by John Ringo
“Nothing,” Mike said. “Unless they’re tanking at Bimini just before their speed run.”
“No way in hell,” Britney said. “Bimini’s DEA central. One boat and crew, once, maybe. Over and over? It’s a small harbor. And they’d have the materials already onboard. All it takes is the most cursory customs check.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, nodding. “That’s the kicker. Once they’ve picked up or are even near their pickup, they’re not going to hit land to tank. Unrep.”
“Okay, that one’s got me,” Britney admitted. “What is…”
“Underway replenishment,” Mike said. “They’re tanking from somebody at sea. Probably a bigger ship to the north of the Grands. That’s if we’re not totally off base.”
“But you don’t think we are,” Britney said.
“No, I don’t,” Mike replied. “And I don’t think they’re tanking in the Abacos. Or picking up their tracks, either.”
“Where then?” Britney said.
“Nassau,” Mike replied. “It’s not that far out of their way. There’s range for them to stop there then make a speed run up to the tanker up north. From there they go to pick up the materials. Then they do another speed run down south, drop the materials, come back through the Cut and head back down to Nassau.”
“Why Nassau?”
“Katya’s there,” Mike said. “And if she’s there, Jay’s not far away.”
“Who’s Jay?”
“Who knows?” Mike said, grinning. “He’s a freelance humint guy I hired. A spy in other words. Former CIA, got riffed during the Clinton administration. Very good. He’s been training Katya. If he’s sniffing around Gonzales, he has a reason. And Nassau’s big. Offshore speed boats come and go all the time. There are lots of ways to do a drop there that would just disappear in the noise. You can’t say the same about the Abacos; those towns are all tiny. They could be picking them up at a rendezvous at sea but even then. No, Nassau makes too much sense. Maybe too much sense but that’s what my gut is telling me.”
“Is that why you chose it?” Britney asked.
“No,” Mike admitted. “I chose it because it was central in the Bahamas and there was a really fucking big yacht for rent. I needed a really fucking big yacht.”
“Why?” Britney asked, chuckling.
“Because I’ve got nearly two hundred people packed in it belowdecks,” Mike said. “Getting them all there, quietly, was hell. They flew in through Miami, then out to every damned airport in the Bahamas. Most of them came in through Nassau but others came in through everywhere from Andros to Freeport. Then we went out where we were reasonably out of sight and the Lynx went out to pick them up. That, by the way, was while I was getting established. Getting their gear in place is even harder. Most of it isn’t here, yet.”
“That was a big movement,” Britney said, her eyes wide.
“Yep,” Mike said. “And we did it in less than twenty hours from the go word. I’ve got good people.”
“Like Gretchen?” Britney asked.
Mike hit the throttle and dropped the boat to a sudden stop, water splashing up over the bow as it slammed into a wave.
“Who the fuck told you about Gretchen?” Mike snarled.
“Friends of yours,” Britney said. “People who care about you.”
“If they care about me, they need to get their God-damned nose out of my private business,” Mike snapped. “Jesus, I’m sick of this. I live under a fucking microscope.”
“For living under a microscope, you don’t talk about things much,” Britney said. “Not important things.”
“I talk about important things all the time,” Mike replied, starting the boat back up. But he kept the speed down to idle. “Stopping a shipment of VX is very God-damned important.”
“Yeah, but not about things that hurt you,” Britney said. “Big boys don’t cry, do they?”
“You’d be surprised,” Mike said, his jaw flexing. “And who the hell am I going to talk to about it? Anastasia? Adams? Nielson? One of the damned harem girls?”
“The commander can’t show his weakness,” Britney said, nodding. “But from what I heard, he showed his ass instead.”
“Yes, he did,” Mike admitted. “But he’s over it, thank you.”
“Bullshit,” Britney snapped. “I’m not ‘over’ Syria. I live with it every damned night. It’s not as bad as it was, but it’s still pretty damned bad. Not the bodies, not scavenging the ammo, not turning the fuckers over to pull the grenades off their belts. No, I just sit in that damned chair and one of them comes over, key in hand. I’m next.”
“I can believe it,” Mike said, looking over at her.
“I’ve had hours and hours of counseling,” Britney said, undoing the straps and turning on the seat. “I took your advice. Now take mine. Talk. Now. Here. Talk to me, Bambi. Start at the beginning. Go to the end. Don’t leave anything out.”
Mike undid his own straps and went below. The ice machine was working and the small bar was, per his orders, stocked. He pulled out an untouched bottle of Elijah Craig, filled two glasses with ice and went back up on deck.
“Here,” he said, pouring two drinks and handing Britney one.
“I’m not a straight whiskey drinker,” Britney said.
“I quit drinking alone three days ago,” Mike said, raising his glass. “Salut.”
“Blood in your eye,” Britney said, sipping the whiskey. “This is good. Smooth.”
“Yes, it is,” Mike said, taking a large gulp. “I’ve got twenty-three empty bottles to prove how smooth.” He looked at the glass, then sighed. “Gretchen.”
It took a while, about half the bottle.
“I wasn’t there,” Mike finished. He’d refilled his glass with ice twice and now the second reload was about gone. “I didn’t see it. I couldn’t do anything about it. But I had to look under the God-damned sheet. I had to see her one more time. She’d been cut in fucking half. Her spine was sticking out. Ribs. I remember thinking ‘that’s a spleen, right?’ ” He closed his eyes, his jaw working, and shook his head.
“She was just a Kardane girl,” Mike said, grimacing, his eyes tight. “Just another duty of the fucking Kildar. Be a good stud. Do the mares and go on.” He lowered his head and his body shook. “And then she was just fucking gone. I’m never going to see her again!”
Britney took the man in her arms and laid his head on her breast, stroking the back of his head as he cried.
“I mean she was going to marry Kiril,” Mike said, sobbing. “I knew I couldn’t have her. She wasn’t mine. She never would be. But she’d be around, you know? I’d see her. And then Kiril gets wasted. It was all my fault! All of it…”
“Shhhh,” Britney said. “You couldn’t have done anything…”
“Bullshit,” Mike said, sitting up and turning away. “I was the fucking commander. I’m the God-damned Kildar! It is, de facto, my responsibility. And, what’s worse, I knew the mission was fucked from the word go. I knew we were screwed. We had so many stupid fucking conditions put on us there was no way we were just going to ghost out. I should have thrown a shit fit when the Georgians refused us helo support. Let Markov take the fucking casualties! They’re fucking mercenaries, that’s what they’re there for! And then the fucking Russians! Oh, did you hear about that BASTARD, Chechnik?”
“No,” Britney said to the clearly enraged former SEAL.
“They knew,” Mike said, snarling. “I can’t prove it but they had to fucking know. If it had just been Bukara, well, that would have been one thing. We could have smoked him then smoked the defenses in the pass, somehow. Do what the girls did and bring up the mortars. Something. But Sadim? He was their fucking varsity! Nielson told the Russians we were picking up signals that looked like a moving unit. The Russians are masters of humint. There was no fucking way that they couldn’t know Sadim was moving! That he was moving into the sector where the op was going down. Nielson and the girls had the intel way in advance, but they didn’t k
now who was moving. They didn’t know it was a fucking brigade. They didn’t know it was Sadim! That was what fucked us. If I ever see Chechnik again, the motherfucker, I’m going to sit him on a short stake and eat my lunch in front of him! And fucking Vladimir had better watch out, too.”
“I don’t get it,” Britney said, blanching at the very direct threat to the president of Russia. “Why didn’t they tell you?”
“Because then I’d have aborted the op,” Mike said, his face hard. “We had ghosted into deepest darkest Injun country. The intel was building when we were still in movement, we hadn’t launched the op. We could’ve aborted and ghosted out. But that meant somebody else would have had to stop the… package. And we had a deal. I did the mission, I didn’t tell the U.S. what the package was. If ANV or Delta did an op in, say, Azerbaijan, then the U.S. would know what the deal was. They’d know what the Russians had really lost. They wanted me to stop the transfer even if it meant hanging us out to dry. Maybe especially if it meant I got smoked. Dead men tell no tales. The motherfuckers.”
“What was the package?” Britney asked. “Shit, that’s well above my clearance… Forget I asked.”
“It’s okay,” Mike said, taking another sip. “I’m not going to tell you anyway. Funny. They go and royally butt-fuck us and I’m still holding up my end of the fucking deal. Go figure.”
“You’re a good man,” Britney said. “And I think I really don’t want to know.”
“I’m a very bad man,” Mike said. “I will tell you this, though. Feel free to pass it on to anyone you can who has National Security Counsel clearance. Please fucking feel free to pass it on. The Russians told the U.S. it was nukes. Three of them. That was what I was getting paid to recover. Three nukes.”
“That’s serious enough,” Britney said, her eyes wide.
“Nothing compared to the real package,” Mike said, his jaw working. “The real package was Armageddon on a fucking platter. But here’s the kicker. I told the fucking Russians if I was going to keep their secret I wanted the deal sweetened. Four nukes. Five mil apiece was the vig. Twenty if I recovered all three. Hell, I turn up with four, that’s another five, minimum, right? Enough to keep my mouth shut.”
“Yes,” Britney said, shaking her head. “That must have been an interesting negotiation.”
“If I’d known they were going to fuck me as hard as they did, I’d have either told them to piss up a rope or told them ten,” Mike said. “Then I’d have sent them back, VPP. But here’s the real kicker. Guess how many I gave the U.S.?”
“Huh?” Britney said then her eyes widened. “Oh… shit.”
“Three,” Mike confirmed. “Hey, that was all they were expecting.”
“You have a nuclear weapon in your possession?” Britney said carefully.
“Yep,” Mike said. “About ten kilotons. In the basement of my castle. Partially disassembled I might add, thanks to the WMD expert I picked up on the same op. Something about retaining the quality of the tritium. But it can be assembled in about three minutes. And one of these days, oh let that day be soon, I’m going to take it and shove it up Vladimir’s ass, then blow the son-of-a-bitch.”
“I so didn’t want to know any of this,” Britney said, shaking her head. “I’m not even sure who I can tell.”
“I can put you on the phone to the President if you’d like,” Mike said, putting the boat back up on plane. “And you’d be surprised the shit you don’t want to know about what’s in the basement of my castle. Belts.”
“We were talking about Gretchen,” Britney said, strapping in.
“Yeah, we were,” Mike said, powering up. “And now we’re not. Thanks, though. I appreciate it.”
“We’re not done,” Britney said as the boat started hopping waves again.
“No, we’re not,” Mike admitted. “And, yeah, we’ll talk again. But it was a good start.” He tossed the remains of his drink over the side and looked over at her. “Think you can survive making it down to the cabin and getting me a Coke?”
“Can I ask you one thing first,” Britney said, undoing the straps while bracing herself.
“What?”
“What is the Navy’s first rule about a fire fight?”
“Send the Marines.”
Chapter Seven
“Who now?” Jason O’Connor asked. “The Marines?”
O’Connor was the desk manager of the Hollywood Florida Central Governmental Surplus Repository. Run by the Marshals Service, it was the place where everything the United States government seized in its ongoing war on drugs was dumped for eventual resale. Stuff seized by the IRS, despite the “Central Government” part, was sold through another agency.
The law under which the government seized most materials was incredibly archaic, going back to the middle ages. Effectively, the condition of forfeiture meant that when a crime was committed involving a device, vehicle or even home, that device, vehicle or home was considered an accomplice in the crime. And being an inanimate object, it had none of the “rights” of an individual. It was assumed to be guilty.
Thus when a person was pulled over and drugs were found in his car, the person would be arraigned, have hearings and in some cases eventually be tried if there was sufficient evidence and if the DA was feeling lucky.
The poor car had no such rights. Oh, if the owner contested it was given a trial, but no peers! And if the owner didn’t contest, usually because they were guilty as hell, the poor thing was sent directly to the Hollywood Florida Central Governmental Surplus Repository where it languished behind chain-link fence and barbed wire until some individual bought it at auction and freed it from durance vile.
Quite often that person was a friend or relation of the original drug dealer, who then transferred the title back. This was especially common with boats, some of which had been “incarcerated” four or five times for the exact same offense, the definition of recidivist. Alas, there was no three strikes law for boats.
Jason was having a bad day. Apparently, every government service in the nation was descending on South Florida for reasons he didn’t know and, frankly, could care less about. And they all wanted vehicles. Since the HCGSR had lots of vehicles, of every shape, model and description, and since the U.S. government already owned them, it was a natural source. Cars had been rolling off the lot all day. Not only did every one mean more paperwork, he knew they were going to be returned in poor to awful condition. Virtually unsellable. Cops never took care of their cars. Fibbies were the worst. No, DEA was the worst; what DEA did to a car shouldn’t happen to a junkyard dog.
But this guy wasn’t BU or DEA. No suit in the first case, no jeans and dreadlocks in the latter. He might be BATF. Some of the BATF guys had that military look. And those cars… Jesus.
“What?” Jason snapped.
“You have five offshore power boats,” the man said in strongly accented English. He handed over a distribution form. “The Kildar wishes them.”
“And what the fuck is a Kildar?” Jason asked, sitting on his stool and looking at the form. All the blanks were filled in but none of them made sense. He’d never seen the authorization code and the security code was… He turned to his computer and made his way through the menus, hunting up the code list. The authorization code was through SOCOM, which he’d sort of guessed. He’d seen one like it before. But the security code… The issuing office was listed as “Need-To-Know.” Fucking black ops. It was a valid code but it just pissed him off. The five boats were the best thing he had in the yard. They were going up for auction, one at a time, over the next month and were going to mean real money to the U.S. government. Money that was going to buy new gear for cops for one thing. The fuck if he was just going to let them disappear into a black ops hole. Fuck them. He had authority to deny requisitions and he was God damned well going to use it.
And the guy was just too fucking pretty. He looked like a fucking movie star. That was what really tipped the scales. It just pissed the overworked, in his opin
ion, desk manager off.
“No,” Jason said, handing back the form.
“This is the proper paperwork, yes?” the man asked, blinking.
“That is the proper paperwork,” Jason replied. “But I’ve got authority to deny those. So… No. Goodbye.”
Vil considered the little man for a moment. He was puzzled. He was fully aware that most people outside of Georgia did not know who the Kildar was. That, in fact, the Kildar would prefer to keep it that way.
But he also knew, because the Kildar had told him, that the authorization was at a very high level. He should, by rights, have been terribly obsequious, perhaps not even asking for a bribe. The Kildar had told him the man would not ask for a bribe and that Vil should not offer, that that would cause problems. But there were problems.
“I would like to make a call,” Vil said, pulling out a cell phone.
“Fine,” Jason said. “Call whoever you’d like. The answer is still no.”
The guy was still looking confused. He had a weird accent, maybe German or something. Maybe he would have understood “Nyet” or “Non” or whatever. Let him call whoever he wanted. SOCOM might think it was hot shit but it pulled no weight with the U.S. Marshals Service!
* * *
“Pierson.”
“Colonel Pierson, this is Vil Mahona. I am one of the Kildar’s—”
The guy was talking Russian so Pierson responded in the same language.
“Team leaders,” Pierson said. “You’re on an open line, Vil.”
“Yes, sir. I apologize for that. Sir, I am having a difficulty. I have been tasked to obtain five vessels for the Kildar’s use from a facility in the town of Hollywood, Florida. You are familiar with this facility, yes?”
“I am familiar, no,” Pierson said, smiling. “But I can figure it out. Go on.”
“The desk manager has refused my request,” Vil said. “The Kildar has assured me that I have proper paperwork and the man even admitted that to me. But he still refuses. I am wondering if I should offer him bribe?”
