Alien Hunter: Underworld by Whitley Strieber Page B

battery on my phone.”
    â€œI thought you were a goner. Give me a heads-up next time.”
    â€œI’m at Wright-Pat. There’s been an incident. I’ve ordered our facility here sealed.”
    â€œAn incident? What kind of an incident?”
    â€œYou need a team out here to clean up some atypical remains. Plus there’s a casualty. An airman.”
    â€œShit!”
    â€œThe body’s been mutilated. You’ll need to commandeer it. Our eyes only.”
    â€œWhat are you telling me?”
    â€œWhat you need to do! And I need a plane.” He would have preferred to drive to Washington, but there was no time for that now.
    He left the facility, closed the access door, and listened as the locks clicked into place on the other side. The cleanup team from their unit were now the only people on the planet with the code needed to open this door.
    He wondered whom she would choose. Things had gone wrong before, but this was the only time anything remotely this messy had happened.
    An airman pulled up in a big SUV. He got out to open the door, but Flynn let himself in. He sat in silence as he was driven to the flight line. When they arrived, a jet was just being positioned on the apron. It was the full dinner: a general officer’s plane complete with a cabin crew of two.
    â€œYou don’t need to stay on board,” he said as he stooped to enter the plane.
    â€œSir?”
    â€œLeave the aircraft, please. You’re not needed today.” There was no reason to put anybody in harm’s way who didn’t absolutely need to be there.
    The two stewards looked at each other.
    â€œDo it!”
    Slowly, they went to the rear of the cabin. When the crew were down on the apron, he activated the steps. The steps came up, the door closed, and he locked it down. He signaled the pilots. “Get this thing cleared and get it moving.”
    There was some sort of a reply, but he didn’t listen. As always, he had work to do. He’d been away from his unending records search for over thirty hours, and he didn’t like that. He pulled out his iPad and hooked into the secure network, then began once again searching police reports—town by town, and city by city.
    He looked at murders, disappearances, accidents, anything that might lead to the dark place that was his beat. He worked for an hour. For two. He stopped only when he had assured himself that his beat was for the moment quiet.
    He wouldn’t allow himself to hope, but maybe—just maybe—he had indeed gotten the last of them. Maybe it was just him and Morris now.
    He listened to the roar of the wind speeding past the airframe and to the noise of the engines. He let his eyes close and was immediately asleep, or as asleep as he ever got. The doctors called it “guarded sleep,” the sleep of men in combat. He dreamed of Abby on a blue day on the beach, watching the gulls wheel. The sweet smell of her cornsilk hair filled his memory, and he sighed and turned as if toward somebody in the seat beside him.
    His eyes opened. He had become aware of a change in the pitch of the engines. He evaluated it. Normal. They were landing.
    New rules: Be faster on the scene than ever before. When the aliens are apparently dead, cut the remains to pieces.
    It was an air force plane, but it landed him in the general aviation section at Dulles.
    He left without a word, not looking back. The mystified pilots watched him cross the tarmac and disappear into the terminal. They had never even seen his face.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    WHILE HE was away, Flynn’s personal car had been moved into the general aviation parking lot. He walked over to it, a black Audi R8 GT. To a man with his reflexes, most cars drove like buses. The R8 did not.
    There was a bag from Wagshal’s on the passenger seat, which, as his standing order with Transportation instructed, contained a pastrami on rye and a Brooklyn Lager. As a Southwest 737 screamed