by Jack Mars
Get an infection. See if I care.
It took Luke a moment to grasp what was frightening the man. It wasn’t the firefight, the slaughter, the pain he was in, or apparently, even the prospect of his own death.
It was Dunn.
“Do you know who I am?” Dunn said again.
The man nodded, then closed his eyes. He appeared to be whispering something under his breath.
“Don’t do that,” Dunn said. His voice was utterly calm. It almost had a tone of humor in it. His slid the edge of his serrated knife along the man’s cheek. A thin line of blood appeared there. “Open those little eyes before I cut them out.”
The young man shook his head.
“Open!” Dunn shouted.
One of other prisoners shrieked behind his gag.
The young man opened his eyes. He was breathing deeply and rapidly, almost hyperventilating.
“Who am I?” Dunn said.
“You’re the ghost,” the kid said. “Some of them say the Devil.” Abruptly, he began to cry.
Dunn smiled. “Very good. Yes. I am the Devil.”
“You cut the hearts out and eat them.”
Dunn nodded. “Yes. And do you know why I do that? Not to steal their souls, if that’s what you’ve heard.” He leaned in very close. His thick reddish beard was an inch from the man’s face. It was almost if he would offer the man a kiss.
“I do it to take their power into myself. The more I kill, the stronger I get. You understand?”
The young guy nodded crazily.
“But when I cut your heart out, I’m not going to eat it. Do you know why?”
Tears streamed down the man’s face. “Yes.”
“Tell me why.”
He could barely talk. “Because I’m weak.”
Dunn’s smile was nearly ear to ear now. He seemed delighted by such a clever student. “That’s right. You’re weak. And you’re sick. I will cut your heart out and you will see it beating in my hand before you die. Then I will bring it to your children and feed it to them. They will feast on their father’s weakness, and his sickness. I will visit them in their beds. I know where they are. You can’t hide them from me because I see inside you.”
“Please…” The man stared at the floor. He could not stop shaking.
Dunn stood.
“Tell me something,” he said to the trio of prisoners. “Where is the weapon that the pirates stole? I want it. The man who tells me I will kill quickly, with mercy. And I will release you to your God. The others…”
Dunn’s eyes were alight with good humor. “The others I will keep with me. Forever.”
The two men with gags in their mouths clamored to speak.
“Mmmm! Mmmm!”
It seemed that rank-and-file Boko knew about the weapon, and what had become of it. Or at least they thought they did.
“The border,” the young man without the gag said.
Dunn crouched close to again.
“What? Careful now. I will know a lie from your lips.”
“They took it to the border. Chad. The open field near Blood Marsh. Ten miles to the east. They gonna trade it for money.”
“Trade it to whom?”
“The brothers from the north. You would call them Al-Qaeda.”
Dunn nodded. “Very good.”
Without warning, his wrist flicked out. The knife drew a sudden slice across the man’s neck, from just below one ear, to just below the other. It looked like a big red smiling mouth three inches below the one on his face.
A wide river of blood flowed out, a waterfall of blood, splashing down over the man’s chest. Dunn stood again, stuck a big boot out, and pushed the man over sideways. The man made a gasping sound. His blood poured onto the floor, the bare dirt greedily sucking it up. Within a few seconds, the man had stopped gasping, but the blood kept flowing. His mouth hung open. His eyes stared at nothing.
The other two men stared at their comrade with wide eyes.
“I promised him a quick death,” Dunn told them. “I keep my promises.”
Suddenly Ed’s large frame filled the doorway. He glanced at the bound and bleeding lifeless body on the floor. It seemed to make no impression on him.
Luke got it. A dead Boko on the ground. It was hard to feel much about that.
Dunn had just committed a war crime, Luke realized. Some back home would call it an atrocity. But he also realized that when this was all over, that little incident probably wasn’t going to make it into the report.
“Stone,” Ed said. “Lights in the sky. Choppers coming.”
“How are they doing?”
Ed shrugged. “Took some ground fire from the north, maybe a mile off. They veered off and they’re looping back in from the south. I laid out a couple of signal flares on the ground for them. I think they’ll do okay.”
Dunn looked at Luke. “I need to get going,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
6:20 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
General Frank Loomis was annoyed.
“I told you people last night that we had highly trained and experienced Special Forces teams based in Niger, ready to go, awaiting our orders.”
Susan had trouble paying attention to the general’s words. Instead, she watched his face contort while he spoke. He had a sharply lined face. His dress greens always fit him impeccably. He seemed remarkably physically fit for a man his age. Then again, when he got irritated, his face tended to flush with anger. She wondered if he was keeping his blood pressure in check.
The leaker was here in the room.
The thought came to Susan unbidden, and she had no idea if it was true. But the very fact of a leaker inside the White House was starting to make her paranoid. The group tonight was small—a dozen people. She’d had Kurt clear the room of aides, assistants, staffers, runners, and all manner of ambitious young hard chargers.
What had Casey really said? They’d heard that the plane crash might be a decoy for a larger attack. Lots of people knew that, including many of the folks who were no longer invited to these meetings. It was a pretty innocuous piece of data. It didn’t mean anything.
It didn’t mean there was a missing weapon in the hands of Boko Haram.
It didn’t mean that Luke Stone was operating covertly in the forests of northeastern Nigeria, unbeknownst to that country’s government, and against the orders of the President of the United States.
It didn’t mean the President was having an affair with Luke Stone.
Your mind is wandering.
Through an effort of will, she brought herself back to the present moment. General Loomis was still speaking. Susan scanned the faces in the room—tired, bored, distracted, waiting for their chance to speak and put their own agenda forward.
Kurt Kimball stood like a statue at the head of the room. Haley Lawrence worked to open a candy bar. General Nat Kirby of Army Intelligence appeared ready to doze off. Amy Pooler, her blonde hair in the same bob Susan used to wear, looked very serious and pressed an earpiece to the side of her head, listening intently to something other than Frank Loomis.
She was lucky.
These people had access to a lot of information. If one of them started feeding it to the press, it would be bad.
Loomis scowled. “But once again we went with Luke Stone, an aging cowboy who appears to operate without oversight, and without any chain of command.”
“Agent Stone reports directly to me,” Susan said, and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Loomis nodded. “I know he does, Madam President. And he seems to disobey your orders rather more often than he obeys them.” He reached into the stack of papers in front of him and brought a single sheet to the top. “I have a list here of exactly how many ways Stone has been insubordinate, has breached protocol, or has violated international treaties and norms, during this one operation. Admittedly, since we have no idea where Stone is or what he�
��s doing, the list may already be out of date. It’s possible he’s added new violations since it was prepared. Would you like me to read it anyway?”
Susan smiled. “No thank you, General.”
“By the way,” Loomis said, “this is nothing against Stone personally, in case you think it is. I knew him when he was young and in Delta Force, and he was an excellent soldier, if a little headstrong. I also know you have a very close working relationship with him.”
Loomis paused, letting his last statement hang there.
Susan stared at him. His steely eyes suddenly seemed very large and bloodshot. They reminded her of the fake owl eyes people put on their lakefront decks to keep the geese away. She fought the urge to demote him from this council on the spot.
He’s fishing. Don’t bite.
“Stone’s been a remarkable agent,” she said. “He saved my life, he saved my daughter’s life, he helped save the Republic at least twice by my count, saved the city of Charleston more or less single-handedly, decapitated a violent and erratic regime in North Korea, and has helped us avert nuclear war with the Russians. If you had been there the night assassins were machine-gunning our car, I think your faith in him—”
“And I think you may have lost some objectivity,” Loomis said.
“Excuse me,” Susan said. “Is that a man thing, or a military thing?”
“What?”
“Cutting off a woman before she’s finished speaking.”
Loomis was caught short by that one. For a long moment, no one said anything.
“Madam President, with all respect due to you, and everything you’ve accomplished, and everything Stone has accomplished… I think we need to go in another direction. We can still turn the situation around, but it will take a change in tactics, and personnel.”
Susan shrugged. It would be nice to get off the topic of Stone for a little while. Maybe he was dead. If he wasn’t, and she hoped he wasn’t, she was going to strangle him when he got back.
“Let’s hear your plan, General.”
Loomis nodded. A younger man in dress greens sitting next him, a colonel, handed the general a sheet of paper. Loomis brought a pair of reading glasses out from a breast pocket and slipped them on.
“First, we assume that Stone’s mission will fail, possibly in embarrassing fashion. We quickly work to establish plausible deniability that we had any knowledge of his presence in Nigeria.”
“Kurt?” Amy Pooler said.
Kurt turned to her. “Yes.”
“Stone’s intelligence team in Niger has just contacted us. I have a preliminary report available.”
Kurt looked at General Loomis.
“General, I think this information may inform or modify your plan.”
The general waved a hand. “Sure.”
Amy nodded. She began to scroll through the summary on the tablet in front of her, reading out loud. “Stone is alive and uninjured, as are Agents Newsam and Dunn. They have infiltrated Nigeria, attacked and routed a Boko Haram outpost in Sambisa Forest, and rescued more than one hundred of the girls who were kidnapped last week. The girls are being transported by helicopter to Maiduguri by international aid organizations, with security assistance from the Nigerian military. The girls will receive health assessments in Maiduguri, and hopefully will be transferred from there to the refugee camp in Niger, to be reunited with their families sometime in the next several days.”
Susan nearly laughed in delight. She looked at General Loomis. Most of the eyes in the room were on Loomis.
“What interaction has Stone had with the Nigerians?” he said.
“None,” Amy said. “According to Agent Swann, Stone and his team rescued the girls, secured the outpost, then moved deeper into the forest as assistance began to arrive. Apparently, Stone had negotiated this arrangement privately before leaving Niger. Agent Swann reports that the private aid agencies intend to keep secret Agent Stone’s participation in the rescue.”
“Well, we’ll see how long that lasts,” Kurt said. “Where is he going now?”
“Agent Stone and his team have received intelligence from captured Boko Haram members that the missing weapon was moved to the border of Chad. There is a transfer or sale of the weapon planned between Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Stone is headed to the rendezvous point in an attempt to thwart the transfer.”
“Jesus,” Susan said.
“He still has no intelligence on what the weapon is,” Amy said. “But it appears certain now that it exists, and Stone’s intention is to retrieve it himself, if possible.”
“I told you, he’s crazy,” Loomis said. “You wanted to do this with a scalpel, Madam President. But it’s not going to work. We need to get the coordinates of that transfer, and go in there with a sledgehammer. A hundred men, with drone and Apache helicopter support. There’s really no time to waste.”
“Amy?” Susan said, ignoring him for the moment. “What else?”
Amy’s eyes stayed focused on her tablet. “Agent Swann reports that he has been drone-monitoring the border of Chad and Nigeria since he arrived in Africa. There is a great deal of Chadian military activity in that region. There have been several firefights in the past twelve hours, including at least one in the area Agent Stone reported as the possible location of the missing weapon.”
“Susan,” Kurt said, “Chad is always active on that border. Remember, Chad itself is not what we would think of as a functioning country. Clean water, a secure food supply, modern roads, an electricity grid, basic infrastructure—the government has proven unable to provide these things to its citizens. But they do have a military, and what they try to do at all costs is keep Boko Haram out of their territory. In a fragile country like Chad, the presence of Boko Haram could cause a humanitarian catastrophe.”
“Have we reached out to the Chadian government?” Susan said.
Amy look up and nodded. “It’s after midnight there, but I took the liberty of having our diplomats reach out through back channels. At the moment, the Chadians are denying any military activity on the border with Nigeria. According to official reports, there have been no incidents on the border for several days.”
“Why would they lie?”
Amy shrugged. “Oh, they’re generally pretty uncooperative when it comes to sharing information. They may resent what they see as our meddling, or they may not want to acknowledge the full extent of the security issues on the border, or…”
“They may have something to hide,” Loomis said.
“Yes,” Amy said. “That, too.”
“Was there any further information from Agent Swann?” Susan said.
Amy nodded. “Agent Swann has passed on a request from Agent Stone that we refrain from taking further action until he reaches the rendezvous point and has a chance to make another report. He is concerned that a sudden American military presence at night could lead to conflict with the Chad military, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, or any combination of them. He says he doesn’t want to get caught in the middle of that.”
She glanced at General Loomis. “But he does request that Special Forces drop teams—three teams of four men each—be prepared to reach and secure his position after he arrives there, in full communication with the Chad military. So there’s no confusion. He also says he might need a Chinook helicopter.”
“When does he expect to arrive at the rendezvous point?” Haley Lawrence said.
“In approximately six hours,” Amy said. She looked around the room.
“I guess it’s a long walk.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
10:01 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The White House Residence
Washington, DC
The clock was her nighttime friend.
It hung on the kitchen wall in the First Family Residence, and was an ornate holdover from an earlier time. It was the only sound in the room.
It was made of polished wood, its face covered in rounded glass, the numbers in Latin. It had a pen
dulum of yellow metal that hung down beneath the face, and which swung back and forth, softly but incessantly.
Tick, tick, tick…
One minute ago, when the clock struck X, a single gong had sounded. The clock always gonged once, no matter what the hour.
Susan sat alone at the alcove table, absently eating a chicken salad sandwich on white toast. The White House chef made what might be the best chicken salad on the planet—with chopped walnuts, raisins, and cranberries. He made sure there was some in the refrigerator for her nearly every night, and it was her go-to late-evening meal.
It didn’t excite her tonight. Maybe she was over chicken salad.
In front of her on the table was a tablet computer, standing on a tripod. She avoided the news and instead scrolled through the photos on her daughters’ Instagram account—Lauren_&_Michaela. Two weeks into it, and there were already millions of page views and over 900,000 subscribers. Their reluctant mother was one of those subscribers.
Here they were in bright sweaters—Lauren in a yellow-green, Michaela in blue—over black ski pants, and matching wool hats with the word SISTERS across the front. There was an obviously fake winter background scene behind them. It was a campy touch—the girls were in Southern California, while most of the country was bogged down in winter. In one picture, their faces were pressed together the way teenage girls used to do in boardwalk photo booths when Susan was that age.
“God, I miss them.”
She missed them in more ways than one. She missed them in the sense that she wished they were here so she could squeeze them, in the sense of a hole being torn from her heart because they were so far away. But she was also missing them. They were growing up, and she wasn’t there. Everything about them was changing.