by Dana Fraser
“That was fucked up,” Sean growled as Thomas rounded the back of the rig.
Thomas returned the growl. “You called me over for a fucking lecture?”
Sean pointed at the trailer’s interior. Eight and a half feet wide and fifty-three feet long, more than half of it was shadows. But early morning sunlight bathed the first quarter of its length with a cold, impersonal glow.
More lambs, Thomas thought as he saw the figures huddled in separate cages that ran down each side.
Hearing Sean suck in a deep breath, he braced for the inevitable question.
“What do we do?”
Couldn’t it be someone else’s damned decision for once, he wondered.
“Colonel?” Sean asked as Thomas walked away to deal with Yardley’s corpse. “What do we do?”
“We get moving,” Thomas answered. “Put the girl and Becca in one of the cages.”
DESPERATE, maybe even a little manic, Thomas climbed into the driver’s seat. Sean sat next him, the M16 with its useless underbarrel grenade launcher in his lap. Isaac was in the trailer with Becca and the kids.
Thomas was certain his marriage was over. But it had probably been over before he even woke up that morning. The first death knell had sounded when the power went out and he hadn’t been there for Becca. She would never look at him again without terror in her eyes.
But he could live with that if she survived. If she healed in another man’s arms, he would be happy for her. And if she had Hannah and Ellis to help her heal, he would consider himself a blessed man despite losing her.
“You come up with a plan yet?” Sean asked, nervously rotating the rifle.
Forty minutes had passed since they had pulled away from the co-op. That was ten times the window he had been given to plan his approach on Yardley and almost four times the length of that plan’s execution.
There was gas enough to get them to Dover. But just rolling up on the city was too risky. Staying on the road had its own set of dangers. They had killed Yardley and torn out the GPS units attached to both the truck and the trailer. At best, if Yardley hadn’t been lying about the check in, they had two hours before a team or drone was sent to find the vehicle, starting with its GPS signal.
That gave him time enough to get to Dover, too. But he might have the devil’s minions on his tail.
“We need a place to stash the kids and Becca,” Thomas answered at last. “You and Isaac will stay with them while I dump the vehicle and head into Dover on foot.”
“I’d get there faster,” Sean argued.
Snorting, Thomas flicked a side eye in the kid’s direction. “You sure about that, Junior? You folded like a lawn chair when I punched you in the stomach. I don’t think you got the legs for it anymore.”
Thomas didn’t mean the words coming out of his mouth, but it felt good to say them anyway.
Catching the glare coming off Sean, Thomas waved his hand in a temporary truce. “Hannah left that message for her mom—one of the only people who could translate it. Neither my daughter nor my son know you or have any reason to trust you. If Hannah has any idea about Project Erebus, you think she’s going to believe you’re there because Becca sent you?”
Sean didn’t answer.
“We can’t walk those kids through the cold,” Thomas argued. “Half of them don’t even have shoes and none of them look like they’ve been fed much since all this started.”
Sean turned in his seat, a protest building behind the pressed lips. Thomas started to wave him off again when a massive tree fell across the road behind them, missing the back of the trailer by about twenty feet and blocking both lanes.
Returning both hands to the steering wheel, Thomas tried to keep one eye on the road ahead as he checked the side mirror.
“What the hell was that?” he asked as Sean craned his neck out the window. “Shouldn’t there have been some kind of cracking sound? It’s like it fucking fell out of the sky.”
Less than a thousand feet ahead of them, the phenomenon repeated.
“No, no, no!” Thomas shouted, his brain calculating brake lag on the truck and trailer as he fought the urge to jam his foot down on the brake pedal, potentially locking the wheels and jackknifing the entire rig.
A hundred feet passed in the blink of an eye, then a hundred more. The truck started to skid, wheels locking. Thomas eased up on the brake until he the wheels engaged then he reapplied pressure to the brakes.
Three hundred feet…they were coming up faster on the tree across the road than he had expected. It hadn’t fallen a thousand feet in front of them. Probably less than eight.
Four hundred feet…a Humvee appeared along the side of the road, its .50 cal pointed at the front of the truck.
Five hundred feet…the left side of the trailer got light, the back wheels starting to float above the road.
Five hundred fifty feet…Thomas felt it all ending. He had failed Becca, failed the kids—his own and those in the back of the trailer. He had failed Isaac and Sean and his country.
Six hundred feet…the truck came to a stop, bouncing Thomas and Sean forward in their seats. Men emerged on both sides of the road dressed in camouflage and carrying M16s.
Orders were shouted.
Hands up.
Get out!
Get on the ground.
Get on the ground you fucking maggots!
Someone jerked open the driver side door and threw Thomas onto his back. The barrel tip of an M16 pressed against his nose. Vision swimming, he looked up the length of the rifle to see a warrant officer in aviation body armor, the insignia along his sleeve marking him as serving in the nearby Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Flanking him on his right was an enlisted soldier with an Army Ranger patch.
Both men looked like they had spent the last forty days in the desert. They were gaunt but clean shaven. Their gear was clean and well maintained. They were still professionals, but they didn’t have the look of the men who had been pillaging the countryside, enslaving and killing helpless civilians.
Playing a hunch, Thomas pulled a half forgotten phrase from memory.
“When the impossible mission has been accomplished…”
He stopped, his gaze focusing in on his captor’s face. His heart slowed then stopped as he waited for a reaction.
With a slow blink, the man answered.
“The only reward is another mission that no one else will try.”
Thomas nodded, his skull scraping against the asphalt. He looked the warrant officer straight in the eye, holding the man’s gaze.
“Chief, I’m here to stop Project Erebus.”
The man tilted his head, squinting as if measuring Thomas for a coffin. He stepped back, the barrel no longer in Thomas’s face.
“Prove it.”
The challenge ricocheted inside Thomas’s head as he kept his hands in plain view and eased into a sitting position.
There were times, he thought, when there was no choice but to believe in providence—that some force beyond him was offering a protective, guiding hand.
“My name is Thomas Sand,” he started. “I’m a retired colonel. My wife is Dr. Rebecca Sand…”
Mentioning Becca released a wave of doubt. But, even if he was making a mistake in identifying himself, in trusting that these men were not part of Gavin’s, Becca would be sheltered.
“Project Erebus has had me on a kill list since the launch of Phase I,” he continued, his attention splintering between the man’s reaction to what he was saying and the swarm of activity around him as part of the warrant officer’s team checked the inside of the trailer and began to question Sean on the other side of the truck.
“Becca is on a retain list — she’s in the back of the trailer along with a bunch of kids we just saved from delivery to the Black Diamond location. She’s a mathematician—an important cog in the intelligence community’s brain trust.”
The warrant officer jerked his head in the direction of where Sean was being walked
with a gun at his back toward a waiting Humvee.
“Who is he?”
Momentarily struck by the philosophical nature of the question, Thomas shrugged. “A soldier who saved my wife when I wasn’t there. Beyond that, I don’t know. I can’t even get his last name out of him.”
Thomas shook his head. He needed to control the conversation as much as he could, needed to point them to the evidence that he wasn’t like Yardley, wasn’t some sick fuck delivering children as entertainment.
“Look, there are two books in the pack behind the driver’s seat,” Thomas urged. “One is Sun Tzu The Art of War, it is the key for the other book, a coded journal kept by one of the architects for Project Erebus.”
Another jerk of the warrant officer’s head sent the Ranger jogging over to the truck.
“Check for traps!” the warrant officer shouted before turning his attention back to Thomas. “How do you have it?”
“We were friends,” he answered. “Or I thought we were. I was caught in DC when the power went out, he lived near the airport. Bastard added me to the kill list himself.”
The Ranger returned with both books. The warrant officer thumbed through Gavin’s journal for a few seconds.
“Let’s cuff and gag him,” the Chief said. “Throw him in with the other. Leave the wife and the kids in the trailer and clear the road.”
“Where are you taking her?” Thomas growled as the ranger yanked him to his feet.
The warrant officer placed the gag on Thomas, his gaze dancing with suspicion.
“Somewhere she’ll be safe while I interrogate you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
BLINDFOLDED with his hands cuffed behind his back, Thomas was jerked from a Humvee he had been riding in for the better part of ninety minutes, the time measured with the steady count inside his head of one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus and so on, resetting whenever the vehicle changed direction. By the time he had greeted some thirty-eight hundred hippopotami, he realized the route was circling in on itself.
He was not ninety minutes from where he had started even if his captors had been driving him around that long.
Once he was out of the Humvee, two guards flanked him, each of them fisting part of his clothing so he couldn’t run off. Nearby, the rumble of a larger vehicle echoed, a deuce and a half from the sound of its heavy thrum.
“Keep walking,” one of the guards growled as he led Thomas over uneven ground.
The air around Thomas was slightly warmer than when he had been pulled from Yardley’s rig. But it had a certain damp chill that pricked his skin. It smelled wet, too, and there was a distinct flow of air that was more draft than breeze.
His senses told him he was in a cave. Kentucky had plenty of cave systems, so it made sense for the population to flee to them for safety when they were driven out of the cities. For the deeper caves, it wouldn’t get below freezing even in the dead of winter.
The guards led him up an incline, the ground definitely rough hewn and slippery. A couple dozen feet further, one of his escorts let go of his arm and Thomas heard the rub of heavy canvas as someone pulled back a tent flap. It was only a few more steps after that and the men shoved him onto a rickety folding chair.
“Remove the blindfold,” a familiar voice ordered.
Ignoring the two men flanking him and the two on the opposite side of the cheap card table Thomas had been placed in front of, he studied the tent. He glanced at the floor first, the time worn limestone reinforcing his impression of a cave.
The tent was a GP-medium, the sixteen by thirty-two space partitioned off in the middle by standing screens. The area on the other side of the screens was dark. Around the table were half a dozen battery operated lanterns. The flaps on the tent’s windows were down, no light peaking around their edges or along the ground despite the hour being close to noon.
Returning his gaze to center, he stared at the man sitting directly across from him.
It was the warrant officer from the hijacking and the source of the familiar voice. Behind him was the ranger. Both men had removed their protective gear, their uniforms no longer buried beneath body armor and camo-patterned ponchos.
A cup of coffee half empty rested in front of the warrant officer. Next to the cup were several items from Thomas’s pack arranged in small groups.
“You’re impatient,” he told the warrant officer as he read the man’s name tag over the pocket of the field jacket.
CW4 McFadden was hovering around forty, his pure blond hair shaved close to his tanned scalp. With his visored helmet removed, Thomas could see that the man possessed eyes the color of pale turquoise. At that moment, they were boring into Thomas with laser-like intensity.
“You wasted gas driving me around so I’d think we traveled further than we did,” Thomas lectured. “But you already shed most of your gear and helped yourself to coffee that’s all but cooled. Hell, looks like you were even cataloguing my supplies. Confiscating some of it, too, I’d bet.”
“You’re right,” McFadden smiled. “I intended to make you sit a while longer.”
“So what changed your mind?” Thomas knew McFadden thought this was an interrogation, but the warrant officer wasn’t going about it using any technique Thomas had ever encountered.
Of course, the man was probably flight crew, maybe a pilot. If he was “McFadden” and not just wearing some corpse’s uniform, then he was definitely a Night Stalker from the 160th Special Aviation Operations Division that ran out of Fort Campbell. If so, he likely hadn’t been trained in interrogation beyond how to withstand it for as long as possible if he was captured.
The same was likely true for the ranger standing behind him—one lethal looking Staff Sergeant Nunez.
Thomas glanced over the man’s muscular form. If this was six weeks of deprivation, he could only wonder what the tall Latino had looked like in peak physical condition.
Catching Thomas’ gaze on him, Nunez growled.
McFadden raised a cautionary hand.
“What changed is that I confirmed Dr. Sand’s identity.”
Thomas jiggled his hands as his breath steamed the air in front of him from an irritated snort. “So get these damn cuffs off me.”
Nunez smiled, the deep brown gaze twinkling like the small crystals flecking the cave’s floor.
“I said Dr. Sand’s identity.” McFadden gestured to Nunez, the ranger producing a tablet and placing it in front of Thomas on the table. “Her only listed associate is Dr. Hannah Carter, her daughter. No mention of a husband.”
Thomas’ stomach began to curdle. If McFadden was supposed to be one of the good guys, why did he have Becca’s information on a digitally accessed list of targets to retrieve and shelter list?
“Where did you get this?”
McFadden leaned back and folded his arms across is chest, his piercing blue gaze scanning Thomas left to right then top to bottom. His tongue pushed between his teeth, the tip flattening against his top lip as he processed his prisoner’s question.
Thomas knew the drill. He was deciding how much to tell and what lies e to feed his prisoner.
“That first week,” McFadden began with a hint of emotion coloring his tanned cheeks, “the Night Stalkers were tasked with extracting and transporting high value targets to secured locations. We were told that ISIL and other Muslim extremists, backed by Russia, were launching a multi-prong attack on the United States, including cyber attacks that took down the power grid.”
Remembering how some of Turkey’s military commanders had convinced six thousand troops that they were repelling invaders mere months ago, Thomas nodded.
“Communication was sporadic, but we didn’t need the news or HQ to tell us something else was going on.”
“Fucking brass,” Nunez growled.
McFadden nodded then continued. “When we heard the first ham operators talking about a government conspiracy, we thought it was nothing more than the n
ormal tinfoil brigade. But then we saw the contractors…”
McFadden closed his eyes. Thomas could imagine the scene playing in the man’s mind. Patch and his team had been contractors, so had half of the men Thomas had killed in Louisville. Along with the criminal elements that the planners of Project Erebus had cultivated, the hired guns were tasked with committing atrocities from the very beginning.
“So we deserted,” Nunez filled in, his spine stiffening and his eyes closing to thin slits that dared Thomas to say anything.
“Took me three weeks after wising up to get back to my family,” McFadden said. “We plowed through as many of the merc teams as we could on our way, taking their lives and their gear and picking up more deserters.”
“Building your own army,” Thomas said with a side glance at one of the extra guards.
The warrant officer nodded, the blue-green gaze darkening. “Along the way, we’ve managed to take back and hold about twenty-six hundred square miles.”
Thomas shrugged the accomplishment away. That was little more than fifty miles by fifty miles. Yet they had easily captured him. At the moment, that was all he needed to know about McFadden and his crew.
“You know Becca is Becca,” Thomas challenged. “The journal from my pack proves she isn’t part of the project. She can identify me. So you know I’m not part of the project.”
McFadden’s gaze narrowed, his nose tilting upward. “Our medic says someone really worked your ‘wife’ over—for weeks judging by the age of some of the cuts and bruises, Colonel.”
The warrant officer took his time rolling out the last word, each syllable a separate accusation.
“I was in Brussels when Phase I launched,” Thomas said, arms bunching and straining against the handcuffs.
“Brussels?” Nunez snorted. “Some kind of big shot, huh?”
Thomas didn’t take the bait. He stared at McFadden, his gaze telling the man to get to his fucking point.
“Dr. Sand is not a reliable source,” the warrant officer explained. “Captors can become gods to the prisoners they take.”