Agent for a Cause (The Agents for Good) (16 page)

Breakfast as usual was good. Yet one more blessing to add to all the others I was experiencing. Kevin disappeared off to somewhere, which left Anna and I alone at the table.

She gave me a funny look and asked, “What’s that look for?”

I just shook my head smiling, as I finished fleshing out the newest fantasy I’d just come up with in my head that I wanted to share with her later. Alarms began to shriek as concealed warning lights began to flash throughout the house.

I upturned the table and grabbed Anna, who was sitting deathly still in sudden shock at the sound of unexpected alarms and lights all around us going off. I dragged her to the kitchen and pushed her down on the inside of the kitchen’s surround counters.

“Stay!” I yelled above the noise of the alarms.

“Kevin!” She screamed back at me frantically.

“I know!” I answered, as I took off at a run for the bedrooms.

The lights were now flashing red. I ran into his bedroom only he wasn’t there! He wasn’t in mine either or the spare bedroom. I ran into the bathroom but nothing! Where was he?

I started to run back towards the kitchen and living area, which is when the bullets began to strike the house as the heavy caliber rounds chewed their way through it.

Interlacing cannon fire of thousands upon thousands of shells chased me in hot pursuit down the hall back to the kitchen, as the armor piercing rounds punched through the thickly insulated walls of the house as if they were made of butter. I heard Anna screaming and saw her with her hands over her ears as the house all around us was disintegrating as it was torn apart by hot lead.

I ran the fastest sprint of my life and even then I don’t know how I made it back to the shelter of the kitchen counters. I dove the last few feet as the shells chasing me slammed into the thick steel armor plating that the kitchen cabinets and counters were inlaid with. Crawling I reached Anna. She was crying hysterically and saying something, but little could be heard over the whining destruction of the bullets destroying the house.

Glancing around corners of the splintered cabinets I made out at least six to seven black helicopters surrounding the house, as they poured round after round into it. They had to be using some kind of infrared heat seeking targeting system to have us so pinned down. Kevin was likely dead, only a sudden glance back into the living room proved otherwise.

Kevin was standing there crying and beating at himself, completely freaked out, by what was going on. If I made even an attempt to go get him I would be instantly shredded apart by bullets.

“Why aren’t the bullets hitting him?” Anna screamed into my ear.

The dawning realization came to me then, “Because he’s what they came for!” I answered feeling sick to my stomach.

Yet again I had failed to keep them safe. One of the helicopters swooped down low and I watched as a man poised in the open bay of the helicopter brought a bazooka like weapon up to his shoulder. He shot it off and a grappling net swallowed Kevin whole and ripped him up out of the house and into the air.

Anna screamed and moved forward as the chopper left the remaining group of six choppers, but I held her back. She turned and sobbed into my chest. Her fist hit my chest repeatedly, “Why?” She repeated over and over.

“Because there are evil men that will do anything if the price is right! Anna?”

She looked up at me, as I noticed several cuts on her face from flying glass shards.

“I’ll get him back! I swear it on my life!”

She nodded and wiped the tears from off her face as I saw a new side of Anna emerge or perhaps it’s the harder edge that every loving mother possesses when her child is threatened.

“I know you will and I’m going to help you do it!”

I didn’t argue with her, it would have done no good. I would need help. More help than just she could provide though, because I knew who had kidnapped Kevin.

I reached a hand up and pulled a meat tenderizer mallet out of a drawer and proceeded to smash away at a kitchen floor tile. It shattered revealing a handle beneath it. I smashed the rest of the hidden door’s outline out and I pulled the heavy steel door up which gave a creak of protest. The bullets had stopped.

“Down now!” I yelled as I grabbed Anna and dropped her down into the dark hole in the floor.

I jumped in after her pulling the heavy door closed as I went. Seconds later the dark space surrounding us punctured by our rapid breathing shuddered, as the house above us was hit by missiles, which ignited an inferno, of what little was left of what had once been my home.

I flicked a light on in the space, as the house above us burned and collapsed in on itself. There sat my bike as I’d left it. I’d never been a fan of the chrome and glitziness of something like a Harley. All I cared about was performance and speed. I picked a small five pound oxygen tank off the shelf and slung it around Anna shoulders. I grabbed a helmet and slid it onto her head and hooked the oxygen tube to it and turned the dial.

“This is just oxygen in case there’s poisonous gas ahead. Can you breathe?”

She nodded her eyes full of questions. I repeated the process for myself and then slid onto the bike and fired it up. It came to life with a throaty purr and I gestured to Anna to get onto the crotch rocket behind me. She slid on and her arms came around me tightly.

Her words were muffled, “Where are we going?”

I flicked the headlights on, “Through that old lava tube.” I said loud enough for her to hear.

“What!” She screeched, as I opened the throttle up wide and we shot forward, as her scream trailed out behind us.

This was wild! I’d only done this once before and I hadn’t really cared much about living at the time so the risk hadn’t registered, but now it did! I wanted to very much keep on living as well as keep Anna alive and I had to rescue Kevin.

The old lava tube twisted and turned and got narrower then wider. It went up and down and at times we were horizontal on the sidewalls as we went around sharp turns. The walls of the tube were smooth, which they had to be for this to be possible. If they had been just the least bit rough the sharpness of the lava would have sliced the tires off the bike within minutes or even possibly seconds.

The other hazard was that in the typical dormant lava tube there could be sections where the walls could be paper thin and equally fragile. I just hoped we were going fast enough to skip over such patches of wall thinness and not break through. Otherwise it would be lights out.

It was hard to breathe, but that wasn’t because of any lack of oxygen. Rather it was a direct result of Anna’s tightly clasped death grip around me. This really was crazy, I had to admit, as I felt the air turn warm. Perhaps this had been a mistake, but we would likely have died anyway if we had stayed back there in the dark little hole under the kitchen.

We began the climb upwards and I felt relief flow through me. We were headed up towards the rim. A couple of minutes later we roared out into the sunlight on the outward ring of the caldera. I looked out over the basin of the volcano to where my house was now just a pile of burning embers being watched over by six hovering black vultures intent on ensuring the kill. Off in the distance headed for the sea I saw the chopper that carried Kevin.

It looked like the vultures still gathered over their perceived kill in the basin had seen enough and they started to break away. I tore my helmet off and cast it aside and I heard Anna do the same. I raised my finger to point at the far-off chopper, “That one has Kevin on it.”

“What are you going to do?” Anna asked.

I brought my wrist up and started manipulating the dials on my watch.

“Remember how I was telling you that this is a 500 year cycle volcano and that we were in year 312?”

“Yes?”

“Well I lied and I do apologize for that. We’re in year 512. I was planning on moving this summer anyway.”

I pressed the dial and it moved inward with a click. I took a lot of effort in the preparation of my getaway places and none so much as I had with this place. In a centric ring around the outside perimeter of the caldera floor, core charges uniformly spaced apart, blew.

Within two seconds another ring within the first ring blew and so on and on until the blasts culminated with a single larger eruption directly under the house in the center of the caldera.

Each core charge had been drilled down approximately half way through the hard crust and when the charges blew the bottom half of the crust at the core charge locations slumped off away into the magma chamber. Hot pressurized gases that had been in the making for hundreds of years erupted out of the core holes shooting straight up into the sky like angry geysers full of molten ash instead of water.

The entire caldera, in half a minute, looked as if someone had turned on a giant sprinkler. The black choppers had no chance. Desperately they tried to pull free of the caldera and gain elevation, but the ash columns were already a mile above them in the air. Some of the choppers exploded in midair from the extreme heat of the escaping gases, most of them fell to the volcano floor, their air intakes hopelessly clogged with ash.

The floor had already begun to crack up radiating out from the drill holes. In the center where the house had been a large ash column erupted as the crust broke up and sank into the seething red magma below. It was bittersweet to see the place that I had first experienced so much ecstasy with Anna disappear for forever, but I prided myself on the in depth planning I had done, which had ensured that the home in the basin hadn’t been our final resting place.

I turned the bike and gunned it down the hill toward the road that led to civilization, as the dark menacing ash clouds rose up behind us to fill the sky.

Chapter Twelve

Hope in the Balance

It was five hours later after igniting one of nature’s greatest furies that Anna and I checked into a hotel in Germany. Anna sat on the bed and I could see that she was all about done in. I sat down in a chair by the bed and began to mentally prepare myself for the phone call that I had to make.

My suspicions as to Kevin’s abductors had been confirmed and that was a very bad thing. The chopper had met up with a seaplane and from there Kevin had been flown somewhere into Eastern Europe and I had a good idea where.

I couldn’t rescue Kevin alone and hope to succeed in the survival of either of us and I needed permission before I could do anything. If permission wasn’t given I could still try to do it on my own, but I doubted that I’d get far. My hand shook slightly as I reached for the cell phone on the table as Anna watched me mutely from the bed. I dialed the number in and waited.

“Hello?”

“Flint its Tyre. I need your help Flint.”

There was a long pause and I could well imagine what he must be thinking. I never asked for help. I’d sooner die, but such pride was a thing of the past and I simply couldn’t afford such a weakness anymore, not with a boy’s life on the line.

“What happened Tyre?”

“Kevin’s been kidnapped.”

“I’m on my way Tyre!”

“No that’s not what I need Flint. It’s going to take more than two of us to rescue him.”

“I can pick up Galloway.” Flint said quickly.

“Flint in addition to needing more help I also need permission or you can’t help me.”

There was another long pause, “Who has him?”

“The Iron Wills Club.”

“Are you sure Tyre, because that would be a direct violation of our treaty with them?”

“I’m sure! I saw the emblem on their choppers and I received word from a source who saw the plane that I believe to have had Kevin on arrive in Prague about an hour ago. It’s them.

They caught me by surprise Flint! I think they thought they had me and Anna dead, with the likelihood of the incident getting back to our agency being an unlikely one. I need you to talk to Chantry for me. Would you do this for me Flint?”

“You know I will! This number’s good to reach you for a little while?” Flint asked.

“Yes.”

“Hang tight then.”

The call ended and I set the phone back down on the table and looked at Anna.

“This Chantry is he the one that shot and recruited you?” Anna asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you think we can rescue Kevin? Be honest with me Tyre! I want the truth!”

Her eyes were imploring and I wanted to tell her anything it took to give her peace, but I owed her the truth. “If it’s only you and me then no I don’t see much hope for Kevin or us. If Chantry let’s Flint and Galloway help us then our odds of success raise up to about 40 percent. If Chantry commits the whole agency and the board agrees its 100 percent chance of success or as close to it as you can get.

Even then something could still go wrong Anna. There’s no certainty in missions like this other than that something will go wrong.”

Tears slid down her cheeks and I could tell that she was holding in a wealth of emotion. She nodded as if to say thank you for being honest with her.

“Anna even if Chantry says no I’m still going after Kevin.”

She nodded again and her lips quivered as she softly intoned, “I know.”

She glanced at the cell phone on the table and then back at me and tried to summon up a watery smile. “I’ll just have to pray that he says yes and that everything goes right.”

She slipped off the bed and turned to pray with her elbows on the bed.

“You’re going to pray?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Do you think it works?”

She turned her head to me, “Yes I do! God sent me you didn’t He?”

She turned back to her clasped hands and I felt shaken. It was hard for me to fathom that I could ever be the answer to someone’s prayer and yet she clearly believed so. I glanced at the phone on the table as I listened to Anna pour out her soul with a fervency that was as real as the God she believed in.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when the choice to accept more of the same is present as is the choice to do something different. Something fundamentally right.

I picked the phone off the table and slid onto my knees beside Anna. She glanced over at me and I showed her the phone in my palm and her hand closed over top of it with mine and we started praying together over the same plea before God.