“Are you all right?” Patrick McLanahan asked.
“Chief Ratel,” Brad said, shouting over the ringing in his ears from all the gunfire in the enclosed hangar. “He’s hurt.” A moment later two men hurried over and carried Ratel out. Brad ran over to the robot. He saw where his father had burst through the doorway, taking out most of the wall around the door between the hangar and the front office. All six attackers, the four who had attacked the hangar and the two who attacked Brad on Tank Farm Road, had already been taken away.
“Are you all right, Brad?” Patrick asked.
“Yes. I can’t hear very well from all the gunfire, but otherwise I’m okay.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here. The Highway Patrol and sheriffs are about five minutes out.” Patrick picked up his son and carried him across a large open field to a parking spot near the south end of the runway, where the black Sherpa cargo plane was waiting, its turboprop propellers turning at idle speed. Patrick put Brad down, crawled inside through the cargo ramp in the back, and sat down on the cargo deck, and Brad climbed aboard right after him. A crewmember steered Brad onto a cargo net seat, helped him buckle in, and gave him a headset. Within moments they were airborne.
“What about Chief Ratel?” Brad asked, assuming that his father could hear him through the intercom.
“He’ll be evacuated and treated,” Patrick replied.
“What will the cops do when they see that hangar? It looks like a war zone. It was a war zone.”
“President Martindale will handle that,” Patrick replied.
“How did you get here so fast, Dad?”
“I was in St. George when your alarm went off back in San Luis Obispo,” Patrick said. “It’s less than two hours away in the Sherpa. Thank God Chief Ratel got to you in time and got you out of town.”
“St. George? Is that where we’re headed now?”
“Yes, Brad,” Patrick said. The CID turned to Brad and raised an armored hand, anticipating Brad’s protests. “I know you want to go back to Cal Poly, Brad,” Patrick said, “and now that you’ve received that grant from Sky Masters, your work is even more important. I want to see you continue your training too. So I’m going to assign Sergeant Major Wohl’s team to detect and capture any more attack squads that come after you. They’ll set up closer to campus so you won’t have to travel all the way to the south side of the city for training. They’ll take over your training until Chief Ratel is well enough to do so.”
“You mean, they’ll be my bodyguards or something?”
“Although I’m sure they can handle them, Wohl’s teams aren’t made for personal security jobs,” Patrick said. “They train for countersurveillance and direct-action missions. But we’ve encountered four two-man teams of Russian hit men now. I’m not going to allow any hit squads to roam around the United States at will, especially ones that target my son. So we need to set up a plan of action. We’ll interrogate the new guys, do some investigating, and figure out a plan.”
“So I’ll be like a decoy, sucking in the bad guys so the sergeant major can take them out?” Brad remarked. He nodded and smiled. “That’s cool, as long as I can go back to Cal Poly. I can go back to Cal Poly, right, Dad?”
“Against my better judgment, yes,” Patrick said. “But not tonight. Let the sergeant major and his teams interrogate the new prisoners, gather some information, and sweep the campus and the city. It’ll only be a day or two. I know you do most of your studying for finals online, and your classes are basically over, so you’ll be able to work at our headquarters. Before finals week comes around, you should be able to go back to campus.”
“I’ll just have to figure out an excuse to tell the Starfire team,” Brad said. “The project is exploding, Dad. The university is getting money and support from all over the world.”
“I know, son,” Patrick said. “To the university’s credit, they are keeping Starfire strictly a Cal Poly undergraduate project—other universities, companies, and even governments have offered to take over. Looks like you’ll stay the head honcho for now. Just realize that the pressure to turn the project over to someone else as a for-profit operation will certainly build—most likely Sky Masters Aerospace, I’d wager, now that they’ve invested so much in it—and the university might be induced by the big bucks to let some company take it over. Just don’t be offended if that happens. Universities run on money.”
“I won’t be offended.”