Page 98 of Hush

“None of your damn business where I am. Brewer is safe.” Mike reached for Tom, resting his hand on Tom’s thigh.

“Well, wherever you are, get in contact with Brewer. We can’t find him. He’s not answering at his house and he’s not checked into the Hyatt. We need verbal confirmation he’s good and then you need eyes on him within two hours.”

Mike sat up. Those were the procedures for an active threat. “What’s going on?”

“Russia launched a shitshow of military force overnight. They say they’re just exercises, but the president moved everyone up to DEFCON three. We got tipped off by the FBI that some Russian gangbangers are on the move, too. Could be nothing. Could be a coordinated attempt to make a hit. We need to secure Brewer.”

“Okay. Yeah. I’ll get in contact with him.” Mike swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll get him and take him to a secure location.”

“Maybe you can actually put him in the Hyatt. You know. Under our secure protection? At the taxpayer’s expense?”

Mike hung up on him.

Tom draped himself over Mike’s shoulder, leaning on his back. “Everything okay?”

“No.” Mike buried his face in his hands. “Something’s going on. We’ve got to get back to DC.”

Chapter 26

July 5th

Dark, leaden clouds, brimming with heavy rain and sparking with furious lightning swirled over the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and out into the Gulf of Finland. Winds tore left and right, shaking over the U.S. recon plane running a racetrack pattern from Finland to Estonia and back again, skirting the edge of Russian airspace.

They were monitoring Russian communications, or doing the best they could in the weather. For days, they’d been alternating flights with four other recon planes, vacuuming the skies and sucking up all Russian communications they could. Geeks and analysts decrypted the data and translated the lingo, forwarding everything to the big brains back stateside. Their job was to fly and collect, fly and collect. No matter what.

It was dull, even in the weather. Until—

Lights flickered, and the plane bounced, jerking left and right, unseating crew and anything that wasn’t strapped down. Monitor banks situated in long lines, signal scanners and interceptors, fuzzed and fritzed, making their multi-million-dollar scanning equipment meaningless.

Sergeant Playa picked herself up, and, doubled-over against the turbulence, staggered to her console. There was a dizzying array of dials in front of her, switches and buttons and toggles that controlled an army of fine-tuned instrumentation, all designed to grab Russian ELINT, electronic intelligence, as best it could.

Voices rose throughout the cabin, panicked and frantic.

“Sir! My station is dead!”

“LT, I’ve got nothing!”

“We’ve lost power!”

“Shit, the whole plane has lost power!”

The plane bucked again, jerked as if it had been rear-ended, and then started to drop. Playa saw Lieutenant Hall’s eyes go saucer-wide, a full ring of white all around his irises. Alarms wailed, screaming from every console.

“It was an electromagnetic burst, sir! Someone directed a microwave burst at us! Fried everything!”

They were starting to dive, powerless.

Freefall lasted four seconds, but to Playa, it felt like a lifetime.

“This is Captain Paulson. All crew, buckle in tight and stow gear. We are breaking off course and taking evasive action.” The intercom crackled, flickering to life in fits and starts as the backup batteries powered on and the engines restarted.

“Find the bastards that did this,” Hall growled. “Find them now! This could be the start of a war!”

Playa’s hands flew over her console. “Source! Bearing…. Jesus! They’re close!”

“Sir!” Sergeant Mitchell, down the line of scanners and hovering over the rebooted radar controls, shouted, “There is a Russian ELINT jet closing on us, bearing one-five-one! Distance, less than one mile!”

Playa grabbed her console right as their plane dipped into an S-roll and banked hard, a move more accustomed to a fighter jet than their lumbering recon plane. One of the scanners leaned down and puked between his knees.