“They’ll be here soon,” the lead investigator said, glancing at his watch. Shane noticed for the first time that each of the men surrounding Hall’s desk had a plastic nameplate pinned to the lapel of his suit, like children on the first day of school, and the man addressing him was named Paul Fiore. “The Air Force investigators are flying here from Andrews Air Force Base and are in the air as we speak. But I’d like to start now and then catch the other folks up when they arrive. You’ll probably have to go over your statement more than once, but my guess is you’re going to be telling the story a few times, anyway.”
“That’s fine,” Shane said, although it really wasn’t. There was no way he was going to get out of here any time soon.
“So,” Fiore said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. “Take it from the top. You were driving to work last night and the damned B-52 fell out of the sky next to you?”
“Not exactly,” Shane said. “This part of Maine is so heavily wooded I didn’t actually see the airplane crash. I caught a flash of it almost directly overhead, much too low to be on a normal approach to Bangor, and then it was gone. A second or two later — barely enough time to register what I had seen — I heard and felt the impact and knew immediately what had happened. That was when I pulled my car to the side of the road and went into the woods to see if I could find the accident site.”
The questioning continued, each investigator asking for clarification of various points at various times. After maybe twenty minutes, Fiore got around to the subject Shane had expected him to address right off the bat: “I understand you pulled a survivor out of the wreckage. I admire your bravery, Mr. Rowley. It is imperative we speak to this young woman also, and as soon as possible. We’ve checked all of the hospitals within a fifty-mile radius of Bangor and no one has any record of her. Where is she now?”
This was the question Shane had been dreading. He understood the need of the investigators to question her. After all, who better to describe the circumstances of an airplane crash than someone who had been aboard the plane? But by the same token, the girl had made it quite clear she was in serious trouble and did not want to be found.
Shane didn’t believe for a second Tracie Tanner had done anything to contribute to that B-52 going down, but he also wasn’t about to admit the subject of their search was even now sleeping, injured, in his bed. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak, still with no idea what he would say, when a loud Crash! out in the hallway diverted everyone’s attention.
And all hell broke loose.
Shane craned his head toward the door, as did everyone in the room, just in time to see fellow controller Jimmy Roberts, on duty in the radar room this morning, stomp angrily past the office door in the direction of the facility entrance. “Who the hell do you think you are? And what the hell is up with all the noise?” he asked, continuing down the hallway and disappearing from view.
Shane heard a phht sound, followed in rapid succession by another, and Jimmy Roberts stumbled backward into view. He wavered unsteadily in the hallway before crumpling in a heap outside the office door. A spreading ring of crimson stained the front of Jimmy’s shirt, and he lay on the floor gasping for breath.
Chaos erupted in the office. Chairs toppled over as everyone stood, jostling and banging into each other, some moving to help the injured man, others backing away from the door.
A half-second later, a pair of large men filled the doorway, standing over the fallen Jimmy Roberts. They were dressed in suits remarkably similar to the ones worn by everyone in Hall’s office except Shane, and he had the absurd thought that maybe more investigators had arrived.
Then he saw their handguns.
The two investigators closest to the door saw the guns as well and they shoved backward, hard, plowing into Marty Hall, who had gotten up and rounded his desk at the sight of the injured Jimmy Roberts. He toppled directly into Shane, knocking him to the floor. Shane pushed immediately to his feet, still stunned by the suddenness of the onslaught. The men in the room were cursing and shouting.
Shane looked toward the doorway and saw the intruder to the right scan the room. The man wore thick glasses and his eyes widened when he looked at Shane. He nudged his friend, gesturing in Shane’s direction with his gun, which was big and black and fitted with a sound suppressor on the business end.
“Everybody sit down,” the man on the left said with an Eastern European accent. He was muscular, with a blocky head that seemed to melt directly into his shoulders. “No one needs to get hurt.”
And Shane exploded. He knew he should do as he was told, slow things down, try to figure a way out of this, but Jimmy Roberts was his friend, they had started out as air traffic control trainees at Bangor on the very same day six years ago, had worked traffic together, gone drinking and fishing together, and double-dated with their wives, back before each man’s marriage had crumbled. Jimmy Roberts was his friend, and Jimmy Roberts was lying on the floor at the feet of these men, dying or already dead.
“No one needs to get hurt?” he spat angrily. “It’s too late for that, wouldn’t you say? Or do you get a mulligan on your first victim? Do you only start counting after number one?”
“Easy, Shane,” Marty Hall said softly.
The man with the glasses snarled, “Shut up.”
Shane realized he had taken two steps forward without thinking. He was lost in his rage and his grief and wanted nothing more than to get his hands on the man who had taken Jimmy down. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he was making a mistake, but at this exact moment, he just didn’t care.
And in that instant, things went from bad to worse.
The guy with the glasses was saying something about everyone calming down and shutting the fuck up, that they only wanted to talk to Shane Rowley — Shane thought, how the hell do they know my name? — and then they would go away and leave everyone alone, and that was when Paul Fiore, the lead NTSB investigator, leapt forward and let loose a roundhouse right, catching the guy doing the talking in the side of the head. The man went down like a sack of Aroostook County potatoes, and the room, which had gone silent, erupted in chaos again.
The no-neck guy pivoted and fired. The slug caught Fiore in the face and his head exploded in a spray of blood, and everyone was screaming and scrambling for cover, trying to escape the hail of bullets as the guy continued shooting. The man Fiore had punched pushed himself up off the floor, shaking his head, as the square-headed guy began picking off investigators one by one, like shooting fish in a barrel, Shane thought. He dived behind Hall’s desk, banging heads with the facility manager.
Hall was panting like he had just run the Boston Marathon. “What do we do now?” he wheezed.
“Good question,” Shane said, trying desperately to think. He knew they had just seconds left before everyone in front of the desk would be dead and the men with the guns came for them.
He looked around for something they could use as a weapon. The metal chairs were scattered around on the floor and Shane wondered how long he might survive if he charged the men using a chair as a makeshift shield. Not long, he thought. He squinted against the sunlight streaming in through the window behind Hall’s desk, making it almost impossible to see.