The Agent's Daughter (10 page)

Melina backed out of the kitchen and ran
upstairs.

Melina was in no mood for talking to her
dad, and she certainly did not want to run into Angela. So she got
ready for school and skipped breakfast, only coming downstairs when
her dad yelled up to her that it was time to go. Her dad was not in
a mood to talk either. He had to be to the airport in less than an
hour, and he was already starting to go through the pending mission
in his head. With her brother in the car, though, the drive was
anything but quiet. After they backed out of the driveway and drove
down their street, he started right in.

“
I’m a pretty big hit with
the ladies,” Travis said, looking over at Melina.

She had planned on looking out the window
and stewing about Angela for the whole drive to school, but this
was too good to ignore.

“
What do you mean, ‘I’m a
pretty big hit with the ladies?’” Melina asked.

“
Just what I said,” Travis
replied, now lowering his voice. “I’m as smooth as a baby’s butt.
With butter on it.”

“
As smooth as a buttered
baby butt?” Melina said as she laughed. “Are you sure you want to
go with that visual?”

“
Why not?” Travis said.
“What would you suggest that I use instead?”

“
Silk, maybe. Or melted
chocolate. You never want to compare yourself to a butt. Anyway,
what makes you the ladies’ man all of a sudden?”

“
I don’t know why,” he
said, “but lately, some of the girls in my class have been coming
up to me before class, smiling and saying ‘Hi Travis’ in some weird
girly voice. And some of them come and sit by me at lunch. They
tell me that they like my hair.”

“
Well, you do have cool
hair,” Melina said. “And you are in seventh grade. This is about
the time that girls start to show interest. Just go with it. At
least they don’t think of you as a pest like I do.”

Melina smiled and mussed her brother’s
hair.

“
Hey!” he said. “You’re
messing with the source of my smoothness.”

Talking with Travis helped keep the
situation with her dad and Angela from her mind, but after he was
dropped off, and Melina and her dad were alone, there was absolute
silence. Melina was still focusing on her dad’s trip. She was never
happy when he left on a trip, but this was even worse. He was
leaving her with some woman ex-coworker with whom he seemed to be a
little too cozy.

She broke the silence. “Are we going to see
Mom this weekend?”

“
Yes,” he said. “This is a
short trip. I should be back before you get out of school on
Friday.”

“
Great. I figured that, as
part of my practice driving, I could drive us out there,” Melina
said.

The practice driving. Evan had completely
forgotten that he had promised he would help her practice her
driving.

“
Umm … good idea,” he
stammered.

They drove into the high school parking lot
and pulled up to the curb out front. Melina got out and came around
to her dad’s window.

“
Remember, Angela will be
at our house after school, so you can go right home,” he said as he
rolled down the window.

He puckered his lips, and she leaned forward
so he could kiss her forehead.

“
Have a safe trip, Daddy,”
she said as she walked toward the curb.

“
I will kiddo.”

…………………………
.

“
Thirty minutes to drop,
Mr. Roberts,” said a voice in Evan’s helmet. The voice came from
one of the pilots in the cockpit of the B2 stealth
bomber.

Nothing made Evan feel older than being
called ‘Mister’ by these young Air Force Pilots. He had tried to
get them to call him by his first name, but their military protocol
training precluded any sense of informality.

Evan was strapped into the MAC-25 SSC in the
bomb bay of the B2. Seated in a chair next to the SSC was a woman
with a clipboard. She was Colonel Shirley Beal, the Mission
Director.

“
How are you doing, Evan?”
Shirley asked.

She was regular Air Force but had worked
with Evan for so many years first names had long been standard.

“
I’m doing as well as can
be expected for being thirty minutes away from exiting a perfectly
good airplane sealed inside a giant pill,” he said as he let out an
uncomfortable laugh.

Shirley smiled and looked down at her
clipboard.

“
Okay,” she said, “Let’s
go over the checklist of your mission.”

On previous missions, he listened to the
checklist speech with the attention span of someone listening to
the ‘seat-is-also-a-flotation-device’ speech that flight attendants
make before a commercial flight. But he had not been on a mission
in a while, so he appreciated the focus that would be gained by
going over it one more time.

“
At 0400 hours, we will
pass directly over the Malaz reactor base,” Shirley began. “The
MAC-25 SSC will separate from the B2 at an altitude of 44,000
feet.”

Evan thought to himself. What is it with the
military and acronyms? Why didn’t they just call it something a
little more straightforward like Carbon Fiber Tube instead of
MAC-25 SSC? And, now that he thought about it, here he was in the
most advanced bomber aircraft in the world, a plane that was almost
invisible to radar, and it had the name B2. He thought it should
have one of those cool made-up names like the characters in the
Japanese anime cartoons his son watched. Something like Bombazar or
Stealtheus.

“
After the drop, the B2
will continue to circle the area,” she said. “We will have one of
its onboard cameras scanning the entire Malaz base and the other
focused on the reactor building. I will give you a heads-up if
anything is happening down there. The SSC will then descend for
40,000 feet, followed by the opening of the outer parachute. You
will hear an announcement of this in your earpiece.”

“
Will there be an
announcement if the outer parachute does not open?” Evan
asked.

Without looking up, Shirley continued, “You
then will be at 4,000 feet. Upon successful deployment of the outer
parachute, you will be falling at a slow enough rate for the SSC to
be released. At that point, it will automatically break free and
fall away from you, and you may remove your oxygen mask. Also, once
the SSC falls away, we will cease all contact. We cannot risk your
discovery with any radio transmissions. David Winfield from the
tools group will do his best to keep track of you from our camp
just across the southern Malaz border. Can you hear us, David?”

“
I hear you, loud and
clear Colonel,” David said, his voice booming into the B2 bomb
bay.

“
You will descend another
1,000 feet under the outer parachute,” Shirley said, “and then at
an altitude of 3,000 feet, the glider wings will deploy. This also
should happen automatically, triggered by an altitude sensor. The
joint that holds the wings together is hydraulic, so it should take
about twenty seconds to lock into place.”

“
I notice that you have
started using the word ‘should’,” Evan said. He heard snickering
from David.

Shirley continued, again without looking up.
“After the glider has been fully deployed, pull on this handle that
is right here above you. That will release the parachute. When you
are in level flight with the glider, use the GPS display in front
of you to guide you toward the target.”

“
What about the radiation
detector,” Evan asked.

“
It is mounted right here
behind your head,” Shirley said. “You need to be below 1,000 feet
and directly above the reactor for the detector to record any
meaningful data. It is not recommended that you fly below 800 feet
because you may not have enough altitude to reach the border. The
video camera is also mounted on a swivel above you behind your
head. The camera is already on, but the controls for direction and
zoom are on the glider handles. The video is displayed on the
screen next to the GPS screen. Take video of anything that looks
unusual.”

Evan fiddled with the video controls until
the screen showed a close-up of Shirley’s eyes and nose.

“
Aaaaah,” Evan said. “It’s
coming right for me. Save yourselves, everyone!”

Shirley smiled, but Evan was starting to
make her nervous. She knew that as the mission start time edged
closer, sometimes an agent would make a joke in order to ease the
tension. She had never seen Evan do this. She tried to get him to
focus on the mission.

“
The agency has yet to
determine whether this base is equipped with radar sensitive enough
to detect you,” Shirley advised, “but they put the probability at
twenty-seven percent.”

“
How did the geeks come up
with that number?” Evan said. “I’ve got a foolproof method for
determining whether an installation has good radar – missiles start
flying by you.”

This was not what Shirley wanted to hear.
More attempted humor. The agency was a little wary of this mission
because Evan had not been on a mission since Laura’s accident.
Sometimes when something terrible happens to a member of an agent’s
family, they will take risks that they may not have done otherwise.
Shirley did not think that Evan would take unnecessary risks, but
nobody knew for sure until he was in that situation.

“
We still have fifteen
minutes to drop,” Shirley said, “You seem off today. Is there
something on your mind?”

There was a long silence. Something had been
on his mind since the morning.

“
It’s Melina,” Evan
said.

Shirley was confused. Was there some new
aspect of the mission that she did not know about?

“
My daughter, Melina,”
Evan clarified. “She has started driver training at school, and I
have to help her practice her driving this weekend.”

More silence. This time, Shirley gave Evan a
strange look.

“
Let me get this
straight,” Shirley said, laughing. “You are minutes away from being
sealed in a carbon fiber canister and dropped from a stealth
bomber, so high that you need oxygen, all so you can gather
intelligence on a potential nuclear bomb facility in Malazistan.
And you are worried about your daughter learning to
drive?”

“
Well…” Evan said. “It
sounds different when you say it.”

“
Evan, they grow up. They
do stuff. What is the problem?” Shirley asked.

“
I can’t get Laura’s
accident out of my mind. What if Melina got into an accident. I
can’t go through that anguish again,” Evan replied.

Shirley understood now. “I am sorry, Evan,”
Shirley offered. “I should have made the connection.”

Uncomfortable, Evan shifted in his seat.

“
We all have things that
scare the heck out of us,” he said. “For some, it is heights, for
others, it is hang gliding over foreign nuclear sites. Do you know
the most terrifying day I’ve ever had?”

Shirley stared at him strapped into the SSC.
“I don’t know, every day?”

Evan smiled. “No. It was thirteen years ago.
Laura was eight months pregnant with Travis, and she and Melina and
I had gone to the mall for some reason.”

Shirley smiled. “Yeah. I know what you mean.
Those malls can be terribly scary. Was it Black Friday?”

Evan arched his brow and continued. “Melina
was two and a half with a mind of her own. We were in a store and I
turned around just in time to see Melina run out of the store at
full speed with Laura trying to catch her. By the time that I got
to the front of the store, they were both gone. I ran down the mall
in the direction that they went, but I couldn’t see them. I spent
the next ten minutes in absolute agony thinking that my pregnant
wife was lying passed out somewhere from trying to catch up to my
daughter who I was sure was now out in the parking lot getting run
over.”

“
Quite the imagination you
have there,” Shirley said. “Where were they?”

Evan now had a sheepish look on his face. “I
ran the wrong way. They were in the store next door the whole
time.”

Shirley held her clipboard in front of her
face so he could not see her giggle.

“
The point is, that day I
realized what it felt like to lose one of my kids. To experience
the sense that one of them was gone. Having Melina learn to drive
has brought those feelings back again.”

Shirley placed her hand on Evan’s shoulder.
“Evan. There is nothing that I can say that will make you feel
better about letting your daughter drive. But I will say that from
what I have heard about her, she is a mature, young woman. I am
sure she has her mother’s accident fresh on her mind. She is going
to be a more careful driver than you are.”

Evan thought for a moment and then grabbed
Shirley’s arm. “You’re right. Thank you, Shirley.”

“
Now, let me finish up my
mission checklist,” Shirley said as she smacked Evan’s
helmet.

“
The GPS unit has the
exact coordinates of the reactor building. Once the GPS has
determined that you are the close enough to the reactor building
for the scintillation detector to work, this timer will start. As
long as you are still within the correct distance, the timer
counts. If you stray outside the range, the timer will stop. You
must fly over the building until the timer reaches one minute to be
assured that the equipment has had enough samples to give an
accurate reading.”