War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel

by James Rollins

  At the park’s center, a score of white canvas tents had been erected; most appeared to be dedicated to first aid, but a few were serving food and distributing bottled water. Emergency workers in orange vinyl vests moved through the crowd with clipboards, collecting personal data or reports of damage to various neighborhoods.

  Jane looked forlorn. Even finding their friends amid this chaos was a daunting task. Kane suddenly sat down, as if he also realized the futility of this search, or maybe he was simply exhausted. The shepherd stared up quizzically at him.

  “What’s wrong, big guy?” he asked.

  Kane cocked his head and pawed at his ear with his hind leg, letting out a whine of complaint. Tucker knelt next to him. Up to now, he hadn’t bothered to strip off Kane’s tactical gear. With all the emergency personnel around, the shepherd looked like any of a number of search-and-rescue dogs working the aftermath of the attack.

  “What’s bothering him?” Jane asked.

  “I think it’s his earpiece.”

  Tucker pushed away the dog’s scratching limb and removed the wireless receiver. He inspected Kane’s ear for any damage, but all seemed fine. As he palmed the earpiece, he felt a slight vibration in the unit. He lifted it to the side of his head and heard music playing from it.

  “What is it?” Jane asked.

  “It’s the Beatles.”

  She scrunched her nose. “What?”

  “It’s their song ‘Help!’ ”

  Tucker slipped his own transceiver into his ear and secured his mike. He heard the melody more clearly now. Someone was broadcasting on the same radio frequency. Maybe it was pure happenstance, but he tapped his mike. “Hello?”

  Static followed, then a familiar voice answered. “Tucker, is that you?” Frank asked.

  Relief flooded through him. “Where are you? Is Nora okay?”

  “We’re both fine, but we have quite the story to tell you. We’re over at Queen’s Park, at a picnic table behind the emergency tents.”

  “We’ll be right there.”

  Jane looked expectantly at him.

  “They’re alive. They’re fine. C’mon.”

  He hurried toward the row of emergency tents, and after a bit of hunting spotted Frank waving at them. Nora was seated at the bench before a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on it.

  Tucker gave Frank a bear hug, while Jane greeted Nora as warmly. Kane danced around them all, his tail swishing happily. When they finally broke apart, Tucker kept a hand on Frank’s shoulder.

  “How did you pull off that bit of magic with the radio?”

  Frank gazed toward the sky. “With a little help from a friend. After we realized there was no way you could reach us by normal means, I set Rex to locally broadcasting the best of the Beatles, figuring you or Kane might pick it up.”

  “Smart,” Jane said.

  Tucker frowned. “But how did you know our radio frequency?” He had never shared that information with Frank, nor with anyone.

  Frank shrugged. “With a little help from another friend.”

  Nora pointed behind Tucker. He turned to see a familiar figure strolling toward them with two plates loaded with food.

  “Now there’s my big stud,” the woman said upon joining them—but she was talking to Kane.

  It was Ruth Harper.

  The tall woman bent down and placed a plate before the shepherd, then straightened, brushing back a fall of blond hair, revealing tanned features and a set of amazingly high cheekbones. She wore jeans and a green blouse, along with a pair of thick-rimmed rectangular eyeglasses perched on her nose, which added a certain studious sexiness to her looks.

  “You and Jane will have to share the other sandwiches,” Ruth said, setting the remaining plate on the table.

  “How . . . what’re you doing here?” Tucker asked, finally understanding how Frank had obtained the radio frequency. Nothing escaped the grasp of Ruth Harper.

  She shrugged. “You declined any Sigma operatives for this mission, so I thought I’d use up some vacation time for a short trip to a Caribbean island, to work on my tan.”

  “Does your boss know you’re down here?”

  She coyly raised an eyebrow at this foolish question. Of course, he did. Like Ruth, nothing escaped the attention of her boss, Sigma’s director, Painter Crowe. Instead, she glanced across the breadth of the fiery ruins of Port of Spain.

  “Unfortunately, I got here a tad late. You certainly love to leave a path of destruction in your wake, Captain Wayne.” She turned toward him. “I certainly hope it was worth it.”

  Tucker sighed.

  Only time will tell.

  30

  October 26, 11:48 A.M. AST

  San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago

  Half a day later, Tucker stood on a balcony overlooking the coastal town of San Fernando, some thirty miles south of Port of Spain. In the distance, a black pall still marred the blue skies to the north, looking like a storm brewing on the horizon.

  Which was certainly true.

  After making it out of the city, they had settled here to nurse their wounds and sleep. All morning, they had been monitoring reports, taking measure of the aftermath of the attack. Most of the fires had been extinguished, but even this far south, the trade winds carried the smell of smoke, burning tires, and charred petroleum.

  Exhausted from his efforts the previous day, Kane was curled up on a chaise longue on the balcony, fast asleep. Last night, Tucker had clipped the fur around his laceration and had slathered the wound with antibiotics before applying a fresh bandage.

  “What’s the current death toll?” Jane asked from inside the hotel suite. She stood behind Frank and Nora as the pair worked on their laptops, gathering updates from local news sources. A television droned in the background.

  “Most counts are estimating eight or nine hundred,” Nora reported. “But search-and-rescue units are still scouring the worst-hit areas.”

  Tucker closed his eyes. Despite the irrationality of it, his mind was stuck in an if-only loop, second-guessing all that had happened. While Lyon’s trap at Patos Island hadn’t killed him, it had gotten him out of the way. Still, he wasn’t sure he could’ve done anything if he had been in the city.

  Frank had told him the story of the night’s attack, how Rex had alerted them of the incoming aerial assault shortly after Ruth Harper arrived. The trio had fled the hotel before it was bombed, hitting the fire alarm on their way out, likely saving many other lives.

  “All the media is blaming the Trinidadian People’s Party,” Nora said, “but that’s all smoke and mirrors.”

  Tucker turned from the balcony and joined the others inside. “But how?” he asked.

  “A combination of electronic warfare and psychological operations.” Frank answered. “Rex tapped into and collected reams of data from the drone fleet. The stories were preprepared and spread into every news source and social media outlet. Even now, I’m having a hard time separating fact from fiction, and I was at ground zero.”

  “Further clouding the matter,” Nora said, “I think the TPP was tricked into being patsies in all of this. There are reports of a handful of armed attacks on police stations and government buildings. The raiders who were killed were wearing TPP uniforms, but the bodies number less than twenty.”

  Tucker shook his head. “Which gives the government enough flesh-and-blood evidence to blame the rest of the destruction on these revolutionaries.”

  Jane spoke and turned up the volume on the television. “Looks like President D’Abreo is making a statement.”

  Tucker and the others gathered around the set.

  The president had donned a military uniform for this speech. “. . . for this reason, and in mutual agreement with Prime Minister Magaray, the minister of national security, and the chief of the defense staff, I am declaring a national state of emergency. Martial law will remain in effect until the perpetrators of this cowardly and bloody attack are brought to justice. Upon my order, all members
of the Trinidadian People’s Party are being rounded up for questioning or arrest. But let me assure the people of Trinidad—and all the peoples of the world—we will survive this attack and be all the stronger for it.”

  Jane muted the sound. “What do you think?”

  Tucker contemplated the news, then described his take on it. “Let’s see. A radical faction uses violence and bloodshed to try to oust the current government within days of the election. Its beloved president and prime minister have come to the rescue, promising to quash the militants and provide aid and comfort to thousands.”

  Jane crossed her arms. “In other words, an election that was likely to be lost is now assured of victory.”

  He nodded. “This attack wasn’t a coup. It was an anticoup, intended to bolster the current administration.”

  “And President D’Abreo will owe a debt to his mysterious benefactor,” Nora added. “Not only will someone profit to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in rebuilding costs and infrastructure repairs, there’s no question to whom D’Abreo will grant control of the new Salybia Bay oil fields.”

  “Pruitt Kellerman,” Ruth said behind them all. She had just stepped in from one of the bedrooms where she had been on the telephone all morning.

  Tucker had already told her what Webster had revealed before he died.

  Pruitt Keller—

  It hadn’t taken a genius to flesh out the rest of that name. Any American who had even a passing knowledge of the country’s media industry knew Pruitt Kellerman. Horizon Media Corp was the single largest owner of newspapers, television and radio stations, social media sites, and, according to some people, even state and federal politicians. In addition, Pruitt Kellerman had been extending his reach into Europe and Asia.

  Not that there weren’t detractors.

  Kellerman was currently fighting a firestorm of allegations that he had used Horizon Media’s position to tap phones and intercept e-mails—not only of business competitors and personal enemies but of beltway legislators in charge of regulating the telecom industry.

  “What’s the word from Washington?” Jane asked.

  Ruth sighed. “The attack here seemed to have caught everyone off guard, including the entire U.S. intelligence community. Everyone is scrambling to catch up.”

  Tucker remembered Webster mentioning that one of the objectives of this operation was to distract attention, to turn all eyes toward Trinidad.

  Mission accomplished.

  “We have to stop him,” Nora said. “Expose him.”

  “That’ll be hard, especially as all we have are the dying words of a traitor,” Ruth said. “While Tangent Aerospace is owned by Horizon Media, the corporation is only one shell of a game involving hundreds of companies and subsidiaries, insulating the man at the top from culpability, leaving him plenty of room for deniability. In fact, Sigma has had its eye on Kellerman for years, but nothing ever sticks.”

  “As my mother would say,” Frank said, thickening his Alabama twang, “he’s slicker than pig snot on a doorknob.”

  Ruth offered a small smile. “That he is. We know he’s a majority stockholder in Tangent, but Tangent has no fingerprints here in Trinidad.” She nodded to Nora. “But thanks to your and Rex’s help in pinpointing where the drone fleet was launched from in Trinidad, we have another name. Switchplate Engineering. The company—another subsidiary of Horizon—leased the patch of airstrip and land that was used as the base of operations here. It’s now a bombed-out hole in the jungle.”

  “To further cover up any evidence,” Tucker said.

  “Yet, it’s one more piece to the puzzle,” Ruth added. “Though plainly not enough to go after Kellerman directly. We’ll need more pieces of this corporate puzzle before pursuing him.”

  Nora spoke up from her laptop. “If nothing else, I may have uncovered a noncorporate piece.” She stared over at Jane and Tucker. “Thanks to Sandy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember the date of the last entry in Alan Turing’s journal, the one that detailed his algorithms that Sandy was shown?”

  “What about it?”

  “It was dated April 24, 1940. Just two days before a mysterious fire nearly destroyed Bletchley Park, a fire some believed might have covered up a secret attack on the place.”

  Tucker squinted at Nora. “You and Sandy thought Turing’s journal might have been stolen at that time. Maybe even made it back to the U.S.”

  Nora typed rapidly. “I did some digging into Pruitt Kellerman’s past, to see if I could turn up anything of interest. His father, Trafford Kellerman, killed himself and Pruitt’s mother in a drunk driving accident when Pruitt was four years old. He went to live with his grandparents, Bryson and Gail, in 1969. His grandfather died when Pruitt was twenty-one. His grandmother passed a few years later. Pruitt was their sole heir.”

  Frank leaned over her shoulder as she worked. “What of it?”

  Nora leaned back. “Look here. I hacked into old military records and found this.”

  Tucker joined Frank. On the screen was a faded copy of a U.S. Army form:

  WD AGO 55

  HONORABLE DISCHARGE FROM THE ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES.

  NAME: KELLERMAN, BRYSON GALE

  DATE OF ACTIVE DUTY: 29 SEPTEMBER 1927

  DATE OF SEPARATION: 8 AUGUST 1940

  DOB: 11 NOVEMBER 1906

  Nora scrolled down the form, which listed myriad details pertinent to Pruitt’s grandfather’s discharge. “Bryson Kellerman retired from service at the age of thirty-three, just a couple of months after that mysterious fire at Bletchley Park.”

  “You think he somehow obtained Turing’s journal?”

  “Maybe. Look at what else I found.” She pulled up a heavily redacted version of Bryson Kellerman’s service record. “He was a colonel with army intelligence, though in what capacity is blotted out. But prior to his discharge, Kellerman had served in almost every theater of the war, including a last assignment in Britain.”

  “What are you thinking?” Ruth asked.

  “I think he somehow obtained Turing’s journal, maybe stole it even. Either way, he likely thought it was important enough to keep secret. Maybe he hoped to use Turing’s work to make a profit. You have to remember that postwar America was an industrial powerhouse, the leader of scientific innovation, a legacy left in the wake of the birth of the atomic bomb. Everyone was looking for the next big innovation. During the war, Bryson must have had the foresight to recognize the potential locked in Turing’s papers and spirited them away for himself.”

  “So what did Bryson end up doing after the war?” Tucker asked.

  Nora shrugged. “He sold insurance.” Upon Tucker’s frown, she continued. “Though Bryson likely had an inkling of the importance of what he had stolen, no one in the world at the time could turn Turing’s algorithms into real-world applications. But I could easily see a proud grandfather sharing the trophies of his war years with his grandson and showing him those stolen pages.”

  Tucker rubbed his chin. “Pruitt must have remembered those papers and waited for the world to catch up with Turing’s genius, then sought a way to put them to use.”

  “But what is Kellerman’s ultimate goal?” Jane asked.

  “Power,” Tucker answered. “If you look at the trajectory of Horizon Media, it’s less about accumulating wealth and more about gathering power, of controlling events.”

  Jane nodded. “We’re at the cusp of a new way of waging war, of abandoning the atomic age of Pruitt’s grandfather and entering the era of the digital battlefield. These are wars being funded by corporations and fought by private defense contractors, where profit margins are as important as winning.”

  Tucker sighed. “And Kellerman is determined to be the master of this new world.”

  Frank looked sick. “If Trinidad was some sort of proof-of-concept trial, that is one scary world. From the data that Rex was able to pull before we hightailed it out of the Hyatt, Nora and I estimate this at
tack was carried out with only a handful of drones.”

  “But what’s he planning next?” Jane asked.

  Ruth checked her watch. “I have a video conference scheduled with Director Crowe in a few minutes. He has Sigma digging into that very question. Hopefully he’ll have something for us.”

  Tucker stared toward the open balcony door, to the pall of smoke sitting on the horizon to the north.

  He had better hurry.

  1:18 P.M.

  Tucker found himself back on the balcony after a brief lunch. Kane had returned to his chaise longue, luxuriating in the warm sunshine. Jane joined them, stepping to the rail beside Tucker. She slipped an arm around his waist, but he stiffened.

  She felt it and removed her arm. “Tuck . . .”

  They hadn’t had a real chance to discuss the matter concerning Webster. “You should have told me,” he muttered.

  “I tried—”

  “Not hard enough.”

  “I know that now. But Karl helped keep me alive, protected my son. He risked his own daughter to do so.” She gripped the rail with both hands, her knuckles going white. “Karl and I spent a lot of time working together, perhaps too much time, enough for Karl to grow fond of me, even of Nate. But our relationship didn’t pass beyond that of mutual colleagues.”

  Perhaps from your perspective . . .

  Jane shook her head. “At the very least, I owed Karl my silence. I thought the less you knew about that arrangement the safer it would be for Nathan, even for Karl’s family.”

  “But at what cost?” He pictured Takashi’s head exploding from a sniper round, saw Sandy’s bloated face floating out of the dark trunk of her car. “If I had known beforehand . . .”

  Jane turned to him, her eyes hardening. “What would you have done differently? I had no further communication with Karl after I left. I had no idea what was happening at Redstone. I knew only that Sandy was at risk and the pattern of deaths following the purge of Project 623 seemed to be happening again. I had no way of knowing how deeply Karl was still involved.”