Fallen Angel Read online

  Fallen Angel

  Chuck Logan

  Copyright © 2013 by Chuck Logan

  Publish Green

  322 1st Avenue North, Fifth Floor

  Minneapolis, MN 55401

  612.436.3954

  www.publishgreen.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

  Cover design by James Monroe Design, LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-62652-604-4

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  For the Jos and Andreas out there flying the Kiowas and the Hawks. And for Ernie and Brian.

  Prologue

  Every once in a while a truly talented sociopath comes along who puts up normal scores on all the tests. That’s what the CIA psychologist quipped when he culled Morgon Jump out of Special Forces six years ago. And now even the old agency hands agree: Morgon’s easy smile conceals personality dynamics that can make him a real bad boy.

  So when it’s a Morgon-type situation, you don’t even want to know the details; you just watch the faint whisper creep down a basement corridor at Langley. You strap in, pass covert, and take a hard right on the far side of black. Nothing gets written down or passed via satellite, encrypted or electronic links, landline or telex, or anything except direct word of mouth. An hour after he receives the verbal order, Morgon is on his way to the nearest airport.

  Now he’s thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic flying economy on Swiss Air to keep it anonymous and sitting in an exit seat to stretch his legs. He’s on his way to Baghdad to make someone disappear.

  Morgon packs 180 pounds on a lean six-foot frame topped by slightly longish russet hair. His dry hazel eyes default to bemused detachment and reveal not a crumb of where he’s been or what he did there. He turned 39 last September. The woman he’s been seeing tells him that his face in profile reminds her of Alexander in the mosaic, charging Darius’ chariot. He has a preference for turtlenecks to cover the small but distinctive star-shaped scar on the lower right side of his neck that he picked up on a bad night in Mogadishu in 1993 as a young army Ranger.

  Morgon works the politically sensitive nether regions of the targeted kill business. Some of his jobs can take months of careful planning, or—like this one—they can pop up on the fly, compartmentalized like a Chinese box. The contact waiting at Baghdad International will provide the face, the location, and the reason. The ambiguity does not bother him. Last December a Mexican drug lord caught a 1200-yard shot from a Remington .308 at his villa outside Juarez. Earlier that year a vacationing Iranian nuclear physicist dropped on a crowded street in Karachi. That was arm’s length with a silenced .22.

  The gold Rolex on Morgon’s wrist is not a fashion statement. It’s a blood chit—a universal barter item that will bring an instant cooperative smile to the face of the most illiterate peasant in the remotest back forty in the world. The Rolex tells him he’ll land in Kuwait in six hours and then board Air Iraq for the hop into Baghdad. The Canadian passport in his pocket is issued to David Baker, a resident of Winnipeg. Occupation: security consultant. Baker has a ghost file in the DoD computer that identifies him as a subcontractor with DynCorp. He’s entering Iraq on a business visa. His return reservations are scheduled for two days out after his arrival.

  Briefly he considers the Iridium Global sat phone in his carry-on bag that is loaded with X.9 One Time Pad encryption. It’s reputed to be NSA-proof, and his handler has a matching unit back in the States. The phones are to be used only in an extreme emergency.

  Then he signals the flight attendant and asks her for a bottle of water along with a ginger ale chaser for the electrolytes, to offset dehydration. Once his drinks arrive, he switches on the reading light and opens a thumbed paperback titled Stone Work and relaxes into the author’s paean to building dry bluestone walls in New England.

  Chapter One

  Morgon is still hours away from Kuwait when captain Jessica Kraig wakes up in her sandbagged trailer at the Balad Air Base in Iraq. As she sits up and knuckles her sleep-mussed hair, there’s not much to knuckle. She wears it in a yellow-bronze crop that prompts the older women in the unit to recall Audrey Hepburn. Her dad compares it to prairie Indian Grass in the fall.

  The crop fits her head like a swim cap and complements her no-nonsense persona. She swam competition for a while in high school but gave it up for dance. The way she sees it, in swimming all that counts is winning. It doesn’t matter how you look. In dance, athleticism is a given. It’s form that counts. Jesse likes to win, but she wants to look good enough to stop your heart doing it.

  Short of winning, she believes in cutting her losses. She holds up her left hand, which is trim and tanned like the rest of her, and studies the pale circle on the third finger, where her engagement ring resided until she mailed it back . Extra Coppertone might banish the lingering white stripe. When she runs her tongue over her teeth she tastes the talcum-fine sand that sifts in through the air conditioner . So begins her 167th day in-country piloting a Black Hawk in the flight company of the North Dakota National Guard’s 4/143rd Helicopter Assault Battalion.

  Her roommate, warrant officer Laura Double Bear
, also a pilot, is already up and out taking a run before breakfast. Mornings are cold in the desert, even in April, so Jesse slept in her old, baggy U of North Dakota Fighting Sioux sweatsuit. The first thing she does is look out the window.

  The day dawns clear. A good thing. The rainy season is over, and now the dry, dusty Sharqi winds can gust to sixty miles an hour and throw up wall clouds 1,000 feet high. When the freakin’ sand is up, Balad can look like a howling red airport mall on Mars.

  The base, once home to more than 20,000 American soldiers and contractors, sprawls over six square miles on either side of what once was one of the busiest aircraft runways in the world. Now, with the drawdown, whole sections of Balad are reverting to the Iraqis or becoming desert ghost towns. The Subway remains, along with Pizza Hut, Burger King, a Starbucks, sidewalks, a giant PX stuffed with electronic goodies, endless concrete blast walls, and sporadic incoming mortars. It’s still a war, but nobody has been killed at Balad by hostile fire for a long time. A few years back this smart-ass New York Times reporter suggested the most dangerous place on the base might be one of its four huge mess halls. Troops rotating out of Balad gain an average of ten pounds.

  Jesse peels off the sweats, keeps the T-shirt, pulls on her running shorts, grabs a towel and a wash kit, exits her trailer, and heads down the duck walk to the shower for a quick scrub and shampoo. She carries her Randall survival knife, unsheathed, under her towel as a practical precaution. On her journey from being a grounded farm kid through college smart to army taut, she’s learned to keep her eyes open and her head on a swivel. Men run the military, and the stats tell her she has a one-in-five chance of being sexually assaulted. And then there’s the evil camel spider that lurks in the T-wall joint near the shower and likes to pop out and glare with its beady little eyes.

  Back in her room, Jesse dries her hair and verifies, in her locker mirror, that she has kept the mess halls at bay. At 5'7", she holds to a tidy 125 pounds. She prides herself at maxing the army PT test. No guy carried her gear at survival school. She swings a 16K kettle bell, runs in the 120-degree heat, and rates in the top two on the enlisted men’s informal hot-female-officer list.

  She reaches in her locker, removes her flight pants, and shakes them out. Bingo. A middling-sized scorpion drops to the floor. With no more compunction than flicking a june bug, she whips a magazine off the locker shelf, drops it on the critter, and stomps twice with her bare foot.

  After shaking out her tunic twice, she gets dressed, and the slim curves disappear in anonymous digital camouflage of her Nomex flight suit and desert boots.

  Jesse’s ticket out of the North Dakota wheat fields involved joining the Guard in college to do her bit, sure—but mainly she wanted the aviation schools. It turned out she liked the people, and she really liked the toys. She went to officer training and then to the helo flight school at Rucker. At 27, she’s reinvented herself as an army aviator who likes to go fast. She’d prefer to fly the Kiowa Warrior, a scout aircraft that zips around like a bumblebee with a side-mounted 50-caliber stinger. But the mission calls for her to pilot the utility UH60 Black Hawk.

  She can play it cool and demure—even bat her pale blue eyes on occasion—but when messed with, she has a short fuse. Her soon to be ex-fiancé, Terry, got a whiff of this blowback trait when he tried to talk her out of reenlisting. He wanted her to tag along with him to grad school. Now she’s flying the Hawk in Iraq, and Terry is wandering off in search of himself as an assistant English professor at the University of Iowa.

  Terry got off easy. Two weeks ago, on a night mission, some insurgents sent machine-gun fire her way. She doubled back into the tracers to verify the enemy position. Then she called a brace of Apache gunships down on their misguided hajji heads. Ground crew got to patch some holes in her Hawk, Tumbleweed Six, that night.

  She slaps her Velcro captain’s bars in place on her chest, tugs the brim of her soft cap low over her brow, leaves quarters, and strides through the battalion area, which is a tin-roofed maze of plywood, duck walks, corrugated tin huts, endless concrete blast T-walls, sandbagged trailers, and more plywood.

  As she joins a parade of soldiers headed for the mess hall, a female sergeant falls in step beside her.

  Sergeant first class Marge Bailey is of a certain age that shows in the crow’s feet ironed into the firm skin at the corners of her eyes. A spray of freckles dots her nose, and she wears her chestnut hair in a practical shag. Marge is a crew chief who sometimes flies in Jesse’s Hawk.

  “So?” Marge asks.

  Jesse thrusts her left hand in the air, fingers rigid. No ring.

  “So you did it, now what?” Marge prompts.

  “I emailed him, setting up a call time. I should be able to get a line out at the Internet café. Not as good as being there, but it’ll have to do.”

  “So you’re over him?”

  Jesse squints at the gravel crunching under her boots. “Pretty much.”

  They walk in silence for a few steps, then Marge says, “So, going forward, Captain, what are you going to do different?”

  “Well, Sergeant,” Jesse says, “the mistake I made with Terry was getting thrown by his laid-back act and figuring that his deep brown eyes could complement my, ah . . .”

  “Sharp elbows?”

  “Yeah. Turns out those soft brown eyes were, ah . . .”

  “Full of passive-aggressive spite,” the older woman suggests. Then, after another interval of silence crossing the gravel, Marge says, “Maybe it’s time to set some new ground rules for men in your life?”

  “Like, what do you suggest, Sergeant Mom?” Jesse grins.

  “Well, just my opinion, but I’d suggest a gal with your running pattern would do better with a guy raised with at least one older sister.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Jesse says.

  Right on, Marge. Terry was an only child.

  Chapter Two

  The asset, a smiling young man in slacks and a blazer, waits past customs. He is clean-shaven, his dark hair is neatly trimmed, and he introduces himself as Ahmed after he removes a photo of Morgon from his pocket and studies the likeness. Morgon takes out his photo of Ahmed and goes through the same ritual. They shake hands and greet formally.

  “Marhaba, Ahmed. Salam wa alaikum.”

  “Wa aleikum ah salam, Morgon,” Ahmed says before switching to easy Stateside English. “This way, please.”

  The two security men who accompany young Ahmed have obsidian eyes and faces the texture of orange rinds. Unsmiling, they escort Morgon from the terminal through a wall of brown heat to the parking lot, where they stop at a freshly washed and waxed Mercedes limo. Morgon notes that the car’s tires strain under the load of armor plating.

  “Unfortunately this ride will only take us halfway to where we’re going. It’ll get more hot and dusty after that,” Ahmed comments as he opens a rear door and extends his hand for Morgon to get in.

  As they climb into air conditioning and plush upholstery, Ahmed leans forward and taps the driver on the shoulder, and the car eases forward into the sultry afternoon. The security guards drive a lead Suburban. More of them follow behind in a Jeep. Heavy on the horn and accelarator, they merge into the demolition derby that connects the airport to the city. Beneath the once modern skyline, they convoy through a maze of streets beset by gridlock, uncollected garbage, rubble, and checkpoints.

  Morgon dials down the window to get a whiff of battered air that reeks of open sewage and the exhaust of thousands of generators that whir in lieu of reliable electricity. Baghdad is probably the future—the infrastucture crumbles and public order is a mere wish as the desert reclaims the outer suburbs. Then his attention retreats into the limo’s air-conditioned cocoon and leaves Baghdad’s five million souls to swelter beyond the tinted windows.

  “So fill me in,” Morgon says.

  Ahmed hands him a photocopy of a dazed man caught blinking into the camera flash. He is in his mid-forties, with askew hair and a round face in need of
a razor. Another photocopy of a Tennessee driver’s license is appended to the first. The license photo ID matches.

  “Richard Noland, from Memphis, Tennessee. He should have stayed there,” Ahmed says.

  “How’d he get famous?”

  “He’s a salvage contractor. A sheik up north subbed out a job to him, cleaning up an old oil-pumping station on land he’s developing. Noland is a hands-on guy. He was driving the backhoe that snagged on a cache of buried artillery rounds.” Ahmed smiles tightly. “Some of them were just rusty high-explosives, but most of them had these little death’s-head icons stenciled in yellow . . .” He leans forward for emphasis. “Which means they are loaded with VX nerve agent. When Noland figured out what he had, he turned into a greedy bastard and started putting out feelers to see what it was worth on the black market.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Ahmed’s dark eyes glow briefly and he purses his lips in a modest smile. “Sheer luck. This involves my family. The sheik up north who hired Noland is an uncle. We offered to put him in the hole in the ground with his find. We only have the whole Syrian Desert to work with.” The young Iraqi shrugs.. “We were told to wait for you.”