Wraith Read online

  Titles by James R. Hannibal

  Shadow Catcher

  Shadow Maker

  Wraith

  Wraith

  James R. Hannibal

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  WRAITH

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2010, 2014 by James R. Hannibal.

  Excerpt from Shadow Catcher by James R. Hannibal copyright © 2013 by James R. Hannibal.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

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  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19678-0

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley eBook edition / November 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Titles by James R. Hannibal

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One | Genesis

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two | Refinement

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Part Three | Execution

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Part Four | Recovery

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Epilogue

  Special Excerpt from Shadow Catcher

  Prologue

  King Khalid Military City

  September 2001

  A single F-117 stealth fighter lumbered down the runway at King Khalid Airfield—its angular black fuselage standing out in sharp contrast to the bleached pavement under the glaring Arabian sun. The crew chief wiped the sweat from his brow and shook his head as he watched it lift precariously into the air. He’d never really thought a jet like that should fly—the thing looked like a fancy rock, and rocks should stay on the ground where they belong. Certainly it shouldn’t fly in the daylight like this.

  Daytime flights were usually not part of the Nighthawk repertoire, especially when they were in theater, but the Black Sheep had been doing it with regular frequency ever since they’d arrived in Saudi Arabia. A black jet in broad daylight didn’t seem very stealthy at all. On top of that, they were all training missions. There had been several minor strikes against Iraqi targets over the course of the last month, but the Nighthawks were left out of all of them.

  No matter, thought the crew chief as he began the long walk back to the hangar. Worrying about the sense of it isn’t my job. Ours is not to reason why . . . and so on and so on. Instead, he turned his thoughts toward the ice cream they’d be serving at the mess tent later. Lost in his musings, he failed to take note of the big AWACS aircraft sitting empty at its parking location across the ramp. In fact, the flight line was full of aircraft and none of them had their engines running. King Khalid Airfield was uncharacteristically quiet.

  * * *

  A half mile away, in a small room beneath King Khalid’s main command facility, General Robert Windsor hovered over a pair of sergeants. He paced back and forth and glared at the men as if the fate of the world rested solely upon the speed of their work. His eyes burned through the backs of the sergeants’ necks and they quickened their pace, arranging laptop computers and cables atop a folding table.

  The small room in which the sergeants worked was known as the Room of Death, or ROD, to the men and women associated with it—the most secure American location in Saudi Arabia. Buried two floors beneath the main facility, under several yards of concrete, its primary purpose was storing secrets.

  The ROD’s taupe walls were lined with locking file cabinets stocked with binders, tapes, hard drives, and other forms of classified media. Most of the cabinets also held inventories and access lists for the two rows of tall safes that filled the room’s interior. Next to the door sat a single desk with a computer, a printer, and a nameplate that read MR. JOSEPH MOORE, but Mr. Moore was conspicuously absent. While many individuals from several different fields knew the combination to one or another of the safes, only Mr. Moore knew them all, and it was a matter of great pride for him. Today he’d been unseated from his throne, exiled from his own empire.

  General Windsor smiled for just a moment, thinking of the diminutive bald man, sitting in the office across the hall, slowly coming to grips with the fact that there were still operations that he wasn’t cleared for. Then the smile dropped from his lips. “Let’s go, gentlemen,” he pushed. “Shadow Zero One is approaching the border and we need to get confirmation.”

  The general’s men hooked the laptops up to a stack of appliances on a rolling cart. Once the computers were booted up, the sergeants trans
formed from laborers to technicians, expertly typing commands, bending the machines to the general’s will. On the left computer a map appeared with a little blue arrow near the border of Iraq; every ten seconds the little arrow inched forward. The right computer displayed two windows. In one there was a live video feed of a large house on the outskirts of Baghdad, a main residence with a north wing, a south wing, and a circular drive on the east side. The other window held a raw command line, similar to an old DOS prompt. Above the flashing cursor two data lines read:

  LINK ESTABLISHED

  READY

  “Can’t you get a better refresh rate on Shadow?” Windsor asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Ten seconds is the best the software can do.”

  “Remind me to have Colonel Walker find me better software, then.”

  The sergeant pulled out a small memo pad and made a note.

  “There he is,” said the general, turning his attention to the other laptop.

  On the screen, a black Mercedes pulled into the driveway, followed by two more. A gaggle of uniformed men piled out of the trailing vehicles and fanned out. One of them spoke into a radio. Then the driver of the lead Mercedes got out, strolled to the right rear door, and pulled it open. A familiar figure stepped out sporting his signature beret and obnoxious black mustache.

  “Get the snapshots.”

  The sergeant clicked his mouse a few times and a row of pictures appeared at the bottom of the window.

  “That one,” snapped Windsor. “Send it.”

  The sergeant grabbed the picture with his mouse and dropped it into a folder on the computer’s desktop. Then he typed the file location into the command prompt and added the send command. The computer pondered its task and then TRANSMITTED flashed on the screen. A few moments later another message popped up: RECEIVED.

  Suddenly the video in the other window rapidly swung away from the compound and settled on a distant horizon. The general could see the lazily winding path of the Tigris River stretching away to the southeast.

  “What happened to the feed?”

  “Fargo Two One is bingo, sir. He’s RTB,” said one of the sergeants, indicating that the source of the video, a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, was low on fuel and that its operator had turned the remote-controlled airplane toward its recovery base.

  The general scowled down at his underling. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “The Predator has been on airborne alert for nearly a day, sir. Don’t worry, we have confirmation now and Shadow will be there within minutes. We’ll get him.”

  “We’d better.”

  * * *

  Fifty miles south of Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Jason “Merlin” Boske pulled up the snapshot of the car and its passenger on his right console display and compared it to a hard-copy photograph. The house on the screen matched the house in the photo, except the house in the photo had a little red triangle printed over the south wing. Intelligence was certain that the bunker was there, under that section. Merlin checked his position. He’d be over the target in less than five minutes.

  The whole idea of this mission made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His presence here risked exposing the entire program, and for what? A practice run? No, Colonel Walker had called it something else. A validation. Whatever.

  Merlin put his concerns aside—focusing instead on checking his systems one more time. Four minutes later he called up his infrared targeting system, showing the house in luminescent green. A chill went up his spine. He checked the snapshot again. It was the same house, the same as in the photograph and the same as in the snapshot from the Predator feed. POTUS isn’t gonna like this, he thought.

  The house was the same, but the vehicles were gone.

  * * *

  General Windsor’s eyes flared as a new message popped up on the right laptop. He balled up his fist and punched one of the aluminum filing cabinets, leaving a large dent. Despite his violent display, the message from Shadow remained on the screen, blinking, taunting him:

  SHADOW 01 RTB

  REHEARSAL CANCELED

  TARGET ESCAPED

  Windsor had been setting this up all year. In February POTUS, the President of the United States, had requested that an option be quietly developed. A covert group in the Pentagon came up with the plan: Use progressive strikes to clear a radar path for a Predator, then use the UAV to get real-time coordinates for the target and pass the imagery and location to a stealth fighter. POTUS had liked the idea, but he needed proof. “I’ll authorize whatever assets you need,” he said. “Just show me that you can make it happen; everything but the final step.”

  By mid-April the operation was under way, removing critical air defense radars in southern Iraq. The Iraqis made it easy, taking potshots at U.S. and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone—giving justification for retaliation strikes. Those strikes slowly cleared a path through the radar net for the Predator.

  Then the Black Sheep of the 8th Fighter Squadron arrived in late July. At Windsor’s direction, the stealth fighters flew training missions only, at all hours of the day, hugging the border but never crossing into Iraq. Windsor intended to lull the Iraqis into a false sense of security. Iraqi spies played their part by reporting Nighthawk movements in and out of the airfield and AWACS controllers made subtle references to the stealth fighters’ flight paths over unsecure frequencies. Over time, the Iraqis became accustomed to the idea that the Black Sheep were just there to fly training missions and flex American muscle.

  Things rose to a climax in August with a couple of F-16 strikes against radars at a pair of surface-to-air missile sites. With the objective radars taken out, Windsor moved forward by diverting an unmanned surveillance plane north on the twenty-seventh as a test case. Not only did the Iraqis see it, they shot it down. It was the first hint of a serious flaw in the plan. Maybe the Predator was just too easy to see on radar.

  Intelligence analysts determined which sites might have snagged the UAV and the strikers targeted those sites on the twenty-eighth. That was two weeks ago. Windsor thought it was enough. Clearly it wasn’t.

  “He saw us coming. They must’ve picked up the Predator again,” fumed the general, heading for the door. “POTUS wants an option that I can’t give him with the assets we have. Clean up this mess. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  The sergeants began packing up their temporary control center as General Windsor stepped out into the hallway. A passing airman nearly mowed him down. “What’s your hurry, mister?” The general was in no mood for juvenile clumsiness.

  “Sorry ’bout that, sir,” mumbled the young enlisted man and rushed on without so much as making eye contact.

  “What on earth?” He walked after the kid, ready to tear into him, but as his eyes followed the airman down the hallway he noticed several other people rushing into offices. The sound of tense voices emanated from every workspace.

  Something was very wrong.

  Part One

  Genesis

  Chapter 1

  Nineteen stealth bomber pilots sat at the two long tables in the flight kitchen at Whiteman Air Force Base. The rising Missouri sun broke through the wide glass entryway on the east side of the small facility—the warm promise of its morning rays made hollow by an unseasonably cold wind whipping across the flight line outside.

  At the end of one table a short, stout man in his midthirties stared reluctantly at his plate. Major Brit “Murph” Murphy ran his fingers through a disheveled mop of dark brown hair and sighed. Awkwardly he lifted a forkful of something akin to eggs, and glanced at an older pilot who sat in the far corner of the room. A yellow badge hung from the left breast pocket of the lieutenant colonel’s flight suit, its bold letters proclaiming his position as an exercise evaluator.

  Murph noticed the evaluator checking his watch, and doubted that he would get the opportunity to fi
nish his breakfast. He shifted his eyes back to his fork, tipping it to let the runny mixture fall back to his plate with a series of muted splats. No real loss.

  Murph considered the high-tech Motorola radio in the evaluator’s hand and then eyed the ancient receivers that he and the other pilots wore strapped to their hips. “Cold War relics,” he muttered, catching the eye of the pilot next to him. “We fly a two-billion-dollar jet, yet we carry the very same radios that the B-52 pilots carried in the eighties. We’ll be lucky if we hear the call at all.”

  The other pilot only shrugged in response. He was not Murph’s copilot. Murph’s copilot had chosen to sleep through breakfast.

  The 509th Bomb Wing’s semiannual operational readiness inspection—a practice war—had begun on Saturday, when the command post called in the pilots and their support crews for the arduous task of readying their aircraft for combat. That was usually a fifteen-hour job, but because of a leaky hydraulic reservoir, it had taken Murph and his copilot—along with a team of maintenance techs—more than forty sleepless hours to prepare their jet, leaving them both bereft of sleep.

  The crews that hadn’t spent two days fixing a broken jet had been living in an alert shack on the flight line, listening to scripted intelligence briefings that described an ever-escalating and totally fictional political standoff. When that standoff reached its inevitable breaking point, there would be a surprise alert launch to test the bomber crews’ response times.

  In every exercise script, the breaking point occurred on Tuesday morning, so it really wasn’t much of a surprise. And today was Tuesday. Every pilot in the exercise knew that an alert launch was imminent. Every pilot, it seemed, except Murph’s partner—the rookie.

  Murph choked down his last piece of dehydrated bacon as he watched the evaluator stand up and walk toward the glass doors. The lieutenant colonel stepped out into the sun and lifted his collar to shield his face against the wind. After a brief glance up and down the flight line, he raised the Motorola to his lips.

  “Here it comes,” Murph warned the others.