Ever Hayes - Redemption

Keena was going through the security feeds on our end hoping to pick up something beyond the satellite black hole—anything out of the norm. Tara and Kate squeezed in beside her. Someone at Area 52 was scanning screens as well. Finally a female voice said she’d found something. “I’m patching it through to you.”

The feed came up on our screen, and we saw a small red dot heading from the general vicinity of our island toward Kauai. It entered Waimea Bay, stopped there, stayed there for almost an hour, and then reappeared a few miles off the Kauai coast heading back toward our island. The voice at Area 52, now identified as Nicole, said, “Danny, it looks like they headed back to your island… if indeed that was them.”

“Can’t we get a better feed of that?” Danny stared intently at the screen. “Can’t we see that dot a little closer? Don’t we have infrared or something?”

Nicole replied slowly, “Danny, I’ll do what I can, but there’s some kind of interference seemingly coming off of the carrier, affecting everything around it. Give me twenty minutes to run the feed through all our filters, okay?”

We didn’t have a choice. That dot alone didn’t tell us for certain it was our boat. “Go ahead.”

Those twenty minutes felt like two hours, and when Nicole’s voice came back on she didn’t sound happy. In fact, she sounded kind of scared. “Danny, I don’t know what to say—”

“Did you find anything?”

There was a long pause, and before Danny repeated his question she answered, “Yes.”

“Play it.”

The feed came up on our screen.

“Danny, this is just beyond the black hole—about a mile from your beach best as I can tell.”

The feed was fuzzy and scrambled, but with the enlarged infrared filter we could see seven red blobs on the screen. We watched in horror as one of the seven blobs was left behind out in the open water. What the heck? Tara muffled a scream—hand over her mouth—and grabbed onto Blake, who was standing beside her. I watched, stunned, as the dot they left behind completely disappeared, and another dot in the middle of the screen slowly faded. Was one of those Hayley? Emily? Why in the world didn’t they stop?

Four of the remaining five blobs seemed to be huddled at the front of the boat, and the fifth dot appeared to be driving it. There was only one plausible explanation for what we’d seen. The dot that had fallen overboard hadn’t done so by choice. There was no telling if that dot—person or dog—was still alive. The other blob that had faded away in the middle of the boat had to be dead or their dot wouldn’t have disappeared. This was terrifying to watch.

Reaching shore, the five dots disembarked, moved across the Waimea Bay parking lot, then disappeared. The screen went completely black.

“Nicole… what happened?”

“Danny, I don’t know. Our aerial feed shows them getting into a vehicle in the parking lot, and then they vanish. There’s no trace of where they went or of anything moving in that entire area for a full two hours.”

“We don’t have any cameras down there either?”

“We did.” She sounded as bewildered as Danny. “We do. But they all went down at the same time, again for about two hours.”

“EMP?” Keena asked.

“Maybe.” Nicole’s reply sounded more like a yes .

An electromagnetic pulse? Here? “Wouldn’t that knock out the whole island?” Everyone turned to look at me.

“No,” Nicole answered. “Not necessarily. This EMP—if that’s what it was—could have been isolated to the west side of the island. I’m sending you a map of the blacked-out area. It appears to cover roughly a twenty-mile radius from Waimea. But hang on a second. I need to play the rest of the boat feed for you.”

The boat had reappeared, coming back toward our island. We watched it emerge from Kauai’s blind area into the open water, and we were subjected to another shock before it again disappeared into our island’s “black hole.” There were only two dots in the boat.

“That’s all we’ve got?” Danny asked.

“Afraid so,” was the soft reply on the other end.

But who was who? “And we can’t see who they are any better than that?”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole confirmed.

Keena spoke up then. “Nicole, is it just me, or did that boat coming back not look like it was heading to our island?”

What does she mean by that?

Nicole understood the question. “No, I thought that too. It almost looks like the line of the boat’s path is headed about a mile south of your island.”

Son of a bitch. Toward the USS George Washington .

Danny was already on it. “Governor, that boat had to have been heading for the Washington then.”

“It’s possible. But they’re too far out to reach now. They’ve been gone since four or five this morning, and at forty miles per hour or so, they’d be 250 miles out—easily.”

“We can’t even reach them from Area 52?” Kate asked.

Governor Barnes and Nicole spoke at the same time but with two different answers. Nicole’s “Well…” was the response we chose to hear.

“What, Nicole?” Danny asked.

“We could try sending them an ELF.”

“An ELF?” Tara asked.

EMP… ELF… Sometimes I hate military language .

“Extremely low frequency message,” Keena explained. “Russia, India, and America are the only countries with systems to send them, and we have three transmitters—in Wisconsin, Michigan, and across the Kaneohe Bay from us at the Marine Corps Base Station. If the carrier has a Reed-Solomon code page in its book, and someone catches it coming in…it could work.”

She didn’t sound confident.

“Danny, why can’t we just call them?” Tara asked.

“We could, but they’re in an open communication zone. Any message we send toward the mainland could be intercepted and put the entire ship at risk. If Qi Jia learned we had a boat out there, the mission would already be over. We’d be sinking our own boat.”

Tara didn’t like his response, but she was smart enough to know Danny would be pushing for calling the ship if it were even a reasonable option. Of the two most important people to him in the world, Kate was standing right beside him…and the other had been in that boat last night, too. Everyone knew Danny would do anything for Hayley.

I could see the wheels spinning in his head. He and Keena were going to work on putting a coded message together for Nicole to send. Best-case scenario, we’d have some form of response from the carrier in an hour or two. The governor promised to stay at the Hexagon all day, and he insisted Danny contact him for anything he needed.

Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out the answers to a dozen questions. Who or what fell overboard? Based on the heat signature sizes the fuzzy infrared feed had shown us, it didn’t appear to be either of the kids, but we couldn’t be certain. Still, that deduction had been a little settling to Tara. Her eyes and voice communicated hope that Emily was alive.

That left Reagan, Hayley, Sam, and Lazzo. None of us believed it was Hayley, as Sam surely would’ve gone overboard to save her, even risking his own life. But wouldn’t Hayley have done the same for anyone—everyone—else? Though none of us wanted to say it aloud, I was pretty sure we were all of the same mindset. Sam hadn’t done this, and Reagan would have never put her little sister in danger. If someone had hurt one of the others and taken the rest prisoner, the offender had to be Lazzo.

So where did he take them? The other members of the Pack had maps of Kauai spread out across the tables in Blake’s office. According to the areas Nicole had told us were blacked out, there were only three main roads they could have gone on and stayed out of sight. It could take days to search that area, and by then the aircraft carrier would be halfway to the mainland. We don’t have that much time. And what about that boat with the two people in it? Who was that? Lazzo and…? Or was it not Lazzo at all?