Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “Are you forgetting something?”

  Jimmy hesitates. “Thank you…?”

  “No,” Diane practically snaps. “Vancouver Island is in Canada. If he crosses into Canadian waters, he’s out of our reach.” She takes a breath, and in a softer tone adds, “In case you’ve forgotten, Canada is not very cooperative with extraditions that might carry the death penalty.”

  Jimmy nods, though Diane can’t see this. He glances at me for ideas, but I just shrug. I’ve got nothing.

  Lorcan has a three-and-a-half-hour head start. We’ve got to get ahead of him somehow, but he’s probably halfway up the sound by now—as far as Everett, at least. An even more frightening proposition is that he could be a lot farther north than we imagine. It depends on how hard he’s pushing the boat, how many risks he’s taking.

  “What about Utah?” I ask.

  Utah is the call sign for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter assigned to Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations, or AMO, in Bellingham. It’s stationed at the airport not far from Hangar 7 and has an array of border security equipment that includes night-vision goggles, FLIR Safire cameras, and, of course, a Nightsun spotlight that’ll cut through the darkest of dark. All three will be a godsend on this snowy winter night.

  Jimmy is intrigued, but asks, “How will they stop him?”

  “They don’t have to. You get Utah in the air and see if AMO can spare some boats. Then contact Naval Air Station Whidbey and see if their search-and-rescue helicopter is available—they owe us one, if I remember correctly. Also, the Coast Guard station in Bellingham might have assets they can deploy quickly.”

  “You want to throw up a blockade?”

  “Well … yeah. It won’t be much of a blockade, but if we get searchlights sweeping the water at all the chokepoints, we might drive him to ground. Maybe he’ll hole up somewhere.” I shake my head, as if all this is obvious. “It buys us more time.”

  Jimmy likes it. “Did you catch all that?” he says into the phone.

  “Got it; working on it,” Diane replies. “You want me to contact Canadian Border Services Agency and see if they have any boats out?”

  “Do it,” Jimmy replies. “And I think the sheriff’s office has a marine patrol boat, so see if they want to play. Frankly, I don’t care if it’s deputies in their private boats with flashlights.”

  “Deputies … flashlights…” Diane says, as if writing it down.

  “Need anything from me?” Jimmy asks.

  “Nope,” Diane says, and the line goes dead.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later the phone rings again. This time it’s Marty.

  “We’ll meet you at the elementary school in five minutes,” he says, his voice seeming to vibrate as he speaks.

  “What’s the plan?” Jimmy asks.

  “No worries, man,” Marty says in a horrible Jamaican accent. “We got you covered.” We hear Les chuckling in the background. Normally, a chuckle from Les is like a belly laugh from anyone else, so I’m a little curious … and a bit concerned.

  There are now twenty-seven officers, deputies, and special agents combing through Lorcan’s house and the rooms and passages below. With no victims on the premises, their focus is now on locating anything that will help us find and convict the monster. Eight members of the FBI’s Evidence Response Team arrived an hour ago. Five of the eight were with us at Murphy’s cabin, but I only know one of them by name, and that’s George, the young tech who helped me photograph the death masks.

  The crime scene is in good hands, but it’s still hard to leave.

  Danny gives us a ride to the school in one of the FBI’s ubiquitous black SUVs. As usual, Jimmy sits in front while Nate, Jason, and I pile into the back. It’s considerably more comfortable than the Volvo.

  The drive is short, and a minute later Danny pulls to the curb outside the dark school. The parking lot is deserted, with not a soul or vehicle in sight. After a few minutes, Jimmy starts checking his watch and glancing up the street.

  I don’t know when I first notice it. I suppose it’s like dogs before an earthquake: they know something is coming, they just don’t know what.

  A minute later, the once-imperceptible sound takes voice, hailing its approach; a growl growing into a roar. There’s a change in the air, a familiar pulse as the sound now comes on fast. As it draws near, it fills my senses: I see it, I feel it, I hear it.

  We step out of the SUV and watch with boyish delight as the sound consumes us, throbbing in the night and reminding us that we’re alive.

  It’s Marty.

  Of course it’s Marty.

  And as he comes to rest in the middle of the parking lot, he throws open a door and waves at us, a foot-wide grin on his face. Despite my surprise and wonder, I can’t help but notice the nicely painted logo on the panel behind him. It reads MICROSOFT.

  “Oh, my God,” I say. “He stole Bill Gates’s helicopter.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  We’re in the air a minute later, racing north, not sure exactly where we’re going, but knowing our best hope lies in this direction.

  Marty is both offended and tickled that we think he stole Bill Gates’s helicopter. He’s offended that we think he’s capable of such a thing—until we remind him of an incident in Colorado three years ago. Then he just grins and says, “Oh, yeah.”

  It turns out that Marty’s old Army buddy, Scoot, now flies for Microsoft. After Marty called Scoot and quickly explained why he was waking him in the early morning hours, Scoot made a few calls of his own and pulled some strings with the executives. The guys in the suits were sympathetic to the dire circumstances and readily agreed to loan out one of their extremely fast and expensive corporate helicopters, provided the FBI took responsibility for any damage.

  The fact that this might generate some great PR probably didn’t hurt.

  * * *

  By the time we pass the Port of Everett, the blockade to the north starts paying off. Utah spots a boat running dark just north of the San Juan Islands. They light it up with the Nightsun, but it’s not slowing or diverting. According to the last update, it’s moving way too fast for the current conditions. Utah is concerned that it may founder.

  Since leaving Lakewood, the wind has only increased, and the snow has grown heavy. Even before the first flake fell, news channels between Portland and Canada were calling it the storm of the decade. It’s starting to look like they might be right. Glancing out the port window, I watch the waves of the Puget Sound pass below, looking like an endless herd of white-maned horses.

  This is no weather for boats, or for helicopters.

  As the situation to the north plays out, Marty feeds us updates. “There’s a Coast Guard cutter racing south from Point Roberts,” he advises. “Utah says they’ve ordered the boat to stop, but it’s ignoring the command. They’re going to try to get a bit closer and see if they can make out the hull number, just to make sure.” A minute later he adds, “Coast Guard is ten minutes from intercept.”

  “Can they tell what type of boat?” I ask.

  “When they first spotted it, they said it resembled our target, but…” He pauses and holds his hand to the headphone. “Gee-eez!” he suddenly exclaims.

  “What?”

  “They’re running parallel to the boat,” he says.

  “So?”

  “They’re ten feet off the deck.” The massive grin on his face suggests he’d like to be doing the same, which is absolutely frightening. “Uh—hang on.” He puts his hand to the headphone again, pressing it to his ear. When he releases a moment later, the grin is gone. “No go,” he says, suddenly serious. “The hull number doesn’t match. Coast Guard advises that they’re probably just smugglers. They’re going to have one of their boats intercept and check it out.”

  I swear under my breath. The hope I felt a moment ago is gone, and we’re back to desperately searching for a marble in a football stadium. At the moment, it feels like Lorcan’s winning agai
n.

  * * *

  Whidbey Island runs north and south in the Puget Sound, beginning in the Everett area to the south and ending halfway to Bellingham. We fly the channel between the island and the Olympic Peninsula, watching the lights of Port Townsend drift past through the port window.

  We finally slip beyond the congested southern islands and peninsulas, and into the largest stretch of open water in the Puget Sound. To the west is the wide mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, leading to Port Angeles and then out to the Pacific Ocean. Twenty miles north of us, the San Juan Islands wait, their low silhouettes shrouded by night.

  It’s this northern archipelago that presents our next challenge.

  Nestled in the Puget Sound midway between Vancouver Island to the west, and the United States to the east, it’s here that Lorcan can make his break and cut through Haro Strait into Canadian waters. The fact that we’re this close and still haven’t caught sight of his boat has me worried. Was our assumption wrong? Could Lorcan have ditched the boat near Seattle, or somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula?

  If there’s one thing we’ve learned about him, it’s that he has resources and contingency plans—maybe we just latched onto the wrong contingency plan.

  “Take a look,” Marty says a moment later.

  Unbuckling my seat belt, I lean up between him and Les as he points to the northwest. In the distance, I see the powerful glow of a searchlight shining down on the water and sweeping from side to side. Then Marty points at other lights. “That’s all Canadian territorial water west of the San Juans,” he says. “The Navy helo is on our side of the line, but the other lights are Canadian Border Services. They’ve got two helicopters up, and three boats. Guess they don’t like the idea of your Onion boy coming into their country.”

  My hopes rise once more, but with less elevation.

  With all the lights and activity west of the San Juan Islands, the smart money is now betting that Lorcan cuts up through the islands, keeping closer to shore, or even swinging farther east and then north through Rosario Strait.

  Then we see Utah.

  The Black Hawk is sweeping the water with her spotlight between San Juan Island and Lopez Island. As we draw near, we see the bird suddenly lift its nose and pull a sharp turn to the north. Quickly picking up speed, she suddenly drops low and skims over the wave tops. My heart begins to race at the sight.

  Marty gets the call a second later.

  “They’ve got something,” he confirms. “Another boat running dark. Looks like it’s trying to slip through using the islands as cover. They’re trying to get close enough for a hull number.”

  Marty extracts every last shred of speed from the Microsoft helicopter as he races to join Utah, still ten miles to the north. I glance at the air speed indicator, which displays in both knots and miles per hour, and note that the latter shows we’re now doing over 170 miles per hour. At this rate we’ll close with Utah in three or four minutes.

  You can always count on Marty to properly herald great and terrible things. With the grace of a teenage boy, he starts jumping around in his seat and fist-pumping the air. When he composes himself enough to speak, he announces, “We’ve got confirmation on the hull number.” He turns around and grins at me, adding, “That’s your boat.”

  The news washes over me, and in a single moment I relax and then tense up again. I relax because we found Lorcan; that means we found Melinda—unless he dumped her in the sound someplace between here and Gig Harbor. But I don’t want to think about that right now.

  I tense up because this game is nowhere near finished.

  With that thought, my hand goes instinctively to my coat pocket and the comforting cold steel of the Glock that Jimmy insisted I carry. It’s not my Walther P22, but it’ll do.

  As I continue to gaze through the windshield, it occurs to me that I should be sitting down and buckling up, but I can’t take my eyes off the pursuit playing out before me. As we draw nearer, I can clearly see the boat lit up in Utah’s spotlight. It looks like Lorcan has thrown caution to the proverbial wind as he attempts to elude the relentless Black Hawk. He can barely keep his balance as the boat skips across the waves, giving the hull a proper pounding as it slams into the next whitecap, and the next, and the next.

  Jimmy joins me, the allure of the chase too much to resist. Behind him comes Nate, and over my left shoulder Jason’s face presses forward. The only one not glued to the windshield is Danny. When I glance back at him, he gives me a tired smile and then goes back to checking his equipment, which includes a heavily modified AR-15 rifle.

  “What are they doing?” Jimmy asks.

  It’s a good question.

  From our vantage point, it looks like the Black Hawk has moved up and parked itself on top of the boat. The powerful downward blast from its blades is churning the already frothy water into airborne soup.

  “They’re trying to force him to stop,” Marty says.

  “Aren’t they a bit low?”

  He shrugs. “The skids aren’t touching the boat yet, so I’m going to say no.”

  As the channel draws to its end and splits into a Y with Shaw Island looming directly ahead, I realize that Lorcan has two options: cut left and make a run for the international border just past Stuart Island, a twelve- or thirteen-mile run, or go right and continue to try to lose us in the islands.

  The Onion King finds a third option. Cutting his speed to maybe twenty knots, he steers the boat due north toward Shaw Island.

  “He’s going to run it aground,” Nate says sharply.

  We watch the whole thing play out in the brilliant light provided by Utah, even as the Black Hawk quickly gains altitude to avoid any flying debris from what’s about to happen. At the last possible moment, we see Lorcan throw himself to the deck, covering his head with his arms.

  We don’t hear the crash, but it’s spectacular.

  Rising from the water and cutting across the small expanse of beach in a fraction of a second, the bow of the boat jerks spasmodically skyward as it collides full speed with the driftwood logs lining the high-water mark.

  The hull explodes.

  Chunks of fiberglass shear off and fly in a hundred different directions, taking with them any strength and rigidity the boat still had. Sheer momentum carries the moving shipwreck up and over the logs and launches it twenty feet through the air. It lands like a broken accordion in the clearing beyond.

  Nothing moves.

  Wisps of smoke begin to issue from the back of the boat, growing thicker. A flame appears near the motor, licking the fiberglass as it flickers in the wind, growing stronger as it feeds on the gasoline seeping from the fuel line.

  When I see Lorcan rise from the wreck, staggering to his feet, he seems momentarily disoriented, but quickly gathers his wits. The fire seems to sober him, and he rushes to the cabin door. It must be twisted in its jamb from the force of the crash, because he heaves into it with his shoulder, and finally manages to force it open. Then he’s gone from sight for ten or fifteen seconds, seconds that seem like minutes.

  When he reemerges, a black handgun is held snug in his right hand, while his left is clamped around Melinda’s upper arm. She’s still bound, and even from this distance I can see the blood running down the side of her head. Limping badly, she staggers and falls as Lorcan drags her from the burning wreck and then forces her toward the nearby tree line.

  Why he doesn’t leave her is beyond me, though I suppose someone with his twisted mind doesn’t believe in giving up his possessions.

  “Utah can’t find a good place to set down,” Marty advises. “There’s a field a half mile north of here, so they’re going to keep the light on your guy until they lose him in the trees, then they’ll land and come in from the north on foot.”

  “Are they armed?”

  “I hope so.”

  “How about us?” Jimmy asks. “Can we land here, or are we too big?”

  “See—here’s the thing,” Marty rumbles. “There’s
a burning boat occupying the only decent landing spot, so I’m going to kind of hover over the beach, with like half the rotor over the water and the other half over land. That way you guys can jump down, and we don’t have to worry about tangling with any trees or getting blown up.”

  “How far of a jump?” I ask.

  He grins. “Trust me.”

  * * *

  True to his word, Marty positions the helicopter so that the door opens right near the high-water mark. And while Jimmy illuminates the ground with a flashlight, we take turns scooting down to the skid, and then hopping to the ground just a foot below. Since I’m the last off, I feel the helicopter rock and shift as each body springs free.

  As soon as I jump, I feel and hear the rotors pick up speed, and then Marty swings out toward the tree line, lighting our way.

  Slipping off my glasses, I fold them and slip them first into their case, and then into my pocket. Since Lorcan is now armed, Danny insists on taking point.

  Instinctively I want to argue, not because I relish the idea of putting myself downrange of Lorcan’s gun, but because shine is better than any night-vision or thermal device yet invented. Even now I can see flickers of both Lorcan and Melinda as they move through the trees, looking for all the world like a pair of walking glow sticks.

  It’s one of the maddening things about this charade that Jimmy and I constantly contend with: knowing and not being able to say; seeing and not being able to show. So we let Danny take point, despite my misgivings, and the rest of us follow behind, waiting for him to wave us forward. Thankfully, the trees and underbrush are giving Lorcan considerable grief as he tries to negotiate his way through them in the dark. Melinda is also slowing him down as she staggers along beside him. I’m sure she’s in shock at this point, and she appears to grow weaker with each passing minute.

  I curse Lorcan for putting her through this. He’s done; he just doesn’t know it yet.