The Fall (22 page)

And suddenly, at that very instant, as Angela snuggled up against him while he steered
Dark & Stormy
across a choppy ocean in the predawn darkness of this parallel universe he had fallen into, everything felt strangely right with the world.

But just as suddenly, Jack's inner voice told him the feeling was an illusion. The same instincts that had kept him alive in Afghanistan, Colombia, and back in Cocoa Beach now broadcast that they weren't alone.

The wind in his face, the hull splashing against waves in explosions of foam and mist, the roar of the outboards rumbling in his ears, Jack glanced up at the night sky, his eyes searching for any indication of surveillance, though he knew that would be futile. If the U.S. government had eyes on him, especially with all the noise around him, he wouldn't notice it until either a Coast Guard helicopter or cutter loomed in the horizon, or worse, a Hellfire missile from a drone blew them to kingdom come.

Jack felt the latter scenario to be the likely one. For better or for worse, he had fired at U.S. Army soldiers, probably even killed some. Revenge would come just as sudden and unexpected as that fusillade in his living room.

Feeling exposed to infrared surveillance, realizing how vulnerable they were in the middle of the ocean in an open boat when the enemy was armed with so much aerial reconnaissance technology, he returned his attention to the twin flat screens on his instrument panel, the right one slaved to the boat's GPS navigation system and the left one displaying engine parameters.

Jack scanned the latter one, making sure that everything from oil pressure to fuel levels remained in the green for both outboards, before focusing on the GPS map, an evasive plan forming in his covert ops mind—a plan straight out of the SEAL manual targeted at giving him the edge against a much stronger and better-armed adversary.

An adversary that Jack had angered tonight. And everything he knew told him that this bear he had just kicked would be coming back with a vengeance.

He reached for the radio and switched it to Channel 21A, a frequency of 157.05Mhz, the first of several frequencies reserved for Coast Guard operations.

“What's wrong?” Angela asked.

“Just getting a bad feeling.”

She understood and jumped off the seat, standing in front of the instrument panel, shoulder-to-shoulder with Jack, and began to scan the airwaves.

Pursing his lips, Jack narrowed his gaze at the sky once more before inspecting the GPS overlay of a map of the Florida coastline, making his decision, and turning the bow thirty degrees to starboard the moment he spotted a set of red and green lights marking the entrance to the Fort Pierce inlet connecting the ocean to the Indian River.

*   *   *

“You mind telling me what in the world she was doing in your house, Flaherty?”

Pete sat in the same chair where Angela had been interrogated the day before, with Riggs standing behind him while Hastings inspected his fingernails, backdropped by the remnants of Claudette, which was mostly light rain and sporadic lightning.

The trip to find Angela had proved unproductive, just as he had hoped. But something had gone terribly wrong on the way back. Hastings's attitude toward him had changed just as they'd reached the Cape, after a short phone call from one of his gurus.

The three of them had come straight to the VIP office on the third floor, where Hastings had just sprung a question that Pete wasn't quite ready to answer.

“Sir, I have no idea how she got in.”

“See, Flaherty, that's the thing. I can see her breaking in, but I certainly don't get how she knew the proper alarm code, as well as your wireless password.”

Pete frowned inwardly, realizing this was precisely the risk he had decided to take on when making his decision to help Angela.

“I know how it looks, sir, but I have no idea how she did it. She used to be a hacker.”

“Yes, indeed,” he said. “And apparently she still is quite the little hacker.”

Pete remained silent.

“But you,” Hastings added, “are quite the lying piece of shit.”

He leaned forward. “With all due respect, sir, I will
not
stand for—”

The blow was completely unexpected, and before he knew it, Pete found himself rolling on the carpeted floor, his right temple on fire.

Before he could react, powerful hands yanked him off the floor and dropped him back on the chair.

Stung, dazed, confused, the blurred image of General Hastings leaning forward and planting both elbows on the desk, Pete blinked rapidly, trying to come around, to get it together, to—

“Lets try this again, shall we?” Hastings hissed. “How did Dr. Taylor end up at your place?”

“General,” Pete said, taking raspy breaths, a hand on his throbbing temple. “You are … completely out of line … I will … report this to—”

The second blow stung infinitely more than the first as he rolled onto the carpet again, gasping for air, hands shielding his face as a boot came into view, swinging toward him, kicking him in the solar plexus, doubling him over, sending him flying right into the wall like a football, crashing face first, bouncing, landing hard on his back.

His mouth open, Pete tried to force air into his lungs, limbs trembling, eyes flickering, staring at the ceiling, his mind at the edge of consciousness.

And Riggs snatched him up again with animal strength, dumping him back on the chair like a rag doll, his massive hands clutching his shoulders to steady him.

“Flaherty, you just pissed your pants,” Hastings said. “Now, I'm going to ask you one more time … Dr. Taylor managed to land at your house, where she hacked into one of my classified networks and infected it with some really fucked up stuff. You are not only going to tell me how she ended up at your house, but you're also going to tell me where she's hiding—along with whoever is helping her.”

Pete couldn't have told him if he had wanted to as he wheezed air in and out of his lungs, his eyes losing focus.

“Tell you what, I'm going to step out and leave your stinking ass here with your new
best friend,
who will keep a good eye on you while you think things over.”

With that, the hands on his shoulders vanished and Pete collapsed on his side, landing back on the carpet, arms bracing his aching chest as he curled up in a fetal position trying to breathe, the stench of his own urine reaching his nostrils as he started to heave, to convulse, vomiting whatever little he had managed to eat in the past few hours.

Bastards,
he thought, clenching his jaw, the smell of bile mixing with the coppery taste of his own blood adding to his nausea.

Fight it!
Pete could almost hear Jack screaming.

Mustering strength, he held back a convulsion, blinking rapidly to clear his sight, the blur resolving into Riggs's boots a few feet away, by the door, where he stood with hands behind his back.

Still curled up, pretending to moan while rolling over, turning his back to Riggs, Pete managed to sneak a trembling hand down his right leg, curling his fingers around the Taser's handle, freeing it from its holster and holding it by his waistline.

Breathing deeply, settling his nausea, his eyes regaining focus, Pete rolled back to face Riggs, who stood tall and firm, like a damn rock, eyes front, hands still behind his back.

“Hey … eunuch,” Pete hissed, recalling the video he had seen during Angela's turn at the barrel.

Riggs blinked and dropped his gaze at him, eyes widening in surprise.

Pete pulled the Taser's trigger just as Riggs reached for his sidearm.

Two probes shot out at nearly five hundred feet per second connected to fine wires spooled inside the unit.

The probes poked into Riggs's upper thigh and lower abdomen, delivering a series of five-thousand-volt pulses to his neural network, overwhelming normal nerve traffic.

The large man dropped unceremoniously, like a giant sack of potatoes, and to Pete's joy, it was Riggs's turn to convulse, vomit, and even urinate.

Slowly, his thumb pressing the Taser's trigger, Pete staggered to his feet, suddenly feeling tall next to this trembling bastard.

“Hey … best friend,” he said, keeping a respectful distance to avoid getting shocked himself. “You just pissed your pants.”

Pete released the trigger while kicking Riggs across the temple to knock him out, just as Jack had shown him years ago, before reaching for the soldier's sidearm, a Colt 1911, and shoving it in the small of his back.

Then, just as he had seen Angela do, Pete also shifted his attention to the large windows behind the oversized VIP desk, where he—

“Wait … please,” Riggs mumbled in between raspy breaths.

Pete dropped his gaze at the oversized soldier, amazed he was still conscious.
This asshole has a pretty thick skull.

He swung his leg back, getting ready to kick him again.

“There's … something … you should … know.”

 

7

PRESSURE POINT

In a crisis, be aware of the danger, but recognize the opportunity.

—John F. Kennedy

The MQ-1B Predator lurked over the horizon at twenty thousand feet under a star-filled night, its Rotax 914F engine pushing the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, close to its maximum speed of 135 knots.

The half-ton drone dashed over the beach ten miles south of the Kennedy Space Center, its infrared sensors scanning the ocean below in programmed grids as guided by KU-Band satellite communications via the Primary Predator Satellite Link, a ground-based dish relaying the commands from an adjacent ground control station in nearby Patrick Air Force Base.

Sitting in the left seat of the windowless Predator ground control station, which resembled the back of a semibed, Predator Pilot Major Virginia Jackson, USAF, used light finger touch to shift the right-hand joystick slightly to the left. Two seconds later, she received visual confirmation via the aircraft's nose camera of the Predator banking ten degrees left to a course of one seven nine, parallel to the coast five miles out.

“We're white hot,” reported Captain Rob Quinn, the Predator sensor operator sitting in the right seat of the PGCS and responsible for target prosecution, reviewing the information gathered by the infrared camera of the UAV's Multi-Spectrum Targeting Sensor, the gimbal-mounted dome protruding beneath the aircraft's nose. He compared the scans with the geospatial location of every Coast Guard-sanctioned vessel in their current hundred-square-mile quadrant of ocean at that very instant.

Virginia, a former F-16 pilot who had long become accustomed to the lack of sensory input when flying drones from armchairs, fingered the left-mounted throttle control, trimming power to sixty percent, keeping the Predator at a steady 125 knots for improved endurance while also maximizing the time it would spend over each quadrant. The intelligence briefing had revealed that the target, runaway terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda aboard a thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler, were last reported leaving their hideout in Cocoa Beach heading south following a fierce battle with a Special Ops team, who had stormed their cell.

Where are you hiding, motherfuckers?
she thought, keeping her plane steady while her colleague did the heavy lifting, processing the video feed and transmitting it in real time to a Predator operations center a mile away in the center of the base, where a team of intelligence analysts combed through the acquired imagery and relayed instructions back to the ground control station for prosecution. Three more Predators and their ground crews were deployed five minutes after Virginia's, scanning nearby grids of Atlantic Ocean under the coordination of the same POC.

The intelligence briefing had included the deaths of at least eight servicemen, drastically escalating the relevancy of the threat.

For the next twenty minutes, the Predator team continued to scrub their assigned grids in white-hot mode, meaning heat sources showed up as white against a dark background. The Coast Guard report helped eliminate most contacts, approved vessels—commercial and recreational—cruising up and down the picturesque coast.

“Got something,” reported Quinn, bringing up the finding on the main flat screens hanging between them, placing the crosshairs onto a vessel fitting the description. “This one's not on the list,” he added.

Virginia went to work immediately, reducing throttle while banking to the left, commanding the UAV into long, lazy circles over the target, like a true predator, fingers itching in anticipation.

“HVT confirmed as a thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler,” announced the senior intelligence officer at the POC a minute later, after Quinn had zoomed in and provided them with enough close-up imagery. “I think it's trying to make a run for international waters.”

“Copy that. Starting tracking,” Quinn replied. “Updating coordinates real time.”

Virginia stared at the screen, locating the high-value target while keeping the Predator on a ten-degree bank at a steady ninety knots, holding altitude, allowing Quinn to paint the HVT with the laser range designator housed in the underside dome.

“Target locked,” Quinn reported.

“Coast Guard's on the way,” reported POC. “ETA fifteen minutes.”

Virginia reviewed the information on the screen, reading the relevant data, including target position coordinates, bearing to target and range to target while the ball, or dome, rotated as the Predator banked, keeping the crosshairs locked on the target, as specified during the briefing.

“How many on board?” she asked, squinting.

“Hard to tell,” Quinn reported.

She frowned. The heat from the large outboards pretty much washed away any other heat signatures on such a small boat. On top of that, the vessel had a fiberglass canopy in the middle, and they couldn't see through it.