Chapter Eighteen

Jacie woke up to no mountains. No city. No buildings except a single square structure a little larger than a phone booth. No rivers, no desert, no ocean.

Grass. They seemed to be landing in an endless green sea.

Jacie had the sudden vision of the five of them standing on the prairie in a circle facing outward. Didn’t buffalo defend their young that way? Or maybe musk ox. The Loona-Bomber would have a hard time sneaking up on them.

Jacie lifted her head and looked inquiringly at Brett. He didn’t try to talk, he just shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t know where they were either.

The chopper landed against the glare of the setting sun. They jumped out. Womack led them toward the building, which turned out to be an elevator, then they descended and descended and descended.

Jacie’s ears were still ringing from the rock concert level noise in the helicopter. The high speed elevator made it worse. She barely heard Kaplan say, “We’ll be safe here.”

When the elevator door opened, Jacie believed him. They stepped into a cement-walled fortress. The words, Silo Alpha Charlie # 418 were emblazoned across the wall in front of them.

“We’re in a nuclear missile silo?” Brett asked, his voice hushed.

Stepping out into a concrete block hallway, the artificial light barely illuminated the narrow walkway.

“Only for a short time,” Kaplan said. “I knew we could refuel here and I’ve got every available man hunting for Chita Mendez. We’ll hole up for the night, hopefully get a line on Mendez tomorrow, then we hunt for her and get her to call off her hitman.”

Kaplan turned to O’Donnell, “Frankly, when I told them why we needed to find Chita Mendez, what you’d done to her, there was serious talk about just turning you loose in the nearest city to fend for yourself.”

“No one has the stomach to keep you safe from a woman you raped.” Womack led the way down the hall, their footsteps echoing. “If it weren’t for Garrison and Moreau being in danger, we might have done it. Right now, you owe your life to them.”

“Is there something to eat and a place to shower?” Brett asked politely. “It’s been a long day.”

Jacie shook her head at his cordial tone. He sounded like the Brett who’d saved her life at the swimming pool. He might have a split personality, but he sure was interesting.

Womack walked to a heavy steel door and pushed a series of buttons. A heavy click sounded and the door, made of steel a foot thick, swung open without a sound.

“This way.” Womack waved them to follow him. “There are sleeping quarters and a mess hall. We’ll be eating C-Rations. But we’ll only be here overnight. This is left from the early Cold War days. It’s all automated now.”

“Automated?” Jacie said. “Our nuclear arsenal is automated? Isn’t that a little dangerous? Couldn’t a bolt of lightning launch World War III?”

“Nah,” Womack waved a dismissive hand.

Brett asked, “How did you arrange this place? If no one knows we’re here, then how did you get the access codes for the door. You must have made contact somewhere and if you did, our cover is blown.”

Kaplan stepped forward. “Womack has priority clearance for these silos. He chose this place without consulting me. We decided to do it that way so only one person can be responsible if the bomber shows up. Tomorrow night I’ll decide.”

“Whichever night the bomber shows, the guy who picked the place as good as confesses to being the leak. That was the deal, right, Stu?” Womack pulled dusty, cardboard boxes marked MRE off a low shelf.

“That’s right, so that ought to keep us honest since the leak would be so obvious.”

“I trust Kaplan implicitly,” Womack interjected. “But we’re doing it this way anyway. And we’re not telling any of you the exact location of this place.” He pushed one little flat box into the hands of each lucky diner without comment, then he tore his open and produced several foil pouches. “Bon Apetit.”

Brett whispered in Jacie’s ear, “That’s French. Down girl.”

Jacie dropped her head forward to hide her grin.

The meals were disgusting but mercifully filling. Womack had them out of the kitchen and down the hall within minutes.

There were three rooms Jacie would describe as barracks. Small rooms with three sets of bunk beds each, stacked three beds high. There was a room Womack called officers’ quarters. Jacie would sleep there. He made a very big show in front of O’Donnell of explaining how the door locked from the inside.

Locking the door with the loudest click she could manage, she headed for the cold water shower. As she prepared to wash, she realized she’d left everything she owned in the Camry. She didn’t even have her Long Pine PD sweats to change into.

Later she lay on the thin, lumpy mattress, wrapped in two woolen blankets, clean but chilled to the bone. She loved isolation and yet somehow, she didn’t want to be alone anymore. She wanted Brett.

“Lord, since he’s tougher than he first seemed, maybe he could handle my anger and all my thousands of other imperfections.” She breathed her prayer into the silent room, knowing it was a dream. But was it so bad to have a dream?

“God, could you make this dream come true, please?” She fell asleep enjoying the fact that there was someone in the world that she actually missed.

 

 

 

It was too late!

The security of the Seattle hideaway was lax. Without checking, The Destroyer knew his prey had vanished. He didn’t know where to look next, but there were rocks to be turned over, and O’Donnell would crawl out soon enough. And when he emerged, The Destroyer would be waiting. In the meantime, Chita would soothe him. He, who had never needed anyone, needed Chita desperately.

 

 

When Brett joined his fellow stowaways the next morning, they were drinking coffee strong enough to peel paint off a battle ship.

“We’ve got a line on Chita Mendez. We’ll head out and pick her up today if possible.” Kaplan consulted a notebook he held in his hand. “She’s in the Long Pine area. Maybe that’s why the bomber went a little crazy in Long Pine, going after you two.”

Kaplan’s eyes shifted between Brett and Jacie. “I can’t shake the feeling that you two know something.”

“We’re not holding out on you,” Brett protested. “What possible purpose...”

“I didn’t mean you were lying.” Kaplan cut him off. “I keep wondering if you saw something but don’t realize the significance of it. Why did he come after you?”

Womack interjected with a chopping wave of his hand, “The other hits were all business. No gunshots. No screaming madman. No mistakes.”

“There was gunfire at the bunker,” Kaplan added. “One of our agents had half a clip in him.”

Womack stood, his normal hyperactivity heightened with caffeine. “When’d you get that?”

“Just this morning. The bodies were so badly burned they couldn’t tell until the post mortem.” Kaplan stared at the ceiling for a long second as if he was struggling to distance himself from the memory of the carnage. Kaplan looked sideways at Womack. “We never should have gone and met the team from D.C. We should have been at the bunker, adding to the security.”

Brett saw the regret and guilt in both men. If either one of them was the leak they were first rate actors.

Womack started pacing. The keys and coins in his pocket jingled. “Ballistics come through?”

“It’s a match with the bullets we dug out of Garrison’s clinic. But we’ve never doubted those two incidents were connected.”

“So, you’re not sure the guy who is after us is the same man who killed the engineering team?” Brett tried to keep up.

Kaplan opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Nothing’s a hundred percent, Garrison,” Womack said. “We’re as certain as possible with no eye witnesses. The guys who make devices like the detonator our bomber left are pros. They have their own style to the point of obsession. He wouldn’t share it. He wouldn’t sell it. The hitman...”

“Loona-Bomber,” Jacie said.

Womack smirked. “The MO was slightly different, but it has to be the Loona-Bomber in all these cases.”

“What about O’Donnell?” Brett asked. “Why did the bomber get so close to him and not finish it?”

All four of them turned to the man who had started this mess. O’Donnell nursed his coffee, hostile and sullen, withdrawn except for his occasional ogling glances at Jacie, glances Brett had noticed and chosen not to comment on. For now.

“Because with O’Donnell,” Jacie said, “it’s personal.”

Brett nodded. “That’s why he didn’t just set a bomb.”

“With the others, it was okay to just kill them, snuff them out. But, O’Donnell,” Jacie rasped his name, “needs to know who's killing him.”

Womack snatched tin coffee cups out from in front of the group and quickly rinsed and dried them. “We’re burning daylight.”

They stood.

“We’re not leaving until I get my things,” O’Donnell sniffed.

“Well, hurry it up,” Womack ordered. “None of the rest of us even brought any things.”

O’Donnell grumbled as he went to his barracks to get the clothes and toiletries he’d brought along.

Jacie watched him go. “My clothes are either in my apartment in Long Pine, blown up in Oaken or sitting in a Camry on a road to nowhere in Washington state. I have one pair of jeans, one T-shirt and a ridiculous pair of sandals I’ve been wearing for five days!”

“Four days,” Brett interjected.

“Six days since you blew out that window,” Kaplan corrected.

Jacie looked at Womack. “Which is it?”

He shrugged. “I get seven.”

“The whole thing’s kind of a blur,” Brett said.

Jacie shook her head. “I’m dressed for any occasion as long as I want to look like a complete idiot. But the child molesting rapist gets to pack.” She turned and stalked out of the room in a huff.

Brett let her go because he knew O’Donnell was at the other end of the silo and Jacie couldn’t get through the steel door to go outside.

Womack stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest, bouncing his elbows slightly. “So, are you two, uh...seeing each other?”

Brett heard the apprehension in Womack’s voice. Brett laughed and nodded.

Kaplan leaned against the nearest countertop, his cool, alert eyes missing nothing even though his body was usually motionless. He shook his head and if Brett wasn’t mistaken, shuddered a bit. “Good luck with that.”

“Is she always this...” Womack glanced at Brett with an apologetic look on his face then unfolded his arms and rubbed one hand over his mouth, maybe to keep himself from talking.

“Mean?” Brett supplied.

Maybe he said it just a hair too evenly because Womack shrugged. “Sorry.”

“She tried to kill me before we’d said hello.”

“Sounds like my wife,” Kaplan said.

Brett couldn’t stop a grin from crossing his face. “Then she tried again a day later.”

“You’re still alive,” Womack interjected.

“Is she inept?” Kaplan asked.

“No, I think she liked me a little even then.”

Womack went to the kitchen door and stared in the direction Jacie had walked. He must have decided the coast was clear. “So, she just attacks every man she meets?”

Brett thought about the last few days. “So far.”

“You two are quite a team,” Kaplan observed. “She seemed surprised when you disarmed Bogna and kicked the stuffing out of the three of us without breaking a sweat.”

“You noticed she was surprised?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were unconscious,” Brett said with a little bite in his voice.

“I was conscious,” Kaplan said. “Barely.”

Brett smiled.

Womack stepped out of the kitchen. “O’Donnell’s had enough time. I’m going to grab him. Let’s get out of here.”

“I’ll go find Jacie.” Brett headed out of the room.

“Don’t you think you ought to let her cool down first?” Kaplan asked.

“I like her when she’s all bristly.”

“Well then, you oughta be ecstatic.” Kaplan went out to warm up the helicopter.

Brett laughed and went searching for Jacie. He followed her growling, so she must have seen Kaplan come by.

He found her standing near the elevator to the surface, her fists clenched.

“Counting to ten, Jace?” He began rubbing her shoulders.

“For about the thousandth time,” she muttered. She dropped her head back and sighed as he massaged.

“I think we need to try praying together.” Brett said into her sassy blonde hair.

Jacie reached her right hand up and rested it on Brett’s. She twisted her head around to look at him. “I have always prayed for solitude. I’ve always thanked God I could stand on my own two feet. Praying with somebody will be a switch.”

She turned and went into his arms so sweetly Brett knew she was an answer to his prayers.

“Why do you think we’ve been so alone, Brett?” Jacie pulled back so she could see him. “I mean, I know why I have. I just don’t trust anybody. But how about you? Solid family, true faith...” She brushed her fingertips through his hair. “You clean up fairly good, except for the cat hair.”

“Thanks a lot.” Brett grinned and squeezed her until she squeaked. He loved it. He loved her.