Moon Mask (29 page)

“With all due respect, Mister President, I am aware of his history.”

“You’re aware? Damn it, Alex, he betrayed you too!” Harper had practically roared at him. “When he escaped Leavenworth, he set you up for the fall, made it look like you had helped him escape. A great man like you had to throw in your military career because of a cowardly little traitor like him. Now you want me to set him free? Give him a presidential pardon? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I really can’t!”

Silence had settled over the four occupants of the two rooms then. Langley had seen the president’s face, flushed red a moment ago, struggle to relax. He’d also noticed Jason Briggs’ eyes boring into him through the digital stream.
Trying to read my thoughts, Jason?
He’d thought sardonically. He’d always known that his previous superior had considered him an accomplice in the escape, despite the bullet to the knee.

“No, Alex,” Harper almost whispered the words, reigning in his emotions. “Nathan Raine is going to burn in hell for what he has done to this country.”

Langley waited for a heartbeat and then matched the president’s tone. “I don’t doubt it, Mister President. But, sir, I’m concerned that if we don’t include Raine on this mission, then we will all, the people of this country and of the whole free world, burn right there alongside him.”

The dramatic statement had finally broken through the president’s thick skin. A flash of worry flickered in his eyes. “What are your thoughts, Jason?”

Briggs continued to peer down his beak-like nose at Langley, his shrewd eyes calculating. “This establishment, this country, trained Nathan Raine to be the best of the best. There is no doubting that the man we all once knew would be not only a great asset, but could pull this mission off single-handedly, if he had to,” he replied carefully. “But it is that very ability that concerns me, Mister President. He is a loose cannon, and if he again turns his sights on us, I’m scared to think of what might happen.”

“But what’s done is done,” Mick Kane spoke up unexpectedly. All eyes had turned to him, a flash of anger in Briggs’.

“I don’t mean that callously, Mister President,” he clarified. “There is no doubt, nor denying what he did. He went off the rails and people, good people, died because of it. But, if your intelligence is correct,” he glanced significantly at Briggs, “then he has spent the last three years in hiding, eking out an existence flying tourists to their rich resorts.” His eyes flicked in Langley’s direction, a brief nod of allegiance. Langley liked the Sec Def. Both former soldiers, they knew what it was like out on the battlefield far more than the politicians they served.

“The mighty have fallen, sir,” he concluded. “He has nowhere to go, no prospects, and no future. Presidential immunity in exchange for his help. I don’t believe he would throw that away.”

“He may be a loose cannon, Mister President,” Langley had cut in then, sensing his moment, “but without him, mark my words, without a shadow of a doubt, this mission
will
fail.”

Harper’s face had still been angry, Langley could see. His eyes burned with hatred. Raine’s history with the president was personal. He wasn’t just any old soldier that had gone rogue. He was the man selected by the president to command his own personal army, and he had betrayed both the professional oath that he took to the President and the personal promise he had made to John Harper.

“It seems that fate has dealt me a losing hand,” the president had finally said. “To protect this country, I must make a deal with the devil.”

Well, Hell certainly is the place to do that, Mister President,
Langley thought now as he was guided by three prison guards under the still spinning rotors of the chopper and into The Castle.

It was a silent place, especially at this late hour, the muted stillness broken only by the occasional slamming of huge metal doors and the clanging home of giant locks.

He was passed through numerous security checks, an inordinate amount of time being taken as the guards, or ‘corrections specialists’ as they were referred to, scanned the metal plate in his knee.

In a sadistically whimsical part of his brain, he mused that his torn knee, after three years, had finally come full circle.

With very little care for his elevated status, the guards finally decided that he was carrying no weapons or other forbidden objects and he was led deeper into the facility.

Composed of three, two-tier triangular pods, the facility covered fifty one acres of land. The white walls were broken by solid metal doors and peering inside a handful that were vacant, he saw barren cells, empty save for a metal cot, a toilet and a sink.

After what seemed like an endless march, accompanied only by the pounding of his and the guard’s boots, the jangle of keys and the electronic buzz of mag-locks, he arrived on Death Row.

Despite its airy, sterile atmosphere, compared to the cold grey, dungeon-like aura of the original Castle, USDB Death Row truly was a place of the damned. Reserved for some of the most vile creatures in the world, rapists and murderers, trained in the art of killing by the United States Armed Forces, this was their purgatory; their last stop before the chair, then Hell.

Traitors, all of them, reserved for only the lowest level of the Underworld.

They ultimately halted outside of a thick metal door set into the middle of a bland wall of breeze blocks, supported, Langley knew, by concrete and iron bars.

Even in a maximum security prison where escape was impossible, this cell was the ultimate in containment and solitary confinement. Only two men had ever escaped from the United States Disciplinary Barracks. In 1988, David Newman had made it all the way to Kansas City before being caught four days later. Nathan Raine, however, had been on the run for three years and was only caught due to a stroke of severe bad luck.

He wasn’t going to escape again.

Other maximum security prisoners were confined for twenty-three hours a day. Nathan Raine was confined for one hour extra. He had been trained first by the Army, then Delta Force before being selected to join America’s most elite and secretive special operations force, the CIA’s Special Operations Group.

Often under the direct command of the President of the United States, the ‘SOG’ had conducted clandestine operations around the world for decades. Right from its earliest incarnation as part of the OSS during the Second World War, the Special Activities Division and the Special Operations Group, SAD/SOG had been on every major playing field on the world stage. From Cuba to Vietnam, Columbia to Afghanistan, SAD/SOG operatives had conducted raids and sabotage, assassination and hostage rescue, counter-intelligence and guerrilla warfare for almost seventy years. They carried nothing which could identify them with the U.S. Government, they had no history, no identity. If they were captured, the government would deny all knowledge of their existence. They were men and women who operated outside of the normal chain of command, outside of the law even. Working in small groups or often alone, recruiting native armies and conducting unconventional warfare, they had toppled governments and overthrown regimes all in the name of U.S. National Security.

Only the very best soldiers were selected from the other branches of the U.S. Special Forces – Delta Force, the Navy Seals, the Army Rangers – and, despite having previously been considered the best of the best, they spent over a year re-training. Required to possess at the very least a Bachelor’s degree, they were intelligent men and women with incredible levels of adaptability. It was the only unit whereby all members were required to be trained and proficient in all its branches: Air, Maritime, Ground and the Armour and Special Operations Branch. They were experts in the use of domestic and foreign firearms, weaponry, explosives. They were trained in elite hand-to-hand combat techniques, high-performance driving, flying, SCUBA, closed-circuit diving, freefall and parachuting. They were required to speak numerous foreign languages and survive extreme wilderness conditions, to be experts in tracking and in EMS medicine.

But, most concerning for the guards assigned to the confinement of Nathan Raine, was that he had not only been taught, but had proven his efficiency in what the military termed SERE- Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

‘Escape’ being the optimal word for this particular prisoner.

The architects were convinced that this cell could keep even someone of Raine’s talents confined but, the moment the door was opened, it was feared, he would be gone.

His food was given to him through a slot in the seven-inch thick door and security cameras watched his every move inside his cell. Even now, with a presidential immunity agreement in his hand, Alexander Langley knew not to take the caged animal for granted.

He knew this, because he had taught him everything he knew.

He glanced at the screen above the door which displayed the CCTV image of the interior. He recognised Raine’s shape lying on the bed, his black hair ruffled, his intense blue eyes hidden beneath their lids.

But he wasn’t sleeping, Langley knew.

He was waiting.

“Prisoner,” one of the guards boomed through an intercom into the room while another produced a set of heavy chains. Langley knew the procedure. A small slot in the foot of the door would allow the guards to chain the prisoner’s ankles to the concrete floor.

“That won’t be necessary,” he told the man. “Just open the door.”

“But-”

“I’m here on the authority of the President of the United States, young man,” he told the guard in his usual firm but somehow calming voice. “Now, open the door.”

The man, already informed that the prisoner was being released and therefore – hopefully - posed little flight risk, capitulated. Three keys, from three guards, undid the hard locks, while two electronic key cards from another two guards beeped against the scanner.

The door creaked open and all five guards rushed into the room, bludgeons raised as they circled the bed.

Raine had still not moved and for a second Langley feared it was a decoy. Then he saw the subtle rising of his chest.

“Up, prisoner!” the lead guard bellowed with his considerable lungs. The figure on the bed, lying in darkness, illuminated only by the orange triangle of light filtering through the door, did not move. The guard barked at him again and finally got a response.

Slowly, the prisoner reached out his arm, hand clenched into a fist, and then uncurled the middle finger.

“Why, you piece of-”

“That’ll be all,” Langley cut him off. “Leave us.” The guards hesitated but they had been given their orders. One by one, they filed out of the door.

“We’ll be right outside, sir.” The words were not reassurance, Langley mused. They were little more than a finely concealed threat.

Even now, there were those that still believed, like Jason Briggs, that, despite being shot in the knee and taken hostage by his former pupil, Alexander Langley had helped the prisoner escape three years ago. The accusations, though unfounded, had proved crippling to his career in the Agency.

After having risen through the ranks of Delta Force and being recruited to SAD/SOG almost twenty years ago, he couldn’t go back to the ‘normal’ ranks of the military, despite holding the rank of General. Briggs had made it clear that his career in the Agency was finished but, as a former commander of the Special Operations Group, often referred to as the President’s Private Army, he had Harper’s ear. Once he had recovered from his injury, he had been posted to the U.N. Security Council.

Nevertheless, suspicion of his involvement in Raine’s escape still rebounded through the halls of power.

“Some lights would be helpful, gentlemen,” he called as the guards closed the door. An instant later a single bright bulb, burrowed into the ceiling and protected by an acrylic casing, preventing it from being ripped out and used as a weapon, flared into life.

“Hello, Nathan.”

Nathan Raine did not move on his metal cot. His eyes remained closed, uncaring. It was all show, Langley knew. He knew Nathan Raine probably better than any person alive. He knew that the detached demeanour he portrayed was nothing but a front, a barrier that had always prevented people getting close.

But Langley had been close to him. Even now, after everything that had happened, everything that Raine had become, he couldn’t help but see the young man for what he was.

The son he never had.

“The silent treatment, Nathan?” he continued after a long pause. “I see three years in exile haven’t made you grow up very much.” Still nothing. “Have you nothing to say to me?”

Another long pause, then, “How’s the knee?”

“Oh,” Langley replied conversationally. “Not too bad. Still aches a little in cold weather.”

“And Philippa?”

This time it was Langley’s turn to hesitate, white hot pain searing at his heart anew. His voice was very controlled when he spoke next. “Philippa passed away eighteen months ago.”

Raine opened his eyes, still the striking shade of blue that Langley remembered had almost shocked him when he had first met the cocky young pilot years ago.

Slowly, he pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Did he care? Langley wondered, trying to read him. How could he not? Philippa had thought just as much of Raine as Langley himself had. The son they could never have, because of the ovarian cancer which had ultimately claimed her.

“The cancer flared up again,” he explained, “about two months after you escaped. She fought it. Hard.” His voice caught and he saw emotion in Raine’s eyes. “I was very proud of her.”

Raine said nothing. What could he say?

“She asked after you,” he continued, probing further, trying to find the man he had known. “Right until the day she died.”

Langley could see the pain passing through the younger man’s face, tears threatening.

“Even after . . ?” Raine tried to ask but couldn’t finish.

Even after everything you did, you mean?
“Until the day she died,” he repeated. He took a deep breath to clear his head. He wasn’t here to reminisce. In truth, he wasn’t sure why he had come all this way.