Terminal Run

After what seemed forever but was perhaps only ten minutes a truck could be heard out front. Petri opened the door and admitted three paramedics. None seemed to care that his heart sounded perfectly normal. He was placed on a gurney, an oxygen mask strapped on, his shirt ripped open to expose his chest, a blood-pressure cuff strapped to his arm. The men rushed him out the front door to the waiting ambulance. Petri asked if she could go. The lead paramedic nodded, and she climbed in. The door was shut as the van accelerated out of the court and roared north.

“Somebody want to tell me what the hell is going on?” McKee said through his oxygen mask.

“Specific orders from Patton, sir,” Petri said. “And one of the orders is to keep silent until you’re where the boss wants you.”

“You’ve always wanted to be able to tell me to shut up.” He grinned at her, but her expression remained severe as she put a finger to her lips.

Once steady on the interstate, the first paramedic stripped off his uniform until he was down to his underwear. McKee lifted an eyebrow.

“Please remove your clothes, sir,” the nearly naked medic instructed. McKee shrugged, the order no more odd than the rest of the evening. The paramedic was McKee’s height and age, within five kilos of his weight, with the same skin and hair coloring. McKee traded clothes, the paramedic climbing onto the gurney.

“Put on a surgical scrub cap from the cabinet.”

McKee felt like a fool decked out as a paramedic, but did as he was told. The ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance to a hospital. When the door opened he and the other paramedics hustled the patient through the door, one of the other men shouting medical jargon to the receiving physicians. McKee glanced up, thinking for a moment that they had gone to Portsmouth Naval Hospital. A new face arrived, a middle-aged man in a suit holding a banker’s box under one arm.

“Follow me, sir,” he ordered. McKee followed the suit, Petri staying behind with the man on the gurney, who was being prepared to be rushed to the operating theater. McKee stood in an elevator that zoomed to the upper floors of the hospital building. The doors opened to the roof. The suit wearing agent waved him across a walkway to a waiting medevac helicopter, which was idling. “Put this on, sir,” he said, opening his box and producing an aviator’s helmet with an intercom headset inside. McKee strapped it on over the surgical cap and climbed into the rear seat, and as soon as the hatch shut the aircraft throttled up and lifted off, turning to the northwest.

McKee debated asking the pilots what they knew, but decided to wait. He glanced at his watch. It was half past midnight and he was flying over the eastern shore of Virginia in a speeding medical transport chopper with no idea what was going on. He settled in for the ride, knowing that this had to be urgent. After a half hour the helicopter settled slowly toward a landing site without lights. The chopper came to earth and the rotors spun down to idle. The copilot told him to remain seated. Ten minutes later another helicopter landed in the darkness. A man wearing a helmet climbed out and trotted to McKee’s helicopter and opened the door to join him in the rear.

By the dim wash of the cockpit lights McKee could see the man’s face under the visor of his helmet.

“Good evening, sir,” McKee said to John Patton. “Is there anything you want to share with me about this trip?”

“Nope,” Pattern said without a smile. “Pilot, let’s go.” The chopper took off and flew for another half hour before touching down for a second landing in the dark.

John Patton’s evening had been as odd as Ericcson’s and McKee’s.

The afternoon’s two briefings had given him a sick feeling in his stomach. Things were much worse than he’d ever suspected. The first meeting had been with the Director of the National Security Agency, a man named Mason Daniels, who had nothing but bad news. The second meeting had been with the President, the Secretary of War, the National Security Advisor, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the situation room of the White House, where the news was even worse. He had immediate work to do with two of his chief subordinates, but both were being watched by the other side, their movements chronicled, the state of the military’s readiness judged by whether his men played golf or took Saturday emergency meetings at the Pentagon.