Dark Target
Authors: David DeBatto
Copyright © 2006 by David DeBatto and Pete Nelson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
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First eBook Edition: February 2006
ISBN: 978-0-446-55952-2
Contents
In a Land of Ancient Spirits, UFOs, and Border Smuggling, Team Red Is Unraveling a Mystery that Leads All the Way to Outer
Space…
David DeLuca:
The former Boston street cop turned counterintelligence team leader is just back from Iraq when he’s sent to southern Arizona.
His job: find a missing female Army sergeant who may have stolen military secrets—or find out who might have abducted her…
Cheryl Escavedo:
With top clearance to work at the heart of America’s classified nerve center buried in Cheyenne Mountain, the beautiful sergeant
leaves behind a trail of mystery. Her commander is sure she stole vital information. But DeLuca suspects something worse than
treachery…
Colleen MacKenzie:
Smart, sexy, and fluent in enough languages to go anywhere posing as anything, she becomes DeLuca’s Team Red point woman when
the hunt leads to a Mexican porn and drug dealer—teamed with a Russian crime lord…
Sami Jambazian:
He is a vital member of DeLuca’s Team Red—especially for this mission. Because when the case crashes into the world of UFO
fanatics, Sami has one thing in common with the crazies: he’s seen a UFO with his own two eyes…
D
r. Gary Burgess:
A Ph.D. at sixteen, the brilliant physicist quits his work and disappears, convinced that the U.S. government is using his
research to create a horrific, space-based killing technology. And DeLuca thinks the vanished genius might just be right…
Also by David DeBatto and Pete Nelson
CI: Team Red
To my son, Christopher,
Thank you for heeding my advice and enlisting in the Air Force instead of the Army!
To Pete Nelson,
You are truly amazing. I pray that the “CI” series continues for years just so I can continue to work with you my friend.
To Dan Ambrosio, for having “that vision thing.”
—
David DeBatto
Pete Nelson would like to acknowledge the kindness, generosity, assistance, and expertise of the people without whom this
book could not have been written. That includes, of course, first David DeBatto, my co-author, but also the other people I
harassed on the telephone or via e-mail, including Hugh O’Doherty, Dave Elliott, Jack Brehm, Robert Borth at NORAD, and Major
Karen “Jack” Magnus, Director of Public Affairs with the 22nd Air Force. Thanks to Carolyn Gear for making sure my Spanish
translations made any sense at all, and thanks to Kevin Downey, cave photographer extraordinaire, for helping me navigate
the underground passages. Thanks to Dan Ambrosio for his edits and thanks to my wife Jen for all her help and patience. Final
thanks to my son Jack for not pulling my laptop off the table by the power cord.
—
Pete Nelson
THE GIRL RAN, LEAVING THE JEEP BEHIND. She’d switched cars, abandoning her Civic at her uncle Henry’s trailer after parking
it in a grove of cottonwoods, though she doubted the trees would conceal it for long. She’d teased her uncle about owning
a Cherokee (they were Cocopah) and told him he was a fool to leave the key in the ignition, abandoning the vehicle for weeks
at a time while he traveled the country, but she’d been glad to find the old car gassed up and ready for use. She’d been wearing
night vision goggles to drive with the headlights off, and was in the middle of nowhere, ten miles short of the Mexican border,
on a dirt road the locals called Camino del Diablo, so rutted and eroded with deep corduroylike ripples that she couldn’t
make much better than twenty miles per hour, when it just stopped. It could have been simple mechanical failure. The Cherokee
had more than two hundred thousand miles on it.
She turned the key. Nothing happened. She pounded on the dashboard. She tried to turn the headlights on and off, but the headlights
didn’t work, nor did the radio. When she checked the fuse box, she discovered that all the fuses had been tripped. The spare
fuses in the glove box were blown as well.
She left the NVGs on the seat and ran, out of breath, across the floor of the desert. She was headed for Spirit Mountain,
pausing to consult the topo map her friend had e-mailed her. Her ancestors had taken refuge there. Perhaps she could, too.
Her goal was a place her friend had called the Ano Kayai, the Village of Eagles, an ancient Anasazi cliff dwelling beneath
a red rock overhang, her friend had said, a ruin picked over by pot thieves and of little further interest to archaeologists,
last occupied by mushroom-eating hippies in the sixties, but it was still holy, and she’d found herself praying a lot lately—perhaps
it would protect her. If she could reach it before daylight came, she might be safe. They might not find her. The evil ones.
The ones her uncle had warned her about. Her boots dug into the sand where it gathered in wind-blown drifts, her heels clattering
across the hard-baked
caliche
where the wind had scoured the sand away. She navigated between the saguaros and the ocotillos and the jumping cholla by
the light of a quarter moon, still visible in a sky that was starting to cloud over. She didn’t stop until she reached an
arroyo, where she paused beneath a mesquite bush to catch her breath.
She looked up at the moon. It was a quarter full, but bright in the clear desert air. As a little girl, she’d been fond of
stripping off her frock and dancing naked by the light of a full moon. Now the light was her enemy. Her own body heat was
her enemy—wasn’t that how snakes located their prey? She prayed for the clouds to gather above her, an ancient prayer for
rain that her grandmother had taught her, but she could only remember the first part of it. Perhaps that was enough.
She took a drink from one of the water bottles in her bag. She had two more. If she had to, she could make that last for a
day or two. Yet when she pushed again at the implant beneath the skin of her right forearm, she feared she didn’t have another
day or two—unless she could get it out, her time left on this earth could be only a matter of minutes. It was crazy thinking,
but sometimes crazy thinking made sense. That had to be how they’d found her. Getting the implant had been his idea. She’d
trusted him then. She didn’t trust him now. That had to be it.
She was angry with herself for not being better prepared—she needed a knife, but she didn’t have one. She unbuttoned the top
two buttons of her blouse and leaned forward to take the dog tags from around her neck, hoping the edge would be sharp enough
to slice into her skin. It wasn’t. She tried sharpening the edge of one of the tags on a rock, then pressed it one more time
into her skin, scraping as hard as she could until she drew blood, but it just wasn’t sharp enough. She should have done this
sooner, at her uncle’s trailer, where one of the old fashioned single-edged razor blades he kept to shave with would have
done the job quickly and neatly.
Fortunately, the desert was full of things sharp enough to pierce her skin. She climbed out of the arroyo and moved to a large
saguaro cactus, a twenty-foot-tall specimen, its taproot reaching down perhaps a hundred feet to find water, probably a five-thousand-dollar
plant, she guessed, to the illegal cactus-rustlers who’d come with their four-wheel-drive vehicles and their lassos to pull
the saguaros down and sell them to landscapers in Tucson and Phoenix. The rustlers weren’t necessarily outsiders. Often they
were tribal people who should have known better than to disturb the spirits of a plant that had stood in the same place for
a thousand years. They’d lost their connection to the earth, but who was she to judge? So had she, she feared. It was why
she was in the trouble she was in. It was how the evil ones had gotten to her. Her uncle had warned her, even though he was
as modern as they came.
She prayed briefly to the spirit of the cactus, trying to remember the words her grandmother had taught her long ago, then
positioned her arm against a long needle and leaned into the cactus until the needle pierced her to the depth of perhaps half
an inch. She cried out in pain, once, then gritted her teeth and dug, dragging her arm against the needle until she’d made
a cut that was perhaps an inch and a half long. She tried to get at the implant with her teeth, but it was too far down toward
her elbow, and she couldn’t reach. She dug again with the needle, and the pain was unbearable, but she endured it, digging
with her fingernail until she was finally able to extract the device. She wiped the blood off it and then held it up to examine
it, a small plastic tube, about an inch and a half long.
“Goddamn you,” she spat, using the Cocopah name her grandmother used to call her, which meant “foolish girl.” Foolish for
all she’d done. Foolish for thinking she was better than anybody else, smarter. Foolish for losing her humility.
She flung the device as far as she could into the desert. Maybe they would think she was dead, now that it no longer moved.
Maybe they would leave her alone.
She used some of her precious water supply to wash the wound, then tied her bandana around it, using her teeth to pull it
tight. It would have to do. She had to keep running.
But where were her dog tags? What had she done with them?
There was no time to look for them.
She returned to the arroyo and moved up the wash, keeping to the side when it widened, hoping it would afford some minimal
cover as she climbed through the creosote bushes and the palo verde. If she was reading the map right, her car had died a
few miles short of the arroyo she was to take to bring her to the trail head. Perhaps this one joined the other. She had to
keep moving. She tore her pants on a rock, and then a spike from an ocotillo nearly ripped her hair out, but she kept going.
She’d gone a few hundred yards when she heard a snapping sound in the air behind her, a crackling, like cellophane crinkling.
She turned. There was nothing there, but she felt a presence, a shimmering quality to the darkness, zigzagging lines, like
glass snakes, crawling across her field of vision, just below the visible spectrum.
They were coming for her.
She ran, the red rock walls of a shallow canyon rising to either side of her now. There was a chance that the canyon would
protect her, long enough to find somewhere to hide, a ledge, a cave, a javelina den, anything.
They were coming. How had they found her?
Then, on a distant hill, perhaps a mile off, she saw a light.
It looked like a fire. A fire meant people. Out here, in the desert, at three in the morning, it probably meant people she
didn’t want to know, people who might do her harm, smugglers or thieves, but she didn’t care—perhaps there was strength in
numbers. Perhaps the presence of witnesses would be enough to make the evil ones leave her alone. Unless the evil ones wanted
to kill them all, but if that was what they wanted to do, there was nothing to stop them.
She headed for the light.
Around the fire, the dancers moved, chanting as they circled, their faces painted in the reds and yellows of the earth. There
was a Hopi warrior. There was a Navaho medicine man, and a Mescalero shaman, his back covered by the skins of a coyote, the
image of Kokopelli tattooed across his bare chest. Two women danced naked from the waist up, their eyes closed as they swayed,
enraptured by the chanting and the drumming, at one with the pulse of the universe, the orange-blossom turquoise necklaces
clattering against the sacred crystals strung with leather lanyards that hung from their necks. There was a Mandan holy man,
dressed in buffalo hides, and another warrior whose leathers were like those of the Cree or the Blackfoot, adorned with Sioux
beads he’d purchased at a Cherokee trading post in Enid, Oklahoma. Next to him was a man dressed as a
Star Trek
captain, accompanied by his Klingon wife, and her best friend, who’d come dressed as Counselor Troy, even though at five-foot-three
and a hefty two hundred twenty pounds, the resemblance stopped at the costume, the cleavage, and the curly black wig. A shy
man in Vulcan ears stood back from the circle, reluctant to partake of the hallucinogenic mushrooms the leader of the group
had provided but doing his best to be a good sport, a believer.