Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

"Is it really so hard to believe?" Travis said. "The concept is hardwired right into our culture. We tell little kids in Sunday school a story just like it, and in that story it's not exactly the bad guy who makes it happen."

"Christ's sake," Garner said. "That's not meant to be taken literally."

"No, but you might ask yourself how the story got to be popular in the first place. Don't you think it just appeals to people, on some level? You look around at the world and all its bullshit. This group hates this group, because of something that happened this many centuries ago, and these other people are suffering for it. I'm not saying I agree, but I can understand the attraction of the idea. The notion of just scraping everything clean and starting all over. And I haven't seen a tenth of the ugliness Isaac Finn has seen."

"But Currey," Garner said. "All the rest of them. I just don't understand it. Cultured, educated people, trusted to govern. All of them standing up to be counted as part of something that's… objectively evil."

"We don't need to look to scripture for an example of that," Travis said. "We don't even need to look past living history."

Garner turned and met his eyes. Travis saw a chill pass through him. Along with acceptance, at last.

The driver tapped the brakes and slowed. "Coming up on the L.I.E., sir. Back to the city?"

"I don't think so," Garner said. "Pull off for a minute."

The driver parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards shy of the first on-ramp. The trailing car followed suit.

Garner took out his cell phone again, but didn't dial a number. He glanced at Travis. "You're sure Finn is going to Arica right now?"

"Can you imagine any place he'd rather go, with the cylinder? Now that he thinks the loose ends are tied off, he's free to go see what's there, on the other side-the end result of his dream."

Garner considered it for a few seconds. Then he opened the phone and dialed. While it rang, he switched it to speakerphone.

"Who are you calling?" Travis said.

"A lieutenant general I know in the Air Force. Heads up the Reserve Command."

"You trust him?"

"He used to rat me out for cutting class, but we're better since then."

The line clicked open and a man said, "This is Garner."

"So's this," Garner said.

The man on the phone said, "Rich, how are you?"

"I'm good, Scott. But I need a favor."

"Name it."

"I'm on Long Island, just east of the Army depot at Rockport. Williston Air Force Base is out here somewhere, isn't it?"

"About twenty miles further east."

Garner looked at the driver and nodded. The guy put the car in gear and pulled out. He accelerated to pass the westbound on-ramp and put on his blinker to take the next one.

"I need a lift," Garner said. "For myself and seven friends. What's the fastest thing they have stationed at Williston?"

"The fastest transport?"

"The fastest anything."

"I know they've got a wing of Strike Eagles. Those'll go Mach two without breaking a sweat. They could ferry one passenger per plane, if you swap out the weapon systems officer."

"We don't anticipate any dogfights," Garner said. "We just need to win a race. And I need you to keep this in the back channels, Scott. All the way. No one learns about this who isn't flying the planes, clearing them, or waving them off the aprons."

"What the hell's going on, Rich?"

"Nothing good. Keep your communications off the primary channels. Use something secure. But make damn sure you don't use the Longbow satellites. We have reason not to trust them."

"Those would be no good anyway, tonight," Scott said. "I'll find a different option."

Garner cocked his head. "Why are the Longbows no good tonight?"

"Don't know. It's the strangest thing. The whole constellation, forty-eight satellites in all, went into some kind of standby mode about three hours ago. No one can get access."

Garner turned to Travis, and in the glow of the freeway's overhead lights, the man's expression went cold.

"Holy shit," Garner said.

They were in the air thirty minutes later. Travis's F-15E was the third off the runway. Its wheels left the ground and a second later Travis felt like he was lying on his back, and that he weighed about five hundred pounds. There were four green-screen displays in front of him, left to right in a row. They were full of visual data and numbers, most of which he couldn't make sense of. One he could: altitude. That number was climbing rapidly.

The fighter leveled off at thirty thousand feet. Travis looked to his left and right, and saw the southern coastline of Long Island passing far below. A continuous vein of light reached west to the bright sprawl of New York City, then snaked away down the seaboard into the hazy summer darkness.

Travis saw the light-points of the first two jets' engines ahead. A moment later his plane caught up and settled into a line beside them. Over the next three minutes the remaining five aircraft joined the formation, and then Travis felt the lying-on-his-back sensation again, not because of a climb but simply due to acceleration. All eight fighters were ramping up to nearly their maximum cruise speed, which was more than three times as fast as whatever kind of private jet Finn was traveling in. Travis had already done the math. Even with Finn's ninety-minute head start, the eight of them were going to beat him to Arica by almost four hours. It was enough to make Travis regret the fifteen years he hadn't been a taxpayer.

The force pushing him into his seatback receded as the jet's speed topped out. He stared at the coastline again, already falling far behind. He looked at Manhattan and thought of Paige and Bethany, huddling in the darkened ruins of the place. It was hard to imagine that they could be holding on to even a strand of hope. T ravis watched the black nothingness of the Atlantic for a long time. He felt tiredness steal over him. He closed his eyes for what seemed to be a minute or two, and woke to the sound of the jet's engines whining, their power level rising and falling from one second to the next. He looked up, and through the instrument glare on the curved canopy, he saw the shape of a massive four-engine aircraft above and just ahead of the F-15E. He saw a refueling boom coming down, little airfoils near its tip keeping it roughly stable.

Travis leaned a few inches to the side, looked past the front seat and saw the pilot's hand making feather adjustments on the stick, steady but tense.

"How many times do you have to do something like this before you're comfortable at it?" Travis said.

"I'll let you know if I ever get there," the pilot said.

It didn't sound like sarcasm. Travis decided not to distract the guy with any more questions. T hey reached Arica half an hour before sunrise. From above, the city was a broad crescent of light hugging an inward curve of the sea. Travis could get no sense of the desert except its emptiness-the landscape was black and formless under the deep red sky.

The fighters touched down, offloaded their passengers and were gone again within a few minutes.

A number of airport security officials, as well as local and Chilean federal police, were waiting. Garner spoke to them alone for ten minutes, while Travis sat aside with the agents. He watched Garner make his case. No doubt it was a fairly big deal to land in someone's country and ask permission to personally detain the passenger of an incoming private jet-and to request that it all be kept secret. Travis wondered how many people of lesser clout than a former American president could've pulled it off. T hey sat in the lounge overlooking the tarmac. They waited. Garner called his brother and got an update from satellite and ground-based tracking stations monitoring Finn's aircraft. It was right on schedule.