Authors: Ben Sussman
“You,” he said to the man at the sub’s controls. “Put this into the launching chamber, there,” he pointed at a latch in the floor. The man nodded and scurried to follow orders. When the missile was safely tucked inside, the Commander strode to the front of the submarine and sat heavily in the small chair. He checked his watch again, then stared out the window at the inky depths of the ocean.
“What do we do now?” asked Sasha when the other man had returned from placing the missile.
“We wait,” came the Commander’s answer.
P
urgatory was cold, black and filled with the tinkling of metal against metal. That was the thought that was running through Emma’s mind, or rather the dim corner of her brain that still seemed to be operating. Between the endless expanses of black that filled her inner eye, there were flashes of images.
Her grandmother.
Stooped over a boiling pot of Ramen noodles, looking up to give a glowing smile upon seeing Emma.
Mike
. Suit rumpled, out of breath after having caught up to Emma on the Stanford quad.
Jason
. Sitting on the edge of Emma’s desk, his injured leg resting casually over the side.
The pictures soothed her and for a moment they were the only ones present. Then others began to arrive in rapid-fire succession, blazing in their intensity and pain.
Cameron Allen
. One arm lifelessly spread across the keyboard he had spent most of his life bent over.
Mike again
. Not the encouraging mentor that she had known but the man eaten up by rage and frustration, raising his gun to fire.
Emma knew the image that was coming next. She tried to resist it but it slammed into her unheeded.
Jason again
. Her loyal coworker and friend. Bullets created a crimson collage across his chest. Inside her soul, a deep wail was keening its way to the surface. She tethered herself to it, allowing her mind to be lifted from the dark swirling fog of painful memories. She was almost there. Almost…
“Emma.” Someone was calling her name. Her mouth attempted to form an answer but refused to work.
“Bring her out of it,” the same voice was saying, to someone else this time. A muffled voice gave a reply before the same voice barked, “Do it.”
Emma’s eyes flew open. Bright fluorescent light assaulted them as sounds came crashing into her ears. She gasped and sucked in a giant gulp of air. Slowly, the world came into focus.
Emma was lying on a narrow cot. Just a few feet above her head was a concave metal roof studded with rivets. She tried to raise herself up on her arms but a jab of sharp pain made her stop.
A man’s face swam into view, followed by his hand. Emma did not recognize him. A penlight shone into her pupils.
“Ms. Hosobuchi, can you hear me?” the man was asking.
“Yes,” Emma replied weakly, her mouth cotton dry.
“Can you follow the light with your eyes please?”
Emma did as requested, then blinked rapidly to clear away the trailing stars in her vision. The man ducked away and Emma made another attempt at sitting up. The pain was not quite as bad this time and she leaned on her left arm for support. She noted an IV tube strung from her vein. A bandage lay above it.
“I was shot,” she suddenly remembered.
“Yes, you were,” a familiar voice said to her right. It was the same voice that had been calling her name before she became fully awake. Emma recognized it now. She turned to its owner. “Griggs,” she said.
The general had a chair pulled next to her bed. His face looked haggard, the lines and creases deeper than Emma recalled. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Hosobuchi.” He pointed at her IV. “Your sedatives should be wearing off soon. The doctors had a hell of a time stitching you back up but they did it.”
Emma looked down at her torso. The clothes she had been wearing were gone, replaced by a hospital gown. A quick glance inside it revealed three wounds expertly bandaged. The skin felt tight around them but Emma did not feel much more than that. As her senses slowly returned, Emma noted the low thrum of an engine somewhere. She glanced around at her surroundings, trying to discern her location.
“Where am I?” she finally asked Griggs.
“A plane. We’re heading towards San Clemente Island.”
“San Clemente,” Emma repeated. Yes, now she remembered. The servers. Mike’s betrayal. “Jason,” she blurted out, looking to Griggs.
“I’m sorry,” he answered gravely. His hand took hers. “I truly am.”
The world spun again, making Emma want to vomit. “No. He can’t be. Just can’t.”
The general’s hand squeezed hers. “Listen to me. There will be time to mourn later. I heard everything that Mike said and I’ve pieced together what you were trying to figure out. Right now, we’ve got only one shot to try to stop what he and whomever he’s working for did.
You’re
that shot, Emma. Do you understand?”
Emma met his eyes, trying to understand what he was asking from her. “But the servers were destroyed. There’s no way we can get to San Clemente in time…” she trailed off, the gears of her mind slowly grinding back into motion.
“We’ll be there in twenty-two minutes,” Griggs said.
“What? How?” Emma stammered. “What kind of plane can get us from Colorado to California in that little time?”
“The kind that’s top secret,” Griggs replied cryptically, leaving no room for further questions.
Emma pinched the bridge of her nose in thought. “If I can get there and reboot the system, there’s a chance I can move the data strings to new servers. That would bring it back online.”
“Did Mike know about the backup?”
“Yes,” she said.
“How would he make sure to take it down?”
Emma tried to focus. She could finally feel the cobwebs clearing from her mind. “An EMP,” she said at last.
“Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon?” Griggs asked.
Emma nodded. “It knocks out anything running on electrical power for a sustained period of time. But if it’s not launched from a missile, the range on them is pretty small. It would have to be deployed on the island itself. Once it was, it would render the backup useless. Pretty smart, actually.”
“I sincerely doubt that Mike was smarter than you.”
“Was that actually a compliment, General?”
“It’s the only one you’ll get until we’re out of this mess, hopefully still alive. It’s time for you to prove your worth on the battlefield.” He released her hand, sitting back.
“You should be looking for a submarine,” Emma said, her mind beginning to reboot itself. She did not bother waiting for Griggs to ask why, instead plowing ahead. “There’s no point in doing all of this unless the enemy is poised to attack when the defense systems are down.”
Griggs looked to a uniformed man at the rear, who nodded his understanding and disappeared into the cockpit.
Emma sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. With a stinging pinch, she slipped the IV out of her vein. She stood on shaky feet, then steadied herself.
“What do you need?” Griggs asked her, sounding more helpless than Emma had ever heard him before.
“Get me some clothes,” she answered. “And a computer.”
T
he Porsche Panamera receded from Matt’s sight, carrying Ashley and Luke with it. As it disappeared from view, Matt swung around the corner of San Vicente Boulevard where he and Larsen had been dropped off. He glanced up to see the destination that Detective Larsen had remained silent about.
“The Beverly Center?” Matt asked, as the hulking mass of the shopping center loomed into view. The massive mall and its surrounding streets were quiet at this pre-dawn hour. The little traffic that passed them was zipping by with the freedom that morning hours provided in Los Angeles.
Larsen started walking. “Let’s go,” he told Matt.
Obeying, Matt followed him to the mouth of a parking garage. A steel gate blocked their entrance. Larsen did not bother with trying to open it, instead pushing the red button of an intercom on a nearby wall. There was a small burst of static, followed by a voice.
“Help you?” it said.
“This is Detective David Larsen from the LAPD. I’m responding to a report of suspicious activity up on the helipad.”
Matt looked at Larsen with realization. He had forgotten about the little-known private helicopter landing that rested atop the Beverly Center mall. It was mainly used by high-powered executives and the occasional celebrity to be whisked from meetings in Hollywood to the outer regions of Los Angeles when they needed to avoid traffic. Matt himself had picked up a Russian billionaire from the helipad when the man wanted to buy a block of servers in a building on a nearby street.
There was a perplexed mumble coming through the intercom before the voice said, “I didn’t call anything in. Are you sure-”
“Listen to me!” roared Larsen. “The call came from the Sofitel Hotel across the way. They said they saw something that may violate national security. Now are you going to let me in or are you going to keep worrying about the forms your boss is going to make you fill out while the building explodes around you?”
“Sure, sorry, of course,” came the quick response. It was followed by a dull buzz as the steel gate crept open. As soon as they were able, Matt and Larsen ducked underneath and sprinted to a nearby stairwell. Racing up the steps two at a time, they reached the roof and pushed open the door.
Facing them was a sleek Bell 206 Jet Ranger, its red and white rotors at rest. The pair hurried towards it.
“Good work, detective,” Matt had to admire.
As he pulled open one of the doors, Larsen shrugged. “I heard this one was used to transport a government official yesterday. We got lucky that it’s still here.”
They climbed inside the instrument-studded cabin. Larsen placed himself in the driver’s seat, while Matt took the one next to him.
“Don’t we need keys or something?” Matt asked.
Larsen shook his head, already reaching for the numeric pad nesting beneath the flight controls. “It starts up on a command code,” he said, rapidly punching in the numbers. With a cabin-shaking whump, the rotors kicked to life above them and at the rear. “Okay,” Larsen whispered, steadying a hand around the grips of the controls. He thumbed a switch and the copter lifted slightly off the ground.
Suddenly, there was a clunk and the helicopter nosed back down towards the pad. Matt and Larsen looked out the side window to see a red-faced man in a rumpled police uniform hanging on to the skids. His shouts were lost in the prop wash that was bearing down on him.
Larsen opened up his cabin door to yell at the man, “This is a police emergency!”
“I am the police! Get the hell out of there!” the man screamed back.
Larsen sighed, turning back to Matt. He nodded at the wall behind Weatherly’s head. “Get me that, would you?”
Matt followed the detective’s gaze to see a small arsenal of rifles on the wall. He grabbed one and put in Larsen’s waiting hand. The detective spun back around and pointed the gun down at the policeman. “Get off!” he repeated.
The man stared daggers but lifted his hands from the skids. The copter lifted into the sky as Larsen slammed the cabin door shut again. Tossing the gun to Matt, he steadied the shaky craft and banked it hard to the right.
The smoggy gray carpet of Los Angeles spread before them. Larsen headed for the horizon, where the azure blue of the Pacific Ocean beckoned.
“Where did you learn to fly?” Matt finally inquired.
“Somebody gave me a gift certificate for free lessons a few years ago as a gag gift.” He felt Matt’s questioning glare. “I used to be quite the drunk,” he explained. “But I took them anyway. You never know how things are gonna work out, I guess.” He gunned the helicopter up to maximum speed, glancing at the compass and making a course adjustment.
Matt looked down to see a flash of sand and then the water appear beneath them. He took down one of the rifles from its rack, checked the chamber to find it filled and slammed it shut again. With a moment of quiet to finally think, he let his mind drift.
Luke. He hoped more than anything that his son was safe and that his long ago promise to Katie was kept. Ashley had sworn to drive east and he had to trust that she would. He prayed that if he and Larsen failed that Ashley would make it to safety in time. Yet, it was not just for Luke’s sake he was doing this, was it? There were millions of innocent lives at stake. Men, women and children rolling out of their beds on the West Coast to start their day. They had no idea that this could be the last time they breathed air, gave each other a goodbye kiss or savored a sip of coffee.
Matt looked back down at the rifle in his hands and then to the battered man at his side. This was the last line of defense and, if it were not so frightening, Matt would have laughed.
“You think we’ve got a shot at this?” Matt asked Larsen.
The detective hesitated a beat before answering, “We’re about to find out.” He pointed outside Matt’s window where on the waves below, a small black jet ski was cutting through the water.
On it, was the unmistakable figure of John.
J
ames Peak, the commanding officer of San Clemente Island, was still up. He had managed only two hours of fitful sleep through the night, most of it strung together in all-too-brief fifteen minute increments. Unlike when he had been a younger Navy man, it was not duty that kept him awake but pain.
“Bulged disc,” he recalled the doctor telling him when he finally went for an MRI after dealing with three months of increasing discomfort. The doctor snapped the thin sheet of plastic film up against a light box to reveal the outline of Peak’s lower spine. Using the tip of his pen, he pointed to a small mass of black nested among the white.
“That’s it?” Peak asked dismissively.
“Don’t fool yourself,” the doctor said. “Just a tiny bulge can cause problems. And on a scale of small, medium and large…yours would be considered huge.”
Peak rubbed his tired eyes, the pinching ache in his lower back throbbing. “So what can you do?”