by Riley Flynn
“What are you talking about, Marcus?” His voice sounded weak in his own ears.
“Those aren’t your Eagles, Terry. They’re a new experimental drone. Each one is carrying four Swedish Meteor missiles, which are popular among a number of rogue states right now. The drones will be destroyed by the launch, of course, just in case anyone ever has the opportunity to investigate, which I highly doubt. We’ll be lucky if we can still get a plane off the ground when this is all over.”
At that moment, the office door burst inward and slammed against the wall behind it, followed by four men with black suits and severe haircuts.
“THAT’S NOT THE ESCORT!” the one in front hollered as the Secret Service agents threw themselves on top of Fletcher, almost crushing him against the sofa on the window wall.
As the fuselage erupted in a flash of orange and yellow and red, Terence Fletcher’s last thoughts weren’t of his wife or children, or even what was happening around him. They were of Jerry Fredericks, and staying up all night drinking beer and playing poker so many years ago, when the future was still a dream instead of the nightmare it had become.
Chapter 1
Five days earlier – Boblingen, Germany
He only sees her from behind, the flowing black hair draped over her shoulders as they walk through the cobblestone street. It’s a quaint little shopping block lined with old Tudor-style buildings, the place where he took her on their first date.
Her feet kick up little puffs of dust with each step. Everything seems so gray on the empty street. Even the air seems gray.
Why won’t she turn around?
“It’s time,” she whispers, but he still can’t see her face.
Time? No, not yet. They have loads of time, tons of time. They have their whole lives ahead of them.
He suddenly notices that they’re alone on the street, and that she’s in her scrubs, the gray ones she wears with a long-sleeved sweater underneath because there’s always a bit of a chill in the old hospice where she works.
No, wait—she works at the hospital. Why did I say hospice?
She’s shuffling ahead of him down a gray hallway. He hates this place; it’s old and claustrophobic, and it smells. It can’t be the hospital—that building is new and modern-looking and open. She doesn’t work here.
Vague realization starts to set in at the edges of his consciousness, and with it comes a growing alarm that he can feel but doesn’t understand.
“Why are we here?” he asks, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth, he knows he doesn’t want to hear the answer. He puts his fingers in his ears and shakes his head like a child. No. Nonononono.
She stops in front of him and finally turns to face him. His heartbeat starts to gallop, and suddenly he doesn’t want to see her face. No. Not at all. Nonononono.
But his eyes won’t close—they’re stuck fast to the turning head in front of him. Every moment seems to take a lifetime as his heart pounds in his chest. He knows what he’s going to see, but he refuses to accept it. If he doesn’t see it, it’s not real.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and the words hit him like an ice pick to the belly. The sound of his own racing breath seems to envelop him as her face finally becomes clear: horribly, horrifyingly clear.
All trace of her former beauty has been painted over by the grayness of the disease. The light in her eyes is now out, replaced by a pair of dead charcoal embers floating above her ravaged cheeks.
NonononononoNO!
“Promise me,” she whispers. “I need you to promise.”
“I promise,” he says through numb lips, not knowing what he’s agreeing to. All he’s aware of is the growing hole in the center of him throbbing like the dull ache of an infected tooth.
Her smile is hideous on that gray, empty face.
“I love you,” he whispers as she recedes into the distance of the hallway, now as long as a football field, a distance he knows he can’t cover even if he sprints with everything he has. She’s lost to him. He understands that now with an icy clarity that makes his heart crack.
“Jax,” she says, but it’s not her voice. “Jax, open up, man.”
Jackson Booth’s eyes snapped open as his hand reflexively reached for a weapon that wasn’t there. His heart was still thundering in his chest like a race horse, his face glistening with sweat.
Taptaptap at the door again. He looked around him: he was in the cheap old hotel room he’d rented for the last three weeks. He’d fallen asleep in the chair in the corner. The bunched muscles in his lower back were screaming blue murder. On the single bed next to the latticed window was a girl lying in a lump under the covers, eyes closed, breathing deeply.
Hayley, he told himself. It was Hayley. But that meant…
Rachel. Oh, God, Rachel, no. Nonononono.
Realization flooded into him, bringing with it the wave of grief that had been startled out of him when he woke up.
“Jax,” a familiar voice called from the hallway. “Seriously, dude, get up. We gotta move. Orders.”
He ignored the pain in his back and leapt to his feet, instinct telling him to let the man in before the noise woke the sleeping girl. He opened the door to see a wide brown face with an annoyed look on it.
“Why you don’t answer the door, man?” Ruben Lambert asked as he stepped into the room. “You got a lady in here?”
Jax frowned and brought an index finger to his lips, pointing the other toward the bed.
“Shit,” Ruben whispered as he saw the girl. “Sorry, didn’t know. What’s she doing here?”
Jax was silent, but the look on his face spoke volumes. His friend looked to the girl, then back to him, then back to the girl.
“Aw, no,” Ruben moaned, his eyes closing. “Tell me it’s not that.”
Jackson Booth wasn’t the crying sort. He carried his pain inside, like all the men in his family, for better or worse. But he couldn’t keep it out of his voice.
“Two-thirty this morning,” he husked. “Wasn’t time to get her from the hospice to the hospital. Not that there would have been any point by then. After both eyes went gray, they knew it was just a matter of time.”
Ruben had no such problems showing emotion; tears shone in his eyes as he draped an arm around Jax’s broad neck, stooping a bit to match his friend’s height and pulling him close.
“That’s fucked up, buddy,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Jax nodded silently. He was glad Ruben was here, even if he didn’t show it. They didn’t have to say things out loud. They’d been best friends since they met in basic training a dozen years ago. More than brothers in arms, Ruben was his brother in every sense except genetically. Their difference in rank—Jax was a captain, Ruben a chief warrant officer—was something they just worked around.
The two men glanced over at the girl. She was moving fitfully in her sleep, rubbing at her eyes with tiny fists, her long blond hair draped over her face. Her stuffed panda doll—a skinny, bedraggled thing that looked like it had been left out in the elements for a year or so—was held captive in the crook of her arm. Jax hoped her dreams were better than his, but deep down, he knew they weren’t. If anything, they were worse.
“Not even ten years old,” Ruben said with a shake of his head. “Ain’t right, man. No kid should be an orphan at that age.”
He would know, Jax thought. Ruben Lambert had grown up in the foster system in East Los Angeles, shuttled from one home to another every few months for most of his childhood. Signing up on his eighteenth birthday had been a foregone conclusion since he was old enough to understand what the army was.
“So what’s going to happen to her?” Ruben asked. “She have any family here in Germany?”
Jax shook his head. “Rachel’s parents are in Virginia.”
“What about her birth father’s folks?”
“They cut off contact with Rachel and Hayley after he died. She never went into detail about it. I guess grief can mess with a person’s head
.”
“Yeah. Or maybe they’re just assholes.”
“Maybe. Either way, they’re out of the picture.”
It finally registered in Jax’s mind that Ruben was in his fatigues. Behind him, he could see his friend’s pea-green duffel in the hallway through the open door.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
Ruben’s eyes widened. “Shit, I forgot,” he said, his voice rising before he caught himself and dropped back to a whisper. “Echo Company’s been ordered stateside. Special Ops Command chartered a civilian flight to Colorado Springs. No details, just said to rendezvous at Stuttgart Airport at 1200 hours or face court-martial. I tried to call you, but your phone kept going straight to voicemail.”
Jax scowled at the black rectangle of metal and glass lying on the nightstand. “Sorry. Chinese piece of shit won’t hold a charge. Did you say a civilian flight?”
“Yeah, don’t know what the deal is. I figured you’d gone to see Rachel and came back here. We gotta go, man. From the sounds of things, even bereavement leave is off the table. What’re we going to do about Hayley?”
At the sound of her whispered name, the girl stirred under the blankets and let out a sleepy groan. Jax knew he was about to face one of the toughest challenges of his life. He had plenty of experience fighting terrorists, but precious little dealing with children. Rachel had made it clear when Jax first asked her out that she wasn’t going to introduce him to Hayley for a while. She didn’t say it in so many words, but Jax knew she meant her daughter would only meet someone who was husband material.
They’d fallen madly for each other in just a few months, and Jax had met Hayley in early summer. Things were magical for a couple of months. Then Rachel started showing symptoms of an unidentified virus. As an emergency room nurse, she’d been on the front lines of the outbreak, and was one of the first to be infected, weeks before the virus had been properly identified.
And she was one of the first to die, he thought, swallowing hard.
“Hayley’s coming with me,” he said.
Ruben’s eyebrows rose. “You think Archer will go for that?”
Jax had known Lt. Col. Henry Archer, the commanding officer of 1st Battalion of the 10th Special Forces Group, for almost eight years. He was a decent, fair commander, but Jax bringing a civilian back to the U.S. on a military transport would likely be pushing some boundaries.
“Have comms gotten any better?” he asked. Over the past few days, some sort of computer hack had done significant damage to communications systems throughout the military. Rachel’s illness had kept him from paying much attention to it.
“Nah,” said Ruben. “If anything, they’re worse than ever—wi-fi’s been down for three days. I can’t connect on my mobile, either. Probably no hope of finding Hayley’s grandparents online anytime soon.”
“What about internal systems?”
“Not much better. Tons of bugs, from what I hear. Shit’s going sideways, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this deployment back home is connected to it somehow.”
Jax turned to the bed to see Hayley’s deep brown eyes looking at him sleepily. They were still red-rimmed from the night before, and it made his heart ache all over again.
“I’ll tell Archer I’m her legal guardian,” he said.
Ruben cocked an eyebrow. “Since when?”
“Since right now. I’ll say we couldn’t get the paperwork issued because of the tech glitches. There’s no way they can check it before we fly out.”
“That’s a pretty big gamble, Jax.”
“What choice do I have?”
Suddenly Hayley was up and out of the bed, still in the clothes she’d worn to the hospice the night before, and Jax realized she’d been listening to them. She stumbled toward the two soldiers, panic etched into her tiny face, and gripped Jax’s arm fiercely.
“Don’t leave me here,” she pleaded in a papery voice. “Please, Jax, don’t leave me alone.”
The desolation in her eyes almost made him crack, but he swallowed it down into the dungeon where he kept all his pain under lock and key. With Rachel gone, he was all the girl had, at least until they got back to the States. He lifted her with one arm as if she weighed nothing, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. He felt the soft fabric of her panda doll against the sandpaper skin of his cheek.
“I won’t leave you,” he whispered into her hair, thinking of Rachel’s final, fading words. “I promise.”
Chapter 2
Jax scanned the terminal from his vantage point in line, taking in the controlled chaos. There were army personnel and support staff milling about that he knew from his two years in Germany, along with others whose faces he recognized. Most of the men and women of Echo Company, the people under his command, sat on their duffels, stripped down to their T-shirts and talking animatedly amongst themselves. As they did, four young women in scrubs and surgical masks circled around the waiting area like bees, administering needles to everyone who got their boarding passes,
Jax also saw a dozen or so military people milling around, ones who weren’t associated with Echo but were in the 1st Battalion, the European arm of the U.S. Special Forces that was based around Stuttgart. He could see now why they were chartering a civilian flight: even a Hercules couldn’t transport this many people in a single flight. But why did they all have to be stateside at the same time? What was the hurry?
He looked down at Hayley as they waited to check in. She was scanning the airport as well, probably wondering the same thing he was: where were all the civilians? Outside of Echo and the others he recognized, there were only a handful of people anywhere. Some frantic-looking security folks jogged past every few minutes, but as for other passengers, there seemed to be none.
The girl reached out and squeezed his hand. Hers felt small and cold.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed to the clerk checking in the personnel. Jax didn’t recognize him; couldn’t, in fact, tell anything more about him than the fact he was in fatigues like the rest of them. Other than that, there was nothing to identify him by name or rank.
“That’s the guy I talk to?” she whispered.
Jax dropped to one knee so he could be at eye level with her. “Only if he asks you any questions. I’m going to try to make it so that he doesn’t, but if he does, what do you say?”
“That you’re my guardian and you’re taking me back to live with my grandparents.”
“Perfect.” He held up a palm for a high-five. She slapped it half-heartedly with her panda. Normally it hid away under her pillow until bedtime, but she hadn’t let go of it since she’d left the bed in the hotel room that morning.
She had talked about her grandparents on the trip to the airport, although in a distracted way, staring out the window of the Hummer. Hayley barely remembered the States—she hadn’t been there since she was three, when Rachel and Hayley’s father had moved to Germany for his career in engineering. She could only remember Rachel’s parents from their infrequent visits to Boblingen; she knew they were from Virginia, but she didn’t have a clue about their address or phone number. And with the Internet pooched the way it was, there was no way to track them online.
Rachel had listed Jax as her emergency contact on her hospice forms, which meant her parents didn’t even know that she was gone yet. The idea of showing up at their door with that news and their virtual stranger of a granddaughter gave him a bellyache.
“Next,” called the admin from his seat behind the table.
Jax and Hayley strode forward, hand in hand. The clerk spared them a blank look before returning his attention to his paperwork. Jax noticed with mild irritation that the man’s black hair was considerably longer than military regulation.
“Name?”
“Capt. Jackson Booth, E-Company, 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group.” He gave him his Department of Defense ID number.
The man scribbled on his papers, then looked up at Ha
yley.
“Who’s this?”
“I’m his guardian!” Hayley blurted, blood rushing into her cheeks.
Before Jax could say anything, the man looked back down at his papers, pen at the ready.
“Name?”
“Uh, Hayley,” said Jax, confused. “Hayley Moore.”
The man scribbled for a moment, then handed him two boarding passes with their names handwritten on them. He saw that Hayley’s had been misspelled.
“Wait over there,” the man said without looking up. “Next.”
Jax shouldered his duffel and tugged Hayley along with him to the terminal’s seating area to join his comrades. Something about the clerk’s tone didn’t sit right with him. Jax was Echo’s commander—he didn’t know for sure that he outranked the man, but he’d never met an army admin that wasn’t a non-com, and definitely not one who dismissed a superior like that. At the very least, there should have been some sort of recognition. Ruben’s words came back to him: Shit’s going sideways.
Through the window walls he could see the tarmac virtually covered in motionless airliners. It brought to mind sitting on the floor in the living room of the house he grew up in, watching the news coverage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers and seeing the airports with all the grounded jets. Jax had been too young to know what was going on, but he remembered his old man saying the sight of all those planes made him feel like the world had turned upside down.
As they walked toward their gate, a woman in scrubs and a surgical mask approached and asked for their boarding passes. She gave each a cursory glance before ordering them to roll up a sleeve. Jax saw the fear in Hayley’s eyes as the needle descended toward her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. “It won’t hurt.”
The girl didn’t believe him and scrunched her face, but seemed none the worse for wear when it was over. A couple of chatting soldiers absently gave up their seats as the two approached, and Jax nodded his appreciation. Hayley sat down, still clutching her panda.