Ever Hayes - Emergency Exit

Major Eddie was frustrated. Hopping out of the helicopter, he approached a group of men standing around an American body. Not only was the man not alive, but he had been shot in the head at point blank range. Why? What fool had been unable to defend himself against a fallen man with no weapon? That stupidity had wasted a significant intelligence opportunity.

Then he heard the radio call from the jeeps that had pursued the other Americans. They had cornered the other jeep on a dead-end road and exploded it with a rocket launcher. They claimed they were sure the girl was not in the jeep, but by blowing it up they had not only killed the two people who might know where she still was—if indeed she hadn’t been in the jeep—but made any evidence the Americans might have had on them worthless as well.

A fourth and final American body was found in the lower level of the hotel. He’d thrown himself on a grenade and was not going to be answering any questions either. An honorable death, no doubt, but a worthless one to the major. He needed a living being to get answers. Apparently he wasn’t going to get any.

It wasn’t altogether a wasted trip though. Not even close. As Eddie entered the storage room downstairs where three Qi Jia men lay, it was clear this was where they’d been keeping the girl. What didn’t make sense was how the men were positioned. They didn’t appear to have been moved either. How did they get this far into the room with four armed men and a little girl in it? How did two of them die from single shots to the head while the third took three to the chest? Why not shoot the other man in the head too?

He had an uneasy feeling he wasn’t getting the entire picture. He had Cabo radio the other vehicles to try to find someone who had been in contact with the dead soldiers downstairs. Two men were brought to Major Eddie. They both admitted to having been in conversation with the men who were killed prior to chasing the other Americans away in the jeep. Eddie wanted to know what they had said.

One of the soldiers gave a detailed account of what he’d heard on the radio. The men had followed a heat signal into the building and then heard voices. They came downstairs and entered the room but saw no one.

“Wait,” Major Eddie stopped them. “Saw no one?”

The man nodded. They had radioed that the room was completely dark and no one was in it. Then there was shooting, and they all died.

So the room was empty, but these men were killed in here and not moved? Major Eddie nodded to himself and cleared the room of everyone except his men. “What are these names on the lockers?” he asked Lazzo, tapping the steel doors and reading some of the names to himself. “Stephen King, John Grisham, Shel Silverstein…”

“Writers,” Lazzo replied. “American writers.”

That meant nothing to Eddie. He and his men searched the lockers but found nothing of real value, until they took the clothes out of the C. S. Lewis locker and found what seemed to be some kind of safe in the wall. It had an alphanumeric keypad. Eddie had a feeling the answers he was looking for were locked behind this door.

He had no clue what code might be needed to open the door, so he had the panel scanned for any explosive devices that may have been set on the other side. Showing none, Eddie had Cabo wire it with their own explosives. They cleared out of the room, in case the explosion caused the roof to cave in, and blew the door. Omar climbed down into the hole first, ready for anything. There was no resistance. He gave the “all clear,” and Eddie and Lazzo descended into the bunker while Cabo stood guard at the entrance.

Eddie took in the room with a panoramic turn. Impressive . There was a wall of monitors with only two screens on, one showing Cabo in the room above them. The other showed a few men hanging out in the hallway. So, from down here they’d seen the men coming, closed the door, and watched through the cameras as they’d searched the room. That’s how they’d gotten the jump on them. Made sense. He looked around at the rest of the room. There was a large control panel with tons of switches with stickers covering them. He read some of the stickers. “Room 217 — Turn chair… Room 217 — Whispers… Room 217 — Door creak… Room 217 — Cat Meow…” It meant nothing to him. There were more switches for the individual monitors, the heater, the generator, etc. The room also contained a refrigerator, a table and several chairs, and a bed in the corner with a generator humming beside it.

Eddie sat on the bed and looked at the pillow. Someone had been lying on the bed recently, and based on how far up the blankets remained tucked, it couldn’t have been a big person. A little girl perhaps? There was only one light in the room, and a tunnel leading to somewhere Lazzo said was welded shut from the inside. How many people had been down here? The four men and the girl? So where was the girl? He walked to the ladder and called up to Cabo, telling him to have the men do a room-by-room scan of every room they could get into in the hotel. There were thirty men here now—fourteen he’d brought with him and sixteen others who had been here before or arrived since. They should be able to cover everything.

Still, Eddie felt like he was missing something. He stared closely at the monitors, and then it dawned on him. The equipment in this room was extremely high-tech. So why weren’t there any recorders? Cabo called down to have Omar come help him. Eddie told Omar to go ahead, and he and Lazzo would be up shortly. Then he told Lazzo what he was looking for. They pulled out their flashlights and started looking in corners, behind objects in the room, and anywhere else they could think of. Nothing. Then Lazzo snapped his fingers.

Lazzo had walked over to the monitors and tried to move them, and they pulled away from the wall easily. Behind each monitor there was a small box, and the ones behind the two working monitors both had lights on them. They appeared to be hard drives of some sort, and they had buttons on the back to go forward or backward or to record. Exactly what Eddie had been hoping for.

Eddie pushed the back button on one and ran it back until he was able to watch from the beginning what had unfolded. He saw four people come into the room wearing hooded white camouflaged military uniforms and ski masks. He couldn’t make out any distinguishing characteristics, but it appeared to be three good-sized men and one smaller male or female. Three of them were carrying handguns. The smaller one held nothing but a flashlight.

They entered the locker, and he forwarded the feed until the soldiers came in. He watched as they searched the lockers, as the first man went down with a gunshot to the head, as the man behind him took three shots to the chest, and as the third man entered to a headshot. Then there was an explosion, and four men came out of the locker wearing… business suits? Not the same white-uniformed people and no girl with them. Likely the guys from the hallway, the parking lot, and the ones who raced away in the jeep .

Those men engaged in a gunfight in the room and then appeared to continue it out into the hallway. So where was the girl? He watched as the four people in white uniforms suddenly reemerged from the bunker, with the smallest one of them carrying the girl. They turned the other way down the hallway and he lost sight of them. There was nothing recorded after that until more Qi Jia men showed up to search the room. Eddie switched to the other monitor.

On the other monitor the first action was a single Qi Jia soldier walking down the hallway towards the storage room. He had come from the direction of the stairs. So the white uniforms had come the other way . “Huh,” Eddie half laughed. He and Lazzo watched the gunfight between the Qi Jia soldiers and the men in business suits. They never saw the people in white uniforms on that monitor. Eddie looked at Lazzo, mulling over what to do with what he’d found. “Erase it,” he told his brother.