Flight (2 page)

“You’re a heavy s.o.b., aren’t
you?”

Outside of the vehicle, Wolfgang
rolled over onto his back and tried to breathe. He looked up at the
sky and it was a dingy gray. A bridge loomed high overhead, a
smashed and torn guardrail making it obvious where they had gone
over the edge. Only the sturdiness of the military truck had saved
them. Its roof had been partially crushed and all the windows blown
out, but the frame held. A lesser vehicle would have crumpled,
killing everyone inside. Captain Smith, the third officer in the
group, hung from his seat belt, his body partially exposed by the
mangled front passenger side. There wasn’t much left of his
head.

Leah moved quickly next to
Wolfgang, helping him sit up. She held a bottled water to his lips.
He drank some, swishing it around his mouth and spitting, getting
water and blood on his shirt. A tooth came out.

She gave him more water and he
swallowed. It felt good. He looked at her face and her eyes were
filled with concern. She also had a gash on her right
cheek.

“You’re hurt,” he whispered. He
used the familiar form again.

“I’m fine.”

She continued to wash his face
off, but now with a small cloth. The front of her shirt had blood
on it, down near the waist, and Wolfgang realized it was his blood.
It would stain and the cloth was stretched out. She’d ruined her
shirt for him.

She gave him another drink, then
helped him lay back. Wlazlo stood over him.

“You took a pretty good shot to
the head there, Wolfie. It’s a good job that piece of shrapnel that
caught you couldn’t penetrate that thick Teutonic skull of yours.
Otherwise you’d have ended up like poor old Smithy over there.”
Wlazlo nodded towards the truck.

Wolfgang closed his eyes. The pain
was too much. He heard words but they simply blended together into
gibberish.

9

Eva Gilliam felt the jeep slowing
down as she and Mark Dornbush, the agent who had rescued her from
the Agency safe house, approached a third roadblock.

The first two checkpoints had gone
smoothly. The guards at them seemed more interested in looking at
Eva’s bare legs and sports bra than they had been in asking too
many questions, just as Mark had predicted.

Which was a good thing.

Mark had stolen the jeep they were
in and had no papers for it. And the back of the jeep was filled
not only with food and emergency medical supplies, but weapons. Eva
had brought serious weapons, including an MP23 carbine with a
grenade launcher, dozens of grenades of several varieties,
thousands of rounds of ammunition, and several pistols. The MP23 by
itself, the most advanced US infantry assault rifle invented, would
turn heads. They weren’t yet common outside of special
forces.

She and Mark had buried the
weapons duffel bag underneath the food and medicine, but if
discovered, she didn’t know what checkpoint guards might think
about her arsenal.

The third roadblock they
approached was different than the others, more fortified. A heavier
gate blocked the one lane of the freeway that remained open,
concrete barriers funneling them into that lane, tire shredders
raised underneath the gate facing both directions, and there were
more guards.

Mark glanced at the desert on both
sides of the checkpoint, but barbed wire and signs warning of mines
extended in either direction as far as they could see.

“Must be the border,” he muttered.
“I wish you’d left your clothes off.”

Eva shook her head in disgust.
Men. She’d put her tank top, camo pants, wool socks, and boots back
on once she thought she’d gotten enough sun to make up for sitting
in the dark for a week. She’d also put a ball cap on and rubbed
sunscreen on her face and shoulders.

Two guards moved into the roadway,
both holding rifles. One of them signaled for Mark to slow down and
stop. A third guard stood behind the other two. Eva could see two
more in the booth, which had been reinforced with concrete. Sand
bags surrounded it, enough room behind them for soldiers to use for
cover in a firefight.

A machine gun on the roof poked
out from behind more sand bags and there was at least one more
guard up there. The gun pointed away from them, towards the freeway
past the roadblock, but even if they could crash the barrier and
somehow avoid the tire shredders, there’d be no way to escape that
gun. Unless the gunner were blind.

Eva resolved to herself that they
would have to negotiate past this barrier. She slid her Glock down
the side of her chair where it wouldn’t be seen by any of the
guards.

“Don’t try anything funny without
giving me a heads up,” Mark said quietly to her.

“I love you, too,” she replied and
smiled at the guard who came up on the driver’s side of the jeep.
Mark came to a complete stop.

Eva looked around as the guard
asked for their passports. A white SUV sat near the booth. She saw
no more than the six guards she originally counted, but a bunkhouse
a few hundred yards away could contain more.

The guard who spoke to Mark had
his rifle lazily strapped around his neck, and he rested both arms
on it like this was a routine stop. But the other two held their
weapons ready, pointing at the jeep.

“Passports?” Mark asked in reply
to the guard’s question. “What do we need passports for?” He had a
big grin on his face and he smiled at Eva like they were newlyweds.
He took her hand. “We’re just going for a drive.”

“Sorry, sir. It was announced
yesterday. There’s new controls on the state border. We have to
prevent the wrong element from getting in. You know how it is,” the
guard said, a stupid grin on his face.

“But we’re leaving,” Mark
offered.

That confused the guard for a
moment. He was clearly new at this.

“But you’ll need your passports to
get back in,” he finally said.

“I still don’t understand.” Mark
was playing dumb.

“You need passports to cross the
border.” The guard leaned over and said conspiratorially, “The
federal government’s falling apart. We have to take matters into
our own hands.”

Eva kept her surprise to herself.
Were things that bad? And so quickly?

Mark didn’t respond. He either
kept his face under control like Eva, or he already suspected what
the guard was telling him. The idiot smile the guard wore showed
how proud he was of himself, his state, for keeping it
together.

Mark smiled just as stupidly back
at the guard. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.”

The guard shook his head and said,
“To each their own. You won’t be able to return without
passports.”

Mark nodded understanding and the
guard seemed about to wave them on when his face suddenly
fell.

“Ma’am, is that a weapon by your
side?”

Eva must not have hidden the Glock
well enough.

“Self-protection,” she replied
calmly.

The guard pulled his rifle up, not
pointing at them, but more ready. The atmosphere grew
tense.

“Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you
to step out of the vehicle and away from that firearm. Do you
understand?”

Eva put her hands up in the air
and said in a helpless voice, “It’s just for protection. There’s
some not nice people out there.”

“I understand that, ma’am, but
unregistered firearms are not allowed to be transported in the
state. For safety, you know.”

His words caught Eva off guard.
Utah was a state full of hunters and the right to bear arms had
always been a hot political issue. They had been one of the states
that had fought desperately against federal gun laws. What was
going on?

“But as you pointed out, we’re
leaving. We have no intention of coming back,” Mark offered
helpfully.

The guard stared at them. He
clearly didn’t know what to do next.

“Enough playing games. Get out of
the vehicle,” another guard commanded, the one who had been back
behind the first two. He had his rifle aimed and ready, pointing at
Eva. Eva opened her door and stepped out slowly, keeping her hands
in the air. Mark did the same, on his side.

The guard moved quickly towards
her, and Eva froze, her head down, her arms high in the air. She
knew she had to signal submission to the man. She didn’t look at
him.

“Faster!” he commanded. He used
the butt of his rifle to shove Eva away from the jeep. “On your
knees!”

Eva stumbled from the shove, took
another couple of steps away from the jeep in a direction also away
from the fortified booth, then sank to her knees. She kept her head
down and her arms up.

“Cross your legs and clasp your
hands behind your head.”

In the movies, that’s when someone
gets shot in the back of the head.

But Eva had been trained for such
scenarios. If the man had been a terrorist, she would have waited
for him to get a little closer, then whirled around and tried to
grab the end of his gun to point it away from her, tried to
maneuver her body so that the guard’s body was between her and the
other guards, then, depending on how well all that went, get behind
the jeep and start shooting, after killing the guard.

It probably wouldn’t have gone
that well. Even if she and Mark took out the three guards outside
the booth, the machine gun on the roof would get them. But it would
be better to die fighting than to take a bullet in the
head.

However this guard wasn’t a
terrorist. He was a Utahn. Half this group was probably Mormon, and
Eva couldn’t see them assassinating two travelers because of a
pistol. Plus she had seen three security cameras on the booth.
Every action these men were taking was being recorded. A female
voice yelling out from the booth further reassured her.

“Take it easy out there,
Shay.”

“You shut up,” the guard yelled
back.

Eva decided to comply with his
original order. She remained on her knees and moved her left foot
over her right and clasped her hands behind her head, interlacing
her fingers over the back of her ball cap. She breathed slowly and
stared straight out into the desert, not looking at
anyone.

But she didn’t like the position
she found herself in, in front of this armed man.

“You okay over there?” Mark
called. That relieved her. It was his way of signaling they should
do nothing.

“I’m fine,” she called back,
confirming their inaction. If Mark wanted to attack the guards, he
would have yelled, “Do you need some help?” and she would have
responded, “Yes,” and the fight would have been on.

“You two shut up!” the guard named
Shay yelled. He came up close behind Eva and hissed at her, “Not a
peep outta you, you hear?”

Eva nodded slightly. She had a
sense of foreboding and steeled herself against what would happen
next.

“I gotta check you for
weapons.”

She could feel his
grin.

He frisked her roughly, grabbing
her everywhere.

“You like that?” he whispered
harshly in her ear while he did so.

She didn’t react.

She did review the military
options available to her. He was sufficiently distracted that she
knew she could reach her hands out and grab his neck, flip him over
her, break his arm and have his weapon trained on the other guards
before they knew what had happened. If it weren’t for that machine
gun.

She endured the abuse.

“Stop fooling around over there,”
one of the other guards suddenly yelled. “They got guns in here. A
big gun. And grenades. Woowee. We got us some
terrorists.”

Eva’s guard stopped what he was
doing and looked towards the guard in the jeep.

“Get over here, Shay. Check this
out,” the guard in the jeep said, holding up the MP23.

“We ain’t done yet,” Eva’s guard
hissed in her ear.

“I can’t wait,” Eva replied and
regretted it instantly. He leaned away from her, bringing his rifle
up, and struck her with the butt, smashing her fingers against her
head. She pitched forward, the baseball cap flying off, her head
smarting and her fingers aching. She deserved it. She knew she
should have kept her mouth shut. She knew the protocol in this
situation.

When it had come time during
training for E&C, Evasion and Capture, she thought, along with
everyone else, she learned later, that if she could evade long
enough, she could avoid the worst consequences of being
captured.

Everyone was captured.

The first time someone hit her,
she wanted to cry out, to threaten to report them, and her captor
sensed that. He yelled at her, belittled her, struck her again and
again, and finally reminded her if she couldn’t handle a little
interrogation in a safe environment, she wouldn’t be able to handle
it in ‘real life.’

Still, the brutality of the
techniques used during the Capture phase of E&C shocked
her.