Ever Hayes - Redemption

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.

“Danny.” Keena’s voice was panicked. “They’ve got missile lock on us.”

“Make sure that power goes off now. Shut it down completely and get out!”

Axel shut it all down as Keena yelled again. “Four missiles just launched. We’ve got about ten seconds.”

“Let’s go.” I grabbed Blake and yanked him up. He quickly slipped into his chute straps as we launched ourselves out into the pelting rain. With no helmets or facemasks, the water tore at our face and skin. It felt like getting sprayed by rocks from the side of a lawn mower. I couldn’t open my eyes and look back, relegated to merely hoping Keena and Axel were falling behind us.

There was a huge explosion above us, and shrapnel flew past in every direction. Our safe haven had disintegrated into a billion tiny pieces of fire. The heat from the blast and burning gas was almost unbearable for several seconds before we finally were far enough away. I was praying my chute wouldn’t catch fire as I felt something tear into my arm, and something else hit me hard in the back, knocking the wind out of me. I did my best to avoid the debris falling around us and in doing so missed the pull zone for my chute by a couple hundred feet. As a result, I hit the water much harder than I should have. The force of that impact stunned me, and I found myself unable to move as the waves washed over me and the ocean clutched me tightly, pulling me down.

Blake landed near me though and easily found my chute—still spread out on the surface. He reeled in the chute fabric and rope as quickly as he could, and Keena swam over to help him. I shook off the impact as I approached the surface and broke through, gasping for air. The storm had riled up the water, waves towering above us, and the sky was nearly pitch-black. They couldn’t have seen us fall. Stay calm. Calm down. Pull it together, NOW .