The Gamma Option

by Jon Land

  Blaine crept to the end of the aisle and pinned his shoulders up against the wood. Total camouflage this way. Rasin wouldn’t see a thing when he swung into the last aisle before the wall, and by then it would be too late.

  Now!

  McCracken swung hard to the right and bolted for the third aisle down. With Rasin’s gunfire struggling to right itself, he gathered momentum and slammed his right shoulder into the shelf of books directly before him. That shelf toppled into the next under the force of the collision, creating a domino effect that sent books and wood crashing backward. McCracken thought he heard a scream as Rasin was buried by the debris, and then there was nothing.

  With the smaller woman still yanking on his throat while holding on to his shoulders, and the big one fighting to regain her feet, Johnny Wareagle seized the only move left to him. He jammed the jagged edge of the staff piece he still held back toward where he judged the smaller one’s throat to be. He closed his eyes for an instant and pictured it perfectly. The sharp wood parted the soft flesh and cartilage beneath the small woman’s Adam’s apple and sprayed him with blood. Her hands flailed from their grasp to stem the flow of the life pouring from her. It still took all his strength to toss her writhing body from him.

  By then, though, the huge woman had regained her feet with a scream of incredible rage born of watching her lover die. In the flash of an instant, he found the scimitar rising in her hand and then dipping into a straight downward motion as she lunged for him. Johnny started his arm upward into the strike, no choice but to sacrifice a limb and hope he could fight down the shock long enough to win.

  He felt the calm resignation flow through him a blink before a trio of deafening roars split his already-seared eardrums. Directly over him, Lace spasmed in her tracks, eyes bulging. She was still trying to force the scimitar down at him weakly when a fourth shot rocked her head forward. Blood exploded from her mouth as fragments of skull and brains coated the ceiling and walls.

  She fell straight over, legs thrashing in death, at Johnny’s feet to reveal Blaine McCracken kneeling in a combat crouch a dozen feet away with smoking pistol still clutched in his hand.

  “Nice for me to be able to save your life for a change, Indian,” he said, rising.

  McCracken lowered an arm to help Wareagle up, but his eyes stayed on Lace and the three scarlet holes stitched down her back.

  “That was for Hiroshi, you bitch.”

  After digging Rasin’s unconscious body out from the rubble of the broken shelves and fallen books, they climbed to the palace’s top floor and reached the roof through a skylight. Wareagle held Rasin while Blaine waved frantically for the hovering Apache to sweep down and pick them up. Around the outer wall of the royal palace, the Iranian masses had taken the battle to the last stronghold of Guardsmen. Blaine heard the gunshots, the screams, the wails of both fervor and pain, and found himself looking away. This portion of the palace roof was flat, and with no wind to impede him the Apache pilot was able to bring his ship to a point where his landing pods were only a yard from touchdown.

  “Lower!” Blaine ordered upward, as he started to push Rasin’s unconscious frame ahead of him into the attack ship.

  He never heard the gunshot, felt only the thud of impact as Rasin’s body smacked against him, the back of the fanatic’s head blown totally away. The kill shot was much too precise to be random, the mark of a top grade sharpshooter.

  “You bastards,” Blaine muttered, turning away from the Apache. “You fucking bastards!”

  Wareagle grasped Blaine at the shoulders and shoved him upward.

  “Now, Blainey! We must go now!”

  The corpse of Yosef Rasin slid from his grasp and McCracken finished the climb into the Apache on his own.

  “Hell of a shot for an Iranian,” the pilot noted somberly, lifting the Apache upward.

  “It wasn’t an Iranian.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just take us up, son, and blow the shit out of this place.”

  “The … palace?”

  “Unless my eyes deceive me.”

  His gaze turned toward the first of the masses who were starting to clear the outer wall. “But the people …”

  “Keep wasting time and you just may have to kill them. Fire your missiles now and they’ll get the idea.”

  The pilot shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  “Then we agree on something anyway,” Blaine said, and leaned back against the Apache’s bulkhead, indifferent to the rest of what transpired.

  It took all eight of the Hellfires fired in the space of twenty seconds to reduce the royal palace to flame-soaked rubble and leave whatever remained of Gamma to smolder within the debris.

  “This is Shooter,” the report came from the marksman on the roof of the building two-hundred-fifty yards from the royal palace.

  “What is your report, Shooter?” asked the voice that would relay the message back to Israel.

  “Rasin won’t be coming home. Dispatch complete.”

  “What about McCracken?”

  “Sorry. No could do.”

  “I didn’t copy that,” the voice of the contact came back.

  “No could do,” Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser repeated into the microphone held in his single hand. His punishment had been exile to Tehran as part of Operation Firestorm, a sniper once more. “McCracken saved my life in Jaffa Square ten days ago. I owed him one.”

  Epilogue

  “IT’S ALL YOU NEED. Believe me.”

  McCracken inspected the piece of paper Evira had handed him from her hospital bed. “Just an address in Paris. This is where I’m supposed to find my son?”

  “You’ll find the answers.”

  Blaine eyed her quizzically. “There’s something you’re not telling me. I’ll accept that, but God help you if it’s something I won’t like when I get there.”

  Evira smiled in spite of herself. “After all this you still sound like my enemy.”

  “Friends and enemies are transitory for the most part. I’ve learned to accept that, too, over the years. I saved your life in Tehran, but you can be damn well sure the life of my son was the only reason.”

  Her gaze was distant. “I couldn’t understand what you were feeling, the strength of the obsession.”

  “Spoken in the past tense because something’s changed you. That Iranian urchin we brought with us from the barricade no doubt.”

  “You took care of him once we reached Israel?”

  “He’s in a state-supported children’s home … waiting for you to get well enough to pick him up.”

  Evira’s face almost brightened. “It’s strange, but at first I thought it was gratitude. After all, he did save my life. Then I saw it was something much more. He needed me, and realizing that made me need him.”

  “Ah, so now we come to the crux of the issue. You and I live in a world where we can’t get close, can’t reach out, can’t touch. So when those moments come when we’re forced to, when we’re allowed to, we prove ourselves to be as inept in the normal world as normal people would be in ours. It makes us vulnerable, not to others so much as ourselves.”

  “Difference is you’re at least free to make a choice while I—Well, the Israelis you saw outside my door aren’t doctors.”

  “You’ll be freed as soon as you’re well enough.”

  “What?”

  “Governments have this thing about embarrassment—Americans, Israelis, even the Soviets. They fear it more than anything. They may have killed Rasin, but they missed their chance at me, which means I’m the only one who can expose the truth of how close the Israeli government came to bringing about the world’s untimely end. Only I have no plans to as long as my terms are met.”

  “My … freedom?”

  “Among other things. Did promise them that your underground and commando days were over, though.”

  “Because you knew I’d seen enough… .”

  “Not really. I just knew you didn’t have the stomach for it.
I could tell by the questions you asked me when we first met, the way you reacted to my responses. I wasn’t what you expected, and it was easier emulating a fantasy.”

  Evira grimaced. “I learned that in Tehran.”

  “For sure. You’ll make a great politician. You care too much about causes to keep operating out of flea markets.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Nope. My thing is people. To me every single individual life is as precious as a homeland for your people or peace for the Middle East in general.”

  Evira looked at him like an old, trusted friend. “You’ve made my decision easy. I suppose I owe you an even greater debt now than I did before. ‘Evira’ is finished. No more shadows, no more crevices, no more … flea markets. I’m taking my fight public, into a different arena.”

  “Beware, my lady. The rules are different, too. Less bullets. More lies.”

  “Not more. Just increasingly difficult to separate from the truth.” She hesitated. “And what about you?”

  “That depends on Paris.”

  Johnny Wareagle made no move to leave the car after Blaine had pulled into the no-parking zone in front of the Paris hotel Evira had sent him to.

  “Worried about us getting towed, Indian?”

  “You won’t need me in there, Blainey.”

  “Why is it everyone knows more about what I’m going to find upstairs than I do?”

  “The patterns are there for all of us to see; they have been from the beginning.”

  “What am I going to find in that room, Indian?”

  “Truth.”

  “A popular word lately …”

  “A journey must come to its own end. We can choose our path, and with luck find another after it has ended. Without luck we become immobile, afraid to go back because we know what’s there. Unable to go forward because our way is blocked.”

  “Like me these past few months?”

  “Perhaps. The key is to seek out that next road, Blainey, and accept the transition it offers from the last.”

  McCracken left the car wordlessly and entered the hotel. In the elevator out of habit he touched his gun, despite sensing he would not need it. His heart was pounding when he reached the door in question and found it already partway open. His guard up again, he lunged through it into a combat stance that was already half-hearted before his eyes found the single figure seated by the window.

  “Bonjour, mon ami,” said Henri Dejourner.

  Blaine didn’t lower the pistol, not right away.

  “Do I need this or not, Henri?”

  “That will be up to you to decide.”

  “You bastard! You set me up!”

  The Frenchman shrugged. “Regrettable, but necessary.”

  McCracken looked at him with a strange calm. “Then the boy …”

  “Not your son. Lauren’s yes, but not yours. I created the fiction out of reasonable fact.”

  “To make me work for the Arabs, because you already were working for them.”

  “Not for—with. The difference is crucial, mon ami. Their concerns, Evira’s specifically, mirrored my own. You were the only one who could help us.”

  “It was your idea, goddamn it!” Blaine exclaimed.

  “Both of ours. We needed you, had to have you.”

  “And when I refused to listen to the messenger boys you sent, you cooked this up.” He shook his head. “You violated principles, Henri, and that makes you a rat.”

  The Frenchman shook his head deliberately. “No, mon ami, principles were only a part of it; practicality was a far greater part. We needed the McCracken of a decade ago, a year ago. Not the McCracken I found on that island off Portland, Maine. The fabrication of a son was meant to assure your services, oui, but it was also meant to insure we were getting a man who would stop at nothing, who would accept nothing, until the affair was satisfactorily brought to a conclusion.”

  “Is that how you would explain it to John Neville, or doesn’t his life matter either? No, don’t bother answering. I can’t stand any more of your bullshit. You broke every unwritten rule in the book and I ought to kill you just for that.”

  Much to Blaine’s surprise, the Frenchman reared back his head and laughed. “I see my plot has accomplished exactly what it was supposed to. Tell me you don’t feel better standing there now. Tell me that gun in your hand does not feel different than it did when I came to you on the island. Tell me a flame you may have throught extinguished forever has not been rekindled.”

  Blaine lowered the pistol. “Fuck you, Henri.”

  “He’s not your son, mon ami. He is nothing to you. It is over.”

  “You know it’s not like that. You know, damn it!”

  The Frenchman rose with a knowing gleam in his eye. “You’re involved, mon ami, with the boy and his life. You told him simply you were a friend, mentioned nothing of what you perceived to be the truth, and on that basis your relationship with him was founded.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “He is my niece Lauren’s son, and she is dead, making him an orphan. That much is true. So what has changed? Plenty in your eyes, yes, but nothing in the boy’s. Everything is perspective. I wanted to meet you like this to be sure at least this one point was presented to you.”

  Blaine found himself wanting to be angry but not succeeding. “You’re still a rat, Henri.”

  “But it was your needs that led you to take the cheese, mon ami.”

  “You knew,” Blaine said to Johnny from behind the wheel of the car.

  “The spirits provided indications I could not ignore, Blainey.”

  “You know the worst thing, Indian? I knew too. From the first time I saw the boy, I felt he wasn’t my son. But I wouldn’t face up to it because I wanted him to be. Make sense?”

  “As much as anything. More than much.”

  “I wanted him to be my son because that would have been my escape, my convenient out. An excuse, a rationale to let myself change, to make myself change.”

  “But doing all you have done to save the boy made you realize you did not want to change, that you were only happy within the hellfire that is both place and feeling.”

  “Not happy, so much as able to succeed. I tried to turn my back, to walk away, to withdraw—I really did. God, how much I’d love to be able to live alone in the woods like you.”

  “And has that helped my withdrawal from the hellfire, Blainey?”

  “No, because I keep drawing you back in.”

  “You come because you must. I go with you because I must. Where is the distinction? We both do what we have to. Only the origins we emerge from are different, and in themselves those origins are meaningless. It is the destinations that matter, and ours are the same.”

  Blaine looked at him reflectively. “We’ve been fighting the same war for twenty years, Indian. What kind of destination is that? The names and places keep changing, but I’ll be damned if they don’t seem interchangeable after awhile.”

  “Because the journey is what matters. Moving is living. Motion is life. One cannot exist without the other.”

  “I wanted that boy to be my son, Indian.”

  “A passenger on the journey, Blainey, regardless of label.”

  “Yeah, I get the point.”

  Blaine arrived at the Reading School in the twilight between afternoon and night. The teacher who had replaced John Neville as housemaster directed him to a small pitch in the school’s rear where a number of boarders were kicking a soccer ball leisurely about before dinner. He approached without hesitation, his step purposeful and sure, but his thudding heart betraying the fear within.

  Fear of acceptance.

  Fear of truth.

  The boy had been involved in this because of him. One way or another that made it his responsibility to do … something. So much to be said, so many explanations called for. Where to start?

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Got to save some stuff for later.”

&nbs
p; “And what about what you did in the Phoenix Project?”

  “Also later.”

  Their first meeting weighing heavily on his mind, he’d composed a dozen speeches en route there, and dismissed them all. None came even close to expressing what he felt, what he really wanted to say. His thoughts swam wildly as he approached the boys clad in sweat suits kicking the muddied ball about in the falling shadow of dusk. He couldn’t see Matthew and wondered if the housemaster might have been mistaken.

  The boy turned and seemed to rush for him in the same motion. Blaine saw the smile beaming, thought perhaps it might have been the greatest sight ever, knew then that he didn’t need the words ready because they would come on their own.

  The boy lunged the last of the way with long hair flapping in the breeze and threw his arms around Blaine, head buried against his chest. McCracken returned the grasp as tight as it came to him, and the embrace lingered for a time before he eased the boy away gently at the shoulders.

  “It’s later.” Blaine smiled.

  A Biography of Jon Land

  Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-eight novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He wrote techno thrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.

  Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel, The Doomsday Spiral, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain our security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.

  In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent, The Last Prophecy, was released in 2004.