Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

  Luke ran, gun in hand.

  Somewhere ahead and to his right, he heard the telltale hollow bonk of the M-79 grenade launcher. Ed Newsam.

  Doonk!

  The gun made a launch sound all out of proportion to its destructive power. It sounded like it had just served a tennis ball. The grenade skidded across the dark on a nearly flat trajectory.

  BOOOM!

  Another bright explosion. The ground shook from it.

  But the bad guys weren’t done. A missile fired, whistling this way.

  BANG!

  It hit somewhere behind him. He turned. The helicopter was hit.

  “No,” he said.

  An image came to him, the bad thing, all those guys in Afghanistan. Wayne. Martinez. Luke had convinced Jacob and Rachel to stay. Always, he was always convincing people to stay. That was Ed’s whole point, wasn’t it?

  Jesus.

  The auto cannon stopped firing. The chopper spun. It came down with a heavy metal crunch in the darkness, somewhere behind a low ridge.

  Luke turned and kept running. There was nothing he could do for the chopper or the pilots. Up ahead, to his left, there was a spot of bright orange on the ground. He made for it, humping it over loose rocks and jagged edges.

  There she was. It was her. She lay sprawled out, her body in an odd position, the kind of unnatural position Luke had seen too many times in war zones.

  “Elizabeth! Are you alive?”

  Her eyes popped open.

  “American?” she said.

  Luke nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I’m playing dead.”

  Luke’s shoulders slumped. All the breath went out of him. He nearly laughed.

  “Good idea,” he said.

  There was a sound behind him, breathing, feet running on gravel. He turned and it was a man—skinny, bearded—running with a rifle. Luke shot from the hip and put one in the man’s chest. The man kept coming, crashed into Luke and they tumbled to the ground. For a moment, they wrestled for the gun, but the strength ebbed out of the man.

  He lay on his back, mouth hanging open. He might have been twenty years old. That thick beard was probably his proudest possession. He reached a hand to his chest. It came away bloody. He looked at Luke, mouthed something, and then died.

  Luke picked up the man’s rifle. It was an old AK-47. He checked the magazine. Loaded. That was a bit of a gift. The kid should have fired instead of charging like that. Luke shook his head. His loss.

  Anyway, Luke was back in business.

  “Elizabeth, I need to move you. I’m going to hide you somewhere.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m not going anywhere. I should stay here with you.”

  “There’s going to be shooting here any minute, and if that happens, you’re going to get shot. Not once, but a lot of times. I need to move you somewhere safe, so I can fight to protect you. It will be easier for me to do that, and much safer for you, if you are nowhere near me.”

  She stared at him with big eyes. “Where will I go?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll find a place.”

  Somewhere to his left, Ed launched another round from the M-79.

  Doonk!

  Luke checked his watch. 7:35 p.m.

  It had been a long day. It was going to be a long night.

  BOOOM!

  Ed’s grenade hit somewhere behind Luke.

  A man started shrieking. He sounded almost like a siren.

  There was a fire off to Luke’s left, where the chopper must have crashed. He didn’t want to think about that right now.

  He held a hand out to Elizabeth. She took it and he pulled her to her feet.

  Luke had an idea. He walked Elizabeth to the cliffs. They were only another fifty yards further on. Sometimes cliffs were totally sheer, sometimes they weren’t. He looked over the edge. It was a long way down.

  But just below, maybe four feet down and to the left, there was a narrow ledge several feet long. A stunted tree stuck out from the wall there. Its root system was exposed, thick and gnarled.

  “Elizabeth, I’m going to need you to be brave. You’ve been very brave so far, but you’re going to have to be even more brave, as brave as you’ve ever been. Can you do that for me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do I need to do?”

  “You need to slide down to that ledge, get a good strong grip on that tree trunk, and wait. I will help you get down there.”

  Elizabeth gazed down at the ledge. Luke could see what she was looking at. Just behind the ledge, the cliffs fell away from a dizzying height. It was dark now, but the truth was clear enough. The fall from here would be endless.

  “Oh my God,” Elizabeth said.

  * * *

  Luke crouched low and moved to a ridge of stone thirty yards from the cliff face. He took cover and aimed his gun at the bad guys.

  Two men were moving slowly across the rocks, guns out, stepping carefully. Their heads swiveled back and forth, looking for the girl, looking for the enemy.

  Luke fired on them, killed them both.

  An instant later, a rocket came screaming out of the night.

  Luke ducked and rolled away just before the rocket hit his ridge.

  BAM!

  The sound was more than deafening. His ears rang. He went deaf for a long moment. Fragments of stone flew into the air and showered down on him.

  Doonk!

  From somewhere to the left, Ed had fired back at them.

  BOOOM!

  Machine gun fire strafed the spot where Ed’s muzzle signature had been. Hopefully, Ed wasn’t there anymore.

  And so it went, tit for tat.

  Luke crawled forward, like a worm, and shot another Al Qaeda in the head.

  From somewhere ahead of him, a flare launched. Luke was silent. The militia was going to probe with that flare and see if they could spot Ed’s or Luke’s location. In the brief glow of the launch, Luke thought he saw perhaps a dozen men crouched by a low stone wall.

  The flare began its slow ascent, lighting up the night.

  An instant later, a line of bombs dropped from somewhere in the heavens. They came screaming down, a violent rain, invisible, pounding the place where the flare had just gone up.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  A hundred yards of fire and fury, a field of death, briefly turned night into day. The explosions echoed across the mountains, and back. In the aftermath, there came the crackling of flames as something burned, possibly a small building, and possibly the bodies of whoever had just been positioned there.

  Drone strike. Beautiful.

  Hours passed.

  In the first bleak light just before dawn, a squad of United States Marines appeared like ghosts out of the mist. They moved carefully across the rocky terrain.

  Luke ducked behind the ridgeline again. This was when people got shot by accident.

  “Americans!” he shouted. “There’s Americans over here!”

  Luke threw the rifle away. He heard them running toward him. He kept his empty hands in the air, where everyone could see them. Two helmeted Marines came around the ridge, rifles pointed at Luke.

  “I’m an American!” he shouted again.

  “Don’t move!”

  The Marines charged him, flipped him over onto his stomach, and began to search him. A heavy foot was planted on his back. The muzzle of a gun was at his neck. Rough hands roamed his body.

  “Agent Luke Stone,” he said. “FBI Special Response Team. The President’s daughter is thirty yards or forty yards from here, on a ledge hanging off the cliff. She’s wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. Don’t shoot her.”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw more Marines running past.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you guys.”

  * * *

  Ed Newsam picked his way across the jagged rocks.

  He was tired. He was dirty. He was scratched up.

&
nbsp; If he raised his gaze, the morning view across the mountain range was astonishing. If he looked down, the view was also astonishing, in its own way. Dozens of terrorist fighters littered the ground. They were skinny, they had thick beards, they wore head wraps. A few were alive and moving. Most were dead.

  Many eyes were open and staring, seeing nothing.

  He didn’t care about these guys. They had an unmistakable look about them. They were foot soldiers. Ed had a date with someone else.

  Up ahead, a guy was sitting on the hard, dusty ground. He was one of the few without a serious injury. He sat cross-legged. The Marines had shackled his wrists behind his back.

  “You,” Ed said.

  The guy looked up. His eyes were exhausted. He didn’t have any fight left in him.

  “Where’s your leader?” Ed said.

  The guy stared at him, his eyes round and concerned. He shook his head.

  “Ayn hu zaeim?” Ed barked.

  Ed knew a little Arabic. The words were right. The grammar and syntax could go to hell. The man on the ground understood well enough. Light dawned in his eyes. He was careful not to speak in response. Silently, he gestured to his left with his head. The move was so subtle, it hardly qualified as movement at all.

  Over there, perhaps twenty yards away, was another man on the ground. This man was also manacled, and he leaned back against some rocks. He had a leg injury, which the Marines had been kind enough to patch up for him. His right pant leg was cut away below the thigh, and the leg was wrapped in a bloody bandage.

  Ed walked over to him.

  The man looked up at Ed. He had jet black hair and a handsome face. His eyes were hard and unafraid. Oh well. There were a lot of hard guys in a war zone.

  “You speak English?” Ed said.

  The man nodded. “Little.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man smiled. “Who are you?”

  Ed reached down and ripped the right sleeve of the man’s shirt. There, on the man’s round shoulder, was a tattoo of a crescent moon and a star, the symbol of the Muslim world. The man looked at it as if seeing it for the first time.

  How did that get there?

  Instantly, he realized his mistake. The one identifying feature in the video was that tattoo.

  Ed pulled his sidearm. He pointed it at the man’s head. Still, the man showed no fear. If anything, his smile broadened.

  “I should have gutted her like a pig,” he said.

  BANG!

  The shot rang out, echoing across the rugged hillsides.

  The man’s body slumped on the stony ground. A halo of blood began to spread around his ruined head.

  “Yeah,” Ed said. “Whatever you say.”

  * * *

  A Black Hawk helicopter hovered overhead, its basket lowered to the ground.

  In the near distance, three Apache helicopter gunships patrolled the skies, moving in slow circles. Further out were more of them. In fact, the sky was black with American helicopters. Luke began to count them but stopped at fifteen, because there were plenty more than that.

  If there were still Al Qaeda militants alive on this mountain, or anywhere nearby, they were not going to challenge those choppers.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” Elizabeth Barrett said.

  She stood facing Luke. She was a head shorter than him.

  “It’s okay. I was just doing my job. That’s all any of these people were doing.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Who are you? What is your name?”

  “Luke Stone,” he said. He thought about who he was, and how to express it. He wasn’t a soldier, a commando, a special operator anymore.

  “I’m an FBI agent.”

  She nodded. “Stone. I’m going to tell my father about you.”

  She turned and limped to the chopper basket, two Marines helping her. They would have carried her, but she insisted on walking. Her bloodied feet were wrapped in thick bandages. Her hands were ripped up pretty badly. She walked with her back straight and her head held up.

  She was a trouper.

  From the low ridge where he stood, Luke could also see the remains of the Little Bird. It looked like some sort of modern art sculpture. The landing gear had bent on impact, dropping the chopper over sideways. A rotor blade had wedged itself into the ground, its opposite number sticking up, pointing skyward. And the whole chopper itself had burned. Its burnt out frame gave the impression of a human skull.

  Jacob and Rachel stood not far from it, looking at the remains. Somehow they had gotten out. That was a very nice development. He wouldn’t call it a surprise, though. Those two had been surviving combat together for a long time.

  Ed Newsam walked across the ridge, the M-79 over his shoulder. He had gone to keep his date with the man in the video.

  “You find him?” Luke said.

  Ed shrugged. “I think so.”

  “Well, you can still try to beat me up, if you want.”

  A light went on in Ed’s eyes. It was if he had forgotten about that, and he was glad that someone reminded him. He looked at Luke, squinted, and grinned.

  “Nah,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  May 9

  8:35 a.m. Arabian Standard Time (12:35 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  The Embassy of the United States in Iraq (aka the Republican Palace)

  The International Zone (aka the Green Zone)

  Karkh District

  Baghdad, Iraq

  “Every single time,” Ed Newsam said.

  Four men stood in a rounded room of polished stone. As much as they spoke just above whispers, their voices seemed to echo off the walls. Big Daddy Bill Cronin was there, in dress slacks, suspenders, and a dress shirt with sleeves rolled to the forearms. Mark Swann was there in jeans and a T-shirt, ponytail pulled tight to his head. Ed and Luke were there, still dirty and rumpled and scuffed up from combat.

  Both Ed and Luke were like the Pig Pen character from the old Peanuts cartoons. They were walking dirt hills.

  Big Daddy looked at Luke.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  Luke nodded. “It seemed that way to me. Every time we went somewhere, they knew we were coming. That SAS guy got chewed up… But those were his own guys. I don’t think he would…”

  He shook his head.

  Big Daddy nodded. “Yeah, he’s been acting a little weird the past couple of months. I wouldn’t put anything past anyone. It’s a temptation over here. There’s a lot of money floating around. You’ve seen it.”

  No one said the word, but they were all talking about the same man: Montgomery.

  “Now he’s been shipped back home,” Ed said. “He’s out of reach. There’s no evidence he did anything. What are we supposed to do?”

  Suddenly the door opened with a bang. The person didn’t even knock.

  It was Trudy.

  “Luke, I’ve been looking all over for you. I just got off the phone with Don Morris. Your wife went into labor thirty minutes ago. Don sent the SRT chopper to your house to pick her up and bring her to Fairfax. They can land at the hospital. He says you should come home right now. You might get lucky. Sometimes these first labors take—”

  Luke was already up and headed for the door.

  “Oh, man. It’s fifteen hours in the air. There’s a stopover in Germany. I’m never going to—”

  “There’s a State Department Lear jet fueling up at the Baghdad Airport. It’s waiting for you. Direct flight to DC.”

  Luke was nearly out the door. He looked back at Big Daddy.

  “What about…”

  Big Daddy shook his head and waved Luke on. “Monty? Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to him.”

  Luke looked at Ed and Swann.

  “See you guys around.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  6:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Camp David

  Catoctin Mountain Park

  Thurmont, M
aryland

  “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  Lawrence Keller walked the quiet, wooded path with David Barrett in the first light of day. The sky was pale blue, with shades of pink and yellow where the sun was rising. There was a slight chill in the air, which would soon burn off. It was shaping up to be a very nice day. Somewhere, a crow cackled, and further away, another one answered.

  Since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Presidents had used this as their country retreat, and as a place to host foreign dignitaries in a relaxed atmosphere, and Keller could see why.

  He mused that it would be just like a Robert Frost poem, except for the six big Secret Service men spread out behind them, and in front of them, and off to their sides. The men murmured into their collar microphones as they moved along. Their voices could be the sound of a small stream.

  David Barrett walked slowly and thoughtfully.

  “I’ll never forget what you did, Lawrence.”

  He said it pleasantly enough. But he left the statement there, and left Keller to wonder about its meaning. It was fitting to walk in nature like this, and to have the President drop a mysterious Zen koan on him.

  What had he done, in David Barrett’s eyes? Taken control during a bad situation, when Barrett was clearly out of control? Put Barrett on the sidelines until his daughter was safe, and he could pull himself together? Derailed a misguided attempt to start World War Three?

  Or was it that he had betrayed David, taping him in the Oval Office during his most vulnerable moments, and then using that tape against him?

  Keller had done all of these things. But what did Barrett think he had done?

  “What are your plans, David?” Keller said.

  Barrett took a deep breath. “This is the happiest day of my life, so first of all, I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to thank God for my many blessings, and take stock of what the future holds. They’ve flown Elizabeth to a hospital in Germany, and she’s still en route there, but everyone assures me she’s doing fine. Later this morning, Marilynn, Caitlynn, and I are all going to fly out there to be with her. It’s going to be one heck of a family reunion.”