“Guess we’ll find out in six hours,” Miller said.
“If they don’t welcome you with open arms, you’ll be too low on gas to make it back, and there are no other places to land.”
“We will eject over target area,” Vesely said.
Miller couldn’t help but smile. He appreciated the man’s spirit, and he’d just taken the words out of his mouth.
“You do know it’s winter in Antarctica? It’s going to be below freezing, windy as hell, and dark for most hours of the day. The odds are against you surviving.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” Brodeur said.
“The odds against you surviving are one hundred percent if we don’t go,” Miller said. “That’s not a threat. It’s a guarantee. The entire world is going to look like Miami in three days.”
“Then why aren’t we flying a battalion down there?” Brown asked.
“I’d rather fight with three people I trust,” Miller said, motioning to the others, “than an army that’s already tried to stab me in the back on more than one occasion.”
Brown stared at him for a moment, and then nodded. “Good luck, then.”
* * *
They were in the air twenty minutes later, speeding around the globe at Mach 1.8. The four F/A-18 Hornets flew high and fast, and carried no ordnance, to stretch fuel as far as possible. Each fighter jet carried one passenger and one pilot, and after Miller requested his unlikely band of heroes use the flight to catch up on some sleep, conversation between the planes had stopped. They all knew the next few steps in the master plan were up in the air. And speculating on what they might find in Antarctica, or worrying about the welcome they might receive on the George Washington, served no worthy purpose. So he’d ordered them to sleep.
He quickly fell into a deep REM sleep, and dreamed of Miami.
Pink corpses littered the streets.
Rainbow swirls of dust fell from the sky and clung to the buildings, like children’s glitter.
He could hear engines roaring in the distance, mixed with racial slurs.
Dread consumed him.
He ran, pursued by something unseen.
Pink sludge clung to his legs, slowing his flight.
“Lincoln,” a voice said.
He turned toward it. A short figure stood in front of him, covered in pink. Blood oozed from its chest in the shape of a swastika.
He looked for a weapon and snapped the antenna off of a car that looked just like the station wagon his parents had when he was a kid. He held the antenna like a sword and stabbed the figure twice.
The pink melted away. For a moment, he saw Arwen’s face beneath the pink, but then she melted, too, saying, “Can you hear me?”
“No!” he screamed, reaching for her. The girl’s hand turned to scalding hot liquid in his hand. He lurched back, tripped, and fell—
Miller gasped as he awoke with a spasm. He’d fallen. He swore he’d fallen. It felt so real. But he was still in the F/A-18, strapped in and immobilized, miles above the Earth.
“You okay?” the pilot asked, clearly concerned that his passenger might be mentally unstable or having some kind of seizure.
“Bad dream,” Miller replied. “I’m fine.” But he didn’t feel fine. His subconscious was clearly worried about Arwen, and that was bad enough, but there were a billion innocent kids just like her.
Flashes of the dream repeated as exhaustion moved through his body like a force. The dream, and the emotions it triggered, began to fade. His internal clock told him he’d slept for just ten minutes, and as he closed his eyes again, he said, “Wake me when we’re within radio range.”
He felt his consciousness fading quickly, but the pilot’s reply slapped him awake. “We’re there now, sir.”
The fog of sleep rolled away from Miller as a tornado of questions flooded his mind. “Have you tried reaching them?”
“Twice. No response.”
“ETA?”
“Twelve minutes, but I don’t think they’re hostile, sir.”
“Why?” Miller asked.
“Because we’re in missile range and they’re not—”
A loud beeping filled the cabin.
“Shit,” the pilot said. “Scratch that. They’re locked.”
“Can we make it to land?” Miller asked.
“They’re between us and the land,” the pilot said.
Then a voice came over the radio. “To, uh, the four incoming craft. Please state your reason for being here, or we will fire.”
Not only did the speaker lack confidence, but he also had very little experience when it came to bluffing. Miller had that in spades. He picked up the transmitter, depressed the Speak button, and said, “USS George Washington, this is Lieutenant Lincoln Miller, stand down now or we will attack.”
Silence.
Miller filled his voice with fire and brimstone and said, “We are here under order of the president of the United States of America. Stand down now, or we will launch a tactical nuclear strike on your position in three…”
It was a ridiculous bluff, but the voice on the other end sounded like it belonged to a kid.
“Two … one…”
42
“Okay, okay!” the voice shouted over the radio. “What do you want?”
“First, I’d like to know who I’m speaking to.”
“Uh, CS James Hammaker, sir.”
CS? Miller had to think for a moment to recall the rank. Culinary services! “You’re a chef!”
“I’m rated E2, so I mostly wash dishes, sir.”
“What are you, twenty?”
“Eighteen.”
Miller could see the pilot in the front seat shaking his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing either. “Hammaker, why am I speaking to you?”
“Um, I think it would be better if you spoke to Ensign Partin in person, sir. He’s on the flight deck now.”
“Why Ensign Partin?” Miller asked, suspecting the answer, but hoping it wasn’t true.
“Because, he’s the highest-ranking officer left alive. Sir.”
Miller felt the angle of the F/A-18 change and knew they were already on approach. They’d be standing on the gigantic aircraft carrier deck in just a few minutes, so he decided not to press the kid. There was only one explanation for the comm being operated by a CS and an ensign being in charge of a skyscraper-sized war machine.
Mutiny.
* * *
The landing was textbook smooth. The deck crews operated expertly, guiding each fighter jet down, and taxiing them out of the way so the subsequent jet could land. Miller stepped onto the deck before the last of the four planes taxied into position. The flight suit he wore did little to stop the arctic cold. He took a breath through his nose and felt the sting of freezing flesh. He wrapped his arms around his chest and looked for the welcoming committee.
Three men approached him, one dressed in purple, one in red, and one in white. They all wore protective headgear, wind visors, and bright-colored vests that identified their deck crew job. This would be a very different greeting than he’d received on the George H.W. Bush, mainly because as a lieutenant, a rank he received shortly before retiring from the navy, he was the highest-ranking officer on the ship.
The three men gave casual salutes as they neared. Miller noticed all three were armed with sidearms—certainly not standard issue for deck crews. The man in the middle, dressed in white, had dried blood on the front of his shirt.
“That your blood?” Miller asked.
The man looked down. “No, sir. I’m not sure whose it is.” He lifted his wind visor, revealing dark brown eyes. “I’ve killed a lot of men.”
Miller looked over the deck. A rainbow of men and women stood motionless, watching the conversation play out. “Which one of you is Ensign Partin?”
The man with blood on his white vest gave a nod. “I am. This is my ship now.”
Miller felt a challenge in the man’s words. “I outrank you, Ensign. While I’m on this ship, I�
�m the commanding officer.” Miller had no scruples about leaving out the fact that he was actually Lieutenant Lincoln Miller, Retired. He was here under presidential orders and had already bossed around a commander.
“You’ll find your rank doesn’t hold much weight around here right now,” the man said.
Miller eyed the deck crew again. All of them were armed. Some with handguns, others with assault rifles. “We’re on the same side, Ensign.”
“You sure about that?”
Miller nodded to the man in purple, who was black. “Well, since he’s still breathing, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that you’re not Nazis. And if we were the bad guys, why would we land on a ship full of the enemy. We’re not here for you, Ensign, we’re here to find, and kill, them.”
The three men relaxed a little.
“Care to tell me what happened here?” Miller asked.
“Mind if we go inside?” Partin asked, rubbing his arms.
Miller would have preferred rapid answers to his questions, but the look in Partin’s eyes said he’d seen and done things that would mark him for life. He nodded and waved for Adler, Vesely, Brodeur, and the four pilots, who had been unloading gear, to follow them inside. On the way to the bridge stairs Miller saw more than one dark red stain and the occasional bullet casing. By the time they reached the warmth of the bridge he’d counted twenty-two spots where he believed someone had lost their life.
A war had been fought on this ship.
Goose bumps covered Miller’s body as he stepped out of the cold and onto the bridge of the USS George Washington. He saw a young man sitting at the comm station looking nervous and insecure. “Hammaker?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, standing to attention.
“For future reference,” Miller said, “F/A-18s don’t carry tactical nukes.”
Hammaker looked to the glossy blue linoleum floor. “Yes, sir.”
Miller gave the kid a pat on the shoulder. He suspected Hammaker had been through a lot. “It was a nice try, though.”
The kid smiled and sat back down.
Miller turned when he heard the bridge door close behind him. Adler, Vesely, and Brodeur stood just inside the door. Ensign Partin gazed out of the long strip of windows lining the front of the high-tech bridge. His helmet had been removed, revealing a gleaming white bald head. The pilots and the two other deck crew members hadn’t joined them.
“Did the president really send you?” Partin asked.
“Yes, you can confirm it by—”
“We have no long-range communications,” Partin said. “Something is blocking satellite communications, from the carrier, the planes, everything. All we have is local radio.”
“Some kind of jammer?” Vesely said.
“Or they just turned the satellites away,” Miller said, then looked at Partin. “You’ll just have to take my word on it. Can you tell me what happened here?”
Partin took a deep breath and let it out with a hiss. “We’ve been here for I don’t know how long—”
“Months,” Hammaker added.
“Months.” Partin turned away from the window and looked at Miller. “Cold-weather training exercises. We put birds in the air every day. Several times a day. And caught them when they came home. It’s what we do on deck. The conditions are beyond miserable here, but harsh-weather exercises test the deck crews as much as the pilots and planes. We did our jobs. No questions asked. A few weeks in, we started sending teams over to the continent. Might have been SEALs. Maybe Rangers. We didn’t ask even though we knew sending troops to mainland Antarctica is against international law. But we’re damn good at our jobs. Damn good. Maybe better than they thought.”
Partin chewed his lower lip for a moment. “They started coming home with more men than they left with. At first it was subtle. One here. Two there. But occasionally there would be ten extra soldiers. Grim-faced sons a bitches, too.”
“They ate like robots,” Hammaker said. “We’ve got some good chow pounders here, but these guys didn’t miss a beat.” He motioned with an imaginary spoon, acting out two scoops per second. “And they did it in unison.”
“In unison?” Adler asked.
“Like when the North Korean Army marches,” Hammaker said. “One, two, three. Scoop, scoop, scoop.”
Partin stared at Adler. “Where are you from?”
Miller quickly understood Partin’s suspicion of Adler’s accent. He stepped forward. “Sorry I haven’t introduced my team yet. This is Elizabeth Adler, she’s a German Interpol liaison.” He motioned to Brodeur. “This is Special Agent Roger Brodeur with the FBI. The man in the cowboy hat is Milo Vesely, a special consultant from the Czech Republic. I can vouch for every one of them and expect them to be treated with the same respect given me. Back to the visiting soldiers.”
Though he was clearly still uncomfortable with Adler’s accent, Partin continued. “They kept to themselves and never spoke to us, which was fine because they scared the shit out of the crew. Then, one day, they were gone. I supervise most flights on and off this ship and I didn’t see them leave. A few days later, the helicopter crews started bringing in big wooden crates, then long metal containers. They stacked them up on the deck like we were a cargo ship.”
“What was in them?” Vesely asked. “Were there any insignias on the wood?”
“I didn’t see any,” Partin said. “But then they started transferring the crates to the support vessels.”
Several ships typically supported an aircraft carrier. Two sub destroyers, two guided-missile cruisers, two antiaircraft warships, a submarine, and two fuel ships. Now that Partin had brought it up, Miller couldn’t remember seeing any support ships surrounding the carrier. “Where are the support ships now?”
Partin shrugged. “One morning, I came on duty and they were gone, along with each and every crate. Crew members who asked questions were thrown in the brig. A group of us started looking for answers. We discovered they were going to the United States, but not what they were taking or their final destination. That’s when we found out about Miami.”
The man leaned forward, clutching a radar console. “I had cousins there.” He looked up. “Did anyone make it out?”
Miller met the man’s eyes. They’d heard about the attack, but not its outcome. “Not many. Millions died.”
“It happened in Tokyo, too,” Adler said.
“And Tel Aviv,” Vesely added.
With a shake of his head, Partin pulled himself out of his despair. “We knew the truth when we heard men cheering. Most of the officers. The commander. Pilots. MPs. Thank God most of the Special Ops guys left with support ships or what followed would have turned out differently. We spread the word and staged a coup that night.” He rubbed a hand over his bald head. “The fighting lasted three days. We lost communications almost immediately and they disabled the screws. We were dead in the water and cut off from the world. Four thousand two hundred men and women served aboard this ship when we left port. I suspect at least two hundred had already left with the support ships, more if you count the newcomers, and we outnumbered them, two to one, but most of us were support crew—flight deck, engineers—” He motioned to Hammaker. “Cooks. We fought guns with knives, with hands, with anything we could find. When their ammunition ran low, we took the ship. There are nine hundred crew members alive. Some are on the fence. We put their numbers close to seven hundred, leaving us with twenty-four hundred dead. We’re still collecting bodies from the lower decks.”
Miller felt sick. War was one thing. The battlefield made sense. The men around you were brothers. You bled for each other. But what happened on this ship was an affront to everything he believed about the U.S. military. He pushed aside his rising anger and asked, “Do you have prisoners?”
“In hindsight, prisoners would have been a smart idea,” Partin said. “But we—we were afraid. We killed the bastards and threw them overboard. Our dead are in the hangar, covered with sheets, but the smell is getting ba
d and we’ll need to give them sea burials soon.” Partin looked up as he remembered something. “We checked the commander’s quarters. Found lots of Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia. Same with the senior officers. Small flags. Old uniforms. Guns. I don’t know if they had it all along, or if it came from the mainland, but it helped with the guilt.” He looked at Miller. “Nazis. Can you believe it?”
“You have no idea,” Miller said. He stood in front of Partin. “Listen, Ensign, what you did here; you can’t be thanked enough. If I get my way, each and every member of this crew will get the Medal of Honor. But this thing isn’t over. The world is still in danger.”
Partin listened intently, his eyes locked on Miller’s.
“Can you take us to the mainland? I need to see what’s there.”
“I’ve got plenty of helicopters,” Partin said. “But no pilots. They’re all gone, or dead.”
“I took lessons,” Vesely said.
“How many?” Miller asked.
“Two. But only piloted once. No takeoff. No landing.”
Miller silently cursed, then saw a hand rise in his periphery. He looked over and saw Hammaker, hand raised. He stood, looking unsure of himself, and said, “I can fly.”
“No way are we letting the kid fly us to Antarctica,” Brodeur said.
“My father is a helicopter pilot for Fox News in Chicago. He taught me how to fly. I have a commercial license.”
“Why are you a cook?” Brodeur asked.
Hammaker shrugged. “Never told the recruiter. Joined to pay for school and didn’t want to risk getting shot down. Figured the galley of an aircraft carrier was a safe place to be. Didn’t turn out that way, though.”
“Well, it’s about to get worse,” Miller said. “You’re hired.” He turned to Brodeur. “He’s all we’ve got. Unless you know how to fly a helicopter.”
He didn’t.
“How long will it take to prep a chopper?” Miller asked Partin.
“I can have you in the air in ten minutes.”
“Do it.”
Partin left. Hammaker followed him.
“Suit up,” Miller said to Adler, Vesely, and Brodeur.
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