Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2)

by Miles A. Maxwell

  Who Did It?

  Someone bombed New York. In a near miss on Washington a second city has been destroyed. Is it militant Muslims? White Separatists? Russia? China? North Korea? Or the worst serial killer of all time — taking not one life, or even twenty, but four million?

  No One Knows

  Lost religious texts appear. Entire faiths are rocked to their foundations. Well-known, highly-respected clerics thought to have been killed by the New York and Virginia Beach bombs are being kidnapped . . .

  For brothers Franklin and Everon,

  the loss, the motivation,

  is very personal.

  While Everon’s team struggles to restore a power system devastated by the bombs’ electro-magnetic pulse, Franklin, a minister, works to restore the personal power of individuals in his emotionally distraught congregation. And those behind the bombs begin to reveal themselves. As clues come fast and furious, the brothers’ own lives become imperiled when the bombers’ sights are set on them.

  For up-to-the-minute information

  about the series, visit StateOfReason.com

  To contact the author,

  write to: miles@broadington.com

  This novel is a fantasy of the future, a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Great effort has been made, especially regarding those individuals who have recognizable positions with government, or publicly known organizations, mentioned herein, to insure they are not mistaken for past or present individuals in those positions. What the future holds, what possible outside influences may be brought to bear on future participants in those organizations, no one can say.

  Copyright © 2015 Miles A. Maxwell FAB LLC

  Owl photo Copyright 2015 John Gray,

  http://johngray-seacanoe.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher, other than for review purposes, is a violation o the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. For reprint permission contact: permissions@broadington.com.

  B B Broadington LLC

  Phoenix / Cheyenne

  Visit Broadington.com

  First Printing 2015.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Cataloging-in-Publication of Trade Editon

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941070

  ISBN 978-1-9403054-06-0

  It is historically indisputable that:

  In the Shi’a Muslim sect, at least ten of the Twelver Imams — the leading clerics of their times — were poisoned, most on order of ranking Muslim Sunni caliphs, at least two by their wives.

  At Mountain Meadows, Utah, Mormon troops murdered a wagon train of westbound settlers including all children over the age of seven. Questions still remain as to the involvement of then-Mormon Prophet-Leader Brigham Young.

  Hindus kill Sikhs. Sikhs kill Muslims. Muslims kill Jews. Jews kill Christians. Christians kill everyone.

  Certain locations

  have been changed

  to attempt to protect the system.

  No Hope

  They were going down. There was no way around it.

  Every system on the big jet was out. The overheads. Control gauges. Wing lights. Every light on the Gulfstream was dark. Under normal circumstances, Franklin might have asked the man in the pilot’s seat next to him, “What would cause something like this to happen? How can all these systems go down at the same time?” And under normal circumstances, busy as Franklin’s older brother was, Everon would have answered. Perhaps a grunt, a shouted mumble. It’s the kind of man Everon was. Under normal circumstances.

  Except for one minor detail.

  The big plane was totally out of Everon’s control. And it was upside down. It was all Franklin could do to hang from his seat harness in the dark and hold onto the infant in his arms, his baby niece Melissa. He was frightened out of his mind.

  The jet’s engines were winding down, their pitch dropping, losing power. Yet the overall sound of the big plane, the whistling wind over the wings and fuselage, was rising in pitch and volume. And the plane’s nose felt to be dropping more and more vertical. Straight down.

  Franklin clutched Melissa to his chest, acid rising in his throat and wanted to throw up. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! BAM! Screams from the back passenger compartment. The fuselage felt like it was twisting, tearing itself apart, about to rip itself to pieces in mid air. Pieces that would in the next few moments be scattered all over eastern New York State.

  CREEEEK!

  In a few seconds it will all be over, Franklin thought. Are we high enough that when the jet’s skin ruptures, the sudden lack of oxygen will knock us out? Or once the plane disintegrates will it be simply the terror of falling through cold space that kills us?

  CLUNK!

  “What was that?” Franklin yelled.

  I Always Liked Him

  The Sudden CLUNK made the entire fuselage vibrate.

  “Aux power unit?” Everon grunted, more surprised question than answer.

  A moment later several scattered dim lights blinked on across the control panel. Franklin could make out Everon’s hands in a death grip, fighting the white yoke.

  He twisted the yoke hard right, and Franklin felt his head roll to his left shoulder, his body sway — as his brother’s right hand shot out to punch buttons, flip levers on the panel.

  Another soft noise joined the whistling wind. A whining, behind and to the right. Everon flipped more switches. A similar noise grew from the left. “Go . . .” he urged, “GO!”

  The whine grew louder, and in the moment Franklin recognized it for what it was, two things happened, more wonderful than he could imagine. Dim lights came on around the cockpit, then back through the cockpit door in the cabin. And the windshield went from pure black to being splattered with bright points of light.

  Stars. Overhead there were stars!

  The wind-sound dropped away. A dim cloud-filled horizon righted below them. The turbulence dissipated. Franklin felt pressure from the seat on the backs of his legs, the weight of Melissa in his arms. They were on top of an ocean of moonlit cotton, flying between mountains of white.

  He leaned forward, looked back through the right side cockpit window. There was no black gunk on the wing. It was gone. The wing was clean. He found the radiation meter wedged behind his seat and moved its probe around the ceiling . . . the walls, the windshield.

  “How is it, Bro?” Everon asked.

  “A trace. That’s all.”

  “You know what that was,” Everon said, not really a question.

  Franklin waited, gently jiggling Melissa to calm her crying.

  “There’s only one answer. Another bomb. Had to be. I wonder where. Close enough to affect us, not close enough to do permanent damage.”

  Franklin floated between worry, sadness, anger. “How is this happening?” he asked softly. Louder, “Is the plane okay?”

  “I don’t know. The few systems I’m using appear functional. We’ll find out about the rest when we get to the Valley.”

  Franklin watched the plane’s lights play over Everon’s tired blond features. Hours without sleep. Hopefully the autopilot was still working and could do most of the flying.

  Franklin’s eyes dropped to Melissa. He smoothed a hand over her dark hair much like his own, soothing her, then looked to the ais
le where Harry sat shaking softly on the floor and scooped the owl back into his soup box. A feather molted from his right wing into the bottom.

  Someone was sobbing in the back of the jet. More than one.

  “Okay to go back there?” he asked Everon.

  “Go ahead. We should remain stable for now but don’t be too long out of your seat.”

  He unlatched his seat belt, stepped around Harry’s box, carrying Melissa.

  The passengers were pretty shaken up. Severe strap burns across necks. Deeply bruised stomachs. Somehow there were no obvious broken bones.

  He knelt along the seats, stopped and talked to each person, letting his voice drop down like a salve, at first mirroring their nervous discomfort then bringing them each down out of the shock they were feeling.

  “You okay?” he suggested.

  “I — I think so.”

  He nodded and moved on.

  “Is the plane okay?”

  “We think it is. You’re alright? Beginning to . . . feel easier, now?”

  Soothing the adults, pacifying the children. Tranquilizing the fast-beating heart. Some, a few moments. Others, longer until they were calm.

  Back past the pantry, through the now-open door to the luggage compartment, tied to the floor was the black body bag. He moved closer, knelt down. He wished he could just unzip it and say, “Cynthia! Wake up!” like she’d done for him so many birthdays and Christmases ago. He thought of the charred Aztec blanket inside, wrapped around Cynthia and Steve’s bodies. Holding each other, clinging in their final moment.

  He gulped down a swallow of air, holding Melissa just a little tighter. He stood and closed the luggage door. He didn’t want to say the words he would have to, to Everon. It wasn’t going to be a very pleasant ride back to Nevada.

  “What was that?” Someone asked as he moved back to the front.

  “We don’t know,” Franklin answered softly, moving forward.

  “It had to be a second bomb,” one of the men behind him said.

  “Where do you think it went off?” a woman’s voice called out. “Boston? Washington? No point sending another one to New York.”

  She was answered only by the whine of the engines.

  Franklin put his seat belt on.

  “This better not be like all the other things the government never figured out,” Everon spit out. “But how can they? Unless someone comes right out and takes credit for it.”

  “I hope Chuck’s okay,” Franklin began, dodging the inevitable.

  “At least he’s inside the hospital. Higher ground,” Everon answered absently, adjusting one of the jet’s controls.

  Franklin remembered Cynthia’s face. When she —

  He looked at his brother. “Uh —” He felt the pain and anger rise up in his chest, behind his eyes, flowing out to his wrists, his fingertips. “Cynthia was alive when I got to her.”

  “What!” almost a scream from Everon. “Wasn’t there anything —”

  “I tried,” he whispered.

  “Couldn’t you —”

  “Jesus Christ!” Franklin said, shocking himself. Never in the last six years had he taken the Lord’s name in vain. “She gave out a death rattle!”

  Everon stared miserably out the jet’s front window.

  “She told me Steve died an hour before.” Franklin felt tears well up. “Her last words were ‘I’ve had better nights-out in New York.’ Then, ‘The cabinet . . .’ That and spotting Harry shaking next to it were how I found Melissa.”

  He waited for Everon to scream something else, about the time lost in the subway. The extra time they’d taken on the bridge.

  But it didn’t come.

  For the rest of his life these things would probably come back as though he’d lived three days in one: Helping pull Victoria Hill, Walter van Patter, Kone and the others from the collapsed subway. Freeing the thousands trapped on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. Finally, Cynthia dying in his arms and finding Melissa.

  It was a day he hoped never to live again.

  Unfortunately his desires would not dictate his future. Today, he would come to realize, was only the beginning of the pain to be borne by himself and many others. Who, Franklin wondered, could have done this to us?

  “Steve —” Everon finally said. “I always liked him.”

  Then there was only silence but for the whisper of the engines as they headed west.

  The Wave

  As Norse Wind continued south, steady at eighteen knots, Pang Zhou returned to his engineer’s room to find the bunk vacant.

  Good, he nodded to himself, Engineering Laboratory. Below the grim, thin-lipped smile, short dark hairs stood straight out, middle of the giant’s chin. Pang Zhou had no eyebrows, and his dead, wrinkleless, tiny coal-black eyes glanced into the bucket filled with red and green slop. There was half as much again on the floor. He shrugged and walked directly through it. He would check on the man’s progress. Sick or not, he’d given him ten minutes to get back to work on the third device.

  But on Deck Two, except for tools and the disassembled long cylindrical cores of two more nuclear bombs, the lab was empty. Nothing had changed. No progress on the third device had been made.

  Zhou considered the bloody vomit he’d seen on the cabin floor. Perhaps­ — Zhou went to check the head.

  But the engineer was not in the bathroom either.

  Zhou looked in the ship’s mess. The satellite television was, for the moment, working. But no engineer.

  Several of Zhou’s crew were glued to the screen, changing between the three channels the ship could receive.

  There was only one thing to watch: New York City.

  Those of the crew without urgent duties sat far away from the Evil One as he fingered the bright hook-knife stuffed into the belt around his waist. Zhou seemed buoyed by the coverage though. Several times, when a particularly destructive scene flashed upon the screen, the briefest smile flickered across his face. Each time the men relaxed a little more. And why not? Their mission was a tremendous success. Relieved, almost happy, plates piled high with fish and potatoes. Soon there would be more. Much more.

  Until a piercing scream filled the air: “TING!”

  The Evil One stood in the middle of the room, legs rigid, face flushed red, arms lowered, fists clenched in rage, staring at the huge speckled head filling the television screen.

  The head was not human, and every man present knew it well. The dark-patterned right eye. The long brown streaks upon the feathers. It was the head of the Evil One’s sacred fish owl, Ting.

  The men struggled to beat each other out the door.

  Zhou’s knife flashed. Conspirators all, he thought. It was them — had cost him his spirit guide!

  In less than a minute three of his crew lay dead on the floor. And Zhou stood alone, making little slicing motions with the knife.

  But as the television camera pulled back, Zhou froze. Still more shocking was the tall dark-haired man with the cobalt-blue eyes exiting the helicopter — an infant in his arms, Ting’s head protruding from the middle of his white button-down shirt.

  “Who is he?” Zhou whispered.

  As if in answer a caption appeared below the man’s chest:

  Zhou responded softly: “A man who will soon be dead!”

  Pang Zhou swallowed down his pain and left the ship’s mess to look for his missing engineer. The man must require some tool found only in the engine room. Head bowed, he was pulled from his reverie in the hallway, where a frightened crewman ran up and halted just out of reach.

  “A lifeboat is missing!” the man said fearfully.

  Zhou squinted back. The man ran away. A single-minded rage poured through Zhou. He knew. The engineer!

  He took stairs up to the bridge two at a time. Grabbed up a pair of binoculars. Scanned the horizon.

  An empty sea? He should have checked on the engineer sooner. It had been more than an hour. “Radar!” he rasped out. He will likely be
dead by the time we find him.

  But no one answered. An all-encompassing quiet seemed to fill the ship. Zhou could feel the engines, but there was no clang of closing hatches. No voice called out. Something was wrong.

  He looked over to find his bridge crew of three kneeling on the deck. They eyed him with disdain, no longer concerned with what he might do. Unafraid of him, speaking in that filthy tongue. Arabic.

  They were praying.

  The Norse Wind bridge offered a 360-degree view around the ship. Zhou scanned the gently rolling sea ahead.

  Nothing.

  What is it? What has happened? It is as if they sense their imminent doom!

  As he turned back to the men, his eyes were pulled to the rear bridge windows. There, way back behind the ship’s stern. Big and dark and overwhelming. Huge, monstrous, moving at terrifying speed. A black wall that would take the ship.

  In a moment the wave was upon them.

  The bow dropped catastrophically. They were going under.

  All due to his loss of Ting.

  In his tiny lifeboat, Zhou’s engineer froze at the sight of the black wall of water coming for him. There was no chance. Nothing could save him. And worse yet, Ahmad Hashim knew absolutely, for the thing he had done, his heinous crime against humanity, he deserved to die.

  Yet, rare is the organism that can find nothing to live for. Self-preservation always takes over. Ahmad thought of what was coming to the people of America. He thought of his hatred for Zhou, the Evil One. He thought somehow he must live. To try to give warning to Zhou’s next victims. Perhaps achieve some tiny modicum of redemption.

  He ducked beneath the tarp. Hurried its cord back under the rim hooks. Knotted the cord tight as he could pull it. Wedged his legs beneath the seat ahead.

  And hung on.

  Evening Arrival Home

  “There!” Franklin pointed out the cockpit window.