He’d steadied the cross of the scope’s reticle on Reyland’s brainpan and had just begun pulling the trigger when he heard the chopping rumble behind him.
Gannon let off the trigger and turned with a mind-boggled expression on his face.
Back over the lighthouse ridge he’d just come down was the unmistakable metallic churning sound of a helicopter flying low.
A bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup sound of gunfire started up a split second later.
Gannon’s eyes almost bulged out of his head.
The six-round burst was followed by another.
Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.
It was the rattle of a chain-fed machine gun.
“No,” he whispered.
It was a gunship, Gannon realized.
A helicopter gunship had arrived now, and it was shooting up his truck.
88
Gannon immediately strapped the M4 on his back and began scrambling up the rock and through the heavier vegetation of the ridge beside him as fast as he could. He was halfway up the promontory when the helicopter roared in over the tree line twenty feet to his right.
It was a gunship all right, Gannon saw as he pressed himself dead still against the shadowed rock with his breath taken. It was a large Bell helicopter like a news chopper, and there was the long black barrel of an M240 bristling sideways out the side of its open sliding door.
As it crested the slope toward the Atlantic-side beach, a blinding white spotlight shot out of the far side of it. The light was probing at the silver palm he’d just been hiding behind when Gannon finally reached the top brow of the ridge.
He was on his hands and knees tucking in under a rock overhang he’d found in the promontory about three minutes later when he heard the helicopter come back over to the Bahama Banks side again.
He crawled out from under the rock and stood and listened to it getting fainter and fainter. After thirty seconds, he saw its lights heading way to the north and west out over the water.
He was terrified that it might head back to attack Ruby and the others, but he realized that Reyland was evac-ing off the island.
Heading where? he thought, tracking the aircraft as it went west. To Nassau? Where else? Had to be.
He hurried quickly south to where he had left the truck.
He shook his head in wonder as he climbed up the sand toward it a minute and a half later. He’d been right. All the windows were shot to shit and the hood and bed had been Swiss cheesed.
But for all that, its engine that he’d left running was miraculously still chugging.
“And they called you a piece of shit,” Gannon said as he climbed in over the broken glass and clicked on the dome light.
There was a sound of ragged breathing behind him. He winced as he glanced back into the crew cab thinking surely Emerson must have been turned into a bunch of bloody rags.
But no. Emerson, wide-eyed and very much alive, sat on the floor of the crew cab staring back at him.
He leaned in closer and looked him over. There was blood on the right leg of his khakis. He took out Blackbeard’s knife and slit open the pant leg and looked at the gunshot wound.
Emerson had been shot through his right thigh. Gannon turned him to the side. The exit wound was nasty.
But at least it was off center on the outside of the leg. It didn’t look like the bullet had hit any bone or arteries.
He slipped Emerson’s belt from his khakis. He cried out as Gannon tightened it into a tourniquet above his thigh.
He rolled him back over and checked his pulse.
He was in a bit of shock, but what do you know, Gannon thought with a shake of his head as he clicked off the dome light.
Like the truck, Emerson was still kicking, too.
Gannon brushed the glass off the seat and sat and put the truck into Reverse. When he let off the brake, gravity began immediately rolling them back down the hill of sand.
After he got the truck turned around, he had to stick his head out the door window to see past the shattered glass.
After a moment over the hiss of the radiator, he heard Emerson begin to cry softly behind him.
“I know, right?” Gannon said. “Shoot up a fine vehicle like this. How could they? Make a grown man cry.”
89
“Emerson, enough already. Wake up,” Gannon said, softly slapping the young agent on the cheek.
“What’s going on? What the hell?” Emerson said weakly from where he sat taped to a kitchen chair.
Gannon watched the young agent’s eyelids flutter open. Then Gannon smiled as he watched them shoot wide as he took a good look around at the windowless rusty Quonset hut they were now in.
It was three hours later, coming on midnight, and they were in the northernmost opposite end of the island in an area known as Lower Bogue. They were behind the razor-wired fence of a business called Island Safe Storage that belonged to an associate of Little Jorge.
Gannon gave Little Jorge and Stick and Ruby a thumbs-up through the glass of the office behind them. They were drinking soda and eating pizza as they went through the money and diamonds they’d already taken from the recovered sea bag.
Gannon loudly dragged an old kitchen chair over the battered concrete floor and sat before the one Emerson was now duct-taped to.
“I know you’re still a little groggy from the painkillers, but it’s time we started talking, Emerson. Bad news. Turns out, you’re not doing so hot.”
Emerson moaned as he looked down at himself where he sat shirtless and in his underwear. There were bloody bandages all over him, at his shoulder, at his crotch, at his right thigh where the tourniquet was still cinched.
“What is this? What’s going on?” he cried as he shook in the chair. “Untie my hands. Untie my hands.”
Gannon leaned forward and lifted one of the incredibly bloody bandages off Emerson’s abdomen.
“Emerson, stop. Get a grip,” Gannon said, showing him the bloody rag. “Your stupid friends shot you in the truck back at the beach, remember? One of the bullets came in through your shoulder here, see, and went down your torso doing who knows what to you before it came out here next to your hip.”
“Nooo!”
“It’s true. I’m worried about you. Your lungs, your major arteries. You were shot with a 7.76. That’s a very large fast-moving piece of lead, son. Do you feel hot? Like you have a fever? You’re in incredibly serious need of medical attention.”
“Then get me to a doctor!” Emerson cried.
“I want to, bro. I really do. And I will,” Gannon said as he placed the bloody rag back onto Emerson’s stomach.
“But I need to find out what in the living hell is going on first. What the hell is going on?”
Emerson looked at Gannon in complete horror. He looked down at his shirtless self, at all the blood and rags.
“This can’t be happening,” he said.
Gannon folded his hands in his lap as he sat there. He crossed his legs as he calmly bit at a thumbnail.
“You’re wasting time, Emerson. Precious seconds. But hey, it’s your life. Not mine. I didn’t get shot. My heart and arteries and internal organs are intact and working fine.”
Emerson took a deep breath and held it. Then he let it out in a loud rush. His eyes were huge as he stared at Gannon.
“It’s about Messerly,” he said.
“Messerly?”
“Yes, Messerly. The NSA defector at the embassy in London. The entire operation. It’s all about him.”
“Oh, that Messerly,” Gannon said. “Assange 2.0. How is it about him?”
“He’s about to release a trove of classified emails that will rip the roof off the Western global intelligence apparatus. It reveals all of our black ops, our black sites. It also reveals some very questionable Bitcoin financial transactions between
some very nasty people around the globe and members of US and British intelligence. Many people, especially a lot of higher-ups in the NSA and CIA and FBI, will go to jail for treason if it comes out,” Emerson said.
“I see,” Gannon said. “You guys are fighting to stay out of jail. I can buy that. That actually makes some sense considering your recent behavior. But what the hell does Messerly have to do with the FBI director’s plane?”
“Our mission was to stop Messerly from releasing the information. But he and the information he has are secured behind the walls of the Chilean embassy in London, where he was granted asylum. Since then, we’ve been scouring the Chilean embassy staff for a turncoat. Someone with enough bad habits to be blackmailed or possibly bribed.”
“Cut to the chase, Emerson. Clock’s ticking, remember?” Gannon said.
He took a deep breath.
“But the problem is that Messerly is very well protected even in the embassy itself. A guard is staffed 24/7 outside his room, and only a handful of people are actually allowed to come into his tiny windowless third-floor suite. That’s why we finally homed in on the embassy doctor, Raphael Santos, who has routine access to Messerly. We looked for a way to blackmail him into knocking out Messerly and retrieving his data, but it turned out that we were digging a dry hole.”
Emerson took another deep breath.
“So that’s why we kidnapped the doctor’s kid,” he said.
90
“You kidnapped his kid! His kid?”
Emerson blinked at him.
“Isn’t the FBI supposed to solve kidnappings?” Gannon said. “Now you commit them?”
“His name was Scott. He was a college kid. He went to Cambridge. He was nerdy but real smart and caring and socially aware. We learned that he had an internship with the French refugee relief group, Cesse de Pleurer, that was going into eastern Gabon for the summer. The CIA had contacts in the rebel groups just across the border in the Congo. So we hired one of the Congolese warlords down there to grab him.”
Gannon shook his head, dumbfounded.
“So the young guy with the headphones on the plane was the embassy doctor’s son? That was Scott Santos?”
“Yes,” Emerson said.
“And the dead black man was your African warlord?” Gannon said. “He was the kidnapper you hired?”
Emerson nodded.
“Yes. His name was Biyombo. Terrence Biyombo. After he grabbed Scott, he read from the script we gave him. At first, he asked the doctor for money like in a regular kidnapping. But after three million dollars was delivered, he called Santos back and told him that he had learned who the doctor was and where he worked and the Russians he bought his weapons from now wanted something else.”
“Messerly’s data,” Gannon said.
“Yes,” Emerson said. “Messerly’s data.”
“Why was the FBI director involved?” Gannon said.
Emerson looked up at the rusted ceiling.
“For a bunch of reasons. Dunning was neck deep in Messerly’s data, for one. Also, Dunning worked with MI6 during the tail end of the Cold War, and we needed him to smooth things over with the British intel people in London who were helping us in the operation.
“But most of all, we needed his radar-jamming G550 to smuggle Scott and Biyombo out of the Congo. The area where Biyombo was holding Scott was in a war zone, and it was becoming increasingly unstable. So Dunning agreed to stop there covertly in the jungle on his way to an Interpol conference in Milan.”
“That’s where they were headed when the plane malfunctioned? To Italy?” Gannon said.
“Yes. The cabin pressure failure problem must have happened as soon as they got to altitude. The plane was supposed to make a turn to the north, but it never did. It kept going west out over the Atlantic.”
“Until it ran out of gas,” Gannon said.
“We had no idea where it was until it crashed,” Emerson said. “We couldn’t track it because the radar-jamming device was on.”
“Who was the other guy on the plane? The other stocky white guy?”
“His name was Oliver Buchanan. He was an undercover MI6 agent working with us. He was posing as a hostage negotiator working with the doctor’s family for Scott’s release.”
“Wow, quite an elaborate production,” Gannon said. “A cast of thousands.”
“Are you familiar with the term parallel construction?” Emerson said. “It’s standard operational procedure in a case like this. We needed to put the doctor in a moving box, cover every angle.”
“You certainly seemed to have accomplished that,” Gannon said. “You must have had him coming and going.”
“Yes. Please, now you know everything. I’ve told you everything. Get me to a hospital now. Please, I’m begging you,” Emerson said.
Gannon stood and started pacing back and forth behind Emerson.
“Not so fast. I don’t think you’re telling me everything,” Gannon said.
He walked over to a computer on a desk in the corner. He shook the mouse, brought up Google, typed into the search bar and hit Enter.
“I knew it,” Gannon said, looking up from the screen. “It says here Messerly’s big info drop is in two days’ time. This operation is still on as we speak, isn’t it? Dr. Santos is still about to take out Messerly for you. He still thinks he can save his son.”
“I don’t know,” Emerson said.
“You don’t know? Okay, fine,” Gannon said as he came over and started peeling off Emerson’s bloody rags. “Are you familiar with the term bleeding out?”
“Stop!” Emerson screamed. “Okay, okay! Yes, you’re right. The doctor is still in the dark. He picked up a package in London we sent him three days ago. It contains sedatives and a drone he’s to use to get all the data out of the embassy for us. That’s why the diver was renditioned and the reporter killed. All the potential leaks needed to be plugged in order to keep the doctor in the dark.”
“Because if Messerly delivers the truth,” Gannon finished for him, “then all you corrupt rotten filthy pieces of money-grubbing shit go to jail.”
“Yes,” Emerson said. “That’s really it. That’s all of it. Now please just drop me off at a hospital. I don’t care if I go to jail. I’m twenty-nine, man. I just don’t want to die!”
“Relax, bro. You’ll be fine,” Gannon said.
“But the internal bleeding!”
“There isn’t any,” Gannon said. “You were only shot in the leg. It’s a through-and-through. I just covered you in some of your own blood. You think you guys are the only ones who can make shit up?”
“You son of a bitch!” Emerson said.
Gannon nodded.
“You better believe it,” he said. “I’m about as nasty a son of a bitch the friendly neighborhood psychopaths of the Naval Special Warfare Command and Joint Special Operations Command and the theater of combat ever created.”
Gannon shook his head as he laughed.
“And what do you know? You and your genius boss just pulled me out of retirement,” he said.
91
The most important briefing in Reyland’s life took place at eleven thirty in the morning off-site in a ruddy brick antique furniture warehouse in the Camden section of London.
Reyland rolled into its rainy cobblestone courtyard with his new team in two Range Rovers at eleven fifteen. There were eight men in his new British operational detail. He thought they looked much like his old American team only they were paler and better dressed.
He left his new men on the ground floor and came up the warehouse’s creaking stairs alone. Coming along the grim and grubby walls, Reyland thought the massive furniture-filled space looked old enough to have stored the tea bags that started the Revolutionary War.
He took a breath and sneezed. It even smelled old. There had been a consignment sh
op just down the road from where they’d summer sometimes with his grandparents in the rural hick kingdom of southeast Indiana, and it smelled like that. Like old church ladies’ coats that had been sitting up in a hot, dusty attic.
Reyland was standing by the window when his MI6 counterpart arrived with her people at twenty past. Reyland smiled as he watched her clop over between the old sideboards and rolled-up rugs in her ridiculous heels. Brooke Wrenhall was shorter in person than she had seemed in the SCIF screen, and her makeup was even more garish.
For a moment, they watched the rain pissing into the green water of the Regent’s Canal outside the dusty old arched window.
“Ah, another sunny day in London,” Reyland said.
Wrenhall took a fat file folder out of her bag and slapped it onto the top of a tarp-covered desk they were standing beside.
Reyland didn’t even have to look at the title beneath the national security designation to know it was Michael Gannon’s covert military records file. He had just read some of it himself on the plane. He’d actually asked the Pentagon for a completely unredacted version and had straight up been denied. There was no love lost between them and the DIA.
“Doing a little light reading?” Reyland said.
“I just got off the phone with a friend of mine in California about this Gannon. This Michael Gannon,” Wrenhall said.
Reyland lifted his chin.
“Interesting conversation, was it? How’s the weather out there?”
“Do you know Bill McKendry?”
“The recently retired head of JSOC? I’ve met the admiral,” Reyland said, nodding.
Wrenhall patted the fat file folder.
“Bill says this Michael Gannon was a legend among legends in the SEAL community and was nice enough to send me some of his records. He’s been through the CIA’s Farm, did you know that? He has tradecraft.”
“I vaguely remember hearing that.”
“What’s especially interesting for me personally, Robert, is the title of the special forces program he helped start at Fort Gordon in Georgia. The Covert No Contact Urban Environment Recon Course. He virtually wrote the textbook on infiltrating, hiding and surviving in a city. And what do you know? Here we are in a city. My city.”
Stop at Nothing Page 22