“We have to leave.” She turned to the doctor. “Let those SEALs out tomorrow at daylight, okay?”
He nodded as she stepped out of the infirmary and climbed the stairs toward the remaining airplanes. “Hey, Flynn.” I scrambled after her. “You don’t have to—”
She stopped walking and turned toward me. “Yes—Hayley—yes, I do have to.”
What could I say? Lazzo caught up to me and grabbed my arm. “Hayley, she’s not coming with—”
“Yes, Lazzo.” I shook his arm off me. “Yes… she is.”
TWENTY-SIX – Catching Up (Danny)
We landed on the USS George Washington to refuel shortly after 3:00 a.m. The next twenty minutes were extremely difficult to understand.
Only a few deckhands greeted us initially. They knew who I was from the meetings back in Hawaii, but they seemed reluctant to talk to me now for some reason. In fact, they pretty much scattered and hid. So bizarre.
Axel stayed with the plane as it was refueled. Blake remained in the crate. Keena and I asked around about my sister, but no one admitted to seeing her—or even knowing anything about her being on board—and the people who’d been awake for the earlier shift were all in bed. Apparently Baker had only left two of his men behind to guard the ship and—even more strangely—they were both sleeping in a locked cell when we arrived. I offered to let them out, but they declined. To quote the great comedian Will Ferrell, it was “mind bottling.”
We found a doctor cleaning up a deceased boy at the infirmary down the hall, and the doctor was a little more forthcoming. He told us Captain Baker had killed this boy—his own son—for protecting a girl and an African man. Has to be Hayley and Lazzo. The boy appeared to be in his late teens. Hold on… Baker shot his own son?
The doctor then showed us Brock—in a body bag—and explained he’d been shot through the throat with an arrow. So she found a bow? But hang on, if Hayley can fight, why is she still going along with this? I asked the doctor if the girl with the black man had been a prisoner. His bewildered look answered my question. She wasn’t? What the heck? Not only was she not acting like Lazzo’s prisoner, but the captain’s daughter had freed Hayley and Lazzo after they’d been captured and hid them. That’s when her brother had been killed by her father. The captain’s daughter was still working with Hayley and Lazzo. They had locked two of Baker’s SEALs in a cell and left on another plane—slightly before 9:00 p.m. Just when I thought it couldn’t get crazier! And now we’re a full six hours behind them.
Unable to get any useful information from anyone else who was up, we headed to the tower to check on the progress of the planes that had left. They had at least made it to the coast—all three planes—before they exceeded the scope of the USS Washington’s radar. Keena and I noted the line they’d traveled and hurried back to the plane, setting our course for the same path. We didn’t waste any more time on the carrier and took off after the other planes—now six and a half hours behind.
About an hour off the western shoreline—halfway between LA and San Francisco—we hit a major thunder and lightning storm. Initially we thought it would serve as a blessing in disguise, allowing us to pass through unnoticed. But then the lightning began wreaking so much havoc with the controls of the plane that our screens were little more than constant fuzz. We didn’t pick up the small Coast Guard cutter on the screen, but we did catch the surface-to-air missiles they fired at us just in time. I heard Keena yell out “SAMs” seconds before Axel swerved and put us in a rapid climb. The first set of missiles exploded harmlessly off the wings.
“Danny, we have too much weight on this plane.” Axel was furiously flipping switches and turning dials.
He was right. The plane was loaded. It had four jeeps on it—who knows why?—and tons of crates full of who knows what. Kate and Axel had possibly picked the worst plane in Hawaii to hide Blake on, and now we were stuck with it for this. I had considered unloading it—when Keena and I had arrived—and now I definitely wish we had. Stupid!
I stood up to unfasten the jeeps and hollered at Axel, “Open the cargo door.”
“Danny we’re too high for that. It will dump everything. Everything.”
I knew he meant Blake too. “We don’t have a choice!” I yelled. The door slowly began to open. I hurriedly anchored myself to a wall with a thick black rope.
“Danny, you’ve got to do it fast.”
I almost had them all unfastened. “Got it, Axel.”
“Danny, we have a bigger problem. There’s a bigger boat moving toward us. We’ll never get high enough to get out of its range.”
I ran to the front of the plane and looked at the screen. If that was a former US Navy ship, it was probably loaded. We’d be dead ducks. Shit. I stuck my face in the cabin camera which I assumed was how they were monitoring us. “Do not write us off,” I shouted into it. “You hear me, do not write us off. We’re still in this.” Then I turned to Axel, handing him and Keena each a parachute pack. “Put us in the steepest possible climb right now. When everything falls out of the plane, level off, line us up with Sacramento, and power everything down. Everything.” He knew I meant the cameras. I needed to save Blake.
“Danny, that could kill the engines. This plane isn’t built for that.”
“I know. Let the engines die, then level us out. If we lose panel power, so be it. We gotta try to make it.”
Keena knew what I was saying. Kill the camera feed as soon as it would be believable. “Roger,” she said.
Axel looked at me then her. “Ditto that.”
“And guys.” I clapped both of them on the back. “If we get split up somehow, you’ve got until midnight Sunday to make it to that island in the middle of the Pringtime Reservoir. We’ll move on to the exchange coordinates from there. Do not go directly to Knight’s Peak. Okay? Anyone not at the Res by then we treat as dead. Got it?”
They both nodded, and I ran back to the crates as Axel cranked the nose of the plane sharply up. I pulled inflatable rafts and parachutes off the wall and threw them on the floor between Blake’s crate and the open door. The jeeps were rolling out the back, crates sliding behind them. I pretended to fall against Blake’s crate—assuming I was still on camera—exaggerating the vacuum pull of the open cargo door. I used that fall—and a drawn out fight to stand back up—to hook two of the cords used to hold the rafts in place to the bottom of Blake’s crate. Now he was anchored solidly to the airplane wall.
I then quickly slid the top off of Blake’s crate and dropped a stack of chutes into it. I detached several small diving tanks from the wall, dropped one in Blake’s crate, and held onto another one for myself. I quickly threw on my parachute pack and grabbed a bag full of diving gear with my free hand. Here goes nothing. I set a bag with a raft in it on top of his crate, and as the plane climbed to nearly vertical, the remainder of the cargo emptied out of the plane. The plane went dark—electrical system nearly in total failure—as we passed a seventy-five degree angle. Axel used the last burst of power to begin leveling out the plane.