Quinn lifted the MTGs that hung from his neck. Part of the right temple support hung loosely by a bundle of wires. The stem had broken in two when Nick clubbed him with his own gun. He seated the goggles awkwardly on his face, tightened the strap, and powered them up. They still worked.
Aided by the illumination of enhanced infrared, Quinn could see that Baron had not dragged him far from the Palace. The GPS in his heads-up display showed the cave less than twenty meters away. Using the wireless control to zoom in on the green triangle, he could even make out the entrance. He took another swig of water and started to push his way back to the cave. Then he abruptly stopped. There was a line of text flashing in the corner of his display.
MESSAGE WAITING
Insult to injury. That arrogant jerk had actually sent him a message through his MTG control. He pushed the command button to display the message. Lines of green text began to scroll up his screen:
I’M GOING AFTER THE OBJECTIVE.
GET BACK TO SHADOW CATCHER.
IF I’M NOT BACK IN TWO HOURS, YOU WILL HAVE TO GET HER AIRBORNE ON YOUR OWN.
POINT HER DOWNHILL, GIVE HER A TWO-SECOND BURST OF FULL FORWARD THRUST. THEN VECTOR THE EXHAUST DOWN.
YOU NEED A MINIMUM OF FIFTY KNOTS.
ONCE YOU’RE UP, SWITCH ON THE AUTOPILOT AND SHE’LL DO THE REST.
GODSPEED.
P.S. WHEN WE GET HOME, YOU’RE FIRED.
Something flared in the goggles behind the text, a short heat bloom somewhere to his left. He deleted the message and focused on the area but couldn’t make anything out amid the brush. Then it happened again: a circular bloom of heat expanded quickly and then contracted into nothing. Suddenly, Quinn remembered the pattern from his infrared training.
He crept forward, cautiously picking his steps. Soon he could make out an infantryman, dressed like the one he had killed, moving in the direction of the cave and carelessly smoking a cigarette. Apparently nobody had ever told this soldier that death sticks were a great way to get picked up on infrared. Was this guy the Chinese response to an American black ops insertion? Quinn felt a little insulted.
Instead of continuing past the Palace on his patrol, the soldier walked straight up to the entrance. He stamped out his cigarette and pocketed it, listened for a moment, and then moved the camouflage to the side of the entrance and crawled in. That clinched it. McBride’s questionable translation could have meant several things, but if the Chinese knew about the Palace, this was definitely a trap. And Nick was still walking into it.
Quinn activated his comm implant. “Shadow One, this is Two, over.” He heard nothing but faint static. “Shadow One, this is Shadow Two, come in.” Nick did not respond. He must have moved out of range for the line-of-sight mode. Quinn switched his implant to SATCOM and tried to contact the Wraith for a relay.
Still nothing.
He remembered that Nick had ordered Drake to mute his signal during the argument. Maybe Drake had forgotten to put him back on the link.
A branch cracked somewhere to Quinn’s right. He crouched low. Five more soldiers walked up to the Palace entrance. This group moved more deliberately than the first, actively scanning the area, weapons up and ready, sweeping distinct fields of fire. Quinn tried not to breathe. He still had several meters of cover, but if one of them looked in his direction with their NVGs, they might get lucky.
The newcomers looked better equipped than the smoker. For one thing, they carried Chang Feng submachine guns with helical magazines, decent firepower if you didn’t mind the MADE IN CHINA stamp on the pistol grip. All that the smoker carried was a pistol. The newcomers’ helmets and gear looked custom fit too, as opposed to standard issue.
The leader of the group noted the camouflage lying to one side of the cave. He leaned down to the entrance and called out in a low voice. A moment later, the infantryman came scrambling out, speaking rapidly. The largest of the newcomers roughly pulled him closer and put a hand to his lips. The leader waved and pointed, directing three of the soldiers to fan out and keep watch. Then he and the big guy lifted their NVGs and began a tense conference with their new friend.
There was a long exchange, during which the smoker’s voice grew loud again. Finally, the leader snatched the radio microphone from the smoker’s vest and thrust it in his face. The young man took the microphone and made a radio call. He waited a few moments, but there was no response. He called again. This time, in the intervening silence, he nervously withdrew a cigarette from his trouser pocket. The big one slapped it from his hand. Again, the smoker received no reply to his radio call. Quinn realized that he was trying to call the soldier that Quinn had killed.
While the big guy continued to abuse the smoker, the leader stepped away from his little group. He picked up the wayward cigarette and then moved in the direction of Quinn’s hiding place.
Quinn’s pulse quickened. He quietly raised the MP7, measuring the distance and angles to the other five soldiers. If the leader discovered him, he would have to take him down with one three-round burst so that he could quickly shift to the others. The big guy would get the next two bursts. Even while bullying the smoker, he stayed alert, his eyes roving, always keeping one hand on the Chang Feng’s pistol grip. Then Quinn would have to change his position as he tried to take out the other three serious operators. He could save the smoker for last. That guy looked about as ready for a firefight as a meter maid.
With both hands on his weapon, the leader scanned back and forth over Quinn’s head with his naked eyes. Then he froze his gaze in a direct line with Quinn. He started to look down.
Quinn slid his finger into his MP7’s trigger guard. He couldn’t raise the weapon all the way to his eye for proper aiming, but he didn’t have to. At this range, he could shoot from the hip and still put three rounds in the center of the leader’s forehead. He slowly depressed the trigger.
Just as he felt the MP7’s action about to give, Quinn noticed the man’s eyes. The leader wasn’t looking straight at him. Instead, he was glancing down at his battle vest. With his left hand, the soldier let go of his weapon and pulled a cell phone from a vest pocket. Then he turned to face the cave. Quinn released the trigger. He could feel sweat gathering above his eyebrows where the padding of his MTGs met his forehead.
The leader dialed his phone and waited. After a few moments, he spoke, his voice carrying a very different tone from the one he had used with the infantryman. Clearly, he was reporting in to a superior. Quinn had never wished that he could speak a foreign language more than he did right now. If only he knew what this guy was saying.
After his report, the soldier hung up his phone and rallied his group. His commanding and demeaning tone returned as he spouted a series of orders. The six of them quickly disappeared into the forest.
What set them off like that?
Quinn tried to put it all together. The smoker had crawled out of the cave speaking excitedly, but nothing about the Palace should have upset him if he already knew that it was a hideout. Quinn and Nick hadn’t been in there for long, and from the outside it appeared that Nick had left the cave just as they’d found it. Then Quinn remembered the radio. His bullet had shattered the control head. There was no way to hide that, and no easy explanation.
Between the broken radio and the missing soldier, the hunters now knew that their quarry was somewhere under the net, and the guy with the phone was Quinn’s only link to whoever would spring the trap.
He took off after them.
CHAPTER 49
Imight as well be searching for Bigfoot.
Nick knelt down in the underbrush for a breather. He had moved quickly southeast, his best guess as to Novak’s track, searching for some sign of the long-missing pilot. With only circumstantial evidence that Novak even survived the shoot-down in ’88, he felt like a crackpot, roaming the woods in search of a hairy mythical creature.
After a swig from his C
amelBak, Nick cracked open the control box for his MTGs, revealing an LCD screen and a small keyboard. He activated the map function. Three-dimensional satellite imagery filled his goggle display and moved to center on his position. He noted that the population density increased exponentially in the direction of the coast. Villages popped up with growing regularity along major roads to the east and west. They would funnel Novak toward the coastal city of Hanjiang. Nick couldn’t let him get that far.
He saw a strip of lighter green on the map. When he zoomed in, he found just what he needed. In another kilometer, there was a long farm valley that ran perpendicular to his course. A narrow strip of cultivated land spread for miles along a meandering river. That was where he would catch up with Novak.
Whatever evasion skills the old pilot had forgotten during his long incarceration, he would remember enough to avoid open areas unless absolutely necessary. Novak would have to stop and search up and down the tree line for a good place to cross the valley. Nick, however, had the benefit of current satellite imagery.
There.
A narrow orchard spanned nearly the entire width of the valley. Novak would likely see it from the tree line and make for its cover, but he would probably be a few hundred meters to one side or the other when he saw it. Nick could go straight there. With any luck, he would be waiting when Novak arrived, if he arrived at all.
Nick set off again, moving as quickly as he could without making an absolute racket in the scrub. He could not afford to move with more caution. There was no time. Every minute of daylight increased his chances of getting seen by locals or caught by the PLA.
As he trudged through the brush, Nick tried to raise Drake on his comm unit. “Wraith, this is Shadow One, come in.”
Drake did not respond. Despite the climbing temperature, Nick felt a chill. The mission was going pear-shaped fast. Maybe he should have waited with Quinn until the idiot woke up. He could only hope that he had pounded some sense into the kid, that he was finally following orders and heading for Shadow Catcher. Without a link to the Wraith, he could not communicate with him to find out. Worse, he could not talk to Drake or Romeo Seven to keep them apprised of the situation.
Without comms, Nick had become completely isolated, the textbook sign of a mission on the verge of catastrophic failure, just like the mission in Iraq ten years before.
A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek. The temperature was rising. He lifted the MTGs to rub his eyes and found that the forest had lightened considerably. The trees seemed to be thinning as he moved toward the coast, and now the early-morning sun broke through the canopy, casting rays of jade light all around. He pulled the goggles off and stowed them in his harness. He knew that their fused multispectrum sensors could give him a technological advantage, even in broad daylight, but there was something about seeing things with his own eyes, some elusive sense that science had yet to reproduce.
Pain throbbed in Nick’s jaw, pounding in cadence with the thump of his quickened gait. The kid had really landed a good one. He was lucky that the punch hadn’t buckled his knees. Of course, Quinn was lucky that Nick hadn’t shot him for mutiny. That kid had too much baggage.
Maybe Quinn was a product of this Entitlement Generation that all the Washington pundits were talking about. Maybe he just had trust issues. The source of his problem didn’t really matter. He was going to jail as soon as they got home.
Nick tried the Wraith again.
Nothing but static.
A half hour later, the wet scrub underfoot melted into a soggy layer of rotting leaves, and the trees thinned to the point that Nick had to give his full attention to moving between them unseen. Visibility improved to easily thirty meters on either side. A PLA search patrol or even a stray villager might spot him if he traipsed rapidly through the forest as he had done earlier. He was almost to the tree line. He checked the GPS screen in his MTG control box. It showed the orchard less than fifty meters ahead.
Nick began scanning left and right, looking for any sign of Novak or his Chinese captors. Then he heard the rumble of a powerful motor. Creeping to the edge of the trees, he looked southwest down the valley and saw that a farmer had already driven his tractor out to an adjacent field. To the northeast, others were out on foot, moving along rows of plowed land, spraying it with chemicals from pumps mounted on their backs. The day’s work had begun.
Nick’s heart sank. He hadn’t thought of the orchard as something that might need daily maintenance. How long would it be before workers came to spray these trees with pesticides? Novak might have the same thought and find a different route.
He pulled back into the trees. Who was he kidding? The guy had probably died twenty-five years ago. He was chasing a ghost and risking Shadow Catcher in a Chinese trap.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement to his left. He raised his MP7 and tracked it along the tree line, his eyes just above the scope. Instead of one smooth scan, he searched in sectors, periodically steadying his gaze to make movement easier to spot.
Within a couple of seconds, Nick found him, a single individual skirting from tree to tree. His head wasn’t turned toward Nick; instead, he watched the farmers. Nick peered through his scope. The newcomer wore a different uniform from the man they’d killed. He wore a tactical vest, and his tiger-striped camouflage did not match any of the Chinese variants that Nick knew of.
Then he caught a glimpse of the man’s weapon. That gun was unmistakable. The monstrous, unwieldy barrel of an old Colt .45 M1911 jutted from the newcomer’s hand like a caveman’s club.
Hello, Bigfoot.
CHAPTER 50
“They have no communications.” Hei Ying spoke in measured but fluent Chinese. “I severed the SATCOM link at the Wraith, the hub of their network. The command center, the aircraft, the ground team—each of them is now isolated from the others.”
The spy reclined in the driver’s seat of a sedan, parked in the shadows behind the Romeo Seven hangar. The mission had stretched late into the day, much later than expected. Darkness had already begun to fall.
“Very good.” Zheng’s voice was mottled by the sat phone’s heavy encryption. “And what did you learn before you cut them off?”
“They did not reveal the position of the landing craft, but their team did reach the cave. They plan to head south to locate the prisoner.”
Zheng sighed into the phone. “I already knew as much. You must do better than that. It is time to implement the final contingency that you proposed.”
Hei Ying hesitated. The spy had hoped that it would not come to this, but very little had gone to plan so far. “I am prepared. But I am taking a major risk of exposure. I expect to be compensated, twice the original figure.”
“Yes, yes,” said Zheng. “Just as we discussed. I will see to the money, but you will only be paid if you succeed where Wulóng failed.”
The sound of a door opening and closing drifted across the parking lot. Hei Ying instinctively sank into the seat. “I must go. I will contact you when it is done.”
* * *
McBride pounded the desk next to the computer. Nada. Nothing. It was like everyone associated with Distant Sage had either died or disappeared.
Maybe they had.
With a little help from Molly, he had turned Nick’s office into his own intelligence center, adding two more high-power computers and a server to link all three CPUs. The added speed wasn’t necessary for most of his work, but it was vital for the facial recognition search.
Earlier in the day, he had isolated the image of the Caucasian man from the 2003 picture of Wulóng. Then he fired up Romeo Seven’s facial recognition program and started a match search. It was a long shot. He and Molly had run several algorithms to clean up the image, but at the end of the day, it was still a grainy, ten-year-old picture. It might not be clear enough for a good match.
While waiting for the recognition
software to run its search for Wulóng’s associate, McBride had dug into Major Baron’s Distant Sage mole theory. For the last few hours, he had plowed into the CIA’s data mine, looking for anything on Wright or Jozef Starek. But for all his digging, he came up empty-handed.
The two men were ghosts.
He abandoned his efforts and jiggled the mouse on the computer running the recognition software. The screen came alive. An endless stream of ID photos, mug shots, and candids flashed by, each image processed in microseconds as the program compared key facial features to McBride’s target. The network of databases was huge. Even with the added speed, the search could take another ten hours or more, and it still might not find a single match.
McBride checked his watch. He had promised the major that he would go get his family, and he had already waited too long. As he stood up to leave, the computer running the photo match gave a loud beep. The cycling images froze on a candid picture from the CIA database. A sandy-haired man in a wet suit smiled through a bushy mustache. Incredibly, the system declared the man a seventy-one percent match to McBride’s target, better than he had ever expected. The file listed a number of aliases. He immediately noted a pattern in the names: Adam Albee, Gregory Gartner, James Johannes. There were nine in all, and they were all alliterations. He chuckled. Spooks and their games.
Spooks. Maybe Joe Tarpin could find more information in the CIA’s internal archives. McBride attached the file to an encrypted e-mail.
Joe,
This guy turned up in an old picture with our Chinese assassin. See if you can find him in your archives. I’m on my way to get Major Baron’s family. I’ll call you as soon as I get back to find out what you’ve turned up.
Will
He sent the file to the printer so that he could have a hard copy and then shut down his systems and headed out the door, only to slam into Molly as she raced down the hallway. She let out a startled “Ooh!” The stack of papers in her hands flew in every direction.