Shadow Catcher, Page 2

  Warm salty air rushed over him as Nick pushed open the glass double doors. He started down the stairs to the wooden boardwalk, where several docks extended out into the gulf. Each had room for twenty small craft and each was nearly full, a forest of masts and canvas. Other than the whip and snap of the sails in the gentle breeze, all seemed quiet. Nick felt the temptation to relax.

  The doors to the Grand Corridor clicked closed behind him, wrenching his senses away from the pleasant atmosphere. He paused halfway down the stairs. Scanning farther down the docks, he spied a pair of locals in the common white thaubs and keffiyehs. He watched them for a few moments as they prepared to launch a blue and white runabout, probably for an evening pleasure cruise. They looked harmless.

  At the end of the third dock, he found a black dinghy waiting at the prescribed slip. He held it fast and tossed in their bags while Drake jumped on board and prepped the motor.

  Within minutes, Drake had the throttle fully open, accelerating out into the open waters of the Persian Gulf. Every so often, he steered into a wave, sending white spray over the bow and onto Nick.

  “I know you’re doing that on purpose,” said Nick, wiping the oily gulf water from his face.

  “Just trying to lighten the mood,” replied Drake. “You gotta learn to relax, boss.”

  “I’ll relax when the mission is complete and the team is safely back at Romeo Seven.”

  “You know that ain’t true.”

  Nick refused to respond. He was in no mood for friendly ribbing, and he feared that in a few hours’ time, Drake’s usual jovial temper would sour as well. Before the day was over, Drake would accuse him of betrayal, and he would have every right to.

  Twenty minutes later, another craft appeared on the horizon. Despite his fears, Nick managed a thin smile. The commander of the Triple Seven Chase was well known in the covert ops community as an acquisitions wizard. Colonel Richard T. Walker had just pulled another rabbit out of his pointy hat, and this time she was a big one.

  Nick estimated the vessel to be at least 250 feet long with a 50-foot beam. She looked fresh from the dry dock, with unblemished white paint and a thick red stripe along the rails. She was well equipped too, with three golf-ball-style radomes amidships and a docking station jutting out from the rear beneath two heavy salvage cranes.

  “Illustro ex Caliga,” read Nick, squinting at the black lettering near the bow of the craft.

  “It means ‘Illustrious Sea Monkey,’” said Drake.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Good call.” Drake scratched his chin in thought. “If I remember my Latin correctly, it means ‘Illumination out of Darkness.’” He guided the dinghy to the aft station, cutting his speed to a crawl and then inching into position in an agonizingly slow attempt at docking.

  “Well, that was ugly, Merigold,” said a booming voice from above. An imposing figure leaned against the rail of the upper deck. With his gray crew cut and perpetual scowl, Colonel Walker carried the aura of a man in full US Army service dress, even when wearing a golf shirt and khakis.

  “Hey, I fly airplanes, not boats,” retorted Drake, slapping the tubular black hull of the dinghy. “I’m used to touching down on a solid surface at a hundred and fifty knots, not wallowing in to a moving target at five. You should be glad I didn’t ram this thing into your little rental here.”

  Walker ignored Drake’s attempt to bait him. “Hurry up, gentlemen,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do before dark.”

  “And what work is that, sir?” asked Drake, hopping onto the ship’s dock to secure the dinghy.

  The colonel’s usual scowl faded into a grim smile. “Preparing to raise a ghost from our past, Major Merigold,” he said. “Preparing to raise a ghost from our past.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The sun burned a dull orange hue into the hazy gulf horizon as the Illustro finally slowed to a drift. Leaning against the rail next to Drake, Nick could see nothing but green water in all directions, a seductive illusion of solitude. In truth, the Iranian coast lay less than fifty miles off the port bow, far too close for his comfort. A soft whirring drifted up from below. Down at the waterline, he saw a small section of seawater bubbling and frothing against the hull like a hot spring.

  “What’s that?” asked Drake, following his gaze.

  “It’s a subsurface thruster,” said Nick. “The ship’s dynamic positioning system will hold our coordinates within a couple of meters. It looks like we’re over the objective.”

  “That’s right.” Walker emerged from the pilothouse. “But we don’t want to hold this position any longer than we have to, so let’s get started.”

  The three of them abandoned the warm glow of the Arabian sunset for the cold fluorescent light of the ship’s main lab. White powder-coated cabinets and counters stretched the full length of the room, except for the forward wall, where the Triple Seven’s lead engineer labored before a wide bank of black computers. Above him, a large LCD monitor displayed a steadily growing mosaic of tiny black and gray squares.

  “Are we nearing completion?” asked Walker.

  Dr. Scott Stone looked up from his keyboard and reseated the glasses that had drifted down his sharp nose. “The submersible is covering the final section now, sir. It will complete its run momentarily.” With the last word, a tiny burp escaped his lips. The engineer grimaced and raised a hand to cover his mouth. His face turned green.

  “How ya doin’, Scott?” asked Drake, perching himself on a stool at the long central table.

  Stone did not answer. Instead, he stood up from his workstation, stumbled out the portal, and leaned over the rail.

  Drake grinned. “That good, huh?”

  “Does he realize there’s another deck below that rail?” asked Nick.

  “I had Doc Heldner give him some meds,” said Walker. “She even gave him some gingersnaps.”

  They heard Scott let out a heaving belch, followed by a series of sickening splats from the deck below.

  “I think he just gave ’em back,” said Drake.

  Walker frowned at the pilot. He took a sip of black coffee from a foam cup, paused to savor the black liquid, and then turned and stretched a hand toward the large screen. “Gentlemen, this jumble of mass confusion is a photo-map. We dropped off an autonomous ROV yesterday and then moved off-site while Dr. Stone monitored its progress. It doesn’t look like much now, but once Stone’s program unscrambles the mess, we’ll get a detailed look at our objective.” He focused his scowl on Scott as the seasick engineer trudged back to his workstation. “At least that’s what he tells me.”

  “The ROV is on its way back up,” said Scott weakly, dabbing his face with a small white towel. He sank into his chair. “Let me run the resolution software. We should have an image in under a minute, sir.”

  Nick gazed expectantly at the screen. At first, the picture remained an incomprehensible collage of black and gray photos. Then the hundreds of individual boxes began to move. They shifted, rotated, and adjusted until finally they merged into a single, coherent image: a massive B-2 stealth bomber, the Spirit of Kansas, lying in the silt at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.

  Nick glanced at Drake. Realization washed over his teammate like an angry flood. His eyes grew wide, his jaw tensed. “That’s our jet,” he exclaimed. “My jet.”

  Looking back at the crisp ROV image, Nick could clearly see the blown hatch where Drake had ejected from the aircraft ten years before. Memories of their first combat mission together came racing back.

  HUMINT had predicted a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Tariq Irhaab, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Triple Seven Chase, then just a test squadron, had the only reconnaissance asset that could get to the target, an experimental stealth jet called Dream Catcher. Just hours before the Shock and Awe campaign began, Drake had slipped through the enemy radar fence in the Spirit of Kansas, carr
ying Nick and Dream Catcher in the B-2’s weapons bay, and Danny Sharp, one of the Dream Catcher’s developers, in his copilot seat.

  The mission was supposed to be a cakewalk.

  It wasn’t.

  The bay doors jammed half open during deployment, ruining the bomber’s stealth and sending Nick and the Dream Catcher tumbling toward the desert floor. Nick had no choice but to eject, right in the path of a platoon of Republican Guard. Drake could have left him. He should have, to save the B-2. Instead, he came back for his teammate, taking out the platoon’s missile launcher so that a rescue chopper could get in close enough to grab him. Unfortunately, the launcher got off a shot before Drake’s bomb took it down. The last time Nick saw the bomber, it was limping south toward the gulf, trailing smoke and fire.

  Drake tore his eyes away from the monitor to glare at Walker. “Of course, that can’t be my jet,” he said, tilting his head. “While medevac took Nick, Danny, and me back to the States, you salvaged my jet and towed it out to deep water. You scattered it into a thousand pieces over the Arabian Basin.” He gestured at Nick, his volume beginning to build. “Nick and I sat next to you while you testified before the oversight committee. We corroborated everything you told them!”

  Nick winced. Drake still hadn’t put it all together, that Nick had kept the truth from him almost as long as Walker had.

  “Stand down, Major,” Walker fired back. “What would you have me do, tell a pack of two-bit politicians that we left a stealth bomber at the bottom of the Persian Gulf?” He folded his arms and snorted. “They can’t keep their mouths shut. The Iranians would have picked the wreck clean by now, two billion dollars’ worth of stealth technology out in the open. We had to keep it need-to-know.”

  The colonel’s scowl deepened as he took another sip of coffee. “The first salvage op went bad, very bad. We started to bring her up, but one of the main cables snapped, then the other one. Two divers were killed immediately. The third was pinned under the bomber. I went in to get him out, but there was nothing I could do. I lost the entire team.” He cast a glance at Nick. “After that fiasco, Major Baron and I decided it was better to leave the bomber where it lay.”

  Drake turned to Nick in shock, suddenly grasping the full truth. “You knew about this the whole time?”

  Nick opened his mouth to respond, but after a decade of knowing this day would come, he could not find the words to say.

  “I brought Major Baron into the loop as soon as I returned to Washington,” said Walker. “I needed a sounding board, and I wanted a member of the ops team to be prepared in case word got out about the asset. Baron is the team lead. He had the need to know. You didn’t.”

  The revelation that even Nick had kept the secret from him robbed Drake’s anger of its fire. He shifted his gaze to the floor. “Did Danny know?”

  “No,” answered Nick quietly. And he would never know. Danny had died the previous September. This lie was only a small part of the guilt that Nick still harbored in the wake of his death.

  “If it’s been safe this long, then why recover it now?” asked Drake.

  “An Italian marine science group is planning to map the gulf floor,” said Nick. “We can’t wait any longer.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry we kept you in the dark.”

  “Get over it, both of you,” said Walker coldly. “We need to get this done. I don’t like digging up graves in the Iranian’s backyard. We’ve kept that bomber quiet for a decade, but now that we’re out here, I feel exposed.”

  Nick placed a hand on his teammate’s shoulder and looked up at the ghostly image of the B-2. A chill swept over him. He thought of the horror that lay beneath: the crushed body of a forgotten patriot and two fully armed five-thousand-pound bombs.

  CHAPTER 3

  Where am I?

  Nick stood on a dirt road in thick darkness. He could not remember how he got there. On either side of the road, he saw the high mud walls common to desert villages. They seemed to be closing in on him. He could not feel the ground beneath his feet. The sound of his own breathing echoed in his ears. Then he saw the mosque, its distinctive dome with the worn crescent carved into the west side. Suddenly he knew where he was. He knew what he had to do.

  He had to save Danny.

  Nick found his teammate less than fifty yards ahead, crouched next to a gap in the wall surrounding the mosque’s small courtyard. Danny looked back at him. He stood up and waved as if they were meeting on a neighborhood street back home in Maryland, wearing that same ridiculous grin that he always wore.

  “Get down, you idiot,” Nick whispered into his communications implant. “Stay there. Wait until I get to you.”

  Danny did not respond. Instead, he disappeared through the gap in the wall like a ghost.

  “Drake, I lost visual with Danny,” said Nick, rushing forward. “What’s going on in that courtyard? Where is the target?” He had to get to his friend, but no matter how hard he ran, the mosque stayed fifty yards ahead of him.

  “You can see what I can,” replied Drake, his voice mechanical, distant. “Check the image on your handheld. I’ve got nothing on the thermal.”

  Nick checked the faintly glowing monitor attached to his Falcon ROVER handheld. The receiver pulled real-time thermal video from an RQ-7 Shadow UAV flying overhead. He held the small screen up to his eyes, but he couldn’t focus his vision. He couldn’t make any sense of the hazy green image.

  The target, Zaman Ramiz, had smuggled a nuclear weapon out of southern Russia. The Triple Seven had chased him from Azerbaijan, across northern Turkey and into Bazargan, just across the Iranian border. Drake had stayed behind to fly the Shadow. Nick and Danny had crossed the border in pursuit. Now the arms dealer’s men were dead, and Ramiz was holed up in the small mosque.

  The whole village seemed to shift around him. Suddenly Nick was at the wall. Where was Danny? What a stupid question. He knew where Danny was. He was in that courtyard, and that courtyard was a deathtrap. He looked down at the handheld again. He still couldn’t see the video feed. He put the receiver away and cautiously leaned into the gap to get a look with his own eyes. A spray of bullets ricocheted off the wall beside his head, kicking brick fragments and dust into his face.

  “He just shot at me,” Nick shouted as he pulled back behind the wall. He tried to rub the debris from his eyes. “I need to know where that’s coming from.”

  Drake gave no response.

  Nick had to keep the pressure on. He burst into the courtyard with his MP7 tucked into his shoulder, searching for a target, searching for his teammate. There, just ahead. Danny was lying motionless beside a wide, square fountain. The ancient stones were wet with blood.

  Another burst of gunfire rang out from the shadows of the mosque. Nick felt two bullets slam into his vest. He dove into a prone position behind the fountain, shouting at Danny. But Danny did not answer.

  Nick felt an icy grip crushing his chest. Pain radiated through his torso. He couldn’t breathe. He rolled over and tried to rip off his Kevlar vest, but there was no vest. He wore no protection over his cotton undershirt. The fabric felt warm and wet against his fingertips. He raised his hand to his eyes. It was covered in blood.

  Footsteps. Ramiz stood over him, a blur at first and then slowly coming into focus. The arms dealer smiled down from behind the barrel of his Stechkin machine pistol.

  He pulled the trigger.

  “Okay, that’s really annoying.”

  Nick fought to open his eyes. Drake’s hand was on his arm, shaking him.

  “Seriously, how does Katy get any sleep when you’re home? You’re thrashing around in your bunk and moaning like a creature from a low-grade zombie movie.”

  Nick blinked until his small berth on the Illustro came into focus. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. After taking a moment to gather his wits, he rolled onto his side and glowered across the tiny room at Drake. “I wasn�
�t moaning,” he said, trying to steady his voice. “And for the record, all zombie movies are low grade.”

  “Not true. Zombies are the new vampires.”

  “It’ll never work.” Nick threw off the sheet and swung his feet to the floor. “A brooding, metrosexual zombie is still just an ugly dead thing.”

  “That’s undead, thank you very much,” said Drake, yawning and rubbing his eyes.

  Nick regarded his friend with a curious look. After the briefing with Walker, Drake hadn’t said two words to anyone for the rest of the night, even during the dive planning. Now he had slipped into his old self like nothing happened.

  “What?” asked Drake.

  “Are we okay?”

  Drake stood up and stretched. “Need-to-know is Walker’s call, not yours. You followed orders. I would have done the same.”

  “Really? All’s forgiven, just like that?”

  “I overreacted. In the grand scheme, this team is more important than one man.”

  “Noble words,” said Nick, nodding slowly. He raised an eyebrow. “Then what about the colonel? Is he forgiven too?”

  “Ahem.” Drake coughed and looked away. “So, uh, another nightmare.” He plopped back down on the bunk, put his hands on his knees, and stared Nick in the eye. “Don’t tell me, Danny again? It’s been six months. You have to let him go.”

  “It was my job to protect him. I let him down. I let his wife and kids down.”

  “Danny made his own choice,” said Drake, shaking his head. “He ignored your order to hold his position. You got Ramiz and the nuke. I don’t think you let anyone down.”

  Nick looked down at his chest, half expecting to see the bruises where the arms dealer’s bullets had slammed into his vest, but those wounds had healed months ago. He was lucky he hadn’t taken a round in the head like Danny. The family had to have a closed-casket funeral. Nick fed them the official cover story, that Danny had been in a helicopter crash. He looked up at Drake. “If I go down like Danny, will you lie to Katy like I lied to his wife?”