Frank's Independence Day

by M. L. Buchman

  “Phone signal lost.”

  Then a figure dove out of the door, did a hit-roll-run combo that every aching inch of his body knew by heart. And she’d just done it out an airplane door opening five feet above hard tarmac. That had to hurt.

  But Beat was alive. It was all he needed to know. She was alive. Relief flooded through him like a salve to his soul. The world just wouldn’t be a worthwhile place without her in it.

  The tech followed her. She swept up two other dim figures of only a few pixels each some distance from the plane and disappeared back into the city right off the edge of the Raptor’s field of view.

  She’d kept the ambassador and one of his assistants alive.

  Damn she was good.

  Chapter 19

  1989: Frank

  Beat wasn’t the only one with tricks up her sleeve. After the Ghostbusters II matinee at the East San Antonio six-plex, which was only okay, though Sigourney had been damn hot, Frank got Beat into her car. But he managed to snag the keys and settle her in the passenger seat. Still exhausted from her cross-country drive, she’d obviously been feeling weak and pliable. And he wanted to keep her that way.

  He took the northern route across town from Fort Sam, telling her he had a special spot for dinner. Which he did. It was Monday, July 3rd. Because most folks didn’t have to work tomorrow, San Antonio was having the big city party tonight. They’d met one year ago tomorrow.

  He merged into the late afternoon mayhem, got as close to Woodlawn Lake Park as he could in the thick traffic and parked it. The temp was 90s-ugly falling toward 70s-not-quite-so-ugly. It was a little cooler by the lake, but about a hundred thousand people were showing up. Here, instead of July Fourth smelling like hot dogs and sauerkraut in Manhattan, it smelled of roasted chilies and fresh salsa. Temperature, though, was about equally brutal.

  The food vendors were doing an awesome business, and he and Beat snagged some fish tacos and lemonade and chose their spot by the lake. It wasn’t packed solid with people yet, still an hour or so until the fireworks. The all-dayers were there with kids and float rafts and picnic baskets and blankets and sunburns and all that noise.

  He and Beat just took an empty spot and sat back on the grass. The lake was a couple hundred yards across and folks were still out in those little paddlewheelers for two. The cops actually had a couple of power boats on the water ready to chase away anyone who tried to get too close to the fireworks setup.

  Frank would start mellow, pick a safe topic.

  They talked about Africa. Security standards. Communication. They wandered through the best summer street food in New York. As the evening light settled toward fireworks dark, he went back to her comment from the afternoon. The crowds were pretty serious now. Everyone jabbering excitedly on too much sugar and anticipation. They could have shouted the combination to the Fort Knox bullion repository and no one would have noticed.

  “You said something about helicopters.”

  “Yeah.”

  Frank liked how they could pick up a conversation hours later and stay on the same page. She was so easy to be with.

  “Panama City is going to be a mess.”

  Frank pictured the maps and reconnaissance photos that were covering their office walls. A mess was an understatement. The Panama Defense Force was everywhere. Multiple airports, not counting the one at the far end of the canal. Taking them all out while trying not to kill the thirty-five thousand Americans living there would be a good trick. Taking out radio and television stations another one. And on top of all that, bag the Pineapple himself. Dictator Manuel Noriega had an acne-pocked face, and some brilliant Army guy had dubbed him the ‘Pineapple.’ Did they hire people to be that stupid on purpose? Worse, the name had stuck.

  “You said they’re banking hard on these helicopter pilots.”

  “SOAG, Special Operations Aviation Group. These guys apparently kicked some serious ass in Grenada and the Persian Gulf on some piracy gig. It looks like the powers that be are having them play front and center.”

  “Where are they stationed?”

  “Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”

  “Good. I have to go visit those guys.”

  Frank rubbed a hand across his eyes. She’d just gotten here about eight hours ago and she was already planning on leaving.

  He sat up.

  Would have gotten to his feet to leave if she hadn’t stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Not right away.”

  He kept his back to her, just sat there and stared at all the happy families. The ones where the women could sit still for thirty damn seconds without picking the next battle and rushing off to it. How was he supposed to survive this?

  She shifted until she was kneeling in front of him.

  “Hey.”

  She inspected his face and he managed not to look away. He watched the rapid shift of emotions. He’d been trained to see it. He could see it at the macro level where hate, anger, or fear rippled so fast that the people in a crowd didn’t have time to register the sudden change, they simply felt it. He’d also learned to see it in an individual face. And he knew no face better than the one looking at him from less than a foot away.

  It started coy, playful, with that wonderful hint of sex that always seemed to dance around the corners of her mouth. Then it shifted. First uncertainty, the tightness in brows, the smile sliding off the lips. The widening of the eyes and slackening of the jaw as surprise rippled through on its way to…

  It had been a single year since he’d met Beatrice Belfour and signed up for training. They had beaten, chased, challenged, and strained him past anything he’d imagined possible. They made living in the projects look easy by comparison.

  None of that had prepared him for the final expression hardening on her features. The narrowing of eyes, clenching of jaw, the head pulling back as if trying to retreat before the body could get the message to move away.

  “No, Frank. This wasn’t the goddamn deal.”

  He hadn’t meant for it show, how much he wanted her. How much he needed her. He could feel the pain shifting to anger but couldn’t stop it. Could feel his teeth ache with the pressure and the forward lean. His head shifting forward “like a goddamn pug dog,” he really wished the instructor had given him a different image for that emotion.

  Then it blew out of him. Beat Belfour brought cold, but Frank’s anger brought heat.

  “No, it’s not your goddamn deal, Be-a-trice, but it is mine.” He gritted his teeth to keep his voice low. Of course it was this conversation that the fat ladies on the next blanket over suddenly decided to listen to.

  “I found the woman I want, but she doesn’t want me. So go fly off and see the flyboys.”

  He struggled to his feet and dropped her car keys in front of her.

  “Happy anniversary, Agent Belfour.” He had to space his words around the opening salvo of fireworks bursting overhead like a howitzer. “Pleasure seeing you again.”

  He turned and walked away. It was the hardest damn thing he’d ever done.

  # # #

  Beat didn’t show up at Fort Sam Houston on Tuesday. No one did except Frank. It was a national holiday, everyone else was busy celebrating or relaxing somewhere.

  He received her first report Wednesday morning. She’d somehow managed to embed herself as the Secret Service liaison to the Army’s immensely secretive 160th aviation group.

  It was hard to credit the tactical capabilities she was reporting. These guys were as crazy as the Secret Service in their training habits. Night vision was still so new that Frank hadn’t even been trained on it yet, and these guys had been flying helicopters at night for two years using that technology.

  They redesigned their helicopters just as thoroughly as the Secret Service redesigned Presidential planes, helicopters, and cars. He’d tried to get on the 747 team, but t
hat was a seriously huge step that not even a top-of-class rookie could hope for. Developing the next Air Force One was a cherry assignment and only cool guys with tons of experience got it. He hadn’t even gotten a letter, his application had simply been returned with a small, red tick mark in the “Not accepted” box.

  At first he always had the other guys process her reports.

  As time passed, he started reading her reports rather than his team’s summaries. She sent them to the team from stranger and stranger places. One came from D.C., though he knew she was in Miami at Hurlburt Field watching scenario practice. Then one routed through the New York office that talked about a simulation flight in Panama. It was like she’d somehow become disconnected from him and from wherever she was in world at the same time.

  Sometimes he held a report and wondered if she still truly existed.

  Each one he opened was fascinating, and ripped out his gut all over again. There was nothing personal in them, not a single thing. But he could still hear her voice in the writing.

  As specialists in head-of-state protection, the Secret Service was getting pulled in on planning for Operation Nifty Package, pulled in by the point guard of Beatrice Ann Belfour.

  Inside the overarching Operation Just Cause, intended to depose Noriega and neutralize the brutal Panama Defense Force, the combined military and secret police force, lay a smaller, trickier task.

  Noriega had been convicted as a drug trafficker by a U.S. Federal Court. The U.S. government didn’t want a dictator-martyr on their hands. It could destabilize a half-dozen other countries. They wanted him alive. That was Operation Nifty Package.

  They tracked down his personal jet and a damn serious little gunboat. They pinpointed a dozen villas, uncovered several mistresses, and a thousand little habits. This was all fed into the overall Nifty Package plan through the conduit of Beat and Frank.

  The game was escalating. He no longer had time to be pissed at her.

  Hell, he didn’t even have time to sleep. It was mid-December and soon, very soon, the game would be on.

  Chapter 20

  Beat: Now

  What happened?”

  Charlotte had collapsed, Green had grabbed Beat’s arm, and they’d all swerved and tumbled together behind a stone wall that was probably a goat pen. It sure stank like one. Her side ached as if they’d run a hundred miles, not less than one. Her right knee was screaming, must have twisted it when she dove out of the plane. The moon had set and the world had gone pitch dark, the last fifteen minutes were more about stumbling into things than running.

  About three a.m. local would be her best guess.

  “What happened?” Green shook her arm and it hurt.

  “They shot the radios.”

  “While you were in the plane?”

  “Before. When they killed the pilot, they shot the radios.”

  “Then what was all the shooting when you were in there?”

  “What, Green, is this twenty questions?”

  “Yes, it’s our lives too. Now what happened?”

  Beat lay her head back against the stone wall, glad of the darkness. Glad that Ambassador Green couldn’t see the blood sprayed all over her face. She’d tried to wipe it off her face as they ran. Even if she’d succeeded, it didn’t matter, she could still feel it. Imprinted there. All that training just hadn’t prepared her for the first time she’d killed a man. She’d been in the Service for, gods, two-and-a-half decades, and this had been her first one.

  In the past she’d always managed to take them down, captured for questioning. She’d been with agents who’d taken down a shooter, but she’d never had to do it herself. All she wanted to do was curl up and shake for a while.

  Charlotte wasn’t even doing that. She was simply collapsed across their feet, too exhausted and strained to even weep. She just lay there until the time when they’d make her get up and run again.

  Beat couldn’t afford to do that no matter how envious she was. And Green was right, his life was on the line as much as hers.

  “My phone rang.”

  “I thought you said there was no cell service here.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Then how.”

  “I’m not sure.” But she had an idea. She looked up at the sky. Was someone up there watching them? Forty hours. They’d been missing for forty hours, someone had to be looking for them. Other than the Guinea-Bissau militia. She liked the idea of Frank up in the sky watching over her. Assuming he even knew. G-B wasn’t exactly his area of concern, his job was the President. Still, she liked the idea that it had been him calling.

  She dug for the phone, wincing at the sharp pain all along her ribs. She wasn’t winded, well, not only winded. Her ribs felt as if they were cracked. She’d hit something hard.

  Pulling out the phone, she scanned around to see if anyone was in sight on the streets. She couldn’t see anyone or much of anything in the darkness other than the dull red light of a dying cooking fire in a hut a couple dozen yards down the road, so there was no way to tell. The smell of burning cow dung from the fire added to the goat pen in a most unpleasant way.

  She and Green huddled over the phone to shield as much of the light as possible. She stroked a finger over the glass to wake up the phone. It was rough, jagged. She’d dropped enough smartphones in her day to know that was a bad sign. Though sometimes they still worked even if cracked.

  The light came on and revealed a shattered screen.

  She rubbed at her ribs again under the stolen dashiki. Her skin over the ribs was especially tender exactly in the shape of the phone.

  But what had she hit? Casting her mind back, she reviewed the events of the last thirty minutes. Was that all it had been? Her mind assured her that was the case.

  She’d been fine entering the plane, then the fight. Next time she’d go in with her gun drawn and cocked. And check the rear of the plane before going to the front.

  There’d been the fall into the chair and hitting the table, but that had been her other side. She could feel that bruise, but it was no worse than an average training blow.

  The butt of the rifle. He’d rammed it into her side even as she’d killed him. If not for the phone taking the blow, he’d probably have busted her ribs right into her lung and she’d have burned to death gasping for her own last breath right alongside him.

  Almost killed by the ringing of the bell, she’d also been saved by it.

  “No way to see who called. No way to call them back. Where’s your phone?”

  Green hesitated long enough for the answer to be clear.

  “You left it on the plane because you knew the service here is so bad?”

  “Not worth carrying around,” his whisper was deeply chagrined. “It’s so useless here. I think I successfully have made three calls in three years, and Guinetel can’t link you to international, or won’t. The SUVs have, had, satellite phones. That doesn’t help us much now. Wish I’d tossed the phone in my briefcase this time.”

  “Me too.” Beat started to laugh at the friendly moment, but decided against it when she felt the pull on her battered ribs.

  She powered the phone off. She almost threw it away, but instead shoved it back in her pocket. It had saved her life once already. It deserved being laid to rest in some trash heap better than this place.

  After considering for a few seconds, she revised the clock in her head. Their chances of making it through another day were not good. Her target of “rescued by tomorrow evening” wasn’t going to cut it.

  They’d have to be rescued by sunrise or they’d be goners.

  # # #

  “Signal lost.”

  Frank was going to kill the technician. They’d only just cracked into Beat’s “lost my phone” automatic locator application.

  “It appears she turned off her phone. Or perhaps the
battery died.”

  “I’ll kill her. I’m going to kill her if she lives through this.”

  The President had delayed the return flight to D.C. The situation was either going to resolve in the next three hours or not until tomorrow night. If the latter, they could fly back to D.C. while Beatrice laid low for one more day. But based on the firefight they’d just witnessed, he didn’t like the chances if they had to delay through another Guinea-Bissau day. Didn’t like them at all.

  In the meantime, the next shift of agents had escorted the President off to meetings with the U.N. ambassadors for Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea, the three bordering nations. The President had insisted that Frank stay as long as it took to recover Agent Belfour and her charges. Frank had managed not to kiss the man in thanks.

  Word was, France and the Secretary-General were in on the meeting. Coups were rarely an improvement on regional stability. And while the French embassy hadn’t been touched, several of the others had been shelled, predominantly with duds. These guys couldn’t even put a decent coup together, which was a good thing for Beatrice.

  “Actually, that action of shutting down her phone may have just saved her.” The Navy tech appeared to be wholly unflappable.

  “What do you mean?”

  She remained at her station and started drawing on her screen with a lightpen. It showed up on the big screen and was automatically repeated in the Situation Room.

  “We know they’re in this general area, here.” She drew far too big a circle. There were thousands of human body heat signatures in that circle.

  “I’ve been following this vehicle.” She circled it. “And this one.” She circled another. “Here are their prior tracks.” She turned on long white lines that snaked back and forth along the streets. He looked at the time stamps along the way. They weren’t moving fast like the prior tacticals.

  They were quartering the area. They’d picked up on her cell phone’s signal as it tried to find a cell tower to hook up to, and they’d been triangulating in on it. They were close, less than a quarter mile to the east and south. Another few minutes and they’d have had her pinned down.