CI: Dark Target

by David DeBatto, Pete Nelson

Genres: Literary Fiction; War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

In this second riveting novel, Army Counterintelligence Special Agent David DeLuca and his CI Team--an army within the Army--are up against a rogue enemy who has commandeered a deadly new technology. A sergeant in the Arizona Air National Guard mysteriously disappears, her tracks ending in the desert near the Mexican border. The Army assigns counterintelligence special agent David DeLuca to the case, and he begins to uncover a conspiracy pointing towards deadly new military technology--a top-secret black ops hunter-killer satellite. Part of a military program dubbed "Project Darkstar," the satellite is capable of killing from space by emitting a high energy laser.

Release date: May 7, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

THE GIRL RAN, LEAVING THE JEEP BEHIND. She’d switched cars, abandoning her Civic at her uncle Henry’s trailer after parking
it in a grove of cottonwoods, though she doubted the trees would conceal it for long. She’d teased her uncle about owning
a Cherokee (they were Cocopah) and told him he was a fool to leave the key in the ignition, abandoning the vehicle for weeks
at a time while he traveled the country, but she’d been glad to find the old car gassed up and ready for use. She’d been wearing
night vision goggles to drive with the headlights off, and was in the middle of nowhere, ten miles short of the Mexican border,
on a dirt road the locals called Camino del Diablo, so rutted and eroded with deep corduroylike ripples that she couldn’t
make much better than twenty miles per hour, when it just stopped. It could have been simple mechanical failure. The Cherokee
had more than two hundred thousand miles on it.


She turned the key. Nothing happened. She pounded on the dashboard. She tried to turn the headlights on and off, but the headlights
didn’t work, nor did the radio. When she checked the fuse box, she discovered that all the fuses had been tripped. The spare
fuses in the glove box were blown as well.


She left the NVGs on the seat and ran, out of breath, across the floor of the desert. She was headed for Spirit Mountain,
pausing to consult the topo map her friend had e-mailed her. Her ancestors had taken refuge there. Perhaps she could, too.
Her goal was a place her friend had called the Ano Kayai, the Village of Eagles, an ancient Anasazi cliff dwelling beneath
a red rock overhang, her friend had said, a ruin picked over by pot thieves and of little further interest to archaeologists,
last occupied by mushroom-eating hippies in the sixties, but it was still holy, and she’d found herself praying a lot lately—perhaps
it would protect her. If she could reach it before daylight came, she might be safe. They might not find her. The evil ones.
The ones her uncle had warned her about. Her boots dug into the sand where it gathered in wind-blown drifts, her heels clattering
across the hard-baked caliche where the wind had scoured the sand away. She navigated between the saguaros and the ocotillos and the jumping cholla by
the light of a quarter moon, still visible in a sky that was starting to cloud over. She didn’t stop until she reached an
arroyo, where she paused beneath a mesquite bush to catch her breath.


She looked up at the moon. It was a quarter full, but bright in the clear desert air. As a little girl, she’d been fond of
stripping off her frock and dancing naked by the light of a full moon. Now the light was her enemy. Her own body heat was
her enemy—wasn’t that how snakes located their prey? She prayed for the clouds to gather above her, an ancient prayer for
rain that her grandmother had taught her, but she could only remember the first part of it. Perhaps that was enough.


She took a drink from one of the water bottles in her bag. She had two more. If she had to, she could make that last for a
day or two. Yet when she pushed again at the implant beneath the skin of her right forearm, she feared she didn’t have another
day or two—unless she could get it out, her time left on this earth could be only a matter of minutes. It was crazy thinking,
but sometimes crazy thinking made sense. That had to be how they’d found her. Getting the implant had been his idea. She’d
trusted him then. She didn’t trust him now. That had to be it.


She was angry with herself for not being better prepared—she needed a knife, but she didn’t have one. She unbuttoned the top
two buttons of her blouse and leaned forward to take the dog tags from around her neck, hoping the edge would be sharp enough
to slice into her skin. It wasn’t. She tried sharpening the edge of one of the tags on a rock, then pressed it one more time
into her skin, scraping as hard as she could until she drew blood, but it just wasn’t sharp enough. She should have done this
sooner, at her uncle’s trailer, where one of the old fashioned single-edged razor blades he kept to shave with would have
done the job quickly and neatly.


Fortunately, the desert was full of things sharp enough to pierce her skin. She climbed out of the arroyo and moved to a large
saguaro cactus, a twenty-foot-tall specimen, its taproot reaching down perhaps a hundred feet to find water, probably a five-thousand-dollar
plant, she guessed, to the illegal cactus-rustlers who’d come with their four-wheel-drive vehicles and their lassos to pull
the saguaros down and sell them to landscapers in Tucson and Phoenix. The rustlers weren’t necessarily outsiders. Often they
were tribal people who should have known better than to disturb the spirits of a plant that had stood in the same place for
a thousand years. They’d lost their connection to the earth, but who was she to judge? So had she, she feared. It was why
she was in the trouble she was in. It was how the evil ones had gotten to her. Her uncle had warned her, even though he was
as modern as they came.


She prayed briefly to the spirit of the cactus, trying to remember the words her grandmother had taught her long ago, then
positioned her arm against a long needle and leaned into the cactus until the needle pierced her to the depth of perhaps half
an inch. She cried out in pain, once, then gritted her teeth and dug, dragging her arm against the needle until she’d made
a cut that was perhaps an inch and a half long. She tried to get at the implant with her teeth, but it was too far down toward
her elbow, and she couldn’t reach. She dug again with the needle, and the pain was unbearable, but she endured it, digging
with her fingernail until she was finally able to extract the device. She wiped the blood off it and then held it up to examine
it, a small plastic tube, about an inch and a half long.


“Goddamn you,” she spat, using the Cocopah name her grandmother used to call her, which meant “foolish girl.” Foolish for
all she’d done. Foolish for thinking she was better than anybody else, smarter. Foolish for losing her humility.


She flung the device as far as she could into the desert. Maybe they would think she was dead, now that it no longer moved.
Maybe they would leave her alone.


She used some of her precious water supply to wash the wound, then tied her bandana around it, using her teeth to pull it
tight. It would have to do. She had to keep running.


But where were her dog tags? What had she done with them?

There was no time to look for them.

She returned to the arroyo and moved up the wash, keeping to the side when it widened, hoping it would afford some minimal
cover as she climbed through the creosote bushes and the palo verde. If she was reading the map right, her car had died a
few miles short of the arroyo she was to take to bring her to the trail head. Perhaps this one joined the other. She had to
keep moving. She tore her pants on a rock, and then a spike from an ocotillo nearly ripped her hair out, but she kept going.
She’d gone a few hundred yards when she heard a snapping sound in the air behind her, a crackling, like cellophane crinkling.


She turned. There was nothing there, but she felt a presence, a shimmering quality to the darkness, zigzagging lines, like
glass snakes, crawling across her field of vision, just below the visible spectrum.


They were coming for her.

She ran, the red rock walls of a shallow canyon rising to either side of her now. There was a chance that the canyon would
protect her, long enough to find somewhere to hide, a ledge, a cave, a javelina den, anything.


They were coming. How had they found her?

Then, on a distant hill, perhaps a mile off, she saw a light.

It looked like a fire. A fire meant people. Out here, in the desert, at three in the morning, it probably meant people she
didn’t want to know, people who might do her harm, smugglers or thieves, but she didn’t care—perhaps there was strength in
numbers. Perhaps the presence of witnesses would be enough to make the evil ones leave her alone. Unless the evil ones wanted
to kill them all, but if that was what they wanted to do, there was nothing to stop them.


She headed for the light.

Around the fire, the dancers moved, chanting as they circled, their faces painted in the reds and yellows of the earth. There
was a Hopi warrior. There was a Navaho medicine man, and a Mescalero shaman, his back covered by the skins of a coyote, the
image of Kokopelli tattooed across his bare chest. Two women danced naked from the waist up, their eyes closed as they swayed,
enraptured by the chanting and the drumming, at one with the pulse of the universe, the orange-blossom turquoise necklaces
clattering against the sacred crystals strung with leather lanyards that hung from their necks. There was a Mandan holy man,
dressed in buffalo hides, and another warrior whose leathers were like those of the Cree or the Blackfoot, adorned with Sioux
beads he’d purchased at a Cherokee trading post in Enid, Oklahoma. Next to him was a man dressed as a Star Trek captain, accompanied by his Klingon wife, and her best friend, who’d come dressed as Counselor Troy, even though at five-foot-three
and a hefty two hundred twenty pounds, the resemblance stopped at the costume, the cleavage, and the curly black wig. A shy
man in Vulcan ears stood back from the circle, reluctant to partake of the hallucinogenic mushrooms the leader of the group
had provided but doing his best to be a good sport, a believer.


At the edge of the fire, a young woman named Rainbow stood with her back to the light, gazing up at the stars, visible to
the east, the moon overhead gone now behind a bank of clouds. She’d never felt this good, ever, never known just how one-with-the-universe
it was possible to become—it was everything she’d read about in her studies of Eastern mysticism and Zen philosophy, but it
was better, because this, this night, this ceremony, this special group of people, had somehow managed to tie it all together,
the ancient and authentic past (as represented by the Native Americans) and the realizable future, as represented by the crew
from the Enterprise. They were at the cosmic tipping point between universal epochs, the leader said, and she knew it was true. She loved how
for the first time in her life, she felt like she could be whoever she wanted to be. She wasn’t sure what that was, exactly,
but it didn’t matter—it was the freedom itself that she felt, more than how that freedom manifested itself. So what if the
Hopi warrior was really a Jewish librarian from Denver, and the Navaho medicine man owned a science-fiction bookstore in Flagstaff,
and the Mescalero shaman was currently living off Social Security in Bisbee—tonight, anything was possible.


“I love you,” she said to the sky, watching for movement. The ship was coming. Brother Antonionus had promised it would come.
The idea made her so happy. Perhaps it would beam them up and take them with them, or perhaps it would simply study them tonight,
in order to better prepare for the final ascension. It was an auspicious night. “I love you so much. I’m so grateful. I really
am. I love you so much,” she told the universe, letting the tears come. It was the way she’d been meant to feel. It was everything
she’d lacked in Seattle, working in a cubicle for a running shoe company, dehumanized and joyless, in a town where the permanently
overcast sky hung like a fat gray mattress about a hundred feet above the ground—that’s what it felt like.


That was wrong. This was right.

She wondered, vaguely, what had happened to her daughter Ruby, but knew she had to be around somewhere. The universe was too
benevolent to let anything happen to Ruby—Rainbow couldn’t afford to worry about it. The earth would take care of Ruby. Rainbow
tried to remember the lesson: Stress created negative vibrations, and negative vibrations interrupted the frequency upon which
the universe resonated, whereas positive vibrations harmonized with it. That’s what Brother Antonionus told them, and he’d
gotten that straight from the Rigelians themselves.


“Brothers and sisters,” the man in the white robes with the beatific smile on his face said, his blue eyes glazed and sparkling
with an inner radiance, “People of the Light—move to the rhythm of the universe and feel the pulse of the planets. They are
watching you, my brethren. They see what you do and they feel what you feel. They are waiting for their children to come home.
They are coming to take us home, once we show them we are ready…”


Ruby was bored. She’d spent the day helping the grown-ups make a gigantic mandala in the sand that was supposed to serve as
a landing pad, but she was frankly (and secretly) hoping that the UFOs didn’t come tonight, even though she knew her mother
would be disappointed. Ruby didn’t care—her friends were having a slumber party next weekend, and she wanted to go. All in
all, she was pretty excited about the possibility of traveling to another planet and hanging out with super-intelligent aliens,
or at least she was at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt like maybe she needed to spend a little
more time on this planet, and besides, when she hung out with the super-intelligent kids at school, she didn’t have any fun
at all.


She’d taken a flashlight and wandered off to look for javelinas, the wild pigs that sometimes followed each other around with
their noses in each other’s butts because they were so nearsighted they couldn’t see ten feet in front of themselves. She
checked over her shoulder occasionally to keep the watch fire in view, but she wasn’t worried about getting lost.


She was surprised when she felt something hard rap against the top of her skull, as if a squirrel had thrown an acorn from
a tree, and then another, and a third, until she realized they were raindrops, not acorns. Storms could blow up fast in the
desert, she knew. She knew also that it could be dangerous to be caught in a wash, where flash floods could sweep you away
in an instant.


She turned and headed back to the fire, but then she heard something and stopped.

Something in the desert.

Crying out.

She turned her flashlight toward the sound.

In the distance, she saw something move.

It was a woman, a Native American woman—a real one, not one of the fakes who liked to dance around watch fires and take their
tops off.


The woman stopped when she saw Ruby’s flashlight. Ruby was about to call out to her, and say something like, “Over here—come
this way—you can wait with us until the storm passes,” but then something happened.


She wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it was like a flash of light, without the light. Like somebody was taking her picture
with a flashbulb, but she’d blinked at the last minute, except that she hadn’t blinked, and now there was a bright blue streak
on the back of her retina, but she couldn’t say why, except that she was looking at a woman, and then the woman sort of… melted, and now the woman was gone.


Ruby couldn’t breathe.

Ruby couldn’t move.

For a second, she thought she’d dreamed what she’d just experienced. As she collected her wits about her, Ruby then thought
what she’d seen was a woman being struck by some sort of invisible lightning. And lightning brought with it thunder, which,
at so short a distance, should have been deafening—Ruby had heard only a soft crackling, and then a snap.


And then the woman was gone.

Maybe it was a dream, Ruby thought. Or maybe the image had been sent to her by somebody, the way some people saw the image
of the Virgin Mary in the frost on a windowpane—maybe it meant Ruby had been singled out to be a witness to something special,
except that she could still see the look of fear on the woman’s face, and the pain she felt as she burned. Ruby could definitely
smell something had burned, like the time she was trying to fry ants with a magnifying glass with her friend Cody and accidentally
lit her own hair on fire. The picture of the woman melting was not an image Ruby cared to carry with her—it frightened her—but
how was she going to get rid of it? Maybe if someone explained it to her.


Perhaps Brother Antonionus would know. He seemed knowledgeable about such matters.

Far away, in a darkened control room, lit only by the light of a liquid crystal display, a conversation:

“Collateral target acquired.”

“Positive lock?”

“Affirmative.”

“Biometrics?”

“Calibrating. One twenty-nine point five-four centimeters. Twenty-eight point two-six kilograms.”

“Human?”

“Probable orthodontia.”

“A child?”

“Female. Recommendations? Awaiting instructions.”

“Abort.”

Three weeks later, a Mexican girl named Rosario Flores, from the town of Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, was arrested
in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant in Tucson by agents from the INS who’d received a tip that the owner employed illegal
immigrants. She’d been taken into custody and searched, whereupon it was discovered that she was wearing a set of dog tags
she said she’d found in the desert, hanging from a branch of a palo verde tree in an arroyo. The dog tags belonged to a woman
named Cheryl Escavedo, a sergeant first class in the Arizona Army National Guard. A call to her unit by INS revealed that
she’d been recently reported missing from her job at an entry-processing center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. INS was asked
to hold Rosario Flores in custody.


Flores was cooperative and told INS that she’d been taken to the border in a windowless step-van, along with twenty-five or
so other people, all willing to pay the coyote three hundred dollars apiece to get them into the United States. They’d been
let out of the van in the dead of night, somewhere in the desert, to relieve themselves, got back in the van and drove north
in the darkness and transferred to a windowless tractor-trailer, to be let out again in a warehouse in Tucson. For all she
knew, she could have crossed the border anywhere from Yuma to El Paso. She was sorry she’d taken the dog tags. She found them
when she was looking for a place to go to the bathroom. She hadn’t known what they were. She didn’t want to go back to Hermosillo.
Couldn’t she please stay?


When Escavedo’s Jeep was found abandoned near Spirit Mountain, on the Tohono O’Odham reservation, at the side of a road called
Camino del Diablo, not far from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Testing Range,
the Pentagon was informed. The Jeep appeared to have been hit by lightning, the local authorities said, probably after it
had been abandoned. The tribal police asked the Pentagon what they wanted them to do.


The Pentagon said they’d send somebody out to investigate, and to sit tight until he arrived.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN COUNTERINTELligence agent David DeLuca was a rookie cop with the Yuma police department, his first
thought, looking into a missing person and an abandoned vehicle on or near the reservation, would have been that the disappearance
was alcohol related. It was simply, unfortunately, a fact of life. The girl he’d been sent to find had lost both parents to
alcohol, had been raised by a grandmother, no longer living, and an uncle—it wasn’t unusual either to see the habits of substance
abuse passed down from one generation to the next. Yet the girl had been a straight-A student at Goldwater High in Somerton,
a lifelong teetotaler who’d worked in a shelter for Cocopah women from homes where alcohol abuse had led to other forms of
abuse. Ben Yutahay, the tribal policeman who’d met him to assist in the investigation, ruled out alcohol. His son Marvin had
known Cheryl in high school and said she didn’t drink, even then, when everybody did.


Ben, Marvin, and DeLuca stood in the desert, the light growing in the east and only the last few brightest stars still shining
overhead.


“If that’s lightning,” said Ben Yutahay, squatting in the dust next to the abandoned Jeep, “it’s the funniest lightning strike
I’ve ever seen. Not that it can’t do funny things. I saw a guy once who got his shoes blown off by a direct hit but other
than that, he was fine. But this is strange.”


“How so?” DeLuca said. He’d worked with Yutahay twenty years ago and had considered him a friend, though they’d gone separate
ways and not stayed in touch, DeLuca back east to the Boston P.D., Yutahay transferring over to the tribal authority, where
he headed up a unit of “Shadow Wolves,” so dubbed by the media for the way they could track the immigrant-smuggling “coyotes”
and narcotraficantes through the desert, preferring the early morning and twilight hours, when the low sun cast long shadows that made the tracks
stand out against the desert floor. With F-16s from the 56th Fighter Wing in Gila Bend making practice bombing runs in the
Goldwater Proving Grounds and Marines completing their desert training before heading off to the Middle East, it was a particularly
dangerous place to be an illegal immigrant. DeLuca and Yutahay had left the motel at four in the morning. After a late flight
to Phoenix and the puddle-jumper to Yuma, it had been after midnight when DeLuca checked in. He was exhausted, and yet the
desert sunrise somehow revived him.


“Usually when lightning hits a car, it runs down the outer surface to the ground. Sometimes it melts the tires or the windshield
wipers but it leaves what’s inside alone. That’s why people are safer in lightning storms staying in their cars. Sometimes
you get a side flash where the electricity runs along the surface from the car to something more grounded, like a tree or
a saguaro, maybe. These tires are fine and there’s no side flash. All the damage is inside. But like I said, you can’t always
predict what lightning is going to do. If you could, it wouldn’t be lightning.”


His hair was going gray, and he’d put on about forty pounds since DeLuca had last seen him, but other than that he was the
same, with the same dry sense of humor that DeLuca remembered. His son Marvin was a spitting image of his younger self, DeLuca
thought. Marvin had come along because, Ben said, Marvin was finally thinking of learning a trade and making an honest living
in law enforcement, instead of sneaking around digging up rocks to sell at the big gem shows in Los Angeles or Santa Fe. Marvin
was crouched next to his father, who was pointing at something under the car.


“This is her uncle’s car,” Yutahay said over his shoulder. “I wonder how she got it.”

Ben stood and crossed to where DeLuca was scrutinizing the horizon. It was beautiful rough country, and though he was happy
in Massachusetts, sometimes he still missed the desert.


“The car stopped before the rain came, anyway,” Yutahay said. “There aren’t any splatter marks under the car. The electrical
system is a mess. I can’t tell you exactly but from the sloshing, I think she had plenty of gas.”


“Can you tell what time of day? Or night?”

“The weather report said the rain started falling around eleven, so it had to be before that, but probably not much before.
The headlights were left in the on position, but she left these in the car,” he said, handing DeLuca the flashlight and the
NVGs, both Army issue. “Why would she leave these in the car if it was dark out?”


The flashlight still worked. The batteries in the NVGs had drained.

“Full moon?”

Yutahay shook his head.

“Quarter moon,” he said. “Partly overcast that night, too.”

“Maybe she thought she didn’t need them?”

Yutahay smiled.

“Indians can’t see in the dark any better than you can, David,” Yutahay said. “Maybe she was in a hurry and forgot them. The
tracks she left were of a person in a hurry. I wonder why, though? If she had car trouble, why not stay with the car?”


“Cell phones work out here?”

Yutahay shook his head.

“Maybe she saw the lights of a house?” DeLuca said.

“Nobody’s lived around here for a thousand years,” Yutahay said.

“Why not?” DeLuca asked.

“Why would they want to?” Yutahay said. “There’s nothing here. It’s too far from anything. Sometimes the Cocopah would spend
the summers up in the high country with the Pai Pai or the Kumeyaay after spring planting, near where Cheryl’s uncle keeps
his trailer, but not here. The other thing I’m curious about is the mud on her tires.”


“What about it?”

“It’s red,” Yutahay said. “I don’t know of any dirt like that around these parts.”

Under the driver’s seat, DeLuca found a book in a brown paper bag. The book was a coffee-table sized hardcover entitled Lechugilla: Jewel of the Underground, and it had been signed on the title page by the photographer, a man named Josh Truitt who’d written: “Sometimes to expand your horizons, you have to dig beneath them. Happy birthday, love, Josh and Theresa.” DeLuca showed it to Yutahay. The photographs were of exotic cave chambers, crystal formations and that sort of thing.


“Does that seem like an odd thing to bring along on a trip?” DeLuca asked his old friend.

“Maybe it was in her car before she left and she didn’t want to leave it behind when she switched cars?” Yutahay speculated.

“But she left it behind here,” DeLuca said.

“She left here in more of a hurry,” Ben Yutahay said. He showed the book to his son. “You ever hear of this place?”

Marvin Yutahay looked at the book.

“Heard of it,” he said. “It’s off limits to gem hunters. You gotta get a permit to get in.”

“Why’s that?” DeLuca asked the younger man.

“Lotta good stuff inside,” Marvin said with a shrug. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“I think I’m done here,” Ben said. “The trail leads this way. You good?”

“I’m good,” DeLuca said, throwing the book back in the car. “Hey—I could be home shoveling the driveway right now. This is
a walk in the park.”


“Actually, the park is that way,” Yutahay said, pointing toward the sun.

It was only two days earlier that DeLuca had come home from the Burlington Mall with his wife, fighting the traffic on 128,
to find a message on his answering machine: “Dave, Phil LeDoux. Listen, pack your duffle and get your ass down here ASAP.
Sorry to break up your second honeymoon, but we’ve got something we want you to handle for us. Call the SATO office at Hanscom
and have them book you on a flight to Washington tonight. Then call down to McNair and have them arrange a room for you at
the BOQ. I’ll see you in my office tomorrow morning at 0800. Say hi to Bonnie for me. Out here.”


He’d been back from Iraq for less than a month, in theory recovering from the neck injury he’d sustained when he’d been thrown
through the windshield of a Humvee. The truth was, his neck was fine, and he was bored. Bonnie had seen how eager he’d been
to get another assignment, his first as the leader of “Team Red,” a special ops counterintelligence unit that came with a
hospital bed promotion from staff sergeant to chief warrant officer 2 with a presidential waiver of warrant officer school
thrown in. It had been a mistake to let his enthusiasm show, because she’d taken it personally, despite his protestations
to the contrary.


The Army specialist driving the car that picked him up at the Fort McNair bachelor officers’ quarters was probably twenty
or so but looked fifteen in his “pickle suit,” the Army dress-green or “Class A” uniform. On the advice of LeDoux’s aide,
Captain Martin, DeLuca had worn a uniform