GHOST TRAIL: A Military Spy Thriller Novel Page 13

  “Yes, sir,” the man in the Mariners hat and Ray-Bans said. “This is Charlie Cooper and Matt Stone.” The foreman shook the hands of all three men. Charlie was African-American and Matt was Asian-American. The trio were in their early thirties and in great shape, like they went to the gym before working construction every day.

  “Frank Adams,” the foreman said. “They tell me you just wrapped up a build in Phoenix. You from there or Seattle?” Frank nodded to his Mariners cap.

  “The Northwest and Sacramento actually,” Doug said, “but our last stop was Phoenix.”

  “And you’re on some kind of Habitat tour?”

  “That’s right. We’re old college buddies. We all did a build years ago in college and put a Habitat tour on our bucket list. It’s been great so far. We started in Seattle, then hit Sacramento, San Fran, LA, Phoenix, and we’ll keep goin’ all the way to Florida.”

  “We’re glad to have you. It’s good to have some guys with experience on a build. Do you have a build preference?”

  “No, sir,” Doug said.

  “We can do it all.” Charlie said.

  “Great!” Frank replied. “Why don’t I have Charlie and Matt head on over yonder where they’re pouring the foundation, and Doug, you can help me with the lumber. You ever use a table saw?”

  “Yeah, was practically raised on one. My dad worked construction when I was growing up. I used to cut up all the wood I could! Built tree forts, dog houses and rafts.”

  “That’ll work! Here— put these on,” Frank said. Taking his own safety goggles off and giving them to Doug. “Wouldn’t want you to ruin your shades.”

  Doug smiled. Taking his sunglasses off. Revealing his true identity— Intelligence Officer Yuen Weng. Charlie and Matt were also undercover MSS operatives.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal waited for the last man to leave the office for the night, resuming his translation search. The TransTalk denied his new spelling again. He tried breaking the word up into two words, then three. Both times getting shut down. “NO MATCHING TRANSLATIONS.”

  Hal gave up on TransTalk, giving traditional search engines a shot. He searched PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION sites and tried the first one on the list. It came up empty. He tried different syllables, thinking he may have misheard it from his vision. And finally received a reply: Do you mean DARAR? He clicked it and a translation returned. Although not exactly what he was looking for as it was in Arabic characters. He copy-and-pasted it to a document and repeated the process with the second syllable of the word, JIN. It returned a word in Arabic characters. Hal copy and pasted it beside the first one,ضرر جنّ.

  Hal returned to the TransTalk page and pasted the Arabic combination into the search field of the Arabic to English translator. The translation that came back repelled him from the computer screen. He eased back into his chair. Baffled. He pondered the translation, wondering if it was even accurate. Questioning if he typed in the correct phonetic spelling. And wondering why a man would scream it while blindly swinging a knife through the air.

  The two words seemed permanently burned into the monitor. Hal wondered if they would still be there if he closed the browser. Why would he yell that at me? Hal thought.

  Hal couldn’t take his eyes off the computer. He didn’t know what to do next. He wondered if shutting down the computer would make him forget all about it. He moved the cursor to the shut-down. Staring at the translation… Your entry ضرر جنّtranslates to EVIL SPIRIT.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  A weathered wooden door opened, revealing the steely eyes and cracked leathery face of an older rancher in a cowboy hat. Dale Barrett.

  “It’s not much,” Barrett said, leading Weng and his “college buddies” in. “Just your average, everyday ranch-hand bunkhouse. It’s got a kitchen, fridge and stove. Four racks on the loft. Shower and shitter out back, and it’s got cable TV piped in from the main house.”

  He led them to an upstairs loft, which featured two sets of pine, man-sized bunk beds. A row of windows faced the desert scrub of his ranch.

  “You can join us at the house for breakfast and dinner. It’ll be a treat for the old lady. She ain’t cooked for guests since the kids grow’d up and left some ten-twelve years ago. We eat at six and seven, am and pm. Or you can do your own thing here. No skin off my nose. How long y’all in town for anyway?”

  “A month,” Weng answered. “Two at the most. We’re happy to pay whatever rent you ask, sir.”

  Barrett waved it off. “That build you’re workin’ on’s helpin’ out some folks in need, so long as you boys are workin’ there, you’re welcome at the Barrett Ranch—” The roar of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter took off nearby, drowning out his voice.

  Weng looked out the window. “What was that?”

  “Hell, that’s the best damned jet fighter in the world! Them Air Force boys call that the Lightning Two. F-35. Those stealth fighters and bombers fly in and outta’ Holloman day n’ night.”

  “Sweet.” Weng said. “I’ve never seen one in person before.”

  “Runway’s just a quarter mile that way,” the rancher said. “Fenced off a’course, but you can see it lit up at night.”

  “Who knew there was an Air Force base here?” Charlie asked. Also peering up at the F-35 as it disappeared into the blue.

  “That ain’t even the tip of the iceberg.” Barrett said. “Up north’s the White Sands missile range and the site of Trinity, where they tested the first atom bomb. Got this ranch as a steal because of it!” He cackled the laugh of a working man with dry and dusty lungs. “Everyone was afraid it’d be infected with radiation. We had it checked out and it’s fine. No more radiation than the Sahara Desert. So, whaddaya’ say? This ol’ bunkhouse good enough for you city slickers?”

  Weng gazed out the window, looking at the Holloman runway. “It’s perfect.”

  “Then drop your gear! Dinner’s gettin’ cold!”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal polished off a beer, setting it on his living room coffee table. He snatched up the remote next to it and clicked off the TV. Turning off a football game among two teams that would be fortunate to have games broadcast on local cable-access. Cleveland was beating the Jets in a field-goal fest with a total score higher than their Nielsen ratings—6 to 3.

  Hal’s home was dead silent. He thrust the lever forward on his La-Z-Boy, dropping his feet to the carpet in a thud. Hal made the rounds of his nightly ritual—checking the coffee maker and stove—flipping switches on walls, draining the house of all light and life on his retreat to the back bedroom. Stopping off at the bathroom on the way.

  Hal brushed his teeth in the mirror, staring at the scabbed wound on his arm then straight ahead into the mirror—into his own eyes. Trying to hide the suspicion that he was looking directly into the lens of a camera behind the mirror. I could rip the mirror off the wall and end it right now, he thought. ...And lose any chance of finding answers. Through the course of normal head-angling during the brushing of teeth, Hal’s eyes flicked to the corners of the ceiling—to the chrome of the faucet—to the mirrored medicine cabinet and to chrome towel racks—looking for places he would hide a micro-camera. Hal gargled, spat and opened the medicine cabinet, grabbing his dream blocking pills. He popped two, just like the good doctor ordered. He emptied the glass, turned his back on the mirror and faced the toilet, emptying his bladder. Trapped in the vise of his upper and lower incisors were the two shiny-white capsules. His tongue kicked them out and they flipped end over end like synchronized divers into his urine stream.

  Hal wandered into his dark bedroom, shed his clothes down to his boxers and crawled under the covers. Lying on his back, his eyes traveled around the ceiling of his room, picking out a half-dozen hiding places for micro-cameras. He pondered the chronological events of the past several weeks. Leading up to his skepticism of the pills, his paranoia of what might be behind his bathroom mirror, and who may be staking-out his home right now.

  Hal stared at his vertica
l blinds and the lazy rays slicing through from the streetlights. They splashed to pools of light on his desk and some stretched to the shag carpet beyond. If someone is watching me, I’m not making it hard with all the light I’m providing their cameras, he thought. Cameras… They’re not the only ones with cameras. His head lifted from the pillow looking straight ahead at his laptop on the desk. He got out of bed.

  Hal eased into a small desk chair and fired up his laptop computer. His face and bare chest glowed in moonlight blue from the start-up screen. He opened a web browser, navigating to a sports website. Pretending to check the scores as a smaller window opened to the controls of his built-in webcam.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Baldo took a sip from a steaming mug of coffee, preparing for a long night. He watched Hal at his laptop on a monitor. The feed coming from a micro-cam in the corner of Hal’s ceiling.

  Baldo heard footsteps on the cold concrete floor of the hangar behind him. McCreary arriving for the night shift.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Baldo replied. “He’s on a football website. Checking scores from the weekend and standings. It’s one of the sites he visits when he can’t sleep.”

  “Bring it up.”

  Baldo typed at his computer, and moved the hacked feed from Hal’s browser to a larger screen on the bank. McCreary eyed it. Assessed it as innocuous—and boring. “Any word on his emails? Could you get in?”

  “I’m in his AF email. All work related. He could be using a third party email on his phone. Almost impossible to hack if he has a strong password. Cracking it would be a waste of time. I mean, does Trest want me to hack his emails or surveil him? I can’t do both, sir.”

  “I hear you. I’ll see what Trest says about outsourcing that. I’m gonna’ get some shut eye. Wake me up if he does anything worthwhile.”

  “Roger that.”

  McCreary found a dark corner of the padded floor near the VR OmniTrainer. He grabbed a thick sparring pad, using it for a pillow and closed his eyes.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal went back and forth from the sports website to the preferences window on the Motion Eye camera of his laptop. Hal clicked the preferences tab and boosted the gain on the iris, setting it for low-level light. He adjusted the laptop, nudging the corner while watching the display, until his bed filled the frame. He set the camera to record for a period of ten hours then quickly lowered the monitor illumination. Creating the illusion that it was powering down. Hal pushed back from his desk and returned to his bed for the night. The target of his own surveillance.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal’s foggy nightmare began with an attractive woman in a lab coat injecting him in the arm. He felt like he was falling backward, plummeting down an infinite tunnel of darkness. The woman and the rest of the world pulled away from him, vanishing far above in the distance. He landed in blackness and found himself running in place. At least he thought he was running. Everything was a soup of pitch around him. The only thing he could see was his legs pounding beneath him. His jog turned to a frenetic sprint, but he still felt like he wasn’t getting anywhere. So, this is what Hell is. Running through blackness—all the time—in an eternal void. A voice echoed commands that surrounded him. Coming from nowhere and everywhere. He heard one command after the other. At first they were groggy, like another language. Un-decipherable. Then the words and sentences took form…

  “Avoid the light.”

  “Stay out of water. Water kills.”

  “No bright lights.”

  “Step softly.”

  “No talking.”

  “Listen.”

  “Obey.”

  A surreal figure darted out in front of him while he was on a dead sprint. “Engage!”

  He raised his rifle and fired. He heard no shot nor saw any muzzle blast. Only the sound of beeps spurted from his barrel as he sprayed the murky figure with bullets. Small holes riddled the man’s chest. He looked more cartoonish than a real human being. He fell to the ground and disappeared.

  Another man appeared. Standing motionless before him… A Middle Eastern man in a designer suit.

  “This, is your mission objective,” the mysterious voice echoed. “I repeat Mission Objective. Engage on my command.”

  A dim light appeared on the right. Growing brighter as Hal’s feet thumped toward it.

  “Avoid all light.”

  Hal changed direction. Jogging to the left. Angling away from the light. Jouncing back to darkness. A surreal character leapt out of the dense void. Charging straight for Hal with a bayonet fixed to an AK-47.

  “Engage!”

  Hal raised his rifle around to block, whipping the stock around in the same fluid move. Catching the attacker square on the jaw with a rifle-haymaker. The attacker vanished into the black.

  A tall, slender Asian man appeared, wearing a suit.

  “Mission target. Engage on my command.”

  The image vanished. Hal continued to jog in place. A corridor appeared straight ahead. Hal darted into it. Wary. The walls were flat with no features—just computer-generated polygons. A simulated building of sorts—a three-dimensional blueprint.

  “Right turn in twenty feet.”

  The turn arrived and Hal took it. Trodding hard right.

  “Left turn in ten feet.”

  Hal turned left, approaching a light in the corridor. He moved away from it in a double-time jog.

  “Good. Avoid the light. Enter the building.”

  A door appeared. Hal entered.

  “Engage enemy in fifty feet.”

  Hal spotted him and raised his rifle. He fired, and the spray of bullets sounded like a phone ringing. The enemy, the building and everything else in the virtual world faded as the ringing grew louder and louder.

  The ringing continued from the phone on Hal’s nightstand. He could hear it, but was too tired to open his eyes and answer. He willed his arm to the nightstand, picking up his cordless landline. Grumbling a greeting. “Yhhhh?”

  “So, that’s how an alcoholic answers the phone! What if I was your mother calling?” “Whhha?” Hal said. Then looked up at his clock. “Shit.”

  “That’s right, Sleeping Beauty. Are you gonna’ come down from the castle and join us here at work anytime soon?”

  Hal recognized Yarbo’s voice. “I’m on the way.” He hung up and scurried out of bed. Hal grabbed a clean uniform from the closet, glancing down at his laptop. Remembering he left it recording all night. He flipped the top down and stuffed it in the carrying case.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  GUOANBU

  A pair of hands fixed a military-grade surveillance camera atop a sleek and sturdy tripod in the bunkhouse loft. Weng panned the camera to the Holloman runway, adjusting the settings. He spoke in Mandarin through a Bluetooth device linked to a satellite phone. “Setting time lapse video on the Holloman runway now. You should be getting the feed.”

  Weng glanced to an open laptop in front of Matt. Its screen split into quadrants-three showed feeds from the entrances and exits to Holloman Air Force Base and the fourth was from the camera Weng just set up-covering the Holloman runways. Runway twenty-five was the most visible from their vantage point.

  “We have the feed of all camera images now,” Weng said through the Bluetooth earpiece, “and will record all cameras twenty-four-seven.”

  The third teammate, a Chinese patriot of African descent with the alias Charlie Cooper, monitored another laptop with a radar image of the air base and its immediate surroundings.

  Charlie pressed buttons on what looked like a bulky satellite phone next to his computer. Radio static sounded from the air-band scanner. He searched past garbled air and radio traffic and found what he was looking for: the back-and-forth communication of the Holloman air traffic control tower. He plugged the phone into a USB port on his laptop. Transcribed text appeared beside a wave-form view of the conversation between the tower and a pilot.

  Weng closed the c
urtains to a mere crack so only the camera lens could peer through at the base. He signed off with his superiors on the other end of the phone, telling them they were headed to their front—the Habitat build.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Baldo was alone in Hangar 302 watching the bank of monitors. Hal was on one, working from his office. His personal laptop was up and running beside his desktop monitor. Hal angled the laptop screen away from anyone passing by and tilted it down to avoid hidden cameras. Baldo’s eyelids were heavy, watching Hal on one screen and random feeds from around the base on other screens.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal worked at his desk, suspicious of the motion detector in the corner of the ceiling, believing it was a disguised surveillance camera. He was careful to not look directly into it.

  A small window on the laptop played the recording of his sleep from the previous night. Hal had scanned through his first hour of his sleep, noticing no changes. He watched himself toss and turn in fast motion, dragging the slider ahead in time.

  Yarbo noticed Hal looking back and forth between computers. “Late night of homework?”

  “Yeah, just downloading it now.”

  Hal glanced at the laptop screen. Surprised to see an empty bed. He rewound it, watching carefully. He saw himself casually rise from bed and saunter to his closet. Putting on sweats, socks and running shoes.

  Hal looked at the time code counter. Only two hours in, which would put the time around eleven-thirty or midnight, he thought. What the hell am I doing and why don’t I remember this? Am I sleepwalking?

  The Hal on screen grabbed his house keys from the nightstand, turned off the bedroom lights and left the room. Hal scrolled the video slider to the right. Zipping through hours of footage of an empty bed. A flash of light appeared in the room and Hal stopped. Slowly scrolling back until his bedroom light turned on. He checked the time code counter. Four hours later. He played the video in real time.