Shadow Catcher

  “James Hannibal is the new kid on the block with one of the better military/covert ops thrillers that I’ve read in a while. Shadow Catcher will keep you guessing, on the edge of your seat, and eager for more. Well done!”

  —Raymond Benson, author of The Black Stiletto series

  PRAISE FOR

  WRAITH

  “Hannibal brings together a terrific mix of real air technology with intrigue and nonstop action. A true suspenseful story that will keep you turning the pages until the exciting finale; it really is a great tale.”

  —Clive Cussler

  “Hannibal, a former Air Force officer, offers an insider’s view into some of the U.S. Air Force’s most intriguing weapons systems in his promising first novel, a post–9/11 thriller . . . Hannibal demonstrates that high-tech weapons are only tools, and that it’s the people doing the fighting who win the day . . . Will please military fiction fans.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2013 by James R. Hannibal.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61839-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hannibal, James R.

  Shadow catcher / by James R. Hannibal.—Berkley trade paperback edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-425-26687-8

  1. B-2 bomber—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction.

  3. International relations—Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A71576S53 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2012051359

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2013

  Cover design by Rich Hasselberger.

  Cover photograph of plane by Joel Sartore / National Geographic / Getty.

  Text design by Laura K. Corless.

  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.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  EPILOGUE

  Shadow Catcher is dedicated to John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau, CIA paramilitary officers who spent two decades illegally incarcerated in Communist China. The strength of character and mental fortitude of these men outshine any hero that I could write.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  An army of selfless heroes carried this work from idea to publication. Cynthia, my wife, is the greatest hero of all. She is my inspiration and my unwavering encourager. This beautiful, amazing woman counseled me through fits and frustration and she patiently read a hundred drafts of the same story, still remembering to laugh at every joke. Next and much more imposing is my best friend, John Carroll, who listens, critiques, sacrifices, makes fantastic book trailers, and never gloats when he outshoots me at the range. Surrounding the three of us, and comprising the beating heart of this army of heroes, is my family from both sides of the aisle. I am blessed to have more support and love to bolster my military service and my personal endeavors than any man I know.

  At the head of the army, leading the charge, are the generals—my agent, Harvey Klinger, and my editor, Natalee Rosenstein. Next to them stand their lieutenants, Rachel Ridout and Robin Barletta. I am eternally grateful to Harvey and Natalee and their teams at the Harvey Klinger Agency and the Berkley Publishing Group for giving me the opportunity to do what I love most.

  What follows is a list of other heroes as colorful in their character and backgrounds as the cast of The Dirty Dozen. Some I will name only by tactical callsign for security reasons. I am grateful to my units, past and present, for providing inspiration and support. I am especially grateful to London for canceling his vacation to cover me so that I could bring this project to New York, and to Smack for his day-to-day encouragement. My thanks to Baron 1, Fester, Sideshow, and the Millers for taking the time to read and critique—in particular Sideshow, whose contributions carried significant weight in this book, and Baron 1, whose years of experience and expertise brought to life Nick’s PTSD. My thanks to Tawnya for her copyediting and her critiques. She spared Harvey and Natalee from untold horrors of grammar and spelling. Thanks to Mindy Weng for her help with Chinese culture and translation, as well as Joker, the best intelligence analyst alive. And thanks to Mason Moyer, who picked out the Springfield Armory XDm, Ethan Quinn’s favorite weapon and now mine as well.

  Finally, I give thanks to God for all of these blessings. He is my Rock, my Deliverer, and the greatest Author of all time.

  PROLOGUE

  South China Sea

 
January 1, 1988

  David Novak held his gloved hand high against the cockpit glass, his three fingers counting down to a tightly balled fist. The execute command. His wingman peeled away to the northeast. He made no other response. Radio silence was vital.

  For a moment, Novak remained transfixed by the power and beauty of Jade Two’s high-G turn. A cottony dome of vapor formed above the F-16 Fighting Falcon’s wings as the afterburner cut a marbled blue arc across the ocean waves less than fifty feet below. He smiled. These Vipers, as he and his squadron mates liked to call the F-16s, were so much sexier than the ungainly Canberras he’d flown over Russia. After a deep breath, he turned his attention back to the mission. The Chinese coast was coming up fast and, with it, a tangled bramble of newly installed surface-to-air missiles.

  The coastline gained definition, turning from blue haze into a dark green tree line. Then, as if suddenly accelerating on their own, the trees loomed large and flashed beneath him.

  “Fight’s on,” said Novak under his breath.

  He flipped a toggle switch on the panel just forward of his right knee. A moment later, a green light illuminated. That was it—green: good; red: bad; on or off. The simplistic controls for his Red Baron photoreconnaissance pod would not show him what the cameras saw, but as far as he knew, they were rolling. From this point on, he would gather thousands of electro-optical and infrared images, documenting the buildup of Chinese forces directly across the strait from Taiwan.

  Off to his left, Novak spotted a distinctive ridgeline with a V-shaped gap: his first navigation point. He rolled his wings on edge and pulled hard, changing course by forty-five degrees in less than a second, enjoying the feel of five Gs pressing him into the ejection seat. He shot through the gap and then rolled the Viper over, pulling down the other side of the ridge in an inverted dive before leveling out at the bottom of a narrow river valley. In just a few miles, his cameras would capture detailed imagery of a possible surface-to-surface missile pad that the high-altitude birds had found three days before.

  Suddenly, Novak’s radio crackled to life. “Radar spike, radar spike! I’m shifting west from point two.” His grip tightened on the side-mounted control stick. His wingman had just tripped the Chinese radar net. Even worse, he had broken radio silence, and that was tantamount to suicide.

  Agency intelligence said that Fujian’s air defense commander usually kept his radars in coast mode. A single spike was no big deal. Jade Two could have continued on course, and the next hill would have masked him from the radar’s sweep. With any luck, the station’s automatic filter would have chalked up the blip to an anomaly. But radio transmissions—even encrypted radio transmissions—could be tracked. Jade Two’s call had energized the Chinese defense net. Multiple frequency scanners would triangulate the foreign signal and send their solution to the radar operator, prompting him to focus his sweep and refine the track. If the operator achieved a lock, Jade Two was as good as dead.

  Within thirty seconds, the wingman broke radio silence again. This time panic filled his voice. “Missile in the air! I’m defending east. My position is eight miles southwest of . . .”

  Silence. No trail of broken words, no lingering static. The transmission simply ended.

  Novak did not hesitate. He quickly plotted a course to Jade Two’s last-known position and turned to intercept. He hugged the ridgelines, seeking the protection of the ground clutter, knowing that every radar station in the province had just gone active to search for a second aircraft. On the way, he double-checked his camera control. The green light still shined back at him. At least he could get photos of the crash site, vital evidence that his wingman had either lived or died.

  His target area came up fast. Novak popped up to four hundred feet to search for the burning wreckage. The Viper’s bubble canopy offered a panoramic view of the wide valley beneath him, but he found no evidence of a crash site, not even a column of smoke billowing up from the trees. He couldn’t understand it. Then he saw something that made his heart skip a beat. Not the black smoke of a ruined fighter but the orange flash and fast-expanding white cloud of an SA-3 missile taking the air.

  A flood of adrenaline supercharged Novak’s synapses as a feminine voice chanted, “Missile lock! Missile lock!” in his ear. Time slowed to a crawl. He lit his afterburner and pulled hard into the oncoming threat, straining against the unnatural crush of nine Gs. He had precious little altitude to spare, but he used all of it to build his energy, diving for the valley floor as he maintained his high-G turn. Emerald trees whipped by within inches of his low wing. With deft movements of the control stick, he kept the oncoming missile centered at the top of his canopy, and in the slow progression of the temporal distortion, it grew to the diameter of a telephone poll.

  Then it disappeared.

  For a fraction of a second that seemed to last an eternity, Novak saw nothing but the blue sky and green trees. He gritted his teeth and pulled even harder, pushing the Viper and his own body to the limit. He knew what was coming. He had forced the missile to overshoot his aircraft, avoiding a direct hit, but that would not stop the weapon’s proximity fuze from detonating the warhead.

  The giant missile exploded somewhere above and behind him. The blast rocked his aircraft, setting off a disorienting array of flashing red and yellow caution lights. He felt as if the air had been stripped from under his wings. He struggled to maintain control, fighting for every ounce of lift to keep from crashing into the trees.

  Then it was all over. The air became smooth again. The caution lights blinked out one by one.

  Novak checked his wings. They looked perfect. By some miracle, he’d escaped the burning fragments that should have torn the Viper to shreds. He breathed, relaxing his death grip on the stick and easing out of his high-G turn.

  Still shaking from his brush with death, Novak tapped his threat indicator. Even though he had dodged the missile, the alarm continued to chant its mantra in his ears, “Missile lock! Missile lock!” He silenced the voice and pulled into a gentle climb to continue his search for Jade Two. Instinctively, he looked back to see the cloud formed by the missile’s explosion. He only had a split second to realize his mistake. Another fiery SA-3 filled his vision. The alarm had been trying to warn him of a second missile.

  PART ONE

  GHOSTS

  CHAPTER 1

  Kuwait

  March 18, 2013

  A lone Westerner weaved his way along the crowded sidewalk in front of the Souk Sharq in Kuwait City, suffering the uneasy glances and occasional loathing glares of the locals. They did not bother him; with his flaxen hair and fair skin, such looks were unavoidable. On another day, he might have indulged his audience by slowing to gaze up at the beautiful souk, playing the part of the wandering tourist, admiring the high towers and ornate arches that hearkened back to the glory days of the Persian Empire. But not today. There was no time.

  For ten years, the objective had lain hidden, dormant. For ten years, the secret had remained sealed in its watery vault. Now that he was back, he felt like that seal had been broken, as if his mere presence in the Persian Gulf had started a race against an unknown enemy. And somehow he knew he was already behind.

  Once inside the souk, Air Force major Nick Baron moved into the shadow of a pillar. Now free from the usual disdainful looks, he let his steel blue eyes slowly drift over the crowd, scanning the potpourri of faces for something much more dangerous: recognition. He found none. Finally satisfied that he was not being watched or followed, he turned his attention to finding his teammate. It did not take long.

  Nick slowly shook his head and sighed.

  Major Drake Merigold stood in the center of the Grand Corridor at the base of a beautiful two-story water clock, staring up at the Jules Vernian sculpture with his mouth slightly agape. He wore an orange and blue Hawaiian shirt that hung untucked over his khaki shorts. He could not have stood out more amid the drab ga
rb of the locals if he had worn a fluffy red wig and big floppy shoes.

  The two field operatives of the Triple Seven Chase squadron had arrived on separate flights, on separate carriers, under assumed names. Each had used a unique, indirect route to reach the souk, where they were supposed to quietly join up before heading out into the gulf to meet the rest of the team. The stakes of this mission demanded strict adherence to the principles of covert movement. But then how could Drake be expected to fully grasp the stakes? No one had told him the real reason they were here.

  “Magnum PI called,” said Nick, joining his comrade at the water clock. “He wants his shirt back.”

  Drake nodded, still looking up. “It’s called hiding in plain sight, boss.” He was nearly a head taller than Nick, with broad shoulders to match and chiseled Greek features. With his flawless dark hair and obnoxious shirt, he looked like a movie star about to go on a cruise rather than a military operative. He glanced around the wide corridor, pulling the loud shirt away from his body and fanning it to take advantage of the air-conditioning. “They did a good job rebuilding. The last time we were here, an Iraqi missile had just crashed through the ceiling. You’d never know that there was once a huge crater right where we’re standing.”

  “They’ve had ten years to fix it,” said Nick. “We’ve been away a long time.”

  For the first time since Nick had stepped out of the shadows, Drake looked him straight in the eyes. “So, why are we back?”

  Nick dropped his eyes from Drake’s to check his watch. “The others should be reaching the rendezvous point soon. It’s time we got out there.”

  Drake frowned. “You’re starting to act like the colonel.”

  “Just pick up your bag and let’s go.”

  Nick shifted the strap of the duffel bag that hung over his shoulder and started walking toward the central rear archway, the exit to the marina. Like Drake, he wore civilian clothes to hide his military affiliation, although his choices were a little more understated. His dark gray button-down shirt hung loose on his shoulders, masking the solid build beneath. Both men carried civilian duffel bags with enough gear to get them through a few days on the water, just as Colonel Walker had directed.