He screamed, Barrels on this plane! twice more, and Bullshit! just as he got an elbow into someone’s balls. One of them shoved a fist into his mouth.
He tried to bite the fist, hurting his jaw but getting no real grip, and then they forced something into his mouth; he was retching and couldn’t breathe. He badly wanted to drift down into the darkness and pain, but he wanted more to see how all this came out.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 5:20 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Ysabel jumped when her phone rang. She grabbed it and said, “Yeah?”
“It’s time. Do it.” The connection went dead.
She couldn’t quite place the accent but that was okay, too, she knew this was an international effort. It seemed strange that it wasn’t a Spanish accent, though.
Oh, well. She jumped up, peed quickly, put her purse by the door, looked around to make sure there was nothing else for her to forget. She reminded herself again to drop the cheapie convenience-store cell phone in some place where it was likely to be stolen.
Then she sat down and worked the Stinger gadget. Really, this wasn’t as hard as most video games. She tabbed over to the button that said, ARM ON LOCK, clicked on it, and typed the password—DAYBREAK, of course.
A red message flashed Missile will arm when target acquired.
She’d practiced acquiring the target all afternoon; she just slid the crosshairs across the television screen, using the little thumbwheel controls, till the red glow told her it had found the diesel exhaust (imagine the jackass nerve of those Border Patrol assholes, dumping diesel exhaust right out above a city, of all things!)
She pushed the key combination, and jumped at the roar of the Stinger’s exhaust against the roof, a couple of feet above her ceiling. On the screen, the thread of smoke ended in a ball of fire under the aerostat.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 8:30 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
“That’s not where we had our honeymoon,” a soft voice said. Heather thought, That must be Kim Samuelson, when did they bring—
On the screen, John Samuelson’s head was grabbed and a knife went to his throat; after a burst of shouting and a wildly swinging camera, the screen went dark.
Lenny Plekhanov, reading NSA feed, said, “We’ve got the cell-phone towers they relayed through—east coast of Baja—”
A young Asian woman said, “Confirmed, we have that tower’s location, thanks, and an angle on them. North and east of Guerrero Negro, latitude—”
A message flashed up on Heather’s screen; she looked down and said, loud enough so people could hear, “E-bomb attack on the Mexican Navy’s Guerrero Negro station about forty minutes ago. Took out radio, cell phone, and the local landline station, along with the radars on the frigate and cutter in port, and at the airport. Several visual sightings of a big white plane.”
The young Asian woman added, “Alerts out to ICE, Air Force, Air Guard, Navy, all the—shit. Yuma aerostat radar is out, and—Air Force says hostile action.”
On the screen, one big green curve across the Gulf of California blanked out; the remaining green curves peeled back like the cross section of a bullet hole.
“Either that’s the way they’re coming, or that’s the diversion,” Garren said. “We’ll—”
“They’ve killed him, you know. Or they will any minute. Shoot that plane down.” Roger Pendano looked haggard and sad.
Did he even realize that he’d given the order for that almost an hour ago? Or that the operation isn’t being commanded here anymore? Heather was afraid she might find out.
The silence went well beyond awkward before Garren said, “We are working on that, sir.”
Pendano sank into his chair, hands on his head; he didn’t move as everything else went on around him.
ABOUT TEN MINUTES LATER. CLAY SPUR. WYOMING. 6:45 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Jason’s Goo-22 search had found an all-organic restaurant about an hour away, on a route that would take them back to I-25 eventually, so they headed east and south. “We’ll miss being able to find places like this so easily,” Jason said, as they pulled into the gravel parking lot, “but on the other hand, instead of having these little islands of spiritual meaning in an ocean of Big System, we’ll all make meaning where we are, till the whole world will have spiritual meaning.”
“Spiritual?”
Jason shrugged. “There’s more to spirit than just God.”
Once seated, with a big pot of coffee for the table to share, and a big meal ordered for each of them, Jason sighed. “It feels good not to be driving; thanks for giving me a ride clear back to Raton. The mountains are beautiful and the challenge is fun, but after a while, dude, it’s all ‘hand on the throttle, eye on the rail.’”
“Back to the spiritual already.”
“A bunch of us at the commune like to play traditional stuff, and traditional includes gospel. No offense, but when I’m singing ‘You Got to Walk with Your Lord Every Step,’ it doesn’t mean I believe what I’m singing.”
Zach grinned. “You look way too much like one of the original disciples to be a current one.”
Jason nearly shot the coffee through his nose, and said, “I thought Christian types were supposed to try to convert people and didn’t have much of a sense of humor about it.”
“That’s another outfit. They get all the…” Zach froze, staring.
When Jason turned, the television over the bar showed flat Gothic letters, blue on yellow: ATTACK IN THE DESERT. SPECIAL REPORT.
One of the waitresses, braids and big skirt flying, ran to the TV and turned the volume all the way up.
“—joining us, again, the plane carrying Vice President Samuelson on a confidential diplomatic mission was seized earlier today, and government sources confirm that the streaming video webcast that appeared about forty minutes ago was not a hoax. Here’s a clip of that webcast; we apologize for the poor quality of the video and remind you he was being held prisoner and threatened. You may want to take small children out of the room.”
Samuelson’s image appeared, too big, too grainy, and with the color uncorrected. They watched him speak the plane’s position, the terrorists wrestling him, the knife at his neck, Samuelson dragged off camera. The network helpfully supplied subtitles so that they knew someone had shouted in Arabic not to kill Samuelson on camera, and “read our statement, read it now, we may have no time,” over the sound of the vice president shouting Bullshit! and Barrels on the plane!, and that the thuds off camera must mean he was being beaten.
An announcer cut off Samuelson’s scream of Bullshit! “We’re taking you right away to live coverage from our San Diego affiliate where—excuse me, I’m not sure—” The man listened intently to his earpiece. “Should I?”
“That’s some last words,” Zach said.
Jason nodded. “How many vice presidents ever say anything that close to the truth?”
The announcer said, “We are going direct to live video from the traffic reporting plane from our network affiliate in San Diego. We have—”
A blink in the feed cut the anchor off; the picture stabilized into a military jet streaking across the blue sky, seen from beneath and behind.
“That’s an A-10,” Zach commented. “I built a model of that when I was a kid. Weird. It’s a ground-attack plane, basically a tank-buster, not a fighter. Maybe something is going on on the ground?”