War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel (23 page)

“Las Cruces, New Mexico.”

It was their only lead, one that came again courtesy of Nora. She had told them that Tangent was closing up shop at Redstone, moving operations to advance the next stage of this operation.

But what was it? What required such secrecy that it left a swath of dead bodies in its wake?

“We know Tangent Aerospace is headquartered out of Las Cruces,” Tucker explained. “That alone makes it worth checking out, but Nora also mentioned a name she had overheard regarding the new operation. A place called White City. I think it might be code for the army’s White Sands Missile Range.”

“Just outside Las Cruces,” Jane mumbled. “Makes sense.”

“Hopefully we’ll find out more once we’re there.”

“Just watch your back.”

“If I don’t, I know someone who will.” He glanced down at Kane, who noted his attention and wagged his tail. Kane had a bandage taped over the bullet graze across his hindquarter, but the dog looked ready to go.

After saying his good-byes, Tucker hung up and walked back to the Durango with Kane. Frank was washing the windshield with a little too much diligence, overly focused on such a simple task.

“What’s wrong?” Tucker asked.

Frank glanced over at him, giving him an incredulous look. “What’s wrong? You have to ask?”

“I do. You’ve barely spoken since we left Birmingham.”

Frank stepped over, tossed the squeegee into a blue detergent bucket, and sighed heavily. He combed his fingers through his hair and lowered his voice after a glance at Nora. “We were supposed to be rescuing those kids, but we got half of them killed.”

Tucker had been expecting this conversation. “And they’d all be dead if we did nothing,” he countered. “At least Nora and Diane have a chance now.”

“But if we’d been more careful, thought things through more . . .”

Tucker recognized this familiar lament, having heard it all too often, both from other soldiers and from his own lips. “Frank, combat sucks. Terrible stuff happens. Even the best soldiers make mistakes, and sometimes they get people killed. You can let it cripple you, or you can learn from it and move on.”

Frank looked down at his toes. “I . . . don’t know if I can do that.”

Tucker decided it was time for some tough love. “Then this is where we need to part company.”

Frank jerked his head up. “What?”

“You heard me. If you can’t pull it together, you’re a liability. More likely to make a mistake. You could get us all killed.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Not intentionally, but your head is in a bad place. I need you completely
here
—or gone altogether. I’m going to take Kane for a walk. You’ve got ten minutes to decide.”

He left Frank and took Kane over to a grassy area. He hated to be so stern with the man, but sometimes it was better to rip off a bandage and let a wound air out. Kane used the time to sniff out a few precise spots and lift his leg. After the allotted time, Tucker led the dog back.

He found Frank already in the front passenger seat. He opened the back door so Kane could jump in next to Nora.

“We all set?” he asked.

Nora mumbled some acknowledgment, Kane wagged his tail, and Frank stared for a long breath and nodded.

Tucker climbed behind the wheel. “Then let’s hit the road.”

10:22
A
.
M
. EDT
Smith Island, Maryland

“
So you lost them?” Pruitt Kellerman repeated.

He stood at his desk, his back to the view of Chesapeake Bay and the Washington skyline. He leaned with his fists on the desk’s polished surface and brought his face closer to his computer monitor’s built-in camera.

On the screen, the faces of Karl Webster and Rafael Lyon stared back at him. Neither man answered. Behind their shoulders, he could make out Tangent’s ground monitoring station, consisting of banks of computer workstations, all lit by dim halogen lighting.

“Have I got that right?” Pruitt asked.

Webster answered, his eyelids swollen and pinched. “Sir, they’re all most likely dead.”

“It’s the
most likely
part that worries me.”

“The vehicle they tried to escape in is sitting at the bottom of the Tennessee River. We didn’t find anyone inside, but the current is fierce. Any bodies could be halfway to Kentucky by now.”

Lyon cut in. “We’re monitoring police scanners in the cities along the river for reports of drowning victims.”

“What else have you learned?”

Webster answered. “We now know they were staying at a cabin across the river. The manager remembered the dog. We’ve got descriptions of both men, but no credit cards. They paid in cash.”

By now Lyon’s brow had folded into deep angry ridges. He was not a soldier who tolerated mistakes, especially his own. “We did pick up two incoming calls to Sabatello’s phone.”

Webster shifted uncomfortably in his seat at the mention of Jane Sabatello; a flicker of guilt flashed across the man’s features, likely from being reminded of another of his failures, of how he had let the woman slip through his net and escape.

“We know the caller is using a satellite phone,” Lyon continued. “A nonstandard model with enhancements.”

“Enhancements?”

“Encryption, proxies, that sort of thing. Definitely reeks of black ops.”

“Do you think this guy is someone from our own government?” Pruitt asked. “Or an outside player?”

“Too soon to say. Another call or two and we should be able to get an ID.”

Pruitt straightened, stretching a kink out of his back, refusing to let this setback unnerve him. “Assuming one or more of the Odisha people escaped, what damage could they do?”

“None,” Webster said a bit too quickly. “No individual had the complete picture of the project, I’m sure of it.”

“What about stage two? Were any of them aware of
where
you were moving operations this week?”

Webster slowly shook his head. “I don’t see how. My men were under strict orders not to talk.”

Pruitt frowned.

Hardly an ironclad guarantee
.

He knew from personal experience that there were always leaks.

“Do we delay for now?” Webster asked. “Wait to make certain we’re clean before proceeding?”

Pruitt tucked his chin, calculating odds and evaluating risks. If he jumped at every shadow, he would not be where he was today. One did not rise high by ducking low. One had to be bold.

“No,” he decided, “we stick to our timetable.”

Lyon’s lips tightened into a thin grin of satisfaction. “Yes, sir.”

When it came to bloodshed, the man was always eager.

“However,” Pruitt cautioned, “when you both get to White City, put up some extra coverage.”

While I might be bold, I’m not stupid
.

“If that man and his dog escaped and end up at our door, let’s make sure they’re properly welcomed.”

17

October 22, 1:08
P
.
M
. MDT

Las Cruces, New Mexico

Tucker entered the hotel room to find Frank and Nora bent over their spoils from the raid on Redstone. The Wasp rested on the carpet. The drone’s inner workings were exposed, with equipment and tools strewn all around it.

“We’ve named him Rex,” Frank announced with a grin.

“Rex?”

Frank motioned to Kane, who followed at Tucker’s heels, sniffing at the two bags of Chinese takeout in his hands. “You have Kane. We have Rex.”

Nora simply rolled her eyes and leaned over the open braincase of the drone with a tiny screwdriver in hand. “It wasn’t a unanimous decision.”

Tucker crossed and placed the food on a small dining table next to a kitchenette.

Late last night, they had reached Las Cruces after changing rental cars twice while en route across the country. Once here, he picked a hotel on the outskirts of the city. It was a golf course resort made up of casita-style rooms about a half mile from Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park. Their two-bedroom unit had polished cement floors, a small kiva fireplace, and best of all, a deep soaking tub in the bathroom. He came close to sleeping away the entire night in the damned thing.

At the crack of dawn, after a short breakfast of huevos rancheros and oatmeal, Frank and Nora had set about examining the Wasp in more depth. Tucker had watched them remove the top canopy and get to work, but as their language grew technical, full of jargon that could not possibly be English, he took Kane out for a tour through the neighboring state park. Its three hundred acres bordered the Rio Grande. With the park mostly empty, they spent the morning exploring trails through scrublands, meadows, and riverside woods.

But now it was time to get back to work.

“Besides naming it, what else have you learned?”

“Rex is beyond awesome,” Frank said, sounding like a kid on Christmas morning. “Everything is self-contained inside its skull. Battery, guidance system, radar, even a ten-terabyte solid-state hard drive.”

He pointed to the skull, the drone’s spherical central housing. It was twice the size of a basketball, supported by a trio of spider-leglike landing struts. The drone had two wings that crossed at its midline, forming a large X, with four teardrop-shaped protrusions at the ends that housed rotatable, variably pitched propellers. The whole thing weighed a scant twenty pounds.

Frank waved a hand over its small bulk. “The exterior is made of carbon fiber.”

“One that’s micro-honeycombed to trap light,” Nora added. “A type of stealth coating.”

Frank nodded. “It’s a beast.”

“But can you tame it?” Tucker asked.

Frank grinned. “Between my own moderate genius and Nora’s knowledge, I’m sure of it.”

Good
.

Tucker began unloading the boxes of Chinese food and opening them. “What about the Wasp’s original purpose? Are there any clues about what we might be facing ahead?”

Nora sat back on her heels and nodded. “I believe it’s the next-gen soldier for a new type of warfare.”

“What warfare is that?”

“The rise of
information
warfare.”

Tucker frowned. “What are you talking about? Like hacking?”

“It’s a lot more sinister and far more dangerous than that. It’s a combination of brute-force electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and psychological operations.”

Frank nodded. “You need to listen to Nora.”

“Go on,” Tucker urged. “Explain.”

“Everything nowadays is connected, intertwined, overlapped,” Nora began. “It’s a wobbly digital house of cards. It wouldn’t take much to topple it, to create chaos. And this is not unknown to the powers that be. Nations, including the U.S., are investing billions to establish military commands for this new type of warfare, to learn how to topple a foreign country’s house of cards, while beefing up one’s own.”

Frank nodded. “Unfortunately, both Russia and China are already ahead of us.”

“I don’t understand. What exactly do these attacks look like?”

“Like I said,” Nora continued, “it’s basically three pronged.
Electronic warfare
is intended to mess with transmissions, like jamming weapons guidance systems or interfering with air traffic control.
Cyber attacks
involve not only stealing data but disrupting a nation’s entire infrastructure—its power plants, water and gas utilities, railway systems, and on and on. The last,
psychological operations
, or psy-ops, is the most fucked up. Its goal is to degrade a populace’s morale by spreading misinformation through both social media and news outlets, intending to inspire fear and spread panic.”

Frank sighed. “It’s this very threat that my role at Redstone—as a cryptologic network warfare specialist—was established to combat. It’s becoming a whole new battlefield out there.”

Tucker eyed the Wasp with more worry. “And this is its soldier?”

Nora nodded. “Equipped with Sandy’s decryption algorithm, one capable of decoding anything and everything and learning from it, Rex is more than merely a surveillance drone. It can secretly eavesdrop and record any airwave transmission. Even its landing struts are data collectors. Land this baby on any broadband, DSL cable, or phone line, and it’ll suck data like a vampire.”

“What about offensive capabilities?”

“Nothing in the traditional sense,” Frank said. “But Rex comes equipped with directed-burst transmitters. Get him close enough—say, a half mile—and he can scramble any circuits, including some hardened military stuff.”

“So let me get this straight,” Tucker said. “This flying electronic warrior can collect data and intelligence on an enemy and leave behind a path of destruction in its wake.”

Both Frank and Nora nodded.

“Then how do
we
put it to use?”

Frank glanced to Nora, his expression turning sly. “We may have a big surprise for Tangent.”

2:22
P
.
M
.

From across the street, Tucker studied the headquarters of Tangent Aerospace. It rose forty stories, forming a towering glass wedge which loomed over Las Cruces. Its surface blazed in the afternoon sunlight.

Tucker sat on a roadside bench heavily shadowed by mesquite trees. He wore a ball cap and dark sunglasses to hide his features as he studied the main gates of Tangent’s forty-acre campus. Past the high wrought-iron fence, the corporation’s grounds had been landscaped with meandering creeks, English gardens, and gurgling fountains, an oasis of green set amid the desert landscaping of the city’s business district.

He watched a handful of Tangent personnel eating a late lunch, seated under umbrellas on a wide garden patio. Some chatted and laughed; others were bent with their heads together in deep conversation. He wondered if any of them knew of all the bloodshed these past days. Fury stoked inside him at their nonchalant attitude. Whether culpable or not, they were cogs in this machine.