Going Dark Read online

  Although being imprisoned in Russia probably wasn’t something he should think about right now.

  Brian noticed Ruiz kneel down and point to a mark in the ground. How the hell had he seen that at night? It looked to be a partial imprint from the heel of a boot. Maybe this wasn’t as much of a ghost town as it seemed.

  His heart pounded a little harder and the finger on the trigger of his AR-15 grew a little more twitchy.

  They stopped at a padlocked gate in the rusty fence that surrounded the place. Spivak, the teams’ breacher, came forward and pulled a pair of bolt cutters from his pack. One squeeze and they were in.

  It was almost too easy.

  Brian was the fifth man through the gate, and he fought the urge to turn back around. There was something about this place that didn’t sit right with him. Was it the spirit of the men who’d lived hopeless lives and died here under the brutal yoke of Communist Russia, or was it something else?

  They walked in a wide V with Donovan on point, heading across the yard toward the concrete building about fifty yards ahead of them that intel had identified as the former command headquarters.

  Brian was staying close to Senior Chief Baylor as he’d been instructed, when the other man suddenly held up his hand and stopped. The men behind them stopped as well, with the lieutenant commander giving the senior chief a look that was easy to read. “What the hell are we stopping for?”

  It was serious enough for Senior Chief Baylor to break the silence. In a low voice he said, “I thought I saw something. A flash in the distance.” He pointed ahead of them to the south.

  The men close enough to hear turned to look in the same direction, but Brian felt a shiver across the back of his neck and looked behind him instead.

  Shouldn’t the gate have squeaked when they opened it?

  He turned around and retraced a few steps, scanning back and forth with his gun as well as his eyes. He released the finger on the trigger long enough to reach out and touch the hinges of the gate. Even with his gloves, he could feel the unmistakable slick of oil.

  Someone had been here recently.

  What were they missing? If no one had used the road . . .

  He looked down at the ground. All those World War II documentaries he’d watched on TV might just have paid off.

  He didn’t realize the others were watching him. “What is it?” Lieutenant Commander Taylor asked.

  “This was a mining camp, right? They would have had tunnels.”

  Hitler had had miles of them.

  The senior chief swore. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  For once the lieutenant commander looked inclined to agree with him. He tried to contact the other squad using the radios, but no one responded. He cursed and then said to Miggy, “Try the phone.”

  While Ruiz tried to make contact with the sat phone, Brian was surprised to see Lieutenant Commander Taylor pull out what looked to be a small personal sat phone. Brian recalled hearing that the LC had come from big money—one of those old families back east. He guessed so.

  The lieutenant commander turned it on and tried to make a call, but it didn’t appear to be getting a signal, either. Suddenly he looked at the screen, frowned, and used his thumb to hit a button. Whatever he saw there caused his face to lose color. The intense focus and determination slipped. If a look could say “Oh fuck,” his did.

  “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  “What’s going on?” the senior chief asked.

  “For once just follow a fucking command, Baylor!”

  The LC’s loss of control seemed to even surprise the senior chief.

  “Fuck. Everything’s dead,” Ruiz said. “We’re being barrage-jammed.”

  Was it precautionary security to hide something going on here or did someone know they were here? Either way it wasn’t good. Barrage-jamming was unusual, as it knocked out a broad range of radio signals of everyone in the area.

  Lieutenant Commander Taylor didn’t seem surprised, but his expression seemed to turn even more grim. Whatever he’d seen on that phone wasn’t good.

  “I’ll go find them,” Brian volunteered.

  “I’ll go with him,” the senior chief added.

  “No one’s going anywhere,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor said angrily. “Abort,” he shouted for everyone to hear. “Now!”

  Senior Chief Baylor rounded on him in disbelief. “What do you mean? We can’t just leave them!”

  The LC seemed to snap. “It’s a trap. We’re sitting ducks. It may already be too late, but if I have a chance to save some of my men, I have a responsibility—”

  “So do I.” Before the other officer could stop him, the senior chief shot off toward the barracks.

  Instinctively Brian followed him.

  He heard Lieutenant Commander Taylor swear and shout at them to stop, but they both kept running. He saw the senior chief go wide left, obviously targeting the front of the building, but Brian saw something move in one of the windows toward the rear and went right. It looked like a light of some kind.

  He’d almost reached the door when a shout from behind stopped him in his tracks. “Get down!”

  He turned to see the senior chief running toward him. “Incoming!”

  Laser guidance. That was the light.

  “Don’t fuck up.”

  Shit. Too late.

  The world exploded in fire. White-hot pain shot up and down his body from head to toe. And then, blissfully, everything went dark.

  One

  STORNOWAY, SCOTLAND

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  Annie Henderson definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Louisiana, for that matter. Edge of the world was more like it.

  Seated in the guest house pub (or more accurately, the pub with a few rooms above it) in the small seaport village on the Isle of Lewis—at least she thought it was the Isle of Lewis, but it could be Harris, as the two islands were apparently connected—after three flights, including a harrowing, white-knuckled forty-five-minute ride from hell in a plane not much larger than a bathtub, Annie was feeling a long way from home and distinctly out of her comfort zone.

  But that was good, right? Doing something important and making a difference couldn’t be done from her living room couch by getting upset with what she saw on TV. She had to get out there. Do something.

  “It will be an adventure,” her boyfriend, Julien, had assured her. “Don’t you want to help? Do you want to see more dead dolphins and seabirds covered in oil?”

  The memories brought her up sharp. Of course she didn’t. What she’d seen on the Louisiana shoreline after the BP oil disaster had moved her so deeply it had changed her life. The wide-eyed Tulane freshman who thought she wanted to be a veterinarian had switched her major to environmental science, and after graduating pursued a PhD in marine ecology. When Annie hadn’t been studying, most of her free time was devoted to the ongoing cleanup effort and the attempt to return the local habitat to its natural state.

  She never wanted to see anything like that happen again. Which was why she was here. Although initially when Julien and his friends announced plans to go to Scotland to join a protest against North Sea Offshore Drilling’s exploratory drilling west of the Scottish Hebrides, Annie had refused. Activism wasn’t new to her, but it wasn’t like her to follow a man she’d known only a short time four thousand miles away from home to a place she’d never heard of before.

  But after Julien had shown her pictures of the white-sand beaches of Eriskay, the rocky promontories and seashores of Lewis, and the giant granite rock outposts in the open waters of the North Atlantic such as Rockall and Stac Lee near St Kilda that served as nesting places for fulmars, gannets, and other seabirds, she knew she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the vacation she’d planned to visit her mother in Key West. So she’d th