by Sam Powers
She pushed the button and in the viewfinder a small warning light blinked for a moment; what did that… Oh Hell, she thought.
The flash.
It popped just as the thought entered her head, too late to do anything about it. Alex had never been much of a shooter, but in an age of free news and drastic cost cutting, everyone was expected to contribute. She’d always had the camera on auto, always let it make the decisions about whether she had enough light.
The flash was bright, more than enough to swivel every head in the room.
Alex turned and ran, not bothering to stay and try to talk her way out of it. She headed directly for the side entrance. She could hear the footsteps behind her, the frantic voices, the woman screaming in Korean. Her heel clacked on the polished concrete floor and her breath was short, the door just twenty yards away…
The guard stepped out of nowhere, the butt of the rifle catching her flush in the forehead. He turned into a soft blur as Alex fell hard, the world out of focus, sideways, as she plummeted into unconsciousness.
49./
The asset watched it all play out with a sense of ambivalence. None of it meant anything to him anymore. He just wanted to go home, and he leaned against the rafter beam, looking down at the expanse of the warehouse, tired after so many weeks on the road.
He didn’t bother to raise his rifle for a closer look. He could tell generally what was going on, even though it was nearly eighty yards away and dimly lit; it was irrelevant to his final task, which was on the clock. First, the woman had pulled out a camera with a flash on it, which would have almost been comedic if the circumstances hadn’t seemed so serious. Second, the group of scientists working on the device had started running around like chickens with their heads cut off, unsure of whether they were in trouble with American authorities.
Then the guard had struck the woman, knocking her cold, which stirred his anger. He raised the rifle and sighted the guard’s head through the scope, then thought better of it and lowered his weapon. A moment later, another figure stepped out of the shadows of the adjacent staircase to the offices and threw a vicious elbow that knocked the guard equally unconscious. Then the man turned, his back to the asset, and picked the woman up, tossing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. He began to run towards the side door.
Now that was interesting. He raised the rifle again and tracked the scope smoothly over to their position, following their movements and keeping the crosshairs on them. Before the asset could get a good look at who it was, the man turned again, his path cut off by guards with Chinese AK47 knockoffs. He had the same build as the man in Montpellier, that was for sure, and he moved with the assurance and sense of self-preservation that comes from having been under fire. Ex-Marine, maybe even a SEAL, the asset thought.
The man was laboring now under the extra weight, turning the corner between the row of containers to try for the side window. But the guard had returned to his post after the earlier distraction. The angle from the rafters down to the action was too tight for the asset to see the pair anymore; but he could still see the guard by the window, raising his rifle, screaming at them to back off. A foot flashed across the front of the man, kicking the rifle away and prompting the startled guard to back down himself. Whoever he was, the asset thought, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
Or perhaps he was. The rest of the guards had caught up to them, rushing down the wide corridor between stacks of crates, surrounding the couple, guns high. A moment later they were being cuffed.
The asset had been told to expect disturbances. It was all just part of the procedure, as far as he was concerned. He reached into his upper pocket and took out the already unwrapped fruit protein bar, taking a fair-sized bite before returning it to the pocket. It was getting late, and he needed to keep his energy up for show time.
DES MOINES, IOWA
The campaign staff were staying up, enjoying the fact that they were getting a half-day off for the Fourth of July, just a few hours away.
Officially, of course, none of them were working, including the candidate. Officially, their day out in Des Moines pressing the flesh and eating barbecue would be completely unofficial.
Addison March was next door, listening to them through the thin hotel suite wall. He smiled to himself. It was going to be an important day, the Fourth. He had an appropriately weighty speech memorized, a damn impressive eight minutes of solid reflection on America and national security. He had a great place to deliver it, with families thronging to the state fairgrounds; and by memorizing it, doing it off the cuff and not at a podium, he was going to make it look like one of the most impressive conversational ad-libs in campaign history.
Everything could turn on how he handled the Fourth, he thought, as he listened to them laugh and joke, the music louder than it should have been. Most of them were young; they didn’t really understand, not yet. They were overcome by their zeal for campaigning, their ideological need to proselytize. He knew the stakes were much, much higher.
March had prepared for the speech his entire life, really. He’d been using his flair for oratory and drama to advance his political perspectives since long before his days in office. As a businessman and lawyer, he’d once been a powerful fundraiser and PAC chairman for the Republicans. Before that, he’d been a Young Republican, and before, a high school student council president. It was in his nature, and he knew he would seize the moment yet again.
He glanced absently at the newspaper on his nightstand. There was a campaign story on the front page, an assertion that he remained nine points behind, a woeful figure in the modern age of a split electorate. Given everything he’d been accused of in the month prior, he was wryly surprised the party hadn’t asked him to step aside at the last moment; at one point, a week earlier, he’d been down eighteen, wondering if everything he’d worked towards had been torn from him.
But he’d never quit before in politics, and he’d maintained appropriate results. He’d never given up until the war was won.
NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK
The director was down the steps from the plane to the tarmac almost as quickly as they were lowered, moving spryly for a man in his late sixties. Jonah rushed behind him to keep up. A series of cars waited nearby, a rolling operations center for the forty minutes it would take to get to the target location.
Representatives from the SEAL counter-terrorism unit DEVGRU and the Army counterpart Delta Force were waiting by the cars, a pair of sharply dressed officers; their expressions were stone slabs of serious intent.
The director shook each’s hand in turn. “Colonel Ellis. Lt. Commander Hirsh. This is my assistant, Jonah Tarrant; he’ll be in on all of the decisions today. Are we ready to roll?”
“Yes sir,” the Navy man Hirsh said. “We’ve got eyes on target and are establishing recon, including locking down body numbers with thermal and establishing our best entry and exit points.”
“Good. And the reporter, Alex Malone?”
“She doesn’t seem to be on scene, sir. And her phone has been turned off.”
That wasn’t so good, Wilkie thought. “Any word from Agent Brennan yet?”
“No sir. But there are signs of a disturbance at the location. There’s a guard posted in front of the target location, several more behind, and there’s significant damage to the front of the building, along with a damaged vehicle in the lot that looks like it might have been the cause.”
“Jonah?” the director asked.
“One of Brennan’s operational MOs has been to neutralize the opposition’s numerical advantage via significant distraction; he might have been improvising.”
The director turned back to the military men. “Technical support?”
“We’ve got two leading weapons experts on scene as well as a former member of Team Six who has since taken a degree in nuclear engineering. We’re in a position to disarm as soon as we control the building. But there’s an issue.”
“Yes?”
&n
bsp; Jonah interrupted. “They can’t tell what the status of the device is, or whether the people who brought it here are fanatical enough to actually detonate it. They may have some sort of failsafe switch or quick trigger…”
The director understood the ramifications. “So any attempt to go in hot and they might blow the thing?”
“Yes sir,” the young lieutenant commander said. “That’s pretty much the sum of it.”
“Then we need to know what’s going on inside that warehouse, gentlemen.” the director said, heading for the cars. “We need eyes on that device. Let’s get going.”
Brennan awoke to a sudden, sharp pain. He glanced down to his left hand, which was tied to the arm of the wooden desk chair with a plastic restraint. His right hand was similarly immobilized, but it was his left that hurt, because the Korean agent had just run the razor-sharp blade of a knife over it. A thin incision was beginning to bleed badly, droplets running down the side of his hand and wrist.
The place sounded quiet, near empty.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” Park said. She had a strange look on her face, he thought, like an excited child. “We haven’t much time and I debated just shooting you both, but I need to know if I can expect any more company.”
He blinked, his head still ringing from a rifle butt blow, and looked around the area. The technicians were all gone, save two men working on the final portion of the casing. Alex was sitting a few feet away, also tied to a chair, still unconscious. His first thought was that she might be seriously hurt; his second was that he wanted to let her know just what he thought of her decision to go walkabout.
“This is the part where I tell you it’s insane to set off a nuclear weapon...”
“… And I tell you that the west is decadent, and corrupt, and needs to be purged of its arrogance once and for all.”
“Yeah… that part,” Brennan said. “Park, you know they’ll make sure you go up with this place…”
“I’m aware of my fate,” she said.
“This place is quiet. At least you let the workers go,” he said, trying to gauge their numbers.
“We only need a handful here to ensure everything goes as planned. There was no reason to keep them.”
“How big of you.”
“I’ve prepared for today for a long time, we all have. This is an opportunity to assail evil, Mr. Brennan, to leave my mark on the world as someone who was willing to die for what she believed in. How do you suppose you’ll convince me otherwise?”
“Leave your mark? For every nut job who agrees with you, a thousand normal people will remember you as a homicidal maniac.”
“A thousand fools, a thousand dead souls on the American treadmill of productivity over purpose, of self over community and family and tradition, of profit over honor.”
“That’s the narrative they’ve taught you, sure,” he said. “Want to hear the one they’ve taught us about you? How North Koreans are all mindless zombies, soulless robots who do the bidding of a tyrannical, psychotic narcissist?”
She smiled smugly. “Your attempt at psychological influence is amusing, Mr. Brennan. Are you so far gone yourself, so subservient to the agency that you don’t consider your own fate, or that of your colleague? I’m ready to die for what I believe in, Mr. Brennan. Are you?”
“I guess we’re going to find out,” he said. “Because I’m not telling you shit.” If he was lucky, Brennan thought, the commotion involving the car had been enough of a surprise to prompt Alex to make the call. If he was unlucky, they were both dead anyway. Either way, he had no immediate option but to stall.
“Why here? Why not in another major center, where the death toll would be even higher? Why not L.A. or Dallas, or D.C?”
She had a look of rapturous fanaticism when she spoke. “New York is the heart of the American financial empire, the belly of the beast. Had our associates not failed in their earlier task and assembled the device yesterday, it would have been midtown Manhattan. But killing millions of your fellow vermin and making New York uninhabitable for a few decades will have to do. It will also send a message to the rest of the world that North Korea is a nuclear power, and not afraid to defend its values.”
“Values?” She was completely insane, he thought. “Is that why Khalidi hired you?”
She smiled at that, not biting at the attempt to identify her employer. “You’re joking, surely?”
A few feet away, Alex began to stir. “Your friend is going to wake up in a few minutes. Or… is she?” Park asked. She walked over to Alex then took the pistol out of her belt holster. “Let’s say you aren’t afraid of death, Mr. Brennan. I’m sure you’d rather I didn’t kill your lovely friend. So why don’t you tell me what we can expect between now and a half-hour from now?”
She pointed the .45 at Alex’s head.
Brennan said, “So? If you’re really planning on setting off that thing, neither of us has much time left anyway.” He was pulling his wrists away from the chair arms, trying to work the restraints loose. But they were designed to be unbreakable and he wasn’t making any progress.
“No? Okay, I’ll just shoot her…” She placed the barrel against Alex’s temple.
“No...! Look, it’s not going to make a difference what I tell you. I was listening to your conversation. There’s no way they’ll arrive before your handlers can make that phone call and trigger it. There’s no reason to do that.”
Park appeared to be weighing her options when a guard ran up to her. “Sir, you need to see this. We’ve got a situation outside. It looks like we might have some sort of law enforcement around the perimeter of the property.”
She smiled at Brennan. “Hours, eh Mr. Brennan? Don’t go anywhere until I get back,” she said, before following the guard toward the front of the building.
Brennan knew he only had seconds. He couldn’t break the restraints, but that didn’t mean the chair was equally tough. He leaned forward and stood up, the chair suspended from his arms. Then he pushed off the ground as hard as he could, jumping up and backwards, so that his full weight came down on the chair’s frame. The hard edges banged into him like a battering ram, but the chair shattered as they hit the floor, pieces flying in multiple directions. He ignored the pain in his back; it felt like he’d rebroken a rib, but Brennan didn’t have time to complain. He shook off the loose wood from the chair arms then headed quickly over towards Alex.
He was about to try and untie her when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, the flash of chrome from a muzzle being raised. Instead, he pushed Alex’s chair over, banking that she’d be safer from gunfire lying on her side; then he rolled out of the way even as Park and the guard opened fire, the bullets pinging off of the walls and concrete, one even ricocheting off the bomb casing. Before they could fully round the corner he was to his feet, balanced and ready. The guard rushed into the area, rifle out in front of him. Brennan grabbed the barrel, shoving it at first down and then, once the gun butt was squarely under the man’s chin, back up towards him, taking the man out with one hard thrust.
He stepped sideways quickly as Park fired two more shots, both missing, then spun into a low leg sweep, taking her feet out from under her, the pistol flying into the corner of the work space.
Park sprung to her feet from her back almost as soon as she hit the ground, at the ready. She crouched low, feet slightly at each side, knees apart, one fist splayed across her torso, the other held high to block or offer an open palm technique.
Brennan took a deep, cleansing breath. “Chen style? I hate Chen style.”
“Most people do,” she said, as they circled each other. “It’s hard to hit what you can’t touch.”
He struck quickly, lunging in with a front kick, trying to use his size and speed advantage to close the gap between them before she could react. But instead of moving, Park twisted at the waist with the speed and dexterity of a diver, making herself small, his foot brushing by her. She shifted her weight to her inside foot and kept the
rotation going but pulled it in tight, so that she was spinning around his torso in the same motion, her foot pirouetting three hundred and sixty degrees, the torque at her waist snapping it around like a whip, catching Brennan flush in the right hip, striking a nerve and instantly numbing it.
He stumbled sideways as she readjusted her stance, ready for a rapid rebuttal. Brennan shook the blow off. “And that’s why I hate Chen style,” he muttered. “It’s like getting your ass kicked by a ballerina.”
She said nothing, turning her torso away from him to the left as she stepped in, then to the right, his concentration fixed on her body movements and losing track of her hands. A flurry of punches followed, part of a prescribed pattern, Brennan able to block more than a dozen blows in quick succession before, inevitably, one broke through his defense, the open palm catching him in the solar plexus. He turned slightly just at the point of contact, absorbing some of the blow’s strength and avoiding having his wind knocked out, settling instead with half-losing his balance, stumbling backwards. She followed up smoothly with a solid kick to the side of his knee, which he felt give slightly, an instant sprain that send a shock of pain through the nerve.
Brennan backed away, half-limping, creating as much distance as she’d immediately allow. Her technique was near-perfect, he thought. It made it difficult to go on the offensive; Chen style allowed an expert practitioner to use his or her opponent’s weight against them, using locking holds to throw them off balance followed by rapid strikes derived from Chinese boxing.
So he motioned for her to advance, cupping his hand upside down, fingers beckoning her forward. “If that’s the best you’ve got,” Brennan said, “this isn’t going to last long.”
