Shadow Catcher (18 page)

CHAPTER 36

T
he dark foliage of Zheng's favorite forest park drifted lazily past the car's open window. He breathed deeply. One final drive with Han.

In just a few days, he would report to Beijing to take up his new post as defense minister, and he would bring with him China's greatest triumph since the foundation of the Politburo. These were his last days in Fujian. He wanted to soak in the pleasure of its green hills and fresh scents before committing himself to the dirty, crowded streets of the capital. Sadly, circumstances had denied him the pleasure of a smooth transition. As he approached his greatest triumph, he was beleaguered by incompetence.

And betrayal.

Zheng checked his watch. “It is time to return to the base, Han,” he said, offering a thin smile to his driver.

Liang's revelation that he knew about the Persian Gulf operation had been a heavy blow, for it meant that Zheng had a spy in his own circle of trusted servants and operatives. Wulóng could not have been the traitor, and that left only a few alternatives.

Zheng gave two of his Special Forces operatives the task of checking out the divers that were killed in Kuwait: their apartments, bank accounts, the usual fare. As an extra precaution, he had them check out Ling and Han as well. He had never shared any truly sensitive information with Ling, but one could never be too careful.

The result of his investigation cut him deeply. His men found papers in Han's flat that tied him to Liang. His most trusted servant had been reporting to Liang behind his back. It appeared that Han had tried to serve two masters, playing one against the other, waiting to see who would come out on top.

The traitor could have warned the doomed defense minister about Wulóng, but he did not. Perhaps Han had finally chosen a champion. Still, the fact that he chose correctly did not excuse the betrayal.

“We need to stop at the maintenance garage,” said Zheng as Han pulled past the base guardhouse. “The motor pool would like to do some routine work on this car. They will give us a replacement for the day.”

Han cast a furtive glance in the mirror. “Gen . . . eh . . . Defense Minister,” he said hesitantly, “there is no need to interrupt your busy schedule. I can drop you at your office immediately and then take care of the vehicle myself.”

Zheng smiled and gave him a benevolent wave. “No, Han. I am in no hurry to return to the office. Please pull into the garage.” He could see the suspicion in Han's eyes, the moisture developing at the top of his brow. It did not matter. He would not dare disobey.

Han pulled in to the garage, and the electric door closed behind them. Two men in dirty blue coveralls appeared with dust masks covering their faces. Han did not move from his seat.

“Come. Help me out of the car, please,” said Zheng. “I need the strength of your arm.”

The two men stood well away from the car. Nevertheless, Han kept his eyes on them as he climbed out and walked around to Zheng's door. As he opened it and bent down to offer the minister an arm, he positioned himself to keep the men in sight. Zheng could see the fear in his eyes. Good.

Shock filled Han's face as the minister locked his arm in an iron grip. He pulled back, but Zheng used his resistance as leverage, nimbly pulling himself to his feet. Once he had his footing, he spun Han around, pulling a garrote wire from his watch and looping it around the traitor's neck.

Han tried to strike at Zheng, his arms flailing behind him, but his efforts only tightened the loop. Soon his body went limp.

Zheng held the wire taut for another fifteen seconds. Then the two Special Forces soldiers in maintenance uniforms came over and helped him lower the body to the ground. As he straightened up, one of them handed him a cloth to clean the wire. There was a lot of blood. Han's struggle had caused the garrote to slice deeply into his flesh, cutting into the windpipe and perhaps an artery.

Zheng regarded the bloody cloth and shook his head. He hated this sort of thing, but occasionally a leader needed to get his hands dirty to show his subordinates his capabilities and the price of disloyalty.

The secure satellite phone that Han carried for Zheng started ringing. One of the operatives reached into the dead man's pocket to get it. “It is Hei Ying,” he said, handing the phone to Zheng.

Zheng flipped open the phone. “The line is secure. Go ahead, my friend.” He flicked his hand at his men, gesturing for them to take the body away.

“Wulóng is dead,” said Hei Ying.

Zheng's grip on the phone tightened. It seemed that Hei Ying had become a constant source of bad news.

“From what I have been able to piece together,” continued the American, “Baron came home earlier than expected. He is a skilled opponent. Wulóng was outmatched.”

Zheng closed his eyes. “That is most unfortunate,” he said. “And what of your efforts to gain the information I requested?”

“Baron is too cautious.”

The minister let out a heavy sigh. Traitors and incompetents—would these trials never end? He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Then our operation now depends entirely on my men.”

“You underestimate me,” Hei Ying chided. “I still have options open, options that will guarantee your victory.”

CHAPTER 37

W
ill McBride backed out of the Romeo Seven elevator, helping Joe Tarpin carry the crate of Novak's effects into the command center. As the two of them deposited their load next to a workstation, he spied Amanda standing at the center of the room. “There you are,” he said, straightening up and stretching his back. “You disappeared before the takeoff. You're not still mad because Drake didn't take you along, are you?”

Amanda did not reply. She stared up at the main screen. A triangular symbol moved across the map, showing the Wraith's progress, already making its way out of DC airspace.

McBride turned his attention back to the crate and saw that Tarpin had already started rummaging through its contents. He looked concerned. “Something wrong, Joe?” asked McBride.

Tarpin looked up, startled. “Hmph? Oh, I was just taking inventory. There's supposed to be a journal in here, but I don't see it. Has anyone else opened this crate?”

“I saw Nick crack it open before the takeoff. Maybe he took it with him on the plane.”

Tarpin frowned. “He shouldn't have done that, not without checking with me first.”

McBride slapped the side of the crate to get Amanda's attention. “Come on, quit brooding and get over here. There has to be something in here that will help our team.”

Amanda reluctantly joined the two men. She slumped into a chair at the workstation and stared down into the box with an unenthusiastic sigh. “It's been twenty-five years. You'd think if anything in there were useful, someone would have found it by now.”

“Maybe no one was looking,” countered McBride. But after a glance at the contents, he feared she might be right. Despite its weight, the crate held disappointingly few artifacts: just an aged yellow file, a thin photo album, and a pilot's flight log. McBride gingerly pulled the ancient rubber band off the file.

The first document was the initial incident report for Novak's shoot-down, signed by a man named Jozef Starek. The report confirmed what the team had already learned from the digital Book of Honor file. Novak flew a solo mission over China, broke from his planned route, broke radio silence, and then was shot down. Further into the file, McBride found transcripts of the P-3 radio intercepts that backed up the report, as well as glossy black-and-white photographs taken from an SR-71 Blackbird at the time of the shoot-down.

He handed the file to Tarpin. Then he picked up the flight log and thumbed through the pages to the last entry. It was dated 21 December 1987. Novak had not logged his final mission on New Year's Day. That was not unexpected. Pilots normally logged their flights after landing, an opportunity that Novak missed, having been interrupted halfway through the flight by a surface-to-air missile. But then McBride noticed something else. All of Novak's previous flights over China were flown with a wingman in another F-16, every single one. “Doesn't it seem unusual that Novak flew solo on his last mission,” he mused, “especially after he flew all of his other missions with a wingman?”

“Just because something is unusual,” said Tarpin, “doesn't make it criminal.”

“Good point.” McBride stared down at the half-empty page for a moment longer. Then he suddenly looked up, snapping the book closed with a loud
slap
. He reached over and snatched the incident report from the file in Tarpin's hands, quickly scanning the pages a second time. When he finished, he waved the report at the other two. “But that
does
make it something that should be addressed in the incident report, and I don't see it here.”

“Maybe,” said Amanda, wrinkling her nose. She seemed unimpressed.

Tarpin shook his head. “I'm with her. Your logic is pretty thin.”

“Wow, tough crowd.” McBride put the papers back in the file and then laid the Blackbird photographs down on the table, side by side. “Twenty-five years,” he muttered, slowly bending closer to the photos until his freckled nose practically touched the glossy paper. After a few moments, he stood up and glanced around the command center. “I need a magnifying glass.”

“What for?”

“There's a distortion on this photo.” He started rifling through the workstation drawers.

Tarpin picked up the photo and squinted at it. “That's a smudge,” he said. “Probably the smudge where you just touched it with your nose.”

“Millions of dollars in tech, but we don't have a simple magnifying glass?” McBride continued rummaging through desks and cabinets. “I didn't touch it with my nose.”

“Maybe there was a smear of something on the camera lens,” offered Amanda, finally beginning to take interest.

McBride stopped ransacking the command center and gave her an incredulous look. “That photo was taken from eighty thousand feet. If there was a smear on the lens, it would have covered several acres.”

He tapped a blonde technician on the shoulder. “Magnifying glass?” She looked up from her screen and frowned at him, pointing to an earpiece to indicate that she was listening to something.

“I'll take that as a no. Wait a sec.” He grabbed the photo out of Tarpin's hand and placed it on a scanner.

“You can't do that!” exclaimed Tarpin. “You don't have the authority to copy the Agency's materials.”

McBride looked back at him and grinned. “Then it's a good thing you're here to supervise,” he said. He sat down at a workstation, and a few moments later he had the photo displayed on one of its monitors. He expanded a small section and then rolled his chair back so the others could see. “Look, there's a clear distortion here. Doctoring photographs used to be a much more refined science. Twenty-five years ago, there was no iPhoto, not even Photoshop. It took a real professional to fix photographic evidence.” He circled the distortion with his finger. “Whoever did this was no professional. It's a simple masking job. That photo is a duplicate of the original, with this section intentionally blurred into the forest background.”

Amanda removed the photo from the scanner and held it up to her eyes. “It may be a hack job, but it could have fooled me. And the perpetrator got away with it for two and a half decades.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” argued Tarpin. “Let's assume you're right and the photo was masked—that still doesn't tell us who masked it.”

McBride considered the CIA man's point for a moment and then raised a finger. “Maybe we shouldn't focus on the
who
,” he said, rolling his chair over to a different computer at the station. “Maybe we should focus on the
what
.” His fingers flew across the keyboard. Windows flashed up and down on the monitor. Then he abruptly slowed, loudly tapping the last two keys. He rolled his chair back again. “Edward Masters.”

“Who?” asked Amanda.

“The pilot of the Blackbird that took these photos. He can tell us what's missing from that picture.”

Disbelief covered Tarpin's face. “You've got to be kidding me,” he said.

“Your agency lost control of the Blackbird program in the late sixties,” replied McBride. “By the eighties, those assets belonged to the US Air Force, and the US Air Force keeps better records than any military service on the planet—even when it makes no sense to do so.” He used the mouse to highlight a name on the screen. “Thus, I give you Edward Masters.”

“That's great,” said Tarpin, his tone flat. “How long ago did he pass away?”

McBride clicked open another window and highlighted more text. “He's alive and living the good life on Lake Anna.” He pulled the address up on a map for them to see.

“That's only two hours south of here,” said Amanda.

McBride checked his watch and then looked up at her. “Do you think he's awake?”

CHAPTER 38

T
he Wraith still had a long drive ahead before reaching Fujian. Nick left Drake at the controls and retired to the crew bunk for some rest. He placed a hand on his vest pocket and felt the pill bottle that Heldner had given him, but he wasn't ready to sleep. Too much had happened in the last few days.

As he sat down in his bunk, Nick struggled to fit the puzzle together. Chinese operatives attempt to steal stealth technology in Kuwait. The man who turns up to identify their bodies just happens to have been in Kuwait when the Triple Seven's first mission went horribly wrong. Then a missing CIA operative turns up in Fujian, an operative that may well have been sold out by a mole in the Distant Sage operation. And as soon as Nick's team develops a rescue plan, the same man from Kuwait shows up at his house and threatens his family.

Nick shut his eyes tight. The puzzle pieces seemed to move in circles. He wasn't even sure they all came from the same box. How could events split by twenty-five years be related? Maybe they weren't. Maybe he was just grasping for deeper meaning after the shock of seeing Katy and Luke threatened.

Maybe not.

He removed an old leather-bound book from the cargo pocket on his pant leg.

“What's that?”

Nick looked up to see Quinn peeking down from the crew bunk above him. “I thought you were resting,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” replied Quinn. “Like I could sleep on the way to my first real mission.”

“You're not even supposed to be here. It's not a good idea to remind me how green you are,” said Nick. He sat back in the bunk and brought the book up to read.

Quinn refused to take the hint. “You stole that from the CIA's archive crate,” he said. “That's another agency's classified material.”

“This material was entrusted to
my
team, and
I
deemed it essential to the accomplishment of
my
mission,” countered Nick without lowering the book. “
Your
job here is to shut up and stay out of the way.”

Quinn disappeared back into his bunk. “Whatever.”

Nick ignored the young airman and turned his attention to Novak's book. Faded handwritten notes filled almost every page, along with several sketches. He read a few of the labels beneath the pictures:
RB-57 Canberra with Company Recon Mod
,
Photo Analysis Room—Pruszcz Gdanski
,
Red Baron Recce Pod.
Novak was a skilled artist and apparently a technology buff. With all of the detail in the sketches, Nick began to wonder if Novak had an ulterior motive for keeping this journal. He flipped to the last few entries, all made at the CIA's forward operating location on Taiwan, and began to read.

September 26, 1987, FOL Sincheng, Taiwan

Jozef is finally warming up to me again. He's been so distant since Anja and I married that I felt like I'd lost a brother. The environment here is a great catalyst for reconciliation. Like in Poland, we are the only two American pilots. But there, our Slavic heritage gave us a bond with the others, at least a superficial one. Here we have nothing. The Taiwan nationals keep us at arm's length and treat us with suspicion, even the pilots. The ready room chatter is Chinese, filled with the laughter of inside jokes, and often it seems as if we are the butt of them. Jozef is learning Mandarin. He's doing quite well from what I can see. Maybe that will help.

October 24, 1987, FOL Sincheng, Taiwan

It's happening again. We lost three Taiwan nationals this month. One got hit by a missile just after crossing the mainland coastline. He limped back to the base, only to cartwheel down the runway in an unholy fireball. Two more disappeared last week. We sent them on a shore mission to check out a possible buildup on Nanhaixiang. They took a runabout out of Sincheng harbor eight days ago. We haven't heard from them since. Wright couldn't care less. As always, he seems constantly preoccupied with something else.

November 23, 1987, FOL Sincheng, Taiwan

Another national has disappeared, a photo analyst. She took a weekend leave to Taipei and never came back. She's been gone eleven days. Wright, our benevolent spook in charge, claims that she just got burned out and quit. He certainly isn't devoting enough resources to hunting her down.

It's not just the losses. Our reconnaissance runs are becoming less fruitful. Jozef says that it's because the Chinese have stepped up their camouflage, ever since they shot one of our F-16s. But these are huge military sites; they can't stay camouflaged all the time. I think someone is warning them. Maybe we can't trust the nationals no matter where we go. Maybe one of the Taiwan natives has turned, the same way that we think one of the Polish did. I know that I check my six more often when my wingman is a Taiwan national. Thank God for Jozef and Anja. They are the only people here that I can talk to, the only people I can trust.

December 12, 1987, FOL Sincheng, Taiwan

It seems that something goes wrong on every mission: broken reconnaissance pods, Chinese camouflage, bad navigation systems, engine malfunctions. Two days ago, we almost lost Jozef. His engine quit and he had to dead-stick his Viper back to the runway. We still haven't been able to determine what caused it. We haven't lost any personnel since the analyst, but I am still utterly convinced that there is a mole. I get the sense that the nationals agree that something is very wrong. They won't talk to me about it. They don't trust the Americans. Why should they? Maybe one of us is selling them out.

December 25, 1987, FOL Sincheng, Taiwan

Merry Christmas. I've come up with a plan to weed out the mole. I brought in Wright and the director of photo analysis to get approval, but none of the nationals will know about it. After my New Year's Day mission, I'll have a good idea where to find the mole.

Nick flipped the page. Blank. There were no more entries. He placed the journal on the bunk next to him and lay down. So Novak had started his own operation to smoke out the mole. Maybe he was getting too close, about to turn up the right stone. Then he disappeared, and the mole was never found. Nick closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. None of that connected Novak to the mole in the Triple Seven Chase, if there even was one. Nick blinked. Unless Novak's mole and the Triple Seven's mole were one and the same. He swallowed Heldner's pill and closed his eyes. He was chasing shadows.

Even after taking the pill, he could not quiet his mind. For several minutes, random phrases and fragmented visions paraded through his mind. Then, finally, the drug overpowered his thoughts, and he slept.