Free War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel by James Rollins, Grant Blackwood Page B

“Told me she would be gone for a while.”
    “Did she ever tell you what she was doing out here with the locker?”
    Edith gave a small shake of her head. “I didn’t want to pry. She would often spend the night in there. I got the impression it had something to do with her work at Redstone, something that rubbed her the wrong way.”
    Hmm . . .
    “And did she ever tell you what she was working on over there?” Tucker asked.
    “Not Sandy. She knew how to keep her lips sealed and was loyal to a fault.”
    Tucker asked a few more questions, but it was obvious that Edith was as much in the dark as everyone else. Finally he asked a favor. “Whatever Sandy was working on in there looks important. In case anyone else comes sniffing around later, is there another locker we can move her stuff to temporarily?”
    Edith nodded. “There’s an empty space a few rows over.”
    Over the next half hour, Tucker got everything moved, said his good-byes to Edith and Bruce, and was back on the dark roads with Kane. As he rounded a tall hill, he could make out the glare of lights near the horizon, marking the massive complex of Redstone Arsenal. Whatever Sandy was working on, whatever rubbed her the wrong way , the answers lay out at that base. But he could not go traipsing in there himself.
    Tucker admitted a hard truth to himself.
    “I need help.”
    9:10 A . M .
    Back at their motel room, Tucker slept for four hours, grabbed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a stack of pancakes at a nearby diner, and then, armed with a jumbo cup of coffee, he settled before his laptop.
    He had one immediate goal: find someone working at Redstone who could serve as his eyes and ears on the military base. After his years in the service and multiple tours, he had accumulated a wide network of connections . It was one of the great aspects of the military: a bond of brotherhood that spanned years of time and swaths of the world. With military personnel regularly shifting posts and assignments, you eventually learned that you had a close friend—or at least a friend of a friend—on almost any base.
    After hours of dragging up files and placing a few discreet calls to distant friends, he began to worry that this search was a lost cause. He came close to calling a secure, encrypted line, one that would connect him to Ruth Harper, his contact with Sigma, a covert force connected to the Defense Department’s research and development agency. They owed him a favor or two. But he refrained from pulling out the big guns at this point, especially as he didn’t know how intimately the military was involved with Sandy’s disappearance.
    Finally, as hunger pangs began to gnaw at his belly again, he found himself staring at a military ID on the laptop’s screen, one with a familiar face smiling back at him. The man was a decade older than Tucker, with a blond crew cut, bushy eyebrows, and a ready smile.
    “Hello, Frank. Good to see you again.”
    During Tucker’s time in the Rangers, Frank Ballenger had been attached to his unit as a 98H, a communications locator/interceptor. Frank’s role at the time had been to analyze intelligence and pinpoint an enemy, allowing people like Tucker to destroy them. While he and Frank hadn’t been the most intimate of friends, they had gotten along well enough, mostly because Tucker had been curious about how the 98Hs did their job. Few shooters showed interest in the technical stuff—and to be honest, most of it went over his head. Eventually Tucker had to admit as much and summarized their relationship to Frank: you line them up, and I’ll knock them down .
    It would take Tucker another three years in the sandbox to realize how naive those words were. He found his right fist clenched on his knee and had to force his fingers to relax in order to call up Frank’s phone number on Redstone’s website. Frank was now a master sergeant, stationed at the base’s Development and Engineering Center.
    Hopefully he’ll