Man of War

by Sean Parnell

  Rockford walked out of the Situation Room with Styles nipping at his heels like an annoying dog. He followed the man in the gray suit down the hall to a door guarded by two men in dark suits and leaned into the retinal scanner.

  “Rockford, if you think that I am going to stand by and let Cole cut me out . . .”

  What does this have to do with President Cole? Rockford asked himself.

  The lock clicked and the door slid open to reveal a much smaller version of the Situation Room. Rockford stepped inside, the guards springing into action when Styles went to follow.

  “This is a secure area, ma’am.”

  “I am the Director of the CIA,” Styles said. “Get your hands off of me!” she yelled.

  The door closed behind him, but not before Director Styles screamed a final warning. “Goddammit, Rockford, I don’t care if he is the President, you tell Cole that this will not stand.”

  Rockford only had a moment to enjoy the silence before a voice came from an overhead speaker.

  “Roger that, Variable 210, you are cleared hot.”

  “Sir,” a man in a brown polo shirt began, “in accordance with Program protocol 1–1 it is my duty to inform you that operation 032 is in effect and that you have taken tactical control.”

  “I have control,” Rockford said, taking the binder.

  The reference number on the front of the binder read: stalker 7/032 main. It told Rockford that this was the thirty-second operation Steele had run this year, and that the operation was being controlled from Cutlass Main, the Program’s tactical operations center, or TOC, at the White House.

  “Here is the operation’s log,” the man said, handing Rockford a laminated piece of paper that listed every asset in the area.

  Near the top in bold letters was variable 210: a Reaper drone that had checked on station five minutes ago.

  In the center of the room there was a large screen with a drone feed that showed an Osprey disappear beneath the brownout caused by the blades. It shot clear, heading straight up.

  “Stalker, stand by for rifle,” the drone operator said.

  The Reaper feed shook from the Hellfire leaving the rack, followed by “Cutlass Main, this is Stalker 7.”

  “Stalker 7, Cutlass Main switching to secure net. Stand by for authentication on frequency Bravo 2100 and wait for my traffic.”

  “Roger, Cutlass.”

  A garbled electronic squelch came from the speaker and Rockford knew they were switching to the high-frequency encrypted channel the Alphas used when talking to the White House.

  “Stalker 7 on Bravo 2100,” the voice said.

  “Authenticate.”

  “Authentication confirmed. Uplink confirmed.”

  Rockford turned his attention to the screen and realized that he was excited. This was the first time he was getting to lay eyes on Eric Steele, the man President Cole referred to as “my boy.”

  Damn he looks tired.

  It was the first thing he noticed, and Rockford realized that he had seen so many firefights from 20,000 feet that he had almost forgotten that there were real people on the other end of the feed.

  Steele looked like a man who had just stepped out of battle. His dark hair was matted and his face was grimy and caked with dust and grit. The sweat cut whitish lines through the dirt, and then Rockford found himself frozen by Steele’s eyes. To call them green was like calling the sun bright. Rockford couldn’t come up with a color to describe the shade of green; the only thing he knew was that when Stalker 7 looked at him it felt like he was staring right into his soul.

  “Where’s the President?”

  The question caught Rockford flat-footed and his mind went temporarily blank. On the screen Stalker 7 leaned closer and the Vice President realized he was being sized up. It was an uncomfortable sensation.

  “He has been held up,” Rockford answered a moment later. “President Cole is en route and asked me to handle the briefing.”

  Stalker 7 nodded, but remained silent.

  Rockford flipped open the binder and quickly scanned the brief. He came to the “mission goals” line that stated why Steele had been sent to Tunisia in the first place.

  “What is your count?”

  “Minus one.”

  Like many in the intelligence field, Rockford had heard of the Program during his time as Director of the CIA. No matter how deep you tried to bury a special missions unit, there was no such thing as a vacuum. Eventually bits and pieces of the unit made their way out of the shadows. The Program was no different. Once Rockford was sworn in as Vice President he was granted access to the Program, but most of what he knew about Eric Steele came directly from President Cole.

  Rockford knew that the Program did their own recruitment and assessment of the men and women they wanted. The recruiters had watched Steele for seven months, and while he was everything the Program was looking for, it was originally determined that after only ten years in Special Forces he was still too untested for consideration.

  His fourth deployment to Afghanistan changed all that. Steele’s ODA, or operational detachment alpha, was hit hard near the Pakistan border. The operation was compromised and headquarters lost contact with the team. Assuming everyone had been wiped out, they sent a search and rescue team in to collect the bodies. They found Steele fifty miles south of the ambush—seriously wounded and carrying the team’s captain over his shoulders.

  Special Operations Command put him in for the Medal of Honor, but one call from the Program killed the award in its tracks. They were issuing him a waiver, and before Eric was out of the hospital he had been scrubbed from the Department of Defense’s books. He entered Phase One in North Carolina as the youngest Alpha trainee in history, but no one would ever know because the day he became operational, Eric Steele ceased to exist. The Program called it ghosting. They erased all records that Steele had ever been born, the same way they had been doing it since World War II.

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Ali Breul is dead.”

  The words hit Rockford like an open-field tackle and sent him spinning.

  “How?”

  On the screen Steele rubbed a blood-caked hand through his hair, a look of frustration clouding his face. It was obvious that he was waiting for Rockford to say something.

  “They shot him. But that is the least of our problems, sir. This situation . . .” Steele paused. “No offense, sir, but I need to speak with President Cole, now.”

  “Stalker 7,” Rockford interrupted, his voice hard as iron. “Like I said before, the President is not available.” The two men stared at each other from thousands of miles away. Rockford took a breath, and when he continued his voice was even, but firm. “Like it or not, right now it’s just you and me. This isn’t my first rodeo, so I’m not going to ask you to trust me, because I know that something like that has to be earned. You tell me what you need to get this done and I give you my word that I will make it happen.”

  Steele squinted at Rockford, before offering a nod.

  “The first thing you need to know about Ali Breul is that there is no way in hell he would leave Iran without telling me. Either something spooked him or . . .”

  “Or what?” Rockford asked, leaning toward the camera.

  “Or someone pretending to be me told him to leave. Those are the only options, sir.”

  “How is that possible? The only things with more security than Program assets are the damn nuclear launch codes.”

  “You tell me, sir.”

  What is he implying?

  “Someone cut into us, I am certain of it. But what they didn’t know was that Breul and I had a contingency for this kind of thing.” Steele held up a piece of metal. “This is the data pin I implanted into Breul. The same one he activated two days ago in Algiers.”

  “I assume that was your rendezvous?”

  Steele nodded. “Only if he had the package with him.”

  Rockford didn’t want to ask the next question, but k
new he had to.

  “What was the package?”

  “A man-portable nuclear weapon.”

  Jesus.

  “Sir, if I’m right and someone cut into the Program to find Breul”—Steele held up the data pin for the second time—“then I know exactly where they are going next.”

  “Where?”

  “To get their hands on that bomb.”

  Chapter 15

  Eastern Turkey

  In Tunis, Eric Steele jumped back on the Osprey. The pilot pushed the throttle forward and Steele braced himself against the bulkhead, before making his way to the cockpit.

  “How much fuel?”

  The pilot checked the gauge before answering. “Eight thousand pounds.”

  Steele did the math in his head and knew it wasn’t enough.

  “We are going to Turkey. Get a tanker to meet us en route.”

  The flight took two hours plus thirty minutes to refuel, and when Steele walked down the Osprey’s ramp, the engines were red hot. The exhaust hit Steele’s neck like a hair dryer on steroids. The rotors were rotated up and the clearance was much higher than a helicopter, but he ducked out of habit.

  The turbines whined behind him, and Steele turned in time to see the Osprey squat under the torque. At the door the master chief sat with his feet dangling below the skin of the aircraft. The salty SEAL grabbed the brim of his helmet and tipped his hat. It was a small gesture, but Steele got it; the chief was offering his respect.

  Steele stood on the tarmac until silence returned and the Osprey disappeared from view. In his world, respect was earned, not given, and it reminded him of something his mentor, Nate West, had once said:

  Lead from the front and men will always follow.

  Steele’s eyes slowly settled back on the airfield. The base was an isolated relic, a memory of a bygone era when Russia and the United States were locked in a pact of mutual destruction. But it hadn’t always been this way. During the Cold War the airfield housed F-111s, variable wing bombers capable of carrying a nuke into the heart of communist Russia. Now it was empty except for the C-17 he’d requested idling on the sun-bleached asphalt to his left.

  The aircraft reminded him of the fact that twenty-five years after the fall of the Soviet Union the threat of nuclear war was still very much alive. But instead of a bustling base and state-of-the-art bombers it was just Eric Steele. And somewhere out there was a missing nuclear weapon.

  Steele knew Demo would be waiting for him inside the C-17, but instead of heading to the plane, he turned and walked into the freshly painted hangar. He needed to clean Ali Breul’s blood from his hands before he went any farther.

  It was cooler inside the hangar and the sudden change in temperature chilled his sweat-soaked battle shirt, sending goose bumps running up his arms. The Program had taken it over in 2001 and reconfigured it to serve as a way station. They had hundreds of them across the world, a place for the Alphas to rest or refit between missions. Each one was set up the same, a small motor pool of locally purchased vehicles, two Little Bird helicopters, and enough gear and weaponry to outfit a small army.

  Since becoming an Alpha, Steele had visited most of them, and each time he did the same thing. His hiking boots squeaked over the polished floor as he walked to the back where a row of ten lockers waited in the shadows. Each locker had a section of green tape stuck to the door with the owner’s call sign written in black Sharpie.

  Originally the Program used a number system to designate the different regions each Alpha was responsible for. It went from 1 to 10. During the Cold War, Alphas 1–3 had Russia, 4 and 5 had Asia, and 6 and 7 were assigned to cover Europe, which left three operatives to watch Africa, the Mideast, and Latin America.

  In 1986 number 4 was deemed unlucky after three operatives were killed in China, and since no one would take the number after that, higher decided to start with 0 and go through 9, omitting unlucky number 4. It was also the year that the “Stalker” handle was first used.

  Steele stopped at the third locker and placed his hand over the tape that identified it as Stalker 2. The locker belonged to Nathaniel West, the man who had taught him everything.

  The war had taken its toll on the Program, but the standards remained the same. It was the one unit where there was absolutely no wiggle room between supply and demand. The lockers belonged to the dead, and the strip of tape was the only legacy the Program allowed.

  “Miss you, bro,” Steele said before heading to his own locker.

  Inside was a variety of clothing he’d need for any operation: battle shirts, suits, a myriad of uniforms, shoes, boots, batteries, and a hygiene kit. A pair of white headphones sat on the top shelf next to a folding knife.

  Steele grabbed a fresh uniform from the shelf and made a notation on the inventory list attached to the door below a small picture of his mother. He shut the locker and headed toward the restroom to take a quick shower.

  He bumped the door open with his hip, and was greeted by the powerful scent of Pine-Sol. Overhead the fluorescent bulbs blinked to life, and hummed as they warmed up. The lights cast a sallow glow over the gray walls, revealing a bench and a row of showers, urinals, and sinks. Steele dropped his assault pack and set his rifle down before digging at the edge of his plate carrier.

  The Velcro was rough on his fingers and made a tearing sound when he pulled it free. With ammo, ballistic plates, grenades, and a medical kit, the vest weighed almost fifty pounds. Steele’s broad shoulders and lower back took the brunt of the weight, and when he lifted it free the relief was immediate.

  He took a seat and tried to tug the battle shirt off, but the sweat made it cling to his skin. He gave the shirt a violent tug, temporarily losing control of the rage that he had been carrying since he left Tunisia. He felt the seam rip a second before he heard the fabric tear.

  “Dammit.”

  He yanked the battle shirt over his head and threw it into the corner. He lowered his head into his hands, the metallic scent of Breul’s blood hammering his senses.

  Eric had met Dr. Ali Breul in Stockholm a year after Nate West was killed in Algiers. The Iranian was a guest speaker at an International Nuclear Proliferation summit, and while outwardly a huge proponent of the Iranian nuclear program, he knew something the rest of the world did not.

  Iran had no intention of giving up its nuclear program. In fact, Breul had proof that it was working to construct a man-portable weapon. But that wasn’t the worst part. Steele vividly remembered the dinner when Breul had told him the most chilling news of all.

  “So they are making a weapon and you have proof, what’s the problem?”

  “Eric, my friend,” Breul said, leaning in with a sad smile. “Your CIA already knows this.”

  Steele got to his feet, the memory hanging there like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He walked over to the sink, purposefully avoiding the mirror, and turned on the faucet.

  What would make you leave Iran without checking with me?

  The same unsettling tickle he’d felt regarding the CIA target package in Beirut that told him something wasn’t quite right returned with the subtlety of a cattle prod to the throat. Steele realized that someone was playing him, just like they had in Algiers four years earlier.

  When Nate West was killed.

  The mere thought of what had happened there washed over him like a wave. Steele tried to avert the memories by ducking his face beneath the cold water of the faucet, but it was no use. The sights and smells of that day came rushing back, and he could almost taste the salt coming off the Med, mixing with the burnt-meat smell of charred flesh. What was left of Nate’s boat smoldered in its slip, the gunwale burned down like a cigarette that had been smoked to the filter.

  Steele knew his friend was dead as soon as he saw the smoke, and remembered the feeling of the gravel on his knees and the water soaking his pants when he collapsed near the shore. Then there was the buzzing that drew him to the connex, the scent of blood and death hanging heavy in the air
. West’s wife was hanging upside down from a length of chain coiled around her tanned legs. She was naked and her face bruised and swollen like a grape left in water.

  But it was what Steele saw when he tracked the men south and found the tape of West’s son that broke him. He would have given it all up—the Program, his hopes and dreams—and crawled back in himself for the remainder of his life if it hadn’t been for President Cole.

  Steele ripped himself back to the now. He knew that he couldn’t change the past, but the fact that it seemed someone was using it against him sent a wave of anger washing over him. Killing Breul had made this mission personal, but the cold hand of fear tempered the fire of revenge.

  His mother had told him stories of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fear that surrounded a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. “We knew it would never happen, Eric, because after it was over there wouldn’t be anything left,” his mother had told him.

  The tactic was called mutual assured destruction, and it promised that if any country ever hit the United States with a nuke, America would respond in kind.

  Steele had grown up in a different era and never feared an all-out nuclear war. He had a different fear, and it was one man stealing one nuke. It was the scenario you could war-game to death, but never prepare for. A single nuke could literally be detonated anywhere in the world. But worse than the endless list of targets and the catastrophic body count that would follow was the moment Steele realized that right now, he was the only man who could stop it.

  Chapter 16

  Algiers

  “You sure that’s the guy?” Villars asked, taking his foot off the gas after turning the Pathfinder onto the street.

  Their target, CIA officer Charlie Daniels, had pulled his vehicle to the curb and sat behind the wheel stuffing a gyro down his throat.

  “Yes, Villars.” West sighed.

  Daniels had joined the CIA right out of college. He had given his life to the Agency, and it had cost him two marriages, three grand a month in alimony, and a junkie daughter who had recently failed out of the University of Washington. West had taken a look at his bank account and knew that Daniels didn’t have enough money saved up to buy a wading pool in a trailer park.