Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee

  Which was why he wasn’t driving.

  By the time the F–15 lined up on its approach and settled into the glide path, half a mile out, Travis could already see the helicopter waiting. Not even parked on an apron—just sitting there beside the runway, right where the F–15 was going to come to rest. It was a big, hulking son of a bitch. A Sea Stallion, Garner’s brother had called it. Eighty feet long, twenty-five feet high and wide. A massive six-blade rotor assembly on top. It could fly at about two hundred miles per hour once it was up to speed. It would cover the distance from LaGuardia to Central Park in a little over two minutes.

  The F–15 descended through the last dozen yards of its altitude and hit the runway.

  “Gonna roll fast and brake hard at the end,” the pilot said. “Buy you some seconds.”

  “I’ll need them,” Travis said.

  The cylinder had four minutes and fifteen seconds left.

  “Hang on.”

  There wasn’t much to hang on to. Travis saw two metal struts along the sides of the seatback in front of him. They looked sturdy enough. He braced his hands against them, and a second later he heard the airflow over the jet’s body change radically, and his chest was pressed harder than before against the harness straps.

  He saw the Sea Stallion just ahead. It had a tail ramp like a cargo jet, lowered and facing the runway. There was a crewman standing at the foot of the ramp. Overhead, the giant rotor was already spinning. Travis could see the mammoth aircraft rising on its wheel shocks, like it was just a few hundred pounds shy of lifting off.

  The F–15 stopped twenty yards away from it. The plane’s engines powered down immediately, their pitch dropping through several octaves per second—again Travis had the sense that normal procedures were out the window here. The pilot punched the canopy release and shoved it up and open. Travis stood up in his seat and bent at the waist to clear the angled canopy. He tucked the cylinder under his left arm and held it there as tightly as he could. Then he leaned forward, right out of the cockpit on the left side, grabbed the edge with his free hand and let his body swing down and out. It was over ten feet from cockpit to ground. His shoes were three feet above the tarmac when he let go; he landed hard, straightened up and sprinted for the chopper. He glanced at his watch as he ran. Three minutes and fifty seconds.

  They sat at the fire, eating apples from a tree Bethany had found at the southern edge of the park. Something had eaten everything below about eight feet, but the rest had been untouched.

  Paige watched the long needles of a white pine bough curl in the flames.

  “It’s mid-October,” she said. “Any night from now on could freeze. We need to go south if we want to survive.”

  “Do we want to survive?” Bethany said.

  Paige looked at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Bethany said. “I’m not trying to be a quaalude, but . . . what’s the point? Unless I seriously, seriously misunderstood high-school biology, we’re the end of the line, right? You want to live to be a hundred here?”

  Paige lowered her gaze to the flames again and tried to think of an answer to the question. It was essentially the same one she’d been asking herself since the middle of the night.

  The Sea Stallion crossed the East River at a height of two hundred feet, just north of a long, narrow island that paralleled the Manhattan shoreline. A second later the aircraft was screaming over the rooftops of the Upper East Side, banking in long, gentle arcs to avoid the taller structures.

  Two minutes, thirty seconds.

  Travis was standing upright, holding onto the doorway in the forward bulkhead just before the flight deck. Other than himself, the only people aboard were the pilot and co-pilot. Behind Travis was the cavernous troop bay. Its long side walls were lined with bench seats made of steel tubing and canvas. The walls themselves were just the structural ribs of the fuselage and the metal outer skin. Hydraulic lines and wiring conduits ran everywhere. Harsh overhead fluorescent panels lit the space.

  The co-pilot turned in his seat and shouted over the thrum of the rotors and the turbines driving them. “Our orders are pretty damn specific. In addition to the phrase haul ass being emphasized about a dozen times, here’s how I understand it. We land in the biggest clearing toward the south end. We leave the ramp closed. We face forward and we don’t pay any attention to you for the next two minutes.”

  “That’ll work,” Travis said.

  “What the fuck do we do after that?”

  “Whatever you want,” Travis said. “I’ll be gone by then.”

  The guy stared at him a few seconds longer, waiting for the rest of the joke. When it didn’t come, he just shook his head and faced forward again. He mouthed something Travis didn’t catch.

  They passed over Fifth Avenue at a diagonal, still doing just under two hundred miles per hour. The pilot started cutting the altitude, even as he kept the forward speed maxed. Travis saw the clearing ahead, coming up very fast. They covered most of the remaining distance to it in just a few seconds.

  “All right, hang on tight,” the pilot shouted.

  Travis gripped the doorway with his right hand. He held the cylinder tight against himself with his left. He saw the pilot pull back hard on the stick, but for the next half second nothing happened. Then the park and the skyline, visible ahead through the windscreen, dropped away sickeningly as the chopper leaned back into a steep tilt. Nothing through the windows but blue sky. In the same moment its massive tail swung around like a boom, and when Travis saw the park again it was turning like a schoolyard seen from a merry-go-round. He saw people below, running like hell to get clear as the chopper descended fast.

  Just before touchdown Travis looked at his watch. One minute, forty seconds.

  Paige was still thinking about Bethany’s question when the sound started up. A heavy bass vibration through the trees, like a bank of concert amplifiers playing no music, but simply cranked to full volume and humming. There was a rhythm to the sound, as well. A cycling throb. Like helicopter rotors.

  Bethany flinched and turned where she sat, looking for the sound source along with her. It was almost impossible to get a fix on. It was deep and diffused and everywhere.

  Then they heard a man shouting, from very far away.

  Travis.

  Shouting for them to answer.

  And shouting for them to run.

  Travis ran to get clear of the iris, not because he knew which direction to go, but just to get away from the turbine sound—he needed to listen for Paige and Bethany. He looked back once, and through the opening he saw the fluorescent-lit interior of the Sea Stallion. On this side, the iris was surrounded by the massive pines and hardwoods that’d long since filled in the clearing.

  He stopped fifty yards south.

  He shouted for Paige and Bethany again.

  He listened.

  Nothing.

  Nothing he could hear over the chopper, anyway. It’d never occurred to him to have the pilots shut the damn thing down. He just hadn’t thought of it, against the clamor of everything else he’d been focused on. No time for it now. He looked at his watch.

  Fifty seconds left.

  He shouted again.

  A second later he heard them. Far ahead and to the right. He broke into a sprint, holding the cylinder tight and dodging side to side through the trees. Their voices sounded very far away. Maybe far enough that there was no real chance, even with them closing the distance toward him. He ignored the thought. It didn’t serve any purpose. He simply ran.

  An even less welcome thought followed: his math on the timing could be off. Maybe by as much as ten seconds. He’d tried to nail it down as accurately as possible, and where he’d been forced to round off, he’d done so conservatively. It was possible that he had a few more seconds than he thought—but he could just as easily have fewer.

  He glanced down at the cylinder as he ran. Its final blue light stared back at him impassively.

  He kept shouting.


  He could hear their replies now even over his own running footsteps.

  Closer.

  But only a little.

  Thirty seconds.

  He sprinted faster. Felt his leg muscles burn with acid, and welcomed the pain.

  He listened for Paige and Bethany, and realized he could hear more than their voices. He could hear their bodies crashing through the trees. They were closer than he’d imagined. Much closer. There was still time.

  Then he broke through the interlaced boughs of a pair of pines and saw the real source of the crashing sound.

  Not Paige and Bethany.

  A clutch of white-tailed deer. Thirty or forty of them, streaming through the trees, two or three abreast. Spooked by what they’d never heard before: human voices. The animals crossed his path just ahead at a diagonal, damn near running him down. Two hundred pounds apiece and moving at thirty miles an hour. Blocking his way like a train thundering across a road.

  “Fuck!” he screamed. He saw the nearest of the animals draw hard aside from him, the formation bulging away but not slowing or scattering.

  The instant they’d passed he began to sprint again, but even as he did, he heard Paige calling, and the sound was still agonizingly faint and distant.

  He looked at his watch.

  Ten seconds.

  He stopped running.

  He stared down at the blue light again.

  He’d decided hours earlier, before he’d even left Arica, what he would do if it came to this. If time were almost up, and there were no chance of saving Paige and Bethany. If all he could do was get himself back through the iris.

  It’d been no choice at all. Not then and not now.

  Travis opened his hand and let the cylinder fall to the soft earth at his feet. It rolled a few inches and stopped, with the blue light facing him.

  He sat down and rested his arms across his knees.

  Five seconds.

  Paige ran as hard as she could. Bethany kept up beside her. They ducked branches, shoved others aside, vaulted deadfalls.

  It hardly entered Paige’s mind to wonder what the hurry was. There was no room in her thoughts for anything but exhilaration. A wild, animal joy. She couldn’t recall ever experiencing this sudden and steep a reversal of emotions. She ran. She didn’t care why.

  Zero seconds.

  For the moment, the blue light stayed on.

  Not surprising. Conservative estimates. It would die in the next few seconds.

  Travis heard footsteps and small branches breaking. Paige and Bethany were still far away. Well over a minute out. He heard Paige call for him again. He didn’t answer. Suddenly shouting felt like a lie. They’d find him soon enough. He’d explain.

  At five seconds past zero the idea came to him.

  It hit like a physical thing. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it hours earlier, along with all the other preparations.

  He threw himself forward and scooped up the cylinder. He aimed it roughly level with the ground and jammed his finger against the on button. The iris appeared and he saw the sun-drenched leaves of thin forest undergrowth in the present day, and heard the whine of the Sea Stallion again, hundreds of feet away. In the same instant he pressed the delayed shutoff button. He watched the light cone brighten.

  His gaze fell and locked onto the last blue light of the timing line. He was certain of one thing: if the cylinder died before it detached from the iris, the iris would die with it.

  He stared at the light cone, shining intensely as it charged the projected opening.

  The seconds drew out like exposed nerves.

  Then the light cone vanished, and the timing light vanished, and if there was even a hundredth of a second between the two events, Travis couldn’t tell.

  He looked for the iris.

  It was still there.

  Still open.

  Central Park waiting on the other side.

  While he was looking at it he heard a hiss and felt the cylinder vibrate in his hands. He looked down and saw wispy tendrils of smoke issuing from inside the casing, coming out around the three buttons. The thing was dead.

  Travis got to his feet and shouted for Paige and Bethany, loud enough that pain flared in his throat.

  Paige hadn’t heard Travis in the past half minute. Now she heard him again, and at this range she caught in the sound what she’d missed earlier: panic.

  He was screaming for them to move as fast as they could.

  Paige had felt like she was moving her fastest, but hearing the tone of his voice, she found she could move a little faster. So could Bethany.

  Travis kept shouting, providing a source for them to fix on.

  He wasn’t even looking at his watch now. It didn’t matter. They’d make it or they wouldn’t. It was hell not being able to run toward them and help close the distance. He could only stand there, shouting, unable to hear their approach.

  Paige saw him. Fifty yards ahead. Saw him react to the sight of them. Saw the iris hovering open just beside him as he waved them on.

  She also saw the cylinder, lying discarded on the ground. She saw just the faintest trace of something coming off of it. Like smoke.

  She got it without getting it.

  Got it enough to understand it was time to move her ass a little faster still, and to urge Bethany ahead of her.

  “Dive through it!” Paige shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

  She saw Bethany nod.

  They covered the last distance, and Bethany went through the opening like a kid through an upheld hula hoop. Paige followed. She passed across the threshold into a world of filtered sunlight and the rumble of traffic and some kind of heavy turbine engine whine. She hit the ground at the base of a shrub, and looked up. She was just at the edge of tree cover, looking out at a broad, sunny expanse of the park that could only be Sheep Meadow. Hundreds of people ringed the space, and—pretty damned improbably—there was an Air Force-marked Sea Stallion parked out in the middle. Paige had just absorbed that fact when she felt Travis hit the ground next to her legs. She turned to look at him, but saw that he wasn’t looking back at her. He was looking up toward the iris behind them.

  But by the time Paige followed his gaze, no more than a second after Travis landed, there was nothing to see but shrub leaves and blue sky beyond. The iris had already disappeared.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Travis got his final update on the entire situation four days later. He got it by phone from Garner himself. Travis was seated near the back of a United Airlines 757 on approach to Kahului Airport on Maui.

  Longbow Aerospace had been raided. The process had been well underway even by the time Travis landed with the dying cylinder in Central Park. The raids were authorized by the few mid-level Justice Department people that Garner explicitly trusted, and within hours the evidence had been exposed: control hardware and software for the strange and surprising instruments that were really in orbit aboard the Longbow satellites. By then the information was in too many uncorrupted hands for anyone to head it off. Not even President Currey could contain it.

  The real story was never going to go public as anything more than a rumor. Travis had expected that. But the stand-in story was close enough: Longbow had knowingly put a weapons platform in orbit that violated several treaties and international laws. They’d done it without the government’s permission or even its knowledge—though many individuals within the government were tied to the incident. People were talking. Turning on each other. Names were being named. Including that of Audra Finn. She’d been taken into custody during the initial raids, and had already become the face of the story in the media. The faked death was just too irresistible a detail. Authorities were eager to speak to Audra’s husband, as well, but no one could seem to find him.

  In strict legal terms, President Currey was well insulated from Longbow and the investigation surrounding it. But hundreds of powerful people in Washington who hadn’t been in Finn’s inner circle learned in det
ail what Currey had really been a part of. These men and women, at all levels of Justice and even the CIA, had no trouble grasping the severity of what had almost happened. Any one of them could stand in their children’s doorways late at night and consider Currey a man who’d intended to kill them. It wasn’t a good situation for the president. He knew it too.

  He resigned from office three days into the investigation—yesterday. By that time, comparisons to Watergate had already fallen away. This was something much bigger. Essentially, the entire administration was stepping down. There’d been constitutional scholars on all the cable news nets talking about the event in terms of its logistics. Who the hell was in charge now? And how would that person be selected? Congress had managed to agree, pretty overwhelmingly, on at least a temporary solution: Richard Garner could come out of retirement. Maybe he could even finish out the term he’d been elected to, and 2012 could be another election year as scheduled. No one had offered much resistance to the idea, and Garner had been sworn in two hours before calling Travis on the plane.

  All that remained to be squared away were the satellites themselves. They still had plenty of station-keeping propellant on board. Enough to boost them way out into what was called a disposal orbit, where they’d be harmless. But in the end, nearly everyone with any say in the matter had voted to go another route: push the damn things right down into the atmosphere and burn them to cinders.

  “You should have a pretty good view of the show from Maui,” Garner said. “First re-entry is a couple hours from now between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. About half of them should burn up over that area, and they’ll all be gone within the next twenty hours.”

  “I’ve got a place in mind,” Travis said.

  “Reservation for Rob Pullman?”

  “His last.”

  “If you want my advice,” Garner said, “try not to have the room to yourself all night.” He managed a laugh. “But who the hell am I to tell people what to do?”

  They said good-bye and ended the call.

  Travis rented a car at Kahului, went west to Highway 30 and took it south. He followed it clockwise around the broad sweep of the island’s western half, the Pacific at his left blazing with scattered evening sunlight. He passed upscale residential districts and clusters of hotels along the shore. Halfway up the west-side coast he took a left off the highway, and took another a quarter mile later. He pulled into the Hyatt Regency Maui, got out and followed a footpath to the beach. He stopped at the margin where the stone tiles met the sand.