Joshuas Hammer km-8

by David Hagberg

  Joshuas Hammer

  ( Kirk McGarvey - 8 )

  David Hagberg

  When a one-kiloton Russian nuclear demolition bomb the size of a suitcase ends up in the hands of multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, the entire world sits up and takes notice. And when the United States launches an attack on the terrorist's base of operation in Afghanistan, killing his daughter, retaliation against America is inevitable.

  Now, Kirk McGarvey is in for the race of his life, and a race against time. McGarvey has to find out how the bomb will get to the United States, where it will be detonated, and when this, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, will take place. But not only must McGarvey stop the bomb, he must protect his own daughter and the daughter of the president of the United States for a savage act of retaliation by a man gone mad.

  David Hagberg

  Joshuas Hammer

  “David Hagberg runs in the same fast, high-tech track as Clancy and his gun-no colleagues, with lots of war games, fancy weapons, and much male bonding.”

  — New York Daily News

  “David Hagberg is one of the more interesting writers of thrillers in the new millennium. His work rivals that of Clancy, Koontz and Cornwall. With Joshua’s Hammer, he probably surpassed these notable authors. The heart thumping story line is a chilling thriller that gets inside the heart and soul of its cast, humanizing a terrorist and CIA operative. Mister Hagberg turns the genre into his personal playing field with this realistic drama that never eases up on the throttle.”

  — The Midwest Book Review

  “Hagberg, a maven of mach speed mayhem, intricately moves pieces around his global chessboard, unit! many bodies, plane crashes, and running sea battles later, action hero McGarvey wipes out the bad guys. Hagberg’s long yarns always muscle their way to the top of the techno intrigue-warfare genre.”

  — Booklist

  Special thanks to all my friends at I.R.N.B. You guys are awesome!

  My Father’s Daughter

  I am my father’s daughter… with this armor alone, I am incredible.

  Protected in the shadow of wisdom, I grew strong of mind. Guided through the colors of experience, I grew strong of heart.

  Inquiring with forensic precision, I grew curious and able. Expounding into understanding, I grew tolerant and open.

  All my fears laid out on the table, I grew confident of love. Flaws and foibles brought to light I grew to laugh easily.

  I am my father’s daughter… with this armor, I am invincible.

  — GINA HAGBERGBALLINGER

  THE OPENING MOVES

  SUMMER

  Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

  REVELATIONS 6:8

  CHAPTER ONE

  CIA Headquarters Langley, Virginia

  Weary and worried Alien Trumble got off the elevator on the seventh floor where he had to submit to a third and final security check. There wasn’t a lot of activity in the corridors, but then there usually wasn’t except during shift changes. But from the moment he’d entered the front doors he was struck by the underlying tension here, which did nothing to dispel his gloomy mood. What he was bringing to the deputy director of Operations wasn’t going to help much; not the CIA and certainly not himself.

  The civilian security officer handed Trumble’s pass and ID back. “Just down the hall to the right, sir.”

  “Yes, thank you, I’ve been here before,” Trumble said. But not often and not lately. Most of his seventeen years on the payroll had been spent in foreign postings, most recently as chief of station Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But it was time to come home now, maybe. His life was beginning to unravel and he didn’t really know why or what to do about it, except that a change of scenery might help.

  He was an unremarkable looking man of medium height with thinning light brown hair, a slightly stoop-shouldered gait, and puffy features from living for too long in the dry desert climates of the Middle East. But he was an Arabic expert and that’s where the work was happening. In fact because he had lived for so long in-country he probably knew more about the region than all but the most senior analysts here. Certainly enough to know that very large trouble was brewing.

  But until now he’d also considered himself to be a very lucky man. He had a job that challenged him, a wife who loved him and two children who thought the sun rose and set on their father. All of it going down the toilet. In the past year Gloria had become distant, spending most of her free time watching reruns of American television sitcoms. It was as if she had forgotten what home was like and she was trying to remind herself. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Julie had experimented dying her hair first orange, then pink, but their Saudi neighbors had begun to complain and Trumble had to put his foot down. Julie was still resentful, and she moped around the house speaking only when spoken to, and then in monosyllables. In their twelve-year-old son Daniel’s estimation it was time to go home. Most of the people they’d met over there were okay, but they didn’t really like Americans, and he was getting tired of it. He wanted a Mickey D’s, a real mall, Little League baseball and some new video games. Never mind that he had been born in Baghdad, and had never spent much time in the States. He missed it and he wanted to go home.

  The deputy director of Operation’s suite was at the end of the hall from the director’s office. Trumble hurried down the broad, carpeted corridor, and went inside not at all sure exactly what sort of a message he was bringing home with him. He was the Arab expert, but this time he was out of his depth and he knew it.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Trumble,” the DDO’s secretary, Dahlia Swanfeld said pleasantly.

  “Hello,” Trumble smiled, trying to hide his nervousness. “I have a two o’clock with the deputy director.” It was one minute before that time now.

  “He’s on the phone. Shouldn’t be long. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No thanks. We had a late lunch, McDonald’s.”

  Ms. Swanfeld smiled and nodded. Though she’d never married — the CIA was her life — she sometimes acted like a kindly grandmother. Trumble could feel genuine interest and good cheer radiating from her like warmth from a wood stove on a cold winter’s day. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good.

  “How is your family? Happy to be on vacation and back home?”

  “It’s going to be hard to drag them back to Riyadh. But I mink we might be coming home again for Christmas. My folks are insisting on it, and it’s hard to say no to your mother, wife and kids. I’m sorta outnumbered.”

  “I’d like to meet them.” The light on her telephone console blinked out and she picked up the phone. “Mr. Trumble is here.” She looked up. “You may go in now.”

  Kirk McGarvey, his jacket off, his tie loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up, was pulling a thick, red-striped file folder from one of the piles on his large desk. Stacks of newspapers and news magazines from a dozen different countries were piled neatly on the floor around him, and a television monitor, the sound very low, was tuned to CNN. The computer monitor on a credenza next to him was on, but showed only the CIA’s seal.

  “Nice to see you back in one piece.” McGarvey got up, came around the desk and shook Trumble’s hand. “Gloria and the kids okay?”

  “They’re out shopping. We need vacation clothes, but God only knows what they’re going to buy for me. Whatever it is, though, I’m going to have to wear it and like it.”

  At fifty, Kirk McGarvey had worked for the CIA for twenty-five years and kept himself in superb condition by a strict physical regimen that included running and swimming everyday and working out at his fencing club whenever he could. He was a hard man, who until he’d taken over the job as DDO twelve months ago, had been t
he best field officer the CIA had ever known. The fact that he had been a shooter and had killed in the line of duty was widely known. What wasn’t so well known, however, was the number of people he had killed, or the tremendous physical and mental toll the job had taken on him and his family.

  He was six feet tall, two hundred pounds and built like a rugby player with not an ounce of visible fat on his broad shouldered frame. But he was a Voltaire scholar and that curious combination — killer, academic and now administrator-seemed to fit him well. He exuded self-confidence, intelligence, honesty and above all dependability. He had never let one of his people down, he had never held anything back from them, unless in his estimation they didn’t have the need to know, and he was surrounded by a staff of very bright, very dedicated friends who excelled under his direction. There was a comfort zone around him. When you were with McGarvey you knew that everything would turn out okay. All hell might break loose, but you’d come out of it. He’d make sure of it.

  His face was wide, handsome and friendly, unless he was being lied to. His motto was: Don’t bullshit the troops; tell it like it is, or don’t tell it at all.

  “Do you want a beer?” McGarvey motioned toward the couch, chairs and low table by the window.

  “Sounds good.” Trumble set his attache” case on the coffee table, dialed the combination and took out his report contained in a thin file folder.

  McGarvey got a couple of beers from a small fridge in his credenza and brought them back. He took the report. “Not much here.”

  “You might want to take a quick read, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “Mac. But I’d rather hear it from you first. What are our chances?”

  “Osama bin Laden is not a good man,” Trumble said, opening his beer. His hand shook a little and McGarvey noticed it. “He might be crazy.”

  “What’d he say to you? What does he want?” McGarvey asked, giving his C.O.S his entire attention.

  “Well, he says he wants to talk to someone in authority. Someone higher than a chief of station. It’s a good possibility that he means to assassinate whoever we send to him, providing he thinks that person is a worthy enough target.” Trumble had made the arrangements to meet with the Saudi multimillionaire terrorist in Khartoum, at McGarvey’s request. No U.S. intelligence officer had been able to get anywhere near him or his business interests in the Sudan, or his camps in the mountains of Afghanistan, but McGarvey had a hunch that he might be ready to talk. The bad part was that a lot of people here in Washington and in London believed that bin Laden was getting ready to make another spectacular strike again, but no one knew when, where or how. In 1998 more than five thousand people had been hurt and more than two hundred killed when a bomb exploded outside the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. There’d been many other attacks with loss of lives, but Nairobi had been the biggest to date. The general consensus was that there would be a next time and it would be even worse.

  “They took my tape recorder before they brought me up to see him, but it really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been able to keep it, because I wasn’t with him for more than two or three minutes. He told me that I was the face of evil and that if I were to die then and there, no one would shed a tear.”

  McGarvey sat back, a dark, calculating expression in his gray-green eyes. Bin Laden hadn’t balked at the meeting, in fact he’d agreed to it almost too readily, which meant he wanted something, unless he was stalling for time. It was a possibility they would have to consider. Bin Laden could be keeping them talking while he was getting ready to strike. With the latest information McGarvey had seen and the reason he’d sent Trumble orders to set up the meeting, this time when bin Laden struck it would be worse than Nairobi, much worse than anything they could imagine.

  “Did he give you any names, Alien? Anyone in specific who he wanted to talk to?”

  “No, just someone more important than me.” Trumble shuddered. “The bad part is that he knows more about me than I know about him. He told me to get out or die, but I thought I could push it just a little. Maybe he was bargaining they do that a lot So I promised that we’d lift the bounty on his head like you suggested.”

  “What’d he say to that?”

  Trumble looked McGarvey in the eye. “His exact words. He said, “Your wife’s name is Gloria, isn’t it? Your children axe Daniel and Julie?”

  “Jesus,” McGarvey said sitting up suddenly. “Were you followed back to Riyadh?”

  “I don’t think so. Look, it was just his way of letting me know that his intelligence was at least as good as ours and that he wasn’t screwing around. Saving face is everything out there and we are the infidels. He’s taken to heart the idea of knowing his enemies. He could have killed me then and there, dumped my body somewhere it would never be found.” Trumble shook his head, as if he were trying to shrug off the incident, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “He doesn’t operate that way, on that small a scale, I mean. If he wants a bigger fish, killing me wouldn’t have done him any good.”

  McGarvey got up and went back to his desk. “Who’s your ACOS?”

  “Jeff Cook.”

  “Is he ready to run a station on his own?”

  Trumble was a little confused. “He’s coming along. I didn’t hesitate leaving him in charge. He can handle the routine, although his Arabic is a little weak. The Saudis get along with him okay.”

  McGarvey picked up his phone. “Dahlia, have Dick come right over and then get me Dave Whittaker.” Whittaker was the area divisions chief in charge of all foreign CIA stations and missions. McGarvey held his hand over the phone. “Is he married, any kids?”

  “No kids. He’s divorced, his wife’s back in Michigan, or someplace in the Midwest.”

  McGarvey turned back to the phone. “Dave, I have a housekeeping job for you, but I want it done on the QT. I’m pulling Alien Trumble and his family out of Riyadh, effective immediately. In fact he’s in my office right now, so I want you to send a security detail over there to shut down his apartment and get his things back here.”

  Trumble was floored, and he started to object, but McGarvey held him off.

  “I’m putting his ACOS Jeff Cook in charge for the time being. We’ll see how it works out.” McGarvey was watching Trumble. “But listen to me, Dave, tell security to watch their step. Alien’s apartment could be rigged.”

  Trumble’s stomach flopped. The thought that bin Laden could have ordered someone to booby-trap his apartment had never occurred to him.

  “Bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “That’s what Alien told me, but I don’t want to take any chances. This isn’t going to turn out to be another Buckley case.” In 1985 CIA Director William Casey sent his Beirut COS Bill Buckley back into the field after the U.S. embassy out there had been sacked and his cover blown. He’d been picked up the day he got back. He was tortured and eventually murdered.

  Dick Adkins, the DDO’s chief of staff, walked in from the adjoining office. Like McGarvey he wore no jacket, his tie was loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  “Hi, Alien,” he said. “How’d it go in Khartoum?”

  “Not very well,” Trumble said, and they shook hands. He’d known Adkins for seventeen years, first running into him at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility near Williams burg, where Adkins had been camp commandant. At his welcoming talk to new recruits he’d impressed Trumble as a man who might be short on imagination, but who was very strong on details. The first impression he gave was that of a very steady hand on the helm. Nothing in the intervening years had happened to change Trumble’s mind. Adkins was doing the job now that he was always meant to do; acting as precision point man to McGarvey’s sometimes maverick tactics.

  McGarvey hung up the phone. “I’ve pulled Alien out of Riyadh and put his ACOS Jeff Cook in charge for the time being.”

  “I’d just as soon stick with it, if you don’t mind,” Trumble said. “I’ve developed a lot of solid contacts in the last three years.”

  “I do mind,” McGar
vey said. “Your contacts wouldn’t do you any good if you were dead.” “What the hell happened over there?” Adkins demanded.

  McGarvey handed him Trumble’s report. “Take a look at this, Dick. Bin Laden was playing games with him.”

  Adkins sat down and quickly read through the report, which ran only to ten pages. When he was finished he glanced up at McGarvey. “Good call,” he said quietly, and then he turned his attention back to Trumble. “Did you get the sense that he was actually going to come after you and your family?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not his style. But there were a half dozen pretty eager looking kids in the room with him, all armed with Kalashnikovs. It would have taken just a word, or even a gesture, from their boss for them to kill me.”

  “Did you recognize any of them?”

  Trumble started to shake his head, but then thought better of it. He had a very good memory for faces, and the station file in Riyadh had an extensive photo archive of known terrorists and their associates. Not only the foot soldiers, but the planners, the bankers, the technicians and anyone else connected with the dozens of various movements and factions in the region. He’d wanted to do a little checking on his own first before he brought it up. He didn’t know if he was being foolish, but now he decided was not the time to hold anything back no matter how seemingly meaningless it might be.

  “There was one man, older than the others, maybe forty, plain looking, who sat in a corner drinking tea. He was the only one not armed.”

  “Did you recognize him?” Adkins asked.

  Trumble shook his head, trying to place the face as he had done on the way back to the Khartoum airport. “I don’t think so. But I got the impression that he might have recognized me. But it was just for a second, and then bin Laden was talking to me.”