Chasing the Son

by Bob Mayer

  “Trying to scare off robbers?” Westland asked as they pulled up, noting the illumination.

  “Trying to show everyone how much house they have,” Chase answered.

  “Oh,” Westland. “That makes sense. Not.”

  Riley drove his Zodiac to the inside of the dock, where he tied it off. He led the way up the gangplank to the walkway, with Chase, Westland and Dillon following.

  They entered the back sliding doors, into the tree-filled living room, where Gator and Kono were waiting.

  “What do you have?” Riley asked Gator without preamble.

  Gator held up an iPad. “Got my friend to do the best he could with it. He said the pixies wasn’t the greatest.”

  “Pixels,” Westland said.

  “And?” Chase pressed.

  Gator indicated that it was Kono’s turn to contribute.

  The Gullah took the iPad. He tapped the screen, expanding the view of the window. “Here.”

  The others gathered round, but could see nothing special.

  “These lines,” Kono said and then they could see three thread-like lines crossing the blue sky above the green trees and dark water outside the window. “Power lines far back. If this is the Intracoastal, only a few places where lines like that. One is Hilton Head. Tybee Island another. Some also run north-south along coast. Maybe down by Savannah or the Golden Islands in Georgia. I’d have to run the coast to try and figure it out. Match lines to place.”

  Chase looked out the window. “Can you do that in the dark?”

  Kono nodded. “Night vision. We can run the coast.”

  “What time is this meeting on Daufuskie?” Gator asked.

  “Ten in the morning,” Westland said.

  “Cutting it tight,” Riley said. “We not only have to find where Doc and Harry are being held, then we have to launch an op to rescue them before that meeting.”

  “Someone still has a story to tell,” Chase said, indicating Westland. “Who is Sarah Briggs? What are we facing? We need to get a better understanding before running around in the dark searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.”

  “We thought she was dead,” Westland said. “She went on an op twelve years ago. HAHO infiltration into Russia.”

  “What was the mission?” Riley asked.

  Westland shook her head. “Still can’t talk about that. She was an assassin, all right? So it was wet work as they used to say in the old days. Her jump was clean, there was an open chute. And then nothing. No infil report. No initial entry report. And nothing from the Russians either.”

  “Did she cut and run?” Riley asked.

  A new voice entered the discussion. “She did not.”

  Everyone turned and reacted with varying speed. Riley was the fastest, weapon at the ready, Chase not far behind. Gator and Kono also drew their pistols.

  But Westland didn’t.

  Sarah Briggs stood in the front doorway of Chase’s house, blood running down from a cut in her forehead, cradling one arm, and looking like hell.

  “Hello Kate,” Sarah Briggs said. “It’s been a long time.”

  She turned to face the others. “I was betrayed. Khan’d,” Sarah said. She took a step in. “Do you know what that is? Any of you? I’m not referring to damn Star Trek. I’m referring to Inayat Khan, the first woman to jump into Occupied France with a Jedburgh team during World War Two.”

  Riley lowered his gun. The others shifted their gazes from her to him and Westland.

  “What the fuck?” Gator asked, not lowering his weapon. “Thought we were going to kill her?”

  Riley sighed and sat down on the trunk of the tree. “Let’s hear her story. I know what she’s referring to.”

  “I didn’t know,” Westland said to Sarah. “I swear. I didn’t know.”

  Sarah came further in. “Doesn’t matter whether you knew or not. You wouldn’t have had any choice. There was nothing you could do about it. Actually, the whole point is none of us know the truth when we work in the black world.” She looked around the living room. “We’re all played all the time. Don’t you get it? By those who do know. By those we’re supposed to trust. But they aren’t trustworthy. I’m not going to be played any more. No more.”

  “Someone want to clue me in?” Chase asked. He looked at Riley and Westland. “What is she talking about?”

  “She was betrayed,” Riley said. “I’m willing to bet that when she landed after her HAHO jump the Russians were waiting on her drop zone. Took her prisoner. Tortured her. Extracted what information they could. And believed it, since they got it under torture, except it didn’t occur to them that she’d been briefed on false intelligence and gave that up. That’s what happened to Inayat Khan. She was pumped full of false intelligence during her mission preparation, then sent into a Resistance network that her handlers knew had been compromised. She was betrayed. Picked up by the Gestapo. Tortured. Naturally, the Germans believed the intel she gave up. It never occurred to them that the ‘gentlemen’ English would knowingly give her up.”

  “What happened to this Khan woman?” Gator asked.

  Sarah answered. “After they got everything they could from her, they sent her to Dachau where she was shot in the back of the head and thrown into the crematorium.”

  “How do you all know all this?” Gator asked Riley, the concept of books being rather foreign to him.

  “When I arrived at my first Special Forces assignment,” Riley said, “the battalion commander gave me a book to read, titled Bodyguard of Lies. It’s about the covert war during World War Two. Her story was in it. Stuck with me because it always made me think twice every time I got a mission briefing. Wondering whether the mission was actually the mission or a cover for something else.”

  “You can go crazy thinking like that,” Westland said.

  “No shit,” Sarah said.

  “You can end up dead not thinking like that,” Riley countered.

  “I don’t care,” Gator said. “We said we’d kill her if we saw her again. Let’s do it.”

  Sarah looked at Chase. “Preston is moving your son. And Doc Cleary. He’s got them now.”

  “So the two of you have turned on each other,” Riley summed up the situation.

  “So much for searching tonight,” Kono said.

  “Why are you here?” Chase asked.

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Sarah said. “Preston is crazy. I was in this just for the money. He’s in it for something else. Power.”

  Dillon spoke up. “He’s killed three people that we know of. Jerrod and Merchant Fabrou. And Greer Jenrette.”

  Sarah nodded. “And I suspect he’s going to use your son, Chase, to get you to kill Mrs. Jenrette. That way he’ll own all of Daufuskie.”

  “Why do I think you were going to do the same when you were in cahoots with him?” Chase asked.

  “And what did you do to Farrelli?” Riley demanded of Sarah.

  “I killed him,” she admitted. “Just like you had Karralkov killed. He was a crook and a murderer. And what I was going to do doesn’t matter any more. The field has changed. I’m here to help.” She looked at Westland. “Unless of course you’re to Sanction me upon sight.”

  “The final decision on a Sanction is always in the hands of the field agent,” Westland said.

  “And what have you decided?” Sarah asked.

  “I can wait until we see what happens tomorrow,” Westland said. She looked over at the men. “It can’t hurt to have another gun on our side.”

  “Are you really on our side?” Riley asked Sarah. “I see no reason to trust you.”

  “There are ten million reasons for you to trust me,” Sarah said. She reached inside her coat, Gator snapping up his pistol in reaction, and pulled out a thin leather satchel. “I still own Bloody Point. There’s no way Preston Gregory is going to pay me for it, but Mrs. Jenrette will.”

  “And why do I think,” Chase said, “that you offered up my son to Mrs. Jenrette to fatten th
e deal?”

  Sarah smiled. “You’re getting better at this, Horace.”

  “We’re never going to trust you,” Chase said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” Sarah said.

  “Tell us what happened in Russia,” Westland said. “And tell us the truth.”

  “What happened in Russia?” Sarah repeated. “I’d prefer not to go back there, even in words.”

  “I’d prefer to shoot you,” Riley said. “I’m not sure we should believe your story. Either what happened twelve years ago or what happened today. You don’t have a very good track record with the truth.”

  Sarah’s gazed blankly out the back windows at the dark night outside, the glow from the lights on the houses on either side impinging on the view of the Intracoastal.

  “You have coverage out there, don’t you?” she said to Westland, surprising the others.

  Westland nodded. “Yes.”

  “So if you give the signal, I’m dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” Sarah said. “Since Preston has already moved your son,” she added, looking at Chase, “we have nothing else to do this fine night. I will tell you what happened. You decide whether to believe me or not.”

  Twelve Years Ago

  She exited the Combat Talon at 30,000 feet altitude and offset from the border eighteen miles. Arms and legs akimbo, she became stable in the night air as her mind counted down as she’d been drilled.

  She pulled the ripcord and the parachute deployed at an altitude greater than that of Mount Everest. She was on oxygen, had been on it for forty-five minutes prior to exiting the aircraft. The ground, and objective, were over five miles below vertically and over three times that horizontally, leaving no time at the moment for her to enjoy the view.

  She had a long way to fly.

  She checked her board, noting the glow of the GPS and then double-checking against the compass. She began tracking to the north and east. Then she looked about. She was high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. To the west, there was a dim glow from the sun, racing away from her, leaving her a long night of fell deeds ahead. Far below there were clusters of lights: towns, not many, spread about the countryside. She remembered the nighttime satellite imagery and aligned the light clusters into a pattern to confirm both the GPS and the compass. While she was reasonably certain the aircraft had dropped her in the correct place, mistakes had been known to happen and it was on her, not the crew racing back to the safety of the airfield. She also had to factor in the wind, which would shift directions as she descended through various altitudes.

  Her hands were on the toggles attached to the risers of the wing parachute, specially designed for this type of operation. Despite the thick gloves, the minus-forty temperature at altitude was biting into her fingers.

  It would get warmer as she got lower.

  Hopefully, not too warm.

  She’d trained for two weeks in order to be able to do just this jump. The normal time to fully train a Military Free Fall candidate was four weeks: one in the vertical wind tunnel at Fort Bragg, then three out at Yuma Training Ground, in the clear Arizona weather. Like all her training, hers was quicker, harder and compressed. She’d been assigned individual instructors, hard-core Special Ops veterans who knew better than to ask what the female ‘civilian’ was doing in their school. She didn’t even have a name, just a number.

  They followed orders, just as she was following orders.

  She shook her head. Too much time to think as she descended. The time was necessary as she was crossing from a neutral airspace into not-so-friendly airspace. She’d already passed the border, the ‘point of no return’.

  It did not occur to her it was only the point of no return as long as she didn’t turn the chute around and fly in the opposite direction. If it had occurred to her, she wouldn’t be here in the first place, as such people were not recruited into her unit.

  Which also had no name. It didn’t even have a number. It just was what it was. Those in it, knew they were in it. Those outside of it, didn’t know it existed. A simple concept but profound in its implementation and implications.

  Her chute did have a slight radar signature, but not a significant enough one to bring an alert, definitely less than that of a plane or a helicopter; more along the lines of a large bird. And she was silent as she flew through the air, a factor that would come into play as she got close to the ground.

  She checked her altimeter, checked the GPS, checked the compass for heading, confirmed location by lining up the towns against the imagery she’d memorized.

  Halfway there; both vertically and horizontally.

  She was making good distance, almost too good. But better to overshoot and track back than fall short. She dumped a little air, to descend faster.

  Of course she had to be on time. She had the small window every covert meeting had: two minutes before, two minutes after. Outside of that window her contact had strict orders not to meet. To evade. And the mission would be a scrub. A failure.

  It would be a long walk back.

  As she passed below five thousand feet, she flipped down her night vision goggles from their position on her helmet. The world below lit up in various shades of green. She could see the outline of the lake she was using as a final reference point, the flat surface reflecting the quarter moon, confirming her location. She focused on the drop zone, a small, square field, barely big enough to allow her to land her chute in it.

  A light was flickering in the middle of the field, an infrared strobe light. Invisible to the naked eye, it was a clear beacon in the goggles. It went out for a few seconds, then back on, repeating a pattern.

  A pattern that meant it was safe for her to land. At this altitude, if the no-go signal, non-stop flickering, had been present (or no signal at all), she still had time to peel off and land at least a couple of miles away and go into her escape and evasion (E&E) plan.

  She dumped more air, quickening her descent, aiming for the light, estimating that she would land about a minute early. At two hundred feet she dropped the rucksack full of gear on its lowering line so that it dangled below her.

  As she reached the treetop level, she flared, slowing her descent. The ruck hit terra firma, and then she touched down lightly, right next to the light, the chute billowing down to the ground behind her. She quickly unbuckled her harness, looking about through the goggles. A person appeared, moving out of the tree line toward her.

  She was pulling her submachine gun free of the waist strap when the person raised a hand, not in greeting, but with something in it. Her gloved fingers fumbled to bring the sub up.

  The taser hit her on the arm, sending a massive jolt through her system and immobilizing her. She collapsed, unable to control her body. As she curled up on the ground, she could see others coming out of the tree line, armed men, weapons at the ready.

  Her muscles wouldn’t respond. Not even her tongue.

  Someone knelt next to her and reached toward her face. Fingers dug into her mouth and probed. The ‘suicide’ was ripped out of its hide spot in the upper right side of her gum.

  How had they known about that?

  Compromised. She’d been comprised right from the start.

  The person who’d removed her suicide option spoke. “We’ve been expecting you. We have quite the welcome waiting for you.”

  Her muscles wouldn’t work as her gear was ripped off her body. And then her clothes, until she was lying naked in the small field. Her hands were chained behind her back, the cuffs cinched down, but not too hard, a small fact she processed but found odd.

  Her legs were also shackled, but the restraints were padded on the inside, another strange thing.

  Like a sack of meat she was lifted by four men and carried. It was cold, the air biting into her naked flesh, but she barely noticed it, her muscles still trying to recover from the massive electrical shock; along with her brain from the betrayal. There was a van underneath the trees and
she was tossed in, onto a carpeted floor. Someone grabbed a chain off one wall and locked it to the shackle chain between her legs.

  The chains were thick.

  She lay on the floor, staring up the ceiling as the engine started and they began driving. There were two men in the back with her. Despite her nakedness, they seemed barely interested in her; they had their weapons at the ready across their knees as they sat on seats on either side and their demeanor told her they were professionals, men who knew how to use their weapons. They had small, bulletproof windows next to their seats and gun ports, and they alternated between glancing at her and watching the world outside.

  They drove for a long time, hours. Movement returned to her muscles and she covertly tested the restraints, she had to, one never knew, but these were professionals. She was cold but knew better than to ask for a blanket or her clothing. If they wanted her covered, she’d be covered. Everything they were doing was according to a script, one she knew most likely ended badly.

  For her.

  The van came to a halt and she heard muted voices. The back doors were thrown open and a light shone in. It swept over her, the two guards, and then the doors slammed shut once more. The van moved again,, stopping after only a minute.

  Once more the doors opened and two men stepped in, while the guards overwatched. They unlocked her from the chain around her leg shackles. They dragged her out and put her on a gurney. They strapped her down securely with broad nylon straps, then removed the wrist and ankle restraints. Looking about, she could see that she was in an open space, a concrete ceiling about twenty feet above.

  There was a vibe in the air. An odor that was visceral and ancient.

  Fear.

  She was wheeled down a corridor. Shifting her head left and right she saw they were passing doors. Cell doors. Solid steel. No openings in them, but with a small screen next to each with buttons and knobs below.

  Observation. But all the screens were blank at the moment.

  She could hear music thumping away behind those thick doors. Heavy metal music. Her mind flashed back to SERE training: Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. They’d also stripped her naked right at the start. It’s amazing what the lack of clothes could do to a person. Many broke right then. It was especially troubling to the military, who valued their uniforms, in fact placed great pride and a sense of self in their uniforms and their badges and tabs. Some of them, tough soldiers, had broken right then, stripped of their accouterments.