by Marcus Wynne
“Keep him on a tight leash, Paul. He’s a disaster looking for a place to happen.”
“He’s a good warrior. That’s what I need him for. He’s a good warrior and he’s got a good fight to carry.”
“Good bye, Paul.”
The two men shook hands.
As the Suburban pulled away, Hunter turned and saw Raven looking after him. The older man started to raise a hand, but seemed to change his mind and let the hand fall to his side.
3
Two weeks later, Hunter was packing his rucksack up. He had a scheduled run in a Blackwater Mamba out to BIA and a flight out, with a layover in Frankfurt to finalize some reports, and then home to Chicago, with a first class upgrade from a grateful CIA travel section. One of the security specialists he’d been working with wandered into his quarters after a tentative knock at the door.
“Hey, man. Ready to be back in the world?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Hunter said. “You got a while to go on this rotation?”
“Seventeen and a wake up, buddy. Seventeen and a wake up. I’m ready to get gone. You hear about that truck bomb last night?”
“No.”
“A block away from the Al Rashid. Apparently some jihadis had a bomb factory in the building; had a major detonation there, brought the whole building down. We had some of our guys get dinged, one got killed.”
“Agency or Coalition, what?”
“Task Force, dude. Some of our crew.”
“Who got killed?”
“It’s all hushed up, man, but it was one of our senior paramilitary guys. Don’t know his name…he was on a team working for TF-626, if you’re cleared for them. One of the other guys is in the med facility, he got dinged a bit.”
“How do I get to the med facility?”
“The shooters can run you over there in a Suburban…did you know those guys?”
“Maybe,” Hunter said, dread in him. “Maybe I did.”
4
Alec Frovarp lay still in the bed, the stillness of the previously wounded, all too familiar with what the body needs to knit after trauma, conserving all his energy for the vital work of healing. Hunter stood beside the bed till those ice blue eyes shifted from the ceiling to the Air Marshal.
“Hunter James,” Alec said. “Surprised you’re still in-country. Better leave before your luck runs out.”
“What happened?” Hunter said.
Alec was too tired to sustain the burden of being angry with Hunter anymore. “What usually happens? Somebody fucked up. The jihadis were building a truck bomb right under our noses in there. We were working somebody else, saw him go in. Ran thermal on it, saw the signatures working, Paul….Paul worked in close with a sniffer to see what we had in there, explosives, WMD, whatever. Don’t know if the jihadis fucked up, or else if that damn radio scanner we got now, the one that sends detonate signals up and down the spectrum so it sets off the jihadi IEDs, that hit the building…whole place went up. Primary and major secondaries. I was standing off, covering Paul’s egress route….got hit when the next building fell on me.
“Fucked me up good,” Alec said. “But I went in, along with a QRF, and we started digging….Paul…he didn’t suffer, dude. He took major blast. He was long gone by the time we got to him, maybe an hour, hour and a half after the explosion.”
“Ah, god…”
“Yeah,” Alec said. Tears welled in the younger man’s eyes. “God got nothing to do with it, man. These fucking jihadis….and these motherfuckers that tie our hands and won’t let us do what needs to be done…we could have dropped that building in place, but Paul wanted to go in, make sure there weren’t any non-combatants there, no fucking collateral damage, man, did he think these fucks give one moment’s fucking rest about OUR collateral damage? No, but he was willing to go in by himself to make sure. That’s the kind of man he was. He was a great man. A great man. The greatest man I’ve ever know, will ever know. And these fucks killed him. I’m going to have to tell his people, man…”
“I didn’t know he had people.”
“There’s a lot you never knew about him, Hunter. He loved you man, like a son. He talked about you all the time. How you could have been just like him. Just like me. He respected you, you know? He respected that you stood up to him, went your own way. He liked that about you…”
“I’m sorry, Alec.”
“Whatever. Really. You and me, we’re done. He’s gone. It’s over.”
“What are you going to do?”
“As soon as I’m cleared for duty, I’m back in the black, man. That’s where I belong, that’s where I’ll stay. That’s what Paul would have wanted. I’ll never be the Alleycat, but I can send some souls his way. Lots of fucking souls. And someday? Mark my words, Hunter. Mark my words. People better never fucking forget those of us who die for this shit. Never ever, man. “
“Or I swear by all the blood I’ve spilled, I’ll fucking remind them. Remember that, man. Remember that.”
PART IV: DEFEAT THE ENEMY BY CAPTURING THEIR CHIEF
Chapter One
“You know this guy?” Lisa said. “How do you know this?”
Hunter held up the copy of The 36 Stratagems. “This. This book. Every place we’ve been, this book has been around…and every time, the chapter it’s opened to reflects directly on what’s happening to us. Every single time.”
“What book?” Her voice was thick with puzzlement on the phone.
“I’ll explain later,” Hunter said. “What you need to do is turn your resources towards Langley. You want everything, I mean everything, on a former Navy SEAL named Alec Frovarp, either detailed to or contracted with or on staff with CIA’s paramilitary people, attached to the task forces. If that doesn’t come up with something, we’re going to need to reach out to JSOC and DIA…they’ve got their own crews as well with contractors.”
“A contractor? We’re not going to discuss that on the phone, even with encryption,” Lisa said tersely. “Get yourself back here ASAP. I need the brief.”
“Get them started, Lisa,” Hunter said. Fatigue and a weariness as deep as his soul weighed down his words. “Now.”
1
Basalisa Coronas leaned forward and rested her elbows on the makeshift desk she worked from in a conference room in their operations center. There was a strange, very strange, look on Hunter’s face; one she’d never seen on him before. Resignation, weariness, sadness…a bit of fear.
The combination disturbed her more than anything else she’d encountered in this, the most disturbing and confusing case she’d yet worked in a long career. She had to come to rely on Hunter’s coolness, his stability and sense of humor…and his insight into this case.
But whatever he’d discovered in the home of Gene Polchek had rocked him to the core.
“So it’s this man who trained you, Raven, Alleycat, what?” she said.
“No,” Hunter said. “He’s dead. I saw the report, the pictures. Alec. Alec was the guy who took my place as his protégé. He was most of the way off the deep end when I knew him…he talked about stuff like this. Doing something like this. To get people’s attention, shake them up…”
“I can’t believe an American would do this,” Lisa said.
“I can’t either,” Hunter said. “But he’s the only thing that links me, this book, these events…somehow he’s in it. He’s integrally involved in this. I don’t know how…but I know. In my heart of hearts, I know it.”
Lisa looked into his eyes. The certainty there, the knowing was all she needed to be sure of. And she was.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll run down Alec Frovarp.”
One of the junior agents, a bespectacled Midwesterner with snappy red suspenders to hold up his expensive trousers and his custom gun belt, stepped sharply into the room with a folder in his hand.
“Agent Coronas?” he said. “I have something here re: the shooter, Alvin Torkay?”
“What is it,” Lisa snapped.
The agent
blinked, then went on, hesitantly. “Torkay’s wife? Her name was Callie. That was what he said right before he died, Callie.”
“His wife?” Hunter said.
“That’s not all,” the junior agent said. “She was one of those killed on Flight 923.”
The young agent looked everywhere but at Hunter. Lisa turned and fixed him with her basilisk stare.
“Looks like you just may be on to something with this theory,” Lisa said. “Since you seem to be right in the middle of it.”
Hunter’s face flushed, then grew white around the edges as his lips thinned.
“Yeah. Right in the middle of it,” he said.
2
The CIA’s liaison with the CIDG was a huge former pro wrestler named Lance Storm. He’d humped a rucksack as a young man as a Ranger, then after his term of service was up, he’d gone pro as a wrestler. But on September 12, 2001, he put in his application with CIA, and was in the first post 9/11 paramilitary officer training program. He had boots on the ground since then all over the middle east, but a strained back had put him on the sidelines. As part of the “fusion” concept promulgated at the new, forward leaning and aggressive CIA, he was a good fit to work with the pure “inside” intel analysts to season their reasoning with hard field experience.
He was okay with the job for now, till his back healed properly and he finished his rehab. It was good to be in a place where he was listened to, though sometimes he wondered if that didn’t have more to do with his size and physical presence than it did with his mind and field experience.
But there were a lot of good looking single woman agents in the new FBI, and counter-terrorism and the CIDG were hot assignments, so hell, life was good!
His cell phone rang. “Storm here.”
“Hey Lance, it’s David Dean.”
“What’s up, David?”
“We got a hot rocket to run down, has to do with a current or former employee of your outfit.”
“Hot rocket?”
“We need to know about this guy. Everything. Especially where he is right now, or where he was last.”
“And this is important why?”
“Sword of Allah case, man.”
“Well, all righty then. Guess that says that. Let me grab a pencil. Okay, shoot.”
“Last name Frovarp, I spell F-R-O-V-A-R-P, first name Alec, former SEAL operator, known to have operated in Baghdad and Fallujah with one of the Task Forces.”
Lance froze. He didn’t need to write that name down.
“What is this guy’s connection with the case, David?”
“I don’t know, Lance. The boss lady just says jump, and I don’t dare ask why. So I’m jumping here. You got something for me?”
“The name don’t ring a bell, which is peculiar, because I worked those AOs my self, and it’s a pretty small world.”
“That’s what we got,” David said. “Is it possible this guy might have been DIA, or The Activity, something like that?”
“Maybe,” Lance said. “I’d probably have run into them. Activity is Army and a handful of contractors, they don’t like SEALs over there. DIA…maybe. I doubt it, though. Let me see what I can do, I’ll call some people, run it through the databases. Is this his real name or one of his work names?”
“Don’t know. Could be a work name.”
“All right, I’m on it. Let me see if I can work something out of the pencil pushers there. I know some people over at JSOC in the Special Personnel Register, I should be able to pull something most tick if this guy is in the system. How solid is the data? I mean SEAL, operating in theater, etc.?”
“Solid. The source worked with him.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s the source?”
David laughed. “Hey, you’re not working me, dude! But it’s no secret. Hunter James. The Air Marshal.”
Lance nodded his head slowly. “I’ve heard of him. Didn’t know we had any air marshals working in Iraq….”
“Mine is not to reason why…”
“Mine is just to do or die,” Lance finished. “Okay, let me see what I can get for you.”
“Thanks, Lance. And Lance?”
“Yeah?”
“Think about hitting some weights, dude. You’re looking a little puny.”
Lance laughed over his growing discomfort. “I’ll do that. Later.”
He pressed END CALL on his phone, sat back in his expensive Aeron chair (justified by his bad back, he told himself), and watched the other members of the National Counter Terrorism Center busy at work at their desks.
What he was about to do was exactly what the NCTC had been set up to avoid.
He leaned forward and typed in his password, pressed his thumb to the reader affixed to the keyboard, and watched his personal splash screen come up. He typed out a request, just as he had been told, to go to the NCTC’s Identities Analysis Branch where one of the analysts would do a “deep dive” into thousands of private sector and government compiled databases, run cross checks through NSA intercepts and HUMINT reports and see what kind of pull they’d get on Frovarp.
He already knew what they’d find, but this was cover, anyway.
After he sent his request and signed off, he shrugged into his light jacket and made his way out of the Center.
“Going home already?” one of the secretaries called to him.
“Nah. Just fresh air, some thinking, babe. Want me to bring you back a Starbucks?”
“You’re the best, Lance!”
“Lemme see…venti caramel macchiato, right?”
“I can’t believe you remembered that!”
“I always remember the wants and needs of beautiful women, Carla.”
“Go on!”
He left her laughing. Outside, in the mugginess of Northern Virginia, he walked to his car and got into his shiny yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser, cranked it up and went in search of Starbucks. He pulled into a little strip mall, went into a Vietnamese pho shop and ordered a big bowl of pho and a Vietnamese iced coffee. He took his time.
He got back in his car and drummed his fingers on the wheel. Then he took out his cell phone and opened the back, slipped another SIM card into place, then closed up the phone. He punched in a number from memory. The number rang for a long time before it was answered.
“Hello?”
It was a man’s voice, neutral, calm.
“This is Storm,” Lance said. “We have a major problem…”
Later, Lance placed a piping hot caramel macchiato on Carla’s desk.
“There you go, honey,” he said. “The world is perfect, now.”
3
“Nothing,” Lisa said. “They don’t have anything, or so they claim.”
“That’s bullshit,” Hunter said. “I worked with this guy. He’s in the system. They’re just stone walling.”
“We can work around that,” she said.
“What did you have in mind?”
She grinned, an amazing and mischievous transformation to her normal serious mien. “Seems to me a certain Congressman made sure we had his personal cell phone number. Am I recollecting correctly on this?”
“Wicked, wicked woman. What a perfectly evil idea. Let’s do it! And I’ve got a few sources I can tap, but I think this might be the best…”
4
Congressman Walters had his best and smoothest deepest Mississippi drawl on. “Hello, Hector, my good amigo, how are you? I’m good, thanks. How’s your wife and them? Good? Great to hear that. Now, Hector, my friend, I need some help down there. You being the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence and all, you should surely be able to get me a little question answered, couldn’t you? I thought so. I just got a phone call from a man I think very highly of, and he’s trying to track somebody he knows worked, maybe still does work, for your outfit. Now he’s tried to go through official channels, but you know what, Hector? He keeps running into some kind of stone wall down there. Like nobody knows this guy or ever heard of him. Now I know all about operational
security and so on, Hector, and I know about compartmented information and code word projects, but, are you listening to me, Hector? It’s a matter of national importance that we get some answers about this guy, Hector, and it’s something the President and myself have a personal interest in, are you following me? So maybe we can just get this thing done without it being a big major hassle, how does that sound, Hector? Without it having to be an official Congressional investigation or request? Think we can make that happen, Hector? Does that sound like a yes, Hector? I thought so…yes, here’s the name I want: Alec Frovarp. Ex-SEAL, was working for you guys in Baghdad in 2004…and probably other places as well. Yes, I’d appreciate it if you got back to me, and if it has to be on the STU we can do that. Thank you, Hector, very much, for your attention in this matter, and we’ll see at dinner sometime soon, won’t we? You bet, buddy. Have a good one!”
Sam Walters hung up the phone with some satisfaction and smiled at his assistant.
“I think that may have been me at my best, darling.”
“It wasn’t bad, Sam. Not at all.”
5
“We have a meeting to go to,” Lisa told Hunter. “Classified briefing by the Agency rep here in Chicago. On your pal Frovarp.”
