War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel (28 page)

ALICE’S PLACE
TEA PARTY SUPPLIES SOLD HERE

“
Looks like someone had a sense of humor,” Jane commented.

With his nose to the control unit, Frank scoffed, “This sure ain’t no Wonderland.”

Maybe, but we’ve definitely fallen down a rabbit hole
.

Tucker turned to Frank. “Where’s the nearest of those electrical signals that Rex detected earlier?”

Frank tapped at his control unit with his nose bent to the screen. After a moment, he straightened and pointed across the square to the general store. “If we want any answers to this mystery, it looks like we’re going to have to go ask Alice.”

Tucker nodded. “Let Kane and me check the place out first. You two hold here.”

He signaled the shepherd over to his side and headed across the square, counting on the robotic eye in the sky or Kane’s keen senses to alert him of danger. Once at the storefront, Tucker climbed the steps to the porch. The boards creaked under his weight, setting his nerves on edge. He fell momentarily back to Afghanistan, remembering a small village outside of Fallujah where Taliban forces had ambushed his unit. Again, muzzle fire flashed behind his eyes. Blinded by the memory, he failed to stop his boot from cracking through a rotted board. He teetered sideways, but Kane was there, pressing against his leg, supporting him as always.

He regained his balance, patted the dog’s flank, and crossed to the dusty window. A peek inside revealed the place was a shell, nothing more than an empty room with a low ceiling of open rafters and a plank floor. But out of the darkness on the far side, a pair of green lights glowed, like two venomous eyes shining from the shadows.

He eased over to the door, opened it slowly, and slipped inside with Kane.

He circled a finger in the air and pointed across the planks.

S
EARCH
.

The shepherd set off along the edges of the room, sniffing through some old scaffolding, a pile of unused boards. Tucker pulled out his penlight and flashed it along the floor. Scuffled footprints in the dust led to the pair of shining lights. They glowed from a matte-black steel box, about the size of a standard tool chest. A spiral antenna poked from its lid.

Tucker approached it cautiously, fearful it might be some sort of monitoring device, and didn’t want to inadvertently alert whoever might be listening. Once closer, he noted a smaller string of blue and red LEDs blinking next to the antenna. The unit appeared to be completely enclosed with a keypad on the side facing him. A power cord connected the box to a pair of car batteries on the floor.

Kane whined from a far corner of the room. Tucker cringed, realizing he had not ordered Kane to remain silent. He glanced over and saw the dog sniffing and circling a patch of the floor. Tucker recognized the unusual timbre of Kane’s warning. He had heard it all too often in Afghanistan and knew what it meant.

Fearful that the noise might be picked up, Tucker studied the lights on the box, but nothing had changed, suggesting the monitoring device—if that was what it was—was not tuned to pick up sound.

So what the hell is it for?

Wanting answers, Tucker walked back to the door and waved for Frank and Jane to join him.

As the others crossed the square, Kane repeated his warning, scratching at the floorboards. Tucker clenched a fist, ordering Kane to be silent.

I got your message, buddy. Let’s deal with one mystery at a time
.

Jane and Frank climbed up to the porch and entered the general store.

Tucker pointed to the box. “What do you make of that?” he whispered.

Frank shrugged and crossed for a closer look, drawing Jane and Tucker behind him. Without touching anything, Frank gave the unit a full inspection, cocking his head one way, then the other.

“Well?” Jane finally asked.

Frank frowned at the pair of car batteries. “That’s definitely the source of the electromagnetic radiation that Rex picked up. And considering he detected other pools of similar radiation throughout this town, I wager we’d find a slew of these boxes planted all over.”

“But what are they for?” Tucker asked. “And what are they doing here?”

Frank stood up, holding a palm to his aching back, and glanced around the space. His gaze clearly extended beyond these four walls. “We’re only eleven miles from the Trinity bomb site. If I had to guess from the age and wear of the buildings, this mock-up of a town was built during the first atomic tests. The Trinity scientists couldn’t agree on what would happen when they blew up their bomb. Some thought it might even set the atmosphere on fire.”

Tucker shook his head, surprised they risked setting the damned thing off
.

Talk about leaping without looking
.

Frank continued. “They built towns like this all around the bomb site, not knowing how far the blast wave might reach.”

“Clearly it didn’t reach this far,” Jane commented.

Frank nodded. “Back then, the scientists planted monitoring instruments throughout the various towns, to test both the strength of the blast and its radiation effects.” He looked down at the black steel box. “Something tells me someone else is using this town in a similar fashion.”

Tangent
.

Tucker felt an icy finger trace along his spine.

Did we all just hike to ground zero of a new Manhattan Project?

From the worried looks on Frank and Jane’s faces, they feared the same thing.

Tucker pointed to the door. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Frank nodded, but Jane moved over to the store’s back window and raised a small set of binoculars.

“Jane, what’re you doing?”

She waved Tucker over. “You can see the tank and the rest of the Russian equipment from here, parked outside the edge of town. I can make out the faint green glow from under the tank’s treads.”

“Another of the monitoring devices.”

“Before we leave, maybe we should take a closer look.” She lowered the binoculars. “Why has Tangent brought in all of this Soviet-era military equipment?”

It was a good question, but right now Tucker sensed time was running out, and he had learned to trust his gut.

“While this stuff is old,” Jane pressed, “it’s not obsolete. Lots of armies from former Soviet-bloc countries still use such tanks and equipment. What if this is a test run—not only against civilian targets like this town but against military ones?”

Tucker bit his lower lip. Jane was right. All of this smacked of a dry run. But what was the endgame here? Who did Tangent have in its crosshairs?

“If we had a closer look,” Jane continued, “gathered all the makes and models, then maybe we could figure out the true objective of all of this. Find out what country—”

Frank cut her off. “Too late for that.”

Tucker looked at Frank, who was studying the screen of his control unit, which flowed with video feed from Rex.

“We got company coming,” Frank explained. “Black SUV, about a half mile out and moving fast. From the dust trail, it looks like it came from a set of old military bunkers a couple miles away.”

It has to be Tangent
.

“They’ll be here in under a minute,” Frank said.

Tucker stated the obvious. “Then it looks like we’re not going anywhere.”

11:33
P
.
M
.

Karl Webster sat in the passenger seat as the Suburban rattled and bounced across the desert. In the distance, he could make out the dark silhouette of the weathered town, which he had codenamed White City.

He checked his watch and growled to the driver. “Faster, damn it. We’re less than thirty minutes out from launch. I’m not going to let this glitch set us behind schedule.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Suburban shot faster, chewing through the terrain.

Karl turned to the backseat, where a pair of technicians huddled, dressed in gray coveralls, looking none too happy to be headed into the line of fire. “You know which units to check. I want us in and out of there in under fifteen. Got that?”

Both men nodded.

Karl swung around, hoping his ruse held out long enough for him to search the town. He didn’t know if Jane Sabatello and her nameless companion with the dog had somehow reached White City, but he intended to make sure they weren’t on-site to witness what was about to happen.

Worried, he clutched the assault rifle resting across his knees.

Back at the command center, he had faked a problem with one of the monitoring devices, creating an excuse to come out here. Rafael Lyon had squinted suspiciously when Karl had insisted on personally accompanying the repair techs. Karl had stated that he wanted one final boots-on-the-ground look at the site before midnight. Before Lyon could question him more intently, Pruitt Kellerman had called, wanting an update.

As that French bastard took the call, Karl had used that moment to break free of Kellerman’s watchdog.

Still, this stunt would only buy him a narrow window of time.

He stared ahead as the SUV’s headlights finally reached the outer edge of the town. The Suburban swept past the array of Soviet military hardware and parked next to the treads of the massive tank, an armored beast weighing forty tons.

The techs piled out while the driver stayed with the vehicle.

Karl took his rifle and followed the two men in coveralls into the town. He limped on his bandaged ankle, where that damned dog had savaged his leg. He used the pain to center himself, to keep focused on his objective . . . even if it meant going behind Lyon’s back. Karl had started this mess and intended to clean it up once and for all. But first he had a mystery to solve.

He pictured the two figures in the Expedition photographed at the Stallion Gate, especially one of their faces.

Where are you, Janie?

11:34
P
.
M
.

Tucker lowered his night-vision monocle and turned away from the rear window of the general store. He had waited until the incoming Suburban had braked to a hard stop, stirring up a cloud of sand and dust. He had wanted to know how many had arrived and counted four men: two technicians carrying toolboxes, a driver standing by the open door, and another.

Karl Webster, head of Tangent security.

What was he doing out here?

Tucker frowned at the monitoring device as he rushed away from the window.

Did we inadvertently trigger some alert, drawing these others here?

He suddenly worried that his choice of hiding places might not have been the wisest—not that they had any better options.

Thank God for Kane’s sharp nose
.

Tucker joined the others next to the open trapdoor in the floor. Earlier, Kane’s particular whine had alerted him to this spot. He had not heard that unique note of warning from Kane for several years, not since Afghanistan. Beyond Kane’s duties as a military war dog, the shepherd had been trained by a search-and-rescue team to hunt for bodies.
Cadaver sniffing
, it had been called, and it was one of Kane’s grimmest tasks. His partner performed such duties with clear reluctance, expressed by the mournful note to that whine.

Alerted by Kane, Tucker had drawn Frank and Jane to the section of planks. If a body was buried under the floorboards, then perhaps there was a way for them to hide below, too. It took only seconds to discover the trapdoor, which led down to a series of tunnels beneath the town, connecting the various buildings. Old defunct power cables ran along the bottom, suggesting the tunnels were used to wire up the old equipment that Trinity scientists had used to monitor the town decades ago.

Once he reached the trapdoor, Tucker hopped through the opening and dropped to a low crouch with Jane and Frank. He pulled the door shut over them all. The pitch-black tunnel was only three feet high and about as wide.

“Let’s move out,” he said.

Tucker took the lead, crawling on hands and knees. Jane followed with Frank behind her. Tucker intended to use the tunnels to reach the far side of the town, where hopefully they could find an exit and slip away. To achieve that goal, he had sent Kane scouting ahead, while Frank monitored the enemy above through Rex’s eyes.

As he led the others, Tucker checked the feed on his phone from his four-legged partner. The night-vision mode of Kane’s camera showed a bobbling image as the shepherd traversed the maze. A small blinking dot of Kane’s GPS tag marked the dog’s path, slowly building a map of this subterranean system for them.

He watched Kane stop beside a crumpled figure that blocked the tunnel.

Must be the source of the odor
.

The shepherd nosed the remains, as if trying to revive the corpse. By Tucker’s estimate, the body lay in the tunnels on the far side of the town square. The scent must have drafted through the tunnels to reach Kane’s nose at the trapdoor in the general store.

He radioed to Kane’s earpiece. “C
ONTINUE
SCOUT
.”

Obeying the order, the shepherd backed away and found a side tunnel that led away in another direction. Tucker followed after his partner, tracing the glowing bread crumbs on the slowly extending map.

When they reached the turn that led away from the dead body, Tucker had them all hold. “I’m going to check the remains. Maybe they could give us some clue to what’s going on here.”

Jane came with him, while Frank stayed put, his face awash from the glow of his CUCS unit’s screen.

Leading with a penlight, Tucker found the corpse ten feet down the side tunnel. The upper body was half curled on itself, the lower legs trapped under an old cave-in. The remains appeared mummified, with the skin and muscle dried to bone. From the short, brittle-looking hair, Tucker guessed it was a male. The cargo shorts and red shirt suggested it was likely someone young. A caving helmet lay in the dirt.

“I don’t think we’re going to get any answers here,” Jane said. “The body must’ve been down here for at least a decade.”