by Kari Nichols
Hillman allowed himself to sink further below the surface. The water at this depth was too dark for his eyes to make out anything in the murk, but he could feel the vibrations in the water. The boat’s engines slowed as they neared his position. Before it could roar past him, the driver turned wide, circling the area where Hillman had submerged.
The realization hit him and almost robbed him of his precious store of oxygen. They knew where he was. There was only one way they could be so certain of his precise location. How the hell had they discovered his locator beacon? He’d thought that it was broken. If it wasn’t, why hadn’t his people come to rescue them? There was no plausible deniability at The Sector. If shit went wrong in the field, another team would have been deployed to assist.
An active beacon meant his enemies had his location pinpointed to within ten feet. The boat slowed, but no one entered the water. One-on-one, he could take them. If they remained in the boat and waited until he ran out of air, the advantage would be theirs. Hillman needed to take the advantage once again.
Coming up under the boat, he palmed his way forward, using the curve of the boat to lead him to the front. When he was a foot from the surface, he could see clear enough that someone was searching the water for him. The guard carried an automatic rifle, his finger already gripping the trigger. Hillman pulled the knife from his belt loop and gripped it in his right hand. When the man turned away, Hillman broke the surface of the water and launched himself up the side of the boat. He gripped the edge of the boat. His knife flashed in the sunlight and arced down toward the man in front of him. With one sharp jab, he stabbed the man through the neck. Reflexively, the dead man pulled the trigger. The gun chattered. Hillman grabbed the man’s arm and strafed bullets into the boat.
The driver caught the brunt of the fire fight. Two men in the back dove for cover but a third held firm and opened fire. Hillman took three slugs to the chest and hip. His left arm still supported his weight out of the water. He couldn’t feel his right side. His right arm weakening, Hillman aimed the rifle a little to the side of the lone gunman. Three rounds burst through the boat’s engines. The boat was engulfed in flames. Gasoline spewed upward and the fire chased it. The lone gunman ignited, his hands whipping around in an effort to quell the flames, but they were too much for him.
His body fatigued beyond anything he’d ever endured, Hillman dropped back into the water. He had another brief thought about sharks before a calm blackness set in.
Half a world away, another computer pinged as soon as the jammer was deactivated. Unbeknownst to Godin, the design of the Sector locator now included two GPS burst signals. If the first burst failed to link to a satellite, then a second burst on a different frequency would be sent. Finn had had the locators jammed before they’d ever been activated. He’d known which team to expect and what the codes were for their locators. He’d set up the jammer before Godin’s men had captured the soldiers. Once The Sector had activated each locator, it had hit the jammer. The first burst couldn’t send, so the second burst wasn’t triggered.
Now, with Hillman’s locator being unjammed, the first GPS burst hit Finn’s blind and bounced back undetected. It didn’t reach the satellite, so it triggered the second burst. While Finn was blocking one GPS burst, he was unprepared for the second burst. He scrambled to contain it, but knew it was hopeless the instant he spotted it. It was already out.
That burst made its way back to Sector HQ, to Fiona Engleton’s computer. As the head of the Signals department, all GPS transmissions came to her. She recognized the ID code on the locator. She’d had two months to memorize them all. It belonged to Steve Hillman, Sector Task Force Team Alfa Four (TA-4), Second Lieutenant, previously of the Canadian Army and Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), Canada’s elite force. He’d joined The Sector five years earlier and his record was exemplary.
Fiona ran the GPS coordinates to get their real world location. TA-4, Hillman’s team, had gone missing near Vietnam. The coordinates from his locator put him in the middle of the South China Seas. They’d been deployed to eliminate a rogue Sector Agent named Simon Elliott. They had arrived at their insertion point and then they had disappeared. The Sector activated each locator, but not a single GPS burst was received. The static she was getting back told Fiona that the signals were being jammed at the source. She’d passed the information on to the head of Deployment, Walter Freemantle, who had suggested she confer with him on this, alone.
The Sector was very compartmentalized, so the request hadn’t sounded fishy to her. The longer the team remained missing, the more the request started to stink. She had taken her information to Mark Blackburn, but he’d given her the same runaround that Freemantle had. After that, she’d kept her information to herself.
Now she had a location where they could send a team and start searching for the rest of TA-4. And she didn’t know who to trust with that information. Fiona sat at her desk, staring into space. She rattled her fingers over the keyboard without pressing any of the keys. Her eyes jumped to the picture she’d placed next to her phone. Picking it up, she stared at the three occupants. It was taken in Boston a few years earlier, before she’d come to work at The Sector. She stared at her brother’s face. His hair was the same deep auburn as hers, though she’d recently gone blonde. They had both inherited their mother’s green eyes. That was where their similarities ended. Fiona was a slim 5’8” compared to her brother’s 6’5”. He’d gained so much bulk in the Navy that everyone had started calling him Tank. The nickname had transferred over to his civilian life. He’d asked her to remain at The Sector as long as she could, even when she’d told him about the secrets being kept. She was worried that it would come back to hurt her. She needed to talk to him now. She needed to tell him what was going on and to get his advice. She’d stay if Tank thought it was best, but she was getting nervous.
Fiona had passed Blackburn in the hallway earlier that week and he’d given her a conspiratorial wink. If he kept track of the information she’d given him, he could spin it to make her look bad. Looking bad wasn’t what concerned her. Treason; now that concerned her. Canada didn’t hang people for it; but the military could always broker an exception. They’d just do so without the general public ever becoming aware of it.
Swiveling in her chair, she studied the room around her. It was full of people working on computers, just like her. The Sector employed over four thousand people around the world, both military and civilian. Three quarters of the staff were military. Fiona started with The Sector a little over four years earlier and had loved her job until quite recently. Not knowing who to trust made it impossible to enjoy her work. But she couldn’t sit on the information. There was a personal reason that was driving her harder than any other. A very good friend of her brother’s was one of the missing men. She stared at the third man in the picture on her desk.
Warp Douglass had joined the US Navy SEALs at the same time as her brother. They’d fought together, they’d partied together. They’d retired at the same time. Fiona had hung out with them on a regular basis and treated Warp as a second brother. When his team had gone missing two months earlier, she’d called her brother to inform him. She’d had precious little to tell then.
The CIA had recruited Tank before the ink had dried on his release papers. Fiona wasn’t supposed to know that, but it was difficult to keep anything from her. Tank hadn’t told her, the computers had. If the information existed on a computer, she could find it. She had given Tank the coordinates for Simon Elliott’s last known location, which was also used as TA-4’s insertion point. He’d spent two weeks scouring the jungle, but he’d found no sign of them. Now, given all the secrecy, Fiona wondered if TA-4’s plane had ever landed. Could their arrival at their insertion point have been faked?
This new set of coordinates, the one for Hillman’s locator beacon, was the best lead they’d had so far. She gathered all of the details and transferred them to a dummy account she’d set up. She didn’t need her employers trac
king her transmissions and discovering that she was sending out confidential information to a competitor. Though technically after the same objective, The Sector and the CIA didn’t play well with others. Once she’d transmitted the information from the dummy account to her brother’s dummy account, which she’d created for him, she scrubbed all data from both her dummy and work accounts. If anyone came snooping around her computer when she wasn’t at it, well, she’d know about it, but they also wouldn’t get any information she didn’t want them to have.
She hoped her brother could find TA-4 in time.
Chapter 2
The Sector, HQ – two days later
Greg Parker switched off his monitor, his computer already shut down for the night. He flicked the button on his desk lamp and grabbed his coat from the back of his chair. His office was located on sub-level 3, eighty feet below the surface of the earth. With the entire structure of their headquarters being built underground, it eliminated petty quarrels over who had the corner suite with the best view.
Parker rode the elevator up to the surface and signed out at the reception desk. The desk, manned 24 hours a day, gave every appearance of being just another main desk for a faceless conglomerate. Staff rotated often and Parker found he didn’t know half of the people who worked the desk, the current guy included.
“Good evening, Mr. Parker. On your way out for the night?” the desk clerk asked.
“Yeah,” Parker replied, dropping his briefcase onto the desk so the guy could run it through the scanners behind the counter. He signed the register and accepted his briefcase when it was cleared and walked out the front door.
Parker didn’t notice the clerk press a button under his desk. The button wasn’t an alarm. It didn’t bring the cavalry running. Once pressed, it triggered the slow release of a corrosive acid stored in a tiny ampoule. The end of the ampoule was similar to a syringe, where pressure from the inside acted as a plunger, pushing the acid out.
Parker tossed his jacket on the passenger seat and started his car. He drove out of the parking lot, nodding to the guards at the gate. They were on a three-shift detail, but every morning, Monday to Friday, it would be the same two guards. Parker didn’t know what the deal was with the front desk. Parker thought that it must be a dead boring job and no one could do it for long. The guards at the gate stopped anyone unauthorized from entering the premises, so reception didn’t even get the excitement of tossing out the unwanted public.
Half an hour later he was heading into the hills, close to home. His house was in a small valley and the quickest access was to first climb the hills that surrounded it and then descend them. As he rounded the top edge of the cliff and started down the opposite side, he touched his brake to slow for the curve. He pressed the brake pedal to the floor. The pedal was squishy and offered no reduction in speed. Using the gears, he shifted from Drive into Low 2 and felt the lurch as the engine forced the wheels to turn slower. He rounded the corner too fast, but managed to keep his car on the road.
Pressing the brake pedal all the way to the floor, he dropped the car into Low 1 and heard the whine as the engine worked overtime, trying to slow down the car’s momentum. The hill was steep and the engine was fighting a losing battle. Parker hugged the curves as best as he could. He tucked into the side of the mountain and prayed for no oncoming traffic.
The engine was smoking, or perhaps it was the tires. He could feel the car picking up speed and tried the emergency brake. Pressing the button in, he pulled up, expecting it to grab. The handle had no resistance to it. Dropping it, Parker placed both hands on the wheel and focused on making the turns. He was halfway down the mountain when a lumbering truck appeared around the corner. Parker swerved out of the oncoming lane and got around the truck, the driver blasting his horn in irritation.
He didn’t make the next curve. The course change had thrown him too far to the right and the curve came up too quick for him to get the car tucked back in again. At close to seventy kilometers an hour, he broke through the guard rails and his car sailed out over the edge before falling some ninety feet to the valley below. Watching the ground rush up at him, Parker whispered his dead wife’s name before shutting his eyes one last time.
The ampoule placed over the brake cable had long since self-destructed, removing any evidence of tampering along with it.
Lieutenant Dan Jarvis stood at the kitchen counter in his underwear, smoking a cigarette. He read the newspaper and flicked his ashes into the kitchen sink. The lead story was the car crash that had killed a local man by the name of Greg Parker. Reporters had painted him as a widower with suicidal tendencies, which Jarvis knew was bullshit.
It was that damn job. Parker had sanctioned the deployment of the task force, Freemantle had handled the initial stages and once the team was in the field, Jarvis had taken over. The team leader never checked in when the plane landed. When they’d gone missing, everyone had looked at him, but he couldn’t give them the answers they wanted because he didn’t have them.
The entire team had just vanished off the fucking planet. He knew something had happened, but he had no idea what. Two backup teams deployed to their last known location had found no traces of TA-4. Jarvis had never seen so many fingers pointing in his direction. The amount of ass-covering that went on in the military was bad enough on a good day, but it was bloody brutal on a shitty day. And the shittiest part of it was that there was no one that he could blame.
He’d been the last line of defense, aside from Fiona, but she wouldn’t be able to help unless one of the locator beacons popped and, so far, not a goddamn one had so much as blipped on the radar. They were looking to him for answers and he had nothing to give them. They had activated every single soldier’s locator beacon, to give them the widest range of coverage, and they’d gotten nothing.
No one believed that they had died. The beacons were designed to send a signal indicating that the occupant was no longer transmitting vital signs. If their target had somehow gotten the drop on them and managed to kill all sixteen men at once, they’d have known about it. From the time they’d lost contact to the time they’d activated the beacons fourteen minutes had passed.
There were two things that would have explained the lack of a signal coming in. One, a massive explosion had destroyed all of the locators before they could get an emergency signal out. And two, the locator signals were being blocked by some sort of jamming device, but the jammer would have to be powerful and set at the exact right frequency. Fiona had stated that the odds of someone guessing the frequency were on par with winning the lottery. But the odds on the first option were even worse. Her statement had intimated that someone had supplied the jammer with the correct frequency. Fingers had bounced around, but they had all ended up facing in his direction again.
It was bullshit. He was a fucking grunt, well, an ex-grunt now. He hadn’t been in the field in over five years, but he knew how to run an Op and that was all he did. He wasn’t a fucking scientist or a code-puncher and he didn’t know what signal the locators worked on. He’d never been told if his own equipment would interfere with the locator. He knew that Bailey Rhodes, who had designed the locators, was pretty hot shit around The Sector. If she said nothing they had could interfere with the signal then everyone believed her.
Funny, none of the fingers had pointed in her direction.
Jarvis butted out his cigarette in the sink and popped a fresh one in his mouth. He’d been given temporary paid leave until this mess could be investigated to The Sector’s satisfaction. They’d called him at home that morning and told him not to bother coming in to work that day. They would let him know when he was welcome back. He’d spent the entire day in his underwear, smoking his way through three packs of cigarettes and drinking half a case of beer.
When the paper had arrived that morning, he’d ignored it. Now, the realization that someone had silenced Parker’s voice caused the beer sloshing around in his belly to turn stale. Heaving most of the contents into the
sink, he waited for the worst of the nausea and fear to dissipate before dragging his drunk ass up the stairs. He’d have to sleep it off and then take some decisive action in the morning. No way was he going to sit around and wait for some lousy fucker to terminate him without due cause. He’d not done a damn thing, but he knew a few bushes to shake. He’d get his answers and then he’d see which direction those fingers pointed.
At the top of the stairs he had enough time to register the draft of air coming in from an upstairs window before a shadow burst out from the spare bedroom. Unbalanced, with his back foot hanging in midair, the push sent Jarvis tumbling back down the stairs. The alcohol in his system took the shock out of the fall and little damage was done, though he thought he’d dislocated his shoulder. Rolling onto it burned enough that he thought he’d puke again. As he lay there, waiting for the nausea to pass once more, he heard the creak on the stairs. Turning to look up them, he recognized the man in black.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded.
“You talk too much,” Morrison replied. “There are people who don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
“More like they don’t want to hear who I say it to.”
“That, too,” the man agreed as he stepped off the last step and stared down at Jarvis’ near naked form. The man was still in excellent condition. If he hadn’t had as much to drink, he might have been capable of fighting.
“Why did they send a pussy like you?” Jarvis taunted. He waited for the reaction he knew Morrison wouldn’t be able to contain. When the guy swung his leg behind him to kick Jarvis in the back, Jarvis rolled over and kicked Morrison in his stationary knee.
Morrison toppled to the ground as his knee wrenched. Before Jarvis could make another move, Morrison whipped his gun around and fired point blank into Jarvis’ face. Once the excruciating pain had subsided a little, Morrison examined his knee. If Jarvis had gotten any more strength behind the kick, he would have busted the joint and destroyed the leg.