The Brad West Files Read online

  BRAD WEST SPY THRILLERS

  THE

  BRAD WEST

  FILES

  FRITZ GALT

  STEVE DONALDSON

  SB

  The Brad West Files

  Chronicles of a Young Spy

  Fritz Galt and Steve Donaldson

  Destiny of the Dragon © Copyright 2018 by Fritz Galt and Steve Donaldson

  Mind Control and The Shangri-la Code Copyright © 2018 by Fritz Galt

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of these books may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the authors.

  All characters in these books are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue and opinions expressed are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Nothing is intended or should be interpreted as expressing or representing the views of any U.S. government department or agency of any government body.

  Table of Contents

  Book 1 – A Hero’s Journey

  Destiny of the Dragon

  Book 2 – A Hero’s Return

  Mind Control

  Book 3 – The Final Quest

  The Shangri-la Code

  Meet the Authors

  Book One

  A HERO’S JOURNEY

  Destiny of the Dragon

  Chapter 1

  Walls of stone will stand upstream to the west

  To hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain

  Till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.

  The mountain goddess if she is still there

  Will marvel at a world so changed.

  —Mao Zedong’s vision of

  a Three Gorges Dam

  Commander Liang Jiaxi had done it.

  Young and handsome in his white uniform, Liang stood atop the soaring new Three Gorges Dam and felt a moment of intense personal pride. He had built the “walls of stone” that Chairman Mao had envisioned. He had built the world’s largest dam.

  Not only would the enormous structure provide energy to China’s surging economy and prevent thousands of deaths from flooding each year, it would command the world’s attention as a symbol of China’s new might.

  He noted with approval that workmen had removed the last of the cranes and scaffolding. In the glow of the setting sun, the engineering marvel was a sight to behold.

  Like Liang in his dress uniform, the structure was lean and powerful. The rim of the ivory wall reached audaciously out over the river and its slender concrete ribs curved inward neatly at the bottom. But its brute strength was also evident as it abruptly stopped the raging, serpentine Yangtze River.

  He turned and began to stroll toward the river’s northern bank. With a proprietary touch, he ran a hand along the railing that was there to prevent visitors from falling fifty stories into the water. It was one long slab of concrete, and it would be nightfall before he reached the far end, more than two kilometers distant.

  This wasn’t entirely his dam. His country’s founder Sun Yatsen had dreamed of it, and Chairman Mao had written poems about the idea. Liang’s grandfather, the president of China, had approved the design. And Liang’s father had begun construction on it before his death.

  But Liang had brought about its completion. As the grandson of China’s ruling president and the star of the Three Gorges Dam, Liang was heir apparent to the chairmanship of the Communist Party and in his mind the next in line for the presidency.

  In precisely one month, he would host an opening ceremony to focus the world’s attention on China’s greatest engineering feat. He would close a floodgate that led into a diversion channel. The rapid rise in water level would allow most of the twenty-six turbines to begin generating power immediately.

  As far as he could see to the south and east, power lines were strung to distribute the electricity to China’s booming coastal cities. His country would become unstoppable, the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.

  There was only one impediment to his putting the dam online and beginning the next phase of China’s future. It was the objection of an outspoken Chinese anthropologist whom he would have imprisoned years earlier had the old guy not been the father of Liang’s fiancée.

  So what was it going to be: the marriage or the dam?

  Both, he thought with a smile.

  Stripped to his waist, young Brad West clung to the wall of an Arizona canyon. The late afternoon sun burned into the taut muscles of his tanned back and cast an orange glow against Rappel Rock, which he was attempting to scale.

  As a failing college student, he had little power and authority. How could he know that within the week, he would meet a Chinese princess, experience a strange time/space warp, and gather up his friends to try and save her country?

  Sweat rolled into his hazel eyes and he whipped his mane of light brown hair from side to side to flick it away.

  No excuses, he told himself. Rock climbing was as uncompromising as life itself. He had spent all twenty-five years of his life trusting his own counsel, not that of others.

  He reached up for the next ridge.

  High above him, a cell phone broke into the theme from Star Wars.

  What kind of dweeb would bring a cell phone on a rock climb? For the average graduate student like Brad, the roaming charges alone would be murder.

  The phone stopped ringing, and he hung suspended by his fingertips to listen.

  He recognized the nasal voice of his dorm mate Earl “Skeeter-Mosquiter” Skitowsky answering the phone. After a minute of murmured conversation, the phone snapped shut.

  “Time to go,” Earl called from above.

  “All right. Who ruined our climb?”

  “Our favorite anthropology professor,” Earl said. His round face appeared over the top of the cliff. His intense brown eyes peered above the taped rims of his sweat-smeared glasses.

  “Richter?” Brad said. “Calling us?”

  “The one and only. He said you should get a cell phone of your own.”

  “Yeah, if he bothered to pay real wages.”

  “Get a job,” Earl said.

  “Yeah, very funny. So, what’s the good news this time?” He shifted his weight from one hand to the other to relieve the stabbing pain in his fingers.

  “I’m serious. He called to tell us you’re out of a job. The university is expelling you.”

  “Expelling me.” Brad felt his heart stop. “For what?”

  “Could be anything. You’ve been in grad school too long. Haven’t produced a thesis. Can’t come up with an original idea of your own. Maybe it’s just that you’re a lousy teaching assistant.”

  Brad felt his fingers slip. “None of those are grounds for expulsion.”

  “Could’ve been all of the above. Sorry, man.”

  Academics could be so arrogant. It looked like Earl was going to earn his doctorate in anthropology while Brad ended up stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. He stared at the hard face of the metamorphic gneiss formation before him. Why hadn’t Earl waited for him to clear the cliff before passing along the bad news?

  He moved to consolidate his grip, not to climb upward but to prevent himself from falling. How was he going to face life without a doctorate? Since childhood he had tried to divine the story of mankind from the rocks in which it was preserved. Anthropology had been his passion, and teaching undergrads had become his sole means of support. He couldn’t conceive of life without teaching schedules and research expeditions. That was who he was. And without a doctorate, he amounted to nothing to himself or to the world.

  E
xpulsion. What a revolting word. He had avoided thinking or uttering it his entire career. He had pressed on with his frustrating research and ill-received critiques of others’ work until it finally drove him under. He had been moving toward complete self-annihilation for years.

  A tiny but influential part of his psyche was telling him it was time to give up. He had little reason to hang on, literally or figuratively.

  He was seized by a sudden irrational urge to let go, to enjoy a few blissful moments of freefall and then never have to struggle again.

  Then a thumping vibrated his entire being.

  Cripes, could that be the onset of a heart attack? He sucked in his breath and let it out slowly.

  “Hey,” Earl screamed from above. “Quit day-dreaming and look at that.”

  Brad glanced over his left shoulder and made out two specks silhouetted against the round ball of the sun. They were a pair of helicopters swooping south through Tucson’s Santa Cruz Valley.

  The thumping grew louder, closer.

  Why would a pair of choppers approach so fast? They were ruining his moment of suicidal contemplation.

  The crescendo grew to a high-pitched whine. He glanced up to see concern written on Earl’s face. He was either frightened, or thinking about food again.

  The pounding became a palpable mixture of sound waves and a blast of hot air on Brad’s side, then on his other side, then—

  “Hit the deck!” Brad yelled into the din.

  Above Brad, Earl knitted his dark eyebrows, then fell to the ground. A moment later, the landing gear of one helicopter sliced through the air a scant meter from his posterior.

  Dust and loose rocks danced in a maelstrom. Gravel dribbled onto Brad’s hair.

  He had picked the wrong morning to shampoo. He squeezed his eyes shut and held fast. No sooner had the huge mechanical beast passed overhead, than the second one swooped in.

  He pressed against the cliff just as the second blast pummeled him. His bare chest throbbed against the rock. The chopper hovered and its blades began to suck him away from the cliff. He felt the callused ends of his fingers slipping off the rock. The chopper inched closer, wrestling with him.

  He caught an insignia on the bird’s fuselage. It belonged to the U.S. Air Force. Were the military brats from across town there to toy with peace-minded students? How far were they going to go with this?

  The pilot was turned his way. The warped vista of the cliff reflected in the mirrored bubble of the pilot’s helmet. Suddenly he saw his life for what it was, a heroic struggle against the world.

  “Curse you, bloodthirsty butchers!”

  He was overcome by a primitive desire to survive and to make something out of his pathetic existence. Maybe he would even ask a cheerleader out on a date. He gritted his teeth and began to claw for a better handhold.

  The only available rock was several centimeters out of reach.

  With one last, desperate attempt, he lunged for it. The jagged edge bit into the palm of his hand, and he clung to it with all his might.

  Then, just as abruptly as the two choppers intruded upon his life, they twirled around and dropped into the valley below.

  Blood seeped down Brad’s wrist, but he held on.

  The sound diminished in the distance, and along with it went the air turbulence. He was left gasping, his arms stretched to their limits.

  The blood was slick and he began to slip. He kicked at the cliff in search of traction.

  Just when he thought he would have to let go, his right boot found a vertical edge. He pushed against it and changed the dynamics of gravity against his hands. With the newfound leverage, he twisted to gain another foothold higher on the left. Finally, he could relieve the pressure on his injured palm. He reached back and wiped the blood onto his jeans.

  That was close.

  What had just happened to him? He shut his eyes to play back the sequence of events. He had been minding is own business when the two choppers had singled him out to harass him. Couldn’t the air force torment some terrorists instead?

  But he had fended off the attack and won a second chance at life. A rush of adrenalin surged through him. He had to harness it and translate it into purposeful action. He would use it to complete his ascent, his first successful assault of Rappel Rock.

  “You okay down there?” came Earl’s voice.

  “Sure, if stark terror is your idea of ‘okay.’”

  Earl reappeared over the edge. His stringy, brown hair had fallen loose from a ponytail and hung in his face.

  “What in the name of Darth Vader was that all about?” Brad said. He wedged his sore hand into a narrow crack in the cliff and heaved himself upward.

  “Military drones,” Earl said. “Pretty near sheared off my hind quarters.”

  “You could afford to lose a few pounds.” Brad took a moment to catch his breath.

  “It’s not the pushin’, but the cushion,” Earl came back.

  With sharp pain stabbing at his fingers, hands, arms and shoulders, Brad wasn’t exactly in the mood for repartee. But Earl did help him take his mind off the fifty-foot drop below.

  He reached up and grabbed the next outcropping. “Just what kind of choppers were those anyway?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a Sikorsky UH-60m Black Hawk.”

  “A Sky-horsy?” Brad repeated. He dragged a toe up to the next half-inch-wide ledge and prepared to transfer his weight onto it.

  A second later, he felt a rope brush past his head and dangle against his back.

  Blood and balls. He was going to conquer that hill if it killed him. He was determined to prove himself. Not to the world. Not even to the academic community. But to himself. He would defy the odds and survive.

  He did not need Earl “Skeeter” Skitowsky, not even the lucky cheerleader he would attempt to approach that evening, to give his life meaning.

  This was his chance to prove that he could stand up to the slings and arrows—

  The black plastic frames were staring down at him. “What are you waiting for? Take the rope.”

  “Go, if you have to,” Brad said between his teeth. “I’ll stay and do this my own way, in my time.”

  “Then keep that flab moving,” Earl said. “We don’t have all day.”

  “Hold yer love handles.” Brad looked for the next ledge. “I’m working on it already.”

  A few snipes from his buddy usually helped increase his determination. But having survived a military attack on a cliff, he had all the fighting spirit he needed.

  The lead Black Hawk, the pride of the airborne Marines, skimmed daringly low over mountain ridges. The pilot in the second helicopter expertly worked the controls to test the air currents.

  Below them sprawled the large town of Tucson. Ranches and exclusive neighborhoods reached like fingers into the surrounding mountains. In the center of the valley, a grid of streets defined the city. The pattern was occasionally broken by the greenery of golf courses, the shimmer of large parking lots, the ingeniously compact suburban developments, and the deteriorating exteriors of strip malls. Two huge patches of land dominated the city: the University of Arizona with its leafy campus and the dusty air force base with its long landing strips.

  Directly ahead lay an opening in the mountains that led to a flat basin. There lay the desert, its floor punctuated by the three-pronged branches of saguaro cacti.

  Having had enough fun playing in the evening updrafts, the lead helicopter dipped into an attack profile and swooped down to the highway that led like a silver ribbon out of the city toward the Mexican border.

  For several heart-stopping seconds, the helicopter pulled down low over a truck rig. The landing gear nearly rested on top of the trailer. Then it pulled away abruptly and left the rig wobbling to regain control in the erratic gust of wind that ensued.

  A cackling laugh came over the radio. “That was nearly as fun as buzzing the two rock climbers,” the pilot said in Chinese.

  The black chop
pers aimed low between unevenly spaced cactus plants. Like a pair of fish swimming through an undersea world, they weaved a course mere meters above the former seabed.

  “Acquiring target,” the Chinese voice came over the airwaves.

  Moments later, a missile sped forward from his launcher and left a trail of white smoke behind. After a three-second flight, the projectile slammed into the truck’s trailer and blasted a hole through both sides. A blizzard of feathers spewed out the far side of the rig, followed by a flock of naked, flapping chickens. The attack was so swift that the truck barely changed course. The dummy missile flew on and eventually embedded deep in the sand.

  The pilot erupted in another laugh over the radio.

  Finally, he tilted away from the valley and began to crawl skyward. He turned and headed back north to the airbase.

  “East Wind calling Davis-Monthan Air Force Base,” he said with supreme confidence. “Request permission to land.”

  Awash in sweat, Brad finally reached the top of Rappel Rock.

  “You look like a wreck,” Earl said.

  “Thanks.” He looked down the long cliff that he had just conquered. “That’s a first for me.”

  “So you’re no longer a virgin.”

  Brad shot him a look. He didn’t need to bring that up.

  “Er, a virgin rock climber. An unemployed virgin rock climber. Hey, maybe you could make a career at this.”

  Brad stooped and began to gather his gear. It would be a long hike down the back of the mountain, especially with Earl reminding him of his lack of a love life and his abbreviated academic career. He wrapped his shirt around his hand to staunch the flow of blood, then hefted his pack onto his shoulders.

  For his part, Earl pulled his greasy hair behind his head and fastened it with a single rubber band.

  Soon they were picking their way along the ridge of the mountain. Brad massaged the grit from his unruly mass of brown hair. So Professor Richter was kicking him out of UA. What a waste his past seven years had been.