Man of War

by Sean Parnell

  “We . . .” she began, her voice cracking as she got to her feet. “Just got the results back. It’s terminal.”

  Jesus, not today.

  Rockford didn’t know what to say. He just stood there, watching her hands shake as she twisted a frayed Kleenex around her index finger.

  He felt his heart sink.

  Nancy and the President had been together since high school, and as Rockford opened his arms and scooped her to his chest, he realized that she probably didn’t have a memory without her husband in it.

  He held her tight, feeling the sobs. Rockford remembered a speech his wife gave at the Coles’ last anniversary. She had said, They don’t make love like that anymore.

  “What am I going to do?”

  Rockford patted her back. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, knowing that it was a lie. He waited until Nancy stopped crying and then knocked on the door and stepped inside the exam room. The President stood near the table wearing a white tank top and buttoning his pants. Behind him a nurse was taking an empty bag off the IV stand. Rockford’s eyes locked on the Band-Aid taped over a cotton ball in the crook of his arm.

  He didn’t look like he was dying.

  “John, funny seeing you here,” the President said with a smile.

  “I heard they had free ice cream.”

  Cole grabbed his shirt and nimbly worked the buttons before tucking it in. But when he began to buckle his trousers, he made a big show of laughing at the joke, while turning his body away from his VP.

  Anyone else would have missed it, but Rockford knew the man too well.

  He’s hiding something.

  Knowing that his boss was going to have to use the mirror when he put on his tie, Rockford didn’t say anything.

  “So, how did the briefing go?” Cole asked.

  Rockford turned to the nurse.

  “Claire, can we have the room?”

  Cole popped his collar and reached for the blue tie draped over the back of the chair. As the nurse stepped out, Rockford used the distraction to mask him taking a small step to his left. He now had a perfect angle on the mirror.

  “I got an Alpha Flash this morning, and Styles went ballistic.”

  Cole smiled. “Doesn’t surprise me. Robin and I have never gotten along.”

  “Sir, I believe she thinks that you are trying to cut her out of her own operation.”

  “Last time I checked, John, the Director of the CIA wasn’t read in on the Program. There is a reason for that.”

  “Yes, sir, I just feel like I am in the middle here.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with Styles for much longer. Now, tell me about the flash.”

  “Stalker 7 made contact.”

  Rockford made sure the president couldn’t see him before looking at the belt reflected in the glass. He immediately saw what his boss had been trying to hide. The President was losing weight, and had cinched the belt two notches past the worn-out hole he usually used.

  “What did he have to say for himself?”

  “He, uhhh.”

  Shit.

  Cole’s back might have been to him, but there was no mistaking the sudden change in his posture. The President of the United States went rigid, shoulders locking to the rear as he drew himself up. When he turned around his blue eyes were burning like two steel ingots plucked from the furnace.

  The Commander in Chief took a step closer and laid a heavy hand on Rockford’s shoulder.

  “Son, what did I tell you the first time we met?” he asked firmly but without raising his voice.

  Rockford felt something melt in his chest, and he looked at the ground, feeling his eyes begin to burn.

  “You told me . . .” His voice broke.

  “Look at me, John,” Cole said, squeezing his shoulder.

  Rockford looked up. There was no weakness in the man standing before him—he was every inch in charge.

  “You said adversity is just a challenge waiting to be answered.”

  “That’s right. Now what did Eric Steele tell you?”

  “He said we lost a nuclear bomb.”

  The President’s response was not what Rockford expected. Instead of withering under the news, the only outward sign that Cole had heard him was a slight narrowing of his boss’s eyes and a focal shift. Rockford felt that Cole was now looking through him. Other than that, there was silence.

  “Sir, what should we do?” he asked like he was afraid of breaking Cole’s concentration.

  The President patted him and a tired smile played over his face. He turned and retrieved the jacket off the hook on the wall. Cole slipped his arms through it and finally said, “The hardest part of this job, we wait and remember that Stalker 7 has never failed us yet. Not once. My boy will handle it.”

  Chapter 19

  Algiers

  Outside the wire it was obvious that the State Department had no idea what was going on. The tension in the air was heavy when they pulled out of the gate. It was the same electric charge Meg had felt in Ramadi in 2006 and before the fall of Mosul in 2014, like the tingle you got before being hit by lightning.

  Algiers was on the brink.

  Before being recruited by the CIA, she had been a member of the ISA, known as “the Activity,” one of the last truly dark units within the DOD. Her job was to collect actionable intelligence for Special Operations units like Delta and SEAL Team 6.

  Her decision to leave the Army was the only time Meg hadn’t listened to her father, General “Black Jack” Harden. Not only did he want her to stay in, but he was willing to call in some favors after she got passed over for major.

  “I appreciate it, Dad, but I don’t take charity,” she had told him.

  “All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and play the game. How hard is that?” he’d demanded. The Army was his life and to this day he still didn’t understand why she’d left.

  The simple truth was that Meg had a code, and if she couldn’t earn it on her own, then she didn’t want it. A day later, while she was drinking a glass of Merlot and signing the last sheet of her separation documents, the phone rang.

  Her caller ID said the call was from a private number so she let it go to voice mail, and then she got the text:

  I hear you need a job.

  When they called back five minutes later she answered. The CIA offered her the only thing she had ever wanted—a chance to stay in the fight.

  The safehouse at 12 Chemin Al-Bakir was a level two facility, a single-story building surrounded by a twelve-foot wall and a metal gate that might withstand an RPG. The main door of the house was steel reinforced and secured by two locks and a keypad. It could take a heavier beating, but for the most part the safehouses’ main defense was in remaining inconspicuous. Anyone with a Top Secret clearance could handle sanitizing them. It was the third location that was occupying her mind.

  It wasn’t on a map or the official list of stations the State Department had on file. In fact, besides the chief of station, Meg Harden was the only person in Algiers who knew of its existence or location. The code word for the special access site was the Gatehouse.

  “Stay here,” Colt told her while the rest of the team piled out to clear the house.

  Meg rolled her eyes and got out of the van. In the distance an explosion rumbled like thunder off a mountain. That’s freaking artillery.

  “I bet I wouldn’t be out here if I had a Y chromosome,” she said to Colt’s back. The only answer she got was from a roll of automatic rifle fire.

  Meg tore her helmet off and threw it in the van before turning the encrypted radio to the operations channel. It was quiet and she was bored. Safehouses didn’t take this long to clear and she was beginning to wonder if they had forgotten about her. She knew the SOG guys were upset that they were on babysitter detail, but since she was the only one who knew how to sanitize the mainframes they weren’t given a choice.

  Finally the SOG team leader came out the door and Colt waved Meg over.
She looked at her watch. It was exactly 1420 hours. When she got inside Colt was already telling his men what to do. “You know the drill: collect what we need, and burn what we don’t.”

  Meg noticed that James’s eye was beginning to darken from the pop she had given him at the gym, and he was sulking around like a cat with a burned tail.

  Men . . .

  She walked over to the computer in the middle of the room, leaving the maps on the wall and the shelves full of binders for the trigger pullers. Colt had broken them into two teams and half were ejecting the data tapes from the storage devices.

  “Red labels go in the case,” Meg said, pointing to the black tote. “You can nuke the greens and blues.”

  She sat down in front of the computer, a tiny grin on her face. Meg knew they loved putting the data disks in the microwave. Like little children. Even inside the building it was obvious that the volume of fire was picking up. It sounded like someone was sitting on the other side of the wall banging on the concrete with a pair of metal drumsticks.

  “Anyone going to check that out?” she asked, a frown replacing the grin when she noticed a brownish smudge on the keyboard.

  Someone has been eating at the terminal again. It was one of her biggest pet peeves. Being a neat freak was not an easy job in the alpha male world. She had seen guys leave half-eaten sandwiches at a terminal for a week, and then there was the time in Syria when an operative spilled a bottle of dip spit on the keyboard. Meg had to wait two weeks to get a replacement.

  After that she had instituted a strict “no eating or drinking around my crap” policy. Meg thought the stain looked like hot sauce. Her eyes went to the sign she had taped above the monitor and she wondered if anyone even noticed it.

  ABSOLUTELY NO EATING OR DRINKING

  That someone had drawn a penis along with the words “Eat this” answered her question. Animals. She woke up the computer by hitting the ctrl-alt-del keys, but instead of being greeted by the login page, there were two open files on the desktop. Someone had forgotten to lock the computer.

  Using her administrator’s rights she brought up the activity log. Eating she could tolerate; not securing the terminal was something that drove her ballistic. The guilty party’s password popped up.

  “Effin’ Daniels,” she said.

  According to the log, Charlie Daniels had opened the terminal at 1315, a little over an hour before.

  Daniels? What the hell are you doing outside the wire?

  She brought up his login history and, starting from the bottom, re-created what he’d done during his session. A list of deleted documents popped up on the screen.

  Deleting files, are we? Meg used her administrator rights to restore the files and saw that they were emails. She skimmed over the first couple of subject lines. Most of them were names or places that meant nothing to her. Who is Asif Bassar? Knowing that she didn’t have time to go through them all, Meg emailed them to her secured account and went back to the history.

  Daniels had spent the rest of his time going through the access logs before conducting a date search of the past week. What happened two days ago that you are so interested in?

  She scrolled through all the keycards and key codes that had been used on that day. Card-accessed rooms in the embassy were labeled with an “E” followed by the room number. The safehouses were Sites 1132 and 1133. Everything looked normal except that her password had been used to log in to a secure subdirectory exactly thirty seconds after Daniels checked the safehouse codes.

  How did that shit get my password? she wondered, her fingers flying over the keyboard to see what he had been looking at. Meg brought up the session on another screen and found one code that she knew didn’t belong to anyone who worked in Algiers. There was something urgent building up in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t place it.

  “Tower 1, we are taking heavy fire,” a voice shouted over the radio.

  Meg processed the transmission distantly, the way a person hears the television in the other room, while her fingers flew over the keyboard spurred on by the fear-laden voice coming over the radio.

  “We need to go,” Colt said.

  “What channel is that?” one of the SOG guys asked.

  “Home.”

  The embassy.

  “They are at the gate. Close it, close it!”

  Her stomach knotted.

  “Hey, are you bleeding?” It was Colt.

  “Huh?”

  “Your arm.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Meg lifted her arm and twisted it to get a look at her sleeve. The stain looked like the hot sauce on the keyboard. She frowned, not getting it at first, but then she saw the armrest and jumped up so fast she sent the chair flying.

  Oh my God, oh my God, there is blood on my arm. Her throat tightened and she fought the disgust rising up from her stomach.

  Colt was so surprised by the sudden movement that his hand shot to the butt of his pistol. They stared at each other for a second and then the lightbulb went off.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Boss, it is going off out here,” one of the men said, stepping back inside. “Sounds like someone is pounding the Hydra district.”

  “You think the ALF broke the peace?” James asked, stepping over to a cabinet and reaching for the latch.

  “I don’t know, go get the van,” Colt said. “How much longer?”

  She ignored him and moved the cursor to the bottom of the screen, hitting the wrong tab by mistake. A thousand questions were running through her mind, but when the window popped up Meg found herself staring at the last face she expected to see.

  Her own.

  What the hell were you doing, Daniels?

  Meg clicked the right window this time, accessing the security feed. The images moved backward on the screen as she backed it up to the moment Daniels had put his code in the outside door.

  “I need a minute.”

  “We don’t have thirty seconds, Meg.”

  The screen suddenly went blank, but the time stamp at the bottom showed that the program was still running. Someone had erased the feed and made no attempt to hide it. Everything fell into place.

  “Get the UV light,” Meg ordered, closing everything except the key log.

  “Got it,” one of the guys said, holding up the light.

  “What are you thinking?” Colt asked her.

  “Kill the lights,” Meg ordered, hoping she was wrong. She typed the sanitize command and her password, then hit enter. The monitor went black, followed by the lights.

  “If there is blood it will show up under the UV,” she said a second before the ultraviolet light kicked on. “Shine it over here.”

  Colt’s teeth luminesced in the light and when it fell over the computer everyone could see the long swipe marks that proved someone had tried to clean up after themselves. But they had missed the blood on the armrest, and when the black light hit it, the phosphors reacted, making it look dark black.

  “The only way to clean up blood is with bleach and we would have smelled that.”

  “Look,” Colt said, pointing at her feet.

  Meg lowered her head and jumped back. The area below the desk was a black cloud of swirl marks and faint footprints. She knew the smaller ones were hers, but there were two larger sets that led away from the terminal. Meg followed them to one of the lockers, the man with the light tight on her heels.

  She heard Colt draw his pistol, but she knew there was no need. Her heart pounded in her chest when she reached for the latch. She shot a look over her shoulder. Colt was already moving to his left, positioning himself in case he had to shoot. Meg flung the door open and stepped out of the way, letting it clang against the wall.

  “Shit.”

  Colt lowered his pistol, and when Meg came around she saw Charlie Daniels’s contorted frame stuffed grotesquely into the bottom shelf. His legs had been broken so that he’d fit, and Meg saw that he was missing two fingers on his
right hand. He had obviously been tortured before someone slit his throat.

  Chapter 20

  Washington, D.C.

  After the guards barred Styles from following Rockford she stood in the hall panting with anger. The fact that it had been the Vice President and not Cole at the briefing had ruined her plan, but more than that it put her at a disadvantage.

  She wanted to scream, but knew she had already made a big enough scene. And as her anger began to dissipate, the weight of what had happened came crashing down.

  You got one hundred percent accountability of your team, didn’t you? Even now it was ringing in her ears.

  Her stomach cramped and Styles tore herself away, moving as quickly as her pride would allow to the ladies’ room. She checked beneath the row of stalls on her way to the back, stepped inside, and without closing the door began to vomit.

  She knew there was only one way Rockford could have known. Cole had told him. She had underestimated the President and once again he’d used his beloved Alphas to outmaneuver her.

  This wasn’t the first time Cole had used the Program to steal an operation from her without so much as a thank-you or a go-fuck-yourself. But this time it was different. This time Styles’s very life was in the balance.

  How exposed am I? Does Cole know about the nuke?

  She flushed the toilet and went to the sink to clean out her mouth. Styles looked at herself in the mirror and began going over her options. Rockford wasn’t the threat, he was an errand boy, and as the Vice President his authority came directly from Cole.

  Styles knew that the animosity between her and President Cole wasn’t a secret. He had a big problem with policies made during the previous administration, and since she was the only one left, he had been taking it out on her since the day he stepped into the Oval.

  She was a good enough politician to have been able to play it off, if it weren’t for the Iran nuclear deal.

  When President Bentley first proposed the idea of a nuclear Iran it was just the two of them inside the Oval Office. He had asked her what she thought and Styles told him the truth.