The best news of all was that after I caught my flight, the marshals would be heading back to the ranch to guard my family. My kids would be getting extra-special, round-the-clock protection while I was gone. Their safety was paramount, the priority for me. I wanted Perrine bad, but my guys came first. If anything ever happened to them while I was away, I didn’t know what I would do.
Leo told me we were headed to a place an hour south-east of Cody’s ranch, along the California-Nevada border, called the Amedee Army Airfield. As we drove, I wondered if Amedee was Indian for end of the world, because the area was hands down the most desolate place I had ever seen in my life. On both sides of the faded two-lane blacktop was nothing but mountain-rimmed scrub desert beneath a sky so huge and bright and blue, it hurt my head.
“Is this where they tested the atom bomb?” I asked as we slowed and turned onto a dirt road.
“No, sir. I believe that was down in New Mexico,” Leo said from behind his aviator shades.
“I knew I should have made a left in Albuquerque,” I mumbled as we bumped along.
We slowed and stopped about five minutes later. I looked to the left and right for the military airport that was our destination, but there was nothing. No planes, no control tower, no buildings. There was nothing but more desert.
“Um, I thought I was supposed to catch a plane,” I said, scanning the bleak landscape.
The young agents looked at each other, smiling.
“You’re about to,” Agent McCarthy said, opening the door.
“But where’s the … you know, buildings and TSA gropers and everything?” I asked, stepping out and spotting for the first time the macadam runway in front of us.
“That’s at an airport,” the female fed explained as she checked her watch. “This is an airfield.”
“Aha,” I said, pretending like that explained something.
When I turned to her partner for clarification, he was pointing up at the sky.
“Here comes your ride now,” Leo said.
Far in the distance to the east, a plane began to make a whistling descent out of the wild blue yonder. Though unmarked and military charcoal gray, it looked sort of like a corporate jet.
The plane made a wide turn to land from the west. I was almost surprised that the plane didn’t start buzzing me like the crop duster that goes after Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
The sleek, rumbling jet aircraft landed and taxied up, close enough for me to reach out and touch the razorlike edge of its wing. Its jets were rumbling so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself when I thanked the agents who handed me my bags.
Instead of a stewardess, a green-fatigues-clad soldier wearing a beret dropped the door and helped me aboard. As the soldier resealed the door, I could see that the plane’s resemblance to a G6 ended at the steps. Inside, it looked like a cargo plane, with netting and jump seats, and smelled frighteningly like spilled gasoline. A female pilot gave me a wide smile and a thumbs-up from the forward cockpit.
“Can I get you anything, sir?” the soldier asked after he expertly strapped me and my bags to the wall.
Still in a state of shock and awe, I just shook my head as the jets fired and the desert outside the window started to roll.
The soldier didn’t offer me any peanuts or headphones, but he did snap out a large brown paper bag and handed it to me as we left the ground.
“Just in case,” he said.
CHAPTER 31
As we headed south, the friendly soldier-steward told me his name was Larry and that the plane was called a C-26 Metroliner.
What he failed to mention was why I was on a military aircraft, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.
It had been just under an hour when we touched back down to earth. Not bad, considering that Cody’s ranch was almost six hundred miles from LA. Even in a military cargo plane, I decided flying private was the way to go. No one had even once made the suggestion that they wanted to touch my junk.
When I looked out the porthole of a window, not too far off I spotted a couple of parked Chinook cargo helicopters. Where are the Delta and Southwest planes? I wondered. Where are the guys driving the luggage carts? Instead of these usual airport sights, beyond the runway fence were rows of two-story dormitory-style buildings. It looked like we were on some sort of military base.
“I take it this isn’t LAX,” I said to Larry.
“No, sir. We’re at SCLA, Southern Cal Logistics Airport,” he said.
Emily Parker was sitting waiting for me in a Gator XUV, a golf cart on steroids, as Larry dropped the door. She was checking her phone and trying to look all nonchalant, like private jets were the most ho-hum thing in the world to her.
But after I thanked Larry and the pilot and started to walk over, she cracked a smile and started giggling. When she wanted to, Agent Parker could look as steely as the snub-nosed Colt.45 automatic she packed, but when she smiled like that, she looked like the girl you were too afraid to ask to your high school prom. I’d forgotten what a great smile it was. Almost.
“Hey, what do you think? Pretty cool, huh?” she said, elbowing me as I sat. “I told you they wanted you. How does it feel to get the Nancy Pelosi treatment? You’re a real government VIP now.”
“I didn’t fill the barf sack on the ride here, so I guess that’s a start,” I said, dropping my bags in the back of the Gator.
We started to drive. The army MP on duty nodded at us as we came through the airfield gate. Which wasn’t easy, since the young man was trying to look down Emily’s shirt at the same time. On the other side of the fence was a road with the dormlike buildings I’d seen from the plane.
“OK, Parker. Give it up,” I said as we hummed along. “What is all this? I didn’t know I was joining the army. Are we going to the hangar where they have the aliens now? I mean, what’s up with the Area Fifty-One routine? What the heck is going on? What is this place? An air force base?”
“Kind of. It used to be George Air Force Base, but it was mothballed in ’ninety-two. They turned half of it into Southern Cal Logistics, a municipal airport, and kept the other half of it-the dormitories and surrounding area-for multiple military use, mostly training.”
“OK, but why are we here?”
“Let’s get you settled first,” Emily said, swinging into a parking lot.
She took me through a door and up a flight of stairs, and dropped my overnight on a cot in a little room halfway down the hall. She locked the door and handed me a key.
“Are you the RA?” I said, taking it. “Where do I get my meal card? Or do I have to report for boot camp? Help me out.”
“Head’s a couple of doors down, on your left,” she said, all business now. “There’s a general meeting in about an hour. Why don’t we get a bite to eat, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”
CHAPTER 32
Back downstairs, we grabbed a couple of Cokes and plastic-wrapped turkey clubs off a tray in the dormitory’s kitchen. We were taking them outside to a picnic table beside the parking lot when a short, wiry, black-haired man dressed in camo came through the front doors. Though short in stature, he carried himself with a physical grace, like an old-time baseball shortstop.
“Emily,” the soldier said, smiling as he stopped in front of us. “I thought I heard you come in. And you must be Michael Bennett.”
“This is Colonel D’Ambrose, Mike,” Emily said. “He’s in charge of this …”
“Shindig? Fiasco? I haven’t quite figured out what it is myself yet,” D’Ambrose said, shaking my hand. “Have you brought Mike up to speed?”
“Just about to, over lunch.” She smiled.
“Excellent,” D’Ambrose said. “Let me grab some grub and join you.”
“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this until you sign the paperwork,” D’Ambrose said at the picnic table a few minutes later, as he speared some potato salad onto a plastic fork, “but large things are afoot, Mike. Forty-eight hours ago, the president signed a national security directive targeting Perrine as a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. Now, instead of just local and federal law enforcement, my military boys are on board.