Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  She waved him forward.

  Jeff climbed onto the wing on an area black with friction material. He avoided the big “No Step Here” written in bright red on the white wing.

  Dwight reached out to shake his hand. It was a crushing grip of a man who had pitched ten thousand bales of hay.

  “You take care. My Anne was always partial to your show, Mr. Davis. You’ll have to come to dinner. It will tickle her to death.”

  Shelley leaned across from where she’d settled herself in the left seat and started the engine.

  “Dwight.” She shouted above the rising engine noise. “I’d not go mentioning that we’ve been here, especially not Mr. Davis.”

  He smiled at her, but winked at Jeff.

  “I’m just an old man, dearie. Tired from a day of worrying about my calves. My plane? Don’t have no plane. My wife does, but she’s been gone to her sister’s all week.”

  He ducked down to pull wooden blocks away from the wheels.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing. But, Shelley?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  He aimed a gnarled finger at them. “Don’t sir me, I work for a living.” He left one of those pregnant pauses to drive his point home.

  “Now, you make sure you bring this plane back in one piece, or you’ll be answering to Anne. And I don’t want ta be around and about when that happens.”

  “Yes, sir.” She grinned at him.

  He slapped Jeff’s door shut and thumped it twice before moving off.

  CHAPTER 57

  “Where to?”

  Jeff stared out the window as they gained altitude above Dwight’s farm. Below, acre after acre of cows grazed on the lushest green fields he’d ever seen. Not far from the barn, hidden by a roll of the land when they’d been standing at ground level was a big swimming lake fenced off from the pasture all around, complete with a gazebo over a picnic table, a small dock, and a pair of rowboats.

  Above, the gray clouds that had dropped the deluge on their heads were moving off to the East. Large, friendly, cumulus floated about the sky in self-satisfied clumps.

  Then he could see the silos in the distance. He’d never seen them in the light. Two wide domes. They were painted the green of grass, but it was only enough to avert the most casual inspection. Solar panels covered much of the area around, with not a power line in sight. No big electric bill to offer a clue to her whereabouts. The casual visitor would find only a small house at the end of the long dirt driveway.

  There was a cluster of black, nasty-looking SUVs stashed beyond the house, along the edge of the woods on the side opposite the silos.

  Even as he watched, one of the vehicles exploded. A ball of flame burst upward and the SUV flew into the air and tumbled end over end before crash-landing atop another one.

  “Shit!” Shelley banked away. “I thought Grim didn’t know explosives. I told him to leave it alone.”

  A half dozen tiny figures came storming out of the silo entrance, Jeff twisted to look behind them as the plane kept turning.

  The men raced to the other four vehicles. They were among the SUVs when the vehicles all blew up simultaneously. A few seconds later Jeff could hear the thump over the roar of the plane’s engine. More were dead, more men down.

  More men hunting him to the death. He couldn’t breathe. Why were they trying to kill him? He was a chef. He didn’t know anything important. One thing, but nobody knew about that. Nobody, just him. That much he was certain of or they’d have hunted him down twenty-seven years ago. He was sick to death of—bad word choice.

  Okay. Sick as hell of being hunted. Anger cleared his brain.

  “It was Dave.”

  “Dave?”

  “The big guy. The sergeant. Knows explosives cold. Loves them. Kind of creeped me out at the time, but I’m pretty happy right now.”

  “The staff sergeant?” Her voice was perplexed as if she couldn’t get her brain working right.

  Jeff spotted a movement out the window.

  “They’re clear.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Jeff pointed. Half a mile the other side of the silos a small group lay flat in the tall grass.

  Someone in a black leather jacket waved at them.

  “I bet that’s Grim.”

  Shelley did something that made the plane wobble horribly side to side. Only after they leveled out did he realize that she’d just waved back with the plane’s wings.

  “So, where are we going?” He looked out at the rolling fields of wherever they were. Ohio or Iowa or one of those flat farming states. Hell, he don’t even know where they were. He’d never thought to ask.

  There was enough of a silence that he turned to face Shelley. She was staring fixedly ahead.

  “What is it?” He searched ahead, but saw nothing amiss.

  “I, uh, have no idea where to go.”

  Jeff slumped down in the seat. Great, just great. They were in the smallest plane he’d ever been in, he never even knew they made them this small. His shoulders were practically touching Shelley’s on his left and the door on his right. His only clothes were a set of soggy fatigues that were rapidly becoming cold, soggy fatigues. His feet hurt like hell with a steady pounding like a meat tenderizer beating on a chicken breast.

  And he was sitting next to a warrior who didn’t know what to do next.

  No, not a warrior. He glanced behind the front seats. Shelley’s day pack sat on the back seat, even smaller than the two front bucket seats. You’d have to be lovers to sit together back there.

  Master Sergeant Shelley Thomas. The lady of the missile silos. The one thing she’d saved from her home was a small crystalline statue of a mother bear and her cub.

  He’d given it to her. Done it in front of her mother the night he’d proposed. Had it all so perfectly planned. He made Ashlyn’s favorite meal: blueberry pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse with blueberry eyes and nose. He gave her the bear to show Mandy that he’d understood that a man couldn’t get in the way of a mother and daughter. They’d tucked the daughter in as he and Mandy had been doing together since Shelley was two. And then he’d proposed on bended knee…

  It had all been so perfect. It should have worked, it really should have. But it hadn’t. Instead it had blown them apart for twenty-seven years.

  With the bear he’d also hoped to heal the one moment he’d screwed up. He’d told Mandy he was jealous of the time she spent with her daughter. And he had been. Down inside it had rankled at him, but he never should have said it aloud.

  Every time he wanted to take Mandy out, there was Ashlyn. How many nights had the four-year-old preempted his side of the bed, leaving the couch for him? How many romantic evenings had never even gotten off the ground?

  And how fucking stupid had he been to complain about it?

  Jeff Davis knew that, now. He finally understood what that stupid polar bear meant. The problem was that Mandy had known way back then. She’d known what Jeff was trying to say, even if he didn’t. Especially that he didn’t.

  He’d been no more ready to let a little girl into his self-centered image of a romantic relationship after giving the statue than he was before. And Mandy had refused his proposal that night for the same reason.

  Well, that and his mandate that they must leave EMS. There had been other issues. Issues he wouldn’t discuss with any of them. Though it was clear from his discussion with Phillip on the last night of his life, that his old roommate had remembered enough, perhaps too much. Obviously too much, because now he was dead for it.

  Ashlyn Peterson. How had the sweet little girl who hated every minute apart from her mother, turned into Shelley Thomas who had such a deep seated anger at her mother that even the title was a bitter pill barely swallowed? At least he’d grown up enough to know better than ask what the problem was.

  S
helley was the little girl grown. And that little girl had saved his life. Twice now.

  For the first time since he’d met her, she was at a loss. Until this moment he hadn’t known how much he depended on her.

  The plane continued to cruise over the fields, but he could feel its directionless wandering. Unguided, would they simply fly until they ran out of fuel and fell from the sky?

  If Shelley was lost, then it was up to him. For Mandy and Shelley’s sake, if not his own. He had a role to play, even if Mandy had refused to let him play it in the past. And she had no say at the moment, there were only the two of them in this plane.

  No, Mandy truly was three. She’d been with Phillip on his last night. This was Mandy’s daughter. It was probably Mandy who had sent her warrior daughter into the lion’s den to rescue him. That made sense.

  He knew where to go, knew who held the next thread of this madness.

  “Shelley? Can this plane reach New Hampshire?”

  FOURTH COURSE

  MAIN ENTRÉE

  THE FINAL MEAL

  CHAPTER 58

  “We have a team down, sir.”

  Richards didn’t want to be bothered right now. Anders’ little screw up with the chef was not his only concern. But he’d been brushing him off for the last twenty-four hours.

  “What do you mean, ‘team down’?” The Japanese Minister of Finance had just exposed himself to a nice bit of leverage by the Americans, one they could only exploit once, and the President had asked him for recommendations.

  Anders tapped the control pad on the wall of Richard’s cubicle.

  “We found Davis. Satellite caught a helicopter departing the roof of Chicago’s Aon Center building six minutes after the interruption of the recording on the surveillance cameras.” The image revealed a city grid, streetlights and dark buildings. Traffic hurried down thoroughfares in lines of yellow headlights and red taillights.

  Richards paused his video from the President’s Far East trip.

  Anders zoomed into the center of the city grid and froze it as a blur of darkness crossed over one of the streets. A few more clicks and the image resolved into a clear outline of a helicopter against the background lights.

  “We obtained this image from one of the Chinese surveillance satellites we hacked into.” He advanced it frame by frame.

  “You’re running it backwards. The helicopter is obviously landing.” Richards turned his attention back to his own videos.

  “No. This is correct. The helicopter took off backwards. Almost violently. Which says something of both the machine and the pilot.” He continued the frame-by-frame advance. It climbed over onto its back. Then a twist roll that was made even more vicious by the full second time gap between picture frames.

  Then it disappeared as it shot out across the darkness that was Lake Michigan at night. Anders clearly waited for some response, expected some undeserved accolade. Richards let the steady drone of the Boeing’s engines be his response.

  Anders cleared his throat.

  “We spent a full day searching for other evidence to the north. It was a report of a low-flying UFO to the south that led us to these images.” He pulled up several shots from US weather satellites. A tiny heat dot, moving south and west, nowhere near a road.

  “I traced it to an abandoned missile silo complex that was reported destroyed in 1983. You were unavailable, so I sent in a full ODA team, Operational Detachment Alpha 3475. They were closely monitored, but went off the air abruptly. There was a high-level cloud cover, so this is the only image I have.”

  So, Anders had the balls to send in a Special Operations Forces team without preauthorization from him. Granted, he’d locked the man out for a full day after telling him to clean up the mess he’d made in Chicago. Was it a good sign that he had moved ahead with intent, or a bad one that he had grossly overstepped the bounds of authority? It exposed the President in ways he might not appreciate, but Tom Grant wasn’t an easy man to have as a friend either. If trouble arose, he’d let the blame for Anders’ action land squarely on Grant’s shoulders and the problem would resolve itself at both ends.

  If needed, he’d fabricate the documentation of that path connecting Anders’ rash act and the Presidential orders, even though it didn’t exist. He nodded for Anders to continue.

  The image the man displayed next was a video from a dash-mounted camera on one of the vehicles. The clip showed six team members emerge from a depression in the ground and come hobbling toward the vehicles.

  Hobbling. Alpha teams were not supposed to hobble and there were supposed to be twelve of them.

  As they drew closer, it was clear to see that each man was burdened with another. Some rode piggyback, two limped along with another’s help, one dangled in a fireman’s carry over another’s shoulder. For an instant, the man’s head swung free from the hip of the man carrying him. His face was a bloody mess. Completely missing. As if some giant had simply mashed it into the back of his skull.

  “A chef did this?”

  Two other vehicles were visible in the camera’s view. The men landed against the car fenders as if in the last stage of shock and collapse. And then the cars blew up, disintegrated from within. An intense fireball destroying one vehicle, the next vehicle, and then the view tilted for a moment as the vehicle with the camera flew into the air before the recording ended abruptly. The men collapsed upon the vehicles never stood a chance.

  “Are they still lying out there?” Richards was disgusted at the waste. Anders had exposed the President too much. He was not going to keep the man any longer than he had to. He would not be the first agent to take an unexpected walk out the back door of the plane at altitude. They could be over Lake Michigan in an hour.

  “This was six minutes ago. We have scrambled one of SOAR’s Pave Hawks. Still fifteen minutes out.”

  “Should have had one already in the air as backup. What about the objective?” Did he at least get the stupid chef?

  “No personnel were apprehended.”

  Useless twit. It was time he took over management of this operation and close it once and for all.

  “Run the tape again.”

  The background could have been any wheat field, anywhere on the planet. The men emerged and moved forward. They staggered like drunks. Had they been gassed?

  Their faces, normally hardset, fierce after an operation, were visions of shock. They had faced more than a timid chef, they had faced something that had scared the hell out of them. No, it wasn’t fear. He’d seen that on enough subordinates’ faces to know it well.

  They stumbled up against their vehicles, not knowing it was the last moment of their lives. Their eyes were wide, their breathing overly rapid. They had been overwhelmed.

  The flash of orange and they were gone.

  “Again.”

  CHAPTER 59

  It wasn’t until the third time through the tape that he saw it.

  “Freeze that image.”

  Anders did so after another five seconds.

  Sloppy. Richards flipped up the lid of his laptop and cleared the Japanese minister off his screen.

  He rewound the image five seconds, six, seven . . . there.

  A smudge moved across the sky.

  Maybe just a bird, maybe not.

  He zoomed in.

  Enhanced.

  Rolled the video forward and back a frame at a time until he had the clearest view.

  “And what is that, Mr. Anders?”

  He could see the man’s jaw clench before he answered. “A small plane, sir.”

  “A small plane making an abrupt change of direction. A change prior to the explosion itself.”

  Anders was swearing to himself.

  The fool hadn’t yet learned that Richards made up for his crippled body by observing everything. He’d watched his college roomma
te’s every move in every game both on and off the football field. Had watched him systematically seduce every cheerleader on the squad except two. They’d both been too smart even for Tommy Grant.

  No one had ever noticed the cripple in the corner, so he’d made it his business, his main skill, his obsession, to miss nothing. He’d guided Tommy into office, even sent him to the right cocktail party to meet his future wife. The woman was too gifted, too well beloved by all who met her to let pass by.

  Richards wound the tape back a full minute before the team’s emergence.

  Just eleven seconds before they emerged into view a flash lit the grasslands before the camera. That is what the plane had been reacting to. There must have been an earlier explosion, off camera, to the side. But the team had been so stressed that they had continued forward to their vehicles.

  “I need that plane. How far out is the Pave Hawk?”

  Anders reached for the wall control, but Richards overrode it with a keystroke. Six minutes out.

  He clicked on the helicopter and a shortcut menu popped up on the screen. Another click and the encrypted audio link went live.

  “Mother to Pave Hawk One.”

  “Go ahead, Mother.”

  He liked the name. The watchful eye. His own mother had been so watchful over her crippled boy that he’d had no freedom. Now he was the watchful eye to protect freedom. Freedom as defined by the President of the United States, for the most part, but freedom nonetheless.

  “Your target has changed. A small civilian plane was last spotted some eleven minutes ago in the vicinity of your original target. Last seen heading . . .” The midday sun had been coming from behind the vehicle, throwing its own shadow forward. “West or northwest.”

  “Roger. Only one flight in area, now turning to east-northeast. Can close in four minutes.”

  “Observe and report.”

  Two-to-one, perhaps even three-to-one odds the chef was on that plane.