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  “Holy shit!” Macrini shouted, covering his face. Bones and McKinney turned toward Matt, who was still in his zone.

  The bomb’s detonation created a bright orange fireball that mushroomed into the sky nearly 100 meters from his position.

  “Closer to us than the shack,” Matt said to his three teammates.

  He looked at Macrini, who stared back at Matt and shook his head.

  “We were punked.”

  “Roger that,” Matt said.

  “Kill chain denied, Garrett. Return to Jalalabad for new orders.”

  Phase I: Chasing Ghosts

  Chapter 1

  Thursday, April 25, 2002, 1900 Hours (Local)

  Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines

  The one time my country asks for a head on a platter, Matt Garrett said to himself as he recalled the nightmarish scene in Pakistan. He let out a heavy sigh, watching the sun dip behind Mount Apo, just to the west of Davao City, Republic of the Philippines, on the island of Mindanao. From the freezing snow to the humid backwaters. From the epicenter to the periphery.

  I had the damn shot!

  Disappointed in himself, he shook the memory from his head and crushed a smoldering butt under the sole of his dingy work boot.

  Keeping his gaze fixed on the gray evening, he noticed a few destitute, but nonetheless workman-like, Filipinos scurry around the concrete fishing piers that abutted Davao Gulf, a horseshoe expanse of water adjacent to the Celebes Sea.

  Pulling the ratty Dodgers baseball cap down over his forehead, Matt shook off a bit of his clinging anger and discreetly strode next to a shack, watching the activities—nothing out of the ordinary. He had been cycling between Zhoushan Naval Base, China, and Davao City for over two months. Tonight, he had been given instructions in the form of a text message from his handler to meet a dockworker who would provide him information.

  A few short months after being mysteriously yanked from Pakistan while in hot pursuit of Al Qaeda senior leadership, Matt was now trying to locate a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) called Predators. They were just being put to good use in the War on Terror, and it appeared that someone had traded this technology to the Chinese for financial motivations. Either that, or the Los Alamos debacle had contributed to the satellite imagery that indicated the Predators were being built and tested near Zhoushan. He had developed a lead in China when he suddenly received a message from his handler that there was a significant find in Davao City; and so here he was. Every time I’m close, I’m moved, Matt thought to himself.

  Matt was large, a college shortstop, and looked comfortable in his cargo pants and khaki shirt. He tugged at the Dodgers baseball hat again and hid his eyes behind Oakley sunglasses.

  “Muggy,” the dockworker said to him in Tagalog.

  “Always in the evening,” Matt said in Mandarin.

  A hazy mist rolled off the bay, distorting the presence of hundreds of fishing vessels. A gull stood guard atop a pylon and flapped its wings once, as if to shiver, though the temperature was in the nineties.

  “Got any cigarettes?” the man asked, this time in Mandarin also. That was the key, he had been told.

  He turned and looked at the slight Filipino. Matt, standing over six feet, towered above the diminutive man, who was shorter than five and a half feet. The contact had black hair and brown eyes, the norm in that part of the country.

  “Sure. Here.” This time in English. Matt grabbed his rumpled pack of Camels and held it out to the source, who took two, glancing at him for approval. Matt nodded.

  “Running out of time,” Matt said. He watched the man put a cigarette between yellow teeth and strike a match. Once he had lit the cigarette, the man shook the match and tossed it on the pier. He looked in both directions, then nodded at a ship across the harbor.

  “See that tanker?”

  Matt looked past the rows of red and gray fishing ships in the direction the man had nodded. He saw several tuna rigs, then could make out a large black-and-red merchant vessel. It looked more like a container ship or an automobile carrier. He guessed the contact had mistaken it for an oil tanker.

  “What about it?”

  “Japanese. Leaves tonight. Didn’t off-load anything, but Abu Sayyaf put something on it.”

  Matt continued staring at the ship and read the name on the side: Shimpu. That name registered with him, but at the moment he couldn’t remember why.

  “What was it?” Matt asked, still staring at the ship.

  With his peripheral vision, Matt saw the guard remove the cigarette from his mouth and begin to speak. What followed happened quickly: The orange tip of the cigarette fell from the man’s hand and dropped at Matt’s shoes as his contact’s body shuddered. Instinctively, Matt pulled his Glock 26 from beneath his untucked shirt and jumped onto a floating dock running perpendicular to the pier on which they had been standing.

  As he leapt, he saw that the contact was prone on the pier and bleeding from a head wound. He also felt the hot wash of a bullet pass uncomfortably close as he ducked behind a junked generator, which he presumed was used as an auxiliary power unit for some of the ships. The generator pinged twice from gunshots. And Matt eyed a large Bangka boat with a roof, a ferry of some type, going somewhere.

  The helmsman was removing a weathered bowline from a rusty cleat about thirty meters away. There were a few passengers that he could see; mostly fishermen, probably making their way home to Babak on the eastern side of the gulf. He waited until the captain gave the boat a slight shove. As he watched the boat separate from the pier, he sprinted as if he were stealing third base against a catcher with a rifle arm, then did his best long-jump imitation, feet cycling through the air.

  He landed with a thud on the roof of the boat, which promptly gave way and dumped him on the floor, which held.

  The helmsman had put the engine into forward, and the ferry was moving slowly away from the pier.

  No more shots followed him, but he thought that the ship captain might decide to take over where his other attackers had left off. The wizened man was screaming and baring his teeth, throwing his arms up in the air. Matt understood most of what he was saying and stood, brushed himself off, and pulled five hundred dollars from his wallet.

  “Sorry about the roof. Buy a new boat,” he said in Tagalog.

  “My boat. Had for twenty-five years. New roof.”

  Clearly the man was bargaining with him, so Matt pulled two hundred dollars more from his pocket and handed it to the man but didn’t release it. The helmsman tugged on the money with a weathered hand.

  “Drop me off at the next pier up near the airport, and we’re even,” Matt said.

  The man yanked the remaining two hundred dollars from his hand and nodded.

  Much later, true to his word and the seven-hundred-dollar payment, the captain of the ship pulled into the pier normally used for fruit transshipment. Night had fallen, and Matt effortlessly leapt from the bow of the Bangka ferryboat onto the concrete pier.

  He reassured himself by patting his Glock, which had stayed firmly in his hand through the fall, and which he had quickly placed in its holster while still on the floor of the boat. He walked a kilometer to the apartment he had rented, grabbed his gear, then discreetly moved another kilometer and a half toward the airport and checked in at the nondescript Uncle Doug’s Motel.

  Matt presumed that “Uncle Doug” was Douglas MacArthur, patron saint of all things Philippine.

  He tossed his duffel on the floor, locked the door, and pulled out his satellite Blackberry.

  Check out Shimpu. Contact KIA. New location. Standing by.

  Matt sent the dispassionate note as if having contacts killed and being shot at were akin to signing an office memo or sitting in a meeting to discuss the next meeting. He removed the Baby Glock from its holster, ran his finger along the extractor, and felt the reassuring bump indicating he still had a round chambered.

  Almost immediately he received a text message from his hand
ler.

  Airport. Midnight. More to follow. Feet and knees together.

  Matt looked at his watch. It was 0200. Like I’m on a wild-goose chase, he thought, and shook his head.

  Matt forwarded the text to his personal secure e-mail account; his way of keeping a journal.

  “Feet and knees together” was paratrooper code for the way to survive a parachute landing. Matt understood that if you kept your feet and knees pressed firmly together, you stood a chance of not breaking an ankle or leg. If you reached for the ground with one foot, then all of your weight would come barreling onto one spot of one bone at the speed of gravity, usually resulting in a fracture.

  He simply typed back: Roger.

  Sitting on his twin bed with no box springs, he stared at his pistol, cycling the events of the last few hours through his mind. He snapped his head upward and whispered, “Shimpu.” Remembering the meaning of the obscure Japanese word sent a chill up his spine.

  “Divine wind,” he said to himself.

  It’s what the kamikaze pilots called themselves.

  Chapter 2

  Mindanao Island, Philippines

  Garrett had spent the day resting, doing a few push-ups, and chowing on combat rations. One thing about a parachute jump that Matt knew for certain was that you rarely landed in your intended location. Therefore, he needed to be rested and well fed in preparation for the abundance of energy required once on the ground.

  He cinched the parachute straps, tightening them against his legs and across his back. He patted the Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife he had taped beneath his cargo utility pants, then tapped his Baby Glock and visually inspected his SIG 552 Commando rifle. He felt the reassuring weight of his 9mm and 5.56mm ammunition in his outer tactical vest. All seemed to be in good order.

  What was not in good order, in Matt’s mind, was the text he had just received. A group of Filipino Rangers had just been shot down somewhere over the island of Mindanao. Matt’s handler had sent a text indicating that one C-130 was a catastrophic loss, meaning everyone was killed, while the lead airplane had some jumpers get away.

  The question he was to answer was, Were there any survivors?

  I come here looking for Predator connections, and now I’m looking for dead Filipino Rangers, Matt thought, shaking his head. It was not that the task was a nuisance; just the opposite. He knew damn well that the soldiers who had just died were fighting in the name of freedom.

  More sacrifice.

  The Casa 212 airplane bounced along the runway and lifted easily into the sky. Matt was jumping a square parachute so that he could steer it to a precision landing. He had asked the pilots to put him over the wreckage site, and he would work from there. The reported crash site was thirty kilometers east of Compostela.

  Through a map recon, Matt had selected a drop zone about a kilometer away. It was the best he could do, and even at a kilometer, he believed that the blank level-looking spot on the map was probably a banana plantation or, worse, a recently harvested sugarcane field. Either way, he stood a good chance of being impaled on a freshly cut banana tree or sugarcane stalk. Neither was a particularly good option in Matt’s view.

  Once he had silk over his head, he would flip down his night-vision goggles and steer to the best possible landing point.

  The flight from the Davao City airfield to his drop zone took about ninety minutes, even though the release point was only eighty kilometers north of Davao. Matt had asked the pilot to fly south over the water, then to circle around the island and approach the drop zone from the north, which doubled the flight route. He would be jumping from 3600 meters above ground level, which would put the airplane at about 5400 meters above sea level. The plains of Mindanao were surrounded by jagged volcanic mountains that ran parallel along the west and east coasts. The heat and rainfall had, over the course of time, spawned lush tropical rain forests on both the windward and leeward sides of the island. Matt would be jumping in the bowling alley between the two ranges, which topped out at about 4300 meters, but he would be cheating toward the eastern range, where the airplanes had last been sighted.

  As they flew, Matt used his goggles to survey the landscape. Once the pilot made the turn to fly from north to south, Matt saw the city lights out of the front right of the airplane. He was standing between the pilot and copilot seats, observing through the windscreen, and assumed the city was Compostela.

  “There,” Matt said, pointing to his left front. He saw the faintest evidence of fire. Stepping away from the cockpit, he walked over to the port personnel door, which was open, and held on to the rails of either side, leaning out of the aircraft but staying out of the slipstream.

  With his goggles, the fire was more evident. He could see the smoldering remnants of something burning. As they approached, he saw he was looking at two spots of burning wreckage.

  Seems right, he thought.

  He walked back to the cockpit, lifted his goggles, and said, “Just get me over those two hot spots. I’ll open at about a thousand AGL and find a good location. That’s where I need to be.”

  Paramount in his mind was the fact that there might be some survivors. He was jumping in with a small rucksack, which included a first-aid kit. He would be able to treat a few patients, but that was all. Unfortunately, Matt knew, a few might be all that were left from a plane crash.

  “Okay, sir, we’re over top. Anytime now,” the copilot said, leaning back and looking at Matt.

  “Roger. Thanks, guys.”

  Matt checked his gear once more, then walked off the back of the open ramp, fell forward into a swan dive as if he were going to do a belly flop, and flared his arms to stabilize his free fall.

  Initially he was unable to detect the two fires he had seen from the airplane, and as he checked his altimeter, he saw he was approaching 1100 meters above ground level. He spun once, then again. On his second spin, he saw them and adjusted his airflow to direct his fall toward the wreckage.

  At just above 350 meters, he pulled the rip cord on his parachute. It opened cleanly and he had good silk above him. The cool air offset the typically warm Philippine nights and felt good on his face.

  He retracted his goggles from their pouch, steered them to his face, and placed the harness on his head, securing it with a chin strap. The “dummy cord” flapped against his windbreaker but would prevent him from losing the goggles should they come loose.

  Through the green-shaded world of the goggles, he studied the wreckage. He saw an unpleasant sight at the southernmost airplane.

  There were hundreds of people milling around the burnt remnants, but he could determine the oblong shape of the airplane and concluded that aircraft must have been the second in the order of movement. Making a snap decision at about 200 meters before landing, Matt pulled hard and steered about a kilometer away from the southern airplane and toward the northern wreckage.

  The only obvious problem was that he couldn’t see anywhere to land.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered. He realized that talking to himself while under canopy never did much good, but thankfully he caught an updraft and rode it over a small ridge. His quick-firing mind realized that the reason there seemed to be no people near the northern fire was because the terrain was too severe. They might arrive soon enough.

  At 40 meters above ground level, he could see the fire burning, and its ambient light gave him enough visability to conclude that the only place he could land, if at all, would be in the middle of the plow field of the wreckage.

  So, his two options were to land in burning, twisted metal or a stand of twenty-meter oaks, chestnuts, and mahogany trees.

  His goggles refracted the glint of something elongated running perpendicular to his axis of descent and he realized, perhaps a bit too late, that it was the moon reflecting off water, which in those mountains could even be a waterfall.

  Just as his feet were skimming the tops of the trees, he miraculously found a clearing of sorts and toggled hard into a spiral that took him i
nto the hole. Beneath the jungle canopy, his goggles were less useful but still better than the naked eye.

  His parachute caught on something, and he swung forward. He was suspended in air, oscillating back and forth as if on a playground swing set. He had his rucksack on a seven-meter lowering line, so he pulled the quick release and heard it thud into the ground shortly after.

  Matt flipped his goggles back onto his head, removed a flashlight from his vest pocket, and shined it beneath his feet. He was a mere two meters off the ground.

  He removed his Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife from its ankle sheath, cut one riser, then grabbed above his intended cut on the remaining riser, cut it and held on with one arm. He flipped his knife into the ground, heard it stick, then let go.

  He kept his feet and knees together as he landed.

  Collecting his rucksack and knife, Matt pulled a compass from his vest, set an azimuth north, and began walking quickly to the wreckage.

  Chapter 3

  Just to move maybe a kilometer had taken him nearly an hour. Where the terrain was moderately level, it was choked with dense undergrowth. Where there was less vegetation, there seemed to be impossibly jagged and steep volcanic rocks and cliffs.

  Matt took a knee on the rock ledge that he had just ascended. His beacon had been the bright spot in the offing, like town lights reflecting off the clouds, though his goggles, when he could wear them, had differentiated the subtle nuances of the burning crash up on the face of the mountain through the triple-canopy forest.

  Finally, he put his goggles up to his eyes and saw the smoldering ruins of half a fuselage. Looking to his left, he could see the direction from which the aircraft had flown, or tumbled, and cut a wide swath of destruction. To his right it looked like the debris field continued on another fifty meters or so until a flat wall of rock had blocked any forward progress.