“Okay,” Shep said. “Don’t let him spoil yours.”
Morgan concentrated on the dinnertime traffic, which was nothing like the snarls back east. Within the half hour he was on the other side of Lexington, gunning the Cobra down a double ribbon of highway. The night had fallen fast, and the roadside lamps threw shimmering glows on the tarmac like hovering flying saucers.
He spotted a “Flying J” sign pinned to a tower above a twenty-four-hour eatery. To the left was a large gas-up area with extra-high roofing so big rigs could fit, and to the right was the truck parking area, with eighteen-wheelers snuggled flank to flank like beached whales. In one quick scan, he counted no less than thirty. He pulled the Cobra around to a smaller parking lot meant only for cars, where he tucked it behind somebody’s U-Haul before cutting the throbbing engine.
“Shep, you there?”
“Yeah,” Shepard said. “Just making popcorn.”
“Whatcha gonna watch?”
“Road Trip.”
“Funny. Listen, there’s about thirty rigs parked in this lot. Which one is it?”
“Can’t help you there, Cobra. I’ve got the truck pinned to a nav, but it’s not deep detail or satellite overhead. Just the general location.”
“Okay, I’ll recon it. What’s the plate number?”
“Z two six ATR.”
“Got it.”
Morgan got out, stretched his back, and shook out his knee. Then he zipped up his field jacket, pulled his watch cap on, closed his door, and came around for Neika. She squatted right there on the blacktop, peed a long river, and then looked up at him as if to say, “Okay, good to go.”
He leashed her, and they strolled over to the truck park side, where almost all the cabs were dark. The drivers either slept in their tucked-away bunks or were inside the restaurant shoveling food. It didn’t take long to cruise past the tails of all the trucks, where he checked every plate against the letters and numbers in his head. But he came up empty, so he walked the walk again, as if he were holding a lottery ticket and one of those plates just had to be the winner.
But none of them were Z26 ATR. He walked Neika into a small picnic area under the trees. “Shep, you copy?”
“Five by five.”
“No match here. Bet they switched license plates.”
“Shit,” Shepard spat. “I know the damn truck’s there somewhere. Now what?”
Morgan merely smiled, looked down at Nieka, and scratched her thick scalp. “No worries,” he assured his eyes-and-ears-in-the-sky guy. “The nose knows.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind,” Morgan said. “Hang tight.” He bent down and took Neika’s big head in his hands. “We’re going to do a little search, girl.” The moment she heard search, her tail flicked. “You do this right, and I’ll buy you a pig’s ear.”
Military working dogs don’t stay with the same human handlers throughout their careers. When a handler finishes his or her tour, the K9 gets passed to someone else, which is why all the training and signals are uniform. Morgan knew this, and he’d worked with enough MWDs in the past, so he also knew how to run Neika through a sniff track.
If the Tomahawks were on any of the trucks, or had been so recently, she’d pick up the scents of high-explosive warheads. But even if the warheads were, God forbid, nuclear, she’d still hit on the solid-fuel rocket boosters.
He walked back into the truck park and looked around. A tired driver was jumping down from his cab. He glanced at Morgan, just another guy with a dog, before trotting away toward the eatery.
Morgan began with Neika at the tail of the first truck, holding her leash loosely with his left hand as he whispered, “Neika, search.”
They started cruising along the flank. She dropped her head and sniffed the big wheels and the well while Morgan ran a finger along the ledge of the long box. She trotted beside him, occasionally rising up on her hind legs. She poked her nose into the metal gutters, snorted at rivets, and stuck her face in the front wheel well. She sensed nothing and moved on, Morgan close behind.
They started at the nose of the next truck, then the tail of the next, and, by the time they’d sniffed out six trucks, Morgan was getting edgy. Whichever one it was, the driver could show up any minute and just take off. But at the tail end of the seventh truck, Neika acted differently, with shivers rippling through her and the hair standing up on her spine. She tucked her gleaming black nose up under the floorboards, snorted deeply a few times, then backed out, looked up at Morgan, and sat.
Morgan’s smile crinkled his eyes. Bomb dogs never barked or whined; they just sat. But just to be sure, he pulled her away from the rear of the truck, made a small circle, and had her go at it again. Sure enough, she sniffed, shivered, and sat, looking up at him with an expression that said, “What do you want? An engraved invitation?”
He bent down, ruffled her furry head madly and crooned in her ear, “Good girl, Neika. Good girl!” He walked her quickly back to the Shelby and locked her inside with a couple of large Milk-Bones. Then he quick-marched back to the truck. “Shep, I’ve got a hit.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t I sound serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“I’m at the cab now. Looks like nobody’s home.”
“Wait,” Shepard said while he hammered at his laptop. “What’s the model?”
“Kenworth.”
“Take out your cell and hold it up to the lock, back side against the door metal.”
Morgan placed his foot on the runner, gripped the side handle of the cab, hauled himself up, and did what he was told. The locking mechanism clicked, and the lock button popped up.
“You’re friggin’ amazing,” he said.
“Kreskin is amazing.” Shepard grinned. “I’m incredible. But kiss me later. You got quick work to do.”
Morgan climbed into the cab and slid over to the passenger seat. He looked around but could see nothing more than the darkened slumber bunk. There was no way to see from there into the big container behind the cab.
He then examined the dashboard, noting a grip for a cell phone, and spotted something unusual: a small surveillance monitor, probably attached to a camera in the cargo box. If you were only hauling something harmless—like chickens—you didn’t need to check if they were happy or not. He locked the doors, crawled between the seats into the back, and waited.
Ten minutes later, the driver hauled himself up into the cab and shut the door. Morgan stood on no ceremony. He jammed the barrel of his PPK behind the guy’s ear.
“Both hands on the wheel,” he said. “And let me see your knuckles go white.”
The driver hunched and did as he was told, but slowly. Morgan could practically hear the guy’s brain whirring and teeth grinding as he looked at the driver’s hands in the dim light. He had heavily calloused knuckles, so he was a martial-artist type...or just liked punching bricks. Morgan kept the gun barrel bruising the guy’s skull flesh as he worked his way into the passenger seat.
The driver turned only his eyes and stared at him. He was Asian, in his thirties, with thick black hair banded in a “samurai” bun on top. His eyes were like a shark’s: dark, shiny, and dead. His coiled muscles bulged under a lightweight black jacket.
“What you want?” the driver snarled in a heavy accent Morgan recognized. Not Japanese, not Chinese. Korean. Kadir had taken pains carefully explaining to him the difference one day. He now knew they were far from the same, no matter how similar the skin color and eye shape. “No got money,” the truck driver now said.
“Don’t need any,” Morgan said. “I’m rich. Where’s your phone and the keys?”
The driver glanced down at his right side. “Pocket.”
“Don’t even breathe fast. I’m cranky.” Morgan reached into the driver’s jacket, yanked out the things, and eased himself bac
k on the seat, keeping the PPK trained on the driver’s face. He pocketed the cell and tossed the keys in the guy’s lap.
“Right hand only. Turn it on, but just the electrics. And then hands back on the wheel.”
The driver inserted the key and turned. The dashboard glowed, and the surveillance monitor flickered—showing the length of the cargo box in black and white. It was empty. He gripped the wheel again, his fingers white.
“Where are they?” Morgan growled.
“Where what?” The driver turned and looked at Morgan fully now, his nostrils flaring.
“Your cargo.”
“What cargo? You crazy, man?”
“The Tomahawks,” Morgan said, catching a reflexive flicker in the driver’s eyes. “Tell me right now where you dropped them, and I won’t blow your kneecap off.”
Then the driver smiled like a panther. “You gonna shoot me? Big bang right here?”
Morgan smiled back. “You’re right.” He reached inside his jacket, took out a black, five-inch, snap-on Gemtech suppressor, and popped it onto the end of his barrel. “I prefer the threaded versions, but these are usually okay for a couple of shots.”
The driver’s neck veins bulged, his eyes blazing. “Screw you! I tell you nothing, dickhead.”
“All right, which knee’s your favorite?”
The driver made his move. He yelled like a Tae Kwon Do black belt; his right hand released the wheel and bladed hard as he swung it in a lightning arc at Morgan’s silencer. But Morgan simply dropped flat on his back and flicked the barrel down. The driver’s stiff hand smashed into the passenger headrest and broke it right off the mount. Then the driver launched himself out of his seat, and Morgan saw his left hand snap up from his boot, gripping a very long serrated blade. Morgan raised his gun barrel and shot him in the heart.
The cab flashed white, but there was barely a sound, other than the driver’s skull bouncing off the steering wheel as he toppled over to the left.
Morgan looked at the corpse. “I was hoping you’d do something like that, dickhead.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was 3 a.m. when Morgan found himself lying in the grass once again, staring through his binoculars at a cluster of buildings across a wide clearing. But this time it was dark, cold, and wet, and his black jeans were soaked through from a recent rain. His knees trembled from the chill and adrenaline.
The Shelby was nestled behind him in a hedgerow of high bulrushes, with Neika curled up in the back seat. His instincts told him this might get ugly and he wasn’t going to risk her taking a bullet. Shepard had a fix on the Shelby, so he could send someone out to rescue Neika if Morgan didn’t come back. At the very least, she’d make it to his funeral. Before he could prevent it, he saw a flash of Jenny and Alex wearing black on either side of a gravesite. He swept that image from his mind, choosing to review how he’d gotten here instead.
Using the dead driver’s cell phone, Shepard had hacked into its apps, reversed the navigation history, and pinpointed the location where the driver had probably delivered the Tomahawks. How the hell the missiles had been hijacked, remained undetected and were then smuggled out here, Morgan had no clue, but he’d run down that tidbit later.
At the moment he was way southeast in backwoods, hayseed Kentucky, looking at a ramshackle white farmhouse, a few smaller outbuildings, and a towering grain silo with a peeling black cupola. The missiles were definitely there somewhere because he could see small, dark figures patrolling the grounds—bulky in tactical gear, weapons gleaming in the dim starlight. With those assault rifles, they sure as hell weren’t guarding sheep.
He swept his binos to the left and focused on a line of three black Suburban tac vehicles. Between where he lay and the farm, those trucks would be his only cover.
I hate low combat crawls, he muttered in his head. But there was no other way to do it.
Beside him in the grass lay his Smith & Wesson M&P15 tactical rifle, which he’d pulled from the trunk when he parked the car. It had a double magazine rig in the well and an Aimpoint red-dot sight mounted on the top rail, but no night-vision scope—he was old school and didn’t care for the grainy green.
He put the binos away, slipped the rifle to the ends of his upturned palms, and started elbowing forward, one slow inch at a time.
It took about an hour. But then he was there, soaked and breathless, behind the rear bumper of the first Suburban. He’d powered-down his ear piece so nothing would break his concentration, and for a while he just lay there and worked on his heart rate and lungs until the pulse stopped pounding in his ears so he could hear again.
Slow footsteps crunched from somewhere in front of the cars. He quietly laid his rifle down, slipped the silenced PPK from his jacket, pulled himself up into a squat at the right rear of the truck, and peeked around its trunk with one eye.
Another Asian dude. Morgan’s brow creased as he saw him in side silhouette—spiky black hair, muscular neck, a tactical vest thickened with ceramic plates, and an MP5 “Kurtz”—the short-barreled German subgun.
What the hell’s this? Some sorta Kkangpae drug-gang rocket-smuggling thing? But it didn’t matter. American soldiers are dead, and so shall you be.
He tucked back in, ducked-walked from the rear of that Suburban, and over behind the next one to the left. He took a long breath and emitted a low-pitched mourning-dove whistle. The boots stopped and then crunched as they turned.
Morgan did it once more. He now heard the boots moving between the two vehicles, coming his way, and he waited until they were almost on him.
He stepped out and shot the sentry point-blank in the throat. The sentry’s head snapped back, and he stiffened as if electrocuted. As he toppled forward Morgan caught the MP5 and stepped back, letting him fall. But the guy twisted to his right as he collapsed, and a large carabiner clipped to the back of his vest banged off the hide of the truck.
Damnit!
“Dong Pil?” Someone was calling the guy’s name. “Eodi Keysayo?”
Morgan recognized the words: Where are you? Definitely Korean.
He slung the MP5 strap over his back, holstered the PPK, slithered back to the first truck, and retrieved his rifle. More boots were tramping from the direction of the farmhouse, the pace picking up to a trot.
“Dong Pil!”
Shit, Morgan cursed in his head. So much for a sneak attack. If he let them get to the trucks they’d surround and take him. He snap-rolled quickly to the right and saw two more Koreans sprinting in full tactical. Center-mass shots would only dent their “chicken plates” and piss them off, so he opened up on their hips.
He had a flash suppressor on the end of his barrel, but the explosions still blazed like yellow lightning, and the reports banged off the buildings like sledgehammers on an anvil. The Koreans went down screaming.
He heard more slamming boots and shouts. He glanced to the left at the trucks, hearing the voice of his old combat-tactics instructor from “the Farm” in his head: “Whatever makes the most sense, don’t do it.” In other words, don’t take cover behind the trucks. But he had to make the next crew think that’s what he was doing.
He got up and hustled over between the first two Suburbans, took a knee in a pool of the first sentry’s blood, and fired one shot in the air, so they’d see the flash. Then he sprinted straight back into the field, skidded flat like he was hitting home plate after a triple play, and quick-crawled twenty feet to the right.
He hunkered down behind an old iron farm pump. Sure enough, two more Koreans appeared from the left side of the farmhouse, subguns blazing at their own trucks—the tires hissing out like gut-punched fat men, and the windshields splintering like glass spiderwebs in a gale.
Morgan edged up, braced his rifle on the curved head of the pump handle and took aim at a range of fifty meters. Two quick doubletaps exploded the skull of the closer Korean, and
as the second one spun toward Morgan and let fly on full auto, Morgan shot him in the face.
Then the pump shaft thwanged as a bullet struck the iron right in front of his chest. Needles of flying lead stung his face, and he launched himself backward onto the ground—gasping as his spine met the slung MP5. Another bullet whip-cracked just above his nose as he spun himself around on his back like a crab and took two quick rolls to the left.
This one was nuts, coming straight at him from the right corner of the house, screaming something as he unloaded his MP5 in long bursts. But, blinded by his own muzzle flashes and rage, he was still chewing up the water pump. Morgan just lay there and waited until he heard the blessed sound of the subgun’s bolt locking back on an empty chamber; then he jumped up. He saw the guy madly trying to load a fresh mag, just before he stitched him with lead from his crotch to his throat.
Silence—except for the ringing in his ears and the groans of the first two guys whose legs he’d shattered. He waited for a full two minutes, letting his breathing calm to something like normal. He wasn’t sure how many rounds he’d fired, so he switched magazines. Then the front door of the farmhouse opened. Another guy came out, wearing his tactical gear like the rest, but Morgan could see no weapon, and his hands were held high over his head.
“I surrender!” the last sentry yelled in a heavy accent as he stepped off the stoop. “No more!”
Morgan looked around to check his perimeter, then rose to his feet, keeping his red dot trained on a spot just above the Korean’s chest plate. A prisoner might be useful, he thought. But odds are, he won’t talk. The guy was wearing black gloves at the ends of his bare arms.
“Stop right there,” Morgan called as he advanced. But the guy kept coming as if he didn’t understand. Between him and Morgan, the two wounded sentries were writhing on the ground.
“I give up!” the Korean yelled out again.
“Stop right there,” Morgan shouted this time, and then he saw the guy was clutching something in his up-thrust right hand. Morgan pulled the trigger, and his bullet smacked into the Korean’s chest plate, lifting the bastard off his feet, but he also heard the familiar pop of a hand grenade firing pin. Its spoon went twirling up in the air as he slammed himself down face-first. Then the damn thing exploded with a heavy crump and a blinding flash.
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