The Smuggler's Chase: A Chase Fulton Novel (Chase Fulton Novels Book 16)
THE SMUGGLER’S CHASE
CHASE FULTON NOVEL #16
CAP DANIELS
** USA **
Also by Cap Daniels
The Chase Fulton Novels Series
Book One: The Opening Chase
Book Two: The Broken Chase
Book Three: The Stronger Chase
Book Four: The Unending Chase
Book Five: The Distant Chase
Book Six: The Entangled Chase
Book Seven: The Devil’s Chase
Book Eight: The Angel’s Chase
Book Nine: The Forgotten Chase
Book Ten: The Emerald Chase
Book Eleven: The Polar Chase
Book Twelve: The Burning Chase
Book Thirteen: The Poison Chase
Book Fourteen: The Bitter Chase
Book Fifteen: The Blind Chase
Book Sixteen: The Smuggler’s Chase
Book Seventeen: The Hollow Chase (Spring 2022)
The Avenging Angel – Seven Deadly Sins Series
Book One: The Russian’s Pride
Book Two: The Russian’s Greed
Book Three: The Russian’s Gluttony
Book Four: The Russian’s Lust (Summer 2022)
Stand-alone Novels
We Were Brave
Novellas
The Chase Is On
I Am Gypsy
The Smuggler’s Chase
Chase Fulton Novel #16
Cap Daniels
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, historical events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Although many locations such as marinas, airports, hotels, restaurants, etc. used in this work actually exist, they are used fictitiously and may have been relocated, exaggerated, or otherwise modified by creative license for the purpose of this work. Although many characters are based on personalities, physical attributes, skills, or intellect of actual individuals, all of the characters in this work are products of the author’s imagination.
Published by:
** USA **
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
13 Digit ISBN: 978-1-951021-30-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953390
Copyright ©2022 Cap Daniels – All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: German Creative
Printed in the United States of America
The Smuggler’s Chase
CAP DANIELS
Chapter 1
The Shots Unfired
Autumn 2004
Sometimes, the battles in which no shots are fired, no swords are drawn, and no punches are thrown are the most terrifying and destructive of all.
My name is Chase Daniel Fulton, and I had just stepped through the door of the jump plane from an altitude far too high for my lungs to glean enough oxygen from the atmosphere to sustain my life. I would pull the ripcord, or at least try, as I plummeted toward destiny—if I lived long enough to do so—but I had little faith in the parachute that should promise a gentle landing far below. Everything about my plunge left me feeling as if I should’ve never stepped out of the door while flying so high. The fall wouldn’t kill me, but my imminent collision with the world below would be impossible to survive.
I was trained by some of the finest covert operatives on the planet to not only survive, but also fight and win inside the torrent of combat in which everything and everyone existed with singular purpose: to annihilate me and leave me as nothing more than a demolished, hollow shell of the warrior I had once been. On those conventional battlefields, I had few equals and likely no superiors. My mind was honed to razor-sharp precision, and my body was hardened in the sinister forges of war and tempered in the oils of love for the only remaining bastion of freedom on Earth. But that bastion, America, the nation I treasured beyond life itself, had finally asked more of me than I was capable of sacrificing.
Duplicity often leaves a man dangling helplessly between two worlds. In my case, those two worlds were my responsibility to my country and my commitment to Penny Thomas Fulton, my wife who I loved more than words could capture.
Penny had dreamed of life as a screenwriter since her stage debut in fourth grade as tree number two in the play written by her elementary school music teacher. My beautiful North Texas wife had apparently made a terrible tree but fell in love with the idea of creating a story and having others bring it to life. That dream had finally come true some twenty years later when a Nashville talent agent sold Penny’s first screenplay to a Hollywood producer. The producer hired a director, and the director hired a cast and crew. A year later, the unfinished screenplay Penny showed me the night we met aboard a sailboat in Charleston, South Carolina, had flourished and grown into a feature film, and its prescreening was scheduled for Saturday, October 9th, 2004, just three short days away. On more than one occasion, I’d committed by promise, vow, and oath that nothing could keep me from sitting beside my wife the first time her movie touched a silver screen. I had meant those words as solemnly as any man could. However, a telephone call no one could’ve ever foreseen or imagined possible changed my life, and potentially, my marriage . . . forever.
John Woodford, the United States ambassador to The Bahamas had pulled invisible strings to extricate me from a particularly hairy situation involving two dead bodies tied beneath Aegis, my 50-foot sailing catamaran, on Eleuthera only weeks before. Believing I’d never hear from him again, I pressed the telephone to my ear as I sat on the back gallery of Bonaventure Plantation, my ancestral home on the North River, in the quiet, peaceful, southern town of St. Marys, Georgia.
When I ended the call, the pain I saw in Penny’s eyes was the most agonizing blow I’d ever endured. She stood from her chair, turned her back on me, and disappeared deep inside both herself and our home. Every fiber of my being cried out to pursue her and make her understand the gravity of the dire situation into which I’d been thrust.
Accepting the reality of the immeasurable failure such an endeavor would become, I turned, instead, to the only other mistress who’d ever quieted the screaming madness a world such as mine invariably emitted.
My hangar door slid open on its well-oiled tracks, allowing the midday sun to penetrate the cavernous space within. The glistening, elegant curve of Penny’s Secret, my North American P-51D Mustang, revealed herself as I stood in awe of the warbird of a bygone era when men faced men and fought toe to toe. Those days are gone, replaced by the technology and unthinkable cruelty of battles beyond horizons in electronic worlds capable of destroying what humanity remained in our world.
I counted seven passes of the propeller blades before the twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engine belched fire and smoke as the dragon awoke from her slumber. The sound that engine produced carved terror into the hearts and minds of the Germans in 1944 and instilled pride and confidence beyond measure in the men who strapped themselves into the Mustangs over England, France, and Germany sixty years prior. No sound or feeling came close to those of the supercharged Merlin engine on the nose of the Mustang.
The wheels left the bitterness of Earth and found their way into the gear wells on the belly of the beast as both speed and altitude increased, leaving modernity and her trappings well astern. Flying the Mustang required solitary focus, making it impossible for my mind to wander. Though obedient, she was far from placid, instantly executing the commands of my mind, hands, and feet. I pulled the nose through sixty degrees and let the massive blades of the gnawing prop bite into the cool afternoon air. She climbed like a homesick angel until gravity overcame horsepower, and the propeller, once again, faced the Earth. Instead of grass and trees and asphalt and homes, though, the planet was liquid, blue, and endless when it filled my windshield. The unforgiving North Atlantic stretched out beneath me to the limits of three horizons, freeing my tortured mind and heart from the prison of my own creation back on the ground.
Sixty minutes passed like fleeting seconds, and I surrendered myself and my beloved flying machine back to the asphalt and steel of Saint Marys Airport and the hangar that housed not only my magic flying carpets, but also, too often, my soul. I’d spent countless hours inside the steel walls of the hangar doing everything from absolutely nothing to complex mission planning that, sometimes, held limitless lives in the balance. I felt as whole and at home in that hangar as I felt anywhere else.
The burden of an irrefusable mission balanced against the thought of betraying my promise to Penny and left me torn and fraught with thoughts that would’ve been unthinkable before that day. I climbed the wooden stairs to the office overlooking the hangar floor, where I believed I could sit, pray, think, and reach decisions I never wanted to make.
My office, thirty feet above the deck of the hangar, was anything but plush, although the chair behind the ancient desk was more comfortable than any chair I’d ever filled. That’s where I practiced the art in which I’d been trained at the University of Georgia a decade before. I made no effort to impart my craft onto others, but psychoanalyzing myself had become a full-time career.
I pulled open the bottom draw
er and lifted a bottle of Gentleman Jack single-barrel Tennessee sipping whiskey. Three fingers of the honey-colored spirit in my favorite tumbler laid the groundwork for my psychological practice that afternoon. As I replaced the bottle and closed the drawer, the lap drawer slipped from its aged track and fell to the floor, sending pens, paperclips, batteries, and various detritus bouncing in every direction. Fighting off my desire to curse and stomp the debris, I patiently leaned down and collected the junk. Still resting inside what remained of the lap drawer was a miniature tape recorder containing a single microcassette I’d long forgotten.
I pressed the play button, only to discover depleted batteries. It took longer than it should have, but I finally gathered the two required batteries from the heap of otherwise worthless stuff and shoved them into the spring-loaded plastic case. The speaker the size of a quarter crackled until it produced the tinny sound of the voice of the president of the United States recorded during a telephone call a year earlier. When I remembered what waited on the opposite side of the tape, I yanked it from the player and flipped it over. It seemed to take an eternity for the tape to rewind, but when it finally clicked to a stop, my trembling fingers could barely manage to press the play button.
With the herculean task accomplished, the small speaker came to life with the unmistakable, heavily Russian-accented voice of Anya Burinkova.
“My Chasechka . . . I believe day will come and you will find—I do not know English word for device—is rekorder in Russian. Maybe is same for English. I will be gone from your life when this finding happens, but is for you only to listen.”
Chapter 2
The Second Dagger
I pressed the button to stop the playback and sat in silence, staring down at the recorder. The whiskey in the tumbler a foot away didn’t hold any solutions, and the millions of dollars worth of airplanes just beyond my plexiglass window couldn’t help me. One of the voices inside my head roared for me to play the tape while another beseeched me to light it on fire and watch it burn. No matter what was on the rest of the tape, I couldn’t come up with any good that could come from hearing it, but the same voice asked, “What harm can come from hearing a simple message recorded years ago?”
Anya had been a part of my life I would’ve undone if it were possible. She’d stalked, tracked, and finally caught me during, and immediately following, my first real assignment. Ours had been a relationship filled with lies, deceit, and ultimate pain. Her physical beauty was undeniable, but the monster behind the mask of allure terrified and repulsed me. I’d once been in love with the person I wanted to believe lived inside that irresistible shell, but time revealed that person was purely a creation of my own design. I had long since moved on and found the magnificent, truly good woman I both needed and wanted. I no longer wrestled with the ghost of Anya Burinkova. She was little more than a lesson and a memory the world gave me when I was young, naïve, and vulnerable. Having spent nearly a decade facing some of the worst monsters society could produce, I was no longer young, naïve, nor vulnerable, especially when it came to the former Russian assassin who nearly destroyed the man I was destined to become.
The decision was made. I didn’t care what was on the rest of the tape. It would change nothing, so I scooped the recorder from my desk and tossed it—tape, new batteries, and all—directly into the metal trashcan at my feet. Before the device hit the bottom, my tumbler was in my hand and headed for my lips when the forces of the natural world aligned against me.
The collision with the inside of the bin somehow pressed the play button, and Anya’s voice blared, amplified by the acoustic geometry of the empty can. The whiskey continued its course to my mouth, and masochistic curiosity kept me from digging the recorder from the trash and crushing it beneath my heel.
“Is difficult for me to say to you everything, but this is best way for me. I once believed I knew everything about you, and perhaps this was true before night in Saint Thomas. This is first time we touched each other, but I saw you many times before this, and I think also you saw me. Of course, I touched you many times while you slept inside boat, but you did not know I was there. I feel bad for this and also for cutting your tongue when you would not give to me answers I needed. I need for you to know I was not going to kill you inside water. I was only trying to weaken you so we could talk. This is when you shot me and left me without toe. I think many times at night before falling asleep, maybe it would have been better if you had killed me that night instead of only shooting foot. I could have never hurt you if you had done this.”
I listened intently, surprised by her admissions, but unchanged in my resolve for her to be only a memory. My life without her, though still often chaotic, was better than it would’ve ever been with her.
I swallowed another mouthful of whiskey and listened as she continued.
“So much has now changed since night you shot me—so many good things for you, and for me also many changes. My heart is happy for you because you now have love of beautiful woman who is wife and is kind to you. You are also kind man, and this means for her she is happy, also. I must now tell to you something that is strange and impossible, but also many nights when I am falling asleep I dream of maybe being her. She will never see and do horrible things I have seen and done. This means she can sleep with peace inside heart when I cannot. I am envious of this peace, but also I am envious because you give to her love I will never feel from anyone. This is good and how everything inside marriage should be. I want to say this is lucky for you and for her, but this is, I think, not true. Is not luck. Is something more than this, but I do not know word.”
My tumbler required refilling, so, out came the bottle as Anya continued.
“There is one more thing you must know. When you came for me in Russian Black Dolphin Prison, this was wonderful day for me. You and others risked life to bring me back to freedom outside of prison, and you wanted nothing in return. You gave to me on that day and night something so beautiful and perfect it is impossible for me to thank you, even if I could say it a thousand times. This is reason for message. I do not know how to say to you this thing. Maybe is better if I do not. I think maybe is best if only I say . . .”
The office door swung inward, and I looked up to see Penny standing in the door way, staring toward me as Anya said, “Because of this, our lives will forever be connected, and even if you do not believe is true, I will forever love you, my Chasechka.”
Hearing those words, Penny slowly lowered her gaze to the floor, stepped back outside, and closed the door.
I leapt to my feet and rounded the desk to give chase, but by the time I reached the landing outside the door, Penny was already crossing the hangar floor thirty feet below.
“Penny! Wait!” Bounding down the stairs, I caught her before she reached the exit door. “Penny, listen to me . . .”
She spun to face me with tears tracing their way down her perfect face. “Listen? Is that really what you want me to do? I’ve been listening, and let me tell you what I heard. First, you get an assignment that can’t be put off three days before the most important day of my life. No one else on Earth is good enough to go save the world. It’s up to you. You’re the only one . . . like you’re Superman or something.”
I reached for her, but she pulled away.
“Oh, no! I’m not finished. After you take this assignment, what do I hear next? Would you like to guess?”
She paused, but I stood in silence.
Wiping away the tears, she said, “I heard your airplane. The airplane with my picture and my name on it, Chase. I heard you playing with your million-dollar toy, but none of that can top what I heard up there.” She pointed toward the elevated office. “I saw you getting drunk and listening to your beloved little Russian, who you apparently can’t live without, telling you how much she’ll always love you.” She landed her hands on her hips. “What else do you have to say that you so badly want me to hear, huh?”
I reached out to take her hands, but she took a step backward and smiled.
“You want to hear something funny, Chase? I’m not mad. Getting mad at this point wouldn’t accomplish anything. What I am is awakened—awakened to the reality of where I really fit in your world.” She started counting with her fingers. “One, your work. Two, your airplanes. Three, your whiskey. And four, your Russian.” She paused and held up five fingers. “Fifth, Chase. Fifth place. That’s where I stand. And that’s not how successful marriages work.”