by Andrew Watts
The War Planners Series: Books 1-3
The War Planners, The War Stage, and Pawns of the Pacific
Andrew Watts
Point Whiskey Publishing
Contents
The War Planners Series: Books 1-3
The War Planners
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
The War Stage
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Pawns of the Pacific
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
What’s next?
GLIDEPATH
About the Author
The War Planners Series: Books 1-3
Reading order:
* * *
Book 1: The War Planners
Book 2: The War Stage
Book 3: Pawns of the Pacific
andrewwattsauthor.com
Copyright © Point Whiskey Publishing, 2017, all rights reserved.
First edition 2017.
Point Whiskey Publishing
Edited by Eliza Dee
Two tigers cannot share one mountain.
—Chinese proverb
The War Planners
1
In war, truth is the first casualty.
—Aeschylus
Present Day
David Manning had an important mission to complete before heading to his Vienna, Virginia home after work. He had texted his wife to tell her that he was leaving, then went to pick up their ritual Friday dinner. Pizza night had become a favorite end-of-week routine for his family. He turned onto I-66 heading west just as the glow of his cell phone lit up the inside of his car. He swiped across the screen to answer, and his wife Lindsay’s voice came over the car’s speakers.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
“Hey, Lins. How was your day?”
“Pretty good. I did a Mommy and Me class today. Just so you know, those things were a lot easier when I didn’t have a double stroller.”
David heard the delight-filled screams of his oldest daughter, followed by a series of terrified barks. He said, “What was that?”
Lindsay said, “Well, it appears that your daughter has decided that the dog is a pony. She keeps chasing it around the house and trying to ride it. I believe she picked it up from a TV show.”
“Uh-oh. Maybe we should have gotten a bigger dog?” David smiled, picturing his mischievous daughter and the unfortunate Jack Russell terrier.
“Mmm,” she agreed. Then, “Maddie, please leave him alone.” She sounded tired, David thought.
He said, “Hang in there, I’m almost home.”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’m looking forward to date night on the couch tonight. I’ve got the movie all picked out. It’s a chick flick. You’ve been traveling too much. You owe me.”
“Anything you say, babe.” He smiled to himself.
“Here, Maddie wants to talk—”
David said, “Okay, I’ll talk to you—”
“Hi, Daddy!” came his daughter’s voice.
“Hey, Maddie. How’s it going? Are you being good to the doggy?”
“Yeeesss.”
“Your mom said that you—”
Click. His phone’s screen went red, signaling that the call had ended.
David smiled and shook his head. No need to call back. He would be home soon. David’s calls often ended prematurely when his three-year-old daughter got the phone. She loved that red button. It was like the phone makers designed it to tempt kids to press. Oh well.
David scrolled through the radio stations and landed on NPR. They were replaying a news story that he had heard this morning on China beginning to unload much of the American debt that it owned. China’s steel production had also slowed. US markets were getting jittery. They quoted the usual experts, who gave their opinions on whether catastrophe was waiting around the corner. David flipped the radio to the oldies channel.
Traffic was heavy. Rain began sprinkling the windshield, blurring the red taillights ahead. I-66 was moving, but slowly. After about twenty minutes of driving he took the Nutley exit towards Vienna.
Joe’s Pizza and Pasta was at the intersection of Nutley Street and Maple Avenue. David pulled into the parking lot and walked inside. It was a typical Friday night at Joe’s. Loud conversations drowned out soft rock. Waitresses delivered plastic pitchers of soda and crushed ice. Suburbanite families stuffed their mouths with salad and hot slices of pepperoni pizza.
The pizzeria employees knew David by sight.
“Hey, Mr. Manning! The usual, eh?” said the mustached man behind the register. It looked like he had his younger brother next to him, learning to run the register.
David smiled and said hello. He was pretty sure that everyone who worked in the restaurant was related. He paid, took the two boxes, and then walked back out to the parking lot. The bell on the door jingled as he left. The cool fall rain was coming down heavier now.
As he got to his car, a black SUV sped past in the parking lot, splashing through puddles in the pavement. The man in the passenger seat gave him a funny look, like he was waiting on him. David ignored it and placed the pizza boxes in the car. Some people were just impatient.
On the drive home, the scent of garlic and oregano wafted through the air. Those delicious smells tempted him, but David remained disciplined in his most solemn of marital pacts. It was a well-documented fact that opening up the pizza box before arriving home would reduce the temperature of the pizza and raise the temperature of his Italian wife—and not in a good way.
A few minutes later, he parked his Toyota sedan on the curb outside of his house. It was usually a busy Vienna neighborhood, filled with upper-middle-class families walking their dogs and cooking out in their backyards. Today, the rain had sent everyone inside. David was starving. He couldn’t wait to crack open a cold beer and take that first bite of steaming pizza.
He stepped out of the car, pizza boxes in hand, and felt tiny droplets of rain coming down on the back of his neck.
“David?”
The voice behind him sounded friendly. Relaxed. It had the casual tone of someone that could have been an old buddy from the past, or maybe a neighbor. There was no reason to brace himself for what was to come.
He twisted around to see who was
calling his name. He never got a good look at the men. It all happened too fast.
The already dark street went pitch black as a bag was yanked over his head. The sound of his shoes skidding off the pavement was briefly audible as his feet went out from under him. He heard a clap as the cardboard pizza boxes fell to the street. He felt himself falling but never hit the ground. Strong hands moved with precision, grabbing him, holding him up, and wrapping something around the bag over his head, pulling it tight around his mouth so he couldn’t talk. Panic filled him. He writhed and wrestled with every ounce of energy he could muster, but there were just too many strong hands.
They were carrying him now. Disoriented and afraid, he no longer knew which way was up. He tried to move as much as he could but the gripping hands had him in some sort of wrestling hold. He tried to scream, but with the gag over his mouth, all that came out were pathetic, muffled attempts.
David fought to get out of the grip of those hands—how many he wasn’t sure. He felt like they were all over his body. A mix of feelings rushed through him: fear, anger, and the urge to urinate. He felt violated. He had no control now. He kept trying to yell for help.
Had Lindsay seen him? He was right outside their home. If she’d happened to look out the window she could get help…
He felt his knees being bent, and his arms pulled together behind his back. Before David knew it, he was hog-tied and tossed on something flat and metallic. He landed with a loud and painful thud. A metallic door slammed shut. The ambient noises of the street grew dull. He was pretty sure that he was inside a car trunk or the back of a van.
There were no voices. No jingle of keys. A faint vibration told him that an engine was already running. Then a jolt of motion shifted his body. They were on the go. Shit.
David had been kidnapped in the blink of an eye. But no eyes had seen it. He was pretty sure that no one in his neighborhood had been outside in the rain. Lindsay would be in the kitchen or the playroom, neither of which had a view of the street. He should have been sitting down with Lindsay and the girls right now. Instead, David was left alone with his panic.
Rapid streams of thought flowed through his mind as his body jerked with each turn of the vehicle. Who had taken him? What could they possibly want?
His job. It had to be his job.
David worked at In-Q-Tel. It was a venture-capital firm unlike any other. In-Q-Tel was a nonprofit firm in Arlington, Virginia. Its sole purpose was to invest in and secure the most advanced information technology for use by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. His job was to identify and evaluate new technologies that could be acquired and used by the government.
The people who had taken him must want information on something he’d worked on. Some technology. But David jumped from project to project every few months. He had worked there for a number of years now. They could be after information on any number of dozens of highly classified projects.
David tried to think. One of them had spoken his name in English. He tried to remember if there was an accent. He didn’t think so. If they were terrorists, would they have an accent? David was way out of his league. He had been in the Navy for a while. But he had been an officer for only a few months before being let go due to a combination of bad eyesight and budget cuts. He had never deployed or done anything really exciting.
His current job was equally mundane. It sounded a lot more interesting than it really was. He’d spent his first few years out of the Navy working for In-Q-Tel as a low-level tech researcher. His recent promotion meant that he traveled more and got to work on the higher priority projects. But it was still research. David got all of his information about terrorists and spies from books, TV, and the occasional NPR story.
Could they be terrorists? Members of a foreign intelligence service? If he had to guess, these guys were probably from a foreign government. The technology that David worked on would be most valuable in the hands of nations that had the funding and resources to effectively put it to use.
Would the Russians do something like this? Or the Iranians? Would they have spies that had good enough language skills that they wouldn’t have any accent? Would either of those countries take a risk like that? It wasn’t like David could build them the technology. He just knew about the applications: how new voice-recognition software could identify a particular bad guy, or how a new type of computer virus could beat the protection software. Who would want that information badly enough to capture a US employee on American soil? Weren’t they stealing it all through cyberwarfare anyway? The United States wouldn’t stand for this. He had to calm down. The government would find him. Rescue him. Right?
But no one had seen him. Maybe the government would never find out. God, he hoped he wasn’t going to die. Death might or might not be imminent. He didn’t know. But being tied up and blindfolded in the back of a car like this certainly didn’t bode well for his health. David thought about his loved ones. He tried to remember his last interaction with each of them.
He remembered telling his wife, Lindsay, that he loved her when he left for work that morning. He had kissed her on the cheek as she nursed their youngest daughter, Taylor. Lindsay’s eyes had been half-closed as she sat in the rocking chair, but she had smiled. David traveled often now. Lindsay held the house together. She practically raised the kids herself. She was the perfect companion. He owed her everything, and loved her more every day, if that was possible.
He had kissed his oldest daughter Maddie on the cheek as she slept in her bed. Was that the last time he would see them? If he had known, he would have told his wife a thousand times how much he loved her. He never would have let go of his daughters. They were the best part of his life. He couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing them again.
David felt the car turn sharply to the left. The engine thrummed louder and the increasing vibrations told him that they were accelerating. Rhythmic bumps in the road, spaced out every few seconds. Must be a highway. Goddammit, where were they taking him?
He didn’t know why, but he thought of his mother. His wrists hurt from the zip ties being too tight. His whole body was sore from being contorted at an odd angle in the trunk. He was scared as hell that he was going to be killed. And here he was, thinking of his mom, who he hadn’t seen in quite some time. Maybe he did know why. Maybe it was because he was afraid that they would be reunited soon.
David tried to think of the last time he’d visited his mother. It was a year earlier, in the large waterfront home his parents had owned near Annapolis, Maryland. He tried to remember the last thing he had said to her but couldn’t. It was probably about his work. She was always telling him that he worked too hard and too long, and that the government couldn’t keep pushing people like that. That Mrs. Green’s son from church had a government job and he was home every day at 4 p.m. and never had to travel.
He hoped he hadn’t been condescending in his response. She only said those things because she cared for him. If she were still around, she would be devastated if he was hurt—or worse. A Navy wife for more than thirty-five years, she had been tough as nails and dedicated to her three children. She had practically raised them on her own with their father gone so much. He wished she had still been around when Taylor was born. It would have been nice to let her see one more crying grandchild. A slice of heaven for a dying grandmother. But hardship and sacrifice was the way of life in a military family like the Mannings where it was expected that—.
The car came to a sudden halt, followed by the sound of doors opening and shutting. There was an anxious hotness in his chest that he thought could be the start to a panic attack, although he had never had one so he wasn’t sure. Would they hurt him?
He could hear men talking—in English. The sound of a jet engine spooling up told him that they were at an airport. Not good. This could only get worse if they got him out of the country.
David heard the trunk open and felt a rush of cool air. Then the hands grabbed him again. It was more than two
people. Not a fair fight even if he had use of his arms and legs. Tied up, his chances were precisely zero. They moved him swiftly. David gave up struggling. There was no point. He felt cowardly for not fighting. He tried to justify it in his mind. He told himself that he was saving up his strength, but deep down he knew it was just reality setting in. David had completely lost control of the situation.
It felt like there were zip ties around his legs, feet, and hands. He barely had the ability to move and was almost certain that the loss of circulation had made his limbs fall asleep. God, he had to pee. The fear made it worse. If they didn’t untie him he was just going to go. What was there to lose? Now they were lifting and pushing him up. The loud sound of the jet engine indicated that they were likely putting him on a plane. He was going to get thrown into a dark prison cell and be tortured by someone who barely spoke English. He had seen enough on TV to know how it went.
They set him down gently enough on what felt like a cushioned surface.