Running Dark

by Jamie Freveletti

  Block looked shocked. “What?”

  “Mr. Block, do it. Now.”

  “Well, I never been ordered around like that,” Block said.

  Sumner didn’t stay to see if Block obeyed. He sprinted across the deck to the stairs that led to the bridge, clambered up them, and burst onto the small walkway that surrounded it just as Captain Joshua Wainwright stepped out.

  “Pirates,” he said.

  Sumner nodded. “Coming fast. Use the LRAD.”

  Wainwright, a competent, friendly man in his early forties, snapped an order to his second-in-command. They pointed a large gun in the direction of the cigarette boats, now well within a mile of them.

  “Hit it,” Wainwright said.

  The Long Range Acoustic Device released a beam of high-pitched sound at the boats. Over 150 decibels of concentrated noise blasted through the air, like a sonic boom. Sumner winced as the sound assaulted his eardrums. He saw the driver of the lead cigarette boat clap a hand over one ear.

  They continued to hurtle toward the Kaiser Franz.

  “Again,” Wainwright said. He watched the cigarette boats through binoculars.

  The LRAD blared again. When the sound faded, Sumner could hear the tourists screaming on the deck. Still the cigarette boats kept coming. Sumner grabbed a second set of binoculars. The pirates looked like Somalis, dark-skinned and thin. They stared at the cruise ship with undisguised greed in their eyes. He watched one of them hoist a large gun to his shoulder.

  “They’ve got RPGs,” he said.

  “What the hell is that?” Harry Block’s loud voice echoed on the bridge.

  “Sir, you don’t belong here. Please get belowdecks.” Wainwright waved at an underling, who stepped up next to Block.

  Block shook off the crew member’s grip on his arm like a horse shaking off a fly. “I said, what the hell are RPGs?”

  Sumner lowered the binoculars to glance at Block. “Rocket-propelled grenades.”

  “Holy shit,” Block said.

  4

  EMMA SAT UP. A HEAVY CLOUD OF ASH HUNG IN THE AIR, BLOTTING out the sun. She flinched as people hurtled past her going in every direction, some coming so close that she put her arms up to protect herself. Sirens howled far in the distance. Downed runners lay all around her. Three behind her were moving, though they remained on the ground. Several others staggered to their feet. One man drew a deep breath, inhaled the lingering ash, and began a violent coughing fit.

  She took stock. Her back from neck to tailbone ached where she’d landed in the dirt, her arms, previously wet from sweating, were caked in dust that clung to the moisture, and an eighteen-inch scrape of road rash covered her right leg and throbbed. She glanced at her feet and was surprised to see only filthy socks. At mile thirty her feet had ballooned in response to both the extreme heat and the long, pounding distance, and she’d retied her running shoes loosely in order to accommodate the swelling. At mile thirty-three, even the loose shoestrings had hurt, and she’d opened the laces as far as she could without losing the shoes entirely.

  She sat in the dirt on the side of the path, twenty feet from the asphalt. The blackened hull of the vehicle smoldered while a small group of onlookers huddled fifty feet away, watching.

  Emma felt her skin begin to crawl. Whatever medication the man had pumped into her was taking effect. She took a quick glance at the trail. The competitors flowed off the road and onto the shoulder to avoid getting anywhere near the burning car, then reentered and continued forward, using their feet to put distance between them and the site of the carnage. More than twelve thousand runners attempted the Comrades each year, a grueling eighty-nine-kilometer race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. One had to qualify for the Comrades. Many competitors had successfully completed races like Hawaii’s Ironman and so were made of tough stuff. It was a “gun to gun” race, meaning that the competitors were required to complete the distance within eleven hours or be disqualified. When the clock struck twelve, the race was over. The bulk of the competitors passed the finish line between hours ten and eleven. Emma’s qualifying time put her in one of the fastest groups, a good thing in this instance, because the ten/eleven athletes hadn’t yet come this far. The bomb could have hit many more.

  Now these experienced ultra runners took one look at the gaping crater twenty feet from the course and broke into a sprint, running away as fast as their trained legs could take them. There was no stopping the herd without creating an even more dangerous situation, and the few handlers that worked the course at this mile marker didn’t even try. They watched helplessly as the athletes stampeded past them.

  Emma’s heart began to gallop, and a strange euphoria overwhelmed her. Jumbled thoughts ping-ponged through her head, ranging from crazy paranoia to calm scientific logic. Her mind screamed, Go, go! Run away! Then, Oh, God, what the hell did he inject into you? and next, Get to your hotel room and close the door—they’re coming! Somewhere in it all was another thought, born from her chemist’s experience, that calmly informed her, If it’s a chemical weapon, there’s nothing the hospital can do for you now. What sent her fear spiking was the sound of a helicopter, coming closer. Her mind flashed onto a scene from her ordeal in Colombia just a few months before. Panic gripped her.

  Before she knew what she was about, she stood up and looked for her shoes.

  She squinted in the sun, putting her hand to her eyes to stop the glare. The smell of burning rubber filled the air, and bits of ash blew in circular eddies, brushing across the dry, packed earth. She skirted the burning vehicle and spotted her shoes fifteen feet behind her on the side of the course. She sat down to put them on, but before she did, she took a look at her feet. They were far less enlarged. In fact, they were back to their normal, pre-race size. The effect was almost like a cartoon, where a balloon deflates with comic speed. This, the panic, and the otherworldly high told her that the medication was making a circuit through her body. She put the shoes back on with shaking hands, retied them tighter than before, reentered the path at the location where she’d been ejected, and started once again to run.

  Her feet felt feather light, her heart continued to pound, but her breathing settled into a rhythm that she usually achieved at the start of a race, not at the finish. Her legs flew with renewed energy fed by a jagged anxiety. Emergency vehicles coming from the opposite direction screamed past her, not using the road where the racers were but driving in the dirt culvert on the side, kicking up clouds of dust as they did. She swept past runner after runner, catapulting herself down the path. Her head ached with the precursor of a headache, but the pain was nothing compared to the exhilaration she felt since being stuck with the pen. She moved faster and faster, reaching per-mile speeds that were a personal best for her this late in the game, yet still she felt no real strain from the blistering pace.

  She blew past the other competitors, all of whom were showing the extreme fatigue that was common in the last few miles of an ultra and for some was magnified by the pace they drove themselves to maintain since coming upon the burning vehicle. Some stopped to throw up on the shoulder of the road as their stomachs rejected the combination of runner’s gel and liquids that constituted the whole of their sustenance, while others subsided to a dejected walk, their bodies curving from the waist up like a question mark, the result of their muscles’ weakening strength. Some fell on the side of the path and lay there, taking shallow breaths. For them the race was over. This was what the Comrades could do to a runner.

  Half an hour later, Emma still ran at breakneck speeds. Several police vans drove up next to the course, heading in the same direction as the runners. One pulled parallel to Emma, and she watched as a race official leaned out of the back window. He placed a bullhorn to his lips.

  “Keep going straight! Do not deviate from the path for any reason. Avoid all cars parked on the roadside. Emergency personnel are assembled at the finish, and fire-department crews are checking every vehicle for suspicious cargo. Any runners who wish to
stop should step to the side and wait. A rescue bus has been dispatched that can drive you to a safe location.”

  I’ll be damned if I’ll stop, Emma thought. Rather than calming her, the sight of the officials elicited a paranoiac’s reaction. Emma wanted to get away from the truck. It took all her willpower to stay on the course and allow it to pace her. She kicked up her speed, running faster.

  Two and a half hours later, she crossed the finish line. Her legs still felt powerful, but the paranoia had decreased to manageable levels. Along with the receding terror came the return of rational thinking. Now a secondary type of fear gripped her, because she realized that she should have left the course two hours earlier and headed straight to a hospital for testing. The risk she’d taken in waiting was astronomical. Even so, she realized that whatever had been pumped into her was clearly not designed to kill her immediately. In fact, she had never felt stronger at the end of an ultra than she did at that moment.

  Ambulances lined the corral set up to cordon off the finishers from spectators. Runners milled around, some shaking, others crying, and the rest standing in numb silence. Media trucks, their roofs covered with satellite dishes and bristling with antennas, were parked in a crazy-quilt fashion on the outside of the gated area. The reporters leaned over the temporary fence, holding their microphones aloft as they attempted to interview the runners. Paramedics worked on several people who had collapsed, from either the heat or fear, or both.

  The Comrades maintained a fully functional mobile ICU manned by doctors and nurses and prepared to assist any runners who fell into distress during the competition. A quick glance told Emma that she would not get anywhere near it in the time she needed to. At least fifty stretchers containing downed runners lay in a widening circle around it, while triage nurses worked through the injured.

  Emma handed her timing chip to the attendant waiting to accept them, veered away from the ICU, and headed to the tent erected by Price Pharmaceuticals, a client of hers and the entity charged with post-race drug testing. She walked with a grim determination. She needed to know what had been pumped into her, and she needed to know it fast. Who better to check for a performance-enhancing drug or an illegal substance than the drug testers themselves?

  A young woman guarded the door to the VIP area. Emma flashed the red wristband that showed she was a Price-sponsored athlete and stepped inside. Tables set up at the back held large water bottles, bowls of fruit, bagels, and a caterer’s carafe of coffee and tea. Nurses staffed a makeshift lab in the right corner. One, named Karen Stringer, spotted Emma. She closed her eyes briefly, as if in relief, and hurried over. Karen and Emma knew each other from the work that Emma’s company, Pure Chemistry, did for Price. When she reached Emma, Karen threw her arms around her.

  “Thank God you’re all right! We’ve been wrecks around here since hearing the news of the bombing.” Karen pulled away to take a look at Emma. Before she could speak, Emma interrupted her.

  “I know. I’m a mess. I was near the car when it exploded.” Emma displayed the road rash on her leg. “Compliments of flying into the dirt. Can I get it cleaned and a bandage? And if I give you a urine sample, can you test it for any banned substances? I need a drug test right away.”

  Karen frowned at her. “Actually, you look better than anyone I’ve seen so far, even the winners. You’re not limping? I swear you’re the only one. We’ve had a wave of injuries, heat prostration, and dehydration. And why in the world do you need a drug test? We only test the medalists.”

  Emma took a deep breath. “The bomb blew me off the path. While I lay there, a man walked up to me and injected me with something.”

  Karen’s face took on a horrified expression. “Injected you? That’s awful! Forget the drug testing, you need to go to ICU or the hospital right now.”

  “No! That won’t work. People are lined up ten deep in front of the ICU, and the local hospital will take hours, probably even days, to obtain lab results—and that’s assuming they even have the necessary equipment.” Emma waved a hand at the nurses’ station. “You can test me right here, use Rapidtest.”

  Rapidtest was an investigational new test that Price was developing, able to provide preliminary results in thirty minutes. It was not approved by any racing body as yet, but Emma thought it would give her some quick answers. “Whatever additional testing I need, I can handle at the Price offices.”

  Karen looked dubious. “Rapidtest can only test you for performance-enhancing drugs, not for anything life-threatening. You should talk to the police right away.”

  Emma nodded. “I know that, but whatever it was, it doesn’t seem life-threatening. It sent me flying down the path and gave me an extremely paranoid reaction, but that seems to be all. Even so, I could be wrong. You’ll be able to narrow it down a bit. At least tell me what it isn’t, if not exactly what it is. Please, test me now.”

  Karen stared at her a moment, then handed her a sterile collection cup. “I’ll have to draw blood as well. It’s going to take me some time, and you shouldn’t hang around here waiting. When you’re done, give this to me and go straight to the police. Write your name and cell number on the label. I’ll call you with the results.”

  Emma provided Karen with a sample before heading to the opposite corner of the tent, where the Price athletes kept their gear. She pulled out her cell phone and powered it up. Dialed the number she was told she could dial anytime, day or night.

  “This is Banner. Leave a message.” The beep came after.

  “Mr. Banner, it’s Emma Caldridge. I’m sorry to have to call you so soon after Colombia, but I need your help. Something strange is happening here.”

  She left her cell number, then hung up. As she walked out of the tent toward the van that would take her back to the hotel, she felt her head pound. That pain had remained constant, but a new pain was growing. The pain of knowing that someone was after her.

  5

  EDWARD BANNER, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF DARKVIEW, SAT AT a desk and faced a raised dais behind which sat three United States senators and seven congressmen. Banner’s attorney sat on his right, taking notes on a legal pad. Banner’s phone lay on the desk in front of him, switched to “silent.” He saw an “unknown” number appear on his telephone screen and noted the 786 area code. He let it go to voice mail.

  “Mr. Banner, can you tell this committee why you chose, unilaterally, to disobey direct orders from your superiors at the Department of Defense and assist Mr. Cameron Sumner and Major Miguel Gonzalez in their ill-advised and destructive actions in Colombia?”

  The question came from the esteemed Senator George Cooley, a self-proclaimed devout man who prided himself on his conservative views but who kept a wife in a clapboard house in the South and a mistress in a condominium in D.C. The senator was doing the bidding of an oil conglomerate and a major contributor to his campaign. He was searching for a scapegoat in what he called the “shameful Colombian incident” and had decided that Banner would fill the role.

  Banner’s part in the rescue of the Colombian hostages had earned him the highest praise from the media and was the subject of endless magazine and newspaper articles. His military background, coupled with his impeccable credentials and exceptional good looks, had made him a minor celebrity and the crush of scores of women. His refusal to capitalize on the media feeding frenzy by declining all requests for interviews, photo shoots, or speaking engagements only served to boost his enigmatic image. Dressed in a dark blue suit, a muted gray silk tie, a crisp white shirt with French cuffs, and discreet silver cuff links, he managed to appear imposing, down-to-earth, and competent all at the same time. In contrast, the senator, a tall man with a thin, pinched face and avaricious eyes, looked like a particularly mean ferret. He knew better than to allow the meetings to be televised.

  Banner considered the senator a blowhard, but his righteous claims that he “owed it to the American people to get to the bottom of the incident in Colombia” posed a threat to Darkview, something Banner took
quite seriously. Banner also respected the office the man held, even if he didn’t like the man. Therefore he answered in as pleasant a voice as he could muster.

  “At no time did I or Darkview ignore the orders of a superior. Darkview was charged with the task of rescuing the passengers of Flight 689. The mission was still authorized when I flew to Colombia. Mr. Sumner and Major Gonzalez were coming to the aid of one of the passengers on the downed airplane, a woman named Emma Caldridge.”

  Senator Blowhard waved an impatient hand in the air. “We all know who these men were claiming to save, but at what cost?”

  Banner nodded. “Whatever cost is claimed, it was justified. The rescue mission ended up crippling one of the biggest drug cartels in the world. A feat that I would expect this committee to applaud rather than condemn.”

  Senator Blowhard leaned forward. “You and your cohorts managed to destroy the largest oil pipeline in South America in the process. This committee has been assigned the job of determining whether the rescue mission could have been undertaken without such an extreme act of destruction.” Blowhard peered at a notepad in front of him. “Now we understand that Mr. Sumner never returned to the United States. Is that correct?”

  Banner nodded. His attorney leaned in to him.

  “Edward, the court reporter can’t take down nods. You need to reply out loud.”

  Banner glanced at the female court reporter tapping on the keys of her device. He smiled at her in apology. She flushed red. He turned back to the senator.

  “Mr. Sumner is a member of the Southern Hemisphere Drug Defense Agency. After the mission they deemed it too dangerous for him to return to his duties in Key West until they were sure that the cartel leaders were not seeking retaliation. Darkview agreed to hire him on an ad hoc basis and place him far away from his usual territory.”

  “Where is he?” Blowhard said. The committee members all looked up from their notes.