Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  Chase Williams arrived promptly at seven as Rivette had his right hand extended like a gun. The lance corporal lowered it to the table and folded both hands as if a teacher had just walked into class back in Los Angeles. The three soldiers looked from one to the other with alert eyes and what seemed to be sudden understanding. Then Breen and Grace both stood, as Rivette did after he saw them do it. Though it was not required for a retired officer, all three snapped out a sharp salute.

  Williams returned it, pleased to know, at least, that though he was not in uniform these three knew he had served. He had read that they knew little else about him, other than his name and former rank. That was not surprising: until a few hours ago, he was not their commander. And for all Williams knew, he would not be again.

  But you do not think that far ahead, he told himself. There was a target on the dartboard and his job—his only job—was to hit it.

  “Please be seated,” Williams said, walking over, turning around a chair in the last open slot, and sitting. He looked around.

  “No one’s here, sir,” Grace said. “Surveillance is off.”

  Williams saw the camera in a far corner and grinned. The camera was not off, exactly; a chair had been pulled beneath it and the lens had been covered with a slice of white bread crushed to the glass.

  “I like it,” he said.

  Williams looked around the table once, lingering a moment on each of the team members. Their expressions had a rugged independence but their relaxed body language suggested familiarity. That was a good start.

  “Our objective,” he said directly, “is to find and kill the man who attacked the Intrepid, Iranian captain Ahmed Salehi.”

  Williams waited a moment to let the three process that statement. They reacted according to age: Rivette smiled, Grace seemed satisfied, and Breen’s expression did not change.

  “Other than that,” Williams continued, “there are no specific directives or orders. I have, at my disposal, the combined reports of all of our intelligence services and the authority to put the team anywhere it needs to be. Beyond that, troops—we are entirely on our own.”

  “We are plausibly deniable,” Breen said.

  “That is an understatement,” Williams replied. “I will tell you that we work for the White House. So whether we succeed or fail, disavowal is a given.” He thought back to what he had just said. “You’re going to have to help me here. I’ve read your files, your biographies, your citations, your achievements—it’s all damned impressive. What I don’t know is about your training as a team. Who organized it, what kind of drilling you have done. Was it all in the field or were there psy-ops, interrogation techniques?”

  “We trained to stay out of each other’s way, sir,” Rivette said. He looked at the others. “I mean, I think that’s fair to say?”

  “Let me back that up,” Williams said. “Who did you report to?”

  “No one,” Breen told him. “We were each solicited for black ops training. We were brought here, taken to the gym or the firing range or some random room, and told to work together.”

  “On?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Breen said. “It was pretty clear from the start we were put together because we had so little overlap.”

  “We thought it was a kind of social experiment,” Grace said. “Until we were informed about the involvement of a retired four-star, we weren’t sure we were really a team—as such.”

  “Informed by whom?” Williams asked.

  “Whoever sent us the call to arms,” Breen replied. “One line, en route, who we were to meet.”

  The idea returned to Williams that this was either a supreme vote of confidence or a nothing-to-lose Hail Mary. It suddenly didn’t matter. He wanted to take these floaters, this experiment, and use it to bludgeon Captain Ahmed Salehi to death. It might not be enough to buy redemption, but he suddenly wanted very much to try. The question was where and how, and there was still no hint of an answer.

  Williams was about to ask about the team’s accommodations when they trained. He was delayed by a text. It was from his former intelligence director, Roger McCord.

  Must talk at once. Pls call.

  CHAPTER TWLEVE

  Fort Belvoir North, Virginia

  July 22, 7:17 p.m.

  “Chase, how are you? Everyone’s worried.”

  Williams had stepped outside to place the call. He had ignored the other messages and emails from former coworkers until now; McCord was obsessed with intelligence work and was the least likely to be calling about something personal. Though his personal phone was still secure, he had to remind himself that he was no longer working with any of those who had been so close to him for these past few years.

  “I’m okay,” Williams replied.

  “Are you in or out of the cold?”

  “Not free to say,” Williams told him. Which was, of course, an answer. If he were out of the intelligence game he would have said so.

  “That’s fine,” McCord said. “I am being interviewed tomorrow and unaffiliated until then. To which point, feel free to use this. You know where I was a few weeks ago. You know who I met with. He is there, Chase.”

  “Eyes on?” Williams asked.

  “Don’t know,” McCord replied. “Her email, to my personal account, was vague.”

  Williams mentally replayed everything McCord had said. The former intelligence officer had been to Cuba where he met with a physicist, Dr. Adoncia Bermejo, who helped him uncover the nuclear missiles being turned over to the Iranians and then helped him escape from the island. Salehi was last seen in San Juan. Dr. Bermejo had obviously seen or heard of him and knew what he had done.

  That tied into the Russian connection mentioned by the NYPD chief of detectives, he thought. It was in no way clear how that piece fit, but with the strong Russian role in Salehi’s last mission, a connection was certainly possible.

  “Roger, thank you,” Williams said. “Please tell the others I will be in touch when I can.”

  “They know that,” McCord told him. “Everyone is wishing you the best.”

  Williams thanked his colleague again and hung up. This was not information he could act on—there was no telling how long Salehi might be staying in Cuba—but it was also too important not to pass along.

  He called Matt Berry.

  “Go ahead,” the DCS said.

  “I just heard that the solo target is in Cuba.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Highly.”

  Berry was silent. “You want me to put that in play?”

  “Yes. See what it triggers.”

  “I can’t source it to you,” Berry said, thinking aloud.

  “I don’t care.”

  “They’ll want to know. One of your people was just down there.”

  “That’s right.”

  “His informant?”

  Williams hesitated. “An informant,” he said. “This can’t blow back on anyone.”

  “All right, I’ll finesse it,” Berry said. “Watch the files and let me know when Black Wasp needs to move.”

  “I will,” Williams told him and clicked off.

  He stood outside a moment longer, watching the last of the sun set over the base. The energies were flowing again, along with something he hadn’t felt since the earliest days of his thirty-five-year active duty career. As a lieutenant fresh from the Naval Academy, a champion lacrosse player with a love of team and action, he had relished every assignment, embraced each mission—the more dangerous the better because it challenged both of those qualities: camaraderie and physicality. Op-Center had not needed the latter even though Williams had.

  There was one thing Williams did not tell Berry. One thing that the men had not discussed—perhaps because Berry was leaving it up to him. Or maybe he had simply made an assumption that wasn’t correct.

  In either case, Williams understood how stale he had become in a field where stagnation resulted in death. He returned to the officers’ club invigorate
d and with a much clearer sense of what Black Wasp was going to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  July 22, 7:49 p.m.

  When the transfer of power occurred in just under six months, President Midkiff would miss the perks of office. He would miss being hand-carried from place to place, locally and around the globe. Deciding to vacation at his mountain cabin in the Pacific Northwest, he was whisked there. Feeling the need for spiritual uplift, he could decide to see the Israeli prime minister and fly to the Sea of Galilee, or pay a state visit to the Vatican … and privately view the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while he was there. Selfies with God and Adam. He could see any championship sporting event, any film, any sold-out concert. He could have the performers brought to the White House for a private party. Midkiff would also miss having people do things for him, from food shopping to taxes to simply remembering everything that had to be done.

  He would miss convenience but he would not miss power. He would not miss having to decide when people must die to make a point or assert a principle. Or, like now, to pay for the sins of others.

  The proposal on the table in the Oval Office was a military strike against Iran.

  “A deterrent,” Chief of Staff Evelyn Graves had just called it. National Security Advisor Trevor Harward had seconded that. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Paul Broad had agreed; he was the one who had initially proposed a military response to the attack on the Intrepid. Of course, there was more than tactics behind that. Captain Salehi had directly bloodied the nose of the military.

  Only January Dow had argued against the idea.

  “We fired first in two interconnected events,” she said in her quiet but focused way. “We took in a top-ranking asylum-seeker, Brigadier General Amir Ghasemi. And then we attacked and sank Salehi’s ship Nardis in open, international waters.”

  The voices of the other three rose at once, like a chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan.

  “They were trafficking in nuclear weapons!” Broad said, seemingly as outraged by January as by the Iranians.

  “We should aggressively sanction the Russians economically for their part in this,” Graves said. “The Chinese would back us!”

  “We ought to quit the U.N. for being the useless money siphons they’ve been,” Harward suggested.

  The president raised a hand to silence the others and preempt an aggressive response from January. Like migrating birds in the Coast Mountains, each had gone to their own default agendas in response to the crisis. He needed a moment to think and lowered his hand only after everyone had settled back.

  “Trevor, where’s the intelligence community on the terrorists?” Midkiff asked.

  Harward checked his tablet for any updates. He took longer than the president had expected.

  “This is interesting,” the national security advisor reported. “Update from Matt Berry—we have word that Salehi went to Cuba.”

  General Broad was visibly discomfited by the speaking of the terrorist’s name. The others were too busy trying to make sense of that.

  “Why would Havana be involved?” Graves said.

  “They wouldn’t do anything without a push from Moscow or their sugar-for-oil buddies in Caracas,” Harward said.

  “Where did Berry get his information?” Dow asked.

  “Confidential source at the SIGINT station in Lourdes,” Harward read.

  “Op-Center was there a few weeks ago,” Dow said, suspicion in her voice. “Is this from someone trying to put a piton in a new job?”

  “That would be a stupid risk to take if the intel weren’t one hundred percent,” Graves pointed out.

  “If these people were sharp to begin with, if they weren’t all buddy-buddy at Fourth of July cookouts, they would not have taken their eye off Salehi,” Dow shot back.

  “We don’t have to go there,” Midkiff said. “Trevor? Anything else?”

  “All of the investigating officials have checked in, are looking into the lead,” Harward told him.

  “So we wait on that,” the president said.

  He looked across his desk at the others, seated on sofas on either side of a coffee table—one that had been gifted to President Woodrow Wilson shortly before the United States entered the First World War. The devastation of that century-ago conflict, the cost in life, limb, and psyche was suddenly very present in the room.

  Midkiff sighed. “I share the same anger and frustration as everyone in this room. Nearly twenty years ago, we felt the same helplessness after the attacks of nine/eleven. But we are not now dealing with bandits, warlords, and nominally trained agents from the mountains of Afghanistan. I agree that this attack cannot go unanswered. The question is not ‘why’ but how, where, and when.” He pointed at Harward’s tablet. “The answer may lie somewhere other than in Tehran.”

  “Do you believe, Mr. President, that the Iranians had no part in this?” General Broad asked.

  “They may very well have,” Midkiff said. “Pakistan’s hands may also be dirty if, as some of you believe, this was worked with the assistance of their embassy here. Russia was behind the nuclear weapons deal—”

  “We do not know that the Kremlin was involved or even had knowledge of the action in Anadyr,” January pointed out. “It appears to have been worked by a faction of the GRU.”

  “In which case do we confront Russian intelligence?” Midkiff asked. “We were still putting all of that together before this morning and we cannot afford to create a patchwork alliance of our enemies by overreacting or striking the wrong target.” He shook his head. “I want to hit someone, General Broad. I want that very much. But we have to be sure of who.”

  “The Iranian government is a corruption,” the general said. “We saw that when they stomped, again, on their own protesting people.”

  “You can’t go wrong targeting the ayatollahs,” Harward suggested.

  “Unless by so doing you give every jihadist from Yemen to the Philippines another radical martyr to rally around,” January said with open disgust.

  “Then we go after them next,” Harward replied. “Bring them out in the open and destroy them.”

  “That is how wars are won,” Broad noted.

  “That is how wars are begun,” January fired back.

  “This one started with the Crusades—” Harward began.

  “All right,” Midkiff cut him off, firmly enough to also end the debate. “Whoever was involved peripherally or even directly, the roots of this attack are in Tehran. Salehi is Iranian. That’s proof enough.”

  “We do not know who he was working with there, whether it was officially sanctioned,” January said.

  “That’s too fine a distinction for the public to give a damn,” Midkiff said. “The nation has to answer for the act of its representative. I want options for a limited response against the Iranian military. Not the nuclear program—we don’t want to conflate old issues with new, or shine a light on the covert ops that took down the Nardis.”

  “How do we avoid that?” January asked. “Tehran will bring it up.”

  “Let them,” Harward said. “We’ll deny any involvement, work up some story that it was a row between the Russians and their arms dealers and Iran.”

  “It will look like Tehran is pulling that scenario out of its ass,” Evelyn agreed.

  “Again, except for fringe bloggers, the public won’t care,” the president said. “And if the media bothers to investigate, they’ll come up against speculation instead of evidence—and a much juicier story about how the nukes got buried in permafrost.”

  The Oval Office was silent as the president considered the matter. “General, let’s look at a state-run chemical facility somewhere outside of Tehran. We don’t want many civilian casualties. Even if it wasn’t involved, people will believe it was. And it will send a strong message to whoever did provide the chemicals.”

  “Why not wait until we find out who that actually was, Mr. President?” Ja
nuary asked.

  “We will give that some time,” Midkiff agreed, rising. “But the public won’t give us as much time as we may need. And you know as well as any of us, no one in Iran just makes disinfectant and brass polish. Mr. Harward was not wrong. Some targets get you a free pass.”

  The president dismissed the others so he could take a late dinner in the residence, though before he left he texted Matt Berry on his DOTO smartphone, a dedicated one-to-one presidential “burner.”

  Was Cuba connection from CW?

  Berry replied that it was.

  From colleague?

  Berry answered in the affirmative.

  The president signed off. He smiled at the one bright spot in the day. He was not wrong, he thought, giving Chase Williams this chance. But the smile was more than that.

  He envied any man who merited that kind of selfless loyalty.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Havana, Cuba

  July 22, 8:21 p.m.

  Other than during storms, haste was anathema to a man accustomed to the rolling majesty of sea travel. But storms occurred—rarely, but they happened. And they kept a seaman constantly vigilant, feeling a change in the swells, observing the color and humor of the skies, sensing the slightest rise or fall in the intensity, direction, even the smell of the wind, the humidity, the temperature.

  The past few weeks had been a series of small storms for Salehi, and had culminated in a big one. The difference was that he knew this one was coming and he knew how long it would last. Mentally, emotionally, and physically he had prepared for that—for a recovery from the burden of guilt and rage and for unburdened sailing on the other side. Perhaps, he had fantasized, in a nation still tossed by its own storms, by political and domestic unrest between religious and secular forces, he could be a source of unification. Not as a public person but as a reminder that the world was at war with Iran and its sovereignty.