God of War

by Jeff Rovin

  “We’re not hearing Simon,” Mabuza informed both the commander and Sisula. “It’s a little bit the wind, but mostly the metal particulates in that smoke are interfering. I’ll elevate and go out to sea a little—should clear up the dusting issue.”

  “I’ll relay anything important,” Sisula replied. “If it were military we would have heard the chatter.”

  “But not a word from SACAA?” van Tonder asked.

  He was referring to the South African Civil Aviation Authority, which was as tight-lipped as any similar department worldwide. First they checked with the towers, then they checked with the airlines, then they “revealed” what dozens of social media postings had already announced, often with video or images and the disbelieving commentary of observers: that a commercial airliner had gone down.

  “I’m not on their channel, but there’s nothing that I’ve been told,” Sisula said.

  “Simon knows we’re on our way, though.”

  “Of course, Commander,” Sisula told him. “They said they would relay the information to SACAA.”

  “Thank you. Civilian authorities can be stupidly jurisdictional and I want a record of the chain of reporting.”

  “Understood.”

  “Bloody bureaucracy,” Mabuza remarked.

  It was lunch hour, granted—well into it, in fact—and those bloody bureaucrats liked their afternoon drinks. But someone from the SACAA should have been in touch with the only personnel who were on site. Though their response could be clogged in military channels. Simon liked to be in charge of its own missions. The military bureaucracy was itself formidable.

  Mabuza was not as content to be here as van Tonder. There were two things he longed for. One, he openly and frequently declared, was a yearning for the nightlife of Port Elizabeth. The other was a desire to do something with his skills—test new aircraft, even fight in a war.

  “To fly so it matters,” as he put it.

  He loved everything that flew. He designed and built model planes and studied avionics. In terms of his overall desires, the post was a wash. The only females he noticed here had wings. But because they had wings he studied them.

  Sisula, the unit’s communications and tech expert, was the most content of the three. He loved anything digital and didn’t care where he was. Van Tonder was grateful for him. If Sisula were any less able, the outfit would lose Internet access on an hourly basis. The dish on the roof rattled in the near-constant wind, but the brilliant ensign had written a program to compensate for the vacillation. He was always creating uplinks and hacks that provided rich global access to one of the most desolate spots on the planet. Just before bed tonight, Mabuza had delighted to the view from the security cameras inside Boogie Heights, a popular nightclub in Hong Kong.

  Van Tonder looked out through the glass-bubble nose of the helicopter as they closed in on the crash site. It looked to him as if the fire was burning across roughly a quarter mile of flat scrub.

  Mabuza’s maneuver had worked. The next message was from Simon.

  “Dunkel, we have SACAA’s reply that a South African Airbus went off-radar at zero one hundred hours, eleven minutes, and five seconds local,” the Simon radio operator said. “It left Johannesburg at eleven forty-five—it was one hundred miles northwest of you at the time. What is approximate location of presumed wreckage?”

  “Location forty-six degrees, fifty-four minutes, forty-five seconds south, thirty-seven degrees, forty-four minutes, thirty-seven degrees east,” Sisula replied. “Helicopter en route.”

  “Is it patched in?” Simon inquired.

  “This is Commander Eugène van Tonder. Lieutenant Tito Mabuza and I are approximately a half mile from the site.” He pulled off a glove and pushed a pulsing circle on the digital display. “Video should be coming through now. Expect interference proximate to the crash site.”

  “Un … stood … ank you, Com…”

  “Sorry,” Mabuza said to his companion. “That’ll break up the images as well.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about that,” Sisula said. “Simon is talking to SACAA now—reporting to us that there was no mayday. They’re looking into any other communication from the cockpit. They want to know what we saw or heard—I’ll tell them and get back to you.”

  “Thanks.” Van Tonder turned to his pilot. “So they fell off radar. A sudden descent from thirty-five thousand feet.”

  “More than sudden, I think,” Mabuza said. He pointed ahead at the wreckage, its jagged angles and hidden recesses illuminated by its own fires. “The way the fuselage is separated from the nose section—you see the cockpit there?”

  Van Tonder saw the conical structure—what was left of it—angled upward from the ground, the cabin broken off behind it around the galley.

  “That came down in a power dive,” Mabuza said.

  “Powered? Full throttle?”

  “Yes, as if someone leaned or fell against the controls,” Mabuza said. “That suggests either willful destruction or complete and sudden incapacitation.”

  Sisula cut in. “Sirs, Simon says Johannesburg tower received no communication from the Airbus whatsoever.”

  “Then that would seem to rule out pilot suicide or a struggle in the cockpit,” van Tonder said. “Someone would have heard something, the shouts of the flight crew.”

  “It also rules out sudden depressurization,” Mabuza said. “The tower would have heard the alarms, even during the descent.” The pilot pointed toward the crash site. “Look—four equal, separate fires.”

  “What’s the significance?” van Tonder asked.

  “It tells the story of the nose dive,” he said. “The flight deck hit at nearly a ninety-degree angle, and the rest of the plane, still carrying the momentum, crumpled behind it—you see the front of the first-class section? Where the outside looks like an accordion?”

  “Yes—”

  “The structure was compromised there, snapped, and the rest of the plane just crashed down flat. Each of the fuel tanks ruptured at the same time.”

  Van Tonder heard another communication from Simon.

  “I am sending … flight path, Dunkel,” the voice said. “See if … seems unusual to you.”

  “Thank you, Simon,” Sisula said. “Sir, Simon—”

  “We got most of it,” van Tonder said. “Ask them if they’re looking for some kind of sea-based event, like a rocket-propelled grenade.”

  Sisula forwarded the message.

  “They have requested satellite images from Europe and America to look for just that, yes,” Sisula said. “But I had a thought. Commander, do you remember that call we received this morning?”

  “The fisherman?”

  “Yes,” Sisula said.

  “I included it in the daily briefing. Presumed thermal activity off Ship Rock on Edward.”

  “I’m looking at the flight path that just came in from Simon,” Sisula said. “The point where the Airbus disappeared from radar is a latitudinal match with Ship Rock.”

  “How many miles away?”

  “Let’s see—two hundred and twelve.”

  “That’s a slim and pretty distant connection,” van Tonder said.

  “True, sir,” Sisula said. “But when you factor in—just a second, removing height differential so the event and the plane are at the same height—when you factor in the speed of the Antarctic easterlies and the westerlies north of it, something happens.”

  “What?” van Tonder asked.

  “Whatever was above Ship Rock ran smack into the path of the jetliner.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fort Belvoir North, Springfield, Virginia

  November 11, 7:45 A.M.

  Chase Williams had always been an early riser. That had not just been true during his military career, where it was enforced, but also since coming to Washington, D.C. The sixty-one-year-old lived alone at the Watergate and commuted to Virginia. As much as he had little patience for the speed bumps of bureaucracy, he also disliked traffic.
>
  Rising with the sun gave him time to do push-ups and jumping jacks in its comforting orange glow. Then he would shower quickly, put on a seasonal suit, make a thermos of coffee—the vending machine at the DLA was sinister in operation, refusing bills as if it suspected they were all counterfeit—and drive on relatively empty roads.

  And there was something ironic about arriving at his new place of employment as the new sun still caused the walls of the building to glow with angelic innocence. Williams imagined that God was in on the joke. The DLA was anything but.

  Built on the site of what was once a plantation, and named for the first director of the Defense Logistics Agency, Lieutenant General Andrew T. McNamara, U.S. Army, the nine five-story structures that comprise the McNamara Headquarters Complex are part of the sprawling Fort Belvoir complex. Among other assets, the base includes Davison Army Airfield, tactically located just fifteen miles southwest of Washington, D.C.

  A division of the Department of Defense, the DLA is a cornerstone for global combat support, both open-warfare and covert activities. That constant, busy, roiling function is belied by the serenity of the setting. The buildings form an embracing semicircle that includes a large reflecting pool as well as tennis and basketball courts. The façades of the bottom two floors are white, the higher floors are reddish brick. By design, the overall impression is that of a college campus, a home of theory and think tanks, not action.

  One of the first things Chase Williams discovered when he came to work here—using the president’s own access codes—was that the DLA had active files for the assassination of every major political, military, and theocratic terrorist on Earth. Most of those he knew about. What he had not known was that every category had domestic targets. They were not necessarily enemies of the nation or the executive branch. These were culled—“hacked,” as Matt Berry put it—from the black ops groups in this very building.

  Many of these files were updated daily. That included a slim dossier on Mohammad Obeid ibn Sadi, a Houthi terror financier who was ancillary to Williams’s own first mission here.

  Not now, but one day, was the note attached to the file. The note was signed B—Matt Berry, the deputy chief of staff to outgoing President Wyatt Midkiff. Berry was the man responsible for moving Williams, the one-man Op-Center, to his new home here. A hard-nosed, pragmatic, unimaginative, self-interested pain in the ass, Berry was nonetheless one of Williams’s biggest boosters.

  Williams knew from his tenure at the original Op-Center that the DLA was rumored to be the federal government’s largest repository of black ops and dark ops activities. It was said—very quietly—that Director Stephanie Hill had more power than anyone in government, including the president. Hill was not hobbled by the high profile and accountability hurdles of the commander in chief.

  There was a reason for the secrecy. The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency were populated with deep state leakers, anarchists, contrarians, and spies. Because of that, the DLA did not truly exist as a unit with a broad command structure. Beneath Hill and her few deputies, no one knew anyone else.

  Williams was neither naïve nor shockable. His career embraced thirty-five years of military service, most of it at Pacific Command and Central Command. For the last five years he had run the National Crisis Management Center—informally known as Op-Center. His dozens of team members had operated lawlessly at times, and lethally on occasion. So had he, himself. Williams never went to confession over any of it.

  His late wife, Janette, whom he had lost to ovarian cancer, had been his confessor, when one was needed.

  His personal and professional mission had always been to protect these United States from injury. He had done so, putting America before both of those, professional advancement and personal safety. He had sacrificed the approval of his rivals at the FBI and CIA, or even the security of his field personnel. Some of them had paid with their lives.

  Still, the Op-Center based at the DLA was nothing like the Op-Center that Williams had been running until eleven weeks before. As Berry called it, Op-Center 2.0 had invited a certain necessary tedium to set in. Williams was one of thousands of sets of eyes that watched Web sites and data to make sure the homeland was safe.

  The frustrating truth of it, though—the thing that kept Williams from settling in or enjoying the work—was that he did not understand why he was doing it. The deeper reason. Berry had to have one. So far, nothing the deputy chief of staff had said struck him as even remotely honest, let alone transparent.

  Williams knew that the need for Op-Center to go into action was limited to jobs no one else wanted to be caught doing. It wasn’t that Delta Force or SEAL Team Six feared any mission. The opposite was true. But the charters of those and other units were the same as their parent forces.

  In short, they played by certain rules. What he understood was that officially, the Op-Center team Black Wasp did not exist. Restrictions did not apply. They were so no-profile, in fact, that Williams had no contact with them. He knew that after their first and so far only mission the three members of the team had moved from their separate commands to Fort Belvoir. However, at Berry’s instructions, he was not to have any communication unless and until they had a mission.

  “Less chance of anyone recognizing you and asking who, what, why questions about them,” Berry had said. “If they know the president gave you a personal combat team, they’d all want one.”

  That made some sense, but not entirely. Williams had command skills the team could probably use. Why had those been carved away?

  Maybe that was part of the plan, he had wondered. To keep the two key combatants as semi-loose cannons. That was part of what had been baked into this experiment. Berry had once described Black Wasp as an autonomous collective.

  “Or, as it is referred to in the argot, a ‘situational command,’” Major Breen had said when they met. SITCOM was an apt enough acronym. Rank had nominal sway. The members were three soldiers with specific skills working together. Any of them could make a command decision, for him or herself, at will.

  It had worked on the first mission. But that was the only empirical data they possessed.

  Not a deep sample on which to build a policy, but then they—and I—am expendable the first time it doesn’t work, Williams reflected.

  The veteran commander was still adjusting to his new reality. He had gone from being a leader of a vitally integrated team to being the sole employee of an Op-Center that was now a subsidiary line item in the budget earmarked for logistical export support. That cost was folded into the Executive Branch Discretionary Fund, a so-called “exploratory budget” that was conveniently requisitioned and approved by the same person, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “It’s like being buried in a tomb built of UNICEF pennies,” he had told Berry when they met over drinks for their weekly face-to-face.

  The younger man did not get the reference.

  “Halloween,” Williams had explained. “Orange milk containers. You’d collect coins with your candy to help needy children around the world.”

  “Ah,” Berry had said. “The ones who grew up to hate us?”

  “I can’t answer for them,” Williams had replied. “I was raised to do the right thing.”

  Nonetheless, the image stuck: a penny from one trick-or-treater, a penny from another, and you had enough milk for a dozen kids. A dollar from one line item, a penny from another, and soon you had an annual operating budget for Chase Williams’s new Op-Center. Most of that money went back into the DLA system to pay for the office overhead. Berry called it “dark financing,” officially known as zero-sum operational expenditures.

  “That way,” Berry had said, “the DLA never has to rely on congressional funding for ongoing operations. Ms. Hill uses each new allocation to expand her power base.”

  So Williams was buried alive, but he was all right with that. He was single, he had no interest in retirement
, and he was always up for new challenges. He was not just undercover but he was underground, in a clean, efficient, well-lit but windowless basement. He spent his days reviewing intelligence data, largely without human interaction. He missed his team, their input, their quirks, their smarts. Everyone he had met here in the corridors and at the vending machines was pleasant in a neutral sort of way. The used words like “hello” and “good morning” smartly and with a smile. But he could never tell if they were having a good day or managing a global crisis.

  For some of these operators-perdu, he imagined that an end-of-the-world scenario probably was a good day.

  Outside his defiantly open door, the crescent-shaped central corridor of the basement level matched the curve of the building. It was uncommonly quiet today, as most of the people here had just learned of the crash of a passenger jet over the Southern Indian Ocean. Given the subantarctic location, Williams was not surprised that the mainstream media had very little information about the event. The only “certain status,” as the Federal Aviation Administration called crash details, was that it had happened, and that no reports on fatalities, possible causes, or crewmembers had been issued.

  Terrorism had not been ruled out, though it seemed unlikely. South Africa was not on any global terrorism map, save for the sporadic activities of ISIS cells in Durban. And those were typically jihadi sympathizers who were looking to launch attacks outside the nation. And taking down a plane to kill one passenger was tactically more complicated than a car bomb or shooting.

  Even as he considered that possibility, the passenger manifest came up on his computer. There were no red flags. Johannesburg to Perth was not a route political activists, religious radicals, or hostile journalists tended to travel. Military commanders did not usually fly commercial.

  What kept most of the intelligence and DLA personnel at their desks was no doubt the same material that Williams had just received from Matt Berry. It had originated from the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau and had been shared with all networked agencies. Which meant that, by now, everyone in Washington and the media had it.