Rogue Threat (29 page)

Ballantine replayed the scene in his mind: the two commandos in his sights, moving along the woods toward the cabins. His first shot struck the lead man in the chest; the second shot narrowly missed the wingman. He fired successive shots, but the team to his rear was being overrun, diverting his attention long enough for him to lose sight of the other operative. Then, very quickly it seemed there was enemy fire coming from the small set of trees next to the pier. Hit once, he labored to hide in the woods until he could recover.

After a short while, he had moved toward the cabin. He saw a man untying Zachary Garrett and fired immediately, hitting Garrett in the back. He followed the small arms shots with a rocket-propelled grenade to stun whoever was in the house. There was only time to take the one captive, as he was receiving fire.

The trip back to the Sherpa had been a struggle. He had wrestled with the stealth gear, affixing his wing shapers into place. He had ensured the Chinese had used the same stealth technology on his Sherpa that they had used on the Predators. He had quickly fastened two triangles of fiberglass to his wings that angled toward the tail. The United States had achieved radar avoidance through aircraft composition, speed of flight, and shape. His Sherpa now looked like a poor man’s stealth aircraft. Knowing that the United States would have an all-points bulletin on his plane, he intended to do everything he could to evade detection. It was critical to mission success.

Once in the aircraft with Garrett bound, he flipped the remote switch to ignite the previously rigged demolitions to destroy his operations center.

He was exhausted.

His adrenaline had carried him this far. He was flying to a small apple farm on the Vermont-New Hampshire border. He cut a low path through the cool spring morning, his mind trapped somewhere between controlling the airplane, seeking revenge, and adapting his plan to execute the remainder of the overall scheme. He was flying through the valleys no more than a hundred feet above ground level and under 70 mph to avoid radar detection.

This could be quite interesting
, he thought. He was experiencing a moment of surging happiness offset by the loss of his command center, and perhaps Virginia as well. Nonetheless, the plan was coming together with an added bonus of the massive leverage of having Zachary Garrett in his possession. The American saying “what goes around comes around” popped into his mind. Garrett had killed Ballantine’s brother while he watched, and now Ballantine could stage a replay for the brothers Garrett.

He slipped on his night-vision goggles as he carved through a valley, granite cliffs to his starboard side. While it took much longer than he desired, it was better to arrive later than not at all. He spotted the two infrared lights he had asked his wife, Regina, to leave on for him. They were sufficient to give him a good approach at a slow speed with the Sherpa.

Thinking about asking his wife to turn on the infrared lights made him absently wonder about Virginia.
Was she dead or alive? Had they captured her, and were they now extracting information from her? Would she crack?
He didn’t believe so, but he wasn’t sure.

He noticed through his goggles the rows of apple trees on either side of the strip. At the northern end was a house with a single light on in the upstairs bedroom.

The Sherpa’s wheels found the grass, slipping a bit to the right, but the slide was easily controlled with a mild maneuver in that direction, like skidding on ice.

Ballantine pulled the aircraft into a small barn situated between the orchard and the house. As the engine sputtered to a stop, he dragged Garrett’s body out of the airplane and carried him fireman’s style.

Before he reached the steps, Regina came bounding out of the house, across the covered porch, down the wooden steps, and froze.

“What is this?” she said, shocked.

“Someone who tried to kill me. He’s been shot, and we need to fix him.”

“Why . . . what? You’re hurt, too,” she said, stepping back. “What’s been going on?” she asked.

“I got into some bad stuff with some guys who weren’t fishermen.” Ballantine laid Garrett on the porch, and she hugged him on the neck.

“What do you mean? Not fishermen?” she said, pulling away and looking at Zachary Garrett.

“They were trying to run drugs on my airplane, smuggle them in from Canada. We saw them, and they suspected we knew too much.”

“And who’s this, the man who shot you? One of the drug runners?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you bring him here?”

“Because he’s our insurance policy. These drug guys know where we live, and if we keep him alive, I think they’ll leave us alone.”

“What do we do with him?” Regina asked.

“Regina, quit asking so many questions. You will operate on him and then me. Tomorrow I will fly him to his people. That’s the deal, as long as they promise to leave me alone.”

“I’m a veterinarian, Jacques, not a doctor,” she said.

“You know what to do.”

“Why not just call a doctor?”

His faced flinched once as the anger flashed inside him.
Don’t release now
, he told himself.
It’s not the time or the place.
“Just do as I say.”

“Islam, right? Well Islam will grant us this one exception to call a doctor to work on at least you,” she protested.

“Not this time, not ever,” he said. “Now let’s get him in the house, and you can fix him and then pull this bullet out of my shoulder.”

“You must be horrified,” she gasped.

“You have no idea,” he replied under his breath.

Ballantine put on his best face. It had been a week since he had seen her. He routinely returned on the weekends to keep his cover alive and to keep her satisfied. While Regina was an attractive woman, she was also simply a means to an end. Fearing raising suspicions by purchasing land himself, he knew he needed a surrogate. It took him all of two months in Burlington to find a suitable mate who would marry him for the money he generously, but discreetly, spent on her. He had scanned the desperate legions of women on Internet dating sites. Regina had run an ad titled, “Submissive vet seeks dominant man.”

After a few e-mails he had learned she was a veterinarian who had reenrolled at the University of Vermont. She was a second-year master’s student earning a meaningless degree in Islamic studies. She told him she was trying to better understand the root causes of 9/11. She had a small veterinary business—mostly cats, dogs, and cattle—that helped pay for her studies. She lived by herself in a small two-story house on five acres thirty miles from the university.

Their Internet conversations quickly gave way to a cup of coffee and a fast, storybook romance.

“I missed you, honey. I wanted us to have some time together.”

“I missed you too, Regina,” Ballantine said, squeezing her back, wincing at the pain in his rib and thigh.

Regina was about five and a half feet tall and a bit heavier than she wanted to be, but not by much. She had a cute face framed by a bob cut of straight black hair that fell to her shoulders. She was wearing a UVM sweatshirt and blue denim pants.

Walking up the steps with a slight limp, he noticed a folded newspaper on the end table next to the rocking chair. He slowly opened the front fold, scanning the headlines and pictures quickly.

“I haven’t had time to read it, yet. Since you cut the satellite off two weeks ago, I haven’t had any news. Thought it’d be nice to know what was going on in the world when you got back.”

“Did you go into town?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, sheepishly.

“And?”

“I was only there a few minutes. I took the old station wagon, bought some groceries, and picked up the newspaper on the way out.”

He grimaced from the pain throbbing along his left clavicle. She naturally responded as if he was angry with her, as he had been a few other times. He had tamed her, in every sense of the word, to be an obedient wife. She had adopted Islam as her religion, or at least his version of the religion, believing she was to minimize her contact with the outer world and that no one else could be trusted. He had taken her to Canada to be married.

Chasteen had presided over the “ceremony,” dressed in ceremonial Muslim garb. They had stayed two nights at the cabin and then flown back to Vermont, where she purchased, in her maiden name, the apple farm from an elderly gentleman who was moving to a nursing home. Of course, the marriage was not legitimate, but she believed it was, and that was all that mattered.

“Please, Jacques, understand,” she whispered, fear shrouding her words. She took a step back and tripped on the door jamb leading from the porch to the front door.

Ballantine looked at her leaning back against the storm door. Another time he might have smashed her through the glass panel simply for violating his order to never go into town without him. But his primary concern was with whether to kill her or not.
Had she seen anything?
He had purposefully scrambled the satellite code and removed the fuse from the television so that she could not watch any cable or network television.

“Regina, what did I tell you about going into town?”

“To never do it alone. . . . I swear to Allah I will not let it happen again.” She was nearly hysterical.

“And what did you see? Any bad people, any television, any radio?” His eyes were black coals burning through her.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I just needed some groceries and wanted to be able to catch up with you.” Her hands were pressed firmly into the glass, which was fogging around her sweating fingertips.

He grimaced with pain as he raised his right hand and slapped her across the face with the back of his wrist. “Don’t ever do that again. Get inside,” he ordered.

Regina’s head had snapped back, tears spraying against the glass. “Thank you, thank you. I’ll never do it again, I promise,” she cried, opening the door, trembling. She
was
thankful he had not gone mad.

They dragged the limp, bleeding body of Zachary Garrett into the house. She operated on him, removing a bullet from his left scapula. She stitched him up and gave him a shot of morphine to ease the pain.

“How are his vital signs?” Ballantine asked, still in pain himself.

“He’s weak but hanging in there,” she said. Her voice was calm and focused. She knew what she was doing. She was busy picking up used medical supplies and gauze.

Ballantine secured Garrett tightly to the bed and then handcuffed both his hands and feet.

“He will try to escape if we don’t do this,” he said, looking at Regina.

She didn’t respond but poked an intravenous fluid needle in Zachary Garrett’s arm to attempt to hydrate him.

“What are his chances?” Ballantine asked.

She grabbed a new scalpel and held it in front of him as she pushed Ballantine onto a single bed with a white sheet.

“Fifty-fifty. He’s lost a lot of blood. I can tell this happened several hours ago. At some point, I would like to know what really happened, Jacques.” The gleaming scalpel in her hand perhaps had given her some confidence to speak her mind to the man that she believed to be her husband.

She administered some anesthesia and began to carve away at Ballantine. The process took nearly an hour, but she finally pried the bullet from his left clavicle. He had nearly passed out from the pain, but the morphine sustained him. He lay back on the white sheets, now stained with blood, his arm laid atop his chest in a desert-sand-colored sling. His head hit the pillow, and his mind quickly spiraled toward sleep, trusting completely that Regina would clean up the mess and obediently go about her business.

As he drifted away, his last conscious thoughts were that the plan would be okay. He had survived and would live to fight another day. Images of Zachary Garrett blowing Henri’s face to pieces briefly replayed in his mind, causing a weak adrenaline surge that was suppressed by the sheer exhaustion of the last forty-eight hours.

He was reassured by the simplicity of his new plan.

He was going to kill Matt Garrett and let Zachary Garrett watch.

Chapter 36

The distant ring of the phone clawed at the back of his mind like a dredge raking across the sand. It was too soon to wake up, his mind was telling him. He attempted to move in one direction, then another, causing pain to rocket unimpeded through his body as if through fiber optic lines.

He glanced at the alarm clock, not believing that he had slept for ten hours, his body making a very convincing case otherwise. His left arm and shoulder were completely immobilized, causing him to lose balance as he sat up.

He picked up the cell phone and clumsily pushed the encryption button.

“Yes?”

“We have a problem.”

“We? Thought you went solo, Wood? Didn’t we just talk?” Ballantine coughed, still not fully alert.

“I know you’re drugged, but that wasn’t me you talked to. Anyway, someone is alive who we both thought was dead. His presence complicates matters extensively. I want you to . . .”—the voice searched for a word—“   . . .  handle the problem rather quickly.”

“I know about the problem. I will handle it while we execute the rest of the mission,” Ballantine responded, more clearly this time.

He was confused though, certain that only hours ago he had communicated with Ronnie Wood, his contact. There was one phone number he called. The encryption technology masked the voice sufficiently to give him pause. Was he talking to the same person? He had received this call, though. He checked his cell phone display window: Private Number. Ballantine scratched his beard, his mind still swooning from the surgery and Regina’s drugs.