Freeman and Lee moved quickly away from the chopper’s downdraft and the exhaust fumes that were polluting the pristine mountain air into the thick antiseptic air of Sandpoint Hospital, their Vibram boots squeaking sharply on the polished linoleum floor.
Through the glass of the intensive care unit, Freeman could see thirty-three-year-old Roberta Juarez lying in a bed, her head in a shroud of bandages. Only her left eye, her lips, and nostrils were visible, giving her an unfortunately ghoulish appearance, an impression reinforced by the fact that her badly bruised right arm was attached to an intravenous drip. It was obvious to Freeman, from his side on view of her neck, that Roberta’s hair had been shorn off in the trauma unit. Her left hand was in a cast, the doctor explained, because when she’d been shot, her left hand and arm must have taken the brunt of the fall.
“She conscious?” asked Freeman.
“In and out,” replied the young, casually dressed doctor, who, except for his stethoscope, could have passed for a golfer about to go practice his putting. Through the window at the end of the corridor, Freeman glimpsed a menacingly overcast sky. He flexed his wrist and glanced at his watch so that the young doctor would get the message that there was no time to lose. If it started to rain, it would wash away the marauders’ scent. There were other ways, of course, to track them — broken twigs and brush — but the best would be for Prince to get the scent from the abandoned bikes and go from there. Since Freeman’s call to Eleanor Prenty, the word had gone out to the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and the Bureau of Land Management in northern Idaho to give “all assistance possible to General Freeman’s team.”
“Doctor, I need to speak with Ms. Juarez as soon as possible. Find out if she can tell us anything that might—”
“No way,” said the athletic-looking doctor, planting himself imperiously in front of the door. “This patient is in critical condition and I—”
“Johnny,” the general told his SpecFor translator. “Give me a strip.”
Lee whipped out a plastic cuff strip from one of his battle dress uniform’s many pockets.
“What the hell—” began the doctor, his face flushed with shock and anger. “Nurse!”
Freeman’s face was an inch from the young physician’s. “Listen, Grierson, I’m on the trail of terrorists who murdered — I say again, murdered—ten Americans because they wanted something that’s so classified that I don’t even know what it is yet. But I do know one thing, and that is that Roberta Juarez is probably the only person still alive who saw the killers. Anything, anything she can tell me could be vital not only to my finding those sons of bitches but to the security of the United States. Now step aside or I’ll arrest you under the Patriot Act, Section 11B—‘directly or indirectly giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’”
“This is outrageous!” said Grierson. “I’m not moving. Nurse!”
Freeman felled him with one blow.
“Cuff him, Johnny!”
The general stepped over the physician, who was gasping for air like a landed fish, and opened the door to Intensive Care. Roberta was moving her head slightly from side to side, moaning. Perhaps the kerfuffle, the general thought, with young Dr. Grierson had brought her around or had disturbed her somnolence sufficiently that she might hear him. He identified himself gently but firmly, not knowing whether she was hearing him. Had she seen anything that might help them identify the killers?
No answer. No response at all.
He pressed the question respectfully but insistently. “The men who attacked you, Ms. Juarez?” Freeman could hear the doctor swearing. Johnny Lee had him cuffed to a hallway chair and told him that if he didn’t want to be thumped again he’d better be quiet. A nurse saw them, advanced, stopped, then turned and ran back to her station to call security.
All Roberta could say, her voice cracked and dry, was, “It’s spotted.” Her dark eyes closed; she seemed to be asleep. Freeman stayed for a moment, gently taking her warm, flaccid wrist, and prayed for her and, if it be God’s will, help to catch those who had perpetrated the massacre.
When he emerged from the IC unit, security, a short, overweight woman, perspiring heavily, was warning Johnny Lee that she’d called the sheriff.
“You can come with us, ma’am,” Johnny Lee told her as the general emerged from the ICU. “We’ll take you to him.”
Lee uncuffed the doctor, who was now vigorously massaging his wrists. “You’re fucking fascists!” the doctor shouted at both men. The security woman was standing by, openmouthed.
“Get anything?” Johnny asked the general on their way out.
“It’s spotted,” Freeman told him. “That’s all she said.”
“One of the terrorists’ faces maybe,” Johnny ventured, “spotted with psoriasis?”
“Hmm — it’s possible.”
“You — fucking fascists!”
When they returned from the far end of the lake below Bayview to the DARPA base, the sheriff had mustered the day staff together: seven scientists and their seven technicians who worked on the DARPA “Flow-In-Flight” project. He was told that there were more scientific personnel involved in ARD — Acoustic Research Development — as it related to submarines, but the people Freeman was interested in were those who had been working on the latest deep-water-moored DARPA ALPHA barge and the hut where the terrorists had shot the night staff. They had been added to the Acoustic Research Development complex here only in the years since 2007, when more research money had been freed for homeland-defense-associated projects. The money became a flood following the terrorist attacks in which shoulder-fired anti-aircraft rockets had brought down three American aircraft since 9/11.
“Sorry for your loss,” Douglas Freeman told the visibly shaken chief scientist, a Professor Richard Moffat, head of the fourteen-person day shift. “But I need to know precisely what these scumbags stole.”
“A disk,” said Moffat, a man around Freeman’s age.
Though most of the day staff were dressed casually in jeans, like the doctor at the hospital, here in the open they were all wearing either heavy sweaters or Gore-Tex Windbreakers, the temperature having plummeted in the confluency of the Pacific Ocean front that had come barreling in from the northwest, slamming into a warmer Chinook wind driving northward into the Alberta badlands. It was getting cold. Moffat was the only one wearing a white lab coat, stained, it seemed to Freeman, with rust and grease, probably from working near the gantry and cranes of a second green-and-white-striped DARPA ALPHA barge where the staff had to haul in new large-scale test units from the deep, glacier-carved lake.
“I know it’s a disk,” Freeman told Moffat, “but is there anything more specific than ‘Flow-In-Flight’ written on it?”
Moffat was finding it difficult to focus, acutely aware that his laissez-faire attitude toward the security of his fellow scientists had been a disastrous mistake.
“Professor,” repeated Freeman impatiently, “is the disk labeled in any other way?”
Moffat was staring across the lake at the cold-looking mountains. Freeman knew that his SpecWar team had probably a half hour of reasonable weather before the churning gray clouds gave way to rain.
“Professor, I know it’s tough on you at the moment, but time’s of the essence here.”
“What — oh, sorry, General. The disk was simply labeled ‘DARPA ALPHA Flow-In-Flight.’”
“What kind of data were on the disk?”
Moffat had the zombie look of someone in shock. “That’s highly sensitive material, General.”
Freeman shook his head in disbelief. Murphy’s Law was on the loose. Hadn’t Eleanor Prenty gotten through to Moffat and cleared the general of any D.S.R. — document search restriction? Or perhaps Eleanor had gotten through but Moffat couldn’t remember in the state he was in.
“All right, now listen to me, Professor. I want you to focus. Your highly sensitive material has been stolen by terrorists, and my team is going to have to know exactly what to look for.” For a moment the chief scientist stared at Freeman as if he had no idea who the general was.
“We need to focus,” Freeman reiterated.
The professor’s eyes shifted from Freeman again out to the slate gray waters of the lake. “It’s a lot of diagrams and formulas, like so much technical literature. I don’t see how anyone without a degree in—”
“Doc!” cut in Freeman. “I’ve been sent by the president.”
“Yes.” He paused. “I’ve been told that.”
“So what’s on the fucking disk? Is there a diagram, something we can key onto should we see it?”
Moffat thought for a moment. “Doreen?” he called out, and a thin woman in her twenties, chestnut curls wreathing her face, walked over from the gaggle of DARPA ALPHA scientists who were talking to the FBI and DHS agents. Moffat introduced her as Dr. Wyman and told her what the general wanted, assuring her that Freeman was “cleared to the max.”
“Well,” she told the general, “we’ve been recording data from trials of a super-cavitating, that is, super-spinning, torpedo. These super torpedoes were originally pioneered by the Russians. One of them, a Shkval class, could run at two hundred miles an hour and was aboard the Russian Kursk.”
Freeman told her he remembered the Kursk, an Oscar II class sub that sank in the Barents Sea in the summer of 2000.
“It was because of the presence of this super-spin torpedo on board,” Doreen explained, “that the Russians refused offers of help from other countries to rescue the Kursk. They were afraid that either we or the Brits would get our hands on the technology.” Doreen paused, glancing about to make sure that no DHS or FBI agents could overhear. “Our intelligence community got it anyway,” she told Freeman. “And we’ve solved problems the Russians couldn’t because since Russia went belly-up, we’ve outpaced anything the Russians had. We’ve gotten up to super-cavitation at a mile a second.”
Freeman was impressed, but Moffat’s downcast look was that of a man who knew his career was over unless his scientific brilliance could trump his appalling failure in security. He stared out at the lake again as Doreen asked him whether she could tell Freeman about “the Torshell.”
“Yes,” said Moffat softly.
Quietly, her face strained because even with her boss’s permission she was still reluctant to explain the enormity of what America had lost, Doreen explained the secret. “A Torshell,” she told him, “is a super-cavitating — that is, super-spinning — fifty-caliber torpedo-shaped rifle round that we’ve developed from our research on the super-cavitating torpedoes. We’ve drilled a wire-thin hole through the bullet. Think of the thin wire in one of those bag ties you pick up at the grocery store to twist-lock a plastic bag of vegetables or bread rolls, stuff like that.”
“Will this take long?” the general asked, glancing up at an increasingly morose sky and flicking up the leather cover of his watch.
“No,” Doreen said, “it won’t take long but you need to understand how it’s very new, this technology. Revolutionary, in fact.”
“Go on,” said Freeman, trying to contain the legendary impatience that had ironically also led to some of his greatest military breakthroughs.
“Well, as I said, because of the research here, we’ve been able to apply super-cavitating, super-spinning technology to what has been the usual fifty-caliber ammunition rounds. What we’ve done is drill into a tungsten-core bullet a nano-thin lining of incendiary chemicals. The bullet, as in the case of the much larger torpedo, cavitates or spins at super speed because a gas shoots out in front as the chemical inside morphs from a solid to a gas because of the heat from the torpedo’s, or in this case the bullet’s, propellant. This jet of gas shooting out the front forms a protective bubble around the bullet in air — or in water, in the case of the torpedo — and so the bullet or torpedo has next to no resistance.”
Freeman had understood five minutes ago. “You’ve developed a super-fast bullet.”
“Faster,” said Doreen, “than anything ever produced — except, of course, the speed of light.”
“How fast?”
“Well, the Russians, with their Shkval torpedo, have reached two hundred miles per hour in water. Slow compared to what we’ve been able to do. It’s largely a matter of who has the best computer-governed lathes. The tolerances are incredibly small.”
“So,” asked the general. “What speed has DARPA ALPHA been able to reach?”
“NUWAC,” Doreen told him, “our Naval Underseas Warfare Center, has already broken the sound barrier with a torpedo.”
“At DARPA ALPHA,” added Moffat in a voice so lifeless he might as well have been doing nothing more than giving Freeman the time of day, “we’ve developed a projectile, a bullet if you like, that’s reached Mach 10.”
“Son of—” exclaimed the general. “You’ve got my attention!”
“That’s more than eleven thousand feet a second,” Moffat continued in his monotone. “Faster than anything in the history of warfare.”
“Inside the usual cupronickel,” Doreen Wyman added, referring to a normal round’s copper-nickel jacket, “the bullet would melt and break up, even with the gas bubble reducing most of the drag. But in conjunction with NUWAC, we’ve developed a metal-carbon resin jacket that will remain intact until point of impact.”
Freeman instantly recognized the enormous implications, how such a round developed by DARPA ALPHA in this long, landlocked lake more than a thousand feet deep would change warfare forever. They were at a turning point. At Mach 10, such a round could penetrate a tank, the bullet’s superheated molten jet raising the temperature so high inside the tank it would explode.
“How long would it take,” asked Freeman, “to manufacture this supersonic round?”
“Hypersonic,” Moffat corrected him. “Mach 1 to Mach 5 is supersonic. We’re talking hypersonic, General.”
“All right, how long would it take to lathe a hypersonic prototype of one of these rounds?”
Doreen Wyman, Freeman could see, was going to take the Fifth on this one.
“Professor Moffat?” Freeman pressed. “How long?”
“A week — if you had the right state-of-the-art computer-controlled lathes, et cetera.”
“And the disk!”
“Yes,” admitted Moffat sheepishly, looking out at the slate gray water again.
“Do you agree,” Freeman asked Doreen Wyman, “that they could have prototypes in a week?”
“From the time they get the disk, yes. A week.”
It was time to move out.
Prince had gotten a good scent from the abandoned bikes and had led the team to a large jetty, farther down from the DARPA ALPHA shore, from where it was assumed the terrorists had escaped by boat. But which way? The lake was twenty-five miles long and five miles wide. Freeman stuck with his and the sheriff’s Canada-bound idea. With all road and air corridors closed, there simply weren’t that many ways out, and Canada, sixty-four miles to the north beyond Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake, seemed not only the best escape route because the rugged, heavily forested terrain would provide great cover but because there was always the added enticement of Canada’s long, undefined border, and the fact that Canada simply didn’t have the manpower to field effective patrols.
The sheriff, overwhelmed by the catastrophe, walked forlornly down to the jetty.
“Any leads at all?” asked Freeman.
“Nothing very concrete,” replied the sheriff. “Dr. Moffat has asked the navy to send up one of their Hawkeye aircraft to help you with communications in this area. And an FBI guy told me a blood-soaked note was found in one of the victims’ hands.”
“A note?” mused Aussie. “What’d it say?”
“Hard to tell,” the sheriff replied. “One of the DHS guys told me all they could make out was a few letters — looked like ‘RAM’ and ‘SCARUND,’ whatever the hell that means.” He spelled it out for them, and Aussie wrote it down.
“RAM. Computer capacity: random access memory?” ventured Freeman.
“Or people’s names?” suggested Johnny Lee.
“Perhaps,” said Freeman, recalling his visit to Roberta Juarez at the hospital, “the words have something to do with Roberta saying, ‘It was spotted.’” No one could see any connection whatsoever.
“All right,” said the general. “No leads but Prince’s nose at the moment. We have to assume the terrorists have had ample time to reach the northern end of Pend Oreille, where they’d have to leave their boat and hoof it up to Priest Lake. And if the bastards know what they’re doing, which it seems they do, they’ll be avoiding any known back roads because the sheriff’s boys are out in full force. So, let’s see if Prince here can regain the scent up at the north end of Pend Oreille.” The general knelt down, the team doing likewise, Prince sitting as if waiting for his best in show ribbon. “Dear Lord,” began Freeman, “we praise You, we thank You for this world, and we here ask that You watch over us, guide us, so that we may do Your will in the battle against evil.”
“Amen,” they said in unison, and a group of DHS and FBI agents looked variously astonished, embarrassed, and humbled. Prince panted in anticipation of the hunt.
The general, Aussie, Sal, Choir, Ruth, Lee, Gomez, and Mervyn grabbed their weapons and MOLLEs and boarded the Chinook. Already Freeman could see the Hawkeye that Moffat had requested. If the terrorists, with their head start, reached Priest Lake forty-six miles north of DARPA ALPHA, following the general direction of secondary logging roads through the deep forest, they would have a straight twenty-five-mile south-to-north run up the full length of Priest, where they could then pass through a two-and-a-half-mile-wide connecting channel to another three-mile stretch of water. Had they planted a boat? The map showed that along the edge of Priest Lake’s primeval forest there was a smattering of “Mom-and-Pop”-type cottages and a tiny marina, but not much else.
Aussie Lewis, seat harness on, using his MOLLE as a footrest, wondered aloud, and loudly, “Hope we’re not heading in the wrong fucking direction.”
It was unlike Aussie to start the game with a pessimistic prognosis, and the general wanted to counter it immediately. For most of the team, Aussie’s question was nothing more than that, but Freeman, knowing Tony Ruth was a relative newcomer to the team, wanted to stanch any possible pessimism. “Sometimes,” he shouted to Aussie over the noise of the Chinook’s rotor slap, “the most obvious route is the correct one. The scumbags who stole that disk’ll be in a hurry to get that information back to their masters in the Mideast, Chechnya, wherever.”
“They don’t have to do it in person,” said Johnny Lee. “How about them using a landline? With a computer and modem they could set up and transmit the disk’s contents from anywhere they like.”
The general shook his head, and Prince looked concerned. “Sheriff and DHS have all the landlines, public phone booths, et cetera, covered,” answered Freeman. “Besides, now the story’s out, the terrorists are going to know that anyone seen using public landlines with a modem and the like is acting suspiciously and should be reported. Anyway, NSA is going to be picking up all private transmissions.”
“How about satellite phone?” asked Eddie Mervyn.
“Too insecure,” Freeman replied. NSA’d be all over it like the measles. No, the scumbags are heading for the Canadian border; I know it in my gut. Somewhere along the line where there’s minimal surveillance, manpower problems. Canada’s a huge country, bigger than the U.S., and the whole country’s population is only equivalent to California’s. It’s as if every other state in the union were empty.” The general grabbed Prince affectionately by the ears and spoke to him as if the dog understood every word. “Prince, you tell Aussie here that you and I know. Right? We just feel it in our bones, don’t we, boy? Those bastards are headed for British Columbia, and we’ve got to get them before they reach it. ’Course you and I know by now they’re no doubt in civilian garb. Probably look like a bunch of Greenpeacers out to see the flora and fauna.”
“They better watch out,” said Sal, as Prince, sitting up close to Choir, looked on, “otherwise a grizzly’ll bite them on the ass.”
“You be careful,” joshed Aussie, “otherwise—”
“General?” It was the Chinook’s loadmaster sergeant. “Radio call for you from a Richard Moffat.”
For a second, Freeman was wearing what Aussie had long ago dubbed his Patton frown. He took the phone, cupping the mouthpiece. “Richard who?”
“Chief scientist,” Choir reminded him. “Richard Moffat.”
“Hello, Doctor. Freeman here.”
“General, we think we might have an answer for you regarding Dr. Juarez’s ‘It’s spotted’ comment.”
“Oh yes,” answered Freeman.
“First, I should tell you Roberta Juarez didn’t survive.”
“Oh, shit!”
Prince’s head shot up, worried by the general’s sharp tone.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Freeman told him.
“Thank you, General,” Moffat acknowledged.
“Anyway,” continued Moffat, “about her ‘it’s spotted’ comment. Apparently, for security reasons, only one person — who I found out was off sick today — knew about an arrangement that was insisted upon by the chief of naval operations—”
“Yes?” said Freeman, fighting the temptation to say that it was a damned pity that the CNO or somebody else hadn’t paid more attention to damned perimeter security in the first place.
“Well,” continued Moffat, “the arrangement, which was deliberately withheld from DARPA directors — as an added security measure should a director ever be taken hostage and interrogated under duress — was that two scientists here at DARPA ALPHA, one on the day shift, one on the night — the night shift person being Roberta — had agreed to ‘spot’ the disk.”
“Yes?”
“Well, what was meant by ‘spotting’ was that at the end of their respective shifts, these two people would take the disk, and I’m talking here about a three-and-a-half-inch floppy, faster than a CD-ROM but larger than a USB memory device, and for security they’d place a very small circular NDE (non-data-erasing) battery within the reverse — hollow — side of the metal hub so that—”
“So it would transmit a tracking signal,” Freeman said excitedly, anticipating Moffat, “in case it was stolen!”
“Yes. Normally the disk’s battery has a ten-second delay so it won’t be activated while the disk is put in its jewel case at the end of the day.”
“I get it,” said Freeman. “But if somebody steals it without its jewel case, its battery would be activated. A beeper!”
“Correct. I’ve passed this on to Pacific Coast Command and the E-2C Hawkeye out of Whidbey Naval Station. It’s festooned with electronic eyes and ears, and it’s going to patch you into its radio net as soon as it picks up any signal from the disk.”
“Brilliant!” said the general, using the declarative adjective he’d picked up from his sojourns with Britain’s SAS regiment. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“Ah, General, there are a couple of other things you ought to know about.”
“Shoot!”
“Dr. Grierson — the physician—”
“Yes,” said Freeman. “Mr. Cool. The doctor who was looking after Roberta.”
“Yes. Ah, well, the word’s out that he and the hospital are suing you as being complicit in, ah, Roberta’s death. I thought you ought to—”
“Fuck ’im!” said Freeman, his face reddening, the phone in one hand, the other holding a grab bar against the turbulence they were encountering. “Fuck ’im! But thanks for giving me the heads-up, Doc.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That prick physician,” Freeman told Johnny Lee, “who I had you arrest at the hospital? He’s suing me! Poor woman’s dead and he’s got a lawyer on my case.”
“Ah,” said Aussie disgustedly. “These guys’ve got attorneys comin’ out their ass.”
Prince was worried, backing up against the team’s two Zodiacs as if looking for protection. Choir reassured him that the general’s anger had nothing to do with him.
“But,” Freeman announced, “good news. That disk the pricks stole—”
“Has a beeper!” cut in Aussie.
“You’ve been listening in on my phone conversations,” charged Freeman, with mock severity.
“I have.” Everyone laughed.
“I ought to have you arrested!”
“General Freeman.” It was the helo pilot’s voice. “We’re descending to the Priest Lake turnoff.”
“Hold on!” cut in Freeman. “Don’t land here. I’ve just heard from Moffat that the terrorists are carrying a beeper, so I want to contact the Hawkeye to see whether they can get a fix on the bastards.”
“Roger,” answered the Chinook’s pilot. “We’ll take you back upstairs for a while.”
The general, allowing for Murphy’s Law, expected it to take much longer than it did to contact the Hawkeye but in fact they were exchanging info within five minutes. One of the electronic warfare officers aboard the Hawkeye was seeing a dot pulsing on his screen with the urgency of a boil about to burst. The E.W.O., one of the “moles” aboard the essentially windowless aircraft, sat beneath the rotating, spiral-painted rotodome. He routed his call through the “box,” and the binary codes of zeroes and ones sorted themselves out into a military frequency that could be heard on Freeman’s modular infantry radio, informing the general that the E-2C Hawkeye was picking up a clearly identifiable beep from Priest Lake. To underscore the sound, the electronic warfare officer brought the “beep” sound on line so that all the team members could hear it via their MIR’s earpiece. The Hawkeye informed Freeman that the plane would loiter on station to provide GPS-assisted intel.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Freeman told the E.W.O. “But I urge you to stay beyond MANPAD range.”
“Appreciate your advice, General, but I hardly think the terrorists would bother adding shoulder-fired rockets to their load.”
The general signed off and wasted no time informing his pilot that the Chinook’s new landing zone would have to be as close as possible to the beep point the Hawkeye was reporting. The signal put their prey two miles west of an island in the southwest corner of Priest Lake. The island itself was about a mile offshore.
“I love that fucking beeper,” said Aussie. “The fuckers are hoist by their own petard.”
“What’s a petard?” inquired Salvini, who was tightening the webbing that held the helo’s two Zodiacs firmly against the bulkhead.
“Johnny?” called out Aussie as he busied himself checking out his HK G36 assault rifle’s under-barrel grenade tube, the grenades festooned about him. “You’re our linguist. Tell this ignorant savage from Brooklyn what a friggin’ petard is.”
“I don’t know,” said Johnny Lee, the skin over his high cheekbones tightening with concern; for all his knowledge of Asian, Mideastern, Slavic, and Romance languages, he didn’t know what a petard was.
“It’s an explosive device,” Freeman explained, “formerly used to bust through walls. To be hoist by your own petard means you screw up your own plans by your own actions. What Aussie means is that the very thing those scumbags stole is giving them away.” He allowed himself a smile despite the serious business they were embarked on.
“Serves the bastards right,” said Tony Ruth, with grunts of approval from Gomez and Eddie Mervyn, who were tightening the slings on their navy rig Heckler Koch submachine guns.
“And,” said Choir, “if those swine haven’t picked up the Hawkeye’s transmit to us, they won’t know. It’ll be one big surprise when we suddenly appear on top of ’em.” He turned to his beloved spaniel. “That right, boy?” Prince’s tail was wagging affectionately as Choir adjusted the Velcro tabs on the dog’s hagvar bulletproof, anti-shrapnel vest. Prince had easily passed the long, hard training for a tracker at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, but he had never liked the vest, for while it protected his body in the area between his head and hindquarters, it was heavy.
“Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves,” Freeman cautioned Choir. “These swine are clever dicks, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to pull off this attack. They’ve obviously been planning for it for a long time. I checked with the FBI and DHS guys and they say that Tenth Mountain Division has had no reports of theft visà-vis their Paratrooper mountain bikes or uniforms. That tells me,” added Freeman, his voice rising above the noise of the Chinook, “that these terrorists planned their op down to the last detail—” He paused, holding his left hand up for silence, his right hand gripping the roll bar as he listened to the beeper. Damn! It had ceased, which told him that his quarry might be in a “dead zone,” physical barriers blocking transmission, or—
“Maybe the terrorists know they’ve got a beeper,” cut in Johnny Lee.
“Well,” said Freeman, “the best we can do is keep our eyes and ears open.” His left hand indicated the southwest quadrant of his navigational pilotage chart. “We’ll land here, two miles west of this island, the last reported beeper contact. We’ll move in the bush along the west side of this old logging road that runs south-north parallel to the lake. We’ll follow Prince and our own noses but — and I can’t stress this too much — there are isolated cabins, not many, but some with a boat launch for hunters and fishermen. So remember, even if we get a beep right on top of one of them, identify before engaging. These scumbags — twelve of ’em by the bicycle count — may have commandeered a civilian vehicle to save travel time between Pend Oreille and Priest Lake. For them there’ll be no need to worry about identifying friend or foe. Everyone is now their foe, so they’ll be quick on the trigger. I’ll try to stay in contact with the Hawkeye and in whisper contact with you via your MIRs.” The general paused. “Questions?”
“We have any idea what they look like?” asked Salvini. “They could still be in U.S. battle dress.”
“They could,” the general agreed. “But my guess, Sal, is that they’ve gone civilian. The media will have the story out by now, or at least their version of it. Reporters can be sat on for a day, maybe, but there’s no way that the murder of ten American scientists and a security guard in a small community can be hushed up for much longer. So, Sal, my answer has to be that the creeps could still be in our battle dress uniform or hunting gear. But not many hunters use automatic weapons, which I presume they’re carrying.”
“True,” said Aussie, “though I know some so-called sportsmen who hunt deer with AK-47s and M-16s.” He shook his head in disgust.
During the remainder of the flight, Freeman and his team did a quick study of the list of cabins and of ten people who, the sheriff had told him, had fled civilization to live year-round by the now storm-caged lake.
Jake McCairn, sixty-five, had a bad back from too much stress, he thought, and had retreated from the world into his wild, primeval domain. He enjoyed not having to shave or wear his dentures. He liked animals more than people, and when he saw this army guy coming out of the forest at the edge of the lake and calling out, “Mornin’!” Jake ignored him and continued checking the float-lines he’d set for rainbow and Dolly Varden trout.
“You Jake?”
“Eh?” Jake checked another of the lines — nothing.
“You’re Jake McCairn, right?”
“What of it?”
“Signs on the way up from Sandpoint on Pend Oreille say you’ve got a boat for rent.”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“My name’s Ramon. My squad and I need a boat to go up the lake for a while.”
“Should’ve brought your own boat. What d’ya expect, big marinas with neons flashing?”
“We had a boat, a Zodiac, but it got ripped up by a bear or something up—”
Jake McCairn emitted a guttural cough that was a stand-in for a laugh. It could be heard by Ramon’s men thirty feet away in the woods fronting the lake. Low nimbostratus was coming lower, gray mist leaking from it and wreathing the lake in banks of bone-chilling fog.
“So,” said Ramon, producing a wad of fifty-dollar bills. “Could you let us use your boat for a bit?”
“Nope. Going out to the island soon. Gonna get me a wolf skin.” With that, Jake turned his back on the stranger and went back to his line casts.
Jake heard Ramon’s footfall behind him and turned to see about ten or twelve men approaching him from the marshy edge of the lake, and heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching helicopter. He looked up, could see nothing but gray cloud no more than five hundred feet above a gray sheen on the lake, a sign that the sun still existed and was trying to get through here and there.
Ramon grabbed him in a hammerlock, and now the other men were running across the marshy margin between the woods and lakeshore, McCairn protesting violently until one of the men punched him so hard McCairn could hear his jawbone crack.
“Now,” asked Ramon, dark brown eyes appearing almost black in the weak daylight, “where’s your fucking boat, before we break your—”
Jake tried to spit at them but only bloody dribble came out, running down onto his beard-stubbled chin.
“Break his leg,” ordered Ramon, glancing anxiously at the leaden sky for the helo.
Jake attempted to speak but couldn’t, the pain of his broken jaw so intense it came out as “Boa’s…up ’bou’ three hundred yar’.”
“Get him to his feet!” Ramon ordered. “Rashid!”
“Naam!”
“Speak English!” Ramon snapped. “You and Omar deal with the helo if it looks like it’s going to land.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“C’mon!” Ramon told Jake, jabbing him hard with a Heckler Koch 9 mm sidearm. “Take us to the boat and fast or we will break your leg.” He jabbed the old man again. “Think I’m kidding, Mr. McCairn?”
Jake stumbled along through the reeds and fist-sized rocks, and in his hurting fury managed to ask, “You ’mericans?”
The soldier ignored him. When they found the boat, two of Ramon’s men brought the outboard from their torn Zodiac. Then they cut his throat. They started the outboard, a gray wolf howled, and Ramon realized that the dead man’s boat could carry only six men.
There was no argument as to who would go and who would stay behind. Ramon’s commandos from GUPIX, the Government of Palestine in Exile as they called it, always knew that such difficult tactical situations might arise. The four of them, including the two American citizens from one of the vehement anti-federalist Idaho militias who had helped them in their mission against the U.S. government, had trained long and hard, and each man understood what he might be called upon to do in order that those with the disk could escape. And so morale remained high as Ramon told five of his men that he would go with them and the disk in the boat, while the other six men would stay behind.
The sound of the helicopter had now shifted from being eastward, near Montana, back toward them in the thick soup of nimbostratus. Ramon took comfort in the knowledge of how stressed the pilots must be. It would be tough enough on a clear day, flying in the tight airspace in the mist and cloud-shrouded amphitheater of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding hills, but this must be a nightmare. It was nothing like the Iraqi desert, Ramon mused, and he was struck by the sweet irony that in Iraq, in the desert, the terrain had favored the infidels’ infiltration, whereas here America’s rugged terrain helped by inhibiting a helo’s maneuvers.
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Tony Ruth, who, struck by the loudness of the strong, resurrected “beep” being amplified over the Chinook’s internal bay speaker, declared, “We must be on top of the mothers!”
“We are!” confirmed the loadmaster.
“Gonna be tricky!” opined Aussie, looking down at the wide, marshy margin between the lake proper and the edge of the woods.
“That’s what we do,” riposted Freeman. “We do tricky.” He glanced down at Prince, who was panting, sensing the excitement and hearing the soft stream of defensive flares that the Chinook was dropping prior to landing. “That right, Prince?” said Freeman. “We do tricky, right?” Prince’s tail was thumping a bulkhead.
“When we land,” began Freeman, “I want every—” He glimpsed a bluish tail of exhaust at the edge of the woods.
“Missile!” yelled the pilot.
They felt the helo jink sharply right, then—
The explosion was earsplitting, and for several moments neither the general nor the rest of the team, who were slammed hard against the fuselage in their H-straps, could hear anything. Then the high whine of the rear rotors’ portside engine took over the world, screaming as it fought to compensate for the loss of power from the knocked-out starboard engine.
“Going down!” yelled the loadmaster.
Nothing sounded or smelled right anymore, the usually loud but reassuring sounds and odors of a Chinook in steady flight now replaced by decidedly out-of-whack noises and the nauseating smell of leaking hydraulics as pilot and copilot fought to get the machine under control, flares still popping through gray stratus and mist. For a moment the big helo rose promisingly against a violent wind shear, but then they began to plummet.
“Hard landing!” shouted the loadmaster, and Choir, holding the spaniel close to him, could hear Prince whine.
They were out of the gray world, the metallic sheen of the lake sliding downhill, the helo’s nose rattling like crazy and rising insanely, the forward rotor spinning, the rear blades slowing arthritically before stopping altogether, fuselage gyrating in the pilot’s unequal battle with gravity; then they saw a long streak of dark woods west of them along the shoreline now seeming to run uphill. An eagle was glimpsed, then a darker, softer green than the woods was racing up at them, getting bigger, then WHUMP! — walls of reed-scummy water erupted all around and a sound like hail as a downpour of dead stalks and other lakeside detritus struck the Chinook’s skin.
They had come down about a quarter mile from the shore in five feet of water, marsh to the left, open lake to their right.
Young Prince was whimpering like a puppy, but no one said a word. Every one of the eight-man team had braced for a tailbone-smashing crash, but the water and marshy margin of the lake here on the southwestern end afforded them if not a soft landing, then at least a less violent one than they had any right to expect.
Tony Ruth looked the most shaken. Prince’s bright and alarmed eyes were looking up at Choir for reassurance. The pilot and copilot were shouting to each other above the noise as they shut down all ancillary systems that could quickly catch fire if the gas tanks had been perforated. In addition, there were still some of the supposedly anti-missile flares aboard, and they too posed a fire hazard.
“What happened with those damned flares?” Freeman demanded.
The pilot and copilot glared at the general. They had managed, against extraordinary odds, to bring the Chinook to a crash landing in marshland about fifty yards east of the dark line of thick woods, no one seemed badly hurt, and what was Freeman saying? Not “thank you, boys,” but what happened to the fucking flares?
“How do we know!” said the helo captain. “They’re supposed to sucker missiles into thinking they’re our exhaust, but something went wrong. Sure as hell wasn’t our flying — sir!”
“Sorry, gentlemen. You did a great job, but we all nearly bought it because—”
“Captain,” cut in the copilot, “we’re still getting the radio signal from that beeper. It’s up ahead of us about three clicks, on the lake. They’re definitely on the water, General.”
“You hear that, guys?” Freeman shouted to the team, who had already dislodged the two six-man Zodiacs from the webbing and were ready to slide them down the rear-door ramp out to the marsh, from which cold mist was blowing into the helo like smoke. “Their beeper puts them about three clicks from here on the lake, so let’s—” Rounds were thudding into the side of the helo, and through the open ramp door, Aussie could see winks of light coming from the woods about two hundred yards from their position.
“Damn!” said Freeman, “they must have split up. We can’t use the Zodiacs on the lake. They’ll pick us off like flies. Captain,” he enjoined the chopper pilot, “can you stay here and give us their bearing for as long as possible?”
“Will do.”
“Good man. Aussie, you and Sal have got the longest-range weapons. Stay with the two pilots. Hunker down, return fire. We’re going to have to wade through the marsh to the shoreline, get through the woods to that road, and hit those bastards from the rear. No other way.”
“I’ll radio for reinforcements,” said the pilot, “if the helo’s box is still working.”
“Good,” said Freeman, who then ordered everyone to lighten their packs. The copilot informed him that while the radar was still functional, the chopper’s radio was out. The best the pilots could do was keep Aussie and Sal informed of the getaway boat’s position so that as well as being able to return fire with their longer-range weapons, the SpecFor commandos could notify the rest of Freeman’s team via their MIR headsets.
“Good enough,” said Freeman. “So, Aussie, you and Sal are CNN.”
“Roger that,” confirmed Sal.
The volume of incoming fire zipping above their heads and tearing into the fuselage was increasing and, despite his enthusiasm, Freeman realized that there was no way he could have his team wade through the marsh and expect any of them to be alive by the time they reached the shore, let alone the edge of the woods.
“We’ll use the Zodiacs after all,” he told them. “Aussie, you and Sal get ready to throw everything you can at that bunch in the woods. The rest of us’ll drive the Zodiacs across the marsh toward the line of woods. Reeds’ll screw up the outboards’ props, but they should get us there.” The reeds, Freeman hoped, would also dampen the outboards’ noise.
The general shifted his AK-74 to his left hand and grabbed hold of the Zodiac’s pull cord, as Choir, with Prince at his side, came over the gunwale. Ruth, Johnny Lee, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn were already in the second Zodiac. The best they could hope for was to use the body of the helo for cover, keeping it between them and the enemy’s position as they headed for shore.
Aussie reached for his G36 and Sal positioned his heavy-hitting machine gun with his sling.
“Go!” yelled the general. Aussie and Sal opened up, aiming at the winks of the enemy’s small-arms fire coming from about two hundred yards away to the northwest, the hot gases from Aussie and Sal’s weapons bending the reeds close to the helo, the two Zodiacs, on full power, speeding across the fifty yards of thigh-deep marsh between the downed chopper and the line of pine, fir, and golden-yellow larch. Aussie and Sal’s fire was not only loud but accurate, and in the melee of return fire, Aussie’s “Fritz” was almost knocked off by a ricochet caught in the helo’s rotor. He and Sal heard a cry as one of the enemy “winks” was suddenly eclipsed.
Aussie and Sal’s enfilade wasn’t the wild, sweeping cover fire seen in movies, where it seems the good guys have an endless supply of ammunition. Instead it was concentrated, well-aimed fire not meant to simply keep the enemy’s heads down but to take them out.
By the time the opposition — Aussie and Sal guesstimated there must be a group of five or six of them — had taken cover from the two SpecFors’ on-target fire, Zodiacs 1 and 2 were in thick reeds only ten yards from the woods. Freeman, the other five men, and Prince were ashore, but by now the terrorists had recovered from the surprise of Sal’s and Aussie’s heavy and accurate bursts of fire and raked the Zodiacs, putting both out of action. Prince was growling.
Freeman could see the boat first detected on the helo’s radar disappearing from view about two to three miles up the lake, close in to the northwestern shore. And he knew that with the sound of the crash, even the relatively few people who had cabins near or around the lake would raise an alarm which, he hoped, would bring police reinforcements and local reservists from Sandpoint. But the town was fifty miles away by road, and by the time any reinforcements might arrive, the terrorists in the boat would have gotten beyond the lake proper and entered the two-and-a-half-mile-long channel that would take them into Priest Lake. All of which rapidly brought Freeman to the conclusion that there was only one thing to do. His six-man squad would have to do a marathon — minimal-ration, ammunition pack, forty pounds to a man — along the lone fifteen-mile section of the secondary road, an old logging trail that ran more or less parallel to the lake at a distance of a quarter of a mile in places, four miles in others, from the water. There was no chance that he and his five could outrun the terrorists fleeing in a boat, but he might be able to reach another boat or vehicle to catch up with them or head them off.
The general hoped that meantime the Hawkeye would be frequency scanning, and, while he would be unable to make contact with the helo any longer, that it would keep him updated via his modular infantry radio. Freeman had one asset that would save some time: Prince. With the terrorists’ scent firmly impressed upon his olfactory sense, he should be able to help them avoid any time-consuming, deadly ambushes by the five or so rearguard terrorists who had been firing from the edge of the woods at the helo. These scumbags would almost certainly cut back through the dense woods and rush to the road. Then Freeman suddenly realized his advantage. If he, Choir, Ruth, Gomez, Johnny Lee, and Eddie Mervyn could run to the secondary road a mile and a quarter to the west of where they were at present, they might be able to beat these rearguard terrorists who, he saw on his tactical map, were at the foot of a densely forested slope. The terrorists were three miles from the secondary road rather than the one mile his team had to cover before reaching it.
“Right,” said Freeman quickly. “We go. Fast!” Adding, “Now we’ll see who’s been spending too much time with Mommy!” Freeman thought of Margaret, but immediately pushed her out of his mind. Gomez, Eddie Mervyn, and Tony Ruth exchanged grins.
The team headed off, Freeman on point, through the thick woods and the ubiquitous salal brush, its green, mist-polished leaves pushing against them at shoulder height with the same kind of determination, it seemed, as the plant used whenever it invaded a new area, crowding out all other vegetation in its way. They were violating the first rule of the Special Forces: be quiet. The salal in particular, while not prickly, had leaves that were rigid enough to resist a mere brushing aside as one could do with sword ferns and the like, and the six men and dog created so much noise that it sounded to Choir as if a tank was moving through. But Choir knew that the general knew when to break the rules, and besides, Prince was nearby, ready to stop and stiffen at the merest whiff of a terrorist’s scent.
Then they got a break. They had reached a hiker’s trail, presumably one that linked the secondary road and the lakeshore through the forbidding woods. A hard, pushing slog suddenly became a run, and someone’s camelback was sloshing, for which, at the appropriate time, Freeman would ream out the offender in no uncertain terms. Running, it made no difference, but if and when they were forced to close on the enemy quickly, silently, even the greenest cadet knew that the smallest sound could give him away.
It wasn’t the fastest mile in history, but for men weighed down with arms, ammo, and essential war wares, it was exemplary. In another five minutes they saw the road and slowed, senses on high alert. They walked quickly, quietly now, until they could see that the road was clear, then split into two teams: the general, Johnny Lee, and Choir, with Prince leading, on the eastern side of the northbound road, Ruth, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez on the opposite, western, side. They were running again, resolute in their intention to bypass the terrorist group that had been firing on them and to keep going until they found a cabin or one of the few small marinas scattered around the lake’s seventy-mile-long shoreline. With luck, they could get either a boat or a vehicle in which to hightail it to the northern end of the lake before the “disk” party disembarked into the woods and followed one of the creek beds on the twenty-to thirty-mile hike to the border and the equally wild country of the Canadian forests.
Prince, panting, growled at a rush of sound that suddenly burst from the bush, sending all six men to ground until they realized the noise was that of squirrels, not men. Prince stopped to look back at them with what seemed to Freeman an expression of mild contempt for their unwarranted belly flops.
They were running again, and from their GPSs they knew that soon they would be adjacent to the general area from which the rearguard terrorist squad had been firing.