Chapter 35
883 Words
Chapter 35
Daniel slammed awake and wondered if he really had fought Major Henderson, or even more dangerous, his wife.
Other sensations started penetrating his consciousness.
The engines began winding down.
They weren’t moving except for a rock and sway as if a giant rubber band had just grabbed their tail.
There was a strap across his forehead.
The carrier.
He was still in the forward facing seat, which means he’d had to be braced against the sudden deceleration of landing on an aircraft carrier. Someone had strapped his forehead so that the sudden vicious grab of a wire trap wouldn’t injure his neck.
He’d slept all of the way across the Pacific, his first decent sleep in several days. Now they were on the U.S.S. John C. Stennis which had just finished unloading most of its jets to the Whidbey Naval Air Station in Washington state’s Puget Sound. This was a common practice when coming into port; done in order to avoid flight deck operations inside civilian air space. Of course, their carrier would now sit for a little more than a day with nothing on its deck but a passenger jet. It would cause no interference with flight operations because all of the other planes would be gone.
This had been his idea, based on something Beale had said. One thing he’d contributed to the strategy rather just being baggage.
Alice no longer sat across from him.
He struggled out of the seat belt to see her chatting with one of the most feared leaders on the planet as if they were old friends. A moment longer, his brain now fully awake, he realized they spoke in English.
Kim Jong-un’s voice came out heavy, deeper than when he’d spoken in his native tongue. He made awkward but clear use of a distinctly British accent. And they were chatting about the best restaurants in Grenoble.
If there was any way Daniel could be more gone on this woman, he didn’t know what it might be. Alice had not only just charmed the leader of North Korea to relax enough to reveal that he spoke English. She had also just paved the way to make President Matthews have a much more productive meeting.
They filed off the jet into the late evening light, once again wrapped in coats with hoods up. Their entire end of the flight deck was vacant of service personnel. They crossed to the helicopter tied down along the side of the deck. It was the Majors’ other Black Hawk.
Normally they flew them in tandem. For this mission, they’d each left behind their copilots and two of their crew chiefs. This was the “A” team, the very best that SOAR had.
They had separated the helicopters by five thousand miles. One helo was still parked on the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman in the Sea of Japan. The other now sat on the U.S.S. John C. Stennis a few dozen miles off Cape Hatteras, the northwestern most point of the continental U.S. Also conveniently close to the Canadian islands.
After staggering about for a minute on a deck far more wind-torn than the Truman’s deck, Daniel climbed aboard an indistinguishably lethal copy of the helicopter he’d ridden into the heart of North Korea. Accommodations were a little more crowded with Alice aboard, but they were far from the half-dozen troops plus field gear that could squeeze into even a heavily weaponized Black Hawk like the Direct Action Penetrator.
An odd silence settled over them as the helicopter performed the mirror of the movement it had made in North Korea, plunging them down to skim the wave tops before roaring landward. Daniel glanced out the window and what little he could see revealed storm-torn waves.
This time he felt both more and less panic; less for himself, more for any potential danger to Alice. A glance revealed that Alice was enjoying the ride immensely and he did his level best to switch off his over-protective instincts.
Kim Jong-un and his interpreter appeared completely relaxed and at ease with helicopter flight. Any novelty they found aboard a U.S. military helicopter clearly sated in the first flight, they now settled into patient waiting. Daniel had observed that more and more in non-Western countries. Most other world citizens consistently exhibited a patient self-reliance that Americans somehow lacked.
These reflections carried him through the first half of the thirty-minute flight up the storm-torn Strait of San Juan de Fuca and around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The second half was spent white-knuckling as the helicopter dodged between the ten thousand rocks that were the southern end of the Canadian Gulf Islands. The only radar that was going to spot them would be would be some psychotic fisherman out fishing at night among craggy rocks during a nasty northerly storm.
And he’d also be the only person who would find them if the Majors screwed up. If they slammed into a cliff face even a psychotic fisherman would be of little use.
With an abrupt jolt the helicopter slammed him down into his seat. He clenched his hand over Alice’s and held on tight as they climbed into the night. With a sharp tilt toward the stern, he lost all sense of motion.
They hovered.
Outside the window he could see that the lights were on up at the big stone house. Warm, inviting, stable lights that didn’t bob or weave in the dark of the night.
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