by Fritz Galt
She approached him cautiously. “What is it, Caleb?”
He leveled a look at her. “You’re looking at our party’s next presidential nominee.”
She felt her jaw drop. “Caleb! They chose you!”
Smiling broadly, he enclosed her in his arms and planted a huge French kiss that took her by surprise.
But after several seconds, she realized that she was being French kissed by the next nominee for president. What a rush!
Behind her, beyond where Caleb was groping for her posterior, she heard a polite knock at the open door.
Caleb dropped his mitts and stepped away from her with a smile. He already had the calming presidential smile down pat. He peered around her blonde hair to see who wanted to enter.
“Ah, Harry!” he said.
Sandi remained where she stood. Couldn’t the visitor see they were kissing? She smacked her lips to even out her lipstick.
“Sandi, let me introduce Harry Black to you. He runs Piedmont Personnel down in Atlanta. He and his men were the ones who repatriated Sean and his family.”
“Repatriated?” she asked and turned around.
“Well,” the stranger, a dark-haired, sparkly-eyed young man, said. “It took a little more than paperwork.”
So the young stud was self-deprecating. That wouldn’t get him very far in public life. She waited for him to continue, distracted by his virile charm and eyes that seemed to ooze intelligence.
“Er,” he went on, “we had to sneak our way into China with a stealth bomber, locate his family, then shoot our way out.”
“Oh,” she said, tossing back her hair.
“Whatever,” Caleb said, glossing over the young man’s heroic deeds. “You do have Harry to thank for obtaining the testimony.” He crossed to the wet bar to mix a few drinks.
“So that was you at Guantánamo Bay,” she said, sizing him up somewhat differently. “I only saw the bald spot on the back of your head.”
Harry felt the crown of his head with a troubled expression.
Sandi laughed. “No bald spot. I was just joking.”
Harry seemed mildly relieved, but continued to regard her with caution. “So you work for Caleb?” he asked.
“No,” she retorted, feeling slightly offended. “I work—rather, worked—as the principle investigator for Stanley Polk, the Special Prosecutor.”
“Ah,” Harry said, his eyes switching back and forth between her and Caleb as if certain puzzle pieces were fitting together in his mind. “So like me,” he said, “you’ve been busy tracking Sean down.”
“All over the world.”
He nodded, looking mildly impressed.
“Drinks, anybody?” Caleb offered. “Champagne?” He held up a pair of glasses fizzing with golden bubbles.
Sandi glanced at Harry, but he gestured for her to go first. The awkward moment passed quickly and she stepped up to the bar.
“To us,” she said vaguely, and lifted her crystal glass.
Harry was standing opposite her, glass in hand. They clinked together, and an array of bubbles exploded in the air between them.
Was he looking into her eyes? She screwed up her lips and considered the moment. This Harry Black was making eyes at her!
“To the Presidency!” Caleb proposed to the room at large. It seemed like a hollow toast, shared with nobody but himself.
Harry recovered quickly. “Meaning what?”
Caleb explained. “The party has just chosen me to run in the presidential election.”
Harry raised a thick, dark eyebrow. “Do you think you’re really up to the job?” he asked.
To the handsome stranger’s credit, he didn’t seize the opportunity to suck up to Caleb.
“Well, that’s not the point, is it,” Caleb said. “Isn’t winning the important thing?”
Caleb looked between the two who were stealing his thunder with every gesture, every thought they expressed.
“Well, let’s get moving, everybody,” he said, swallowing his drink in a single gulp. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Work?” Sandi said, a thought striking her. “It suddenly hit me. With the Chinagate case slammed shut, I’m out of a job.”
An amused, admiring look played in Harry’s large brown eyes. “Congratulations!”
She took another swallow, courage welling up within her. “Atlanta, huh?” she said, shocked by her own audacity. “Say, you wouldn’t need some expert legal advice down there in Georgia, would you?”
Harry gently took her glass from her and set it on the bar. He tucked her fingers in the crook of his elbow as only a Southern gentleman could do. “Let me tell you about working in Georgia…” he said, leading her out the door.
As they passed the secretary’s station, Sandi gave the kind lady a wave.
She returned the wave with a wink as she lay a finger on the intercom button. “Mr. Perkins, telephone call for you. It’s Lori Crawford on the line.”
Book Three
The Trap
Chapter 1
This country is about to kill the only man that can save it.
Congressman Ralph W. Connors
A December wind howled through the night down the Hindu Kush in eastern Afghanistan. George Ferrar tried to shrug off the cold that seeped through his Pathan waistcoat and vest. He pulled the scarf up over his mouth to conceal his breath in the frosty air.
The darkness crawled with armed and desperate men, and the commando in charge of his undercover unit was an unstable jerk.
But it was a good time to be in Afghanistan.
Sure, Ferrar trudged along plagued by uncertainty and reeling from the effects of September 11. But he was trying to restore order to the world.
America had come under attack. World markets were faltering. Terror had begun its incipient reign. And for the moment, Afghanistan was where he belonged.
Ahead of him, five other veterans of undercover warfare picked their way up a steep trail toward the mouth of Tora Bora’s main cave.
He couldn’t keep his eyes off the evidence of previous mortar attacks. Huge craters pitted the cliff. Corpses of fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban lay headless, limbless and stiff. Unexploded ordinance littered the crags of the slope.
Now he would finish the job.
He hefted the assault rifle to his shoulder. A gun was a normal accoutrement for local tribesmen, and he needed to fit in. It would serve him well, as would the entire arsenal beneath his waistcoat.
He hadn’t started out his career in the Army as a walking battle platform, but technological improvements and the aggressive Green Berets had turned him into one.
In addition to all the gadgetry, he still clung to the know-how he had acquired through long experience of undercover warfare. And he still had his Maine farm boy instincts.
Under the myriad stars that illuminated the mountainside, he looked hard at Alpha, the jerk in the lead.
Operation Jawbreaker used code names like Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. But jerk fit the guy much better.
Alpha was signaling them with a cautionary motion of the hand. The group stopped and waited.
From his position at the end of the line, Ferrar swept the surrounding hillsides for signs of the enemy. Anyone else in that desolate valley would be unfriendly, because the rest of the Allied troops were nowhere near. In fact, they were busy creating a predawn diversion down at the airport that morning.
As usual, his eyes came to rest on the large, strong frame of Alpha. The guy lowered his assault rifle and casually rested it on the frozen corpse of a terrorist fighter.
Ferrar knew Alpha well enough. As a soldier, Alpha was as ruthless and dominant as any alpha bull. As a man, he was Tray Bolton, the foster son of the Director of the CIA. As a former friend, he was the muscle-bound, backslapping jock that Ferrar had competed against in classrooms and gridirons from high school through college.
Only desperate times could throw the two of them into the same unit. And despera
te times had indeed arrived. Quite simply, with her freedom at stake, America needed her best.
Bolton was pulling a night-vision spotting scope out from under his waistcoat.
Ferrar winced. Bad move, Tray.
Above the team of men, an enemy boot scraped against loose scree near the entrance to the cave. A shot rang out.
A second later, the commando designated as Bravo somersaulted down the steep slope, a bullet hole drilled through his forehead.
Footsteps retreated above them.
The unit scattered behind several outcroppings of rock. Ferrar edged closer to a sharp overhang that had snagged his fallen comrade. No breath escaped from Gopher O’Brien’s lips. That’s okay, he tried to communicate telepathically with the still body. You don’t have to hold your breath anymore.
Except Gopher wasn’t holding his breath.
Ferrar bent over and cursed silently, trying to clear his throat. “Bravo is down,” he finally rasped into his voice-activated headset.
Ferrar had engaged in many nighttime operations before joining the CIA’s handpicked Special Operations Group, and he had never used a night-vision scope in close combat situations before. Its objective lens could easily reflect light and tip off the enemy.
Instead, he would sniff the air for a trace of sweat or gun oil. He rolled the brim of his Pathan hat off his ears to listen.
Alpha had played it far too casual.
Sure, in the preceding weeks the war had come to a swift conclusion in Afghanistan, and Taliban and al-Qaeda scumbags were on the run. American and allied ground troops had moved in trying to smoke the terrorists out of their mountain strongholds. And the last pockets of resistance held out in God-forsaken places like that Tora Bora region.
But the unit of combat-hardened special ops veterans couldn’t afford to let their guard down yet.
If they were lucky, they might flush out leaders of the Islamic terrorist group, maybe even snare bin Laden or Mullah Omar. Perhaps they might come across a cache of al-Qaeda weapons, ammunition, equipment, documents, videotapes, maps, or false passports. If al-Qaeda left nothing behind, at least the mission could establish that the terrorist organization had slipped out of the region.
The only thing that they couldn’t do was to get killed, like Gopher O’Brien.
With the entire might of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps behind them, they would not fail to take the cave.
He looked out from under his heavy black eyebrows. The only way they could fail was if someone had tipped off the enemy in advance.
Above him came the sound of resistance fighters waking and scattering, their feet pounding deep into the cave complex.
Well, the enemy was certainly tipped off now. The covert operation had turned overt.
He yanked off his fabric hat, ripped open a pack of greasepaint and smeared it across his broad face. Then he pounded a dull green helmet onto his head and stared at Bolton’s back. Tray Bolton had already lost one man and given up the element of surprise. Now he was letting valuable seconds tick by. Was Bolton waiting for an invitation to tea?
Tray Bolton finally motioned for the unit to advance and pursue the retreating foe. Ferrar scrambled up the remainder of the trail and flattened himself against the lip of a neatly carved, squared-off entrance to the cave.
He pressed both shoulders against the cold stone and held his rifle barrel close to one ear.
Kneeling beside him, Charlie tossed a CS tear gas grenade into the cave. It bounced and popped, coming to a hissing skid some fifteen feet away.
Ferrar and the rest of the men threw off the last of their tribal gear and pulled gas masks over their faces. Listening through the sucking noise of the ventilator in his mask, he heard no choking inside the cave and no more footsteps. The al-Qaeda fighters had retreated sufficiently far into their lair.
Charlie and Delta darted past Ferrar and took up positions inside the entrance. Over his shoulder, he noticed that the sky was turning a faint indigo down the valley where Pakistan lay. Unfortunately, the unit would be silhouetted against the dawn.
Slipping past him, Tray Bolton and Echo hugged the walls of the cave and advanced until they reached the cave’s next aperture.
Another tear gas grenade bounced deeper into the complex. In the deadened space, the released tear gas hissed down further chambers inside.
With the four other special operators safely inside the cave, Ferrar was the last to enter. He kneeled on the stone floor beside Bolton and aimed an ultrasonic radarscope straight ahead. The faint LCD screen displayed an orange image of the room. There were three openings in the next chamber.
Bolton hand-signaled for the men to fan out. Charlie and Delta, who were the ex-Army Rangers Pug Wilson and Al Moxley, would take the right. Meanwhile Echo and Foxtrot, the former Green Berets Colt Sealock and Ferrar, would advance down the center.
Presumably, Bolton, the former Navy Seal would take the left.
Without a sound, the men separated and began the time-honored tradition of covering and advancing down the rough-hewn sandstone corridors.
With tear gas still lingering in the air, Ferrar had to keep his mask on and couldn’t use his night vision scope. Instead, he and his partner wordlessly switched to the radarscope. Colt attached it to the floor and aimed it like a black flashlight into the gloom.
The readout showed the subterranean complex expanding into still more openings. It was essentially a labyrinth. Their unit would never be able to explore the entire excavation. Moreover, they would most certainly encounter hidden nooks, trapdoors, concealed rooms and…
A sudden shockwave from his right nearly knocked him out of his boots. He grabbed his ears as an explosion thundered through the cave.
“Landmines,” he whispered fiercely into his headset transmitter. The place was booby-trapped.
The explosion deafened him momentarily, but not enough to mask the anguished cries of Pug Wilson and Al Moxley.
Colt whipped out a metal detector the size of a long-barreled pistol and jabbed the earpiece in an ear.
While Colt scanned the floor for buried mines, Ferrar whispered into his transmitter, “Charlie and Delta are hit.”
He stared hard into the silent, acrid-smelling blackness.
They were losing men fast, and they weren’t finding a thing. Of course al-Qaeda wouldn’t give up without a fight. And the cave, built eons ago to fend off invasion attempts and reinforced to withstand Soviet bombardment, was not about to give up all her secrets at once.
For the unit to continue would be sheer folly. Half the men were down. With only Bolton, Colt and himself left, Ferrar saw the odds stacking up rapidly in the enemy’s favor.
He yanked Colt by the collar.
“We’re falling back.”
That same night, across the parched landscape of central Afghanistan, CIA Operations Officer Paul Stevens and several hundred marines were on the move in a very different kind of operation.
Humvees laden with ammunition raced through the flat, silent morning streets of Kandahar on a mission to take the civilian airport. Soon they had passed the two-story buildings and neighborhood mosques and were heading south across the scrubland.
“Secure the perimeter,” a voice crackled over the open radio channel.
Paul Stevens watched with approval as the Humvees spread out and raced toward the desert landing strip.
Careful to avoid landmines, they remained on paved access roads. Two groups converged on the ends of the dual runway and a third group approached the International Terminal.
As he neared the building, Stevens could tell from the chinks in the concrete and the dilapidated window frames that the structure had seen better days.
The radio channel came alive with reports of “all clear” from the field.
“Turn down the volume,” he told the marine escort who was driving the vehicle.
Stevens’ handheld radio was tuned to a different frequency. While he wanted to follow the progress of
the airport operation, his thoughts were burdened with the deteriorating condition of the small special ops force for which he was responsible high in the mountains.
In the pre-morning chill, he was listening to the heat of battle.
Ferrar had already reported that Bravo was down.
Ominous silence followed in which he was prepared for any kind of news. With their secrecy blown, the entire covert unit could have been taken out by a single bazooka blast. They might never have had time to report to him by radio. What man had the presence of mind or inclination to radio his commanding officer once he realized that in the next instant he would be in heaven, or hell?
His vehicle came to a jarring halt and he righted himself in his seat. All the soldiers piled out except for Joe Capella, Steven’s logistics man.
“No resistance, sir,” the marine driver reported to him as he stared out at the black airport that the Americans were attempting to take.
Just then, a burst of orange flames licked the bushes at one end of the runway. That flash was followed a moment later by the sound of small arms fire.
The marines had encountered their first resistance of the day.
“A marine is down,” a voice shouted excitedly over the airwaves.
“Jesus,” the driver said.
“But he’s not the first American casualty,” Stevens muttered.
“Huh?”
There was a beep on his handheld radio, nearly drowned out by the static on the driver’s radio.
“Turn that thing off,” he roared at the driver, and pressed his ear to his receiver.
“Charlie and Delta are hit,” Ferrar’s voice whispered fiercely over the airwaves.
“Not good,” Stevens said. “That leaves three men, and one of them is Tray Bolton.”
“Bolton,” the driver repeated over his shoulder. “Isn’t he the—”
“—son of my boss, Lester Friedman, Director of the CIA. This won’t go down well in Washington.”
