Shadow Catcher (5 page)

CHAPTER 8

N
ick pushed the dinghy away from the
Illustro
's dock as Drake fired up the motor. The intruders couldn't have gotten that far out into the gulf without a boat. Walker had activated the surface radar and gotten an intermittent contact, but the range and heading were sketchy at best.

As the sun climbed above the horizon, visibility did not improve; instead of dissipating, the early morning fog simply darkened into a brown haze. The team's cover had become their biggest threat. There was a high probability that more hostiles waited aboard the enemy craft, and they had the advantage. Waiting silently in their boat, they would hear the dinghy coming well before Nick and Drake could make visual contact.

“She's northwest of us,” said Nick, consulting a handheld GPS, “almost on a straight line to the docks in Kuwait.”

“Were they running?” Drake asked.

“No. Walker said the contact was stationary.” Nick set down the GPS and then loaded an extended magazine into his MP7 submachine gun. He winced as he pulled the nylon strap over his shoulder. Doc Heldner had been a little heavy-handed when she stitched up his arm. She could be that way when she was angry.

After ten years, Dr. Patricia Heldner remained a mystery to Nick, patient and caring one minute, merciless with a needle the next. A striking redhead in her late forties, she could still turn heads on any city street, but she preferred to be thought of as the Triple Seven's team mom. And like any mother, she had her secrets. Only Walker knew her story. She and the colonel had worked together well before the Triple Seven Chase came to be. When pressed about her past, the doctor would deftly steer the conversation toward her early medical training or her short tours with aid missions in Africa and eastern Europe, leaving decade-wide gaps in her history.

Most of the team figured that she had worked for the CIA, as was often the case when a DC operative had holes in their background. Drake had an alternative theory. He proposed that she had worked for the CDC and had been placed in the Triple Seven Chase for safekeeping because she was the only living soul with the top-secret knowledge necessary to thwart the impending zombie apocalypse.

After examining Drake, Doc Heldner had determined that he had a concussion and insisted he be kept under observation for twenty-four hours. The rest of the team, including Drake, had tried to convince her that finding the hostiles' boat was more important. Eventually tactical necessity prevailed but not without consequences for Nick. The entire argument took place while the increasingly frustrated doctor ran a needle and thread back and forth through his arm.

“I think I see something,” said Drake, extending the stock of his own MP7 and seating it in the crux of his shoulder. He peered through the scope. “Yeah, tally one small craft, about a hundred fifty yards ahead.”

Nick cut the motor to idle to reduce their noise. “Any occupants?” he asked.

“Not that I can see. They could be lying down inside, but it's just a runabout, so that would be tough to pull off.”

The intruder's boat gradually emerged from the haze, a blue and white runabout. Drake was right; there was no one inside. Then a sickening feeling washed over Nick.

“I've seen this boat before.”

“Where?” asked Drake.

“The docks. Two Kuwaitis were getting it ready as we loaded up the dinghy.”

“I guess they weren't really Kuwaitis.”

Nick clenched his fist. He should have investigated. A sunny day on the docks, and those two had been working on a boat in full white robes and headdresses. How could he have been so stupid? They had worn the traditional Kuwaiti garb because it obscured their features. “I'll drive it back to the
Illustro
. You lead in the dinghy,” he said.

“Sure, boss,” Drake replied. “Just don't lose me in the haze.”

Nick cautiously stepped from the dinghy into the runabout, his weapon still up and ready. It appeared that the intruders had brought only what they needed for the dive. There were some extra tanks, the white clothes, and little else.

While Drake turned the dinghy around, Nick pulled in the anchor and then moved forward to start the motor. As he leaned down to turn the key, he placed his hand on a beach towel lying on the front seat. Something hard was wrapped up inside. He held up the bundle and let it unravel, catching the object before it dropped onto the deck. “Well, that narrows it down,” he said out loud.

* * *

An hour after sunset, Nick and Drake hit the water again. Doc Heldner continued to pout, but the rest of the team agreed there was no time to waste in completing the salvage. Both divers used scooters, dragging the umbilical hoses that they would use to inflate the air bags they had brought down on the previous dive.

They made their final approach to the wreck with their scooters silent and their lights out. Nick wanted to maintain the element of surprise in case more intruders had converged on the wreck. Before beginning the salvage, they searched the bomber's perimeter for signs of enemy activity. They found none.

With no more bombs to disarm and no more rude interruptions, the operation ran smoothly. In a short time, they had the first set of air bags fully inflated. These did not lift the bomber off the seafloor, but they dramatically reduced the aircraft's effective weight for the cranes. Nick nodded to Drake to begin the lifting calls.

“Ready cranes one and two,” transmitted Drake. “Start with the lowest setting and lift together. Ready . . . Ready . . . Now.”

The cables creaked and groaned, but the bomber did not budge.

“Give 'em some more gas. Slowly . . . All together . . .” said Drake.

The cables quivered as Scott increased the torque on the cranes. Finally, like a massive ray lifting itself out of the silt, the aircraft inched upward. Great swirls of murk billowed out from beneath. Suddenly, an alarming
clunk
sounded from the bomb bay. Nick winced, painfully aware that no bomb was ever truly disarmed.

“Hold!” ordered Drake. But the defunct weapons offered no more protests. Once the silt settled, he started barking orders again at a furious pace, trying to keep the bomber level as the cranes lifted it to the first mark. After several stressful minutes, he had it ten feet off the bottom.

While Drake retrieved another air bag, Nick panned the light of his handheld scooter across the seafloor beneath the bomber. A shiny object reflected the light, a diver's watch. He swam over and tried to pull it out of the silt. After a few tugs it came up. And with it came a skeletal arm.

CHAPTER 9

D
espite the shock of discovering the body of Walker's lost diver, the rest of the salvage operation progressed smoothly. Less than an hour later, the team had the bomber at neutral buoyancy twenty feet below the surface—towing depth. They left no trace that the stealth bomber had ever been there.

A professional salvage operator might have frowned upon it, but Nick and Drake used the top of the aircraft as an elevator, piling all of their refuse and equipment on top of the jet, even the body. It felt wrong lifting human remains that way, but the urgency of covert operations rarely allowed for ceremony.

Colonel Walker wasted no time. With the bomber in towing position and the intruders' runabout lifted aboard, he immediately directed the
Illustro
toward the Strait of Hormuz.

“So this is the guy who got trapped under the bomber during the original salvage op,” said Nick. The team had gathered in the
Illustro
's small sick bay to examine the remains.

Walker lifted a foam cup and took a sip of coffee, staring out the sick bay's small portal. “Martin . . . His name was Mitchel Martin. He wasn't even supposed to be on the dive.”

“How so?” asked Nick.

“I put the salvage team together quickly, using two SEALs that I had worked with in the past. I wasn't sure that would be enough, so I consulted our man at the CIA. He recommended we add one of their experts.”

“This guy was a spook?” asked Drake.

“More like a contractor,” Walker replied absentmindedly.

Doc Heldner leaned over the bones and started to cut away what remained of the tattered wet suit. Drake contorted his face in disgust. “Something picked him clean, even inside his suit.”

“That'd be the creepy-crawlies of the deep,” explained Heldner, brushing a lock of red hair out of her face. “Crabs, hagfish, and who knows what else. He's been down there ten years; they probably cleaned all the flesh off his skeleton in a matter of weeks.” She completed her gruesome task and then piled the skeleton's clothing and equipment into a small container, immediately turning to store it in one of the sick-bay lockers.

“Wait,” said Nick, intercepting her before she reached the locker. “I need to take a look at something.” One piece of the diver's equipment had sparked his interest. He carefully took the container from her and placed it on the counter. Underneath the wet suit, he found an underwater cutter. He picked it up and slowly turned it over in his hand. “If you had already begun to lift the bomber,” he said to Walker, “then what was Martin still doing under there?”

The colonel shook his head. “I don't know why he went back under. He was in charge of the air bags, but he had already finished. All I know is that he swam under the bomber just as the first cable failed. It must have been horrifying; thousands of tons of aircraft crashing down on him and nowhere to go.” He looked down at the bones. “I'm glad you found him. Now he can finally go home.”

Several hours later, Nick stood silently in front of the steel door to Walker's stateroom, holding a towel-wrapped bundle in his hands. He did not knock immediately but waited, gathering his thoughts.

“Enter,” commanded Walker when Nick finally pounded on the door. As Nick pushed through the hatch, Walker swiveled around on a chair bolted to the floor of his quarters. He looked haggard. “It's a long way to the strait, Baron. What do you need?”

“I missed the hostile team at the docks in Kuwait. They were right there in front of me and I missed them.”

The colonel drained the last drop of coffee from his cup and then tossed it into a trash can beneath the desk. “Remind me to get one of those big half-thermos, half-mug things for the next trip.”

“I need help.”

“Okay, then get Merigold to remind me too.”

“No, sir, I mean we need another team member.”

Walker furrowed his brow. “You mean you want a replacement for Danny Sharp.”

“Not exactly. Danny was never supposed to be a field operative. The truth is, we've been shorthanded for a long time. Danny just filled the gap. If we'd had another trained field man in Iran, maybe Danny could have stayed behind to help Drake with the Shadow. If there had been another professional with us on this mission, he might have caught what Drake and I missed at the marina, and he could have watched Drake's back while I defused the bombs.” He glanced down at the fresh stitches in his arm. “Instead, the other team got the jump on us.”

Walker nodded. Nick tried to read his stonewall face, but he couldn't tell if he was getting through. The colonel remained silent for so long that he wondered if he had missed his cue to leave. Then the old warhorse's face finally softened, if only a little. “You make a good point, Baron. Maybe you could use some help. I'll look into it.” He leaned back in his chair. “You're getting a break anyway. When we get back, you and Drake get to play pilot again. I'm suspending operations until you complete the final test flight of the M-2 Wraith.”

Walker looked down at the towel-wrapped object in Nick's hands. His scowl returned. “Was that all? Or did you want me to do your laundry too?”

“Uh, right,” said Nick, not quite sure what to make of Walker's minimalist answer. He let it go and began to unwrap the bundle. “You might not want to suspend ops just yet. I want to put together one more little mission before we go home. I think we have a shot at finding out who sent our attackers.”

“I don't think so,” Walker corrected him. “You saw the bodies. There was no unit insignia, no identification of any kind. We know what region they're from, but it will take weeks of forensics to determine their specific ethnicity, and we may never know who really sent them.”

“Not necessarily, sir. I recovered something interesting from the runabout.” Nick moved closer and pulled back the towel, revealing an odd-looking submachine gun with a translucent cylindrical magazine mounted to the barrel. A helix of bullets gleamed in the yellow lamplight, visible through the polymer wall of the cylinder. “It's a Chang Feng submachine gun,” he said with finality.

Walker nodded in mock appreciation. “I can see that, Baron,” he said. “In fact, I think I saw one at the gun show in Charlottesville last year. So what?”

“So it tells us who these guys were.”

“No, it doesn't. Like I said, you can get one of these at a gun show or even order one on the Internet. Our guys could be from New Jersey and still carry this weapon.”

“No, sir, not
this
weapon.” Nick pushed a lever on the back of the magazine and popped out a round. “The export variants are chambered for nine millimeter, compatible with the rest of the world.” Nick held the bullet under the desk lamp for Walker to examine. “But this one is chambered for Chinese military-grade five-point-eight-millimeter rounds. You can't get this weapon anywhere on the open market, and only one group has ever carried it.” He pushed the lever back into place with a heavy
click
. “The Special Forces branch of the People's Liberation Army.”

Walker took the bullet from Nick and turned it over under the lamp. “All right, Baron. What sort of mission do you have in mind?”

CHAPTER 10

A
thick layer of high clouds hid the Special Operations CV-22 Osprey from the eyes of the world below. They masked its noise as well. Even without the clouds, from twenty thousand feet, the roar of its massive tilt-rotor engines would seem little more than a whisper to someone on the ground. Inside the aircraft, however, it sounded like the constant rush of a freight train.

“I still don't think she's as loud as an AC-130,” shouted Staff Sergeant Gunnar “Guns” Haugen, “particularly when the howitzer is going off!”

The young man seated across the cargo space from the blond, thick-necked sergeant shook his head. He cupped a gloved hand to his ear and shouted, “What?”

“I said, I don't think she's as loud as an AC-130!” Haugen repeated at the top of his lungs.

Senior Airman Ethan Quinn smiled mischievously. “I can't hear you,” he shouted back, “because it's way louder in here than in an AC-130!”

Haugen rolled his eyes and sat back on the webbed bench. Quinn surveyed his team: six men, most as young as him, seated on either side of the Osprey's cargo floor. They wore slate gray wingsuits and carried an assortment of exotic gear and weapons. In the dim light of the cabin, the whites of their eyes seemed all the brighter against their darkly camouflaged faces. And those faces looked grim, as if tonight would serve as the defining marker in the short history of their lives.

Quinn nodded. It would.

“Approaching the drop zone,” shouted the Osprey's loadmaster, offering a thumbs-up.

Quinn returned the signal and stood up, steadying himself against a large, sled-shaped crate positioned between the seats. Without a command, he donned his helmet and clipped his oxygen mask into place. The others followed suit. The loadmaster darkened the cabin, and Quinn switched on the night-vision system integrated into his visor. He could see every detail of the cabin, illuminated in the near-infrared spectrum by the covert beacons on each team member's helmet. There was a rush of air, and his ears popped as the pressure equalized. The cargo ramp behind him began to lower.

Quinn held up a balled fist, and the team stood as one. Two men, the largest of the group, moved to the back and grabbed the handles on either side of the sled-crate. They turned to face the ramp, bending their knees and setting their feet like sprinters in the starting blocks.

Haugen reached around to the back of Quinn's helmet and pulled their heads together. Quinn could see the fire in the sergeant's eyes, illuminated in the faint green glow of his night-vision system. “You ready for this?” Haugen asked, using their radio intercom for the first time.

Quinn pushed the big man away, patted the sniper rifle strapped to his chest, and smiled beneath his oxygen mask. “Just follow my lead and try not to screw up.”

With that, he turned and ran, vaulting into space just as the ramp reached its full open position. Then he was flying. Real flying. No matter how many jumps he made, no matter the task that awaited him on the ground, that exhilarating feeling of hurtling through the atmosphere never got old. Quinn focused the adrenaline rush into purposeful action. He tucked and rolled to reverse his heading, stabilized his glide, and then surveyed the scene below.

The clouds formed a solid floor, blocking Quinn's view of the forest. Pressing a button on the control strapped to his wrist, he called up his visor's navigation system. An orange heads-up display flashed into view. A digital altitude tape appeared on the right side, the numbers rolling up the screen from bottom to top. A small square near the center highlighted the location of the objective, with a slant-range readout counting down the distance left to fly.

“The objective is in range,” Quinn transmitted. “Estimated time over target is as fragged. Open chutes at your briefed altitudes.” Instead of a reply, Quinn felt a tug on his leg. He looked over his shoulder and saw Haugen taking up a position at his left heel while another team member floated in at his right. Behind them were two more, followed by the two big guys with the crate. The entire team formed an inverted teardrop, streaking through the night sky at over one hundred miles an hour.

Despite their high terminal velocity, Quinn had no sense of speed—particularly with his helmet protecting his face and ears from the wind. But that changed when he came within five hundred feet of the clouds. He had never encountered clouds on a HALO jump before. The artificial ground rush of streaking toward a solid deck added a completely new dimension to wingsuit flying. As he watched the puffy mass rushing up to meet him at breakneck speed, he understood the addiction that proximity jumpers describe after flying down mountainsides in Europe.

“Stay tight, they're not supposed to be too thick,” he transmitted just as he punched face-first into the deck. Flashes and swirls of green filled his night-vision display as he rushed through the layers and dead spaces of the cloud block. Then the flashes began to merge until they disappeared altogether and all he could see was a translucent green shroud. It took him just a moment to process what had happened; his visor had iced over. He felt Haugen's iron grip tighten on his heel.

“We're going blind here, Lead,” Haugen shouted into his comm receiver. “I'm going tumbleweed. I can't tell up from down!”

“Hold it together,” Quinn snapped. “I'm turning my horizon on.” Without a natural horizon to watch, he could tumble out of control in the clouds, taking his team with him. He moved an arm to press the switch, careful not to disrupt his flight path. The digital horizon flashed into view. Immediately he saw that it was a mistake to fly into the clouds without it. He had already drifted into a shallow bank, losing precious lift and glide range. He realized he should have commanded his team to activate their own horizons before joining the formation. Now it was too late. They could become unstable enough to crash into each other, with deadly consequences.

“We have to get out of these clouds,” he muttered to himself. One thousand feet thick, eight seconds, that's all this deck was supposed to be. How long had they been in here? He should have started counting after entry, but he'd been distracted by the thrill of the cloud rush.

Quinn began to count. Five seconds ticked by, and still he could not see. Worse, if ice was forming on their visors, it was forming on the leading edges of their wingsuits and chute packs as well. The extra weight could cause them to come up short of the objective or, worse, prevent some of their chutes from opening. He had to get them lower soon, but increasing the team's descent rate would guarantee a shortened glide and long walk.

“C'mon, Lead, we gotta get out of this!” urged Haugen.

Just as Quinn drew his arms in and increased his dive, a chunk of ice flew off his visor, then another and another. He could see. Looking up, he saw that the clouds were more than two thousand feet above. They'd been out for a while; it had just taken some altitude for the ice to start breaking off. Dense foliage spread out below like a massive dimpled carpet. Underneath the orange square in his display, he could see the sparse lighting of the target airfield, still twelve thousand feet below.

“I have visual!” Quinn transmitted, and then caught himself and started again, lowering his tone in an attempt to calm his own nerves as well as the others'. “I have visual. I have the objective in sight. We're on course, and I'm recovering the glide path.”

Quinn looked over his shoulder in time to see a chunk of ice break off his chute and smack Haugen right in the visor. The big sergeant sacrificed his position long enough to shake his fist before fighting his way back into formation.

As his altimeter counted through fifteen hundred feet, Quinn deployed his team. “Stand by. Three, two, one, execute.” He pressed another switch, and the orange target box shifted from the center of the airfield to a hill on its near perimeter. He felt a heavy smack against the back of his helmet. Haugen waved as he floated past and then tucked into a high-speed dive. Looking back, he saw the others spreading out to their individual landing points, their infrared beacons gleaming like embers, drifting on the wind.

At three hundred feet, Quinn pulled his chute, flaring just in time to alight on the peak of his hill. As he turned to gather his silk, he looked down and saw the last two team members touch down in the clearing below, followed by the sled-crate under its giant cargo chute. He quickly stripped out of his wingsuit and removed the oxygen mask from his mission helmet, replacing it with a boom mic. “All positions check in.”

“Two's ready,” replied Haugen, and the rest followed in sequence. Below, Quinn watched the two big guys lift a pair of dirt bikes out of their crate. They would walk the vehicles to the perimeter, keeping the engines quiet until surprise was spent.

Finding a solid patch of ground, Quinn set up his bipod. He wished that he could have brought his beloved M-107 fifty-cal. He chuckled to himself. The big gun might have been considered overkill for this particular mission. The smaller TM-110 that he carried now had an ungainly, top-mounted dispenser that made it impossible to use the scope while wearing his mission helmet. Also, the awkward rounds would hardly travel a quarter mile, forcing him to choose a perch closer to the target.

Quinn sighed and took one last look over the objective area with his night-vision system. Two men patrolled the ramp, two sat in a guard post at the gate, and two more guarded the small fleet of three light aircraft. That only left the tower crew. The layout felt too easy, as if Petrovsky really wanted them to succeed. Quinn shrugged. That wasn't entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

He scanned for sources of additional manpower. At the base of the tower, he found a single-story building with two small windows. They were dark, but there could be troops sleeping in there.

Quinn removed his helmet, flipped on the wireless, and seated a featherweight comm unit on his left ear. “Hey, Guns,” he transmitted.

“Go ahead,” whispered Haugen.

“Can you see the windows in the low building on the south side of the tower?”

“Ay-firm.”

“Good. On ‘Go,' put one round into each window just to make sure there are no extra players.”

“No sweat, boss.”

Quinn nodded to himself. “All right, team, here's your target brief. Six, take out the ramp patrol—I only saw two. Seven, take out the aircraft guards; there are two of those as well. Four and Five, secure the guard post at the entrance. I'll take care of the High-Value Individual in the tower. Two, you know your assignment. Three, save your rounds for cleanup.” Quinn checked his watch. “I'm down to my soda-straw scope for night vision, so call out pop-ups in all areas as you see 'em. Execute at twenty-six past the hour.”

Each team member responded in sequence, and then Quinn settled down into his scope. The focused illuminator offered a crisp black-and-white image of his target. Aside from Petrovsky and his thick, eighties mustache, only one other officer occupied the booth. How easy were they going to make this?

Quinn checked his watch. Thirty seconds to go time. He noted the integrated wind meter on his scope display and then cross-checked the position of the crosshairs. The whole mission depended on this shot for success, but the light winds meant he could push the envelope a little. He hesitated for a moment and then adjusted his aim from the heart to the head. Petrovsky's unnaturally large noggin made too tempting a target.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .” Quinn gently squeezed the trigger. A fraction of a second later, Petrovsky went down, hard. In perfect sequence, Haugen's first heavy round sailed through the window of the low building, and the high-pitched whine of the dirt bikes screamed from either end of the field. Quinn shifted to Petrovsky's lieutenant. The younger man dove for cover, but Quinn skillfully added lead and put a round into his back. He took a moment to check for movement. Knowing that his adrenaline had quickened his perceptions, he counted it out in his head. One potato, two potato, three potato.
Nothing. Both men were down. Satisfied, he sat up and donned his helmet. He flipped on his night vision just in time to see Seven put the final round into the final target. All of the guards were down. No one came out of the low building.

“Six and Seven, clear that building!”

Both men dismounted from their bikes. One of them yanked open the door to the structure and then the other crept in. A moment later, Seven raised a thumbs-up.

“All team members report!” ordered Quinn, his heart pumping.

“Two and Three complete. Good shots.”

“Four and Five complete. The gate is secure.”

“Six and Seven complete. The ramp is secure.”

“And Lead is complete. The tower is secure,” said Quinn. “Good job everyone. I think it's . . .”

Suddenly a new voice broke into Quinn's transmission. “Senior Airman Quinn, get your team to the exfil point and then report to me immediately.” Petrovsky did not sound happy.

* * *

Captain Chad Petrovsky paced back and forth at one end of the sparse room inside the building below the tower. Quinn could tell he wanted to sit down, but he couldn't, because Haugen's second heavy paint grenade had covered the only chair in the room with red goo. Petrovsky himself still bore the yellow residue from Quinn's sniper round on the side of his head. An ugly lump had started to form just above his right ear.

“I suppose you think you're funny,” said Petrovsky, his mustache bristling with anger.

Quinn tried to look as contrite as possible. “Negative, sir,” he lied. “I thought my rounds would explode on the window. I could not tell from the scope image that you'd removed the panels.”

“There are no panels!” Petrovsky exploded. “There never
were
any panels. This is a practice range. There is no glass here of any kind!” He beat his chest emphatically. “You were supposed to shoot me in the vest!” The captain paused to feel the bump on his head, wincing as his hand touched the tender spot. Then he gestured at a small cooler sitting on a table against the far wall. “And look what your teammate did to my dinner!” In a stroke of incredible fortune, Haugen's first heavy round had sailed through the unprotected window, penetrated the fabric side of the cooler, and exploded inside. Petrovsky gingerly lifted a paint-soaked ham sandwich. “We told you there were only eight targets in the safety brief: the High-Value Individual, the Secondary, and six security guards. What madness drove you to attack my sandwich?”