Shadow Catcher (10 page)

“Alpha One, ready,” said a distant voice.

Novak fumbled with the radio hanging from his vest and then held the handset to his lips. “Alpha Two, ready.”

The chopper started to rise, rapidly taking up the slack in the cable. The rotor noise became louder as the pilot fought for altitude. Novak looked at his friend.

Starek teased, waving the D-ring on his end of the cord as if he were not going to hook up. As Novak's feet left the ground, Starek beamed at him with his shining white smile. “You win,” he mouthed. Then he clicked the D-ring into place.

Novak felt a tremendous jerk as Starek was caught up into the air with him. He looked below, but he could not see his friend, only the infinite starry depth of the lake. He looked up. The chopper had disappeared as well. He felt suspended in space.

The engine noise became deafening. As Novak reached up to cover his ears, the sound changed from the steady thump of rotor blades to the deep whine of a heavy truck. Suddenly a horn blared and the cold and darkness gave way to heat and blinding light. He fell. His knees hit rough, unyielding pavement and pain shocked his body. Instinctively, he rolled. A huge tractor-trailer flew by, just missing him as he fell down an embankment into thorny wet vines.

Novak looked down at his soaked prison uniform. The grime covering his knees mixed with fresh blood. A few feet up the embankment, another vehicle drove past. His body stewed in the unmistakable wet heat of the Fujian rain forest. He lifted a hand and felt the old scar on his neck, left by a stray parachute strap during his ejection over Russia twenty-seven years ago. He let out a guttural scream.

Novak struggled to his feet amid the twisted scrub, panting and defeated. After a while he looked up at the sun, trying to determine north from south. His vision blurred. The birds resumed their incessant screeching. Finally, he turned to a heading that he could only hope was west. Pain wracked his brain. He forced himself to concentrate. Slowly, he stepped forward. “One . . .”

CHAPTER 20

T
ry as he might, Nick could not focus on his assailant. He fought wildly, but his movements felt slow and languid in the water. The hostile did not suffer from the same restriction. He moved so fast that he seemed a blur, a ghost that Nick could not touch. Nick lost his bearings; he could not distinguish up from down. In the murky water, he could see neither the surface above nor the silt-covered floor below. Something grabbed his left arm from behind, but the attacker remained in front of him. Was there another? He couldn't turn around. He was paralyzed, frozen. The hostile drew in close. He wore a mirrored full-length diving mask. For a moment, the face staring back at Nick was his own, but then his reflection twisted into someone else: Danny Sharp.

Suddenly the assailant brandished a blade. With an agonizing effort, Nick freed his left arm, but the man shoved the knife into his shoulder before he could stop the attack. Pain shocked his body. Nick grabbed the assailant's forearm and wrenched it away, pulling the knife out of his shoulder. The image of Danny in the mirrored mask let out a horrible scream.

“Ow! Let go!” yelled Katy Baron. “Wake up and let go, you big idiot!”

Danny's face dissolved, replaced by Nick's wife, Katy. Her hazel eyes were filled with anguish. He lay in his own bed, at their home in Chapel Point, Maryland. The comforter and sheets lay piled about him, soaked with sweat. Pain still throbbed in his shoulder. Shaking, he quickly released his death grip on Katy's arm. She retreated to the other side of the bed. Tears trickled down her beautiful face.

“What's wrong with you?” Katy asked through her tears. “You could have broken my arm.”

Nick untangled himself from the sheets and assessed his shoulder. Recalling the nightmare, he realized that his arm had been caught up in the sheets and that he'd strained it during his thrashing. At least it wasn't dislocated this time. “Are you okay?” he asked, rubbing and rotating his shoulder.

“No, I'm not okay. You almost broke my arm.”

Nick hung his head. “I'm sorry, sweetheart. I was having a nightmare.”

“You say that as if you didn't have one almost every night. They're getting worse, Nick. Look at you. You almost dislocated your own shoulder in your sleep. Do you realize how messed up that is?”

“Baby, I think you're overreacting.”

“Overreacting?” She held up her forearm for her husband to see. Red marks had formed in the shape of Nick's fingertips. They would surely become bruises. “I have more like these. My doctor is starting to ask questions. How do I explain this? Some husbands only beat their wives when they're drunk. Mine only beats me when he's asleep.” She started to cry again. “There was a time when I couldn't sleep while you were away because I didn't feel safe. Now I can't sleep when you're home for the same reason.”

Nick walked around the bed and tried to comfort his wife, but she backed away from him and shook her head. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

He sat down in frustration as she went into the bathroom to splash water on her face. He watched her lean into the mirror to fuss over her puffy eyes. She had no reason to; she was gorgeous, even when she'd been crying. Her long brown hair fell to one side of her beautiful neck. She wore a silk nightgown that barely came down to the middle of her slender thighs, taut because she was pushed up on her cute little toes. He wished that he hadn't just ruined the mood. The baby was still sleeping.

“You were gone an extra couple of days,” she said, clearly trying to change the subject, like she always did after an episode like this one.

“Yeah. You know how military airlift can be, especially in and out of that region.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “That seems to happen a lot lately.”

Nick winced. She was avoiding one fight by starting another. He had told Katy that he'd been working in the bomber planning cell at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, the Triple Seven's standing cover story for field operations. “Like I said, babe, that region is a pain to get in and out of. The guys who are doing the fighting take priority.”

Katy returned from the bathroom. Instead of sitting down next to Nick, she crawled onto the bed, leaning her back against an oversized pillow and pulling the comforter up to her waist. “Speaking of the guys doing the fighting,” she said, “I was telling Jennifer about your nightmare problem, and she said that it sounded like PTSD. Of course, I told her that didn't make sense, because you're a planner. You're not doing any fighting.” Her last phrase hung in the air between them, more of an accusation than a statement.

Katy's eyes drifted down over his body. Sitting there in his underwear, Nick suddenly felt exposed. She wasn't assessing his muscular form in any sensual way; she was examining the scars on his legs and torso, including the fresh stitches in his right arm.

“I see you have a new one,” she said, pointing at the wound as if it were a collar with lipstick on it. “You got home so late last night that I didn't notice it. What happened this time?”

“I've told you about Bagram before,” said Nick, using the story he'd rehearsed during the long flight home. “It's always under construction. I tried to take a shortcut to the base exchange and tripped over some scraps. I cut my arm on a piece of metal.”

Katy cocked her head to one side. “You know, it's weird. You can stand on that rickety stool in the kitchen to change a lightbulb and then hop down like a cat. You can stand in our rowboat on the river without toppling us over. You can even do those creepy tricks with your knives, flipping them all around your hands like a Vegas magician.” She gave him a sarcastic shrug. “But every time you leave the house, you become as clumsy as a teenager whose legs have outgrown his brain.”

“That's not true,” countered Nick, standing up. He turned slightly, pulling up the left leg of his boxer briefs to reveal two round scars. “Remember? These were from a roadside bomb north of Kabul. Clumsiness had nothing to do with it. I wasn't even driving.” In truth, the wounds in his upper thigh were souvenirs from a gun battle with drug dealers in South America. At least,
he
considered the wounds to be in his upper thigh. Drake liked to say that he got shot in the butt.

Nick's attempt at humor had the opposite effect. Katy threw up her hands. “That's right, a roadside bomb. Thanks for reminding me. So when is Drake going to call and tell me that you've been in a helicopter crash like Danny?”

A cry came from the room across the hallway. Katy closed her eyes and let out a sigh. “He's up.” She shoved Nick away and stood up, grabbing a robe that was slung over the rail of their treadmill. “We'll finish this later. I'm going to go and get him so that he can at least get a glimpse of his father before you disappear again.” She paused at the bedroom door and rubbed her arm. “Try not to damage him. He's even more fragile than I am.” Then she walked out of the room.

CHAPTER 21

N
ick roared up Route 301 at twenty over the limit, losing himself in the steady resonance of his Mustang's 440 horsepower, supercharged engine. He tensed his forearms against the long curve entering St. Charles. He could feel every groove in the pavement, every tiny slip as the rear end tried to shift to the outside. His lovingly restored '67 Shelby GT350 was loud, hot, and a handful in the turns, but Nick liked her that way. Engineers with thick, horn-rimmed glasses designed her back when men were men and muscle cars actually required muscle to drive. Not like today's comfort-built sports “coupés,” made for a generation of wannabe tough guys with personal trainers and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

Beneath the deep vibrato of the forty-year-old V8, Nick let his subconscious wander, drifting about in a tangled forest of memories. Somewhere in that dark confusion was the answer. There had to be a connection. The Triple Seven's first mission went horribly wrong. This mission had skirted the edge of failure. The fact that they both revolved around the same doomed stealth bomber could not be a coincidence.

Bad luck plagued their first mission from the beginning. Dream Catcher's testing wasn't complete, but the White House sent them in anyway. The results were devastating: one experimental aircraft destroyed, one multibillion-dollar stealth bomber lying on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and Saddam Hussein still at large, fueling the insurgent effort for another nine months.

Ten years.

Ten years of making up for that first, botched mission. Ten years of training and fighting, of turning the Triple Seven Chase from a quiet embarrassment into the most effective clandestine unit in the DoD. Now it had all come full circle, and both he and Drake were almost killed. Again.

Nick felt sure that there was something more sinister than Murphy's Law at play here, but no one else could see it. Even Walker, with his legendary paranoia, had dismissed the notion immediately.

The sight of red and blue lights ahead brought Nick's attention back to the road. One of Prince George's County's finest had a little red Miata pinned down on the shoulder. Nick eased off the accelerator and moved over, waving to the officer. The cop stared at the Shelby as he drove by, wearing the expression of a fisherman who'd just pulled a two-pound perch out of the lake, only to watch the fifteen-pound bass swim away.

Nick parked the Mustang near a large hangar facility on the north side of the Joint Base Andrews Golf Course and entered the low adjoining office building. He threaded his way through narrow corridors, silent except for the sound of his heels echoing off the cheap tile floor. At the end of one particularly claustrophobic hallway, he stopped in front of a black door. A dim fluorescent light flickered lazily overhead. A small red and white sign on the door read:

R7

C
LEARED
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY

L
ETHAL
F
ORCE
I
S
A
UTHORIZED

Nick swiped his access card and punched in his code. The door popped open with a hiss. He stepped into a small, circular chamber, and the door closed behind him. Then the wall rotated 180 degrees, and the chamber started descending. Five stories beneath the airfield, the elevator door opened into the main command center of Romeo Seven.

Given just one word to describe the home of the Triple Seven Chase, Nick would have chosen
excessive
. No one knew how Walker got the funding to reopen and renovate a defunct presidential bunker, and no one ever asked, but their little covert unit had the benefit of a two-story-tall command center with floor-to-ceiling screens and a platoon of fully stocked workstations, most of which were empty. They also had several large offices, a lab for Scott, bunk rooms, a well-stocked galley, a gym, and their very own freshwater supply. The taxpayers spared no expense.

“Baron!” Colonel Walker came barreling across the floor, his voice unnecessarily loud in the quiet room. He nimbly weaved his way through a line of crescent-shaped workstations, followed by a young man carrying a clipboard. The kid wore the same uniform that Nick and Walker wore, khakis and a black golf shirt, but Nick had never seen him before.

“Merry Christmas, Baron,” said Walker, his ever-present scowl almost joyful in its most congenial mode. “Santa brought you a brand-new toy.”

Nick surveyed the new recruit. He looked young, too young to be the professional he'd asked for. “Sir, there are so many things wrong with what you just said that I don't know where to begin.”

Walker waved off the comment. “This is Ethan Quinn, your newest field man. He's a Special Tactics pararescueman, fresh from the pipeline.”

“What's on the clipboard, junior?” asked Nick, shaking the kid's outstretched hand. He could see from the taut smile on Quinn's face that he did not like being called junior, or likened to a new toy for that matter. His eyes carried the usual cockiness of a greenhorn operator, but there was something else, something that Nick couldn't put his finger on.

Quinn glanced down at the stack of papers that threatened to overwhelm his clipboard. “Major Merigold gave me all of the forms for processing into the Triple Seven.”

“
Major Merigold
gave you the forms?”

“Yes, sir. He said I needed to get them done now if I want to be part of the test mission tonight.”

Nick nodded, biting his tongue to keep from laughing. Drake loved to prank newcomers to Romeo Seven, usually computer clerks and intelligence technicians, by slipping a pile of arbitrary forms into their first-day paperwork. Most recruits figured out the joke when they reached the application for pet insurance, but two of the computer nerds had actually completed the entire application for membership in the Justice League of America. “Um . . . right. Of course,” said Nick. “You'd better get to it then.”

Quinn dutiful wandered off to find a desk, and Nick leaned in closer to Walker. “Sir, if you have a few minutes, I'd like to revisit our conversation about security.” Despite his low tone, Nick's words seemed to reverberate off the twenty-four-foot-high walls. As if by the cue of a conductor's wand, the handful of clerks and technicians ceased chatting and clicking all at once. Every ear in the place turned discreetly in his direction.

The colonel's scowl shifted from congenial to a look of deep frustration, bordering on real anger. To add insult to his rebuke, he ignored Nick's attempt to mask the topic. “I told you before,” he said in a low, threatening tone, “there is no leak. We can't charter a huge research vessel and drive it into the Persian Gulf without tripping a few radars. Your little escapade in Kuwait City turned up nothing. The attackers were low-level opportunists. They tried, you took them out, end of story, case closed.”

“But . . .”

“I said case closed,” repeated Walker, louder and with undeniable finality. He turned and headed for the stairs to his glass-walled office, perched at the rear of the giant command center. “Get back to work. All of you.”

Romeo Seven's tiny floor staff suddenly found renewed interest in their computer screens. Still, as Nick retreated to his office through the briar patch of desks and computers, he could feel the weight of ten sets of eyes intentionally not looking at him.

Nick sat down at his computer and called up the objectives for the final Wraith test mission. He tried to focus on the flight, to visualize the maneuvers, but he couldn't clear the thoughts of a leak from his mind.

“Knock, knock.” Drake appeared at Nick's office door, carrying a brown file in his hands. “You trying to give the old man a heart attack?”

Nick swiveled away from his computer and looked up at his teammate. “I think we might have a serious security problem.”

“You mean you think we have a mole,” observed Drake. He set the file down on a shelf and then flopped down on Nick's couch, kicking his heels up onto the arm. “You can't be serious.”

“I think someone has been trying to get their hands on a stealth aircraft.”

“Everybody is trying to get their hands on a stealth aircraft.”

Nick leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, stretching his legs out in front of him and crossing his ankles. “Yeah, but what if the problems we had ten years ago weren't just Murphy's Law in overdrive? What if we actually had a mole? Our return to Iraq might have awakened a sleeper within our own network.” He tilted his head back and searched the ceiling tiles for an answer. “I've been trying to remember everyone who was on our crew back then. You know, to match up the lists and find out how many people from the old days were involved in this mission.”

“It's got to be a short list,” offered Drake. “You, me, and Heldner, for starters. And what about Walker?”

“Very funny. Why would he hide the bomber for ten years and then bring in an enemy team when we were there to stop them?”

“Maybe he was trying to have you killed,” said Drake with a grin. “He doesn't like you that much.”

“But you were almost killed too.”

Drake shrugged. “He doesn't like me at all.”

Nick laughed, but then another name popped into his mind from the Dream Catcher mission. “What about your girlfriend?” he asked. “Amanda was there too, running Dream Catcher's propulsion team. And she works for us now.” Then he shook his head, dismissing the idea. “But Amanda didn't know about this op.”

“Right. Good point. Amanda didn't know,” said Drake, sitting up and swinging his feet to the floor.

Nick caught an uneasy twist in his friend's tone. He raised an eyebrow. “You didn't tell your girlfriend that you were heading out to the Persian Gulf, did you?”

Drake became defensive. “Whoa, back off, Nancy Drew. Even if I did tell her, she's our number one technology consultant. She's got plenty of clearance. And, anyway, Amanda is about to join the squadron permanently to lead the Wraith support team.” His cheeks flushed. “She loves this squadron. She's no traitor.”

Nick held up his hands. “All right, take it easy. It was a dumb question.”

Drake nodded. “Yes, yes it was. And you're forgiven . . . again.” He picked up the file and thrust it toward Nick. “Here.”

“What's this?”

“It's the background on our new recruit. I thought you might find it interesting.”

Nick accepted the file. “The kid said something about being part of the test tonight,” he said, studying the picture clipped to the front of the folder. “Do you know anything about that?”

“He's going to be our test dummy for the new Skyhook system.”

Nick looked up abruptly, giving his friend a wary look. “Does he understand the risks?”

Drake stood and raised his hands in the air, as if absolving himself of responsibility. “The colonel approved it,” he said, turning to leave. He paused in the doorway and looked back. “Don't work too long, boss. You need to go home and get some rest before tonight's mission. You're not Superman, you know.”

Nick nodded and waved Drake away with a few flicks of his hand. Then he laid the folder on his desk and studied the picture of Quinn again, trying to grasp what he saw earlier in those green eyes. “Okay, kid,” he said, “what's your story?”

He opened the file to the first page. The bold print at the top of the paper read
RECORD OF PUNISHMENT FOR OFFENSES UNDER THE UNIFORM CODE OF MILITARY JUSTICE
.

Nick dropped his forehead into his hand. “You've got to be kidding me.”