Around five in the morning I heard some shouting and banging down the hall. I swung my head over and looked at the bunk beneath mine. Tara was gone. I climbed out of bed and hurried into the surveillance lab, where almost everyone else was looking up at a giant overhead screen. I could see a small black circle at the end of a long dirt driveway.
“What is that?” I asked Jenna.
“A house, we think. But we can’t see it. That black circle is blocking all our camera angles, even infrared.”
“And that’s—”
“Definitely not normal.” She finished my question as a statement. “When the rest of the blackout lifted off Kauai, this spot remained. They think it’s intentional. Someone there is doing this.”
I could feel my heart accelerating. Finally. Hope. Nicole zoomed in on a set of fresh mud tracks going around the black circle and into a smaller building—a shed or something. We could see the back end of a mud-covered van sticking out of the shed. Nicole brought up the feed of the front gate of the compound and rewound the recording the full forty hours it could go back before the blackout. Not once did that van appear on the screen, even though it definitely had been driven recently. It had to have come down the driveway during the blackout. This really could be something. I could see that same hope in Tara’s eyes. Combine the van and satellite scramblers with the fact the house seemed to be in a remote gated compound, and it was the ideal location to hold hostages.
“How did they not find that last night?” I whispered to Jenna.
“From what I’ve seen on the screen, someone had covered the entry with brush. It was really well covered.”
Nicole and Keena were working frantically to reverse the blackout currently blotting out the house—technology versus our master technicians. It took about twenty minutes. “Whose sector was that in?” I wanted to know who had missed this earlier.
“It wasn’t,” was Danny’s surprising reply. “The gate was at the edge of the blacked-out area, but the house was outside the blackout zone. It’s almost like that was part of the plan—to make us think they were hiding in the blackout zone.”
No wonder we missed that black circle. We wouldn’t have been looking for other blackout areas. The kidnappers wanted to travel with cover, but when the cover was lifted and that area was searched, they didn’t want to be in it. Pretty smart actually.
“Wait,” Jenna said out loud suddenly. Everyone turned to look at her. “Shouldn’t we be able to see the van drive down the driveway?”
“No,” Nicole answered. “It’s blacked—”
“No, she’s right,” Keena chimed in. “The blackout zone went to the gate, but not more than a dozen or so feet past it. We watched all the feed before and after the blackout there. And we gave up on the feed of the house because it was always blacked out, but—”
“Not the driveway,” Danny finished her thought. “That’s a half mile of open space, at least.”
“Right.” Jenna nodded. “We need to rewind the feed of the zone just past the gate, before it gets to the blacked-out circle.”
Nicole was already doing it.
“Look where the tire marks initially cut off the driveway and head around the house,” Danny said, pointing at another screen. The live daylight feed on that screen—zoomed in—revealed the tracks were definitely fresh. Danny stood over Nicole’s shoulder as she hammered in numbers and spun the dials. His attention was back on the big screen she was operating. “Run the feed from the beginning of the blackout to the end.”
Less than half an hour after the blackout began, we spotted headlights from what we assumed was the van. We watched it cut off the driveway and drive around the black dot to the shed. As it neared the shed a motion detector light came on. A minute later I heard several gasps around me as two men on the screen—dressed in black with masks—pulled Reagan, Emily, and Abbey out of the back of the van. They stepped briefly into the light then walked them into the shed.
“That was Hayley and the girls, right?”
“No, Dad. It was Reagan.”
“But that was Hayley’s neon yellow Under Armour hoodie.”
“I know. Trust me, it was Reagan.”
“Can you rewind it?” I wasn’t convinced.
Nicole looked at Danny and he nodded. She spun it back.
“Zoom in.” There wasn’t a lot of light, so it was blurry, but the military’s digital technology was amazing—and that definitely wasn’t Hayley. My shoulders slumped and I sat back in my chair. There were no I told you so’s to go with the sympathetic looks I got. Jenna squeezed my shoulder. I sighed. At least they’re still alive.
Nicole flipped to infrared and continued the feed. We saw five dots move towards the back of the shed then disappear one by one. What the? A sixth dot was hanging out near the back of the van while two more dots stayed relatively motionless, essentially in the middle of the giant dot—the van.
“Why—” Tara started to ask.
“Tunnel,” Danny said. “They had to have gone underground.”
Or into a freezer. Glancing back at the van, a third dot was now visible towards the back . The van backed out, returned to the driveway, and disappeared again into the larger blackout zone when it neared the gate.
Nicole replayed that last part around the shed again but it didn’t provide anything new. At least we’d learned a few things. Reagan and the girls were taken into that house by two men—or we assumed they were men. It hadn’t been Reagan, Emily or Abbey who had fallen out of the boat. Another person—Hayley, Sam, Lazzo, or someone else entirely—stepped out of the van for a couple minutes then hopped back in. The van left and came back almost fifty minutes later with just one passenger, who also disappeared in the garage. I agreed with Danny’s tunnel assessment now. Seems everyone did. Best guess was the returning person was the one we’d seen climb into the back of the van—not Hayley, Sam, or Lazzo. The other two passengers had taken the boat out toward the USS George Washington. If all of that was as it seemed, then two of the three had disappeared with the carrier.
Still, none of this explained anything, and no one wanted to jump to any further conclusions. It was time to take action. By 8:00 a.m. Danny and the Pack were on a plane with all their gear, headed for Kauai. It was time to breach that house. The rest of us stood or sat around the satellite room in Area 52, watching the big screen. Another Area 52 operator—Damien—had come in to replace an exhausted Nicole. He was following the plane on the screen, and we’d be able to see everything unfold from here.
I looked up as Tara walked over to me, and I stood tentatively to meet her, unsure what she wanted. She raised her arms and wrapped them around me, burying her head against my shoulder. I breathed in deeply, reveling in her scent and appreciating this opportunity to squeeze her tightly—finally.
“I’m scared, Ryan.”
Chills zigzagged through my body, and I rubbed her back with one hand. “Danny’s gonna get her back, babe.”
“But what—”
“No, Tara. But nothing.” I lifted her chin to look her directly in the eyes. “Danny’s getting her back.”
She pulled me tightly against her again, her head back on my shoulder.
Come on, Danny.
SEVENTEEN - One Thousand Miles (Hayley)