by David Archer
“Marco to Noah,” they both heard. “Noah, Neil is my hero! He not only shot down the damned helicopter, he blew away the bastards who were leading this lamb to the slaughter. I got their weapons, and I’m doing my damnedest to take control of this boat! Conley and Mayweather died in the helicopter, so I’m just dealing with the crew.”
“Good work,” Noah said. “If you can take out their security, the rest of the crew will probably surrender.”
“I’m already there,” Marco said. “I’m holding the bridge crew at gunpoint and the captain is turning us toward land now. You want to call the Dragon Lady and get me some help when we get to the docks at Galveston?”
“I can handle that,” Neil said. “I’ll follow you back, but Noah, you have to do something. That asshole Schlatter captured the girls! You gotta get them some help, okay?”
“Allison is working on that,” Noah said. “I’m on my way to McGuire Air Force Base, and then I’m flying to Vegas. I’ll be out there as soon as I can, Neil, you just stick with Marco.”
“I will, but you get your ass out there and save those girls! Go save them, Noah!”
“Noah out, subcom off,” Noah said.
Esmeralda was racing through the city, heading toward the air force base. “How long until we get there?” Noah asked.
“I’m calculating the best route, and timing it to the traffic lights that we will encounter. The best I can possibly do is another fourteen minutes.”
“Then do it,” Noah said.
Unexpected traffic issues slowed them, and it was sixteen minutes later when Esmeralda pulled up to the gate of the air force base. The two guards standing there looked down at Noah, and one of them looked at a data pad he was holding.
“You are Mr. Wolf?” he asked.
“I am, my name is Noah Wolf.”
“Sir, I am instructed to ask you to tell me the name of your compatriot who fell in the line of duty.”
Noah looked at him. “His name was Moose Conway.”
“And sir, where did he die?”
“London, England,” Noah said.
The guard looked at him and nodded. “Very good, sir,” he said. “There is a Jeep coming to escort you to the airfield. We are trying to find you a pilot, but just about everybody qualified has been out on a training mission, and the rest are on leave. Follow the Jeep and they’ll show you where to go.”
A Jeep appeared and the guard exchanged some sort of signal with the driver. It turned around and Noah told Esmeralda to follow it.
Three minutes later, they pulled up beside a fighter jet. Noah jumped out of the car and was handed a helmet and flight suit, which he quickly put on.
“Where is my pilot?” he asked, but nobody had an answer for him. A man with a captain’s rank insignia turned toward him.
“Sir, we’re trying to find one. No one was scheduled to be flying an F-15 today at all, so everybody is either too short on hours or gone home.”
Noah looked at him for a second, then turned to Esmeralda, still sitting in the car. “Are you qualified in the F-15 E?” he asked softly, so the captain couldn’t hear.
“Yes,” she replied just as softly. “It’s in my programming.” She opened the door and climbed out of the car.
He turned to the captain. “Don’t worry about it, I brought my own pilot. If you don’t believe me, you just call the Joint Chiefs and ask.”
The captain stared at Esmeralda. “Sir? Are you serious?”
“Captain, I could explain it to you, but you wouldn’t believe a word I said anyway. You already know that I am a government agent, right?”
“Sir, yes, sir,” the captain said. He stared at Noah for a second, then turned to a nearby airman. “Get this lady a flight suit and helmet, now!”
The airman ran off to do as he was told, and the captain turned back to Noah. “Sir, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you just ruined my career.”
“If I don’t know what I’m doing,” Noah said, “some very good people are going to die. You want that on your conscience?”
The captain turned and spoke to several other airmen. “Come on, ladies,” he shouted. “Let’s get this bird ready to get in the air!”
Moments later, Noah climbed into the rear seat of the plane while Esmeralda settled into the cockpit. The canopy came down and the engines came to life, and Esmeralda spoke to the control tower.
“McGuire tower, this is four one seven niner niner six bravo, requesting clearance for takeoff.”
“Four one seven niner niner six bravo, affirmative, what is your call sign?”
Esmeralda didn’t respond for a second, so Noah chimed in. “Call sign is Camelot, I say again, Camelot.”
“Affirmative, Camelot, you are hereby granted emergency clearance for takeoff.”
Esmeralda pushed the throttles forward slightly and the plane moved into position at the start of the runway, and then she shoved them all the way home. Noah was thrown back in his seat as almost one full G of thrust shot them down the runway and into the air. The plane almost stood on its tail as it climbed at a rate of nearly 50,000 feet per minute, and it was at its flight altitude of fifty-five thousand feet only ninety seconds later.
* * * * *
“I hate just waiting,” Jenny said. “I wish they’d come, so we could do something.”
“Hey,” Sarah said, “the longer they wait, the longer we have a chance of somebody coming for us.”
Renée looked at Sarah. “You really think there’s much chance of that? If he’s telling the truth, the FBI has no idea where we are, so that means nobody does.”
Jenny shrugged. “As long as we’re alive, there’s hope. How long have we been in here?”
“God, I don’t know,” Sarah said. “No way to keep track of time when you’re locked up in a box. An hour? Could be two or three hours, for all I know. For that matter, we don’t even know how long we were unconscious.”
“I don’t think it’s been all that long,” Jenny said. “Probably not more than an hour since Schlatter was here.”
“I wonder if anyone knows we’ve been taken?” Renée asked.
“They know,” Sarah said. “I should have been talking to Noah by now, I’m sure.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Jenny said. “You heard Schlatter. He figures Noah was part of it. That would mean Marco is, too, so by now he’s probably ratted them out.”
Sarah shook her head and laughed bitterly. “As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about,” she said. “Thank you, Susie Sunshine.”
Jenny shrugged. “Better to know the truth,” she said. “On the other hand, both of those guys are pretty hard to kill. Neil, on the other hand? Him I’m worried about.”
They heard a distant knocking and Jenny held up a finger to tell the other women to be quiet. She listened for a moment, then moved to one wall and put her ear against it. “That’s not coming from the next room,” she said. “It’s probably the FBI man. Schlatter said he was a couple rooms down, right?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Too bad we can’t talk to him. Maybe he could come up with an idea.”
Renée moved over by Jenny. “Maybe we can,” she said. “Let’s see if he knows Morse code.” She tapped on the wall once, then dragged a thumbnail across it twice, followed by four sharp taps, then three scratches. She waited for a moment to see if there was a response, then did it again.
After the second time, they heard two taps, a scratch and another tap, then a scratch and the three taps, followed a second later by two taps. Renée looked at the other girls. “I asked ‘who?’ FBI, he says.”
“Ask him if he has any idea how to get out of here,” Jenny said.
Renée set to work, tapping and scratching. After a moment, she stopped and they listened. More sounds came back to them, but Renée frowned. “He has no clue. He wants to know who we are.”
“Tell him,” Jenny said. “He’s been working on this case, he probably knows about E & E.”
Jenny laughed. “Yeah, no joke. If we could get out of here, I’d do my best to do exactly that.”
Sarah was sitting against the wall, her head leaning against it. She was looking up at nothing, but then she noticed the light bulb hanging overhead. It was in a socket that was wired directly into a long coil of wire. She looked at it for another second, then got to her feet and reached up to take hold of the socket. She pulled gently and the entire coil of wire came down like a slinky spring.
“Yay,” Jenny said. “You made it a little brighter in here.”
“That’s not what I got in mind,” Sarah said. She was studying the way the wires were put together, and then felt the heat from the bulb for a second. “Hundred and twenty volts,” she said. She let the light hang there and walked to the door for a moment, tapping a fingernail against it above and below the doorknob. A moment later, she turned and looked at Jenny.
“If I can get us out of here,” she asked, “do you think we can actually do anything?”
“If we can get that door open, I think we have a chance. What are you thinking?”
“I think it’s time to turn off the light. I can use the wires to burn out the middle of this doorknob. It’s not as good as a cutting torch, but I can definitely cut it off. Then I should be able to reach inside and unlock it, trip the latch so we can open the door.”
Jenny looked at her. “Will it make a lot of noise?”
“Some sizzling and popping. Not real loud, but there is some noise.”
“Go for it. Just remember, there’s probably somebody standing right outside that door. If he hears it and opens the door, you hit him with every bit of that juice.”
Sarah looked at her for a moment, then nodded. She pulled the light close and the coil stretched more. Then, she made sure she knew where the doorknob was and yanked the socket free. Darkness settled instantly, but a moment later, there was a bright flash and a loud pop as she hit the doorknob with the exposed wires.
She froze for a second and waited for some sort of response from the other side of the door, but there wasn’t any. A moment later, she hit it again, and then again. Each time there was a flash and a pop, but they could also see in the flashes that the middle of the doorknob was disintegrating quickly.
“It’s just aluminum,” Sarah said. “The spark is hot enough to melt it. Shouldn’t take me more than a few minutes to get all the way through.”
She worked at it, and fifteen minutes later, the doorknob fell off. She hit the middle of the door with the wires and looked quickly into the hole as the flash illuminated it, then carefully held the wires away from the door. The metal around where the doorknob had been was hot, but she reached inside with a finger and managed to catch the latch. She gave it a pull and the door popped open half an inch.
“Just wait,” Jenny whispered. “See if anybody reacts.”
They waited another sixty seconds, but there was no reaction to the door being opened. Jenny pushed it further and looked through the crack, then a bit more and stuck her head out to look the other direction. There was no one in the hallway outside and no sign of security cameras, so she motioned for Sarah and Renée to follow and stepped out.
“What now?” Sarah whispered. “Which way do we go?”
Jenny looked around, then down at the floor. There were no indications of which direction might be better, so she pointed in the direction of the FBI agent’s cell. They padded quietly down the hall, listening at each door until they heard his breathing.
“Hey,” Jenny said in a whisper. “FBI, can you hear me?”
“Who is that?” he asked just as softly.
“E and E,” Jenny said. “We got out of our cell, but we don’t have a key to get you out. Any idea where we are?”
“No, none. Somebody knocked me in the head and I woke up in here.”
Jenny bit her bottom lip for a moment, then said, “Okay, sit tight. We’re going to try to either escape and bring back help, or find some way to call help in. We won’t desert you, okay?”
“Don’t worry about me. If you can get out of here, go for it. If you can send help back, then maybe they can get me out, but don’t risk your own lives for me. Understood?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Jenny said. “Just sit tight.”
She made her way farther down the hall until she came to an intersection, and then pressed against the wall beside it. She listened carefully but didn’t hear anything, so she quickly poked her head into the intersection and looked both directions.
There was light to the right and only darkness to the left. She motioned for the others to wait, then stepped around the corner and made her way slowly toward the light that she could see. About halfway there, her ears started to register sound. She slowed down and stayed against the wall as tightly as she could, the sound growing louder with every step.
“… the little one. I wouldn’t mind giving that a try before you drag her down to Frankenstein.”
Jenny didn’t recognize the voice, but it was a man. The next voice, however, she knew instantly.
It was Schlatter.
“If we had time, I’d be all right with that. Unfortunately, we have thirty-seven donors to harvest. Let’s get the organs sold as quickly as possible, then we can carve them up and ship them out. Anybody we haven’t sold off within the next twelve hours, we just leave them where they are. Nobody will ever find them here, anyway.”
Jenny crouched beside the wall. This hall led directly into a room, and that room was where Schlatter and the other man were sitting. She sat for several seconds, trying to figure out what to do, then quickly looked around the corner into the room.
Schlatter was sitting with his back to her and another man was beside him, staring at a computer monitor. She looked quickly, but there was only one door leading out of the room, and that would have taken her right past both of them.
Across the room, the other four men with guns were sitting around a table. To Jenny, it looked like they were playing cards, and one of them was talking on a cell phone.
If it had only been Schlatter and the other man, she would have tried to take them out. There was no way she could reach the others in time, however, and any attempt to do so would only guarantee that she died. There was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered, but ever since she met Neil, Jenny really wanted to live.
Still, the mission had to come first. None of them were paying any attention to the hallway, so she leaned out and took another look around the room.
The man with the computer screen was obviously doing something on the Internet, but he must’ve been hardwired somehow. There was no Wi-Fi network close by, or the subcom would’ve been able to get on it. On the other hand, there had to be a cell tower somewhere close by. Otherwise, the man on the phone wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone. If she could get her hands on a phone, she could call Allison and they could trace the GPS signal of the phone to figure out where they were.
A phone in the room chose that moment to ring, and Jenny almost jumped out of her skin. She jerked into the hallway in case anyone looked her direction, and heard Schlatter take the call.
“Yes,” he said. “He what? Are you serious? God, that just screws everything up. Dammit, dammit, all of them? They’re all dead?”
He listened for a moment, and then she heard his chair move as he got to his feet. She couldn’t stick around to hear more, but hurriedly padded as silently as she could down the hallway back the way she had come. She made it to the intersection and around the corner, then stopped to listen again.
A second later, she heard footsteps coming down the hall. She glanced at Renée and Sarah, who had been waiting for her there, and mouthed the words, “Get ready.”
All three of them stood with their backs against the wall as two pairs of footsteps came stomping their direction. Schlatter and one of the armed men stepped around the corner, and
all three women leapt onto them. Jenny got onto Schlatter’s back, her arm wrapped around his throat, and squeezed as hard as she possibly could while Sarah and Renée grabbed the other man and slammed his face into the concrete blocks of the wall. Renée grabbed his hair and yanked back, then slammed his face into the wall again, and again. He was fumbling at his belt, trying to get his pistol out of its holster, but Sarah grabbed his hand and yanked it back. When he tried to push her off, she grabbed his arm and bit it, then yanked the pistol out as he jerked it away. Renée slammed his head into the wall one more time, and the repeated impacts finally rendered him unconscious. He fell to the floor and Sarah turned with a gun in her hand toward Schlatter and Jenny.
Jenny was snarling, her arm wrapped tightly around Schlatter’s throat. He was doing his best to reach back and drag her off, but she had her legs wrapped around his waist and was holding on for dear life. The crook of her elbow was squeezing on his throat, and he was obviously suffering the effects of blood flow being cut off to the brain, because his flailing arms were getting weaker and weaker.
Suddenly they dropped, and he fell forward. Jenny landed hard on his back but refused to let go. She held on for another minute while Sarah stood near the intersection, holding the gun. They had made some noise, but it didn’t seem to have made it down to where the other men were waiting.
Two more minutes passed and Jenny finally let go. She crawled off Schlatter’s body and lay on the concrete floor, gasping for breath.
Renée checked the man she had beaten down and found a set of keys. She waited until Jenny caught her breath, then held them up and rattled them gently. Jenny nodded and pointed toward where the FBI agent was held, and Renée hurried that way. Two minutes later, they saw her coming back alone. She shook her head. “None of them fit.”