The Filter Trap Read Online Free

hundred feet high. Navy buoys have already confirmed abnormal wave height suggesting that range at landfall.”
    “Jesus!” SIMI showed concern. “We’re on an island, where will people go?”
    “There’s only one person you four gotta worry about.”
    “Air Force One!” Lee remembered.
    “That’s right, at least your squad leader still reads the paper, or Twittler, or Facepage, wherever you kids get your news.” He pointed at her. “Since you know already, fill em in, RF.”
    “You guys don’t seriously think they have ‘stars and stripes’ cupcakes at the commissary all the time, right?” Lee asked rhetorically.
    Nana hit his forehead with his palm. “She’s right, the president’s been on the island since last week.”
    “Well, not this island,” Franks corrected him. “But in Hawaii, and now he’s above it. We put your better halves up there twenty minutes ago. You get to take over when they’re relieved; JSOC is pulling them away for something else. We knew you’d only come for sandbag siren duty since the cell towers started overloading about an hour after the Event.”
    “The Event ?” Lee repeated. “Can we get back to that? How does the Moon disappear?”
    “Airmen!” Franks straightened up, putting on his fiercest face. “It is not your position to question our situation, but to follow orders, and only those that come out of my mouth. That’s the only explanation you get.”
    The squad shelved their questions, as hard as it was. Training to follow orders kicks in when it has to.
    “If you haven’t guessed already, I need you in your pits and 300 klicks north to relieve Tom-Tom, Bennis, Angry Uncle and Sour Man by 0400 hours,” Franks ordered, then cringed. “Forget the clock, I’ll give you a countdown deadline to get airborne.”
    “Normally I’d be chomping at the bit for presidential security detail, sir,” LARS started, “but I gotta know what—”
    “But nothing , pilot!” Franks angrily interrupted her. “You’ll be finding out what all this means when the rest of us do. If you want to stay here and piss on yourselves for the next five minutes before suiting up that’s fine with me, but I have been put on sandbag duty. I hope for your sakes I don’t live to see your sorry asses come back for mop up. You are dismissed!”
    The four young pilots slowly stood and saluted as Franks marched out of the door.
    “Did you see it? He almost teared up at the end,” Nana said.
    “Not funny,” LARS insisted.
    “Wasn’t joking.”
    “The Air Force has strange ways to instill respect and service,” Lee said. “I’m sure that last bit was meant to motivate us. The colonel will be in greater danger here on the ground in a tsunami than we will up there above it.”
    “Speaking of above it, I don’t get it. What happened to the Moon?” LARS asked. “And what does that have to do with tsunamis?”
    “The tide,” Lee answered.
    “The Moon ain’t pulling the tides up any more,” SIMI added. “All that water’s gotta go somewhere.”
    “Yeah,” she agreed. “Up our asses in forty minutes if we don’t get hopping.”
     
    From the air the pilots saw big boats make a slow march out of Pearl Harbor, a thin gray line stretching miles into the Pacific.
    “Think any of those ships can withstand a hundred foot wave?” Lee barked over the radio to the bubbas.
    “It won’t be a hundred feet once they get out far enough,” Nana replied.
    “Well that shit is due here in half an hour, how fast can they move?”
    SIMI chimed in. “It’s classified, but a Navy buddy told me that they clocked the Reagan at over a hundred miles per hour after the tsunami in Japan.”
    “How about our tsunami?” asked LARS.
    “Fast as a bullet,” Lee answered. “500 miles an hour, something like that.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Colonel gave me the mission log, didn’t want you three getting sentimental before we left.”
    “Shit,” the bubbas said in unison.
    “I hope