Caldwell was working on a particular project that had been ongoing before he had joined Alexander Paul’s company. The project had a secret price tag that was rumored to be well into eight digits, and the money was all offline. Nowhere did the project appear in any budget. And Caldwell reported directly to the man in charge. This was private money, so room 219 would never have heard of the company’s project or the troubles that needed solving.
Alexander Paul had served in the Army for many years, rising in a career that took him to the rank of brigadier general. Until he chose to speak out against management, publicly criticizing the administration and calling its decisions in Syria foolish. It didn’t take long for the door to be handed to him. But then the White House changed. His words sat well with the new administration, which made Paul head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Despite the new start, Paul’s career at DIA didn’t go much better. He earned a reputation for being inflexible and, more dangerously, apt to bend the facts to his agenda. Once more, he stood out as a maverick, and once again his career ended badly when he became a liability, this time when the administration was embarrassed by an incident at the agency he ran.
“Don’t talk to him about DIA,” Caldwell had been told by more than one person when he’d joined Paul’s private firm.
Word was, Paul’s early departure at DIA had fueled a passion for vengeance, though no one ever said against whom. If anything, he’d channeled his anger into his new consulting company, which thrived. Even though his tour at DIA had been cut short, Paul was still thought of as being on the cutting edge of military, security, and intelligence issues. Not everyone thought Paul was outspoken. Some thought he said what needed to be said. And some of those were in the upper echelons of corporate America. Those contacts ensured a comfortable transition for him, with money flowing into his new company.
When offered the job, Caldwell had been unable to pass up the challenge. In fact, he had taken the position without even talking to his wife. Although she didn’t know everything he’d done in his career, which was mostly a good thing, she’d endorsed his choice.
She understood, Frank thought. It meant a home, soccer games at Witter, and a new car.
He’d met his future wife at a thirteen-mile trail run. He’d been sporting a short, carrot-red beard that he’d originally cultivated during his many secret missions in and around Pakistan. She ran slightly in front of him for most of the race and only started to tire at the end. As she flagged, Caldwell found himself doing something he’d never done before: He let her stay in front.
At that point, Caldwell had still been a Ranger, volunteering for missions that dropped him deep into the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where he worked with people he could never tell his fiancée about.
“I’ll marry you if the beard goes.”
She’d made the offer one night after they’d finished a particularly tough trail run. The beer was cold, tasted good, and they both looked as if they’d been dragged through a mud puddle.
He had laughed and immediately agreed, of course. It hadn’t been unexpected; he’d given enough hints that the ultimate question would be inbound soon anyway. Shaving the beard also meant no more trips to the Hindu Kush. A clean-shaved man in the mountains was only a blinking sign that he was an American.
But even without trips to the Kush, the packing and unpacking of Army life quickly grew tiresome. She would plan for races and marathons that he’d have to drop out of at the last minute. It was time to leave the military.
But Caldwell quickly found that he was not meant for a day job. He missed the action, and this job with Alexander Paul’s consulting firm had served as the perfect middle ground between repeated combat tours and something that was meaningful and at least slightly more predictable.
He took the private elevator to the twentieth floor, where his badge and a unique key unlocked access to his office.
Alexander Paul’s secretary was waiting for Caldwell as he walked in.
“Integral wants to meet.”
“Again?” Caldwell didn’t ask it sarcastically. He’d learned quickly at his new job that the customer ruled the day.
This would be the third meeting of the month with ITD—Integral Transaction Data— a global company that processed payments for nearly every form of credit cards or debit cards in the world, and which was being victimized by a very talented hacker. The phantom was endlessly chipping away at ITD’s security, launching thousands of hacks on a daily basis. ITD was accustomed to millions of lesser hacking on a daily basis, but this hack was different. The trail was faint; it came from inside their firewall but originated in Russia, relayed through several servers around the world, but using hacking scripts that contained the fingerprint of Russia. At the very least, the hacker wanted ITD to think he was Russian.
“I know what we need to do,” Caldwell’s boss, Alexander Paul, had commented about ITD’s hacking problem several times, as if there were some other agenda he couldn’t share with Caldwell. The only other thing Paul had told him about the ITD job was that Caldwell should keep a firearm handy. So, apparently, the ITD job was dangerous, but Caldwell still had no idea why. He’d locked up all of his guns back when his son started to climb out of the crib. But since the ITD project had gotten underway, he’d been carrying a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver in the glove compartment of his car.
Caldwell had to admit that it felt good…facing unknown danger, carrying a weapon again.
Still, it would have been nice to have a little more background about the job. It had quickly become clear that Paul would only be granting Caldwell access to limited information. Thus far, each time he’d met with the ITD people he’d felt a little like a babysitter—on-site to calm the customer’s fears. And perhaps a spy for his boss.
That’s fine, he thought as looked at his calendar before calling to schedule another visit with ITD. It’s still a great gig. If Paul wants me to babysit the client, I’ll babysit the client. But what kind of babysitter packs a gun?
Chapter 4
A Remote Frozen Lake in the Yukon
Will Parker pulled his backpack from the aircraft with two sleeping bags and his .300 Winchester Short Magnum rifle. The Otter’s cargo had shifted with the broken skid. It left the airplane in such a tilt that the lower wing nearly touched the surface of the ice.
At least it held, Will thought as he put the strap of the rifle over his shoulder.
The pothole lakes in the Yukon were famous for being very deep. An airplane that had sunk to the bottom would be hardly worth the expense of bringing it up to the surface. Once the electronics had been dunked, the Otter would never see a blue sky again.
More importantly, they were in one piece and dry. A dunking for either him or her could be as dangerous as being soaked in gasoline and lighting a match, with the bitter air and approaching storm. Even a fire might not be able to dry one off quick enough in temperatures well below zero.
“We’ll get you out of here.” Will stroked the Otter’s airframe like a father rubbing a sick child’s head. He had had too many close calls in his bird to let this be the final word.
He helped Karen onto the shoreline. It was not dark yet and there was still some daylight, although darkness fell early in the Yukon this time of year.
“I’ve got to get the word out.”
He traversed the lake ice again, climbed into the aircraft, and retrieved the portable radio from the dash panel where he had left it after landing, then took it back to the shoreline.
“ATC, this is November one-one-two. Mayday, mayday, mayday.” He’d escalated the call to a mayday now that the aircraft could not be flown out without major repairs.
He only heard static.
Will reached into his backpack and pulled out his cell phone. The signal was dead.
“What’s going on?” Karen, as a scientist, liked the facts.
&n
bsp; “My guess is the solar flare.” He had seen one screw up the avionics only a few times of his flying in Alaska, but still wasn’t sure why it had caused the Otter’s engine to stutter.
“There must have been water in the gas.” He said the words to himself, but she was close enough to overhear them. Two bad events that came together were not uncommon in this harsh environment.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Will had checked the fuel port and knew an additive had been poured in with the gas. Bad fuel was just one guess.
He tried radioing the mayday message again on the SP-400 handheld radio, but again didn’t get a response. All he heard was the garble of static.
The problem was that they had headed south from Snag. His flight path should have taken him to the northwest. Any concerned search party would be heading in the wrong direction. And with the storm coming in there wouldn’t be a search party for days.
They were on their own.
“November one-one-two is down to the southwest of Snag. Crashed on a pothole lake approximately ten nautical miles southwest of Snag.” There was hope that another aircraft might hear the call and relay it to Center. He repeated the message several times, then shrugged and turned to the more important matter. “We need to get ready for this storm.”
The darkness would arrive soon and with it the drop of temperature. Well to the north in Barrow, residents wouldn’t see the sun for more than sixty days. In Snag, they’d be lucky if they got more than five hours of light at this time of year.
“The snowstorm won’t let the temp get too low.” Will pulled his parka up over his head. He didn’t mention that the drop that followed the storm would be deadly. “Let’s get some protection.” He pointed to the snow-covered outcrop up the rise from the lake. As they started up the bank from the edge of the lake, Will stopped. A movement caught his eye.
“She won’t come back this way.” Karen saw the rabid fox crossing the lake, heading back toward Snag. “She is in the early stages.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She is still a fox. She still thinks and acts like one.”
Will pointed his rifle at what appeared to be a snow-covered rock that rose above them like the tail of an airplane. “We can make a lean-to at its base.” He had taught young Marines how to make winter survival shelters in the wilderness back at Bridgeport, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The Mountain Warfare Training Center famously taught how to handle a dunking in a frozen lake with a full pack on. They’d also trained Marines to climb the face of a cliff, then rappel back to the bottom using an Australian descent, a method that involved traveling down the cliff face-first while standing upright. It was not for the faint of heart. And Will Parker had taught them how to do it all.
“I’ll get the ax.” He hiked back out to the Otter, worked his way to the back of the aircraft, and pulled out a short red-handled tool and a soft-sided duffel bag filled with much-needed survival gear.
Will put Karen to work at the outcrop. He built the frame of their shelter with a downed log that leaned from the top of the outcrop to the ground like the main pole in a tent. Next, he felled several small trees, cutting off the branches and tossing them to her so they could be stacked, one after the other from the tent pole to the ground. She pulled them tight together so as to make a nearly impenetrable wall and then laid pine boughs on the top, keeping her mind busy and her body warm as they worked together.
A long, dead log lay near the edge of the lake. Will trimmed all of the broken branches and pulled it up parallel to the wooden tent she had lashed together to form a long-log firepit. He used another log, which he stacked next to the first one, building a channel for the fire. He used a fire starter in his survival pack with some gathered twigs. Soon, the fire was burning from the center out toward both ends, in its channel between the two logs, causing the warmth of the fire to be like a space heater in a small room. He cut up two small pine trees and pulled them under the lean-to to form a bench under the covering and next to the firepit. Karen layered the pine boughs on the bench and put a sleeping bag on top.
Will leaned the .300 Winchester next to the outcrop, keeping it within easy reach. The fire would provide warmth, but the light risked attracting much more than a dip in the temperature. The glow of the eyes of the pack of wolves would soon be just beyond the light of the fire. He stuffed the survival pack in the corner of the shelter to act as a pillow and a brace from the bitter deep freeze that was coming.
The shelter could have easily protected them through an entire bad winter in the lower forty-eight states. But the Yukon could turn into a fatal deep freeze with the arrival of a single Siberian storm, and it would be nothing like any winter that Dr. Karen Stewart had experienced.
“Here, put this second bag inside the first.”
They would need it for the storm that was coming.
* * * *
“November one-one-two is overdue.” The air traffic control specialist at the Anchorage Air Traffic Control Center just outside of Anchorage was on the phone with the center in Juneau.
“Who’s that?” The boss knew which pilots to worry about, even in the thousands that came through their sectors.
“Parker.”
“Do we have an ELT signal?” The boss knew that it would take a significant crash for the emergency locator transmitter to send out an alarm.
“No.”
“I know where he is.”
“Snag?”
“Yeah, Dr. Stewart of the CDC has a station out there.”
“Did you see this front coming in?” The specialist was looking at a radar screen showing approaching weather.
“From Siberia?” Hundreds of miles to the southeast, his Juneau colleague was looking at the same imagery on his screen.
“Yeah. Probably set a record.”
“Not in Snag.” The temperature would have to go to a record low to beat the history of the small airfield.
Chapter 5
A Remote Inlet on the Eastern Coast of the Baja
The cold floor and the headache from the blow to his head were the first things Todd Newton noticed when he finally stirred to life. He tried to focus with his eyes, but the room was pitch-black. He took in the smell of stale urine and something else, a putrid, decaying, rotting stench that almost made him gag. His vision was useless, but he sensed the presence of a wall opposite him, very close, making the room no larger than a jail cell. He moved his hand to his head to feel the dried blood, but as he did his hand was stopped by the chain that held his wrist.
“Uh… what?” His mouth was dry and he could barely speak.
It hurt too much.
He laid his head back down on the cold tile. There was a constant buzz in his ears. Soon he faded back into unconsciousness.
* * * *
A stream of daylight came through the crack of a window shutter and directly into his face. Todd tried to lean up and saw the shape of the other Marine, motionless in the far corner of the concrete room.
Todd’s boots were missing and a chain was around his ankle.
Footsteps came down a stairway on the other side of a thick wooden door. He tried to hold his head up, but gravity seemed to grab it as if he were on another planet.
“Water,” he croaked.
A brute of a man with broad shoulders and black hair cut in a short military style, came in, crossed over to him, and kicked him in the stomach.
“Ooph.” Todd Newton buckled and tried to hold out his arms to protect himself from another blow. The man crossed over to the other Marine, unlocked her chain, and pulled her up by her hair. He dragged her across the room to the door. Only a whimper of a sound came from her as he and another man pulled her through the door.
Moments later, Todd could hear Lucy’s screams through the ceiling. There was a thud, then another, again and agai
n, as if a large object were striking a watermelon.
He covered his face with his unbound hand, as a welcome wave of unconsciousness pulled him back down into the dark.
* * * *
“Todd?” Her voice was a whisper, slurred as if the blows to her head had broken her jaw or shattered teeth.
“Hey. What is this?” He tried to keep his head from spinning.
“They keep asking about Mike.”
“Ridges?” Todd’s body reacted with a shiver as he said the words. “We haven’t talked to him in forever.”
“They know we sent emails….”
“How?” In their few communications with their former classmate, they’d always used the deep web, making their emails untraceable.
“They want to know what we said.”
“We need to get out of here.” He felt as though he was catching his second wind. He understood that they were on their own. The Marines at Pendleton wouldn’t miss them for a day or more, and when they did, he wasn’t sure they’d even care to look. As far as the Corps was concerned, they were AWOL.
Newton looked around the room. The walls were thick adobe, causing an unpleasant chill in the space. The air held a pungent smell of a well-used fire pit.
“I think we’re in Mexico.” He tried to lean forward as he spoke the words quietly.
“How?” She was coughing up blood as she spoke. “Why?”
He reached down to the chain around his ankle. A padlock held the chain tightly, restricting the blood flow. The chain around his wrist was just as tight.
“We need a plan.”
As he spoke the words, the door swung open again. This time, the man came to the room to Todd, unlocked the chains, and grabbed him by his arm. Todd tried to stand, but the man dragged him like a sack of potatoes. The other man grabbed his other side, and they pulled him through the door, up a short stairway, and into much larger room with windows covered by black plastic trash bags and a large chair in the center.
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