by Marc Cameron
“I’d say he’s an old-school communist. Hard-line enough to keep the support of most of the party’s old guard. He talks a lot about making some progressive changes, but I’m not sure he’ll do much more than talk. He hasn’t figured you out yet, and that keeps him honest . . .” Montgomery paused, pedaling away on his bike. “At least I’d thought it kept him honest, until this business with the money trail through the Australian telecom.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “That is strange. If Zhao is responsible, he’ll answer for it. But considering what happened to the last couple Chinese leaders who tested our resolve, it’s a dangerous thing to make assumptions—and even more dangerous to cling to them. I’m not saying Zhao would hesitate to kick us in the teeth if he thought it would be good for China, but he didn’t strike me as the haphazard type. With Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency mechanisms for hiding one’s money matters, he has his people run payments through a shell corporation in one of our Five Eyes partners?”
Montgomery opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it.
“Knock it off, Gary,” Ryan said. “Stop holding back. You had another thought.”
“Well,” Montgomery said, “I don’t know if it means anything, but my counterpart running Zhao’s protective detail is a CSB colonel named Huang. We’ve run across each other a time or two over the years on various protective operations involving the U.S. and the PRC. He’s got a stick up his ass to be sure, but he’s a heck of a capable guy. Doesn’t smile very much, but neither do I when I’m working. There’s something about him that I think speaks to Zhao’s character.”
Ryan had stopped pedaling now and sat looking at the agent. “How’s that?”
“Well, a good protective agent will always protect the office, no matter who’s sitting in the chair. But Colonel Huang is protecting the man.”
“And you can tell this how?” Ryan asked.
“There’s a certain look in the eye of someone protecting a man whom he respects.”
“And you believe this speaks to what kind of man Zhao is?”
“I do,” Montgomery said. “That said, even despots have friends. I’ll keep an eye on the colonel, just to get a pulse for what kind of human being he is. If he’s what I believe he is, that says something. I get the feeling this guy would walk through fire to protect Zhao Chengzhi, even if he was not the paramount leader of China.”
Montgomery glanced at his watch and grimaced at the time. The workout had gone longer than he’d planned. That was the problem with operating so close to the President. A smart, observant guy like Ryan noticed when the routine changed.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I must ask to be excused. Special Agent Gallagher will be in charge for a few hours.”
“Everything okay?”
Montgomery smiled. “Everything’s fine, sir,” he said. “I’m going out to Beltsville to observe some AOP scenarios leading up to the G20.”
“Attack on the principal,” Ryan mused. “Who’s going to try and kill me this time?”
“Keep this to yourself,” Montgomery said. “But it’s the Chinese.”
“What are my odds?” Ryan peered over his reading glasses. “And you’d better not say stellar.”
25
A waitress who was far too chipper for six o’clock in the morning had just brought John Clark a plate of eggs and wheat toast when his cell began to buzz on the table beside his plate. He accepted the call and put the phone to his ear, using his fork to fiddle with his eggs as he listened.
“Hey, Gavin,” he said.
“Smokinggun.txt!” Gavin Biery said, his voice jubilant.
Clark took a bite of eggs. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he would need the energy. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Right,” Biery said. “It’s a white-hat-hacker term for the digital clue that breaks a case wide open. I’m always looking for this very thing when I search for hidden malware or forensic evidence.”
Clark trapped his phone between his ear and his shoulder while he used both hands to butter his toast. “Okay . . .”
Biery took a deep breath, as was his custom when he prepared to launch into a lengthy explanation. “The dark web isn’t what I’d call surf-friendly, but GRAMS lets you search some of the sites.”
“GRAMS?”
“Think of it as the Google of the darknet,” Biery said. “Anyway, I did some snooping for the name Matarife, figuring anyone who went by a moniker like ‘the Slaughterer’ probably has an ego the size of the Death Star. There are billions of sites on the surface web, so this kind of guy can hide in plain sight. The darknet is smaller. Users rely on anonymity, but they stand out more once you focus on them. Took me a couple hops from one sick site to another, but I eventually stumbled onto your guy.” Biery exhaled hard. “I gotta tell you, John, there’s a reason they call it the dark web. This Matarife makes snuff videos—stuff you can’t unsee. Prevailing chatter is that they’re the real deal. The computer script alone about made me puke. I thought I might be able to grab metadata from some of the photos but didn’t have any luck.”
Clark closed his eyes, willing himself not to interrupt. The crescendo of Gavin Biery’s voice said he was moving toward something big.
“But you know what? People aren’t suddenly born on the darknet. At some point, somewhere back in time, they had a presence on the surface web. That’s how they found that Silk Road guy, an old post on Reddit advertising his site. So I did a search on the only slightly less perverted visible portion of the Web. Turns out a user calling himself Matarife 13 had a long convo on an S-and-M chatroom three years ago where he posted some photos. He was running decent OPSEC even back then, using a VPN and an anonymizer program to scrub the metadata—”
“What?” Clark said, biting his tongue.
“He used a virtual private network and a program to wipe the digital fingerprint off any photos he uploaded—except he didn’t. Matarife chose a sloppy anonymizer that left behind EXIF data on a couple of his posted photographs.”
“And that means?”
“It means, John,” Gavin said, “that you need to get a pen, because I’m about to give you the GPS coordinates to this filthy piece of shit’s house.”
• • •
Outside the United States, crime bosses employ sizable armies to guard against the almost inevitable attack from rival gangs. Like something from a Hollywood action flick, cold-blooded men wearing dark sunglasses and tight black T-shirts patrol remote hacienda grounds with MP5s, AK-47s, and even the occasional Hi-Point SMG. These residences have high walls, rimmed with broken glass to discourage intruders. They’re often fortified with electric fences and vicious dogs.
Farther north of the border, cartels contend less with marauding competition and more with teams of raiding law enforcement. They’re still heavily armed, but these U.S.-based operations put more trust in CCTV cameras, often purchased from their local Walmart. Sometimes they rely on nothing but a good standoff from any neighbors and acres of grain sorghum to act as a buffer.
If Ernie Pacheco—Matarife’s real name—had known that John Clark was creeping through the sorghum field behind his ranch north of Alvarado, Texas, he would have opted for a lot more than three strands of sagging barbed wire.
The team of Campus operators had originally flown to Dallas on a commercial flight. Clark had declared his Wilson Combat .45 in his checked baggage but brought little more with him on this trip than the communication and surveillance equipment needed to watch Eddie Feng. He had none of the gear he would have normally used to execute an early-morning assault of a rural compound.
John Clark was a dyed-in-the-wool .45 guy. He’d used the 1911 weapon system to great effect in Vietnam and the many—way too many—years that followed. He’d eventually transitioned to a SIG P220—still in .45—but a brutal injury to his shooting hand had caused Clark to reevaluate his choice
of sidearm. Long and painful months of rehab had finally returned his ability to shoot the trusty SIG Sauer, though at first with only his middle finger. He’d finally regained dominion over the tendons in his index finger—but the shorter single-action pull of the 1911 made accurate shooting a hell of a lot easier. Plus, it was the excuse he needed to buy a new gun and revert to the firearm system that was so ingrained in his muscle memory. The Wilson Combat Professional felt like he was reuniting with an old friend.
Still, he’d regained proficiency with a variety of weapons. Necessities of the mission and common sense made him grab a Glock 19, a spare fifteen-round magazine, and a Gemtech GM-9 suppressor from the Gulfstream before the others departed for Argentina. He wanted to have a little deeper pockets when it came to ammo loadout. The argument of .45 versus nine-millimeter went out the window when you were out of bullets. Even so, he didn’t abandon the Wilson in favor of the Glock. He carried them both. He was a firm believer in “Two is one and one is none,” and the .45 remained his primary weapon in the Askins Avenger holster at three o’clock, while the Glock rested comfortably over his right kidney in a Comp-Tac holster inside the waistband of his pants.
Along with the pistols, Clark carried a Benchmade AFCK folding knife, a small roll of Gorilla tape, and a pocket Streamlight flashlight. It wasn’t much, but he’d done more with less. His rules of engagement made the job a little easier.
If anyone fought back, he intended to kill them.
From the looks of the waist-high Johnson grass and dry stalks of grain sorghum, little else but mourning doves and rattlesnakes had spent much time in the fields behind Matarife’s house in years.
Clark stayed low as he moved, crawling when the stalks were short, stooping in a fast duckwalk when the plants gave him better cover. Earth-tone 5.11 slacks and a black sweatshirt helped him blend well into the long morning shadows. The field was damp from recent rains, but the day promised to be a hot one for September and the ground was already beginning to steam. The humidity and muggy odor of wet earth, not to mention the fire ants and the high probability of coming nose-to-nose with a pit viper, brought back so many memories that Clark found it nostalgic . . . almost.
Ding Chavez hadn’t exactly been wrong in his earlier assessment. John knew full well he risked becoming far too focused on the human-trafficking aspects of this op. The sight of the girls at Naldo Cantu’s, covered with track marks and surrounded by used condoms, brought back memories he’d suppressed for decades, memories that made him who—and what—he’d become. Just looking at the poor drugged kids made him feel like his teeth might shatter. He was nearing seventy years old. Still a tough old bird, no doubt, but old was fast eclipsing tough as the operative word.
For as long as he could remember, something inside Clark had pushed him to check out danger, to go and see, to help. Some accused him of being addicted to violence. If he was honest with himself, there had been a time when he relished a good fight. When there was going to be violence on his watch, he certainly didn’t want to miss it. But the fight wasn’t the main thing. His wife, Sandy, had summed up his sentiment best when she caught him coming back in from his private range early one morning on their Emmetsburg, Virginia, farm.
“John,” she’d said, sipping her morning coffee and looking even more beautiful than she had the day he’d met her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll still be relevant.”
It was at once the kindest and most pitiful thing anyone had ever said to him.
Maybe that was it. Relevance.
His workouts were less intense now, his runs slower. His hair was thinning . . . no, it was just plain thin. Even worse, each passing year saw him get a little more emotional. Hell, he got choked up when his grandson caught a pop fly at a baseball game. And all that blubbering just served to piss him off. He abhorred the idea of going soft.
But a guy past his use-by date wouldn’t be inching through a dry sorghum field behind a murderous bastard’s house. Pound for pound and year for year, he could still hold his own against most threats. He was the personification of the sentiment “Never underestimate an old man in a dangerous profession.” Like Jack London, he wanted to go out on his own terms, “as ashes instead of dust.”
And so Clark fought the clock by fighting bad men, whenever and wherever he found them.
The sorghum was thick enough now that he had to drop back down and belly-crawl. The tops of the plants rattled and hissed when they brushed together, brittle and heavy with grain. He moved as quickly as possible, taking care not to disturb the stalks any more than necessary. Only a trained observer would be able to see the ripple of his approach by watching the tops of the plants.
Clark heard the distant splash of someone taking a morning swim in a pool. He estimated the house to be less than a hundred meters away now. Crawling, he tapped the Wilson Combat with his elbow, habitually making sure it was still in the holster where he’d left it. Ahead, the plants began to thin and Clark found himself entering a small clearing. A mound of fresh earth, roughly two feet high and at least eight feet wide, blocked his path. Beyond the dirt pile, at the far edge of the clearing, rutted tracks ran between the grain rows toward the house.
Clark dropped flat, his chest to the damp earth, scanning the edge of the clearing. He turned his head as he looked, knowing from experience he could miss important elements of danger if he moved only his eyes. Searching inch by inch, foot by foot, he searched for anything out of the ordinary—game cameras, tripwires, fishhooks strung at eye level.
Just inches from his nose, half an earthworm hung from a ball of roots and sod, exposed to the air, cut in two by whatever tool had been used to turn the clods. The worm was still moist, telling Clark the dig was recent, probably during the hours of darkness. Small piles of tiny white pellets were visible here and there among the clods of rich black soil. At first glance he took the white stuff for fertilizer, but he inched forward, getting a closer look. He rolled one of the gray BBs between a thumb and forefinger—he moved forward immediately, scuttling around the edge of the piled dirt, dreading but knowing what he would find. He fought the urge to vomit as he came to the lip of a hole dug in the middle of the clearing, eight by eight feet square and four or five feet deep. At the bottom of the pit, from beneath a layer of dirt and pellets of kitty litter, the pale fingers of a delicate hand reached toward the sky.
26
Mamat bin Ahmad sat on an overturned wooden crate with his back to the trunk of a tall coconut palm, gazing out to sea, when the satellite phone in his lap gave a startling chirp. He and his men were on the southern shores of the Indonesian island of Buru, within easy pouncing distance of any passing pleasure craft—if one would only pass. The window for their operation was small. He’d already received an earlier call informing him that the USS Rogue had passed Timor-Leste hours before. The American Cyclone-class patrol ship was steaming north from a recent stop at HMAS Coonawarra, the Australian naval base in Darwin, where it would join the Philippine and Malaysian military vessels in a joint antipiracy patrol of the Sulu Sea.
Mamat had been expecting the second call and kept the satellite phone’s plastic antenna extended and oriented toward the sky. Even so, the sudden noise made him jump and he very nearly dropped the device in the sand. All his men were jumpy—it was understandable, considering their mission—but they needed leadership and, mercifully, did not seem to notice his fumbling.
Mamat was a young man, not yet twenty-five years old. Had he been a happier sort, his intensely white teeth would have shone through a broad smile. But since his father had died, his family had known nothing but poverty. His older sister had run off with a Dirty Joe—one of the older American or European men who came to Southeast Asia looking for a wife. His mother cleaned hotel rooms for wealthy tourists in the Indonesian city of Manado—but she was perpetually sick. Mamat’s father had fully expected his son to follow his path. Men in his family had fished for generations. Ma
mat learned about boats and became a better-than-average sailor, but the tenets of Jemaah Islamiyah lured him away while he was in his teens. JI provided stability—and, even more important, a cause higher than living hand-to-mouth as a simple fisherman. Mamat’s parents were both devout Muslims, observing a strict Ramadan or meticulously making up missed days when illness made fasting impossible. But even they saw things in moderation.
Moderation bored Mamat almost as much as fishing did. The leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah taught him that the one path lay in complete devotion—a religious zeal that allowed no room for moderation or compromise. Yes, Mamat knew boats, but his true skills lay in other areas. Recent interactions with members of Abu Sayyaf had made him witness to enough bloodshed that a surprise chirp should not have startled him—but it did, because this was no ordinary call.
He did not recognize the number. The men who would call this phone rarely used the same phone more than a few times. Still, he knew Dazid Ishmael would be on the other end of the line. He could almost feel the man’s uncanny energy coming through the handset.
Mamat had seen Ishmael behead four different Abu Sayyaf captives, each time with an American Ka-Bar knife. The commander’s resolve and devotion against the infidels was nothing short of amazing. He’d begun to think of Ishmael as a father figure and prayed for the moment he might prove himself.
That moment had come with this satellite phone call.
“Are you ready?” the commander asked.
Mamat looked at the six men sitting in the shade on either side of him along the deserted length of beach. Some stared out at the water; others sipped fruit juice as they pondered their coming fate.
“We are all ready,” Mamat said.
“Very well,” Ishmael said. “AIS shows that a likely vessel departed Ambon four hours ago, sailing southwest. Her present bearing leads me to believe that she is trying to reach Wakatobi.”
