Now this one man, a former air force captain who was one level below the navy equivalent rank of Lieutenant Commander, and now a terrorist, had completely outmaneuvered her. And that missile…
She crossed the room and knelt down in front of her safe, input the twelve-digit numeric code, and opened the door, then withdrew a plastic sleeve that held her rotating codes. She sat down in front of her desk and keyed the proper code into her laptop.
The admiral raised an eyebrow at the face gazing back at her. She leaned back in her chair and put two fingers to her chin.
“Huh,” she said after a few seconds of wordless surprise.
“How is your ship, Admiral?”
“In one piece, Captain Johnson.” She shrugged. “Except for the hole in the superstructure. Your missile tore through the portside wall of the bridge, hit my chair, and got stuck in the opposite bulkhead. Had I been sitting in that chair…”
Carl shrugged. “I’ll try to do better next time.”
“Why no warhead?”
“I guess my mercs forgot to put the bomb part in that damn thing. I’m ’a have to get on ’em about that.”
“You could have destroyed my ship and crippled my entire fleet,” the admiral said. Oddly, she felt uncharacteristically chatty. It was almost as though she’d been bested in a chess match and felt obligated to give her opponent the respect he was due.
The initial nuclear explosion had been a very small yield, barely a kiloton, but radar was disrupted for hours. And that had been Johnson’s plan, she now knew. As he promised, his second missile flew undetected out of that nuclear soup and deployed the same end-of-trajectory evasions as state-of-the-art US missiles. None of her escorts’ guns or missile batteries could intercept the inbound missile. How and when he had acquired such high-end terminal guidance technology beguiled her.
“Admiral, I simply needed you to be distracted by what you thought was a couple live nukes coming down the pipe. I needed you to be on the defensive for a few minutes.”
“While you evacuated the president on what…a sub…under cover of that thick black smoke?” She nodded at the laptop. “Now I understand why the FBI and TER had such difficulty with you.”
“They underestimated my willingness to escalate. They underestimated the lengths to which I will go to save my president.” He cocked his head to the side. “My only mission, Admiral, was to save the president. Murdering thousands of American service men and women in your fleet and crippling America’s Pacific Fleet was not the mission.” He paused. “Unlike your mission.”
Suddenly, the admiral knew why he called. “You know, don’t you?”
He nodded. “My people have discovered you have a daughter whose identity you’ve kept hidden all these years. We discovered she’s married.” He dipped his head, and the admiral felt those brown eyes slicing into her brain like lasers. “To a man who is a senior member of Hollis and Grainger Koll’s staff.”
She nodded again, knowing resignation was clear in her eyes. “How did you know to look?”
“You were too driven to kill us, Admiral. You could have easily diverted your attack planes to a safe distance if you even half-believed I had a nuke. You could have saved all those pilots and brought them back around for a second run. Hell, you could have self-destructed those missiles and waited until my chopper ran out of fuel and fell into the ocean. Then you could have launched two or three hundred more missiles at us. I think that’s what a prudent flag officer would have done.
“But no.” Carl took a deep breath. “You wanted it too much. Somewhere during the past few years, your officer training, your allegiance to your country, was hijacked, co-opted somehow. You owe allegiance only to Atlas.” Carl shrugged. “Those pilots didn’t have to die, so now you have to pay for their lives, either with your daughter’s life or your own.”
The admiral nodded and then reached into her drawer and withdrew her service handgun. She laid it on the desk in front of her. “Do I have your word as an officer and gentleman that my daughter will be spared?”
“On my honor as an officer and gentleman, your daughter will be spared, Admiral.”
She felt oddly at peace. There was no need for any further explanations or discussions. She’d been discovered and would either be arrested and disgraced in a military court-martial or assassinated by the terrorist later. His current offer was far better than either of the other options.
Admiral Montmarkle picked up the gun, put it to her temple, and pulled the trigger.
Three hundred miles to the north, Carl Johnson rose from the communications desk chair in the submarine SCIF adjacent to the sub’s CIC. He looked at President Mallory and Aaron McGrath standing to the right of the desk, then at Captain Manford and Merc Three standing to the left. The five of them left little room to maneuver in the cabin.
Three was still sopping wet from being pulled from the ocean. He and the pilot had bailed from the chopper thirty seconds before the fighter missiles destroyed the helicopter. Carl learned Three had added air tanks to his flight kit in case they actually had to deploy the nuke. With air tanks strapped to their backs, they dove as deep as they could to avoid the initial gamma rays of the nuclear detonation. After a minute, they popped their life vests and floated back to the surface. Fortunately, the wind had carried the residual radiation away from them.
“Boss, you actually gave her your word?”
Carl shrugged. “There is no honor available to someone who is trying to kill the president. I will do or say anything to protect her.” He swiveled his head toward McGrath.
The TER director nodded. “I would have done exactly the same. Now, our TER analysts have identified sixteen top-level operatives associated with the Kolls, all of whom are assigned to senior government positions or corporate jobs, and your Wizard has located all of them. We also have the location of the admiral’s daughter and that woman’s husband. I have CIA wet-work teams standing by to execute on all targets simultaneously. Awaiting the commander-in-chief’s order…”
“Mr. Johnson.” Shirley Mallory stepped forward and put her hand on Carl’s arm. “Carl, you’ve done so much for the country, and for me and my daughter, after what we put you through. Would you like to finish this?”
“I would indeed.” He glanced at Merc Three. “Give the word, Three.”
Three nodded in return and spoke into the wall phone he held in his hand. “Wizard, all teams execute!”
For two minutes, Three nodded at the phone while wearing a look of intense satisfaction. Finally, he hung up and said, “All targets eliminated. Zero casualties, our teams.”
Carl touched a couple keys on the captain’s laptop, and Wizard’s face appeared on the video stream. He expected the feed to appear patchy like a cell phone video, but the sub had top-grade military comm gear. Wizard’s image was crisp in high definition and the audio made it sound like he was in the room with them.
“Alright, Wizard, let’s wrap this up, eh?”
“Copy that, Boss. McGrath’s people sent me control of a satellite over the island. Tying you in now.”
An overhead view of a small three-square-mile island appeared on the laptop. It was almost barren and had only a small airstrip and a few warehouses. Wizard had previously uncovered architectural drawings from a little-known company that had built a massive bunker-type structure buried deep inside the island. The overhead satellite verified the subterranean complex with thermal information.
“And get that reporter on standby so the world can witness this. What was her name?”
“Tying in Miss Logan too.”
Ten seconds later, the face of a man resembling Hollis Koll appeared on the monitor. For a split-second, he seemed shocked but recovered quickly. Behind him stood Hollis with his arm in a sling. Grainger opened his mouth to speak, but Carl preempted him.
“Hollis! How’s that arm?”
Hollis seemed so visibly angry he couldn’t speak, and the man’s face was turning more cherry red by the secon
d.
Grainger shook his head and said, “What does it take to kill you?”
“A smarter man than you, Grainger.”
“I suppose President Mallory isn’t dead, either.”
Carl shook his head. “She is not.”
“So what now? I suppose the president will try to extradite me from a country none too friendly to the United States.”
Carl simply glared into the camera for a few seconds. “Extradite? Pffft! It’s just you and me now, so how ’bout I just send a bomb over there and blow your ass up?”
“Good luck with that,” Koll said. “First, you have to find me.”
“Well,” Carl said. “I coated my blade with the same isotope you put in the president’s blood.”
Grainger’s face shaded, and Hollis looked at his wounded arm as if to discover the truth of Carl’s statement.
“Mmm-hmm. I know exactly where you are, and the bomb is on its way.”
A klaxon started to blare on the video as the bunker’s defense system detected the inbound missile.
Hollis exclaimed, “One missile? You launched one missile at us? We’re a hundred-fifty-feet underground, under solid concrete.”
Carl shrugged. “I don’t think that’s going to matter. Or did you already forget I still own nine more nuclear missiles?” After conferencing with the president and McGrath, it was unanimously decided they needed to make sure the Kolls’ bunker was completely destroyed. There was no room for chance, so Mallory authorized the use of an air force nuclear-tipped bunker buster, though Carl saw no benefit in disclosing that fact.
Grainger consulted someone off-camera, then banged his fists on the console in front of him.
“No, no, no! You did not launch a nuclear missile at a foreign country!?”
“Their fault for harboring a terrorist organization that tried to kill my president…three times.”
“The president would never agree—”
“I didn’t ask her permission.” Carl looked over at Merc Three. “Is Miss Logan getting this transmission and the satellite imagery?”
Three nodded. “We’re transmitting live.”
Carl shrugged and said, “Like I said, Mr. Koll, it’s just you and me now.”
Four antimissile missiles blasted away from the north and south ends of the small island and quickly closed the distance to the inbound missile. Right before intercept, though, the inbound went into a spiraling evasion maneuver and all four of the intercept missiles missed on their first attempt.
Grainger banged his fists on the console. “Carl Johnson, you mother fu—”
The inbound missile hit the island exactly over the center of the underground bunker. It burrowed deep for a fraction of a second and then the satellite feed flashed bright white for a few moments and no one spoke. The satellite optics adjusted, and a huge mushroom cloud could be seen expanding over the island.
Miss Logan’s voice could be heard on the silent channel. Her stunned face showed on the left half of the screen and a high-angle view of the mushroom cloud showed on the right.
“Oh my God! You detonated a nuclear bomb in a foreign country?”
“You think the American Terrorist cares about borders and sovereignty?” Carl said. “Nobody tries to kill my president and lives to talk about it. And I still have eight more nukes for anyone who wants to go after her again.”
Carl had insisted on broadcasting the transmission live so that the world’s nuclear powers would know the American Terrorist was responsible for the explosion, not President Mallory.
“Is President Mallory alive? Safe?”
“The president is safe in the protective care of the US military.” He shrugged at the camera. “I expect she’ll want to make an announcement as soon as she hears I exploded a nuclear weapon. But Atlas is decapitated and its senior leadership incinerated, so my war is concluded.”
Carl nodded at Merc Three, and the laptop screen went blank. He faced Mallory and McGrath. For a moment, his gaze lingered on his former nemesis, then he held out a fist.
McGrath fist-bumped him.
“We did good, Aaron.”
“We did real good.”
“Carl…” Shirley Mallory began.
For a moment, Carl thought she was going to break down in tears.
“I and my daughter, the whole country, we owe you so much.”
He smiled mischievously. “Yes, you do, Madam President.” Carl turned to the captain of the submarine. “Permission for me and my team to disembark.”
Three interrupted. “Me and the rest of the team are getting off at San Diego, then we’ll head across the border and lay low and rebuild a couple of your estates. Regroup and retool, that sort of thing. Nineteen, that’s Agent Cummings, and her family are actually in Los Angeles at the Manhattan Beach Pier waiting for you. Wizard took it upon himself to arrange for you to get off there and debrief her, then join us down in Mexico later. If that’s okay with you…”
“I could sure use a vacation.”
Carl followed the captain out and was assigned a junior lieutenant to escort him topside, where he was told they’d take an inflatable boat to the pier a mile away. On the way, he saw Lieutenant Hawkins and his two marines sitting in the enlisted galley, so he detoured.
“Lieutenant Hawkins,” he said as the marines rose and stood at attention. “At ease, Marines. I saw Corporal Inajosa. I was the last one down the hatch and just before the conning tower went under, I saw her carrying my guy. They were too far away to make it.” Carl took a deep breath and looked at each of the marines. “She could have saved herself, but she chose to try to save one of my guys and she died for it. I suppose that’s what being one of the few and the proud is all about. She died a hero, Lieutenant. I know that. You’re going to have to figure out how to live with that.”
Hawkins nodded. “I know, Captain.” He nodded, then snapped a precision military salute. His marines did the same.
Carl saluted them back.
Thirty minutes later Carl hopped out of the submarine’s inflatable boat and walked through the early morning crowd on the beach. Some folks took pictures or videos of the military inflatable. Some were pointing at the conning tower of the submarine parked offshore. He wondered if the beach crowd recognized him.
As he trudged through the sand, he picked out Lenore Cummings’s lithe figure easily. She stood with an easy confidence, and her gaze continuously roved around. When her gaze met his, it stuck, and he saw a mix of emotions cascade across her face. He waved, and she gave him a head nod.
Then he saw Lisette and froze. He knew instantly the future date of a conversation he’d promised to have with the girl was right then, at that moment. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and as he approached, she took a step back almost behind her mother. The circumstances that had thrust Carl and Lenore’s family together were resolved with the destruction of Atlas, and he knew there was absolutely no scenario where he could ever see them again. There was only one more thing to do.
He walked up to Lenore, her daughter, and her mother and knelt his right knee in the sand to appear as unthreatening as possible to the girl. “Miss Lisette,” he said.
She peeked from behind Lenore’s shoulder.
“What I did to you and your mom was unforgivable, and I will never do that to anyone ever again.”
Her eyes teared up and she nodded.
Carl stood. He felt an air of completion, but there was also an emptiness inside him he knew would never fade, a void he would never fill. That day he’d dreaded for the last eight months had arrived.
Today was the first day of the rest of his life without his son.
“Lenore, I tried to blame you for Mark’s death. And I tried to blame the others too.” He shrugged. “Fact is, he’s just gone, and it wasn’t your fault.” He tried to think of something else to say, but no words came to mind.
Carl turned and walked away, a tremendous burden of guilt lifted from his shoulders. He felt a lightness in his step
and imagined that Mark would be proud of him. He found himself smiling as he walked.
“Carl!”
He turned to find Lenore walking toward him. She walked right into him, literally colliding with him, and wrapped her arms around his neck. They hugged fiercely for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Carl. I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” he said. “So am I.”
They disengaged and she stepped back. “Is it over, Carl? I mean, really over this time?”
He nodded. “I think so. I hope so.”
“What are you going to do now? This whole week, it’s a hard act to follow.”
“I know, right?” Carl kicked some sand. “I think I’ll go back to Taos for a bit and help Rebecca rebuild her little Sanctuary. Then maybe I’ll head down to Mexico. Alfonso Reyes had some legitimate businesses down there that are now mine.”
“Well, check in on us in a while. She’s been through a lot and she’s still processing it. I know it’ll be hard for you to face her and it’ll be hard for me, but I think it might help her heal if she knows you care about her and that you’re there for her if she needs you. I mean, if you want.”
“I will.”
Lenore walked backward away from him, adding, “You know, after you get done rebuilding Rebecca’s house, you still owe me a new one since you blew up my last two.”
As she turned away, Carl hollered, “First one wasn’t my fault!”
She waved without turning, so he turned away and started walking again.
He didn’t know where.
Day One without Mark…
THE END
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Poston is the acclaimed #1 international bestselling author of several fast-paced adventure thriller novels featuring hard-edged yet vulnerable characters in “gritty page-turning” stories with “complex human interactions.” He has also received rave reviews of his Jason Peares historical western series.
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