by Jude Hardin
CHOKE 2
THE JACK REACHER FILES
Jude Hardin
CHOKE 2
AIRSTRIP THREE HAD BEEN CARVED out of a heavily wooded area in southwest Georgia, not far from the Alabama border. Forty acres wide and eighty acres long, it was a perfect rectangle in the middle of nowhere, its perimeter protected by armored vehicles and electrified fences. Listed with the FAA as an intercontinental service port for foreign dignitaries traveling from the west coast of the United States to Europe, the surrounding airspace was restricted to planes and helicopters equipped with an electronic signaling device set to a certain frequency, which changed every hour on the hour. If an approaching aircraft didn’t transmit the correct signal, then a decommissioned fighter jet was launched to escort the intruder away from the area. If the offending plane or helicopter didn’t comply after two explicit warnings from the F-18 pilot, it was presumed to be hostile and shot out of the sky.
The Circle controlled twenty-seven such installations at various locations across the country, and Diana Dawkins had landed at every one of them. She’d never heard of any major incidents, or even any close calls, but she knew that even the best avionics systems failed sometimes, and it was always a relief when the control tower approved the pilot’s request for a runway or helipad.
A yellow fuel truck pulled away from the Gulfstream Aerospace G650 business jet parked on the tarmac as the copter descended and then landed on the roof of the Operations Building. Diana unbuckled her safety harness. Before she removed her headset, she turned to Kobe Dreisler and said, “I guess this is it.”
“Yeah,” Kobe said. “Take care of yourself.”
They both knew that Kobe wouldn’t be continuing on to Montana, that the injuries he’d sustained and the mistakes he’d made at the CHOKE camp in central Florida were enough to put him out of commission for several weeks. He’d been a good partner for the most part, and it made Diana sad to think that she might never see him again.
“You too,” she said.
Two recruit operatives—identified as such by the red jumpsuits and white ball caps they wore—ran from the elevator hut to the helipad. One male, one female. Both carrying first aid packs. Diana disembarked and followed the female back to the elevator while the male stayed with Kobe and assessed his injuries. The pilot would probably ferry the two men to the nearest VA hospital, where Kobe would be issued a new set of credentials and admitted under a new identity.
The female recruit didn’t say anything to Diana as they descended to the second floor of the Ops Building. She didn’t need to. Diana knew the drill. They would walk into the locker room together, where Diana would stow her gear and strip naked and lie on a padded table for a head-to-toe examination, followed by a series of questions designed to challenge her mental acuity. Pending perfect scores on the physical and psychological assessments, Diana would shower and put on a fresh set of clothes and head down to the Situation Room on the first floor for a teleconference with The Director.
Only that’s not what happened this time.
Not exactly.
After Diana bathed and dressed, the female recruit led her down a hallway to another room on the second floor and left her there alone. The space was approximately ten-by-ten feet, about the size of a small bedroom. Blank walls, vinyl tiles on the floor, a wooden table and three chairs under a naked light bulb.
It was an interrogation room.
Diana sat in one of the chairs and wondered why she was there. Was she supposed to interrogate someone, or was she the one to be interrogated? She sat and stared at nothing for a few minutes, her eyes and the rest of her body heavy with fatigue. Finally, unable to fight it any longer, she put her head down and drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep, her brain too tired to do anything but shut down for a few minutes now that she was in a safe place.
The snick of the door opening jarred her awake.
She rubbed her eyes and looked up at the man who’d walked into the room. He was enormous. Six-four or six-five, two hundred thirty pounds or more.
For a second, Diana Dawkins thought she was dreaming.
Jack Reacher?
Couldn’t be.
When her eyes cleared, she saw that it wasn’t Reacher, that the face was totally different from the pictures she’d studied.
Different, but still handsome.
Very handsome.
“Who are you?” she said.
“John Taggert. I’m your new partner.”
He extended his hand, but Diana stayed where she was. She folded her arms across her chest and glared up at him from her chair.
“It’s you,” she said.
She recognized the voice. The massive body. It was the man who’d tackled her as she was escaping from the CHOKE camp in Florida. She’d only seen him in silhouette before, but she knew it was him.
“Excuse me?” Taggert said.
Diana stood and looked up at him, somewhat intimidated by his size, but not enough to back down. She’d killed bigger men with her bare hands. If you knew what you were doing, speed and agility and wit trumped body mass every time. And Diana knew what she was doing.
Not that she expected any sort of physical altercation with Taggert. They were on the same side, after all. Which made what happened in Florida even more baffling.
“Don’t play stupid,” Diana said. “Why did you ambush me and throw me on the ground? Why did you take my weapon?”
“I needed it. You didn’t. You were running away.”
“I wasn’t running away. I was in danger of being captured. Or recaptured, I should say. We didn’t evacuate until I was reasonably sure that Reacher wasn’t there. No file on him, and then I spoke with The Director, who said he’s most likely in Montana.”
“They sent me in with a modified mission,” Taggert said. “I did what needed to be done.”
“Which was?”
“I took out the leader. Colonel Gilbert. Along with some of the other officers.”
“How did you do all that in such a short amount of—”
“Look at your watch.”
Diana looked at her watch. It was almost ten o’clock in the morning. She’d slept over five hours.
“My initial directive was recon only,” she said. “It changed to a capture mission, but there was never any order to assassinate any of the officers.”
“It was my idea. The Director liked it, decided to go with it. CHOKE has cells all over the country. You know that. We start cutting them off at the head, one by one, and eventually—”
“Look, I really don’t need a lesson in covert warfare, Mr. Taggert. I’ve been doing this for a while. And by the way, why aren’t we discussing all this in the Situation Room?”
“I just came from there,” he said. “I have everything we need for the new assignment. Have a seat and I’ll—”
“You have everything we need for the new assignment? Now I’m really confused. That information usually goes to the lead operative.”
As the words left Diana’s mouth, she realized what had happened.
“Right,” Taggert said. “I’m the lead on this case now.”
Outraged that she’d been demoted, Diana pulled out her phone and started to punch in The Director’s number, but she stopped and cancelled the call after the first three digits. She didn’t like the decision, but she knew that there was no way to change it at this point. Any sort of confrontation with The Director would probably only make her situation worse.
She sat at the table.
“Okay, so you’re the lead on the case,” she said. “We’ve wasted
enough time. Let’s get on with it.”
“Are you sure? Because if you’re going to have an attitude about me being in charge, I can call The Director myself and request a different operative.”
“I said let’s get on with it.”
Taggert sat in the chair across from Diana.
“Reacher was in Montana before,” he said. “Years ago, with a group called the Montana Militia. The leader was a man named—”
“Borken,” Diana said. “They kidnapped an FBI agent named Holly Johnson. I know all about that, and I know how it turned out.”
“You know the official version. The French mercenary version. But one of our sources inside the FBI has an informant who’s telling a different story. It’s quite possible that Jack Reacher was responsible for some of those deaths.”
“If that’s the case, we should probably give him a medal. And a paycheck.”
Taggert nodded. “I agree, off the record. But none of those kills were sanctioned. By anyone. Whether they were justified or not would be up to the judicial system to decide. We can’t condone vigilantism, even when it turns out the way we want it to.”
“That’s The Director talking,” Diana said.
“Yeah, well, he’s the boss. And when you get down to it, Reacher’s the kind of wildcard that could make CHOKE ten times more dangerous than they already are.”
“No argument there,” Diana said. “So why do we think he’s in Montana?”
“It’s where CHOKE has their headquarters, and their central training facility. If they’re planning another attack—and we believe they are—it’s probably where all the leaders will convene to work out the logistics.”
“I’ve seen the profiles on some of those leaders. They don’t have the combined military experience to work out a meatloaf recipe, much less a coup on the United States of America.”
“They don’t,” Taggert said. “But Jack Reacher does.”
“Okay, so what’s our mission?”
“Our primary directive is to get inside and bring Reacher out. Alive.”
“Secondary?”
“Assassinate General Randolph Janning.”
Janning was the leader of the entire CHOKE organization. He called himself a general, although he’d never actually been in the army, or any other branch of the service. Diana had studied his files. She knew all about him.
“Your idea to kill Janning?” she said.
“Yes.”
“And The Director approved?”
“Of course. It’s the smart thing to do. As long as we’re in there, it wouldn’t make any sense not to go ahead and eliminate the man who started it all.”
Maybe, Diana thought. Although the FBI had been trying to build a case against Janning for years, planning to arrest him and charge him with a capital offense, and then use him as a witness against hundreds of other CHOKE officers in exchange for a lesser sentence. Life in prison instead of the death penalty, most likely. It seemed that by killing Janning, The Circle would be stepping on the FBI’s toes in a big way. Not that there was anything extremely unusual about that, but it was the reason Diana wanted to confirm that The Director had given the go-ahead on the hit.
“Actually, Janning wasn’t the man who started it all,” she said. “Borken was. CHOKE is an offshoot of the original Montana Militia.”
“Right. But Janning started the offshoot. Anyway, we’re going to take him out of the picture. Then maybe the whole thing will collapse.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Template Fourteen,” Taggert said. “I have the scripts here in my backpack.”
Great, Diana thought. She hated Template Fourteen. This assignment just kept getting worse and worse.
THE FLIGHT FROM AIRSTRIP THREE to Airstrip Seventeen was scheduled to take four hours and fifteen minutes, but with the time difference it was technically still morning when they crossed the border from South Dakota to Montana.
11:47, to be exact.
Diana had slept part of the way, but the past hour had been spent with the same female recruit who had escorted her from the helipad. The young lady was now assisting Diana with her change of identity in a curtained booth in the back of the plane. The recruit had everything needed for a complete makeover, including some high-tech equipment for fabricating phony credentials.
Diana Dawkins was now Camille Weatherby. Cammy, for short. Thirty-two years old. Brown eyes and sandy blonde hair, achieved with a custom dye job and a pair of tinted contact lenses. Cammy came from a good family, but she’d fallen on hard times in recent years. Odd jobs, in and out of drug rehab, two divorces and two bankruptcies. After a particularly abusive relationship with a welder in Illinois, she’d hit the road in search of a better way.
What she’d found, according to the Template Fourteen scenario, was a man named Brent Holbart, a former Marine Corps sniper who was totally fed up with the way the country was being run. Brent knew of a group of like-minded individuals in Montana, a well-organized militia outfit with plans to take matters into their own hands, and he’d convinced Cammy to come along with him and join the fight.
When the recruit had finished helping with the makeover, Diana got up and stooped toward the center of the fuselage, joined Taggert on the curved bench that served as a conference area.
“Your turn,” she said, gesturing toward the aft end of the plane.
“Actually, I’m good,” Taggert said. “The Holbart character was written with me in mind. No physical changes necessary. She did my driver’s license and credit card while you were asleep.”
Diana turned to the third page of her script.
“It says here that his hair is thinning. Go on back there and let her fix you up.”
“That sounded almost like an order, Ms. Dawkins. Are we forgetting who’s in charge on this mission?”
“We’re not forgetting anything. But if I think something isn’t being handled correctly, I’m going to tell you about it.”
Taggert leaned over so that Diana could see the top of his head. He was balding at the crown. Diana hadn’t noticed it before because he was so tall.
“Happy?” he said.
“Happier than you’re going to be in a few years when that spot gets bigger.”
Taggert nodded, smiled. “It’ll be all right. I’ll just shave my head and start auditioning for roles in action films.”
“Right.”
“By the way, you look good as a blonde, Cammy.”
“Don’t get any ideas, Brent,” Diana said, maintaining a tough exterior, careful not to let Taggert know how much she appreciated the compliment.
When the plane landed, they were taken to an area inside the hangar and fitted with some thrift store clothes and worn-out boots and tattered backpacks. After that they were escorted outside, where they climbed into the cab of an old pickup truck with a Jim’s Lawnmower Repair decal in the rear window. Diana slid to the middle of the bench seat while Taggert took the passenger’s side. Only they weren’t themselves anymore. They were Brent and Cammy. The driver, an operative named Lambert Noles, took them about a hundred miles west on Interstate 90, staying in the slow lane as they approached the first turnoff for Billings. Wearing a checkered flannel shirt and an oil-stained baseball cap—looking every bit the part of Jim the lawnmower guy—Noles stayed in character as he pulled to the shoulder and said, “This is as far as I go, folks.”
“Thanks a lot,” Taggert said, opening the passenger’s side door and climbing out.
“Yeah, we appreciate it,” Diana said. “Have a good one.”
Diana climbed out and shut the door. She and Taggert grabbed their backpacks from the open truck bed, stood there and watched Noles ease back onto the highway, veering off toward Billings when he got to the exit ramp.
“Just fifty more miles to the main gate of the compound,” Taggert said. “But the last five are pretty brutal.”
Diana nodded. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as it looks on the maps.”
She
stuck her thumb out, and they started walking backwards along the shoulder of the interstate. The sun was shining, but the crisp October wind swept along the landscape in gusts, and it stung Diana’s face and hands as the pair made their way west.
“Ever been to Montana before?” Taggert said.
“Yeah, but never this time of year. They should have given us warmer jackets.”
“And gloves.”
“And better socks.”
Car after car whizzed by, along with the big rigs, the eighteen wheelers, hauling whatever to wherever, making the wind chill even worse. Finally, a pickup truck with an extended cab veered over into the emergency lane and braked to a stop. Diana ran to the passenger’s side and opened the door. Taggert was right behind her.
There were two rifles mounted on a rack over the rear window of the pickup, and some other hunting gear cluttering the back seat. The guy behind the wheel was probably in his mid-thirties. Long black hair, full beard, wraparound sunglasses. The interior of the truck reeked of cigarette smoke.
“I can take you up to the next exit,” the driver said. “About nine miles, if that’ll help.”
Diana nodded, started to climb into the cab.
“I think we’ll pass,” Taggert said. “Thanks anyway.”
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said.
Taggert shut the door, and the driver gunned it back onto the highway.
“Are you crazy?” Diana said.
“I didn’t like the looks of it.”
“Because of the guns? He was a hunter.”
“I just didn’t like the looks of it.”
“You’re the reason nobody’s stopping for us. You know that, right? Because you’re so big.”
“Nothing I can do about that.”
Diana was furious, but there was nothing left to do but keep moving forward.
They walked another two miles or so before a second vehicle, a blue four-door sedan, slowed and pulled to the shoulder about a hundred feet in front of them. They ran to the car. A man was driving, and there was a woman beside him in the passenger’s seat. The man was much older than the woman. Mid-fifties, probably, while she was barely in her twenties.
