by Richard Fox
Shannon nodded slowly.
“Let’s hope Latif’s replacement has worse tradecraft and more sense to look both ways before crossing the street,” she said.
Ritter didn’t laugh at the joke.
“What—my timing’s off?”
“You weren’t there,” Ritter said. The smell of dirt and sweat came back to him; he glanced at his fingernails for the umpteenth time to check whether they were clean of Latif’s blood.
“Fair enough. We have a new intern, and I need you to show her the ropes. She’s still on provisional status, so keep the conversation light despite your history.”
Ritter crossed his arms. “Shannon, after the debacle with the last intern, I don’t—wait, what?”
“Yes, Natalie is here. Dine in; you’re on a thirty-minute recall until that USB is decoded,” she said.
Ritter felt his face flush as a level of anxiety unacceptable to a spy grew in his chest. He and Natalie had spent a furtive weekend together while she was training in Virginia and passed e-mail to each other through a shared e-mail account by saving, not sending, draft messages. The details of her training and Ritter’s fieldwork were never discussed.
“I don’t know how to cook,” Ritter said.
“You’re a spy, Eric. Figure something out,” Shannon said. A red light flashed on her desk phone.
“Go. Someone else needs an ego stroking,” she said.
Natalie rapped her fingertips against a kitchen counter. Ritter had left her alone in his apartment ten minutes ago to pick up their dinner, and the view from his living room bored her. She stood up and stretched, the jet lag from her flight trying to convince her that it was well past her bed time.
She checked her watch, she had a few solid minutes to scout out the apartment.
Natalie peeked around a half-open door and into a bedroom. She knew better than to snoop around Ritter’s apartment, but her curiosity got the better of her. The apartment’s layout was identical to her own: a single bedroom, a bath, a tiny kitchen, and European disdain for closets. This wasn’t surprising, as her apartment was down the hallway.
She slipped a pen in the space between the frame and the door hinge to mark how far the door was open. Everything had to look exactly the same after she’d finished looking around.
The bed was a mess of crumpled sheets. A traveler’s backpack, the kind college kids hauled all across Europe, lay on the bed, half full and unzipped. A half-dozen passports from Canada and western Europe were mashed between clothes, a wig, and a leather pouch soldiers used to hold toiletries. She ran her fingers along the zipped side of the backpack and felt the outline of a small pistol.
The pack was Ritter’s “bugout bag,” a single portable he could take when it came time to disappear quickly and efficiently.
She opened his closet, where a row of designer suits hung from wide hangers. She flipped open one of the jackets and saw a label for Scheer & Söhne, a tailor she recognized from her shopping expedition earlier that day. That shop had offered only bespoke suits that were so expensive, they didn’t bother with price tags. The floor of the closet was a jumble of leather shoes that looked handmade and bore different sets of gold-inlaid initials on the heels.
How could he afford all this?
Tucked into the edge of a mirror was a photo of Eric and Natalie, in their army-gray, digital-pattern uniforms, hands joined in a diamond shape. They stood next to a professional wrestler, who flashed his signature hand sign. On the other side of him was another pair of army officers, Jennifer and Joe Mattingly. Jennifer was dead, killed by an IED. Natalie had never gotten the whole story, but Eric had killed the insurgent responsible for Jennifer’s death, an insurgent who had become their ally in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq.
At the end of the rack were a bulletproof vest and an Applegate-Fairbairn knife sheathed next to a holstered Glock 19 with a custom-molded grip.
She moved to the nightstand and was about to touch it when she saw a dusting of powder on the handle. An old trick to mark the passage of an unwelcome visitor.
Suddenly paranoid, Shannon left the room, made sure the door was open the right amount, and went to the kitchen. The refrigerator held a half-empty bottle of sparkling water and something foul in a cardboard box. Dishes in the glass cabinets were covered in dust.
Other than the bedroom, the apartment looked like it had been vacant for months.
The lock to the apartment door beeped, and Ritter came in, carrying a paper bag, grease spots seeping through the sides.
Natalie flashed a smile, giving her best “not guilty” expression.
Ritter pulled a bottle from the bag.
“Water. Sorry, I’m on call,” he said. “Why don’t you take a seat. I’ll get this ready.”
Natalie sat at the two-person table on the other side of the sink and watched as Ritter fumbled through his cabinets. Didn’t he know where he kept the plates?
“What did you get?”
“Doner kebabs and falafel. There’s an Iraqi refugee a few blocks away who makes falafel just like that stand at Camp Victory,” Ritter said. He wiped down a pair of plates and opened the Styrofoam containers. The smell of spiced lamb and lemons wafted from the kitchen.
“Do you speak Arabic with him?” she asked. Ritter was one of the few army officers who could speak fluent Arabic, a fact that had made him invaluable during their time in Iraq.
“I guess this isn’t what you were hoping for in the way of genuine Austrian food. There’s a schnitzel place in Salzburg we can go to once things calm down…if you want,” Ritter said.
“And how many days of ‘calm’ have you had?”
Ritter placed a plate of thinly sliced lamb, mixed with onions and lettuce over a piece of pita bread, in front of Natalie. He sat across from her and let out a slow breath.
“I think I’ve spent at most three nights in a row in this apartment. When we aren’t doing work for the shipping company, we’re doing work for…the company. If that makes sense,” he said.
“It’s starting to. Is there a language bonus for doublespeak?” she asked.
“Not that I’ve seen on the pay stub. I kept up with our unit after I was reassigned, but all the information was broad brush. How’re folks at Dragon Company and at headquarters?”
“You didn’t keep up with Shelton?” she asked. Shelton was the company commander of the two missing Soldiers Ritter had helped find. She had been there when Shelton confronted Ritter over the death of their former insurgent ally. Their parting had been cathartic and unamicable.
“No, haven’t tried.”
A cell phone in the kitchen buzzed. Ritter looked down at his untouched meal and sighed.
“Never fails,” he said as he stood and went into the kitchen. Natalie heard a few terse words before Ritter came out of the kitchen.
“Sorry, Natalie, I have to go in,” he said.
“Not me?”
“I asked but no. You’re still on probation, and this is a red ball recall.”
“Red ball?”
“Oops, I didn’t say that. Enjoy your dinner. The door will lock by itself when you leave.” Ritter grabbed a coat from a hanger and opened the front door. He looked over his shoulder. “We’ll do this right when I get back.”
“Stay safe,” she said.
Ritter nodded and left.
Ritter found the rest of the team—Mike, Shannon, Carlos, and Tony—in the company conference room, waiting for him. Shannon’s face was pale, her lips pursed with tension. Tony’s considerable bulk jittered like it always did when he’d had a few too many energy drinks. Mike sat stock still next to the long table running through the middle of the room, his hands poised atop of the treated oak. He always reminded Ritter of a cobra, reared up and ready to strike.
A rail-thin Asian woman in her mid-twenties with straight black hair and thick-rimmed glasses sat at the table. She gave Ritter a quick wave when she saw him. Irene Ma was the newest permanent addition to the team
Shannon had plucked Irene from the cubicle farms at Langley after she’d inadvertently come across a Caliban Program operation in the Sudan. Irene had been an hour away from identifying Shannon, Ritter, and Mike to the FBI as international arms smugglers before Shannon made her an offer she couldn’t refuse and brought her into the program to keep her quiet and to co-opt her analytical acumen for the team’s purposes.
Carlos, seated in a high-back leather chair, kicked an empty chair toward Ritter as he came into the room. Carlos’s arm was still in a swing; a cast ran from just below his right shoulder to his wrist. Two bullets from a Libyan terrorist’s gun had nearly cost him the arm, but Carlos kept insisting the wounds were “just a flesh wound.”
“Get started,” Shannon said to Tony.
Tony hit a button on his lap top and a mess of word and PDF documents flashed on the screen.
“All this is from what Ritter got off that dead guy in Aden,” Tony said, with all the tact Ritter came to expect from the overly caffeinated analyst. “These are the shipping manifests for the Opongsan, a North Korean fishing boat flagged in Mongolia.” A red dot from a laser pointer circled a series of numbers on the screen. “This is the Lloyd’s of London insurance registry. That becomes important in a second.”
“I thought Lloyd’s stopped insuring anything in North Korea after they got burned paying for that helicopter that ‘accidentally’ crashed into a government building,” Carlos said.
The conference table vibrated as Shannon slammed a fist against the lacquered wood. She stared daggers at Carlos.
“Sorry,” Carlos said sheepishly.
The image on the screen blinked to show a map of the Horn of Africa and the surrounding ocean, a red circle around one of the thousands of ship-tracking symbols.
“The AIS tracking beacon for the Opongsan didn’t turn on until it was seventy-three miles off the coast of Yemen, which is odd. Lloyd’s requires that it be on before it even leaves the home dock in Wonsan,” Tony said. The screen flashed again, and the red circle was off the coast of Somalia.
“Now the ship is sitting at the Eyl anchorage, where Somali pirates keep ships until they’re ransomed.” Tony flipped the slides to show a satellite photo of a dozen ships in a ragged line extended from the coast.
“Slide six, now,” Shannon said.
Tony clicked ahead, and a grainy photo of an open case filled the screen. A spherical object covered in metal with protruding wires was equally spaced over the surface. A keypad was embedded in the green foam surrounding the sphere.
“Shit,” Mike said.
“It’s a nuke, implosion type, with a yield around three kilotons given the diameter and the amount of plutonium we think the North Koreans have,” Tony said.
“Is it enough to trigger the end times?” Shannon asked.
Tony frowned, then nodded.
A new window opened on the screen, and an icon for a small airplane flew over a map of northern Virginia. A white circle spread from the plane and encompassed an area from Dulles International Airport to the outer edge of Washington, DC.
“There’s no way a nuke that small could do that much damage,” Irene said.
“The physical damage from the blast—all the thermal, overpressure, and radiation effects—won’t trigger the end-times. If they detonate the bomb at altitude, the electromagnetic pulse will wipe out every computer in that radius.”
“Northern Virginia? Why is this such a big deal that you call it the ‘end times’?” Natalie asked.
“You ladies are new, and I’ll let you in on something that isn’t a secret,” Shannon said. She picked up a laser pointer and ran a dot along the highway running from Dulles into the nation’s capital. “There are fiber-optic cables running beneath the Dulles toll road that carry three-quarters—yes, three-quarters—of the world’s Internet traffic. Connected to those cables are data centers that handle most of the world’s banking transactions.
“An EMP blast will wipe out everything. Every record, everyone—and zero confirms how much money the world has in its bank accounts. We lose that data, and the world economy goes down like a proverbial house of cards.” Shannon set the laser pen down with a snap. “Need any more convincing?”
Natalie and Irene stayed quiet.
“And a bunch of Somali pirates have it,” Ritter said. Rumors of nukes for sale had al-Shabaab bubbled around the terrorist underworld since the fall of the Soviet Union; the device on the screen brought a decade’s worth of worst-case scenarios to life.
“For now. The pirates reached out to the Abu Sayf network, al Qaeda’s arms and financing arm in Saudi Arabia, through their al-Shabaab contacts, and they’re finalizing the sale,” Shannon said. “It’s going slowly—which is a blessing for us. Abu Sayf has been burned before by fake nukes, and they’re sending a specialist to confirm what they’re buying. The device is still on the Opongsan, as far as we know.”
“Why haven’t we hit it with a dozen cruise missiles? Let the fish worry about it?” Carlos asked.
“Because as far as we know the bomb is still on the boat, Carlos,” Shannon said. “We can’t send it to the bottom and hope for the best.”
“Who else knows?” Ritter asked.
“It’s safe to assume the North Koreans are aware, but there’s not a damn thing they can do about it from their side of the planet. Abu Sayf has been moving money around to make the delivery, and I notified the Directors before calling all of you in,” Shannon said.
“What do we do?” Carlos asked.
“Our first priority is to recover the device. Second is to destroy it before it becomes a threat to friendly nations. Mike, Eric, you’ll take a transport from Aviano to the USS Ronald Reagan, which is steaming through the Red Sea as we speak. You’ll link up with a SEAL team from and get to that nuke immediately, if not sooner. Understand?”
“Why are they waiting for us?” Ritter asked.
Shannon swallowed before speaking.
“They don’t know there’s a nuke involved. This is to protect our sources and tamp down on panic if word gets out that there’s a nuke loose in the wild,” Shannon said.
“They’re not going to appreciate being kept in the dark when they do find it,” Carlos said.
“No, which is why the mission is ostensibly to capture a high-value individual on the boat. Tony has a ready-made target packet for Mike and Eric to memorize during their trip. So, act surprised when you see the nuke. Once recovered, a specialist from another team within Caliban will link up with you, and you will assist them in taking control of the device,” Shannon said. Ritter had never heard mention of another team within the Caliban Program. What else was Shannon hiding from him?
“Why do we want it? Shouldn’t it go to some weapons of mass destruction team with some alphabet agency in Virginia? They’ve only been training for this kind of thing since…forever,” Tony said.
“I shared your concerns and others with the Directors, and this is the course of action they’ve decided on,” Shannon said. She sat up straight. “Eric, Mike, the SEAL team will outfit you with uniforms and weapons. Try and blend in when you’re aboard ship.”
“It’s easy. Just don’t use big words and make sure everyone knows you’re a SEAL everywhere you go, and you’ll fit in just fine,” Carlos said. As a veteran of the army’s Delta Force, he had a share of opinions and a raft of jokes about the navy’s special warfare arm.
Shannon slid a satellite phone across the table to Mike.
“Get going.”
Chapter 3
Of all the things Ritter had come to hate during the long war on terror, helicopters were at the top of his list. He wasn’t sure whether it was the unending vibrations that churned in his stomach and turned his face green or the frighteningly low altitudes pilots chose to fly. Maybe it was the blades whirling over his head like the sword of Damocles.
He and Mike weren’t in a helicopter, technically. The V-22 Osprey flew with its engines horizontally to the ocean in the p
lane configuration; those same engines could rotate upright and turn the aircraft into a helicopter. The tilt-rotor and turboprop engines could get them most anywhere in the world quickly and land on a dime, but watching the damn thing transform in flight made Ritter long for his days in a Humvee. There were no surprises or engineering miracles to operate a Humvee. He and Mike had languished in the “plane” for the past fourteen hours as the Osprey flew over the Red Sea to the Reagan.
Ritter shivered as the smell of jet fuel washed through the plane. He made the mistake of glancing up and saw the hose and catch basket from the KC-130 refueling plane lift from view through the cockpit glass. Ritter hadn’t bothered counting how many times they’d refueled midair since they’d lifted off from Aviano. Infiltrating hostile nations and risking death and torture seemed a lot saner to Ritter than taking on jet fuel through a hose at God knows how fast and how high in a plane/helicopter with an identity crisis.
He looked down at the airsickness bag, open and ready in his hands. There’s nothing left to give, he thought. His stomach didn’t believe him and seized up. Ritter hunched over and struggled to keep himself together.
A hand shook his shoulder. The crew chief was in front of him, rotating his fist between thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Ritter gave him a thumbs-up but kept the bag handy. He looked over at Mike, who had his head against his chest, his arms tucked in. He’d been asleep since wheels up. The bastard.
Half an hour later, the crew chief took up a post at the starboard window and kept a keen eye on the tilt-rotor engine.
Ritter was about to ask whether there was a problem when the aircraft lurched forward. A high-pitched whine filled the cabin, and the crew chief divided his attention between the craft and the other window. Ritter’s seat vibrated fast enough that he thought an electric current was running through it. The noise ended with a thump and Ritter felt the aircraft regain its momentum.
The crew chief, anonymous behind his helmet’s visor and face mask, slapped him on the shoulder.
