He exhaled and slumped down. “Give me a cigarette, man. They’re in my bag. I’ll tell you the whole thing. This mission is cursed.”
I lit his Marlboro for him with his Zippo and placed it between his lips.
“Okay, Justin. Now, from the very beginning,” I said.
He took a breath.
“It all started in Iraq. On the night of May 1, 2007, we ran a raid from the Special Forces command in Balad up north all the way down south. Near the shore of the Persian Gulf in Basra.”
“In Eardley’s C-130?”
“Yeah. It was a big CIA-run operation. There were Rangers, Green Berets, and SEALs. I was just a weatherman and forward observer.”
“Weatherman?”
“An Air Force weatherman. They bring us out on potentially longer raids to read the sky, just like the guys on Channel 6. Weather’s important to pilots and planes. Like life-and-death important.”
I nodded.
“Go on.”
“Anyway, so the top special operators, mostly veteran SEALs, were real jazzed about grabbing some bigwig al-Qaeda asshole they got intel on, so they brought all the toys way down there. Little bird choppers, some Humvees, some dirt bikes. There were about thirty of us altogether.
“So the hot dogs do a recon, to suss out a plan while a contingent of Rangers and B-level folks like myself are supposed to hang back at this remote staging area, as backup in case some heavy-duty shit goes down. While all the hotshots were on surveillance for hours, us peewees were sitting around shooting the shit. And this one Ranger, this guy Toporski, goes exploring on the outskirts of this remote craphole suburb of Basra. After an hour, he radioes us to come running because somebody took a shot at him.
“We run over there, and there’s another shot from this hut’s window, and we light it up and kick in the door ready to grease Osama, who we hadn’t found yet. But it was better than that. A million times better. It was the mother lode.”
Chapter 30
I still hadn’t heard the chopper coming back but knew it could return at any second. I nudged Justin to keep him talking.
“Back in 2003 when we came in, the week before we got to Baghdad, a national bank was knocked over by the guards who were supposed to watch it. Three hundred million in cash and gold. Well, I don’t know how that loot got there to Basra in some shithole of a hut, but that’s where it was.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Treasure hunting in Basra?
“There it was in a locked room under a tarp. There were two pallets. On one was millions of dollars in Federal Reserve US hundred-dollar bills, and on the other pallet were stacks of gold bars up to the waist. There were 105 of them in all. Each one twenty-seven pounds of pure gold, with the word Engelhard stamped into them. I’ve seen a few things, but when Toporski pulled that tarp, that took the cake. I mean, it was just…
“Right then and there, we decide to take it. Don’t tell the hotshots. Screw them. All six of us—including Haber and Eardley, our pilot—grab it all, load it into the Humvee. We had to take out the seats. The truck was scraping the ground. Then we hauled ass back to the plane.”
“And did what with it? How would you get it out of the country?”
“Eardley comes up with a plan. He’s gonna drop this gold- and money-filled Humvee from the plane into this lake he knows up north near the base, just open the back ramp and put it in neutral and dump her out. Mark its location, and we’re going to come back and get it.”
“Like sunken treasure.”
“Exactly, man. Like pirate booty. Then he’s gonna crash the plane, fake his death, and get out of the country.”
“Nobody stopped him?”
“No way. He was on a desert landing strip. Not like he had to ask the tower for permission. It was war.”
“What did you say when the others got back? Didn’t they ask where Eardley and the plane went?”
“What do you think we said? We don’t know. Acted like he just went nuts or something.”
“And they bought it?”
“Yep. Didn’t find a body, but with the plane down—they shut the case.”
“So how did he get out of Iraq?”
“He said he put a good chunk of money in a knapsack before dumping the rest in the lake, and found a guy in a pickup to drive him to the border. He bought a fake passport. He was a smart guy. He learned some Arabic. He would joke around with the Iraqis. He was a likable guy, with giant balls. I miss him.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You killed him.”
“Not me. That was that asshole Therkelson. He said it was an accident.”
“So what’s all this here?” I said. “The camp and everything.”
Justin smiled.
“You’re going back for the rest of the money!”
He nodded.
“Exactly. We were training to go back into Iraq to snatch it. It’s in ISIS-held territory now.”
“But at the last second, Eardley bugged out,” I said, thinking about his reaching out to the reporter.
“I guess. He wasn’t the same after. He and Haber used to be buddies, you know. We all were. And we looked up to those two. Would have followed wherever they led. But Haber took over the training operation and brought in some…investors. The stakes got higher.”
“And Eardley had regrets?”
“I mean, he’d made this split-second decision to fake his death…he traveled the world, but he wanted his life back. The money wasn’t worth living the rest of his days underground, a war criminal instead of a hero. So he disappeared. Which we knew meant he was gonna blow the whistle on us all. Except the boss man tracked him down. Got to him before he could betray us.”
“And here we are.”
“And here we are,” Justin repeated, as the trill of the helicopter sounded out the open door behind us.
Chapter 31
I looked out the door and saw the little black bird come down out of the sky directly above the firing range, silver tatters of mist trailing behind like a wedding gown’s train.
Then the guns on the helicopter’s underbelly opened. Wide.
I dove to the plywood ground of the trailer as Justin lunged out the door.
I pressed myself into the corner as the chopper’s minigun tore the trailer in half. The sound of it was industrial, the scream of a table saw ripping a two-by-four. The floor I was hugging shook as if caught in a tornado, a violent storm of lead and tracers that tore the roof off the structure like a can opener.
I was still shaking, my deafened ears ringing, when the two guys grabbed me and dragged me out of the smoking, burned metal ruins of the trailer. Out onto the cool grass of the range I was dragged and dropped.
A hunting boot hit me in the face, the little metal lace hooks opening my lip like a razor.
“That’s for killing my friend, you son of a bitch,” I heard one of the three camo-clad bozos say through the ringing of my ears. “And crippling the other one. He’ll never walk again because of what you did.”
“My pleasure,” I yelled as I thumbed at my lip. “Anytime.”
“Hey,” Justin said, looking around. “The girl and the old man. Where the hell did they go?”
“Girl?”
“Yeah, the damn girl who was with him. She has a gun.”
“We’ll find her in a second,” said the slimmest of them.
“You must be Paul Haber,” I said. “The leader of this band of merry asswipes.”
“Now, now, Detective. I have a mission to run, and chasing you all the hell around these mountains has been quite a delay. Good-bye now. You can shoot him, Devine, any time you’re ready. We need to get going.”
Chapter 32
That’s when I came out and said it.
“Your coordinates are wrong,” I said calmly. “I have them.”
“What?” Haber said, turning back to me.
“Eardley had them in his stomach. In a condom. Twenty-four numbers. He must have known you guys were close, so he
swallowed them. You don’t have the right ones. I do.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Am I?” I said, forcing a laugh. “Fine. Go over there and get your head chopped off for nothing.”
“You gotta be shitting me, boss,” said the guy who had kicked me. “This mission is doomed, sir. I told you.”
“This mission is not doomed,” Haber said, as a high-pitched beep came through on their radios.
“Come in, you dummies. Dummies, come in. Over.”
I smiled. It was Rosalind.
“What the—?” Haber said.
“Listen up. My grandpa’s got your friend’s gun, and he’s got a bead on your head, mister. Now drop your gun or he’ll blast your head off.”
The sound of the silenced bullet that hit Haber’s head as he swung up with his rifle for the tree line beyond the range was insignificant, but what it did to his head was very significant. Half headless, he toppled over backward as if it were a trust team-building exercise. Not surprisingly, no one caught him.
“Now my grandpa’s got the bead on you other guys,” the girl’s voice said over the radio. “Drop your guns if you don’t want to get shot, too.”
They dropped their guns.
I stood and picked one up.
“Mr. Walke, I thought I told you to leave,” I said into Haber’s radio, as I saw the good old man emerge from the trees with his granddaughter and dog.
“Yeah, well, I don’t hear so well sometimes,” he radioed back.
Epilogue
It was about two hours later when I drove my rental Chrysler 200 back down the mountain, around the line of the Pennsylvania State Trooper cars.
Joe Walke sat beside me, and Rosalind and Roxie slept in the back.
“I owe you my life, both of you,” I said to Mr. Walke, as we pulled up in front of a crumbling old Victorian in Marble Spring, a block behind the church.
“You’re good people, Mike. You would have done no different for us, were we in trouble. Good people are the same everywhere. They help each other.”
“They tuned you up pretty good, and you lost your truck and the ATVs. I feel terrible.”
“Ah, the vehicles are insured, and a crack or two to this old noggin ain’t nothing at all. I actually feel sorry for those stupid young men.”
“Sorry for them?”
“Look what we as a nation asked them to do. Go off to war, ride on helicopters, and kill people in some far-off hellhole. Then they come back, and we ignore them. Too busy playing with our phones. We couldn’t care less.
“Any wonder these kids would want to line their own pockets? Hell, everybody else seems to be doing the same thing these days.”
“Not everybody,” I said, and shook his hand.
“So long, Mike,” Mr. Walke said with a wink. He lifted his sleeping granddaughter out of the backseat. “You find yourself around these parts again, look me up. We’ll go down to the veterans’ hall for a jar or two.”
“Will do,” I said, smiling.
He’d just closed the rear door of the car when my phone, sitting there in the drink holder, started to ring. I’d glanced at it coming into town and had seen the screen filled with messages.
“Hello. Mike here,” I said.
“Sweet mother of hope, you’re alive,” Mary Catherine said. “Well, thanks for calling, Mike. We haven’t been worried sick about you or anything. What happened, the case went late? You decided to stay over in DC? That Parker woman wasn’t around, was she? You better hope not.”
“I stayed over in Pennsylvania, actually,” I said.
“Pennsylvania?”
“Well, it’s sort of a long story,” I said, glancing back up at the misty hills above the town as I followed the state road toward home.
“Don’t make a sound. Not a single sound.”
Someone is luring men from the streets to play a mysterious, high-stakes game in the English countryside. Former Special Forces officer David Shelley will go undercover to shut it down. But this might be a game he can't win.
The hunt is on.
Read on for a special excerpt from the shocking new thriller Hunted, coming soon from
Two men trod carefully through the trees in search of their prey. Bluebells and wild garlic were underfoot, beech and Douglas firs on all sides, tendrils of early morning fog still clinging to the damp slopes. Somewhere in this wood was the quarry.
The man in front, feeling brave thanks to the morning sherry, his bolt-action Purdey and the security man covering his back, was Lord Oakleigh. A Queen’s Counsel lawyer of impeccable education, he had an impressive listing in Debrett’s and his peer’s robes were tailored by Ede & Ravenscroft. Oakleigh had long ago decided that these accomplishments paled in comparison to the way he felt now—this particular mix of adrenaline and fear, this feeling of being so close to death.
This, he had decided, was life. And he was going to live it.
The car had collected him at 4:00 a.m. He’d taken the eye mask he was given, relaxed in the back of the Bentley, and used the opportunity for sleep. In a couple of hours he arrived at the estate. He recognized some of his fellow hunters, but not all—there were a couple of Americans and a Japanese gentleman he’d never seen before. Nods were exchanged. Curtis and Boyd of The Quarry Co. made brief introductions. All weapons were checked to ensure they were smart-modified, then they were networked and synced to a central hub.
The tweed-wearing English contingent watched, bemused, as the Japanese gentleman’s valet helped him into what looked like tailored disruptive-pattern clothing. Meanwhile the shoot security admired the TrackingPoint precision-guided rifle he carried. Like women fussing over a new baby, they all wanted a hold.
As hunt time approached, the players fell silent. Technicians wearing headphones unloaded observation drones from an operations van. Sherry on silver platters was brought around by blank-faced men in tailcoats. Curtis and Boyd toasted the hunters and, in his absence, the quarry. Lastly, players were assigned their security—Oakleigh was given Alan, his regular man—before a distant report indicated that the hunt had begun and the players moved off along the lawns to the treeline, bristling with weaponry and quivering with expectation.
Now deep in the wood, Oakleigh heard the distant chug of Land Rover engines and quad bikes drift in on a light breeze. From overhead came the occasional buzz of a drone, but otherwise it was mostly silent, even more so the further into the wood they ventured and the more dense it became. It was just the way he liked it. Just him and his prey.
“Ahead, sir,” came Alan’s voice, urgent enough that Oakleigh dropped to one knee and brought the Purdey to his shoulder in one slightly panicked movement. The wood loomed large in his cross hairs, the undergrowth keeping secrets.
“Nothing visible,” he called back over his shoulder, then cleared his throat and tried again, this time with less shaking in his voice. “Nothing up ahead.”
“Just hold it there a moment or so, sir, if you would,” replied Alan, and Oakleigh heard him drop his assault rifle to its strap and reach for his walkie-talkie. “This is red team. Request status report…”
“Anything, Alan?” Oakleigh asked over his shoulder.
“No, sir. No visuals from the drones. None of the players report any activity.”
“Then our boy is still hiding.”
“It would seem that way, sir.”
“Why is he not trying to make his way to the perimeter? That’s what they usually do.”
“The first rule of combat is to do the opposite of what the enemy expects, sir.”
“But this isn’t combat. This is a hunt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it isn’t much of a hunt if the quarry’s hiding, is it?” Oakleigh heard the note of indignation in his voice and knew it sounded less like genuine outrage and more like fear, so he put his eye back to the scope and swept the rifle barrel from left to right, trying to keep a lid on his nerves. He wanted a challenge. But he didn’t want to die. r />
Don’t be stupid. You’re not going to die.
But then came the crackle of distant gunfire, quickly followed by a squall of static.
“Quarry spotted. Repeat: quarry spotted.”
Oakleigh’s heart jackhammered and he found himself in two minds. On the one hand, he wanted to be in the thick of the action. Last night he’d even entertained thoughts of being the winning player, imagining the admiration of his fellow hunters, ripples that would extend outwards to London and the corridors of power, the private members’ clubs of the Strand, and chambers of Parliament.
On the other hand, now that the quarry had shown himself capable of evading the hunters and drones for so long, he felt differently.
From behind came a rustling sound and then a thump. Alan made a gurgling sound.
Oakleigh realized too late that something was wrong and wheeled around, fumbling with the rifle.
A shot rang out and Alan’s walkie-talkie squawked.
“Red team, report! Repeat: red team, report!”
Cookie had been hiding in the lower branches of a beech. From the tree he’d torn a decent-sized stick, not snapping it, but twisting so it came away with a jagged end. Not exactly sharp. But not blunt, either. It was better than nothing.
He’d watched the player and his bodyguard below, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Forget the nervous old guy. He had a beautiful Purdey, but he was shaking like a shitting dog. The bodyguard was dangerous, but the moment Cookie saw him drop his rifle to its strap, he knew the guy was dead meat.
Sure enough, the guard never knew what hit him. Neither of the hunters had bothered looking up, supreme predators that they were, and Cookie dropped silently behind Alan, bare feet on the cool woodland floor. As his left arm encircled Alan’s neck, his elbow angled so that his target’s carotid artery was fat, his right arm plunged the stick into the exposed flesh.