War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel

by James Rollins

  Tucker turned to Jane. “I think I know someone who might be able to help us with that, someone who can quietly pull some strings in Washington and discover who was truly behind your project and the one at Redstone.”

  Jane scrunched her nose. “Who are you—?”

  Sandy interrupted her. “As you’ll see, Nora, I succeeded in perfecting Turing’s system. I did so for two reasons. First, to see if it was possible, but also as a fail-safe. Since I couldn’t discover who’s behind all of this, I wanted to discover a way to stop it in case anyone else followed in my footsteps. I figured I’d have to build it in order to know how to tear it down.”

  “Smart,” Nora said, as if speaking to the ghost on the screen.

  “With the code finished, I was able to create a mirror image of the same algorithms. It’s a way to tear down any functioning version of my systems, even the GUT-C code that I developed already for Tangent. It will basically lobotomize any AI created through my designs.”

  Tucker noted a file that was named LOBOTOMY. It must contain the countercode to her operating systems.

  Sandy leaned closer to the camera. “Nora, you must stop them at any cost. Alan Turing was abused and destroyed because of the truth of who he was. Don’t let them do the same with his final work.” Sandy finally sat back, stared at her hands, then back at the screen. “Nora, I love you. I never said it before, but I should have. I hope it’s not too late.”

  A sad smile glowed on the screen as the video ended, freezing there forever.

  Nora reached up and touched the screen, tracing Sandy’s chin with a fingertip. Finally her hand fell away. Nora hung her head for a long breath.

  When she finally spoke, it was soft and forlorn. “She was so bloody smart . . . and so beautiful . . .”

  Jane went to her and pulled her close. “Nora, I’m so sorry.”

  Nora’s shoulders shook as she quietly sobbed.

  10:12 P.M.

  Standing in the parking lot of the resort’s golf course, Tucker shivered as he waited in the dark. After night had fallen, the desert temperatures had plummeted from the low eighties to just shy of forty degrees. He stood guard with Kane at the rear of their SUV. An hour ago, he and Frank had carried Rex out to the open grass of the course and launched the drone for its covert assault on the antenna array atop Tangent Tower.

  He could hear Nora and Frank talking inside the Honda Pilot, the two of them helping guide Rex for this sortie. Jane was also with them, offering whatever technical advice she could.

  He patted Kane’s side. “Looks like it’s just the two of us on guard duty.”

  Kane wagged his tail.

  “Yeah, it’s just the way I like it, too.”

  After another half hour, the back hatch opened, and Jane poked her head out. “You should see this.”

  Tucker leaned down to Kane and waved an arm. “CLOSE PATROL.”

  He did not want any surprises tonight.

  The shepherd took off, gliding through the darkness and vanishing.

  Only then did Tucker turn his attention to the darkened interior of the Pilot. As an extra precaution, Tucker had removed the bulb from the SUV’s overhead lamp. The only light source came from the tiny screen of the jury-rigged CUCS control unit and the laptop attached to it. The view on the computer screen looked down upon the lit-up wedge of Tangent Tower. The feed came from Rex’s camera.

  “Should you be flying that close to the building?” Tucker asked.

  Frank dismissed his concern. “We’re at the drone’s max elevation and in full stealth mode. Kane’s not the only one that knows how to keep out of sight.”

  Nora added, “We need to be this close in order for Rex to hack into Tangent’s systems without being detected.”

  “And how’s that going?”

  Frank grinned proudly. “Beautifully.”

  Nora was less enthusiastic. “We’ve only partially penetrated the data firewall. We don’t dare push any deeper. Like Sandy mentioned, her central operating system still has some bugs and weaknesses in it. So we’re pulling what we can slowly.”

  “A gigabyte a second isn’t slow.” Frank sounded wounded, as if Nora had insulted his best friend.

  And maybe she had.

  Nora waved a hand. “If Rex had Sandy’s latest algorithms, there’d be no limits to what that drone could do.”

  With her mind on the task at hand, Nora’s mood had much improved. Earlier, she had spent the evening in her room. Through the door, Tucker heard Sandy’s faint voice as Nora reviewed the video several more times on the laptop. Tucker doubted the repeated viewings had anything to do with gathering more intelligence. Still, when Nora had finally stepped out, she looked more collected, her staunchness fueled by a fiery anger in her eyes.

  Frank refused to let anyone trash talk his pet project. “Rex is not only gathering data at those speeds but processing what he’s culling. It shouldn’t be much longer until he finds something useful.”

  Janet nodded. “It’s damned impressive. All Frank and Nora had to do was give Rex some search parameters, and the drone took it from there. The drone isn’t just dryly compiling information. It’s looking for anomalies, mapping trends, and doing some rudimentary analysis.”

  Frank explained. “I asked Rex to sniff out any communication between the tower and White Sands. Rex should be able—”

  Nora interrupted Frank, drawing his attention back to the screen. Their chatter quickly dissolved into technical details beyond his pay grade.

  Jane smiled at Tucker, lifting an eyebrow. She was clearly amused by the camaraderie of the pair and silently reminded him: Remember when we were like them?

  He did.

  Frank rolled to the side slightly. “I think we got something. Come see.”

  A map glowed in a corner of the screen. It showed the territory of White Sands with a cluster of blue dots near the northern end of the base.

  “Rex managed to detect a series of communications over the last week, all directed to a specific set of GPS coordinates.”

  “What’s more,” Nora added, “there’s been an uptick in that communication over the past twenty-four hours.”

  “Something’s happening out there,” Frank said.

  Tucker could guess the source of that commotion.

  Webster’s convoy must have arrived from Redstone.

  Tucker straightened. “Looks like someone should go out and see what all the fuss is about.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Frank asked. “Another hunting expedition?”

  “Don’t think that’ll work a second time.”

  “Well, whatever your plan is, let’s not hang out there for too long.” Frank pointed to the markers on the map. “That section of White Sands is home to the Trinity Site—as in the first detonation of an atomic bomb.”

  “What’s your concern?”

  “My concern is that at some point I’d like to have children. If we hang around that place too long, I’m afraid I’ll start glowing, and my little swimmers will die.”

  Jane spoke up, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Frank. We won’t be blindly wandering the desert.”

  Tucker turned to her. She had spent a good part of the evening using his phone in private. She must have been prepping for what was to come. He didn’t like her expression at the moment, having seen it all too often.

  “Jane, when you get that look, I get worried.”

  She smiled. “You should be.”

  19

  October 23, 3:48 P.M. MDT

  Bingham, New Mexico

  The next day, Tucker drove through the blazing desert. A straight strip of two-lane blacktop stretched through a dry desert of rock and scrub brush. Overhead, the sky shone a startling blue, unblemished save for a few cotton-ball clouds.

  He headed west along Highway 360, which hugged the northern border of the White Sands Missile Range. The surrounding rugged territory and the mountains in the distance shared a histor
y with Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, and the notorious Apaches, Cochise and Geronimo.

  Struck by the breathtaking desolation of the area, Tucker found the vast expanse daunting. If the coordinates Rex had found were correct, their group would need to venture dozens of miles into restricted, heavily guarded territory.

  But at the moment, his passengers were oblivious of such worries.

  During the three-hour drive, Jane had fallen asleep in the backseat, with Kane tucked in a ball close to her belly. She was plainly exhausted, but he knew much of her fatigue was due to the heavy weight on her shoulders. Despite her brave words upon arriving on his doorstep, she was scared—not for her own sake, but for her son’s. Last night, he had caught her looking at photos of Nathan on her phone, swiping slowly through them when she thought no one was looking, her eyes full of pain and love.

  It was good she had these hours to rest—which was true for all of them.

  Seated next to Tucker, Frank drowsed with his chin on his chest. Though Frank did lift his head in time to see a green sign for the tiny town of Bingham flash past—population nine. Tucker slowed, noting a small general store and a little farther on a large sign for a rock shop.

  Their destination was another twenty miles ahead along the highway.

  It would soon be time to get everyone moving.

  They had left Nora back in Las Cruces, where she was studying Sandy’s code, seeing if they could use any of it to their benefit. This morning, Tucker had spoken with her after a Starbucks run. It looked like the woman hadn’t slept all night. She seemed determined to finish what Sandy had started, no matter where it might lead. Past her exhaustion, Tucker also saw the haunted look in her eyes. He sensed her need to talk and had sat with her.

  “You have to understand,” Nora had eventually shared, waving at the screen of code in front of her, “this was Sandy’s passion. She always felt a deep bond with Alan Turing, an affinity that transcended hero worship. Maybe because she felt a kinship with the man—not only for their common love of math and codes but because they shared a lifetime of prejudice, persecution, and secrets.”

  Tucker had understood.

  For Sandy, it couldn’t have been easy growing up gay in Appalachia.

  “She seemed almost protective of Turing’s memory.” Nora offered a small sad smile. “I used to tease her, telling her the only reason she liked me was because I was both gay and British, like her hero.”

  From the way Nora spoke about Sandy, he knew their relationship went much deeper than that. So he let her talk, knowing it helped her reconcile her loss. Eventually she had returned to her work, looking more determined and less compulsive.

  Jane stirred in the backseat, stretching an arm and stifling a yawn. “How much longer until we reach the Sirocco trailer?”

  “Fifteen to twenty minutes.”

  She sat up, looking surprised. The movement woke Kane, who huffed at having his nap disturbed. She checked her watch. “Then we need to get ready.”

  The plan from here was dicey at best. White Sands had been in operation for some seventy years, home to decades of top-secret military projects. Base security was tight. Whether Jane’s plan would be enough to get them to Rex’s coordinates without being caught, only time would tell.

  Jane pulled up her iPad, which tracked their progress. “There should be a turnoff on your left in another five miles. But we should pull over before that, get our eyes on our target first.”

  Tucker had already planned on doing that. Once close enough, he slowed and guided their SUV onto the shoulder of the road. “Better stay inside,” he warned the others.

  He climbed out into the heat, popped the hood, and spent a few minutes pretending to check the engine. He reached and undid the radiator cap, letting steam escape. Then he wiped his sweating brow and climbed back inside, leaving the hood propped open, as if waiting for the overheated engine to cool.

  Once he was behind the wheel, Jane handed him a set of binoculars. “Follow the dirt road ahead back some hundred yards or so off the highway.”

  Peering through the binoculars, he did as instructed and found a white construction trailer sitting out there, fronted by unpainted wooden steps. A sign over the door read:

  SIROCCO POWER

  EL PASO, TEXAS

  Frank had his own set of binoculars and must have noted the same sign. “Those guys are a long way from home.”

  Tucker panned around, finding nothing but open desert. He saw no evidence of the neighboring military base: no tall fence, no ominous warning signs. All he spotted was a rutted tract heading out into that rugged landscape. He knew fifteen miles due south was the Trinity Site, where Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team detonated an eighteen-kiloton atomic bomb, forming a crater of radioactive light green glass ten feet deep and a thousand feet wide.

  Tucker felt a shiver on the back of his neck.

  This is where World War II ended and the Cold War began.

  He returned his attention to the trailer and spotted a dusty, late-model white Ford Expedition parked alongside it, emblazoned with the Sirocco Power logo on its doors: a red-and-yellow mountain peak beneath a single blue lightning bolt.

  “What do you think?” Jane asked.

  “It’ll have to do,” he conceded.

  She clapped him on the shoulder. “Now there’s the can-do attitude I know and love.”

  Using Tucker’s secure sat phone, Jane had spent all day yesterday discreetly searching for a chink in the armor of White Sands security, looking for the best way onto the base. Through her multiple contacts, she eventually found it.

  Sirocco Power was contracted by the state of New Mexico to build eight hundred miles of power lines for wind and solar energy. A bone of contention with the Department of Defense was that fifty miles of those lines would run through a northern corner of White Sands. Still, with both the state government and the federal Bureau of Land Management backing the project, the Pentagon eventually folded, but not before gaining some concessions, which included the tight monitoring of any Sirocco employees at the work site.

  At this early stage of the project, those employees only numbered two: a pair of engineers who were conducting land surveys in this remote corner. According to Jane, they rotated those engineers fairly regularly—which, considering how isolated it was out here, only made sense.

  “Car’s coming,” Frank warned.

  To the west, a gray Jeep with a yellow light on top headed their way.

  Definitely military.

  Uh-oh.

  The vehicle must have come from the Stallion Gate ten miles farther up the road, marking the northernmost entrance to White Sands. Suspecting this was a routine patrol, Tucker got back out and returned to examining the engine compartment. He retightened the radiator cap as the vehicle drew abreast of the SUV.

  As the Jeep slowed, Tucker raised an arm, giving them a thumbs-up. With the sun glinting off the vehicle’s windows, he could see nothing of the interior, but he felt a pair of eyes watching him.

  Keep moving, he silently urged.

  Without a word, the Jeep’s engine growled deeper, and the vehicle continued down the road and soon disappeared around a bend. He suspected they’d run his license plate number. He hoped the false ID used to rent the vehicle continued to hold water.

  Not wanting to push his luck, Tucker spent a few more minutes tinkering with the engine before shutting the hood and rejoining the others. He wheeled the SUV around and backtracked to the nearby town of Carrizozo, where the team had dinner and mapped out their plan.

  As the sun finally sank away, Tucker faced the group across the ruins of their meal. “Ready?” he asked.

  It would be now or never.

  He got nods all around. Kane, seated at his feet under the table, wagged his tail.

  For better or worse, at least it’s unanimous.

  8:09 P.M.

  Ninety minutes later, Tucker slowed the Honda Pilot as he neared the dirt road th
at led to the trailer belonging to Sirocco Power. He doused his headlights, made the turn, and coasted to a stop. A hundred yards down the darkened road, yellow rectangles of light marked the trailer’s position, a lonely outpost here in the desert.

  He and Frank got out, while Jane took the wheel with Kane in the passenger seat. The two of them donned ski masks and took off low through the scrub brush, while Jane turned on the headlights and continued slowly down the bumpy road toward the trailer.

  As she did so, Tucker angled wide with Frank, circling toward the far side of the trailer from the approaching Honda Pilot. The plan was simple: to blitz the two engineers before they were any the wiser.

  As Jane pulled up to the trailer’s steps and rolled down her window, the door opened and a tall man took a step out.

  Jane called over to him. “I’m sorry to bother you. I saw your lights on. I think I’m lost.”

  As Tucker approached the trailer from the shadows, he recognized the sweet charm in her voice, imagining her sheepish smile as she played her role.

  “Where you trying to get?” the man asked, tugging a company cap more firmly on his head as he headed over to her. He carried a beer bottle in his hand.

  A glance through the nearest window showed another man lounging on a sofa inside the trailer, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt, watching a football game on a big LCD television.

  Sorry to interrupt game night, boys.

  On Tucker’s signal, Frank ran out of the dark and blindsided the man, hitting him from behind and crashing his target headlong into the side of the SUV. At the same time, Tucker dashed through the door in a single bound. The fellow on the sofa only had time to swing his legs to the floor when Tucker pointed his JPX handgun at his face.

  “You really don’t want me to fire.”

  Outside, Kane growled as Jane let the shepherd loose.