by Sean Parnell
“A bloody big white helicopter, George. A fucking Mi-8, in fact, dumped in a cut in the jungle with a camouflage net and all. Kid only spotted it ’cause they had a blowout last week and the wind must’ve stripped her cover.”
“Are we surprised, Rodney?” Hank instantly pictured the big Russian-made flying machine with its bulbous body, twin turbines, and long tail boom.
“Fuck no.”
“Did it have markings on it?”
“Big black letters. U.N. I told those gendarmes to set up a perimeter and stay the hell away from it until someone from infectious diseases sniffs its arse.”
“You know what this means, right?” Hank said.
“It means that poor bastard from the Windhoek wasn’t hallucinating, or lying.”
“Where’s he now?”
“In the morgue.”
“And where’s that hand, Rodney?”
“In the freezer beside him.”
“Keep it there, Rod. And I think you should put a twenty-four-seven guard shift on it.”
“Already done.”
Hank thought for a moment and said, “Somebody’s got to take a look at that hand. Somebody else.”
“Got any ideas, mate?”
“Yes, I do.”
“All right. Let me know whenever you want to come clean. I’m all ears.”
Hank Steele nodded at the cell phone. “Soon,” was all he said, and he flipped it closed.
He walked into the house, found some red apples in his kitchen fruit basket, and brought two outside, one for Carlota and one for the mare. The horse devoured hers with her domino-size teeth and big lips, while Carlota frowned at her apple and said, “George, no candy?”
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “They’re bad for that beautiful smile.” He handed her back the flip phone as she giggled and rode away.
Hank stood for a while, watching the girl and her horse until they became small figurines in the wind-stroked grass on the long hill down to Mabuda Farms, and then disappeared. He saw a cluster of flickers in the darkening valley where Chino was making fires to cook for the guests outside, and above him the sky was purple and pink and the black silhouettes of bat hawks wheeled. He would be sad to leave this place, but he knew it was time.
He’d been hungry when one of Kruvalt’s men had driven him back from Maputo. Now he only wanted a drink and a smoke. He went into the house and came out with his pipe, a leather pouch of tobacco, an imported bottle of Dewar’s, and a cup made from a cow hoof, no ice. There was a chair on the front porch that he’d made from bamboo poles and cowhide, and next to that a table made from a Bugarubu drum, and he sat down, leaned back, lit up his pipe, and sipped.
The Program. That’s where his life had turned. . . .
Before that, he’d been just another team sergeant in a 7th Special Forces Group Operational Detachment Alpha. Sure, he was proud to be one of the “quiet professionals,” and his 201 file had swelled with overseas missions and citations, but he’d felt no more special than any other green beret. After all, his father had fought as a Marine in the Pacific. He couldn’t beat that and he didn’t try.
Young SF NCOs had a tendency to marry the first girl who’d have them, given their long stints away. Jolana was a Czech beauty who didn’t know any better. She’d weep whenever he left her, which was often, and they’d had a young daughter, Marla. The divorce was plain and simple, typical for Fort Bragg. That place was replete with young mothers who quickly got wise and then married lawyers or accountants. Then Marla had grown up and had her own child, so Hank now had a granddaughter. He wondered who she was and what had become of her.
He was nothing to her. He wished he’d been more.
He’d fallen much harder for Susan Gannon, a tall, patient, beautiful nurse who could have been a fashion model. Being married to Susan was a blessing each day, even though he was living a lie. He still wore his Special Forces uniform, but that was just cover. By the time they met, he’d already been in the Program for years. Together they had a son, Eric, whom they both adored, and whom Hank thought of as his redemption for all the dark things he’d done for his country.
“Might I buy a green beanie a refill?”
He heard that voice again, that semi-British Yalie twang, in some bar on Bragg whose name he’d forgotten. The man was older, debonair, with a sly smile and a cane. Soon after that, Hank had volunteered for something that had no official name. And then came the missions, one after another, to places so dangerous that few men ever returned. And finally, Russia, and he hadn’t returned either.
Camp Number 722. A terrorist training camp whose candidates Hank was supposed to kill, and where he’d discovered at the very last minute that all the trainees were children. That’s where he’d drawn the line and that’s where his country had burned him. The Russians had sent him to Lubyanka, where the KGB had tortured and tried to turn him, and failed, and eventually a colonel named Putin had, with ill-disguised pleasure, told him that the U.S. government had convicted him in absentia of treason. Then it was five more years in a hellhole called Black Dolphin prison, until he’d finally dug his way out and escaped.
But he couldn’t go home. Ever. If he did, Susan and Eric would find themselves the targets of hatred and disdain forever, like the wife and children of Lee Harvey Oswald. He still loved them, terribly, as much as he had on the last day he saw them. But he’d sworn to keep them safe. They were his final mission.
Yet just a year or so before, he’d heard from another member of Cemetery Whisper, a burned Russian Spetsnaz named Vitaly Chak, who’d told him that Eric had run a renegade solo mission to southern Russia and had tried to find him. That’s why he’d sent that postcard. He knew it would hurt, but sometimes a man had to reach out from the grave.
This thing with the Windhoek was churning in his guts. Something told him it wasn’t a one-off. A Chinese PLA rifle bullet? Men in “spacesuits”? One biowarfare plague had already nearly destroyed humanity, and he suspected this hit was something similar and could potentially be much worse. He knew that his son was an Alpha, and he knew that he had to see him. But Hank Steele wasn’t the sort of man who lied to himself. It was partially about the Windhoek and what was going on, and more than partially, because time was going too fast and he needed that one last chance.
He had no idea how or why this had happened, but in his head he heard Bob Dylan’s prescient tune, “Simple Twist of Fate.”
He’d finished two brimming slugs of Scotch, but he didn’t remotely feel it. He got up with his pipe, went into the house to his study at the very back, flicked on a battery lamp, and rolled up the black-and-orange Sankara rug from the floor. He removed three floorboards, then lifted the heavy mortar ammunition crate by its rope handles from the musky darkness below.
He locked the study door. He opened the crate. Inside, next to his Celestron spotting scope and a Vietnam-era French MAT-49 submachine gun, was the old black-and-green, Ten-Tec Century 21 transceiver, along with a set of C-47 pilot headphones and a telegraph key mounted on a polished wooden board. He set them all out on his scarred candlenut desk, then removed a large ashtray sitting on the top of a fruit box next to the desk. Inside was a small gas generator. He started it up and plugged in the radio set.
He sat down in his curved-back rattan desk chair and looked at the telegraph key. He wouldn’t need a Morse code chart, because every number and letter was carved into his brain. But he would need one more thing.
He got up and went back to the mortar crate and took out a book.
It was a very old copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Tender Is the Night.
Chapter 28
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
The Program’s Gulfstream G650 transcontinental jet had been decommissioned and sold off to an Arab sheik from Dubai, but the air force version sitting on the tarmac looked very much like it, and would certainly do. It wasn’t easy to recover and reassemble assets after so much time, and the support staff at Q Street, particu
larly Penny Amdursky, felt like they’d held a garage sale and were now trying to track down the neighbors who’d bought all their toys.
But it paid to have friends in high places. One call from Katie Garland over to the air force chief of staff at the Pentagon, and lo and behold, they had a jet.
Also, for some inexplicable reason, perhaps owing to a bureaucratic glitch, all the contents of the Program’s team room—on the second floor in the back of a hangar belonging to Air Combat Command’s 1st Fighter Wing—were still there. All the weapons and tactical gear were still in the armory. No one had touched any of the Alpha lockers, including those of the deceased, which traditionally remained undisturbed forever, like the cocoons of sailors buried at sea. And while the palm print and retina readers outside the team room’s half-ton iron door had been dormant for nearly a year, Ralphy Persko had blinked them alive from Q Street with thirty keystrokes and a prayer.
Steele arrived at Langley with his small quick reaction force in two of Miles’s security Suburbans. The composition of this QRF was unusual in that Alphas generally operated as singletons with only a keeper nearby. In this case, the mission required some redundancy, plus additional firepower, so he had Dalton Goodhill along, then brand-new Slick, who hadn’t even received her OTC tab yet (technically, those completing the operator training course were awarded only virtual tabs, because there were no uniforms on which to wear them), her keeper Shane Wiley (having lost Collins Austin to the female assassin Lila Kalidi he was regretting now that he’d put Slick up for this), and Miles Turner, who wasn’t an Alpha at all. Allie Whirly was also along, but she had no role on the manifest and would be there just in case someone needed to steal an aircraft downrange. Ralphy’s computer had spit out a name for the mission, Purple Rain, which was random and could in no way be connected to China or Mongolia, because that’s how the algorithm was designed.
This time Steele remembered to pluck out his brown contact lens before plugging his eyeball into the retina reader, and when the door lock clicked and they hauled it open, he squeezed the lens back in and Allie said, “The green eyes are so much prettier.”
“Maybe, but I’m Matthew Schneider now, and I believe that’s sexual harassment.”
“I’d harass you all night long, Mr. Schneider.” She grinned a wolfish grin.
Inside the team room, Steele walked past the Alpha lockers and tried to ignore the engraved nameplates of Jonathan Raines, Collins Austin, and Martin Farro, which were now essentially metallic tombs containing personal effects that no one would ever touch—a Program tradition. He punched the digital locks on the Steelwater safes containing long guns and heavy weapons, and turned around to summon Slick, whose real name was Melody Spintrap (for which she’d been thoroughly bullied in middle school), and was now Stalker Eleven. Next to her stood Miles, wearing an expression that said he hadn’t signed up for this, and behind them Dalton Goodhill and Shane Wiley.
Miles and Slick joined Steele and they started selecting firepower. Steele, a firm believer in cross-pollination, decided they should all be using the same ammo, so the men pulled HK416s with Aimpoint CompM4 red dot sights from the racks, and Slick chose an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon para version with a collapsible tube stock and an ACOG sight. They drew long black duffels from the lockers and packed up the guns, lots of empty magazines, and three drums for Slick’s light machine gun, but then Steele locked the safes.
“What about handguns and LBVs?” Miles said. “And comms.”
“And maybe some grenades, boss?” Slick said to Steele. “Some ammo?”
“We’ll get all that from the supplier downrange,” Steele said. “And the parachutes.”
“Parachutes?” Slick’s blond eyebrows rose. “Um, you know I’ve only done static line, right? No HALO or HAHO.” She meant the two variations of special operations high altitude parachuting.
“No sweat. We’ll be keeping it simple,” Steele said. “LALO.”
“What’s that?”
“Low altitude, low opening. Static line, no reserves.”
“Oh.” Slick swallowed and looked up at Miles.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn ya,” he said.
“You three look like the Mod Squad,” Shane Wiley commented from where he, Goodhill, and Allie were standing side by side.
“Yup,” Allie agreed. “Linc, Pete, and Julie.”
“Who’s that?” Slick asked.
“Never mind,” Goodhill said. “You’re too young.”
They took the duffels, locked up the team room, and headed back out to the tarmac.
The two pilots and a crew chief were waiting outside the Gulfstream. All three had previously worked for the Program and had returned to air force assignments, but Ted Lansky had yanked them back with a signed presidential order, for which refusal was not an option. Steele recognized them as the same ones he’d once hijacked for his unauthorized trip to find his father in Russia. The chief pilot looked up at Steele’s bearded face and squinted.
“You look kind of familiar.”
“Yeah, I was once an uncooperative passenger, but I’m all better now.”
“Oh, shit . . . You’re not still carrying that hand cannon, are you?”
Steele smiled and pulled open his leather bomber jacket. His father’s 1911 was right there in a hip holster. The pilot shook his head.
“That’s why I never liked grunts.” He cocked his chin at his crew, and the three climbed aboard their jet.
The Gulfstream’s gleaming white fuselage began to glow with a strange red and blue oscillation, and Steele and his team turned and squinted down toward the end of the airstrip. A convoy of dark vehicles was cruising rapidly closer and Steele realized that all of the base’s air activity had stopped. They looked like government, and as they neared he heard fender flags whipping and saw motorcycle outriders.
“What the hell’s this now,” Miles said. “I’m up-to-date on child support, so it can’t be that.”
The convoy made a long loop to the right, across the wide runway, then came back and stopped in a semicircle, cupping the Gulfstream from about seventy meters away. There were two motorcycle cops on Harleys, a black Suburban, the presidential Beast, another Suburban, a tactical truck, and two more bike riders. Steele figured this might be National Security Advisor Garland again, perhaps bearing some last-ditch “attaboy” message, but the Beast’s front passenger door opened and the president’s lead Secret Service agent came around and crossed the tarmac.
“Evening,” said Jack. “You’re Steele, right?”
“For you guys, yes.”
“You carrying?”
Steele opened his jacket, unholstered his handgun, handed it over to Dalton Goodhill, and said, “Nope.”
“Good,” Jack said. “Let’s take a walk.”
He and Steele crossed the tarmac, heading toward the Beast as more Secret Service agents appeared. A rear door opened, Katie Garland got out, then Ted Lansky, and finally President Rockford himself. Steele heard Allie Whirly behind him whistling low in amazement and then Goodhill hissing at her, “Flygirl, shut up.”
John Rockford shook Steele’s hand. He was dressed for some sort of occasion, wearing his signature woolen navy-blue coat, dark suit, white shirt, and scarlet tie. Before he could say anything the whine of heavy jet engines loomed, and they all turned to watch Air Force One floating down from the evening sky, and its tires touched the tarmac without even a squeal and its engines reversed, then faded away. Rockford smiled at Steele and gestured over his shoulder at the Gulfstream.
“Mine’s bigger than yours,” he said.
“No argument there, Mr. President.”
“What happened to you?” Katie Garland, buttoned up against the cold in a trench coat, was looking at Steele’s eyes, bandage, and beard.
“My old face is on too many servers, ma’am.” He wasn’t going to be flippant with the national security advisor. “We’re going for a few changes.”
“Oh, I see,” she said, though it
was clear she was no fan of scruffiness.
“Steele,” the president said, “Ted briefed me on something a short while ago. I know you’re about to launch, but I told him you needed to know.” Rockford cocked his large head at Lansky, who stepped forward and seemed to be chewing his pipe stem, as if he were about to convey bad news.
“Okay, Stalker Seven,” Lansky said. Even if the president was using Steele’s name in an open forum, he wasn’t going to. “Here it is, and I’m going to keep it short because the president has to go. Earlier this evening, the man with the cane received another encrypted radio message, but from Africa this time.”
Steele knew he meant Thorn McHugh, who’d supplied the intel about Colonel Liang and apparently still had such an extensive network of informants that it would have made Julian Assange jealous.
“This message was long, detailed, and came from Mozambique,” Lansky went on. “In short, the sender relayed that someone hit a cargo ship out there and killed the entire crew of eighty-two, except for one survivor, who’s no longer surviving. Sender thinks a biowarfare agent was used, that the Chinese are involved, and believes he has proof.”
“All right, sir,” Steele said. He wasn’t sure what Lansky was getting at, since that wouldn’t affect his pending mission. “Sounds like it might be connected to this PLA laboratory director we’re about to go snatch, but—” He stopped talking because the president had put his hand on his shoulder.
“The sender’s your father, Eric.”
Steele felt all the blood drain from his face. It usually took a lot to spike his adrenaline and his heart rate, but he felt his pulse pounding in his neck and a weird sort of squeal in his ears. He hadn’t heard that sound since the last time a grenade had detonated too close.
“Yes. And?” That was all he said to Lansky, because he didn’t feel able to say more. His teeth were grinding, his mind reeling. He was trying to remain professional about this.
