David Dun - Overfall

“But if I take you…”

She indicated the off button on the phone.

Sam was looking at a woman who was crazy with determination.

“This is what I get for saving your life?”

“No. This is what you get for trying to run it. Nowhere in our contract does it say you can make life and death choices for me. I am your equal. Get that through your head.”

“If you come you fight my way.”

“Since I don’t know any other way to fight, I suppose yours is as good as any.”

“You are something else.”

“I’ll grow on you. Let’s go,” she said. “Harold, I’ll call you back later.” They both ran back to the plane.

T.J. looked worried.

As Sam was walking to the plane a bad feeling almost paralyzed him. He tried to shake it off. He considered that the intruders were far ahead, trained and heavily armed, and probably impossible to catch. His small group wasn’t ready for this.

“Come here,” Sam said, pulling T.J. away from Anna.

“What about me?” Anna said.

“Just stand there,” Sam growled, about as mean as he ever sounded.

“I don’t think we should take Anna and I’m afraid this could end in disaster,” Sam said.

“You stay. The boys and I will go. If you sit here she’ll stay and there isn’t a hell of a lot she can do about it.”

“I don’t want you dead, T.J.”

“It’s the job. I wanna go, but I sure as hell don’t wanna take Anna Wade.”

“If you fly right over to the far side you could be flying into automatic weapons fire. If that happens you’ll be dead.”

“We won’t go straight. We’ll come in at the end of the island and go overland.”

“It’s your choice.”

“What are you saying?” Anna walked over to where they were standing.

“You and I are staying here to run the radio,” Sam said.

“No way.”

“Anna, I’m staying here and so are you. T.J. and the boys are going.”

The pilot was slow in reaching for the door. He cleared his throat and spoke. “What are all these guns, and this?” he said, speaking in a tight voice, his eyes hard with fear.

“Little problem,” Sam said. “These gentlemen need to go to the other side of the island, up at the other end, and look for someone.”

“With those?” the man said, still eying the armament.

“Lotta bears over there,” Sam said.

“Bullshit,” the pilot said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars if you take them.”

“Am I gonna get shot at?”

“Probably.”

“Fifty thousand cash plus you buy the plane if it’s damaged. And I want it in writing now.”

Sam took out a pen and scrawled the deal.

“And the movie star here signs it.”

“Listen, asshole, we gotta go,” Jeff said.

“Take it easy,” Sam said. The man’s being reasonable. And now that we’re paying him fifty grand he’s officially agreed to fly through live fire.”

The pilot swallowed and looked at Sam as if he might rethink his position. The three men jumped into the plane. Sam shut the door, practically choking with frustration.

He and Anna stood in silence while the plane taxied and took off.

They watched as the seaplane flew down the island, made a turn, and disappeared in the distance. In ten minutes they got a radio call.

“Sam, they are long gone. No seaplane, no boats, no nothing. We watched as the Otter took off in the distance. There was a chopper nearby that could have come into the old orchard back here. We’re coming back.” Then there was a few seconds’ silence and T.J. came on again.

“We’ve been hit. We’ve been hit. Somebody stayed behind. We’re going to try to land.” Then more stridently. “Duke and Jeff have both been hit bad. Automatic weapons fire.”

Sam called seaplanes and a medical helicopter. The pilot got the Beaver on the water.

Twenty minutes later T.J. came on the radio.

“Damn it, Sam. Duke and Jeff are dead. Both gone.”

Sam and Anna sat in a Hawker 700 jet that had leveled off at 32,000 feet.

“We have to go after them. The longer they are gone, the harder they will be to find.”

“You know, you’re trying my ego. Supposedly I’m an expert at this. We have fifty people or more working their butts off nearly twenty-four hours a day looking for escape routes from Canada. We are monitoring phones, we’re nudging the Canadian government, we’re getting informal help from the FBI and Scotland Yard without yelling too loud because of the circumstances and because governments can screw things up. They left in a private plane, and we’ll find it.”

“I know. I just can’t stand it.”

“We lost two more men because we couldn’t wait.”

“I know. I know. We’ve gone over this.”

“Until we know where they went, you need to get your mind off it and give the appearance of Anna Wade going about her business as usual.”

“Yeah, well, you can just haul your cute butt down to my studio party.”

“I said I would ride in the limo.”

“But we aren’t going if it will in any way affect the hunt for Jason.”

“Absolutely.”

Anna began eyeing the small couch in the back of the jet’s cabin.

“Lie down if you like,” Sam said.

“Will you come back so we can talk before I fall asleep?”

“Sure,” Sam said. He took a mint-green blanket and white pillow from a forward baggage compartment, ushered her to the back of the plane, and sat in an upright seat across from the couch. Anna, already in her stocking feet, lay down.

“Why don’t you sit here?” she said.

Sam got the idea, moved over, and put the pillow in his lap.

“Tell me about the letters in the picture book,” she said.

“Maybe I should be the one on the couch.”

“Come on, Sam.”

“The thing with the sat phone and the New York Times. I didn’t like it.”

“It was just a bluff. You were being a butt head. Let’s not digress.” She put her hand on his arm and patted it.

“No.” He said it with a tentative tone to soften what was not soft.

“I know. I was wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I won’t do it again but I’m sure I’ll be tempted.”

“One of the letters was to my son. It was in English so you know what it said. Mom found it in his things.

The other was in the language of my tribe. It was from my grandfather to me.”

“And what did it say?”

“It was very similar to the letter I wrote to my son except for the last line. My grandfather didn’t mention the sunset or the beer.”

“And?”

“It said ‘Do not neglect the gift that I have seen.’ Loose translation.”

“What is that gift?”

“I have dreams. Sometimes hunches. They are just normal things. Most people have them.”

“Your Grandfather was a Spirit Walker?”

“Yes.”

“And he had these dreams and hunches?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Methinks you doth protest too much. In the cabin when you jumped up and said we had to get out. Was that one of those dreams?”

“Yeah.”

“When was the last time you had one?”

“Before getting in the seaplane at the lodge; on the roof of the Dyna Science building before getting in the helicopter. But you know that was logical. It had only one engine. I usually use one with two turbines.”

“When before that?”

“When I was sailing past the mouth of Devil’s Gate. I turned in.”

“It’s how you saw me.”

“Well, it made it easier.”

“Come on. Would you have seen me if you’d kept going?”

“Probably not. I had the same bad feeling about putting you in the seaplane.”

“So what is this?”

“It’s nothing.”

“What did your grandfather mean?”