“Do what I say!” he choked out as he highlighted both the men’s icons and told the network that they’d been killed in the exercise. Their Merges temporarily blinded and deafened them to simulate their deaths.
“Now! Go!”
Randi Russell heard, but didn’t comply. Smith sounded completely out of it and the bastard tracking her would be incapable of missing the kind of target he was asking her to present.
“Go!” he shouted again and this time she did, taking a leap of faith into the open. She ran full-speed in the direction of the shooter, teeth grinding against each other as she waited for the inevitable round that would kill her.
Instead, she found the shooter on his knees reaching desperately for something behind him on his belt. Figuring that there was no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth, she fired two rounds center of mass and another into the man’s face as she passed. Smith had once again pulled a rabbit from his hat.
It took only a few seconds to come up on the second man, who was also on his knees, but with his Merge in his hand. He heaved it into the woods and was bringing his rifle around when she fired a shot that penetrated his lightweight helmet and tore away most of the top of his head.
“Both men are down!” she said into her throat mike, adjusting her trajectory to take her toward the stream.
“Jon?”
She burst through the bushes, immediately sweeping her rifle toward a camo-clad man lying on his side at the edge of the water. The knife sticking out of his neck suggested he was no longer a threat and she ran to Smith, who was lying half submerged in the stream.
“Jon?” she said, grabbing the back of his hair and pulling his face out of a pool of vomit. No response.
When she rolled him on his back, his eyes fluttered open and she saw the Merge he was holding against his stomach. He tried to throw it, like the man she’d just killed, but it only went about six inches. She picked it up and hurled it into the trees.
“Jon? Jon!” His skin was dead-white and freezing cold to the touch. “Talk to me. Are you hit?”
He shook his head weakly as the sound of a helicopter became audible. Randi grabbed him by the hands and began dragging him to cover, but didn’t make it before the chopper came overhead and a powerful spotlight illuminated them.
She released him and swung her rifle into the blinding glare, but then stopped when an amplified voice overpowered the beat of the rotors. “Randi! Hold your fire!”
The copter swung in a slow arc, looking for a place to land, and she dropped to her knees, taking Smith’s head in her lap. “Hang on, Jon. The cavalry’s here.”
46
“No sir. We don’t have details yet on how it happened.”
James Whitfield sat in the office at the back of his home, staring into the darkness as he listened over an encrypted line.
“Davis was killed and we lost communication with Craighead over the course of a few seconds,” his man continued. “Miller’s Merge started sending garbled data right before that and then went offline. We’re trying to make sense of that now.”
Whitfield didn’t respond. Had he made the same mistake again? Had he underestimated his adversaries? No. Smith and Russell had repeatedly proven themselves in the field and he’d responded to that with overwhelming force: three well-armed, Merged-up special forces operatives benefiting from the element of surprise.
“So they both survived?” he said finally.
“It appears that way, sir. A helicopter touched down on top of Miller’s last known position. It was on the ground for less than five minutes and we believe picked up Smith and Russell, as well as our people.”
“You believe?”
“Our man on the ground has confirmed that they’re all gone, but he didn’t personally witness the transfer.”
“And where did the helicopter go?”
“We weren’t prepared to track an aircraft. I hope to have that information soon.”
“We don’t have the luxury of hoping, Captain. Call Andrews and get surveillance planes in the air.”
“That’s going to be difficult, sir.”
“I don’t care if it’s difficult,” Whitfield said, momentarily losing control of the volume of his voice. “Do whatever you have to do and find that goddamn chopper.”
“Sir, we could expose—”
“No more excuses, Captain! Get those planes in the air.”
Whitfield broke the connection and threw his headset into the wall. This was a complete, unmitigated disaster. If Miller and Craighead were still alive, they’d hold out for a while, but eventually would talk. They wouldn’t know anything more than the fact that they’d been sent to take out two people involved with a homegrown terrorist network, but if the right questions were asked, the carefully crafted anonymity of Whitfield’s Pentagon contacts could begin to show cracks.
How had they defeated his men? Where had the helicopter come from? But most important, who were these bastards?
47
“Is a little goddamn hot water too much to ask?” Smith said, unable to control his mounting frustration as he ran the faucet over his numb hands. The only heat and light in the dilapidated farmhouse came from the flames crackling in a woodstove that looked like it hadn’t been used since the turn of the century.
“Come over by the fire,” Randi said, throwing a threadbare blanket she’d found over his shoulders and pulling him toward the living room. Fred Klein slid a low stool — the only piece of furniture in the house — toward the stove and Smith lowered himself carefully onto it.
“Sorry about the accommodations,” Klein said as Randi knelt and rubbed Smith’s back vigorously, trying to get the blood circulating. “It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s on its own hundred acres and owned by a fictitious mining company that can’t be traced to us. If you need medical attention we can bring someone in.”
Smith shook his head, fighting off another of the endless waves of nausea that refused to subside. “My body temperature’s coming back up and there’s nothing you can do about the effects of the Merge but wait them out.” He paused. “Thanks for coming for us, Fred. I know the risk you’re taking.”
“I don’t think you have much to thank me for. Too little too late.”
Smith just stared into the flames in front of him. While he’d always admired Klein’s patriotism and intellect, the retired spook wasn’t exactly a spring chicken and had very little direct experience with ops. Smith had always assumed that in this type of situation he and Randi would be sacrificed — an unfortunate fact of life that he understood and could live with. But seeing Klein standing there with a gun bulging in his jacket put the man in an entirely a new light. Smith’s already enormous respect for him grew just a little more.
Klein’s phone beeped and he seemed grateful to be able to divert his attention to it. Randi took the opportunity to stoke the fire, trying not to look worried while Smith watched her in his peripheral vision.
“All right,” Klein said, stuffing his phone back in his pocket after a brief conversation that consisted mostly of worried grunts on his end. “We have a positive ID on all three men.”
“Mercs?” Randi said.
He shook his head. “Active military. Two SEALs, one special ops marine.”
“What the hell were they doing at my friend’s cabin?”
“No one seems to know. The SEALs are posted to Afghanistan and the marine is an advisor in Iraq. I’m guessing they were supposed to be on their way back by now with no one the wiser.”
“They didn’t just fly to the States on their own,” Smith said. “Someone gave the order.”