Silverware rattled as a drawer opened and closed. The intruder was still in there. Kneeling in the shadow of the pantry, Nick held the octagonal tumbler out from the corner, using it as a mirror. In the distorted reflection, he could see the intruder’s hand and the glint of a blade.
Nick burst into the kitchen, extending his knife in a forward thrust. His target yelped in terror. Her knife clattered to the floor. Nick slammed his hand against the island to stop his momentum, just in time to prevent his blade from plunging into the flawless skin at the base of his wife’s elegant neck.
Katy clutched the fold of the bath towel she was wrapped in with one hand and grabbed the counter behind her with the other. All of the color had drained from her face. She gasped for air as if she had been punched in the chest.
With wide eyes, Nick looked from his boot knife to his wife and back again, trying to grasp what had just happened. He had jumped past every level of reason and deduction, straight to deadly action, and almost killed the woman he loved. What was happening to him? Was he really that paranoid?
With one deft movement, he tucked the blade into its sheath and then pushed his palms out toward Katy, as if that would stop the fury he could see building behind her horrified eyes. “Don’t freak out, baby,” he protested. “Please don’t freak out.”
“What is wrong with you, Nick?” she demanded as soon as she was able to speak.
“I thought you were upstairs. I heard a noise in the kitchen and I assumed the worst.” He glanced down at the knife on the floor. “I saw a weapon.”
Katy knelt down and picked up the pewter-handled carving knife. She waved it at Nick. “You saw a utensil!”
For the first time, Nick noticed the half-carved ham sitting on the island, along with a plate and a loaf of bread.
“Your son has not given me a moment’s rest all day,” said Katy, shaking the knife at Nick, forcing him to back away. “I finally got him to lie down, and I thought I could get a snack and a bath and feel like a normal human being again. Clearly, that was too much to hope for!”
An insistent wail erupted from upstairs.
“And now he’s awake.” She jammed the carving knife down into the ham, put her hands on her hips, and glared at Nick. “Well?”
Nick was at a loss. “Well what?”
“Well, go and get him,” she said, gesturing toward the stairs. “I’m going to take my bath and eat my sandwich. And don’t you come knocking, because I don’t think I can bear the sight of you for a while.”
* * *
“Nick and Katy are the happiest, most well-adjusted couple we know.” Amanda Navistrova took the seat that Drake held for her, tugging her khaki skirt around her tan thighs. “You just caught Nick on a bad day.”
Drake took his own seat at the table and rested his arm on the white linen to take Amanda’s waiting hand. She looked stunning. No, she had looked stunning when he picked her up from Northrop Grumman’s DC headquarters, even with her hair pulled back and her blue eyes hidden behind glasses. Now that she’d had a chance to “freshen up,” letting her blonde curls fall down around her shoulders and replacing her glasses with contacts, she looked absolutely gorgeous. She could have been a runway model. Of course, there weren’t too many runway models who could have been aerodynamic propulsion engineers with two degrees from MIT.
Drake ordered their drinks from the waiter and then turned his attention back to his date. “You haven’t seen them together in a few weeks.” He leaned forward. “Talk about your Shock and Awe. Between the strain of the baby and Nick’s refusal to acknowledge his PTSD, I don’t think they’re going to make it.”
“Nick does not have PTSD,” argued Amanda. “He just has nightmares.”
Drake shook his head as he buttered a piece of bread. He took a bite and then shook the half-eaten piece at Amanda. “You should have seen him trying to sleep on this last mission,” he said between chews. “Have I told you about his zombie voice?”
Amanda grimaced. She gently took Drake’s hand and guided the bread down to his plate. “Keep your voice down. He doesn’t know that you told me you were going to Kuwait, does he?”
Drake swallowed his bread. “Of course not. Besides, you didn’t know why I was going. I didn’t even know.”
Amanda looked down at her hands.
“You figured it out?” asked Drake.
She scrunched up her nose. “I had an inkling. I never felt like Walker was giving us the full story about the salvage. But I always figured Nick was in the dark with the rest of us.”
“It’s not that he doesn’t trust you,” said Drake, lowering his voice to a whisper. “He loves you like a little sister. It’s just that he’s become even crazier about need-to-know than Walker is.”
Amanda nodded knowingly. “I don’t blame him, but enough about Nick and Katy. Let’s focus on us now. We only have a few hours before we both have to get to the hangar. I have a few more tweaks to make to the Wraith before tonight’s test.”
* * *
Nick sat on his porch, holding his son in his arms and gently rocking back and forth. He ran his fingers along the silky strands of Luke’s golden hair and looked out across the darkening water. He could not shake Katy’s horrified expression from his mind. This morning he had bruised her during his nightmare, and tonight he had almost shoved a knife through her chest. The nightmares, the lack of sleep, the anger that he always felt boiling beneath the surface—what was he becoming?
Katy stepped through the open back door. “Easy boy,” she said, “I’m unarmed. I left my spatula in the kitchen.”
Nick continued to stare out over the water in silence, even though he could feel her effort to show him forgiveness.
She knelt next to him and kissed her baby on the head. Then she kissed Nick on the cheek. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Can you handle him?”
Nick closed his eyes and sighed. He should have seen this one coming. “I thought I told you. I have to go back to work tonight.” He knew the words sounded harsh and accusing. He knew he should recant and reach out to her. But he didn’t.
Katy stood up, her sweetened demeanor fallen away. “Of course you do. What was I thinking?” She pulled Luke out of his arms and wheeled around to head back into the house.
The sight of her walking away again filled him with rage. “I’m trying,” he called after her, anger tainting his voice.
Katy kept walking. “Try harder,” she said, and slammed the door.
CHAPTER 24
“Lighthouse, Wraith is leaving flight level two five zero, starting the descent for the Skyhook test.” Nick sat in the mission commander’s seat on the right side of the M-2’s cockpit, with Drake in the copilot’s seat to his left. A panoramic view of the Maryland coast spread out before them, displayed on a continuous 180-degree wrapping screen. The aircraft had no windshield, no windows at all. Instead, sensors embedded in the aircraft’s skin fed the enhanced infrared display, showing them the world outside in crisp black and white. They could see every detail of the coast, every wisp of cloud in the sky despite the darkness of the night.
Nick programmed the autopilot for a long, spiraling descent through the restricted airspace. It would take more than twenty minutes for the Wraith to descend from twenty-five thousand feet to its new altitude, just five hundred feet above the Atlantic waves. He took the opportunity for a rest, removing his flight helmet and running his fingers through his sweaty hair. After a long pull from his water bottle, Nick turned in his ejection seat to face his copilot, his forehead creased with concern. “Are you ready for this one?”
Drake set his own helmet down on his knee. “Of course I am. Why? Are you worried?”
So far, the test flight had gone smoothly, just like the previous four test flights, all flown during the month before the Persian Gulf mission. The Wraith had arrived at Romeo Seven’s hangar facility in late January. A casu
al observer, or even an aircraft buff, might have mistaken her for a B-2 stealth bomber, but she was something entirely new. The M-2 was bigger, with more deeply swept wings for supersonic flight. She also had new engines, stolen from the F-22 program and modified by Amanda’s propulsion team.
This single M-2 was the only bird spawned from a doomed program called the LRS, the Long Range Striker. Originally the B-2’s replacement, the LRS fell victim to budget cuts and a shifting political climate. Scott and Amanda were both lead design consultants on the project. When it lost funding midstream, Walker saw a tremendous opportunity. Black money finished the job, custom built to Triple Seven specs.
Tonight’s test flight had gone like clockwork, with the Wraith’s array of tactical systems functioning perfectly. But Nick had a bad feeling about using a live target for the Skyhook test, especially a live target that he didn’t trust.
“Relax, boss,” said Drake, one corner of his mouth twisting up into a grin, “just because the last guy to get yanked off the ground by a Skyhook cable was . . .”
Nick held up his hand. “Don’t say it. I’ve already got a bad vibe about this test. You don’t need to jinx it more.”
Both pilots put their helmets back on and clipped their oxygen masks into place. Nick turned and pressed a series of squares on a large touch-screen monitor that angled up out of the console to his right. “Lighthouse, this descent is going to take a while,” he said into the radio. “I’m going to send you our flight data so that you can get something useful out of it. I’m starting the telemetry feed now.”
“Lighthouse copies, we are receiving your feed,” replied Scott from Romeo Seven. “If you don’t mind, give us some basic maneuvers on your way down for better data.”
“I’ve got this one,” said Drake, taking the controls. “This spiral descent is taking too long anyway. I think I’ll take the express elevator instead.” The Wraith lurched to the right as Drake rolled her up on a knife’s edge, slicing through the horizon into a deep dive. The digital altitude readout became a green blur as the huge jet accelerated toward the water.
Nick leaned back in his ejection seat and stretched. “Do you really have to do stuff like this?” He watched the altitude readout blaze past ten thousand feet on its way to zero. “You’re such a child.”
“I’m showing massive spikes in the auto-stabilizer inputs,” said Scott. He sounded terrified. “It looks like you’re plummeting toward the ocean.”
“I think you’ve made your point, Drake,” said Nick.
Drake righted the aircraft and pulled back hard on the side-stick control. The engines’ vectored thrust system tilted the exhaust nozzles upward to help him power out of the dive. The surface of the Atlantic flashed by the screen, every peak and valley of the small waves standing out in sharp detail.
Nick grunted under the strain of seven Gs. He couldn’t help feeling a little pride. No other aircraft this big could handle that kind of maneuvering, not even a B-1. He let out a long breath as Drake settled at five hundred feet. “Don’t worry, Lighthouse,” he transmitted. “Your numbers were correct. That was just Drake’s version of basic maneuvering.”
“And he wonders why I don’t like him,” replied Scott.
“All right, gentlemen, it’s time to get serious,” said Nick. “Let’s not forget the gravity of what we are about to accomplish.” He closed his eyes and said a quick prayer. The whole team agreed that the Wraith needed a Skyhook capability for covert exfiltration, and that meant conducting a human test, but consensus didn’t make it any less dangerous.
This test would mark the first human trial of a Fulton Skyhook Surface-to-Air Recovery system in more than thirty years. The Department of Defense had officially banned live recoveries for good reason. The last man to get yanked off the ground by a fixed-wing aircraft had been thrown a quarter mile through the air and slammed into the ground at over a hundred miles an hour. It took the coroner’s team a week to recover all the pieces. Only the CIA had maintained the option after that, and even they dropped it ten years later for lack of use. No one wanted to try it.
“Wraith, this is Dagger, radio check,” came Quinn’s voice through the radio.
“Dagger, Wraith has you loud and clear. Are you on coords?”
“Affirmative, I’m at the location you gave me,” said Quinn.
Nick selected a waypoint labeled DAGGER from the touch screen on his console. Immediately, a green square appeared on the forward screen, fixed over Quinn’s coordinates between the Wraith and the coastline. Another, larger square appeared at the base of the display, showing magnified video of Quinn’s position, captured by one of the forward cameras. In the lower-right corner of the square, a small boat gently rocked back and forth in the black waves.
“There’s our boy,” said Drake.
Nick tapped the boat with his finger, and the video began tracking it, keeping it at the center of the square. “Dagger, pop a thermal marker for confirmation,” he said.
A bright white spot flared in the video, nearly blotting out the boat before the computer auto-tuned the image. Nick put his thumb and forefinger inside the box and spread them apart, zooming in until he could see Quinn slowly waving the signal marker back and forth.
The pararescueman stood at the back of a runabout. While everyone else had taken the early evening off, Quinn had navigated the boat around Cape Charles, out into the open water beneath the maneuvering area.
“He looks cold,” said Drake. “I guess it was kind of harsh for us to send him out there on his first day.”
Nick pointed to the front of the boat where a young woman sat behind the wheel, huddled up under a blanket. “Nah, Molly went with him to drive the boat home.”
“Molly the new tech with the big brown eyes?”
“That’s the one,” said Nick.
Drake grinned. “I guess he’s okay then.” He steered the aircraft to point directly at Quinn’s position and then leveled the wings. “I’m stable and on target,” he said. “We’re ready to deploy Skyhook.”
Nick entered the commands, and two more video squares appeared at the bottom of the main screen. One showed a V-shaped cable-catcher extending forward from a well beneath the nose. The other showed the claw, a long cylinder split down the middle, extending from the forward edge of the bomb bay.
Airborne personnel recovery systems had always been simple in concept but dangerously complicated in execution. Getting the target off the ground was easy: fly an airplane into a cable held aloft by a balloon, capture that cable in a V-shaped catch, and voilà, your target is airborne. Thanks to the vector physics involved, the target would experience little more than a mild jerk and slowly rise to a trailing position.
The deadlier problems arose while trying to reel the target into the aircraft. There were just too many variables. Sometimes the cable got caught in the wing vortices and spun wildly in circles. Other times it tracked low and off center, trapping the target in the aircraft’s engine wash. During the last human trial, it just snapped. C-130 crews solved these problems by hanging off the end of the cargo ramp and chasing the cable around with long J-hooks. Predictably, that didn’t always work.
Scott had come up with a more technologically elegant solution to the cable problem. His claw had sensors that could detect the difference in motion between the cable and the surface background; in effect, it could “see” the line. Then its short robotic arm would adjust to the cable’s motion and snatch it out of the air. A winch inside the claw would reel the target into the bomb bay and then retract, placing him directly in front of the ladder to the flight deck.
The system had worked perfectly on the last two tests with dummies. As Walker noted during the premission briefing, there was no reason it shouldn’t work just as well with Quinn.
“Dagger, deploy your balloon,” said Nick, praying that Walker was right. On the screen, he watched Quinn unravel
a line onto the floor of the boat and then pull a rip cord out of a small square packet. A miniature blimp rapidly inflated and shot skyward. The thermal panel on the balloon shined brightly on the infrared display, making it an easy target.
“Slow to one hundred and forty knots. Hit the line fifty feet below the balloon,” said Nick.
“Roj,” Drake replied, “just like last time.”
The line came up fast despite their slow speed, but Drake hit it exactly where he needed to. The catch snapped closed, severing the line above the vise and sending the balloon sailing away behind them.
Nick checked the video squares. Quinn had disappeared from the boat, and he could see Molly waving her thermal marker in a circle, the okay sign. But the other video feeds didn’t look right. The system still hadn’t captured Quinn’s line. The claw wasn’t moving.
A red light began flashing on Nick’s control console. “The system is frozen. We’re dragging him toward the coast. Start climbing now!”
“Should I turn back toward the boat?” asked Drake
“Negative. You’ll put him into the engine wash.”
As the Wraith climbed through two thousand feet, Nick keyed the radio. “Dagger, cut away, cut away, cut away!” He waited for a response, but the radio remained silent. The kid might not even be able to hear him over the roar of the engines and the slipstream. “Dagger, this is Wraith. Cut away, cut away, cut away!”
Scott’s Skyhook package came equipped with an emergency system—a lightweight parachute packed into a small pocket on the back of the vest. By Scott’s design, Quinn could pull a single rip cord that would sever the line and deploy the chute. He wouldn’t win any prizes at an air show, but the little chute would get him to the ground alive. Unfortunately, that emergency system had never been tested. Worse, if Nick released the cable before Quinn cut away, it could wrap around his neck or body during free fall, breaking his spine when he deployed the parachute or preventing him from deploying it at all.
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