Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  Diega nodded.

  “He said Leon wanted to meet her.”

  “DeLuca—where is she?” Vasquez said. “Can you patch me through to her?”

  “She’s not transmitting,” DeLuca replied. “The last message we got said she was going toward the back bedroom, down the hall.”

  Vasquez moved with as much speed as he could without drawing attention. Toward the back of the house, the music muted now in the distance, he opened a bedroom door, Diega right behind him, drawing his weapon as he entered, though he knew that if he fired it, the others would be on him in seconds.

  Nothing.

  They backed out, trying another door, but the room was again empty. A light shone from under the door at the end of the hall. They approached silently. Vasquez heard somebody inside speaking a Slavic language, his speech a drunken slur. He opened the door to see the Serb with his shirt off, unbuckling his belt, while MacKenzie sat on the edge of the bed. Lorkovic held his arm out to show Vasquez the hunting knife he held in his hand.

  “Here comes the brave pimp to protect his whore,” the Serb managed to say.

  Vasquez decided not to wait for him to finish his sentence. He crossed quickly and feinted to the right to make the Serb lunge awkwardly at him with the knife, dancing left to catch the man by the wrist, which he cracked into splinters behind the man’s back, wrapping his arm around Lorkovic’s throat and dropping with all his weight to snap the man’s neck, sparing the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague the trouble.

  He rose from the body as it twitched, moved to MacKenzie, and asked her if she was all right. She had a heavy clay ashtray in her right hand, which she’d hidden behind her back, and appeared to be angry.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I can take care of myself.” She tossed the ashtray on the bed, now that she no longer needed to hit the Serb on the side of the head with it. “He was about to tell me what happened to Theresa. If you could have waited two more minutes, we might have known.”

  “Good work, Hoolie,” DeLuca said. “We’ll find Theresa.”

  “I don’t think she’s here,” Vasquez said, turning to Mack. “What did Lorkovic say to you?”

  “I said I wasn’t working tonight and that I only came to find my friend Theresa,” MacKenzie said. “He said, ‘You want Theresa Davidova, I’ll show you Theresa Davidova.’ That’s all I could get him to say.”

  “Show you?” DeLuca said. “Like, ‘show you the body’?”

  “Or show you the video,” MacKenzie said.

  “Do they make snuff films here?” Vasquez asked Diega.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “They make everything here. But I haven’t heard of that.”

  “I’m pulling you out,” DeLuca said. “That’s an order. The man in the Twinstar is Vitaly Sergelin. You two are done for the night.”

  They put the body in the shower after stripping it and hanging the clothes on a hook behind the door—perhaps someone would think he’d slipped on a bar of soap.

  Outside, the music had changed from conjunto/Tejano to hip-hop as a hardcore Latino rap group took the stage, the scene by the pool starting to resemble the scene in the spa. There was a commotion on the stairs behind them. They turned to see Cipriano Cabrera leaving the meeting, arm in arm with Vitaly Sergelin. Leon Lev was right behind them, followed by the other members of the cartel and their aides and bodyguards. From the looks on everybody’s faces, the meeting had gone well, with much laughter and conviviality in evidence. Leon Lev gestured with his arm and suggested that Cabrera and the others join the party, but they only shook their heads and headed for their respective helicopters, Lev wearing the disappointed look of a man who’d gone to an awful lot of trouble and expense for nothing. MacKenzie heard him bark an order to one of his aides, saying, “Get me Dushko!”

  They watched as first the black helicopter and then the white one rose from the ground, the ferocious backwash kicking up a cloud of dust. Hoolie looked at his watch. It was eighteen minutes after midnight. They were standing by the cab when they saw the explosions in the sky, a relatively small one followed by a much larger one, then balls of fire as the fuel ignited, burning debris blowing out and falling from the sky in slow motion. There was a numb silence, and then the ranch filled with shouting and screaming as panicked people began to stream out the gates of the resort, men and women piling into limousines and cars and peeling out as fast as they could, while inside the gates, men with machine guns and rifles held their weapons at the ready, looking confusedly into the sky and talking into their walkie-talkies and trying to figure out what had just happened.

  “The Rio Grande Bridge,” Vasquez told the cab driver. “Quickly. Can we drop you off somewhere?” he asked Diega, who said the bridge would be fine.

  When they were clear of the chaotic scene, Vasquez bit down twice on his transmitter.

  “What happened?” he asked. The cab driver eyed him in his rear-view mirror.

  “Two choppers down,” DeLuca told him. “No apparent survivors.”

  “Cabrera and the Russian?”

  “Negative,” DeLuca said. “Cabrera and the Cobra that came with him. The Russian got away.”

  “Stingers or SAMs? Or triple-A?”

  “Negative,” DeLuca said. “Nothing lit up.”

  “RPGs?”

  “Negative,” DeLuca said. “Too high to hit.”

  “C4? Maybe someone put an IED on the chopper during the meeting.”

  “Maybe,” DeLuca said, “but who put one on the Cobra? It never landed.”

  “Did we shoot ’em down?” MacKenzie asked. “What’d we have in the air?”

  “Nothing,” DeLuca said. “We had the UAV but both Hellfires are intact. The A-10s weren’t in the area.”

  “So how, then?” Vasquez said. “And who, if it wasn’t us? Colombians? Rivals? The Mexican government?”

  “Hang on,” DeLuca said. “We’re processing the intel now. We’ll let you know.”

  They went over it again and again. When both helicopters took off at once, in opposite directions, DeLuca had had to make a quick decision, which one to follow. He let the Russian go, knowing it was probably going to take him to the private airstrip where his Gulf 5 jet was waiting, and instead sent the UAV after the white Sikorsky carrying Cipriano Cabrera and friends. The Predator kept the aircraft securely in view of its variable aperture infrared camera. Peggy Romano reran the pre-explosion sequence several times, the camera clearly showing the heat from the engine and the body heat from the passengers. The data stream refreshed twenty times a second. Slowing the stream to virtual stop-time, it appeared that at 0022 hours, eighteen and fourteen-twentieths of a second, everything was normal with the Cobra gunship, the first to explode. By 0022 hours eighteen and fifteen-twentieths of a second, the external temperature of the aircraft had reached fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit, a near-instantaneous ignition, imparting so much energy to the aircraft that according to Peggy Romano’s best estimate, the largest piece of debris to survive the explosion was a three-inch-long piece of rotor. The same thing happened a mere 1.7 seconds later with the second helicopter. The best thermobaric shells the military had only reached sixteen hundred degrees at midplasma, and detonations radiated out from the center, an entirely different signature from what DeLuca had just witnessed.

  In other words, it wasn’t a bomb on board, and it wasn’t a missile. Nor, Romano said, was it a signature similar to anything a MIRACL or THEL laser would leave. If it was Darkstar, DeLuca concluded, then Darkstar was armed with a weapon unlike anything LeDoux had briefed him about, and LeDoux would have told him what he knew.

  “Send your data and your report to Captain Martin,” DeLuca told Romano. “Tell me something—who else knew we were flying a Predator tonight? Who else could know?”

  “The operator at Nellis,” she said. “And his team, I suppose.”

  “Our downlink here is secure, right?”

  “Right,” Romano said.

  “How about
between Nellis and the bird controlling the UAV?”

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  “So somebody could have intercepted the feed?” he said.

  “Conceivably,” he said. “It’s encrypted, but that can be defeated.”

  “The God problem,” DeLuca said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Just an expression,” DeLuca said. “And the Predator was flying good? No mechanical problems?”

  “None.”

  “Clear from being damaged by any flying debris?”

  “Clear.”

  “Any reason you can think of, then,” he asked her, “why we lost contact with the Predator two seconds after the second chopper went down?”

  Chapter Nine

  DELUCA’S PHONE RANG THE FOLLOWING MORNing. He’d risen early to read through the scientific papers Dr. Penelope Burgess had given him. The morning news programs were reporting the crash of a helicopter believed to have been carrying Mexican drug lord Cipriano Cabrera, an attack believed to have been led by rival narcotraficantes hoping to take over the cartel. Mitch Pasternak sounded like he had a cold. DeLuca told him maybe he should see a doctor.

  “For a cold?” he said. “With the doctors around here, I’ll end up on my own table. Don’t worry about it—I wear a mask half the day anyway, so when I need to, I can blow my nose without using my hands. I got the results back on the items you sent me. What do you want first?”

  “Maybe the hair sample,” DeLuca said.

  “Not much there,” Pasternak said. “Female, young, used conditioner. What else do you want to know? No sign of drug use of any kind. Clean as a whistle. Was this person from some sort of ethnic group?”

  “Isn’t everyone?” DeLuca asked. “She was Native American.”

  “I thought she might be,” Pasternak said. “The piece of beach glass you sent me is a bit more interesting.”

  “Because?”

  “My first thought was that you were wasting my time. It was a rock, and it was clean, no blood, no hair, not used as a weapon. But it was a strange sort of rock—I had a rock collection as a child. I won first place in my second-grade science fair with it, as a matter of fact. I had a piece of obsidian I used to carry in my pocket that the sample you sent reminded me of. At any rate, I chipped off a piece and ground it into powder to run a spectrographic analysis.”

  DeLuca wasn’t sure he liked the way Pasternak teased him along. Gillian just gave it to you straight. On the other hand, Pasternak was much droller, his sense of humor even darker than Gillian’s, if that were possible.

  “Can we skip the ‘I’m-so-clever-you-have-to-guess-what-I-know’ part?” DeLuca asked. “I’m kind of on a schedule here.”

  “What fun is that?” Pasternak said. “Well okay. My second thought was that you’d sent me a bouillon cube from the primordial soup. It was full of DNA.”

  “Can we say whose?”

  “We can’t,” Pasternak said. “There’s no point in sending it along to the FBI because it’s not in any sequence. You need intact strands to identify someone. This stuff was scrambled to where an ordinary pathologist might say, ‘Well, it’s organic, but beyond that, we can’t tell.’ You think this was a lightning strike?”

  “Something like that,” DeLuca said.

  “Well, your lightning bolt or something like that definitely hit something,” Pasternak said. “Using what I have in my lab, it would be hard for an ordinary pathologist to say if the DNA we’ve got came from a cactus or a coyote. Fortunately…”

  “You’re not an ordinary pathologist?” DeLuca guessed.

  “Exactly,” Pasternak said. “I took another sample and sent it to a friend of mine at Helixa who said he’d run it through one of his amplifiers…”

  “That’s the genome project lab in Cambridge?” DeLuca said.

  “One of two in the race,” Pasternak said. “NIH was the other, but NIH had a much slower approach, taking the thing in order and moving from one end to the other. The thing Carl Schiffler at Helixa came up with was a way of breaking the chromosome down into its one hundred thousand separate parts, much like the scrambled DNA in the sample you sent me, and then they’d amplify each gene a million times or whatever and then put the whole sequence back together. Anyway, my friend was able to narrow it down a bit. This came from the Sonora Desert, correct, and not from the jungles of Borneo or the Congo?”

  “Correct,” DeLuca said. “Near the Mexican border.”

  “Well then it’s probably not an orangutan or great ape of some sort,” Pasternak said, “which means it’s human.”

  “And this Carl Schiffler guy is certain?” DeLuca asked.

  “Carl Schiffler is 100 percent certain of everything he thinks he knows, but he’s not the person I asked,” Pasternak said. “He owns Helixa, but he’s not who I talked to. Carl Schiffler wouldn’t give me the time of day. Or he would, but he’d lie. But yes, my friend is certain.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So how did it get in the glass?” DeLuca asked. “Could lightning do that?”

  “Lightning can do anything,” Pasternak said. “I don’t know if you’re going to remember this, but a couple years ago in South Africa, there was a soccer game, and one of the teams hired a witch doctor to put a hex on the other team, so during the game, the sky clouded over and there was a lightning strike, and all the players on one team got hit. And it’s not like they were all standing in a group—they were spread out all across the field, mixed in with the other players. That’s an absolutely true story. You can look it up.”

  “I imagine the witch doctor didn’t have much trouble finding work after that,” DeLuca said.

  “He’s probably got his own infomercial,” Pasternak said. “So could lightning fuse sand into glass? Sure. Could that fusion incorporate genetic material? I suppose, though it doesn’t seem likely. I did some research on lightning strikes. We don’t get a lot of those in Boston, so I have no personal experience with lightning victims. Only 10 percent or so are fatal. There’s a guy in Italy who’s been hit six times and he’s still an atheist.”

  “You’d think he’d learn to stay indoors anyway,” DeLuca said.

  “You would,” Pasternak said. “Maybe he likes it. Maybe he works for the railroads and he’s never had any money.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning he’s a poor conductor,” Pasternak said. “Anyway, you get a huge range of variables, depending upon the strength of the strike and the proximity, if it’s a direct hit or a side flash, lots of things. There’ve been cases where the victim suffers first- or second- or even third-degree burns, and others where the victim himself is relatively untouched, but his clothes are burned right off of him. Or her. If I’d have known that was possible in junior high school, I could not have stopped praying for lightning to strike Stephanie Goldbaum. As a rule, burning is minimal, or maybe not minimal, but it’s not like the janitors at the power plants who get fried when their keys get caught in the transformers. Lightning is a current and currents travel on the outer surfaces of things. Burns tend to be associated with the things people are wearing, jewelry, belts, piercings, hats, wet clothing. The air surrounding the bolt heats up to around fifty thousand degrees, which then expands and causes the thunder you hear, but an average stroke of say a million volts, or just under a thousand times what comes out of your sockets at home, and maybe thirty thousand amperes, only lasts .0002 second. They think some bolts get as high as three hundred thousand amps and ten or fifteen million volts, which is probably going to sting, but that’s more the exception than the rule. That’s on the ground. There are discharges of megalightning above the clouds in the form of sprites and blue jets that reach fifty miles into space and carry billions of volts. Somebody who’s hit on the ground, you get heart failure, respiratory paralysis, hearing loss, vision problems, EKG abnormalities, and a whole lot of psychological sequela including memory loss, confusion, inattentiveness, and irritabilit
y, which may all come from thinking God hates you, but burns are, well, they’re a part of it, but they’re not the biggest part.”

  “So you couldn’t, for example, vaporize a person with a lightning bolt?”

  “Vaporize somebody?” Pasternak said, laughing. “My God, who are we worried about—Zeus? I guess my best answer is, I don’t know, but I really don’t think so. You could maybe vaporize a mouse or a rat. I don’t think anybody’s gone out in a lightning storm with a kite and tied the other end to a rat to find out.”

  “You don’t know DOD,” DeLuca said. “I can almost guarantee you, someone has.”

  He’d just called the radio station WROZ and left a message to ask to speak to Ed Clark, of Sea to Shining Sea, when a chartreuse Neon pulled into the motel parking lot and Sami Jambazian got out, dressed in his own clothes again. DeLuca greeted him warmly and invited him in, handing him a cup of coffee, black with two sugars, the way he knew Sami liked it.

  “Thanks, but we’re not allowed to drink caffeine,” Sami said. DeLuca shot him a questioning look. “I’ve been trying to decaffeinate myself for a long time anyway, so I figured I’d go with it. I had a headache for a day but it went away. It’s the not eating meat part that’s hard—I’m so constipated I think I’m gonna blow up. Don’t worry—I’m taking something for it.”

  “Welcome back to Earth,” DeLuca said. “You traded the Mercedes for a Neon?”

  “It’s the group car,” Sami said. He looked around at all the technology inside the Jet Stream. “Jesus. Nice place you got.”

  “We also have Playstation 2 and TiVo. So what do you think? What’s up with the Brethren?”

  “It’s interesting,” Sami said. “They’re not stupid. They look like they are, but they’re not. They just really want somebody to lead them. They’re tired, and probably a little naïve. I think for a lot of them, the best part is being told what to wear and eat and drink and think and say, and then they get jobs trimming the rose bushes and it’s like the best vacation they ever had. Something like that. They all really support each other, which maybe looks weird from the outside, but from the inside, it’s all they want. They hug a lot.”