Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  The smoke was still thick, but they could see him now. Twenty-five feet away their target stood still in the middle of the room, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his legs together.

  His eyes on the six men in front of him.

  Above him Dakota could see stars—there was a jagged eight-foot-long hole in the roof above Violator’s head.

  Dakota shouted, “Contact front!” and he pressed his trigger.

  And then, just like that, their target was gone. He fired straight up, into the air and through the hole in the roof.

  The six JSOC operators stood there, guns trained on empty space. Dakota had gotten one round off, but he didn’t think he’d hit anything.

  The team leader was the first to run forward. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling now, and he saw nothing but the nighttime sky.

  Harley stepped up next to him. “There is no way that just happened.”

  77

  Court soared through the broken roof, his eyes closed and his appendages tight against his body lest he rake them across the jagged edges marking the border of the breach created by the charge he’d affixed to the ceiling soon after his arrival here at Alexandria Eight. Once he felt the cool of the night air on his skin he opened his eyes, and he watched the large CIA safe house fall away below him as he rose, shooting upwards as fast as he would if he were flying in a plane.

  He still wasn’t feeling great about his chances—his heart pounded and his stomach cinched tight with terror—but he’d made it out of the range of the JSOC boys, so he knew there was nothing else he could do to affect his chances now.

  Court told himself he should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

  Instead, however, he fought a wave of nausea as the motion and the nerves played havoc on his insides.

  —

  At the Special Activities Division cache in Harvey Point, North Carolina, Court had run across a new piece of equipment that immediately reminded him of something very old.

  The Fulton recovery system, more commonly known as the Skyhook, was something of a legendary device in special operations. Invented in the 1950s, the Skyhook was a personnel ground-to-air retrieval system consisting of a large balloon attached to a rope, which connected to a body harness. When the device worked as advertised, the balloon rose to several hundred feet, and an aircraft equipped with a capture device grabbed the rope under the balloon and then heaved the person in the harness up into the sky. Once alongside the aircraft an operator in the cabin could then use a device to reel in and recover the “victim.”

  It sounded great in theory, a little too Buck Rogers, perhaps, but for a spy behind the lines with no other options, it was much better than nothing.

  But Court had heard of no more than five or six times where a Skyhook recovery had been successfully executed in the field.

  The item Court noticed in the experimental locker at the Point was a modernized and miniaturized version of the Skyhook. Named the Buzzhook, instead of a huge balloon and helium tanks, this ground-to-air retrieval device employed a 16-by-16-inch quadcopter that could climb vertically at fifty miles an hour carrying a payload of fifteen pounds.

  Behind the quadcopter, three hundred yards of four-millimeter bonded Kevlar rope spun out quickly from a large, spring-loaded spool in Court’s backpack. The rope was black in color and it had been invisible in the dark attic, so thin that even with rail lights from the JSOC assaulters’ firearms they could not see it, especially with the smoke from the breaching charge in the air.

  As soon as he’d blown the roof, Court pressed a preset button on the drone and it fired straight up through the hole created by the breaching charge. The Buzzhook pulled its cordage to a height of nine hundred feet in just seconds. Here it stopped suddenly and began hovering, staying perfectly in place with its onboard GPS receiver and its gyroscope.

  An infrared light blinked on the drone, and a second infrared light, attached to the cord a hundred feet below the Buzzhook, blinked as well.

  Within moments of the drone launching out of the roof of Alexandria Eight, a de Havilland Twin Otter with a painted-over tail number flew to the exact same GPS coordinates, but at an altitude of only 400 feet. The hundreds of people on the ground—the media, first responders, local cops, FBI, and interested CIA officials—all stood and stared. Police helicopters had seen the craft coming in from miles away, but it had claimed to be on its base leg for nearby Washington National Airport, and it only deviated from its flight path forty seconds earlier, so there was no time to begin tracking it before it arrived.

  Timing had been everything, of course, and here Court had had to make a few educated guesses. He’d told Zack to plan on arriving directly above Alexandria Eight at twelve thirty a.m., but to plan to have an excuse ready for air traffic control that could speed them up by five minutes, or slow them down by the same amount.

  That gave Court a ten-minute window.

  The Twin Otter captured the Kevlar cord and pulled Gentry into the sky at twelve thirty-three, yanking him almost straight up by entering a steep climb.

  Court looked down at an altimeter on his watch and saw he had ascended four hundred feet. He looked up and behind him, and finally he saw the aircraft, flying black now, all its lights extinguished. He kept his body tucked as tightly as possible, felt the incredible wind and cold and even the thick mist as he was pulled along through a small cloud, and he told himself that this was not nearly as bad as he thought it was going to be. As long as the tiny cord that served as his lifeline held, then he would be fine.

  But as he was looking at the dark aircraft above him, he saw something that made his heart stop. The Twin Otter suddenly banked to the left . . . hard to the left.

  Court knew physics well enough to understand what would come next, so he closed his eyes and held on to the harness inside his clothes by wrapping his arms even tighter across his chest.

  Two seconds later he felt his harness wrenched hard in the direction of the plane above, then he whipped around at over one hundred miles an hour. He screamed a volley of curse words and he kept his eyes closed, but when he felt the pull direction change again, and he sensed he was now flying forward and not backwards, he gave in and opened them.

  The Fox 5 helicopter he had flown in forty-five minutes earlier was now right in front of him, no more than one hundred yards away, its rotor blades churning the air.

  The harness pulled harder now, Court seemed to climb faster, and he passed fifty feet above the whipping blades of the Bell 206.

  Court vomited into the night.

  Thirty seconds later and only a minute and ten seconds after leaving the attic of the CIA safe house, Court found himself hanging right next to the open cabin door of the aircraft. The pilot had made no more evasive maneuvers; Court knew the massive starboard-side propeller of the Dash 6 was only fifteen feet behind him, so he prayed no more aerobatics were forthcoming. He looked into the dark cabin and saw Zack Hightower wearing a flight suit, a large earmuff headset, and goggles. His blond hair whipped in the wind as he reached out with a hooked device in his hand. With this he grabbed onto Court’s harness and pulled him towards the cabin doorway.

  Court’s feeling of weightlessness went away in an instant when Zack grabbed the harness with his hand, then pitched backwards, heaving himself and Court to the floor of the cabin. While both men lay there in a heap, Zack spoke into the mic of his headset. “Punch it, Travers!”

  Court looked up and forward into the open cockpit. Chris Travers sat alone in the left seat, a baseball cap turned around backwards and big earmuff headphones on his own ears. Immediately he reached up to the throttle above him and shoved it all the way towards the windscreen. The pitch of the engine outside the open left side door rose markedly. Court climbed up to his knees and off of Zack, but Zack remained on his back. For some reason Court saw him sniffing his gloved hand.

 
“Did you puke? That’s nasty, bro.”

  Court helped him shut the cabin door.

  —

  The Twin Otter wasn’t the fastest aircraft in the CIA’s inventory, but this one was one of the few that Matt Hanley could plausibly deny as belonging to him. It had been stripped of all markings in preparation of reregistering it and using it on special operations in Central and South America, and since the new registry had not been completed, the aircraft remained in a perfect state of limbo to be employed in the Gentry rescue operation.

  It was also a dependable aircraft, and although its top speed was barely two hundred miles an hour, that was fast enough for the plan devised by Court and Zack, and then tweaked by the pilot.

  Just two hours earlier when Hanley called Travers asking for some quick help, the young Ground Branch operator ran some numbers and looked at some maps, then he rushed frantically to attach the tubular polymer capture “horns” to the port wing of his aircraft and get the bird in the air.

  While he did all this Zack worked on acquiring the gear the three men would need for the next stage of this operation. Namely, food, water, camping gear, and three parachutes. All this he had stowed in the cabin and strapped down, and while Travers set the autopilot just five minutes after picking up Gentry, the other two men began quickly donning their chutes. Travers had already turned off his radio because he got tired of listening to air traffic control yell at him, but he assumed Air Force F-16s from Langley Air Force Base had been scrambled and were en route to intercept the illegal flight. He knew a Dash 6 didn’t have much of a chance against a World War I–era fighter plane, much less an F-16, so he wanted to be long gone from this poor bird before they got in range.

  Three minutes later, after a quick handshake from Travers and a forced hug from Zack Hightower that made Court’s gunshot wound to his ribs hurt like hell, Court opened the cabin door and leapt out. The other two men did the same, each far enough apart to where, in the darkness, there was no chance they’d find one another on the ground.

  By design, all three men landed in different parts of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  After he buried his chute and put on his backpack, Court checked his GPS and found himself only five miles west of the town of Sperryville, Virginia. His first inclination was to walk those five miles, arrive by daylight, and then stop at the first Waffle House he could find.

  But he fought that urge with a wistful smile, and instead he turned east, heading away from civilization and deeper towards the dark mountains.

  Zack Hightower splashed down in a dank oxbow lake alongside the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. He cussed and bitched as he climbed out of the murky water, slicked slime off his clothes, and slung his pack over his back. Checking his GPS and looking over this terrain, he decided he’d make camp right here, just so he could get out of his clothes and get some sleep. First thing in the morning, he told himself, he’d walk east to Luray, Virginia, and he’d hop a bus back to D.C. He had no idea if he would have a job at CIA, but tomorrow was a workday, and he wanted to be ready for work, just in case his new master called.

  Chris Travers sat alone in the back of the aircraft for a few minutes, then he jumped out himself. He misjudged the wind around his landing zone and ended up stuck in a tree in the mountains on the Virginia/West Virginia border. He wasn’t hurt, but it took him till well past sunup to untangle himself, climb up his lines to the canopy, and get out of the pine tree.

  By noon, however, he walked into the town of Brady, West Virginia, sat down in a diner, and ordered a turkey sandwich and a Diet Coke. While he ate at the counter he watched TV coverage of the event the evening before in Alexandria, culminating with an airborne rescue and an attempted escape.

  Travers hid his smile behind his sandwich when the reporter then said the aircraft had crashed into a desolate field high in the Allegheny Mountains, and all on board were presumed dead.

  He left the diner minutes later and headed off in search of a bar. His first operation as a CIA black ops pilot had gone off perfectly, and he wanted to toast himself with a shot, or three, of Jameson.

  78

  Catherine King stepped off the elevator on the seventh floor of the CIA’s Old Headquarters Building. Her assigned control officer escorted her into a conference room—the same room she’d visited a week earlier to interview Denny Carmichael—then offered her a cup of coffee. When she declined, the young woman disappeared, and soon the door opened again.

  Catherine had never met Matthew Hanley, the Acting Director of the National Clandestine Service, and she knew very little about him. All she knew of his CV was that he’d been a Green Beret, an SAD officer, and then had worked as station chief in Haiti. He’d been back here running SAD until yesterday, when he was tapped to take over NCS for the late Denny Carmichael.

  She assumed Hanley knew the man she called Six, but she had no idea if Hanley still had any association with him, or even if Hanley had been involved in the manhunt for the ex–SAD operator.

  But that didn’t really matter, because Catherine knew this morning’s meeting would not be about Six. It would be about Catherine. Or, more specifically, it would be about what Catherine planned on publishing. There was no other earthly reason why first thing in the morning on his first day in his new position, the new top spook in the United States would want to speak with an investigative reporter for the Washington Post.

  When Hanley stepped through the door she found herself surprised. Where Denny had been lean and stately, Director Hanley looked like an old linebacker. She could tell from his eyes and his nose that he liked to drink, and she could tell by his frame that he liked to eat, but his ruddy complexion made her think he could handle both without ill effects.

  He shook her hand gently and sat down. Smiling while he talked, he seemed night and day different from his predecessor.

  There was significant chitchat at first—Hanley seemed to enjoy talking—but when he got down to business she realized he had a definite objective.

  “Ms. King, I want to offer you a great opportunity.”

  “An opportunity to do what, exactly?”

  “An opportunity to help your country.”

  She rolled her eyes. “By not talking about what happened at the safe house, you mean?”

  “You can talk about it. I hope you will. But I hope you are . . . fair. Deliberate about what you say.”

  “Have you read anything I’ve written?”

  “Every week.”

  “Then you know I am both fair and deliberate.”

  Hanley seemed to consider a moment. Like he was playing chess and thinking over his next move. “I’m ready to make a deal. A really nice deal.”

  “And I’m listening, Director Hanley.”

  And then, for the next several minutes, Acting Director Matthew Hanley offered Catherine King unprecedented access to the inner workings of the CIA. Exclusives, tips, personal tours, and visits to places she could not have dreamed of getting into. Introductions to players, background intelligence on world figures, and data that she had never thought she would obtain from anyone in government, least of all from the top spy in U.S. intelligence.

  Hanley finished his spiel by saying, “Denny Carmichael was not an evil man. I didn’t like him, never did. But that was because his methods were too top-down. He thought he was a puppet master and a king, and that’s not what this place needs at all. Everything bad that has happened, everything classified you’ve learned about in the past week . . . it was all Denny Carmichael. When he died . . . I’d like to hope that could all die with him.” He spoke in a pleading voice now. “Don’t destroy this Agency by reporting the crimes of a man who no longer needs to be stopped. Instead, watch this Agency closer than anyone in the Fourth Estate has ever watched us. Make sure I don’t become Denny. You can have a real positive impact on this organization, on this nation.” Hanley wi
nked. “And you can probably write some damn fine stories in the process.”

  Catherine kept her poker face, but she had already decided to be extremely sparing in her reporting. She knew the power of the media to destroy, and she knew that despite all the nuance in the world, a thorough piece on the front page of the Washington Post about rogue bands of assassins killing their way across the nation’s capital under orders from the number two man at the CIA would cause politicians to gut the Agency down to nothing.

  She wouldn’t do that.

  That the new guy running NCS just offered her unparalleled access almost caused her to jump out of her chair.

  Instead, she forced him into specifics, hammered out dates for meetings and general ground rules for sharing information, and then she kept her poker face as long as she could. Finally she reached out a hand. “I look forward to following your tenure here very closely, Director Hanley.”

  Hanley shook her hand, and she could see on his face that he recognized he’d just paid dollars to someone ready to accept dimes.

  “I bet you do, Ms. King.”

  —

  Arthur Mayberry opened the wooden door to his home, but he left the storm door locked. Through the Plexiglas and bars he saw a white male in his thirties standing in the morning sunshine. He wore a suit and tie, and a serious expression.

  The media had moved from his sidewalk a week or so after Jeff Duncan nearly blew up all of Columbia Heights, but these damn cops just kept coming.

  Bernice appeared at Mayberry’s side just as he said, “I’ve told you boys everything I know.”

  “I’m not here to ask questions.”

  “Then what can I do for you?”

  The young man held out an envelope. “You can take this, and not ask me any questions. To be honest, I don’t care for them any more than you.”

  Mayberry looked at the envelope. “Well, what is it?”

  “That’s a question, Mr. Mayberry. Please pay attention.”