by Sean Parnell
“Well, the walking dead have no filters.” Cole grinned at him. “Don’t tell anybody I said that.” He pointed to a heavy wooden sideboard. “Black Label’s in there. Pour us a couple.”
“Yessir.” Steele got up and executed his task, extracting the liquor and pouring two tumblers, neat. He handed one to President Cole, they clinked, and Steele resumed his seat as they both took long swigs.
“I see you’re wearing a suit,” Cole said.
“Yessir. Funeral.”
“I know all about it. Condolences to all of us, for Austin, and for Raines before her. I told Rock I’d write that letter to Austin’s mom. I knew her much better than he did. You Program Alphas are like my kids, you know.”
“I know, sir.” Steele nodded. “And thanks.”
“Maybe orphan’s a better word,” said Cole. Then he set his Scotch down on his rolling meal tray and coughed deeply and with a dark liquidity for a good twenty seconds until it subsided. He took a handkerchief from his pants pocket, wiped his lips, and picked up his drink again. “Sorry, it’s in the lungs now.”
“No need to apologize, sir.”
Cole laughed. “I’m not apologizing. I’m just pissed it’s in my lungs.”
Steele laughed too, then they both got somber again.
“So,” Cole said, “Ted Lansky’s been briefing me, per instructions from the president. Guess they think my brain’s not fried just yet and I might have a couple of insights left. My guess is you’re here because the Program’s under some kind of assault. Two assassinations on a couple of our best Alphas, another attempt on you . . .”
“It’s not just that, sir. . . .”
“I know, I know.” Cole slid himself off the bed, cranked himself upright, and straightened his spine. He was clearly in pain, but he wasn’t going to verbalize it in any way, nor even let it show on his face. He walked with purpose toward the window blinds, and Steele was surprised to see him draw them open, revealing what certainly looked like a large picture window and the rolling West Virginia hills right outside, except that they were forty feet underground. “It’s digital,” Cole said as he looked out at a flock of black crows creasing the rainswept sky above the rows of green hills. “Works off a camera mounted up there on the roof. Pretty neat, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway, you’re thinking we’ve got a turncoat inside. That’s the only way this killer, or killers, could know where our operators are working, how to get to them, their real-time vulnerabilities, correct?”
Steele was actually amazed at Cole’s mental acuity, given his physical condition. Yet he still stood up from the couch and ambled toward the former president, just in case he lost his balance or suddenly had to sit down.
“That’s how it looks,” he said.
“Looks can be deceiving, you know that, Eric. What if that’s just what the opposition wants us to think? What if all that’s happened is that they’ve got some slick hackers who’ve cracked into our system and are gathering intelligence on us from our own communications? What if they simply want us to think we’ve got a bad apple? I’ll bet you’re tossing and turning at night, trying to figure out who in the family needs killing, while maybe nobody does at all. Am I right?”
It didn’t escape Steele’s notice that Cole kept using the term we, which told Steele that either he was trying to hang on to his former glories, or that he was much more endeared to the Program than he’d ever admitted before. But the thought that the former president might be right about this cat-and-mouse game both shocked him and pumped up some hope. Shock, because he knew that such unfair suspicions were how people got burned at the stake. And hope, because he wanted it to be just the way Cole was laying it out. He wanted to stop suspecting Meg, or anyone else back at Cutlass Main II.
“I sure hope you are, sir,” Steele said.
Cole turned to him from the phony window, which actually wasn’t phony at all. It was just a couple of floors lower down than it should have been.
“The other thing to consider,” Cole said, “these killings are red herrings. They’re feints designed to throw us all off from something else.”
“Something else?”
“Something worse, Eric. But I haven’t yet figured out what that is.” The former president then had another long bout of coughing, and this time Steele took his elbow and helped him return to his bed. The skin under his sweater sleeve felt like it was hanging off his fragile bones. Cole recovered again, yet he wasn’t about to surrender his bottle of Black Label, and poured himself another two fingers. Steele declined with a small wave, and figured he’d better move the conversation along before Cole no longer had the strength. He took out the challenge coin from his pocket and placed it on the food tray. Cole stared at it, then looked back up.
“I already gave you booze, son. You coining me for a beer?”
“I found it on Demo’s gravestone, sir.”
“I liked that young man. . . .”
“It had a microdot embedded in the back. I got one of our boys to decrypt it.”
“A microdot. Now that’s old school. I was never officially in the spy game, but I always liked the gadgetry and—”
“Sir, the message said ‘Cole knows.’”
The former president sipped his Scotch, looked up at Steele, and said nothing. Steele didn’t mention the map coordinates, not yet.
“Someone left it for me, sir. I suspect that it was actually Demo, by way of someone else he tasked with instructions to execute if he died.”
Cole still said nothing.
“What is it that you know, sir?” Steele asked, and now he’d put his drink on the table and was staring intently at his former commander in chief, for whom he’d soldiered on faithfully for years, without question, and to whom he’d become something of a surrogate son.
“Tell him, Denton.” It was Mrs. Cole’s voice, and it startled both of them, and Steele turned to see her standing in the door. “Tell him, hon. He deserves to know.”
Steele turned back to President Cole.
“It’s about your father, Eric,” Cole said at last. “That’s what I know.”
Chapter 21
Siberia, Russia, 1993
It was death in the tall grass.
Hank Steele knew it was going to be his death, if he didn’t move fast. The guy facing him was six and a half feet tall, a master sergeant in the elite Border Guards division of Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU. He was wearing a camouflage tunic, brown woolen pantaloons, black combat boots, a bear fur hat, leather bandoliers crisscrossing his barrel chest, and, weirdly, a maroon tie. A jet-black walrus mustache drooped over his thick lips and his eyes were like charcoal briquettes under centipede eyebrows.
The uniform didn’t intimidate Steele, nor did the AK-47 slung from the giant’s left shoulder. It was the wickedly curved Gurkha fighting knife gripped in his bare right hand. It was about the size of a farmer’s scythe, and Hank knew it wasn’t there for harvesting wild roses. The guy was going to use it to flay open the man he was hunting, who happened to be Hank.
The only thing saving Hank Steele, at least for that moment, was the fact that he was wearing a similar uniform and spoke dead fluent Russian, thanks to the JFK Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg and the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Of course, his uniform was stolen and had been supplied by a Program contact in Vladivostok, but this oversize Pogranichnya Ohrhana couldn’t know that. And there was one other environmental factor in Hank’s favor: it was October in Siberia, and this open plain near the west bank of the Lena river, halfway between Yakutsk and Tiksi, would normally have been slathered in six feet of snow by this time in autumn. But Siberia was experiencing a rare warm spell, so the bullrushes and river grass were still about seven feet high.
He could hear the rest of this guy’s search party running around out there on both flanks, along with their hunting dogs barking like banshees. But he couldn’t see them, which meant they couldn’t see him,
or his soon-to-be mortal combat partner either.
The only weapon Hank had was a knife, a Choate Tool Corp. throwing knife with a weighted double-edge blade and a rubber-coated grip. He’d already used up all the ammo for his Makarov PB 9 x 18 mm pistol, so he’d tossed it away about half a klick back. It was a nice gun, but the built-in bulky silencer gave it away as an assassination weapon, and being caught with it would be like getting nabbed by a cop in a bank vault with a stethoscope and a safecracker’s manual. He longed for his .45 caliber 1911, the one his father had used on Guadalcanal, but he’d left that at home for his nine-year-old son, Eric, just in case he never made it back. It wasn’t much of a legacy, but Hank and his beloved wife, Susan, didn’t own a mansion or a yacht. Government service was its own reward, right?
The big guy looked down at Hank and cocked his head like a Russian wolfhound, because Hank was breathing hard after his four-klick sprint from the perimeter fence of Russian Committee for State Security Technical Training Facility 722, which sounded somewhat academic, but housed a top secret camp for turning carefully selected orphaned youths, snatched up from all over the world, into robotic killers.
One of those youths had just been captured in Somalia by Delta, after leading the shabab in the murder and mutilation of a number of American troops in Mogadishu. Under interrogation he’d revealed the existence of Camp 722, and thereafter, President Clinton had ordered the Program to take care of the problem. Clinton never actually set foot in Cutlass Main and barely acknowledged its existence. He had Al Gore issue the order, which seemed etymologically appropriate to Hank.
What no one mentioned to Hank Steele—and what he only found out once inside 722—was that the “youths” in the camp weren’t even teenagers yet. They were all children, some of them not yet nine years old, the age of his own son.
The Border Guard was asking Hank to see his identification card, since he obviously knew that this stranger wasn’t part of his platoon. Hank smiled and said, “Konyeshna, tovarich.” Of course, comrade. And while he reached inside his tunic with his left hand, he drew the Choate from his right-hand boot and in one fluid motion whipped it ten feet through the air and into the giant’s throat.
The giant’s eyes bugged out and he arched his back. A gush of blood frothed from his open mouth. Then he gripped the knife by its black handle, yanked it out of the torn flesh below his plum-size Adam’s apple, tossed it into the grass, and charged at Hank.
Hank turned and took off, with the staggering giant’s boots pounding the red earth behind him and the sound of the Gurkha blade whipping the air. Hank opened the distance until he sensed a gap between them of about twenty feet, slammed on the brakes, spun around, and charged right back at the gurgling Border Guard. It was like two locomotives bearing down on each other head-on, except that Hank then “slid into home,” hard on his ass, with his right boot cranked to the left so he took out the giant’s front ankle, and the big man crashed forward and down onto him like the steel drop-ramp of an Armored Personnel Carrier.
Hank snap rolled to the right and the giant slammed onto the ground face-first, and before he could shake it off and elbow himself up again, Hank had spun left and mounted his back. He jammed his right knee into the man’s cervical C7, dove forward, looped his right forearm under his throat, gripped his own right wrist with his left hand on the other side, and hauled back as hard as he could, snapping the giant’s neck.
The move might have won him a martial arts tournament medallion somewhere, except that nobody saw it.
There were shouts now in the tall grass coming from maybe a hundred meters away, back in the direction of Camp 722, but they were moving Hank’s way, and he heard a rank and a name and knew they were calling out to his “dance partner.” His only chance now was to get to the river and if God and the luck that had always saved his ass before were on duty today, then Dmitry would be there with the boat and they might actually make it. But he had to move fast.
He rolled off the corpse and immediately thought to search in the grass for his throwing knife, then realized he couldn’t fight off an entire platoon of GRU with a steel toothpick. So instead, he dragged the AK-47 out from under the dead guard by its strap. It only had one curved magazine in the well—thirty rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm, unless the Russians also didn’t like overpressuring magazine springs, in which case, it would be only twenty-nine rounds.
You’re actually doing ballistic analyses now, numb nuts? Hank chastised himself, then tried to turn the giant over to search him for more ammo, but the deadweight was like a damned Volkswagen. He knew he was out of time, leaped to his feet, and took off for the river.
He’d studied topical maps and stereoscopic U-2 surveillance photographs of the target area for a full month before being inserted into Vladivostok. He knew exactly where the river was.
It was too damned far.
Hank ran for his life, through the tall grass that whipped at his face and sliced the skin of his hands and neck like the elephant grass that always cut you up on the drop zones in southern Taiwan and Thailand. He didn’t have a compass, or enough time to use one anyway, but it was late in the day and he’d seen the ice ball sun sinking over the camp at his six o’clock behind him, so he kept on pounding east, always east, hoping he’d just run right off a cliff and wind up cannonballing into the Lena.
Didn’t happen. They were gaining on him. He didn’t know exactly how many, but they were directly behind and also on both rear flanks, and their dogs were straining and barking. He had no idea why the GRUs didn’t just cut the beasts loose and let them rip him to shreds, but he figured that would come soon enough. His lungs were on fire, his heart slamming in his throat, and he tossed his fur hat away and breech-checked the AK as he ran.
You hesitated, Steele, and now you’re screwed.
It was no time for some pitiable after-action analysis, but he’d always been a self-critical type, something he’d honed while in 5th Group, and then Delta.
You should’ve just executed the mission and taken out as many of those kids as possible, then exfilled nice and quiet, and this would’ve been a cakewalk instead of a friggin’ fiasco. But you had to be Mr. Morality, didn’t you? Did you actually think you could cut them loose and they’d follow you like some Pied Piper? Moron. Susan’s gonna be pissed.
Then the gunfire started. He knew it was coming, but the bangs of multiple AK-47s firing at him on the run jolted his system. Kalashnikovs were always loud, but the hardpack landscape and thick clouds above were doubling their kettle drum echoes, and the heavy Russian rounds were cutting down shafts of grass on either side of his sprint. His spine hunched, nerves prepping for the inevitable punch, and another unwelcome sentimental thought flashed through his mind.
Is Eric ever going to know what happened to his dad? I love you, son.
He burst out of the grass into a wide clearing. It was the west bank of the Lena river, and it ran all the way north and south as far as the eye could see, a plain of much shorter grass and moss-covered boulders, and it was beautiful as hell. The rushing river slewed northward in a wide silver S, and the bank on the far side was steep and clear with nothing on top but more scattered rocks and scrub. A couple of AK rounds whacked into a boulder to his right and went careening up into the air, and he ran to the lip of the ten-foot-high bank.
There was Dmitry’s boat, right below him, wallowing in the cold river water.
It was upside down.
It was on fire.
Jesus.
Hank spun around, threw himself down behind a boulder, flicked the AK’s safety to full auto, and opened fire into the tall grass. He wasn’t trying to spot proper targets and make every round count, he just needed to buy enough time to make it across the river, so he swept the barrel from left to right and let loose. At a rate of fire of six hundred rounds per minute, he emptied the entire magazine in three seconds, but he heard shouts and saw the tops of bullrushes whipping as his pursuers stopped firing and hurled themselves at the gro
und, and he left the AK where it was, pouring spent smoke like a steel cigar, and he got up, spun around again, tore off his tunic on the run, and launched himself off the edge of the cliff bank.
It was like jumping into an arctic bathtub. He came up sputtering and starting clawing his way to the far bank, hand over hand like Mark Spitz on speed. He heard his GRU pursuers behind him reaching the bank from which he’d just jumped, but they were shouting epithets instead of firing, maybe even laughing, and he had no idea why but he wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth.
He reached the shallows on the far bank, burst out of the river, and started scrambling up through the sticky black mud of the low cliff above. Then he heard the rumbling engine and stopped.
A Russian six-wheeled BTR Armored Personnel Carrier was poking its snout down at him, with its Snoopy-helmeted commander grinning from the open hatch, behind a locked and cocked RPD light machine gun. And just arriving on either side of the frog-nosed APC was another platoon of GRU Border Guards, all aiming enough firepower down at him to leave nothing but his boots.
Hank Steele raised his hands in surrender.
He didn’t know what was going to happen to him next, but one thing he was sure about.
He wasn’t going home.
Chapter 22
Green Bank Medical Facility, West Virginia
Eric Steele’s breaths were rapid and shallow, but that wasn’t because of any actual physical strain. They were in sympathy with what he imagined his father had gone through out there on the Siberian wastes. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d experienced himself on multiple occasions, except that he’d always made it, escaped by the skin of his teeth.
But Hank Steele hadn’t made it. And this was the first time in his life that Eric had heard this tale of lionhearted courage, and he was filled with cross-firing emotions.
He sat there on the couch in the hospital’s presidential suite, unable to move or speak. Mrs. Cole was next to him, her slim, pale hand resting on his forearm and squeezing it slightly, as if she were comforting a child after imparting sorrowful news. Former president Cole had somehow mustered his strength again, refilled his own tumbler, and climbed off the bed. He’d wandered back over to the faux window, where he was standing and gazing out at the rainstorm whipping the West Virginia mountains, two floors up and miles away.
