Wraith (30 page)

Epilogue

When he finally got home, Nick had some careful explaining to do. The B-2 deployment, now public knowledge, explained his extended absence, but it could not explain the stitches in his thigh. Katy did not let him off easy.

“You didn't call for more than a week,” she fumed, her hands on her hips. “Then you come home wounded and all you can offer me is, ‘Sorry, dear, accidents happen'?”

“Drag told you that I couldn't call once they pulled me out of Alabama,” argued Nick.

Tears formed in Katy's eyes. “But he didn't tell me you were going to a forward base as part of a war. He told me it was an exercise. Then, a few days ago, he calls to say that you've been in an accident, that you're okay but you have to remain in a field hospital until they can medevac you home. How am I supposed stay calm when, the day after a war kicks off, your boss tells me you're too hurt to talk on the phone?”

Nick tried not to show his relief. She was upset, but at least she was buying it. She would never know how close he'd come to death, how far he'd traveled beyond the front line. “I'm so sorry, sweetheart.”

She fell into his arms, still sobbing quietly. “I was afraid you weren't really coming home. I kept waiting for the chaplain to knock on our door. Promise me I won't have to go through that again.”

She rested her head on his chest. Nick ran his fingers through her hair and smelled her sweet perfume. “I promise, love, I promise,” he said. And even though they both knew it wasn't true, it still made them feel better.

*   *   *

Nick had to make one more classified trip out to Washington to meet with the oversight committee and debrief the mission. Then, two weeks after his return, he finally began his B-2 training. During those months, he and Katy often invited Drake over for dinner, but the two pilots avoided any discussion of the mission that had sealed their friendship. Mostly they talked of squadron gossip and Drake's long-distance relationship with Amanda.

When his training was complete, Nick moved into the Tiger weapons office. Murph had moved on to an instructor position at the B-2 Weapons School and Drake had taken over command of the shop, with Nick as his second. The two of them were still rearranging the desks and furniture to their liking when Drag appeared in their doorway, gently rapping on the frame with his knuckles. “You boys busy?” he asked in his raspy, nicotine-laden voice.

“Not at all, sir,” Drake replied.

“Good.” Drag's voice was ominous, conspiratorial. “I need a few moments of your time.”

Drake shot a wary look at his friend, but Nick just responded with a thin smile. Walker had warned him this was coming. During the Washington trip, the two of them had discussed the future—Nick's future, and the future of the Triple Seven Chase. It was not just a T-38 chase squadron anymore, and it no longer belonged to Merlin.

Nick patted his friend on the arm. “Don't worry, Drake. I think you're going to like this.”

Drag nodded toward the door. “Time is wasting, gentlemen. I need you to come with me. I have some papers for you to sign.”

And now a special excerpt from James R. Hannibal's

SHADOW CATCHER

Available now from Berkley!

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.

PART ONE

GHOSTS

CHAPTER 1

Kuwait

March 18, 2013

A
lone Westerner weaved his way along the crowded sidewalk in front of the Souk Sharq in Kuwait City, suffering the uneasy glances and occasional loathing glares of the locals. They did not bother him; with his flaxen hair and fair skin, such looks were unavoidable. On another day, he might have indulged his audience by slowing to gaze up at the beautiful souk, playing the part of the wandering tourist, admiring the high towers and ornate arches that hearkened back to the glory days of the Persian Empire. But not today. There was no time.

For ten years, the objective had lain hidden, dormant. For ten years, the secret had remained sealed in its watery vault. Now that he was back, he felt like that seal had been broken, as if his mere presence in the Persian Gulf had started a race against an unknown enemy. And somehow he knew he was already behind.

Once inside the souk, Air Force major Nick Baron moved into the shadow of a pillar. Now free from the usual disdainful looks, he let his steel blue eyes slowly drift over the crowd, scanning the potpourri of faces for something much more dangerous: recognition. He found none. Finally satisfied that he was not being watched or followed, he turned his attention to finding his teammate. It did not take long.

Nick slowly shook his head and sighed.

Major Drake Merigold stood in the center of the Grand Corridor at the base of a beautiful two-story water clock, staring up at the Jules Vernian sculpture with his mouth slightly agape. He wore an orange and blue Hawaiian shirt that hung untucked over his khaki shorts. He could not have stood out more amid the drab garb of the locals if he had worn a fluffy red wig and big floppy shoes.

The two field operatives of the Triple Seven Chase squadron had arrived on separate flights, on separate carriers, under assumed names. Each had used a unique, indirect route to reach the souk, where they were supposed to quietly join up before heading out into the gulf to meet the rest of the team. The stakes of this mission demanded strict adherence to the principles of covert movement. But then how could Drake be expected to fully grasp the stakes? No one had told him the real reason they were here.

“Magnum PI called,” said Nick, joining his comrade at the water clock. “He wants his shirt back.”

Drake nodded, still looking up. “It's called hiding in plain sight, boss.” He was nearly a head taller than Nick, with broad shoulders to match and chiseled Greek features. With his flawless dark hair and obnoxious shirt, he looked like a movie star about to go on a cruise rather than a military operative. He glanced around the wide corridor, pulling the loud shirt away from his body and fanning it to take advantage of the air-conditioning. “They did a good job rebuilding. The last time we were here, an Iraqi missile had just crashed through the ceiling. You'd never know that there was once a huge crater right where we're standing.”

“They've had ten years to fix it,” said Nick. “We've been away a long time.”

For the first time since Nick had stepped out of the shadows, Drake looked him straight in the eyes. “So, why are we back?”

Nick dropped his eyes from Drake's to check his watch. “The others should be reaching the rendezvous point soon. It's time we got out there.”

Drake frowned. “You're starting to act like the colonel.”

“Just pick up your bag and let's go.”

Nick shifted the strap of the duffel bag that hung over his shoulder and started walking toward the central rear archway, the exit to the marina. Like Drake, he wore civilian clothes to hide his military affiliation, although his choices were a little more understated. His dark gray button-down shirt hung loose on his shoulders, masking the solid build beneath. Both men carried civilian duffel bags with enough gear to get them through a few days on the water, just as Colonel Walker had directed.

Warm salty air rushed over him as Nick pushed open the glass double doors. He started down the stairs to the wooden boardwalk, where several docks extended out into the gulf. Each had room for twenty small craft and each was nearly full, a forest of masts and canvas. Other than the whip and snap of the sails in the gentle breeze, all seemed quiet. Nick felt the temptation to relax.

The doors to the Grand Corridor clicked closed behind him, wrenching his senses away from the pleasant atmosphere. He paused halfway down the stairs. Scanning farther down the docks, he spied a pair of locals in the common white
thaub
s
and keffiyehs. He watched them for a few moments as they prepared to launch a blue and white runabout, probably for an evening pleasure cruise. They looked harmless.

At the end of the third dock, he found a black dinghy waiting at the prescribed slip. He held it fast and tossed in their bags while Drake jumped on board and prepped the motor.

Within minutes, Drake had the throttle fully open, accelerating out into the open waters of the Persian Gulf. Every so often, he steered into a wave, sending white spray over the bow and onto Nick.

“I know you're doing that on purpose,” said Nick, wiping the oily gulf water from his face.

“Just trying to lighten the mood,” replied Drake. “You gotta learn to relax, boss.”

“I'll relax when the mission is complete and the team is safely back at Romeo Seven.”

“You know that ain't true.”

Nick refused to respond. He was in no mood for friendly ribbing, and he feared that in a few hours' time, Drake's usual jovial temper would sour as well. Before the day was over, Drake would accuse him of betrayal, and he would have every right to.

Twenty minutes later, another craft appeared on the horizon. Despite his fears, Nick managed a thin smile. The commander of the Triple Seven Chase was well known in the covert ops community as an acquisitions wizard. Colonel Richard T. Walker had just pulled another rabbit out of his pointy hat, and this time she was a big one.

Nick estimated the vessel to be at least 250 feet long with a 50-foot beam. She looked fresh from the dry dock, with unblemished white paint and a thick red stripe along the rails. She was well equipped too, with three golf-ball-style radomes amidships and a docking station jutting out from the rear beneath two heavy salvage cranes.

“
Illumination ex Caligo
,” read Nick, squinting at the black lettering near the bow of the craft.

“It means ‘Illustrious Sea Monkey,'” said Drake.

“I don't believe you.”

“Good call.” Drake scratched his chin in thought. “If I remember my Latin correctly, it means ‘Illumination out of Darkness.'” He guided the dinghy to the aft station, cutting his speed to a crawl and then inching into position in an agonizingly slow attempt at docking.

“Well, that was ugly, Merigold,” said a booming voice from above. An imposing figure leaned against the rail of the upper deck. With his gray crew cut and perpetual scowl, Colonel Walker carried the aura of a man in full US Army service dress, even when wearing a golf shirt and khakis.

“Hey, I fly airplanes, not boats,” retorted Drake, slapping the tubular black hull of the dinghy. “I'm used to touching down on a solid surface at a hundred and fifty knots, not wallowing in to a moving target at five. You should be glad I didn't ram this thing into your little rental here.”

Walker ignored Drake's attempt to bait him. “Hurry up, gentlemen,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do before dark.”

“And what work is that, sir?” asked Drake, hopping onto the ship's dock to secure the dinghy.

The colonel's usual scowl faded into a grim smile. “Preparing to raise a ghost from our past, Major Merigold,” he said. “Preparing to raise a ghost from our past.”