Uncle Ted popped into her life today for a reason. He said he called because of her mom, that crazy, wonderful mother of hers.
“Mom wouldn’t let a man die like this,” she reasoned. “Neither would my uncle.”
Kyla’s adrenaline surged as she realized what she was about to do.
Joint Base Andrews, MD
Ted was already on the flight deck, so he stuck around to observe the landing at Andrews. On a normal day, the airport would be busy with military transports and helicopters, and he was alert for any sign of normal activity, but there wasn’t a single thing moving.
He wasn’t on the internal comms with the flight crew, so he couldn’t hear what they or the tower said on the radio.
“Please let it end when we touch down,” he thought, knowing it probably wouldn’t. The longer Air Force Two went without fighter support, the more he was certain this wasn’t a random missile attack. If the Air Force got wind of danger, they would have sent up a full squadron of fighter jets to protect the VP. Top of the line airframes, too, F-22 Raptors, no doubt.
But there was nothing out there.
He tried Kyla again as the plane dropped to about a thousand feet. If he could get word from her that she was all right, he could focus on his mission. It wasn’t like being overseas where he had no idea what was going on back home. Now he was fighting for his home; Kyla was a part of it.
The network symbol said he had no service, so he pocketed it and watched outside.
The two long runways at Andrews were joined by a wide grassy infield. Huge domed hangars flanked the landing strips on both sides, though more were on the western edge, which was to his left as they approached.
No emergency services vehicles.
None of the black fleet of Secret Service trucks.
No airport personnel hustling along the fringes.
And beyond the airport, there were no cars on the move. Highway 4 and the Beltway should have been crawling with traffic.
There were vehicles on the road, but they weren’t moving.
Five hundred feet.
They passed over the golf course like they always did, but today, there were no carts crawling along the grassy fairways. None of the usual bright-colored outfits on golfers. They were low enough now to see individual people.
It was mid-morning, in June, near a military base. There should have been someone down there.
The pilot and co-pilot worked the controls as they neared touchdown.
Ted found one of the jump-seats normally reserved for the stewards and strapped in for the last leg. He relaxed as the rear wheels barked. A second or two later, the front tires gently nudged the earth, and then the plane began to rattle. The engine brakes spun up, making it sound like the pilot was trying to take off again, but the deceleration indicated exactly the opposite.
The pilot pulled back his headphones.
“Tell her we’re down. We’ll be at the gate in two minutes. I’ve got no tower clearance, but there’s nothing else in the air for five hundred miles. We’ll be fine.”
The co-pilot began talking on the internal comms.
Once they got close to the presidential hangar, the pilot turned to Ted and gave him a little nod. “Good job keeping the veep alive. I’d hate to come home short by one man.”
“Thank you for pushing the stick today,” Ted replied. “You saved us all.”
The pilot gave him a steady look, then turned back to his controls. “Let’s hope they open the garage doors for us.”
Ahead, the presidential hangar door remained closed.
Amarillo, TX
Brent spent several minutes standing in the hallway where his fellow guards had disappeared. On some level, he felt remorse for the prisoners too, but they came and went, so he didn’t know them as well. The men and women in the corrections department were like brothers and sisters.
He snapped out of it when he noticed the pile of clothes belonging to Toby Greer. He recognized the man’s black baton; it had white dots to signify how many times he’d had to crack skulls with it. They were supposed to be like kill marks on a fighter plane, which was something he’d brought back from his service in Vietnam.
Brent had been there, too, and that shared military experience kept them close.
Now his bud was a pile of laundry on the dirty floor.
“Brent?”
He almost coded out on the spot, though the woman’s voice was soft and curious.
“Yes?” he stammered.
“Sorry,” Trish said sheepishly. She’d come up behind him. “I had to see this for myself. You were right. They’re all gone.”
“It wasn’t an escape,” he replied in his business voice. “Unless everyone stripped down before they left.”
She chuckled. “Not fucking likely, is it?”
“No. But what is likely, here? What could have caused this?” He looked around, expecting a chemical truck or army tank to be sticking through one of the cells. Anything that would account for this crazy situation.
“We tried calling Central Texas Supermax, but they didn’t answer. State police isn’t picking up, either. Same with local Amarillo.”
He turned to face the pretty young woman. She appeared scared, which was saying something for her. She’d done years in an environment many men couldn’t handle.
“Trish, give me a headcount of those who are left downstairs. I’m going to go outside, just to be sure they aren’t out in the yard having a good laugh.”
She shook her head. “We checked the cameras. No one is out there. But please, get a visual confirmation. Maybe the cameras are wacky.”
They separated for their own destinations, but as soon as he went through the security doors and saw into the grassy yard and sports area, he spotted more piles of clothes.
“Some of them were out here when it happened.”
No one walked across the parking lot, and no cars came in or out of the visitors’ gate. That wasn’t wholly unusual given the early hour and how far they were from the nearest town, but it began to paint a picture for him. People were gone inside, in the yard, and on the streets.
The sky was normal, too. The sun appeared like it always did. All was as it should be, except the people.
“It’s not a joke,” he mumbled to himself.
He stumbled a little while backing up, then he ran inside.
“Trish!”
For a seventy-five-year-old man with fifty extra pounds, he ran the hallway like a world-class marathoner.
“Back up the camera tapes! Back them up!”
He was going to get to the bottom of it …
CHAPTER 9
Joint Base Andrews, MD
No one opened the doors to the hangar, and no support staff came to greet the plane. They sat on the tarmac for fifteen minutes while the VP conferred with Auger and the general. Eventually, she brought him in.
Vice President Williams gave it to him straight. “We need someone to check what the hell is keeping them.”
“I’ll do it,” Ted said without thinking.
The vice president studied his face. “Major MacInnis, are you sure?”
He studied the subtext and wondered if she preferred to keep him by her side, rather than have him go out of the plane to snoop around. If she did, it wasn’t something he could figure out by the emotionless tone of her voice.
“I’ll go with Captain Biddle. Frank is my assigned co-pilot for this flight. The two of us will get some damned answers, I assure you.”
David Auger sat up and leaned across the conference table. “Ma’am, I suggest two teams go out. The Air Force team and the Service team. Service will check on our people in the presidential hangar. They can go check out other facilities. We’ll cover more ground that way.”
Ted was uneasy about Mr. Auger, and his organization, but it wasn’t his place to disagree with the VP’s right-hand man. It would hamper his efforts to contact her friend Melvin, but what could he say? He watched Emily as she pu
rsed her lips in thought, knowing her job was a balancing act.
“That’s fine, David, as long as you stay here with me.”
The Service guy gave a curt nod.
Emily looked at Ted. “Whoever makes contact with the airport or security staff, the first thing I want you to do is raise the pilot and let us know you’re okay. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation to all this…”
Ted watched her facial expressions. If he had to guess, he’d say she doubted her own claim.
“I have a phone with all the numbers in it,” he assured her. It was protocol for Air Force Two pilots to have every contact number they might need during a flight. The assumption was if a tower went offline, they’d be able to call up the air traffic control supervisor directly. “But I’d like to add yours,” he said without thinking. “Uh, I mean someone in your office.”
She held out her hand and took his phone.
He hoped he’d have better luck with her number than with Kyla’s. Ted had tried to reach his niece a few times while waiting inside the plane, but her phone wouldn’t ring.
“Here’s my direct number,” she said in a businesslike tone. “Call me as soon as you find something, Major.”
Five minutes later, his foot hit the tarmac.
The modified jumbo had its own retractable stairway, so it didn’t depend on any airport to provide jetways and steps, but they decided it was too risky to lower it. Instead, he had to go to the lower level of the plane and hop out the bottom hatch.
The Secret Service guys insisted on going first, and they were already on the run across the tarmac toward Air Force Two’s usual hangar.
“Not much for team players, are they?” Frank Biddle was a middle-aged Air Force pilot, same as Ted. A lifer in the service, as they say. He was also supremely capable behind the stick, but today his assignment was to co-pilot for Ted, which made him a backup of a backup.
Ted shunted that line of thinking aside. He was no longer a scrub on Air Force Two. He now headed up an intelligence-gathering mission for the Vice President of the United States.
“You had to be there,” he deadpanned. “But one of their guys tried to pop the vice. I think they are looking to make up for that. Look at them run.”
“I heard about that. News gets around fast on a plane, you know?” Frank chuckled quietly, as if someone was watching them.
“I guess.” He pointed to a different hangar about a hundred and fifty yards away. “Let’s go check that place out. The main terminal is directly behind it.”
They both ran across the empty tarmac. Snipers would have a clear shot for a mile in all three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees around them. It felt like running across an open stage with a huge spotlight on him.
By the time he’d made it across, sweat seeped through his blue uniform under his arms.
“What do you say we come back in a limo?” Frank said suggestively.
“If you see one, I get to ride in back.” They both had a good laugh at that.
The side door to the giant aircraft hangar was open, as if people had been using it today. Ted got up next to the wall and waited for Frank. An orange flag blew by on the pavement, as if a flagman who was supposed to guide planes to the jetway had walked off the job.
When Frank got there, he pulled out the snub revolver.
“Hey, I didn’t get a sidearm.”
“This is Emily’s—the veep’s,” he corrected.
“Sharing guns? Wow, that’s supposed to come after the seventh date, not before the first.”
“Shut it,” Ted snapped. “It doesn’t mean anything like that.”
Not to him, anyway.
Ted looked inside the hangar, fully expecting to see someone. There was a government 737 parked under the roof, with a stairway up to its open door, but no people were in sight.
“Damn,” Ted said as he waved Frank to look inside. “Someone has to be here. This is a fucking airport.”
“Slow day, you think?”
Ted gestured toward the main terminal. Even from a hundred yards away, he should have seen people standing at the plate glass windows along the front. Every hour of every day he’d flown out of Andrews, there was someone watching out those windows.
“If we don’t find anyone there, I’ll eat my cap.” Ted put his hand on his pilot’s hat to make his point.
“I hope you’re hungry,” Frank said sarcastically, “because I’ve got a bad feeling about what we’ll find.”
They ran across the next stretch of open concrete. Ted looked as far as he could over the airfield grounds, but no limos or normal vehicles were in sight. He did note a food truck parked next to an executive jet. Probably belonged to a general, or a typical congress-critter.
He diverted over to it on a hunch.
When he and Frank arrived, his hunch was proven correct: the food truck wouldn’t be out on the tarmac unless it was making a delivery.
“It’s still running.” Ted trotted up to the open driver’s window. The front seat had some clothes draped over it, but the driver wasn’t there.
“Come on, let’s take this truck. Some four-star won’t get his lunch, but I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Frank trotted slowly around the front bumper. “If it means I don’t have to run anymore, I’ll steal the president’s lunch.”
Ted opened the door and shoved the disheveled uniform onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. The owner would have to chase the truck to get them back.
He laughed as he put his foot on the brake. Some dude would have a lot of ground to cover as he ran naked across the wide airfield taxiway.
“Now we have wheels. Let’s get this over with and beat those Secret Service guys at their own game. I want to be the one to give the vice president some good news.”
“Let’s roll out,” Frank agreed.
There were still no people in those windows…
Bonne Terre, MO
“What are we going to do?” Peter asked the instant they were back at the SCUBA dock. He fiddled with his chem light, which hung from his belt.
Tabby struggled to catch her breath. They’d been fast-walking back and forth in the mine, and it had caught up to her. But that wasn’t even a minor issue. After seeing the spreading chemical fire, she decided to break out the big guns. She reluctantly pulled out her phone and turned it on, causing the kids to act like she’d saved their lives.
“I need to call my mom,” Audrey said as if to be first to claim it.
Donovan was quick to pile on. “And my momma will want to know where I am. I was supposed to text her when we were back on the bus. We’ll get back to the bus, won’t we?”
“No,” Peter droned.
“Yes,” Tabby said at almost the same time. After a pause, she repeated herself. “Yes, you will definitely get back on your bus. I promise.”
She tapped on her phone to check for a signal, but she’d never gotten service in the mine before, and today was no exception.
“I know your phones were taken, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We have about a hundred feet of solid rock above us. Dad talked about getting a repeater, or whatever he called it, so we would have a cell signal down here, but he never got around to it. I think he liked visitors to take a step back from their technology while they were here. It forced them to pay attention.”
She thought back to Peter’s cringy flirting on their tour. He was paying attention all right. To her.
She clenched her jaw, which was a nervous tick she’d long tried to kick. Fortunately, because it was so dark in the cavern, none of the younger kids saw it.
“All we have to do is hang out down on this level until the fire is out.” She tried to be convincing but didn’t do a very good job of it. The excitement of the last half-hour had taken an emotional toll on her. She hated being in charge of these kids. It should have been her on the first elevator up, not part-time Peggy—the other girl Mom and Dad hired to work the mine tours.
She took a seat on one of
the wooden benches. On a busy day, it would have been soaked from SCUBA divers who sat there after they came out of the water, but it was bone dry.
Audrey shined her light across the lake. The beam reflected off the surface and hit one of the giant rock pillars, but it went no further. The illusion was that the lake went off to the nighttime horizon.
“Will we burn to death?” Donovan practically whispered it.
“What? Why would you say that?” Tabby couldn’t predict what would come out of the kids’ mouths, but she never expected such nonsense. “We are next to a giant underground lake, under a sopping wet rock ceiling, next to a stone walkway. The only thing flammable is this bench and a few wooden boards on this dock.”
“But it could burn, couldn’t it?” he pressed.
Peter groaned. “Of course not, genius. If it did, we could splash lake water on it.”
“If a fire came through here, we’d get on a boat and go deeper into the mine. Unless fire can walk on water, we’d be more than safe from it. Nothing could get us there.”
Audrey shined her light in Tabby’s face. “Should we go on a boat right now? It might help keep us safe, you know?”
Tabby took a deep breath, noting for a moment how she could smell the coppery metal odor from the burning liquid on the upper level. Her intention was to fully catch her breath so she could answer in a reasonable manner.
“Guys, whatever is going on up there, I promise you we can survive it down here. We have lights. Water. A little food. There is literally nothing you have to worry—”
She smelled it again. The odor was now stronger.
The others must have noticed her hesitation, because they all craned their necks like a bunch of prairie dogs testing the air for hawks.
“You said that word ‘literally’ again,” Peter said with forced humor.
Tabby replied like she was in a dream. “Yeah … I did.”
This time, she took in more of the stench, and her head immediately flared with pain, like she’d been gifted a migraine headache from a giant.
“Gross!” Peter pinched his nose. “Someone took an aggressive dump!”
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