by Jeff Rovin
But that’s not all if it, she told herself.
In the kung fu schools she had attended, Grace had been taught to respect absolutely her elders, their experience, their seniority. All of them had been men, albeit Chinese men, but it wasn’t that. She had carried that deference into her military career—again, most of her superiors were men—and they had been a perfect fit. Now that she was in the field, her skills as a fighter and her submission to Williams and Breen were in conflict. She felt that her instincts were perfectly suited to the free-form nature of the Black Wasps, of this mission.
These two men keep jerking back into traditional special ops procedure, she thought. And Rivette was caught somewhere in the middle. That didn’t surprise her; Major Breen had been a father figure since the day they all met. The result was that she felt marginalized, not being true to her own nature or to the nature of Black Wasp.
It is an experiment, she reminded herself. When you get home you can say all of this in the debrief.
There were a series of structures ahead and, calmer now, she returned to the others.
* * *
The clinic was a small, two-story structure that sat partially on pilings on the south side of the bay. It looked like it had been built from a home design adapted to this other use. From the shine on the siding, it appeared to be new construction that had not yet endured extended exposure to the elements. The facility was accessible by a winding secondary road or by the sea—something Williams felt made it ideal for the kind of illicit trade this crew had represented.
It was still early and there was no obvious activity as yet.
“Second floor looks residential,” Breen said. He was standing beside Williams and looking through a pair of collapsible binoculars. The other team members were with the prisoners. “Drapes not opaque like downstairs … shell collection on one sill. Hanging plant in one window. No movement anywhere inside.”
“I see an ambulance in the driveway,” Williams said.
“Probably to take emergency cases to local hospitals,” Breen said. “This place doesn’t look like it’s equipped for major surgery—don’t see where they’d fit an OR or recovery room.”
“Strictly local, emergency trade, I’m guessing,” Williams said. That, too, fit the profile of smugglers and possible human trafficking. People who had been stuffed in ships or sealed vans would certainly need at least superficial medical care.
There was a new and efficient wharf that lead to the back door. It was difficult to see because it sat under a patio that extended outward from the pilings and looked out on the sea. He suspected that was part of the intention of the design. Williams steered toward the floating wooden dock.
“We just going to knock?” Breen said.
“Probably the best approach.”
“Whoever answers will probably know the boat. They may have heard the shots.”
“I’m counting on both,” Williams said and turned toward Grace Lee. “Lieutenant?”
The young woman rose and jogged forward. Whatever frustration she felt earlier seemed to have dissipated. She stopped beside Breen, facing Williams.
“Commander?”
“What do you think about ringing the doorbell and telling whoever answers that we have a patient?” Williams asked. “We go in, ask questions.”
“I’m fine with that,” she said, but added, “You do realize these jumpsuits are not standard local wear.”
“I know. That’s why we’ll have Rivette go-with. Threat analysis all his. If everything’s good, we’ll bring the men up.”
“If they don’t let us in?”
Williams said, “Then it’s your move.”
Grace did not have to think about it. She nodded.
The lance corporal was at the stern, watching for any sign of pursuit. Breen ran back and replaced him, sent him forward, and Williams told him what they were planning. Rivette did not have to be asked to go ashore and watch her back.
It was a bumpy mooring, but then Williams had not been to sea for years. The irony was not lost on him that the man they sought shared his former vocation. He hadn’t thought of the Iranian since they’d jumped. The events of the day before came back with a wave of rage.
Not now, he told himself. You have people in the field.
Rivette tossed a rope over the mooring and followed Grace over the rail. Though Williams had hit the wharf loud enough to have drawn someone’s attention, he did not detect any movement in the windows.
It had been a very long time since his heart beat as rapidly as it did now.
* * *
Grace and Rivette crossed the dock. Right before they vanished under the patio, the lance corporal unholstered his Beretta and held it in the small of his back. He did not look around, he listened around: except for a few seabirds and a dog well in the distance, there were no sounds.
The lieutenant pressed the buzzer. They heard a scraping sound and exchanged puzzled looks. Rivette touched Grace’s arm, moved her slightly to one side so he’d have a clear shot if he needed one. The door opened wide and a young woman looked out. The scraping sound had been the wheelchair in which she was seated.
“Dr. Newallo?” Grace asked.
“I am she,” the woman said pleasantly. She looked to be in her late twenties, with a narrow, high-cheekboned face and her black hair drawn into a low bun. She was pulling on a waist-length lab coat and did not seem surprised by the attire of the callers.
“We … we have injured crewmen,” she said. “Stab wound to the chest, cut tendon in the leg.”
“No bullet wounds?”
“No,” Grace said.
“Bring them in,” Dr. Newallo told her with a trace of surprise but without hesitation. “Do you require a stretcher?”
“I don’t think so.”
The woman wheeled away but left the door open.
Grace turned toward the boat and motioned to Williams and Breen. The crewman Grace had stabbed in the chest was tightly wrapped with bandages and they brought him first, placing him on a low table in an examination room. The doctor wheeled over, slipped on a pair of gloves, adjusted an overhead light, and began cutting away the bandages.
Rivette, Breen, and Williams remained in the waiting room. Grace followed the doctor.
“Doctor, while you do that, I’d like to talk to you,” Grace said.
“Go ahead,” Dr. Newallo said without looking up from her work.
“I want to know if you treat members of Jamaat al-Muslimeen.”
“Who is asking?” the doctor replied.
“I’m looking for the man responsible for the terror attack in New York yesterday,” Grace said. “We believe he may be here.”
The doctor tossed the bloody bandages in the trash. She wet a cloth with a sterile solution and dabbed at the wound, wiping away the blood. She moved the light again and peered into the cut.
“I do not ask the political affiliation of my patients,” she replied, “or inquire as to their livelihoods. Those few who pay for care—and, yes, pay well—support the free medical treatment I am able to give the rest of this poor community. Such was not available to me when I was a child and run over by an automobile.”
“I understand,” Grace said. “The man I seek killed seventeen people and injured many more. He had JAM accomplices who murdered a man and his family in Montreal.”
“I have heard these reports and have seen a photograph on the computer. I do not know this man.” She stole a look at Grace—at Grace’s hips. “You did this to my patient?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“So you have injured people as well,” Dr. Newallo said. She turned back to her patient. “He has lost a good deal of blood but you missed his lung.”
“I know,” Grace replied.
The doctor wheeled to her medicine cabinet and removed a squat bottle and a hypodermic. She administered a local anesthetic. “I cannot help you,” the doctor said.
Despite a vent blowing cool air, Grace felt warm. “
All I’m asking is an address.”
“You should try the newspaper office,” the doctor replied.
Grace felt helpless and did not like it. “Is your computer locked?”
“It is.”
She did not ask for the password, nor did she consider trying to force the woman to give it to her. Grace was about to find the doctor’s office, see if there were any paper files, when Williams stepped up behind her.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We don’t need to trouble Dr. Newallo any further.”
“Meaning what?” the lieutenant asked.
“We found another way.”
Grace exhaled loudly and walked around him. The other two men were not in the waiting room.
“What’s going on?” she asked Williams.
“Come with me,” he replied as they headed toward the front door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
McMark Residence, Washington, D.C.
July 23, 6:33 a.m.
Four months ago, Matt Berry had purchased the row house condominium on P Street NW for cash. It wasn’t his cash; it belonged to the Defense Logistics Agency and, technically, so did the residence. But it would have taken a DLA-White House insider to trace the funds; apart from President Midkiff, Berry was the only one of those. The purchase had not been illegal. It had simply been a lend-lease element of Berry’s compensation package that no one would ever find out about.
Berry slept well when it came to what he called “sleights of funding” like this. In fact, he slept well most days. Tonight, however, had been an exception.
He woke shortly after five to check the latest report from Elgin AFB, and he followed the copilot’s updates until Williams and the Black Wasp team went out the door of the F27. There was nothing after that; no calls or texts from Williams. None of the others would have contacted anyone; except for recruiting and training, neither General Lovett nor anyone else at the DoD was to receive reports from the independent team. That was as much cover-your-ass as security: if something went wrong, no one wanted this on the welcome mat. There was also no danger of the messages being intercepted. They would come directly to Berry’s secure international device from Williams’s own SID, which, unless he tried transmitting from a seabed or deep valley, were the most reliable communications technologies to come out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency since the internet.
But there was, over his morning double espresso, an alert from January Dow’s office at State:
6:57 a.m., Atlantic Standard Time, Rio Claro-Mayaro Region, Trinidad:
Special Anticrime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago (SAUTT) of the Ministry of National Security has received confirmed reports of extended criminal action at the mouth of the Navet River, Cocos Bay. Seaark Dauntless 40 Class WPB, CG 121, dispatched 6:55. No stated link to JAM activity. Satellite report at 7:11.
Katie Stahl, Deputy Director of Open Source Intelligence
INR Office of Analysis for Terrorism, Narcotics and Crime
Berry touched the screen of his tablet to check the map of the Black Wasp drop zone, just to make sure.
“Yep,” he said, with a sudden chill that a second double espresso could not chase. That was where the team was supposed to land.
He checked his SID; saw nothing from Williams. Berry considered texting him but did not want him distracted.
If he was still at large and alive.
The DCS began to wonder if pouncing on Williams’s guilt had been fair to the man, if a hastily conceived, hastily executed mash-up like this had not only been reckless but exploitative. It wasn’t as if Washington didn’t use people countless times a day, every day. Everyone who accepted an assignment like this, Williams included, understood that while success was rewarded, mistakes and the people who committed them got buried. Sometimes figuratively, often literally.
You sent an emotionally wounded sixty-year-old man on a covert operation, and you made it sound like you were doing him a favor, Berry told himself as he looked out the window of the spacious kitchen, watched the rising sunlight bouncing off town houses and signage.
“Ah shit,” he said, getting up to shower. “He could have declined.”
Berry shambled off to the bathroom feeling, if not clean inside, clean enough to live with this however it went.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cocos Bay, Trinidad
July 23, 7:37 a.m.
Avinash Scoon opened the bedroom door to find a young black man standing just outside holding a Beretta hip high … and pointed at his waist.
The twenty-three-year-old man raised his hands face-high and backed away. He was not unaccustomed to seeing weapons in the clinic, and unsavory men with unhappy expressions. But the man in the hall was different. He seemed, somehow—and perhaps it was just the morning light—in an odd way almost saintly.
An older man stepped from behind the man in the corridor. Even though he wasn’t armed, and positioned himself between Avinash and the gun, he did not seem so kindly.
Hamilton Breen looked around the second-floor room he had seen from the boat. The draperies had suggested that Dr. Newallo did not live here alone and that proved to be the case. An English-language newspaper on the man’s nightstand suggested that communication would not be a problem.
“I have very little time,” Breen told the man. “We are looking for members of Jamaat al-Muslimeen here on the island. Where are they?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know. Americans? I like Americans very much!”
Breen dismissed the remark with a wave of his hand and pointed to a dresser where there were car keys. “You drive the ambulance, yes?”
“I … I drive Dr. Newallo,” he said—apparently hoping to appeal to the man’s sense of charity. He did only good and charitable deeds.
Breen considered this. “Of course. That makes sense. Even better. You make regular runs to different places?”
The man nodded.
“The ambulance has a GPS?”
The man nodded again.
“With cached routes?”
The man hesitated.
“With cached routes?” Breen repeated more forcefully, stepping from between the driver and Rivette.
“Yes, yes,” the man said.
“Password?”
The man shook his head.
Breen collected the keys, held the ring in front of the man. Avinash did not have to ask what to do. He pointed out the ignition key. Breen removed it from the ring and threw the rest on the bed.
“I am leaving one of my people behind, on the boat outside,” Breen lied. “If you alert the authorities, you will die. Understood?”
The man nodded vigorously. “I have no … no…”
“Favorites, other than the doctor,” Breen said as they turned to go. “Behave and she lives, too.”
The man gave an even more enthusiastic, even grateful nod. “I … I filled the tank last night, sirs!” he said.
Breen thanked him and shut the door.
* * *
Williams had been waiting at the foot of the stairs. Upon getting a thumbs-up from Breen, he hurried to collect Lieutenant Lee.
“Where are we going?” she asked as they hurried out the front door.
Williams did not answer until he was sure they were out of earshot of the operating room.
“Inland,” he said. “We’ll know more when we’re moving.”
“What about the other crewman?” she asked as they hustled to the ambulance.
“We left him with his drugs,” Williams told her. “We don’t want to have these people pursuing a vendetta against us.”
Grace shot a look at Breen who was coming up behind them. His expression was as neutral as ever, though the phrase “moral ambiguity” popped into Grace’s head.
Okay to kill users, not sellers, she thought bitterly.
The team went to the ambulance, Grace and Rivette in back on high alert, Williams driving. The major did not have a lot of experience with technology, but it was
more than Williams possessed.
Williams used his own smartphone GPS to plot a course while Breen investigated the device fixed to the dashboard. He scrolled through the archives, comparing it to the paper map of Trinidad.
The swamp was to the south, stretching well inland; the coastline stretched north, where police or smugglers’ boats might be watching for anything out of the ordinary; so Williams headed northwest, toward the cities of Sangre Grande—the largest town in this region—Arouca, and Port of Spain. The entire run was just under twenty-eight miles. It actually helped to be driving on the left side of the ride, opposite what Williams was accustomed to; it forced him to be present every moment.
“There are a lot of random trips in here,” Breen said, “and only one with repeat visits.”
“Where?”
“Port of Spain,” he said. “Diego Martin section … cul-de-sac called Ajax off Wrightson.”
“Street number?”
“Seven,” Breen said. “If we engage, it’ll take us there.”
“Do it,” Williams said, closing his own GPS and accelerating as a pair of police cars passed them, racing in the direction from which they’d come. “The clinic?” Williams asked.
Breen watched them from the side mirror to make sure they did not turn. “No,” he said. “Nearest police station is eight-point-three miles northeast,” he said, checking the GPS. “Even if Avinash called, the timing would be tight. My guess is they picked up chatter about the opium. I hope they’re going to seize it.”
Williams said nothing. Based on his airplane reading, Trinidad was a major hub for narcotics bound for West Africa and the United States. Political corruption was widespread and that mindset—and profit—trickled down to law enforcement. One of January’s own releases stopped short of calling Trinidad a narco-state, but drugs—and murder—helped to drive the local economy.