The Stronger Chase

by Cap Daniels

  THE STRONGER CHASE

  CHASE FULTON NOVEL #3

  CAP DANIELS

  ** USA **

  The Stronger Chase

  Chase Fulton Novel #3

  Cap Daniels

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, historical events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Although many locations such as marinas, airports, hotels, restaurants, and buildings used in this work actually exist, they are used fictitiously and may have been relocated, exaggerated, or otherwise modified by creative license for the purpose of this work. Although many characters are based on character traits, physical attributes, skills, or intellect of actual individuals, all of the characters in this work are products of the author’s imagination.

  Published by:

  ** USA **

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954880

  Copyright © 2018 Cap Daniels – All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design: German Creative – Cover photo: Bridge of Lions, St. Augustine, FL by Kim Seng at RoyalStockPhoto.com

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Dedication

  This Book is dedicated to …

  My dear friend “Earl,” whose real name can’t be divulged, but he is the real-life inspiration for my character, Clark Johnson. He is a patriot, warrior, leader, father, and constant source of encouragement. He has not only been a true and faithful friend for decades, through good and bad, but he is also one of the few people I’ve ever known who is always ready to embark on an adventure at the drop of a hat. Thank you for your friendship, inspiration, and for teaching me that a friend will help you move, but a real friend will help you move a body.

  SPECIAL THANKS TO:

  My Astonishing Editor:

  Sarah Flores – Write Down the Line, LLC

  www.WriteDowntheLine.com

  Aside from her remarkable talent as an editor, Sarah has a magnificent way of pushing me to write beyond the limits of what I thought I was capable of doing. She is inspirational, demanding, encouraging, and a constant motivation to improve my craft and expect more of myself. Without her, my work would be unreadable.

  PADI Master Instructor Dan Lennon:

  Dan was the first person to take me diving in the Florida Keys. He showed me a world of beauty and wonder that I never imagined could exist. His infectious passion for diving and his unequalled ability to share his decades of knowledge and experience with a rookie diver like me inspired me to become a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and share the fascinating undersea world with hundreds of dive students through the years.

  Inspiration:

  Everyone who crossed my path in my five decades on Earth and provided the inspiration for countless characters who have been set free on the pages of this and other works of fiction.

  1

  Back in Old Havana

  Havana was not a place I ever thought I’d see again. After my first mission to find, identify, and kill Anatoly Parchinkov, aka the gopher, had ended with me lassoing the legendary Russian assassin, pulling him from the deck of a mega-yacht, and chopping him into fish food with the outboard of a borrowed dinghy in the mouth of the Rio Almendares, I thought I’d never return to Hemingway’s home away from home. But there I was on a moonless June night in 2001, lying in the mud forty feet beneath the black surface of the filthy water of Havana Harbor.

  Lying beside me on the seafloor, also wearing a LAR V Draeger closed-circuit rebreather, was Clark Johnson, former army Green Beret, and the man I currently trusted with my life above and below the waterline. We had just swum three miles in blackout conditions to arrive beneath the Komskoy kroshechnaya akula, a boat affectionately called the tiny shark. The boat was Russia’s smallest spy submarine designed to carry four crewmen: pilot, engineer, and two intelligence operatives. She was tied alongside in Havana Harbor, recharging her batteries and undergoing a software upgrade, as well as some mechanical repairs from having been run hard aground during an exercise off the Yucatan Peninsula.

  That grounding is how we knew where she was. The recovery effort to salvage the damaged minisub had caught the attention of an NSA satellite photo analyst. He’d identified the sub as it was hoisted aboard a salvage ship and before it had been tarped on deck. The salvage ship had sailed into Havana Harbor and offloaded the sub at a shipyard, where the required repairs could be accomplished without drawing too much unwanted attention. Fortunately, the attention that I needed the sub to garner had already come from the sharp eye of that NSA analyst. I owed that guy a bottle of something old and expensive.

  Clark and I lay motionless, catching our breath and preparing for the surface mission. Our rebreathers supplied the oxygen our bodies required, then captured the carbon dioxide we exhaled, scrubbed it, and added enough oxygen to turn it back into breathable gas so no bubbles would be seen on the surface, giving away our position. That, along with our whisper-com system, made us a nearly undetectable and highly lethal team in the water.

  To pinpoint our position, I floated a pencil-sized GPS buoy and found that we had stopped three meters short of the docked minisub. Adhering precisely to our plan, Clark swam east until he was three meters beyond the bow of the craft, and I held my position, awaiting his signal to surface.

  Two clicks of the whisper-com, and we kicked slowly and rose from the murky depths at half a foot per second. It would take us eighty seconds to surface, and we would do so in silence. Our masks were fitted with fifth generation night vision, giving us the ability to scan the surface environment for anything unexpected.

  Our heads broke the surface simultaneously, and we immediately went to work, scanning the dock and finding what we knew would be there: two guards with AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, and two night vision cameras mounted high on a pair of aluminum stands and focused on the tiny shark.

  Another pair of clicks of the whisper-coms, and Clark and I drew a pair of identical etching lasers and aimed them at the black glass lenses of the security cameras. The lasers, one of the most incredible new gadgets to surface from the CIA’s technical services branch, etched a copy of everything the camera captured the instant before, onto the lens. To anyone watching a live feed, the scene would appear unchanged indefinitely. It was unlikely that anyone was actually watching, but we certainly didn’t need anyone sounding an alarm. The only weakness of the lasers was that we had no way to know if they’d actually worked. We were putting our lives in the hands of some pimple-faced computer geek a thousand miles away.

  With the cameras hopefully sufficiently blinded, we drew our Heckler & Koch Mark 23 silenced pistols from our holsters and allowed the saltwater to drain from the barrels. We watched the armed guards lean against the hood of an aged Jeep and light a pair of cigarettes. Following our intricately planned timing protocol, we took careful aim, put a single bullet in each guard’s left eye, and watched them melt to the ground.

  So far, our plan was going flawlessly. The only thing that remained was to take on our gruesome cargo, cut the minisub free of her mooring lines, crawl inside, figure out how to get it started, and drive it out of Havana Harbor without being cut in half by the deck gun of some Cuban patrol boat. Fortunately for us, the Cubans barely had enough gas to run their patrol boats a few hours a day. Through the lens of the NSA’s handy little snooping satellite in geosynchronous orbit over Castro’s bungalow, we’d watched them exceed their sea time quota the previous afternoon.

&nb
sp; We climbed silently from the murky water onto the dock, clipped our fins to our load bearing vests, and scanned the area for any prying eyes. We were the only living creatures for half a mile, except for maybe some dock rats and the cats who had their way with them.

  The absolute weight of a dead body is astonishing, but we managed to drag the corpses of the guards to the sub without snapping our spines. I sliced the bowlines and spring lines while Clark took care of the stern. The hatch of the sub wasn’t sealed, so we propped it open and slid the bodies into the belly of the tiny machine.

  Getting inside was the easy part. Reading enough Russian to learn to operate the ship on the fly would be the challenge. Ours were the first Western eyes to ever see the inside of the kroshechnaya akula, so we didn’t know what to expect when we slipped through the hatch.

  Thankfully, the interior was far more familiar than we’d feared. The controls were overly simple, and there was enough room for even my long legs. After sealing the hatch and bringing the electronics online, I opened the seacocks, allowing the ballast tanks to fill slowly and silently submerge the boat.

  Clark whispered, “Diving officer, make your depth two-five feet, three degree down bubble.”

  I whispered, “two-five feet, three degree down bubble, aye-aye, sir.”

  We laughed quietly since neither of us had any idea what that meant, but it sounded like something they’d say in the movies when stealing a top-secret, Russian mini spy submarine. But this was no movie. This was real life—at least as long as our lives lasted.

  The learning curve was steep. We bounced off the muddy bottom once, barely preventing two unintentional surface breechings. It was a lot like flying an airplane in zero visibility with instruments labeled in the most complex written language on Earth, but we figured it out and slipped out of Havana Harbor at eleven thirty-seven p.m. We made five and a half knots, bearing two-niner-five magnetic, until we were sure we’d cleared the mouth of the port. We headed due north, running for international water. In eleven more miles, we would’ve been home free.

  We’d overestimated the endurance of the batteries. They gave up the ghost in eighty-one minutes, leaving us seven-point-four miles north of the Port of Havana, in a lifeless, bobbing, black metal tube with two stinking dead bodies.

  “What would be the fun in having everything go right?” Clark said as he opened the hatch and stuck his head out into the humid tropical night air. Pulling his radio from its waterproof case, Clark pressed the PTT button. “Shepherd, Lost Sheep, over.”

  The mission commander was apparently a Dukes of Hazard fan, and Clark and I were obviously Bo and Luke, but the coffinesque tiny shark was no General Lee.

  We took a GPS position and passed it to Shepherd, the recovery ship disguised to look like a fishing trawler.

  “Lost Sheep, this is Shepherd. We’ll be on your bow in eleven minutes,” came the garbled reply over the radio.

  I hoped no one in Havana had realized the sub was missing and wouldn’t notice for at least eleven minutes. A lot can go wrong in eleven seconds, and a freight train of wrong can show up in eleven minutes.

  I guess fate and the gods of the good guys were on our side that night. Shepherd showed up ten minutes and forty seconds later and had us in tow ninety seconds after that. Before climbing out of the sub, I pulled a laminated card from one of my pockets and taped it to the console with two long strips of waterproof tape. The printing on the card was done in Cyrillic script and read:

  I have lost faith in what was held so dear by my father, and before him, his father. I give to you this gift so you may know the extent and limits of my comrades’ ability to be where you cannot see, and to hear what you believe cannot be heard. For my sins against you, I will be punished. For my sins against the Rodina, I will be crucified.

  VVT - Victor Vladimirovich Tornovich.

  We submerged the sub using external ballast tanks strapped port and starboard, then to add an additional layer of authenticity to our charade, we dropped the trawler’s fishing nets in the water. We made our way toward Cayo Hueso.

  Hungry, tired, and waterlogged, Clark and I peeled ourselves out of our dive gear in the pilothouse of the trawler. Although the water temperature was near eighty degrees, we were still shivering from the hours we’d spent submerged, with our body temperatures slowly dropping toward the water temp. The thermal blankets Doc had brought along were lifesavers. Doc was Jimmy Reyes, a career navy medical corpsman on loan to us from the Special Forces Underwater Operations School on Key West.

  After our teeth had stopped chattering, Clark and I devoured bowls of chili and sandwiches. Doc checked our vitals and declared that we’d live to dive another day.

  The Russian mini spy sub following us, close in tow, was step one in an intricate and complex plan to draw SVR Colonel Victor Tornovich out of the Kremlin, and into the boxing ring with me.

  My latest nemesis, Colonel Tornovich, had been the mastermind behind one of the most ingenious plans to infiltrate American covert operations ever devised. He’d learned of my existence from an American double agent named Jarrod “Dutch” Thompson. Tornovich had trained and dispatched Captain Ekaterina Norikova, a gorgeous, blonde deep-cover agent who called herself Anastasia “Anya” Burinkova, to seduce me and feign defection to the U.S. She embedded herself into covert operations with me, all the while reporting back to the Kremlin on every detail of how we operated. That alone would have been a remarkable plan, but Tornovich took it one giant leap further. He ordered Anya to convince my mentor and former covert operative turned psychology professor, Dr. Robert “Rocket” Richter, that she was his daughter from an affair during the Cold War, with a beautiful KGB officer named Katerina Burinkova.

  Anya—Captain Norikova—was, among a great many other things, a brilliant actress. She fooled everyone she encountered, especially Dr. Richter and me. I’d fallen head over heels in love with the Russian seductress, and Dr. Richter had worshipped the ground on which his alleged daughter walked.

  In a bizarre twist of fate during a rescue mission to recover Skipper, my former collegiate baseball coach’s daughter, from a pornography ring in Miami Beach, Anya had taken a bullet in the back and fell to her death in a South Beach mansion.

  Skipper had been like a little sister to me when I was playing ball at the University of Georgia, but she’d made some bad decisions after I was recruited into covert ops. Ultimately, she ended up in the hands of some nasty characters in South Florida.

  We got her out, but without Clark, I wouldn’t have come out of the operation alive. He’d proven to be not only a warrior, but also a loyal friend.

  Even after her death, we had no idea Anya was still working with the SVR and Tornovich, until a pair of Russian illegals pirated my boat, taking Skipper and me hostage in an attempt to find Anya. They had lived undetected in the States as Americans for God knows how long. We were able to survive the piracy with a little help from the U.S. Coast Guard, resulting in the arrest and interrogation of the two illegals, Sara and Michael Anderson. The Andersons cut a deal to save their lives by spilling their guts. That’s when Dr. Richter and I, along with the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community, learned the horrific truth of Tornovich’s diabolical plan, and Anya’s brutal implementation of it. I had vowed to find and kill Victor Tornovich for what he’d done. Stealing the minisub was step one of my plan to fulfill that vow.

  2

  The Getaway

  We cleared Cuban territorial waters without any gunboats racing out to rake our decks with their machine guns. We no longer needed to pretend we were fishing, so we pulled our nets out of the water. I’d never known the execution of a plan to go flawlessly, but so far, that one was close to perfect.

  Five hours into our crossing of the Gulf Stream on our way to the Coast Guard station on Key West, a radar return appeared on our scope fifteen miles north, directly off our bow.

  I watched the small blip on our screen draw closer. It was making eleven knots and bearing straight
at us in the pitch darkness of the Florida Straits. With our twelve knots of speed, we’d intercept the other boat in under forty minutes. I couldn’t wait.

  Clark and I thanked the crew of the trawler, and especially Doc for getting us and our new toy out of Cuba alive. When the radar indicated that the other boat was less than a mile off our bow, I heard Clark declare, “Tallyho! I’ve got ’em. Twelve o’clock.”

  I followed his outstretched finger into the darkness and saw the lights of Aegis II, the fifty-foot sailing catamaran that was not only my home, but also our getaway car.

  Like two ships passing in the night, Aegis II came down our port side as the headsail was furled, and the engines purred to life. Skipper, my former coach’s daughter, was at the helm. She executed a flawless one-hundred-eighty-degree maneuver, and brought the cruising cat alongside the trawler, matching our speed perfectly.

  Tony Johnson, Skipper’s boyfriend and a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, deployed fenders over the starboard hull just before Skipper snuggled the twenty-ton sailboat against the trawler. Clark and I leapt from the trawler and onto my boat, and we waved goodbye to our former crew.

  Skipper peeled off to port and Tony retrieved the fenders.

  “Welcome home, guys. How was it?” Tony said when we’d made our way to the cockpit on the aft deck.

  “It was a nice swim, little brother. You’d have loved it,” said Clark.

  Tony and Clark were brothers and the son of my covert operations handler, Dominic Fontana. The intelligence world is pretty small, and family ties aren’t rare within the circle.

  “It’s good to have you back,” said Skipper.

  I hugged her. “It’s good to be back. Did you guys have any trouble finding us?”

  “Nope,” she said. “You were right where the satellite tracker said you were.”

  I hadn’t intentionally pulled Skipper into my world of espionage and bad guys. She came to spend some time with me after we’d snatched her back from the bad boys in Miami. She wasn’t quite ready to return to the domestic life with her parents in Athens, Georgia, after having spent months in the hands of pimps and porn producers in South Florida. She needed some transition time, and a fifty-foot sailing cat was as good a place as any to transition.