Black Hawk Day Rewind: An action packed spy thriller (Mark Savannah Espionage Series Book 1) Read online

  Black Hawk Day Rewind

  By

  Baibin Nighthawk & Dominick Fencer

  http://www.nighthawkandfencer.com

  http://blackhawkdayrewind.wordpress.com

  Black Hawk Day Rewind

  Copyright 2013 - 2014 by

  Baibin Nighthawk and Dominick Fencer

  ISBN: 9781301526628

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please direct them to Amazon.com. Thank you for respecting the work of these authors.

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, places, events and incidents in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as a representation of views of any department or agency of any government body.

  Adult Reading Material

  Black Hawk Day Rewind

  "Black Hawk Day Rewind is a fast paced thriller that is bound to keep you reading until the wee hours of the morning...This is a novel that will turn a boring day into a thought-provoking one." Excerpts from Review by Maria Beltran (for Readers' Favorite).

  "...an explosive novel to awaken the senses...I guarantee you will become completely lost within its pages." Excerpts from Review by Lisa Jones (for Readers' Favorite).

  "This is an impressive novel, both intense and exciting, with a level of polish that makes for an effortless read." Excerpt from Review by R.D. Hale.

  "A gripping story from start to finish, the characters come alive on the page." Excerpt from Review by Sterling Gate Books

  "Baibin Nighthawk and Dominick Fencer have put together a realistic and complex portrait of the war on terror...Black Hawk Day Rewind is intense and realistically written. Action and Adventure fans of all ages will love it." Excerpt from Review by Ray Simmons (for Readers' Favorite).

  "This novel is quick paced and keeps hitting you with mystery and intrigue as all spy novels should." Excerpt from Review by Wayne Marinovich.

  “The moment you doubt

  whether you can fly,

  you cease for ever to be

  able to do it.”

  J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906

  PART ONE

  Barnett Cooper

  1

  Barnett understood immediately. It was like a scene from a movie; a soldier knocked at the door with his hat in hand and his eyes fixed on the ground, expressionless.

  When Barnett saw his mother stagger backwards and somehow manage to sit down on a kitchen chair, he turned up the television and sank deeper into the couch. He did not want to hear where or how his father had died. He needed to get away, his heart was being overwhelmed by a sea of emotions, but then it all suddenly stopped. Ice filled his mind and his heart calmed.

  He was thirteen years old that day in 1993 when Lieutenant J.F. Bennett told his mother how his father had died a hero’s death in the Battle of Mogadishu.

  A few days later, Barnett stood at his mother’s side as his father Turner C. Cooper was awarded the Medal of Honor at the funeral. Barnett would demand that the medal be hidden away in a desk drawer; he would never want to look at it again. Seeing that medal would take him back to the one damned moment he most wanted to avoid, the moment that would remain forever frozen in his mind: he saw himself playing basketball with his friends, his mother getting her hair feathered at the hairdresser’s, while far away his father was dying in Mogadishu alone on an operation conducted under the auspices of the UN.

  Barnett would never get to talk to his father again. That was hard to accept. He would never get to work out the unresolved issues that he had with his father: he felt cheated by his father’s death.

  Before his father left for the mission, Barnett had told him that he didn’t want to go to West Point, and that he wanted to be a doctor. This had left his father greatly disappointed, and also led to some uneasiness between them.

  Barnett despised the military. Arrogant military personnel, like his father, thought they had the right not only to plan your day, but your future as well. They never let emotions get involved and expected the best from you at all times, even if you were just going down the street to buy a paper.

  His mother put up with Turner C. Cooper and gave in to all his whims, like forcing the family to vacation at the lake every year so he could fish. Barnett literally hated it, not just because the lake was boring, but because he loved animals and he could not stand to see a hooked fish struggling for life.

  Barnett had thick blond hair, which would darken gradually as he grew, highlighting the contrast between his warm and withdrawn green eyes and those of Turner who never dropped his stern and searching stare.

  Barnett used to daydream for hours on the shore of the lake, looking up at the sky and at the horizon. He liked to imagine himself flying through the air: not in an interceptor - that would have made him feel sick - but rather on a colored seaplane.

  His father did not approve of his fantasies and told him that he thought and acted like a sissy. The long periods of silence between them grew inevitably longer. Turner wanted him in his own image and likeness, but Barnett was an entirely different person and they could not have a single five-minute conversation before one of their voices began to grow louder.

  Barnett hated his father but he could not admit it. At the end of the day, he was afraid of him.

  He had lost respect for his father long ago when he had seen him come home drunk one night, accompanied by a girl who had her hand down his pants, as he squeezed her breasts and stuck his tongue in her mouth after swearing out loud.

  Turner bid the girl farewell with a slap on her ass and then demanded that his wife help him get undressed and put him to bed without uttering a word.

  Turner C. Cooper was a man made of rock and ice, he was in command of the A squadron of the Delta Force and he lost his life in Mogadishu. Three months later, Barnett asked his mother how his father had died.

  “He wasn't on board either of the two Black Hawks that were shot down,” his mother began. “He was in a Humvee with three Navy SEALs. It seems someone ambushed him; he was hit by an anti-tank rocket.”

  “Why was he there with three Navy Seals in the middle of a city under siege?” asked Barnett surprised. “He was trying to get to his Delta Team. It was supposed to be a quick raid, but instead they got caught up in real urban warfare. Hundreds of militiamen began converging on the city. They also told me that there was a problem in the coordination of operations and he was taking care of that.”

  “But why three navy Seals?” Barnett continued. Her explanation seemed vague, and it was, even for a boy of thirteen.

  “I don’t know, Barnett; I didn’t ask them. However, you know how the military are: they tell you what they want you to know, not the truth. Your father was on a special mission and he lost his life earning that medal in the drawer. It does not matter much now, we have to go on and luckily he was a prudent man. The life insurance he left us will allow us to live well enough, and you will be able to go to college and follow your dreams.”

  Even if his mother was not close to him, and often seemed superficial, she gave Barnett a sense of security and peace of mind for the future, and he was d
eeply grateful to her for this.

  2

  Barnett had decided to spend the last six months of his studies on a university exchange program. He would leave Harvard and go abroad and do fieldwork.

  Studying at Harvard was hard. The constant competition with other students and test-taking to secure a career as soon as possible was nerve wracking, but it was even harder to admit to himself, as it had been years ago, what he wanted, and what he would do as an adult.

  When Barnett had found himself faced with the decision of which path to take and what kind of man to become, he had not surrendered to the demons that tormented him, to the uneasiness he felt from the moment he woke up in the morning that only eased its grip on him during his nightly dreams. He had enrolled in Medical School.

  The presence of a domineering father, then his sudden absence, a busy mother looking for a partner she could rely on, and his own strong and introverted character, had prevented him from coming to terms with adolescence quietly and gradually. Instead he chose to immerse himself in extreme sports in order to test his limits and, above all, not to hear the silent scream of his solitude. It was as if he didn’t care about dying, and this continuous daring consumed him but frightened him to death.

  Girls were great. He loved them, but they only ever lasted a couple of months. He was kind and charming, intelligent and athletic, but he did not want to be tied down. He dumped girls suddenly, usually after one last, passionate night: it was a masterful touch to make a woman feel like a chemical pleasure dispenser.

  Barnett had no real human contacts; however, he did not consider himself ill, rather that he was surrounded by socially ordinary zombies with no qualities of their own, as if they were chimeric laboratory mice with human characteristics. He would have to understand the reasons behind this or risk sinking further into the abyss.

  Barnett was about to graduate in Psychiatry. His grade point average was higher than that of his classmates. He was a passionate biochemist and a keen observer, equipped with the right amount of cynicism to stand with one foot in the laboratory and the other in specialized facilities to study extreme clinical cases and make observations that would allow him to extrapolate behavioral trends, before moving to clinical trials of new generation molecules. In fact, he considered himself the first patient on the list.

  He would finish Medical School and get his M.D. and afterwards his PhD. He had a natural gift for science and wanted to show the world that he lived without compromise; his mother had given him the money he needed, and he would repay her in the future for allowing him the freedom to choose his own life.

  3

  “Now, not only are you licensed for visual flight, but also instrumental flight,” said the FAA examiner after having submitted Barnett to the practical tests.

  “You’re pretty smart from what I’ve seen. I saw how you reacted to the turbulence and sudden gusts of wind; it seems that you’re not afraid of anything. It was almost like you were part of the situation and the plane.

  “You managed, I don’t know how, to instantly lessen the yaws and the rolls of the plane under stress. I talked to your instructor, two emergency landings in three years due to engine failures. It doesn’t seem to have left the slightest scratch on you. If you were not a university student, I’d put your name forward as a test pilot,” he said, smiling and giving him a slap on the shoulder.

  After switching off the engine, they both took off their headphones and got out of the Cessna 172R, after performing the post-landing checks.

  Barnett’s old instructor came to meet him smiling, pleased with his student’s exam.

  “Great! What are you going to do now?” he asked. “I guess we’ll be seeing a lot less of you.”

  Barnett smiled at his teacher and nodded. He had paid for his flying lessons by working for the school as a paragliding instructor, but the three nights a week he was doing in E.R. would pay for one hour of flight every seven days.

  “I’m leaving for Argentina in a couple of weeks on a university exchange program,” he replied. “There is an innovative project on neuronal cells that I want to work on before graduating and starting on my PhD. It's very important for what I want to do.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I’ll come back here and complete my PhD,” smiled Barnett. “Don't panic, you’re not going to lose me as a customer. Six months pass by so quickly that you won’t even realize it between one bit of turbulence and the next!” Barnett said laughing. External turbulence, and even more internal turbulence, was a thing he understood well.

  4

  The Rio de la Plata, seen from above, seemed like a huge dirty funnel filled with pasta and beans, and Buenos Aires looked like a hermit crab leaning against it, with its messy, fast-growing barrios, accustomed to the chaos and dynamic melting pot that is South America.

  Barnett carefully watched the extension of the wing flaps, anticipating the typical sound of the landing gear descending; soon he would be on the ground.

  ‘What a fucking stupid idea…to develop a project on neuronal cells in Argentina. It had forced researchers to move to a country that is still struggling to get out of an economic crisis; but why?’ he thought angrily.

  Then he remembered the sensuality of the tango and imagined an Argentine woman dancing with a red rose between their teeth, and a shiver ran momentarily through his cavernous body.

  Suddenly he realized that the plane had landed and the pilot had fully opened the spoilers, so he opened the air vent, forgetting the lips clinched around a red rose.

  Barnett shared a room on the university campus with Antonio, an Argentine of Italian origin who was specializing in hematology and an enthusiastic rugby player. He was about six foot four inches tall, liked fist fights, pints of beer and his passion for women often led him to sleep away from their room at night.

  Antonio liked mature women, usually ten years older than himself. He preferred them to be married because, according to his theory, a married woman who had a crush on a single guy ten years younger than herself was not challenging. Such women were also proud of their independence, so he was not always obliged to pay the bill.

  Barnett spent his free time with Antonio on weekends. He often went home with Antonio to the South of the country to visit his parents, or Barnett took him flying. Antonio usually wanted to get his feet on the ground immediately after take-off and they’d take just a short flight around the field before landing, because Antonio’s pulse sky-rocketed from the anxiety it induced in him.

  They seldom got drunk. Like good doctors, they preferred cigarette addiction to getting drunk, disregarding lung cancer as if it were a hoax invented by a Martian whose goal was to destroy the tobacco corporations.

  Barnett did not particularly like Buenos Aires, but its troubled history, its messed up barrios teeming with noisy and multi-colored life, pierced the walls around his heart that had been in icy hibernation since his father’s death several years earlier; the momentary warmth he received from the city calmed him.

  Campus life was marked by lectures and working in the laboratory, where Barnett often spent his nights in the hope of anticipating results, of making a breakthrough and a significant contribution to the study.

  His most interesting class was with Professor Zimmermann, a neuro-psychiatrist who, along with three other well-recognized researchers, was responsible for the project on neuronal cells. They were working on a new approach to the regrowth of brain neurons, combining the transplantation of new cells with the use of a trabecular structure containing neural stimulating growth factors to support and guide the cells during regrowth.

  This therapy and strategy would enable them to overcome the problem of dead neuronal cells which limited the effectiveness of regenerated and transplanted cells.

  He was halfway through the course, and soon he would have to take an examination before a scientific committee, which would also judge his laboratory work. That would be followed by a meeting and discussion with his teacher,
whose evaluation would have a large influence on the final exams.

  5

  Jane had a perfect body. She was a natural blonde and Barnett liked to take her against the wall of the room without undressing, just pulling down his trousers, no foreplay or unnecessary fuss.

  This would be the third time in two days.

  He liked to sink his fingers into the moist heat of her sex to quickly open a passage, wasting no time. He hardly ever kissed her; his interest was concentrated between both of their thighs in a rhythm that left neither any choice in the matter; without a word, and without letting out a sigh.

  Jane didn’t even notice when he came, she was just taken off the wall and put back on her feet; then Barnett handed her panties after picking them up from the floor.

  “Do you want to come flying with me in an ultralight tomorrow, Jane?”

  While he said this, he looked at the door. He wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible. He still smelled of sex, but now he just wanted to have a cold shower and be alone.

  “Fuck you, Barnett! You slam me against the wall like I am a doormat with your head elsewhere, you come, then you turn around and ask me if I want to go flying with you. This sucks...you make me feel like a whore, except you don’t pay me. Shit!”

  Jane went away crying, slamming the door of the room without even putting on her panties under the skirt that she had never taken off, and without looking at him.

  “Fuck, fuck!” Barnett said loudly and, with a towel around his waist, went to the bathroom to shower.