The dirt track cut over a low hill, the edge of which now glowed with the headlights of the approaching 4x4.
Leif considered that the chase had brought something new into his heart, something he’d not felt before. He had grown up small and witty, but afraid of pain and failure. Nothing like his father. But now he felt a surge of unfamiliar confidence in himself. He felt as though he couldn’t fail. He understood that they might fail, that they could be killed or captured; he wasn’t kidding himself. But the primal aspects of his personality did not seem to respond to that knowledge. He felt at ease and secure.
The 4x4’s headlights broke over the hill and bore down on him followed by a whine of gears and crunch of tires on rocks and dirt. Leif stuck out his hand and waved. The 4x4’s brakes screeched and it idled to a stop beside him. The smell of burned oil drifted from the hot engine. The old 4x4 had no doors. Its worn canvas top caught the evening breeze.
Despite himself, Leif asked, “Does this thing run on gas?”
The man in the 4x4 took off his dirty hat and set it on the patched knee of his dungarees. He said in a heavy Australian accent, “It’s converted. But what kind of question is that to greet a man with on the side of the road?”
“Sorry,” Leif said, “it was the first thing that came to mind.”
The man stared at him for a moment and then turned and spit into the desert.
“Um,” Leif stammered a bit, “I… my friends and I, that is, are camping… out that way,” and he pointed directly at the gunship out in the darkness and then cursed himself. The man looked over Leif’s shoulder to the ridge, squinting.
“It’s really more that way,” Leif said, pointing farther north.
The man put his hat back on his head. “You all right? Feeling okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I have a pregnant wife back home, and I wanted to check in on her, but our sat-phone’s dead, so I…”
“You shouldn’t be in the Outback on foot at all, lest alone without a sat-phone.”
“You’re right, but I thought I’d wait here to see if I could flag someone down and use their sat-phone to check in with my wife. The pregnant one.”
Dammit Leif get your shit together.
He drew a deep breath. “I’m pretty nervous about the whole thing.”
The man shifted his weight in his seat, took out his sat-phone, and looked at it. “Not nervous enough to stay home where you shoulda. Right?”
“Sure, but I really would appreciate the help.”
“You must be daft or lucky, probably both,” the man said, looking out along the dirt tracks. “No one drives down this road. Why, I bet I’m the first one to drive down this way in a month or more.”
“That’s lucky for me then,” Leif said, feeling irritation rising.
Just give me the damn phone, and I’ll let you get on your way.
The man looked at the phone and then leaned over the passenger seat and handed it to Leif. He said, “Get in the truck and sit down, no reason to be uncomfortable while you talk. I’ll give you a few moments to yourself.” He took the key out of the ignition and stepped down out of the 4x4, walking out into the scrub a good distance. Without ceremony the man, now facing the sunset, unzipped his fly and relieved himself.
Leif tapped on the phone’s screen, calling up a search on System Alliance Development. He found the headquarters and then looked through the corporate information. No officers listed. He found a submission area with a security flaw, hacked into the corporate site, and browsed the listings. He noted a few names of scientists, but then came to Roger Freisman, VP of Robotics, based in Bremerton, Washington.
“Good stuff,” Leif said to himself.
He looked up to see the man watching the horizon, giving him privacy with his wife. Despite the fact that the man had given him a hard time at first, Leif felt a pang of guilt for lying to someone who was now being so good to him.
Leif looked back down to the phone and found Freisman’s HR records, medical benefits, etc. He took out a scrap of paper and a pen and jotted down Freisman’s home address and a few facts. Married. 16 year old daughter. Out in the scrub, the man turned and starting walking back to the 4x4. Leif tapped quickly into the phone and then lifted it to his ear. “I love you too,” he said, and pretended to end the call.
The man, now standing beside the 4x4, said, “Your wife okay?”
“Sure is,” Leif said, handing back the phone and stepping out of the 4X4. “Thank you.”
The man climbed into the 4x4 and looked at Leif. “You need a ride back to your camp? This thing’ll make it there.”
“No, I’m fine, but thanks very much.”
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He pushed the 4x4 into gear and drove away.
…
Jeffrey and Stacy sat in the gunship’s cockpit watching the headlights of the 4x4 off in the distance. It held its position for some time, and then the headlights began sweeping and bouncing down the road again. Jeffrey let the lights move out a mile or so before he flew back. Leif came on board and shouted over the engines, “Roger Freisman is our man. He’s the VP for Robotics. We get him, we’ll have the keys to the castle.”
After the ramp had sealed shut, Stacy said, “Great work.”
“Thanks.”
Jeffrey asked, “Where do we go?” He looked over his shoulder at Leif and saw a solid confidence in his son’s expression.
“System Alliance Development’s robotics division is headquartered in Bremerton, Washington, up near Seattle. There’s a Navy base nearby. I’ve been there. I had to fly in to do some repairs on a Dakota gunship’s main boards last year, so I’m somewhat familiar with the area.”
“What if the guy looks up what you did on his phone?”
“He’ll find nothing. He could call the provider for logs, but his phone is clean.”
“Excellent,” Jeffrey said. “Where’s Bremerton in relation to Seattle?”
“You know the Olympic Peninsula?”
“Yes, the mountains to the west, right?”
“That’s them. Bremerton is on the inside of that, across Puget Sound from Seattle.”
With their target in hand and several hours to fly, Stacy and Leif settled into the rear seats, and Jeffrey pushed the gunship across the Pacific one more time. He knew he should have flown to some desolate area and gotten a good night’s sleep before moving on, but he was too eager to get closer to a potential solution. He washed a caffeine tablet down with a swig of water and flew out across the Great Barrier reef, into the black sky.
Out over the open ocean, the bright half-moon hung in a field of stars. Ahead, a storm front rose up off the water’s surface. Jeffrey pulled back on the stick and brought the gunship up to 35 thousand feet. The storm clouds, glowing in the moonlight, rolled beneath the gunship’s belly. The night and storm brought Jeffrey relief as the gunship melted into the darkness. A few red and blue markers strobed in the distance, but far enough off that no one would make out the black gunship in the night sky.
Jeffrey considered saving fuel by flying below the speed of sound, but over seven thousand miles of ocean separated Australia from the northern U.S. coastline. He wasn’t sure he had it left in him for over ten more hours of flying. He pushed the gunship past Mach-3 and it drank deeply of its fuel. Yet, this speed would cut the trip time down to just under three-and-a-half hours. Even so, they would be jumping seven time zones and when they arrived again on U.S. soil it would be nearly 8AM.
Halfway across the Pacific, the horizon glowed a deep red over the blanket of clouds. Then, with the gunship speeding toward it, the sun cut into the sky in a blinding red disk. Jeffrey scanned the controls again and found a dial with the graphic of a sun half blazing and half covered in a dark square. He turned it and the cockpit glass went black.
“Oh, wow,” he said, and backed off the dial, reducing the tint so he could see out the shaded glass. The sun now hung above the horizon as a solid plate of copper. As he flew, the sheet of clouds b
roke up, allowing him to see down to the gray chop whipped up from the dark-green sea. The high clouds thinned out more, and fog built up over the ocean, pressing itself up against the landmass of the Washington coastline.
“Hey Leif,” Jeffrey shouted into the back.
“I’m up, I’m up,” Leif said. A thumping and a curse came from the back, and then Leif appeared in Jeffrey’s rearview mirror. He sat down, and Jeffrey saw him grinding the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.
“You’ll grind out your eyeballs if you keep that up,” he said.
“It feels good to grind out your eyeballs,” Leif said through his hands. He stopped and looked over the navigation controls. “What can I help you with?”
“I need you to help me locate this town. I’m riding the IFR signal into Seattle, but I don’t know Bremerton’s frequency, or even if they have an airport. I haven’t looked for it on the GPS. Locate it, and then show me where a good area for a landing site might be. We need a nice, secluded landing site as close to Bremerton as we can manage. Also, I need you to scan for people like you did before.” Jeffrey slowed the gunship, and began to let it lose altitude.
“Should be easy enough,” Leif said. “When I was up here, I did a bit of hiking in the evenings. The entire Olympic Peninsula has gone back to wilderness. You go fifty miles west of Bremerton and you won’t find a soul.”
“Maybe we should try to risk a bit closer,” Jeffrey said. “I, for one, do not want to hike fifty miles there and back.
“Got it.”
The blanket of fog caught in ripped sheets on the glaciated peaks of the Olympic mountains. Farther inland, the fog ran thin, and only eddies of it remained in the valleys and over the lower forested peaks. The majority of the peaks passed to their left. Then the gunship flew over a thin inlet, its tree rimmed water still dark in the morning light.
The gunship crossed the inlet and was back over forested land, when Leif said, “Hold up.”
Jeffrey pulled back on the stick and hovered, “What?”
“You see that larger body of water just past the last hills there?” A glitter of blue-green ran north to south, separating the forest.
“Yes.”
“That’s Puget Sound, so Bremerton is just on this side of it in the trees there. You see the city over there?”
Jeffrey squinted and saw the forest broken by a gray swath along the water.
“Okay,” he said.
“That’s Seattle, so it’s probably a good time to start looking for a place to land.”
“I think we can get closer,” Jeffrey said. “What do you see on the ground?”
“There are heartbeats everywhere, many big enough to be people. The forest is littered with signals. It’s most likely deer and other animals.”
“We’ll just have to risk it then.”
Jeffrey scanned the ground, coming closer and closer to the city. Now he saw buildings over the trees and he dropped the gunship just a few feet above the tree tops. To the right, a road ran along, cutting a path through the forest. Jeffrey veered away from it. The forest consisted of immense pine trees with branches so heavy they could have been trees themselves in other areas of the country. Here and there, gaps in the trees revealed a forest floor clogged with briars and ferns. As Jeffrey turned the gunship away from the road, he flew out over a clearing and thought he had just appeared over some kind of facility in the woods. However, when he looked for buildings, he saw nothing. The area had simply been recently logged. Young saplings grew in the clearing and he considered that this probably meant that the area, currently growing back, would be vacant. He lowered the gunship into the clearing and set it down behind a low rise on the southern side of the clearcut. The gunship settled at a slight angle, and he shut off the engines. As he pulled off his straps, he heard the ramp hiss open.
Stacy said, her voice distant in the back of the gunship, “This is definitely a change.” Then her voice became even fainter as she stepped out of the ship. “Oh my God. Look at this place, it’s… mossy.” As Jeffrey unstrapped himself, the outside air rolled through the cockpit, carrying with it the scents of spring flowers, pine resin, and morning mist.
Jeffrey and Leif moved out of the cockpit, through the back, and down the ramp to join Stacy standing among old broken stumps on a bed of ferns and grasses. Young pine saplings surrounded them, reaching up shoulder high. Delicate purple foxgloves, blue lupine, and yellow daises grew up among the grasses. On several of the mossy stumps large, yellow banana slugs shifted through the morning dew. Jeffrey inhaled the cool air through his nose, let it fill his chest, and let it out again.
“What’s the next step?” Stacy asked.
“I sleep,” Jeffrey said, rubbing his head and yawning. “We’ll stand our ground for awhile to see if this place is abandoned or if we get guests. Then we’ll have to risk leaving the ship and pray to God no one finds it.”
“We could leave someone with the ship and let the other two go,” Stacy said.
“You mean, leave me with the ship,” Jeffrey said. “I’m the only pilot right?”
“Yes.”
“You ever kidnap someone before?” Jeffrey asked.
Indignation slid into Stacy’s voice. “No. Have you?”
“No, but I’m fairly confident I can. What about you?”
“I’m pretty sure I could do it,” Stacy said, and turned to Leif. “What about you?”
“I’m not gonna make any claims at all,” Leif said. “I’m gonna vote for all three of us, and risk the Kiowa. We don’t know what we’re up against here, and in that situation we need all the experience and help we can muster.”
Stacy looked at the gunship. “What about the ramp? If we close it, will it lock us out?”
Leif said, “I disabled the fingerprint scanner when we were on the island. It only operates on the secondary switch now. It won’t lock us out, but we can’t lock anyone else out either.”
Stacy nodded, and then said to Jeffrey, “So go get some sleep and we’ll get you up… when?”
“Let’s leave at dusk,” Jeffrey said. “You two scout out a path to the highway and then try and get some sleep this afternoon.”
Jeffrey stepped back into the gunship, took some BDU’s from the survival bags, and set them out for a pillow. He lay down. In a few moments, the sound of his breathing rolled out of the gunship.
CHAPTER 16
Stacy followed Leif to the edge of the clearcut and found that the briars there grew higher than their heads, a solid wall of thorns. Farther east, the briars thinned to ferns and broad-leafed plants. They hiked through the underbrush to the south and found a deer trail. Branches grew over the trail, and Stacy had to stoop and push bushes aside to enter the forest. As they walked, the air remained cool in the deep shade of the old trees.
“So do you have a boyfriend or…?” Leif asked.
The question made Stacy uneasy, and she considered lying, but then said, “No.”
“Oh,” Leif said.
Stacy felt that he wanted to say more and wished he wouldn’t. She said nothing more. As she walked, listening to the cracks of twigs under their feet and the buzzing of insects, the moment passed.
Within the hour, after a few dead ends, they stepped down a steep bank to the gravel shoulder of the road. The new pavement lay under a hallway of trees. Moss tinted the edges of the blacktop green. In a moment, an electric whine rose up from around the corner and a car flashed by. The driver looked at them as he passed.
“I think we should set out before nightfall so we can get someone to pick us up and take us to town before dark,” Leif said. “We’ll have a hard time catching a ride on this road at night.”
A semi rolled by as Stacy spoke.
“What?” Leif asked.
“I said, sounds good to me.”
They stood on the road for a moment more. Stacy felt as if there was something more she should do, some more planning or surveillance, but nothing came to mind. Another car passed and, w
hen it had gone, Stacy turned and walked back into the forest. Leif followed her up the bank.
…
When they returned to the gunship, they found Jeffrey snoring in tremendous draws of breath. His boots stuck out onto the ramp in a slightly shifted position. A fat, round winter wren landed on one boot toe, hopped to the next, picked at the sole, and then, when Jeffrey drew in another snoring breath, flitted away.
Despite the bright afternoon sun, the air remained pleasantly cool as it filtered in through the forest. Leif and Stacy walked up the low hill to see the rest of the clear-cut. The area extended out about 500 meters square. A red-tailed hawk glided out from over the surrounding trees and circled, its wings outstretched, pinion feathers splayed wide. Stacy and Leif watched as it completed another circle and then glided back over the trees and out of sight. They turned and walked back to the ship.
Stacy listened to Jeffrey’s snoring for a moment and then looked out across the clear-cut. “I think I’ll try to get a bit of rest away from the ship.” She walked up into the ship, took out a few BDU’s from the survival gear, rolled them up to serve as a pillow, and walked along the tree line. Most of the moss still held the dampness of the morning fog, but she found a spot of dry grass, lay back on it, and looked up at the trees. The pines shifted as the breeze hushed through them. Small, fat clouds moved across the blue sky. Every so often, one crossed the sun, dropping her into shadow and the air chilled. As the cloud moved on, the sun beamed back out warm and bright. In this shifting of light, Stacy fell asleep.
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