Run and Hide

by Alan McDermott

  Although it was a large engine block, he didn’t expect it to pose them much of a challenge, but after a minute of grunting and heaving, they hadn’t managed to move it more than a couple of millimeters. That in itself was telling, and Hannagan knew there had to be a mechanism holding it in place. The room had only one visible switch, but when flicked, it did nothing but illuminate the small space. He winced as the light flared in his NVGs, then turned it off again.

  The pallet remained in place.

  By combing each wall, he eventually found a switch in a hole in the drywall. He told his men to cover the engine, then pressed the button and quickly raised his own weapon. The pallet raised a couple of inches on near-silent hydraulics, then shifted to one side to reveal a brightly lit basement.

  Hannagan pushed the NVGs up and waited for Colback and Driscoll to make their move, but the gunfire he’d expected failed to materialize. From his position, he could see much of the interior. While it appeared to be abandoned, he had no choice but to send one of his men down to investigate.

  He watched his subordinate gingerly descend, rifle up and ready to unleash hell, but when he reached the bottom of the stairs and scanned the room, he called up the all-clear.

  Hannagan quickly climbed down to take a look for himself. It was indeed deserted. He checked for signs that it had recently been occupied and soon found what he was looking for. A water bottle had a thin sheen of moisture on the outside, meaning it had recently come out of the fridge. He found two more in the trash.

  That they’d been here was now beyond doubt, but where had they gone? Hannagan saw no obvious exits apart from the stairs leading back up to the garage. “There must be another way out,” he said. “Search everywhere but watch out for booby traps.”

  Exactly 120 seconds after the first man had descended the stairs, the pallet swung back into place above with a resounding thunk. The lights went out, leaving the two men in darkness.

  Hannagan put his night-vision glasses back into position and raised his rifle, expecting an attack. Instead, the sprinkler system overhead burst into life, drenching him and his companion to the skin.

  CHAPTER 9

  After fifty or so miles, Eva turned the motorcycle onto a dirt road and headed into the woods. Good, thought Colback. If they were stopping, it would give him the chance to ask some of the questions that had been bouncing around in his head for the last hour.

  When they reached a small clearing, Eva stopped the bike and turned the engine off.

  “We’ll rest here until morning,” she said, putting the helmet on the handlebars. She gestured for the backpack.

  Colback shrugged it off and handed it to her. “Then what?”

  “We’re going to need help. They managed to track us to the cabin, possibly by satellite, or someone told them this was a CIA safe house. If we’re going to evade them, we need to be in the loop.”

  Colback frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  Eva put the bag on the ground. “I’ll explain in the morning. Right now, we need to get some sleep.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m not that tired.”

  “Great,” Eva said, handing him the rifle and settling down, using the backpack as a pillow. “You can take first watch. Wake me in three hours.”

  She closed her eyes and within seconds was purring gently.

  During his time in the Green Berets, Colback had come to appreciate the value of grabbing sleep whenever possible, but this was a new situation. Back then, the nature of his mission had been simple: engage the bad guys and kill them. Now he didn’t even know who the bad guys were, or why they wanted him dead. He only knew that they seemed to be US agents of some kind. He’d hoped Eva would shed light on the problem, but as her priority was getting rest, he’d have to be patient.

  Colback studied her as she slept and saw little family resemblance. Jeff Driscoll had been quite a few inches taller, with ears that an elephant would have been proud of. His face was rounder too, whereas Eva’s tapered from her eyes down to her slightly pointed chin. After the extended time they’d spent in the cabin basement, he’d come to realize that the Asian-seeming cast to her eyes was the result of makeup rather than genetics. He didn’t know if she’d done it to evade the facial recognition system she’d mentioned, or simply to make herself look more attractive.

  Not that she needed much help on that score.

  Despite the circumstances, Colback felt something stir within him as he watched her snore gently. It wasn’t merely a physical attraction. He’d never met a woman so cool and assured under pressure. Few men, either. He could hardly have asked for a smarter or more capable ally in the nightmare they were living.

  Colback looked away from Eva and struggled to think of a reason why anyone would want to kill all the members of his squad. Nothing leaped out at him. The people after him appeared to have connections to the government, so it wasn’t likely to be an act of revenge for one of the insurgents he’d killed in Afghanistan or Iraq during his numerous tours. What could have turned his friends and him into such a liability?

  He spent the next few hours with various ideas going through his head, none of which made any sense at all. Finally, he shook her awake.

  Eva was instantly alert. “Any sign of visitors?”

  “None,” Colback said. “I have a few questions though.”

  “You should rest. I have a feeling tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”

  “I will, but I want to know what you’ve got planned. You said something about satellites and being in the loop.”

  Eva took a bottle from her backpack, swallowed a big mouthful, and passed it to Colback. “The satellites operate 24/7 and the signals they send back can be seen by anyone with the proper equipment and clearance. I have a friend who has access to both. The only way we can avoid the eyes in the sky is if we know what they’re looking at. First thing in the morning, I’ll take the bike to the nearest town and swap it for a car, then we’ll go see him.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “New Lexington, Ohio.”

  “That’s hundreds of miles away,” Colback said.

  “Three hundred and eighty-three from our current location, and that’s as the crow flies. With a couple of stops for food and gas, we’ll make it by sundown. Any earlier and we’ll be sitting around waiting for night to fall.”

  “You think they’ll be watching him, is that it?”

  “Probably,” Eva admitted. “By now they’ll have a complete file on me, including known associates. All of my credit cards, bank accounts, passports, and anything else that leaves an electronic signature will be on their watch list. We have to go off-grid, which means giving you a crash course in spy shit 101.”

  “I know the basics,” Colback countered.

  “You know squat and that’s putting it mildly. You’re also hard-headed and that’s not gonna fly.”

  Colback’s nape bristled. He shot her a glare that normally sent tough men cowering, but Eva continued as calmly as before.

  “You need to lose the attitude,” she said. “I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to take out a Taliban machine gun nest, but this is my domain. If I speak, you listen. If I give you an order, you obey without question. You got that?”

  “I got it.”

  “I hope so, because so far I’ve had to tell you everything twice, and that could get me killed. If you slow me down, you’re on your own. I want to find out who killed my brother, and you can be part of the solution or part of the problem.”

  “I said I got it.”

  “Good.” Eva checked her watch. “Get your head down. I’ll wake you at seven, then go get some new wheels.”

  “How do you plan to do that if your credit cards are being monitored?”

  “Always with the questions.” Eva sighed and dug into the backpack, then pulled out a bundle of hundred-dollar bills. “We pay cash from now on.”

  “How much have you got? We could be on the run for weeks.”


  “Fifteen grand,” Eva told him. “But your guess is way off the mark. If we’re careful, we might have four or five days at the most.”

  “Why don’t you contact the CIA for help? Surely they’d send a team out to support you, or at least look into who’s behind all this.”

  “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”

  Despite her sarcasm, Colback felt his question deserved an answer. “Well?”

  Eva shook her head slowly and stared at the ground, as if conflicted. Colback got the feeling she didn’t want to go into it, but eventually she relented.

  “Who runs this country?” she asked at last.

  Colback frowned. “The president, of course. Well, the government.”

  “Wrong. You couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s a body that calls themselves the Executive Security Office. They’ve been the power behind the White House ever since the end of the Second World War. Back then, they were mere billionaires, but now they control everything. The ESO decides which ‘unsavory’ acts are carried out and by whom. Need to destabilize the government of an African country in order to gain access to its oil? The ESO gives that task to the CIA. Got a reporter sniffing too close to a politically sensitive story? ESO tells us to make it look like an accident. All of my orders were given to me by my superiors, but I suspect they ultimately originated from the ESO.”

  “How come I’ve never heard of the ESO?” Colback asked.

  “Few have. I first learned about them from my friend Farooq but dismissed it as conspiracy theory. It was only when Bill Sanders let it slip that I knew it really existed. You ever hear of a guy called Edward Perkins?”

  Colback shook his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “It shouldn’t be. His death barely made the local newspapers. Perkins claimed to have created an engine that ran on water.”

  “I’ve heard of those,” Colback said.

  “Well, they’re all bogus. To extract hydrogen from water, you need to use more energy than the hydrogen will create when it’s burned. It goes against the first and second laws of thermodynamics.”

  “I’ll trust you on that.”

  Eva let the remark slide. “I did my own research when I first heard about it. Most inventions like it are scams designed to get people to invest in shell companies that fold after a few months. Typical boiler-room scams. Turns out, though, Perkins had actually done it. He’d created an engine that worked. It was still in its infancy, but once verified, panic set in. Oil is just about our single biggest reason for going to war, and the profits line the pockets of very influential people. Once they’d worked out the financial impact—and we’re talking trillions of dollars—it was decided that Perkins had to go.”

  “They told you all this?” Colback asked.

  “No, I worked it out. A substantial amount was deposited in Perkins’s bank account the day the patent was signed over to a government body, though he wasn’t able to spend a penny of it. His car mysteriously ended up in a lake, with him inside.”

  “Fascinating stuff,” Colback said. “But why does this stop you from contacting the CIA?”

  “For the ESO to know about the safe house, Langley must have handed over my file. They would only do that if ordered to, and the ESO are not going to allow them to hinder their mission by helping me. I’m as much a target as you are.”

  She must have known this would happen, Colback thought, yet she still decided to help me. That took a lot of guts, but he knew it wasn’t really about him. Eva was clearly driven by the desire to get to the people behind her brother’s death, and the only reason she’d saved him was because he might have information that would help her achieve her goal.

  One thing was for certain: he wouldn’t last long without her.

  “Back to the satellites,” he said. “I still don’t see how knowing what they’re looking at via the eye in the sky is going to help us. If we stay with your friend, we’ll know if they zoom in on his place, but by then it’ll be too late. We’d be trapped. Staying mobile would be better, but then how do you contact your guy if we can’t use cells?”

  “I have an app on my phone,” she said.

  “That’s it? You download an app and want me to believe it’s secure?”

  “This one is. Farooq created it himself. It uses technology even I don’t understand, but I know that if anyone manages to intercept the messages, it’s impossible to decode them. As for using it to locate us, the digital package is bounced off servers all around the world. By the time they pin down a location it’ll be too late to do anything about it.”

  Colback had to concede to her greater knowledge. His own experience with the latest gadgets was limited to the social media applications he had installed on his cell phone, and he had no idea what went on in the background. “That reminds me. You owe me a new cell. The one you smashed cost four hundred bucks.”

  “I’ll buy you a top-of-the-range model when this is all over. Until then, steer clear of all electronic devices unless I say so.”

  Colback was no longer in the mood to argue. Weariness had snuck up on him, and as he let out a yawn, the prospect of getting his head down suddenly seemed the most important thing in the world.

  “One last thing,” he said as he made the backpack-cum-pillow as comfortable as possible. “What was the little surprise you had for the guys in the basement?”

  “If they manage to get it open, anyone still inside after two minutes will be doused in a permanent blue dye. It’s not toxic, but looking like a Smurf for the next couple of weeks should take them out of the game.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “Open it, goddamn it!”

  Hannagan pounded on the trapdoor as if his anger would speed up the process, but the hatch remained firmly in place.

  “The switch isn’t working,” his subordinate said over the comms unit, and Hannagan cursed once more at his own stupidity. He should have known the place would be rigged, but the subject had been smart enough to use a timer to suck more people in. This wasn’t a mistake he’d make again.

  With the stairs to the garage cut off, his only hope of seeing daylight again was to find the exit Colback and the woman had used for their own escape. The sprinklers had stopped, which was one small crumb of comfort, but the lights remained off, meaning he would have to conduct the search through the dim green tinge of the night-vision glasses.

  It only took a minute to find the passageway hidden behind the closet and, as Hannagan stepped into the illuminated tunnel, he saw for the first time what he had been soaked in. His hands were stained dark blue, and when he ushered the other team member into the tunnel he could see the man was covered from head to toe with the same dye.

  “I gotta feeling this ain’t gonna wash off,” Hannagan heard, but he was already contemplating his own future. There was no way he could be seen like this in daylight, which meant he had until dawn to find the pair.

  The consequences of failing didn’t bear thinking about.

  Hannagan radioed the other team leader to let him know about the discovery of the escape route. He didn’t explain his own personal predicament, as he knew it would take his teams’ minds off the job. “Looks like they got out through a tunnel. It leads east from the rear of the garage and it’s at least a hundred yards long. Send some men out that way.”

  Hannagan switched frequencies, then took a deep breath before updating West on the situation. “Nest, Eagle One. We just missed them. She had an escape tunnel. Expand the satellite image and check the woods for thermals. Set the focus a hundred yards east of the building and expand from there. They can’t be too far away.”

  “They’d better not be,” West warned, and Hannagan waited while the pencil-pushers adjusted the bird’s field of view. He tried wiping his hand on the wall to get rid of the dye, but he only succeeded in leaving a navy streak on the stone. Driscoll wouldn’t have gone to the trouble if it were something that would rinse off in the shower. He’d be wearing it for days, he knew, if not weeks
.

  “Eagle One, we have two heat signatures moving away from you.”

  Hannagan entered the coordinates into his GPS as they came over the air. “Can you confirm it’s them?”

  “Negative. We can’t see through the treetops.”

  “Roger, Nest. We’ll check it out.”

  There was little to gain from telling West about his impromptu blue shower. Plenty of time to explain once he’d completed the mission.

  “Eagle Two,” he said, addressing Eckman. “What’s your position?”

  “Seventy yards from the house, heading east.”

  Hannagan gave him the coordinates he’d received from West, then ran to the end of the tunnel. He scampered up the ladder and caught his breath when he reached the top, wary of his quarry and her tricks. He stepped down a couple of rungs, then used the muzzle of his rifle to ease the hatch open a couple of inches. There was no explosion, and no one tried to pepper his face with bullets. He pushed the hatch all the way open, then climbed out and put his NVGs back into position.

  He saw footprints in the dirt and broke through the foliage to follow them. The trail led in the direction of the recent sighting, and he checked in with the rest of the men to synchronize the takedown.

  “Nest, Eagle One. What’s the current location of the targets?”

  “Two hundred yards to your east, moving away slowly.”

  “Roger that.”

  Hannagan had no idea if Driscoll had access to NVGs but decided to proceed as if she did. He ordered the men to close slowly, staying silent imperative. A few minutes later, he saw the figures in the distance. He could make out their movements between the trees, and they didn’t appear to be in any particular hurry. “Hold up,” he whispered into his mic. “I have them.”