Killer Focus

by Fiona Brand

  A diver appeared over the lip of the trench and swam directly toward him. For a split second Todd was certain it was Downey, then something wrong registered; the neoprene suit and the gear were regulation, but the mask and the tank weren’t. Adrenaline pumped. It was possible the stranger was a diver from the charter launch that had been trolling in the area earlier. He couldn’t hear the sound of the launch’s engine, which meant they could have dropped anchor nearby, but recreational diving wasn’t compatible with game fishing, especially not this far out and with the visibility so poor.

  The second possibility was that the diver was one of the bad guys, protecting their drop site. Instinctively, he depressed the shutter on the camera, then reached for the knife sheathed at his ankle. The diver veered off to one side. Todd spun in the water as a second diver swam up out of the trench. A hand ripped at his face mask. Salt water stung his eyes and filled his mouth: his oxygen line had been cut. An arm clamped around his neck. He slashed with the knife. Blood clouded the water and the arm released. With a grunt, he kicked free, heading for the surface. With a lungful of air he could make twice the distance with ease.

  A hand latched around his ankle, dragging him back down. Jackknifing, he dove at the man, slicing with the knife. Blood and air erupted. He glimpsed the camera as it drifted down to the seabed, the strap cut in the struggle, and he registered that the other diver had also used a knife.

  Vision blurring, he grabbed the limp diver’s regulator and sucked in a lungful of air. He had a split second to register a third diver, then a spear punched into his shoulder, driving him back against the hull of the ship. Shock reverberated through him; salt water filled his lungs. Arm and shoulder numbed, chest burning with a cold fire and his throat clamped against the convulsive urge to cough, he kicked upward.

  Sixty feet above, the ocean surface rippled like molten silver. Sunlight. Oxygen.

  A sudden image of his wife, Eleanor, and small son, Steve, sunbathing in their backyard in Shreveport sent a powerful surge of adrenaline through his veins. He cleared the edge of the hull.

  A split second before his vision faded, he spotted Mathews and Hendrickson, floating. Distantly, he felt hard fingers close around one ankle, the cold pressure of the water as he was towed down into the trench.

  Shreveport, Louisiana

  October 21

  Eight-year-old Steven Fischer dropped the ball.

  “Aw, Steve. Didja have to—”

  His cousin Sara’s voice was high-pitched and sharp as Steve stumbled to a halt. It was the middle of the day in his cousin’s backyard. Despite the fact that it was autumn, the sun was hot enough to fry eggs and so bright it hurt his eyes, but that wasn’t the reason his vision had gone funny. He could see a picture of his dad, staring at him, which wasn’t right. His dad was away, down south somewhere. Having another holiday on the navy, Granddad Fischer had joked.

  This time he’d promised to bring Steve back a sombrero.

  Fear gripped him. As abruptly as it had formed, the picture faded, like a television set being turned off, and the tight feeling in his chest was gone.

  “I’m not playing anymore.” He stared blankly at Sara, who was looking ticked. He was going home. Something had happened. Something bad.

  Shreveport, Louisiana

  November 20, 1984

  Eleanor Fischer watched the coffin as it was lowered into the grave and fought the wrenching urge to cry out.

  The gleaming oak box was filled with Todd’s clothing and a few mementos that had meant something to him. Silly bits and pieces she had hardly been able to part with: a snapshot of Todd, darkly handsome in full dress uniform; a wedding photo; a disreputable old T-shirt she’d tried to throw away half a dozen times and which he’d stubbornly retrieved from the trash can; his favorite baseball cap.

  Knowing that the box didn’t contain his body, and that his remains would most likely never be recovered, didn’t make the grieving any easier. She still couldn’t accept Todd’s death; she didn’t know if she ever would. A part of her expected him to come home with some wild explanation as to why he and the rest of the guys had gone AWOL, wrap her in his arms and blot out the horror of the past month.

  Jaw clenched, she dropped a white rose onto the coffin lid, and gently squeezed Steve’s hand to let him know it was his turn. Steve’s rose dropped, the stem broken, the petals crumpled, as if he’d gripped it too tightly.

  Swallowing the sharp ache in her throat, she hugged him close in an attempt to absorb his pain. His shoulders felt unnaturally stiff, his spine ramrod straight.

  Since the day he’d come home insisting that she find out where Todd was and check that he was all right, he’d been…different. He hadn’t wanted to play with any of his friends, or swim; instead he’d stuck close to home, staying within earshot of the telephone. When they had finally heard that Todd was missing, presumed dead, Steve had simply gone to his room and had sat staring at the wall, his focus inward.

  The doctor had said that children coped with grief differently from adults, but he didn’t understand that Steve had known Todd was in trouble before they’d been informed he was missing.

  Commodore John Saunders handed Eleanor Fischer the folded flag that had draped Todd’s coffin, his expression grim.

  This was the second ceremony he’d officiated at this week, and there were six more to go. Eight men lost at sea, nine men lost in all, if you counted the launch skipper, and none of the bodies had been recovered. When that many men disappeared on a peacetime mission, it was difficult to stop the speculation, and so far the media had had a field day, calling the incident a bungled mission.

  To compound the embarrassment, the civilian who had instigated the hunt, an old crony of Admiral Monteith’s, had also died, a victim of a heart attack after drinking too much at an official function. When the news had broken, Monteith had run like a rat, hiding behind his medals and his Boston connections and taking early retirement. He had refused to be questioned over the affair. Monteith’s secretary and his personal aide had also resigned, leaving the office in disarray. The file on the mission had been conveniently “lost” and had somehow never made it onto the Admiralty’s new computer system.

  As far as Saunders was concerned, the whole affair had been a wild-goose chase from start to finish, and a waste of taxpayers’ money. And he had lost eight good men.

  He would carry out an investigation. Regulations demanded that a proper reporting process had to be adhered to, but with Monteith’s defection, the likelihood that they would come up with any satisfactory conclusions was close to nil.

  The launch had broken up on the rocks, and to date only a small part of the wreckage had been located. The life raft had been found farther along the coast, fully inflated and equipped, which had added to the speculation. Something had gone seriously wrong, and Saunders wasn’t buying into the accidental-drowning scenario.

  Fischer had been a seasoned veteran, and so had every member of his team. They should have survived what had amounted to a recreational dive on a sunken wreck in calm waters. With no witnesses other than a fishing boat that had seen two launches in the vicinity, and no bodies or evidence beyond the wrecked launch and the life raft, there was little chance that answers would ever come to light.

  But he did know one crucial piece of the puzzle that the press hadn’t stumbled on yet. Todd Fischer’s team hadn’t only been searching for a cache of drugs and guns; they had been hunting Nazis.

  Saunders’s ulcer burned every time he thought about the briefing for the mission. Monteith must have been senile.

  He would make it his personal mission to ensure that that particular piece of information never saw the light of day. The media had already done enough damage. It was better that Fischer and his team were perceived as deserters than that the U.S. Navy was made into a laughingstock.

  One

  Present day

  Lieutenant Commander Steve Fischer stepped into the records room of the Jackson Naval Air Sta
tion, Florida, and handed the clerk a list of the files he wanted to view. There were nine in all. Eight didn’t require a security clearance; one did. On request, he produced his ID and security clearance and waited for his details to be verified against the computerized register.

  Several minutes later, the files were deposited on the counter, checked and signed off by a second records officer and Fischer was cleared to carry them through to the cramped work cubicles that ran the length of one wall.

  Taking a seat, he placed the eight files he had chosen at random, and in which he had no interest, to one side, and selected the file labeled Akidron. In a recent overhaul of the filing system, Akidron had suddenly appeared. The reference number tied it in with a group of files containing material on operations in the Middle East, but the coincidence that Akidron spelled backward was Nordika had been enough to pique his interest.

  He examined the security classification and a seal that had been put in place in 1984 and had never been broken, indicating that he was the first person to view the file since it had been taken out of circulation. The fact that the file had been off-limits for over twenty years and had a high security rating was notable but not unusual. Jacksonville was the center for the Southeast Command, which included twenty-one naval installations, among them Guantanamo Bay and Puerto Rico. With Cuba on their doorstep, a number of files contained sensitive material that could affect the security of the United States.

  He broke the seal and opened the file. On the first page Akidron was reversed to spell Nordika.

  He skimmed the pages that detailed the information supplied by George Hartley, a wealthy manufacturer based in Houston, and which had been passed on to Monteith. Hartley claimed that ex-Nazi SS officers, in league with Marco Chavez, head of a major Colombian drug cartel, were involved in smuggling arms and drugs. The arms were bound for terrorist and military factions in South America and Cuba, the cocaine was moving stateside. Military personnel were reportedly involved, although Hartley hadn’t been able to supply a list of names. When the divers had gone missing, an attempt to follow up on the details Hartley had supplied had been stalled by Hartley’s unexpected death. According to the coroner’s report, the fatality had been caused by a lethal cocktail of prescription medications and an excess of alcohol, and had been deemed an unfortunate accident.

  Suddenly the lack of information available on the wreck of the Nordika and the disappearance of eight navy personnel made sense. Monteith had not only run from the scandal of the loss of an entire SEAL team and the ridicule that would result from a failed Nazi hunt, he had been afraid for his own life. Hartley had been executed, and Monteith had recognized that he would be next.

  In a botched attempt to kill the affair, he had concealed all the evidence he’d obtained by renaming the file and closing it. He had banked on the fact that twenty years after the Nordika tragedy, there was likely to be little interest in a follow-up investigation. Monteith had died just eighteen months later, reportedly of natural causes.

  The back of his neck crawling, Steve flipped through the last set of pages, which contained the mission brief and the orders issued to Todd Fischer and his men. The documents had been signed off by Monteith. As he turned the last page, an envelope attached to the rear file cover with tape that was cracked and perished by age detached. Glossy prints and a set of negatives spilled across the desktop.

  The first photo—a splash of bright turquoise and the primary yellow of a mask and snorkel—was of himself at age eight, underwater, in the family swimming pool. The second was a shot of his best friend, Marc Bayard, the third of his cousin, Sara.

  The fourth print was of Todd Fischer, sitting on the bottom of the pool, holding his breath and waiting patiently while Steve had fooled with the camera, trying to get a cool shot of his dad.

  Chest tight, he picked up the print, careful to handle only the edges, and stared into a piece of the past he had never expected to find. He remembered the afternoon the photos had been taken as clearly as if it had been yesterday. It had been approximately two weeks before his father had disappeared. The weather had been hot and sultry and his dad had been home on leave, giving them snorkeling lessons and, when they’d pestered him, a lesson on underwater photography. Normally, they weren’t allowed to touch the camera, because it was an expensive piece of equipment and the shutter release was ultrasensitive.

  In the next photo the luminous turquoise of pool water changed to cool blues and lilacs. Seawater. The absence of red and yellow tones in the coral indicated the depth as being from between forty to sixty feet, maybe a little more.

  Through the murk he registered the focal point of the shot, the stern of a vessel and three numbers. The reason Monteith had kept the film, which should have been passed on to Eleanor Fischer, was now obvious. The numbers, remnants of Lloyd’s Register numbers, were familiar. Two years previously Steve had spent a few days in Costa Rica, chartered a launch and had found the wreck of the Nordika. Because of its remoteness, the site was not a popular dive location, but it was noted on the sea charts. He had dived on the wreck and had taken almost the exact same photo.

  A set of prints depicting the cargo hold and the ancient diesels in the engine room followed. The sensation, as he flipped through the prints, was eerie as he viewed the same scenes he had photographed, only this time seen through his father’s eyes.

  The next photo made the tension in the pit of his stomach escalate: a diver and, off to the side, the shadowy, encrusted shape of the Nordika’s hull. The final two snapshots were markedly different. The first was an off-center flash of a face distorted by a diving mask and a cloud of dark fluid—blood. The second, aimed upward, as if the camera had dropped to the sea bottom and the shutter mechanism had triggered, capturing the divers suspended above, one arching back as a spear punched into his shoulder.

  Steve stared at the print. The snapshot was skewed, but the picture it had produced was sharp enough. He could make out the U.S. Navy marking on the wounded diver’s scuba tank, as well as the tattoo on Todd Fischer’s bare shoulder—the same tattoo that was visible in the holiday snap of his father sitting in the bottom of the Fischer family swimming pool.

  For a split second the image of his father that he had “seen” more than twenty years before was superimposed over the print. He had never told his mother, or anyone, the full truth, that somehow in the last few seconds of his life Todd Fischer had reached out and connected with him. That he had experienced the moment of his father’s death.

  The phenomenon had been singular and frightening. As the days following his father’s disappearance had passed and the search had continued, Steve had waited for news, aware that even if they did find his father it was too late. Todd Fischer had died on October 21, 1984, at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon.

  The weeks of waiting for confirmation of what he had already known had burned deep. But just days after the funeral, when the press had published a leaked naval report citing Fischer and his men as deserters, Steve had been stunned. He had grown up with a number of calm certainties in his life. One of those had been that his father was a bona fide hero and a patriot. There was no way Todd Fischer would have deserted his family, his command or his country.

  Shortly after the funeral, he had overheard his uncle discussing the fact that Todd had been working on something sensitive enough to hit a nerve with naval command, and the possibility of a cover-up. At eight years old, Steve hadn’t grasped the concepts of collateral damage and expendability fully, but he had understood enough. Something had gone wrong and his father had been sacrificed. He could understand his father giving his life for his country—Todd Fischer had talked about that risk often enough—but he couldn’t accept that sacrifice going hand in glove with the disgrace of being labeled a traitor.

  He hadn’t known all of the men who had died, but he had met some of them. They were mostly married with families. They hadn’t been any more expendable than his own father had been, and he was certain
that in no way had justice been served.

  Now, finally, he had proof. Instead of investigating the crime, Monteith, along with his personal staff, had covered the deaths up and walked out.

  Extracting a notebook from his briefcase, Steve made a note of the personnel who had been involved, not only with the mission but with the reporting process, including the filing clerk who had authorized the closing of the Akidron file.

  Maybe it was overkill, but Monteith, a decorated admiral, had been frightened enough by Hartley’s death to not only resign, but to commit an act of treason by concealing a threat to national security, and an indictable offense by concealing evidence of a mass murder. Steve could only put that fear down to two things. Monteith had obtained further information that wasn’t contained in the file, and he had been afraid for his own life.

  Replacing the photographs and the negatives in the envelope, he slipped them into his briefcase along with the file, locked it and returned the remaining files to the front desk. After all these years the possibility that he could find his father’s remains was remote, but at least he had clarity on one point: Todd Fischer and the seven men under his command had been murdered while serving their country.

  Frowning, the clerk counted the files, checked them against the register then recounted them. “Sir, there’s a file missing.”

  He stared at the space Lieutenant Commander Fischer had occupied on the other side of the counter just seconds before. He was talking to air.

  Fischer had already left.

  Two days later Fischer walked into an interview room at the office of the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, D.C., and handed a copy of the Akidron file to Rear Admiral Saunders. The only other occasion he had met Saunders had been at his father’s funeral, although he was well aware of Saunders’s career path. Since 1984, Saunders’s rise through the ranks had been swift, moving from commodore to rear admiral with a raft of commendations and honors for active service in the Gulf. Following a stint in naval intelligence reporting to the Joint Chiefs, his career had shifted to another level entirely when he had been headhunted by the Director of National Intelligence.