by D C Alden
Mike threw himself to the left, rolling across the dirt, his eyes blinded by white fireworks. He felt a rush of wind as the vehicle missed him by inches. He heard a desperate cry and a sickening crunch. He came up on his knee, weapon shouldered, trying to focus. His eyesight returned and he flipped his QuadEyes down. He saw Boswell lying motionless on the floor, panting. Further away, he watched Miller and Flynn unloading everything they had into the escaping vehicle. High-velocity rounds and clouds of buckshot punched through glass and metal. The Mercedes fish-tailed towards the asphalt road in a cloud of dust.
It was going to make it.
Flynn dropped to his knee, dropped his aim and fired his M4 shotgun several times. The Mercedes’ rear off-side tyre blew out, and the SUV careered off the road, crashing through the wooden boundary fence and coming to a stop a short distance away. He saw a group of SEALs converging on the shattered vehicle, firing as they went. He saw uniforms moving swiftly through the headlights, then more shots. Making sure.
A round kicked up dirt close by. Mike made it to the shed, took cover behind the cinderblock wall. Miller and Flynn dragged Boswell to safety.
‘Where’s Don?’
Miller shook his head. ‘Didn’t see him.’
Flynn waved to a group of SEALs taking cover behind the barn they’d just left. ’Need a corpsman here!’ Three of them sprinted across and skidded to a stop behind the shed. They went to work on Boswell immediately. On the net, medevac choppers were confirmed inbound.
‘Take care of him,’ Mike told them, and then they were moving again, sprinting across another stretch of open ground for the ranch house. They made it to the side of the building. Another team of SEALs came up behind them, led by Billy Finch.
‘Hostiles have fallen back into the bunk house,’ the senior chief told him. ‘They must have a shitload of ammunition because they’re laying down some intense fire. Delta’s moving into a blocking position, gonna choke ‘em off.’
Mike slapped the wall of the ranch house. ’I need to get inside here, asap. Give me suppressing fire on that bunk house right now. ’
Finch keyed his radio. A moment later the bunkhouse doors and windows were being shredded by incoming. Mike pulled a grenade from his kit. ‘Popping smoke.’
He lobbed it out into the compound. Miller did the same, Finch’s guys too. In seconds, the ground in front of the ranch house was wrapped in a chemical fog.
‘Moving.’
Flash bangs went through the doors and windows. The ranch house shuddered with the force of the detonations, and then Mike was inside, weapon up, barrel sweeping the smoky darkness. Mike signalled to Finch who broke right with his team. Mike headed left.
They spread out, moving tactically through some kind of lounge area furnished with scattered couches and a large TV on a sideboard. There was blood on the wall and Miller motioned towards a pair of legs splayed out behind a shredded Lazy Boy. There was a body there, a Hispanic man with three large, bloody holes in his white tunic. His mouth was open and his sightless eyes stared up at Mike.
Shhh!
Gun barrels swivelled towards a partially open door. Mike took point, covered by Flynn and his Benelli, ready to discharge a cloud of killer buckshot. Miller stayed back and low, his trigger finger ready.
Mike heard a hushed conversation in Spanish, male and female voices followed by another urgent shhh! He was within touching distance of the door, his barrel pointed at the crack, the white phosphor imaging of his QuadEye’s turning darkness into daylight. The door was open about three inches. As he reached out with his hand a moustachioed face filled the gap. The eyes widened and the face disappeared.
‘Don’t shoot, please!’ pleaded a heavily-accented voice. ‘We’re nurses! Por favor!’
Mike backed away from the door. ‘Policia,’ he lied. ‘All of you, outside now, hands on your heads! Movimiento!’
The door opened and several men and women hurried out into the lounge, their hands clasped over their heads. They all wore white tunics, and Mike ordered them down on the floor. Miller and Flynn started binding their hands with plastic ties.
‘Watch them,’ Mike said, then he entered the room, gun up, ready to unload. The room was dominated by a high-tech patient bed and reeked of antiseptic. Tables stacked with boxes of medical equipment and drugs lined the walls. Someone was packing up, their services no longer required. That would explain the body bag on the trolley next to the bed. The window was closed, the blind lowered. Outside, the shooting sounded less intense.
Mike was more interested in the body on the floor, a man lying face down, his arms and legs tied with strips of torn sheet and a couple of trouser belts.
‘Pat, get in here.’ Flynn stepped into the room. ‘ID the body.’
While Flynn checked the body bag, Mike knelt down next to the live one. His eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply, oblivious to his bonds. Mike grabbed his bearded jaw and twisted it towards him, comparing the face to the mugshot on his MX50 Tactical Tablet. They were one and the same. He called it in to Kirtland and received a confirmation.
‘Talk to me, Pat.’
‘It’s Matthew Sorenson.’
‘Get the lead nurse in here.’
A few moments later Flynn escorted a Hispanic medic into the room, her hands still bound behind her back, her eyes white and wide in the darkness. She must’ve been pretty intimidated by the heavily-armed men with the insect-like helmets surrounding her.
‘What’s your name?’ Mike asked her.
‘Rosa Estevez. I was Mister Sorenson’s primary carer.’
‘What happened here?’
Estevez told him and Mike nodded.
‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
‘Hector was a good man,’ she sniffed.
Everyone flinched as several deep concussions shook the room. Mike led Estevez outside and eased her to the tiled floor. ’Stay down until I say so,’ he told them all. Then he pointed at Flynn.
‘Pat, you’re with me. Ty, I’m sending Billy back here to provide security.’ He called Finch on the radio, and a few moments later he met the SEAL in the lobby.
‘Location is secure,’ Finch reported.
Mike cocked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Need your team back there to watch over the HVT. He’s sedated, so he’ll need to be stretchered out. My guys will need help prepping him for transport. And get a corpsman to monitor him, make sure he stays alive.’
‘Roger that.’
The shooting had almost stopped. Mike moved to the main door and took a quick look outside. There was smoke pouring from the windows of the bunkhouse. Guards were stumbling outside, coughing and hacking. Voices screamed in Spanish, telling them to get down. Most obeyed. Some came out blasting. It was the last thing they ever did.
After a few more minutes, the shooting had all but stopped. The radio net was filled with chatter as SEAL and Delta elements confirmed their objectives. Mike made his own call.
‘Sierra-Oscar-One, what’s the status on the medevac?’
‘Birds inbound, ETA four minutes.’
With Flynn following, Mike ducked outside and ran across the compound to the shed wall. Boswell was still there, surrounded by four SEAL corpsmen. The CIA operative’s face was pale and twisted in pain.
‘How’s he looking?’ Mike asked, kneeling down.
‘Broken femur, broken humerus, busted ribs, probable punctured lung.’
‘They h-h-hit Don,’ Boswell gasped.
‘Don’t talk,’ Mike told him. Definitely a punctured lung. ‘Medevac is inbound. Hang in there.’
With mounting dread, Mike stood up and headed towards the shattered fence. The Mercedes was still in the field, its bodywork and passengers riddled with bullets, but Mike wasn’t interested in that.
‘Oh Jesus,’ he heard Flynn whisper behind him.
Just beyond the broken fence, a body lay on the asphalt, covered with a ground sheet and weighed down with a rifle. The edges flapped and rustled in the wind as
two SEAL corpsmen packed away their med bags.
Mike stood over the corpse. It was surrounded by bloody bandages and discarded med wrappers.
‘He went under the hood of that Merc,’ one of the corpsmen explained. ‘Got trapped beneath the axle. There was nothing we could do.’
Tapper’s left boot was missing, and his foot and leg were mangled to bloody pulp. Mike wasn’t going to lift the sheet. He didn’t want to remember his friend that way.
The radio net buzzed. The compound had been fully secured, and the clatter of approaching helicopters rose and fell across the prairie. LED landing beacons pulsed in nearby fields as wounded SEALs and D-Boys were helped to the LZ. A couple of SEALs headed over with a combat stretcher.
‘We’ll take it from here,’ the corpsman said.
Mike shook his head. ‘He’s one of ours. I’d be obliged if you could secure him to the stretcher though.’
The SEALs didn’t argue. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wait with him,’ he told Flynn. ‘I’ll police up the HVT, then meet you back here. We all go together.’
Flynn’s face was grim. ‘Roger.’
Mike jogged back to the compound, where the fog of smoke and the acrid tang of cordite hung on the air. In front of the bunkhouse the surviving guards had been bound and hooded. The Gray Eagles were still overhead, still watching and reporting, but the assault phase was effectively over.
A Chinook cleared the ridge line and thundered overhead, dropping towards the LZ a short distance away. Dust swirled across the compound as more helicopters came in fast and low. When he got back to Sorenson’s treatment room, Blake’s unconscious body had been strapped to a stretcher while Estevez’s medical team were gathered on the couches, watched over by Miller and the other SEALs. There were FBI agents on the inbound Chinooks who would process the civilians.
‘Let’s move him.’
Blake was lifted and carried outside. Surrounded by SEALs, his head and torso covered with body armour, the oblivious industrialist was stretchered down to the LZ where the helicopters waited, their massive rotors beating the grass. Mike watched a contingent of Chemical Corps troops and several FBI agents going the other way, heading into the compound. Blake was loaded onto the waiting Chinook and strapped down. Boswell was next, secured to another stretcher and tended to by the USAF medical team aboard the aircraft. Last to be loaded was Don Tapper, whose stretcher was secured to the hard points at Mike’s feet. The SOG leader found it difficult to look down at his friend.
More SEALs and D-Boys climbed aboard. The powerful turboshaft engines cranked up, then the aircraft lifted off the ground, ramp down, skimming low across the prairie before starting to climb.
Mike looked back, saw the compound still blanketed in darkness, the white smoke of the smouldering bunkhouse drifting across the ridge line, the pulsing lights of the helicopters and landing beacons in the surrounding fields. It was a lot of risk, a lot of effort and moving parts just to bag one guy, but they’d done it, with no small thanks to the Estevez woman and her team. Now it was about making sure Don’s death, and the deaths of so many others, were not in vain. For the first time since Philip had slipped through his fingers, Mike felt a little better about himself. Not much, but it was still an improvement.
Then he looked down at his friend. The XO’s star would be carved into the white marble wall at Langley, and his name entered into the Book of Honour, and that’s where Don Tapper’s story would officially end. For his brothers in the Special Operations Group, he would never be forgotten.
The Chinook banked to the southeast. The wilderness flashed beneath them as the aircraft continued its climb, heading at maximum speed towards the New Mexico border.
Say Hello, Wave Goodbye
‘Are you okay, Madam President?’
Coffman nodded, a faint smile lingering on her lips. ‘I’m fine, thank you Drew. It’s just a headache. I can’t seem to shake it.’
The Secretary of Defence stepped a little closer. ‘Would you like me to call the doctor?’
‘No, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m just tired, that’s all.’
‘Why don’t you get some rest? It’s pretty quiet right now.’
Clark offered her a sympathetic smile. Or was it patronising? Coffman couldn’t tell which. She was losing her edge. No, not just her edge.
She got up from the conference table, and what remained of her National Security Council stood too. Up on the video wall, Shanghai and Lubbock were still the major focus of attention. Politically, the Chinese were starting to thaw, but their diplomatic silence had been replaced by a simmering anger. There was talk of retribution, of reparations. On whom, from whom, Beijing wasn’t saying, but Coffman sensed trouble on the horizon.
In Texas, the city of Lubbock had been completely walled-in. People had been rescued, but not as many as Coffman had anticipated. Not that she cared of course, but perceptions were everything now.
She left the conference room and retired to her private suite, grateful for the opportunity to avoid human contact for a while. The headache had lingered at the back of her skull for the past twenty-four hours, and she certainly felt a little lethargic, but then again she’d been burning both ends of the candle for weeks now. She was entitled to a little down time, goddamit. After all, she was still the President of the United States.
She undressed in the master bedroom and took a long hot shower. She wrapped herself in a thick white bathrobe with the presidential seal embroidered above her left breast and poured herself a generous bourbon on ice. She popped two Tylenol, then curled up on a couch, watching the darkening sky outside the windows, the flurries of snow whipping past the thick glass. Christmas was approaching and the winter storms had finally arrived, driving snow across the Rockies and laying a thick white blanket across the plateau below. The skies above were leaden and ominous, a perfect metaphor for current events, Coffman reflected.
Erik was still missing.
Now Bob Blake was missing too.
She’d ordered Charlie Schultz to find him, and now he’d vanished. Only Karen Baranski remained by her side, although Coffman sensed a growing distance between them. Her phone had barely rang in the last four days. She felt like an outsider in her own Situation Room. Half her Security Council had left for Washington, citing urging departmental or personal issues, leaving behind nameless subordinates in their wake. Only her SecDef remained, and Coffman had sensed a growing assertiveness in Clark’s speech and manner. The conclusion was inescapable and profoundly devastating. The walls were closing in.
The cordless phone trilled with an incoming call. Coffman reached over and plucked it off the table.
‘This is the President.’
Silence. Then, ‘Hello, Amy.’
Coffman bolted upright in her chair, her heart pounding. ‘Erik?’
‘How are you?’
‘I’ve been better,’ she confessed, but she smiled in spite of herself. ‘It’s good to hear your voice. I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too.’
Coffman leaned back in her chair, her legs curling beneath her. She sipped her drink, ice cubes singing off the glass of her crystal tumbler.
‘It’s a little early, isn’t it?’
Coffman ignored the observation. ‘Where are you, Erik? Can I see you?’
‘I don’t think so. Besides, you were right; orange doesn’t look that great on me.’
Her body chilled. She took a mouthful of bourbon, the dark liquid burning its way down to her stomach. ‘Are they recording this?’
‘They don’t need you on tape, Amy. I’ve given them everything. Bob is singing like a canary too, or so they tell me.’
Coffman closed her eyes. So, it really was over. Strangely, she didn’t feel any sudden anger or fear, or even desperation. No, what hurt her most was the betrayal. ‘Why, Erik?’
The scorn in his voice stung her. ‘Is that a joke? After everything we’ve done, the countless lives we’ve destroyed? I hate clichés
, but I couldn’t live with myself. Worse than that, I couldn’t bring myself to look at you anymore. You’d become someone else, someone I didn’t recognise. A monster, I finally realised.’ He sighed deeply. ‘So I guess I did it for both of us.’
Now it was Coffman’s turn to scoff. ‘How very noble of you. I’m sure that defence will go down well with a jury.’
‘I’m not interested in saving myself. Whatever happens to me, whatever hole they drop me into, I’ll go willingly because I deserve everything that’s coming. Besides, I’m not going out like Charlie.’
Coffman gripped the phone a little tighter. ‘Schultz?’
‘The very same. He knew it was over, so he shot his wife, then he turned the gun on himself. They’re keeping it under wraps for now. She had breast cancer, did you know that?’
Coffman’s voice was a whisper. ‘I didn’t.’
‘They’ll probably frame it as a suicide pact.’
The line hissed softly for several moments. When Erik spoke again there was a terrible sadness in his voice. No, more than that, Coffman realised. A finality.
‘Every night I think of that moment, back at the house, when I told you about the outbreak in Baghdad, remember? I should’ve talked you out of it, threatened you, walked away, but I didn’t. Instead, I went with you, willingly. I could’ve saved us both. Now millions are dead.’
Coffman’s emotions threatened to choke her. She swallowed her drink and put the glass down. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself. This was all me, all my doing.’ Coffman closed her eyes and said, ‘You’ve been a good friend, Erik. My only friend, in fact. I wish I’d realised that sooner.’
She sat forward, bare feet on the granite floor, her knees pressed tightly together, her body lost inside the bathrobe. She felt so small now, so powerless and insignificant. There was nothing left but words.
‘Is this the last time we’ll ever speak?’
More silence. Then, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
She blinked the tears away. ’I’m going to miss you.’
