The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

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.
    The fighters touched down, offloaded their passengers and were gone again within a few minutes.
    A number of airport security officials, as well as local and Chilean federal police, were waiting. Garner spoke to them alone for ten minutes, while Travis sat aside with the agents. He watched Garner make his case. No doubt it was a fairly big deal to land in someone’s country and ask permission to personally detain the passenger of an incoming private jet—and to request that it all be kept secret. Travis wondered how many people of lesser clout than a former American president could’ve pulled it off.
    They sat in the lounge overlooking the tarmac. They waited. Garner called his brother and got an update from satellite and ground-based tracking stations monitoring Finn’s aircraft. It was right on schedule.
    From the airport lounge Travis could see the city in one direction and the desert in the other. Arica was a beautiful place. In the predawn its structures stood silhouetted against the pink ocean. Most of its streetlamps were still on, their light softened by the breaking day. Toward the south end of the city’s shoreline, a giant stone formation punched up out of the ground, shaped like an overturned ship’s hull. It was at least four hundred feet high.
    Then there was the desert. Which was simply empty. It stretched away south and slightly east of town, hemmed in by shallow rises of the land on both sides—these too were empty. There was just nothing out there past the city’s edge. Not so much as a lonely weed.
    The sun came up and the sky went pale blue. There wasn’t a trace of cloud in it, in any direction. Travis wondered if there ever was.
    Finn’s plane was on approach. Two minutes out. Travis was standing in the dim interior of a mechanical room, just inside a door that accessed the tarmac.
    He was holding an HK MP7 that’d been provided by airport security. So were the Secret Service agents. Garner had one too, but at the agents’ insistence he wasn’t going to participate in the action. He seemed annoyed about it, but only a little. Travis guessed that he’d only agreed because he didn’t expect much action. As far as anyone could tell, Finn was traveling alone. Even if he did have security with him, a light business jet couldn’t hold enough people to counter the strength that was waiting here. In addition to Travis and the agents, the local and federal police had dozens of armed officers concealed among the airport’s structures. Garner had thoroughly convinced them that Isaac Finn was not someone they wanted on their soil.
    Someone in the tower spoke over an intercom. “Ninety seconds.”
    Travis glanced at Garner in the vague light. “The police are clear that we’re taking point on this, right?”
    Garner nodded. “The way we’re doing this, they’d prefer their people not become involved at all, beyond providing a show of force. Makes it easier to pretend it never happened.”
    “All I care about is making sure no one shoots at the plane while the cylinder’s inside,” Travis said. “It’d be the same as opening fire while Paige and Bethany were in there.”
    Garner took his point. “Should be no need for any of that. Just let him open the door and exit the plane, and