by Sean Parnell
It was a struggle dragging herself from that five-star luxurious room, as it was rare that the Program would foot the bill for what their cranky old comptroller, Mrs. Darnstein, referred to as “excessive and unnecessary comforts.” But in this particular case, Austin had had to move fast, and she needed an appropriate and “prepackaged” cover that would camouflage the mission tasks she was about to execute.
As Stalker Eight, she was going to blow up a ship. As Sabrina Quinley, she had to look like a woman who’d scoff at the idea of changing a flat tire for fear of breaking a nail.
Her keeper, Shane Wylie, had thrown this thing together at lightning speed, as soon as POTUS had signed off on the Alpha Flash. Austin had then grabbed a Program driver from the underground motor pool, had him break a couple of land-speed records en route to her condo in Bethesda, selected one of three “go bags” she always kept ready, and they’d hightailed it out to Langley Air Force Base, where Wylie had already commandeered one of the Program’s Gulfstream G650 transcontinental business jets. Then they’d taken off for Trieste, which gave her and Wylie almost a full nine hours to chow down on fresh galley food prepared by a U.S. Navy cook and download encrypted mission intel flowing their way from Ralphy Persko’s shop.
Among her other assets, such as a third-degree black belt in Okinawan Goju Ryu and a body that could make Bar Refaeli envious, Austin also had a photographic memory. By the time the Gulfstream landed in Trieste, she knew the precise locations of her accommodations, backup safehouses, emergency rendezvous points, and her infil and exfil routes and had memorized all of her dive tables. But she hadn’t had time for a nap, which was why that enormous king-size bed was so damned tempting. Ah well.
This evening she was wearing a jade-green, sequined, sleeveless, misdemeanor-short dress, which, coupled with her flowing fire-red hair, ice-blue eyes, and a pair of matching Sergio Rossi heels, gave her the kind of aura that made the hotel staff (both men and women) swallow their gasps and blush when she appeared in the lobby. She was also carrying an Elizabetta clutch bag with a slim chain strap, into which she’d tucked her cell phone, lipstick, a modest four-inch switchblade, and an anodized black Walther PPKS in 7.65 mm, with the smallest AWC Systems Technology suppressor she could rustle up from the Program’s armory. Usually under such circumstances, she would have holstered the pistol to her inner thigh, but the dress was simply too skimpy. At any rate, the holster always itched her, and not in a good way.
She smiled at the hotel’s valet as he helped her into a Fiat cab, and she said to the driver, “Porto Franco Nuovo, per favore. Il ristorante Al Nuovo Antico Pavone.”
“Sì, mia cara,” the driver said, and they were off along the Viale Miramare, the coastal road leading south to Trieste’s upscale marina packed slip-to-slip with holiday motorboats, sailboats, and yachts.
Austin sat back in the cab and looked out at the lovely Gulf of Trieste, with its glistening inky waves, pinpoints of light twinkling from its coastlines, and the matching stars above. To anyone else, it would have been a romantic panorama, but she wasn’t really seeing any of it. She was mission-focused, thinking about all of her waypoints and gear drops, mingled with a bit of pity for Shane Wylie. He was an older man, tall and slim and graying, and because of that he didn’t remotely “match” her cover and was staying in a ratty B&B in the city center, over on the Slovenian side. But she also knew that he didn’t care about luxuries and would be focused completely on ensuring her success and keeping her alive. Shane was widowed from the love of his life, Austin was openly bisexual, and their relationship was like that of a wise old gambler handling a crackerjack young pool hustler.
She got out at the Al Nuovo Antico Pavone restaurant, an upscale place just across from the marina, where the rows of fiberglass hulls were gently knocking together as they undulated in the midnight breeze. If Ralphy’s operational intel was right—and it always was—the Chiroo would be anchored exactly 1.27 miles due west of the last marina slip at Porto Lido and the Corpo Piloti del Porto, the port’s pilot station.
Per maritime practice, the Iranian vessel’s captain had checked in with the pilot’s office by radio the night before. The NSA had intercepted his transmission, passed the frequency to a contractor called HawkEye 360, which had then tasked its cluster of reconnaissance satellites with fixing the ship’s position for “someone” over at the White House.
So, Austin’s target was now a “floating duck,” and she was inwardly crouched and ready to pounce, but she knew she couldn’t rush it. First she had to run a tail check.
She strolled inside the restaurant, nodded at the stuffy maître d’, and took a seat at the bar. She declined a menu offered by the admiring bartender, ordered a Campari and soda, nursed it through only three sips, and looked at her cell phone, until it flashed with a texted code word, thunderball. She almost laughed out loud at that, because Shane was so darned old school, but it meant “game on.” She paid her bill in euros, went to the ladies’, then walked right out the service door at the back. If she had a tail of any kind, she knew that move would panic her pursuers and she’d feel the upset in the atmosphere. But nothing happened. She was clean.
She walked back to the port, waited at the wide thoroughfare of Riva Grumula until the traffic cleared, and crossed the road. She could hear the dark waters lapping at the pier pylons as she took the slim stairway down to the marina. The air was a sweet mix of jasmine, sea salt, and marine oil, and she settled onto a bench facing the Pontile Istria slip, where there were so many vessels it looked like the boat expo in Vegas. She glanced at her TAG Heuer Women’s Way dive watch, a timepiece elegant enough for her evening attire. Her time-on-target was getting close.
But it was holiday season in northern Italy, and despite the late hour there were still a few summer sailors fussing with their hobby vessels. She slipped off her heels, crossed her legs, and mimed searching in her purse for a cigarette, until one last trio of drunken college kids finally moored their skiff and left the pier empty. Then she strode barefoot over to the slip, skipped past the first seven boats, and spotted the sleek-hulled, six-meter Allegra 18 outboard. She knew it was the right one because Shane had tied a green neon ribbon to the steering wheel, just like a frequent flyer would do to his suitcase when too many of them looked exactly alike.
She untied the mooring, tiptoed over the prow and the boat’s cargo cover, swung into the comfy leather pilot’s perch, hit the starter on the Selva 40 hp whisper engine, backed out of the slip, and headed out to sea to kill the Chiroo.
Half an hour later, Austin’s minidress was lying neatly folded on her pilot’s chair, and she was a mile away from her anchored skiff and twelve meters below the waves, snug tight in a black Cressi Lido wet suit and zooming along on a TUSA Underwater Diver Propulsion Vehicle—basically an electric miniscooter that looked like a minitorpedo—with the caged propeller at the back between her diving fins and her muscled buttocks perched in its small seat. Lying horizontally, she only had to lean left or right to steer the DPV, which left her hands free out front to grip the 4.5 kilogram Limpet mine she was going to magnetically attach to the Chiroo’s hull, at the exact spot where she knew the vessel’s fuel tanks were located.
On her chest she was wearing a Draeger LAR V closed-circuit 100 percent oxygen rebreather, which expelled no telltale bubbles. Strapped to her right calf was an Underwater Kinetics Blue Tang titanium diver’s knife, and her Walther PPKS—silencer screwed on—was in a waterproof pouch buckled to her right thigh. A Scubapro heads-up display was attached to her mask and projecting her dive time, depth, air mix quality, and navigational waypoints into her right lens, so as long as she kept herself aligned with the digital moving spear, she’d find the Chiroo as easily as Waze would get her to the local Trader Joe’s in Virginia.
The water was cold, but she wasn’t. She was thinking about how awesome Shane Wylie was, and how he’d perfectly prepared everything for her, and it was all waiting right there in the cargo hold of the boat. If she’
d had a father around as a child, Shane would have been her ideal model.
On the other hand, she thought as some sort of oblong sea creature blurred by her right flank, if I’d had someone like Wylie as a dad, I probably wouldn’t be in this game at all. I’d be a happy-go-lucky yoga instructor or something. Ah well.
Then the hull of the Iranian cargo vessel appeared about a hundred meters directly in front of her, a long, black, bathtub-shaped silhouette, bumping up and down in the gentle waves above, which had the hue of ice-pop blue with a full moon glancing off the water. For a moment she was tempted to just attach the Limpet, set the fuse timer, and scoot, but she knew that wasn’t proper procedure. What if she was way off course, and the boat was an innocent fishing vessel full of handsome Italian boys? That would suck. So she slowed the DPV’s electric engine, arched her back, and it pushed her slowly to the surface. She killed the motor, gripped the handgrip hard so she wouldn’t lose her ride, and popped her black-capped head above the waterline, just long enough to spot the ship’s name glistening on its forward hull in the moonlight.
Fuck you, Chiroo, she thought as she slipped back under.
The Limpet mine made a little too much noise when its powerful magnet sucked it against the ship’s hull on the port side of its shallow keel. Austin froze there in the shadows for a moment and just listened. The ship’s engines weren’t running yet, so she knew she’d hear stomping feet above her head if anyone aboard was alarmed by the hollow bang of metal against metal. But nothing happened. She reached up with her gloved left hand, switched on the OrcaTorch red lens minilight above her left ear, and set the Limpet’s detonator for exactly 0200 hours. Then she doused the light and swam, very carefully, under the keel and toward the starboard side of the ship, with her sea sled shut off and hanging from a lanyard attached to her ankle. It had a small air bladder so it wouldn’t drag her down.
There was another, much smaller hull bobbing five meters above her in the undulating waves, knocking rhythmically against the Chiroo. From Ralphy Persko’s intel flow and Shane Wylie’s careful briefing, Austin knew this was the “feeder boat” that had just delivered the nuclear triggers to the Chiroo. It was a 350 Outrage, a larger, European version of the Boston Whaler, and crewed by Corsican weapons smugglers who’d somehow gotten their hands on the triggers, perhaps by hijacking or bribery. But Austin hadn’t been briefed on that and she didn’t really care. The thing of it was, these slimy bastards couldn’t be allowed to continue their nefarious activities at the expense of the entire Free World. In addition—Wylie had stated firmly—the Program couldn’t take a chance that the deal for the trigger exchange might go sour at the last minute, and that the Corsicans might leave the area again with all, or part of, their lethal load.
“In other words,” Austin had said to Wylie at his safehouse briefing that afternoon, “all these fuckers have to go down together.”
“Indelicately put, but yes,” he’d replied.
“If I were delicate, Shane, you’d have nothing to do with me.” Austin had grinned.
“True.”
Austin turned onto her back as she cruised beneath the Outrage hull, emerged on the far side, and scanned the surface above from a depth of three meters. In the silver moonlight she could see the cream-colored boat flank and a black gunwale above the shallow waves, and since no one was leaning over the rail, she kicked her fins, coasted up, breached the surface, dropped the regulator from her mouth so the Draeger wouldn’t hiss, and detached the Crenova Dry Bag from her thigh. It was really no more than a fancy baggie, and she opened the seal, removed her PPKS, and gripped it at the ready. The safety was off and she already had one round in the chamber.
She cruised along the flank toward the bow, where she could hear two men chatting in Corsu, very much like Italian. They were talking about money, drugs, and sadistic sex, which made Austin’s next moves even easier—not that she was having any pangs of conscience. She reached up with her left hand, gripped the rail, and pulled herself up. The two men, both with heads of black curls, wearing heavy fisherman sweaters and clutching Benelli shotguns, spun around to stare at her as if she were some kind of mermaid from hell, which she was.
She shot them both in the face, one after the other. When they collapsed to the Outrage’s deck, their limbs twitching and boat boots kicking, she shot each one in the skull again. Her silencer made no more noise than a heavy-duty stapler.
She raked the PPKS’s sight across the pilot house, but she didn’t see anyone else aboard, so she slipped back into the water, swam to the stern, and checked that no one was looking down from the rusty flanks of the Chiroo above. She repouched her pistol, pulled her diving knife from its scabbard, and sliced through the fuel lines on all three Mercury outboard engines. Then she stuck her regulator back in her mouth, quickly submerged before the spilling gasoline could reach her lips, and headed back to her Allegra outboard.
She was back on board in ten minutes, and the return ride to the marina was glorious. She was naked, her long red mane whipping in the wind, her flawless skin being dimpled by the midnight air, with nothing left in the boat but her dress, heels, and purse. Shane had provided a large ripstop gear bag, along with a twenty-five-pound kettle bell, and she’d packed all of her diving equipment into the bag, including her pistol and knife, added the weight, clipped the bag to her DPV scooter, and dumped everything over the side. She was as clean as a newborn baby, though she looked like a Victoria’s Secret model on a bender.
She reluctantly put the dress back on just before she docked at the slip. Then she removed Shane’s ribbon from the wheel, tied the boat off, and tiptoed along the dock, carrying her heels, and she walked straight for the same bench she’d perched on an hour before and took a seat facing the water. She looked at her Tag Heuer, where the second hand was just ticking toward 2:00 a.m.
The sheet of light came first, as it twisted up into the sky like a rope of orange and yellow fire. Then came the boom, which doubled as it echoed off the shoreside buildings of Trieste and rattled all the nearby windows. And last came a stranger sound, like a giant gripping an enormous serpent and twisting it until a shriek emerged, and there in the distance, a pool of rapidly spreading fuel fire engulfed the Chiroo’s blackening hull, as its prow tipped up and it began to sink, along with its foul cargo.
A few late-shift restaurant kitchen people came rushing out onto the boulevard. For a moment, Austin considered trying to bum a cigarette, but then thought better of it. She stared at the raging inferno just a mile from the port.
“So that’s what they mean by afterglow,” she whispered to herself with a smile, and she stayed until the ship was gone.
Chapter 16
Washington, D.C.
Ralphy Persko had taken the day off. Eric Steele was about to ruin it.
“Ralphy, what are you doing?”
“Waiting for you to call me, of course.”
“I tried reaching you at Main.”
“They shouldn’t call it that anymore. They should call it Mini-Main.”
“Pitts said you had the day off.”
“Yeah, my first one in two weeks.”
“Where are you?”
“Buenos Aires. I had Scotty beam me down here for lunch.”
“Where are you, wiseass?”
“Home.”
“You got a microscope?”
“A what?”
“A microfuckingscope.”
“I’ve never heard that particular scientific nomenclature before, but if you’re asking for something to be enlarged and examined, I can probably accommodate.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“Can’t wait, Seven.”
Ralphy lived on Sixteenth Street NW in Crestwood, halfway between Silver Spring and the National Mall, in one of those classic old brick brownstones where he rented a floor at the top. The neighborhood was diverse, like most of Washington outside the centers of government, and Ralphy was the only Caucasian living on a block of African Am
ericans, Hispanics, and a sprinkling of Indians.
The brownstone was owned by the Jepsons, a black family who were kind to Ralphy, often invited him for Sunday dinners, and made no demands other than his timely rent checks. In turn he was a model tenant: no drugs, loud music, wild parties, or girls. The Jepsons thought he was a Smithsonian Institution computer geek from a wealthy Connecticut family, trying to make up for his privilege. He encouraged that belief, which worked well for cover, and certainly never told them that he’d been born into a poor Polish family from Fall River, Massachusetts.
Steele arrived at Ralphy’s door after climbing three long flights, rang the bell, saw the peephole flash, and heard four different kinds of locks being turned as if the place were a flat in the South Bronx. The door opened and he slipped inside to find Ralphy wearing headphones and clutching a device in one hand that looked like an old-fashioned transistor radio, and something like a magic wand in the other. Persko locked the door behind Steele, held up a cautionary finger, and went back to what he’d been doing, which was a strange sort of dance along the apartment’s perimeter.
Steele looked around. The place was unexpectedly neat, with an expansive wooden living room floor, IKEA pop art rugs, and lots of books on shelves, mostly nonfiction tomes about computers and coding, but also some Clancy, Ludlum, and Hiaasen. There were six large windows, all tilted inward due to the shape of the top of the building, and Ralphy’s profession was revealed by one long table along the far wall, packed with laptops, monitors, motherboards, and soldering irons. In the middle of the living room a CD player was perched on a barstool, from which “Bamboléo” by Gipsy Kings was vibrating the window glass.
Steele waited while Ralphy finished dragging the tip of his magic wand along the walls, as if he were using a divining rod. Then he switched off the CD player and pulled the headphones down from his mess of sweaty curls. He was wearing a blousy Hawaiian shirt with leaping marlins all over it, cargo shorts, and no shoes.