A Week to Remember
by Timeguardian

Chapter Eleven

After Race briefed him on the situation based off of Hadji's info, Phil Corbin formed a quick ten person strike force and rushed to the abandoned campground with Race in tow.

Once they arrived on the site along with an ambulance, Phil quickly briefed the team as they armed themselves and set them on their way before heading in beside Race.

While his friend chose to go to the center of the property, Phil split off to check the perimeter.

When she initially split up with Hadji to check the area out, Jessie Bannon chose to skirt around the perimeter, checking the outermost buildings and cabins.

Keeping to the shadows as much as she could despite the daylight, Jessie managed to make it to a small group of cabins near a pond when she caught sight of a familiar figure. Uh oh.

It was the man who managed to overpower and throw her out of plane the day Jonny was kidnapped.

Jessie ducked quickly behind one of the cabins and struggled to get her breathing back to normal.

All during her recovery, Jessie suffered nightmares from the attack. It frustrated her to no end but now that she was this close to him, it was all she could do to stand her ground without shaking out of her shoes.

Carefully, she kept her back to the cabin and inched forward. She couldn't stay there forever – Jonny needed them right now.

She neared the corner of the cabin when suddenly a hand seemingly out of nowhere reached from around the corner and grabbed her by the neck. With a strangled squeak, Jessie felt herself slammed against the side of the cabin, her attacker being the very person she had tried to avoid.

The man's appearance had not changed much since that day – he was still strong as anything and despite her clawing at his hand, she couldn't get him to budge. Jessie then tried kicking out at him, but he did not move or release his grip on her.

He sneered at her. "Well, well – can't get enough punishment can we? I threw you out of a plane and you survived. Now you and your friends want to interrupt my moment of triumph. Let's speed things up, shall we?"

With his free hand, he quickly dug into the pocket of his pants and brought out what looked like a small box with a button on it.

"You think it's really that easy to get the best of me?" He finally asked. "Well guess what? I win. The name of Rex Miller will be remembered throughout history."

Rex pressed the button on the unit. "There – twenty minutes until the United States falls apart."

Jessie was barely holding onto consciousness when she noticed darkness edging in on her vision. I'm out of time. Dad, where are you?

Phil reached the area around the pond when he heard an unfamiliar voice. Once he rounded a corner, he was shocked to see a man trying to choke Jessie to death!

As quietly as he could, he slipped his Sig Sauer from his holster and approached. Something about the man struck a familiar chord in him, but there was no time to consider that.

Phil raised the butt of his gun and swooped in, landing a solid blow just above the man's left ear.

He was rewarded in his efforts when the man released Jessie, swayed, and toppled to the ground. Phil pounced on him immediately, securing the man's hands behind him with a zip tie cuff.

Phil looked over at Jessie, who at this point sank to the ground gratefully, taking in a huge lungful of air.

"You okay, Jessie?"

Jessie nodded her head, reached over and picked up the small box that Rex dropped after Phil took him down. Now that she had a better look at the device, she could see the button he used along with a flashing red light emanating from the top of it. "It looks like a signaling device, but I wonder to what. Once he used it, he said there was twenty minutes left."

Phil offered her a hand and got her to her feet. "I think we better get moving considering the circumstances, but let me check on my team first."

He then reached up to touch a button on the headset he wore. "This is Alpha leader – need backup at my location - target secure and ready for transport. I want a sit rep from the rest of alpha team, now!"

Race rushed past members of Phil's team who already had taken down targets of their own.

Once he arrived at the center of the campground, Race started checking each of the surrounding cabins in turn by keeping low, listening, and looking in the windows. It took nearly three tries before he finally found the sight that he was hoping for.

He opened the front door and rushed inside to find Hadji standing near a table, wide eyed and getting into a defensive stance.

"Hadji, what - oh."

The sight of Jonny unconscious and slumped over at the table stopped him in his tracks. He rushed over and began checking the teen out as Hadji explained. "He was hit hard on the head, Race. I can barely keep him awake and he insisted that I check out the laptop that was left here. It was being used by the boss, apparently."

Race heard a squawk over his headset and listened to Phil's new updates before transmitting his own. "Alpha leader, this is Alpha one. I found where the boss was staying. I need medical help to this location – I located Jonny but he's injured."

"Understood. The target had what looked like a switch that he used but I don't see that anything has changed. He claimed a countdown started before we took him into custody. Do you see anything on your end?" Phil asked.

"Hold on," Race replied before turning to Hadji. "Hadji, Phil thinks a countdown may have been set in motion."

Hadji looked at him warily before sitting down at the chair nearest the laptop computer and typed in quite a few commands before looking up in alarm. "He is right. A countdown HAS started."

Race wiped a hand across his brow and thought fast. "Is it for the missiles?"

In reply, Hadji turned the laptop until Race could see the screen. On the screen was an emulator type session that was clearly a connection to the missing computer system – Race knew that much from the screen structure that Dr. Quest always insisted on adhering to when he wrote and used computer code.

In the middle of the screen, a silent timer was counting down for a command to launch – fifteen minutes left.

Race swore. "I've got to update Phil and his team. Get Dr. Quest on the line now - he was heading to the study to work on this when I left the compound."

Switching back to his headset, he clued in Phil on their status as two EMTs came into the cabin.

Dr. Quest sat in his study and studied the computer in front of him. He had brought up what information he knew about the late professor's work and thought about how he could approach the problem of breaking something like that.

IRIS sounded an alert. "Phone call incoming from Hadji Singh."

"IRIS, put it on speakerphone."

IRIS complied and moments later he declared. "Hadji, this better be good news."

He listened intently as Hadji described the setup that he encountered. "Race is here and we have a problem. We found a laptop computer here that is tied into the computer system that they stole from you. There's a time on it now, and it looks like a countdown was set in motion early – we have about thirteen minutes before an order is sent to launch those missiles."

Dr. Quest dropped the pencil he was holding and looked at his progress on the computer screen. He was only just wrapping his mind around what the late Professor had accomplished. "I'm far from ready – is my actual computer equipment there?"

"All we have found so far is the laptop."

Something didn't make sense about this. His thoughts were coming a mile a minute as he cobbled together the makings of a plan. "Put Race on the line, Hadji. While I am talking to him, see if you can get that network to communicate with ours. It may be hampered by the cloaking software but with both of us working on this, it should break to our advantage."

"Right away, Doctor Quest."

Hadji handed his phone to Race and quickly turned his attention back to the computer in front of him.

Race brought the phone to his ear. "Benton-"

"Listen and listen well, Race – the setup that Hadji is describing doesn't make sense. My computer equipment has to be nearby. There's not enough range to do this otherwise."

"What am I looking for?"

"A building with electrical generators or drawing a lot of power – in an abandoned campground full of cabins like that, it should stick out like a sore thumb," Dr. Quest explained, "and Race? You have my authorization to get that equipment offline by any means necessary."

"Right. I'm on my way."

Race was about to hand off the phone back to Hadji before he heard his friend ask. "Race, you found Jonny?"

He knew that question would be asked but still it was all he could do to keep his voice even. "Hadji did. Benton, he was injured and unconscious when I got here. EMTs are checking him over now and he will be en route to the hospital shortly."

There was a sharp intake of breath over the connection before Race finally heard him mutter. "Then let's get this done."

Time is tight for our Quest team. More soon.