With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  Ferral handed over a paperbound book to Lisa. Hunter recognized the book even before he saw the cover.

  “The 36 Stratagems,” Hunter said.

  “That’s right,” Farrel said. “This one was bookmarked at the chapter titled: Defeat The Enemy By Capturing Their Chief.”

  “Jesus,” Null said. “This guy and this fucking book.”

  Hunter’s lips were drawn thin, and his face was dangerously pale.

  “He’s mocking us,” he said.

  “Who is the chief?” Lisa asked. “Of the investigation? Of aviation security? The President? Who is he referring to?”

  “I don’t know,” Hunter said.

  “Let them work the book,” Lisa said. She plucked it from Hunter’s hands. “We’ll wait outside till you’re completely ready for us, Madeline.”

  “Got it, boss,” Ferral said. She took the plastic sheathed book and went back into the building.

  “Let’s go,” Lisa said. She led Hunter and Null back through the breached door into the sunlight outside.

  “What’s your take, Hunter?” Null said, his breezy chatter put aside for now. He was deadly serious. “Who is the Chief?”

  Hunter shook his head no, then stared out into the distance. “I don’t know.”

  6

  In the bell tower, the sniper took a deep breath, eased half of it out, and took up the slack in his trigger. The cross hairs trembled, just barely, with the slow beat of his heart.

  7

  Perceive those things which cannot be seen…

  The words of Miyamoto Musashi, as told to Hunter James by Paul Raven, also known as The Alleycat in the dark world of special operations…why did those words spring to mind right now?

  Hunter asked himself that, even as he turned his head and scanned his surroundings, looking high and low, near and far, just as he’d been trained.

  Something was wrong.

  Somewhere, an enemy was looking at him, and that enemy’s attention had shifted into intention -- something was going down.

  But what?

  The fine hair at the base of his neck stood out, and there was an unpleasant surge in the pit of his stomach.

  Lisa felt it too, or maybe she was just picking it up from Hunter.

  “What is it?” she said.

  8

  The sniper knew it too, for like any experienced and successful hunter he had the knack of rapport with his target, and he could feel his shot slipping away.

  So he took another breath, willed his cross hairs still and pressed the trigger.

  9

  Hunter felt the shot before he heard it; he sprung forward and wrapped both arms around Lisa, flinging the two of them behind the armored Suburban. He saw the hair part on Lisa’s head, saw raw flesh yellow and white, then dot with red as the blood began to run.

  Then he heard the flat CRACK of the shot.

  And then the next.

  And the next.

  “Shit!” Lisa yelled. She clapped her hand to her head. Hunter reached into his left hip pocket and pulled out his US Army pressure bandage, tore it open and pressed it against Lisa’s wound.

  “Hold it there,” he said.

  He drew his pistol and turned to assess the situation.

  Ed Null lay on the pavement, his unfired M-4 near his outflung hands. A pool of blood grew beneath him from the massive wound in his upper chest. The HRT on the door was down, slumped against the wall. The driver of the Suburban slouched forward across the steering wheel, the remains of his head still buckled firmly beneath his untouched helmet.

  “Where’s the fire coming from?” Hunter shouted.

  10

  The HRT snipers turned and looked up. Onofrey caught the muzzle flash of the last shot.

  “Up there! In the tower!” he shouted.

  His spotter whispered into his mouthpiece. “Hurt 6, Sniper 2, we have a sniper in the bell tower to our rear, engaging…”

  The two snipers swung around, the spotter bringing his M4 up, Onofrey swinging the big gun around and bringing it to bear on the bell tower. The two FBI agents were painfully aware of their lack of cover, and knew their only chance was immediate superiority of fire and precision to take out the other sniper.

  Dale Ross rolled his selector switch to full auto.

  When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic.

  And that’s just what he did.

  A fast burst, just to let the bad guy know they were on him and they were pissed. Then quick fast bursts peppering the area where they’d seen the muzzle flash. 28 rounds and then a speed reload, something he’d practiced daily till he could do it in under a second from his open pouch, and he did it just like he did in training and now that he had the range and elevation right he just let fly…

  While Rhino brought the big gun up (elevation 50 feet above, approximate distance 100 yards…) his mind calculating distance, swinging the narrow little well of the world in his eyepiece and a glimpse of gun barrel (fire) and then work the bolt again and (fire) and seeing dust fly from shattering concrete and masonry…

  And the angry agents boiling out of the building added their fire to the cacophony…

  11

  On the far side of the bell tower, away from the rounds destroying his hide and his rifle, the sniper threw over a long rope coiled and ready. He snapped his carabiner on his rappel seat over the rope, then slithered over the rail and sped down the rope to the ground. It was the work of an instant to unsnap his link and make his way across the street and through a yard into a back alley where a nondescript blue van waited. He slid behind the wheel, turned the key, and pulled slowly down the alley and joined the traffic a block away, just another car in the crowd.

  It took him less than three minutes to do so, during which time the enraged HRT poured over one thousand rounds of small arms ammunition into the rapidly splintering bell tower. Two minutes after the van had merged into the traffic, a HRT Blackhawk circled overhead, snipers sitting in the open doors, their scopes scanning the shattered sniper’s hide, and their terse voices calling out instructions to the men on the ground moving cautiously towards the church.

  12

  A paramedic worked on Lisa’s head as she sat against the back of the ambulance.

  “You’ll need to come in, get this cleaned out properly and some glue or stitches in there,” the paramedic said. “It’s just a flesh wound. Put a bad gash in your do.”

  Lisa ignored him and spoke to Hunter. “I guess you’re the Chief. First the Sparrow, now this?”

  Hunter stood with his hands on hips, right hand comfortably close to his unfired pistol. He stared at the bagged body of Ed Null being loaded into the Coroner’s wagon, alongside the limp bundles of plastic that held two HRT agents.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Hunter said. “Taking me out doesn’t stop the investigation…”

  “It’s not just Sword of Allah and aviation security, Hunter,” Lisa said. She brushed away the paramedic, waited till he walked off to tend to a slightly dinged HRT agent. “This is personal. You’re a target, within the target. Frovarp, if it is indeed Frovarp, he wants you AND the publicity about AVSEC. It’s personal. And it’s getting that way for me, too. I want to kill this son of a bitch. I want to kill him very dead.”

  Her face was twisted in anger, maybe a little pain, but mostly anger. The cold measured controlled anger of the professional. Hunter saw quite plainly that if the Sword of Allah, who was possibly Alex Frovarp, ever fell into her sight picture, that the terrorist would not survive the encounter.

  But then, he felt that way himself.

  And by the look on Ole Bjornstadt’s face, and the faces of his team mates, the shooters felt the same way.

  13

  The President of the United States and his National Security Advisor, Natalie Sonnen, sat together in the Oval Office and listened to the briefing presented by the Director of the FBI.

  “This is spiraling out of control,” the President said. “We still don’t
know if one of our own is out there orchestrating this, we’ve got the media all over it and that goddam Sam Walters is ringing my phone off the hook, and he’s got some kind of inside track because he’s hearing this shit just as soon as I am! I want all the faces in one room. I want the whole Council, DHS, FBI, CIA, TSA, FAMs. We’re clamping down on this now.”

  “When do you…” Natalie Sonnen began.

  “Tomorrow,” the President cut her off. “I want everybody here tomorrow.”

  “We have to coordinate the schedules…”

  “Tomorrow, Natalie.”

  Natalie Sonnen recognized that tone of voice. “Yes, Mr. President. Tomorrow.”

  14

  Natalie Sonnen’s long suffering assistant had started at the White House as a Presidential Intern, and had wangled a position out of her internship that had eventually led her here, to the desk right outside the inner sanctum of the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. Sometimes she wondered if it was worth it all, because after you took away the supposed glamour of working in the White House, and the undeniable thrill that came from being in close proximity to the most powerful people on the planet, there would be little denying that the job sucked. Pay was okay for a white collar job, but the constant pressure -- and the often borderline insane demands of her boss -- made Suzie Kozak wonder if she had done the right thing in leaving Iowa City. She could have been a state senator or at least an aide in Iowa. Here she was a glorified secretary, though there was a real secretary to actually do typing and answer the phones most of the time, but an “assistant” was much the same anywhere else -- go fer and personal slave. And listening to Natalie Sonnen’s mouth was grating to anyone, but especially a semi-practicing Christian woman who hadn’t had a date or even gone out to a movie in almost a year.

  But Suzie bowed her head and kept at it, because she hoped to leverage this job into something else someday. What, she wasn’t quite certain, but maybe something as simple as a new boss might keep her where she was. She could only hope.

  She looked at the e-mail she’d just finished composing. Another big meeting. But then, they were all big, weren’t they? She hit the SEND tab and watched the message disappear into the secure servers and routers they used.

  The message went to the router and then to the secure server in the basement, then along shielded and regularly swept cables into the secure and hardened network that linked the sensitive organs of the US government together. The National Security Agency was responsible for the information security of the White House, and they monitored the traffic that went through there. Deep in the bowels of the NSA facility at Fort Meade, a router shunted all e-mail originating from certain White House offices to a separate server, located in an isolated part of West Virginia, in a clandestine facility dedicated to the service of black operations. Hidden within that server was a program that hid those e-mails from anyone looking for them…unless they had a particular access code.

  The Sword of Allah had that code.

  He watched the e-mail scroll across his screen, and looked at the time schedule and agenda for the meeting.

  Then he began to tap at the keys of his laptop.

  Chapter Four

  Hunter turned the pages of his battered old copy of The 36 Stratagems. He paused on the chapter of Stratagem 18: Defeat The Enemy By Capturing Their Chief. Another translation had it as To Catch Rebels, Nab Their Leader First. It was one of the Six Stratagems for Attack. The explanatory example told of the battle of Suiyang, between rebel commander Yin Ziqi and Suiyang garrison commander Zhang Xun. Zhang Zun fought off Yin Ziqi many times, but the wily rebel commander had escaped him. Zhang Zun lured Yin Ziqi in with a show of weakness, and assigned his best archer one task and one task only: shoot Yin Ziqi.

  And Yin Ziqi took an arrow in the left eye, and the rebel army fell apart.

  So was that was Sword of Allah intended?

  It made no sense to take Hunter off the board; it made little more to take Basalisa Coronas or Null out either. They were all replaceable; other agents were ready, willing and briefed, ready to step into the gap if any of them fell.

  The Chief was someone else.

  Someone without whom the “battle” would fall apart.

  He picked his cell phone up off the night stand table, cluttered with hotel detritus, and hit the speed dial for Basalisa Coronas’s phone.

  “Lisa?” he said. “Who do we call at Secret Service?”

  1

  “Here you go, bud,” Captain Ian Bryson said to his fellow fighter pilot. He handed “Pert” Tart a cup of coffee. “Just like you like your women: black and bitter.”

  “Screw you, Ian,” Tart said. “At least I like women.”

  Bryson laughed. “My inner woman is gay. She likes women, too. You on CAP today, right?”

  “You should know. You’re my designated alternate. Want to fly today?”

  “Hell yeah. You know I want the hours.”

  “Too bad, pretty boy. Just for me.” Tart sipped the coffee and screwed up his nose. “Damn, it is bitter today. Cooks must be on crack.”

  Bryson laughed. “See you at the briefing.”

  Ten minutes later, “Pert” Tart was vomiting, and then suffered the humiliation of a massive diarrhea attack. Twenty minutes later, Captain Ian Bryson took his place as Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Block’s wingman on a mid-day Combat Air Patrol over Washington DC.

  2

  The flight time from Chicago to Washington DC in the backseat of a fighter was considerably shorter than in the first class cabin of a 747, Hunter discovered. After briefing the Secret Service liaison with CIDG, Hunter was whisked to the tarmac where a Air Force reserve fighter waited. After a fifteen minute safety briefing, he was bundled into a G-suit and equipped with a helmet and oxygen mask, strapped into his seat and then literally blasted off the runway at max speed to Washington’s Reagan International, where he was met on the tarmac by a Secret Service Suburban driven by a guard from the Uniformed Service. At the White House Hunter was ushered into a waiting room, and then, after fifteen minutes, he entered the office of National Security Advisor Natalie Sonnen. An attractive but somewhat cowed looking young blond woman with a name tag that said Suzie Kozak offered him coffee.

  “No thanks,” Hunter said. “I’ve had enough for the day.”

  “Ms. Sonnen will see you in just a moment,” Suzie Kozak said.

  Just then the door of the inner office opened up and Natalie Sonnen urged out a harried looking young man with a bad haircut, who brushed past Hunter on his way out.

  “Agent James, please come in,” Natalie Sonnen said. She turned and walked back into the office without a backward glance.

  Hunter gave Suzie Kozak a raised eyebrow, then followed the National Security Advisor into her office.

  “Shut the door,” Sonnen said as she rounded her desk.

  Hunter did so.

  Sonnen waved at one of the expensive leather armchairs arrayed in front of her desk. “Take a seat.”

  Hunter hid his smile; he was reminded of his days as a paratrooper and being called into the First Sergeant’s office. The National Security Advisor had more of a feel of a crusty troop sergeant than an officer, that was for sure.

  “So what’s the problem?” Sonnen said. Her face was hard and intelligent; there was no nonsense there, though Hunter could see she probably had a sense of humor.

  “I believe the President may be the target of Sword of Allah,” he said, with no preamble. “I think that an attempt will be made on his person sometime in the near future, probably in a media event or appearance or key meeting.”

  “Key meeting? Why do you think that?” she said.

  Hunter took a moment to explain the recurring motif of The 36 Stratagems and the significance of the chapter they had discovered in the warehouse.

  “They tried to take out you. Twice, as I understand it,” Sonnen rebutted. “What makes you think they’re going after the Commander in Chief?”


  “Everything about Sword of Allah is about deception, Ms. Sonnen. Deception within deception. By going after me, they focus our attention on me…when we should be looking at what the book says. The Chief. I only take one interpretation from that. Sure, the Secretary for Homeland Security, or the Administrator of TSA, that would make a statement…but not like an attack on the President, who is ultimately responsible for all, would. Does the President have any major events scheduled in the near future?”

  Natalie Sonnen folded her hands, then bowed her head to look at the printed out schedule on her desk, then looked back at Hunter.

  “You think this motherfucker is going to make a play for the President?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I think this motherfucker is going to make a play for the President.”

  “Well, that shit isn’t going to fly.” Sonnen hit her intercom. “Suzie? Get the SS Agent in Charge up here. Now.”

  3

  Things happened.

  The Combat Air Patrol was increased over Washington DC. An emergency tasking went out the Federal Air Marshal Service, and all flights over Washington had Air Marshal service, though in some instances it was not a full complement of gun fighters. The Secret Service enhanced their own measures as well: the vehicle blocks were extended a block further, and the anti-aircraft team on the roof of the White House was reinforced -- and given additional Surface to Air Missiles.