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‘Jackson was a helicopter pilot. Would that explain it?’

‘Well it might, Doctor Stone, but I doubt it. I saw the helicopter they flew back in. I have over three thousand hours in Hueys and I wouldn’t have attempted to fly one of
those
back shot to shit the way she was, let alone a bird like the ’Hawk. I talked to a couple of other pilots afterwards and they said the same thing. No way someone without a lot of time in that particular helicopter would have even tried to bring her home.’

‘So can you search Datacore for pilots who might have had that experience?’

Fitzpatrick turned to face the computer on his desk, shaking the mouse to banish the screensaver. He moved the cursor, clicking the button to launch the Datacore application, pulling his chair closer to the keyboard to type in his password. After a moment the search page filled the monitor’s screen. Fitzpatrick had clearly never learned to touch type, and his gaze flitted from keyboard to screen as his index and middle fingers hesitantly worked the keys. Alison felt like reaching across the desk and wrestling the keyboard from him, but she forced herself to be patient. 

‘Well, now, the Pave Hawk they were flying that day was a modified version of the Black Hawk, so I’ll look for someone with time in either of those helicopters. The ’Hawk was introduced in the late ’seventies, so I’ll set the search to start then.’

Alison realized she was leaning forward in her seat.

‘You can also narrow the search by blood type. The
hh
group would have shown up as O negative before it was tested for specifically.’

Fitzpatrick added her suggestion, punching the ‘Enter’ key when he had finished typing. It took a few seconds for the program to compile the results and then the screen filled with the names, ranks and units of scores of pilots. He moved the mouse and clicked a box near the top of the display to show photographs of each, angling the monitor so that Alison and Lars could see. It took a couple of minutes to scroll through the twenty or so pages of results. Not one of the men resembled Gant.

Fitzpatrick stared at the screen.

‘Well, Doctor, that’s everyone who flew a variant of that helicopter for the Navy over the last thirty years. No sign of Cody among them.’

Alison’s heart sank. She had been sure they would find him. She thought the commander also seemed disappointed not to have found what they were looking for.

‘Why just Navy? Your man certainly likes the military, but he doesn’t seem to care to limit himself to any one branch of it. Doyle was British Army, Mitchell was Air Force and Jackson was U.S. Army.’

Alison turned to look at the sheriff. Of course he was right. Fitzpatrick was already amending his search; as soon as he was done he tapped ‘Enter’ again. It seemed to take longer this time for the program to produce results. Alison realized she was holding her breath. Once again the screen filled with lists of names, ranks, units, many more this time. Fitzpatrick clicked the mouse to bring up thumbnails of service photos and immediately began scrolling through them. This time Alison noticed that the sheriff was also leaning forward to examine the screen on the commander’s desk.

It was Alison who saw him first, her finger flying to the screen.

‘There!’

Fitzpatrick leaned back in his chair, staring at the monitor.

‘Well I’ll be damned.’

Fitzpatrick moved the mouse, clicking on the thumbnail. The image enlarged to fill the top left corner of the screen. There could be no mistake. It was Gant. Fitzpatrick was reading aloud from details of the man’s service record that now filled the remainder of the screen.

‘Chief Warrant Officer Paul Kyle. Served with the Nightstalkers. That’s the Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Joined in ’83, shortly after the unit was formed. With them for ten years until he was shot down over Mogadishu. They found Kyle’s tags in the wreckage of the helicopter but his body was never recovered.’

Fitzpatrick sat back in his chair, still looking at the screen. There was silence in the office. It was Henrikssen who spoke first.

‘Do you have any thoughts on how we might find your man, commander? I think we have to assume by now that he’s not coming back to the base and unfortunately it seems like he’s had quite a bit of practice making himself disappear.’

This time it was Alison who spoke.

‘I think I might have an idea.’

20

HE
WAS
GLAD to finally leave the motel. His side still hurt a little but the wound was almost healed and he was well enough to travel. He kept the jacket he had taken from the security guard buttoned up as he walked into town. He had washed the shirt he had taken from the man in the small washbasin but the bloodstains, though faded, were still evident.

He found the Carson City Bus Depot, a drab, squat building opposite a low-rise mall, and paid forty dollars for a ticket to Ely. It was almost three hundred miles and the trip would take most of the day. He had an hour to kill before the bus departed and he crossed the street, going into an internet café. Choosing a booth near the back he logged on, first checking to see whether any of the news services were still running the story. Thankfully there was little coverage. Only KHNV were still carrying it, but even they seemed to have relegated its importance. Only a few short paragraphs had been dedicated and they focused mainly on the implications for the town’s arms depot following the incident at Mount Grant, mentioning only in passing that two men were still being sought by the authorities. He checked the watch he had taken from the security guard at the hospital. Still twenty-five minutes before his bus left.

He had decided in the motel room not to check the base website for news of his disappearance. There was little point. He could never return and any messages from the people who had known him at Fallon were only likely to make the next step that much harder. It was always difficult to walk away, to leave behind the men he had served with, that he had fought alongside, knowing that if by some random chance he were ever to meet them again he would need to ignore them, to turn away, if challenged to deny any knowledge of their existence. Sometimes the urge to check up on people, on lives he had left behind, was almost too much to bear. A number of years back he had almost succumbed, riding his bike across country to an air force base in Alabama. He had read that Rudy would be there and had wanted to see the man, if only from a distance. It had been the last time he had allowed himself to entertain such thoughts. There was only pain when you looked back.

But now that he was sitting in front of the screen, the keyboard beneath his fingertips, he found the urge to check on his old life one last time almost irresistible. After hesitating a moment longer he typed in the address for CNIC – the Navy’s Installations Command website, navigating to the ‘Region Southwest’ section of the site and selecting ‘NAS Fallon’ and then the ‘Newsroom’ tab. Under ‘Recent News’ there was a single entry, from two days before, under the heading ‘Master Chief Carl Gant’. The entry was from the base commander, Captain John James Fitzpatrick, asking all service personnel at Fallon to pray for the safe return of the CSAR instructor who had been missing from the base since before Christmas. His eyes were drawn to the final sentence of the short paragraph:

Our thoughts are with the Master Chief and his partner, Alison Berkeley, at this difficult time
.  

What did that mean? He went over to the commander’s quarters most Sundays for dinner and each week without fail Carla quizzed him about his personal life. Fitzpatrick knew that he wasn’t seeing anyone, let alone someone called Alison Berkeley. Fitzpatrick must have hoped that he would check the website and was trying to send him a message. He read the paragraph again, in case there was another clue he had missed, but there wasn’t. The only thing that stood out was the reference to this woman.

Alison Berkeley.
He didn’t know an Alison Berkeley. Could Fitzpatrick have been mistaken? Had he inadvertently sent him the wrong message? It was unlikely. He had left only this single piece of information – he would have chosen it carefully. The commander would know that he had been in the back of the van that had crashed into Mount Grant hospital. Hopefully he wouldn’t believe he had any involvement in whatever the other men in the van had been up to, that he had been there against his will. If Fitzpatrick had figured that much out he would have realized that the base was probably under surveillance. The message was deliberately cryptic.

Alison Berkeley.
The only Alison he had met recently had been that doctor at University of California. At Berkeley. That had to be what Fitzpatrick meant. But how did he know about her? He had told no one on the base that he had been to see her.

He checked his watch. The bus was leaving in five minutes. He logged off, paid the woman behind the counter for the use of the computer with the few dollars he had left, and walked back across the street to where his bus was now waiting. He climbed aboard, showing his ticket to the driver. The bus was almost empty, and he headed towards the back. As he settled into his seat he heard the soft hiss as the door closed. The bus pulled slowly away from the depot.

He stared out the window as they left Carson City, heading towards Dayton and Silver Springs beyond. Fitzpatrick must have meant Alison Stone. It was the only conclusion that even came close to making sense. He decided to put aside for now how that had come about; it was unlikely he was going to figure it out by himself. The question was whether he should attempt to get in touch with her. He trusted Fitzpatrick not to knowingly place him in danger, but there could well be factors that the commander hadn’t considered. He had to assume that the base was still being watched, which would certainly include the website. The message was already two days old and it would be at least another day before he could get to Berkeley, assuming he chose to go at all. He had only met Alison Stone that one time, three months earlier, and had told her nothing about himself that should have allowed her to connect him with Fallon.

But clearly somehow that connection had been made, and now it seemed that Fitzpatrick was in contact with her. Was it possible that whoever was looking for him would figure out his cryptic instruction as well? It didn’t seem likely but he clearly didn’t have enough information to be sure. Perhaps it would be better if he just picked up his money and left it all behind.

He shifted in his seat, trying to take the pressure off his side. Well, he had some time to make up his mind. It would be five hours before the bus reached Ely and there wasn’t much he could do until then.

21

AXL
FRIEDRICHS
LEFT Las Vegas before dawn, driving west through Red Rock Canyon. Twenty minutes later as the highway curved north he slowed. It had been several years since he had last been out here and the turnoff was easy to miss in the half-light. When he was certain he had found it he pulled on to the hard shoulder. With the growth in commuter traffic from Pahrump Route 160 had become busy. It was unlikely that anyone would follow him, but his training made him cautious, and this morning he did not wish to be seen. He sat for ten minutes, smoking a cigarette in the darkness, checking the Defender’s large mirrors for traffic. When he was satisfied that the road was empty in both directions he switched off the headlights and turned off the highway, the Land Rover’s large tires bouncing over the uneven surface as they followed the rutted dirt track south.

After two miles he stopped and climbed down from the cabin. A tree that had no business among the junipers, Joshua trees and creosote scrub of the Mojave lay on its side, blocking the track. He had placed it there years before. The trunk was a couple of feet in diameter for most of its length. It would take two strong men to drag it out of the way, more than enough to discourage whoever might have made it this far to turn back. The Land Rover had a winch mounted to the front bumper but he ignored it. Instead he bent down, linked the fingers of two huge hands underneath one end of the tree and lifted, the muscles in his forearms and thighs bunching with the effort.

When the trunk had been dragged off the track he climbed back up into the Defender. The Land Rover’s cabin was generous but nevertheless he had to duck his head to fit his six foot seven inch frame. The diesel engine clattered into life and he drove forward twenty yards, stopping again to reposition the tree across the track. From this point on the terrain became more difficult and he selected low range from the gearbox, sliding the stubby second lever to lock the center differential, helping the vehicle to maintain traction as its tires scrabbled over the loose surface.

Gant’s abduction had been a disaster. He had seen to it that Ramirez and Flood had shared Keogh’s fate, but not before he had extracted the truth from Ramirez about what had happened in the back of the van. And then there had been nothing to do but wait. Gant would most likely die. If by some miracle he survived they would wait a few months until things had calmed down and then pick him up again. In the meantime they would move on to the next person on the list.

But then things had started to happen that he still did not fully understand. Thankfully he had sent a team back to recover the blood samples Keogh had taken from Gant before the forensics team had a chance to log them. When the samples had been analyzed
Der Eckzahn
had become very agitated, demanding that they bring the SEAL in immediately. Friedrichs had been trained by the KommandoSpezialkräfte, an elite military unit of the German army, and he would not admit to being afraid of any man. But Old Dogtooth was different. And he had never seen him this worked up about anything.

He would have to tread carefully. DeWitty had tipped them off about the sheriff from Hawthorne. They had been lucky there. He had flown a team in from Minnesota to keep Henrikssen under surveillance, and that had already paid dividends. But now
Der Eckzahn
was blaming him for not knowing about the woman. Old Dogtooth was right of course. If Gant had been seeing someone it was more likely that they’d find him through her. But neither team had made any mention of this woman in the weeks that they had had him under surveillance before Christmas. And almost three days had gone by before anyone had noticed the announcement on the website. That had not made
Der Eckzahn
happy either.