“Name it.”
“I’m on Long Island, just east of the Army depot at Rockport. Williston Air Force Base is out here somewhere, isn’t it?”
“About twenty miles further east.”
Garner looked at the driver and nodded. The guy put the car in gear and pulled out. He accelerated to pass the westbound on-ramp and put on his blinker to take the next one.
“I need a lift,” Garner said. “For myself and seven friends. What’s the fastest thing they have stationed at Williston?”
“The fastest transport?”
“The fastest anything.”
“I know they’ve got a wing of Strike Eagles. Those’ll go Mach two without breaking a sweat. They could ferry one passenger per plane, if you swap out the weapon systems officer.”
“We don’t anticipate any dogfights,” Garner said. “We just need to win a race. And I need you to keep this in the back channels, Scott. All the way. No one learns about this who isn’t flying the planes, clearing them, or waving them off the aprons.”
“What the hell’s going on, Rich?”
“Nothing good. Keep your communications off the primary channels. Use something secure. But make damn sure you don’t use the Longbow satellites. We have reason not to trust them.”
“Those would be no good anyway, tonight,” Scott said. “I’ll find a different option.”
Garner cocked his head. “Why are the Longbows no good tonight?”
“Don’t know. It’s the strangest thing. The whole constellation, forty-eight satellites in all, went into some kind of standby mode about three hours ago. No one can get access.”
Garner turned to Travis, and in the glow of the freeway’s overhead lights, the man’s expression went cold.
“Holy shit,” Garner said.
Chapter Forty-Three
They were in the air thirty minutes later. Travis’s F–15E was the third off the runway. Its wheels left the ground and a second later Travis felt like he was lying on his back, and that he weighed about five hundred pounds. There were four green-screen displays in front of him, left to right in a row. They were full of visual data and numbers, most of which he couldn’t make sense of. One he could: altitude. That number was climbing rapidly.
The fighter leveled off at thirty thousand feet. Travis looked to his left and right, and saw the southern coastline of Long Island passing far below. A continuous vein of light reached west to the bright sprawl of New York City, then snaked away down the seaboard into the hazy summer darkness.
Travis saw the light-points of the first two jets’ engines ahead. A moment later his plane caught up and settled into a line beside them. Over the next three minutes the remaining five aircraft joined the formation, and then Travis felt the lying-on-his-back sensation again, not because of a climb but simply due to acceleration. All eight fighters were ramping up to nearly their maximum cruise speed, which was more than three times as fast as whatever kind of private jet Finn was traveling in. Travis had already done the math. Even with Finn’s ninety-minute head start, the eight of them were going to beat him to Arica by almost four hours. It was enough to make Travis regret the fifteen years he hadn’t been a taxpayer.
The force pushing him into his seatback receded as the jet’s speed topped out. He stared at the coastline again, already falling far behind. He looked at Manhattan and thought of Paige and Bethany, huddling in the darkened ruins of the place. It was hard to imagine that they could be holding on to even a strand of hope.
Travis watched the black nothingness of the Atlantic for a long time. He felt tiredness steal over him. He closed his eyes for what seemed to be a minute or two, and woke to the sound of the jet’s engines whining, their power level rising and falling from one second to the next. He looked up, and through the instrument glare on the curved canopy, he saw the shape of a massive four-engine aircraft above and just ahead of the F–15E. He saw a refueling boom coming down, little airfoils near its tip keeping it roughly stable.
Travis leaned a few inches to the side, looked past the front seat and saw the pilot’s hand making feather adjustments on the stick, steady but tense.
“How many times do you have to do something like this before you’re comfortable at it?” Travis said.
“I’ll let you know if I ever get there,” the pilot said.
It didn’t sound like sarcasm. Travis decided not to distract the guy with any more questions.
They reached Arica half an hour before sunrise. From above, the city was a broad crescent of light hugging an inward curve of the sea. Travis could get no sense of the desert except its emptiness—the landscape was black and formless under the deep red sky.