Home Port (A Deep State, Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) (Long Haul Home Book 4) Read online

  Here, there was no need for emergency lights. The stairwell was fully lit, a fact that confused Thomas.

  “The civilian departures are cancelled,” Franks said, his voice echoing as they descended. “Just bringing the last of the planes down from the sky before they run out of fuel.”

  Thomas forced his throat to relax and threw Franks a smile. “Any chance I can get an internet connection while I’m waiting?”

  “Hell, I wish,” the man laughed then gave his left shoulder a slap where the microphone for his walkie-talkie was attached. “Everything but our radios went down two hours ago. Central is whining that they actually have to write shit down.”

  Forgetting himself for a second, Thomas responded with a throaty snort. He remembered those mission-critical days when a loss of power brought everything to a frustrating, sometimes deadly, standstill. At his age, he hadn’t expected to see those days again.

  But they were here, he suspected. This was more than just a power outage, and the CBP agents were holding back.

  Thomas patted his hands around his pockets, locating the blu-tooth earpiece for his phone. “I suppose there’s still no smoking even when the phones and internet are down.”

  “Yep,” Franks answered as they reached the bottom of the stairs and he swiped his badge through another card reader. “Sorry about that, Colonel. Could use one myself, to tell you the truth.”

  “I’m supposed to be quitting, anyway. The wife, you know,” Thomas continued, loosening the men up. “Stopped for a whole damn month. Not that I’ll get any leniency for good behavior.”

  His hand dipped into his pocket. He pulled out his phone, checked the signal, found it still down, then discreetly started the beta of another app his company had developed on the side. Informally named “Proximity Snoop,” his teenaged son’s behavior had inspired Thomas’s request that the tech guys come up with something that would allow him to casually forget a phone in one room then listen in on that room through his earpiece.

  “You just don’t realize how attached you are to these damn devices until they stop working,” he complained in his best old man voice as Astere and Franks led him down an empty white hall that stretched at least fifty yards.

  Turning his head, he nodded at Franks’ gun.

  “Looks like a Maxim 9. Didn’t think those were out until after Christmas.”

  Thomas had noticed the odd shape of the holsters as the agents approached him outside the plane. But the significance of the change from the agency’s usual firearm carry hadn’t clicked in his head until he found himself in the sterile emptiness of the underground hallway.

  Franks and Astere were carrying guns with built-in silencers.

  “Pilot program,” Astere answered after a short delay then laughed and twirled his finger in the air like the planes still circling far above them with dwindling fuel supplies. “Say we have to pop some jihadi. Less noise means less panic among the civilians.”

  Thomas nodded with sage understanding. They were right, but the explanation didn’t ease the tension burrowing deeper into his bones.

  “Who did you talk to at DoD?” he asked as they reached a numberless door right before the hall T-sectioned.

  Astere swiped his badge through the card reader then held the door open for Thomas to enter first as Franks answered the question.

  “Central didn’t say.”

  “But they know to come here?” Thomas asked, casually setting his phone on a bookshelf as they entered some kind of exterior office area with a desk and chair in the middle and another door on the opposite wall.

  “Sure thing, Colonel,” Franks soothed, walking toward the second door and opening it. “You mind waiting in here? We have to try reaching central again and…well, right now, you’re not cleared for any information we might get.”

  Eyes scanning for impromptu weapons, Thomas replied with a nod and a tired roll of his shoulders. Passing the single imposing metal desk that divided the room, he paused again, shook his head and pressed both hands against his back, taking a short stretch to further cement in the agents’ minds that he was a man past his prime and fatigued from the trip.

  Through the foot or so of open door space, he could see black backpacks in heavy duty nylon. Layered on top of them were bulletproof vests, the white-lettered decal of CBP Special Operations stamped big on each of them. Unlike the traditional vests cops wore, the ones in the store room resembled the Army’s old Interceptor vests, with their extended back and front to protect the spine and groin and a collar device for the throat. If he gave one of the vests a squeeze, he’d probably feel ballistic plates beneath the nylon and padding.

  “You guys are really ramping up your gear,” he laughed, then spotted case after case of water stacked to the ceiling in one corner of the outer office. He jerked a thumb at the tower of bottles. “Looks like you’re laying in for the apocalypse, too.”

  “Nah, some sorry bastard has to hump those upstairs for the arrivals since the vending machines are out,” Franks answered, the friendliness exhibited in the long walk down the hall fading from his voice as Thomas continued to delay. “We’ll have an update for you soon, though. Just sit tight on the bench back there, Colonel.”

  Watching the door swing shut, Thomas stuffed his earpiece in and began to listen.

  CHAPTER TWO

 

  THOMAS COULD HEAR Franks and Astere moving around but not any words. They certainly weren’t contacting central. This deep underground, he doubted their radios worked.

  Optimizing his time alone, he scanned the room for obvious cameras then moved over to the CBP bags and opened one, his carryon slung across his back.

  The top layer of the CBP bag held an empty water bladder, a first aid kit, and four Glock magazines, each one holding thirty-three 9mm rounds. As Thomas dove deeper into the bag, Astere finally spoke loud enough for him to hear the agent.

  “You saw his status, right?”

  “Yeah,” Franks said, his tone low enough for Thomas to believe both men were whispering near the outer door, mere inches from where he had placed his phone on the bookshelf. “He has a threat warning, but I couldn’t bring up the link. Then the whole fucking system crashed.”

  “So…what?” Astere asked. “Does that mean we kill him or just detain until the DoD guy shows up?”

  “There’s no DoD guy,” Franks snickered. “I made that up on the fly so he wouldn’t give us any shit and rile up the sheeple getting off the plane.”

  “Look,” Franks continued before falling into a short, ominous silence. “Way I figure, a threat is a threat. We kill him and claim he tried to escape. You see that dive watch he’s wearing?”

  Finding a folding combat knife inside the bag, Thomas pulled it out and extended the blade.

  It was a Fox Karambit, the three-point-two inch curved blade never failing to remind him of a cat’s claw. He tested the honed edge, a grim certainty flashing across his face.

  The pointed tip buried between the base of the skull and first vertebrae meant instant death, while the curved edge was a beautiful little throat slitter. Personally, Thomas preferred insertion behind the jaw just about where the ear ended. The target died a tad slower, but the spot was easier to strike during an intense struggle than the small window to the brain stem at the back of the skull.

  Opening up a throat, on the other hand, required going deep if death was the desired outcome.

  For Thomas, in that subterranean warren of locked doors, death was definitely the desired outcome.

  Listening to the debate in the outer room, he tucked the knife up his sleeve, inserting it handle first with his thumb riding the flat edge of the blade to keep the weapon in place.

  “Damn wedding band is probably plati—”

  Astere clammed up as Thomas noisily opened the storage room’s door, a forced cough on his lips.

  “Any chance I can get one of those waters?” he asked as both men walked toward him. “Last cart service on the
plane was more than four hours ago.”

  The agents tried to maintain a friendly face, but their hands hovered near their firearms. Thomas waited until they cleared his side of the heavy metal desk then let the handle of the Karambit slide into his waiting palm.

  Astere smiled, dark eyes glittering with a poorly concealed malice. “Sure thing, Colonel. Let’s go crack one—”

  The agent didn’t get another word out. Thomas grabbed him by the shoulder, fisted the fabric of his shirt and jerked down, spinning the man’s body one hundred-eighty degrees at the same time. Fast as lightning, Thomas found the sweet spot just below Astere’s neck and jammed the curved blade deep as his free hand wrapped around the grip of Astere’s Maxim 9.

  He didn’t stop to draw leather, just tilted the holster upward and fired at Franks’ gut, praying that the manufacturer hadn’t added an external safety since the gun show.

  Shock spread across Franks’ face as parts of his stomach misted the air behind him.

  Thomas removed the pistol from its holster then crossed his arm over to Astere’s opposite shoulder, pushing on the side of the dying man’s head where the Karambit was buried. Angling the barrel of the gun down as Franks pawed at his own weapon, Thomas opened up the agent’s head with another round.

  With one target completely neutralized, he pushed against Astere so that the man slid off the blade with a wet sucking sound.

  By the time the agent’s body hit the floor, he was dead, but Thomas shot off one last round to be certain.

  Wasting no time, he grabbed Franks’ pistol and the security badge that would open the doors. He shoved the badge in his pocket then dropped the magazine on the Maxim to check its load.

  Seeing that the magazine was for a Glock and the bullets were 9mm, same as what was in all those CBP backpacks, he smiled.

  WEARING one of the agency’s windbreakers over the Interceptor vest, Thomas entered the parking garage closest to the International Arrivals Building with his carryon and a CBP backpack over his shoulder. He bypassed the expensive SUVs, the luxury sedans, and anything and everything manufactured in the current century. He kept walking, his steps starting to drag until he came upon a mid-to-late 70s Granny Caddy. Beige with a white cloth top, the Coupe de Ville’s exterior looked like it had only been taken out on Sundays then polished and put away like wedding silver.

  Despite his heart jackrabbiting against his sternum back in the underground storeroom, he had risked five minutes grabbing as much as he could discreetly carry out of the building. For breaking into the Caddy, the CBP bag had already been packed with everything he would need, including a slim jim.

  For some reason, Customs and Border Patrol planned on opening a lot of locked car doors.

  “Curious times,” he whispered, taking out the slim jim.

  Squinting in the darkness, Thomas rotated the brim on the CBP cap he had liberated from the storeroom. His mouth a thin line of concentration, he slid the hooked end of a thin strip of spring steel between the Caddy’s window and the door’s rubber seal. He fished a little to the left then eased upward a few inches, moved right and fished a little more until he felt the hook catch on the rod attached to the door lock. Taking a slow breath in as he gazed around the parking level, Thomas slowly slid the strip up. A satisfying click rewarded his efforts.

  He opened the door and tossed his bags in then pushed the driver’s seat back as far as it would go. Turning on his phone’s flashlight app, he opened up the Karambit and pulled out a small black roll of electrical tape from his carryon. He put the Caddy in neutral, placed his phone flash side up on the floor then contorted his six-foot frame into a pretzel to work open the ignition cover.

  The cover popped, a fistful of wires descending.

  With a rough swallow, Thomas moved the phone with its light a little closer and disconnected what he hoped were the battery and ignition wires. Using the Karambit, he stripped the insulation off the ends then twisted them back together.

  The dash lights stuttered on.

  Squinting and praying at the same time, he scraped off the insulation to the starter wire, his fingers feeling fat as he struggled to avoid touching the exposed strands.

  Headlights pierced the darkness.

  Thomas flipped his phone and jerked the two joined wires apart. He wrapped one hand around the Maxim 9, and patted along the floor with the other. Finding the power button for his phone, he killed the display light.

  A two-way radio squawked over the approaching purr of a car’s engine. Airport cops, CBP, security—the driver’s exact identity didn’t matter. Thomas figured anyone still on duty was part of whatever the hell was going down at the airport.

  Some kind of coup?

  The sweat dotting his face joined and slid in fat drops down his skin. A cramp squeezed at the muscles of his right leg, the limb tucked and twisted against the seat as his grip on the handgun lightly pulsed.

  An eternity seemed to pass before the lights moved on and the sound of the vehicle faded to nothing.

  Thomas lifted his head, took a few darting glances around the parking garage then repaired the work he had just torn apart. Finished stripping the starter wire, he touched it to the two lines he had twisted together.

  The Caddy grouched and coughed a few times then came to life. Thomas cut off a measure of the electrical tape and covered the wires so he wouldn’t electrocute himself while driving. The Caddy threatened to stall. He revved it a few times, his gaze glancing off the fuel gauge.

  The owner had parked it with a full tank, which he figured was somewhere around a twenty-five gallon capacity. But the sedan was an old beast. The best he could hope for was ten miles a gallon. That gave him no more than two hundred and fifty miles out of an anticipated trip of eight hundred miles to reach his Indiana home.

  There will be other cars, he reminded himself as he settled the Maxim 9 across his lap and pulled out of the parking space.

  Looking for the garage’s exit sign, he mentally planned his route for the trip ahead. To reach Ellis and Hannah, he had to travel west. But first he would drive south toward Centreville where Gavin DeBerg, an old acquaintance, had moved in early spring.

  Thomas figured that if an old app developer half a decade out of the military was a threat, then so was Gavin.

  Unless, of course, DeBerg was an accomplice.

  CHAPTER THREE

 

  GAVIN’S CENTREVILLE home stood on a one-acre plot with another hundred acres of public parkland behind it. The house itself was an ostentatious eleven thousand square feet distributed among two stories and a finished basement. Separate quarters attached to the house had their own garage space for the red haired au pair from Ireland with the perky breasts who had spent most of her work hours in the pool or tanning alongside it on Thomas’s last visit.

  Instead of pulling up to the house, Thomas drove the Cadillac down a bike path that started half a mile away and parked the vehicle out of sight of the main road. Engine idling, he ran a line up the AM and FM dials one last time as the sky lightened to a muddy orange.

  The radio was nothing but static, no commercial or emergency stations left broadcasting. Some short wave stations or hobbyists might be on, but his travel radio was in his checked baggage at the airport. And he couldn’t use the bloodied CBP radio he had taken from one of the dead agents. With the unit’s built in GPS, he had only kept the device until he was free of the airport.

  Knowing he was losing the ability to listen in on any Fed and local law enforcement channels, he had felt a hollow twinge in his gut when he opened the Caddy’s window and let the hand radio fly. But the risk of keeping it with him was too damn high.

  Thomas killed the engine then prepared the wires so he would only need to give them a quick tap together if he had to haul ass away from Gavin’s home. Next he popped the trunk to make sure there were no goodies stored inside—like a shotgun or a rifle.

  Finding the space empty of everything but the spare tir
e with its cloth covering that matched the spotless carpet, he groaned. Granny didn’t even have a jack in her trunk.

  Conquering the urge to slam the lid, he closed it gently then pushed down until he heard the lock click. Placing both of his bags on the car, he took a few minutes sorting through his supplies. The most essential items went into the CBP bag.

  Leaving the bike path, Thomas carried everything with him.

  He walked through woods he had spent time birdwatching in over the Fourth of July weekend. Becca and Ellis had been with him on that trip. Thomas hadn’t yet committed to sending his son off to an all-boys private high school for his senior year. Becca had just wrapped up a project for her company that was, and was not, part of a grant from the National Security Agency.

  Among the three of them, there had been a sort of détente on the extended holiday weekend made more relaxed by the presence of outsiders.

  Nearing the end of the trees surrounding Gavin’s home, Thomas found a brush pile and concealed the carryon bag. A quick scan of the immediate ground confirmed there was no other pile he could mistake as the one he had used. He also spotted a football-sized rock near the base of one tree. He picked it up and walked to the outer edge of Gavin’s lawn without breaking cover. He dropped the rock, got on his knees and pulled out his field glasses.

  Gavin lived in a subdivision of multi-million dollar homes with lots from one acre to ten and values ranging from the roughly two million Gavin had signed for to upwards of thirty million. For the DeBerg family, the new home was an increase in land and square feet but a large step down in cost. Thomas had viewed the move as a reprimand by Gavin to his German-born wife Agnetha because it took her away from the art gallery crowd she had endlessly fawned over when the couple lived in Arlington.