by Brad Taylor
Tim was a friend who had just retired from the military and started his own security consulting business. It would do me no good to tell her that Tim was still conducting dangerous work—maybe more so because he no longer had the backing of the U.S. government. I embraced her, whispering in her ear, “It’s not always me. There’re plenty of guys like me. I’ve told you I’m done. This is my last tour.”
She began to sob. “You’ve said that before.... I worry all the time.... I’m afraid when the phone rings. It’s always the same man telling me you’re okay. I think to myself, Why would I think he’s not okay?, then realize the call is because someone else is dead. One of these days he’s going to tell me you’re dead. I can’t do this anymore. . . .”
I knew then that something had broken; something inside Heather had collapsed under the strain. She had always known the importance of my work, and had given me unwavering support through absences at Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries. She had been my biggest cheerleader, but something had changed. It sank in for the first time that this really was my last tour. I love the mission with a passion. More than just a job, it defines who I am. But make no mistake, I love my family more.
I held her close, stroking her hair. “Shhh. That’s not going to happen. Look, I’ll talk to Kurt, see if I can get a weekend at home after the lockdown, so I can be at Angie’s birthday. That’ll be a start, won’t it?”
Heather looked at me, her face softening. I had hoped that night that committing to come home for Angie’s birthday would be the first step toward Heather’s believing in our new future.
Before I could say anything else, Angie came scampering in from outside. “Dad! The food’s on fire!”
Heather broke the embrace and looked into my eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that.” She sniffled and wiped the tears from her face. She gave me a halfhearted smile. “Go save the steaks. You can save the world tomorrow. We’ll see you in a month.”
I smiled back, kissed her on the lips, and jogged out to the grill.
After dinner, Heather went to clean the kitchen and I took Angie to her room on my back. I turned out the lights and lay next to her.
“Dad, did you know Mr. Paul’s going to teach me to ride a bike?”
“Mom told me that. I can’t wait to see you do it.”
I answered nicely but wanted to leap out of bed, run next door, and punch good ol’ Mr. Paul in the mouth. Maybe I wanted to punch myself, I don’t know.
“Will you watch me when you get back?”
“Of course I will, doodlebug. Go to sleep.”
She closed her eyes but kept talking. “How long are you going to be gone this time?”
I felt an acid bile in my stomach. “Same amount of time, but this will be the last time for a while.”
“How come you always have to go? Mr. Paul never goes away. How come he gets to play with Megan all the time?”
Angie was old enough to make connections between my life and the lives of others. Looking at her by the glow of the nightlight, I felt more torn than I ever had in my life, pulled in opposite directions by forces outside of my control. It was almost a physical pain.
I stroked her hair. “You know why I have to go.”
“To keep the bad men away?”
I leaned over and gave her a kiss. “That’s right, to keep the bad men away.”
8
Memories of that night, and the commitment I had made to Heather, were interrupted by Blaine Alexander moving to the front of the table. He addressed the group. “Well, I’m lucky to be working with my favorite team on this one.”
The comment caused the team to laugh. Whenever he became involved, the endgame had begun, so whatever team he was working with became his favorite team. Blaine and I had worked together on multiple operations in the Taskforce. He was a pretty switched-on guy, politically savvy and tactically sound. He had to be to keep the job. Before he could continue, I raised my hand. “Sir, I need to talk to Colonel Hale. Can you start without me? It won’t take a minute.”
He nodded, knowing what it was about. “Yeah, go ahead.”
I left the room at a jog, seeing Kurt talking to his deputy commander, George Wolffe, outside of the Ops Center. George had come over from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. I don’t know him near as well, but from what I’ve seen, he’s calm and levelheaded. Unlike a lot of the folks at the CIA, Kurt said he was a meat-eater, so that was good enough for me. I didn’t mind talking in front of him.
“Colonel Hale. Hey. Hold up. I need to talk to you.”
“What’s up?”
“I need to go with the team. I need to fly tonight.”
Kurt looked at me like I was nuts. “What are you talking about? You’re the one who begged me to break protocol and let you go home for your daughter’s birthday. I broke every rule in the book to make that happen. People jumped through hoops to get you clean for the trip. Now you want to go to Tbilisi?”
“Sir, things have changed. The trip was planned because of our deployment schedule. The team’s now deploying early. I need to go.”
“You need to go home to your family. Come on, Pike, nothing’s going to happen between now and when you get there. They’ll just be building a pattern of life. This thing won’t kick off for at least a week.”
“You don’t know that. We could be in a world of shit in twenty-four hours. I need to go. It’s my team.”
“Pike, think about this. You’re the one who told me you haven’t been to a single birthday of your daughter’s since the first one. Go home. Azzam will wait. Even if this pops, there’ll be other targets. Take the leave.”
“No. This is it. I told you before. This is my last rotation. There won’t be any other targets for me. My team’s leaving. I need to go. We’re at Omega, for Christ’s sake. Don’t do this to me.”
Kurt said nothing for a beat, staring at me, mulling over the request. “Okay. You can go. But if you’re flying tonight, you don’t have time to get to a non-attrib phone for a call. Heather’s going to get the usual notice from the Alias Shop after you’re gone.”
Heather had gotten this kind of impersonal phone call from operations plenty of times, updating her on my status. This time would be particularly difficult, but I knew she would understand.
“Good enough. She’ll get over it. She knows this is my last tour. After this, it’ll be Pike 24/7.”
When I reentered the conference room, Knuckles gave me a look. I nodded, bringing a smile to his face. After that, we both focused on the man talking, spending the next four hours getting an in-depth briefing on the target, his templated actions, the Tbilisi environment, and the cover we would use to get the mission done.
Later, as we were packing our kit for the flight in the fourth-floor locker room, Knuckles broached the subject. “Heather’s going to murder you for this. You promised her. It’s the only reason she let you do this tour.”
“She’ll understand. The guy’s trying to get a fucking dirty bomb. It’s what I’m here for. It’s not like I did this for a boondoggle to Hawaii or something.” I started packing, saying again, “She’ll understand.”
Knuckles finished what he was doing and walked out of the room, saying, “That’s what I said before my divorce.”
I shouted at his back, “You married a stripper when you were nineteen! She left you three months after you tied the knot! Heather will understand.”
Knuckles had already left the room, leaving me to say the last part as more of an affirmation than a fact. I stared at my kit, wondering if I was making a huge mistake. Knuckles was good. He was ready. I had been training him to take over after this tour anyway. I truly believed he could do it, but I also knew that the transition was six months early, and while he had the raw talent, he hadn’t been a team leader inside the Taskforce. An Omega operation wasn’t the time for him to figure out what that meant. The risks were too great. On top of that, the team—any team—develops its own personality, driven by
the team leader. The members weren’t plug and play. We were clicking because of my leadership style. I’m not saying it was perfect, or even the best, but that was irrelevant. They were used to me, and now wasn’t the time to switch horses. It was one more birthday, but after this, I would be at them all.
9
Tbilisi, Georgia
Four Days Later
I heard my earpiece crackle, then the words I was waiting for: “Pike, Hedgehog is on the move. Should be passing you in about one minute.”
I was sitting on a patio just off Rustaveli Street in downtown Tbilisi, sipping my coffee like the seven other patrons around me. I had to physically fight to suppress a smile. I absolutely loved this work and would have done it for free. I looked at my watch, realizing with a pang of guilt that today was Angie’s birthday. I consoled myself that I had made the right call. Kurt had been wrong. Azzam was going down tonight or not at all. If I had stayed behind, the team would have been forced to either conduct the operation without its full complement of people, including their team leader, or miss the opportunity altogether. Given the stakes, they might have attempted it, but odds were they would have decided to pass, wasting a year’s worth of work.
“Roger. Break—break. Knuckles, this is Pike. Hedgehog’s headed home. You have execute authority.”
“Roger all. About time.”
Muslim names are always long, drawn-out, impossible-to-say things. Being the Ugly Americans, we usually gave a nickname to whoever we were tracking just to clean things up. Sometimes it’s simply his initials, as in UBL for Usama bin Laden, or AMZ for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Other times, it’s because the guy reminds us of someone. We had taken to calling Azzam the “Hedgehog” due to his remarkable resemblance to the porn star Ron Jeremy.
Azzam was currently conducting a complicated Internet dance of challenge and counterchallenge with the Chechen who was providing the radiological material to ensure that each was who he said he was, and that neither was the enemy. The Chechen himself had entered Georgia through the contested Pankisi Gorge, with onward travel into Tbilisi. Intelligence indicators showed they were planning on conducting the transaction no earlier than a week from now, which ordinarily would have given me plenty of time to plan a detailed operation.
Unfortunately, the Georgian interior police, with the help of a few choice pieces of intelligence from the United States, were set to arrest the Chechen tonight. This forced us to take down Azzam as well, as he would flee once he got word that the Chechen had been captured. You’d think we could just tell the Georgians to hold off, but the truth was that, while Georgia was a staunch ally of the United States, my team was inside the country without their knowledge. The Georgians had no idea about Azzam, and I’d just as soon keep it that way. Let them have the Chechen. Azzam would lead to much bigger fish.
The patio I was on sat at an intersection, giving me a commanding view down three of the four streets in front of it. Azzam should be walking toward my café, moving straight at me. It was still fairly early in the night, but the streets were already starting to pick up with partygoers hitting the bars and nightlife.
A rowdy group exited the Irish pub down the block, obviously already drunk. As soon as they cleared the sidewalk and crossed the street, I saw Azzam. I looked away. Call me superstitious, but from past experience, I’m positive that staring at someone somehow causes them to know you’re there.
“Knuckles. I’ve got him. He’s on schedule. No deviation.”
“Roger.”
Over the past four days we had developed a pattern of life on Azzam, and determined that the best time to snatch him was after his dinner meal, before he got back to his hotel. Each night, Azzam had eaten in the same restaurant, then walked the half mile back to the small, local inn he had found. He stayed on main thoroughfares through most of his route but took one shortcut down a narrow, one-lane road in order to avoid walking the extra four hundred meters the main road would have forced on him. This was where we intended to take him down.
I continued to sip my coffee like all the folks around me, without staring at the pedestrians to my front. I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye. Looking back to Rustaveli Street, the main four-lane thoroughfare that ran through Tbilisi, I saw a police car pull up on the opposite side, lights flashing.
Shit. That’s going to cause a deviation.
10
It had been two days since the phone call with the robotic-sounding man telling Heather that Pike would be unavailable to come home this weekend. He had been unfailingly polite, but it had done nothing to blunt the hurt she felt. She hadn’t had the courage to tell Angie her father wouldn’t be here for her birthday. But then Angie had yet to ask. In truth, she would probably take it better than Heather herself.
It was already past one, and she still hadn’t picked up Angie’s birthday cake at the supermarket. Before she did, though, she needed to go to Tim’s to pick up the piñata. She had asked him to help with the birthday party when she found out Pike wouldn’t be home, and he’d readily agreed. She had an ulterior motive for the favor: She intended to convince Tim to put some pressure on Pike to retire. Or at least find a less dangerous job. She wasn’t even sure what it was that Pike did, but it had to be worse than the SMU, and that was bad enough. While not best friends, Pike and Tim got along well, and Tim was the only one with any experiences like Pike’s. The only one Pike would listen to. In her heart, she secretly hoped Tim would offer him a job at his consulting company.
She hadn’t told Angie about the piñata, but like children everywhere, Angie had picked up that there were secrets afoot and was sitting expectantly in the backseat. She rounded the corner to Tim’s house and parked on the street. She recognized Tim’s Blazer in the driveway, but not the two unfamiliar sedans behind it.
Angie asked, “Whose cars are those?”
Heather had no idea, and hoped she wasn’t interrupting a meeting Tim had scheduled.
“I don’t know. Probably salespeople.”
Before Heather could stop her, Angie jumped out, racing to the back door, shouting, “Maybe it’s Daddy!’
“Angie! Wait!”
Heather felt a pang of guilt. In keeping the piñata secret she had hoped to lesson the blow of her father’s absence. Now it appeared she had only exacerbated it, as Angie had surmised her father was the surprise. Rehearsing what she would say as she walked up the driveway, she saw that the back door was open, with shards of glass on the ground. She heard Angie shriek and felt adrenaline fire into her body.
Heather’s eyes dilated and her muscles became engorged with blood in a fight-or-flight response. She chose to fight, running into the kitchen through the back door. She saw a large man holding Angie by the hair twenty feet away.
Without conscious thought, Heather snatched a paring knife from a block on the counter and charged the man with a primal scream. She registered him flinging Angie away like a rag doll as he prepared to defend himself. Before she reached him she was knocked to the ground from behind, disarmed, and jerked to her feet. She noticed blood all over the room. Great washes of it, as if someone had slopped a bucket haphazardly about. Looking for the source, she saw Tim lying on the floor, wicked gashes all over his body, his intestines slopping out from a hole in his stomach. She felt faint, unable to assimilate the slaughter.
The man holding her said, “What the fuck are we going to do now?”
“Well, we can’t take them with us.”
She faced the voice and saw a handsome blond-haired man, his hands covered in blood up to his elbows. His eyes were purple and flat. Dead. Unbidden, a memory of her childhood dog came to mind—a large husky that had been hit and killed by a car. When Heather had found him, his lifeless eyes looked like those of the man in front of her.
The man restraining her said, “Whoa, Lucas, I didn’t sign on for killing a woman and a kid. They’re not on the target list.”
Lucas said, “No shit. I fucking get that, but we need to get out
clean. I didn’t ask them to come here. Look at the bright side: It’ll help confuse the authorities. It’ll play right into our cover of random violence. They’ll have so many threads to run down, it’ll cover our tracks.”
Another man Heather hadn’t noticed, now holding Angie, said, “I ain’t doing that. No way. No amount of money’s worth this.”
Lucas snarled, “The mission takes priority. Don’t go soft on me. I’ll do the work. Just hold them still.”
Heather spoke for the first time. “Please. We won’t say anything. Please don’t hurt my baby girl.”
Lucas looked at her with something bordering compassion and said, “I’m truly sorry about this. Just the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately, I can’t make it painless. It’s got to look like something crazy happened here.”
Before she could say anything else, Lucas shattered her jaw with a vicious right cross. She hit the ground on her hands and knees, feeling the blood spill out of her mouth. She heard Angie scream, “Mommy!” then felt something smash into her spine. She rolled over and surprised the men by rapidly crawling to her purse. Lucas grabbed her legs and jerked her back, but not before she had her cell phone. She hit 911 before he could stop her. He smacked the cell phone out of her hand, towering over her.
“You bitch. You just lost any sympathy from me.”
He hammered her broken jaw again. Everything went black.
Three hundred miles away, inside the Taskforce Headquarters, a computer started bleating.
11
The Tbilisi police car remained where it had stopped.
“Knuckles, this is Pike. Stand by for a FRAGO. Azzam’s about to deviate his line of march.”
“Roger. You want me to stand down?”
I thought for a second. Ordinarily, unlike our training exercise, this would be an automatic rollover, as the chance of compromising the team far outweighed any hasty plan that we came up with. But with the Georgians taking out the Chechen tonight, a rollover wasn’t possible. We would take him tonight, or start all over, waiting another six months to a year to get him—if we could even track him again.
