Ever Hayes - Redemption

“Four prisoners,” I corrected.

“Four?” Hayley asked. “Who is the fourth?”

“No idea,” Blake replied.

“You don’t know?” Hayley repeated.

“We don’t know.” I confirmed Blake’s response.

Eddie pounded his fist against the wall. He turned to me. “Danny, I can’t believe it. I am sorry. Lazzo deserves no respect for this—no forgiveness.”

“Eddie, I’ll admit, I came here to kill Lazzo for what he did. But now I’m with Hayley. I can understand his lack of alternatives and the resulting desperation. Seriously, I was willing to do anything to save my sister.” I glanced at Blake. “Literally anything.”

“That does not make it right,” Eddie growled. “He was weak and foolish to trust Boli…even if it was to try to save me, Cera… any of us. Hayley tells us you saved his life, and this is how he repays you?”

“Eddie, put it this way. If he’d have told us what was going on, we wouldn’t have helped him. We probably would have kicked him off the island and maybe even thrown him in prison. Then you’d be dead… both of you.” Eddie looked at Cera and I continued. “Anyway, now it’s done. We can discuss it more later but for now, let’s put it behind us. In a few hours this place will be crawling with troops and covered by every imaginable form of radar.”

I glanced up at the ceiling and the little black box with the red light.

“Infrared blocker?” I asked Silas. He nodded. Nice . I looked at the others. “We need to get out of here—like now. Eddie, how did you even get here?” I asked.

He pointed at Silas. “This man. He helped us escape. He flied us here yesterday.”

“Silas, you can fly?” Blake asked. Silas nodded. “That’s good. We might need that.”

“Where’s your plane?” I asked.

“It’s only a four-passenger,” Eddie answered. “But it’s about four miles south of here. We landed on a highway and parked it in a barn.”

Four passenger? Crap. That isn’t going to work .

Hayley read my mind. “There’s a chance they didn’t find ours, Danny.” Everyone turned to her. “Lazzo, Flynn, and I found a smokejumping base about twenty-five miles west of here. We concealed the plane behind some old planes and fire equipment and tried to lure the enemy paratroopers away from there. Our C-130 doesn’t have enough fuel to get back to the carrier, but if it’s still there, it at least gives us an option out. We can all fit in that easily.”

“We’ll never make it twenty-five miles before dawn,” Keena pointed out.

She was right. The attack on that building would draw Qi Jia’s undivided attention to this area. I had been expecting drones by now but understood their absence to merely mean they were planning tomorrow’s search. They’d be hitting it hard in the morning. Even if we could make it to the hangar, the skies would be full of aircraft and drones. We’d never be able to take off and would be shot down immediately if we tried.

Before Commander Boli wrote off my bringing him the book, he would do all he could to find out who had blown up the building. They’d easily find the bodies in the ditch—if they hadn’t already. They’d have no trouble tracking us to the farm—especially in the daylight with their dogs. I could think of only one alternative, and given what Lazzo had attempted to do in kidnapping Hayley, it was definitely a risky one. We had to trust Eddie. We had to trust Silas and Cera. We had to risk the safety of all surviving Americans to try to keep ourselves alive.

We were five miles from the secret back entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain bunker, an entry only presidents and vice presidents knew about—well, and me, thanks to the book. We had to get there, and we had to take three non-Americans in there with us.

I told Eddie they needed to trust me and follow me. He didn’t object. We set out for Cheyenne Mountain and arrived at the back door a few minutes after 2:00 a.m. I found the dead tree the book mentioned and dug out the base of it until I found a long bolt. I pulled the bolt out and pushed the tree trunk over. There was a lockbox under the trunk with a scroll-lock. I entered the five-digit code and lifted the lid on the box, revealing another keypad. I had memorized the twelve-digit code for that as well and typed it in. A hum slowly turned into a whirring noise as the ground in front of me began to move. A four-by-four square hole was revealed, with a ladder leading down into the darkness.

I looked back at the others. I had no idea what to expect in there. I knew the secret tunnel was nearly two miles long—that was about all I knew. Eddie had a puzzled look on his face. “What?” I asked him.

“I studied maps of this place for hours. This tunnel, it was not on the maps.”

“No, I know. Only the presidents knew about it.”

“And vice president?”

“Yeah, he did too.”

“He told you about this?”

“Kind of.” I nodded.

That seemed to be enough for Eddie. “You want me to go first?”

“No, Eddie, I need you to come in with Blake last. We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, and if there are Americans in the tunnel, they’re not going to welcome you.”

“Danny,” Eddie put his massive hand on my arm. “We don’t have to go in if you don’t want us to. You don’t have to trust us. You have risked and lost enough.”

“I appreciate that, but I’m not leaving you out here. Cera doesn’t deserve any of this. I’ll deal with what comes for bringing you in. But you stay at the back. You let Blake protect you.”

“We will give you our guns then.”

“How about this? We leave them at the base of the ladder here. We’re probably going to have to exit this way again anyway. We’ll have them here if we need them.”

“Sounds good.”

We all climbed down the ladder. Eddie, Silas, and Cera left their rifles and handguns at the base of it. I gave Blake the code to seal the exit, and I moved on ahead. To my right and left there were two large steel doors I knew to be garages. Each garage supposedly held a transport vehicle and two motorcycles. As the vehicles had been replaced annually, they’d only be a couple years old. Hopefully they’d still run if needed. I didn’t open the doors for fear of making noise, though I was definitely curious about how the vehicles were intended to get out.

There was no one in the tunnel. We walked the entire two miles to the actual bunker back entry without any opposition. The backdoor in—or doors to be exact—were not at all what I was expecting. They were a pair of three-by-three foot steel squares—crawling height barely—with a giant eighty-inch screen on the wall above them. I flipped a switch beside the screen and it came to life—presumably wired into the bunker’s power. The screen displayed twelve six-by-six inch boxes of video feeds—obviously from throughout the bunker. What we saw shocked us. Cheyenne Mountain was crawling with Qi Jia troops.

One of the screens showed a room with seven Americans in a cell. The other screens showed Qi Jia troops sweeping, moving bodies around, eating, working on computers, and coming in and out of the bunker. By the raingear they had on and the wet footprints on the floor, it was clear it was raining outside now. That was great for us in terms of covering our earlier tracks.

“Look,” Eddie whispered suddenly. “Commander Boli.”

The person Eddie indicated as Boli was in a room with two Qi Jia soldiers and an American soldier with his back to us, addressing someone sitting in a chair we couldn’t yet see.