Arctic Fire

by Stephen W. Frey

  “Ready?” Maddux called in a low voice to the fourth man in the room, who wore a hood like the ones he and O’Hara were wearing.

  His name was Nick Telford, and he ran the RCS counterterrorism division for Roger Carlson. Maddux and Telford had come aboard RCS about the same time twenty years ago. As far as Maddux was concerned they had a healthy respect for each other, but that was it. Of course, that was the most intense relationship Maddux could have with anyone—except Carlson. He loved that old man—as much as his ultimate loyalty to the United States allowed him to love anyone.

  “Have at it,” Telford answered indifferently. “He’s all yours.”

  The subject’s name was John Savoy. He was fifty-two, but he looked older than that to Maddux, like he was in his early sixties. He had thinning brown hair, pasty skin, and an obvious paunch. He also had a wife and two kids in college, and he worked for the Department of Energy. He was a bureaucratic lifer, and he looked boring because he was boring, Maddux knew. His appearance and his career weren’t covers at all. He was just an ordinary man trying to make a little extra money on the side by selling what he figured was a little harmless information.

  He had no idea how big a shit-storm he’d stepped squarely into the middle of by selling that information—until now, anyway.

  At Maddux’s orders, Telford and several of his men had picked up Savoy in Arlington early this morning on his way into work, thrown him in the back of a white van, and whisked him down here to the farmhouse in central Virginia. As Maddux stared at Savoy, he could tell the guy was already on the verge of tears.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Savoy?” Maddux asked gruffly.

  “No,” Savoy whimpered. “I have no idea.”

  With no warning, Maddux delivered a sharp kick to Savoy’s groin. Savoy screamed in agony and tried to double over against the pain. But he couldn’t because his hands were tied so tightly above his head. All he could do was scream. Then scream even louder and more pitifully when Maddux delivered a second, even harder kick to the exact same body organs. Savoy lifted his knees to his gut, but he didn’t have the strength to keep them there for long.

  “We know who you are, you piece of shit!” Maddux shouted at Savoy, who was coughing so violently he was already starting to spit up blood. “We know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m just a midlevel guy at DOE,” Savoy gasped. “I’m a nobody in the Office of Fossil Fuels, for Christ’s sake. I swear it.”

  “Like hell!” Maddux snarled. “You’ve given away some very sensitive information about LNG tankers heading toward American soil to the wrong person, haven’t you, Mr. Savoy?”

  “What? No, I don’t even—”

  Maddux delivered a blistering right cross to Savoy’s jaw, which sent several of the older man’s teeth flying from his mouth and into the room.

  Savoy began sobbing hysterically through his pain when he saw Maddux pull a pistol from his jacket.

  “Russian roulette,” Maddux whispered as he moved close to Savoy and pressed the barrel to Savoy’s head. “That’s what we’re about to play. Six chambers and one bullet, and I keep pulling the trigger until you tell me what I want to know or the gun goes off. Got it?”

  Right away Savoy began screaming and shouting and doing everything he could to keep the gun away from his head.

  Maddux chuckled as Savoy danced beneath the rope. He pressed the gun back to Savoy’s head whenever he tired and went still for a moment. Finally, Savoy had nothing left in the tank and hung limply from the hook, exhausted and defenseless.

  Maddux spun the gun’s six-chamber ammunition cylinder so it sounded like a drumroll. As the clicking faded, he pushed the barrel to Savoy’s head one more time.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Telford demanded. “This guy doesn’t know anything. He’s a fucking bureaucrat, for God’s sake. Let’s get him out of here.”

  “This is my interrogation,” Maddux snapped. “Not yours.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Tell me what you know, Mr. Savoy, or I pull the trigger!” Maddux yelled as he pressed the gun hard to Savoy’s head. “You gave information about those LNG tankers coming at this country to someone you shouldn’t have on the outside, didn’t you? Well, it turns out that someone on the outside was a person of interest to us.” Maddux dropped the barrel of the gun from Savoy’s head and forced it down the man’s throat so he gagged violently. “Don’t deny it!”

  “No, no, I didn’t do anything like that!” Savoy screamed past the gun barrel in a garbled voice as he gagged. “All I do is watch those ships after they leave port,” he explained when Maddux pulled the gun from his mouth. “That’s it as far as the LNG tankers go. I haven’t given any information to anyone except my bosses at DOE. My information isn’t even that important.”

  That wasn’t all Savoy did, Maddux knew very well. He was selling himself short in a big way. Savoy also interfaced with Naval Operations in Norfolk, Virginia, to keep them up to date on where those ships were. So the military could track the tankers in case decisive defensive action was required.

  Maddux knew this because he was the one who was paying Savoy not to tell the Navy that a huge LNG tanker called the Pegasus was heading directly for Virginia Beach and not toward Savannah, Georgia, where it was supposed to be heading. He was the one paying Savoy to tell the Navy that the Pegasus was still on course for Savannah. He knew all that because he was that person of interest, though Savoy couldn’t tell, thanks to the hood.

  Maddux smiled as he pressed the barrel to Savoy’s head one more time. He’d told Carlson that the ship hadn’t even left Malaysia yet. “Tell me, you bastard. Tell me what I want to know!” And, of course, Carlson had believed him.

  “Please don’t hurt me anymore,” Savoy pleaded.

  “Tell me!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll tell you what you want to—”

  The bullet exploded from the pistol with a deafening blast and slammed through Savoy’s brain. His body went limp instantly as blood and gray matter splattered the wall behind him.

  “What the hell?” Telford shouted. “He was about to break!”

  Maddux brought the revolver up in front of his face and stared at it for a few seconds. Then he glanced at O’Hara. “Did you not fix this gun like I told you to?” he demanded accusingly. This was the third and most important reason he’d wanted the kid in the room—so he had plausible deniability. “What the hell?”

  Maddux pointed the gun at the ceiling, flipped the ammunition cylinder out to the left of the gun, and pushed the extractor rod. Five live rounds and an empty shell fell from the chambers and clattered across the tile floor. “Jesus Christ,” he hissed. “This thing was fully loaded. What the hell’s wrong with you, kid?”

  “What do you mean?” O’Hara asked hesitantly. “I, I didn’t…what are you—”

  “Be loyal to me, damn it!” Maddux shouted. “Remember what we talked about outside. Why the hell didn’t you fix this gun like I told you to? I told you to leave one bullet in it. That was it. Just one fucking bullet!”

  O’Hara hesitated for several seconds, then looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry, sir,” he finally mumbled, kicking at the cement floor.

  “Christ,” Telford hissed, yanking the hood off. He had a huge head with a square jaw and a shock of blond hair. “This was a fucking joke,” he said as he stalked toward the door. He stopped before pushing it open and stared at Maddux. “Do you really not check your own guns before you come in here to do this, Shane?”

  “I was too busy.” The plausible deniability had worked. Telford was irritated, but not suspicious. “I didn’t have time.”

  “What a moron.” Telford banged the door open. “Fuck this. You guys can bury the body yourselves.”

  “You can take off your hood,” Maddux said when Telford was gone. “You did great, Ryan.”

  “What exactly did I do?” O’Hara asked as he gazed at Savoy’s body, which was still swinging back and fort
h beneath the hook. “I didn’t know anything about that gun. I didn’t even know you had a gun on you.”

  Maddux pulled off his hood and tossed it into a corner of the room. “No, you didn’t, Ryan. But you did the right thing.”

  John Savoy had been executed in the nick of time. Maddux had found out yesterday that the CIA was closing in on him. They’d determined that Savoy was giving some kind of vital information to someone outside the Department of Energy, though they hadn’t identified who he was giving it to or exactly what the information related to. They’d intended to take Savoy to Langley for a tough round of questioning this afternoon that likely would have ended in his arrest, though not his death.

  During the session, Savoy would have undoubtedly identified the man on the outside as Shane Maddux. He was too weak a man to keep his secrets for very long.

  And that had left Maddux with only one alternative: murdering Savoy. He couldn’t risk being identified as that person of interest and putting all of RCS—and himself—at risk.

  Certain individuals at the CIA might understand and agree with Maddux’s plan of causing a domestic disaster in order to scare the president and Congress into giving America’s intelligence community greater powers. Those individuals might agree with the strategy, but they couldn’t risk actually being involved in that scenario. It was far too risky for them personally, so they would have stopped the Pegasus from plowing into Virginia Beach.

  Well, the CIA wasn’t getting anything out of Savoy now. And, importantly, the man who would replace Savoy at the Department of Energy was an individual Maddux knew and trusted. A man who believed in everything Maddux and RCS were doing to protect the country. The fact that the Pegasus was heading for Virginia Beach instead of Savannah would remain a secret for a few more days. And that would be all the time Maddux needed. The crew would sail the ship right up onto the beach and then blow it up. The resulting fireball would probably kill half a million people in the Virginia Beach/Norfolk metropolitan area, wound another half a million, and scare the hell out of the rest of the country.

  Liberal bastards like David Dorn who believed the United States needed to be a kinder, gentler nation would be ignored, laughed at, and scorned again—like they had been right after 9/11. Homeland security would once again become a top priority for the nation, and there would be no more discussions of doing away with critical groups like Red Cell Seven. Widespread wiretapping, torture, and domestic spying would be available to those groups…again. The liberals would be sent packing and the neocons would rule the landscape…again.

  Americans were becoming apathetic about security at home, Maddux believed. It had been more than a decade since 9/11, and people had forgotten how awful that attack had been. They needed to be reminded to keep the country strong. One way or another, Maddux was going to remind them. And keep reminding them.

  A terrorist group in Syria would claim responsibility for the attack, and that was fine. Let the militant idiots shoot their guns off in the air on TV newscasts and grunt and cheer like the animals they were. Let them think they’d won a glorious victory, and let their arrogance and their stupidity cause their demise. In the end, the attack by the Pegasus would only make the United States much stronger.

  He grimaced. He didn’t want to kill all those people in Virginia, but sometimes innocents had to be sacrificed. Sometimes individuals had to die so the rest of the country could survive. This was one of those times.

  “Sir?”

  Maddux looked up. “Yes, Ryan?”

  “I want you to know something.”

  “What?”

  “I am loyal to you, sir,” O’Hara said. “One hundred percent loyal.” He motioned at Savoy’s body, which was hanging almost still now. “I have no idea what just happened in here, but I won’t ask any questions. I’ll do whatever it takes to protect this country. I believe that you know what you’re doing, and that you’re doing the right thing.”

  For the first time in a long time, Maddux felt himself choking up. Ryan O’Hara was one of the finest Americans ever minted.

  Fortunately for Maddux his cell phone rang, and he gestured for O’Hara to leave.

  “Hello.” He cleared his throat several times. “Hello,” he said more firmly this time. No incoming number had appeared on the phone’s tiny screen, but only a few people had this number, and they wouldn’t call unless the issue was vitally important. “Who is this?”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.” It was Captain Sage Mitchell. Maddux recognized the voice immediately. “What do you want?”

  “Do you know who this is?”

  “Of course I know. What do you want?”

  “We may have a problem.”

  Maddux checked the door to make certain O’Hara had closed it all the way. “What do you mean?” He could feel his chest tightening. He didn’t like the tone he was picking up in Sage’s voice.

  “That excess ballast we tossed over the side a few days ago may not have gone to the bottom after all.”

  Maddux froze. “What?”

  “One of my friends may have helped the ballast.”

  “Christ! Why?”

  “The ballast had saved my friend’s life right before that.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No,” Sage said dejectedly, “I’m not.”

  This could spell disaster in capital letters, Maddux realized. This could blow everything sky-high.

  Because Troy Jensen had discovered that Maddux was planning to assassinate President Dorn. Because Troy had figured out that the Olympian was headed for Boston not to unload its cargo but to detonate it—and that Maddux was facilitating the ship’s entry into Boston Harbor. And because Troy had discovered that Maddux executed American citizens who’d dodged justice on a technicality or were suspected of committing treason but hadn’t been found guilty yet. Troy had dug up all of those skeletons and was about to go outside the chain of command to report what he’d found. Fortunately, they’d short-circuited Troy in Mexico.

  Or maybe they hadn’t.

  If Troy was still alive, he and Carlson had a huge problem on their hands. The man in Mexico who’d met with Troy after the bullfight had taken copious mental notes. Troy hadn’t been bluffing about what he knew.

  “I’m having a conversation with the friend who might have helped the ballast when he gets back here later,” Captain Sage explained.

  Maddux was so angry he could barely contain himself. “You listen to me, and you listen to me good,” he hissed. “As soon as you finish talking to him you call me and tell me what he said. Find out what you need to find out and use any methods you have to use to get answers. We must know what we’re facing. Everything depends on it. You understand me?”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t want to have to cut you off,” Maddux warned tersely. “You wouldn’t like the consequences.”

  “I’m sure,” Sage agreed in a low voice. “At least I called to tell you what was happening.”

  As he should have, Maddux thought to himself. There wasn’t anything heroic in making this call. “One more thing,” Maddux said before Sage could disconnect.

  “Yeah?”

  “Any chance that ballast you threw over the side last year might have survived too?”

  Captain Sage hesitated. “You mean—”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly who I mean.”

  No,” Sage answered confidently. “I don’t think so.”

  “Did that ballast ever wash up anywhere? Did anyone ever find it?”

  Sage hesitated again. “Not that I know of.”

  Still, Maddux figured the chances that Charlie Banks had survived were minimal. They would have heard something by now. But you never knew. If this life had taught him anything it was that you could never count on something without absolute proof. Even then, you couldn’t be a hundred percent sure.

  Maddux took a deep breath. Suddenly he wasn’t feeling very well. “Call me as soon as
you know something,” he ordered.

  “I will,” Sage promised.

  “Out.”

  Maddux gazed at John Savoy’s dead body as he ended the call. For some reason Savoy reminded him of the bully he’d killed when he was fourteen years old. He’d shot the kid with one of his father’s pistols. Then he’d buried the body in the woods. Murdering the kid hadn’t bothered him at all, not one bit.

  In fact, he’d enjoyed watching the life ebb out of the kid as the son of a bitch had gasped for help from the ground with a bullet hole in his heart. He’d enjoyed watching the search for the kid’s never-to-be-found body from the front-row seats too.

  The only killing Maddux had ever regretted had occurred the other night, a few miles from here. He’d managed to turn the tables on the man who’d surprised him coming out of the kitchen in the brick house and break the man’s neck, the man who was helping the Chinese. But not before his wife had come screaming down the stairs.

  He’d been forced to kill her too, and he was sorry about that. But sometimes innocents had to die for the good of the whole. That had been one of those times.

  As he gazed at Savoy’s body, Maddux realized that he might need to go to Alaska—which meant that Ryan O’Hara would have to kill David Dorn.

  CHAPTER 27

  “I’M REALLY sorry,” Karen murmured.

  “Are you always going to think the worst of me?” Jack asked, trying to sound offended even though he wasn’t at all. “Is that how it’s going to be?” He gave her his best hurt-puppy-dog expression. “I try to give you a compliment about how nice you are and that’s what I get?”

  “I said I was sorry. OK?”

  “OK, I guess.” A sly grin slowly replaced Jack’s sad expression. “Of course, the arrest would be even nicer if you were wearing a tight white blouse, a blue miniskirt, stiletto heels, and—”