“What should we do, sir? Boal asked.
Howe tried not to panic as he dialed Parks. There was no answer. He turned to Boal. “Stand by.”
Howe’s stomach churned, and his face grew hot with anger. His hands trembled. Parks was calling his bluff, and if so, it was because Parks somehow believed that he had the upper hand. Satellite imagery showed that Parks had not moved from his location, his custom refurbished 16th century castle in Trans Dniester. In Howe’s eyes, that made him a sitting duck, a far easier target to hit than Bin Laden had been in Pakistan.
Howe did not understand why Parks didn’t accept reality and just take the damn deal. It was an organizational restructuring that made perfect sense, and even though Howe had a scorched earth plan in case there was outright refusal from Parks, he never thought he’d actually have to implement the plan. Parks’ resistance to become part of the world stage made absolutely no sense to him. It somehow had to involve Luthecker, Howe surmised. Perhaps Collin Smith had been right, that Parks had discovered something about the young man that gave him the upper hand. If that was the case, Howe could waste no more time. He had to go with the scorched earth option, as unfortunate as it was; he would kill them both as soon as possible.
Howe looked up and noticed that all eyes were on him, waiting for his order. It only served to intensify the gravity of the situation. Howe decided that he had no other choice but to pull the trigger. “Launch.”
There was a hush over the room and a moment of stillness before the lead technician, Michael Calleri, spoke. “We are green; let’s launch this bird, gentlemen.”
Everyone scrambled to his or her station, and all eyes turned toward the monitor that held the SR-73 in view. They watched as the engines roared to life, tail cones flaring with a deep blue flame before the one hundred-foot long war machine began to roll forward. In seconds, the unmanned SR-73 was screaming down the runway, nose lifting off the tarmac first, then the rear wheels, and the plane was fully airborne. The wheels retracted underneath the fuselage just before the after burners kicked in, the flames from the engines turning from the red of lower temperatures to the blue heat of the higher degrees. In no time, the SR-73 was a dot on the screen, gaining altitude and speed until it disappeared from camera view.
The runway camera went dark, and all attention quickly turned to the three targeting screens. Several lines of code scrolled across the screens before a bird’s eye view of the earth’s surface in black and white appeared on each of the screens. Howe watched as control center personnel quickly settled into their routine. He listened in on the chatter between technicians.
“Altitude twenty-thousand feet and climbing.”
“Speed at Mach one point five.”
“All systems go.”
Boal turned toward Howe.“We’ll reach max speed and altitude in twenty-minutes. In target range in less than forty minutes.” Boal leaned in closer to Howe and whispered. “Sir, there’s still time to abort.”
Howe checked his phone. There was no response from Parks. “Let me know when you have target lock.”
“I am going with you. I am part of this now. And you need me,” Masha said to Chris.
“It’s dangerous.”
“It’s my car. And I know ways into the North Star castle that you do not.”
Chris looked at Yaw.
“She’s right,” Yaw said. “We need her and she can help. Now let’s go. We’re wasting time.”
Chris tossed Yaw his Kali sticks before climbing into the passenger seat of the car. Once Yaw settled into the backseat, Masha got behind the wheel and started the WRX, slipping it into gear. The four-wheel drive kicked in, and the Subaru roared away from the abandoned industrial park, back toward the heart of Tiraspol.
“Are you sure Semyon won’t come to these buildings looking for us?’ Chris asked, worried about Nikki and Winn.
“No. I am not sure,” Masha replied, keeping her eyes on the road. “But then, from what I hear in those phone calls, none of us are safe.” She turned to Chris. “I hope that you are as good at this as you say you are.”
“She betrayed you, Semyon,” Leonid said as he held the ice bag against his left eye. The heavyset Russian had been the first of Semyon’s enforcers put down by the three Americans who had regained consciousness.
“She betrayed us all.” Semyon held a blood-soaked handkerchief under his broken nose, in hopes that the bleeding would eventually stop. His anger at Masha’s actions had only served to intensify the pain. “And she will pay for it with her life.”
Semyon, Leonid, along with Reza and Abram, the two other Russian soldiers who had confronted Masha and her mysterious new American friends in the alley next to the disco, were still nursing their wounds after the altercation that left them empty handed. Semyon had yet to report what had happened to Mr. Parks, deciding it wiser instead to take his men away and recover in the backroom of a local bakery where the owner owed Semyon a favor. The establishment owner had brought them food and water then had given them privacy in the storage room that had an icebox along with the first aid kit.
“We should report this to Mr. Parks,” Reza said.
“That would be unwise,” Semyon replied.
“What do we do?” Reza asked. The six-foot-tall soldier with the lean build and long legs sat on the edge of a metal prep counter, his AK-47 leaning against the wall next to him. Reza tried to straighten his right leg, the one that had been hit in the back of the knee by Winn’s Kali stick, but the pain was too great. He winced as he massaged the ligaments around the joint.
“We find them,” Semyon answered. “And we do so before Mr. Parks ever discovers that we had the woman in our grasp, and we were beaten by a handful of foreigners with…sticks.” Semyon’s nose was swollen and painful to the touch, but as he pulled his hand away and checked his fingers, it appeared that the bleeding had stopped.
“Masha’s new friends, the Americans; who are they?” Abram asked, wincing at the vibration of his own voice, his head still pounding from the blow to the back of his skull. Still fighting off dizziness, he steadied himself against the wall.
“I do not know,” Semyon replied. “But I do know where Masha goes. She does not think that I do, but I know. Gather the others. We will find her and her new friends. The only one that needs be kept alive, for now, is the woman, Nikki Ellis. The rest, we will kill.”
“You still haven’t found her,” Luthecker said to Parks. He sat on the overstuffed black leather couch situated across from the fireplace in Parks’ castle suite. He looked at the child’s music box before moving his eyes to the weapons that hung on the wall over the fireplace. He recognized a pair of Turco-Mongol sabers that crossed one another over a Jida Lance, underneath this a thin chain, with twin metal balls at each end, was also decoratively draped. Luthecker could see by the markings etched into the metal and the amount of corrosion that the weapons were authentic, and he calculated them, save for the chain, to be over three thousand years old.
Luthecker’s eyes drifted from the weapons to the flicker of the flames in the fireplace as Parks stood behind him.
“Those blades date back to Genghis Kahn. Allegedly, they were his own,” Parks said.
“You’ve been misled. Those are the blades of a low-ranking soldier, not of a leader.” Luthecker turned to Parks. “And you won’t find her.”
“Wouldn’t you, just once, like to have a conversation free of strategy and subterfuge?”
Luthecker looked at the fireplace again, allowing the hypnotic movement of the flames to seduce him.“I don’t follow you.”
“Of course you do. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have her. I have you. That means she’s close and is going to stay that way until this is resolved. And that’s because she loves you; and she’s sure as hell not leaving without you, now is she?”
Luthecker kept his eyes locked on the flames, and Parks sat on the couch next to him. “You know, if it was just you, Alex, I could see you going the martyr route. Le
tting Howe kill us both, in effect ending your pain; ending your isolation. Admit it; the thought’s crossed your mind, hasn’t it? Ending it all? Or more accurately, finding out?”
Luthecker kept his eyes on the flames.
“But it isn’t just you, is it? Not anymore. It’s you and her. And you’re not about to let her die. Not after you’ve saved her in such a deliberate, flagrant fashion. She was going to die, and you stopped it cold. It’s like you gave fate the middle finger. What’s that Chinese proverb? If you save a life, you are responsible for it? Add to that, love; the most powerful motivational narcotic of all.”
Parks got to his feet.“You’re going to stop Howe in his tracks. Don’t deny it. And you’re going to do it for her. I don’t know how you’re going to do it, but I don’t have to know how. All I know is that you will; I can feel it from blood to bone. And it’s going to be a game-changer. I’m not as good as you are at this, of course, but I trust my instincts. Like I said, I have complete faith in you; and I can’t wait to see how it all goes down.”
“I’ve traced James Howe’s cell phone GPS signal to a location about ten miles south of a private airstrip in the Arizona desert,” Nikki said to Winn as the martial arts instructor looked over her shoulder. “There is a cluster of top secret government and corporate buildings in the area. I’m going to access satellite images, pinpoint his location, and see exactly which structure he’s in,” she continued, as she rattled her fingers on the laptop keyboard. In seconds, the screen showed overhead images of a square, windowless concrete structure with several large-scale satellite dishes on its rooftop, all surrounded by twelve-foot-high fences topped off with razor wire coils.
“How are you accessing all of this?” Winn asked.
“It’s a byproduct of having to move PHOEBE to the Deep Net after what happened in Los Angeles. Search engines like Google only access about point zero three percent of the Internet. PHOEBE is growing. Not only can she predict trends in large data sets on the surface net, she can run circles around Google in the Deep Net if I want her to. And there isn’t a firewall she can’t crack, either. I promise you, Parks’ entire operation is lurking in the depths down here, somewhere. And when I find it, and I will, he’s going to be in for some big surprises. But right now, we need to focus on what Coalition Properties and James Howe are up to.”
Nikki turned her attention back to her laptop screen. A dozen keystrokes later, she was looking at building schematics.
“Look at the size of those radar dishes,” she said.
“What does that mean? Winn asked.
More keys. “Looks like a launch center,” Nikki said, thinking out loud.
“To launch what?” Winn asked.
“Drones, more than likely.”
More keys. “They put something in the air.”
The laptop screen turned to a completed launch sequence—countdown clock zeroed out.
“I’m looking at the log. Whatever it is, it used an awful lot of runway, so it’s gotta be big; according to the log, it left an airstrip in Arizona twenty minutes ago.”
More keys.
“Okay, I’ve hacked into the aircraft’s flight system.”
The data on Nikki’s laptop screen was now identical to what Calleri and his flight crew had on theirs.”
“Holy shit it’s fast. It just passed Mach five. And the flight path takes it…oh, no.”
“What?”
“It’s headed this way.”
“What are you going to do?”
More keys. “Jam the son of a bitch if I can.”
“Approaching Mach six the S7-73,” Calleri, said. “All systems are green.”
The launch center was dark, offset by the blinking lights of the control consoles and the wall of monitors that had black and white satellite images of both the city of Tiraspol and Lucas Parks’ North Star castle.
“Fifteen minutes until targeting range.”
Boal turned to Howe for a final answer.
“Take out the target,” Howe said.
“We are a go. Paint the target.”
“Wait.”
Howe, Boal, and the rest of the tech team turned to Calleri.
The flight technician lifted his hands from his keyboard as if electrically shocked by it, a baffled look on his face. His eyes went back and forth between his workstation and the wall of monitors.
“What is it?” Boal asked. He stood behind Calleri and looked over the man’s shoulder.
“We have a problem.”
“Problem? What kind of problem?”
“It’s slowing down.”
“Slowing down? Why?”
“New commands.”
“From who?”
“From somewhere else.” Calleri turned to Boal. “The system has booted me out.”
“The system’s booted you out? Are you sure your instruments are reading right?”
“Yes, I’m sure. And I’m telling you, somebody kicked me off.”
“What does that mean?” Howe interjected.
“It means I’ve lost control of the bird.”
“Fuck. Me.” Those were the only words Nikki could manage as her fingers danced furiously across the laptop keys. She could feel the sweat dripping down the side of her temples and cheeks, but she didn’t dare wipe her face or take her eyes from the laptop screen, not even for a second.
“I’ve electronically hijacked the biggest drone ever made while it’s going Mach six.”
The only thing Winn could see were numbers scrolling across the screen at an alarming rate. “What are you going to do?”
Nikki hit keys. “Put on the brakes.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t fucking know.”
Howe watched as the control team for the SR-73 went from perfectly choreographed harmony to complete disarray, all in a matter of seconds. Systems operators and flight technicians shouted over one another.
“No response on the override system.”
“It’s not responding. Nothing’s responding. It’s been jammed.”
“We’ve got a bird out of control. Speed is down to Mach one point five. This is a big problem—”
“Jesus Christ—“
“Everyone stay calm.”
“Switching to manual.” Calleri got up from his workstation and sat behind the joystick. He hit several keys to activate the manual override before moving the stick, trying to regain control of the SR-73. It was unresponsive.
“What the hell is going on?” Howe yelled over the room.
“We’ve…it’s been hijacked,” Calleri said, completely bewildered.
“What do you mean, it has been hijacked?”
“I mean someone else is flying this thing, and it’s not us.”
“Where they taking it?”
“I don’t’ know. Someone else is at the helm.”
“What?”
“Someone else—”
“I fucking heard you. Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“How is this possible?”
“I…I don’t know. I’ve never had a drone system hijacked before.”
“Shut it down,” Boal said.
“I can’t. Even if I could, there’s no time. It’s all ready over Russian airspace. If it keeps dropping speed and altitude, their radar’s going to catch it.” Calleri was starting to panic.
Howe looked at Boal. “How is this possible? How in the hell is this possible? What the hell is going on?”
“Sir, I—“
Calleri slowly rose from his chair. “Oh, no...”
“Amazing view, isn’t it?” Parks said as both he and Luthecker stood on the castle balcony, which looked over both the city of Tiraspol, all the way to the Dniester River.
“After my time in prison, I realized it really is the little things. A sunset. A quiet evening. You have to enjoy them while you can.”
Luthecker said nothing. The moonlight dancing off the river held his gaze.
Parks chec
ked his phone for the time. “We’re past Howe’s deadline.” Parks moved to put his phone back in his pocket, but the device slipped from his hand and fell to the stone floor of the balcony, breaking into pieces.
Luthecker watched the pieces scatter across the stone.
Parks smiled uneasy at Luthecker before he crouched down and picked up the broken parts of his phone. He tossed the bits of plastic on the small balcony table to his right. “What do you think he’s going to do? Do you think he sent assassins?”
Luthecker said nothing.
“I know that he didn’t expect my refusal, so he wouldn’t have had the time. And he may be dangerously arrogant, but he’s not stupid; he knows that there’s no way he could have gotten them past my people.”
Luthecker detected a slight change of pitch in Parks’ voice.
“How’s he going to do it?”
“It could be one of a thousand different ways,” Luthecker finally answered.
“Bullshit. There’s only one, and you know what it is. You’ve been holding out on me this whole time, and I’ve allowed it because I don’t know how it is you do what you do, and my knowing might change it. But the deadline has passed so whatever is in motion is in motion. So out with it. Remember, if I die, you die.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Parks pulled his knife and put it to Luthecker’s neck.“Yes I am.”
Luthecker didn’t move. He held Parks’ gaze.
Parks finally pulled the knife from Luthecker’s neck and sheathed it back in his waistband. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. I know that you know how this all ends. And I know that we don’t die. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be so calm. Because you couldn’t let it end like this. You’d want to see her again, one more time.”
Parks started to pace.
Luthecker stayed silent. He kept his gaze on the horizon.
A distant roar that echoed through the air became louder and louder. Parks rushed out to the balcony and searched the sky.
Rise: Luthecker, #2 Page 29