A Deeper Blue

by John Ringo

  "That's not going to be the only target," Britney said.

  They were driving up I-4 towards Orlando with Mike carefully obeying the speed limit. The GT was going to be a cop magnet.

  "They've got six barrels," she pointed out.

  "I know," Mike said, pulling off of I-4 onto Sand Creek. "The problem is effective distribution. The cans are only going to get a few people. Sure, that's terrorizing, but they're going to want something that is going to horrify."

  "Aerial?" Britney said. "There's a combat air patrol. Anything flying unrestrictedly will get shot down."

  "Will it?" Mike said. "That's never been tested. That's why the Keldara are going to be enjoying the wonders of the Magic Kingdom while I try to figure out what the other targets are."

  "Why do you have to do it all?" Britney asked as the car turned onto International Drive.

  The GT, especially with Britney in the passenger seat, drew plenty of stares but Mike was ignoring them.

  "Because I get lucky," Mike said, frowning. "But I don't feel fucking lucky about this op. I feel that it's fucked to the max. They're going to get through. Somewhere. We've got over three hundred gallons of that shit in play. Inside. Right here. Somewhere."

  There was a packed line for Wet and Wild, over a hundred people in bathing suits even in this weather. One teenager, probably about fourteen, was arguing with her parents. She had the one flattest stomach Mike had ever seen. She stopped arguing and frankly stared as the GT drove by.

  "They're going to get through," Mike said, thinking about that lovely little girl lying on the ground twitching like a dying cockroach.

  "You are prepared?" Farzad asked the assembled fedayeen.

  "Yes, Haj," Jamal said. "We are prepared to sacrifice ourselves. We will strike the infidels as they have never been struck. This will make us heroes beyond even the martyrs of the Twin Towers."

  "Stay near to cover," Farzad said. "When the panic starts, mingle into the crowds. Then you know what to do. We will strike as one and the Satan will tremble."

  " . . . Yes, sir, I understand," Colonel Olds said, hanging up the phone and trying not to curse.

  Colonel Freeman Olds had spent most of his career in staff positions. He was, in fact, very close to a perfect staff officer. He was meticulous in the extreme and could juggle multiple tasks quite effectively. He was also a workaholic, putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day pretty much consistently.

  However, one of the reasons that Olds had had, in his opinion, far too few commands was hidden in his generally excellent reviews. It was not so much that negative terms were included as certain positive ones were missing. He had hardly noticed but phrases like "capable of critical decision making under pressure" were notably absent. That's because what many of his reviewers had realized was that he, well, wasn't. He could make recommendations and create multiple scenarios, but to get him to make a hard decision—one that could negatively affect his career if he was wrong—he had to be cornered like a rat in a trap.

  He had been just as meticulous and risk avoidant in building his career. He had carefully gotten all the merit badges, worked the buddy system, gotten all the right positions at all the right times. His time as a battalion commander had, admittedly, been less than perfect but that was understandable. The battalion he took over had been terribly poorly managed and undisciplined in the extreme. It could hardly be his fault that it had failed the annual Army Readiness and Testing Evaluation Program. He had managed to argue that to various people who, despite the unit being decertified for combat operations after two previous trips to the sandbox, had kept him from being relieved and forcibly retired.

  But he was well aware that this position was his last chance to get stars. If he could manage the conditions carefully enough, if he could avoid serious incident, he'd pin on stars by the end of the year.

  The fly in that ointment was this Kildar character. The local FBI office, Orange County, City of Orlando, all the other federal and state groups in the task force, they were all on board with the plan. Maintain a low profile. Make the public aware that there was a threat but also ensure they knew the powers-that-be were on the situation. Avoid serious incident. Reduce public strain. Deconflict the situation.

  This joker's idea of deconflict, though, was "kill them all and let graves registration sort them out."

  Which was why he had called an old friend from the Point. The general was a couple of years ahead of him and despite being, in Olds' opinion, less than stellar in the brains department he'd managed to pin on stars almost four years ago. The general was also in a very good position, the Plans office in the Pentagon. Oh, he might complain that he wanted to get back to the sandbox, preferably with a command, but Olds knew he was just doing the Good Soldier routine. Plans and Ops ran the Army; commanders just followed Plans and Ops' directives.

  But it also put him in an excellent position to deal with this Kildar fellow. So Olds had explained his problems, leaving out that Jenkins had threatened to kill him. The general had been pretty busy, which might have explained the bluntness of his response. It boiled down to a.) Jenkins got things done, b.) Jenkins had the support of the CJCS and the President so the general couldn't do anything if he wanted to. He'd added that the colonel might want to pay attention to actions in his AO and not spend time trying to get his support personnel changed.

  Which left the colonel pondering his Rolodex. If this Jenkins character really did have support all the way to the CJCS—he refused to believe the idiot had presidential backing—then it would take a line of attack outside the chain of command to get him removed.

  He picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Washington. There was more than one way to skin a Kildar.

  "Anything?" Mike asked as he walked in the suite.

  There simply weren't any houses for rent big enough to take even the teams he'd brought with him. So he'd rented a floor of an off-Disney hotel. He wasn't going to be at what he considered ground zero.

  "No," Greznya said. "There is nothing. Jay is trying to determine who the drops were going to but without any more drops . . . We're still getting the take from Katya but so far we haven't picked up any sign that Gonzales is directly involved."

  "They had one more boat," Mike said. "But nothing to pick up and no fueling point."

  "So what are they gonna do?" Britney asked.

  "Strike at us," Mike replied. "They'll either try to hit the yacht or snatch somebody. Not much they can do else. The VX is in the hands of the U.S. government."

  "Are you going to bring the harem over?" Britney asked.

  "Hell of a choice, isn't it?" Mike asked. "But, no, I'm going to leave them at the estate with Vil and Yosif's team, what's left of it. Let 'em get a tan. If the Colombians want to tangle with those teams they're free to. Besides, the farther away from me they are the better."

  "Hey, I was driving around with you all day!" Britney pointed out.

  "I know," Mike said. "Which was silly, but with you around I look like some businessman with a doxie. I don't have Katya and next to her, you're the girl most likely to survive. And if you don't, well, that's why you wear a uniform."

  "That's pretty fucking cold," Britney said.

  "Pleased to meet you, won't you guess my name?"

  "Senator Grantham's office."

  Steve Worrel was the Senior Defense and Intelligence Staffer for Senator Pat Grantham. He had been an Army intelligence officer, worked briefly for the Agency, then gotten out and gotten a "real" job. Shortly after hitting civvie street he'd gotten into politics as a volunteer, then worked his way up to staffer to a senator. But given that most of the senator's committees were related to domestic affairs rather than military, he wasn't by any stretch of the imagination the senator's most senior aide. Hadn't been, rather.

  When someone started blackmailing the senator with videos that certainly appeared to be of the senator not only in bed with a young woman, two actually, but strangling one of them to death, he had gained
some prominence. That was because he knew the people to call to, discreetly, start checking out the DVD. People who could pull it apart, electron by electron, to try to determine who had made it, where it was made. In the meantime, the senator had tap-danced. The main demand of the blackmailers had been to kill a conservative judicial nomination. The senator had instead held the nominee up in committee, arguing that to vote against him would have been too much of a reversal to stand up. And hoped like hell that Steve would pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

  In the end, Steve's quiet research had turned out to be moot. Others had found out about the blackmail operation and "done something" about it. What exactly the "something" was was unclear. But there was a CNN report about a major battle between Albanian gangs in a small Albanian town known for its prostitution rings along with smaller indicators here and there: a nightclub taken down by what appeared to be a special operations team, a complaint leveled by Fiji about Americans attacking some of their troops.

  And then the resignations began. Senator Traskel. Two senior career officials at State. Others in the British Foreign and Home office. A French general. The list went on and on. And none of them came back through the revolving door. It was how it worked. You got out of government service and turned right back around to work for a lobbyist or a defense firm or somebody else that wanted to swill at the government trough. It worked that way in every democracy in the developed world. But not this time, they all just disappeared. "Writing their memoirs." "Taking some family time." Not even entering academia. Just . . . left. Disappeared off the radar screen. In the case of a couple of Japanese officials, they really had disappeared; they went out to go SCUBA diving in Saipan and were "lost at sea." A few other officials, one Russian, two Chinese and one Italian had "died as the result of injuries." From street muggings, usually. Well, one in a fall. He'd apparently been out on his balcony taking in the night air at four AM and had managed to land fifty feet away from the building.

  Following the resignations and "accidents" were the rumors. There was a man they just called "The Reaper" at first. He turned up in a private jet, met with senior government officials, usually the head of state, and then left. He carried something scary and powerful and wherever he went, careers ended. In a few cases, lives ended. In those cases he had made extra stops. He didn't require that the local government take care of "the issue." He would even do that for them. All they had to do was turn a blind eye.

  Slowly another name had surfaced: Kildar. Mike Jenkins. Mercenary. Feudal warlord. He had a harem of teenage girls. He had a company of mercenary commandoes. He was a phantom; nobody knew who he was or where he'd come from. You didn't fuck with the Kildar. You needed dirty deeds done . . . well, anything but "dirt cheap" and he was the go-to guy. He was the guy that governments used when "deniable" was consideration number two right behind "has to be done, or else." He wouldn't hand you a Kleenex for less than five mil and he was worth every dime. Oh, and he made beer. Yeah, that beer.

  And the word got around. If anybody asks about the Kildar, you know nada. Unless it's somebody trying to blow his op, in which case you warn them off, quietly, and spread the word around. You don't fuck with the Kildar. Too many people owe him, including Senator Grantham and, by extension, the entire conservative side of the Senate. And the liberal side of the Senate and House weren't going to fuck with him because . . . Well, he knew something, had something.

  Nobody wanted to say what. But senators and ministers didn't resign over irregularities in campaign finance. As one governor said, it took "a live boy or a dead girl." The rumors were that it was both. And dead boys. Bottom line, you didn't fuck with the Reaper.

  "Hello, Colonel," Worrel said, wincing. He wasn't a big fan of Olds, whom he considered an incompetent asshole. But that description fit a lot of people he had to deal with in D.C. He listened for a moment then blanched.

  "Colonel, all I can say is that it's a good thing you called me," Worrel replied. "Have you spoken to anyone else about this? Okay, I want you to listen to me and trust me, Colonel. Do not, I repeat, do not try to mess with Jenkins. If something bad goes down, it will be buried and spun into victory on all fronts and you'll come out smelling like roses. If you do not piss off Jenkins. If you do, if you try to, pardon my language, fuck with him, you will end up sorry and sore. Nobody will know you, no favors will be big enough to cover your ass . . . . No, I can't discuss why, certainly not over an unsecure line . . . I guess that's up to you, but given that you're in charge of the task force, coming up to Washington might not look too good, especially if anything happens while you're away from your post . . . . Yes, that's what I suggest. Okay, we'll talk about it when you get back. Goodbye."

  Worrel hung up the phone and considered it for a moment. Then he picked it back up.

  "Maggie, Steve. I need to talk to the Boss sometime soon."

  Lasko Ferani stepped through a door hidden in a mural and looked around the room.

  Cinderella's Castle was built over a three-year period in the early 1970s. The base structure of the castle, the skeleton as such, was rebar and concrete. But that skeleton was remarkably small, taking up less than half of the castle's structure. The rest was Styrofoam also on a rebar skeleton. It had undergone a significant renovation for Disney's twenty-fifth birthday celebration, but that had only entailed changing the Styrofoam. It was a dirty job but somebody had done it.

  The room Lasko stood in was original structure in part. The floor and back wall. The side wall, through which he'd stepped, was part of the Styrofoam structure as were the last two walls and the ceiling. The room was littered with small bits of Styrofoam that had flecked off the interior.

  But there was a window, and that was what mattered. It was small and oval shaped, but it had a view straight down Main Street.

  He dragged a table into the room, then a comfortable chair. He arranged them in front of the window carefully, then went back to get the rest of his gear.

  Two sandbags, a mat for the top of the table, a spotting scope with thermal imagery and a bottle of water. He had a packed lunch, and Yakov was planning on coming up and relieving him, briefly, this afternoon. He very much wanted to ride the rollercoaster called "Space Mountain" but he was not sure they would have time.

  He settled his arms into the straps, pushed the rifle's butt into his shoulder, settled his elbows on the mat and leaned forward. He was aware that he was going to have to stay that way most of the day but he'd done it before.

  * * *

  Anastasia stepped out of the Fountain and waved to Vil.

  "I'll be fine," she said, shaking her head. "I'll be about an hour."

  "Okay," Vil said, flexing his jaw. He wasn't sure that the harem manager should be wandering around Nassau alone, certainly not right now. But if anything happened, well, they were dialed in with the Bahamas government. It could be, as the Kildar would put it, "handled."

  He turned the Fountain away from the dock and motored over to the fueling point. With the extended range tanks he had plenty of fuel, but he'd gotten in the habit.

  "Reading departure signs in some big airport . . ." he sung quietly, perfectly on key. Vil was one of the Keldara's finest singers and the key of the songs Randy had taught them was perfect for him. Now if he could just find out a.) where "Margaritaville" was and b.) what was with "a lost shaker of salt" and why it seemed so important . . . .

  Anastasia had a very specific reason she didn't want the team leader, or any of the Keldara, following her around. She was working on her agoraphobia. If she had some big strong men to hide behind, it wouldn't be the same. She needed to be on her own, to face the world all by herself.

  She was reminded, though, of the derivation of the word when she reached the market. "Agora" was from the Greek word "to gather" and fear of the outside translated, literally, as "fear of the market." There were so many people, so many sounds, she had to pause at the entrance and gather her courage.

  She'd just taken a deep breath and started
to step forward when she felt arms clamp around her. Before she could even start to yell a bag was over her head. She felt a bump on her leg, one that was going to bruise, as she was tossed into a vehicle.

  Then there was a strong smell and it was all she recalled for a while.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "Kildar," Greznya said nervously.

  "Go," Mike replied. He was looking at the defense plans for the Orlando area and shaking his head. Everybody was so afraid of scaring off the tourists, who were staying away anyway with the report of VX in Florida, that you couldn't really call it a sieve. It was more like a bottomless bucket. The security plans just sucked.