Love Is for Tomorrow

by Michael Karner

  The passenger cabin contained the typical cream leather luxury of private jets except for the high tech consoles lining the back wall.

  Antoine and Smith shook hands before sitting down.

  “Don’t think I asked for cancelling your holidays,” Smith said with a crooked smile.

  “I know you’re a lone wolf, Smith,” Antoine replied.

  A small case stowed under Antoine’s seat contained his mission gear. The engines started, becoming a constant background thrum.

  Marlene drew his attention with a tray of small aperitifs.

  “Anything to drink or a light snack for you, gentlemen?”

  “Give me a Coffee, black please,” Antoine said.

  Alcohol would only dull his senses. The same went for sugar. Caffeine, however, had the opposite effect.

  “I’m starving by the way,” Smith said.

  Marlene went to the back of the airplane and opened the mini-bar.

  “Do you know what Jason was doing?” Antoine asked Smith.

  Marlene presented them with a cart to choose from.

  “He was infiltrating a Syrian Khorasan terrorist cell at a weapon handover site.” Smith scooped some oysters onto his plate and said, “Here’s a recording of comms traffic.”

  Smith played an audio file while they ate. Static, crackle and audio distortions overlaid what must have been Jason’s voice. “The MI6 got compromised. There are dead bodies everywhere. I’m going in hot. Heading to extraction point Charlie. Ditching all comms.” More static filled the channel.

  Smith pressed stop. He leaned back and exhaled.

  “That’s the last thing we heard.”

  “Then it’s just what we feared,” Antoine said.

  He turned to the console of electronics and put in the earpiece lying at one of the workstations.

  The agency’s logo lit up the screen. He entered his credentials. A world map flashed across showing the location of all hotspots and agency assets.

  Simulations and military strengths played before Antoine’s eyes. A lot had changed in the few days he had been off the radar. The world was a powder keg and one spark would be enough for it to blow. Frontlines and borders were now blurred.

  He didn’t know what Jason was onto, but he would bet it was a radiological weapon, a “dirty bomb”.

  They would need the right tools to take on an enemy with such potential for destruction.

  There was an incoming message on the web-portal from his colleague, Priya Patel. Her face appeared on the screen.

  “Take a look under your seat. Early Christmas gift from Usman.”

  Antoine reached down and opened the casket.

  All the gear was ready, special glasses and a quadrocopter drone, stored neatly in foam padding.

  “Time to get back into the zone,” Priya told him. “Your mission is to find and retrieve Jason. I will be your eyes and ears. Welcome back to the real world Antoine.”

  He dismissed her by closing the laptop.

  “For this one we might already be too late,” he said to himself.

  The plane touched down in Hatay still covered in night.

  Being on missions changed him. It let Antoine know what he was made of: resilience. They tried to bury me before. They didn’t know I was a seed.

  Priya’s voice in his earpiece was a small comfort, but he was the one out there with his sniper friend.

  The border town appeared in a dusty valley of rocks and dry vegetation. An amalgamation of rusty barriers and run-down buildings lay in ruins.

  Smith chose an unlit side road to ditch their vehicle and continue on foot.

  Something was wrong. It was unusual for a town to be so dark.

  Antoine got out of the SUV. The asphalt was broken. The building he came to find was gone.

  He exchanged glances with Smith.

  “Time to wear the big boy pants,” Antoine said.

  Taking their backpacks off, they used the cover of a dark alley to lay off their civilian clothes. Antoine knelt down and took out his tactical suit and display. He sent the drone into the air. Its rotors buzzed like an insect until it lifted out of earshot. Smith confirmed with a hand signal that he’d established contact with the agency.

  Antoine slipped into his noise reducing boots, light Kevlar weave and tactical gloves. Everything was where it should be. Glock 19, extra magazines, gun loaded and holstered. He clapped down his goggles, turning everything into a green haze. His night vision active, Antoine led Smith into the bomb site.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BACK TO BLACK

  “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” - E. Hemingway

  Hatay, Turkey

  Antoine used to hate these kind of missions: New surroundings, no prior planning, no orientation of place. However, having Priya’s oversight put him more at ease.

  He sent out the quadrocopter drone and connected with her. The UAV was soon out of his sight. He put his trust in Priya’s flying abilities to give him an overview on the situation ahead of him. A sensor in his tactical suit would also let the drone follow him on autopilot.

  The tight fitted bulletproof suit had become a second skin. There was no luxury, only practicality. Antoine adopted the aerial view of the drone’s camera in his goggles.

  “Well, where are we?” he said. “Priya, what do you see?”

  “Looks like whole of Reyhanli is suffering from a power outage.”

  “But the bomb was a long ways back,” Antoine said.

  “It’s not from that. This blackout is deliberate.”

  The sound of an engine caused Antoine’s head to jerk to the left.

  He and Smith merged with the shadows. A truck rushed past them, then another. They were followed by several cargo carriers. Antoine could tell that they were military vehicles, all headed towards the border. The darkness made it difficult to spot any details.

  Antoine and Smith crouched behind a wall until the last vehicle passed.

  “Looks like a military convoy heading to Syria,” he informed Priya.

  “Weapons and even personnel maybe,” Priya said. “I’ve seen this happen before. It is probably the reason for the blackout. It’s effective at hiding things from the eyes of the public.”

  “I concur,” Rose said. “War has no eyes.”

  Rose had been back in the game since Antoine and Smith entered the hot zone but this was the first time that she spoke.

  “I didn’t know you were in on this, Rose,” Antoine said.

  “A large chair alone doesn’t make a queen,” Rose answered. “The convoy you just saw is your CIA’s rat line. This is the work of your people; a back channel highway into Syria for weapons and ammunition. The receivers: Jihadis.”

  “Congress would never authorize that,” Antoine said.

  “It didn’t,” Rose said. “But the involvement of the MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Liaison activities do not need to be reported to Congress. A legal loophole. Been used a few times.”

  “Benghazi,” Antoine said.

  Antoine and Smith moved on.

  Priya marked sites for him from her UAV and satellite view.

  “I can see the extraction site,” Antoine said. “Or better, what’s missing.” He didn’t need light or the quadrocopter’s night vision to spot it. It was a black hole against the night sky where something should be, but wasn’t - a bomb crater. In all the time it hadn’t been repaired. The infrastructure led to it like arteries to a torn out heart. The street, or what was left of it, was ripped open like an earthquake had struck.

  Car wrecks lay torn open, some shredded in half. The buildings adjoining the blast site stood half in ruins. Their jagged roofs resembled a crown around the epicenter.

  Priya’s voice brought Antoine’s eyes up.

  “No sign of Jas
on.”

  With bated breath he stepped into the remnants of the bomb blast. Smith trailed behind him.

  Through the outskirts of the ruin, his night vision goggles scanned the black bowels of the building.

  Smith took a high position, crouched behind an old piano. The smell of old wood still clung to it. As soon as Antoine turned away, he caught the tang of old cement mixed with stone and the rusty aroma of iron bars cracked open like twigs.

  Antoine crept forward to the waist-high remnants of a wall close to the center of the blast site.

  They didn’t have time to waste. If they missed the extraction Jason would go dark. Antoine jumped down to the lower level. Where are you, Jason?

  A voice came out of the dark, making him flinch.

  “Lightning.”

  Antoine blinked, blind in the confined darkness. He started for his gun, but then realized that the speaker had given the right code sign. Antoine gave the countersign. “Thunder.”

  Jason came toward him stepping out of the pitch black, an old AK-47 rifle lowered and his body clad in the local civilian fatigues. With his Arabic origin, full beard and dark, expressive eyebrows, he blended in perfectly.

  “Target found.” Antoine spoke into his comms.

  Jason fumbled under his turban. He took out his ear-piece and signed to Antoine to cut comms for a moment. Antoine hesitated for a moment, before he complied. Jason pulled him into another corner of the ruin, what was left of an old living room. A dirty ruffled teddy bear made clear who had lived there.

  “Where are the rest?” Antoine asked.

  “There are no rest left,” Jason said, wide-eyed. “You don’t understand. I followed the truck all the way to the site. One car, four people. Followed them all the way. They got out and were waiting for the buyers to come. One car arrives and I watch the handover about to happen. Six hostiles and this weapon the Khorasan were talking about. MI6 moves in according to plan. In less than a minute the firefight is over. They move in to get the bomb. Squad leader radios in that the site is clear and the hostiles are down. Then out of nowhere, automatic weapons open up. I see muzzle flashes, but no shooters and the bullets coming out of nowhere. It’s like sentry guns went off and took out the whole team. The MI6 team is cut down and the bomb just disappeared. Two trucks just vanished into the night. From where I was, I could see everything but there was no one there. I can’t explain it. Neither equipment failure, nor lack of sleep. Someone planned for this scenario.”

  Antoine’s gut churned.

  “The question isn’t what you saw,” Antoine said. “The question is: Who can assault an al Qaeda handover ambushed by the MI6 and still come out victorious and unseen?”

  Rubble fell from overhead. Both men whirled into a shooting position.

  Smith looked down from above.

  Antoine relaxed his finger and took it off the trigger.

  Smith had his own weapon in hand, ready to fire, then lowered it as he saw Antoine. “What’s up lads? I’ve been calling you on the comms. I don’t know about you but let’s make like lightning and bolt.”

  They walked back to their vehicle and got inside.

  “So what happened with mission Flytrap?” Smith said as he got into the driver’s seat.

  Jason held up a bullet shell. “We lost everyone to them. This and footprints in the ground are all I saw of the attackers. After they left, I went in and took fingerprints, hair, wallets, watches - everything I could of the Khorasan,” Jason said pointing to the rucksack he had placed by his feet. “If we know who they are, maybe we can find out who they were dealing with.”

  Antoine had heard this all before. Relegated to the back seat, he took his phone out and checked the messages. There was only one that could still be important: a message from Nigel. Antoine connected his earplug and played the voice recording.

  “Hello Antoine,” he heard Nigel say. His voice sounded shaky but excited in a good way. “Bear with me. Apparently I’m not a super spy… yet. However, this gentleman, big fellow with a mustache and a cowboy hat, gave me something, in case my memory returns and I got some information about you. He gave me his business card: Blake Griffin, Houston and Howard’s Consulting Group.”

  “It’s obviously fake,” the reporter went on. “But if it’s all we got, I’ll take it. I’ll make sure to send it to you in an envelope. I mean, if he would have just given me a fake card, I would have said burn it, but he... he handed us his fingerprints. One set of prints are mine, the other belong to this fake Blake.”

  A smile stole over Antoine’s lips, but it was Smith who tore him out of his amusement.

  “Hey Tony. What’s up?”

  The pickup rumbled up a rocky byroad, shaking the whole passenger cabin. Antoine had to hold on to the safety handle above the door and nearly dropped his phone.

  Antoine shut it down, hiding the screen from his colleagues. “Nothing,” he said with a calm in his voice that belied the truth. For one year Antoine had been waiting for a cornerstone to build his mission upon. It had now come. The hunt was on.

  ***

  Washington D.C., The United States of America

  Tanya paced the wooden floor of the coffee-brown colonial style office. Polished trophies from golf, tennis and polo adorned the walls and shone in the sunlight. Various awards and even a picture of Kenway shaking hands with the US president served as a reminder of his ego.

  Kenway stood at the end of the room, pouring in a drink from a decanter amongst a large collection of old whiskey bottles. The portrait of his bank’s founder, dating a hundred and fifty years back during the American Civil War, proclaimed Kenway’s pedigree. If he wasn’t awaiting appointments like her, he would sit on his throne-like chair, ruling over a kingdom that spanned beyond borders.

  Tanya took note of the items on his desk: Cuban cigars, a cigar cutter, a paperweight and golden customized pens. Save the cigars, they would make excellent weapons. You’re a fool to come into my reach without having me handcuffed first.

  Even then, she could and would take him out. Lucky for him, she was in for the long game.

  She glanced over a group picture in front of a fraternity house.

  Despite decades having passed since the photo was taken, Tanya recognized faces from the Goldman Sachs, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds. The others must have been from just as prominent families.

  “Drink?” Kenway asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “So, let’s get to business, shall we?” He sat down inviting her to sit opposite. He sipped his drink. “You know, people always ask why there are wars. The answer is still the same after four thousand years: Power. But real power doesn’t come from backing the winning side. It comes from bankrolling both.”

  He indicated a chess-board on a small side table. Tanya saw herself as a chess piece and knew which one she needed to take out to win. To come close to the King, you needed to be in the position of the Queen.

  Kenway scrutinized her while downing the glass of too expensive whiskey. “Why are you here and how far are you willing to go?” he asked.

  “As far as necessary. I am not accustomed to losing. I’m here to be an asset on the winner’s side.”

  “Ah,” the man said and leaned back in his seat. “Let me ask you a question. Who wins most?”

  “I would say the more ruthless and better skilled player,” Tanya said.

  “Good answer. But wrong.”

  He paused.

  Tanya crossed her legs and leaned forward, an eyebrow raised.

  “The one who produces the chess-pieces wins most,” Kenway said.

  Tanya nodded. It may be different chess boards, but the same game takes place around the world.

  “We didn’t leave all that military equipment behind in Iraq for no reason,” Kenway said. “You see the only difference in real life is sometimes you need to make more chess pieces to keep the game going. And now we created a new boogeyman that the world fears… and the Table thrives on that.”


  Tanya blinked the moment she heard the man mention her reason for coming here. She thought she might as well push her agenda.

  “When can I meet the Table?” she asked. She had just completed two preposterous missions on their behalf but the way she saw it was not just retirement but a seat at The Table. The missions had cost her dearly but it would be worth it. She was here to collect what she was entitled to.

  “You need to do something before you’ve earned that right.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. It sounded like trouble and treason.

  “I just stole the bomb,” Tanya said. “What else do you want me to do?”

  He slid a dossier to her over the desk.

  “Put it to use.”

  She took it like a curious child.

  “What is it?”

  “Your future,” he stated. “Your mission: Destabilize our opponent. The effect should make them back off from our plans in the Middle East. And according to our information about you we expect a windfall of profit from it if it’s done right. The money is a little icing on the cake. The specifics... are in there.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  He didn’t answer. Only the tick-tock of a grandfather clock broke the silence.

  Tanya’s throat was dry.

  “You don’t have to decide right now. I’ll give you,” Kenway stopped to look at his Patek Philippe, “half an hour.”

  Tanya looked down at the dossier. The cover gave no clue of what might hide inside. However, a circular coffee stain and dabs near the edges, showed that she wasn’t the first to see its confidential pages. Tanya was greatly concerned about what was in the dossier and did not like where this conversation was going. She was even more concerned that whatever it was she would do it. She had one final mission that she promised herself she would do and she needed to join The Table for it.

  “So despite where you are from you have worked for Uncle Sam before,” the gentleman said after a while.

  “Sir.” Tanya cleared her throat. “I have worked for both sides,” she said, irritated at the not-so-subtle allusion.