by Sean Parnell
But she didn’t cut off his ear.
He wasn’t an Alpha.
Chapter 28
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
Eric Steele hijacked the Program’s Gulfstream G650 at four o’clock in the morning. The pilots, however, didn’t realize they were being hijacked until they were four hundred nautical miles out over the Atlantic.
There were two full crews for the Program’s transcontinental jet, including a pilot, copilot, and navy steward, plus maintenance teams, always on standby in twelve-hour shifts down at the last hangar of Air Combat Command’s 1st Fighter Wing. Langley’s wing commander believed that these tight-lipped personnel, who occupied the small BOQ on the second floor of the maintenance hangar, rear side, were part of an air force black budget program. They, in turn, wore air force flight suits and carried bona fide air force CAC cards, so as not to embarrass him. To access the Program’s restricted area, you walked through the hangar, past the arrow-shaped F-15s and science-fiction F-22s, up a stairway on the other side, and then you palm-printed a reader on the steel access door and entered a long hallway.
If you turned right, you were part of the Gulfstream’s crew. If you turned left, you were Team Alpha.
Steele had entered the Program’s team room at 0300, after first sticking his thumb in a scanner. And he was shocked to find Meg Harden standing there, all alone, sipping coffee from a hot mug and looking amazing as ever in tight jeans and a white roll-neck sweater. His first thought was that it seemed like a year since their erotic tryst in her apartment. His second thought was that the Program definitely had a traitor inside, and she was still on the list.
Behind her was a row of Alpha gear lockers, each with a nameplate stamped stalker and the corresponding number—Jonathan Raines’s and Collins Austin’s lockers were still there, untouched. To the left was a substantial armory, with long guns and specialized ordnance stowed in upright Steelwater safes and handguns in MultiVault biometrics. To the right was the “wardrobe,” which afforded Alphas a myriad of tactical clothing and civilian outfits with foreign labels.
“How did you know?” Steele said as he dropped a hefty duffel on a changing bench. He was wearing his navy flight jacket, a black commando sweater, black jeans, and tactical boots.
“You were the only one who wasn’t there when Main II went down,” she said. “Did you know about that?”
“Yeah. I talked to Ralphy.”
“So did I.” Her ice-blue eyes were examining his worn features like a concerned pediatrician.
“So Ralphy rolled over on me,” Steele said.
“No, he just guessed you might have gone to see President Cole. I called over there and got the former First Lady. She wouldn’t say much, except that she thought you might be heading ‘somewhere east,’ as she put it.” Meg scanned his attire. “You’re a little overdressed for this weather.”
Steele said nothing. He walked over to the armory, spun the combination on one of the safes, took out a large black tactical bag, and started selecting and loading equipment. Meg watched him.
“There’s no flash in the works, Eric. You don’t have a mission.”
“There’s a flash in my head,” he said.
And then she was there, behind him, and she turned him around and reached up, both of her small hands grasping the back of his neck, and she pulled him down and kissed him long and slowly, as if it might be their very last time. She pulled away and looked up at him. Her eyes were gleaming.
“I don’t know what this is between us, Eric, where we’re going, what we’re supposed to be. But you don’t trust me. I can taste it.”
“I trust you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure at all. “I guess I’ll find out how much in a minute.” He knew she could stop his plans with just a few taps on her phone, and he couldn’t stop her except with violence.
“I’m not going to get in your way,” she said, “but I think you’re off the reservation . . . emotionally, and professionally.”
“Thanks, Doc.” His sarcasm iced the atmosphere, and Meg took a few steps back and sat down on the bench.
“Go do whatever you have to do, Eric. I’ll just wait here and read till you’re gone.”
He picked up his duffel and slung the tac bag. They were both heavy.
“I don’t see a book,” he said.
She showed him her cell phone. “Kindle.”
“What are you reading?”
“Five Years to Freedom.”
It was a famous book by Colonel Nick Rowe, about his capture and long imprisonment in the jungles of Vietnam, and his ultimate escape. And then Steele knew that she knew, and he was wondering if, when he got to the other side, he’d be walking into an ambush. But he didn’t say anything more and just left. . . .
The Gulfstream crew was surprised when he rousted them out for a flight to the city of Split, Croatia, but they certainly didn’t make a fuss. Normally they’d get a WARNO from Cutlass Main prior to any mission, but they also had standing orders to respond to the requests of any Alpha, especially in the flesh. Stalker Seven wasn’t the type of guy you’d say no to, and he waited politely while they washed up quickly, grabbed some coffee and doughnuts, and all headed out to the jet.
It was an hour later, over blue water and on a longitudinal track with Nova Scotia, when the first message came in from Washington, a flash from a keeper named Blade. The navy steward walked back to Steele, where he was sitting in the passenger compartment among his gear bags, staring out the window. She told him he was wanted in the cockpit to take incoming comms. He declined and said he’d return the transmission in due course.
Two minutes later, she returned and said, “Sir, the captain would like to have a word with you up forward.”
Steele nodded, got up, and made his way to the cockpit. The captain and first officer were both in their mid-thirties, wearing olive flight suits and commercial aviation headsets and mics. The captain, sensing Steele’s arrival, said to his copilot, “You have the controls.” The copilot responded with, “I have the controls,” and the pilot turned to look up at Steele.
“Sir,” he said, “I have orders to turn this aircraft around and head back to Langley.”
“Interesting, Captain,” Steele said. “On whose authority?”
“Mike Pitts, sir, apparently via the White House chief of staff, Mr. Lansky.”
“Ignore that order,” Steele said. “Just keep flying to Split.”
“I can’t do that, sir.” The pilot kept his eyes on Steele but shook his head. “That authority supersedes yours.”
Steele reached back into his waistband and pulled out his father’s Colt 1911. He didn’t point it at anyone, but just showed it to the pilot, as if he were making an offer at a gun show.
“Isn’t this a classic?” he said. “Original frame, only blued once.”
The pilot looked at the heavy pistol, and at that point the copilot had seen it peripherally, and the airmen glanced at one another. The pilot pursed his lips and looked back up at Steele. “Sir, you know you can’t fire a forty-five in an airplane. We’ll depressurize and come apart.”
“Actually, I had it retooled for nine millimeter,” Steele said. “But you’re right, it’s extremely dangerous. On the other hand, we’re not far from Hamilton, and I’ve got a HALO rig in the back. Do you?”
Neither pilot said anything else, and they carried on.
It was early evening when they arrived in Croatia. Steele deplaned with a curt apology and promised the pilots and navy ensign that he’d make it up to them over a steak dinner at the Capital Grille, if he ever returned. Waiting for him on the tarmac was a gray Fiat Doblo Cargo with smoked windows, and he hauled his two large gear bags over, shoved them in the van’s rear hatch, and got into the passenger seat. The driver was a tough-looking blond American woman, with deep dimples, green eyes, and a well-worn A-2 flight jacket.
“Nice to be able to skip passport control, isn’t it?” she said as she started driving.
&nb
sp; “Allie, you look as crazy and hot as ever.”
“Thank you, Mr. Steele.” She grinned.
They had met a decade before at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, when Allie was flying Lakota helicopters for the army and Steele was still in Special Forces. At one point, in absolute defiance of all army regs, they’d gotten drunk together on Jack Daniel’s that had been smuggled over in someone’s mouthwash bottle, and had wound up over at the Public Affairs’ celebrity-visitor VIP B-hut known as “the Hotel California,” screwing like young warriors who hadn’t been laid in a year—which was the case for both of them.
It hadn’t gone anywhere, but they’d remained good friends, and Allie had gone on to commercial helicopter flying all over the world. It was said of her that she could fly a lawn mower if there was nothing better around.
“Sorry about the short notice,” Steele said as they headed across the tarmac toward a Russian Mi-8 multirole cargo helicopter. It was silver and had a large Road Runner cartoon painted on the fuselage beside the cockpit, but this Looney Tunes version was cracking a whip. “Who you flying this beast for?”
“Romanian oil company. And I don’t mind the short notice, hotshot, but it doesn’t give us enough time for fun.”
Steele didn’t pursue that, because he knew it wouldn’t take much to tip them both over again. Allie, whose nickname was “Whirly,” parked the van ten feet behind the Mi-8’s tail rotor and together they hauled Steele’s gear, chucked the bags behind the cockpit seats, and got in.
“Where we goin’?” Allie said as she fired up the APU and the large main rotor began to slowly twirl.
“Siberia.”
“Si-fucking-beria, huh?” She laughed and put on her headset. “Now I get it. You’re just using me ’cause you know I’ve got a license for Russian airspace. But do you also know how friggin’ far that is, sport?”
“I know you’ve got something like a Robinson fuel bladder in the back. I saw it.”
Allie snorted, “You make a girl feel cheap.”
The big helo rolled forward on its fat tricycle wheels, Allie spoke to the tower, and they took off and banked hard right, heading toward Sarajevo, and then Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Black Sea.
“I owe you for this, Allie,” Steele said in all sincerity. There were many people in his life with exceptional skills and talents, but few that he knew he could count on once he’d gone rogue.
“Well,” she said, and she looked at him and grinned and reached over and squeezed his thigh, “you can check in anytime you want, baby.”
Steele said, “Yeah, but then I could never leave.”
Chapter 29
Sol-Iletsk, Russia
There was nothing in the world like Russia’s Black Dolphin Prison.
While many other countries had maximum security incarceration facilities, some of which could only be imagined by authors of dystopian fiction, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service had certainly broken the mold after this particular design.
Remote was not the proper descriptive word. It hulked on the vast open plain of the steppes in the middle of nothing, somewhere north of the Kazakhstani border, where the summers were as long as a sneezing fit and the endless winters were so cold that a prisoner’s tears froze before striking his food bowl.
Austere would have also failed in terms of an apt architectural description. Black Dolphin was the shape and color of a Maltese cross, with each of its concrete and rebar branches fifty meters in length, extending from a central circular fortress capped with a squat black dome. The four branches held twelve prison cells each, with a corridor between them, and the central roundabout held the administrative offices. Above ground there was only one apparent story. Below ground was the interrogation facility, known as “temnitsa,” the dungeon, as well as the prison’s oil-fueled power plant.
There was no gymnasium, common dining area, recreation room, library, or single television. There was no outdoor exercise area. Prisoners never saw the light of day, or the glow of the moon.
Secure, however, was an appropriate adjective. A Voronezh-class, slotted waveguide radar antenna was constantly turning above the central dome and could detect any incoming aircraft at ten kilometers out, as well as ground vehicles at a similar range. All the iron prison cell doors used digital locks, so there could never be an issue of a stolen or duplicated key. Three rings of four-meter-high security fences, topped with razor concertina wire, surrounded the prison, with a “sweep strip” sewn with PMN-2 antipersonnel mines bracing the first ring from the outside.
Inside the prison, FPS guards patrolled the hallways, armed with Bizon submachine guns, SR-1 Vektor pistols, rubber truncheons, Sabre pepper spray, and nasty attitudes. Outside, the hardiest of this lot patrolled the grounds beyond the wire, wearing fur hats, boots, and long coats, armed with AK-74s and leashed to Caucasian ovcharkas, bearlike mountain dogs bred to fight off wolves.
There was only one entrance to Black Dolphin. It was on the southern end of the south-facing wing and consisted of a “submarine chamber” of one pair of steel exterior doors with pneumatic locks, then another pair of two-inch-thick plexiglass doors, also remote-controlled, and a bulletproof desk station manned 24/7 by two FPS officers, who eyeballed a bank of eight flat-screen monitors and kept their Vektor pistols always chambered.
There were no visitors. Ever.
You didn’t escape from Black Dolphin.
You simply hoped to die young.
The prison’s warden, Major Mikhail Petrov, had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, which made him one of the youngest such executive bureaucrats in the entire FPS system. He had a confident gait, a bit of a paunch, a swept-back Stalinesque haircut with mustache to match, and wore a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch and a pair of Gucci Urban eyeglasses—unusual choices for a uniformed Russian apparatchik. Petrov was also one of the most corrupt wardens in the Service, which was why he’d volunteered to manage Black Dolphin, because his superiors from Moscow or even Chelyabinsk rarely came to check up on him. When they did, the Jaeger-LeCoultre was quickly switched for a Russian Raketa, and the glasses for a pair of FPS-issue steel rims.
His office, behind a locked steel door on the north side of the prison’s central hub, was more than comfortable and sported an enormous oak desk, a long plush couch draped in dromedary camel fur, and a very fine bar. When seated in his black leather “captain’s chair,” Petrov could call up any of the prison’s security cameras on his desktop computer—which he rarely did because he was usually watching Italian porn. When he wasn’t working, he resided thirty-two kilometers north in a stylish dacha in Livanovka, on the banks of the Ural river, where he was currently hosting a pair of beautiful Mongolian whores. At the moment the dacha was bathed in waves of creamy white snow, like something out of Doctor Zhivago.
Per Petrov’s instructions, his officers and guards rarely knocked on his door, unless it was for a matter of urgency, and with the amount of snow on the roof and grounds of the prison, all the sounds reaching him this evening were muted and soft. The only things he was hearing were the strains of Tchaikovsky wafting from his iPod speakers and the orgasmic moans from his computer—which was why he looked up and frowned when he thought he heard something outside of the norm.
The sound was Eric Steele, killing Petrov’s guards.
Steele had just arrived in the prison’s bread truck, which he’d hijacked after waving it down, kneecapping the driver with a 9 mm round, crushing the man’s Nokia cell phone, and leaving him zip-tied in an abandoned roadside barn. The truck was a 1980s UAZ-450 van, which looked particularly harmless with its cartoonlike “face” of bug-eyed headlamps, and because the snow had started to assault Sol-Iletsk with something akin to a blizzard, the two patrolling guards at Black Dolphin’s main gate were hunkered inside their greatcoats, and off their game.
The bread truck was on schedule. Who the hell else would show up at this arctic hellhole in the middle of the night?
Steele parked the truck twenty meters bac
k from the rolling gate in the perimeter fence, because he intended to use the vehicle again and didn’t want it damaged by what was about to transpire. He got out, and the two FPS guards turned from a close conversation they’d been having about the quality of Ukrainian hookers, stared at him, and their jaws went slack.
The tall dark figure standing in the swirling snow looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nemesis in Predator. The guards saw a black ballistic helmet and the eerie green glow of a PVS-14 monocular night-vision device, a black balaclava revealing only dispassionate lips, and then full Ratnik body armor festooned with ammunition pouches and bristling with Dutch V40 mini–fragmentation grenades, a pair of legs encased in ribbed Kevlar and Arc’teryx LEAF knee protectors, and black Lowa Gore-Tex boots. The figure appeared to be gripping an HK416 A5 assault rifle in 5.56 x 45 mm NATO caliber—no suppressor.
Steele said, “Dobryj vecher.” Good evening. But he did not add the courteous comrades.
The Russians said nothing, but they fumbled for their AK-74s and their massive ovcharka guard dogs strained at their leashes and snarled like mountain lions. Too late. Steele opened fire, raking a burst across the openmouthed gapes of the two guards, whose skulls exploded in clouds of crimson beige as they slammed down on their backs in the snow. The dogs, still leashed to their fallen masters, barked like banshees and tried to lunge at Steele to tear him apart. He didn’t like killing innocent animals, so he walked forward and butt-stroked the left-hand beast in the head, knocking him clean out. The second animal lay down in the snow and whimpered.
The gate wasn’t locked. Steele chopped the latch with a gloved hand, slid it open on its creaking wheels, and was facing a thirty-meter concrete walkway leading to the prison’s main entrance. He slung the 416 and swung an RPG-7 rocket-propelled launcher around from his back, then reached over his right shoulder for one of three rockets settled there in a quiver. In some cases, Steele preferred the RPG over any of the U.S. inventory’s light anti-tank tubes, because the Soviet weapon could be reloaded and was purely mechanical. He shoved the rocket into the tube, twisted the phallus until its collar nipple met the tube’s notch, shouldered it, yanked the ring-pin safety off the rocket’s nose, thumbed the pistol grip’s hammer down, took aim at the prison’s double steel entrance doors, and fired.