Kitabı oku: «Primary Command», sayfa 3
CHAPTER FOUR
12:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Headquarters of the Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“Don’t worry. You look real pretty.”
Luke was in the men’s room of the employee locker room. His shirt was off and he was washing his face in the sink. A deep scratch ran down his left cheek. The lower right side of his jaw was red and bruised and beginning to swell. Murph had clocked him a good one along there.
Luke’s knuckles were raw and ripped up. The wounds were open, and blood was still running a little bit. He had clocked Murphy a few good ones himself.
Behind him, big Ed loomed in the mirror. Ed had put his blazer back on and was every bit the consummate, well-dressed professional. Luke was supposed to be Ed’s superior officer in this job. He couldn’t put his own suit jacket back on because it was dirty from when he had thrown it on the ground.
“Let’s go, man,” Ed said. “We’re already late.”
“I’m going to look like something the cat dragged in.”
Ed shrugged. “Next time do what I do. Keep an extra suit, plus an extra set of office casual, right here in your locker. I’m surprised I need to teach you this stuff.”
Luke had put his T-shirt back on and was starting to button up his dress shirt. “Yeah, but what do I do now?”
Ed shook his head, but he was grinning. “This is what people expect from you anyway. Tell them you were doing a little tae kwon do sparring in the parking lot during your coffee break.”
Luke and Ed left the locker room and bounced up the concrete stairwell to the main floor. The conference room, as close to state-of-the-art as Mark Swann could get it, was down the end of a narrow side hallway. Don tended to call it the Command Center, though Luke felt that was stretching the facts a bit. One day, maybe.
Nervous butterflies bounced against the walls of Luke’s intestines. These meetings were a new thing for him, and he couldn’t seem to get used to them. Don told him it would come to him in time.
In the military, briefings were simple. They went like this:
Here’s the goal. Here’s the plan of attack. Questions? Input? Okay, load gear.
These briefings never went like that.
The door to the conference room was straight ahead. It was open. The room was somewhat small, and twenty people inside would make it look like a crowded subway car at rush hour. These meetings gave Luke the willies. There were endless discussions and delays. The press of people made him claustrophobic.
Invariably there would be bigwigs from several agencies and their staffers milling around, the bigwigs insisting on having their say, the staffers typing into BlackBerry phones, scratching out notes on yellow legal pads, running in and out, making urgent phone calls. Who were these people?
Luke crossed the threshold, followed closely by Ed. The overhead fluorescents were bright and dazzling.
There was nobody in the room. Well, not nobody, but not many. Five people, to be exact. Luke and Ed make it seven.
“Here are the men we’ve all been waiting for,” Don Morris said. He was not smiling. Don didn’t like to wait. He looked formidable in a dress shirt and slacks. His body language was relaxed, but his eyes were sharp.
A man stepped in front of Luke. He was a tall and thin four-star, in impeccable dress greens. His gray hair was trimmed to the scalp. There wasn’t a stray whisker anywhere on his clean-shaven face—whiskers knew better than to defy him. Luke had never met the man, but he knew him in his bones. He made his bed every morning before doing anything else. You could bounce a quarter off it. He probably did, just to make sure.
“Agent Stone, Agent Newsam, I’m General Richard Stark, Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“General, it’s an honor to meet you.”
Luke shook his hand before the man moved on to Ed.
“We were very proud of what you boys did a month ago. You’re both a credit to the United States Army.”
Another man stood there. He was a balding man, maybe somewhere in his forties. He had a large round gut and pudgy little fingers. His suit did not fit well—too tight at the shoulders, too tight around the center. His face was doughy and his nose was bulbous. He reminded Luke of Karl Malden doing a TV commercial about credit card fraud.
“Luke, I’m Ron Begley of Homeland Security.”
They also shook hands. Ron didn’t mention last month’s operation.
“Ron. Good to meet you.”
No one said a word about Luke’s face. That was a relief. Though he was sure he would hear about it from Don after the meeting was over.
“Boys, won’t you sit down?” the general said, waving a hand at the conference table. It was gracious of him, to invite them to sit at their own table.
Luke and Ed took seats near Don. There were two other men in the room, both wearing suits. One was bald and had an earpiece that disappeared inside his jacket. They looked on impassively. Neither man said a word. No one introduced them. To Luke, that meant enough said.
Ron Begley closed the door.
The major surprise here was there were no other SRT people in the room.
General Stark looked at Don.
“Ready?”
Don opened his big hands as if they were flowers opening their petals.
“Yes. This was all we needed. Do your worst.”
The general looked at Ed and Luke.
“Gentlemen, what I’m about to share with you is classified information.”
* * *
“What are they not telling us?” Luke said.
Don looked up. The desk he sat behind was polished oak, wide and gleaming. There were two pieces of paper on it, an office telephone, and an old, battered Toughbook laptop with a sticker on the back of the screen depicting a red spearhead with a dagger on it—the logo of Army Special Operations Command. Don was a clean desk kind of guy.
On the wall behind him were various framed photographs. Luke spotted the one of four shirtless young Green Berets in Vietnam—Don was on the right.
Don gestured at the two chairs in front of the desk.
“Have a seat. Take a load off.”
Luke did.
“How’s your face?”
“It’s a little sore,” Luke said.
“What did you do, slam the car door on it?”
Luke shrugged and smiled. “I ran into Kevin Murphy at Martinez’s funeral this morning. Remember him?”
Don nodded. “Sure. He was a decent soldier as Delta goes. Bit of a chip on his shoulder, I suppose. How did he look… after you ran into him?”
“Last I saw, he was still on the ground.”
Don nodded again. “Good. What was the issue?”
“He and I are the last men standing from that night in Afghanistan. There are some hard feelings. He thinks I could have done more to abort the mission.”
Don shrugged. “It wasn’t your mission to abort.”
“That’s what I told him. I also gave him my business card. If he calls me, I’d like you to consider hiring him here. He’s Delta trained, combat experienced, three tours that I know of, doesn’t wet his pants when the fur starts to fly.”
“He’s out of the service?”
Luke nodded. “Yeah.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Armed robbery. He’s been taking down drug kingpins in various cities.”
Don shook his head. “Jesus, Luke.”
“All I ask is you give him a chance.”
“We’ll talk about it,” Don said. “When and if he calls.”
Luke nodded. “Fair enough.”
Don pulled one of the pieces of paper on his desk closer to him. He slipped a pair of black reading glasses on the tip of his nose. Luke had seen him do this a few times now, and the effect was jarring. Superhuman Don Morris wore reading glasses.
“Now to matters a little more pressing. The things we didn’t talk about at the briefing are as follows. This mission comes straight from the Oval Office. The president took it away from the Pentagon and the CIA because he thinks there’s a leak somewhere. If the Russians manage to crack open this captured CIA guy, who knows what’s gonna come out of him. We are looking at a large potential setback, things need to move very fast, and privately, the president is furious.”
“That’s why we’re on our own?”
Don raised a finger. “We have friends. You’re never quite on your own in this business.”
“Mark Swann can…”
Don put a finger to his lips. He pointed around the room and raised his eyebrows. Then he shrugged. The message was: let’s not talk about what Mark Swann can do. No sense sharing that information with the people in the gallery.
Luke nodded and changed direction mid-sentence. “…get us access to all kinds of databases. Lexis Nexis, that kind of thing. He’s a madman with a Google search.”
“Yeah,” Don said. “I think he’s got a subscription to the New York Times online. He says he does, anyway.”
“Who was the guy from Homeland Security?”
Don shrugged. “Ron Begley? Desk jockey. He worked at Treasury when September eleventh happened. Fraud, counterfeiting. When they created Homeland, he switched over. Seems to be stumbling and fumbling his way up the ladder. I don’t think he’s a problem for us.”
Don stared at Luke for a long moment.
“What do you think of this mission?” he said.
Luke didn’t look away. “I think it’s a deathtrap, to be honest with you. It scares me. We’re supposed to drop into Russia undetected, rescue a bunch of guys…”
“Three guys,” Don said. “We’re allowed to kill them, if that’s easier.”
Luke wouldn’t even entertain that thought.
“Rescue a bunch of guys,” he repeated, “torch a submarine, and get back out alive? That’s a tall order.”
“Who would you send on it?” Don said. “If you were me?”
Luke shrugged. “Who do you think?”
“Do you want it?”
Luke didn’t answer right away. He thought of Becca and baby Gunner, in the cabin just across the Chesapeake on the Eastern Shore. God, that little baby…
“I don’t know.”
“Let me tell you a story,” Don said. “When I was a commander in Delta, a bright-eyed young guy came in. He had just qualified. Came out of the 75th Rangers, like you did, so he wasn’t green. He’d been around the block. But he had an energy, this kid, as though it was all new to him. Some guys come into Delta and they’re already grizzled as hell at the age of twenty-four. Not this guy.
“I tapped him for a mission right away. I was still going on missions myself in those days. I was deep into my forties by then, and the brass at JSOC wanted to put me out to pasture, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Not yet. I wouldn’t send my men into places where I wouldn’t go myself.
“We parachuted into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Way upriver, out beyond anything resembling law and order. It was a night drop, of course, and the pilot put us in the water. We crawled up out of those swamps looking like we’d all been dipped in shit. There was a warlord up there, called himself Prince Joseph. He called his ragtag militia Heaven’s…”
“Heaven’s Army,” Luke said. Of course he knew the story. And of course he knew all about the new Delta recruit Don was describing.
“Three hundred child soldiers,” Don said. “Eight men went up there, eight American soldiers, no outside support of any kind, and put bullets in the brains of Prince Joseph and all his lieutenants. A perfect operation. A humanitarian mission, with no ulterior motives but to do the right thing. Bang! Decapitation strike.”
Luke took a deep breath. The night had been terrifying and exhilarating all wrapped into one adrenaline rush of a package.
“The international aid societies came in and did what they could with the children, repatriated them, fed them, loved them, reeducated them to be human again, if that was even possible. And I kept tabs. Many of them eventually made it back to their home villages.”
Don smiled. No, he positively beamed.
“In the morning, I lit up a victory cigar along the bank of the mighty Congo. I was still smoking them in those days. My men were with me, and I was proud of every single one of them. I was proud to be an American. But my newbie was quiet, thoughtful. So I asked him if he was all right. And you know what he said?”
Now Luke smiled. He sighed and shook his head. Don was talking about him. “He said, ‘All right? Are you kidding me? I live for this.’ That’s what he said.”
Don pointed at him. “That’s right. So I’ll ask you again. Do you want this mission?”
Luke stared at Don for another long moment. Don was a drug dealer, Luke realized. A pusher. He sold you on a feeling, a rush, that you could only get one way.
An image of Becca holding Gunner again flashed across the screen in his mind. Everything had changed when that baby was born. He remembered Becca giving birth. She was more beautiful in those moments than he had ever seen her.
And they were planning to build a life together, the three of them.
What was Becca going to think about this mission? When he sold her the last one, when she was about to give birth, she had been upset. And that one was an easy sell—just a quick trip to Iraq to arrest a guy. Of course, it turned into much more than that, full-on combat and the rescue of the president’s daughter, but Becca had only learned about it after the fact.
Here, she would know the deal going in: Luke was going to infiltrate Russia and attempt to rescue three prisoners. He shook his head.
There was no way he could tell her that.
“Luke?” Don said.
Luke nodded. “Yeah. I want it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
3:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Queen Anne’s County, Maryland
Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay
“You’re home early.”
Luke looked at his mother-in-law, Audrey, taking his time, soaking her in. She had deep-set eyes with irises so dark, they seemed almost black. She had a sharp nose, like a beak. She had tiny bones and a thin frame. She reminded him of a bird—a crow, or maybe a vulture. And yet, in her own way, she was attractive.
She was a well-preserved fifty-nine now, and Luke was aware that as a young woman in the late 1960s, she had done some modeling for newspaper and magazine advertisements. As far as he knew, it was the only work she had ever done.
She had been born into an arm of the Outerbridge family, vastly wealthy New York City and New Jersey landowners since before the United States became a country. Her husband, Lance, came from the equally old-money St. John family of New England lumber barons.
As a general rule, Audrey St. John frowned upon work. She didn’t understand it, and she especially didn’t understand why someone would do the kind of dangerous, dirty work that occupied Luke Stone’s time. She seemed continually flabbergasted that her own daughter, Rebecca St. John, would marry someone like Luke.
Audrey and Lance had never accepted him as their son-in-law. They had been a toxic influence on this relationship since well before he and Becca exchanged their vows. Her presence here was going to make it that much harder to talk to Becca about this latest assignment.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, trying to sound cheerful.
He had just walked in. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt, but so far that was his only nod toward being home. He reached into the refrigerator and came out with a cold beer.
It was full summer now, and the weather was fine. The surroundings here were beautiful. He and Becca were living at her family’s cabin in Queen Anne’s County. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years.
The place was an ancient, rustic place sitting on a small bluff right above the bay. It was two floors, wooden everything, with creaks and squeaks everywhere you stepped. The kitchen door was spring-loaded, and slammed shut with enthusiasm. There was a screened-in porch facing the water, and a newer stone patio with commanding views right on the bluff.
They had started gradually replacing the generations-old furniture to make the place more suited for everyday living. There was a new sofa and new chairs in the living room. One Saturday morning, by hook or by crook, and by sheer animal will, Luke and Ed Newsam had managed to insert a king-sized bed in the upstairs master bedroom.
Even with those upgrades, the sturdiest thing in the house remained the stone fireplace in the living room. It was almost as if the stately old hearth had been there, looking out over Chesapeake Bay since biblical times, and someone with a sense of humor had built a small summer cabin all around it.
It really was an incredible place. Luke loved it there. Yes, it was far from his office. Yes, if the SRT job really did pan out, and it looked like it was going to, they were going to have to move closer. But for now? Paradise. The ninety-minute commute home didn’t seem nearly as bad, just knowing that this was the payoff at the end of it.
He glanced out the window. Becca was on the patio, feeding the baby. Luke would have loved nothing more than to take a seat out there with them, gaze out at the water and the sky, and just sit there until the sun went down. But it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, he had to pack for his trip. And before he even started, he had to do the hardest thing—announce that he was going.
“Did you get punched on the job?” Audrey said.
Luke shrugged. Even though he could feel them well enough, he had almost forgotten the scrape on his cheek and the swollen jaw line. Pain was an old friend of his. When it wasn’t excruciating, he could barely feel it. There was almost something comforting about it.
He cracked open the beer and took a slug. It was ice cold and delicious. “Something like that. But you should see the other guy.”
Audrey didn’t laugh. She made a sort of half-grunt and went upstairs.
Luke was tired. It had already been a long day, with Martinez laid to rest, the fight with Murphy, and everything else. And really, it was just getting started. He intended to be here for an hour before he headed right back to the city again, from there to Turkey, and then, if all the signs were favorable, over to Russia.
He went outside. Becca nursing the baby was like an impressionist painting, her bright red jumper and floppy sun hat against the green grass, and the vast sweep of pale blue sky and dark water. There was a double-mast tall ship replica at full sail in the distance, moving slowly to the west. If he could press STOP and freeze this moment in time, he would do it.
She looked up, saw him there, and smiled. Her smile lit him up. She was as pretty as ever. And a smile was a good thing, especially these days. Maybe the darkness of this postpartum depression was beginning to lift.
Luke took a deep breath, sighed quietly, and smiled himself.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said.
“Hello, handsome.”
He leaned down and shared a kiss with her.
“How’s the baby boy today?”
She nodded. “Good. He slept for three hours, Mom kept an eye on him, and I even got to take a nap. I don’t want to promise anything, but we might be turning a corner here. I hope so.”
A long pause drew out between them.
“You’re home early,” she said. That was the second time in the past five minutes someone had said that. He took it as a bad omen. “How did your day go?”
Luke sat down across the small round table from her and took a sip of his beer. As always, he believed that when trouble was brewing, the thing to do was to get right to the meat of it. And if he could get past the worst of it, maybe it would happen too fast for Audrey to come out here and pile on.
“Well, I have an assignment.”
He noticed himself fudging. He didn’t call it a mission. He didn’t call it an operation. What kind of assignment was it? Was he going to interview a local craftsman for the weekly newspaper? Maybe it was a high school science project?
Instantly, she was wary.
Her eyes stared deep into his, searching there. “What is it?”
He shrugged. “It’s a diplomatic snafu, really. The Russians took three American archaeologists prisoner, and confiscated their little submarine. They were diving in the Black Sea, looking for the wreck of an old trading ship from ancient Greece. They were in international waters, but the Russians felt they were too close to Russian territory.”
Her eyes never wavered. “Are they spies?”
Luke took another sip of his beer. He let out a sound, a short bark of laughter. She was good at this. She’d already had a lot of practice. She went right for the open vein.
He shook his head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“And you’re going to go where, and do what?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to Turkey, to see if we can get them released.” The statement was true, as far as it went. It also overlooked an entire continent’s worth of detail. It was a sin of omission.
And she also knew that. “To see if we can get them released? Who are we?”
Now it was a chess match. “The United States of America.”
“Come on, Luke. What are you not telling me?”
He sipped the beer again and scratched his head. “Nothing of substance, hon. The Russians are holding three guys. I’m going to Turkey. They want me there because I have experience in the kind of mission that led to this. If the Russians are willing to negotiate, I probably won’t even be directly involved.”
Behind Luke, the screen door slammed. Becca’s eyes looked past him for a second. Dammit! Here came Audrey.
Becca’s eyes were suddenly angry. Tears welled up in them. No! The timing couldn’t be worse. “Luke, the last time you went abroad, I was almost nine months pregnant. You were going to Iraq to arrest someone, remember? A police job, I think you called it. But it turned out you were going to rescue the president’s…”
He raised a finger. “Becca, you know that isn’t true. I did go to arrest someone, and the arrest was uneventful…”
That was a lie. Another lie. The arrest was a slaughterhouse.
“…daughter from Islamic terrorists. Your helicopter crashed. You and Ed fought Al Qaeda militants on a mountaintop.”
“All of that happened after we were already there.”
“I’m not stupid, Luke. I can read between the lines of newspaper reports. The articles admitted that dozens of people were killed. That tells me there was a bloodbath and you were right in the middle of it.”
Luke raised his hands a tiny amount, as if she had just pulled the world’s tiniest gun on him. The baby was still there, suckling away as if none of this was happening.
“It’s an assignment, hon. It’s my job. Don Morris…”
Now she raised a finger. “Don’t you Don Morris me. I don’t even blame Don anymore. If you didn’t want to go on these suicide missions, then he couldn’t get you to go. It’s really that simple.”
Now she was crying, the tears pouring down.
“What’s going on?” a voice said. The voice was too eager. It sensed blood in the water, and was moving in for the kill.
“Hi, Audrey,” Luke said, without even turning around.
Becca stood and handed Audrey the baby. She looked down at Luke, her eyes hard. Her entire body was shaking now from the tears.
“What if you die?” she said. “We have a son now.”
“I know that. I’m not going to die. As always, I’m going to be very careful. Even more so now, because of Gunner.”
Becca stood there next to her mother, her hands balled up in fists. She looked like a toddler who was about to start shrieking in the middle of the supermarket. Her mother, in contrast, was calm, simpering, self-satisfied. She bounced the baby in her thin, birdlike arms and cooed to him in quiet baby talk.
“It’s going to be okay,” Luke said. “It’s going to be fine. I know it is.”
Abruptly, Becca stormed off, up the small hill toward the house. A moment later, the screen door slammed again.
Now Luke and Audrey stared at each other. Audrey had the sharp, predatory eyes of a hawk. Her mouth opened.
Luke raised a hand and shook his head. “Audrey, please don’t say a word.”
Audrey ignored him. “One day, you’re going to come back here and you’re not going to have a wife anymore,” she said. “Or a house to live in, for that matter.”
