instead of adjusting for error, you’d be compounding it.”
“But that still doesn’t make sense,” Frank objected. “You wouldn’t need a very powerful computer to change all of the coordinates on its own. All it would need would be the new location of magnetic north, and then the software could take it from there. I could write that routine in fifteen minutes.”
And indeed that seemed like a dead end once more.
“Hmm. Good point.” His father sounded disappointed. “Oh well, time to get moving anyway.”
They got back in the Land Rover. Soon, they were driving again, lights out, across the broad, moonlit meadows.
Frank, Sr. turned the radio on, and browsed around the channels. “Doesn’t your generation listen to any music that isn’t crap?”
“Uh, my generation doesn’t listen to this crap, either. Why don’t you try public radio?”
His father explored the left-hand of the dial, and found the right channel. But instead of the usual Saturday night fare – music or A Prairie Home Companion – two of the weekend news anchors were speaking about foreign affairs.
For those of you that may have just tuned in, that was White House Press Secretary Tom Falconer we were listening to, reading a brief statement about the rapidly escalating crisis with North Korea. Falconer is now leaving the West Wing Press Room, so it looks like there won’t be an opportunity to ask questions.
Thanks, Melinda. As we just heard, Acting President Henry Chaseman has placed U.S. troops in South Korea on the highest state of alert, following the statement by North Korea’s General Chan Bach Choy that any effort by the West to interfere with the North’s current military buildup will be met with a nuclear attack.
“Holy Shit!” Frank’s father exclaimed, turning the radio up.
The Press Secretary also announced that the U.S. is keeping all of its options open – including a nuclear response if the North attacks the U.S. Melinda, what do we know at this point about the two missiles we’ve been talking about all week?
Well, Brian, GNN reported an hour ago that it has obtained satellite photos that seem to indicate that North Korea has begun fueling them.
Thanks, Melinda. Let’s go now to retired Air Force General Brent Kingston. Can you hear me, General?
Yes, Brian. Good to be back on the show.
Thank you, it’s always great to have you here. Now can you tell us, General, about how long it would take the North to make these missiles operational once fueling has commenced?
Well, we know that the new Taepodong 3 missile is a combination solid fuel/liquid fuel launch vehicle, and we have a pretty accurate idea of its dimensions. While we can’t be sure of the exact fuel mixture they’re using, which affects the ratio of liquid oxygen to liquid propellant to some degree, we can make a pretty good guess – say ten to twelve hours.
So General – that would mean that these missiles could be launch-ready as early as tomorrow morning sometime?
That’s right, Brian.
Frank, Sr. whistled softly, and clicked off the radio.
“I wish to hell we’d whipped them for good when I was over there during the war. I’ve never liked this guy Chaseman, but I agree we’ve got to draw a line in the sand with them before it’s too late. The question, of course, is how?”
“Do you figure the North Koreans could really hit Washington?”
“I don’t know. It would be a great circle route over the Arctic, which makes it harder for me to visualize the distance. Why don’t you check your fancy new database and find out?”
Why not indeed? Frank opened the database he’d downloaded, and then the administrative page with the search function. He typed ‘Pyongyang’ into the ‘report’ function and saw a pair of coordinates display. Then he opened the drop down menu and typed ‘Washington, D.C.’ into the ‘distance from’ data field. When he clicked Enter, the display read:
0.0000
“So what did you find out?”
“That I must have done something wrong.” He repeated the sequence, and got the same result.
“I don’t understand. I’m getting an answer that can’t be right.”
“Well, what do the coordinates for Pyongyang say?”
Frank went
back a step and read them out:
38.902431N – 77.016553W
“The longitude anyway has got to be wrong” his father said. “Try punching that into my GPS and see what you get.”
Frank reached across and typed the numbers into the GPS unit, and then hit the Enter key.
Slowly the Land Rover drifted to a halt as father and son gazed at the map on the small screen of the GPS unit, and in particular at the location of the cursor that blinked on and off, on and off, on and off.
It was dead center on the dome of the Capitol Building.
* * *
“General Hayes, sir.”
Acting President Chaseman looked at his intercom, and then up at Ken Sanford, his Chief of Staff.
“What the hell does he want?”
“I expect he’s come to escort you to the War Room, sir. I understand it’s going to take close to half an hour before we arrive and get settled in, and things may start happening very quickly not long after that.”
“Why not the Secret Service?”
“In time of war, sir, the military assumes equal responsibility for the President’s safety.”
Chaseman was beginning to sweat profusely. The North Koreans had decided not to play the role that he had assigned to them. And the President was still unconscious, recovering from his quadruple bypass operation.
“Okay, show him in.”
Brigadier General Fletcher Hayes wasted no time. He began speaking respectfully but forcefully from the doorway to the Oval Office.
“Good morning, sir. I’ve come to escort you to the War Room. Would you please follow me?”
Chaseman and Sanford followed silently down the hall of the West Wing, and then down the stairs that led to the White House kitchen.
The Alexandria Project: A Tale of Treachery and Technology (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 1) Page 28