by Jack Mars
Susan stared at Kurt. “Not authorized? Not authorized by whom?”
“By Agent Stone.”
Susan ran a hand through her hair. “Oh man.”
Kurt shrugged and sighed heavily. His body language suggested this was about what he’d expect. His carriage, normally so erect, slumped an almost imperceptible amount.
Along the table to her left, in an impeccably ironed dress green uniform, General Loomis of the Joint Special Operations Command took a slow, but satisfied sip from his coffee mug. He was square-jawed, crew-cutted, as slim and sinewy as a piece of beef jerky. He seemed more than a little pleased.
“Susan,” he said, “I had a staff member research this situation last night. We appear to have a team on the ground led by a special agent, admittedly one with a track record of uncommon achievements, but also with a reputation for being a cowboy, and a history of insubordination, overstepping his authority, and at least whispers of human rights violations. He is supposedly in command of his own boutique spy agency now, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from going into the field when the mood strikes.”
Susan looked at him. Did his wife press his uniform for him, or was it his mom?
“Are you done?” she said.
Apparently, he wasn’t. “His team includes a former hacker who became a federal employee to escape a long prison term, and an intelligence officer who at one point was the mistress of Don Morris, one of the architects of a failed coup attempt that included one of the worst terrorist incidents ever to take place on American soil. The only person on that team with a hint of credibility is Agent Newsam, who has excelled in every deployment he’s ever had, but who nevertheless seems to go along with—”
“Why don’t you tell her who the guide is?” Haley Lawrence said.
Loomis scowled. “Never mind the guide.”
Susan shook her head. “What are we saying here, Kurt? What is the worry, exactly?”
“There is some concern that Agent Stone has gone rogue, or is about to do so. Agent Swann described Agent Stone as pissed off, to coin a phrase. He recommended that we speak with Agent Stone directly. This is another departure from protocol. In the past, Agent Swann has been a reasonably good conduit for relaying two-way information and providing updates.”
“Have we done what he said?” Susan said. “Have we called Stone?”
Kurt shrugged. “We were waiting for you. Stone reports directly to you, and you seem to have more influence over him than others.” Kurt’s words were heavy with meaning—loaded, like a plate of nachos with triple cheese.
“The mission he is on is highly sensitive,” Kurt said. “He needs to keep out of the public eye and remain focused on what he was sent there to do. If he is considering some sort of retaliatory attack on Boko Haram… well, obviously, we can’t have that. He and Agent Newsam have just witnessed an atrocity. They may be traumatized and not in their right minds. If so, we may need to recall Stone and his entire team, and start the process all over again.”
Susan was careful to make no sign. She had sent Luke over there, against her better judgment and her own personal desires, and this was what you got when you sent Luke Stone somewhere. Unpleasant surprises tended to pop up.
Why had he gone into the refugee camp? Why did he do the things that he did?
In the years she had known him, Stone had been right again and again and again. He didn’t do what the data suggested—he went on instinct, like a wild animal. So far it had worked. Then again, there was Susan’s new Vice President, Stephen Lief. He had been Stone’s idea.
She shook her head. Maybe Stone was losing it.
“Susan,” General Loomis said, “as I described last night, we have teams of special operatives, highly trained, well rested, and fit for service, on-call at our base in Agadez. Within an hour, we could present you a plan for tracking that weapon and getting those men inside Sambisa Forest.”
Susan looked at him. “General Loomis, are we friends? Do I ever call you Frank?”
He shook his head. His eyebrows furrowed. “No, ma’am.”
“Then please address me by my title. If you don’t mind.”
“Kurt,” Amy Pooler said, cutting through the chatter. “We appear to have made a connection to Agent Stone’s satellite phone. We can bring him into this conversation any time the President is ready.”
Kurt looked at Susan.
“Just dandy,” Susan said.
Not even eight in the morning, and already this day was spinning into orbit.
Kurt gestured with his head at the black speakerphone device in the center of the conference table; it had half a dozen tentacle-like protuberances that stabilized it. Staffers invariably called it the octopus. “Put him on the speaker system.”
A long moment passed. Susan sipped her coffee.
A disembodied voice came from the octopus. “Hello?”
“Agent Stone?” Kurt Kimball said.
“Yes. Kurt? How are you doing? Is Susan with you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
1:57 p.m. West Africa Time (7:57 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Forward Operating Base (FOB) Desert Lion
Diffa, Niger
The afternoon sun beat down.
Luke, Ed, and Paul Dunn were staying out of its way. They were on the top level of the base, surrounded by sand bags, and in the shade offered by a green canvas awning. Stone had taken a cold bucket shower, and the guys here had lent him a tan camo uniform that wasn’t drenched in blood.
Until a moment ago, the three of them had been hunched over a laptop perched on a flimsy card table, looking at satellite maps of Sambisa Forest, along with real-time high-altitude drone footage Swann was taking of the village where Dunn thought the girls were. The place was little more than a clearing, with a collection of thatched roof huts.
There were men with weapons in the village—that much was clear. And there were a couple of jeeps with rear-mounted machine guns. But the villagers themselves appeared to be gone, along with whatever livestock they’d had. For the moment, the girls, if they were there, were being kept out of sight.
“They probably know we’re watching them,” Dunn said.
Luke waved his hand. He was on the phone now, but Dunn didn’t seem to notice. Dunn had been in the field too long. Something had happened to him, and apparently he had snapped. Luke could hardly blame him, but it was a little troubling to think that AFRICOM had assigned him this man as his guide. Dunn was obsessed with killing Boko Haram. It made his personality somewhat… one-dimensional.
Even so, he seemed to know his stuff.
“Agent Stone?” a male voice said over the line. The connection was not great. Luke pressed the phone to his ear.
“Yes,” he said. “Kurt? How are you doing? Is Susan with you?”
“I’m here, Luke,” she said. She sounded small and far away.
Luke took a deep breath. That relaxed him a bit. He wanted to hear her voice, and he wanted her to know he was okay. By now, she had probably heard what happened.
“Susan, how are you?”
“I’m okay. How are you?”
“Uh, not great. You heard about the suicide attacks today?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s the whole story. Ed and I are here, we’re uninjured, and we’re still operational. But it was a nasty little business today. A lot of people got hurt. And there are thousands of people just sitting here, waiting to be next. There are also about a hundred kidnapped young girls, who may be less than forty-five miles from our current location.”
“Where are you right now?” she said.
“We’re still in Diffa, at the Special Forces base here.”
“Agent Stone,” Kurt said, “at any point, have you crossed the border into Nigeria?”
“Negative.”
“What is the status of the operation?”
“Uh… we are studying drone footage provided by Agent Swann, and working with the guide to pinpoint possible—”
“What are your intentions?” Kurt said.
“Kurt, I don’t feel free to discuss my intentions over this connection.”
“Agent Stone, unless we can get some clarity about the status of the operation, we are leaning toward scrapping it, pulling your team back, and moving forward with alternatives.”
Luke nearly smiled, but didn’t. The thing had barely started, and already they were calling him back? “Uh, negative, Kurt. Status here is good. Operation is progressing as planned. By tonight, I expect to be able to question subjects regarding the whereabouts of the missing item.”
“Stone,” another male voice said. He couldn’t make out who that was, and he didn’t bother trying. “You are not authorized to enter Nigeria. Do you understand?”
Stone shrugged. “Of course I understand.”
“Agent Stone,” Susan said, “we know what you intend to do. And I’m ordering you not to do it. It’s stupid. It will create an international incident. And you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Madam President, I understand your concerns.”
“Stone!” Susan said. “Listen to me. You are to stand down at once. Return to the base at Agadez immediately. I expect to hear that you arrived there by this evening.”
Stone shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Stone,” Kurt Kimball said. “The President of the United States has just given you a direct order. You serve at her pleasure. You are liable to lose your—”
Luke looked at the telephone in his hand. It was the simple type of satellite phone that he preferred. He didn’t like a lot of bells and whistles. What he wanted were big numbers on the keypad. A green button for call. A red button for hanging up.
And that’s what he had here. So he pressed the red button. Then he looked at Ed Newsam and Paul Dunn.
“Damn satellites,” he said. “I’m always losing these calls.”
It was bad. He recognized that. Susan was angry with him. She was worried about him. Maybe she would even come under pressure to take the SRT away from him—that seemed to be where Kurt was going at the end of the call. But there was nothing Luke could do about any of that at this moment. If Susan had been there this afternoon, seen what he had seen, maybe she would feel differently.
Of course she would. No thinking, feeling person could possibly do otherwise. And she had the people here to do something about it. If she knew what Luke knew, she would deploy him, and Ed, and crazy Paul Dunn, in the same way Luke was planning to.
Ed was staring at him.
“The girls are there, man. At least some of them. Swann just gave us some video of some punks moving half a dozen of them from one hut to another. They had them tied together, moving them in a human chain.”
Luke nodded. If that was the case, then there was a lot of planning to do. But first things first. He looked at Dunn.
“How do we get there? We can’t drive or chopper across the border, and forty-five miles is a long walk.”
Dunn cracked his big knuckles. “There’s a Nigerian military depot about three miles on the other side of the river. We walk there and take one of their jeeps.”
“Steal it?” Ed said. “We can’t risk a shootout with the Nigerians.”
Dunn shook his head. “No. We don’t steal it.” He went to his pack, which was leaning against the sandbag wall. He unclipped the top, reached in, and pulled out a brown paper bag. Then he tossed it on the table. Blue- and green- and peach-colored paper money spilled out. Luke picked up a couple of bills—Nigerian naira, in five-hundred and one-thousand denominations.
“We buy it,” Dunn said. “Everything’s a payoff around here. Remember?”
“Where’d you get this money?” Luke said.
Dunn shook his head. “Don’t even ask.”
“I’m asking.”
Dunn shrugged. “Everything’s a shakedown, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
2:20 p.m. West Africa Time (8:20 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Nigerien Air Base 201
Agadez, Niger
“Listen to what he says here,” Trudy said.
“Trudy, I’m trying to keep an eye on this village,” Swann said. “While simultaneously trying to monitor these troop movements to the east on the Chad border.”
Trudy shook her head. Swann was always like that. He liked to do one thing at a time. Watching a village and troop movements constituted at least two separate activities in Swann’s mind—possibly more—even though both things were taking place on a video screen two feet from his face.
“Well, watch the village, and the troops, but listen to this.”
Swann sat at a metal desk, flying an MQ-9 Reaper drone high above Sambisa Forest. He held a joystick controller in one hand, and a throttle in the other. He stared intently into the three laptop screens laid out in front of him. He looked like the world’s largest little boy, playing a very important video game.
The screens showed aerial views of what appeared to be dense jungle. To the left of the screen now was an area of clearings. Small figures moved in the clearing. Occasionally, Swann put the green crosshairs on a figure and zoomed in.
They were in the tiny office that passed for their command center. The walls were drab green and smelled like paint. There was one window, and outside it was a view across a dusty runway toward a large aluminum building with a sloping corrugated roof. The building was rusty—it looked like it had been there a while. Windblown sand was piled up on the side of it.
Inside the office, the ceiling fan spun slowly, making a faint rattling noise and pushing the stifling hot air around. They had eaten another meal since Ed and Luke had left, and they had taken it here in the command center—hard plastic trays and empty plates and bowls lay scattered on one of the other desks.
Trudy set her tablet, standing on its tripod, on the desk next to Swann’s. Paused on the table was closed-circuit video footage of the interrogation Luke and Ed had done on the Algerian prisoner, Mustafa Boudiaf. Boudiaf was slim, with salt and pepper hair and a lined face. He was not tied up or restricted in any way; he spent most of the interview smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. When he finished one cup of coffee, he would immediately request another one.
For the most part, he seemed calm. But once in a while, he would have an explosive outburst. Like now, for example. Trudy pressed the sideways triangle that indicated Play.
The camera angle was from above Boudiaf and to his left. It was taken by a camera mounted in the corner of the room, near the ceiling. The camera would have been clearly visible to Boudiaf, though most subjects tended to forget it was there.
“I must get out of here,” Boudiaf said.
“Where do you need to go?” Ed Newsam’s voice said. Newsam himself was not in the view of the camera.
Boudiaf shook his head. “You will be drowned like rats!”
“Who’s going to drown us?”
“Allah himself will drown you. And he will burn you in fire. He will punish you for your wickedness. You will be washed away. No one will remember you. A thousand years from now, they will find your civilization at the bottom of the sea.”
Trudy stopped the video.
“Do you see where I’m going with this, Swann?”
Swann shrugged. “The guy has a Biblical apocalypse thing going on? Some people are like that. It’s a fetish.”
Trudy shook her and smiled. For someone as smart as Swann supposedly was, he could also be pretty dumb. He was so intuitive about technology, it was almost as if he had been born half-robot. But he would miss subtle, and sometimes obvious, cues of human behavior.
“Sure,” she said. “Yes, he seems to be making scriptural references about the end of the world. But outside of the burn in fire reference, he’s focused on water. You’re going to drown like rats. You’ll be washed away. They’ll find your civilization under the sea. This is a man who was leaving the country, and moved all his belongings eighty miles inland from Baltimore and
away from the nearest coastline.”
“Are the two things related?” Swann said. “My best guess is he put them where someone else, a person unknown to us, can gain easy access to them. From an intelligence perspective, there may be something of value in his storage unit.”
Trudy nodded. “That’s why we have agents staking the place out. But as of the last report I received, half an hour ago, nothing had come of that.”
“Give it time,” Swann said.
“We’re missing something here,” Trudy said. “We missed it during that interview. Assume for a minute that an attack is coming, and that Boudiaf knows, or strongly suspects, what it is and when it’s coming. Further, assume he thinks it’s going to hit the Washington, DC, or Baltimore area, or maybe the entire eastern seaboard.”
“Those are a lot of assumptions,” Swann said. His eyes were glued to the screens in front of him. They never wavered for a moment. The drone’s altitude was too high to take hostile fire from the ground. But if Trudy knew Swann, that hardly mattered. He wasn’t taking any chances.
“Right, but in that context his behavior suddenly makes perfect sense. He thinks a flood is coming.”
Swann glanced away from his screen and looked Trudy in the eyes.
“He’s a religious fanatic. They always think a flood is coming, or a fire.”
“What if he’s right, in this case?” Trudy said. “What kind of weapon could cause a flood on the East Coast?”
“A giant water pistol,” Swann said, without missing a beat.
Trudy lapsed into silence for a moment. Maybe there was nothing to this water idea. It was a thought experiment, the kind of thing she had been doing for years. Pull together disparate elements of a problem, then make a wild, hare-brained guess about them. What did they have in common? What, if anything, was possible? The man had sent his belongings inland, he was fleeing the country, and during a stressful interview, he kept referring to water. Boudiaf either had water on the brain, or Trudy did.
