Shadow Catcher

  “All team members report!” ordered Quinn, his heart pumping.

  “Two and Three complete. Good shots.”

  “Four and Five complete. The gate is secure.”

  “Six and Seven complete. The ramp is secure.”

  “And Lead is complete. The tower is secure,” said Quinn. “Good job everyone. I think it’s . . .”

  Suddenly a new voice broke into Quinn’s transmission. “Senior Airman Quinn, get your team to the exfil point and then report to me immediately.” Petrovsky did not sound happy.

  * * *

  Captain Chad Petrovsky paced back and forth at one end of the sparse room inside the building below the tower. Quinn could tell he wanted to sit down, but he couldn’t, because Haugen’s second heavy paint grenade had covered the only chair in the room with red goo. Petrovsky himself still bore the yellow residue from Quinn’s sniper round on the side of his head. An ugly lump had started to form just above his right ear.

  “I suppose you think you’re funny,” said Petrovsky, his mustache bristling with anger.

  Quinn tried to look as contrite as possible. “Negative, sir,” he lied. “I thought my rounds would explode on the window. I could not tell from the scope image that you’d removed the panels.”

  “There are no panels!” Petrovsky exploded. “There never were any panels. This is a practice range. There is no glass here of any kind!” He beat his chest emphatically. “You were supposed to shoot me in the vest!” The captain paused to feel the bump on his head, wincing as his hand touched the tender spot. Then he gestured at a small cooler sitting on a table against the far wall. “And look what your teammate did to my dinner!” In a stroke of incredible fortune, Haugen’s first heavy round had sailed through the unprotected window, penetrated the fabric side of the cooler, and exploded inside. Petrovsky gingerly lifted a paint-soaked ham sandwich. “We told you there were only eight targets in the safety brief: the High-Value Individual, the Secondary, and six security guards. What madness drove you to attack my sandwich?”

  Quinn stifled a laugh. “I guess I overthought the test. I wanted to show you that I was covering all the bases”—he shrugged—“and I wanted to give Guns a chance to show off his skills. I had no idea that the room was . . . er . . . occupied.”

  Petrovsky clasped his hands together, lowered his eyes to the floor, and let out a long exhale. “All right, kid, you win,” he said, raising his head and looking Quinn in the eye. I can’t fail you for killing my sandwich. Both of your shots were spot-on, even if one of them almost killed me for real. The rest of the attack was textbook perfect. Go and tell your team that they passed.”

  Quinn cocked his head to one side. “We passed?”

  “Yes, all of you. Your training is now complete. Graduation is at zero nine hundred on Thursday. And heaven help you if I see your face before then. Or ever after. Now get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “First there!” shouted Haugen, sloshing beer onto the table as he raised his glass.

  “That others may live!” responded Quinn in unison with the others. He had stopped counting how many times they’d shouted the motto, and a few beers back he’d stopped wondering when the manager of the Hog’s Breath Saloon would politely ask them to leave.

  “Mission Qual is done, little PJ!” yelled Haugen, reaching across and slapping Quinn on the shoulder, sloshing more beer onto the table in the process.

  “Stop spilling your beer, Guns,” ordered Quinn. “That’s alcohol abuse!” He watched the foamy golden liquid swirl around the bases of the empty beer bottles in front of him. There were only two, along with a pair of shot glasses. Only four drinks? He was buzzing way too much for only four drinks. Then he remembered that the hot waitress in the blue-jean miniskirt had been steadily removing bottles and glasses from the table, replacing them with full ones. There was no telling how much booze he’d had. He smoothed out his short brown hair. Where did that hot waitress go, anyway?

  Quinn knew he’d had too much to drink. But hey, they were celebrating. You only completed the entire Special Tactics Pararescue syllabus once in your lifetime. More than two years of training: survival, parachuting, combat diving, paramedic certification, and a host of other schools, all culminating in tonight’s airfield seizure exercise in the Florida Everglades. In two days, he would graduate from Mission Qual and receive the coveted maroon beret, the mark of a full-fledged Special Tactics pararescueman.

  Haugen and the others would get berets as well, but theirs would be scarlet. They were combat controllers: special ops fighters with the skills to take down an enemy airfield and the expertise to build it back up into a functioning friendly base. In this Mission Qual class, Quinn was the only pararescueman, known in the Special Forces community as a PJ, but the two training pipelines merged at many points. He and Haugen had shared a lot of painful weeks together over the last two years.

  “You’re not keepin’ up, PJ,” said Haugen, pouring more beer into Quinn’s half-full glass. He didn’t seem to care that he was pouring Guinness and Quinn was drinking pilsner. “That was some shot you took at Petrovsky.”

  “He had it coming,” said Quinn with a wicked grin. “He’s treated me like a second-class citizen ever since we got to Mission Qual.”

  “He made you team lead for the final exam,” offered one of the others.

  “He thought he was setting me up to fail,” replied Quinn. “I don’t think he believes PJs should be part of this phase.” He raised a finger and imitated a politician giving a campaign speech. “Captain Petrovsky is a Combat Control PJ segregationist!”

  Haugen frowned. “You idiot. That segrim . . . that segee”—he polished off his beer—“that jerk could’ve washed you out for violating safety protocols. He’s been looking for an excuse to get rid of you, and you almost gave it to him.”

  Quinn gulped down the rest of his mixed beer while the others whooped and cheered him on. “Yeah, well, he missed his chance.” He ran his sleeve across his mouth. “One more day to sleep this off and then a wake-up and we’re done! And there’ll be no paper tests in between to spoil the mood!”

  “Speaking of sleeping it off,” said Haugen, “I think I’m done for the night.”

  Quinn stood up, knocking his stool over. “As tonight’s lead, I declare one final team exercise: Operation Get Home Without Puking! Six, go and get us a taxi-van.”

  While the rest of the team paid their tabs and made their way to the door, Quinn and Haugen headed for the men’s room. As Haugen put it, “Somebody’s gonna lose bladder control in that van, and it’s not gonna be me,” but when they entered the restroom, Haugen headed for a stall instead of a urinal.

  “Aw, man, Operation Get Home Without Puking is already a bust!” said Quinn, laughing and slapping Haugen on the back as the big man emptied his stomach into the toilet. “Whew, you shouldn’t have had those fire wings when we first got here. They smell worse now than they did when you were eating them.”

  When Haugen was finished, Quinn made a perfunctory effort to clean him up and then the two of them went to catch up with the team. Just as they stepped outside, they saw their teammates climbing into a yellow van twenty yards up the sidewalk. Quinn waved and jogged unsteadily in their direction, shouting, “Hey, wait up, team!” but the van door slid closed, and the driver pulled into traffic.

  Quinn slowed to a stop, holding his hands out to stop the streetlights from swirling around. “They left us,” he said.

  Haugen wobbled up beside him, staring at the retreating van in disbelief. “Hey, they left us,” he complained.

  “That’s what I said.” Quinn opened his wallet and looked at the lonely ten-dollar bill that remained. “Shoot, I hate using credit for a cab.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Haugen. “My truck is right over here.”

  “We can’t drive, you idiot. We’re drunk.”

  “
Wrong. You’re drunk. Don’t you remember? I just puked out everything I’ve had in the last two hours. I’m also bigger than you. It takes a lot more to get me drunk. I’m fine.”

  Quinn closed his eyes and tried to think. Haugen’s logic seemed sound. He had vomited a whole lot of liquid. He was a big guy too, and didn’t basic science say that it took a lot more to get big guys drunk? Still, something hidden in the heavy fog of his alcohol-laden subconscious was calling to him; he just couldn’t make out the words. “Okay, Two,” he relented. “Let’s head back to base.”

  Haugen cranked the engine and pulled into traffic. His movements were solid and confident as he accelerated toward Hurlburt Field. Quinn relaxed. The flash of the white lines on the road began to make him queasy, so he closed his eyes and laid his head back on the seat. “Wake me before we pull up to the guardhouse,” he said.

  Quinn woke to the sound of light jazz, then acid rock, then bluegrass.

  “We need some tunes,” said Haugen, pressing the radio buttons to flip through the stations.

  Quinn laughed and began to lay his head back again, but headlights flashed in his peripheral vision. Haugen had swerved into oncoming traffic. “Look out!” shouted Quinn, reaching out and wrenching the wheel to the right.

  A horn blared. Haugen finally looked up and saw the oncoming car. He doubled Quinn’s correction, cranking the wheel farther to the right. The truck careened back across the right lane and hit the low guardrail at more than seventy miles per hour. It cartwheeled over the barrier and into a drainage ditch, bouncing off the rear bumper before crashing into the muddy water upside down.

  Blinding pain shot through Quinn’s face and chest as he fought to push the air bag away. Water poured into the cab. “You okay, Guns?” he asked, searching for his friend through the flashes of white and red obscuring his vision, but Haugen was not in his seat. Quinn felt like his head might explode. He was upside down, his face filling with blood. The water lapping at his forehead continued to rise. He had to get out. He had to find Haugen.

  It took several painful seconds for Quinn to unhook his seat belt and free his legs from underneath the crumpled dashboard. He tried the door, but he couldn’t move it. Then he saw that the front windshield had torn away on Haugen’s side. He struggled through, holding his breath to squeeze beneath the submerged gap between the hood of the truck and the bottom of the ditch.

  Finally out of the truck, Quinn stood up and tried to run forward, but he stumbled, slashing his face on a torn piece of fender as he fell back down into the water. He came back up with a guttural cry of frustration. Where was Haugen? Then he saw him, a few feet ahead of the truck, floating facedown in the muddy water. He tried to take another step and fell again. His equilibrium was shot. Haugen split into two men before his eyes and then merged back into one. The headlights on the road seemed to head right for him before jerking away at the last second.

  “Guns!” he yelled. Haugen did not move. With extreme effort, Quinn trudged forward until he reached his friend. He rolled him over. Haugen was pale. His eyes were open but unfocused. Quinn dragged him to the edge of the ditch and pulled him up onto the grassy bank below the curb. “Guns, wake up!” he shouted again.

  He laid his cheek close to his friend’s mouth to feel for breath and watch for his chest to rise, but before he could finish the assessment, he had to wrench his face away to vomit into the water behind him. With that out of the way, he turned back to Haugen, certain that he wasn’t breathing. He checked for a pulse. It was there, but it was weak. He tried to pull himself up to his knees to begin rescue breathing. More headlights flew past. The road and the bank swirled around him. He faltered, sliding down into the water he had just puked in.

  Quinn tried to crawl back up to Haugen, but his limbs would not move. A siren sounded in the distance. He laid his head down on the bank, still submerged from the waist down in his own swirling vomit. The image of his unmoving friend began to fade. He passed out.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Two years, Airman Quinn,” said Captain Petrovsky, glaring at the young operative.

  Quinn stood rigidly at attention in Petrovsky’s office at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The late-afternoon sun shone through half-open blinds, casting broad stripes across the lone maroon beret sitting on the captain’s desk. The lump on the right side of Petrovsky’s head had gone down significantly, leaving an ugly bruise and several small cuts from the fragments of the paint bullet. Quinn’s hand quivered as he subdued the instinct to touch the cut on his own face. It itched. Fifteen stitches for a three-inch gash down his right cheek; that was definitely going to leave a scar.

  “And now Haugen is dead.”

  That phrase snapped Quinn’s attention back to Petrovsky, who stepped around the desk and handed him a single page of paper. “This is the record of your Article Fifteen Nonjudicial Punishment and the statement of your offenses,” he said. “The JAG came in early this morning to help me prepare it, just for you. It says that you have the right to prepare and present a defense to me. Do you wish to invoke that right?”

  Quinn stared down at the page. He didn’t have the heart to read it. He shook his head in silence.

  Petrovsky nodded. “I didn’t think so. That paper will follow you the rest of your career. That way, every one of your future commanders will get to read the highlights of your adventure last night—how you left the Hog’s Breath Saloon stumbling drunk, how you allowed your teammate to drive despite his extreme intoxication, and how you—a pararescueman—lay passed out in your own vomit while Staff Sergeant Haugen breathed his last.”

  Quinn maintained a stolid military expression, but inside he screamed at the final charge. A tear escaped his right eye, rolling down his cheek and mingling with the stitches, making them itch all the more.

  “Oh, so now you care?” asked Petrovsky, his face turning red. “Well, it’s too late. You should have started caring last night when Haugen put his keys in the ignition. You should have started caring when you were in that ditch, too busy puking to give him mouth to mouth.” Petrovsky reached back and picked up the maroon beret. “This was supposed to be yours,” he said, thrusting the beret in Quinn’s face.

  Quinn’s heart dropped when he heard the words supposed to be. His eyes grew wide, and he shifted his gaze to meet Petrovsky’s angry stare.

  “That’s right,” said Petrovsky. “In a single night, you proved that you have neither the mental fortitude nor even the basic common sense required of a Special Tactics team member.” The captain took a breath and let his tone return to normal. He paced in front of the desk. “Because of your skills, I was willing to let the other stuff slide: the attitude, the incident on the sniper range”—he reached up and touched the bump on his head—“even the personal attack last night. I was willing to view it all as youthful exuberance and moxy, but now I see it as a pattern of behavior. You’re headed down a road to self-destruction. I can’t allow you to bring that kind of risk into this community.”

  Petrovsky stood directly in front of Quinn so that their noses were just millimeters apart. “You’re done here, Airman Quinn,” he said in a low but intense voice. “You will not graduate with this class or any other.” He jerked the form out of Quinn’s hand without backing up. “This paper says that I have the right to keep you here, to put you on work detail like a common criminal. But I don’t want to. I just want you off this base.” He paused to glare a moment longer into Quinn’s eyes and then turned and tossed the beret into his trash can. “Now get out of my office and go pack your stuff.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Quinn burst into his dorm room, not bothering to shut the door behind him. He went straight to the bathroom and vomited into the pedestal sink. Then he looked up at the face in the mirror, the stitched gash, swollen and red, a disgusting drop of yellow bile still clinging to his chin. He yelled and reached back to punch through the glass but caught himself. Petrovsky’s words echoed in hi
s mind: “A pattern of behavior . . . a road to self-destruction.”

  Maybe Petrovsky wasn’t the problem. Quinn asked himself why he would take the risks that he’d taken over the past few weeks. Why destroy two years of work with childish insubordination and foolish pranks? And how could he have let Haugen drive? The image of his friend dying on the bank was seared in his mind, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not bring Haugen into focus.

  Quinn stepped back from the mirror, wiped the spittle from his chin, and stripped off his shirt. He was in great physical condition by any measure. Even the big guys in the squadron said that he was abnormally strong. He could run faster, jump higher, and carry more than any of his classmates. Yet, for all his strength, he could not overpower the alcohol in his blood when Haugen needed him most. Worse, he was a highly trained medical technician, a certified EMT. Yet, for all his knowledge, he couldn’t even provide basic rescue breathing when his friend lay dying.

  The smell of bile stung Quinn’s nostrils, and he reached down to wash the vomit out of the sink. As he turned the knob, he caught sight of the tattoo on his upper arm. The Angel of Mercy held the world in her hands. Beneath her, a scroll read THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE. Quinn flew into a rage, his green eyes flashing as he screamed at the mirror. He grabbed a sponge and scrubbed at the tattoo. When that did nothing, he grabbed the Brillo pad that he used for his pots and scrubbed even harder. Flesh tore from his arm. He ignored the pain, scrubbing until he could not see the angel anymore. Then he dropped the bloody Brillo pad into the sink, fell to his knees, and wept.

  CHAPTER 13

  It took a couple of days for the Illustro to drag the bomber out into the Arabian Sea, but when the captain finally set the stabilizing thrusters, the ship was more than twelve thousand feet over the ocean floor.