I Own the Dawn: The Night Stalkers (23 page)

President Peter Matthews stared at the screen on the Situation Room wall.

“Tell me.”

General Brett Rogers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood and strode to the screen.

“The more our analysts chew on this one, the worse it looks. It started as a lead at a forward air base south of the Hindu Kush. They kicked it to Fort Campbell, which bumped the problem to SOCCOM. We’re now twenty hours in and we know there is trouble, and we think it may be bad. Definitely international, potentially disastrous.”

“First slide,” he called out to the room whose only other occupant was Daniel Darlington, the President’s Chief of Staff. Some orderly hidden in the next room put a picture of a rugged soldier in his fifties up on the room’s center screen. A bio ran down one side.

“Colonel James Evans has a long and distinguished career. He goes back to Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada, Desert Storm, every military action in the last thirty years, he’s been in it. Always at the front. We’ve used the man on several high-security missions. He isn’t trained Airborne, nor Special Forces.”

Peter shared a smile with his Chief of Staff, who looked as at ease here as he had when he’d been Chief Assistant to the ex-First Lady. They both knew Brett had been the Commander of Special Operations Central Command before being tapped as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He still defended his own, not that it would slow the man for a moment if someone in his former command actually screwed up.

“He tried for SEALs and Spec Ops a couple times each. Frankly, no one wanted him. He was a bit of a wild card. But he has a killer instinct we found useful and he also had a real habit of not ending up dead. Known for taking matters into his own hands a little too often. He even hit the news a couple times. You may remember the forces who wanted to take Baghdad for President Bush Senior. Evans’s unit struck almost fifty miles past the Kuwait-Iraq border before we reeled him back in.”

Peter hadn’t heard of it, but he’d been in junior high school and mostly thinking about girls. Daniel shook his head. Daniel was half a decade younger and had been learning how to add single digit numbers at the time. Peter did his best to nod sagely for the General to continue.

Brett Rogers cleared his throat. “Frankly, Mr. President, we’re worried. We’ve talked to his commander. Evans took an extended leave, hadn’t taken any in over three years, now he’s been on his own for over a month. No one that we’ve spoken to has any idea what he’s been doing. His personal effects are gone as well. No parents, no siblings, can’t find any girlfriends. He just flat disappeared.”

“What are his most likely objectives?” Peter had slowly adapted to these Sit Room meetings. Being the youngest President in history didn’t make him any less the President. If he asked enough questions, the experienced people in the room gave him all the information he needed to make decisions.

“That’s what bothers us. We don’t know. But the problem kept getting escalated because it has all the earmarks of a covert operation. Lower-level analysts kept bumping it up, hoping that it would eventually reach someone’s level of security clearance. But it didn’t.” He called out for a map.

Northern Afghanistan popped up on the screen.

“The pilot’s report placed him fifty miles short of the Uzbekistan border, but not on any road that we have on any map. We’ve redone the imaging with a couple of unmanned Global Hawk recon birds we had in the area. Four overflights in the last twelve hours. This is what we have.”

Three images came up on the wall, the second two clearly close-ups of the first. A pair of tire tracks appeared, starting from nowhere, descending down the mouth of a widening valley. That’s where he must have landed.

The close-up scrolled rapidly along the tire tracks. They disappeared several times, but after a little hunting, they locked back onto them.

The image stopped abruptly enough for Peter to jerk forward in his chair.

“A windstorm wiped the area clean beyond this point. We’ve searched for white Toyota pickups along this general heading for a hundred miles. Over forty have been located, they are the camels of modern desert warfare. And also the vehicle of choice for any wealthy farmer or opium runner. In the last seven hours we’ve eliminated about half of the suspect vehicles. We could be chasing a ghost. If he changed vehicles, we’d never know.”

Peter stared at the high-altitude close-ups of three dozen white pickup trucks. Several had an animal tied in the back, sheep or goat. These had red
X
s in the corners. A few had a dozen men piled in the back. Either working as a local bus, or a group of insurgents. Two had the clear profile of large machine guns mounted, their black outline clear against the white top of the cab.

Each vehicle without an
X
had a number in red. A list on a side screen was scrolling through the analysts’ comments on each vehicle.

“Boil it down for me, Brett.”

“We don’t know where he is. We don’t know what he’s planning. We don’t know where he’s heading. But we have a general direction. Because it is Colonel Evans and because he used his single strongest covert operations connection to arrange a ride from SOAR to cross the Hindu Kush in a hurry, we know he has a definite target and a timeline that is now only two days away. Until we know more, we’re recommending a heightened alert to all embassies and bases throughout the region. And that requires Presidential authorization.”

The long-range map came back up. White dots appeared all over the map. Over half had red
X
s. Others were far to the east or west of where Colonel James Evans had landed. Even as he watched, red
X
s appeared on two of those vehicles and they blinked off the side-screen list.

“If he continued straight out of the valley and due north across the desert…” Daniel leaned forward to stare more closely at the screen. “There’s nothing there.”

Brett scrolled the screen down. It was too large an area. There were a dozen possibilities. At some point, he’d pick up a road and could go anywhere.

Another pickup disappeared, then two more were added by analysts working away in the Pentagon.

“We need more help.” And he knew exactly who to ask.

“Hey, Em.”

“Hello, Mr. President.” The video occupying the center of the Sit Room screen showed Major Emily Beale. He’d seen her just a few months ago at her wedding, but he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. She may have been his childhood friend, but the woman took his breath away every time.

“So formal with your Commander-in-Chief?” They had grown up next door to each other, after all.

“My crew is here with me, Sneaker Boy. You want to go a couple rounds in front of them?”

“Hello, Mr. President.” Major Mark Henderson leaned in over his wife’s shoulder.

“Hi, Mark. How’s married life?”

“How are we doing on Colonel James Evans? Something nasty if we’re getting a call from you, sir.”

“You never were any fun, Mark.” For one thing, he’d captured the woman of Peter’s dreams. And he’d done it before Peter had been smart enough to figure that out. Actually, Emily Beale had done the choosing, and Peter knew from years of experience, nothing could change the woman’s mind once she made it up.

“Nope!” Mark’s grin belied the statement. They’d had a particularly memorable bachelor party in the White House involving too many cigars, too much brandy, and an expensive poker game, which Mark had won handily, as you’d expect from a career officer. Peter had been totally outclassed and merely watched the last half of the game and surprised himself at how much he liked Em’s fiancé.

“We tracked him out of the valley and forty miles north before losing his tracks to a sandstorm.”

“That would put him almost to the Uzbekistan border.”

“Right. But we don’t know where he’s headed or why. Every hint of his past is a dead end. He didn’t have one buddy, nothing. A loner. And a damned skilled one. The second man is a dead end so far, but we’re still working on it.”

Even liking Mark, it was hard to look at the two of them, practically cheek to cheek in front of their camera.

“K2?” a voice sounded from someone on Emily’s side.

“Who said that?”

Emily and Mark shifted back a bit, revealing a tall, thin man with a mop of brown hair and a short Asian-American woman by his side.

“First Lieutenant Archibald Stevenson III, sir. We met at the wedding, my mother introduced us.”

The son of Betty Stevenson, high recommendation. Personally, the woman scared the crap out of him. Her team’s insights into future geopolitical alliances and reconfigurations were downright spooky in their accuracy. And their long-range predictions frequently cost him more than a night’s sleep. The long-range stuff occasionally so ugly he mostly prayed for it to happen in someone else’s administration.

The Sit Room orderly splashed Stevenson’s picture and short bio up on a screen. He’d flown with Emily for almost a decade, an even higher recommendation.

“So, what’s K2? I thought that was a mountain in Nepal. He can’t be heading there.”

“Actually, sir, K2 the mountain is on the border of Pakistan and China about three hundred miles northeast of here.” The man didn’t even bat an eye at correcting the President. Just as formidable as his mother. “K2 is what they call Karshi-Khanabad air base in Uzbekistan. We were there until 2005 when the Russians and Chinese convinced the government to throw us out.”

An image came up on a side screen. It looked like any single-strip airport he’d ever seen.

“Why there? What’s the connection?”

“It is the only military asset in the area.”

“Did he—” Emily started.

“—Evans serve there?” Daniel finished.

That always bothered Peter. They did that a little too often for his liking. Yes, he wanted a smart man for Chief of Staff. But he was a little too fast sometimes. Peter smiled and remembered his mother’s advice from her years as a federal judge. “Surround yourself with people smarter than you and listen to them.” Well, between Emily and Daniel, there were two very, very sharp minds working on this.

Colonel Evans’s bio was returned to the screen and scrolled down.

“Four years, Em. He served there from the day we took residence in 2001 right up to the shut down on May 29, 2005. Well done, team. Now, why?”

Emily looked at the people gathered around her. Mark close behind. Archie and Kee practically attached at the hip. Did they have any idea how obvious they were? She’d have to warn them if any upper-tier officers came around. Had she and Mark been that obvious? Emily almost laughed. No, they’d spent too much time hating each other’s guts. Or at least she hated Mark’s. He claimed that he’d been besotted from the first moment he saw her but had been careful not to let her catch even a hint. The fact that she’d done the same only made the joke worse.

Big John and Connie hovered to either side like bookends, barely able to stand being in the same tent.

The image on the laptop of K2 bothered her, but she couldn’t place her finger on why.

“Could you zoom in to the right end of the airfield?” Archie asked and leaned in.

Emily watched the screen closely. Jets, a lot of jets. Russian jets. Mostly old ones.

“A lot of old MiGs. Couple Yak bombers. And some Sukhoi, a few 27s but mostly the SU-24 Fencers.” Of course, Archie was first across the line, even faster than the guys at the White House who were serving the images. Labels started appearing even as the image continued to expand until the angular taxiways filled the screen.

“What are those?” She pointed to the squared-off humps beside the taxiways. Even as she asked, she knew the answer.

“Hardened bunkers. What’s tucked away in those?”

More labels began appearing. “This is our latest intelligence.” General Brett Rogers’s gruff voice sounded clear across the encrypted link to Washington. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had offered to wrestle her father for the right to give her away at her wedding. Awfully sweet, and more than a little scary that the leader of the U.S. military thought so highly of her.

“Much of which dates back to 2005,” he continued, “when the SCO had the Uzbekistan government kick us out of K2. It was a damned useful base. Would save you boys, er, and gals, a lot of flight time if we could still station you there.”

The labels that kept appearing were consistently older aircraft.

“This is all third-gen gear.” Archie leaned in for a closer look. “There isn’t a single fourth-generation piece of equipment. Some of these are even second-generation fighters. This is like Davis-Monthan Air Force Base where we store our old fighters and bombers outside Tucson. High desert, dry, planes left there to rot. Except they don’t rot.”

“New or not, I would wager that a lot of it still works.” Kee was thinking the same thing she was.

“Hold on. Pan right please.” Archie this time. He and Kee were working in some kind of synchronicity. He’d always been tentative. Brilliant, but tentative. With Kee at his side, her old friend spoke with a clarity and confidence Emily hadn’t heard outside of actual combat in a decade of flying together. Sergeant Kee Smith had earned her place on Emily’s crew but still kept revealing more surprises.

“MiG-29s. That’s some serious group of fighters.” A MiG-23 scared Emily enough, but her Hawk stood some chance against one. The half-dozen 29s was a different matter.

“Our analysts here are saying they haven’t been seen to move in over a decade.”

“Pull way back.” Now Kee was taking the lead. “More. More. More.”

“There!” And Emily saw it. Each white pickup truck trailed a little line of white dots as the analysts tracked them over the countryside. Most went in circles, taking the kids to school, picking up groceries, etc. Some went farther, running sheep to market or insurgents over the border.

A series of four separate tracks stood out. The first was their known one, Colonel Evans’s Toyota, the one they wanted. They’d picked up another a dozen miles into Uzbekistan, out in the desert far from any road. The dots weren’t connected, they were mapped as separate trucks. But the first two followed the same general line, as did the next two. The latest was on the road system now and headed straight for K2.

“There’s our man.”

Four images flashed up. A white pickup truck with nothing of note except a small bundle in the rear cargo area.

“That’s where he stowed the camouflage net when we picked him up along with a dozen cans of fuel. You can see, he’s discarded the cans he’s emptied.”

Sure enough, the truck bed was emptier with each photo.

Kee snapped her fingers. “The camo net. That’s why the line was more broken than you’d expect. They hid under the camo net whenever they stopped.”

Kee had proved herself to be an exceptional gunner and rock-steady under fire. But she fought against everything so hard that Emily had been reluctant to trust her. One of the biggest votes in her favor was the little girl. To engender such trust from a child spoke volumes about a person. And her association with Archie spoke volumes as well, though in a different language. Despite a presented attitude of promiscuity, she was proving very loyal to one man.

Kee Smith remained a puzzle to Emily. So rough, never finished high school, but ate up advanced Army training with scores she and Archie had trouble achieving. Trusting no one except herself. No, that wasn’t quite right. Once her loyalty was won, Emily was sure Kee Smith would die to protect you. But that loyalty wasn’t given without serious proof. Dilya had won that, but even Archie didn’t appear to be all the way there yet. Oddly enough, Emily thought maybe she herself had.

The girl now looked at her like an idol, which certainly wasn’t how they’d started. She’d caught the reflection of Kee’s spiteful salute that first day in the window of her Hawk. She’d almost turned and taken the woman down, but she was so sick of being the only female combatant in SOAR that she decided to wait and see.

“There.” Emily followed Kee’s pointing finger. She didn’t see it at first. Then…

“Two dogs.” An elbow stuck out the passenger side window of the third image.

Emily smiled to herself, glad she’d waited.

***

“Can you get to them? Before they get there?” the President asked anxiously.

Emily glanced at Archie while she worked the figures herself. Early morning now. Fourteen hours of daylight in this season. Evans’s distance to K2. She shook her head and Archie hesitated, then nodded reluctant agreement.

“Sorry, sir. Even if we flew the first leg in the daylight to strike a couple hundred kilometers inside a supposedly friendly country, we can’t beat him to K2. The fact that they actually aren’t friendly means we’d have to be that much more careful, which means slower. He’ll be there before we could get him, probably even if we left now and flew the whole mission in daylight.”

Did she need to explain to the President again about the dangers of daylight flying? There was a reason that SOAR flew their missions under the cover of dark. They were good, damn good. But during daylight maneuvers, all the ground-hugging you could do didn’t count much to the overflying fighter jet or the anti-aircraft guns.

SOAR worked because they ruled the night using methods and training no other nation had yet duplicated. Even the other divisions of the U.S. military hadn’t managed SOAR’s proficiency in the dark. Some day another nation would, and SOAR would have to rethink itself as they had for the thirty years since their founding.

Peter’s lack of any military experience prior to becoming Commander-in-Chief worried her at times. He meant well, but he didn’t always listen.

“I’ll trust your judgment on that one, Em.”

Maybe he did listen. Finally.

“So, what do we do?”

“We now know where. Let’s work on what and when.”