He drew his sidearm, released the safety catch, held it pointing down by his side, and crept forward. His eyes popped out at the sight of the terrorist identified as Luke Spencer as he finished urinating and hobbled back into the boathouse.
The general was too flabbergasted to move. This was a master terrorist!? This hobbling cripple had disarmed and killed two trained soldiers? How in the name of God was that possible? He moved forward, and was almost at the boathouse door when he heard the unmistakable roar of an airboat engine, and a moment later saw the terrorists whoosh from the boathouse aboard an airboat. He cursed, raised his arm, standing with a two-handed grip on his pistol, aimed and fired.
Sophie perched high up on the operators seat of the noisy airboat. Luke tried to get comfortable as the unusual craft skimmed the surface of the water. Due to the noise of the rear mounted aircraft propeller that drove the shallow-bottomed craft, neither of them heard the gunshot or were aware of the imminent danger they were in.
“Fuck!” said the general as the bullet ‘pinged’ off the grill covering the giant propeller. He cursed himself again, for failing to keep up with his target practice. It was a shot he would have made easily ten years ago. Marksmanship was another of his natural talents — usually. He lined up another shot and fired at the moving target once more before they were out of sight.
23:38 PM
The air supply aboard the nuclear powered submarine USS Amarillo dwindled rapidly making it difficult for submariner Pete Williams to breath. He realized that it was the end for him, and knew he must mount some sort of retaliatory defense. He sat at the captain’s desk and read his stream of incoming e-mails; he shifted through the day-to-day garbage, while he tried to break the captain’s pass-code.
He had been a seasoned hacker; in fact, he had once caused a major incident as a youth, when he had successfully hacked into a US top-secret military computer. A supposedly impregnable computer. The army had been highly embarrassed that this young kid had broken in to their system so easily. However, they wanted to play down the breach of their security, and the evidence proved that the young man was a harmless geek, apparently on a quest to find concrete evidence of the existence of extra-terrestrial beings and in particular, the secrecy surrounding Area 51.
Instead of prosecuting him, they waited for the media interest to die down then offered the teenager a job, as he clearly had talent, and they thought he would be of more use to them as a member of staff. Better on the inside testing their systems, as opposed to being on the outside trying to break in.
This was how Pete Williams, who’d previously had no interest in the armed forces as a career found himself aboard the USS Amarillo, glad to escape the glare of infamy. He hadn’t enjoyed his moment in the media spotlight. His duties apart from the odd bit of code breaking and unofficial hacking was as one of the contingent to muster the nuclear weapons should they ever be needed.
However, the thin diminishing air didn’t help his concentration as he’d tried his damndest to break the codes. He sweated profusely and the stench from the captain’s remains made him gag. He glanced at the corpse slumped on the floor, with dried, congealed blood around his orifices.
He regarded the elderly captain, one of the last old-school leaders and he found himself remembering that for twenty years during the cold war years all codes on the US nuclear missiles were set at 00000000. The official thinking being that it would be too much for the men launching the missiles to have to remember complicated codes, it would speed their launches, instead of having to find the codes, they would have the edge over their Russian counterparts, and these few valuable seconds could prove vital. Incredibly, this went on for two decades, and it was pure luck that some disgruntled, suicidal soldier had not launched a missile with such a simple code and sent them all to Armageddon.
More recently, hackers revealed that the Syrian government’s top-secret communication pass-codes were set to 12345 and if the memorandum was above top-secret they took the extra precaution of adding another digit making the pass-code 123456, and it had been this simple code Pete Williams had used to open the captain’s wall-safe and had retrieved the nuclear launch-codes. He shook his head to get his mind back on track. Why not try it again, he tapped, 00000000 into the pass-code box, and remarkably the computer sprung into life. “You idiot,” he said to the captain’s cadaver. He now had access to the submarines arsenal of forty-eight tomahawk nuclear weapons and he had the launch codes. Payback time, he thought bleakly.
23:39 PM
General Malloy rushed into the boathouse and without breaking step leaped onto an airboat, took a moment to start it, and moved out of the boathouse in pursuit of the fugitives. He had used an airboat once before, on maneuvers in Alaska of all places where airboats were used extensively as they were equally suited to a snowy terrain and could skim over ice as easily as water.
He listened and detected the rough direction of the fleeing craft. He put on his night-vision goggles and searched slowly from east to west getting used to the green imagery. Then he spotted them. “Outstanding!” he declared, locking onto the fleeing terrorists.
He could tell by the way the fleeing airboat moved that it was piloted by an inexperienced driver and he knew that he would catch them effortlessly. He opened the throttle and gave chase.
23:40 PM
“What do you mean, ‘it’s got no brakes?!” Luke yelled over the din of the propeller.
“There are no brakes on airboats,” she replied with a shrug.
“Then, how do you stop?” he asked incredulously.
“You decelerate,” she said simply, while she tried to steer by moonlight.
“What if you want to avoid something?”
“That’s why you sit high up, looking for debris or marine animals, you swerve to avoid in most cases. There’s no reverse either,” she told him knowing she’d enjoy his reaction to this piece of news.
“Huh? What happens if we go up a dead-end?”
“Let’s pray that we don’t.” She smiled.
“Maaan, that’s crazy, what sorta lunatic invents a high speed vehicle with no means of stopping?” He cut short his ranting as a helicopter passed overhead, and they swapped anxious glances. Luke realized with a sinking heart that they were caught, when, strangely the helicopter continued its journey ignoring them, swiftly followed by another three choppers flying in formation northbound. “That ain’t cool,” he said.
“Maybe they didn’t see us?” she suggested.
“Or they’re no longer looking for us,” he said hopefully.
She smiled, loving him more and more by the minute, when a plume of blood exploded from his shoulder as a high velocity bullet ripped through it. The impact made him twist and he fell forward.
Her mouth dropped open in disbelief. She hardly had time to register he’d been shot, and by whom? She slowed and squinted into the darkness, when a second airboat loomed from the darkness and the general rammed her.
The airboat clipped Sophie’s and the angle sent her into a high-speed tailspin, which almost pitched Luke into the swamp. Sophie fought for control of the spinning airboat and thought that she would topple from the seat high up, in her unbalanced position. Sophie saw the lake edge loom up and knew that impact was going to be inevitable.
She braced herself, but the crash caused her to fall to the bottom of the craft and she landed on top of Luke. She felt concussed and confused, her senses told her to help Luke, but found her body unable to respond to her commands. She intensified her efforts and felt the airboat rock. She knew without looking up that someone else was onboard.