War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel (48 page)

Tucker dropped to a knee to examine the injury, only to get a warm lap of a tongue on his face. Kane panted and gave a weak wag of his tail.

“Yeah, I’m glad to see you, too.”

But the reunion would have to wait. More debris rained down from above, crashing around the base of the cliff, ripping through the netting.

“Tucker!” Nora called as she reached the bottom of the steps.

Jane hung in her arms, clearly weakening.

Tucker noted a handful of trucks and SUVs still parked in the makeshift garrison at the foot of the escarpment. They were going to need a vehicle. He stepped over to Lyon’s body and patted down the man’s pockets, figuring Lyon would have his own truck, not trusting anyone else to do the driving.

Tucker found a set of keys in the man’s jacket and yanked them free. As he did so, a groan rose from Lyon. The soldier’s eyes fluttered, and he coughed blood from his lips. Tucker stepped back, but the man was no longer a threat, his spine shattered, his limbs paralyzed. Still, eyes rolled toward Tucker—then Kane.

“Little fucker,” Lyon moaned. “. . . more like a cat . . . got nine lives.”

Tucker kept a protective hand on the dog. “But he needs to learn to land on his feet. Maybe you should’ve, too.”

Nora and Jane hobbled closer to them. Tucker pressed the key fob, setting one of the trucks to chirping. He tossed the keys to Nora and took Jane from her.

“Get that truck over here. We need to find out what happened to Frank.”

Nora nodded and sprinted off.

A cough drew Tucker’s attention back to Lyon. Bloodshot eyes centered on him. “You think . . . won. Kellerman . . . you’ve got nothing on him.”

Tucker was ready to laugh at this assessment, but Jane sighed.

“Bastard may be right,” she said. “When Nora lobotomized the drones, the code erased everything. With Webster gone, there’s no one else who can directly implicate Kellerman’s personal involvement. And layered in corporate shells, he’s well insulated from liability.”

A weak laugh flowed from Lyon’s throat, along with more blood. His head lolled back, and his chest gave one final heave—then his body slackened. His eyes stared up at the sky, but they clearly saw nothing.

With a growl from the truck’s engine, Nora backed over to them.

Tucker helped Jane onto the bench seat in front. Then he hauled Kane up into his arms and hopped into the back bed. He slapped the rear window, and Nora took off across the mine’s grounds.

Behind him, Tucker watched the monastery crumble and crack, slowly falling to ruin at the base of the cliff.

Kane dropped his head heavily into Tucker’s lap and let out a world-weary sigh.

“Don’t ya know it, buddy.”

Tucker shook his head, picturing Pruitt Kellerman.

We won the battle, but lost the war
.

38

November 21, 10:24
A
.
M
. EST

Washington, DC

The ringmaster of this circus sat front and center before the closed-door Senate hearing. From the half-filled gallery at the back of the judicial chamber, Tucker watched Pruitt Kellerman lean toward one of his lawyers, smiling, offering a chuckle of reassurance to his bevy of legal counsel.

Tucker clenched a fist on his knee.

This was the third such hearing in three weeks, after what the news media had come to label “The Siege at Kamena Gora.” With the array of military hardware found strewn across those fields and forests—both aerial drones and their land-based counterparts—investigations continued, involving the military, intelligence services, and civilian police agencies across Europe and the United States. Conspiracies abounded, and villains were propped up daily, only to be cleared later.

Only one person seemed to deflect any blame.

Kellerman continued to deny any personal involvement, cladding himself with mountains of legal defenses and layers of corporate protection. But the CEO of Horizon Media had an even stronger tool to attack his accusers: a very loud and broad pulpit. Horizon Media Corp and its hundreds of affiliates continued to sculpt the story. For every allegation or claim, Kellerman had talking heads that would shout loudly from those many pulpits, drowning out discourse, declaring this all a witch hunt or worse—an attack on the foundations of America.

Tucker shook his head. Jane had been right.

The bastard’s good
.

Jane hadn’t even bothered to attend this hearing, spending the crisp fall morning with her son, Nathan. She was out of the hospital after having a bullet removed from her shoulder and wanted every possible moment with her boy.

Tucker couldn’t blame her. He shifted in his own hard seat. After catching a ricocheted round in his hip, he was still in pain if he sat for long—or maybe it was simply he hated being idle, being stuck in one place. After weeks in DC dealing with the aftermath of all this, a certain wanderlust had begun to set in. He longed to finish his trip with Kane to Yellowstone. Winter would be the ideal time to visit the snowy, frozen wilderness, offering the perfect place to clear his head. But that would have to wait. Not only was Kane still recovering from his injuries—a broken rib and a bullet wound of his own—but Tucker had some unfinished business here.

Nora sat next to him, her arms folded over her chest. Fury shone in her eyes as Pruitt laughed at a joke by one of his lawyers. Tucker didn’t know if Pruitt recognized Nora in the gallery as one of the survivors of Redstone, but she remained here for her friends, for Stan, for Takashi, and for many others. Diane was the only other person to walk away from that purge, and she did so now on only one leg. The wound she had sustained from the escape, a deep laceration to her leg, had developed an infection that required amputation. She was still in rehabilitation.

“How’re you holding up?” Tucker asked her.

She lowered her chin and glowered. “Give me a minute alone with that asshole.”

You and me both, sister
.

After another fifteen minutes of jostling and points of order, Senator Fred Mason of Utah, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, banged his gavel. A hush fell over the space.

Kellerman sat stiffly at a polished wooden table before the committee’s six highest-ranking members for this closed-door session. The CEO of Horizon Media was flanked by the same number of lawyers, ready to face and contest any new allegations.

No one knew why this hearing had been called so suddenly and under such clandestine circumstances. A lone television camera sat unmanned and idle. Wall-mounted monitors to either side of the chamber were dark. Those in attendance had been granted special clearance. The hearing was beyond merely
closed-door
. It was hermetically sealed and locked up tight.

“I call this hearing to order,” Mason announced. “And for all our benefits, I’ll get straight to the point, Mr. Kellerman. A witness has recently emerged who will testify and provide evidence of your personal involvement in treasonous and criminal activities, covering events not only in Serbia but also here in the United States and in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.”

Kellerman’s chief counsel leaned and whispered in his ear, but the CEO gave an annoyed wave of his hand. “What witness, Senator? What activities?”

Mason shifted forward, looking over the rims of his eyeglasses. “Mr. Kellerman, before the committee calls this witness, is there any statement you’d like to make? This is your last opportunity.”

The chief counsel began to lean toward Kellerman, only to be held off. Kellerman’s next words were meant for his lawyer, but his microphone picked them up. “They’re bluffing. There’s no witness. This is all a show.”

Tucker smiled.

It was a safe gamble—and came very close to being the truth.

Mason signaled a uniformed guard stationed at a set of double doors to the left of the senators’ raised dais. The doors were opened, and the witness entered.

Frank stepped into the chamber, smartly outfitted in his army dress uniform. He limped on a leg with a shoe splint strapped to his foot. After Tucker and company had vacated Skaxis Mining and rode wildly down to Kamena Gora, they had discovered that Frank’s efforts at stalling and taking out the one tank had saved a majority of the hamlet’s villagers. His only injury was a twisted ankle—and not from the fighting or barrage, but from slipping on a patch of ice the next day as the Sigma team, which Ruth had sent into Serbia, evacuated Tucker’s group from the region.

“Master Sergeant Frank Ballenger,” Mason introduced, then waved the man to a seat. “Thank you for your help and cooperation.”

With a pinched brow, Kellerman studied Frank, plainly wondering who this newcomer was. While Kellerman likely knew Tucker was working with Jane and had support from Nora, Frank was apparently still an unknown commodity to the CEO.

Tucker savored the flicker of worry in Kellerman’s eyes.

Here is one bastard who does not like surprises
.

And Kellerman was about to get a huge one—because Frank was
not
the witness.

Frank withdrew a familiar CUCS unit from inside his jacket. He hunched over it and manipulated its controls. A moment later, a low humming buzz reached the hushed chamber. A small drone flew slowly through the still open doors, circled around the senators’ dais, and came to a hover in the middle of the chamber.

“Say hello to Rex,” Mason said.

Suddenly every cell phone in the room began ringing, even those in silent mode. Tucker’s satellite phone was no exception. He removed it and saw someone—or something—had commandeered it. Upon the screen, video footage showed tanks firing upon a mountainside hamlet. Across the room, the dark monitors flickered to life, showing other images: a child’s body on the street, the guttered and smoking ruins of a home, the sweep of a Warhawk through the air.

Kellerman was on his feet.

To one side, the robotic television camera charged with power, lifting its dark lens, while green lights flashed.

Good boy, Rex
.

“He’s getting better at this,” Tucker whispered.

Nora grinned. “And he’s only getting started.”

In the aftermath of events at the border, Rex had been recovered from a field by Frank and the Sigma team. The drone had broken a propeller or two after finally losing power and tumbling like a fallen leaf out of the sky. And lucky it had. With no juice, Rex had never received the code that Nora had broadcasted out from the C3 hub. He was never lobotomized, never mind-wiped like the other drones.

Once the industrious little drone had powered back up, Frank and Nora had discovered it had been busier than anyone suspected, performing operations once again that had been part of its subroutine in the past. Rex was built and designed as a data miner. While flying in Serbia, he had done just that, tapping into the transmissions feed sent out by the command station and sucking data out of the C3 hub.

On a screen to the left of the chamber, the face of a ghost appeared, flickering, then speaking. Rafael Lyon leaned closer to the video camera for this chat.
“We’ve just received word that six leaders of the Serbian parliament were successfully assassinated in Belgrade. The news outlets are going nuts
.”

Across the chamber, another monitor glowed to life, showing Kellerman standing in his office, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He faced the camera and frowned.
“But didn’t we target
eight
politicians? Wasn’t that the plan?”

Lyon answered from across the chamber,
“With the timetable moved up, we lost the opportunity on two
.”

The exchange went back and forth as the two plotted the timetable and destruction of a handful of Serbian hamlets.

Senator Mason lifted a hand. “That’s enough. Thank you, Master Sergeant Ballenger.”

The screens went dark, leaving the room in stunned silence, but the television camera lights remained green, broadcasting what had just been revealed far and wide.

“We have much more,” Mason said.

And they did. Two nights ago, Frank and Nora had sent Rex on a little hunting expedition across the Chesapeake Bay to Horizon’s headquarters on Smith Island. Rex had performed like a charm, drawing out more incriminating evidence.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Mason asked as the television camera pointed at Kellerman.

From the man’s expression, Tucker imagined the CEO of Horizon Media wanted to ask for a new set of adult diapers.

But before Kellerman could respond, the monitors bloomed to life again, showing the face of another ghost. Sandy smiled from all the monitors—and likely on television screens around the nation. It was the last fleeting glimpse of her from the footage on her thumb drive.

Bravo, Sandy . . . bravo
.

Nora clutched Tucker’s hand, choking with emotion. “We . . . we never told Rex to show that.”

Tucker looked over to the woman, to the tears welling and rolling across her cheeks.

Rex
was
learning.

Tucker pulled Nora close. “Alan Turing would have been proud,” he whispered. “Of both of you.”

5:14
P
.
M
. EST

Smith Island, Maryland

Pruitt Kellerman stood before the expanse of glass overlooking the bay. A haze hung over the water, casting the distant skyline of Washington into a ghostly mirage. As the sun set, he could almost feel the city fading from his reach.

Elsewhere, both here and across the bay, lawyers were in full emergency mode, dealing with the repercussions, the allegations, and the charges that were still being filed. He’d had his passport stripped from him, and the entire island was under watch in case he tried to escape.

But there’s no escaping this
.

Not just the island, but any of it.

He was savvy enough to know he had lost. All that was left was the fallout.