“Yeah. When did he take off? You remember?” Henry said.
“I think four days ago. The day after we saw him in that stupid disguise. The day you decided this was the best spot in the entire ocean to fish. Off the Nubble Light House on Cape Neddick.”
Beto stopped his teasing. He thought he might be getting under Henry’s famously thin skin. He loved the rhythm of the boat bobbing on the light chop. He enjoyed the pleasure of good pipe tobacco, especially in the sea air. He wondered about the wisdom of the placement of this well-photographed lighthouse, built on a tiny nub of an island only a couple hundred yards from the rocks on the mainland.
He considered how inconvenient it was to have this lighthouse on an island, especially when there were several higher locations on the mainland where a lighthouse could have been built with even better range for the light beam. Beto imagined how it was, in a storm of long duration, with the furnace out of fuel, the electricity out, waiting for the seas to calm down so someone could come and resupply and repair by boat. What were they thinking?
“Hey, Henry, let’s go up there,” Beto said.
“The sign says no trespassing.”
“Let’s go up there,” Beto said again.
They let down the zodiac launch from the trawler and motored over to the dock in the little cove between the rocks, hidden from the mainland. They walked up the steps to the small storage shed and then up the walkway to the main house at the base of the light tower. Henry and Beto spent over an hour exploring the grounds and the keeper’s quarters. No one had lived there since the Coast Guard left in 1987.
At the Directorate’s command center, Frances grabbed Andrew’s arm. “What?” said Frances, “Knock off the noise.”
Frances and Randal stood behind Andrew and peered into the screen in front of him.
“Look, see?” Andrew said, excited.
“See what, Andrew?” Randal said.
“Movement at the lighthouse at Cape Neddick. I told you.”
“So someone is at the lighthouse—so what?” Randal pushed.
“Those guys are FITO. I have identifiers on all FITO personnel. See? FITO is occupying the same rock where their energy source generates telekinetic radiation,” Andrew said. “This proves it. They’ve moved to Cape Neddick from Cape Ann.”
“Not enough evidence for me,” said Frances. You will have to….”
Andrew banged on his table again, harder this time. He shouted, “I got it, I got it. I got the evidence you’re looking for, Frances.”
“What?”
Andrew swiveled around to face her. He took several deep breaths. “Remember, Frances, when you came to my cave? Remember computer seven?”
Frances said, “Yeah, number seven was doing a search for another computer at the FBI that logged on to two sites that you were logged onto. What about it?”
“Seven alerted me that he completed his search. He has untied that web of proxy servers.”
“Took him long enough. Where is this FBI computer genius located?”
“Look for yourself,” said Andrew. He lifted a laptop computer up to her face with a map of New England on it. A bright red light was blinking on Cape Neddick, Maine, where Henry’s laptop sat on the Water Walker’s galley table.
Andrew and Randal looked into Frances’ eyes. They watched her skepticism fade. Randal was certain.
“Okay, Andrew,” Randal said. “We’ll take that as a confirmation that we’ve located the right target.”
Frances, Randal, and Andrew couldn’t stop watching the traces of human FITO movement beaming from the Nubble Light at Cape Neddick.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sandy’s joy at Hank’s return pressed hard against her pangs of emptiness at the absence of her husband. She missed her micromanaging, neat-freak of a partner. What was she supposed to tell her son, just now out of psych rehab? The young veteran looked weak and adrift.
Hank had changed so much since he deployed to Afghanistan. He’d been so successful in high school and in every phase of his Army training. Before he left for his deployment, he proudly displayed his Airborne Wings, his Ranger Tab, and the Unit Scroll for the 75th Ranger Regiment on the shoulder of his uniform. Sandy never quite understood the meaning of the insignia, but she certainly understood the pride beaming off her son’s young face and Hank’s recently acquired strengths: physical, moral, and spiritual.
But when he came home on leave after two years of intense combat against the Taliban, all that strength had drained away. He sat for hours staring out over the rocky ledge where Gabriella stood. Hank put himself in the care of a Veterans Administration doctor who relied heavily on drugs to address Hank’s symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Sandy knew Hank was washing down the pills with vodka.
Somehow Hank purchased an old Colt 1911 pistol and ammunition. Sandy and Henry woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunshots outside. Henry grabbed the shotgun he kept under the bed and ran out to confront the shooter, and he nearly had a gun battle with his son. Fortunately, Hank had expended all the rounds in his pistol before he aimed it at his father and pulled the trigger. Henry recognized his son before either of them caused any damage.
That incident moved Henry and Sandy to seek better treatment for their son. They found the most highly recommended facility and doctor at the Loving Center in Port Angeles, Washington, supervised by the nation’s top psychiatrist, a Doctor Romano Goldstein.
Sandy looked at her son as he nibbled at the sandwich she made for him. “So you are doing better, Hank? It’s great to have you home.”
Hank looked up at his mother. Sandy wondered if he heard her words. He just stared at her. “Cielavista has changed, Mom. It looks like an Army camp.”
Sandy groped for words. “We are having some serious trouble, Hank. There’s a secret society that is systematically murdering innocent civilians here in the US and in other countries. Nonina has received some kind of supernatural power to combat their efforts, and she has been very effective. This society, called the Directorate, has located us and is planning an attack on us. We have begun preparations to defend ourselves here. Incidentally, I found your Ranger Handbook. It’s been very helpful.” She tried to smile as she awaited Hank’s reaction.
Hank’s eyes brightened as if a curtain had been raised. Sandy didn’t know whether to be pleased or alarmed. He quickly devoured the ham and cheese sandwich and asked, “You got anything more to eat?”
Sandy warmed up a bowl of chowder and Hank made short work of that and the rye bread and butter she served with it. “Let’s see what you got going on,” he said.
Sandy took her newly revived son into the barn. The first floor was divided into a briefing room and several work stations for Task Force Saber operations officers. On the second floor was the operations center. Sandy laid the handwritten operations order in front of him. He quickly comprehended everything.
“You think the enemy is moving to an assembly area?” Hank said.
“Right, but we don’t know where.”
Hank and Sandy leaned over the table with the map of New England on it. “We are here,” she said, pointing to a green pin on the coast just south of Cape Ann. “Gabriella has created a dummy location here,” she said, indicating the blue pin at the Nubble Lighthouse on Cape Neddick, Maine, “as a decoy to throw the enemy off.”
Hank looked at his mother and shrugged his lack of understanding at her.
“Don’t ask me how she does these things,” Sandy said. “It’s beyond me. And even if I got it, I couldn’t explain it.”
Hank went back to the map. He drew a pencil line between the two locations, running almost due north along the coast about sixty miles long. “If you were the enemy,” Hank said, “where would you put your attack headquarters?”
Sandy studied the map. “Somewhere out in here, equidistant from the two pins on the map. That way they could shift forces from one target to the other.”
“Right,” said Hank, “but t
hat covers a lot of ground.”
Carlos came into the ops center and sidled up to Hank and Sandy. He laid a note on the table with numbers on it—42.93N, 71.19W.
“What’s this?” said Sandy.
“Not sure. My grandson Beto just texted it to me.”
“It’s latitude, longitude,” said Hank. He went to the computer and pulled up a lat-long locator web site. The site dropped a pin on the town of Sandown, New Hampshire, exactly where Sandy had estimated the enemy’s location.
“Where in the world did this come from?” Sandy asked Carlos.
He was on the phone with Beto before she asked the question. He clicked off. “Looks like my grandson Beto and Mr. Henry are fishing for more than fish.”
“Where did you say Dad was?” asked Hank.
“I didn’t, Hank. Truth is I don’t know. He took off in a huff a week ago and I got the impression that he may not be interested in coming back. The last words I said to him were, ‘I can live without you’.”
Hank looked at Carlos. They let the awkward minute pass. “Okay, so that’s out in the open. Good to know,” said Hank.
Carlos said, “Well, let me tell you Beto and Henry are visiting a cousin of mine in the little town of Cape Neddick, Maine, near York Beach. It seems….”
“Cape Neddick?” Sandy interrupted.
“Yeah, I know,” said Carlos, “some coincidence, right? That they should be staying in the same town that Gabriella has set up as our decoy location. Anyway, there’s more. Evidently they got suspicious about a character staying near them in the trailer park. Henry used his FBI buddies to look into him and they identified a woman connected with him. She worked at the CIA years ago. Henry got her plate number and had local police monitor her movements. First in Maine, then New Hampshire. Her car is parked at the Zolinos Vineyard Resort in Sandown, New Hampshire.”
“And these are the coordinates,” said Hank. “Where are your map pins?”
Sandy handed Hank the little box, and he stuck a red pin on the paper map on the table at a point corresponding to the pin on the website.
“My head is spinning,” said Sandy.
“What?” said Carlos, studying the map.
“Henry’s gone. Right when we desperately need him here at Cielavista. He has abandoned me. Us—he has abandoned us. And for some reason he shows up at the decoy site. And he’s running down information on our enemy.” She seemed dazed.
“We need eyes on the enemy,” said Hank.
Sandy heard a new voice from her son’s mouth. A commanding power resonated in his words. She was remembering some of the material produced by the Loving Center for families of PTSD patients. Most of these soldiers are compelled to return to the front lines. The explanation is not healthy. She remembered a chapter on the thirty-two chemicals in the brain, and when a soldier encounters combat the adrenal gland secretes powerful druglike hormones into their nervous system. This stimulation becomes addictive. Then when they return home they find themselves still acting in the same mode—hypervigilant, combative, angry, sleepless, startled at loud noises—but since there is no real threat, there is no release of these internally produced chemicals. So they feel compelled to return to where the excitement is, despite the fact that they will suffer discomfort, separation, and exposure to danger.
She watched Hank return to the battlefield, seeing firsthand the warrior in her son resurface right before her eyes. She wondered if he was prepared to reenter combat, but there was nothing she could do about him any more than she could do anything about her AWOL husband.
“Sandy,” Carlos said, breaking into her thoughts.
“What?”
“We need you out on the rocks. We can take care of the operations and the troops here,” he said.
Sandy took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. She looked at Hank.
“Son,” she said, “I am so glad you are home. I am sorry for the chaos we’re in. Please take care of yourself. I’ll see you tonight. Let’s eat together in the cottage. Carlos, tell your wife to come too, okay?”
Hank Baker, former Army Ranger, Andy Santiago, one of Carlos’s grand nephews, and Lucille, the wolfhound, low-crawled along the ridge line overlooking the Zolinos Vineyard Resort in the town of Sandown, New Hampshire. Hank’s senses came alive in his familiar role—deep recon in enemy territory.
“So the dog talks to angels,” said Hank to Andy.
“That’s what they say,” said Andy, creeping next to the ranger.
“And you communicate with her?”
“Sort of,” Andy said. “Not like talking, but I know what she’s thinking.”
Hank shook his head. “That place has turned into a looney bin since I left.”
From their position at the top of a short cliff covered with high grass they could observe the encampment below. Dawn was seeping into the valley with no promise of warmer temperatures. Whistles sounded. Men scampered into six separate clusters on the muddy streets in front of the modular buildings. Doors slammed, the low rumble of voices and a few shouts filled the air in the valley below the recon team. Streams of light mist blew across the vineyard as the morning light ascended.
“We have two angels overhead,” said Andy.
“What are they there for?”
“The enemy has the technology to observe human activity at long distances. Kind of like radar, but more dependent on some kind of paranormal power. The angels are providing a shield over us that’s deflecting their view. Otherwise they would pick up on our movements and we would be in deep doo-doo.”
“This is one strange war,” said Hank.
The two men scanned the encampment with high-powered binoculars. Occasionally they would jot down notes in their notebooks. Lucille watched the men.
Andy produced a camera with a telephoto lens and aimed it at the enemy’s formations and he shot away. He attached the camera to his cell phone and sent the images to Cousin Ricardo’s phone back in Task Force Saber’s ops center.
“I’ve never seen that many huge men in one place at one time,” said Hank.
“Not one under six four by my guess. And they all seem to cower to their leaders, the little guys and the women,” said Andy.
“Look at the group by the pond,” said Hank. Both men focused their binoculars on the thin strip of sand at the edge of the pond. Their binoculars brought the scene in close. A small framed woman with her hands on her hips was yelling at a group of these huge monsters. The men assumed the push-up position at her command. After a while, some of them dropped onto their stomachs and she went over to each one and stomped her boot into their backs. None gave the slightest retort. They just took the humiliation and tried to give her more push-ups.
“Looks like six units, each led by two or three smaller people,” said Hank.
Hank and Andy crawled to four different vantage points and collected data until well after nightfall. They made their way through woods, swamp and brush, back to Andy’s vehicle parked in a shopping plaza seven miles away. In an hour they pulled into a service plaza for a memory dump. They put their observations into a Ranger format called “Essential Elements of Information”—organization, activities, vehicles, weapons, uniforms, leadership. They looked at each other.
“This is one lethal enemy force,” said Hank.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Firdos sat on a stump and smoked a cigarette. Randal Sanford came up beside him. They watched Firdos’s squad practice fire and maneuver under the command of one of Firdos’s operators, Sam Farenza. The squad was divided into two fire teams. Team Alpha laid down suppressive fire while Team Bravo scrambled up the hill to a covered position. Then when Sam yelled, “Move!” Team Alpha leap-frogged ahead to a new position while Team Bravo covered them with suppressive fire.
“How they doing, Firdos?” said Randal.
“They do what they’re told,” said Firdos.
At the top of the hill two telephone poles lay on the ground. Each fire team slung their weapons acro
ss their backs and hoisted the telephone poles on their shoulders and jogged down the hill, turned around, and hauled them back up, grunting and shouting all the way. They threw the poles down and each fighter in Team Alpha lifted a Team Bravo fighter over his shoulder and carried him down, shouting, “Death to FITO!” Then the men threw their human burdens down on the ground and put a boot on their necks.
“Recover,” said Sam. “Do it again, you pathetic animals. You’ll keep doing this drill until you get it right. Forget about eating until you do. Back in attack formation.”
“Good training,” said Randal.
“You call me a seer,” said Firdos.
“That’s right. You have a talent for it. That’s why we hired you,” said Randal.
“I have some blind spots.”
Firdos had been thinking about his time in Cape Neddick. He would observe the two men who lived across from him in the trailer park coming and going to and from their rented residence. When they drove off in their SUV he tried to follow them with his telekinetic powers, as he had done thousands of times before. But with these two—he could not “see” them. Their images and their traces escaped his vision.
He thought it was an anomaly. Then yesterday as he panned over the vineyard with his sky-view vision, one blurry spot hung over the ridge to the east like a cloud. As hard as he tried, he could not penetrate it.
When Firdos explained his doubts to Randal, Randal said, “My boy, don’t you see? Your trailer park neighbors were FITO soldiers, somehow covering their movements from your eyes. That confirms Andrew’s theory, right? What appears as a deficiency to you works as an asset to us at higher headquarters. I’ll report this to the board.
“We’re preparing for victory here, Firdos; a glorious battle, believe me. Keep up the good work, commander.”
Randal walked away to inspect his other squads. Firdos was still conflicted by the warm feelings he was getting from being encouraged.
“Sam,” Firdos called out, “Give the guys a ten-minute water break then get them back to work.”
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