The Ghost Pattern

…37

A feverish sense of anticipation anxiety crept up on all of them, as they watched the hours slip by and counted each hour obsessively, waiting for DigiWorld’s call to come in with a possible location. They responded to that anxiety in different ways, suited to their individual personalities.

Sam smoked, playing with the smoke as it left his lungs, at times competing with Steve in the art of blowing the perfect smoke ring. Was cigarette smoke better than cigar smoke when it came to smoke rings? They debated that for almost forty minutes, driving Alex crazy.

Blake analyzed the news, as he did with every chance he got, looking to the media for any new information about the missing plane. By the bleak look on his face, there was nothing new in the press.

Tom had started heating up the grill, too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, but that was Tom’s stress relief; he liked to cook.

Alex had nothing to do, just paced back and forth on the patio, occasionally biting on her right index fingernail, so unsettled she couldn’t even sit down. How much longer would they have to wait? Were they still going to find the passengers alive? Or just piled up in a superficial mass grave somewhere? If the UNSUB had taken the plane to get a hold of nine neuroscientists, what about the rest of the people? What had become of them? If satellite scans failed, what other means would she have to find the missing XA233? Has she been wrong all this time, focusing on Russia? Had she been wasting time and people’s lives on her obsession with V? Damn waiting… There were too many questions and not enough answers, and it pissing her off. I hate this powerlessness shit, she thought. Now I’m almost like Lou, I just wanna shoot whoever took that damn plane.

“Hey, I got us a crew,” Lou said cheerfully, coming out in the backyard with some papers in his hand.

They gathered around him hastily. Finally, some damn news.

“OK, here it is,” Lou said, showing them his notes. “We have a crew of fourteen standing by, with two choppers, ready to fly in when we call them. They didn’t seem overly preoccupied with operating behind the Russian border.”

“American?” Alex asked. “Or Japanese?”

“American. There’s an American military base in Wakkanai, at the northern tip of the Japanese islands. These guys, Dark Ravens they’re called, are a contractor with troops over there. Starting tomorrow morning at 0600 they’re on the clock, and that’s costing us $160,000 a day, whether we use them or not.”

“Whoa,” Alex said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Blake dismissed her reaction to the cost of the operation. “I just wish we knew where to tell them to go.”

“Will fourteen be enough?” Alex asked, thinking of Lou’s estimation of potentially fifty armed forces working for the UNSUB.

After a quick moment of silence, he frowned a little, and then replied, “They’ll have to be.”