The Unending Chase

by Cap Daniels

  THE UNENDING CHASE

  CHASE FULTON NOVEL #4

  CAP DANIELS

  ** USA **

  The Unending Chase

  Chase Fulton Novel #4

  Cap Daniels

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, historical events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Although many locations such as marinas, airports, hotels, restaurants, etc. used in this work actually exist, they are used fictitiously and may have been relocated, exaggerated, or otherwise modified by creative license for the purpose of this work. Although many characters are based on personalities, physical attributes, skills, or intellect of actual individuals, all of the characters in this work are products of the author’s imagination.

  Published by:

  ** USA **

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  13 Digit ISBN: 978-1-7323024-5-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018911401

  Copyright © 2018 Cap Daniels – All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design: German Creative

  Dedication

  This Book is dedicated to…

  My dear friend, mentor, teacher, and sometimes tormenter, Leo, who is the real-life inspiration for the fictional Leo in this novel.

  To list Leo’s titles, degrees, licenses, and certifications would consume this page and still be incomplete.

  To adequately catalog his attributes as a man of impeccable character, astonishing capability, boundless knowledge, and unequalled wisdom would be impossible.

  Leo taught me to fly airplanes without looking out the window, but that doesn’t scratch the surface of the countless lessons he taught me about how to live life without limits and to constantly strive to improve in everything that I do, competing only with myself and demanding more of myself than others could ever expect.

  Special Thanks To:

  My Astonishing Editor:

  Sarah Flores – Write Down the Line, LLC

  www.WriteDownTheLine.com

  Sarah’s tireless efforts to make me a better writer never cease to amaze me. She is a brilliant teacher, inspiring source of constant encouragement, and astonishing talent when it comes to turning my work into palatable fiction. Without her, my work would be unreadable.

  Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician:

  “Boomer” (Real name withheld upon request)

  His patience with my ten thousand questions about how explosives can actually work under water was a testament to his calm, deliberate demeanor.

  Master Instructor Dan Lennon and the dive professionals of Rainbow Reef Dive Center in Key Largo, FL:

  Their knowledge and experience were invaluable in creating the technical diving sequences in this novel.

  Medical Editor Judson Moore, M.D. – Orthopedic Surgeon Extraordinaire:

  Although Dr. Moore is a wizard at repairing the damage humans do to their arms, wrists, and hands, his guidance and direction on how to properly inflict injury during the interrogation scenes in this novel was invaluable.

  The Dive Medical Officers and Hyperbaric Medicine Specialists at the University of Alabama Birmingham for whom I have unending admiration and appreciation:

  Following a scuba diving accident in 2014, the physicians at UAB not only saved my life, but also restored me to full strength through prolonged recompression therapy. My experience with those amazing professionals during that terrifying period of my life is the inspiration for many scenes in this novel.

  1

  The Wrong Team

  Exhaustion overtook me, and I collapsed to the wet, hard-packed sand of the eastern shore of Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. Every inch of my body ached, and my head throbbed in time with my heart, as it seemed to be making great efforts to leap from my chest. The sun peeked over the horizon of the eastern sky and the Atlantic Ocean lapped gently at the beach. Sweat poured from my mosquito-ravaged body, and my last ounce of strength washed away with the tide.

  The pounding in my head morphed into a rising crescendo of intense, thundering beats. Not only could I hear the approaching thunder, but I could feel it in every muscle of my body. It grew louder and stronger until there was no choice left but to open my eyes and see, feel, and hear anything other than the relentless, inevitable pounding. I gasped and instantly drew myself into a ball as a bounding herd of wild horses galloped around me, enveloping me in their advance, their hooves bouncing off the wet sand, and their nostrils flaring.

  After having survived countless encounters with Russian assassins doing their best to end me, the thought of my end coming beneath the hooves of a horde of wild horses sent the last energy within me escaping as uncontrollable laughter. As quickly as they’d arrived, the horses disappeared, continuing their irrational sprint down the beach as if pursued by some invisible predator. I had been spared.

  In my exhaustion, I’d forgotten about the horses. Cumberland Island was home to a herd of nearly two hundred feral horses; the descendants of those brought to the island in the sixteen hundreds by European explorers and settlers.

  The last several hours of my life had been spent scouring the island for Captain Ekaterina Norikova, the Russian SVR officer whom I’d known as Anya Burinkova. I’d loved her once, and despite the deception, there remained some part of me that always would.

  I’d fallen hook, line, and gruzilo for Anya, especially when she’d supposedly given her life working with me to save my former college baseball coach’s daughter, Skipper, from a Miami porn producer. Only weeks after Anya’s supposed death, I’d received a mysterious call from a man named Michael Anderson, a Russian illegal who’d escaped U.S. custody and kidnapped Skipper. He demanded that if I ever wanted to see her alive again, I would face him in the middle of the night where he was holding Skipper on Cumberland Island.

  I’d dropped everything and put myself and Clark Johnson on the island as quickly as possible, where we not only found Skipper bound and gagged, but where we also found Michael Anderson’s body with Anya’s fighting knife sticking out of his back.

  Skipper had said, “It was her, Chase. It was Anya.”

  I’d given up believing Anya was dead sometime before that night, but thinking she’d beaten me to Cumberland Island and killed Skipper’s abductor minutes before I’d arrived was almost unfathomable to me.

  I’d sent Clark and Skipper back to the mainland in the boat we’d used to race to the island. Skipper needed a doctor to make sure she wasn’t hurt. I had remained on the island, consumed by my insatiable desperation to find Anya Burinkova before she could disappear again.

  I searched every inch of the island throughout the darkness of that long night, running at a breakneck pace until I fell onto the sand, completely spent. The sun had broken across the eastern horizon, and I’d found no sign of Anya or any boat that may have brought her to the island. There was no other way to get to Cumberland Island—except by helicopter.

  As I lay there, desperately trying to muster the strength to continue the useless search, my phone chirped.

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re back,” said Clark Johnson.

  Clark, a former Army Ranger and Green Beret, now worked for the same agency that employed me as a covert operative. Our skill sets complemented each other perfectly, and we’d become not only brothers-in-arms, but also lifelong friends. He was the closest thing I’d ever have to a brother.

  “I’m on the ocean side. I’m not sure where, but I think I’m on the north side
of the entrance to Christmas Creek. The surf is light over here. You won’t have any trouble landing or getting off. Is Skipper okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine. Just some scrapes and bruises. She’s with me. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  I hung up, relieved to hear Skipper wasn’t hurt. She’d been through more than any twenty-one-year-old girl deserved. She was tough, but at that point, I didn’t know just how tough she actually was.

  “Chase, get up. Let’s go. Chase!”

  I opened my eyes to see Clark standing over me, kicking my boot.

  I scrambled to my feet and dusted sand from my clothes. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’m spent.”

  “Come on. We’ll get you some grub and a shower. It looks like you could use both. I take it you didn’t find Anya.”

  “No,” I admitted. “No sign of her anywhere.”

  “That’s what I figured,” he said, helping me into the boat.

  He shoved us off the beach, and we powered away through the light surf and back around the north end of the island. After a short ride, we pulled alongside the old wooden dock at the Jekyll Island Club and crawled out of the boat.

  Clark gave me a hand up. “This is the first place you and I ever met. Remember?”

  I smiled through my exhaustion. “Yeah, I remember. You were standing right over there, hitting on Anya, and I was trying to decide whose side you were on.”

  “I wasn’t hitting on her,” he protested.

  “Yes, you were. You hit on everybody.”

  Instead of a wasted effort to defend himself further, he changed the subject. “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up.”

  We mounted a golf cart and headed for the hotel.

  Skipper slid her hand into mine. “Are you okay, Chase?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just been chasing a ghost at a sprint for the past seven hours. How about you? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for coming for me. It’s pretty much becoming a regular thing, you rescuing me.”

  I shook my head. “I got there too late this time.”

  Skipper stared at her shoes. “I know you don’t believe me, but it was her.”

  “I believe you.” I squeezed her hand then pulled Anya’s knife from my pocket.

  Skipper looked at the knife with a blank expression.

  “It’s Anya’s knife,” I said. “She left it intentionally for me to find. Did she say anything to you?”

  She shook her head. “No, she only spoke in Russian to the guy. I mean, I guess it was Russian. It sounded like it.”

  I wrapped the knife in the rag and stuck it back in my pocket.

  “Do you remember what she said?” I asked, hoping she could remember any of the sounds. If she could get close, maybe I could piece it together.

  “It sounded like, ‘Will she bite these common tees.’ I know that sounds stupid, but she said it to him over and over. Then she stabbed him twice in the chest. I’d never seen anything like it. She moved so fast. It was like she was possessed or something. It was scary, even though I knew she was saving my life. Then he fell by the fire, and she looked straight at me. She looked the same as when the two of you pulled me out of that house in Miami, but she was like, cold and focused or something. And then she stabbed him again, right in the back, then took off running. It freaked me out. I mean, why did she leave me there tied up? Why didn’t she cut me free?” Her hand trembled in mine.

  “Tell me again what she said. Try to remember, and try to say it just like she did.”

  “I don’t know, Chase. It just sounded like, ‘Will she bite these common tees.’”

  “Could she have said, ‘Vy oshibayetes’ v komande’?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It kinda sounded like that.”

  “Was she saying it to you or Michael Anderson?”

  “Oh, she was definitely saying it to him. She never even looked at me until after he was dead. So, that thing you said. What does it mean? What do you think she said?”

  “I think she said, ‘You’re on the wrong team.’”

  2

  A Brand-New Man

  Clark was right, as usual. A shower, a meal, and a few hours of uninterrupted sleep made me feel like a brand-new man. Jack Ford, the operations manager of the Jekyll Island Club, granted us the use of a pair of adjoining rooms on the second floor of the glorious old hotel. The Club and Jack had a long and storied history of cooperation with the organization for which Clark and I worked. Theirs had been a relationship of mutual benefit for decades. When the Club needed a favor, regardless of the magnitude, we’d always said yes. When we needed anything the Club could provide, Jack Ford always rolled out the red carpet.

  I’d been recruited into the agency on the hallowed grounds of the Club by a collection of seasoned operators with heroic and larger-than-life histories of their own. Ace, a former fighter pilot; Beater, a Naval Academy graduate and intelligence-gathering legend; Tuner, the father of acoustic signature identification; and Dr. Robert “Rocket” Richter, also a fighter pilot and key player in the early days of manned supersonic flight alongside Chuck Yeager. They were the four men who plied me with expensive scotch and Cuban cigars, took me sailing on the most magnificent sailing yacht I’d ever seen, and asked me to give up life as I knew it and dedicate myself to the service of others. Their question and my answer had changed my life forever.

  Dr. Richter had been my favorite UGA psychology professor and the man who led me into the hands of the other three who recruited me into the service of my country as a covert operative. I had those men to thank, or perhaps to blame, for what my life had become.

  I had accomplished very little compared to the men who’d led me into this life. I’d killed a notorious Russian hitman and his twin brother on my first real mission out of training. I’d rescued my coach’s daughter from a series of bad decisions. That mission was personal and not associated with my employment with the agency. I’d successfully lured a notorious Russian colonel, Victor Tornovich, into the open and ended his meteoric rise up the SVR ladder, but I didn’t feel like I’d done anything to measure up to the accomplishments of men like the four who’d recruited me, and men like my partner, Clark Johnson.

  The time was coming for my agency to expect more of me. I wanted to earn my stripes and prove I was worthy of the company I kept, but I was consumed with the singular thought of finding Anya, as I’d come to believe she was still alive.

  I met Clark and Skipper in the dining room for an early dinner. The maître d’ sat us at a private table near the back of the ornate room so we could talk without curious guests listening in.

  “So, tell me what’s on your mind, Chase.” Clark raised his eyebrows and stared at me over his water glass.

  “You know what’s on my mind,” I told him. “I have to find her.”

  He closed his eyes and swallowed a mouthful of spring water. “You’re only going to find her if she wants to be found.”

  “She may not want me to find her, but I know for sure that she wants me to know she’s still alive. If she didn’t, she would’ve snuck in, killed Michael Anderson, and silently slipped away, leaving no trace. But that’s not what she did. She stared straight at Skipper, making sure she recognized her. And on top of that, she left her knife sticking out of his back—specifically for me to find.”

  “You may be right, but why? Why wouldn’t she just kill him, cut Skipper free, and wait for you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s afraid.”

  Clark laughed. “That girl ain’t afraid of the devil, let alone anything on Cumberland Island. What could she possibly be afraid of?”

  “I think it all depends on her status,” I said.

  “Her status?”

  “Yeah, her status. If she’s running from somebody, she may be afraid I’ll turn her in. She has to know I’m pissed about the whole ordeal. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll hand her over to Langley.”

  Clark shook his head. “I
don’t know, Chase. There are too many unanswered questions. Too much we don’t know to be making those kinds of assumptions right now.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I admitted, “but here’s what I think happened. I think the CIA pulled her out of that VA hospital in Miami and saved her life just so they could interrogate her. I think she killed the agents who were guarding her in that safe house and then flew their helicopter out of there.”

  Clark subconsciously nodded as I spoke. “All of that is possible, I guess, but how did she know where Anderson and Skipper were? And more than that, if she was still working for the Russians, why would she kill him? Why kill Anderson? He was red commie to the core. You don’t get more loyal to the Kremlin than him.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I believe it was her. I believe Skipper’s story, and I believe it was her knife. There aren’t ten knives like that in the world.”

  “Okay. Let’s say it was her. What now?”

  “I’ve got to find her.”

  Clark shook his head. “You know as well as I do that if she wants you to find her, she’ll come to you. You said it yourself. She’s a lot better at this than you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but is she better than you?”

  “Maybe,” he said quietly.

  Out of the blue, Skipper opened up. “I have two things to say.”

  She had our attention.

  “First, thank you for believing me. I know it was her. And second, I want in.”

  “What do you mean you want in?” I asked.

  “I want to go to that school. You know, The Ranch or whatever. I want to do what you do.”

  “No!” Clark and I yelled out.

  “It’s not up to either of you,” she said confidently.

  “You don’t get to walk up to the gate and just say, ‘I want to be a spy, so let me in.’ That’s not how it works.”

  “Okay, Chase. Tell me how it does work.”

  Silence filled the air, and I returned Clark’s gaze. Neither of us knew what to say.