BRAINRUSH 02 - The Enemy of My Enemy (2 page)

Instinct took over.

Though Jake knew he was still too low for the maneuver, he didn’t hesitate. Slamming the throttle forward, he dumped the nose and yanked the Pitts into an eighty-degree power spiral.

Chapter 2

Hathaway Middle School

Malaga Cove, California

F
rancesca knew how important routine and structure were to her autistic students. Children who understand the behavior expected of them are less anxious, especially when they’re given  schedules and visual reminders when they need to move on to the next task or activity.

It was story time. She read aloud from
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
—the chapter where young Tom and Becky found themselves hopelessly lost in the caves. She sat on the floor with her legs tucked to one side under the spread of her full-length knit skirt, her thick auburn hair spilling onto an olive cashmere sweater. The book was in her lap. Her soft Italian accent caressed each word of the story, punctuating the growing sense of danger in the scene.

“Under the roof vast knots of bats had packed themselves together, thousands in a bunch; the lights disturbed the creatures and they came flocking down by hundreds, squeaking and darting furiously at the candles...”

Ranging from the ages of seven to ten, the children were captivated by her words. They sat in a semicircle within the designated “imagination zone” at the back of the classroom, each on a different-colored pillow. A Mickey Mouse clock on a stool next to Francesca allowed them to count down the time until the session was over.

Francesca glanced up to absorb their reaction to the story. She cherished her time with these marvelous children. Her graduate education in child psychology and a natural empathic ability helped her guide them through the challenges they faced.

Unlike most children suffering from autism or other spectral disorders, these children had joined Francesca’s unique class because he or she was exceptionally gifted in some way. Nature had provided a unique balance in each of them, replacing the loss of their interactive social skills with a genius-level talent. Three of the children were amazing artists, two with oil and the other with pen and ink. The images they created were astoundingly lifelike. Another had a remarkable affinity for memory and numbers, able to perform complex mathematical calculations in his head in a matter of seconds. Two of the children were natural musicians, including seven-year-old Sarafina, who could simultaneously compose and play masterful music on the piano, each score reflective of her mood at the time.

Francesca loved each of them for their indomitable spirit.

A nine-year-old boy seated on a plush green pillow raised his hand. He wore an Indiana Jones T-shirt over baggy jeans and sneakers. An unruly mop of blond hair and oversized dark sunglasses covered much of his cherubic face, but twin dimples at the corners of his generous lips hinted of mischief. A golden retriever with a guide-dog harness was sprawled on the floor next to him. As the boy’s hand came up, the dog immediately raised his head.

Francesca glanced at the clock. She smiled when she confirmed that story time had ended exactly when Josh put his hand up. Though he was blind, his internal clock was every bit as accurate as any expensive timepiece. “Yes, Josh?”

“Miss Fellini, why can’t Tom and Becky just walk out the caves the same way they came in?”

“That’s a good question,” Francesca said. “Apparently they couldn’t remember all the turns they made.” 

Josh’s face screwed up into a question mark.

Francesca shared a knowing smile with the teaching assistant seated behind the group. “Well, Josh,” the man said. The children turned his way as he spoke. “Not everyone has a memory like yours. Most people would find it very difficult to keep track of
every
turn.”     Bradley Springfield dwarfed the tiny wooden desk-chair he sat on. He was in his late twenties, two inches over six feet, and had the trim body of an avid cyclist. The rich tan of his skin and a jaguar-like grace reminded Francesca of the star soccer players from her home in Italia. He wore light Dockers, a button-down white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and an Ohio State baseball cap he never took off. The children adored him.

Josh scratched his chin as he considered Bradley’s comment. Finally he said, “Then they shouldn’t have gone in the cave in the first place.”

“I can’t argue with that, big guy.”

“Well, I can!” Sarafina said in a voice that came out much louder than she intended. When everyone turned her way, she immediately dipped her head forward so that her dark shoulder-length hair hid most of her face. The fingers of one hand danced unconsciously on her lap, playing an unheard melody on an imaginary keyboard. She wore a pink sundress and sandals sprinkled with sparkles.

She peeked up tentatively with a pleading expression that accented her big brown eyes. “I… I mean, sometimes when you’re on an adventure, you have to take chances, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be a real adventure.”

Francesca knew Sarafina was drawing on memories of her own recent escapades—the painful portions of which she’d learned to bury in the past few months. She’d met the girl three years ago at the Institute for Advanced Brain Studies in Venice, Italy, after Sarafina’s parents had been killed in a car accident. Francesca had been a teacher at the institute, specializing in children with mental and emotional challenges. She’d cherished the position—until she’d discovered that the institute was a cover for an international terrorist organization.

When she and Sarafina had been taken hostage and held in the caves of the Hindu Kush Mountains, it was the courage of Jake and his friends that helped them narrowly escape with their lives. After the institute was closed down, the child was alone, and Francesca was determined to protect her. But Italian law prohibited adoption by a single parent, so she acquired the help of a local magistrate—a long-term family friend—and was appointed Sarafina’s guardian. The friend helped Francesca secure the documents necessary to allow them to travel to the United States. 

“You make a good point,
cara
,” she said. “But you shouldn’t take risks that could end up getting you into—”

Francesca stopped when she heard the buzz of an aircraft outside.

It sounded like Jake’s plane.

Chapter 3

Malaga Cove, California

W
ith a flood of concentration, Jake swept the plane into a spiraling dive, thankful for the Pitts’s exceptional control response and maneuvering abilities. The move loaded the airframe with over eight Gs—a multiple of the force of gravity exerted on the body—pushing him and his passenger deep into their seats. After the first rotation, he held the turn steady at five Gs.

Everyone had a different tolerance for how much their body could handle before losing consciousness. As a trained fighter pilot, Jake had developed a high tolerance, a factor he was gambling on now. The wannabe martyr in the backseat was great at mimicking a Texas cowboy, but his brain implant wasn’t going to help him now.

Jake let out controlled grunts as he tightened the muscles in his torso and legs. This inhibited the pooling of blood in his lower extremities and delayed the loss of blood to his brain. In the end he knew it would be a losing battle. He’d have to ease off on the stick before he blacked out. He just needed to last longer than the man behind him.

Jake’s eyes darted from the rapidly falling altimeter to the rearview mirror. Tariq’s eyes bulged under his goggles. His facial skin sagged into his chin. His hands and arms were out of view. They’d feel as if they each had hundred-pound weights attached to them. Jake hoped that the force would keep the man pinned down long enough.

He tightened the spiral. The ground spun more rapidly in the windscreen. Francesca’s school was dead center beneath him. He didn’t alter course. To do so meant reducing Gs.

Passing through seven feet.

The ground rushing up fast.

Jake’s vision began to tunnel. He focused his mind on the school below and screamed a mental warning to Francesca.

There’s a bomb at the school. Get out now!

**

Francesca wondered why Jake was flying so close to the school today. His regular flight-training area was on the other side of the peninsula.

There was a commotion outside. The distinctive sound of the buzzing Pitts grew louder, more urgent. Francesca felt a growing sense of alarm. She rushed to the open window. Josh’s dog, Max, was at her side. Sarafina and several others scurried to join them. Josh beelined to his “safe place”—a large cardboard box on its side in a corner of the room. He curled up in the box’s shadows and pressed his hands to his ears. Bradley moved to comfort him.

Outside, children scattered on the playground. A teacher shouted and pointed at the sky. Max barked. Francesca shielded her eyes from the sun with her palm and looked up. Jake’s plane spiraled toward the ground at an incredible speed. Before the scream could escape her throat, Jake’s urgent voice invaded her thoughts: 

There’s a bomb at the school.

She saw from the shocked expression on Sarafina’s face that she’d heard it, too.

**

Jake sensed he wasn’t going to make it. The ground was too close. Tariq’s eyes had glazed over but he wasn’t out yet. Jake needed another second or two. But time had run out.

Two hundred feet. No choice.

In one quick movement, Jake pushed the nose at the ground, leveled the wings, and yanked back on the stick. The accelerometer snapped to ten Gs and the Pitts broke out of the dive barely thirty feet over the schoolyard. Jake caught a brief glimpse of children running across the playground before a welcome blue sky filled his windscreen.

In the mirror, Tariq’s face paled, his eyes lolled, and his head slumped forward in his seat.

Jake pushed the throttles to the max. He put the Pitts into a high-speed climb toward the Pacific Ocean. He had to move fast. Tariq would regain consciousness in less than thirty seconds. He’d be disoriented for a minute or so, but that wouldn’t prevent him from detonating the explosives strapped to his chest.

Or those he’d placed at the school.

At two thousand feet, Jake reduced power and trimmed the nose into a shallow dive toward the water. He unfastened his safety harness and headset, flipped a middle finger to the unconscious man in the backseat, and jumped out of the plane.

Chapter 4

Malaga Cove, California

T
he round canopy of the emergency chute snapped open above him, jerking Jake from his tumbling free fall into a controlled, eighteen-feet-per-second descent. His pounding heart felt like it wanted to break out of his chest. For just a moment, he felt a slight tingling in his left hand. His breath was short. He sucked in deep lungfuls of air to calm himself. The sensation passed.

The altimeter on his watch read fifteen hundred feet. He was over the water but the breeze was pushing him back toward the shore. In ninety seconds he’d be on the ground, or at least in the breakers. Craning his neck over his shoulder, Jake watched as the Pitts descended toward the dark blue water. The starboard wings of the biplane began a slow dip as it lost trim. In another few seconds, the double wingtips would strike the water and the plane would cartwheel to a gut-wrenching end. 

Jake reached for the smart phone he usually kept in his breast pocket. He came up empty-handed. The phone was still in its cockpit holster on the plane. Too bad, he thought. The crash would’ve made a great YouTube video. In any case, the violent scene he was about to witness would be forever ingrained in his brain. Like so many others.

Jake watched in fascination, counting down the seconds to impact. A small part of him would die with the loss of the Pitts, but
every
part of him was glad to say good riddance to the suicide bomber in the backseat—and the detonator that threatened to blow up the people he loved. He prayed that Francesca had heard his warning.

The Pitts was at eighty feet and dropping fast. The wings dipped further.

Right…about…n—

The biplane’s altitude shifted abruptly. The lower wingtips jerked upward. The whine of the three-bladed prop surged. The plane leveled off just above the undulating water. Every nerve in Jake’s body seemed to fire off simultaneously. He jerked his head toward the approaching shore, willing himself to move faster. Five hundred feet above the water. The school’s nearly a mile away.