Running Blind

by Cindy Gerard

  These security measures were reassuring, now that he knew Corbet was in the mix. If anyone came within a quarter-mile of the perimeter fence or dared to breach the no-fly zone, World War III would break out before a bad guy ever got close enough to try to get inside the building.

  “So you think most of the staff are gone now?” Rhonda’s question broke into his thoughts.

  “There’s one way to find out.”

  They hit the elevator and rode to the first floor.

  “Access log, please.” Coop waited for the MP manning Helen’s desk to hand it over.

  Coop scanned the list of personnel still inside the building, taking note of several things of interest before nodding his thanks. Then he gripped Rhonda’s elbow and walked back toward the elevator.

  “So?” she asked, once they were inside and heading down to level five.

  “It’s just us—except our names were removed from the log per Sec Def’s request, so officially, we aren’t even here. Only the MP and the five floor guards. And Dr. Corbet, who never logged out.”

  “Corbet’s here? Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Apparently not. When I saw his name on the log, I looked back a few weeks. He works a lot of weekends.”

  “That’s kind of sad. Why wouldn’t he want to go home to his family?”

  “Because he doesn’t have a family to go home to,” he said soberly.

  He could see she was dying to know what he knew about Corbet, but she didn’t ask again. So he gave her an opening.

  “Before you dig into the data you ‘borrowed’ from his computer, why don’t you see what you can dig up on Corbet and his family?”

  31

  “This is so sad,” Rhonda said a little over an hour later.

  They’d settled in her living quarters. Coop had plopped onto his back on her bed, his arms crossed behind his head, his eyes closed. She sat at the small desk, her tablet plugged into a network port that accessed the main network, acquiring data on Corbet.

  “He was born near Ukraine. Taken away from his family by the Russian government when he was only ten and sent to a state-run school when his aptitude for science and physics caught the attention of one of his teachers. It’s barbaric,” she said.

  “That’s the good old USSR for ya.” Cooper was clearly as disgusted as she was.

  “You already know all of this, though, don’t you? How he was rushed through accelerated classes, paraded around Moscow like some pet protégé? How he was running a government-sponsored weapons lab at the age of twenty-five?”

  “Actually, the only part I knew about was the weapons lab.”

  That uneasy feeling she’d had ever since seeing the missile in the “No Admittance” room raised its ugly head again.

  “What else did you find out?”

  She read on. “He fell in love with one of his research assistants when he was in his late thirties and was only allowed to marry her after he refused to continue working for the state. That was thirty years ago. Her name is Svetlana. They have a daughter, Anna. She’d be twenty-five now.” She turned in the chair to look at him. “I thought you said he didn’t have a family to go home to.”

  “He doesn’t.” His face had hardened. “When he sought asylum and defected to the U.S., they didn’t make the trip with him.”

  “How could you know that? I haven’t been able to find any more information. Everything ends with him defecting.”

  His jaw clenched, and it was clear that he couldn’t or didn’t want to meet her eyes. And just like that, she knew.

  “Oh, my God. You . . . you and the team. You made it happen. You got him out of Russia.”

  His silence was her answer.

  And suddenly, she understood. There had been a cost involved in bringing Adolph Corbet to the United States. The cost had been leaving his family behind.

  “Months of work. Careful preparation. Precision planning. Everything was in place,” he said softly. “But the day it went down, Anna missed her bus because of a flat tire. For sixty-eight consecutive days, that bus had picked her up from her job at exactly three forty-five p.m. and taken her to the library, where her mother would meet her, and then they’d walk the rest of the way home. On the one day that it mattered, Anna didn’t make it to the library on time.”

  Her heart fluttered wildly. “So you left them there?”

  Guilt filled his eyes. “We had no choice. Corbet was already with us. It had taken months to make that happen, and other lives were on the line. Good people had stuck their necks out for Corbet and would die if we didn’t stay the course. We had to move him before he was missed. Uncle wanted him out of Russia as much as Corbet did. So we got him out.”

  “And Svetlana? Anna?”

  “Were waiting at home when the Soviet police went looking for them.”

  Oh, God.

  “We had a team on the ground that intercepted. They got them across the border and finally to Budapest and safety.”

  This was no spy story. This was real life. Agonizing, terrifying, real life in a Communist country. “How long ago was this?”

  He let out a weary breath. “It’ll soon be two years.”

  Two years. How horrible. How sad. “Why haven’t they come to the States to join him?”

  “Because there are eyes everywhere. They’re in hiding. At least, I hope they are.”

  Her heart jumped again. “What does that mean?”

  Again, he didn’t look at her. But his tone revealed his anger. “You know what it means. If they’re not hiding, then either they’re dead or the Russians found them and are holding them in prison.”

  She was quiet for a long while, digesting it all, thinking of the suffering they’d been through. “Why do you think Corbet ended up here? At Area Fifty-One?” she asked. That, it seemed, was the million-dollar question.

  “You saw the same thing in that room that I did.”

  The missile.

  “Whatever he had in the works when we got him out of there was big. We made sure he escaped the lab with most of his research, and what he couldn’t bring with him we destroyed. That’s why we had to get him out that day. That moment,” he added, and she knew he was again feeling guilt over leaving Svetlana and Anna behind.

  He dug into his pocket, pulled out the zip drive with Corbet’s copied files, and stared at it for a long moment before tossing it to her. “Now’s as good a time as any. Let’s see what’s on this puppy.”

  “Here goes everything,” she said, and plugged it into her tablet.

  • • •

  Corbet’s files were thorough. And shocking. Just as shocking as the title of the first document she opened up.

  “Eagle Claw,” she murmured, not believing what she was seeing.

  “Say again?” Cooper sprang off the bed.

  “He’s working on Eagle Claw. My God, I thought that was a myth.”

  “Scroll down. Let’s see the overview.”

  Eagle Claw:

  Hypersonic cruise missile

  Speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 7

  Range 500+ kilometers, the capability to reach any target on earth in less than an hour

  Prototype includes advanced avionics GPS, radar terrain matching, and internal guidance

  Semiautonomous terminal guidance, the ability to use heat signatures or radar to provide final targeting, results in extreme accuracy

  Titanium alloy construction

  Scramjet engine and a rocket booster power

  Adaptable to conventional and nuclear payloads

  Can launch from the ground, ship, or an aircraft

  “Holy, holy hell,” Cooper swore. “Do you know what this is?”

  “A doomsday missile?”

  “I was going to say Armageddon, but that’s close enough.”

  “No wonder
the U.S. wanted Corbet and his research.”

  “And what do you want to bet that the Russians would do just about anything to get it and their scientist back?”

  “Let’s back up a sec.” She scanned the overview again. “These are merely specs. This doesn’t mean the project is anywhere near completion—or even operational, for that matter.”

  “You saw it. It looked pretty damn complete to me.”

  “Hold on. Let me check out some of these other files, see where they’re really at with the production.”

  She quickly opened file after file. Most of them contained indecipherable equations and formulas, test runs, and databases. And there were hundreds of them.

  “This is going to take a while,” she said. “Looks like I’ll be pulling an all-nighter.”

  Cooper walked restlessly to the door. “I need to figure out how to get to Corbet. I want to talk to him.”

  “What do you plan to do? Take out a guard?”

  “It won’t come to that,” he assured her.

  Yikes. She’d been kidding. “What if I find something here? Something you need to know about? How will I get a hold of you?” Cell phones wouldn’t work in this five-level underground bunker designed to shield against electronic eavesdropping.

  He dug around in his duffel and pulled out a small case. Inside were two earpiece radios. “The latest and greatest technology Uncle’s money can buy.”

  “They’re so tiny.”

  “Which means they have a pretty short range. Not too sure how well they’ll work in reinforced concrete, but we’ll give it a go.”

  He turned one on and handed it to her before carefully fitting his in his ear, making sure the appropriate tab lay against his cheek.

  When she struggled with hers, he reached up and helped her. “This tab stays against your cheekbone. It’s a bone-conduction microphone. You don’t have to key anything to transmit—just speak as clearly as you can.”

  “Pays to have spooky friends, huh?”

  “Let’s hope so. Don’t wait up for me.”

  As he headed for the door, she said, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Two minutes later, she heard his voice in her ear. “Hondo to Buttercup, do you read me?”

  Despite herself, she grinned. “Burns to Cooper. Some nitwit intercepted our private line. If you see him, shoot him. Over and out.”

  32

  She wasn’t smiling an hour later. She’d finally found what she’d been looking for.

  Big, scary stuff.

  She touched a finger to the radio tab against her cheek. “Cooper. Get back here. Now.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Just get back here.”

  “On my way.”

  She paced as she waited, almost bursting with panic when he finally walked in the door five minutes later.

  “Eagle Claw is way past its testing stage,” she blurted out. “It can be ready to go into production in a matter of days.”

  He eyed her thoughtfully. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. That killing machine is ready to go.” She ripped the earbud from her ear and tossed it onto the table. “What the hell is DOD thinking? Something this cutting-edge, with the capacity to elevate military power to world domination, and which the government has sunk billions of dollars into—why the hell wouldn’t they already have security nailed to the wall?”

  His expression had grown dark, and she could see he had the exact same questions.

  “They’d have to have this wrapped up tight,” she continued. “There can be zero chance that Russia gets this technology back. Or what if North Korea or Iran or any other badass regime got hold of any part of the working plans or the alloys?”

  When he still said nothing, she let it all out.

  “Why the hell don’t they have this facility armed to the gills? I’m talking antiaircraft guns, Phantom jet patrols, hell, a battalion of Marines!”

  He met her eyes then, and she knew she wasn’t going to like what he had to say. “Because they don’t know that Eagle Claw is ready to go,” he speculated, his words hanging in the room like a black cloud.

  “How can that be?”

  “Maybe because Corbet hasn’t told them.”

  She let that idea take shape, congeal, and finally form. “You got in to see him? Is that what he told you?”

  He gave a quick shake of his head. “No. I didn’t get in to see him. Short of explosives, no one’s getting into that room unless Corbet gives them access. You need to keep searching his files,” he said abruptly.

  “What exactly am I looking for?”

  “Anything in duplicate. Progress reports. Timelines. Any files that seem redundant.”

  “Now that you mention it . . .” She turned back to her tablet and scrolled through Corbet’s files. “There are a lot of copies of the same files. I only opened the originals. Hold on.”

  She went to work and soon came up with a frightening pattern.

  “He’s cooking the books,” she said finally. “Providing a progress timeline to DOD and keeping another timeline for himself.”

  “And?”

  “And,” she said, her alarm building, “according to the timelines he’s been turning in to DOD, Eagle Claw is a good three months away from completion.”

  She looked up at Cooper, who had stopped pacing.

  “Why would he do that?”

  She could see him attempting to frame all the pieces they’d uncovered into a cohesive picture. When he turned to her, she could tell that he had it all worked out in his mind. “We were sent here because of a vague but credible threat, right?”

  She nodded, giving him time to pull it all together.

  “We find that security is tight but not on red alert. We’ve got ourselves a Russian scientist who defected with his plans for a doomsday missile. A scientist who apparently has attained his mission but fudged his reports to the Department of Defense, so they have no way of knowing that Eagle Claw is mere steps away from being operational.”

  She swallowed hard, afraid she knew where he was going with this.

  “A scientist,” he continued, “who hasn’t seen his wife and daughter in two very long years and who, according to all the data you’ve found, has worked day and night to complete his task.” He looked at her sharply. “The Russians got to him. That has to be it. Somehow they got someone on the inside and got to Corbet. What do you want to bet they’re using his wife and daughter as bait for blackmail?”

  “They want their Eagle Claw technology back,” she said as the horrible realization gelled. “And the only way they can make it work is if they get Corbet, too.” She looked him squarely in the eyes. “They’re going to attack this facility to get it, aren’t they? They’re coming after Eagle Claw and Corbet. That’s the credible threat.”

  He looked at her long and hard before reluctantly nodding. “Yeah. I believe it is. The big question is, when are they going to make their move?”

  “We’ve got to get word to Nate,” she said urgently.

  “And how do you propose we do that? We’re as locked in as the facility is locked down. We’re not getting out of here until Monday morning, when the staff return from Vegas.”

  He was right. Once you stepped into the bunker, all contact from the outside world ceased. That had been built into the security program. Clever, and exactly what she would have done. Until she urgently needed to contact someone on the outside. “What if we don’t have until Monday?” She hated even asking. They both looked at the wall clock. It was a little after nine p.m. The longest Friday of her life—and it was about to get a lot longer.

  “I’m going to go talk to the guards and the MP,” he said. “Give ’em a heads-up to be extra alert and see if any of them are in the loop on a contingency plan to bust our asses out of here or if the plan is to go down
with the ship.”

  “I’ll head for the server farm,” she said. “Maybe I can find a way to circumvent the system and somehow reach Nate. Or even the nearby Air Force base.”

  “My money’s on you,” Cooper said.

  “Normally, I’d agree. But from what I’ve seen, even though interior communication can be breached by someone who knows what they’re doing, getting outside contact is a whole other ball game. If I manage to find a way, it’s going to take a while.”

  “Keep something in mind, Buttercup, we’re merely speculating here. What we’ve got is valid, and we should assume the worst and be prepared. But with the no-fly zone an exterior security, the odds of anyone even getting close to the bunker are almost nonexistent. There’s every possibility that we’ll spend a dull weekend playing gin . . . or strip poker?”

  “Nice try, Hondo. But I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.”

  He picked up her earbud and handed it to her. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  She slipped it into her ear and headed for the door.

  His hand on her arm stopped her. “You okay?” He searched her eyes intently. “I know you didn’t sign up for this.”

  She was as okay as a woman who had applied for a desk job but had ended up in the middle of a possible siege situation could be. “Got my badass outfit on,” she said with a weak smile. “How could I not be okay?”

  He grinned and pulled her against him. “You do look pretty badass in black.”

  Then he kissed her. She moved into him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and pulled him close. He was the only thing that would hold her together if this weekend turned into something she had no preparation for.

  When he pulled away from the kiss, he pressed his forehead to hers, still holding her. “Nothing’s going to happen to you as long as I’m drawing breath, Buttercup.”