by Jack Mars
Keller shook his head. “The White House? Camp David? His family ranch in Texas? I have no idea. You would know better than I. This was the first time I’ve spoken with him in more than a month.”
“Okay,” the voice said. “Then here’s what I need you to do…”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
June 27
3:35 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Headquarters of the Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“Sir?” someone said. “Sir, we’re here.”
Luke snapped awake. He sat up. It took him several seconds to figure out his surroundings.
He was inside the confines of a helicopter, riding in darkness. The chopper was new, and the interior was plush and comfortable. The seats were leather and hadn’t even begun to scuff yet. He knew this chopper well. It was a beautiful bird, the sleek black Bell 430 that Don had acquired for the Special Response Team.
One of the pilots was looking back at him. He was a clean-shaven young guy in a helmet, cherub face, probably just out of the military. His helmet had a small microphone adjusted just above the chin strap. The kid was smiling.
“You dozed off, sir.”
“Right,” Luke said.
He blinked and looked out the tinted windows. Just to his right, north, were the bright lights of Washington, DC, and its close suburbs, Arlington, Alexandria, and the rest. He could see reflections on the water where the wide river emptied into the bay. To the south, there was less light as the suburbs did their slow fade into rural Virginia.
The chopper began to drop down, and Luke could see the helipad approaching. The SRT headquarters was a wide, squat, three-story building made of glass and steel. It had been a HUD building until recently, but they had given it a bit of a facelift when Don’s team moved in. The windows sparkled in the lights of the approaching helicopter.
The bird was low now, the building, its parking lot, and the small green campus rising up to greet it. A signalman in a yellow vest and holding bright orange wands stood to the side of the helipad and guided the chopper in.
The pilot set the bird down perfectly in the middle of the pad. He killed the engine and the rotors immediately began to slow. There was a whine as they powered down.
“Thanks, guys,” Luke shouted.
He climbed out of the passenger cabin with his bags, ducked low, and crossed the tarmac. He was inside a fenced-in security area, the fence topped with barbed wire. It was a cool, breezy night. The breeze felt good on his skin. He felt good. Tired, in some pain, but overall… okay. He knew there were problems waiting for him here, but he was confident they could be worked out.
What was it a wise man had once said? You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Well, he and Ed had cracked a few eggs. A few dozen, in fact. And Swann had, you know, vaporized an entire egg factory, but…
Luke nearly laughed at the thought of it. Overkill. That was probably overkill.
A small, slim figure stood at the open security door to the building. As he approached, the figure resolved itself into Trudy Wellington. She wore a dark shirt and slacks. Her long hair was tied back into a bun.
She held the door wide for him. He walked through, a bag on his shoulder and one in his right hand.
“Any word on Ed?” he said to her without preamble.
She nodded. “He’s okay. They took him to Baghdad. Turns out he got hit eight times. He had a bullet lodged in his thigh and needed emergency surgery to take it out. It was an inch from his femoral artery. He’s lucky.”
“He’s lucky he has thighs as big as twenty-pound turkeys,” Luke said. “How did he come through surgery?”
“Fine. He’s stable. They have a cover story for him. He’s a consultant who got hit during an ambush while coming in from the airport. He’s going to be recuperating there for a few days.”
Luke smiled. “His old stomping grounds. He’s gonna love that.”
“How was your trip?” Trudy said.
Luke shrugged. “I barely remember. They put me on painkillers, and a Georgian military doctor took the shrapnel out of my forearm and my calf right there on the plane. If you’ve never had gunshot wounds cleaned inside an eight-seat Lear jet flying above thunderstorms over Greece, I can’t really say I recommend it.”
He stopped and looked down at her. Behind her big round glasses, her eyes were tired. Her face looked drawn.
“You?” he said.
She nodded. “Fine. We left Turkey as soon as the mission was over.” She shook her head. “I mean, when that dock blew, we just packed up everything in five minutes and got out of there. We landed about two hours ago. The trip was uneventful until we got home.”
They were moving down the hall. All the office lights were out. The small cafeteria was closed and locked. There was no one around. Why would there be? It was nearly four in the morning. What was Trudy doing, lurking in this building by herself?
“Swann here?” Luke said.
“Don sent him home. Luke, Swann’s been suspended, pending an investigation.”
Luke’s shoulders slumped. He shook his head and sighed. “Ah, man.”
“Don’s in his office, waiting to see you when you come in. There’s trouble, Luke. There’s been a lot of fallout.”
Luke didn’t have much to say to that. “Okay.”
He turned left at the darkened foyer to Don’s office. His door was open a crack and the light was on. Trudy lingered at the threshold of the foyer.
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thank you. Hopefully I won’t need it.”
He went in. Don was sitting behind the wide expanse of his desk. The desk was like a football field. It was like the hood of an old Chevy muscle car. Outside of the office phone and a computer monitor, there was nothing on top of it.
Luke put his bags down.
“Don, I take full responsibility for the drone strike. Okay? One of the objectives of this mission was to scuttle that sub, and it wasn’t going to happen. We were caught in a full-on shitstorm. That freighter was an ordnance dump, and we had no way of knowing that beforehand. Everything was blowing up. We didn’t even have a visual on the sub. If we didn’t get out when we did, everyone would have died. Swann calling in a drone strike didn’t just kill the sub, it probably saved our necks.”
Don looked at him and gestured at one of the chairs across from him. His eyes were flat and hard. “Sit down, son.”
To Don’s right, Luke’s left, the flat-screen TV on the wall was on. It was CNN, showing reruns of news from earlier in the night. On the screen was video of a blonde-haired woman, maybe thirty-five years old, taken in what seemed like the late afternoon. She was astonishingly beautiful, in a bright blue blazer and white dress shirt. She was standing at a bank of microphones, holding some sort of press conference.
Senator Susan Hopkins (D)—California read the caption at the bottom left-hand side of the screen.
Luke raised his eyebrows. “Wow. That’s the senator from California? I thought it was an old guy.”
“There are two, as I’m sure you must know,” Don said. “The other one is an old guy. This one is a freshman, just got elected last year. She was some kind of supermodel before this, cover of Bimbette magazine and all that. Her husband is a dotcom billionaire. This is who the people in their wisdom are voting for these days.”
Don turned up the sound from a remote control in his hand.
“Once again,” Senator Hopkins said sternly, “our military has blundered into a disaster of its own making, carrying out an unprovoked attack on a sleeping giant, the only other major nuclear-armed power in the world. Do they want to start a world war? I don’t think I need to remind anyone that a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia has the potential to end all life on earth as we know it.”
She paused, and turned over a page in front of her. The narrow black podium in front of her looked like something a musician would use for sheet music. She made eye contact with the cameras a
gain.
“So-called black operations, black budgets with no Congressional oversight, black sites where prisoners are taken without due process and are routinely tortured. The American people are tired of the Pentagon giving this great country a black eye in the rest of the world. My office has strenuously requested that the details of this unprecedented attack be made public, but we are being stonewalled by the…”
Don turned the sound down.
“They don’t make it easy on us, do they?”
Luke smiled and shrugged. It was hard to peel his eyes away from the freshman senator. “She’s cute, though.”
Don nodded. “Plus the whole black theme of her remarks. Black this, black that, black eye. It kind of works, doesn’t it?”
“It works,” Luke said absently. He wasn’t sure if it worked or not.
He turned to face Don again.
Don ran a big hand across his forehead. He yawned. It was late.
“She’s right, you know. People are stonewalling. The Pentagon, the CIA, all the intelligence agencies, they’re running interference for us on this. They’re not happy about taking a bunch of arrows, but they see the need for group cohesion.”
“They were all in on it,” Luke said. “It’s not like they can wash their hands. It was a CIA sub from a CIA front company. Big Daddy gave us the Chechen and the Georgian, and Big Daddy is CIA. One of the prisoners was a Navy SEAL. The drone was NSA. We don’t even have any drones. The president himself requested that we do this. I sat in on a meeting with a general from the Joint Chiefs and a guy from Homeland Security. What did all these people think would happen when we went in there? That nobody would notice?”
“Luke…”
“Don, I don’t remember anyone telling me to go into Russia, rescue the prisoners, kill the sub, but for God’s sake, don’t break anything.”
“Son, you overstepped,” Don said. “I don’t blame you for that, but I’m not the one who gets the final say. I was called on the carpet at the White House this afternoon. It was a difficult mission. I explained that to them. Then I was called in by my direct boss, the FBI director. He understands, certainly better than some of the people at the White House, what goes into an operation like this, the risks involved, and the split-second decisions that need to be made. All the same, he’s under pressure himself. The shit is running downhill, to coin a phrase.”
“The operation was a success,” Luke said. “We met both of the objectives, and we lost one man. A man who showed up wearing a suicide vest, by the way, in case anyone is wondering what his intentions were.”
“The fallout is we are eye-to-eye with the Russians everywhere on earth,” Don said. “Even if cooler heads do prevail in the near term, and there’s no guarantee of that at the moment, you can bet they’re going to pull some stunt to get us back. Meanwhile, the president has a public relations and diplomatic disaster on his hands.”
“We saved his daughter’s life less than two months ago,” Luke said.
Don nodded. “I’ve met the president, he is a good man and has been a fan of this agency for obvious reasons. But just between the two of us, I don’t think he is the toughest president we’ve had during my time on this planet. He isn’t built for stormy weather.”
“What are you saying, Don?”
Don sighed. “The director told me that the Bureau is going to conduct a full internal investigation of the operation, its design, the personnel involved, and their actions. He has also agreed to an objective third-party assessment, in all likelihood carried out by the office of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. I’ve engaged with a well-regarded firm of private defense attorneys, on the outside chance that criminal charges result against any of our people.”
Luke stared at him. Things were going in a strange direction. “Why would JAG have any jurisdiction here? We’re not in the military anymore. This was not a…”
Don shook his head. “It’s for show, Luke. Try to understand that. This was a mission ordered by the president, and sanctioned by Homeland Defense, to rescue special operations personnel, including a Navy SEAL. They can make a case for JAG investigating it. They can make a case for Bozo the Clown investigating it, if they want to. It’s all about looks right now.”
He paused for a moment and took a breath.
“We’re hanging by a thread, son. The legal firm is going to punch a whale of a hole in our budget. Eventually, it’s going to come to light that we spearheaded this operation, no matter who else was involved.” He gestured at the TV. An ad for Dodge Ram trucks played silently. “And people like your supermodel friend are going to start demanding our heads on a plate.”
Luke opened his mouth as if to speak. But he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Instead, Don went on:
“I suggest you kids get your stories straight. So far you, Swann, and Trudy Wellington have all walked in here at different times and claimed responsibility for the drone strike. That’s not going to hold water. Either Swann followed your orders, or he went rogue. It’s really going to be that simple.”
“Don…”
Don sighed heavily. “I hate to do this. I really do. And I want you to know that I am going to go to the mat for you, and for the entire team. Personally, I’m proud of what this unit accomplished. But in the meantime, you are suspended from duty, with full pay and benefits, pending the outcome of any and all investigations into your conduct during this mission. If you have your service weapon with you, I need you to surrender it now. Also, I need you to surrender your Special Response Team identification, FBI badge, and your access card to this facility.”
Luke felt himself going numb. It was an odd sensation. He’d been in combat since he was eighteen years old. He’d experienced many disturbing things.
But this felt… It felt…
He didn’t have the words to describe it.
Don eyed him. “I’m sorry, Luke. If it helps any, think of it as a paid vacation. You have a new baby boy. You have a beautiful wife. Spend some time with them. Relax a bit. Grow a beard. Let me worry about this.”
Finally, Luke found his voice. It sounded small and weird to his own ears. “How long will the investigation take?”
Don shrugged. “They seem to want to move fast. A month? Six weeks?”
“And the outcome…” Luke said.
“We’re in the civilian world now, son. Newspapers… politicians… bureaucrats… I couldn’t even hazard a guess.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
11:45 a.m. Moscow Time (3:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Strategic Command and Control Center
The Kremlin
Moscow, Russia
The young man walked briskly through the wide hallways of the control center, on his way to the large War Room.
His footsteps echoed along the empty corridor. He wore a dress uniform of the Russian Ground Forces. He carried himself with military bearing, his carriage erect, his eyes alert, his face calm, impassive, and serious.
Just ahead, a wide automatic door slid open. He passed through the doorway and into the swirling chaos of the command center’s main room. The chatter of voices hit him like a wall as he entered.
At least two hundred people filled the space. There were at least forty workstations, some with two or three people sitting at five computer screens. On the big board up front, there were twenty different television screens.
Screens showed digital maps of Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the wider Middle East. A series of screens showed location maps of American nuclear capabilities and missile sites spread out across North America, Asia, and Europe.
“Corporal Gregor,” a female voice said to his right.
He turned and a secretary was standing near an open door. She was heavyset, perhaps in her fifties, with a stooped back. She gestured at the door with one open hand, as if welcoming him to a weekend dacha. “This way, please.”
Gregor moved through the doorway and entered a smaller, oval-shaped room. A crew of men, som
e in uniform and a few in civilian clothes, sat around a conference table. They were mostly older men. Gregor came in and stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, chest out, shoulders back.
The room was stark, mostly bare, and cigarette smoke lingered in the air. None of the technology from the larger room was in evidence in here. Instead, there were half a dozen ashtrays on the table.
A fat general, his nose red from decades of vodka, poked the table with a heavy index finger. His hands were large and thick.
“Twelve hours since their attack,” he was saying. “It is unreasonable to wait any longer. We are ready, so take one of their pieces off the board. Without further delay.”
The men looked up at Gregor.
One rose from his chair and came around the table. He was a colonel, in the uniform of the Strategic Air Command, another man in his fifties, but he was tall and trim, with white hair. “Ah, Gregor. Come in, come in.”
He turned to the others. “Gentlemen, this is Corporal Gregor. He’s a good man and an exceptional soldier. We’ve already discussed his valorous actions during the Second Chechen Campaign. How many confirmed enemy kills, Gregor?”
Gregor’s face didn’t change. Showing pride in one’s actions was frowned upon. Also, he would not describe the emotions he felt about his time in Chechnya as pride. Nor did he look with pride on the weeks he spent at his mother’s cold-water flat afterward, screaming into his pillow and drinking until he blacked out.
“Twenty-six, sir.”
“Twenty-six confirmed kills,” the man repeated. “Infantry kills?”
Could the man not tell from Gregor’s uniform that he was infantry?
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
“Hand-to-hand combat?” the man said.
“Yes sir, five confirmed kills in close quarters combat.”
“How did you dispatch them?”
“Ah… four with my knife, sir. In the case of the other one, I had lost my knife in the battle, and I killed him with… with my hands, sir.”
