“Maybe.”
“Is no ‘maybe,’ Hayley.” He was fuming. “It was stupid. She could have killed you. And if she tells anyone, they’ll come here. They come here… they die. Then I will have to shoot you too. We all die.”
This is getting old. “I know, Lazzo.” My only hope was to trust Flynn.
My only hope was to trust Captain Baker’s daughter.
FOURTEEN – Two Down (Ryan)
Careful what you wish for—I’d heard it said a thousand times. In this case, Danny’s request to make Redemption Island a black hole on the Area 52 surveillance system was the wish we were going to regret. We didn’t need a satellite to see the USS George Washington from Redemption, but we also weren’t really watching it. The governor had asked us to keep an eye on it—since it was in the satellite “black hole”—and we did that during the day. But at night—when we went to bed—its security and occupants weren’t on our mind.
Danny knocked on my door around nine thirty Monday morning. “Is Hayley here, Dad?”
I rubbed my eyes. It had been a long night, thanks to Ollie’s restlessness. “No. You just woke me up.”
The calm on my son’s face flickered to something else. “Huh. She wasn’t at Blake’s either. No one has seen her or the girls, or Sam, since last night, and the boat they took out to the carrier is still gone.”
I heard footsteps walking up behind me. “What’s going on?”
Danny was looking down at the cove then out toward the open water.
“No one’s seen Hayley or…” I stopped myself.
“Wait… what?” Tara pushed past me.
Idiot. “Tara—” Too late.
“Danny. They didn’t come back last night? Emily…” Panic was evident in her voice. “No one’s seen Emily?”
“That’s why I came over here.” Danny placed his hand on Tara’s shoulder. “You’d told her to be back in an hour. I thought maybe she’d checked in—”
“We just went to bed.” I interrupted my son.
Tara was grabbing his arm now. “Danny… No one has seen any of them since last night?”
Danny shook his head. Tara pushed past me again and into the house. Danny turned back toward the tree house. “Tell her we’ll find them. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”
“Please do.” I watched him walk away then followed Tara inside. She took her nightshirt off and stepped out of her underwear. She slipped into her black bikini and a pair of board shorts, threw on a light hooded sweatshirt, and brushed past me once more.
“Tara, what are you—where are you going?”
“You stay with Ollie.”
I couldn’t really argue. Yes, Hayley was out there too, but Emily was much younger, and Tara had been against letting her go along last night. I’d had to convince her it was okay. I had a feeling some of Tara’s emotions right now involved a certain degree of anger toward me as a result.
Ollie was sleeping now—of course. Right when I wanted him to be awake so I could keep up with what was going on. Screw it. I grabbed a T-shirt, pulled it on, and went into his room. I lifted him out of his crib and hurried out the front door. By the time I reached the tree house it was empty. Figuring they were at Blake and Kaci’s, I almost sprinted there, Ollie bouncing—sound asleep—in my arms the whole way. I found everyone crowded around the computer in the office. Danny was on a direct line with one of the operatives in Area 52. It sounded like the governor was there too.
Keena was going through the security feeds on our end hoping to pick up something beyond the satellite black hole—anything out of the norm. Tara and Kate squeezed in beside her. Someone at Area 52 was scanning screens as well. Finally a female voice said she’d found something. “I’m patching it through to you.”
The feed came up on our screen, and we saw a small red dot heading from the general vicinity of our island toward Kauai. It entered Waimea Bay, stopped there, stayed there for almost an hour, and then reappeared a few miles off the Kauai coast heading back toward our island. The voice at Area 52, now identified as Nicole, said, “Danny, it looks like they headed back to your island… if indeed that was them.”
“Can’t we get a better feed of that?” Danny stared intently at the screen. “Can’t we see that dot a little closer? Don’t we have infrared or something?”
Nicole replied slowly, “Danny, I’ll do what I can, but there’s some kind of interference seemingly coming off of the carrier, affecting everything around it. Give me twenty minutes to run the feed through all our filters, okay?”
We didn’t have a choice. That dot alone didn’t tell us for certain it was our boat. “Go ahead.”
Those twenty minutes felt like two hours, and when Nicole’s voice came back on she didn’t sound happy. In fact, she sounded kind of scared. “Danny, I don’t know what to say—”
“Did you find anything?”
There was a long pause, and before Danny repeated his question she answered, “Yes.”
“Play it.”
The feed came up on our screen.
“Danny, this is just beyond the black hole—about a mile from your beach best as I can tell.”
The feed was fuzzy and scrambled, but with the enlarged infrared filter we could see seven red blobs on the screen. We watched in horror as one of the seven blobs was left behind out in the open water. What the heck? Tara muffled a scream—hand over her mouth—and grabbed onto Blake, who was standing beside her. I watched, stunned, as the dot they left behind completely disappeared, and another dot in the middle of the screen slowly faded. Was one of those Hayley? Emily? Why in the world didn’t they stop?
Four of the remaining five blobs seemed to be huddled at the front of the boat, and the fifth dot appeared to be driving it. There was only one plausible explanation for what we’d seen. The dot that had fallen overboard hadn’t done so by choice. There was no telling if that dot—person or dog—was still alive. The other blob that had faded away in the middle of the boat had to be dead or their dot wouldn’t have disappeared. This was terrifying to watch.
Reaching shore, the five dots disembarked, moved across the Waimea Bay parking lot, then disappeared. The screen went completely black.
“Nicole… what happened?”
“Danny, I don’t know. Our aerial feed shows them getting into a vehicle in the parking lot, and then they vanish. There’s no trace of where they went or of anything moving in that entire area for a full two hours.”
“We don’t have any cameras down there either?”
“We did.” She sounded as bewildered as Danny. “We do. But they all went down at the same time, again for about two hours.”
“EMP?” Keena asked.
“Maybe.” Nicole’s reply sounded more like a yes.
An electromagnetic pulse? Here? “Wouldn’t that knock out the whole island?” Everyone turned to look at me.
“No,” Nicole answered. “Not necessarily. This EMP—if that’s what it was—could have been isolated to the west side of the island. I’m sending you a map of the blacked-out area. It appears to cover roughly a twenty-mile radius from Waimea. But hang on a second. I need to play the rest of the boat feed for you.”
The boat had reappeared, coming back toward our island. We watched it emerge from Kauai’s blind area into the open water, and we were subjected to another shock before it again disappeared into our island’s “black hole.” There were only two dots in the boat.