Axel stayed with the plane as it was refueled. Blake remained in the crate. Keena and I asked around about my sister, but no one admitted to seeing her—or even knowing anything about her being on board—and the people who’d been awake for the earlier shift were all in bed. Apparently Baker had only left two of his men behind to guard the ship and—even more strangely—they were both sleeping in a locked cell when we arrived. I offered to let them out, but they declined. To quote the great comedian Will Ferrell, it was “mind bottling.”
We found a doctor cleaning up a deceased boy at the infirmary down the hall, and the doctor was a little more forthcoming. He told us Captain Baker had killed this boy—his own son—for protecting a girl and an African man. Has to be Hayley and Lazzo. The boy appeared to be in his late teens. Hold on … Baker shot his own son?
The doctor then showed us Brock—in a body bag—and explained he’d been shot through the throat with an arrow. So she found a bow? But hang on, if Hayley can fight, why is she still going along with this? I asked the doctor if the girl with the black man had been a prisoner. His bewildered look answered my question. She wasn’t? What the heck? Not only was she not acting like Lazzo’s prisoner, but the captain’s daughter had freed Hayley and Lazzo after they’d been captured and hid them. That’s when her brother had been killed by her father. The captain’s daughter was still working with Hayley and Lazzo. They had locked two of Baker’s SEALs in a cell and left on another plane—slightly before 9:00 p.m. Just when I thought it couldn’t get crazier! And now we’re a full six hours behind them.
Unable to get any useful information from anyone else who was up, we headed to the tower to check on the progress of the planes that had left. They had at least made it to the coast—all three planes—before they exceeded the scope of the USS Washington’s radar. Keena and I noted the line they’d traveled and hurried back to the plane, setting our course for the same path. We didn’t waste any more time on the carrier and took off after the other planes—now six and a half hours behind.
About an hour off the western shoreline—halfway between LA and San Francisco—we hit a major thunder and lightning storm. Initially we thought it would serve as a blessing in disguise, allowing us to pass through unnoticed. But then the lightning began wreaking so much havoc with the controls of the plane that our screens were little more than constant fuzz. We didn’t pick up the small Coast Guard cutter on the screen, but we did catch the surface-to-air missiles they fired at us just in time. I heard Keena yell out “SAMs” seconds before Axel swerved and put us in a rapid climb. The first set of missiles exploded harmlessly off the wings.
“Danny, we have too much weight on this plane.” Axel was furiously flipping switches and turning dials.
He was right. The plane was loaded. It had four jeeps on it—who knows why?—and tons of crates full of who knows what. Kate and Axel had possibly picked the worst plane in Hawaii to hide Blake on, and now we were stuck with it for this. I had considered unloading it—when Keena and I had arrived—and now I definitely wish we had. Stupid!
I stood up to unfasten the jeeps and hollered at Axel, “Open the cargo door.”
“Danny we’re too high for that. It will dump everything. Everything.”
I knew he meant Blake too. “We don’t have a choice!” I yelled. The door slowly began to open. I hurriedly anchored myself to a wall with a thick black rope.
“Danny, you’ve got to do it fast.”
I almost had them all unfastened. “Got it, Axel.”
“Danny, we have a bigger problem. There’s a bigger boat moving toward us. We’ll never get high enough to get out of its range.”
I ran to the front of the plane and looked at the screen. If that was a former US Navy ship, it was probably loaded. We’d be dead ducks. Shit. I stuck my face in the cabin camera which I assumed was how they were monitoring us. “Do not write us off,” I shouted into it. “You hear me, do not write us off. We’re still in this.” Then I turned to Axel, handing him and Keena each a parachute pack. “Put us in the steepest possible climb right now. When everything falls out of the plane, level off, line us up with Sacramento, and power everything down. Everything.” He knew I meant the cameras. I needed to save Blake.
“Danny, that could kill the engines. This plane isn’t built for that.”
“I know. Let the engines die, then level us out. If we lose panel power, so be it. We gotta try to make it.”
Keena knew what I was saying. Kill the camera feed as soon as it would be believable. “Roger,” she said.
Axel looked at me then her. “Ditto that.”
“And guys.” I clapped both of them on the back. “If we get split up somehow, you’ve got until midnight Sunday to make it to that island in the middle of the Pringtime Reservoir. We’ll move on to the exchange coordinates from there. Do not go directly to Knight’s Peak. Okay? Anyone not at the Res by then we treat as dead. Got it?”
They both nodded, and I ran back to the crates as Axel cranked the nose of the plane sharply up. I pulled inflatable rafts and parachutes off the wall and threw them on the floor between Blake’s crate and the open door. The jeeps were rolling out the back, crates sliding behind them. I pretended to fall against Blake’s crate—assuming I was still on camera—exaggerating the vacuum pull of the open cargo door. I used that fall—and a drawn out fight to stand back up—to hook two of the cords used to hold the rafts in place to the bottom of Blake’s crate. Now he was anchored solidly to the airplane wall.
I then quickly slid the top off of Blake’s crate and dropped a stack of chutes into it. I detached several small diving tanks from the wall, dropped one in Blake’s crate, and held onto another one for myself. I quickly threw on my parachute pack and grabbed a bag full of diving gear with my free hand. Here goes nothing. I set a bag with a raft in it on top of his crate, and as the plane climbed to nearly vertical, the remainder of the cargo emptied out of the plane. The plane went dark—electrical system nearly in total failure—as we passed a seventy-five degree angle. Axel used the last burst of power to begin leveling out the plane.
“Danny.” Keena’s voice was panicked. “They’ve got missile lock on us.”
“Make sure that power goes off now. Shut it down completely and get out!”
Axel shut it all down as Keena yelled again. “Four missiles just launched. We’ve got about ten seconds.”
“Let’s go.” I grabbed Blake and yanked him up. He quickly slipped into his chute straps as we launched ourselves out into the pelting rain. With no helmets or facemasks, the water tore at our face and skin. It felt like getting sprayed by rocks from the side of a lawn mower. I couldn’t open my eyes and look back, relegated to merely hoping Keena and Axel were falling behind us.
There was a huge explosion above us, and shrapnel flew past in every direction. Our safe haven had disintegrated into a billion tiny pieces of fire. The heat from the blast and burning gas was almost unbearable for several seconds before we finally were far enough away. I was praying my chute wouldn’t catch fire as I felt something tear into my arm, and something else hit me hard in the back, knocking the wind out of me. I did my best to avoid the debris falling around us and in doing so missed the pull zone for my chute by a couple hundred feet. As a result, I hit the water much harder than I should have. The force of that impact stunned me, and I found myself unable to move as the waves washed over me and the ocean clutched me tightly, pulling me down.
Blake landed near me though and easily found my chute—still spread out on the surface. He reeled in the chute fabric and rope as quickly as he could, and Keena swam over to help him. I shook off the impact as I approached the surface and broke through, gasping for air. The storm had riled up the water, waves towering above us, and the sky was nearly pitch-black. They couldn’t have seen us fall. Stay calm. Calm down. Pull it together, NOW.
Once Blake was convinced I was going to be okay, he asked Keena, “Where’s Axel?”
“I don’t know.”
>
“Did he make it out?”
“I don’t know … he wasn’t with me.”
“Guys.” I grabbed onto Blake. “The boats…” I pointed at them beyond us. The Coast Guard cutter was weaving through the path of debris we’d launched out of the back of the plane. The Navy ship, which turned out to be a destroyer, was also heading our way. Logically, there were fifty to a hundred people on the cutter and another three to five hundred on the destroyer, and they’d all be looking for survivors. We had to make ourselves even more invisible. “We stay together.” I made sure they both heard me. “Get rid of anything light colored or reflective. We need to get away from the debris—away from the areas they’re searching. Follow me as fast as you can.”
“Danny, I don’t have—I lost my MK20,” Blake said, after I’d given the instructions. “I’ve still got the raft, but no gun.”
I’d lost my rifle too—a huge loss for a sniper. “Don’t worry about it,” I told him.
Keena was holding her MK20 and handed it to Blake. “You’re a better swimmer than me, Blake. And I’ve still got my nine. You’ve still got the book right Danny?”
My backpack was intact and strapped to me under my flight suit. I nodded. “Safe, sealed, and dry.”
We swam away from the debris and watched the boats conduct their search from a distance. There still was no sign of Axel. We were all fearing the worst.
You never know with him though. He once told Emily and Abbey that he was “undrownable”—that he was born with gills that had been temporarily covered up with skin. “They’re there if I need them,” he’d said. The girls—of course—laughed it off, but he swore his mother gave birth to him while surfing and hid him in the Great Barrier Reef until the swell had subsided. He always said he’d prove it someday. There’s no time like the present, Axel.
TWENTY-SEVEN – Left Axel (Danny)
---------- (Thursday. August 4, 2022.) ----------
Neither boat found us. We saw the cutter park by the destroyer for twenty minutes or so before it split off east. We expected the destroyer to turn back south but it continued north. Apparently, if the exploding plane hadn’t already done so, they were now absolutely convinced we were dead. And maybe Axel is.
Most of the flames from the burning cargo and fuel had been put out by the waves and rain. There was little left on the surface, and the one SEAL raft we did find was shredded—though not quite useless. We removed the small motors from the SEAL raft to propel the inflatable Zodiac Blake had strapped to him. It wasn’t going to get us far fast, but we knew we were only a hundred miles or so off the coast, and the raft—at any speed—was certainly better than swimming.
We never found Axel. No gunshots were fired from the ships anywhere near us, so we didn’t think they had either. I plugged my dog tag tracker into my tablet, but there was no activity near us. Blake didn’t have his so he didn’t show up on the screen. I’d instructed Kate to take it from him back at the Hexagon after our “fight.” I told Keena to let hers sink to the bottom of the ocean. Past a hundred feet deep they didn’t work, so she wasn’t visible either. I kept mine, so the mole would know I was still here—still going. The captors wanted me to make it to Colorado. They wouldn’t have been involved with these ships, so I wasn’t worried about them—or the mole, more likely—calling in our position. If they thought everyone else with me was dead, that was probably for the best.
The hope for Axel—of course—was that he’d had similar luck to ours, that he’d found something to keep himself afloat and would somehow be able to make his way to shore. Hopefully he’d be waiting for us at the base of Pikes Peak—at the Pringtime Reservoir. It was unlikely, but Axel was resilient. Who knows?
“Danny.” Keena tapped my arm. “Why would they shoot us down if they know it’s us? Don’t they want you to get to Colorado?”
I nodded. “Yes and no. I don’t think everyone is on the same page in this plan. I think whoever is orchestrating this is trying to keep it from the other leaders. The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing, if that makes any sense.”
That selfish secrecy was our primary advantage. Baker and his planes might have caught the attention of the patrol ships, and they’d have spread the alert to the other regions to watch for those planes. But with us, they knew they’d shot us down. No one would be looking for us. And whoever was waiting for us in Colorado didn’t want anyone else to know we were coming either. They just wanted to know where we were. My dog tag would be monitored by the mole—I was counting on that. That was keeping Reagan and the girls alive.
The heavy rain and insanely high waves made progress toward shore difficult—and it was still so dark I needed a flashlight to read the compass on my pack. On the one hand, we were grateful for the stormy seas. The other ships probably didn’t like being out here in this crap either—most likely the reason they didn’t conduct a more thorough search. On the other hand, we were alone out here—screwed if this raft didn’t hold out—potentially dead in the water. Even after taking the gas and small motor from the other raft, we didn’t know if we had enough to get to shore. We were riding the waves as much as possible—cutting our engine like NASCAR drivers on caution laps—milking every last drop of fuel.
Fortunately, we had just enough. According to my watch—which read 7:40 p.m.—it took us exactly twelve hours to get to shore. We sank the Zodiac about a quarter-mile offshore and bodysurfed the rest of the way in. The rain never stopped—never even paused—until we reached shore. Then all of a sudden the storm dissipated, and the huge waves we’d barely escaped now looked like relative ripples. Go figure.
As dark as it had been all day, it was actually getting lighter as night fell. We weren’t about to complain. Climbing the cliffs, we walked past a splintered wooden sign that read “Mavericks.” We were just south of San Francisco. Crap. We were way farther north than we’d intended to be. What the hell were those ships doing way up here? The Qi Jia base in Los Angeles had to have seen the rescue planes pass and sent patrols up this direction—hopefully just on the water. Based on our most recent intel report, there shouldn’t have been any military in California north of LA.
Keena pulled a map out of her backpack and clicked on her penlight. “Danny, we’ve got to cut through Yosemite from here. We can’t come up from the south anymore.”
I nodded. “Anything wrong with that?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of like a funnel through there—one way, nowhere to hide. But there shouldn’t be anyone up here, right? I mean, they’re not looking for us, right?”
“Don’t think so. Yosemite makes sense. I’m good with that. Blake, you think they still keep all those special ATVs in the lot at Area 51?”
“Back home?”
“No. Fifty-one, not fifty-two. In Nevada.”
“Ah ... Yeah. The DPV’s or the Batmobiles?
“Desert Patrol Vehicles would be great. There’s only three of us.”
“Yeah. Of course, man. They keep everything there. Anything high-tech you can imagine.”
“Hope so.” I looked at the map carefully. “Coming in from this angle is going to change everything. It’s a lot less direct.” I traced my finger from where we were through Yosemite to Creech Air Force Base, to Cedar City and along I-70 to Breckenridge, south on 9, north on 11, and finally east to the Pringtime Reservoir. This would be so much easier with a plane.
“We’ve gotta find a car first,” Keena said.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Blake answered. “If anyone was out here surfing during the chemical attacks, their cars would still be here.”
He was right. Surfers would not have been a priority of Qi Jia’s demolition crews.
The lot was indeed full of cars, but it took hotwiring a dozen before we found one with a battery that still had juice. “What surfer drives a Dodge Charger?” Blake asked.
“Hey, don’t complain.” Keena shoved him playfully. “It has gas in it, and it isn’t a Prius.”
; “A Prius would’ve started on the first try.”
“Hey, both of you.” I shook my head in mock disgust. “Did you seriously compare a Charger to a Prius?” The idea of the three of us packed into a small Toyota was rather amusing. I’ll definitely take the Charger. We loaded up our gear and headed east, rounding up enough gas from a couple stations to fill our tank and head for Yosemite. The entire Bay Area was dark and abandoned. We didn’t see a single light. I’d forgotten how eerie it felt to be here. Several sets of chills coursed through my body as I thought about it. This really happened. It still was so impossible to believe.
And then my mind drifted off to Hayley. Where are you now? Please tell me you’re still alive. God, please keep her safe. The fact that she clearly wasn’t fighting against Lazzo was still eating at me, but there had to be a good reason for it. I had to get to her. I’m coming, Hayley. I’m coming.
ACT II
TWENTY-EIGHT – Long Hungry Gulch (Hayley)
Three Days Later
---------- (Sunday, August 7, 2022.) ----------
Central Colorado
We had followed Baker’s two planes across the country undetected—far as we could tell—until we flew over Grand Junction. I should say until they flew over Grand Junction. Lazzo, didn’t take us anywhere near it. Baker knew there was a military base there. Danny had marked them all on the map for him. I had no idea what made him pass so close to it. But on the radar screen the two dots we were following became one after Grand Junction. Evidently we’d lost one of the planes. And the element of surprise. Whoever saw the one probably saw the other. And if that plane had been shot down, Qi Jia would be scrambling troops to go investigate. That had been Thursday afternoon. They probably found the downed plane Friday morning, and by yesterday I was sure they had an entire army out looking for us—or them. Awesome.
Redemption Page 17