Exit 9 Read Online Free PDF

“What is it?”
    Rachel frowned and shook her head. “I…I don’t know. I thought I had something, but…”
    “What?”
    Again, she shook her head. “Nothing, I guess.”
    He knew that was a lie. Whatever it was, she was still mulling it over. But that was her way. Once she had it figured out, if she ever did, she’d share it with him.
    He looked back at the map. “We can’t ignore the fact that they might have found Bluebird. We’re going to have to divert one of the other teams to check this out. Leon, correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like brown team is almost done with its route.”
    Leon nodded. “They’re due to report in this evening. Once they’ve done that, they’re freed up.”
    “Good. Send them to Lougheed. Let’s find out what happened to our people.”
    “Will do.”
    Leon and the others returned to their desks, leaving Matt and Pax standing at the map.
    “And if it is Bluebird?” Pax said.
    Matt knew exactly what his old friend was asking. It was something he’d also been giving a lot of thought to. “It’ll be time to bring him in.”

5
     
    I.D. MINUS 14 DAYS
     
    B ROWN TEAM LEADER Gagnon looked out the window from his seat behind the controls of the seaplane at the circle of light on the choppy ocean below. Wright, his partner, sat in the seat behind him, operating the wireless remote that controlled the spotlight attached to the bottom of the plane.
    Since the previous afternoon, they’d been searching for any sign of yellow team. They would have started sooner, but a severe storm had passed through the area, grounding them for over forty-eight hours.
    The real miracle, if one wanted to call it that, was that the sea hadn’t completely iced over yet. That was global warming for you, Gagnon thought. Even this close to winter, there were still ice-free parts of the Arctic Ocean that had never been that way at this time of year in the past.
    “Anything?” he asked.
    “Just water.”
    It was all that Gagnon had seen, too. “Let’s move on to the next sector.”
    He straightened out the plane, and headed for the next grid coordinates.
    They were both acutely aware that it could have been the middle of summer with twenty-four-hour daylight, and they might still not spot any wreckage if something had happened to the yellow team’s boat. A rogue wave could have swamped the vessel and taken the whole thing down, or the rough seas could have broken everything into tiny bits and spread it far and wide so that there’d be nothing to draw attention. The fact that it was less than two weeks shy of winter, and the only light they had to cover the hundreds of square miles below them was a small spotlight, made the task seem impossible.
    Two more hours, Gagnon decided. If nothing turned up, they’d call it a night and radio the Ranch to see if they should continue the search tomorrow or pack it in.
    __________
     
    T HE ISLAND WAS small, found on only the most detailed of maps. At its widest, it was only a quarter-mile across. It was, in the most generous terms, a rocky, ice-covered piece of nothing.
    Five hours earlier, two men, a camouflage shelter, and the equipment they would need for their assignment had been flown in. At the time of their drop-off, they’d been unsure how long they were going to have to stay, but at most, it would be no more than two nights, and it was quite possible they’d be sleeping in their own beds back at Bluebird that very evening.
    Ten miles away, a Project boat, looking very much like a fishing vessel slowly making its way back to port somewhere to the south, was scanning the skies with a compact yet powerful radar system. The information it collected was transmitted real-time via satellite to a handheld device that was part of the equipment the two men had brought with them.
    For nearly an hour, they had been watching a blip weave back and forth across the screen, slowly growing closer to the island. It was getting late, though, so at some point