Shadow Catcher

“James Hannibal is the new kid on the block with one of the better military/covert ops thrillers that I've read in a while.
Shadow Catcher
will keep you guessing, on the edge of your seat, and eager for more. Well done!”

—Raymond Benson, author of The Black Stiletto series

PRAISE FOR

WRAITH

“Hannibal brings together a terrific mix of real air technology with intrigue and nonstop action. A true suspenseful story that will keep you turning the pages until the exciting finale; it really is a great tale.”

—Clive Cussler

“Hannibal, a former Air Force officer, offers an insider's view into some of the U.S. Air Force's most intriguing weapons systems in his promising first novel, a post–9/11 thriller . . . Hannibal demonstrates that high-tech weapons are only tools, and that it's the people doing the fighting who win the day . . . Will please military fiction fans.”

—
Publishers Weekly

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2013 by James R. Hannibal.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BERKLEY
^®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61839-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hannibal, James R.

Shadow catcher / by James R. Hannibal.—Berkley trade paperback edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-26687-8

1. B-2 bomber—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction.

3. International relations—Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.A71576S53 2013

813'.6—dc23

2012051359

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2013

Cover design by Rich Hasselberger.

Cover photograph of plane by Joel Sartore / National Geographic / Getty.

Text design by Laura K. Corless.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Shadow Catcher
is dedicated to John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, CIA paramilitary officers who spent two decades illegally incarcerated in Communist China. The strength of character and mental fortitude of these men outshine any hero that I could write.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An army of selfless heroes carried this work from idea to publication. Cynthia, my wife, is the greatest hero of all. She is my inspiration and my unwavering encourager. This beautiful, amazing woman counseled me through fits and frustration and she patiently read a hundred drafts of the same story, still remembering to laugh at every joke. Next and much more imposing is my best friend, John Carroll, who listens, critiques, sacrifices, makes fantastic book trailers, and never gloats when he outshoots me at the range. Surrounding the three of us, and comprising the beating heart of this army of heroes, is my family from both sides of the aisle. I am blessed to have more support and love to bolster my military service and my personal endeavors than any man I know.

At the head of the army, leading the charge, are the generals—my agent, Harvey Klinger, and my editor, Natalee Rosenstein. Next to them stand their lieutenants, Rachel Ridout and Robin Barletta. I am eternally grateful to Harvey and Natalee and their teams at the Harvey Klinger Agency and the Berkley Publishing Group for giving me the opportunity to do what I love most.

What follows is a list of other heroes as colorful in their character and backgrounds as the cast of
The Dirty Dozen
. Some I will name only by tactical callsign for security reasons. I am grateful to my units, past and present, for providing inspiration and support. I am especially grateful to London for canceling his vacation to cover me so that I could bring this project to New York, and to Smack for his day-to-day encouragement. My thanks to Baron 1, Fester, Sideshow, and the Millers for taking the time to read and critique—in particular Sideshow, whose contributions carried significant weight in this book, and Baron 1, whose years of experience and expertise brought to life Nick's PTSD. My thanks to Tawnya for her copyediting and her critiques. She spared Harvey and Natalee from untold horrors of grammar and spelling. Thanks to Mindy Weng for her help with Chinese culture and translation, as well as Joker, the best intelligence analyst alive. And thanks to Mason Moyer, who picked out the Springfield Armory XDm, Ethan Quinn's favorite weapon and now mine as well.

Finally, I give thanks to God for all of these blessings. He is my Rock, my Deliverer, and the greatest Author of all time.

PROLOGUE

South China Sea

January 1, 1988

D
avid Novak held his gloved hand high against the cockpit glass, his three fingers counting down to a tightly balled fist. The execute command. His wingman peeled away to the northeast. He made no other response. Radio silence was vital.

For a moment, Novak remained transfixed by the power and beauty of Jade Two's high-G turn. A cottony dome of vapor formed above the F-16 Fighting Falcon's wings as the afterburner cut a marbled blue arc across the ocean waves less than fifty feet below. He smiled. These Vipers, as he and his squadron mates liked to call the F-16s, were so much sexier than the ungainly Canberras he'd flown over Russia. After a deep breath, he turned his attention back to the mission. The Chinese coast was coming up fast and, with it, a tangled bramble of newly installed surface-to-air missiles.

The coastline gained definition, turning from blue haze into a dark green tree line. Then, as if suddenly accelerating on their own, the trees loomed large and flashed beneath him.

“Fight's on,” said Novak under his breath.

He flipped a toggle switch on the panel just forward of his right knee. A moment later, a green light illuminated. That was it—green: good; red: bad; on or off. The simplistic controls for his Red Baron photoreconnaissance pod would not show him what the cameras saw, but as far as he knew, they were rolling. From this point on, he would gather thousands of electro-optical and infrared images, documenting the buildup of Chinese forces directly across the strait from Taiwan.

Off to his left, Novak spotted a distinctive ridgeline with a V-shaped gap: his first navigation point. He rolled his wings on edge and pulled hard, changing course by forty-five degrees in less than a second, enjoying the feel of five Gs pressing him into the ejection seat. He shot through the gap and then rolled the Viper over, pulling down the other side of the ridge in an inverted dive before leveling out at the bottom of a narrow river valley. In just a few miles, his cameras would capture detailed imagery of a possible surface-to-surface missile pad that the high-altitude birds had found three days before.

Suddenly, Novak's radio crackled to life. “Radar spike, radar spike! I'm shifting west from point two.” His grip tightened on the side-mounted control stick. His wingman had just tripped the Chinese radar net. Even worse, he had broken radio silence, and that was tantamount to suicide.

Agency intelligence said that Fujian's air defense commander usually kept his radars in coast mode. A single spike was no big deal. Jade Two could have continued on course, and the next hill would have masked him from the radar's sweep. With any luck, the station's automatic filter would have chalked up the blip to an anomaly. But radio transmissions—even encrypted radio transmissions—could be tracked. Jade Two's call had energized the Chinese defense net. Multiple frequency scanners would triangulate the foreign signal and send their solution to the radar operator, prompting him to focus his sweep and refine the track. If the operator achieved a lock, Jade Two was as good as dead.

Within thirty seconds, the wingman broke radio silence again. This time panic filled his voice. “Missile in the air! I'm defending east. My position is eight miles southwest of . . .”

Silence. No trail of broken words, no lingering static. The transmission simply ended.

Novak did not hesitate. He quickly plotted a course to Jade Two's last-known position and turned to intercept. He hugged the ridgelines, seeking the protection of the ground clutter, knowing that every radar station in the province had just gone active to search for a second aircraft. On the way, he double-checked his camera control. The green light still shined back at him. At least he could get photos of the crash site, vital evidence that his wingman had either lived or died.

His target area came up fast. Novak popped up to four hundred feet to search for the burning wreckage. The Viper's bubble canopy offered a panoramic view of the wide valley beneath him, but he found no evidence of a crash site, not even a column of smoke billowing up from the trees. He couldn't understand it. Then he saw something that made his heart skip a beat. Not the black smoke of a ruined fighter but the orange flash and fast-expanding white cloud of an SA-3 missile taking the air.

A flood of adrenaline supercharged Novak's synapses as a feminine voice chanted, “Missile lock! Missile lock!” in his ear. Time slowed to a crawl. He lit his afterburner and pulled hard into the oncoming threat, straining against the unnatural crush of nine Gs. He had precious little altitude to spare, but he used all of it to build his energy, diving for the valley floor as he maintained his high-G turn. Emerald trees whipped by within inches of his low wing. With deft movements of the control stick, he kept the oncoming missile centered at the top of his canopy, and in the slow progression of the temporal distortion, it grew to the diameter of a telephone poll.

Then it disappeared.

For a fraction of a second that seemed to last an eternity, Novak saw nothing but the blue sky and green trees. He gritted his teeth and pulled even harder, pushing the Viper and his own body to the limit. He knew what was coming. He had forced the missile to overshoot his aircraft, avoiding a direct hit, but that would not stop the weapon's proximity fuze from detonating the warhead.

The giant missile exploded somewhere above and behind him. The blast rocked his aircraft, setting off a disorienting array of flashing red and yellow caution lights. He felt as if the air had been stripped from under his wings. He struggled to maintain control, fighting for every ounce of lift to keep from crashing into the trees.

Then it was all over. The air became smooth again. The caution lights blinked out one by one.

Novak checked his wings. They looked perfect. By some miracle, he'd escaped the burning fragments that should have torn the Viper to shreds. He breathed, relaxing his death grip on the stick and easing out of his high-G turn.

Still shaking from his brush with death, Novak tapped his threat indicator. Even though he had dodged the missile, the alarm continued to chant its mantra in his ears, “Missile lock! Missile lock!” He silenced the voice and pulled into a gentle climb to continue his search for Jade Two. Instinctively, he looked back to see the cloud formed by the missile's explosion. He only had a split second to realize his mistake. Another fiery SA-3 filled his vision. The alarm had been trying to warn him of a second missile.