Code Name: Bikini

by Christina Skye

  Code Name: Bikini

  Christina Skye

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Northern Afghanistan

  Winter

  DARKNESS.

  Wind and death.

  Trace O’Halloran didn’t move. Cold dug under his Kevlar vest as he watched the rugged road below him.

  Something moved over the snow-dusted ground near his feet. Another rat.

  Red eyes glowed in the faint green light of his night-vision goggles. Only rats could survive in this godforsaken mountain pass in winter.

  It was Christmas Eve. Back in the States, families sang hymns and parents assembled dollhouses to surprise wide-eyed children while snow fell in the soft hush.

  But here on a rugged plateau in Afghanistan, the cold was merciless and wind cut with icy fingers. Frostbite was unavoidable if he didn’t find shelter soon. But the mission came first.

  Trace leveled his gaze on the road three hundred feet below his hiding spot. He didn’t think about the fresh wounds across his left wrist or the blood that darkened his forearm, courtesy of a difficult high altitude, low opening—HALO—jump.

  Abruptly he felt movements in the night. Leaning forward, he read a change in energy patterns. A three-truck convoy crawled through the darkness. Their Korean-made trucks were guarded by soldiers wielding Soviet RPG-7 shoulder-launched missiles.

  An equal-opportunity war, he thought grimly.

  And this was his target. The convoy carried covert German communication technology extorted from a weapons designer based in Singapore. Not surprisingly, the man had disappeared before he could reveal his blackmailer. In the hands of a trained technician, the new device could track a massive quantity of U.S. communications. Through the application of mathematical predictive models, government assets could be located and areas of vulnerability tapped within minutes. In enemy hands the system could inflict catastrophic damage, and Trace’s job was to see that the hardware never reached its destination.

  Truck lights carved the darkness. The convoy stopped with a screech of brakes. Agitated voices cut through the cold, still air.

  The men in the Korean trucks were ruthless and well trained. They would shoot anything suspicious on their trek to an isolated mountain stronghold sixty miles to the north. But Trace didn’t intend to be noticed until he was ready. As he glanced at his watch, his skin burned. Frostbite was setting in.

  Ignoring his pain, the SEAL fingered a button on the device in his left pocket.

  Something moved down on the road. The first truck pulled sideways and two soldiers jumped out. Arguing loudly, they pointed to a paper flapping in the bone-chilling wind.

  Right on schedule, Trace thought. Nice to see technology working right for once. His maneuver had lured them exactly where he wanted them.

  Dark fur brushed his arm. Ears raised alertly, a black Labrador retriever held his down position behind a rock, awaiting Trace’s next order. The big dog had trained with Trace for months to prepare for this mission, and Trace sensed the dog’s eagerness to go to work.

  Not yet, Duke.

  His hand settled on the dog’s head. The Lab watched every movement, waiting for the next touch command.

  As the wind keened over the rocky slope, Santa Fe and Christmas cheer were a universe away. Trace couldn’t even remember his last Christmas at home. His last two leaves had been cut short because of security alerts. As part of a top-secret government team, code-named Foxfire, Trace trained hard and kept personal attachments next to nil. That was the price of admission for special operations work, but the conditions had never bothered Trace, not when the stakes were so high.

  Other people might call him a patriot. But for Trace the job boiled down to very personal terms—protecting family, friends and a way of life from enemies without honor or scruples. If doing his job meant taking a bullet, he was more than ready to pay that price with his own blood.

  A silent alarm vibrated at his wrist.

  Showtime.

  Silently, he pulled a small box from his Kevlar vest. The dog sniffed, then gripped the box’s metal handle between his teeth. When Trace touched the Lab’s collar in a pre-arranged command, weeks of training kicked in. Duke skirted the rocks, turned and then headed for the road below.

  Be safe, Trace thought. Stay low and move fast. He didn’t have to project the commands. Duke would do exactly as trained.

  Trace leveled his scoped assault rifle and measured his target. A third hostile soldier jumped down, shouting at his teammates. Trace took out the nearest truck’s tires and front windshield with a four-second burst.

  The insurgents scattered. Gunfire hammered the air above Trace’s head. His next volley drilled the middle truck’s gas tank. Under the explosive flare of an orangered fireball, he jumped a boulder and dropped into a narrow wash that snaked toward the road.

  Hidden by walls of sand, he followed the curve of the wash, a shadow swallowed by the greater darkness of the night. One short tap on a small transmitter alerted his backup team that the encounter had begun. Now he had only minutes to complete his objective and head for the extraction point.

  He sprinted to the bottom of the wash and found the big package exactly where he’d left it a day earlier, buried beneath a foot of sand. In seconds Trace had opened the canvas to reveal a blood-spattered body dead for barely ten hours. He rechecked the uniform pockets, then hefted the dead weight over his shoulders.

  Hidden by the mayhem of the explosion, he carried the body closer to the road, placed it in the sand and then raced along a second trail barely visible in the light from the burning truck.

  It was time to draw fire and alert the convoy to the body. If all went as planned, the insurgents would find the communications gear and codes planted on the body and begin using them. Everything they picked up from U.S. sources would be carefully constructed disinformation.

  Trace wasn’t crazy about using human remains for a mission, but their local allies had provided unidentifiable bodies of insurgents killed in a violent skirmish earlier that day. Now they were dressed and outfitted as American soldiers.

  Automatic weapons fire punched the air to his left, and a tracer round whined over his head. For every round he could see, Trace knew there were three others invisible in the darkness. The SEAL followed the rocky slope away from his service dog, who bounded toward a nearby overhang. Once
Trace was certain the body had been discovered, he turned into the open and made a clumsy run toward the highest ridge, his movements calculated to draw maximum fire.

  The maneuver worked. Down the hill, dark shapes raced toward him, rifles level.

  Kevlar was good, but it wouldn’t stand up to repeated bursts from an AK-47. That’s where the ceramic plates in his vest took over. But a glancing blow hit him with deadly force and knocked him off his feet.

  Calculating the speed of his pursuers, he primed a grenade and lobbed it over his shoulder. Rocks shot up, clawing at his back and neck while gunfire burned near his face and tore through his glove. His excited pursuers clustered at the top of the slope below, shouting in delight when they saw Trace fall.

  A second burst of fire drilled up his arm, but he didn’t move, feigning a fatal wound.

  His heart pounded.

  Sweat streaked his face.

  Footsteps raced behind him. He calculated strike force, distance and probable accuracy as the wind howled over the rocks, and then his fingers closed around another grenade. He yanked the pin and lobbed the deadly metal sphere hard, generating a wall of noise that masked more enemy fire.

  The blast was deafening. Sand flew into his eyes and mouth. Another round tore through his right deltoid.

  Trace’s vision blurred. More shrapnel from enemy fire tore into his chest and neck. He stumbled and then plunged forward, the wind in his face as he hit the cold sand. A chopper crested the mountain, the whine from its engines blessedly familiar.

  Another explosion ripped through the night, and the lead truck vanished in a red fireball.

  The big Lab had accomplished his mission, planting his C-4 charge under the last truck while the insurgents were distracted by Trace’s clumsy run.

  Nice job, Duke.

  Pain raked Trace’s chest. He stumbled as blood gushed thickly over his Kevlar vest, every muscle stiff, every movement strained. Over his head the mountains seemed to darken, blurred between cold wind and night sky.

  And then he died.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SOMETHING WAS wrong.

  The air was too clean, too calm. There was no acrid smell of cordite and no rumble of distant artillery.

  White curtains danced slowly in a warm wind. The smells of bleach and floor wax filled his damaged lungs.

  Wounded. Hospital?

  “Nice to see you’re finally awake.” The voice was vaguely familiar. “You look pretty good for a dead guy.”

  Trace cracked open one eye. Even that small movement hurt.

  Hell, everything hurt, but he couldn’t remember why.

  “Very funny.” Trace managed to lift his head. “You look like shit, Houston.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe life with my sister doesn’t agree with you.”

  “Kit, hell. I wish I’d been home with her. Instead I flew overnight from Singapore to get here.”

  Trace tried to sit up and grimaced. “Where’s here?”

  His superior officer, Wolfe Houston, stared at him thoughtfully. “Military hospital. Germany. You’re in ICU, pal. Ryker has been spitting bullets waiting for you to come around.”

  Ryker. The head of his top-secret government operations team. That much Trace remembered.

  He didn’t move. His throat felt raw, as if he’d swallowed a convoy’s worth of gasoline fumes, which he probably had. Slowly the fragments began to return. He’d used all his grenades, and then he’d stumbled across the ridge in clear sight, drawing fire to the location of a second, cached body left where they were meant to be found. More false codes were planted on that second body.

  As AK-47 bursts followed a blast from a shoulder-launched missile, Trace had gone down, knocked out cold. Duke had to have jumped the rocks, dragging him to safety while the helicopter drew fire. A second chopper would have shot in low to pick up Trace and Duke.

  Otherwise the SEAL wouldn’t be here in one piece.

  As the rest of his memories returned, his head began to pound. When he sat up, his left arm felt too heavy. “How’s Duke?”

  “Your dog is A-Okay. He just ate two steaks and ran a mile before breakfast. I wish I could say the same for you.” Houston’s expression sobered. “You were in cardiac arrest, completely flatlined when our people got you aboard. It took almost two minutes to revive you. Duke didn’t leave your side once.”

  Trace managed a lopsided grin. “Duke did good. He saved my butt after that last volley. I remember he dragged me to the extraction point, not much after that. But…something’s different.”

  “You were dead, O’Halloran. Of course you don’t remember much.”

  No, something else was wrong. Trace shook his head. “My reflexes are off. I can’t pick up any energy trails. Everything is quiet.”

  “Your chips are all disabled. Precautionary measure, according to Ryker. He told the medical team to close down all your Foxfire technology until you’re fully recovered.”

  Trace stared at the ceiling, trying to get used to the deafening silence inside his head. “I like knowing who’s behind me without having to look around. When will I be reactivated for duty?”

  “Get well first.”

  In war, soldiers fought with all kinds of ammunition. Recently the array of weapons had changed drastically. As part of the Foxfire team, the two men used focused energy as a tactical weapon. Thanks to mental training, physical conditioning and selective chips developed in a secret facility in New Mexico, their seven-member team had changed the definition of military combat.

  Only a few people knew that the success rate of the covert Foxfire team was unmatched anywhere in special operations. Trace excelled at psi sweeps, spreading energy nets and reading changes made by anything alive in the area. The more difficult the terrain, the better.

  Usually, he could have communicated telepathically with his commanding officer. Now there was only silence. Trace was stunned by the difference. With his extra senses closed down, he was locked within the narrow space of his body. The experience made him realize how much he had taken his Foxfire gifts for granted. Now he was flying blind, moving through a world that felt like perpetual twilight.

  But chips took a toll on the nervous system, and even good implants could malfunction. Better that his hardware be disabled until his body recovered from the beating it had taken in Afghanistan.

  As a test, Trace tried to set an energy net around the small room. Usually he would have succeeded in seconds.

  But now nothing happened.

  Wolfe Houston watched him intently. “Tried an energy net, didn’t you?”

  Trace shrugged.

  “You okay with this?”

  No way. Trace felt out of balance and irritated, and he chose his words carefully. “I’m used to my skill set. Being without any energy sensation is damned unnerving. How do people live like this?”

  “I’m told they manage pretty well,” Wolfe said dryly.

  Trace shifted restlessly. “How bad was I hit?”

  “Let’s just say you won’t make Wimbledon this year.”

  “Hate tennis. Stupid ball. Stupid shorts.” Trace hid a grimace as pain knifed down into his shoulder. “Now how about you cut the crap? How bad, Houston? When do I get back on my feet, and when will my chips be reactivated?”

  Silence.

  He stared at Wolfe Houston’s impassive face. No point in trying to read any answers there.

  “You’re here for a patch job, which you’ve received. Air evac will transport you to a specialized hospital stateside within the hour. If you do everything right, you’ll be back in action inside six weeks.”

  Trace made a silent vow to halve that prediction. “What about the bodies? Did they take the bait?”

  “Swallowed it whole. They’re already using the communications unit you secured inside the uniform. That hardware will generate permanent system deviation in the parent programs. Hello, major static.”

  Trace smiled slowly. “Goodbye, security problems.”

  “Ryker is
thrilled. You’ve earned yourself some solid R&R. So what will it be, Vegas or San Diego?”

  “Forget the R&R. Get a rehab doc in here. I need to start building up my arm.” Trace tried to sit up, but instantly something tore deep in his shoulder. He closed his eyes, nearly blacking out from the pain.

  A shrill whine filled the room—or was it just in his head?

  “Idiot. What happened?”

  “I’m just—just a little dizzy, sir.” Trace blinked hard at the ceiling. Pale green swirled into bright orange. Did they paint hospital ceilings orange?

  “…you hear me?”

  The orange darkened, forming bars of crimson.

  “Trace…hear me now?”

  The room was spinning. Trace had felt the same sensation back in Afghanistan before Duke had roused him, licking his face furiously.

  His vision blurred. He tried to stand up, biting back a curse as the whine grew. Chip malfunction? Can’t be. They’re all disabled.

  Have to stand up. Have to find out what’s wrong.

  The room spun faster. Trace didn’t see a medical team crowd around the bed, equipment in hand.

  He was back in Afghanistan, fighting brutal cold and a hail of tracer rounds.

  “DOES HE KNOW?”

  “Not yet.”

  Two men stood at the end of the deserted hospital corridor, their faces grim. In front of them a fresh X-ray was clipped to a light box.

  Trace’s surgeon frowned. “He’s still groggy from the last surgery.” The tall Johns Hopkins grad tapped the black-and-white image. “Torn ligaments. Bone fragments—here, here, here. We cleaned up everything we found. After rehab he should recover full use of his elbow and wrist, which is a near miracle. You saw him on arrival. I’ve seen a lot of trauma cases, but nothing like that. What did you people do, shoot him out of a tank?” He didn’t wait for an answer, rubbing his neck worriedly. “If he’d lost much more blood, he wouldn’t have made it out of surgery.”