Polar vortex, p.27
Polar Vortex, page 27
Blue. Plastic. An inhaler.
I showed it to Lilly and put it to her lips. She wheezed in with everything her little body had in it. The effect was immediate. A second later she nodded and I clicked the device again. She took a deeper breath.
My abject terror eased, the tensed every-muscle-in-my-body relaxed a little, the painful knot in the pit of my stomach shifting into something more resembling nausea. And then pain. Sixty seconds inside this furnace of a room and parts of me began to thaw out.
I ignored it.
Some color returned to Lilly’s cheeks.
“Who are you guys?” The kid finally managed a full sentence.
“We’ve got four more people trapped outside, not far,” Otto said. He got back to his feet.
“Out there?” The kid pointed to the door in disbelief. “Wait…trapped…?”
“My name is Otto Garcia. I was the Air Marshal on Allied Flight 695.”
“Allied Flight…” Gears and circuits went into motion in the kid’s head. He was obviously stoned, but a light finally went on in his eyes. “Are you serious?”
Otto didn’t dignify this with a response.
“I got to get on the radio.” The kid looked left and right. “In the other room.”
“What’s your name?” Otto asked.
“Jimmy Craig. I mean, call me Jimbo.”
“Jimbo,” Otto said in a calm and measured voice and reached to shake his hand, “what we have here is an emergency situation. When you fly a plane, aviate and navigate come first, communicate comes last once the situation is under control. Are you the only person here?”
Jimbo nodded in short quick bobs of his head.
“So then you’re the only person who can help us. We need to stabilize, make sure these children and my friend here aren’t in immediate danger of death, then help the ones outside as best we can.”
“That’s all the medical—”
“We have people outside. Right now I need you to find any and all parkas, blankets, any heat sources like chemical packs and butane. Anything warm. And water. We need water.”
The kid had his hands up with a finger out for each item. “Okay, okay…”
“Do you have any weapons?”
“What…why?”
“We ran into a polar bear out there that almost killed us. Might be more.”
“Oh, my—”
“Kid. Jimbo. Focus.”
“Right. Yeah, we’ve got a shotgun in the lockbox, some shells.” He stared open-mouthed at Otto for a second before he nodded again and then disappeared around the corner into the next room.
“And in sixty seconds,” Otto called out, “once you get all that for me, we’ll make that call together. Get on the radio. You’re going to be famous, kid.”
Otto turned his attention back to us. Lilly sucked in short quick breaths. Her lips weren’t as blue anymore but now pinkish.
“You okay?” he said to her.
She nodded but didn’t say anything. She sat up to demonstrate. I involuntarily squealed in pain.
“Everything okay?” Jimbo asked from the next room.
“Fine,” Otto called back and moved toward me.
By sitting up, Lilly sat on my left hand cradling her. The sudden heat and pressure cracked my fingers from the claw-position they’d been frozen into. I pulled my hands out from under her and inspected them. It was the first time I’d seen them in proper light in days.
The tips of my index and forefingers of both hands were blue-black and all the fingers were splotchy blue and white. They shook as I attempted to get a better look. With the palm of one hand I tried to feel my face. Hard and lumpy.
“Don’t,” Otto said gently. He knelt. “Let’s get a look at you.”
“We need to get outside and get Howard, and Liz and the others.”
“I don’t think you are going anywhere. Come on, let’s have a look.”
I had my suit unzipped already, and he pulled it down from my shoulder, had me sit on a chair, and with my permission, tugged on the feet of it to slide off my body. A rancid stench immediately filled the air—like feces and sewage and rot but worse.
Otto didn’t flinch. He tenderly unwrapped my left foot, peeled away each layer of sodden sock and wrapping to reveal toes, black and brown and bulbous. Flaps of skin sloughed off my legs and feet as he removed more clothing.
“I saw you drop off Liz’s canister,” he said as he unwrapped the right foot.
“I figured walking into a foreign military base with a weapon of mass destruction under my arm wasn’t a good idea.”
We both managed a small laugh. “You’re right.”
“It’s in the shed. I’ll let whoever goes down there from the base figure it out.”
“And you gave Howard his disk?”
“I figured if he was going to die, he’d appreciate having his ‘precious’ with him.”
“He won’t die. I’m going out to get him.”
“He might already be.”
How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten? How much longer could someone survive out there? The wind buffeted the building like some giant was outside hitting it with a bat.
“I’m not sure it was a good idea to leave Roman and Bjorn together,” Otto said.
“What? Why?” They seemed barely alive.
“Not sure. Roman wasn’t as badly injured as he was making out. He could have come with us.”
“You think so?”
“I have a bad feeling leaving those two together with Liz.”
The wind hammered the building again. I glanced up. Strong construction. Interior metal I-beams with oversized bolts and lots of concrete. Looked like it could withstand being hit by a bomb, but it shuddered in the onslaught.
“It will take it,” Jimbo said as he returned with piles of gear over each arm. He saw me inspecting the walls. “This is like a once-in-a-century polar low. Twenty-four more hours of this. Wind going to hit maybe two hundred kilometers an hour out there.”
He dropped the blankets and gear on the floor between me and Lilly. She had the inhaler in hand and took another puff.
“Hey, don’t do too much.” I groaned.
Bolts of pain shot like lightning from my fingers and feet up my spine and into my brain. Already my face felt like it was on fire.
Jimbo had one hand over his nose. “What in the hell is…” He looked down at my feet and grimaced. “Sorry, eh?”
Otto finished stripping off my socks and took my dirty survival suit. “Let’s get you something clean.”
“Yeah, there’re some socks there. Some woolen mitts and such.” Jimbo pointed at the pile. He ripped open a plastic package. “These are chemical heaters. Open ’em up.”
He had a whole box and dropped them on the floor.
“And I got a bunch of parkas and boots and so on in the storage back there. Heavy stuff. Tell me what we need.” He handed me a bottle of water and dropped a few more onto the floor.
I unscrewed the cap with the palm of my hand and held it pinned between my wrists and tried to sip it. My lip lanced in pain. Some drops dribbled into my parched mouth.
“Take it slow with the water.” Otto stood with my suit. “What we need now is to make that call on the radio. Get some help on the way here. Once we do that, you and me, Jimbo, we’re going to go rescue some people.”
“Oh, yah, eh?”
The kid was stoned, but he looked up for about anything.
“So why are you out here by yourself?” Otto asked.
“This is the hydrogen production facility. We keep it separate, like, from the rest of the base. Big hydrogen containers up top.”
“Hydrogen?”
“For the balloons, eh? That’s what this building is. We launch weather balloons twice a day, all year, no matter what. Usually we’re two, but Environment Canada has cuts, eh? So now it’s only me. I came down earlier in the day from the base to send one off, and then the winds came up, so I decided to stay, right? Don’t want to do that mile and a half walk back up in this. Golly, no.”
Their voices echoed as they walked around the corner away from us into the next room.
I heard Otto ask, “How many people are at the base?”
“Seventy-five. Give or take. The Frozen Chosen they call us.”
“And the transport?”
“The Hercules comes on Tuesdays—today—but probably later tomorrow when the wind calms down. Flies up from Trenton, Ontario.”
“That’s right on the American border?”
“Oh, yah.”
They kept chatting as Jimbo explained the radio.
Lilly had one hand over her nose. I gingerly took some of the socks from the pile of new clothes, removed the packaging and tried to slip them over my feet.
“You guys okay?” I whispered.
“I’m okay, Mr. Mitch,” Jang said. His face was scarlet around the patches of frostbite, but he didn’t flinch or react in any way.
“Lilly?”
She was in her bright orange suit. The color in her face had returned with a vengeance, her cheeks now scarlet, her lips full and pink. She breathed easily. No signs of frostbite. I’d packed her oversized suit with every scrap of dry fabric and clothing I could spare in the past week, made sure to keep her high and dry.
“Yes, Commander?” Otto’s voice on the radio in the next room was loud enough to hear over the wind. “This is Air Marshal Garcia from Allied Flight 695.”
Not long now, Emma, I said to myself. I imagined her face at the news. I couldn’t believe we made it.
“Yes.” Otto’s voice boomed. “Allied 695. We need immediate help.”
The pain blossomed and lanced through my entire body, but something else as well. An itch I’d never been able to scratch. One deep in the back of my mind.
Howard insisted that he hadn’t sabotaged the radio, yet someone had wrecked the “transmit” button on it. Rasheed. What had happened to him? He was the only one who really knew how to work that radio.
Otto’s voice echoed loud.
After the crash, Adrian the cabin manager had honestly looked like he’d never seen Otto before. Otto claimed it was all part of the act, that Adrian knew who he was but had to pretend he didn’t. Howard had said that Otto’s gun wasn’t standard issue for the TSA. The Glock 19, like my dad used to have. Wasn’t standard for police, either. Was more of a hunting handgun.
Why would he suggest that we shouldn’t have left Roman and Bjorn together outside?
And…
I didn’t remember seeing Otto in First Class before the accident. Not in one of the pod beds. I’d looked around. He was in the regular class line up in front of me when we checked in. Did Air Marshals need to check in? Where did he come from before the accident?
Too many coincidences…
Otto said loudly, “We have four survivors here and four more outside. No other survivors have been picked up.”
How in the hell would he know no other survivors were picked up?
A tingling dread eclipsed my pain.
I patted my pockets for my knife, but Otto had taken it with the suit. The flare gun, too. I had my journal and the adrenaline syringe in the jacket pocket from my inside-suit clothes.
“How long till you will be here?” Otto said loudly from the next room.
And why was Otto the only one doing the talking? Why hadn’t I heard Jimbo?
“Kids,” I whispered. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes, Mr. Mitch?” Jang whispered back.
“I need you to go back outside. Very fast and very quiet?”
Lilly’s eyes went wide but I put a finger to her mouth.
“Shhhh,” I said. “Take as many blankets and warmers and socks as you can. Go right outside the door against the wall away from the wind.”
Jang said, “Now?”
“Right now. Go, go, go.” I gave Lilly a hug and squeeze.
She got up and waddled away in her suit. Jang dragged a pile of blankets. The little kid was in his sneakers and layers of clothes we’d wrapped him in since the plane. They looked at me as they reached the door. Otto was talking loud. I nodded at them as Jang reached for the door latch and I coughed as loud as I could.
Wind ruffled and scattered papers again. I smelled something more than the rot of my own feet. Something burning.
“Mitch? You okay?” Otto said from the next room.
I gritted my teeth and searched for something—anything—to use as a weapon. A laptop? A half-full garbage can? I settled on a heavy stapler and unhinged it and stuck it under my leg. I struggled to grip it with the palm of my hand.
Otto appeared around the corner and frowned. “Hey, where are the kids?”
“Where’s Jimbo?” I asked.
“He’s…ah…” Otto sighed and scratched the back of his head with his Glock in his right hand.
“Don’t hurt my daughter, please.”
“I really like you.” Otto advanced toward me. “And Lilly is beautiful, just amazing. It really breaks my heart.”
The weird smell became stronger. At first I thought maybe I was having a stroke—smelling toast, right?—but now there was definitely something burning.
“The thing is, Mitch.” Otto leveled the muzzle of his gun at my head. “There can’t be any survivors from Allied 695.”
CHAPTER 37
OTTO STOOD FIVE feet from me, the muzzle of the gun not more than two. His arm steady. Finger on the trigger.
I counted in my head—two shots by Howard, and then two more in that chase to the boat?
Black smoke billowed into the corrugated metal ceiling twenty feet up.
“Where are the kids?” Otto said.
I gritted my teeth, the palm of my right hand squeezed around the heavy stapler. Otto had fired twice at the seals, right? And then three more shots at that bear when it first appeared…
“You got them in a cupboard?” Otto glanced left and right. The tabletops ringing the room each had storage doors underneath. “You know what’s up there, right?”
When I didn’t reply he said, “Hydrogen. There’s like a thousand pounds of liquid hydrogen in a tank on the roof.”
“Why are you doing this?”
He laughed. “You want the whole villain confession? I’m not a bad guy, Mitch—”
“You’re an asshole.”
He shrugged. “This whole mission went sideways. None of it was supposed to happen like this.”
“Are you actually an Air Marshal?” I played for time and counted: two shots and two more and then two more and one to finish the bear…
“Does it matter? You’re the wrong guy at the wrong time caught up in something way bigger than you. Where are the kids?” He pressed the muzzle directly against my forehead.
Licking flames now joined the smoke overhead.
“I don’t have to shoot you,” Otto said. “We can play a game with one of your feet, see how long you can take that. Although”—he looked over his left shoulder at the thickening smoke and flames—“it had better be a quick game. So I’m going to ask—”
A bang at the door.
My heart jumped into my throat. One of the kids? But the shape at the window was too large. Roman? Bjorn? A glimmer of hope surged in my chest. Maybe someone from the base?
Had he really called them?
Then another fear. Was he actually the Air Marshal? Was this a government plot? The CIA or something? Was Howard right?
Speak of the Devil.
The door swung open.
A snow-encrusted Howard stepped through. He feebly held a knife at his side and groaned what he must have hoped was a roar as he stumbled forward.
Otto stepped away from me. Swung the gun around. Howard hadn’t covered half the distance before the shot cracked out. The poor bastard crumpled to the ground.
Otto pointed the firearm back at me.
“I really didn’t want to use bullets,” he said. “Then again, by the time this thing overhead explodes and burns I’m not sure that they’ll—”
Without making a sound I ducked and charged straight at him. Did he have a plus-one in the clip when he started? Was he that kind of guy? Did he reload the mag? Did I count right?
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
His face expressed the beginnings of puzzlement. With one arm down to his left side, he fumbled at his suit pocket as my right-arm-swinging-haymaker with the open stapler slammed into his temple.
Surprise, asshole.
The stapler wasn’t one of those little ten-page clippers you’d usually find on your desk. Someone here had been writing very big reports. This must have weighed five pounds in forged steel with over-sized staples, one of which wedged itself halfway into Otto’s left temple.
I’d never gotten into a fight in my life—something my dad had never forgiven me for. With flailing fury my momentum carried me into Otto.
The stapler bounced off his head and knocked him to my left. He slipped and stumbled back, and had almost recovered when I hammered into him. I tried to lunge and set my foot down—but a lancing pain sent an electric bolt upward through my body leaving me screaming in pain as I tumbled to the ground in a mess over Otto.
The Navy SEAL was surprised by the attack—if he was even a SEAL, the lying bastard—but he recovered fast. With his left hand he grabbed my throat and dug his thumb and fingers into the soft part under the neck and gripped my larynx. Squeezed.
I gasped and writhed. Felt chunks of my skin sliding off in the struggle.
I wasn’t even an armchair athlete. I laughed at my friends who made fun of me for not hitting the gym more. This guy was ten years my junior and trained to kill anything on two or more feet.
But I had something he didn’t.
A daughter freezing to death outside.
I let him choke me while I waited for an opening. In that moment I didn’t fear dying; I needed to hurt him as badly as I could. I struggled but he pinned me with his legs.
He yelped in pain. His legs holding me slipped free, but it wasn’t me that hurt him somehow.
Howard loomed to one side, propped up on an elbow, blood pooling around him. He hacked at Otto’s side and arm with the knife.
Otto punched Howard straight in the throat with his right hand holding the gun. Howard managed to hack at the arm as he choked and Otto dropped the weapon. It clattered to the floor.
I showed it to Lilly and put it to her lips. She wheezed in with everything her little body had in it. The effect was immediate. A second later she nodded and I clicked the device again. She took a deeper breath.
My abject terror eased, the tensed every-muscle-in-my-body relaxed a little, the painful knot in the pit of my stomach shifting into something more resembling nausea. And then pain. Sixty seconds inside this furnace of a room and parts of me began to thaw out.
I ignored it.
Some color returned to Lilly’s cheeks.
“Who are you guys?” The kid finally managed a full sentence.
“We’ve got four more people trapped outside, not far,” Otto said. He got back to his feet.
“Out there?” The kid pointed to the door in disbelief. “Wait…trapped…?”
“My name is Otto Garcia. I was the Air Marshal on Allied Flight 695.”
“Allied Flight…” Gears and circuits went into motion in the kid’s head. He was obviously stoned, but a light finally went on in his eyes. “Are you serious?”
Otto didn’t dignify this with a response.
“I got to get on the radio.” The kid looked left and right. “In the other room.”
“What’s your name?” Otto asked.
“Jimmy Craig. I mean, call me Jimbo.”
“Jimbo,” Otto said in a calm and measured voice and reached to shake his hand, “what we have here is an emergency situation. When you fly a plane, aviate and navigate come first, communicate comes last once the situation is under control. Are you the only person here?”
Jimbo nodded in short quick bobs of his head.
“So then you’re the only person who can help us. We need to stabilize, make sure these children and my friend here aren’t in immediate danger of death, then help the ones outside as best we can.”
“That’s all the medical—”
“We have people outside. Right now I need you to find any and all parkas, blankets, any heat sources like chemical packs and butane. Anything warm. And water. We need water.”
The kid had his hands up with a finger out for each item. “Okay, okay…”
“Do you have any weapons?”
“What…why?”
“We ran into a polar bear out there that almost killed us. Might be more.”
“Oh, my—”
“Kid. Jimbo. Focus.”
“Right. Yeah, we’ve got a shotgun in the lockbox, some shells.” He stared open-mouthed at Otto for a second before he nodded again and then disappeared around the corner into the next room.
“And in sixty seconds,” Otto called out, “once you get all that for me, we’ll make that call together. Get on the radio. You’re going to be famous, kid.”
Otto turned his attention back to us. Lilly sucked in short quick breaths. Her lips weren’t as blue anymore but now pinkish.
“You okay?” he said to her.
She nodded but didn’t say anything. She sat up to demonstrate. I involuntarily squealed in pain.
“Everything okay?” Jimbo asked from the next room.
“Fine,” Otto called back and moved toward me.
By sitting up, Lilly sat on my left hand cradling her. The sudden heat and pressure cracked my fingers from the claw-position they’d been frozen into. I pulled my hands out from under her and inspected them. It was the first time I’d seen them in proper light in days.
The tips of my index and forefingers of both hands were blue-black and all the fingers were splotchy blue and white. They shook as I attempted to get a better look. With the palm of one hand I tried to feel my face. Hard and lumpy.
“Don’t,” Otto said gently. He knelt. “Let’s get a look at you.”
“We need to get outside and get Howard, and Liz and the others.”
“I don’t think you are going anywhere. Come on, let’s have a look.”
I had my suit unzipped already, and he pulled it down from my shoulder, had me sit on a chair, and with my permission, tugged on the feet of it to slide off my body. A rancid stench immediately filled the air—like feces and sewage and rot but worse.
Otto didn’t flinch. He tenderly unwrapped my left foot, peeled away each layer of sodden sock and wrapping to reveal toes, black and brown and bulbous. Flaps of skin sloughed off my legs and feet as he removed more clothing.
“I saw you drop off Liz’s canister,” he said as he unwrapped the right foot.
“I figured walking into a foreign military base with a weapon of mass destruction under my arm wasn’t a good idea.”
We both managed a small laugh. “You’re right.”
“It’s in the shed. I’ll let whoever goes down there from the base figure it out.”
“And you gave Howard his disk?”
“I figured if he was going to die, he’d appreciate having his ‘precious’ with him.”
“He won’t die. I’m going out to get him.”
“He might already be.”
How long had it been? Five minutes? Ten? How much longer could someone survive out there? The wind buffeted the building like some giant was outside hitting it with a bat.
“I’m not sure it was a good idea to leave Roman and Bjorn together,” Otto said.
“What? Why?” They seemed barely alive.
“Not sure. Roman wasn’t as badly injured as he was making out. He could have come with us.”
“You think so?”
“I have a bad feeling leaving those two together with Liz.”
The wind hammered the building again. I glanced up. Strong construction. Interior metal I-beams with oversized bolts and lots of concrete. Looked like it could withstand being hit by a bomb, but it shuddered in the onslaught.
“It will take it,” Jimbo said as he returned with piles of gear over each arm. He saw me inspecting the walls. “This is like a once-in-a-century polar low. Twenty-four more hours of this. Wind going to hit maybe two hundred kilometers an hour out there.”
He dropped the blankets and gear on the floor between me and Lilly. She had the inhaler in hand and took another puff.
“Hey, don’t do too much.” I groaned.
Bolts of pain shot like lightning from my fingers and feet up my spine and into my brain. Already my face felt like it was on fire.
Jimbo had one hand over his nose. “What in the hell is…” He looked down at my feet and grimaced. “Sorry, eh?”
Otto finished stripping off my socks and took my dirty survival suit. “Let’s get you something clean.”
“Yeah, there’re some socks there. Some woolen mitts and such.” Jimbo pointed at the pile. He ripped open a plastic package. “These are chemical heaters. Open ’em up.”
He had a whole box and dropped them on the floor.
“And I got a bunch of parkas and boots and so on in the storage back there. Heavy stuff. Tell me what we need.” He handed me a bottle of water and dropped a few more onto the floor.
I unscrewed the cap with the palm of my hand and held it pinned between my wrists and tried to sip it. My lip lanced in pain. Some drops dribbled into my parched mouth.
“Take it slow with the water.” Otto stood with my suit. “What we need now is to make that call on the radio. Get some help on the way here. Once we do that, you and me, Jimbo, we’re going to go rescue some people.”
“Oh, yah, eh?”
The kid was stoned, but he looked up for about anything.
“So why are you out here by yourself?” Otto asked.
“This is the hydrogen production facility. We keep it separate, like, from the rest of the base. Big hydrogen containers up top.”
“Hydrogen?”
“For the balloons, eh? That’s what this building is. We launch weather balloons twice a day, all year, no matter what. Usually we’re two, but Environment Canada has cuts, eh? So now it’s only me. I came down earlier in the day from the base to send one off, and then the winds came up, so I decided to stay, right? Don’t want to do that mile and a half walk back up in this. Golly, no.”
Their voices echoed as they walked around the corner away from us into the next room.
I heard Otto ask, “How many people are at the base?”
“Seventy-five. Give or take. The Frozen Chosen they call us.”
“And the transport?”
“The Hercules comes on Tuesdays—today—but probably later tomorrow when the wind calms down. Flies up from Trenton, Ontario.”
“That’s right on the American border?”
“Oh, yah.”
They kept chatting as Jimbo explained the radio.
Lilly had one hand over her nose. I gingerly took some of the socks from the pile of new clothes, removed the packaging and tried to slip them over my feet.
“You guys okay?” I whispered.
“I’m okay, Mr. Mitch,” Jang said. His face was scarlet around the patches of frostbite, but he didn’t flinch or react in any way.
“Lilly?”
She was in her bright orange suit. The color in her face had returned with a vengeance, her cheeks now scarlet, her lips full and pink. She breathed easily. No signs of frostbite. I’d packed her oversized suit with every scrap of dry fabric and clothing I could spare in the past week, made sure to keep her high and dry.
“Yes, Commander?” Otto’s voice on the radio in the next room was loud enough to hear over the wind. “This is Air Marshal Garcia from Allied Flight 695.”
Not long now, Emma, I said to myself. I imagined her face at the news. I couldn’t believe we made it.
“Yes.” Otto’s voice boomed. “Allied 695. We need immediate help.”
The pain blossomed and lanced through my entire body, but something else as well. An itch I’d never been able to scratch. One deep in the back of my mind.
Howard insisted that he hadn’t sabotaged the radio, yet someone had wrecked the “transmit” button on it. Rasheed. What had happened to him? He was the only one who really knew how to work that radio.
Otto’s voice echoed loud.
After the crash, Adrian the cabin manager had honestly looked like he’d never seen Otto before. Otto claimed it was all part of the act, that Adrian knew who he was but had to pretend he didn’t. Howard had said that Otto’s gun wasn’t standard issue for the TSA. The Glock 19, like my dad used to have. Wasn’t standard for police, either. Was more of a hunting handgun.
Why would he suggest that we shouldn’t have left Roman and Bjorn together outside?
And…
I didn’t remember seeing Otto in First Class before the accident. Not in one of the pod beds. I’d looked around. He was in the regular class line up in front of me when we checked in. Did Air Marshals need to check in? Where did he come from before the accident?
Too many coincidences…
Otto said loudly, “We have four survivors here and four more outside. No other survivors have been picked up.”
How in the hell would he know no other survivors were picked up?
A tingling dread eclipsed my pain.
I patted my pockets for my knife, but Otto had taken it with the suit. The flare gun, too. I had my journal and the adrenaline syringe in the jacket pocket from my inside-suit clothes.
“How long till you will be here?” Otto said loudly from the next room.
And why was Otto the only one doing the talking? Why hadn’t I heard Jimbo?
“Kids,” I whispered. “I need you to do something for me.”
“Yes, Mr. Mitch?” Jang whispered back.
“I need you to go back outside. Very fast and very quiet?”
Lilly’s eyes went wide but I put a finger to her mouth.
“Shhhh,” I said. “Take as many blankets and warmers and socks as you can. Go right outside the door against the wall away from the wind.”
Jang said, “Now?”
“Right now. Go, go, go.” I gave Lilly a hug and squeeze.
She got up and waddled away in her suit. Jang dragged a pile of blankets. The little kid was in his sneakers and layers of clothes we’d wrapped him in since the plane. They looked at me as they reached the door. Otto was talking loud. I nodded at them as Jang reached for the door latch and I coughed as loud as I could.
Wind ruffled and scattered papers again. I smelled something more than the rot of my own feet. Something burning.
“Mitch? You okay?” Otto said from the next room.
I gritted my teeth and searched for something—anything—to use as a weapon. A laptop? A half-full garbage can? I settled on a heavy stapler and unhinged it and stuck it under my leg. I struggled to grip it with the palm of my hand.
Otto appeared around the corner and frowned. “Hey, where are the kids?”
“Where’s Jimbo?” I asked.
“He’s…ah…” Otto sighed and scratched the back of his head with his Glock in his right hand.
“Don’t hurt my daughter, please.”
“I really like you.” Otto advanced toward me. “And Lilly is beautiful, just amazing. It really breaks my heart.”
The weird smell became stronger. At first I thought maybe I was having a stroke—smelling toast, right?—but now there was definitely something burning.
“The thing is, Mitch.” Otto leveled the muzzle of his gun at my head. “There can’t be any survivors from Allied 695.”
CHAPTER 37
OTTO STOOD FIVE feet from me, the muzzle of the gun not more than two. His arm steady. Finger on the trigger.
I counted in my head—two shots by Howard, and then two more in that chase to the boat?
Black smoke billowed into the corrugated metal ceiling twenty feet up.
“Where are the kids?” Otto said.
I gritted my teeth, the palm of my right hand squeezed around the heavy stapler. Otto had fired twice at the seals, right? And then three more shots at that bear when it first appeared…
“You got them in a cupboard?” Otto glanced left and right. The tabletops ringing the room each had storage doors underneath. “You know what’s up there, right?”
When I didn’t reply he said, “Hydrogen. There’s like a thousand pounds of liquid hydrogen in a tank on the roof.”
“Why are you doing this?”
He laughed. “You want the whole villain confession? I’m not a bad guy, Mitch—”
“You’re an asshole.”
He shrugged. “This whole mission went sideways. None of it was supposed to happen like this.”
“Are you actually an Air Marshal?” I played for time and counted: two shots and two more and then two more and one to finish the bear…
“Does it matter? You’re the wrong guy at the wrong time caught up in something way bigger than you. Where are the kids?” He pressed the muzzle directly against my forehead.
Licking flames now joined the smoke overhead.
“I don’t have to shoot you,” Otto said. “We can play a game with one of your feet, see how long you can take that. Although”—he looked over his left shoulder at the thickening smoke and flames—“it had better be a quick game. So I’m going to ask—”
A bang at the door.
My heart jumped into my throat. One of the kids? But the shape at the window was too large. Roman? Bjorn? A glimmer of hope surged in my chest. Maybe someone from the base?
Had he really called them?
Then another fear. Was he actually the Air Marshal? Was this a government plot? The CIA or something? Was Howard right?
Speak of the Devil.
The door swung open.
A snow-encrusted Howard stepped through. He feebly held a knife at his side and groaned what he must have hoped was a roar as he stumbled forward.
Otto stepped away from me. Swung the gun around. Howard hadn’t covered half the distance before the shot cracked out. The poor bastard crumpled to the ground.
Otto pointed the firearm back at me.
“I really didn’t want to use bullets,” he said. “Then again, by the time this thing overhead explodes and burns I’m not sure that they’ll—”
Without making a sound I ducked and charged straight at him. Did he have a plus-one in the clip when he started? Was he that kind of guy? Did he reload the mag? Did I count right?
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
His face expressed the beginnings of puzzlement. With one arm down to his left side, he fumbled at his suit pocket as my right-arm-swinging-haymaker with the open stapler slammed into his temple.
Surprise, asshole.
The stapler wasn’t one of those little ten-page clippers you’d usually find on your desk. Someone here had been writing very big reports. This must have weighed five pounds in forged steel with over-sized staples, one of which wedged itself halfway into Otto’s left temple.
I’d never gotten into a fight in my life—something my dad had never forgiven me for. With flailing fury my momentum carried me into Otto.
The stapler bounced off his head and knocked him to my left. He slipped and stumbled back, and had almost recovered when I hammered into him. I tried to lunge and set my foot down—but a lancing pain sent an electric bolt upward through my body leaving me screaming in pain as I tumbled to the ground in a mess over Otto.
The Navy SEAL was surprised by the attack—if he was even a SEAL, the lying bastard—but he recovered fast. With his left hand he grabbed my throat and dug his thumb and fingers into the soft part under the neck and gripped my larynx. Squeezed.
I gasped and writhed. Felt chunks of my skin sliding off in the struggle.
I wasn’t even an armchair athlete. I laughed at my friends who made fun of me for not hitting the gym more. This guy was ten years my junior and trained to kill anything on two or more feet.
But I had something he didn’t.
A daughter freezing to death outside.
I let him choke me while I waited for an opening. In that moment I didn’t fear dying; I needed to hurt him as badly as I could. I struggled but he pinned me with his legs.
He yelped in pain. His legs holding me slipped free, but it wasn’t me that hurt him somehow.
Howard loomed to one side, propped up on an elbow, blood pooling around him. He hacked at Otto’s side and arm with the knife.
Otto punched Howard straight in the throat with his right hand holding the gun. Howard managed to hack at the arm as he choked and Otto dropped the weapon. It clattered to the floor.
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