Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) (8 page)

Chapter 17

Beat: 1989

Half a step before
storming into the conference room at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, Beat stopped herself.

Secret Service liaison office to U.S. Southern Command regarding the Panama situation.

This was Frank’s first assignment, a huge feather in his cap to be assigned the project straight out of training. She’d gotten some of the history on it. The whole thing was tiny when it started, so they sent down a senior agent and three rookies, one of which was Frank. Two months in, the senior guy got offered a cherry assignment. He’d insisted that one of the rookies had it in hand, so rather than send a new lead, they’d sent the new leader a mid-level guy to help.

So what had she done?

She’d gone from six months in Africa to being assigned to the Panama mission in under seventy-two hours.

By being so angry at Frank Adams that she hadn’t been thinking, was how she’d done it. Beatrice had blown through the Secret Service command hierarchy so fast that she’d bet her section commander had shipped her out just to be rid of her demands to be assigned to the Panama project.

Panama? What the heck was up with that?

She’d landed from Africa Wednesday night, slept most of Thursday, tracked Frank down on Friday morning, and was supposed to have the week off but instead been on the road by that night. She’d driven twenty-four of the last forty-eight hours, crashing into a Motel 6 in Chattanooga, Tennessee for fourteen hours in the middle of it. Now it was Monday morning, July third at eight a.m. She was in San Antonio, Texas and through the Fort Sam security.

And Panama?

If she went storming into the Secret Service liaison office, Frank would just laugh his head off and she’d be forced to kill him. And she sure didn’t like the idea of being one of the peons like he was, but she didn’t want to start a battle for control either. Her section commander had made it clear that some new agent was shaping up well and they were going to let him run with it and see how he did. He’d told her that they were only letting her jump on because she’d done so well in Africa, but it wasn’t her team.

So, one, she didn’t want to tromp on his toes.

Two, the fact that she’d showed up at all… well, he’d know he’d won. She hadn’t thought of that. She’d just been so damn angry she hadn’t been thinking right up to this moment. He’d made her angrier than the day he’d tried to carjack her new car. And she was angry now for his not being where she’d left him.

That in itself was pretty damn stupid. Of course he’d take a great opportunity like this one.

She didn’t like these feelings one bit for a whole lot of reasons.

She turned and walked back to the white porcelain water fountain hanging from a gray tile wall between the bathrooms. She wasn’t thirsty, though her throat was dry. She just needed a moment to think.

Beat knew that if she were rational, she’d go and climb back into her car and head right back to Brooklyn, to beg for a new assignment.

No strings. No ties. Her parents had always been trying to tie her in knots to fit their plans for her. It had sure worked on her sister. Hannah had a degree in literature, a pediatrician husband she’d met at Vassar and helped support through Columbia, two cute kids, and she was barely twenty five. They’d just bought their first place barely ten blocks from her parents’ place, serious parent heaven. Hannah’s life was all neat and set. And it probably was, her husband was a great guy. Good for her.

Not for Beat.

Over the last six months she’d finally decided that she liked her new nickname, even if Frank Adams had been the one to give it to her. Beat was a tougher, stronger woman than Beatrice Ann. Beat wouldn’t be shying away from facing Frank Adams. She’d just sweep into that conference room and take over.

She turned, made sure her vest hung straight and headed for the office door. Just as she hit the door she realized that, without thinking, she was wearing the exact clothes she’d been wearing when she first met him.

Well, he better not get all smug, or he’d be going down.

Going down hard.

# # #

Frank heard the door slam open, rocketing into Malcolm’s desk with a sharp thwack. He didn’t even bother to turn, he knew exactly who stood now in the doorway behind him.

The other three guys, so used to the banging door they didn’t jump, did turn to look. Frank could see by their total shift of concentration just how much they appreciated the vision standing there.

He turned his chair slowly from where he’d been studying the latest information regarding the thirty-five thousand Americans living and working in the Canal Zone.

Beatrice Ann Belfour looked incredible. The first time he’d seen her in these clothes, it had been in the darkness of a New York City hot-summer night. Now she was lit by the Texas sunlight streaming in through the window. The damn woman shimmered.

He made a point of inspecting her exactly as he had so long ago in the underground garage at the Secret Service building. Her red sneakers had been replaced by blood-red cowboy boots, but the jeans were still tight, the lemon-yellow blouse brought her glowing skin to life, and the leather vest that he now knew was almost as soft as her skin had just enough bulge to show that she was packing her revolver in its normal shoulder holster. Her hair was about six inches longer, she hadn’t cut it since they’d met, and it now fell in a glorious thick wave well past her shoulder.

And those dark eyes were boring holes right into him.

“Hey, Beat.” He made it sound as casual as he could. It took effort ’cause he was so damn glad to see her.

“Hey, Adams.” She didn’t move, just stood there letting him drink his fill of her.

He’d never get enough. He knew he’d missed her, but had no idea how much until she stood there in front of him.

Gone, Adams. You’re twenty-one and you’re completely and totally gone.
That wasn’t sup
posed to happen until he’d played the field much wider and longer. It was something he’d never expected. Find a woman someday, sure. A main squeeze. But in the six months she’d been gone, he hadn’t even noticed another woman. Oh, he’d had offers, but there was not a one for him other than Beat Belfour.

Then she glanced over his head at the other three guys, “So, who’s in charge here?”

Frank let the silence stretch a bit before drawling out an answer.

“It’s gonna really suck for you…”

Her eyes came back to his. She glared at him with that splendid mix of arrogance and pride, of a woman who knew she was just that damn good. Then a bit of smile that she did her best to hide with a scowl.

“You.”

“Me.”

# # #

Frank had sort of forgotten how good she was. By lunchtime he had Beat up to speed with what it had taken his team three months to gather together, by mid-afternoon she was adding ideas to his scenario planning. And he was loving it. It was like there was some kinda hyperactive feedback loop between them and the ideas just circulated back and forth between them. The other guys had gone, but he’d stuck around to show her what they knew and they’d taken off from there.

“So they’re mobilizing everything?”

“Rangers, Delta, Air Force, Special Forces choppers, everything. All running as exercises now, but everyone knows they’re gearing up for a big hit. We’re doing a razzle-dazzle down there, moving troops in and out so fast that no Panamanians can count ‘em and make a counter-plan.”

“Choppers, huh?”

Frank glanced down at the paperwork. “Some outfit called the 160
th
Special Operations Group. What are you thinking?”

Beat just smiled at him. He could see that something had just clicked in her brain and she wasn’t going to share it yet. So, he looked for a change of topic.

“It’s July 3rd, you know.”

“Yeah,” she said it like it was nothing important and that pissed him off some.

The other agents had left after lunch. They had families in the area. Only he and Beat had stayed. The heat in the office had gone up several degrees since lunch even though the sun had moved around the other side of the building. It forced Frank to loosen his collar. The four white walls covered with maps pressed in around the four desks and table, all crammed into a space that had probably been one man’s office prior to the Secret Service’s arrival. Gearing up for a potential invasion of Panama had made space a premium at Fort Sam.

“What I’m thinking… ” she drew out the words in a way that definitely made him think some very nice things.

God, she was muddling his brain. All he knew was that he wanted to get his hands on Beatrice Ann Belfour and he didn’t care how, as long as it was soon.

It was a trap. Had to be.

“I’m thinking that I saw a place on the drive in that’s still running
Ghostbusters II.
Want to go?”

“You hate sequels.”

“You love Sigourney Weaver.”

Yep. A complete and total trap.

Chapter 18

Frank: Now

What do we know
about her?”

“Who?” Frank knew exactly who the President was talking about, but he wasn’t going to let him off that easy. They were effectively alone, walking through the underground corridor that connected the Dag Hammarskjöld Library with the Secretariat Tower. Two agents cleared the corridor ahead and two followed behind.

“Don’t give me a hard time here, Frank.”

“Or what, sir?”

“Or I’ll name Beat the head of my detail when she gets back and put you somewhere you can be of use like an Alaskan sewage treatment plant.”

Damn he liked working for this man. He took a joke and built in a ray of hope and confidence that Frank sure wasn’t feeling.

“Kim-Ly Geneviève Beauchamp, mixed French and Vietnamese descent, French side came to Vietnam in the 1930s. Traditional plantation owners. Had to leave to avoid the War and the Reeducation Camps, but the ties were too deep and they came back almost right away. She was born there. Educated John Hopkins and Cambridge, the one in England.”

“A Cambrian?”

“Cambrian, sir?”

“If it weren’t a proper noun it would be a good Scrabble word, with the C, M, and B it’s worth thirteen points and is eight letters long, a good length. If you can find just one letter to play off, you can score an extra fifty point Bingo for clearing your tray. Cambrian is from an old story at Oxford. We always said Cambridge was found by some Oxfordians who couldn’t cut it. So they were banished to the fens, the marshes, and founded a silly little school named Cambridge. Cambrian is an ancient geologic age, out of date, slow. Worse, she’s probably a Cavendisher, one of the all-women colleges at the University.”

Frank had no idea what he was talking about, but he seemed pretty pleased by it all. Frank turned back to his report. “Straight to UNESCO, now Chief of Unit for World Heritage of Southeast Asia. Very determined lady. Cavendisher by the way is a also proper noun, so you don’t get to use that one either.”

President Matthews nodded his head and kept his silence as they continued down the corridor. At the stairs they went down one flight to get to the United States Security Center.

The President was thinking some pretty serious thoughts when he didn’t even smile at a Scrabble-based tease.

Frank knew that silence. Knew it from deep inside when he’d waited in Texas wondering when he’d get to see Beatrice Belfour again.

He offered the President the next layer.

“Thirty-two years old, married once, didn’t stick. Broke off with last boyfriend two weeks after being named Chief of Unit last year. Word is he didn’t like that her career was dusting his, a German named Klaus of all things.”

That actually got the President to stop right before they went through
the outer security door. That caused the other agents up and down the
hall some consternation, but Frank flickered an “all okay” sign and just waited.

Nothing.

President Matthews’ face was normally intensely expressive, man couldn’t play poker to save his life as his friend Mark Henderson kept proving to him time and again. And right now it was very carefully showing nothing.

Frank whistled quietly to himself. How long had the President been in conference with her? An hour, a little more.

He thought back to the day he’d met Beat. Once around the nose of her BMW, he could easily have run. Cops might have laid chase, but he’d have a pretty good chance of making it clean. She probably had expected him to. But something about her made it so that he got in the car. He’d stood there for three heartbeats, then trusted her with his life. It had been that fast. At least for him. He’d seen that lady with the dark, dark eyes and just had to know more.

“I bet, Mr. President, that she’d be glad of a chance to do a lecture series at George Washington University or something like that.”

“Are you trying to matchmake me, Frank?”

“No sir, Mr. President. Just thinking out loud, sir.”

They walked through the outer door of the basement security offices together, Frank flashed a hand signal clearing the other agents in the hall to close the distance from either end of the hall and to take up station on the door.

While the outer and inner door bolts were shifting with their sharp metallic buzzes, the President spoke without looking up at him.

“So, maybe I’ll keep you around after all. Now let’s go see about getting Agent Belfour in from whatever limb she’s stuck out on.”

Frank followed him in with the first feeling of hope he’d had all day.

“By the way, Frank, ‘cavendish’ is a sweet tobacco cake. So I can use it. Seventeen points.”

# # #

“The problem we have, Mr. President, is that we have no way to contact any assets on the ground, or even determine if they’re still alive to do so.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Brett Rogers stared at them out of their screen which linked to the White House Situation Room.

So much for hope. Frank resisted the urge to lay his head down on the table.

Once again, the President sat at the head of the table. Frank and Hank sat to either side. Frank had sat, ’cause otherwise he’d pace and that wouldn’t help anything.

In the hour since they’d been gone to the U.N. meeting with Southeast Asia, the staff in the room had been sharply upgraded. The left-hand seats along the wall were now filled with Army, Navy, Air Force, and Special Forces reps, all officer ranks. They each had direct links to their superiors sitting to either side of General Rogers in the Situation Room as well as to whatever other points of contact they needed.

The screens which had held a few photos of the plane, garage, and burning liaison office in Guinea-Bissau were now filled with images of the center of downtown Bissau. Dozens of buildings were on fire. Two dozen tanks were scattered about the town like dropped toys, except several of them were burning as well.

“Intramural. The Army is fighting itself,” the President observed.

“That and probably worse. Only the core of the town has ever had cell phone service, but Guinetel pulled the plug on that, or someone pulled it for them, about six hours ago. Phones aren’t exactly common either, especially not outside the core. There aren’t more than a couple dozen Internet lines for public use in the whole city, fastest thing they’ve got wouldn’t run my four-year-old grandkid’s MathWiz game. But they pulled the plug on those too. So not even Twitter to give us ground intel as there would be in any other disaster of a nation. The only people with satellite phones are the drug lords, and they’re all lying low or engaged in the battle. We’ve kicked a Global Hawk drone into the air and it should
be on site shortly. We’re hoping we can grab some radio chatter. The Raptor we sent earlier was an imaging bird, doesn’t have the heavy intel-gathering package.”

It was all still a jumble.

Frank looked about the room and tried to spot why. Everyone was doing their thing. The screens to either side of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs were alive with data. But it didn’t feel right.

He’d ridden out enough of these with the President now to know that when they were on the track of a solution, even if it wasn’t there yet, you could taste the crackle of it in the air.

This air tasted of nothing but air conditioning and worry.

He looked at the satellite photo of Bissau taken on the last pass before darkness had fallen.

It was midnight there now.

It was time to be on the move.

But each time she moved, Beat would become harder to find. Clearly, going back to the airport hadn’t been her first choice. Couldn’t blame her since she’d already lost two people there. By now Beat would know that downtown wasn’t worth risking either. Not even on the chance of finding a working cell tower.

“Cell phones.”

“What?” The buzz of conversation dropped. The others had been talking about something else. Mapping patterns of unexpected thermal movement. Like that would work in a city of a couple hundred thousand people with a coup going on.

“They’ve shut off the cell towers, Frank.” General Rogers and he had become friends over their last few years serving together at the White House.

“Right,” Frank could see the idea forming in his head. “But maybe Agent Belfour hasn’t shut off her own phone. Do the Raptor or Global Hawk have cell phone scanners? Can we piggyback it onto a radio and talk to them?”

One of the techs on the left-side of the U.N. security office must have put up a request to join the conference. The Marine Corps intelligence officer who was running the conference popped an image of the tech’s face into the lower corner of the main screen. Navy Lieutenant, cute Asian woman, sitting third down the left-wall row.

“Sir, the Global Hawk drone as rigged can only receive calls for monitoring purposes. But the Raptor bird already on site for imaging had been previously tasked for alert broadcast to all cell phones in an area. That hardware is still aboard. It will take some time to set up, but we should be able to transmit with one bird and receive with the other.”

“Get it built. You’ve got twenty minutes until everything is on site.”

Twenty minutes. Frank closed his eyes and tried to do one of those telepathy things like in the movies. He’d be the first one ever to successfully send a telepathic message and save a life.

“Stay low, be careful,” he thought as loudly as he could.

# # #

“Why can’t we just steal the plane?” Ambassador Green whispered from close beside Beat. At least he’d learned to keep his voice down.

They squatted close beside the wreckage of the garage. Still no one had come to clean it up. The flesh of the pieces of the two embassy personnel killed in the explosion had started to go putrid in the tropical heat. There was a slight land breeze headed out to sea, so she moved them to the upwind, east side of the garage to cut the smell.

When Charlotte and Sam had asked what that stench was, she hadn’t answered. Thankfully they already knew to never ask her something a second time. They’d learned that she always heard them and when she didn’t respond it was because they didn’t want to know. Not the screaming of a burn victim, nor the wailing of half the family as they were told the other half was now dead.

“Can you fly a plane?”

“Always meant to learn, but no. Can’t you?”

Like she was some sort of miracle girl. Actually, she’d be willing to try if it weren’t for the two tacticals parked at the other end of the main terminal. Their crews might be asleep and/or drunk, but they’d snap to the moment she tried cranking over the plane’s engines. Two turret-mounted machine guns would make a real mess of the plane and any passengers long before they reached takeoff speed.

No, she had a different plan.

“Wait here.” While she’d been out prowling earlier, she’d traded her blue
pagne
and skirt for a dark
dashiki
and loose pants that would allow her move well.

She slid up to the bottom of the plane’s fold-down steps and waited. She’d found a cooking knife during her prowl and held it hidden in her hand, the blade held flat against her wrist. While it was no K-bar survival blade, it would be quieter than her Sig Sauer. Though she made sure that too was close to hand.

The pilot’s large blood stain at the base of the steps had dried, not even the flies could find anything more there. She spotted his body shoved under one of the wings.

The lights were out over the whole airport, only the moonlight had revealed the tacticals. The steps were still hanging down and the inside of the plane was pitch dark. The third of the four steps creaked and the plane rocked ever so slightly on its shocks as she climbed aboard. Up the narrow aisle between the facing pairs of armchairs with the little tables between them to either side. Not even the smell of stale peanuts remained.

The cockpit was quiet and the moonlight through the windshield let her see enough to find the switch for the panel lights.

She turned them on with a flick and saw that she was screwed.

The pilot must have been trying to radio for help after the garage blew up, before being dragged from the plane. Whoever took him had shot the radios. Five neat shots right through the faces of each radio and transponder. No calling for help from here. She shut off the panel lights.

She knew the King Air had an ELT in the tail, but she wasn’t exactly sure where. Emergency Locator Transmitters triggered for crashes. They must have manual switches. If not, she would beat it with a length of steel pipe until it decided to cry for help.

It would be a messy call, ELTs were designed to scream long and loud on common radio frequencies, but at least it would tell someone to come looking for them.

She was halfway back through the plane when an alarm burst out in the cabin.

Not an alarm!

Her cell phone.

It rang again so loudly in the plane she almost wanted to cover her ears. It vibrated harshly against her rib cage, under the
dashiki
in the pocket of the shirt she’d kept on beneath her native clothes.

She bent over to dig for it under the layers of cloth.

As she did so, a roar and flash slapped at her, knocking her sideways into a seat with the sheer force of the concussion.

Another burst and she saw the origin.

Bending over had saved her life.

Someone had been asleep in the back of the plane, probably after raiding the tiny galley. Someone with a rifle.

Woken by the cell phone, he’d fired wildly at her inside the plane. Her ears still rang, the only thing she could hear, though the cell phone buzzed once more against her rib cage.

Blinded by his own rifle fire, the man stumbled forward down the aisle.

Go just one more step, she coaxed him forward.

He fired at the cockpit again, shattering the windshield. The spent cartridge casing ejected right past her head, fast, and pinged off one of the windows. Had to be a Czech VZ with that kind of ejection. Amazing that the thing still worked, it should be in a museum.

In the light of the muzzle flash, he saw his mistake. She was lying mostly in one of the seats, now right beside him.