“In receipt of message. Plan Change B. 23/1415. We are ready and now in position. The timing will work. Proceed as per plan.”
He quickly reviewed his acknowledgment of the message, then hit the “F6” key.
The computer screen went momentarily blank before “SENDING MESSAGE” appeared on his screen.
He held very still and listened very closely. He could barely hear the tiny electrical motors in the trunk of his car as they moved the eighteen-inch satellite dish around on its thin steel mounts. The laptop computer interfaced with the Global Positioning System, which was also hidden in the car trunk, to determine his exact location, then used that information to move the miniature dish around to align it with the Ukrainian satellite that spun 21,000 miles overhead. Once the dish was in sync with the satellite, it sent a one second data burst to test the connection. After receiving the test data, the Ukrainian satellite responded back to Morozov’s system with a one second burst of its own. Not until then did Morozov’s computer send up his message, which was then bounced off another satellite before being beamed down to a station in Kiev.
Morozov shut the lid on the computer and turned off his car. Walking to his motel room, he glanced once again at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Not much else to do now, but wait. Tomorrow would come soon enough.
He entered his room and nodded to the diner man, who frowned, then immediately left. Morozov fell down on his bed. Ten minutes later, he was fast asleep.
Ninety seconds after Morozov sent up his signal, the Cray super-computer onboard the K-23 satellite had finished its final computations and downloaded the information to the National Reconnaissance Organization center in western Virginia. It had a good fix on the source of the data transmission. The target area that the computer came up with was much less than twenty feet square. Twenty minutes after that, a military C-21 transport took off from Andrews Air Force Base, just outside of Washington, D.G, enroute to Wichita, Kansas.
The door exploded open as seven armed and helmeted men burst like lightning into the dimly lit room. Morozov awoke with a start, then instantly rolled off his bed and went for his gun. Ammon stood at the bathroom doorway without moving.
“Get down on the floor!” someone screamed. “Get your freaking face down on the floor!”
In a daze, Morozov reached for the 9mm which was stuffed under his left armpit. But before he could even get his hand around its beveled grip, he found himself sailing backward and crashing into the wall. Three men were instantly on top of him, pushing him to the floor and smothering him with their weight. A thick, black hood was immediately pulled down over his face. And then he felt the jabbing pain of the needle as it was shoved deeply into the meat of his thigh.
Six feet away, Richard Ammon found himself in an identical position, covered with black-uniformed bodies and pressed unmercifully onto the floor. He also felt the sharp sting of the needle and almost immediately passed away into a deep and foggy sleep.
As the two men stopped struggling and drifted away, a husky voice spoke into a cellular phone. “We’ve got them,” he said without introduction. “Yeah, they’re both alive. No shots were fired. We’re bringing him in.”
BOOK TWO
Simply put, it comes down to this.
You have to drop steel on the target.
TWENTY-FIVE
Richard Ammon was alone. He lay on his back on a hard mattress, staring at a bare cement ceiling. It was dark and cold and very quiet. His mind was swimming, he couldn’t think, and it hurt to focus his eyes. His tongue felt numb and swollen and his mouth was thick and dry. His arms felt like heavy weights and there was a soft buzzing in the back of his head. It would take another twenty minutes for his kidneys to completely wash the heavy sedative from his blood. Not until then would his arms quit tingling and the feeling move back into his legs.
He closed his eyes and smelled the urine and cleanser as he tried to figure out where he was. With a painful strain, he rolled over, pushed his feet onto the floor, and sat up. Looking around him, his heart sank. He was in a prison cell. A dank, dark, cold prison cell. He rubbed his eyes and glanced around the room, taking in the stainless steel toilet and tiny wash basin, the cement bed and the shiny, flat, metal plate that served as a mirror. He studied the huge steel door, with its tiny slot to pass through plates of food, and the windowless, gray cement walls.
And then it hit him. And as he remembered, he took a quick breath, paralyzed for a moment in fear.
Morozov had sworn he would kill her. He could hear his cold voice and could see the green eyes.
“If this mission fails, for whatever reason, Jesse will certainly die.”
Ammon’s heart raced. Pushing himself up, he stumbled to the door. Pressing his face against the tiny, grate-covered window, he peered out into the hall. Nothing. He couldn’t see a thing. He stopped and listened. Nothing. Not a sound. He called through the window. No one was there. He glanced at his watch. It was gone. How long had he been here? How much did they know? He called out through the window once again.
“Is anyone there?” He listened as his voice echoed down the empty, steel hallway. He called again. No response. Far off in the distance, he could hear a fan turning, an eerie and lonely sound.
Thirty yards away, at the end of the hallway and behind two thick, double-locked doors, three guards sat behind a bulletproof window and watched on their remote controlled monitor as Ammon pushed his face against his prison cell door. One of them immediately picked up the phone.
“Yeah, he’s awake. No, not more than a minute ago. Yes… yes… Okay, we’ll be waiting.” He placed the receiver back in its cradle and motioned to one of the other guards.
“Open her up. They’re on their way down.” Another guard pushed a series of codes on a computer keypad, and they listened to the quiet buzz as the internal locks inside the first door retracted into the cold steel.
Ammon swallowed hard to fight down the panic. Morozov would kill her! He was running out of time!
He stumbled back to the bed, fell onto the corner and pressed his eyes with his fists. A mighty shiver ran the length of his body. Folding his arms across his chest, he rubbed his biceps until the skin burned.
Like a cold slap of thunder, the sudden clang of a metal door sounded from the end of the hallway. He looked up and listened and waited. Footsteps approached from the far end of the hall. He sat on the edge of the bed. His own door buzzed and then clicked as the internal locks rolled open.
For the first time in weeks, a flicker of life burned in Ammon’s eyes. He pushed himself to his feet as Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Tray walked into the musty cell.
Ammon stumbled forward. “Tray! They got Jesse,” he muttered through a thick tongue and chattering teeth. “They got Jesse. Please, you’ve got to help me!”
Oliver Tray grabbed Ammon by the arms and turned him back to the bed. “Richard, it’s okay. It’s okay. We got her.”
Ammon slumped onto the mattress and looked into Oliver’s face with unbelieving eyes.
“I swear to you, she’s going to be okay,” Tray assured him.
Ammon’s eyes glistened. He wiped his hands across his face and through his short hair. Was it really over? He just couldn’t believe it. He looked up at Tray, pleading. Oliver read the pain in his eyes. Kneeling in front of his friend, he said slowly, “Richard, listen to me. We got her. I wouldn’t lie to you. Everything is going to be fine. We brought her in a couple days ago, and I swear to you, she’s doing just fine.”