Once Is Never Enough

by Haris Orkin

  Sancho thought about John Glenn and Mrs. Merkin as he stared at the lights of Cape Canaveral from the window of his lavish and securely locked cabin. Why couldn’t Flynn take Belenki’s offer or at least pretend to? That’s all he had to do. Instead, he pulled that stupid, stupid move.

  Belenki didn’t seem like a killer, but then he didn’t exactly seem stable either. If he thought Flynn and Sancho were a threat, who knew what he might do. Sancho took a class in abnormal psychology junior year and Belenki fit the profile of someone with both narcissistic and paranoid personality disorder to a T. Much like Flynn, he had grandiose ideas of who he was and what he was put on Earth to do. They both had that exaggerated sense of privilege which allowed them to bend rules and break laws. Both had supreme confidence in their judgment and never doubted they were right. All Sancho did was doubt, and as he looked at the lights of Cape Canaveral, he began to doubt he would live to see the dawn.

  Flynn staggered back into his luxurious cabin and Fergus locked it tight. This time his hands were bound behind his back with zip tie restraints. As an expert at escape in general and Houdini in particular, Flynn knew just what to do.

  He squatted down and slowly dislocated his right shoulder, slid his bound wrists under his bum and squeezed his legs through until his hands were now in front. After sliding his shoulder back into place, he searched the room and found a dime under a couch cushion and a ballpoint pen in a drawer. Pulling off the pen’s plastic cap, he put the bulbous end in his teeth, and used the flat end to push up the zip tie lock and back the strap out. His hands were free. Now he just had to find a way out.

  The way he escaped from that mad, one-handed, half-Chinese doctor was by climbing through a ventilation shaft. Of course, that escape route turned into an obstacle course from hell with fire and water and other lethal death traps. Somehow, he survived and made it out alive and still managed to stop the mad doctor’s plot.

  Flynn used the dime he found to unscrew a ventilation grate and pull it free. The vent was barely wider than his shoulders, but he pushed his head inside to see what he could find. He eased himself in a little further, sliding in past his shoulders.

  As his eyes adjusted, he caught a glimmer of light ahead. A way out? He tried to wriggle in further, but the vent narrowed, and Flynn couldn’t budge beyond where he was. He tried to wriggle back out and that proved just as difficult as some part of his clothing caught on an unseen edge. Flynn was stuck. He couldn’t move forward, and he couldn’t move back.

  “Oh, good God.” His voice echoed in the vent.

  When Severina was at Harvard Law, she did many all-nighters. One time before finals she stayed up two nights in a row. After a grueling day of tests, she went back to her dorm room, intending to stay up and study for a third night. She fell asleep on her law books and when she awoke it was dark outside. She checked her clock. 6:15. Panic seized her when she realized she must have slept through the night. Her test was in less than an hour and she hadn’t studied at all.

  She fought her anxiety, skimmed as much of the material as she could, then rushed across campus to her seven o’clock contracts class. She raced into Houser Hall and hurried down the corridor, surprised to see she was the last one to class. The door to the class was already closed. When she threw it open, the room was dark. The desks were empty. There was no one there.

  She wondered if she was having a nightmare, and as she looked around the empty room it slowly dawned her that it wasn’t seven in the morning, but seven in the evening. She had only slept for an hour. Not all night. She was disoriented and discombobulated and that’s exactly how she felt after learning the truth about Belenki.

  She was living in a nightmare she couldn’t wake up from. Like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, her boss intended to stop the motor of the world. When she and Belenki first met, they bonded over their love of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She was pretty sure that was why he hired her. Belenki saw himself as a modern-day Ayn Rand character.

  Like John Galt, he double majored in physics and philosophy. She and Belenki both flirted with Objectivism as college freshman and still had faith in many of its tenets. She bought into the idea that there was virtue in selfishness. That greed was good. She believed that individual freedoms were best protected by the modern system of laissez-faire capitalism. Severina was a strong proponent of free will and so was Belenki, who saw the rise of Daisy as the end of everything.

  He would stop the motor of the world before he let humanity lose its autonomy.

  But what if Belenki wasn’t dealing with reality? No one else believed that Daisy was sentient. And even if he was right and Daisy was self-aware, sending the world back into the stone age might not be the best way to handle that problem. He was asserting his own free will and stealing everyone else’s.

  The craziest thing of all was that Flynn apparently wasn’t crazy. At least not about this. He was right all along. Where did Fergus take him? Did that son of a bitch murder him? And if not, what did Belenki intend to do with him? She couldn’t just let Belenki bring down the world, but she wasn’t sure how to stop him. Severina paced back and forth in her cabin, clenching her fists.

  She thought about what she did to Wendy. How she refused to believe her. How she thought Wendy was as crazy as Flynn.

  “What did I do? What the fuck did I do?”

  Flynn couldn’t catch his breath. Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He rocked back and forth to dislodge himself from the vent. His arms were pinned and he couldn’t find the proper leverage.

  “Bloody hell!” he shouted, his voice echoing in the vent.

  Marshalling every ounce of angry fury, he wrenched himself back as hard as he could, ripping his shirt and cutting his face. He stumbled backwards over a stool and landed on his bum. Furious, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed the stool and threw it at the glass observation window. He didn’t care that his cabin was half-submerged, and water would come rushing in. He just wanted out.

  The stool hit the window hard and bounced right back at him, smacking Flynn in the nose, knocking him back on his bum again.

  “Bloody bastard!” He lay flat-out on the floor, staring at the elaborate stamped tin ceiling. He didn’t bother to get up. There was no reason to. He needed to calm himself. Cool down and concentrate.

  A knock at the door broke his concentration once more.

  “Yes?” he shouted.

  The deadbolt clicked. The door opened, and in walked Severina, dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck. She was surprised to see him flat on his back, his face cut, his forehead bleeding.

  “Those bastards! Look what they did to you!”

  “So finally, you believe me.”

  “We can’t let him get away with this. We have to tell the authorities what he’s trying to do!”

  Flynn sat up. “First off, we have to neutralize Fergus.”

  “Already done,” she said. “Sergei suffers from insomnia and keeps a supply of Halcion. I stole his stash, spiked a bunch Red Bulls, and handed them out to Fergus and his team.”

  “What about Sergei?”

  “I gave him one too.”

  “Brilliant. So, they’re all out cold?”

  “For now.” She helped Flynn to feet.

  “We have to find Sancho.”

  “He’s already free. He’s waiting at the landing craft.”

  “Then why are we standing around here?” Flynn rushed out the door and Severina hurried after him.

  Flynn searched the sleeping bodies of Fergus and his men for weapons. They were sprawled all over the boat in various uncomfortable-looking positions. Severina tried to hurry him along, terrified that they could awaken at any moment.

  One did.

  He looked at Flynn with bleary, unfocused eyes and tried to draw his sidearm, but Flynn already had it in hand and smacked him in the head with it, rendering him unconscious once again. All in all, Flynn filched an MP5 submachine gun, a Beretta M9, and a Heckler and Koch sniper rifle. />
  Flynn and Severina found Sancho waiting on the landing craft. It was already in the water and bouncing around in the chop.

  “What the hell took you so long!” Sancho shouted.

  “Your friend wanted some weapons!” Severina shouted back.

  As they climbed aboard the landing craft, Sancho paced back and forth. Flynn took control of the helm. “Unmoor us please, Miss Angelli.”

  As Severina unmoored them, Belenki’s fiancé, Anika, came running up in her strappy high heels, denim shorts, and barely-there tube top. “Don’t leave without me!”

  “It’s not safe where we’re going. You’re better off here,” Flynn said.

  “Without wi-fi? Fuck that!”

  “What do you mean it’s not safe?” Severina asked. “Where do you think we’re going?”

  “To Cape Canaveral to stop that launch,” Flynn replied.

  “Cape Canaveral! Are you out of your mind?”

  “You really have to ask that,” Sancho muttered.

  Anika leaped onto the landing craft, right into Sancho’s arms. She towered over him, smiling down. “Good catch,” she said.

  Flynn backed the boat out into the sea, turned it towards the lights of Cape Canaveral and gunned the twin engines.

  Severina shouted to be heard over the roar. “You do realize that mission control is nowhere near the launch site! It’s miles south of here near Port Canaveral.”

  “We aren’t going to mission control.”

  “But NASA has mission managers there. Supervisors overseeing the launch! We have to tell them what Sergei intends to do!”

  “There’s no point in storming mission control,” Flynn said grimly. “We don’t know who’s working with Sergei and who’s not. We might delay the launch, but we won’t stop it. To do that, I need to destroy it.”

  “Destroy it?”

  “A rocket is at its most vulnerable right before lift-off. In fact, the Serenity 2 is being filled with fuel as we speak. They do it right before the launch because they need to keep the liquid oxygen at such a low temperature. Basically, it’s a massive bomb. The equivalent of four million pounds of TNT.”

  “But there’s a nuclear bomb on board! If you blow up the rocket, won’t you blow up the bomb?”

  “Blowing up a nuclear device won’t initiate a chain reaction. That is not how they are detonated.”

  “Cape Canaveral is an air force base. There’s security everywhere.”

  “Not during a launch. They keep the entire area clear of anyone at this stage. That includes security.”

  “But they must be watching the perimeter.”

  “I’m sure they are.”

  “So how you plan to get past them?”

  “I’ll do whatever I need to.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  Flynn picked up a pistol from the cache of weapons he made off with. “Nice to hold a Beretta again. It used to be my favorite firearm before N insisted I give it up for the Walther PPK.” He shoved the weapon in his belt.

  Sancho pointed at the long rifle. “What’s that big one?”

  “A Heckler and Koch MM110. It weighs less than nine pounds but packs a very powerful punch.”

  “Dude…You’re not planning on shooting anyone, are you?”

  “Just the Serenity 2.”

  “Can you drop me off at Cocoa Beach?” Anika asked.

  “Sorry, darling,” Flynn said. “There’s no time for detours. Not with the fate of humanity in our hands.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Belenki woke up face down on his bathroom floor with his pants around his ankles and ass in the air. The last thing he remembered was Severina handing him a Red Bull so he could keep his eyes open until the launch. His head felt fuzzy and his face rested in a pool of drool.

  “Dammit,” he slurred. Did he pass out while taking a crap? Did he have a stroke? What the hell? The bathroom door opened and banged him in the head. “Ow!”

  It was Fergus. “Sorry, sir.” He looked crocked off his ass. “We have a problem.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Drugged. I’m pretty sure Miss Angelli roofied our Red Bulls. Half my men are still zonked out.”

  Belenki lifted his face off the floor. A long string of spittle dangled from his mouth to the tile. “Shit.”

  The mercenary grabbed Belenki’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “The landing craft is gone along with Flynn, Perez, and Miss Angelli. They may have kidnapped Miss Piscotti, because I can’t find her.”

  “They can keep her.”

  “Flynn took some of our weapons as well.”

  “Where would they go?”

  “I believe he’s headed for the launch site.”

  “Did you call security over there?”

  “Already done, sir. I’m going to take the other tender and see if I can find him before he hurts anyone.”

  A wave of dizziness hit Belenki and he sat heavily on his heated Japanese toilet seat. “You see ‘em, you shoot ‘em. I’ve had enough of this shit.”

  Sancho sat next to Anika and held on tight to a cleat as they bounced over the rough chop. The landing craft crested the top of each swell before plummeting into the trough below. A wave of nausea surged through Sancho. He caught Severina’s eye as she held onto the gunwale near Flynn. She too looked close to tossing her cookies, giving him a look like “what the hell do we do?”

  Sancho shook his head. Once Flynn was on a mission, there was no stopping him.

  He glanced back at the Argo receding in the distance. He couldn’t see anyone on deck, but they were hundreds of yards away. Hopefully, Fergus and his asshole operators were still passed out.

  Sancho turned his gaze back to the shore and saw the first reddish rays of the rising sun reflected off Belenki’s rocket and the erector-set-like towers around it.

  They rapidly approached the beach, the launch pad less than a mile away. Sancho wondered if Flynn had any idea how to land this landing craft. He wasn’t slowing down, and they were running out of ocean.

  “Dude!” Sancho shouted. “You might want to hit the brakes!”

  Flynn took the hint and eased off the throttle, but as the boat approached the beach, Flynn misjudged the depth and ran the ship aground. Sancho and Anika toppled off their padded bench. Severina fell as well. Flynn didn’t budge, ensconced as he was in the captain’s chair. He pulled the lever to lower the front landing gate and it thumped against the sand.

  Sancho hurried his ass off the boat, Anika right behind him, unsteady and teetering in her strappy high heels. Then came Severina, who promptly retched in the sand, followed by Flynn, with his armful of stolen weapons. He tried to hand the MP5 to Sancho.

  “Keep it, man. I don’t need it.”

  When he tried to give the submachine gun to Severina, she raised both her hands and shook her head, backing away. “Would you please put those back in the boat!”

  “Where are we?” Anika asked.

  “About two miles from the Space Go Launch Complex,” Flynn replied. “That’s the Serenity 2 on the launch pad over there.”

  Anika nodded. “I’m calling an Uber.” She looked at her phone. “No fucking bars. Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Sancho heard them before he saw them. All-terrain vehicles. Six of them. Bounding over the bluff and down to the beach. Each one had its own helmeted, camo wearing, flack-jacketed soldier. Within seconds they were surrounded with six assault weapons aimed at them.

  “Put your weapons down!” screamed the shortest soldier, his voice high-pitched and hollow inside his helmet. “On the ground! Do it now!”

  Flynn looked perplexed. Severina rested her hand on his arm. “He wants you to put the weapons down.”

  “Soldier, my name is Flynn. James Flynn. And I’m an agent of her Majesty’s Secret Service. Who might you be?”

  “I am Captain Dutton, commanding officer of the Security Force Squadron of the 45th Space Wing, and I’m gonna need you to comply with my order
and put down your weapons!”

  “Drop ‘em, dude,” Sancho put his hand on Flynn’s shoulder. “Before somebody shoots you.”

  Captain Dutton’s voice rose in pitch as he shouted even louder. “You are trespassing in a highly restricted location! This is a designated blast danger area and if you don’t drop those weapons in the next five seconds, we will drop you where you stand, sir!”

  Sancho saw himself reflected in the tinted safety glass of their goggles. They were eyeless, faceless avatars of authority. Fear palpitated Sancho’s heart. He knew Flynn wouldn’t back down and tensed for the inevitable shit show. Fingers hovered over triggers. Sancho sank to his knees, hands up.

  “James, I’m begging you, man. Put down the fucking guns.”

  Even though Sancho couldn’t see the soldiers’ eyes, he could tell they were no longer looking directly at Flynn. The slight tilt of their helmets indicated they were looking at something past him. Sancho slowly turned his head. Something metallic crested the surface of the sea a hundred yards out. Was that Goolardo’s mini sub? Was that the Seawolf? A hatch opened on top and Mendoza’s giant, pale, pumpkin head popped out.

  He held something, but Sancho couldn’t tell what until he heard a distant pop and saw a flash of light and smoke. Something whooshed between him and Flynn. An ATV exploded. Sancho hit the beach as parts flew everywhere. The soldiers dove for the sand.

  Two started shooting at the mini sub as Mendoza reloaded his weapon. Sancho looked back at the burning, smoking husk of the all-terrain vehicle. Flynn ran right past it and leaped on a still-intact ATV.

  Flynn shot out the tires of all the remaining vehicles with his MP5, but the soldiers couldn’t hear Flynn’s gunfire over their own barrage of bullets. All six fired at Mendoza.

  Mendoza launched another rocket and blew up another all-terrain vehicle. As fiery pieces of ATV rained down, Mendoza slowly slid back into the sub and closed the hatch. The Seawolf submerged, disappearing under the waves.

  The soldiers stopped shooting and heard Flynn roaring away on the All-Terrain Vehicle. They leaped to their feet to see him bounding over the bluffs. The soldiers raced to the three still functioning ATV’s only to find every tire shredded.