When the Colonel finished, Will’s heart was pounding like a bass drum. Despite being seated, a wave of vertigo washed over him, and he almost fell out of his chair. None of this made any sense. He had no memory of doing any of those things. He would never shoot a crew member. He would never try to launch a missile without the order from Command Ops. If it were true, then why not show him the video? Why not show him proof? Because Alexander was telling lies—bold and terrible lies. That was the only logical explanation for any of this. Alexander was framing him as the fall guy for some readiness incident that must have occurred at Silo 9. Maybe an accident had damaged the silo or the missile. That’s why Schumaker was here; Alexander had brought in an outsider to validate his cover-up and make it official.
“Is any of what I said ringing a bell for you, Captain?” Alexander asked, a smug look on his face.
I have to keep my composure, Will told himself. If I can keep my composure and just get out of this damn place, then I can hire a lawyer and deal with whatever bullshit charges they’ve decided to trump up against me.
“No, sir, I’m afraid it isn’t. I don’t recall any of the events you described, and to be frank, sir, I would never do any of the things that you said. I don’t know what’s going on here, but there must be a mistake. A terrible mistake. Somehow, I’m being confused with someone else.”
Alexander sighed. “Barnes, you were my number-one junior officer. I’d already prepped the paperwork recommending you to screen early for O-4. If I hadn’t seen the video footage of you with my own two eyes, I would have never believed it possible.”
I need my own witness. I need an alibi, Will realized, his mind racing a hundred miles an hour now.
“Talk to my wife. I’m sure she can clear this up,” Will said. “She can vouch for my behavior and my whereabouts—” The grimace on Alexander’s face stopped him. His stomach knotted. “What’s that look for? Did something happen to my wife? Did something happen to Diane?”
“Your wife is dead,” Alexander said, holding eye contact. “When the MPs came to your house to arrest you, they found Diane murdered in your bed. You strangled her, Will. Strangled her in her sleep.”
A bomb went off in Will’s brain, scrambling his thoughts and igniting a fire-jet of raw emotion in his chest. Dead? Diane is dead . . . murdered by my hand. Impossible. His vision blurred, and the sobs came in lurching torrents. “No, no, this can’t be happening. Please tell me this isn’t happening. Please tell me this is some sort of twisted joke.”
Alexander shook his head. “I wish I could, son. I really do, but something in you snapped that night. This is the first moment of lucidity you’ve had in three weeks.”
“Three weeks?” he said with a cough. “I’ve been in here for three weeks?”
The Colonel nodded. “I’m afraid so, and we’ve been waiting desperately for you to snap out of this fugue you’ve been in since you were arrested.”
Whatever sick, twisted game they were playing, it needed to stop and stop right goddamn now. He wanted his life back. He wanted it back right now.
“Captain,” Schumaker said, his expression calm and mollifying, “I know this is difficult, but I need to ask you some technical questions, all right? How did you know how to defeat the launch enable–system safeguards? How did you disable the primary signal from Command Ops and the backup signal from A-OPS?”
Will ignored the questions. He didn’t give a shit about this asshole from ARPA.
“Captain . . . Captain, over here,” Schumaker said, waving a hand. “You and Sergeant Lewis changed the missile-flight trajectory by tinkering with the rate gyroscopes. Who taught you how to do that? What was the new target you selected? Look at me, Captain Barnes—what target did you select for the missile?”
Will was on his feet now, pacing like a caged lion. His face felt hot, and a buzzing sound was drowning out Schumaker’s voice. Then another voice—a voice both strange and familiar—said:
You don’t have to talk to them. You don’t have to tell them anything. They’re insignificant. They’re fools . . .
In his peripheral vision, Will registered that both Alexander and Schumaker were on their feet now, backing away from the table. No, backing away from him. The orderly had stepped in front of the two officers and was holding a wooden baton at the ready.
“What’s he saying?” one of them asked.
“It’s all gibberish. This is what he’s been doing since the day we brought him in,” someone else said.
“All right, we’re done here.”
No, please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here! Will begged, but something was wrong. The words weren’t coming out. It was as if they were trapped in the vacuum of his mind.
The door to the room opened, and he watched his one and only chance at freedom walk out of the room. Colonel Alexander paused at the threshold, just long enough to give him one final pitying backward glance.
Will screamed, but he couldn’t tell if it was a real scream or something he only imagined.
They can’t hear you. I’m in control now, the voice said.
No, don’t lock me in again, Will begged, suddenly remembering who and what he was dealing with. Please don’t send me back to that place.
Then you have to promise to behave, or back to purgatory you go.
I promise I won’t interfere. I’ll just watch. I can do better this time. I promise, Will said.
Oh, I know you can. Stick with me, Willie boy, and I’ll get us both out of here. Time’s a wasting, and we’ve got a job to do . . .
DAY ONE
Did Noah wait to start building the ark until after it started raining?
No, no, he did not.
—Willie Barnes
CHAPTER 1
The Present
1658 Local Time
The Tora Bora Mountains
Afghanistan
The bullet clipped his left ear.
Staff Sergeant Michael Pitcher dropped, spun around, and pressed his back firmly into the rock he’d been sheltering behind.
“Your ear’s bleeding,” said Corporal Jeremy Wayne, a.k.a. Bug, flashing Pitcher a toothy, tobacco-stained grin from behind his own rock two yards away.
Pitcher reached up and felt the shredded cartilage. His fingers came away wet and bloody. “No shit, Sherlock. Does everybody from Tennessee have your powers of deductive observation, or are you just special?”
A barrage of 7.62 x 39 mm bullets pounded the other side of Pitcher’s rock as the Taliban terrorists they had been hunting strafed his position with a prolonged burst.
“I’m special,” Bug said. “My mamma dropped me on my head, so she makes a point of telling me that every chance she gets.”
The ear was beginning to burn. Pitcher could feel blood running down the side of his neck now. He turned his head, angling it enough that Wayne could get a look. “How bad?”
Bug gave a little shrug. “I always thought that ear stuck out farther than the other one. If you ask me, it’s an improvement. At least now you got a book-matched set.”
“You’re a real dick, you know that, Wayne?” Pitcher laughed, despite himself, despite the ear, and despite the shitty situation.
Bug acknowledged the compliment by barking, “Hooah, Staff Sergeant.”
Rock chips and dust rained down as another volley of rounds pounded Pitcher’s rock shield. “You know what I think? I think it’s time we blow this sonuvabitch up,” he shouted over the staccato cracks of the enemy’s AK-47. He pulled a grenade from his kit.
“I thought they wanted us to take this dude alive.”
“We tried it their way. Didn’t work.”
Bug spit a brown glob of tobacco juice onto the dirt beside him. He brought his M4 up and shifted into a squat. “Ready.”
Pitcher nodded and with his left hand counted down: Three, two, one.
Bug popped up and went to work with his M4, sending a storm of bullets in the enemy’s direction. A beat later, Pitcher was up. He pull
ed the pin, sighted his target, and threw the grenade. It was a picture-perfect toss—a twenty-yard lob landing on the backside of an outcropping of boulders where Zabiullah Momar Haliqani had taken position.
“Helluva throw,” Bug called as both men dropped back behind their rocks.
As if in reply, the grenade exploded, the detonation echoing through the mountain pass all around them. They waited for return fire, but none came. All was still and quiet, but as a rule Pitcher didn’t trust quiet. Now came the shitty part—checking to see if the grenade had worked. He looked over at Bug.
“You ready to do this?”
“Pincer?” Bug asked, gesturing two converging arcs with his hands.
Pitcher nodded. “I go high; you go low.”
“Check.”
Pitcher turned to face the two soldiers on his other side and fixed his gaze on Corporal Connard, who was clutching an M249 SAW. “Ready?”
“Fuckin’-A I am,” Connard said, all spit and vinegar.
“Anything goes wrong, anything at all, I want you to hunt those Taliban assholes down and cut ’em to pieces. Understood?”
“Roger that, Sarge,” Connard said; then he and Specialist Garland to his left both moved into cover positions. Pitcher looked back at Bug and chopped a hand forward. The two elite soldiers—from the Army’s Tenth Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York—crept out from behind their respective rocks and began the treacherous advance on the outcropping of boulders where their quarry was hiding. Zabiullah Momar Haliqani had blown up five Americans, and it was their job to either capture or kill the terrorist bastard before he disappeared into the mountain catacombs the Taliban currently occupied.
Pitcher and Bug left the safety of the rocks behind and moved slowly but deliberately in a tactical crouch over the uneven terrain. Behind the cluster of boulders now fifteen yards away, Haliqani and two of his lieutenants were waiting. Odds were good that at least one or two of the Taliban terrorists were still alive—alive and waiting with AK-47s or their own grenades for the stupid Americans walking into a suicide trap.
Pitcher glanced to his right at Bug, who was maybe a yard ahead of him.
Bug caught the look and nodded once in understanding.
The two soldiers began to arc away from each other, Pitcher climbing up the mountain and Bug looping down. They would come at the enemy from opposite directions, above and below, creating a cross fire. Connard would use his SAW to keep the Taliban pinned down during the advance, which so far—knock on wood—had gone smoothly. Too smoothly, Pitcher thought. No shots fired. No slips, no falls, no tumbling rocks giving away their positions. He kept his eyes and feet moving and working hard: scanning the target, checking the ground, placing a foot, scanning the target, checking the ground, placing a foot.
He was a tactical fucking mountain man today.
Climb to glory and hooah and all that shit!
As he reached the zenith of his approach, only three yards from the snowman-shaped boulder he’d selected to shelter behind for the final engagement, adrenaline coursed through his veins like liquid lightning. His entire body felt turbo-charged. His senses were crisp; his muscles were—
Connard’s SAW roared to life behind him, sending a maelstrom of 5.56 x 45 mm NATO rounds into the rocks below. Pitcher’s legs churned, and he closed the distance to the snowman boulder in a snap. He dug in behind the rock, squatting, his back to the enemy and pressed against cold, hard stone. He heard the crack of the enemy’s AK-47 lighting up below him, but the strafe wasn’t aimed at his position. Then he heard a burst from an M4 below and knew whom they were shooting at.
Bug.
Another strafe, this time from the SAW.
Pitcher capitalized on the cover fire. Bringing his weapon up, he popped his head around the side of his boulder for a look down the mountain. Two figures. One lying supine and motionless. The other crouching, aiming an AK-47 down the mountain. Pitcher sighted in, exhaled, and let a round fly. The bullet caught the Taliban fighter dead center mass, and the man pitched forward.
Pitcher watched Bug pop his head out from behind a rock twenty yards below. They locked eyes and shared the same wordless thought: Where’s the third dude? Pitcher scanned east; he knew exactly what had gone down here. He’d seen it before. Haliqani had commanded his underlings to stay behind and martyr themselves while he made a run for it.
Coward.
He gestured for Bug to check the two downed Taliban fighters while he stalked east after Haliqani. From the expression on the other man’s face, he could tell Bug didn’t like that idea, but Pitcher was the boss. He got to his feet and began advancing east, sighting over his M4 and scanning every rock big enough a man could shelter behind. Haliqani couldn’t have gone far—and Pitcher had the upper hand. He had backup, superior firepower, and . . .
He took a knee and dipped his gloved finger in a red-black, wet splotch on a rock.
And he wasn’t injured.
He tracked Haliqani, following the blood trail over the rocky terrain for at least a quarter mile until he spied a low crack in the side of the mountain.
“Oh fuck,” Pitcher grumbled. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Weapon up, Pitcher advanced on the crevice. From the outside, the almond-shaped tunnel entrance reminded him of a cat’s eye, winking back at him. A deep, throaty Afghani voice taunted him in his mind: You want me, Michael Pitcher? Then come and get me. The mountain is my domain, ally to my people for thousands of years. Follow me, if you dare, to your death.
Pitcher took a knee beside the mouth of the cave so he could peer inside; there was no telling how deep it went. Was this cave an entrance to the fabled Tora Bora tunnel complex—the same infamous cave network that Osama bin Laden had once utilized in the early days of the War on Terror—or was it simply a crevice of opportunity? In either case, Pitcher knew he was walking into a trap. All Haliqani had to do was hide in the darkness ten yards inside the mouth of the cave, and he could pick off Pitcher with ease.
He rubbed his chin, and then it occurred to him that all he had to do to counter that strategy was toss a grenade into the crevice and blow the bastard up. And without hesitation or further self-debate, that’s exactly what he did. The mountain barked a plume of dust, and smoke bellowed from the low crack. Twenty yards away, he saw Corporal Wayne running toward him, anxiety and concern ripe on the other man’s face. So this time he waited, reclining against the mountain beside the crevice until Bug arrived.
“You’re not going to actually go in there?” Bug said, breathing heavily.
“Confirm capture/kill,” Pitcher said, setting his M4 down and fishing out his SureFire EB2 tactical LED flashlight. “Those were our orders.” He took a knee, and Bug stepped up behind him, sighting into the cave with his M4 over Pitcher’s shoulder.
“Ready.”
Pitcher clicked on the power button, and a six hundred–lumen beam of white light cut the tunnel’s darkness like a laser. He swept the light through the space, tracing a rectangle in the air.
“Clear.”
Pitcher clicked off the light.
“How deep you figure she is?” Bug asked.
“Dunno . . . but deep,” Pitcher answered. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about this crevice didn’t feel right.
“Sure you want to go in there?”
“Yeah,” Pitcher said, taking off his Kevlar helmet. His neck muscles instantly rejoiced at the respite from the weight.
“That’s one helluva tight fit,” Bug said. “Why don’t you let me go? My ass is skinnier than yours.”
It was true. At five foot seven inches and 143 pounds, Wayne was the smallest man in the company. Yet despite his compact frame, the Lord had seemingly blessed him with the strength of a man twice his size. Wayne had once carried an injured soldier halfway down a mountain while wearing fifty pounds of gear. The scene had reminded Pitcher of a Discovery special called Ants of the Amazon, where he’d learned that soldier ants can lift twenty time
s their body weight. It was this infamous incident and his insectlike physique that had won Bug his nickname.
Pitcher drew his .45-caliber 1911 handgun and said, “You’re in charge while I’m gone, Corporal.”
“If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m coming in after you,” Bug said, packing his lower lip with Wintergreen snuff. “Right after I finish this dip, of course.”
“If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, it means the Taliban captured my ass and you need to call in an airstrike on this mountain.”
“Your wife is never going to forgive me for letting you do this,” Bug said in protest. “You know that, right?”
“What Josie doesn’t know can’t hurt her,” Pitcher said with a crooked grin and disappeared into the mouth of the cave.
CHAPTER 2
8:28 a.m. Local Time
Middle of Nowhere, Upstate New York
(124 Miles from Watertown)
Josie Pitcher stared at the fish, and the fish stared back at her.
Hmm. So that’s what tilapia looks like.
She’d always assumed it was some slimy, ugly fish, like a cross between a catfish and an eel, but no, it actually looked like a bigger version of the sunfish perch she used to catch as a kid when her dad took her fishing at the pond down the road.
“I think he likes you,” her eccentric host said with what could be described only as a goofy old-man smile. “They don’t usually sit still like that.”
“What made you pick tilapia for your hydroponic system?” Josie asked, squatting and staring into his “aquarium,” which was essentially a giant blue plastic bathtub with a Plexiglas window on the side.
“Aquaponics,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘hydroponics,’ but this here is an aquaponic system,” he said. “Hydroponics doesn’t cut it.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, getting to her feet.
“Hydroponics is like half the equation; it’s unbalanced. Aquaculture is the other half of the equation, but fish farming is also unbalanced. In each system, the nutrients get depleted, and the waste products build up to toxic levels. But put the two systems together, and wham, you get a balanced system. I grow duckweed here in these hydroponic beds. Duckweed is high in protein and minerals, grows fast, and does a good job of keeping algae from taking over. The duckweed serves as the feedstock for the tilapia. I picked tilapia because they’s a strong fish. They grow fast; spawn year-round; and can tolerate warm, dirty water and crowding. And most importantly . . . they taste damn good.”
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