by Jeff Rovin
Williams’s own destination was another elevator. This one was going down. Not to the lobby but to a section below. There were no numerals in the elevator, just a scanner that responded to Berry’s thumb. They emerged in a long, semicircular corridor that seemed to match the curve of the building. There were people moving about here as well, though no one carried a device, or spoke. If anything, nods were exchanged and nothing more. There were also fewer people in uniform. That did not mean there were no officers, only that they were incognito. He had a clear sense—call it his military-intelligence instincts—that logistics were not what was going on down here.
Black ops. Dark ops. As with most rumors, the stories about this facility were apparently true. He was both impressed and a little disappointed that for all his interaction with Berry, the man had never breathed a word of it.
The DCS took Williams to a small room that opened to the print on the new arrival’s index finger—just as the Tank had done at Op-Center. He looked at the door before entering. Inside was a desk, a laptop, and a landline. There was a chair for one guest and the walls were bare.
Berry shut the door behind him. The click of the latch came with the slide of an internal bolt.
“It’s not what you think down here, what anyone thinks,” Berry said.
Williams sat on the edge of the desk, looked around. “I know. The lock just told me that.”
Berry remained by the door. “Oh?”
“Electronic data is protected by tech, not a double elevator system and electronic deadbolts,” Williams said. “Four physical assets require that. People, a forgery department with all kinds of documents on-hand for emergency operations, and weapons are three of them. The employees are coming and going, so that’s not it. Documents can be bought on the open market, so it’s probably not that either. Experimental weapons require structural reinforcing, which you don’t have here, so they are not on-site either.” He tipped his forehead toward the door. “Wood panel, steel and fiberglass interior for security and mold abatement in a subterranean environment … just like Op-Center.” He pointed at the overhead vent. “Warehousing biological agents and toxins require an air filtration system that isn’t standard issue like this one.”
“Impressive,” Berry said.
Williams shook his head. “Average. I’m just trying to ease my head back into the game.”
“So what’s the fourth ‘thing’ that needs security?”
Williams fixed him with a look that was suddenly wise and confident. “Pallets of ash. Stacks of gold,” he said. “This is a logistics facility. Ops aren’t conducted from here. They are financed from here.”
Berry nodded. “That’s right, Chase. Screw bitcoin. Outside of the Fed and Fort Knox, there’s more physical money in this place than anywhere in the country. Not just for ops but for every bloody thing you can imagine, from buying journalists with chump change to funding revolutions. Most of the people you saw down here? Accountants.”
“More invisible than spies because they live their lives right out in the open,” Williams said. “Everyone knows who they are, what they do. Just not for whom.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Whose office was this before the Intrepid?”
“Mine,” Berry replied. “I needed a larger office anyway.”
“I should have guessed it,” Williams said. “You handle all the president’s black bag operations.”
“It’s challenging work and a great insurance policy,” Berry said. “I know where all the skeletons are. Gives me a lot of freedom in the real world.”
“I wondered why Harward never laid a glove on you,” Williams said, referring to the president’s abrasive national security advisor.
“Even my own boss doesn’t know exactly what I do here,” Berry told him. “Not that Evelyn Graves is the brightest chief of staff who ever walked those corridors.”
“She knows where different skeletons are buried,” Williams suggested.
Berry smiled pleasantly.
“So the administration has you laundering money,” Williams said. “I’m not a financial guy. Why am I here?”
“For exactly that reason,” Berry replied. “It’s the last place anyone in D.C. would think to look for you.”
Williams frowned. “Am I a target, Matt?”
It took Berry a second to get his meaning. “No, no,” the DCS said. “Sorry, it’s nothing like that. Yeah, intelligence people are miffed because they got a black eye on your account, but they’re not that pissed, I don’t think.”
Williams was relieved. Every agency in town would have to explain how they didn’t know about Captain Salehi. And then they would have to do additional damage control as word got around that Iran was no longer just financing terror but actively participating in it. The participation of the ayatollahs in Tehran bumped the global jihad from deserts and mountains to a major world power.
Berry looked down, began to pace in the small room. “Still, Chase, I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Your team blew it and everyone knows that. No one will have anything to do with you and placing a lot of them in other agencies is going to be a bear.”
“Yet here I am,” Williams said, returning to the topic at hand. He did not want to think about the others. Not now. It frightened him to think that for many of them the nightmare would not end this morning. Many were good and blameless intelligence officers who would be snapped up by other agencies. But some of them would not be offered jobs, even though they had nothing to do with the surveillance on Captain Salehi. Those who were close to Williams, like Anne, like other members of upper management, would be tainted. They would have to seek employment in the private sector. And a few—especially those with second mortgages, single-income families, college-age kids, and credit card debt—would be used as bait to draw out foreign agents. Other nations had deep repositories of gold and cash as well. Not just enemies but allies like Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia. Money would be offered to the unemployed in exchange for any names, information, tactics, or off-the-grid facilities they could identify. Anyone who took the money—and two or three might be tempted—would then be approached and offered the choice of prison or the opportunity to feed false information to their contacts.
It’s a stinking business, Williams thought.
“Did you say something?” Berry asked.
“Here I am,” Williams repeated.
“Oh. I thought—never mind,” Berry went on. “You are here because no one knows you—and there’s something you have to do.”
“For who?” Williams asked.
Again, Berry was stopped short. He looked at Williams. “For yourself, Chase. And for the president. This isn’t charity from me to you. I rubber-stamped it because I know you’re one of the best intelligence directors we’ve got. The captain goes down with his ship but you weren’t the one who hit the iceberg. That”—he threw a hand in the air, a burst of long-simmering frustration coming to the surface—“that was our government’s across-the-board, over bloody reliance on tech and its lower-cost, inexperienced young practitioners. We ask too much of them and their goddamn algorithms.” Berry stopped pacing and looked at Williams. “Of course, we older guys have our albatrosses, too. We’ve been at this long enough to make enemies internally. January Dow, for instance.”
“I’m well aware,” Williams said. “No intelligence fail there.”
“So back to my point, if I can continue without interruption,” Berry said. “The president knows you, I know you, and we both had the same reaction when January showed us the security camera image from the deck of the Intrepid.”
Williams guessed it a moment before Berry spoke.
“You’re going to let me go after that bastard,” Williams said.
“No one has a better reason,” Berry said. “And no one,” he added, “is going to have a better team.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
July 22, 12:22 p.m.
“Corporal, I want you to hurt me.”
Lieutenant Grace Lee of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Airborne, stood five foot two and seemed slighter than that in her loose-fitting sweat clothes. The twenty-six-year-old wore her black hair in a very short military style, tufted on top and buzzed on the sides; her eyes were dark brown but their intensity made them seem almost black.
Lee stood in a circle comprised of seven men and two women, all of them members of the 1st Special Forces Command, Airborne, each of them larger than she was. She had invited the brawniest of the new recruits to stand in the circle with her. He faced her on a patch of dirt that had been raked-free of rocks and spaded to make for softer falls.
The man, Corporal Andy “Behemoth” Evans, stood six-five and weighed more than twice what Lieutenant Lee weighed. Growing up, Behemoth had always wanted to face a trained martial artist. He did not believe, in his gut, that anyone could overcome his size and muscle—especially someone like the woman standing before him, whatever her rank in the kung fu form she had announced in her short introduction. Yet she seemed to think she could take him. No weapons, just her tiny hands. And that gave him pause. From where he stood, it looked as if he could easily snap her in two.
“Corporal?” she said when the young man did not move. “I gave you an order.”
“Lieutenant, can we walk through this?” he asked.
There were quiet titters all around and Behemoth realized, suddenly, the question had created the impression that he was afraid of being injured.
“You will attack me, now, or—”
Behemoth moved. He came at her like a charging bear, all arms and torso, and the next thing he knew he had been stopped hard by those tiny hands pressed to the bottom of his rib cage. The next thing that happened was her right forearm had traveled from there straight up his breastbone, introducing her open palm to his chin and snapping his head back painfully. A heartbeat later, he felt his right leg buckle as her right heel slammed against the back side of his knee. That foot then went directly to the ground, bending her knee behind him. With her hand still pushing up on his chin, supported by her arm on his sternum, he fell back over her right knee, hitting the ground with the small of his back and a loud oof.
“Stay down,” she instructed Behemoth while she addressed the others. “My frontal attack incorporated the following tools,” she said. “First, I employed Tiger Mouth, my outstretched hands drawing stopping power, energy, chi from my core. There was no muscle involved and none was required. Second, Tiger Form Palm Heel Strike—also coming from my core, guided along his own center into one of his most vulnerable spots, the chin. That gave me control of his center and,” she added, pointing up, “turned his eyes in a useless direction. Finally, Snake Leg, wrapped around his, allowed me to plant my heel in behind his knee and force the joint to bend, his posture to buckle. Finally, I placed my right leg in a Crescent Step position behind him creating a straight line using my upper leg. Combined with the continued pressure on his chin, pressure that kept his momentum going backward, he had no recourse but to fall over.”
She looked down again at Behemoth.
“You want to try again from there?” she asked. “Keep in mind that what you think you know about hand-to-hand combat can work against you.”
Without hesitation, the big recruit scrabbled along the ground and threw himself toward the instructor, wrapping his big arms around her legs, just below the knees, and hugging them toward him. Lieutenant Lee permitted herself to fall—straight down, elbow pointed down. She planted the hard bone between his shoulder blades, causing him to cry out … and let her go.
“That spot reacts almost like the reflex action of the knee,” Lieutenant Lee said, rising. “Pile driver pressure will pop the arms open like a toy action figure. That leaves you free and him vulnerable to having his fingers crushed with your heel, his neck snapped with a knee-drop, or any number of other damaging results. Brute force, however it is applied, will never, can never defeat technique.”
She offered her hand to Behemoth and helped him up. He was actually wobbly from the strike.
“That is what we will learn here,” Lieutenant Lee said as the dusty Behemoth rejoined his comrades—none of whom was tittering now. “Chi and form over savagery and muscle. We will do six weeks of hand to hand, followed by two weeks of knife fighting. Over the next two months you will be hurt. You will be cut. You will learn to enjoy the pain as a lesson in where you must improve. You will learn to be alert. You will acquire an acute sensitivity to hostile energy around you. You will not only look out for yourselves and your comrades-in-arms, you will watch out for civilians in your day-to-day life so that monsters like the Iranian terrorist who—”
The young woman was interrupted by a distinctive chime on her smartphone, the deep tone of a Tibetan singing gong. She excused herself and ran to the table outside the circle where she had left her device. The lieutenant picked it up, opened it with facial recognition, and read the single phrase:
BLACK WASP
“Menendez, take over!” she shouted over her shoulder to one of the other women before hurrying off in the direction of the Special Operation Training Facility Building.
CHAPTER FIVE
Camp Pendleton, California
July 22, 9:47 a.m.
Despite the morning’s events—indeed, because of them—Captain Pete Talbot of the media office, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, felt it was important to keep his appointment with Fox News. The segment about rapid military deployment seemed even more relevant than it had in years, and both Pendleton command and the Department of Defense felt it was important to reassure viewers.
The enthusiastic career officer was walking the crew through a field to where they would watch a display by the unit’s top marksmen.
“The Fifteenth provides a sea-based Marine Air Ground Task Force that is able to conduct both crisis response and designated special operations, whatever the theater requirements of geographic combatant commanders,” he said in a single-breath, perfectly parsed statement of principles. “In support of that broad military mission, it is essential that fields of operation can be cleaned from a safe distance by our sharpshooter personnel.”
The interviewer, Amara Holiday, rolled her eyes a little at that description—“sharpshooter personnel.” It was the kind of redundant official-speak that made these military assignments so grating.
When did “sharpshooters” no longer become enough to describe people who could hit a distant target? she wondered. Why “personnel”?
She wouldn’t be a boor and ask. It was just the way of things, of people wanting to sound more knowledgeable by piling on needless words. Her fellow reporters did it on-air—“afternoon hours,” “rain event,” “health condition,” “multiple people.” All added words that added, in fact, nothing. She wondered what the marksman they were out here to video would say if he were told to put two or three bullets in the same place each time he fired. Insurance or overkill?
While Captain Talbot droned on—Amara would listen to him later, when she edited the footage—she glanced at her tablet, at the biography of the man who was already standing in the shooting range. Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette was a Los Angeles native of Cajun descent, twenty-two, who discovered his proficiency with handguns at age ten when he stopped a bodega robbery with the owner’s .38; two shots fired, two assailants down with matching shots through the hip. The LAPD enrolled Jaz in a gun safety program where he excelled in the junior marksmanship program. Since joining the Marines at age twenty, the young man had won a Distinguished Marksman Badge, a Distinguished Pistol Shot Badge, numerous other citations and medals, and had a stated goal of breaking the 2.2-mile pickoff record established by a member of Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 in 2017 against an ISIS fighter.
“Is he a man or a machine?” Amara wondered aloud, interrupting the captain’s narrative.
“Excuse me?” Talbot said.
“Lance Corporal Rivette,” she said.
“He is a man, and a remar
kable one,” Talbot said to the reporter. “Considering the poverty in which he was raised by a single mother, the fact that he found his calling and has been provided with the means to a productive and satisfying career in the Marines is nothing short of—”
“Wait, where is he going?” Amara asked suddenly.
Talbot glanced behind him. “Damned if I know,” he said.
The captain texted Rivette’s commanding officer to ask where their star was headed. The answer came back quickly and concisely.
“Sorry,” Captain Talbot said, shutting the screen of his smartphone. “I’m told it’s a personal matter. I believe the squad will be sending over—if you’ll scroll down the list, it should be Maria Primera?”
As he spoke, a woman came running toward the shooting range. Talbot continued his discourse on the 15th’s preparedness as if there had not been an interruption. Rivette, however, knew the meaning of the two-word message, one that would not be found in any of the code books:
BLACK WASP
CHAPTER SIX
The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, Virginia
July 22, 12:50 p.m.
Major Hamilton Breen liked his life. He liked the woman he was dating, Inez Levey, an American history professor with a particular passion for Andrew Jackson. And he liked where he lived and worked, at the University of Virginia campus. The stately campus, with its whispers of the Old South, reminded him of the equally stately old buildings in Philadelphia where he had grown up. As a child, living in a brownstone on Spruce Street, around the corner from Independence Hall, he had first learned about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. When he read that there was an early draft of the Declaration of Independence in the National Archives—a handwritten draft by Jefferson with marginal redactions in Adams’s and Franklin’s hand—he implored his parents to take him to see it when it was displayed at the National Archives in Washington. It was there, then, that he intuited how to get into the thought processes of other people. He was not just looking over the shoulders of these great men, he had learned how they thought. He saw their life and times, their values and ideals, through their eyes. That empathy proved invaluable to him in his later career.