Ghosts of War

by Brad Taylor

  —

  In any mobilization of this size, the scope itself took on a special meaning. President Hannister may have ordered nobody to cross the Rubicon, but there has always been a critical mass in war. Whenever enough forces were deployed, regardless of the reason, the question of defense or offense became moot. The units themselves, commanded by well-meaning men and women who only wanted to ensure survival in a fight, became a driving force in the fight itself.

  The planning and training for the eventual clash became a precursor, like leading a racehorse to the stall, with everyone from the lowliest lieutenant to the division commander pressing for the order to attack, all knowing what happens when the gate opens.

  President Hannister didn’t understand the complexities of the deployment, but Colonel Kurt Hale should have realized that the Rubicon had been crossed when the president issued the order for mobilization.

  It would be very, very hard to put the horse back in the barn after it had been primed for a race. When fully formed on the European continent, it would want to run, as it had been trained to do, and the men in the saddles would advocate for the gate to open. Begging to be let go.

  The opposition understood this, watching warily and matching the mobilization step for step.

  Sitting in his estate in Slovakia, Simon Migunov saw none of this, but he was about to accomplish his end goal: slaughtering untold hundreds of thousands so he could walk free.

  31

  I looked at the screen again, seeing the words from the translation on the small tablet and wondering if I was about to step onto thin ice. I decided it was worth it. I said, “What do you mean, you don’t want to fight anymore? Are you talking about not fighting with me? Because I’d love that, trust me.”

  Shoshana floated her weird glow on me and I realized I didn’t want to go where we were headed. But it was too late. She said, “No. I don’t want to fight, period. I want what you have. I want to do something like you do with Jennifer. Where I can use my skills for something else.”

  “With who?”

  She dropped her eyes and put her hand on the door handle, saying, “I need to get out of here before you guys get committed.”

  I grabbed her arm, preventing the door from swinging open. I said, “Hey, come on. Nobody’s here with us. You want to start a business doing something else? Away from Aaron? Does he know?”

  She looked up at me, and I saw I’d missed the entire thing. She wanted Aaron to leave their life, with her. And she had no idea how to make that happen.

  She quit pushing the door and said, “You and Jennifer have found something together. I yearn for the same thing. I don’t want to kill people anymore. I crave a normal life.”

  I wanted to tell her the truth, because I knew who she was, but I couldn’t. I settled for reality. “Do you even know what normal is? Trust me, for people like you and me, it’s not that great. You’ll be sick of it in a month.”

  She closed the door and sat for a second, not saying a word. And I realized she’d picked me for the camera instruction for a reason. She wanted to talk, and of all the people she’d ever met, I was the one who was most like her.

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head violently, saying, “No, no, no. I don’t want to hear that. I’ve watched you two. You and Jennifer are connected like Aaron and me. I see it. I feel it. I want to do something like that. I want to be happy.”

  I said, “You’re not now?”

  She leaned her head back and said, “I’m not sure. I’m not sure I even know what happiness is.” She looked at me and said, “Am I happy? Is this it?”

  I chose my words carefully. At the end of the day, I really did care for her, and I didn’t want her to feel the pain I had felt in the past. “Look, you have a particular set of skills, and they’re useful, but you don’t need to toss them away because of what happened to you. You can still use them for good. With Aaron.”

  She said, “This mission is good, but good missions are few and far between. That asshole we’re chasing, Mikhail, is an example of that. He and all the others wanted my skill at killing, but not my skill at preventing death. Aaron is the only one who saw beyond what I had become. I know what I am, and it’s evil.”

  Shoshana was about the most lethal killing machine I’d ever met, yet she was analyzing herself in a way I never could have. And she did deserve happiness, but she’d never have it, as long as she didn’t understand the skills she owned were God-given, and were neither good nor bad. They were just skills. Some people could sink a basketball from forty feet time after time. Some could survive in chaos, completing the mission no matter the obstacles. Different abilities, but still, just skills.

  The conversation triggered a realization for me. Something from a ridiculous movie I’d watched as a young man. I said, “You’re the Pumpkin King. I can’t believe I haven’t seen that before.”

  She looked at me with suspicion and said, “What is that? Some American insult?”

  “No, no. It’s from an American animated film called The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Pumpkin King is in charge of Halloween, but wants to be Santa Claus. He wants to be in charge of Christmas, but he’s a badass. That’s you.”

  Confused, she said, “So what’s that mean? I can’t change?”

  I realized I was saying exactly that. “No. Wait. In the movie, the Pumpkin King is a good person. He’s just trapped in his world. He realizes he can change his world without taking someone else’s. That’s all I meant.”

  She looked at me with slitted eyes and I said, “Shit. I don’t know what I meant. I do know that you have skills that are good. That you use for good. You shouldn’t toss them aside. Using them doesn’t make you evil. Only the outcome is potentially bad, and you determine that. Like what we’re doing here.”

  “I don’t want to kill anymore. And I’m not. No matter what this mission brings. I’m done killing.”

  I said, “You can’t call that. We might get into a situation where it’s inevitable. You know that.”

  She looked at me with conviction and said, “No. I’m not the Pumpkin King. I want to be something else. I won’t use my skills for death anymore.”

  I had no idea where the little demon was going with this. It was the strangest epiphany I’d ever witnessed, and I was wondering why she was telling me and not Aaron.

  She shifted tack yet again and said, “Do you love Jennifer?”

  That caused a small explosion of air from my lungs. “What the fuck? Are you kidding me with this? Why do you Israelis always ask that?”

  “It’s a serious question.”

  “Do you love Aaron?”

  She said, “Yes. I do. He doesn’t know it, but I do, and I want to be his Jennifer.”

  I leaned my skull on the headrest, buying time, then said, “Well, maybe you should tell him, dumbass. You can’t be Jennifer and keep that shit bottled up.”

  She said, “I don’t want to be the Pumpkin King.”

  The words were so sad I had no answer. Like a handicapped child dreaming of playing in the NFL, she would never be Jennifer. Ever.

  Our earpieces squelched and I heard Knuckles say, “Got movement in the foyer. It’s Mikhail.”

  Shoshana opened the door to leave and said, “Maybe you should tell Jennifer how you feel. She would appreciate it as well.”

  She exited the car slowly, then turned and looked at me in her weird way. I felt the spear of her gaze and wondered how much of the exchange had been me helping her. The conversation left two competing thought streams going through my mind, but only one required my immediate attention.

  “What do you have?”

  “Mikhail’s talking to Simon. Got them both, and Mikhail’s about to leave. Looks like they’re shouting at each other.”

  The call made me wish we’d equipped Knuckles with a lipreading camera, but he was hidden
on a bench in some sort of memorial park and couldn’t get close enough for it to matter.

  Hearing the radio, half out of the vehicle, Shoshana turned around, now all business. She said, “You good?”

  “Yeah. Get staged in your car. Bet you dinner it’ll be me leaving.”

  She said, “Nope. I got a feeling I’ll be doing the surveillance on this one.”

  She exited the vehicle and I tossed the Pelican case housing the extra equipment in the rear, under a blanket. Knuckles came back. “We got a problem. Mikhail just left the house, but he didn’t go to a car. He’s crossing the street and headed right at me. On foot.”

  Shit.

  “Intentions?”

  “He’s walking into the memorial. Pike, it’s wide-open in here. If he gets up top and conducts a meeting, you aren’t getting close.”

  I knew what he meant from my recce the day before. Just across the street from the target house was a memorial park for the fallen Russian soldiers who had liberated Bratislava during World War II. Built on a hill, it was crisscrossed with paths and benches, with a monument at the crest, a forty-foot obelisk on top of a pillared square of granite. All told, the park was probably ten acres of open terrain. A perfect spot to conduct a meeting because it would require absolutely no countersurveillance. Anybody trying to penetrate would be spotted. Jennifer and I could wander through once or twice, since there were others in the park, but no way would we be able to focus on a meeting for any length of time.

  I said, “What’s your recommendation?”

  “Forget it. I’ll remain in place and pick him up again when he leaves. You won’t get any useful intel if you attempt a penetration, and if you get burned here, you’re no good for anything else.”

  I started to respond when my door swung open and Shoshana climbed in like she was being chased. She frantically looked around and said, “Where is the Pelican case?”

  I pointed to the backseat. She grabbed the case and ripped it open. She pulled out a tan box connected to a thick computer tablet by a wire. She opened the box. Inside were what looked like a toy helicopter, maybe six or seven inches long, and a folding joystick.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Something from Get Smart.”

  She grinned at me, and I thought, How in the hell did she know?

  32

  Shoshana began breaking out the separate components, saying, “Give me your computer, quickly.”

  I handed her the tablet we had tested earlier, asking, “What is it?”

  She said, “It’s the other part of the system,” and she called Aaron, speaking in rushed Hebrew. She took the tablet, then manipulated it until it was slaved to the control unit. I asked, “Bluetooth?”

  She handed me the toy copter and said, “Yes. Hold this out the window in the palm of your hand.”

  I did so, and its rotors began turning, startling me with a little hurricane force of wind. It took off, a giant bumblebee flying into the air. In seconds, it was out of sight.

  I turned to her, watching her manipulate the joystick, and saw what the bird saw, the land being eaten up as it flew toward the memorial park. The detail was impressive for such a small drone. Embarrassingly enough, I’d seen nothing like it in all my time working with James Bond stuff. Taskforce R&D guys are getting an ass-chewing over this.

  “Did your command invent that?”

  “No. It’s called a Black Hornet, and it’s made in Norway. We just modified it to work with the lipreader software. The original has both a thermal camera and a normal one. We ditched those because we needed a better lens and had no need for thermal.”

  Knuckles came on. “What’s the call?”

  “Stand by. . . . Shoshana is working some magic.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  I glanced at the screen and saw a bird’s-eye view of Knuckles sitting on a bench. I said, “Looking at you now. Which way did he go?”

  He glanced around, seeing nothing, then said, “Straight up the stairs. He didn’t deviate. I think he’s headed to the monument on the top.”

  To Shoshana, I said, “Will you break link? How much distance can you get?”

  “Over a kilometer. We’re good on that. Time is the killer. I only have twenty-five minutes of flight time.”

  Knuckles fell from view as the drone went higher into the air, focusing on the monument. Shoshana did a slow circle around it, then said, “There he is. And he’s with someone.”

  She zoomed the lens and I recognized Mikhail, standing just inside the overhang of the monument. A pillar stood between the drone and whomever he was talking with. Shoshana slid the drone sideways and the second man came into view, a burly guy with a two-toned face, the upper tanned, the lower white. It took a second to realize why. He just shaved off a beard.

  Shoshana said, “Are you getting feed?”

  I looked at my tablet and said, “Yes.”

  “Hit record.”

  I did so, and the computer began working its algorithms as it took in what the two men were saying. I could see the gestures the men made, but wouldn’t get a readout until we were through. The burly guy looked agitated, and Mikhail was matching his temper. Whatever was going on, with Knuckles’s report about an argument with Simon and now this, something clearly wasn’t going right for them.

  The meeting lasted a little less than ten minutes, and ended with Mikhail handing the other man a slip of paper, then clapping him on the back. When they separated, Mikhail retraced his steps and the other man went in the opposite direction, leaving the park from another exit. We stayed on Mikhail.

  I stopped the recording and keyed the radio, “Knuckles, Koko, meeting’s over. Mikhail’s headed back your way.”

  “How are you seeing that?”

  “I told you. Shoshana magic.”

  Jennifer came on, apparently not appreciating my jokes. “Knuckles, this is Koko. The Israelis have a drone.”

  Knuckles said, “So I’m free to go? I’d prefer he didn’t see me twice.”

  “No. We’ll track him, but we only have about ten minutes of flying time left. I don’t want to lose eyes-on because our technology failed.”

  Jennifer said, “Aaron has one over here as well. We can launch it when you run low.”

  I thought about that for a second, and then decided against it. “Good idea, but Knuckles stays. We have no way to recharge these things in the car, and we might need yours later.”

  I got a roger from the team, and said to Shoshana, “Where is he?”

  “Coming down the steps now. He’ll be in view of Knuckles in seconds.”

  And sure enough, Knuckles said, “I have eyes-on. He’s walking back to the house,” then, “Break—break, Simon just exited the building. Moving to the Beemer parked out front.”

  Shoshana worked the drone and, off the net, said, “Get ready to record. They’re going to talk.”

  Sure enough, Mikhail shouted from across the street, then jogged toward Simon. Shoshana waited until Mikhail linked up before zooming in on their faces. She said, “Hit it,” and I did.

  The conversation was brief, but the image was crystal clear. If we didn’t get a recording out of this, it was the software’s fault, not the camera angle.

  The two men shook hands, then Simon opened his car door. I punched the tablet to stop the recording and initiated the translation software, saying, “Get that drone back here. You’ve got Simon when he leaves.”

  Looking at her tablet, she said, “Mikhail is moving to a car as well. We’re both going into motion.”

  I called it out to the other teams, telling Knuckles the bird was off and to give a time and direction when the two targets departed. I said, “We need to get that drone back. We’re about to move.”

  I saw something hit the hood and she said, “It’s here.”

  My tab
let vibrated, telling me the computer had done its work, and the meeting on the hill began to play on the screen. Unfortunately, it was absolute gobbledygook, like the tablet was giving us what Charlie Brown’s cartoon teacher said. “What the hell is this thing doing?”

  She took it and said, “Wrong language. They weren’t speaking Yiddish.”

  “That’s just great. What good was any of that, then?”

  She began to fast-forward the video, saying, “We send it back if we need to. We have a whole day of surveillance in front of us. Might not have anything to do with the Torah anyway.”

  She reached the meeting with Simon and hit play. Miraculously, the short conversation appeared correctly. Shoshana said, “Speaking Yiddish now.”

  Mikhail:

  He wasn’t too happy with the additional mission. He seems to think the last one is clearly enough. He’s shook up about what he did.