The blow was completely unexpected, and before he knew it, Pete found himself rolling on the carpeted floor, his right temple on fire.
Before he could react, powerful hands yanked him off the floor and dropped him back on the chair.
Stung, dazed, confused, the blurred image of General Hastings leaning forward and planting both elbows on the desk, Pete blinked rapidly, trying to come around, to get it together, to—
“Lets try this again, shall we?” Hastings hissed. “How did Dr. Taylor end up at your place?”
“General,” Pete said, taking raspy breaths, a hand on his throbbing temple. “You are … completely out of line … I will … report this to—”
The second blow stung infinitely more than the first as he rolled onto the carpet again, gasping for air, hands shielding his face as a boot came into view, swinging toward him, kicking him in the solar plexus, doubling him over, sending him flying right into the wall like a football, crashing face first, bouncing, landing hard on his back.
His mouth open, Pete tried to force air into his lungs, limbs trembling, eyes flickering, staring at the ceiling, his mind at the edge of consciousness.
And Riggs snatched him up again with animal strength, dumping him back on the chair like a rag doll, his massive hands clutching his shoulders to steady him.
“Flaherty, you just pissed your pants,” Hastings said. “Now, I’m going to ask you one more time … Dr. Taylor managed to land at your house, where she hacked into one of my classified networks and infected it with some really fucked up stuff. You are not only going to tell me how she ended up at your house, but you’re also going to tell me where she’s hiding—along with whoever is helping her.”
Pete couldn’t have told him if he had wanted to as he wheezed air in and out of his lungs, his eyes losing focus.
“Tell you what, I’m going to step out and leave your stinking ass here with your new best friend, who will keep a good eye on you while you think things over.”
With that, the hands on his shoulders vanished and Pete collapsed on his side, landing back on the carpet, arms bracing his aching chest as he curled up in a fetal position trying to breathe, the stench of his own urine reaching his nostrils as he started to heave, to convulse, vomiting whatever little he had managed to eat in the past few hours.
Bastards, he thought, clenching his jaw, the smell of bile mixing with the coppery taste of his own blood adding to his nausea.
Fight it! Pete could almost hear Jack screaming.
Mustering strength, he held back a convulsion, blinking rapidly to clear his sight, the blur resolving into Riggs’s boots a few feet away, by the door, where he stood with hands behind his back.
Still curled up, pretending to moan while rolling over, turning his back to Riggs, Pete managed to sneak a trembling hand down his right leg, curling his fingers around the Taser’s handle, freeing it from its holster and holding it by his waistline.
Breathing deeply, settling his nausea, his eyes regaining focus, Pete rolled back to face Riggs, who stood tall and firm, like a damn rock, eyes front, hands still behind his back.
“Hey … eunuch,” Pete hissed, recalling the video he had seen during Angela’s turn at the barrel.
Riggs blinked and dropped his gaze at him, eyes widening in surprise.
Pete pulled the Taser’s trigger just as Riggs reached for his sidearm.
Two probes shot out at nearly five hundred feet per second connected to fine wires spooled inside the unit.
The probes poked into Riggs’s upper thigh and lower abdomen, delivering a series of five-thousand-volt pulses to his neural network, overwhelming normal nerve traffic.
The large man dropped unceremoniously, like a giant sack of potatoes, and to Pete’s joy, it was Riggs’s turn to convulse, vomit, and even urinate.
Slowly, his thumb pressing the Taser’s trigger, Pete staggered to his feet, suddenly feeling tall next to this trembling bastard.
“Hey … best friend,” he said, keeping a respectful distance to avoid getting shocked himself. “You just pissed your pants.”
Pete released the trigger while kicking Riggs across the temple to knock him out, just as Jack had shown him years ago, before reaching for the soldier’s sidearm, a Colt 1911, and shoving it in the small of his back.
Then, just as he had seen Angela do, Pete also shifted his attention to the large windows behind the oversized VIP desk, where he—
“Wait … please,” Riggs mumbled in between raspy breaths.
Pete dropped his gaze at the oversized soldier, amazed he was still conscious. This asshole has a pretty thick skull.
He swung his leg back, getting ready to kick him again.
“There’s … something … you should … know.”
7
PRESSURE POINT
In a crisis, be aware of the danger, but recognize the opportunity.
—John F. Kennedy
The MQ-1B Predator lurked over the horizon at twenty thousand feet under a star-filled night, its Rotax 914F engine pushing the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, close to its maximum speed of 135 knots.
The half-ton drone dashed over the beach ten miles south of the Kennedy Space Center, its infrared sensors scanning the ocean below in programmed grids as guided by KU-Band satellite communications via the Primary Predator Satellite Link, a ground-based dish relaying the commands from an adjacent ground control station in nearby Patrick Air Force Base.
Sitting in the left seat of the windowless Predator ground control station, which resembled the back of a semibed, Predator Pilot Major Virginia Jackson, USAF, used light finger touch to shift the right-hand joystick slightly to the left. Two seconds later, she received visual confirmation via the aircraft’s nose camera of the Predator banking ten degrees left to a course of one seven nine, parallel to the coast five miles out.
“We’re white hot,” reported Captain Rob Quinn, the Predator sensor operator sitting in the right seat of the PGCS and responsible for target prosecution, reviewing the information gathered by the infrared camera of the UAV’s Multi-Spectrum Targeting Sensor, the gimbal-mounted dome protruding beneath the aircraft’s nose. He compared the scans with the geospatial location of every Coast Guard-sanctioned vessel in their current hundred-square-mile quadrant of ocean at that very instant.
Virginia, a former F-16 pilot who had long become accustomed to the lack of sensory input when flying drones from armchairs, fingered the left-mounted throttle control, trimming power to sixty percent, keeping the Predator at a steady 125 knots for improved endurance while also maximizing the time it would spend over each quadrant. The intelligence briefing had revealed that the target, runaway terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda aboard a thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler, were last reported leaving their hideout in Cocoa Beach heading south following a fierce battle with a Special Ops team, who had stormed their cell.
Where are you hiding, motherfuckers? she thought, keeping her plane steady while her colleague did the heavy lifting, processing the video feed and transmitting it in real time to a Predator operations center a mile away in the center of the base, where a team of intelligence analysts combed through the acquired imagery and relayed instructions back to the ground control station for prosecution. Three more Predators and their ground crews were deployed five minutes after Virginia’s, scanning nearby grids of Atlantic Ocean under the coordination of the same POC.
The intelligence briefing had included the deaths of at least eight servicemen, drastically escalating the relevancy of the threat.
For the next twenty minutes, the Predator team continued to scrub their assigned grids in white-hot mode, meaning heat sources showed up as white against a dark background. The Coast Guard report helped eliminate most contacts, approved vessels—commercial and recreational—cruising up and down the picturesque coast.
“Got something,” reported Quinn, bringing up the finding on the main flat screens hanging between them, placing the crosshairs onto a vessel fitting th
e description. “This one’s not on the list,” he added.
Virginia went to work immediately, reducing throttle while banking to the left, commanding the UAV into long, lazy circles over the target, like a true predator, fingers itching in anticipation.
“HVT confirmed as a thirty-two-foot Boston Whaler,” announced the senior intelligence officer at the POC a minute later, after Quinn had zoomed in and provided them with enough close-up imagery. “I think it’s trying to make a run for international waters.”
“Copy that. Starting tracking,” Quinn replied. “Updating coordinates real time.”
Virginia stared at the screen, locating the high-value target while keeping the Predator on a ten-degree bank at a steady ninety knots, holding altitude, allowing Quinn to paint the HVT with the laser range designator housed in the underside dome.
“Target locked,” Quinn reported.
“Coast Guard’s on the way,” reported POC. “ETA fifteen minutes.”
Virginia reviewed the information on the screen, reading the relevant data, including target position coordinates, bearing to target and range to target while the ball, or dome, rotated as the Predator banked, keeping the crosshairs locked on the target, as specified during the briefing.
“How many on board?” she asked, squinting.
“Hard to tell,” Quinn reported.
She frowned. The heat from the large outboards pretty much washed away any other heat signatures on such a small boat. On top of that, the vessel had a fiberglass canopy in the middle, and they couldn’t see through it.
If this was a daytime ops, they would be able to zoom in using the Predator’s high-resolution cameras and count the pimples on their asses, but at night they were limited.
But it didn’t really matter. They had them, and as much as Virginia simply wanted to blow the bastards back to the land of a thousand virgins, someone with a higher pay grade had decided that they wanted the terrorists captured alive. Besides, the intelligence briefing indicated the possibility of a hostage aboard.
Although Virginia was Air Force, her current assignment piloting domestic drones placed her under the direct command of the Department of Homeland Security, which had limited her rules of engagement on this mission to locating and reporting their coordinates to the Coast Guard, while maintaining missile lock just in case the terrorists decided to fight back.
And that’s where the AGM-114N Hellfire missile, the Predator’s primary strike weapon, came into play. The Hellfire was considered a high precision asset—meaning it was ridiculously accurate. Although it weighed in at only one hundred pounds, placing it on the lighter side of air-to-surface missiles, it’s thermobaric warhead was good enough to obliterate a truck or lightly armored vehicle.
Or a fiberglass Boston Whaler.
Virginia glanced over at Quinn, who gave her a thumbs-up. He was ready to fire on command.
She contacted the Predator Operations Center, letting them know she was in a holding pattern with missile lock active.
Engaging the autopilot, Virginia did something she couldn’t do back in her F-16 days: she reached for a can of soda in the small cooler under the flat-screen monitors and waited for the cavalry.
As she popped the lid and watched Quinn grab a bottle of water, she zoomed out on one of the center screens and located the feeds from the other Predators, one of which showed the transponder signature of the USCGC Margaret Norvell, the Sentinel-class cutter cruising at twenty-nine knots to intercept.
She zoomed in on the 154-foot long vessel packing enough firepower to blow the Whaler to pieces if the terrorists decided to get naughty. On top of that, the Margaret Norvell would be backed by a pair of super-fast Defender-class speed boats, each doing forty-five knots along their own intercept courses but scheduled to arrive more or less at the same time as the larger but much closer cutter.
And literally hovering above all of that firepower, Quinn was just a push-of-the-button away from releasing a Hellfire, which being supersonic, would smoke the boat in less than five seconds.
She returned her gaze to the HVT, holding just twenty knots while maintaining zero eight zero about four miles out.
Don’t these guys know we have eyes in the sky everywhere? she thought, figuring that after all of the press the Predator and its big brother, the Reaper, had received during the Iraqi and Afghan campaigns, that Al-Qaeda would have gotten smarter about evasive tactics.
She frowned while staring at the Boston Whaler. Something felt wrong, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
“Hey, Quinn, what’s the top speed on those?”
“Close to forty knots,” he replied.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought. So why is this one going so slow, especially if it’s trying to get away?”
“I’ve already thought about that,” he replied. “Don’t have a good answer.”
Virginia shifted uncomfortably in her seat and set her drink down. “I mean, wouldn’t you be hauling ass if you had just blown away a bunch of soldiers in their home turf? And where is it headed? What’s their range?”
“About four hundred miles fully fueled.”
“Any larger vessels in the vicinity?”
“I’m tracking a dozen freighters within their range. I’m getting their coordinates to the Coast Guard in case they make a run for any of them.”
They continued to follow it for another ten minutes, zooming in as much as possible to see if they could spot people moving about, but the signature remained steady, with the outboards painting the boat white.
The cutter finally approached it from starboard and turned parallel to the HVT’s course keeping a distance of three hundred feet. A minute later the first Defender boat showed up and approached the Boston Whaler.
Virginia and Quinn watched the large center screen, where the infrared camera painted all of their respective heat signatures, including that of the second Defender boat, which joined the first, flanking the runaway—
Virginia blinked and leaned back the moment the screen went blinding white.
“What the hell’s that?” she yelled.
She figured it out just as the screen returned to its normal resolution, depicting only three vessels now, the large cutter still cruising at normal speed plus the two Defender boats surrounded by flaming debris that rapidly vanished as it sank.
“They blew themselves up, Quinn,” she said, a heavy sinking feeling squeezing her chest. “The crazy motherfuckers blew themselves up!”
* * *
Inside the Predator Operations Center, Pete Flaherty, director of the Kennedy Space Center, watched the large center screen tracking the runaway Boston Whaler until it detonated.
“We have confirmation that none of the Predators fired, sir,” said Commander Heather Vickers, assistant to the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, standing next to Pete by the large screens in front of a row of POC analysts monitoring their workstations. She was dressed in a standard camouflage working uniform with a matching cap partially hiding her brown hair and sporting a silver oak leaf. “The boat exploded from within. Probably suicide.”
“Damn fanatics,” hissed the analyst sitting at his workstation in front of them, an Air Force lieutenant, as he replayed the video feed on the overhead monitors.
Pete exchanged a glance with Heather and asked, “Did the Defenders have eyes on the occupants before the explosion?”
“Negative, sir,” she replied. “Everything happened before they could train spotlights on the HVT.”
“I need the whole area combed,” he ordered.
“Agree,” replied Heather. “Though I’m not sure how much we’ll find after that blast.”
“I know,” he replied. “Just want to be thorough.”
“I’ll direct a pair of Predators to run a white-hot scan on the entire grid. And it’ll be morning soon. We should be able to spot anything easily with the HD cameras the moment the sun comes up.”
Pete nodded. “Good thinking, Commander. I’ll mention your c
ooperation in my report to General Hastings.”
“Thank you, sir. We’re all on the same team.”
“I need to get back to the Cape now. Please keep me posted.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pete walked off and headed for the POC’s exit, his mind exploring the possibilities, starting with his strong belief that Jack and Angela had not perished in that explosion.
The man’s a SEAL, for crying out loud, he thought, which meant he had plenty of options—and the training to execute them—especially when surrounded by a dark ocean.
He frowned as he walked out of the building and stared at the predawn skies over central Florida, filling his lungs with cool, humid air, trying to keep his tired mind focused.
A car waited for him to take him back to the Cape, and he walked toward it, opening the rear door and settling in the backseat while contemplating the very surreal turn of events in the past couple of hours.
He shook his head. At first he thought it had been a hoax, but as far as he remembered, only Jack knew the detail about the carabiner failure during their Colorado rock climbing trip long ago.
As downright impossible as it sounded, Pete couldn’t come up with another explanation to Jack’s sudden return from the dead than the one he had offered over the phone. There was no way he could have survived Afghanistan. Pete had seen Jack take at least a dozen rounds fired at close range from those Taliban rebels before the SEAL team could secure the ridge. And although the rebels had taken the body with them as a trophy, the blood-soaked sand in the same spot where Jack had fallen just minutes earlier was enough evidence to call it KIA.
But then again, Pete hadn’t actually seen Jack tonight. He had spoken to someone who sounded like Jack, and who even knew details about their rock-climbing trip … but he never had eyes on him, and neither did any of the surviving soldiers, who had just reported a dark figure escaping in the Boston Whaler along with Angela. And the Coast Guard wasn’t able to get close enough to identify anyone before the explosion.
But Angela claimed it was him, he thought, his mind still having difficulty swallowing the uncanny reality that had unfolded—and continued to unfold—right in front of him.
The Fall Page 17