1
You have a visitor.
Colonel Emily Beale tried to make sense of the message on her secure phone, but she’d been awake for thirty-six hours and couldn’t decipher its hidden meaning. A slow scan of the airfield at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, showed that she stood alone on the unlit tarmac. The last bird of the two companies of MH-47G Chinook Spec Ops helicopters, which had been her sole focus for the entire time, had departed less than a minute ago.
No “visitor” here. Just herself and the lingering exhaust fumes dissipating into the night. The lights of the tail helo ducked beyond the silhouette of trees against the stars, leaving only the heavy beat of the big helos’ twin rotors to fade into the waning night traffic from Route 41 along the eastern edge of the base.
A crescent moon was trying to punch through the high horsetail clouds that presaged an incoming weather system. Predicted as the first big storm of November, she’d believe it only after it showed up.
A reminder beep. Oh, right. Phone message. She definitely needed sleep soon.
In the last day and a half, she’d formulated an emergency, set up the scenario, and given the crews a scant hour’s notice to create an action plan and implement it. Both heavy assault companies of the Night Stalkers 2nd Battalion had just winged aloft headed for a simulated combat search-and-rescue crisis staged eight hundred kilometers away at Fort Bragg’s gunnery range. She added to the challenge by pre-staging their action assets down in Fort Rucker, so they’d have to go to Alabama first—though they didn’t know that’s why they were going there yet.
She’d handed off the task of setting surprise traps along their possible routes to her assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Trisha O’Malley. Not only did her red-headed sidekick possess an evil bent when it came to training, but it would also be good practice for training the commander in her—Emily had taken away half of Trisha’s counterattack forces after her plans were set. Interestingly, it hadn’t thrown her into one of her normal verbal fits of incomprehensible Boston-accented protests against God, The Army, and whatever else she worshipped. Instead, she watched Emily steadily for about five seconds, grinned evilly, then headed off while issuing a maelstrom of commands. Emily would have liked to hear what she had in mind; but Trisha moved at a warp speed beyond her own capacity at the best of times.
Now, with the twenty twin-rotor Chinooks departed, half of the entire regiment’s heavy-assault team—the rest were based in Georgia, Washington State, or currently deployed—the night’s silence unfolded enough to hear the honking of late geese headed south in the overhead darkness.
She didn’t want a visitor.
What Emily wanted to do was go home. But the Montana ranch and her family seemed impossibly far away.
Montana ranch.
Phone message.
Visitor.
She pulled out her phone, though she didn’t remember tucking it away, and checked the message again. The visitor wasn’t here; she’d already figured out that much. Nor at her Fort Campbell office. Oddly, not out on the ranch either, at least not exactly.
Oh right, someone else was telling her she had a visitor somewhere. Not someone telling her—something! The message had been a carefully nondescript alarm from her top-level security alert system.
The message was from inside the secure Tac Room she’d built at Henderson’s Ranch. Someone had entered who wasn’t supposed to be inside there. Only three people other than herself had access to that space—none of whom would be labeled a visitor.
It was the sole office of what they figured was the smallest and least known intelligence agency in the nation—they themselves didn’t know of any smaller ones. Of course, no one knew about them. Perhaps twenty knew of the room’s existence, but most of them were the family’s ranch hands who didn’t care. A bare handful knew the room’s purpose, and she kept it that way. The only likely visitor was former President Peter Matthews, who had set up their agency while he still had the power to do so. However, Emily knew that her childhood friend was currently in Africa in his “retired” role as Secretary of State, and even he couldn’t open the door.
Deciding that a deserted airfield in the middle of a secure Army base was a safe enough place from which to find out who the hell had showed up in Montana, she first checked the GPS readings of the Tac Room’s three operators. Two were in the ranch house lounge off the big kitchen; typical for an after-dinner evening. Lauren was in Hawaii on vacation with her husband.
She called the Tac Room, wondering who had broken in and if they’d answer the phone. Yet there was no break-in alert; rather, someone had attempted to login on the computer system there—and failed. Who had slipped in? The US government had spent a lot of money to make sure that was impossible. Neither Claudia nor Michael could have missed that, unless…
Over a thousand miles west, the evening sun would still be up, shining golden off the first real snow of the season. The cold-sharpened air would smell of horses and larch pine. November was incredibly late for the first snowfall, but she loved seeing the seasons brush across the ranch the way they never brushed the DC of her youth or the Kentucky of her present. Hopefully, she would see it soon.
Someone did answer and spoke with no introduction. There was no need for one; she knew the voice instantly.
“Hi, Emily. We need to talk. In person. It’s majorly important.”
The phone fell from Emily’s nerveless fingers. She heard a small tink as the screen cracked on the tarmac.
2
“Is this über-weird or is this über-weird?”
“Not giving me a lot of choices there, Captain Ethan Merced.” They’d started using each other’s full title and name two months ago when they made captain together, and the charm of it hadn’t worn off. His wife and four-year-old had picked up on it as well and called him nothing else. Which, as Ethan appeared less charmed about, Abby encouraged at every opportunity.
“Kinda obvious anyway, Captain Abigail Rose.”
Abby kicked the tail of her big helo sideways to pass between the tops of two particularly tall oaks fast approaching on her helmet’s visor display. Night vision and radar pointed them out—not a challenge at all. Then the next tree, just beyond the first pair, had her slewing hard the other way. Hard enough to turn her last name into a grunt from Ethan: Ro-hose.
She sighed; the mission was weird. Who sent two full companies, totaling twenty Chinooks, along the same Black Route all at once? And on one hour’s notice? That was unusual even for the US Army’s 160th Regiment. This Black Route was a five-hour, thirteen-hundred-kilometer training run from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, down to Fort Rucker, Alabama, out to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and home—all in the moonless darkness. They were nicknamed the Night Stalkers for a reason.
