Callsign: King II- Underworld (7 page)

Nina didn’t think the Mogollon Monster was responsible for the events that had closed Highway 60, and she wasn’t hiking across the Superstition Wilderness to find proof of the creature’s existence. She expected to find only a very rational, banal explanation for the accident and the subsequent enforcement of the exclusion zone, and when she returned with proof, she would write about it. If she learned something else, something unexpected, she would write about that with the same objectivity. That was what she did.

Though barely discernible in the darkness, Nina had little trouble keeping to the trail, which followed a creek bed along the western slope of Pinto Peak. The course of both the creek and the trail—which according to the guidebooks, had been in use since prehistoric times, and in the not so distant past, had been used by the Apaches and by US Army soldiers hunting them—had been determined by nature; like the water that periodically flowed down Campaign Creek, the trail followed the path of least resistance, through the narrow divide between the craggy mountains.

Nina had lapsed into a natural rhythm, her legs no longer complaining about the constant climb. After about two hours, she crested the high point on the trail, still well below the level of the surrounding peaks, and began the somewhat trickier task of descending the other side in the darkness.

As she started down the path, she checked her GPS. She was more than halfway to her objective, and soon would turn east along Cuff Button Trail. If she kept this pace, she would be in position to observe activity in the exclusion zone well before dawn.

Her sense of satisfaction was short lived. As soon as she put the Garman back in her pocket, she realized that the few moments spent staring at the screen of the device had deprived her of her night vision. Even as she cursed her stupidity, an unseen loose rock shifted beneath her foot. She went down on her backside, sliding unceremoniously about ten feet down the trail. The coarse terrain scraped her legs through the rip-stop fabric of her pants, which nonetheless protected her from serious damage. The same could not be said for her bare hands; she had instinctively flung her arms out for balance, taking the impact of the fall on the heels of her hands, which were then nearly shredded by the short slide down the rocky trail.

She cursed her bad luck, instinctively cradling her scraped and bleeding palms. But even as the echoes of her oath and the sounds of tumbling rocks jarred loose by her fall were swallowed up by the night, she heard another noise that turned her blood to ice.

It was one of those sounds that everyone recognized instantly, even if their only experience with it was from movies and nature documentaries—a rapid clicking sound, almost like a party noise-maker.

It was the unmistakable buzz of a rattlesnake, and it was close. Despite her familiarity with the desert and its many diverse and potentially deadly denizens, Nina did what most people do when surprised by a venomous snake: she screamed.

11.

King and Pierce were only about a quarter of a mile away when a shrill scream broke the otherworldly quiet. The two men exchanged a brief glance and then, as if motivated by a single mind, turned and headed back up the trail at an urgent but prudent jog.

Faced with essentially the same problem—how to approach the exclusion zone surreptitiously to conduct a covert investigation—King and Pierce had arrived at the same solution as Nina Raglan. Using the highway was a non-starter; that route would be subject to the heaviest surveillance. But the maze of trails running across the Superstition Wilderness was not as likely to be watched, particularly at night. That, at least, was what King was counting on.

He had done extensive map reconnaissance during the flight, scanning overhead satellite imagery of the area, researching other environmental factors that might have significantly altered the conditions on the ground. He had also done a little shopping.

Their first stop after picking up the rental car at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, was at a large sporting goods store in Tempe, where his purchases were waiting to be picked up. Equipped with the very best survival gear, and perhaps most importantly, two sets of ATN Viper night vision monoculars, King drove their rented SUV east, away from the setting sun, along state route 88 and the Campaign Trailhead, little suspecting that very soon they would have company on the trail.

King’s night vision device soon revealed an attractive woman, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, staring fearfully at her surroundings. Her eyes, which glowed like green coals in the Viper’s display, were darting back and forth, and he realized that she was straining to see in the darkness. Her head snapped up at the sound of their approaching footsteps.

“Who’s there? Don’t come in any closer. I’m practically sitting on a rattler, and he’s pissed off.”

King froze in place and immediately began scanning the area around the woman for some sign of the snake that was menacing her. Most of the ground on the hillside was bare, but there was a jumble of large rock flakes a few feet below where she sat, and a few yards away up the hillside, there was a waist high sagebrush, either of which might have concealed a lurking rattlesnake.

“Hold still,” King said, unnecessarily. “My name’s… Call me King. I’m going to approach very slowly and see if we can’t shoo Mr. Slithery away with a minimum of drama.”

King could see her searching the darkness to locate him and found it a little disconcerting. He was standing right in front of her and could see her plain as day, but from her perspective, he was a disembodied voice.

He cautiously extended the tip of his lightweight aluminum trekking pole—another of the purchases he’d made from the sporting goods store—and tapped the rock pile near her feet. There was a blur of motion as something darted from beneath the rocks and bumped the pole.

“There you are,” King murmured. The snake, probably a diamondback rattler, was incredibly fast, and as the woman had so eloquently put it, very pissed off. It was a wonder that she hadn’t been bitten. He continued probing the creature’s hiding place, hoping that it would do what most wild animals did when confronted with a threat that could not be overcome with their natural defenses, and move away. The snake struck again, closing its mouth around the tip of the pole and this time, it refused to let go.

King carefully pulled the relentless animal away from the rocks and away from its original intended victim. “Okay, ma’am, I want you to move very slowly to your right.”

He could see the naked apprehension on her face, but she nodded and did exactly as he had instructed, shifting sideways at an almost glacial pace, without making a noise louder than a whisper. When she was about three feet away from where she had been, King gave the pole a shake and the snake let go, squirming once more into its hidey-hole.

“Ok, ma’am. You’re safe now. You can get up.”

“Nina.”

“Right.” King grinned. In the military, everyone except enlisted personnel in uniform was either a “sir” or “ma’am,” until you were told otherwise. It was a habit that sometimes persisted, even though he was now in the super-secret, autonomous Chess Team, where military traditions did not apply.

“Uh, Jack?” Pierce said, from just behind him. “We have a problem.”

King turned and found his old friend staring back down the trail. He also saw the ‘problem’ of which Pierce had spoken. Two figures, wearing digital pattern camouflage, from the tops of their desert boots to the cloth covers on their Kevlar tactical helmets, stood a few yards away. Another similarly dressed figure was covering them from about a hundred yards up on the hillside. Each weapon was equipped with a PAC-4 infrared laser targeting emitter. The laser beams were invisible to the naked eye but bright as day in the ocular of a night vision device like the Viper or the much more advance PVS-7s that each of the newcomers wore. The lasers reached out from the carbines to show where the bullets would eventually go: right into King’s and Pierce’s hearts.

Soldiers. They’d been caught by an army patrol.

One of the pair from below took a step forward and gestured with his carbine. “Face down. Hands where I can see them.”

“What’s going on?” Nina asked, unable to make out anything more than silhouettes.

“Shut up,” snarled the soldier. “You’re all in a shitload of trouble. Do as I say, or you leave here in a body bag.”

With a sigh, King sank to his knees and remembered that there was, after all, an exception to the military “sir or ma’am” rule; it didn’t apply when dealing with prisoners.

12.

From almost a hundred yards away, Ivan Sokoloff watched King’s capture play out through his own PVS-7 device. This time, he didn’t give voice to his rage, but inwardly he was seething. He had stalked King and Pierce across the desert for hours now, eschewing the trail for a hard scrabble across the slopes of the mountain, just waiting for an opportunity to take the shot and fulfill the contract. When King had doubled back to help the woman—an unexpected player in the drama that Sokoloff had spotted early on—the hitman had thought that his chance had finally come.

Although the desert trek represented a physical manifestation of his relentless pursuit, it was only the culmination of several hours of activity that had begun just a few minutes after he had delivered news of his failure in New York to his employer. He had no sooner arrived back at his hotel room when another text message had arrived, informing him of King’s next destination: Phoenix, Arizona.

His mysterious employer seemed to know everything about King’s itinerary, and had already booked Sokoloff a seat on the same plane. There was a subtle hint of urgency about the communiqué. Sokoloff could tell that there was something in Arizona that his employer didn’t want King discovering before his death. Unfortunately, the rigid enforcement of transportation safety rules made it impossible for him to get a weapon on the plane. The new body scanning technology now made it impossible to bring even a ceramic knife aboard a plane.

Not that Sokoloff would have made the attempt in so public a fashion. Even though he had sat only thirty feet away from the man whose death would net him more money than he could possibly ever spend, and even though he had walked right past the unsuspecting King on three different occasions during the course of the flight to Denver, and once more on the way to Phoenix, the thought of a quick strike—perhaps a knife-hand blow across the windpipe, or a rigid finger, stabbed through the man’s eye and into his brain—had never been more than an idle daydream. The problem with not being able to transport any weapons meant that, before he could go after King upon arrival in Phoenix, he had to stop and get some new tools of his trade.

His employer had streamlined that process. “Arrangements have been made,” he had been told in another of the maddening text messages. His employer seemed to know King’s every move, and had supplied Sokoloff accordingly, with a set of desert camouflage fatigues, night vision optics, and most importantly, a used but serviceable, Smith & Wesson Model 4006 .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol and three 11 round magazines. All of this had been waiting for him in a Nissan Xterra that had been left at the parking garage of the airport.

For a couple hours thereafter, he had followed King’s progress electronically. His employer had acquired the GPS tracking signature for King’s rental vehicle, allowing the Russian to reacquire his target and obviating the need to maintain visual contact, which might have risked exposure. It also represented one more opportunity lost; he could have pulled alongside King on the open highway and casually shot him as he drove, but no…a better opportunity would come.

Yet as he had hiked across the desert, reminded with every arduous foot of forward progress that he had lived the soft life too long to be doing this again, he had been unable to get within pistol range. He needed to be close; if he missed with the first shot, there was no telling what might happen. And because King and Pierce had night vision as well, sneaking up on them was doubly difficult. The appearance of the woman, hiking along blissfully unaware of the deadly cat and mouse game, had added a further complication, but her fall and subsequent cry for help had finally given him the chance he’d been waiting for.

And then the soldiers had appeared out of nowhere.

As he ducked his head down to avoid detection, he realized that he should be counting his blessings. Had he been only a few seconds quicker, he would have given himself away to the patrol. But that was cold comfort. King was now in military custody, and Sokoloff didn’t have the first clue how he was going to overcome that obstacle.

The soldiers didn’t question their prisoners, but quickly searched them, stripped them of their gear, zip-tied their hands and then ordered them to march down the trail in the dark. Sokoloff then heard one of the uniformed men speak into his radio. “Devil 2-1, this is Devil 2, over.”

Sokoloff couldn’t make out the reply. Somehow, the electronic voice reproduced by the radio’s speakers didn’t have the same acoustic quality.

“2-1, come up and sweep the area with your team. Let’s make sure there aren’t any more surprises out here, over.”

There was another scratch of static.

“Roger that. Meet you back at the FOB. Devil 2, out.”

Sokoloff kept his face tight against the warm desert ground, but now he was smiling. Maybe there was a way after all.

13.

A High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) more commonly known as a “Humvee” was waiting a short way down the trail. King noted that it was the M998 variant of the venerable military transport vehicle, configured almost like a pick-up truck with a soft canopy over the rear cargo area and wooden bench seats on either side. The three prisoners were bundled into the back of the truck—no simple feat with their hands bound, and two of the soldiers got in as well, keeping them covered at all times with their M4s. During the forced march, Nina had made a few indignant inquiries that had led to a threat of being gagged, and so all verbal communication had ceased. Nevertheless, as they were herded into the transport vehicle, illuminated by flashlights, King managed to give Pierce a confident nod that said:
Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this.