The Final Hour

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Well, you’re out of the frying pan,” Rose told me. “But now you’re really in the fire.”

His voice came over my headset as the Cessna moved through the night sky. The stars drifted slowly past at the windows. Sporadic lights appeared below and went slowly by.

I was sitting up front in the passenger seat. The headset blocked out the noise from the pounding engine, but that pounding still surrounded me, surrounded everything. Rose’s voice was small and distant at the center of that rhythm, but I could hear his words clearly.

“Washington has shut our mission down completely,” Rose went on. “Shut us down and shut us out. I was afraid even to try to get you protection for your escape, afraid they’d alert the guards-and that the guards would shoot you. The best I could do was post Mike out there with an off-road vehicle and the best surveillance equipment I could find so he could track you whenever you made your run for it. But all the same, you’re just plain lucky you got out of Abingdon alive. You have no idea how much danger you were in.”

The pilot glanced over from the seat beside me. He was a small, thin man named Patel. He had black hair, large eyes, and an easygoing smile. When he heard Rose’s words, he jogged his eyebrows at me, up and down, comically. As if potentially getting killed in a prison break was just some big adventure. Then with a quick grin, he faced forward. He flew the plane low over the dark territory beneath. I guessed that he was intentionally staying below any controlled airspace. Now and then, we heard a voice from a control tower somewhere, but Patel never answered. He flew the plane without a word.

Rose was sitting right behind me, right next to Mike in the cramped rear seats. His voice continued in my ear. “Already, since the escape, Abingdon has started to come apart at the seams. The guards are totally corrupt, some bought off by the Nazis, some by the Islamists. That guy Dunbar was running some kind of drug ring. Even the warden was in on it. The whole place was a cesspool.”

“Gee,” I said, “and it seemed so pleasant on the surface.”

I heard Mike chuckle. Rose didn’t chuckle. He wasn’t the chuckling sort.

“So like I said, you’re out of the frying pan,” he went on. “But you’re no better off. Worse, maybe, if it comes to that. Now the cops are hunting for you all over the place. Washington denies you ever worked for them. And when I try to pass on your warnings, my bosses won’t believe me.”

“They won’t believe you about the Great Death?”

“They say they’ve got any number of threats centered around New Year’s Eve and that security is as tight as it can be everywhere. Even if they wanted to, there’s no way to amp it up any further.”

“But Prince was counting on that from the beginning.”

“He must’ve been, if he’s planning to go through with it.”

“So where does that leave us?”

I heard Rose sigh over the headset. “Alone, pretty much. Or, at least, if we’re going to get some help, if we’re going to get anyone to take us seriously, we’ve got to figure out just what exactly Prince is planning. Without that, I can’t call in reinforcements. There’s nowhere to call them to.”

“But I’m pretty sure it’s going to take place in New York. Isn’t that enough? Couldn’t we tell them-”

“You’re ‘pretty sure,’” said Rose sourly. “That’s my point. And no, it’s not enough for you to be pretty sure of something or even to remember something. We have to prove it if we’re going to get any action.”

I rolled that over in my mind for a moment as the plane moved smoothly over a small town. With the town’s streetlights and houselights glittering in the night, it looked like some kind of jewel lying on a black background.

“So what are we going to do?” I said finally. “We’ve only got twenty-four hours left. If that.”

It was a moment before he answered-so long, in fact, I looked over my shoulder at him. Then he said, “Well, for one thing, we’ve got to use the information we already have and try to pinpoint exactly where Prince is planning to go. And for another thing…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

The plane bucked and wavered as it flew through a pocket of rough air. The stars dipped and rose at the windows.

“What?” I said finally. “For another thing, what?” This time, when I looked back at him, I saw Rose and Mike exchange a glance.

“We’re hoping you can help us, Charlie,” Rose said then. “We’re hoping you’ll remember something that will help us.”

“Well, I’ll tell you whatever I can…”

They glanced at each other again.

After that, no one said anything for a while. I sat there, staring out the window, thinking back over the memories that had returned to me, the memory especially of that conversation I’d overheard inside the barracks. Prince and Waylon and Sherman plotting out the Great Death. I had this feeling that I was missing something, some essential clue to the exact nature of their plan. I had this feeling there was something I knew that I didn’t know I knew.

“What’s a C.O. device?” I asked. “I heard Prince say they were going to acquire it from the Russians.”

“Yeah, we’re checking on that now,” Rose said. “Is there anything else? Anything else you remember that might help? Something specific about the location of the attack? The time?”

I shook my head. “Not that I can think of…” But again, I had that feeling that there was something, something just beyond my memory

…

Rose fell silent behind me. He sat back in his seat.

The plane trundled on. I tried to think back, page through my memories, but I couldn’t think of anything useful.

After a little while, Patel turned to me from the pilot seat. He seemed completely unaffected by our conversation: cheerful and relaxed. He looked like he’d just been waiting for his chance to speak to me.

“I hear you want to be in the Air Force,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“So you ever pilot a plane before?”

“A couple of times. I took some lessons-you know, taking off and landing-but I never got my license. I never even soloed.”

“Want to fly it now?”

I sat up straight. It was the best offer I’d had in-well, for as long as I could think of. “Yeah, you kidding? Absolutely!”

Patel let go of the pilot’s stick and let me take the copilot’s control, which was right in front of me. My feet found the rudders on the floor and my eyes scanned the cockpit’s instrument panels, trying to remember which digital readout was which and what they all meant. I followed the track laid out for me on the GPS, turning the plane slightly this way or that, remembering to work the pedals at the same time I turned the yoke.

The feel of the plane came back to me quickly. Soon I was holding it steady, looking out through the windshield at the sky. It’s an almost magical feeling, flying a small plane at night. You feel like you’re sailing on a sea of stars. Best of all, for long, good minutes, it took my mind off things, off the heaviness inside me, the dread of what was coming next. It gave me a break from the tension that had tied me in knots for so long, ever since I’d been put in prison. Plus, it was fun.

I had no idea how deadly serious it would be before all this was over.

After a while, Patel took the plane back. “If it’s been some time since you took lessons, I think you better let me land it.”

“Yeah, especially at night,” I said.

The Cessna started to drop down through the darkness. I peered out through the windshield, but I didn’t see anything ahead of us. I could just make out the darker darkness of the earth beneath the sky. But there was no place to land.

Then, a light gleamed and died. Patel corrected the plane’s course and headed toward it. I watched him as he pushed in the throttle, raised the flaps, slowed the plane so that its nose angled down and the plane sank out of the sky.

The light flashed below again and for a moment, I could make out the shape of a small dirt runway in the middle of an overgrown field, just at the bottom of a small hill. The setting looked familiar to me somehow.

“Where are we?” I asked into the headset microphone.

Rose’s voice came back to me over the headphones. “Look to your right.”

I did. At first I couldn’t see a thing. Then, against the background of the starry sky, an unmistakable shape appeared. It was a building, a house, with a large central tower and two smaller towers, one to either side.

It was that quirky mansion that served as Prince’s headquarters.

The plane dropped down slowly toward the earth.