Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel

by Jonathan Maberry

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Reconnaissance General Bureau

  Special Office #103

  Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

  Sunday, August 31, 9:00 a.m. EST

  Colonel Sim Sa-jeong sat at his workstation and watched a series of events unfold half a world away. Six separate windows had opened on his monitor, each one obscuring the face of the person with whom he had been communicating. One window showed a sports arena in Kentucky seconds before bombs exploded. Another showed a random act of brutal murder in a fine-arts store. The rest were similar. Brutality and explosions.

  Sim reached for his cup of tea but it remained in his white-knuckled fingers for long minutes, the tea growing as cold as the blood in his veins.

  Then, one by the one, the small windows winked out until only the original image remained. The smiling face of a woman.

  She spoke in English, not bothering to provide a translation. Sim had been assigned as her contact here in North Korea because his English was very good. A similar arrangement had been made, he was certain, in other countries.

  The woman said, “Do I have your attention?”

  Sim cleared his throat. “You do,” he said. “But of what value are these acts? Small bombs? Casual murders? Are we supposed to care about petty violence in America? We already know that it is a nation filled with corruption and—”

  “Please,” said the woman, “let us forgo speeches. They are trite and repeated by rote, and I do not care to hear them.”

  “Then—”

  “These events are intended for three reasons,” she said. “The first is to get your attention, which I believe I have.”

  Colonel Sim said nothing.

  “The second is to make sure that the signals from the cameras are routed properly to you.”

  Sim again said nothing, waiting for what was surely the true point of this elaborate and highly dangerous contact.

  “And the third is to inform you that the auction will commence on schedule. Five minutes before the bidding begins I will send a call-in code and a banking routing number. Each bidder will receive a separate routing number. Any attempt to use that routing number for any purpose except to make a bid will result in termination.”

  “Termination of what?”

  The woman merely smiled and this time she did not answer.

  Sim considered. “You ask a lot and yet we do not know this thing on which we are expected to bid? Do you take us as fools? Do you expect us to bid on crude bombs such as the ones—?”

  “Of course not,” she said smoothly, her smile never wavering. “You are bidding on something that will change the nature of the arms race. Something that will, in fact, end it. If you bid correctly, it will end the inequality of the arms race solidly in your favor.”

  “This is needlessly cryptic.”

  “Is it?” She laughed. The woman had a deep, throaty laugh that Sim found entirely unpleasant. “Make sure someone is watching this feed, Colonel. By the time the bidding begins you will have no doubts as to the value of what we are selling.”

  “What assurances can you provide that this is not an elaborate trick?”

  “Beyond seventeen weeks of your own vetting process?” she asked.

  “Yes. Beyond even that.”

  “Keep watching the feed, Colonel. By the opening bell you will have no doubts at all. I can guarantee it.”

  Before he could respond, the face vanished, replaced by a placeholder image of a sloppily painted letter A surrounded by a tight letter O. Even in China the symbol was known. It represented a concept that was totally antithetical to the strict Marxist social-political concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  It was the circle-A.

  A for Anarchy. O for Order. And its polluted philosophy:

  Anarchy is the mother of order.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 11:25 a.m.

  I sat on a nuclear bomb, swinging one foot, cleaning my nails with the tip of a skinning knife. All around me people I liked were beating the hell out of each other.

  Ghost lay at my feet, chewing on an arm.

  It was a normal Tuesday for me.

  The arm, by the way, was rubber. It’s been a running gag with my crew to appease the fur monster by giving him toys shaped like human hands, arms, and legs. Occasionally they’d give Ghost toys fashioned to look like even more sensitive body parts. I took those away from him. Ghost sleeps on the foot of my bed. I don’t want him to get ideas.

  I sipped a cup of Death Wish coffee and watched the members of Echo Team go through armed and unarmed combat drills with a bunch of candidates sent to us by Delta, the SEALs, Force Recon, and FBI Hostage Rescue. These guys were the survivors of a group of ninety-two we’d started with two weeks ago, and this was why we were here in Brooklyn. The job would normally have fallen to the senior team leader at the Hangar, but he was still in the hospital recovering from injuries received on a bitch of a mission that had, among other things, landed him in a pit filled with genetically altered pit bulls. The smallest of those dogs had been 140 pounds. The rest of his team was in various states of recovery and rehab.

  Very frequently our job sucks.

  I’d brought the six remaining members of my own battered Echo Team with me to Brooklyn, and they were currently pitted against the last fourteen candidates. There was a lot of grunting, cursing, sweating, thudding, and groaning going on.

  Very little of it from my guys, I was happy to see. Happy, but not surprised. Echo Team has walked a lot of hard miles through the Valley of the Shadow.

  A wooden knife came sailing through the air, hit the mat in front of me, and bounced up to thud against the bomb. The resulting carroom was hollow. Most of the bomb was a shell; a Teller-Ulam case was enough to make a point during lectures. It had a dummy electronics package for disarming drills, but no fissile materials.

  We’re macho manly men, but we’re not stupid.

  As I watched, a Cro-Magnon-looking guy who’d been a first-team shooter for Delta grinned as he closed on the oldest man on Echo—Top Sims, who was pushing forty-five now. The Delta shooter saw an old man with gray threaded through his hair, a seamed brown face, and crow’s feet. Easy meat. The Delta bad boy grinned and went for it.

  The next thing the bad boy saw was the mat coming up to smack him in the face. I doubt he ever saw the punches and kicks Top used to knock a big chunk of ego off him. Next time maybe he’d fight the man rather than the assumption.

  Ghost glanced up as the man hit the deck, and I swear to God I heard him snicker.

  My guys—Top, Bunny, Lydia, Ivan, and Sam were dressed in black BDU trousers and T-shirts with the green Echo Team insignia on the chest. Someone—I suspect Bunny—had added a scroll of words around the insignia as an unofficial motto for the team: If It’s Weird and Pissed Off—We Shoot It.

  Crazy, but sometimes there is truth in advertising.

  Besides, lately there was a lot of very bad stuff happening in the world. The DMS was stretched way too thin, hence the push to recruit some newbies. There was not one field team operating at full compliment. Not even Buffalo Team in North Dakota, which was nicknamed the “sewing circle” because they usually had twice the downtime of other groups. Not anymore. Buffalo Team had been chopped pretty badly in three successive gigs that left them with only two uninjured operators and four with moderate injuries who could still roll out at need. Hell, even our frequent collaborators in SEAL Team Six and the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Teams were being run ragged. This wasn’t a new war against a single enemy. It was everywhere. Cartels rolling with body armor and high-tech firearms, religious fundamentalists with bombs, splinter cells buried like ticks in the skin of society, and let’s not forget a bunch of supposedly not officially sanctioned hit teams from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, neo-Nazis, and, yeah, even some secret societies. Everybody was cranky and
the bad guys seemed bent on turning the whole world into a war zone. We needed to replenish all of our existing teams that had taken losses and put additional teams in the field, and we needed to do it yesterday.

  I’d hoped we’d have more than fourteen left out of ninety-two. But one by one the candidates from that larger group had demonstrated qualities inconsistent with what we needed. Anyone who showed hesitation in a crisis was instantly cut. Anyone who couldn’t switch from pack member to leader and back again was gone. Anyone who lost a step when mission parameters were changed was out. Anyone who couldn’t take the bullshit, pain, and hardship we dealt was let go.

  That left fourteen.

  I set my coffee cup down and hefted my knife. This one was steel and it was sharp.

  “Incoming!” I yelled, and threw the knife randomly into the mass of tussling bodies.

  They all scattered, dodging and diving out of the way. All but one of them cut sharp looks at me as they moved. One guy, a wiry goofball with a shaved head, evaded the knife—which landed with a thunk in the middle of a training mat—but the way he did it pissed me off.

  “Top,” I said.

  Top had caught it too. His eyes blazed as he rose to his feet and bellowed, “Ten-shun!” with his leather-throated drillmaster’s voice. Everyone snapped to immediate attention, including the goofball. I picked up my coffee and sipped it while Top handled this.

  He got up in the kid’s face. Top is about six feet tall but when he’s mad he’s a roaring giant.

  “Soldier,” he roared, “what were you evading?”

  “Knife, sir.”

  “‘Sir’? Sir? Don’t call me sir, goddamn it. You think I’m an officer? I work for a living.”

  “Knife, Sergeant Major.”

  “Did you look to see if it was a knife?”

  “No, Sergeant Major, but I—”

  Top got a little closer. “How did you know it was a knife?”

  “It was a knife drill—”

  As soon as those first words were out the goofball tried to put the brakes on, tried to keep the rest of that sentence in his own head. I heard a couple of the other guys hiss the way people do when someone else steps barefoot into his own shit.

  Lydia and Bunny were silently shaking their heads. Sam sighed. I heard Ivan mutter, “Oh, hog balls.”

  No need to repeat exactly what Top said to the goofball. It was all bad, it was all nasty, and it was all deserved. In combat training you don’t react to what you think the drill is, you react to what is actually happening. It was a worse mistake than when the Delta shooter had underestimated Top. It was the kind of mistake a Special Forces operator should never make. There is no margin for error, no allowing for those kinds of assumptions. It made me wish I’d thrown a flash-bang instead of a knife, because that would have hammered home the point.

  “So you just assumed it was a knife because it was a knife drill,” roared Top, “Your psychic powers eliminated every other possibility so that you did not even have to so much as turn your head to see what you were evading?”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant Major, it won’t happen again.”

  “Tell me, son, who had the sheer audacity to send you to us?” demanded Top. “Who hates us that much?”

  “Army Rangers, Sergeant Major.”

  “Bullshit, son,” growled Top in a voice that shook the rafters. “I am an Army Ranger and Captain Ledger is an Army Ranger and the Army Rangers don’t have a clown college, so you can’t be an Army goddamn Ranger, now can you? I want you to get your shit and get the hell off of my training floor.” Top paused for a millisecond. “Why am I still looking at you?”

  It was harsh and it was humiliating, and usually neither Top nor I go in much for a public dressing-down. But it was such a rookie mistake that any operator who was here right now would have doubts about this kid when it came to real combat. That kind of split focus and weakened trust would get people killed. Not could get people killed—it absolutely would.

  The Department of Military Sciences is a tough gig. Mr. Church built it around teams of operators who were not among the best, they were the best. The top men and women recruited from active service in Delta, the SEALs, and elsewhere. The best of the best without exaggeration. It wasn’t an ego thing or a prestige thing. These soldiers had to be that good because of what we faced day in, day out.

  However, while I was watching this incident I wondered how an ordinary citizen would react. They’d probably think that this was comical, or that it was needlessly cruel. That it was a bunch of macho thugs comparing dicks. From a distance, it looked just like that. But if that same citizen could see guys like Top in real combat, fighting the monsters we fight, then they might take a longer pause before passing judgment. This isn’t a Sylvester Stallone flick and it’s not a comic book. This is the world, and the world is a far scarier place than Joe Ordinary will ever know.

  Ivan said, “Dog balls.”

  Most things were some species of balls to Ivan.

  The room fell into silence as the Ranger, his face flushed to scarlet, gathered up his gear and walked to the locker room. His backbone was straight, though, I’ll give him that. With luck, this incident will have burned out the last traces of slack assumption in him. He might go on to be the kind of soldier who would deserve his slot on our team. We’ll never know, though, because there are no callbacks in this theater.

  When the door closed, everyone turned toward me. My guys and the recruits. I looked at them, particularly the new guys, looking for resentment, for hostility, for accusing glares. Anyone who pinned his own emotion to what had just happened was going to split cab fare with the Ranger. All I saw were serious faces from the thirteen remaining candidates. I waited out a three-count and then gave them a single, curt nod.

  “Any questions?” I asked.

  There were none.

  “Very well,” I said. “New drill, Top—three to two, broken leg.”

  “Bite my balls,” said Ivan, but he was grinning, enjoying what was coming. Lydia laughed and punched him on the arm.

  Top gave me a curt nod. It was one of his favorite scenarios, too.

  The group was divided into five-man teams. Three bad guys, two good guys; but the kicker was that one of the good guys was to simulate having a badly broken leg. Working together, the good guys had to fight their way past the three opponents, cross fifty feet of the mat, and cross a safe line Top had taped on the far side. The bad guys were allowed to have wooden knives and clubs. The good guys were not.

  It was a bitch of an exercise. There were variations of it to simulate broken arms, being blinded, or in bigger groups having two soldiers protect a “shot” comrade from the whole rest of the team. There was nothing academic about any of this, most of the people in this room had already been in one real-life version of this kind of thing. And that’s a damn sad fact to report.

  Ghost, however, sat up to watch and was apparently entertained by the thuds of wood on skin and the sounds fighters made when their mock opponents weren’t feeling all fuzzy and warm.

  My phone rang. The screen display showed an icon of a steeple.

  My boss, Mr. Church. Before I could get anything else out he cut me off. “My office. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The Hangar

  Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

  Sunday, August 31, 11:33 a.m.

  Church was alone in his office and he gestured for me to close the door and sit. I dropped into a leather chair. Ghost sat in the corner, watching us both.

  “Captain,” Church said without preamble, “we are having an interesting day.”

  “I know. I heard about Riggs and the Berserkers.”

  “Before we get to that, where are we with the candidates? How soon before they’re ready to roll?”

  I sucked my teeth. “‘Roll’ as in begin official training, or ‘roll’ as in go into the field?”

  “The field.”

  “Ideally? Three weeks. Why, how much time
do I have?”

  “Almost none. We’re having an interesting day.”

  “I hate the word interesting.”

  He snorted. “So far most of what’s happening does not directly involve us, but I don’t like the way the day is shaping up. If things move in a certain direction I would hate to lose a step getting into gear. To that end, we may have to dismiss anyone who needs hand-holding and assign the rest where they’ll do the most good.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  He merely grunted. There was a beautiful cut-glass water pitcher and two glasses on his desk. He poured us each a glass. In the middle of the desk, perhaps slightly closer to him than me, was a plate of cookies. Church always had cookies. If he had to jump off a sinking ship in only his skivvies he’d land in a lifeboat that was stocked with cookies. They were either his only weakness—or perhaps the only proof of his humanity—or maybe there was some kind of significance to the cookies. To which ones were on offer apart from his ubiquitous vanilla wafers; and to the times he offered one, or didn’t, and how many he ate—and how often. Rudy and I have been trying to work it out for years. We were sure there was something there.

  Or maybe Rudy and I had become batshit paranoid. Jury was still out.

  Church took a vanilla wafer, tapped the crumbs off, took a small bite, and set the cookie down in the precise center of a paper napkin. “Have you watched the news this morning?”

  “No. Been busy making life miserable for the candidates. Why? Are the Berserkers—?”

  “No. We have no news on that situation. However, a bomb was detonated this morning at a sports center in Lexington, Kentucky. Initial reports suggest it was a backpack bomb similar to the Boston Marathon event some years ago.”

  “More Chechnyans?” I asked.

  “Witnesses say that the suspects were two teenage boys, probably Asian.” He described the situation. “This is breaking news, so you now know as much as I do. However, I rolled Moonshine Team to provide any on-site assistance, and I put them at the disposal of the ATF and local law.”

  “Okay.”

  “There was also an explosion at a law library in Gettysburg. One casualty, no witnesses. Nature of the bomb is unknown. So far no one is connecting the two, but I dislike coincidences. I sent Liberty Bell Team via helo to put eyes on that.”