Jamie Freveletti - Running from the Devil

Hell comes complete with its own army, Emma thought.

The lead soldier barked an order, and the soldiers fanned out. They walked toward the plane, collecting any surviving passengers as they did.

Emma tried to stand, but the world spun around her. She dropped to the ground and crawled away from the landing strip. When she reached her backpack, she grabbed the strap and dragged it with her. Her fingers clutched at the earth as she pulled herself forward. She gasped for breath and shivered in what she supposed was some sort of shock reaction. She couldn’t control the shaking. The blood from a cut on her head had congealed into a sticky mass from her temple to her jaw. When she moved, the mess cracked, like dried mud. Her head pounded with an unholy sharp, stabbing pain. She stole a quick glance behind her. The men in fatigues were busy collecting the survivors. They didn’t look Emma’s way.

She focused on reaching the safety of the tree line. Once there, she scrambled into the forest and collapsed behind a fat bush. She rifled through her backpack, looking for her cell phone. She found it, flipped it open, and waited while it searched for service. After a minute, the screen displayed NO SERVICE. She felt blind panic rise in her, swamping her. She willed herself to calm.

“Screw it,” Emma whispered.

She typed a text message anyway. She knew that the text system often worked even when the phone service did not. Her fingers shook as she dialed her boss’s number and typed:

Am alive, plane downed, in jungle, army men taking hostages. Help.

Emma hit send and waited while the phone displayed a little hourglass that spun as it searched for service. After a minute the display read UNABLE TO SEND.

“You worthless piece of shit!” Emma hissed out loud at the phone. She turned it off and snapped it shut. She slumped back down and stared at the burning treetops. Her eyes grew heavy, her head ached. She felt a strange languor wash over her. She worried that a concussion was causing her drowsiness, but she no sooner had that thought than she slipped into unconsciousness. The orange flames blurred as her mind shut down.

4

BANNER SAT IN SOUTHERN COMMAND’S CONFERENCE ROOM AND gazed at a large screen that contained a PowerPoint satellite photo of a black mushroom cloud. He wasn’t sure of the significance of the picture, but he figured it didn’t bode well.

Department of Defense, State Department, NORAD, and Department of Transportation personnel filled the room, as well as a soldier named Miguel Gonzalez, who’d been appointed to run a possible special operations first response force. About thirty, he was a slender five foot ten, and Banner guessed he was of Cuban descent. The others referred to him as “Major.” Banner didn’t know Miguel’s background, and no one offered the information. Presumably Stromeyer knew the details, but she hadn’t volunteered them, either.

The group in the room consisted of some of the best military and political minds in the country. The highest-ranking members of the army, navy, air force, and marines fiddled with legal pads, flipped pencils in the air, and sipped coffee from china cups that they held like mugs, ignoring the elegant, curved handles.

Jordan Whitter represented the political branch. Whitter’s reputation for maneuverability within the State Department was legendary. As a result, his career had already outlasted two presidents. Whitter had shrewd eyes and a lifelong bureaucrat’s aversion to sticking his neck out. He wore a dark suit and a striped tie that he kept adjusting.

Banner watched Whitter fidget with his tie and wondered why he’d chosen that particular combination. He’d bet a week’s salary that the stripes on the tie matched Whitter’s college colors.

Banner’s own participation in the meeting wasn’t clear, even to him. He attended at the request of an old friend, Brigadier General Robert Corvan. Corvan asked Banner to moderate the meeting, but made no mention of hiring Darkview for a mission.

When Darkview provided the military with highly qualified special operations personnel, Banner flew the men into extremely volatile situations—wars, guerrilla insurgencies, and genocidal civil conflicts. Although they often fought alongside the regular army, they were technically not a part of the United States military machine, and so their deployment could not be considered by the “host” country as a formal act of war.

The men’s unique status conferred some equally unique benefits. They were not required to follow military protocol, they had state-of-the-art equipment, and their pay was much better than their regular army counterparts. Their status conferred some negative consequences as well. Although they died in battle, their deaths were not included in official war tallies, no one hailed them as war heroes, nor did anyone present their widows with posthumous medals acknowledging their sacrifice. The unkind called them mercenaries.

Recovering a hijacked plane, even by force, could be handled by regular military search-and-rescue teams sent openly into the target area. Banner’s crew generally implemented covert missions, and so Banner wondered what the collected men in the room knew about this situation that he did not.

Miguel fiddled with a laptop computer, replaced the mushroom-cloud photo with a large satellite map of Colombia, and began his presentation.

“The first thing we did was look for any distress signals emitting from where we believe the plane landed. A satellite passing over Colombia returned a report of a cell-phone-based GPS transmission in this part of the country.” Miguel pointed to the northwestern mountains near the Colombia-Venezuela border.

“Unfortunately, the satellite passed again approximately one hundred minutes later, and the ping was gone.”

“Could it have been from a passenger’s phone?” the undersecretary of the navy said.

Miguel nodded. “The GPS transmission code was registered to a phone owned by a passenger named Emma Caldridge. And Ms. Caldridge was kind enough to send us a note.” The photo behind Miguel shifted to a copy of Emma’s text message. The words army men taking hostages were highlighted.

Whitter groaned. “This is awful.”

Banner couldn’t agree more, but he was surprised at Whitter’s empathetic response. Perhaps the man had a heart after all.

“I agree, sir. But at least we know that some people survived the crash. Better to be a hostage than dead,” Miguel said.

Whitter slapped his hand on the table. “Hostages are a political nightmare! How many? There were two hundred and sixteen people on that jet. This administration cannot have such a breach of security under its watch.”

What an asshole, Banner thought.

Miguel shook his head. “Tough to know how many survived. Once the cell-phone ping disappeared, we looked for any other anomalies that could indicate a downed jet, and we found this.”

The mushroom-cloud photo reappeared. Miguel pointed at it with a laser pointer.

“We believe it was a large explosion that caused this actual cloud. If this is the plane, either it exploded on landing, or it was deliberately exploded.”

“How long will it take to get a small troop to the location pinpointed by the cell phone transmission?” Banner said.

“It’s done already,” Miguel said.

“Excellent.” Whitter smiled for the first time that day.

Miguel grimaced. “We requested that the Colombian military send a helicopter to verify that it was the crash site and assist in a search-and-rescue mission. They did, and they say that no crash exists at those coordinates.”

Whitter’s face fell. “Could she have sent the message while the plane was still flying? Perhaps the plane continued on for a while?”