“Engage now!”
Gale pressed the autopilot button hoping to God this sixty-five-million-dollar hunk of metal was up for the challenge.
Five seconds passed.
Ten.
Seven hundred feet.
One mile away.
“It’s not engaging.”
He heard the colonel swear over the frequency, then his voice became sharp and urgent.
“Okay, no problem, Mr. Gale, I’m going to coach you through this.” Wallinger led him through which buttons to press, which switches to flick, and how to compress the brakes one last time.
Three hundred feet.
Gale flew over Middleton’s shore, the runway just ahead.
“Flaps! Flaps! Slow the jet!”
Gale triggered the flaps and the jet tilted.
Two hundred feet.
One hundred.
Fifty.
Twenty-five.
The front wheels smacked onto the runway and the plane bounced.
“BRAKES!”
Gale smashed on the brakes, did exactly what the colonel had told him to do, but the plane was going too fast, it was tilted too far to the left side.
Gale put all his weight onto the brakes. Metal crunched as the port wing collided with the tarmac—the momentum turned the plane to the right side and Gale felt himself go weightless as the jet pitched into the air.
He closed his eyes, covered his face, and was blasted with the loudest noise he’d ever heard.
* * *
Wallinger glanced over at General Bressant. The big general had his eyes glued to the screens on the wall.
A controller stood. “F-22s are reporting a crash landing.”
Wallinger said, “How far out is Coast Guard?”
“Fifteen minutes, sir.”
General Bressant took off his headset, handed it to Wallinger, said, “I need to contact the Northern Unified Command immediately.”
“Sir?”
Bressant leaned in close to Wallinger. “If one iota of what that pilot said was true, we’ve got a problem. A big problem. I’ve got to follow protocol on this one.”
The general rushed out of the room.
Wallinger turned back to the screens. “Any sign of life on that island?”
* * *
Gale’s face was warm.
Sunlight streamed through the cockpit’s spider-webbed window. He blinked, took in the erratic beams of light flooding through. The headset had been thrown from his head, lying in pieces by his feet, and the cockpit’s contents were strewn about.
Gale unlatched himself from the seat and slowly got to his feet. His head hurt, his vision was blurry.
Taking a moment to steady himself, he went into the cabin. The place looked like a bomb had gone off. The dead Russians and the pilot lay like rag dolls over the seats. One was propped up against the wall: it was Scarface.
Gale stood over the man, bent down, and grabbed the black tablet in its Velcro holder from Scarface’s tactical vest. As he went for it, he noticed a satellite phone was strapped next to the tablet. Gale snatched both items and planned on using them when he got out of the wreckage, but first he needed to do something.
Gale took off Scarface’s tactical vest and threw it aside, then he grabbed the dead man’s undershirt and took that off as well.
Scarface’s chest showed a myriad of scars and battle wounds; clearly he was a seasoned soldier. But Gale wasn’t looking for scars. He raised the dead man’s right arm, exposing the inside of his right bicep.
And there it was, the confirmation Gale needed.
The small, almost imperceptible, “V” tattoo. The tattoo etched on every KGB and now SVR Vympel Group operator in the world. Russia’s most deadly covert assassins. Viktor Sokolov’s most deadly assassins.
After all these years, Sokolov is still alive and these men are still operational.
Gale let Scarface’s arm drop and he walked over to the door, pulling on the red emergency release lever. After a moment of struggling, the door blew open. Gale jumped onto a patch of dirt and hobbled away from the wreckage.
He tried turning on the tablet first, but nothing happened. Next, he went for the satellite phone, which chimed on immediately.
He punched in Emily’s phone number. Straight to voice mail. Same with Trask’s. Gale started feeling sick to his stomach. He called Petit’s number and the old cowboy answered immediately.
“Alvin, it’s Jim—”
“Jim, oh Jesus, something’s happened.” For the next minute Gale listened to his old friend’s frantic voice on the other line. When Gale eventually hung up, he found himself on his knees.
Gale dropped the phone and took in the wreckage. The G650 was missing both its wings and horizontal stabilizers. The fuselage looked like a crumpled tin can and small electrical fires blossomed from numerous holes in the galley. Gale determined the plane had skidded and tumbled a good thousand feet beyond the runway after the crash.
Rotors thumped in the distance and Gale could see a red blur of a Coast Guard helicopter on the horizon.
He had a couple minutes before they got here.
They have Cassie.
They have Emily.
Trask is—
Gale reached into his back pocket and took out the folded envelope he’d taken from the green lockbox underneath the floorboard in his office.
What lies ahead can’t be done alone.
His fingers trembled as he unfolded the envelope and took out the contents.
The horrid photographs gazed up at him; they were just as he remembered them. The cruelty of the pictures and what they symbolized. What they led Gale to do.
He sat down in the grass, looked at the photographs for another moment, and then put them back in the envelope, leaving only the worn, bone-white card. He flipped the card over and gazed down at the phone number scrawled in pen on the back.
After thirty years of escaping his past, it was time to confront it head on.
It was time for James Gale to die.
And Robert Gaines to live again.
He dialed the number on the satellite phone, pressed it to his ear. As it rang, the Coast Guard helicopter got closer.
The roar of the two F-22s cracked like thunder in the distance.
When the ringing stopped, he heard a click, and then the familiar animatronic woman’s voice say:
“Station. State your call sign.”
“This is PEGASUS. I need to speak to Susan Carter and Prescott McGavran. Tell them it’s about Striker. Tell them Robert Gaines is blown.”
Gale talked for thirty more seconds and then hung up just as the Coast Guard helicopter touched down on the field next to the crash site.
He lay down in the tall grass and stared up at the blue sky, his eyes misting over—hoping to God someone from his old life would answer his cry for help.
Chapter 42
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
OLD CIA HEADQUARTERS BUILDING
IT HAD BEEN a hell of a day for Susan Carter and it was only going to get worse.
The sixty-six-year-old Tennessee native stood in her office on the seventh floor of the old CIA headquarters building and took a swig of expensive sour mash from a tumbler as she gazed out over the Potomac River in the distance, her mind reeling from the call she’d received on a burner phone from Prescott McGavran nearly thirty minutes before.
Susan, turn on the news to the footage of the plane crash in Alaska. It’s concerning Striker and PEGASUS. Meet me in the executive SCIF in forty-five minutes. Speak to no one until we talk.
As the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Susan Carter was not a woman who was easily rattled, but the surprise call had shaken her to her very core.
She turned from the window and stared across her office at the flat-screen on the wall where a news anchor talked over a live feed of a plane crash on Middleton Island just off the coast of Alaska. So far, local authorities were reporting multiple deaths and one survivor. The ae
rial footage showed the crumpled features of a Gulfstream jet, rescue crews, and an FBI team surveying the wreckage.
What the hell is going on? What does this crash have to do with Striker? What does this crash have to do with PEGASUS? The man has been dead for over thirty years.
Deep in thought, Carter traversed her office, downing the rest of the bourbon. It had been over three decades since she’d heard the cryptonym PEGASUS. Over thirty years since she and her old boss Prescott McGavran, the legendary spymaster and former Moscow Chief of Station, had run their deadly agent in the Moscow streets.
Eight months before, Susan Bradford Carter had been appointed by the young new president, William McClintock, to be the first woman to head the CIA. The president—a former marine himself—liked what he saw in Carter, especially when it came to her views on foreign policy. Due to the decades Carter spent abroad at the behest of the United States government, she understood the world much differently than the pencil-pushing bureaucrats in Langley. She understood the nuances of the United States’ enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, and of course those thugs in office in Iran. Not to mention the hornet’s nest that was the Middle East and the proliferation of ISIS in Africa and Southeast Asia.
President McClintock became a fan of Carter after her first interview for the D/CIA position. Carter, the then deputy director of counterintelligence, had detailed to McClintock how China needed to be strictly monitored, how Russia couldn’t get away meddling in US affairs and that their dictator, Vladimir Putin, only understood one language, and that was force. After she had mapped out how the CIA would deal with the rising terrorism and tyranny abroad, McClintock appointed her to the position and three weeks later, Susan Bradford Carter was confirmed by a majority vote in the Senate—designating her to the coveted role of D/CIA.
With the proverbial glass ceiling shattered at her feet, Susan Carter, nicknamed the Ice Queen by her subordinates, began her aggressive foreign intelligence campaign.
So far, it was going splendidly.
That was until Prescott McGavran’s alarming message came over her burner phone thirty minutes before.
A knock on the door tore Carter’s attention from the news as her special assistant, Jack Crowley, poked his head into her office. “Ma’am, I know you said you didn’t want to be disturbed—”
“Is my detail ready to take me to the SCIF?”
SCIF was the acronym for a Secret Compartmented Information Facility, a secure room where secret information could be passed along without having to worry about electronic surveillance or data leakages.
“Almost, ma’am, but the associate director of military affairs, Werner Monroe, is outside trying to see you.”
“I’m not speaking to anyone.”
As she said it, Werner Monroe pushed past Jack Crowley and barged into Carter’s office. The AD/MA’s face was flushed with stress. He held up a USB in his hand.
“Ma’am,” Monroe said, “we’ve got a big problem that requires your immediate attention.” His eyes flicked to the television. “The Northern Unified Command has been calling me nonstop to get ahold of you. There is a situation in Alaska.”
Carter steadied herself against her desk, McGavran’s words reverberating in her head.
PEGASUS. Striker. Speak to no one until we talk.
She had ten minutes until she would meet the old spymaster in the SCIF and she didn’t intend on speaking to Monroe, but the panicked look on the AD/MA’s face made her relent. She ordered Crowley outside and shut the door.
“What is it?”
“Ma’am, the Northern Unified Command has received a recording from a general at JBER in Anchorage. The recording came from a pilot aboard a private jet”—Monroe indicated the crash on TV—“that jet.”
“And why does this concern me. Shouldn’t that be the FBI’s problem?”
“That’s the thing, ma’am, before that plane crashed, the pilot asked to get a message to you,” Monroe said, putting the USB on her desk.
“I’m sure there are a lot of quacks out there trying to get ahold of me, Monroe.”
“Ma’am, the pilot says he’s an old agent of ours. Robert Gaines.”
“Robert Gaines is dead,” Carter said, trying to keep her voice restrained, but knowing the cat was out of the bag.
“I know that, ma’am. I checked—”
“Thank you, Werner,” Carter said, grabbing the USB. “Wait outside.”
Carter waited until the door closed, put the USB into her computer, and opened the encrypted zip file. Blood was starting to pound in her ears, as the fear of what she might hear on the audio bubbled up within her. Her finger hovered over her track pad for a moment, then she pressed play. A crackling of static sounded, followed by the voice of a man she thought dead long ago.
“Just listen to me, Colonel. I need you to get a message to Prescott McGavran and Susan Carter at the Central Intelligence Agency. Tell them it’s about the Striker program. Tell them that it’s their old agent, Robert Gaines, tell them I’ve been compromised. That PEGASUS has been compromised. Viktor Sokolov and his SVR Vympels have found me. Tell them that the Russians have been kidnapping Americans off American soil and that they took my daughters. Tell them that they are taking them to the sharashka. Tell them if they don’t do something, Viktor Sokolov will kill them.”
Carter stared at her computer, Robert Gaines’s words detonating in her head like fireworks.
All these years Prescott McGavran had been lying to her. The deception was incalculable. Robert Gaines was alive! But not only that, he’d brought the darkest chapter of Susan Carter’s professional career back to light. For a full minute, Carter sat in disbelief at her desk and wondered how Prescott McGavran, a now low-ranking analyst within OREA, the Office of Russian and European Analysis, had known so quickly about Robert Gaines. Had he hacked into some military channel and heard this before her? Or had PEGASUS contacted him directly as well?
Carter snatched the USB from her computer and marched out of her office. Crowley jumped up from his desk, his phone pressed to his shoulder. “Ma’am, DNI Nagle is trying to get ahold of you.”
Monroe, his own encrypted cell phone against his ear, cupped a hand over the receiver. “I’ve got the office of the SecDef asking for you, ma’am.”
The cat is surely out of the bag.
Carter stopped in the middle of the room. “Tell each of them I will speak to them in thirty minutes.” Fast-walking out of the reception room and into the hallway, she told her security detail to follow her into the private elevator reserved solely for her and pushed a button for the fifth-level basement.
As the elevator descended, she clutched the USB tight in her hands and closed her eyes, trying to compartmentalize all that was going on. As the elevator reached its destination, the doors opened, and she walked down the sterile white hallway to a door that led to the CIA’s executive SCIF. She scanned herself in and told her security detail to wait in the hall. Stepping inside, she saw the hunched figure of Prescott McGavran waiting for her at the table in the long white room.
Carter wasted no time sealing the airtight doors. When the SCIF pressurized, she sat at the table across from the old man.
Prescott McGavran wore a tweed jacket and pushed his bifocals up along his long crooked nose, his white hair combed perfectly over his head. A steel-plated briefcase was handcuffed to his left wrist, which sat on the table between them. “Madam Director—”
“Oh cut the crap, Prescott. Just what in the name of Christ is going on?!”
Chapter 43
POST 866
ARTUR’S LABORATORY
A SHARP, STABBING pain ricocheted down Cassie’s left arm and thrust her out of a deep, dreamless sleep. She sat up abruptly and grasped at her upper arm, which was covered with heavy bandages. IV lines ran out of each of her forearms and she realized she was sitting on a gurney in a room that looked like a mad scientist’s laboratory.
A computer monitor flashed from a table across from
her, displaying a 3-D rendering of a human brain that constantly changed color. It took a moment for Cassie to realize that dozens of wires and electrodes hung down from her scalp.
“Don’t touch them!” Artur ordered, turning away from the computer monitor; his face sported a deep five o’clock shadow. He moved to her and forced her hand away from the throng of wires she had attempted to wrench from her head. “How is the pain?”
Suddenly, it all came back to her. The trial. The firefight on the mountaintop. Billy cowering behind the large boulder and Brady firing at the prisoners. Cassie remembered the searing pain of a bullet entering and exiting her arm, then she remembered being surrounded before the drones had fired down upon them with the knockout gas.
“It hurts.”
“I can fix that,” Artur said, grabbing a syringe and injecting it into her IV line. “You just tell me if you need any more.”
Cassie immediately felt a warm wave flood over her body and she relaxed. Artur stood over her and gently put a hand on her forearm.
“Bez prikosnoveniy!” No touching, a voice shouted. A black-clad, armored guard came into Cassie’s field of view, grabbed Artur by the shoulder, and shoved him away. Artur pointed a finger at the guard’s Kevlar vest and spat at him in Russian, making the guard retreat toward the door.
“Where are Billy and Brady?”
“Red Block,” Artur said, returning back to the computer monitor that showed the 3-D image of the brain.
“Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. You’re lucky the bullet didn’t nick your brachial artery. Another centimeter to the left and you would have bled out.”
Cassie sighed and relaxed even more as the drug fully took hold. She smiled with the euphoria it brought and then began to take in the room. It was unlike any other room she’d seen in the facility so far. It was cluttered, filled with sophisticated-looking lab equipment. Pictures of the human brain covered the walls. A futuristic chemistry setup took up a massive workbench, and behind the workbench, Cassie could make out a small nook that housed a bunk.
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