Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“A 21-gun salute for All the Wrong Moves, a fast-paced, original, authentic military mystery that builds to a pulse-pounding finale.”
—Carolyn Hart,
Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of the bestselling
Death on Demand series
RAVES FOR
MERLINE LOVELACE . . .
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“Merline Lovelace rocks! Like Nora Roberts, she delivers top-rate suspense with great characters, rich atmosphere, and a crackling plot!”
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—Carla Neggers, New York Times bestselling author
“Lovelace’s many fans have come to expect her signature strong, brave, resourceful heroines and she doesn’t disappoint.” —Booklist
“Compulsively readable.”—Publishers Weekly
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ALL THE WRONG MOVES
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / November 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Merline Lovelace.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-15123-5
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This book is dedicated
to the men and women in uniform
who put their lives
on the line every day . . .
and put their trust in American ingenuity
and technology to keep them safe.
Acknowledgments
The characters and events in this story are figments of my admittedly overactive imagination but I owe special thanks to several experts who provided real-life details:
To Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Sherk, program manager, Tactical Technology Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for his advice and counsel. The good stuff is his, the technological goofs all mine.
To Border Patrol agent Martin Hernandez, El Paso Sector, for patiently answering my questions regarding procedures, tactics, weaponry, and what it’s really like out there on patrol.
And a special thank-you to Dr. Larry Lovelace, my incredibly skilled nephew and ER doc extraordinaire. I can always rely on him to provide gory details when I need them!
CHAPTER ONE
OUR latest test project arrived on-site exactly four days before I got a boot full of decomposing human flesh.
If I’d known that experience lay ahead of me, I would have refused to sign for the piece of equipment delivered that hot August afternoon. I didn’t, of course, so I merely stood alongside the collection of eggheads and misfits who comprise my crack test team and gaped at the contraption nestled inside its packing crate.
“Okay, Techno Diva. Enlighten us.”
That came from Dennis O’Reilly. Techno Diva is one of the titles he and the rest of the team have bestowed on me, along with Geardo Goddess, Inspector Gadget and several others that don’t bear repeating.
“What the heck is it?”
As usual, O’Reilly was the first to speak up. And, as usual, I had no answer.
I’m a program analyst, for God’s sake, not an engineer. Between shifts as a cocktail waitress at the Paris Casino in Vegas, I’d earned a BS in management by showing my face occasionally at Party U, aka the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Okay, I may have shown more than my face. Somehow I managed a passing grade in Risk Management Techniques. No big deal. Who actually manages risk, anyway?
The United States Air Force, I discovered.
Traipsing into that recruiter’s office ranks right up near the top of my list of dumb decisions. My only defense is that I was really, really pissed at the time. With good reason, I should add. Two days before, I’d discovered my husband with his jeans around his ankles and his face buried between our neighbor’s 38Ds.
True, Charlie and I had pulled into the Tunnel of Love Drive-Through Wedding Chapel on a whim one wild weekend. Also true, it didn’t take me long to realize my mistake. I mean, even with bulldogs like Charlie you do have to come up for air eventually. But I tend to be a little stubborn. I hung in there for almost six months playing wifey. Obviously I wasn’t very good at it.
I dumped Charlie, but I haven’t been quite as successful at dumping the United States Air Force. I’ve tried. Trust me on this. I have tried
. Don’t even get me started on all the things I hate about the military.
Like these ABUs. That’s Airman Battle Uniform for those of you who’ve never had to wear ’em. They’re the air force’s latest version of haute couture—baggy pants and a loose, boxy shirt in digitized tiger stripes of blues, grays, greens and tans. The fabric incorporates this high-tech near-infrared technology that is supposed to render you immediately invisible. Maybe if the observer is blind or drunk or both.
Then there’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Did you know dueling is a punishable offense under the UCMJ? Like, who duels these days?
See why I want out?
Sometimes.
The problem is, the air force is an extremely subversive organization. Right from day one, instructors do a number on you in Officer Training School. You’re subjected to classes in military history, strategy and tactics. Some left-foot, right-foot on the parade ground. A little this-is-how-we-really-fight-the-war. A few sessions at the firing range. Then they pin two gold bars on you and presto-digito! You’re now responsible for the safety and security of the entire free world.
I know it’s bull. I also know I’m the last officer you want with a finger on the launch button. Luckily for the safety and security of the free world, I’m a non’er. That’s non-sortie producing personnel to you civilian types. Not seriously engaged in combat to those who are.
Yet despite the hassles, despite the ridiculous regulations governing every aspect of my professional life, I can’t shake this irritating sense that I—Samantha JoEllen Spade, product of a long line of losers and boozers—am actually part of something important.
God, I hate that feeling!
I hate even more the suspicion that the air force might be my last chance to change the course of history and make something of myself.
So here I am, a second lieutenant with all of thirteen months’ service under my belt, stuck at a test site a few miles outside of Dry Springs, Texas.
Dry Springs is just what its name implies—a collection of crumbling adobe buildings set smack dab in the middle of the desert some eighty miles east of El Paso and the nearest air-conditioned mall. Talk about a crinkly hair on the back end of nowhere! My team and I would pack up and leave in a heartbeat if we could.
What team, you ask? Our official designation is Future Systems Test Cadre-Three. FST-3, for short. I won’t tell you my team’s interpretation of that acronym. Think odorous bodily functions. Suffice it to say their version will never appear in any official documentation, although you might spot it on some bathroom walls out here in West Texas.
FST-3 is a minute speck in the mysterious bureaucracy known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Another acronym. Brace yourself. You’ll see more. The military loves to abbreviate and obfuscate.
DARPA is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense, but don’t let the name fool you. DARPA itself does zero research. Instead, it manages selected projects at universities and major research centers. The goal is to aggressively pursue and develop new technologies that might advance military operations.
Now, normally a program manager such as moi lolls around in a nice, clean office at DARPA Headquarters in Arlington, VA. I should also point out that most project managers are civilians or senior ranking officers. Due to a slight difference of opinion with my former boss at the Air Force Research Laboratory, however, I was “loaned” to DARPA and put in charge of my little team.
Our mission is to evaluate technologies developed by small businesses or enterprising individuals who don’t meet DARPA’s threshold for direct oversight. Translation: we play with gizmos and gadgets developed by mom-and-pop businesses or whacko inventors who putter around in their garages at night.
Most of the time FST-3 operates out of a nondescript office at the sprawling army base just outside of El Paso. Once a quarter we go into the field to evaluate items that might, by some wild stretch of the imagination, have potential for military application in rough terrain. Hence our isolated test site near Dry Springs, Texas.
I have to be careful how often and how loudly I complain about being in charge of FST-3, though. FST-1 specializes in cold weather technology and operates out of an igloo in Alaska fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle. FST-2 battles alligators for space on a hump of sawgrass somewhere in the south Florida Everglades.
Back to my little team. In recent months we’ve evaluated inventions that ranged from the improbable to the downright ridiculous. But this one . . .
“What is it?” O’Reilly threw at me again.
I shot him an evil look and consulted the paperwork handed to me by the crew who’d unloaded the crate. “This is the project Harrison Robotics wants us to evaluate.”
Our usual methodology is to review submissions and choose items to test well before we go into the field. This was a last minute addition pressed on us by a friend of a friend of an uncle of DARPA’s chief scientist. Or was it the uncle of a friend of a friend? Whatever. The weird-looking result was staring us in the face.
“They call it an Ergonomic Exoskeletal Extension,” I read. “EEE for short.”
Exoskeletons aren’t new. Even I know Berkeley University first developed a lower body exoskeleton they called BLEEX way back in ’04. But this guy . . .
My gaze swung back to the contraption nested in foam inside the packing crate. Metal braces formed its legs. Additional braces comprised a set of arms. These extremities were connected to a computerized spine. At the top of the spine was a circular headpiece bristling with wires, probes and a face-shielding visor.
“Geez,” I muttered. “Damned thing looks like an Erector set having a bad hair day.”
The female standing next to O’Reilly let out the snorting neigh I now know is her brand of laughter. Took me a while to figure that out.
“We should call it EEEK.” She whinnied. “Not EEE.”
EEEK, which rhymes with geek, which is the most generous term one can apply to Dr. Penelope England. Unlike me, Pen aced every one of the classes leading to her two PhDs. Very much like me, she doesn’t deal well with persons in authority. Her problem is that she’s smarter than ordinary mortals by a factor of, oh, a thousand or so. Mine is that I have a slight tendency to mouth off.
“What are we supposed to do with it?”
O’Reilly again. He also has a mouth on him. Five-two, with orange hair and glasses encased in nerdo black frames. He swiped at the perspiration dripping from his pudgy chin.
I wasn’t in much better shape. I, too, am cursed with red hair. Mine is several shades darker than O’Reilly’s bright pomegranate, thank God. My late, unlamented ex used to call it dirt red. I prefer cinnabar. And my eyes are a deep, melting chocolate, not muddy brown.
Luckily, I don’t have your typical redhead’s complexion. After I burn and peel a few dozen times, I acquire a semblance of a tan. Only on the patches of skin revealed by my ABUs, of course. Out of uniform, I look like a scalded raccoon.
In it, I’m usually swimming in sweat. Like now. Doing my best to ignore the torrent coursing down between my breasts, I consulted the project sheet again.
“Apparently,” I announced after perusing several convoluted paragraphs, “one of us is supposed to strap him- or herself into the exoskeleton and go for a twenty-mile run. In full combat gear. Carrying a sixty-pound pack.”
With perfect syncopation, the other four members of FST-3 took a step back. Their feet thumped the dry earth, and their interest in EEEK evaporated as quickly as the scant quarter inch of precipitation that had fallen on Dry Springs so far this year.
“Full combat gear,” O’Reilly echoed, his carroty brows soaring above his glasses. “Sixty-pound pack. Sounds like a job for an active duty military type.”
My glance zinged to the only other military member of my team. His zinged to the purple smudge of mountains in the distance.
We played the waiting game. Ten seconds. Twenty.
�
��Well, Sergeant Cassidy?”
All right. So I caved. I usually do in face-offs with Staff Sergeant Noel Cassidy. A Special Ops noncom with two tours in Iraq under his belt, he was assigned to FST-3 after beating a charge of lewd and lascivious acts with an underage female.
(There’s that Uniform Code of Military Justice again. I’m telling you, it’s a piece of work!)
Cassidy’s attorney got him off by proving that the underage female he solicited—Cassidy, not the attorney—was actually a he-male well past the age of consent. Sergeant Cassidy would have much preferred a jail sentence. His steroid-and-muscle-bound masculinity has yet to recover from the shock of messing around with a drag queen. As he reminded me when he finally met my determined stare.
“You know my shrink hasn’t cleared me for return to full duty.”
“She would, if you’d haul yourself up to Fort Bliss.”
Fort Bliss is our home station. Three-point-four zillion acres of desert straddling the Texas/New Mexico border. Host to the army’s armor and air defense artillery training centers. And FST-3. The main post itself isn’t bad, but there’s nothing blissful about this remote corner of the post unless you’re a Gila monster or diamondback.
“You’ve missed the last two appointments,” I reminded the sergeant.
“I’ll schedule another for next week.”
“You’d better make this one.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I scowled but couldn’t bring myself to come down too hard on the guy. After all, the sight of Charlie boinking our neighbor messed me up enough to land me in uniform.
“All right.” I signed the acceptance sheet and gave it back to the driver. “Let’s haul this contraption inside. If and when we figure out how to work the thing, I’ll climb aboard and take it for a spin.”
All the Wrong Moves Page 1
