Blind Rage (2 page)

“But that’s not fair!”

She blinked back tears and turned to her father for help again. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t have a license. Not entirely. Between the pressure to keep her grades up and her extracurricular activities, she hadn’t been able to find time to take driver’s ed.

He wiped air with his hands. “Don’t look at me, kitten. Not getting in the middle of this.”

She’d always loved the idea of being his snuggly little kitten. Suddenly she hated the nickname.

“What do you mean, you’re not getting involved?” she said, pouting. “You’re a parent, too.”

“I meant that I’m not about to countermand your mother,” he said gently. “We have each other’s back, especially when it comes to parenting. And it so happens that I agree with her.”

“But why?” It sounded whiny, but Tess couldn’t help it. She really wanted to go with Toby.

“For the same reasons your mother mentioned,” he said. “I used to be in high school. I used to be just like Toby Cavanaugh. Heck, I
was
him. I know exactly what’s on his mind.”

Her mother positively beamed. Tess couldn’t stand it. Her father and Toby were nothing alike. And she felt like she was losing her touch. She’d always been able to sway her father before.

“You don’t trust me—is that it?” she said.

“Oh, we trust you,” her mother said. “It’s Toby we don’t trust. Don’t get me wrong. I think he’s a nice boy, Tess. I just don’t think it’s appropriate for you two to be without some sort of chaperone.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Maybe so,” her father said, “but for now, think about going with your friends instead.”

“It’s just not fair!” she wailed.

Tess grabbed her board and stomped off toward the parking lot. She stood next to the big SUV under the lights and fumed, pacing, while she waited for her parents to slowly catch up.

They are so infuriating.
She watched them surreptitiously, head bowed, as they approached holding hands.
Eewww
. She didn’t know anyone else whose parents acted so sickeningly romantic in public. She glanced around the parking lot to see if anyone was looking.
If I did that with Toby in front of them, they’d just lecture me.

Engrossed in conversation, they acted as if nothing was wrong when they came up to the SUV. Her father opened the tailgate and put his board inside, then took her mother’s and laid it in on top. Almost absentmindedly, he reached over and grabbed Tess’s board and stowed it along with the others, talking to her mother the whole time. He walked around to the passenger door and opened it for her mother, then circled around to the driver’s side. Tess got in the back and flounced onto the seat. Her father climbed in, started the engine, and plugged his iPod into the stereo system. Soft jazz filled the interior.

“Dad, could you get some decent music on your playlist?” Tess said.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’ll get I.T. on it right away.”

From the way his eyes crinkled, she knew he was smiling. She turned away and sighed. At least it wasn’t the headbanger eighties punk rock he sometimes listened to when he wanted to pump himself up. “Reliving my ill-spent youth,” he’d say, recalling his days skateboarding around the Cal Poly campus. She shook her head.

Parents are such a pain.

Five minutes later, they got onto the highway heading west toward the city. Tess stared out the window and watched the dark terrain zip by in a blur. A mix of light snow and rain had started falling, and the sparkling, lacy veil of flakes and drops mesmerized her. The season had run late that year. Normally, the ski areas closed by early or mid-April, but the cold, wet winter had provided plenty of snowpack. They might even get in another day of boarding in early May. It wasn’t unheard of.

Tess’s head nodded as drowsiness overtook her, and she jerked awake. She leaned against the door, wrapped her mittens in her hat, and put it between her cheek and the window as a pillow. Her mother craned her neck to look at her.

“Put your seatbelt on, Tess.”

“Yes, mother.”

Her mother smiled. “I love you.”

Tess folded her arms over her chest and closed her eyes without responding. She must have dozed off. When her eyes opened, she immediately sensed something wrong. Her parents had stopped talking, but Tess felt rather than heard the unspoken communication between them. In the dim light from the instrument panel, she saw her mother’s hand grip her father’s arm. She felt the tension in it and slowly became aware of a sound other than the steady hum of the engine—a low rumble and loud hiss that almost sounded like a waterfall or a huge wave breaking on shore.

Tess swung her gaze out the window, eyes straining to see in the darkness. She suddenly realized with growing horror that a moving wall of snow was descending the mountainside ahead of them. They were driving right into it. Her father tensed and the SUV momentarily slowed, then spurted ahead again.

“James?” her mother said, a note of fear in her voice.

“No brakes, Sally,” her father growled.

He gunned the engine, but there was no way the SUV could outrun the avalanche. As the lip of the rolling wave of snow and debris reached the edge of the highway next to them, Tess clutched the door handle, her heart leaping into her throat.

“Hang on!” her father yelled.

The roaring avalanche tumbled over the vehicle, blotting out the taillights of the few vehicles ahead of them. Tess heard screaming and realized the sounds came from her as the tsunami of snow flipped the SUV like a toy, rolling it over and over, burying it in an icy tomb.

Tess screamed again, the awful sound of her terror and pain lifting her from the depths of the nightmare into consciousness. It was the same dream she’d had for the past year, one that had recurred nightly at first. Lately, it haunted her with decreasing frequency, but with no less terror than when it had begun. She lay still, letting the tendrils of the nightmare dissipate like morning mist, willing herself to think of sunnier things. It wasn’t easy.

When she came fully awake and the dream was no more than a fading memory, she slowly opened her eyes. And, like every other day for the past year, she saw nothing. Not darkness, or light. Not shapes or colors.

Nothing.

One year earlier. . .

Captain Travis Barrett, US Army Special Forces, took slow, deep breaths to decrease his rapid heartbeat and focus his nervous energy. Sweat trickled down his side under his
qmis
, the traditional loose-fitting shirt that Pashtun men wore with full trousers called
shalwar
. He ignored it and opened his eyes wider to see more clearly in the dim light. He was acutely aware of the smallest sounds—the high, squeaky chirrup of a bat in the night, the faintest whisper of moving air, and somewhere up ahead, the low murmur of voices.

Travis kept up the deliberate, steady breathing, trying to keep his excitement in check. It appeared that they’d finally gotten some HUMINT that might pay off. He and his team relied heavily on two forms of information—HUMINT, or human intelligence that came from informers, eyes and ears on the ground, and COMINT, or communications intelligence that came from intercepted phone calls, text messages, and e-mails. And information was the currency Travis and his team traded.

He eased farther into the cave.

In a sense, Captain Travis Barrett didn’t exist. An avowed adrenaline junkie, he’d felt rudderless in college, like there was no point to studying. Realizing he couldn’t afford passions like skydiving and motorcycle racing on the wages of a burger-flipper, he’d joined the army. He figured Uncle Sam might as well pay for his adrenaline fixes. The army had definitely delivered. After 9/11, he’d immediately signed up for Special Forces, and the thrills, along with the opportunities to serve his country, had gotten bigger. His skills and fearlessness—along with a previously untapped facility for languages—had earned him notice from the top brass.

Less than six months after terrorists had brought down the Twin Towers by hijacking and flying jet aircraft into them, Travis had been recruited for a special detachment called the Strategic Intelligence Collection & Containment Unit. The army, like most government agencies involved in the war on terror, didn’t want to rely on any other agency for help. That’s why the Navy had its own air force, the Army had its own navy, and the Air Force, well . . . So the Army created a little version of the CIA within its ranks. And Travis was one of the unit’s best spies.

For most of the past six years Travis and his team had operated in and around “the Stans”—Afghanistan, Waziristan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. They’d also led incursions into other Mideast hotspots, like Yemen. But most of his time had been spent in Afghanistan, tracking al-Qaeda. Even though its leader Osama bin Laden had finally been hunted down and killed after nearly ten years, the organization and the terror it sowed still existed. Few people knew about his unit; fewer still knew what he and his teammates actually did.

Right now Travis was following a lead from an Afghani shepherd he’d been cultivating for months as a potential informer. He and his team, blending into the native population, had found the man veterinary care when his sheep had come down with a mysterious illness, and had brought in a midwife when the man’s wife was due to deliver their third child after a difficult pregnancy. Travis had personally offered the man his friendship, sometimes sitting with him through late nights watching the flock, just talking with the man in his native Pashto language. Travis knew the shepherd’s allegiance was to his family and tribe, first and foremost. The man had no love for the Taliban or al-Qaeda—both groups operated in ways foreign to his tribe’s traditional way of life. Recently, he’d passed on information to Travis’s team.

Travis eased into the narrow passageway, instinctively ducking to keep from banging his head on the low rock ceiling. He knew they never would have found the cave without the tip from the shepherd. Travis’s excitement grew. His mission simply was to get in, verify the cave’s occupancy, identify members of a particular cell if possible, and get out. If the information checked out, Travis would relay what he’d learned to another unit awaiting instructions.

The sound of conversation grew louder as Travis made progress through the confined space, and shadows flickered on the walls of the cave limned by dim orange light. Travis heard the low rumble of a generator, and along with it came the faint odor of diesel fumes. The light grew brighter as Travis negotiated a tight bend in the passage, and the volume of the words, murmured in Arabic, not Pashto, told him he was very close. The passageway took another turn ahead of him, and Travis crept closer and snuck a peek around the edge of the rock wall.

Beyond the turn, the tunnel opened up into a larger cavern. Six men sat in a rough circle, some on the cave floor, a few on bedrolls, and one on an ornately carved wood Afghan chair. All were bearded and dressed in the traditional
qmis
,
shalwar
and
pagray
—turban—of the local tribesmen. Most also wore a long vest and a
chadar
, a scarf that doubled as a cloak, over their shoulders. Travis detected the mingled smells of sweat from men who hadn’t bathed, horsehair, and damp earth and rock. The man on the chair appeared to be the leader. Travis would need a closer look to confirm his identity. Conscious of a soft whirring sound, he edged a bit closer, then closer still until the man turned his head and Travis could see his face in the light of the few dim electric bulbs powered by the generator. Travis held his breath.

It’s him!

An al-Qaeda leader they’d been chasing for two years.

Quickly, he scanned the faces of the rest of the men in the group to see if he recognized anyone else. Just as he started to turn away, one of the men sat up abruptly and stared directly at him. Raising his arm to point, he shouted an alarm to the other men. Travis whirled and moved as fast as he could back down the passageway without waiting to see if the others spotted him or not. The tunnel walls flickered brighter with the glow of flashlights, and Travis heard excited shouts behind him. It was not far to the exit. He ducked his head, leaned forward, and pushed toward the inky black hole of the cave entrance as fast as he dared. They wouldn’t dare shoot at him inside the cavern for fear of ricochets, he knew, but once outside, he’d be fair game. He had to hustle if he was going to outrun them. The blanket of night would help provide cover.

As he moved, he thumbed a mic on his radio and called out clear instructions to the army unit awaiting his commands. A joystick jockey somewhere safe and warm in the mountainous neighborhood was piloting an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone by remote control. On Travis’s command, the pilot would signal the drone to fire a bunker-busting AGM-114R Hellfire II missile at the cave.

The cave opening was just ahead. Breathing heavily, Travis pushed himself to the limit. Before he even reached the entrance he shouted into his radio, “Go! Go! Go!” He burst out into the starlight and immediately cut to the left, out of sight of the entrance. He heard the yells of the men behind him as they converged on the mouth of the cave, but their voices were quickly drowned out by the deafening shriek of the incoming rocket. The night lit up like the sun. A huge, fiery explosion erupted, and the world in Travis’s vision tumbled end over end and finally went dark.

Travis ripped the virtual reality helmet off his head and turned to his teammates excitedly.

“Hoo-ah!” he yelled. “What a rush! What’s the verdict? Did we score a hit?”

“Direct hit, captain,” his warrant officer called out. “L-and-S ground station says images from the Gray Eagle confirm it.”

Travis pumped his fist in the air as his unit cheered. The drone pilot at the army’s logistics and support base had locked on the coordinates and had infrared pictures showing the blast site.

“Looks like we lost the avatar,” Travis said, “but as long as we got that SOB Basir al-Samara that’s what counts.”

Travis knew that certain people, James included, would be pissed. The avatar was actually a tiny radio-controlled helicopter, but it was hardly a toy. James and his company had put hundreds of millions of dollars into R & D on the little gizmo, and Travis had just proved it was everything it was cracked up to be. First, he could control most of its functions with the virtual reality helmet. Turn his head, and the helicopter turned. Lean forward, and the little flying machine moved ahead; lean back, and it flew backward. Equipped with stereoscopic cameras, the device saw exactly what Travis would see if he were there in person. Better, Travis could shift to infrared night vision if needed. When Travis moved his eyes, not his head, tracking cameras in the VR goggles moved the helicopter’s “eyes” in the same direction. Stereo microphones worked just like Travis’s ears, but were even more sensitive.