by Joshua Hood
Black plucked the drive from the container and dropped it into his shirt pocket.
“Felix, if it was anyone else, I wouldn’t say a word. But you and I go back, what, ten years?”
“Twelve,” Black answered. “What’s your point?”
“Twelve years and I’ve never given advice that you didn’t ask for.”
“David, cut the foreplay and just say what you got to say.”
“Update your will before you take this guy on.”
“Good to know,” he said, getting to his feet.
Back in the Challenger, Black took the laptop off the passenger seat, stuck the drive in the USB port, and typed in the passcode printed on the sheet of paper.
>>>>CIA Remote Portal
_Login ID
>>>>Connection Established_
Query: Hayes, Adam
1 match-
Programs_TREADSTONE/BlackBriar
Well, that explains things.
He looked down at the note and typed in the words written in black ink: location ping. A moment later a satellite image popped up, the crosshairs centered on a blue dot near Deception Pass.
“Got you.”
19
DECEPTION PASS, WASHINGTON
Jesus, Adam, what did Nicky get into?” Deano demanded.
“I have no idea, that’s why I was hoping you could break the encryption.”
“Shit,” Deano said, lowering his voice, his eyes ticking toward the wall that faced the house. “If Martha found out . . . You know what she thinks about this Treadstone shit.”
“Deano, I hate that I even have to ask, but whatever Ford sent is the reason they are trying to kill me.”
“Damn it,” Deano said, getting to his feet. “Go on and log in, I’ll see what I can do.”
“You sure?” Hayes asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Just got to find my damn readers first. And you might want to put on a pot of coffee, ’cause I’m not as fast as I used to be.”
Hayes logged in to his email and then walked over to the coffeepot in the corner of the room.
“Coffee is in the cabinet. Got a few bottles of water in that fridge over there,” Deano said, frowning at the screen.
Hayes got the coffee started and sat down on the couch to wait. He didn’t realize how tired he was until he sank back into the couch.
Just going to close my eyes for a second, he thought.
* * *
—
Hayes slithered out of the mangrove swamp and through the tall grass that lined the shore. His fatigues were torn from his time in the swamp, and stained black from the mud in the Orinoco River. The insects buzzed around his head, drawn to the sweat cutting white rivulets through the camo paint smeared across his face.
The swamp had taken its toll and Hayes was exhausted. He’d run out of food the night before, and his eyes burned from lack of sleep. But he forced himself to keep moving. At the top of the hill, Hayes paused and glanced over his shoulder. Even through the emerald-green hue of the night vision, there was no hiding that it was rough country. Desolate and unforgiving. The last place a sane man would choose to visit.
But quitting wasn’t a choice. Free will wasn’t exactly an attribute Treadstone cultivated in their operatives. They were in the complete-the-mission-or-die-trying business.
The mission had been fucked from the beginning. Infil routes covered, the safe house was blown like they knew he was coming.
There was a leak, but where and, more important, why?
He’d spent the last three days tracking the convoy carrying his target. Sleep was out of the question. Even in the swamps, there were patrols—men looking for the American sent to kill the colonel.
He was exhausted, and his body had taken a beating. The skin on his neck and arms was covered in mosquito bites, and the puckered half-moons marked where he’d cut the leeches from his skin.
But he was alive, and there was still a mission to complete.
Hayes shrugged out of the pack, thumbed the cover from the CamelBak’s bite valve, and plugged it in the corner of his mouth. He took a long pull, the water bitter from the iodine tab he’d used to purify it.
But it was wet, and that was all he cared about.
When he’d drunk his fill, Hayes pulled the night-vision binoculars from the pack and trained them toward the road. The distant yellow of headlights alerted him that his prey had arrived. Hayes watched the line of dark green trucks bounce over the muddy road. The lead vehicle stopped at the gate and a soldier got out, an AK-47 slung low over his chest.
The soldier unlocked the gate and motioned the convoy forward. Hayes shifted his attention to the middle truck, watched it stop in front of the house with the white columns. The door swung open and his breath caught in his chest as his target stepped out of the car.
“Got you,” he said to himself.
* * *
—
“Hey, Adam—”
Hayes felt something grab his shoulder. A hand, his mind told him. He grabbed it and twisted, ignoring the star cluster of pain through his head, left hand reaching for the pistol.
“Easy, little brother,” Deano said. “You were having a nightmare.”
Hayes checked his watch. It was midnight; he had slept for four hours, which explained the dried-out burn in the back of his throat.
“Slept longer than I expected.” He coughed.
“How are you feeling?” Deano asked, limping around the desk and bending down to open the small fridge.
“Better than I hoped. Martha knows her stuff,” he said, testing the range of motion in the arm.
“She should,” Deano said, retrieving a bottle of water and tossing it to Hayes. “Hell, she worked in the emergency room at Ryder Trauma Center for seven years.”
“The ER in Miami?” Hayes asked, twisting the cap from the bottle of water and downing half of the contents in one gulp.
Nothing had ever tasted that good.
“Yes, sir—same hospital they send the Special Forces medics to to get their training,” Deano said, crossing to the printer next to the computer.
“Martha’s a miracle worker,” Hayes gasped when he finally came up for air.
“She’s not the only one.” Deano beamed, plucking three pages from the tray and holding them up for Hayes’s inspection.
“Wait . . . you cracked it?” Hayes asked, jumping to his feet, eyes locked on the photos in Deano’s hand.
“Oh, yeah, and let me tell you—”
Before Deano could finish, Ajax leapt from his bed and rushed to the door, an ominous growl emanating from deep inside his chest.
20
DECEPTION PASS, WASHINGTON
Felix Black turned off State Highway 525 and drove east, slowing to let the silver panel van carrying the Strike Team catch up. He followed the road for half a mile, cut the lights, and eased the car onto the gravel road he’d seen on the satellite map.
He grabbed the H&K 416 from the seat and hopped out of the car, motioning for the van to pull deeper into the trees. When it stopped, Black pulled open the door and climbed inside.
No one spoke in the cargo compartment. The only sounds were the metallic snaps of magazines being shoved into rifles and the thump of their bolts slamming bullets into chambers. Felix Black had already briefed the Strike Team that had flown in from Langley, told them what kind of man they were going after, but he wanted to make sure there was no confusion.
“Listen up,” he hissed.
The men stopped what they were doing, and all eyes turned toward him.
“You guys are the best in the business; that’s why you’re here. But I want you to forget everything you think you know. In the past thirty-two hours, our target has killed five of my men—guys who’d been there, done that, and got the T-shirt.”
He paused, let his words sink in before continuing with the brief.
“This is a straight kill mission and we are weapons-free as soon as we step out of this van. Do you understand?”
The men nodded.
“I am going to give you one piece of advice. If you see anything inside that fence not marked with an IR beacon, you kill it. Because if you don’t, Adam Hayes will put you in a box.”
Black pulled his night-vision goggles over his eyes, grabbed his H&K 416, and opened the back door. He waited for the rest of the team to form up around him, then they crept east toward the fence line, stopping short to let the breacher cut a hole in the chain-link.
“Let’s get those machine-gunners on the flanks,” Black ordered.
The two M240 Bravo gunners moved out to the left and to the right to set up their positions. Black took a knee next to a bush and tugged a ruggedized Android tablet from the pouch attached to his plate carrier.
“We’re set,” the gunners announced over the radio.
“Roger that, standby,” Black replied.
He depressed the button on the corner of the device and the screen flashed to life. The startup message announced kilswitch v-2, followed by a satellite overlay of the target area.
When Black joined the SEALs in 1994, GPS units weighed thirty pounds. Since they were too heavy to be practical in the field, he learned to call in air strikes with a map and compass. That changed in the early 2000s, when civilians were finally allowed unrestricted access to the military satellites.
In 2001, when Black bought his first Garmin eTrex for two hundred dollars, the unit was the size of a remote control and ran on AA batteries, which made it light enough to carry in his pocket. Black took it with him to Afghanistan and it turned out to be a game changer. Not only was it light and resilient, the Garmin was capable of pinpointing a location within one meter.
Accuracy that allowed him to bomb the Taliban into submission.
At the time Black thought it was the greatest innovation in modern warfare, but the Garmin had nothing on the Kilswitch. He slid the stylus from its holder and tapped on the blue dot that marked Hayes’s location in the house.
Prosecute this target?
Black opened the Persistent Close Air Support window. The onboard GPS system automatically established an uplink, and a moment later the Available Air Assets window was auto-populated with two columns: Armed and Unarmed.
Let’s see if Gray came through, Black thought, as he tapped the Armed block and waited for the spinning hourglass on the screen.
1 Asset: General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
Armed x2 Hellfire
Execute: Y/N
“You guys might want to grab some cover,” he said over the radio before tapping the Y with the stylus.
It took less than a second for the signal to travel from the unit to the CIA-operated General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper loitering 10,000 feet overhead. The UAV received the targeting package, but before processing the strike the onboard security system sent an encrypted authorization request back to Langley.
In less than five seconds the drone had received a response. Strike Authorization Confirmed.
The Reaper banked to the left, its onboard navigation system guiding it into a sweeping turn that brought it online with the uploaded coordinates. Twelve miles from the target, the Reaper leveled off, and the targeting system activated the laser that would guide the AGM-114K to the target.
On the ground, Black watched the progress on the screen.
Laser Armed . . . Master Arm Hot . . . Target Lock . . . READY TO ENGAGE
He tapped the fire button and the word RIFLE flashed on the screen, the signal that the Reaper had launched the hundred-pound Hellfire.
Impact In 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7
The missile was on its way and Black turned his attention to the target building. See you in hell, motherfucker.
21
DECEPTION PASS, WASHINGTON
Ajax stood at the door of Deano’s outbuilding, hackles bristling down his neck.
“Ajax, foei”—no.
But the dog ignored him and continued to growl at the door.
“You think something’s out there, well, let’s take a look,” he said, fingers flashing over the keyboard. “This security system was a birthday present from Martha. State of the art. It covers both the cabin and this building.”
But Hayes wasn’t listening; a distant, familiar sound had caught his attention. “You hear that?” he asked, stepping closer to the door. Praying that it had just been the wind or a figment of his imagination, because the only other explanation didn’t make any sense.
“Oh, shit, we got zips in the wire,” Deano shouted, running toward the arms room. He reappeared a moment later with the SOCOM 16. “These sons of bitches picked the wrong fucking house,” he said, heading for the blast door.
“Deano, wait,” Hayes said, trying to cut him off, but there was murder in the man’s eyes, and he shoved Hayes out of the way, threw the latch on the blast door, and stepped outside.
Hayes had regained his balance and turned to follow Deano when he heard the freight-train scream of a supersonic object cutting through the air. A sound pregnant with the promise of imminent death.
He opened his mouth in warning, but his words were lost beneath the earth-shattering rumble of the Hellfire slamming through the roof of the cabin and detonating.
Time stopped on a dime and Hayes watched in horror as the eighteen-pound thermobaric warhead detonated, the sudden change in pressure creating a vacuum inside the enclosed space. Sucking the cabin walls in on themselves. The pressure building until it reached critical mass and then ba-boooom.
The second detonation sent a wave of superheated gas and flame rolling outward from the point of impact. It vaporized the drywall, sheared through the pipes and the studs like a scalpel through flesh before fireballing through the exterior wall of the cabin.
“Martha!” Deano screamed, and then the shock wave punted him across the yard and threw him into the side of the outbuilding.
Hayes was lifted off his feet and slammed into the wall. The impact punched the air from his lungs, and he fell to the floor, gasping for breath—choking on the caustic black smoke that filled his lungs and scalded his eyes.
There was no doubt as to what had just happened. The evidence was in every breath—the acrid taste of burnt fuel and explosives telling him someone had called in an air strike on the house.
In an instant the fragment Martha had removed from the wound made sense. Fuckers put a tracker in me. But there was no time to worry about that now. The fire had spread from the cabin to this building. The crack and pop of the roof joists overhead warned that he didn’t have long before the flames found the support beams and the roof caved in, trapping him in the inferno.
Move.
Hayes crawled along the floor, trying to stay below the thick blanket of smoke that was forcing the breathable air from the room. He lowered his head and moved forward, ignoring the burn of the flaming embers against his exposed flesh, following the gentle caress of the cool air wafting in through the open door.
I’m not dying here.
Hayes made it outside and tried to take a breath, but his lungs recoiled from the scorching air. He was overcome with a fit of coughing that left him with the copper taste of blood at the back of his throat. Hayes crawled to the well halfway between the smoldering cabin and the outbuilding.
His hands closed around the pump, and he primed it, putting his face underneath the spigot as he pumped. The water gushed over his face, clearing the cinders and dust from his eyes, quenching the burn on his bare skin.
God, that feels good.
Hayes finally could see what was happening around him, and he knew it was a scene he would never forget.
Everything within a twenty-foot radius of the blast zone was on fir
e. The pine trees burned like roman candles in the night, and the heat from the flames caused the sap in the trunks to boil. Expanded until they exploded with the crack of a high-powered rifle.
Ten feet to his right, Hayes saw Deano lying motionless against a tree, his neck bent grotesquely to one side, blood trickling from his nose, the sling of the SOCOM 16 still wrapped around his forearm.
Hayes rushed to his side, ignoring the voice in his head warning him that the fight wasn’t over.
Get down, it ordered.
But the warning fell on deaf ears.
Hayes knelt beside his friend, knowing in an instant that he and Martha were dead, and that it was his fault.
“I never should have come here,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He wanted to say more, but his grieving was cut short by a shout in the distance, followed by the unmistakable brrrraaaaaaap of a machine gun opening up.
Hayes threw himself to the ground a moment before a coil of tracers came lashing through the flaming trees. The bullets snapped overhead, cracking through the air like a bullwhip. The last time Hayes had been under machine-gun fire was in Afghanistan, in the Helmand River Valley—Taliban country.
* * *
—
His team was there to assist the Afghan Army in the Taliban from their opium-rich stronghold.
They were crossing a poppy field, the team sergeant on point, eyes open for any Taliban ambush, and Hayes bringing up the rear, watching their so-called Afghani allies in case any of them wanted to score a few points by killing an American.
Hayes had just turned to check their six when a Taliban fighter armed with a Soviet-made PKM opened up on the formation. He remembered the fear that came from being caught out in the open. Pinned down, the bullets chewing up the earth in front of his face, kicking dirt into his eyes.