by Jack Mars
Another voice, a different one this time. “Agent Stone, what about evacuating possible target cities?”
Luke rubbed his forehead. He almost couldn’t believe the extent of the problem they faced. There was a ton of back chatter on Susan’s end. He doubted anyone was even listening to him. Who were these people asking him questions?
“We can’t do that,” he said. “The attack might have already taken place. How can we know? If we start evacuations, it’ll cause panic, and people will run. Some of those people might be infected, but not showing symptoms yet. If people run, we could drive the disease out into a much wider dispersal area. No. We have to monitor for signs of the attack, catch it as soon as possible after it happens, then lockdown and quarantine.”
“Do you know what you’re suggesting?” a deep male voice said. “You’ll be trapping people in…”
The call dropped again. Luke sat up and sighed. He slid his phone onto the table in front of him. They weren’t going to do anything he suggested. It sounded like a very large cocktail party was going on over there. It sounded like intermission.
Swann was watching him. As soon as Luke put his phone down, Swann wiped the thin sandy hair out of his eyes. “Luke, how much space do you have left in your head?”
“Enough.”
Swann looked at his notes. “Okay. Jihadi social media basically went dead about an hour ago. There are kids still screwing around, of course, but the real jihadists have stopped talking. Also, their satellite phones are dead. Their safe house phones are dead. The video streams have dried up. Email has dried up. Everything is off the air. Our people monitor their networks twenty-four/seven. They tell me they’ve never seen anything quite like this before. Nobody is saying anything.”
“They don’t want any slip-ups,” Luke said. “They don’t want to say anything that gives us a hint or a lead to go on.”
Swann nodded. “That’s right, not even enough to make a guess. They’re showing remarkable discipline. They know we’re listening, and they’re not saying a word.”
Luke shook his head. The terrorists got more and more sophisticated all the time. The technology became more advanced, cheaper, and readily available. Companies made innovations, released them all the time, and the jihadis adopted the innovations the next day. Meanwhile, US government procurement officers took six weeks to move a memo from one side of the desk to the other. All of that stuff was a given.
But their ability to go silent was what bothered him. Luke had heard tell of how during World War Two, entire cities in the United States would go dark in seconds, as soon as the air raid sirens started. In major cities, like New York and Boston, everyone would shut out the lights at once. In those days, people were on the same page, everybody pulling in the same direction.
Now, people in the US were going eight hundred different directions at once. And it was the enemy that could turn their own lights off, so to speak, in seconds. Luke wasn’t sure what that meant.
Trudy hung up her phone. “We’ve got six planes that will be airborne within an hour, five hundred personal protection suits and one hundred infrared thermometers on each one.”
“Six planes? Trudy…”
“I’m going as fast as I can, Luke. That’s three thousand hazmat suits and accessories, in the air, an hour from now. And I started making these calls fifteen minutes ago.”
He shook his head. There was a shortage of hazmat suits in the country, and the ones that existed were at a premium. The idea was to get as many suits and infrared thermometers airborne as possible. When the attack came, if it came, the suits could fly directly to the city affected, and be put into the hands of first responders as fast as possible. It was a cockamamie idea, and it made Luke all the more worried because he had thought of it. So far, it was the best he could come up with.
But six planes? Jesus. Sixty planes wouldn’t be enough. It was a big country.
He looked at Ed. “What about you?”
Ed shrugged. He was still on the phone, but apparently waiting for someone to come back. “Pretty good, not perfect. We’ve got a chopper, an MH-60 Black Hawk with some anti-radar stealth technology. Night Stalkers are going to loan it to us, as long as I promised not to lose it. We’ve got our own SRT pilots, Rachel and Jacob, en route to Key West right now. They’re hitching a ride on two Navy F-18s, moving down the coast at about a thousand miles per hour.”
“Good so far,” Luke said. “What about the drop teams?”
“We’ve got a three-man SEAL sniper team, just got into Key West from a mission in parts unknown. Their CO left it up to them. They’re tired, but they’re willing to go airborne again. I figure you can round out that foursome.”
“Good,” Luke said. “What else?”
Ed shrugged. “Maybe not as good. We’ve got four Seventy-Fifth Rangers doing underwater crash survival training at the pool in Key West. They’re all young, and none of them have seen combat.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “If I’m riding with the sniper team, we’ll go in first. The young guys will support. We’ll tell them not to shoot us in the back.”
Ed nodded. “Fine.”
Luke picked up his phone again. He dialed in to the Washington conference call. A robot voice asked for his security code. He punched it in and at the tone, he announced himself.
“Luke Stone,” he said. “Back again.”
“Luke, where are you right now?” Susan Hopkins said. Finally, Susan Hopkins, and she was speaking to him.
“I’m over the Gulf of Mexico, maybe an hour from Key West.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to talk to a man who might know what city will be hit.”
A male voice chimed in. “In Key West?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“Uh, I can’t really tell you that right now.”
“Stone,” Richard Monk said, “this isn’t the wild west. If you have information, or you plan to go on an operation, you need to tell us what you’re doing. You need to coordinate your activities with the Joint Special Operations…”
Luke pressed the red button on his phone. He placed the phone on the table in front of him again. It was becoming a long day. He looked at his team.
“Damn phone. Keeps dropping the call.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
3:23 p.m.
Joint Interagency Task Force South, Naval Air Station Key West
“You sure you’re up for this?” Luke said.
“Up for what?” Ed said, huffing and puffing the slightest amount. “Man, I was born for this.”
The sun rose high and hot over the palm trees. The low-slung buildings of the naval air station and the larger flight control tower squatted in the shimmering, baking heat of afternoon. A slight breeze did nothing to cool off the day.
The Black Hawk helicopter looked like a drab green insect parked on the flight line. Luke and Ed walked out onto the tarmac, Luke carrying a green satchel loaded with weapons, Ed gimping along on his crutches.
As they moved along, a fighter jet took off a quarter mile away, its engine noise nearly deafening. A moment later, the jet reached the sound barrier. If the takeoff was loud, the roar of the sonic boom was more than loud—it seemed to rip a hole in the fabric of reality.
Luke smiled. “We got a bunch of hard-headed Navy SEALs and a gaggle of Seventy-Fifth Rangers right out of grade school waiting for us on that chopper. They’re going to think you’re some far out old man, waiting to collect his social security check.”
“You’re older than I am,” Ed said.
“Yeah, but I’m not debilitated like you are.”
“Fair enough,” Ed said. “I guess I’ll just have to prove my mettle by grabbing the biggest SEAL in there and kicking his butt up and down this chopper pad.”
Luke laughed. “That’ll spice things up some. Maybe you should wait until we’re out over the water.”
The chopper’s engine whined into life as they approached. The four rotor
blades began to turn, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. Luke and Ed reached the cabin and climbed on board.
Seven men in jumpsuits and helmets watched them as they entered.
“Gentlemen!” Luke shouted over the noise of the chopper blades. “I’m Luke Stone of the Special Response Team. I’m your commanding officer on this trip. Thanks for joining us today. I’m former Seventy-Fifth Rangers and former Delta Force, so I know what you guys are about. This is my partner, Ed Newsam. Don’t let the crutches fool you. He’s former Eighty-Seventh Airborne and former Delta. He’s hell in a wheelchair. I’ll brief you guys on the operation as soon as we get in the air.”
“Sir!” a voice rang out. “When did you join the Rangers, sir?”
Luke looked at the face attached to the voice. The other guys looked young, but this kid was positively cherubic. Basic training, AIT, and Ranger School hadn’t burned the baby fat off his cheeks. Luke glanced at the name tag sewn into his jumpsuit.
SOMMELIER.
“You go by the English or the French pronunciation?” Luke said.
“So-mee-yay, sir! Charles! Private First Class!”
The kid next to him smiled. “Sir, we call him Charlie Something.”
Luke nearly laughed. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Sir, no one can pronounce his name, sir.”
Luke looked at the wiseass kid again. “Well, Sommelier, how old are you?”
“Nineteen, sir.”
“Then I joined the Rangers around the time you were born.”
“Yes, sir. No surprise there, sir.”
Luke moved up front to the cockpit. A man and a woman in visor helmets and green camouflage flight suits sat surrounded by blue sky through the cockpit windows, and a bewildering array of controls and displays practically against their knees.
These were the SRT mission pilots, Luke’s pilots, Rachel and Jacob.
They were old friends of his, and they’d flown together for years. Both of them were former U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The 160th SOAR were the Delta Force of helicopter pilots.
Rachel was as tough as they came. You don’t join an elite group of Army special operations pilots as a woman. You brawl your way in. Which was perfect for Rachel—her off-work hobby was cage fighting. Luke liked Rachel. She had dark auburn hair. She was brawny like the old Rosie the Riveter posters. Big arms, big legs, big all over, and barely an ounce of it fat.
Meanwhile, Jacob was as steady as a rock. His calm under fire was legendary, almost surreal. His hobby was mountaintop meditation retreats. Physically, he was nearly the opposite of Rachel. He was thin and reedy. He looked nothing like your typical elite soldier. The thing he had going for him, besides his profound sense of calm, was that he was probably one of the ten best helicopter pilots alive on Earth.
“How we doing, kids?” Luke said. “Ready for another crime fighting adventure?”
“We live for adventure,” Rachel said. “Where we headed?”
“We’re taking this thing to Cuba,” Luke said.
Jacob smiled. “Nice. I bet they’d love to get their hands on this thing.”
“We’re not going to land in Cuba,” Luke said. “Though it would be fun to dance the night away in Havana with Rachel here.”
“You know how to sweep a girl off her feet,” Rachel said, smiling while her hands flipped switches in front of her.
“There’s a yacht about a mile out from Varadero. We’re going to fly in below radar and I’m going to drop in with some of these guys in the transport hold. There’s a Saudi billionaire on that boat and we’re going to extract him.”
“So we’re gonna drop the basket for him?”
Luke nodded. “That’s probably easiest. I’m not expecting a lot of cooperation from this guy. With that in mind, I don’t want to tip people off that we’re coming. What’s the odds of getting across the water without picking up a funeral procession of Cuban choppers?”
Jacob shrugged. “Here? This is one of the busiest air stations we have. You’ve got Navy strike fighter squadrons, Marine Corps attack squadrons, and Air National Guard rescue squadrons doing training exercises. You’ve got Navy P-3s looking for drug smugglers. There are so many American planes and choppers in the air, we own the skies west to the Dry Tortugas and south to the edge of Cuban airspace. To the Cubans, we’ll look like more of the same for the first sixty or seventy miles. Then we’ll drop low and come in just above the water. If you guys do your thing fast enough, by the time they pick us up, we’ll be back among the friendlies.”
“All right,” Luke said. “Let’s hit it, then.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
4:05 p.m.
The Skies Approaching Varadero, Cuba
“We don’t tolerate resistance,” Luke said. “Someone shoots, someone so much as shows a weapon, they’re out of the game. Copy?”
He glanced through the wide open doorway. The chopper rode low over the water, moving fast. It was probably close to its max air speed, around 180 miles per hour. The dark blue water went by in a dizzying blur, almost close enough to touch. A hot wind blew in, buffeting his face and body.
“Copy,” the men around him said. “Copy that.”
Luke crouched on a low-slung bench in the chopper’s personnel hold. He felt that old trickle of fear, of adrenaline, of excitement. He had swallowed a Dexedrine pill twenty minutes before, and it was starting to kick in. It had been a long day already, but suddenly he felt sharper and more alert than before.
He knew the drug’s effects. His heart rate was up. His pupils were dilating, letting in more light and making his vision better. His hearing was more acute. He had more energy, more stamina, and he could remain awake for a long time. Dexies were old friends of his.
His two teams sat forward on their benches, eyes on him. The two groups made an eye-catching combination. To his right sat three grizzled, thick-bodied Navy SEALs, each with full beards, Oakley sunglasses, bullet scars, and bizarre intaglios of tattoos wrapped around bulging muscles. Their eyes were sharp, but relaxed. To his left sat four young guys, sporting the lean and mean bodies of athletes not that far out of high school, clean-shaven, eyes wide and excited and nervous.
Luke’s helmet was patched in to the pilots in the chopper cockpit, as well as to Swann back at the Naval Air Station.
“Jacob,” he said. “What kind of time are we looking at before this airspace becomes unfriendly?”
Jacob’s voice was calm as always. “If we catch the Cubans napping, we might be able to hold a position in here for as long as seven or eight minutes. Ideally, I’d like to see you guys drop in, acquire the target, and load back up in three to five minutes. I have a feeling we’ll be racing for the exits at that point.”
“Swann, what are we looking at on the bridge of that ship?”
“I’ve got a real-time satellite feed direct from the deck right now. I’d say we’re looking at one part dance party, one part Oktoberfest, and one part freak show. Omar has about twenty or thirty girls with him on there, and a handful of men. I’m tracking a man I think is Omar on the top deck. He has short black hair, and a tattoo of a black horse on his right pectoral muscle. He’s wearing a pair of red shorts and no shirt. Careful, though. He’s dancing with four women around him.”
Luke stared at his men. They had heard every word from both Swann and Jacob. “All we want is Omar. We don’t want a gunfight, but we stop anybody who does. We don’t hurt the girls. When we get on deck, use simple Spanish to clear them out of the way. Caer al suelo! is good. It means ‘Drop to the floor.’ You can shorten it to Al suelo! Push a couple of them down. The rest will get the idea.”
A Navy SEAL had the stub of an unlit cigar in his mouth. He smiled. His voice had a little bit of Texas in it. “I don’t say a word. When people see me coming, they start crawling on the ground all by themselves. Just like worms. Don’t ask me why that happens.”
Luke ignored his comment, but directed his words to the SEALs. “
A-team, we go straight to Omar, bag him, and bring him out.”
“Easy as pie,” one of them said.
“B-team, you support and cover us. You secure the drop site, and you hold it while we bring Omar up. You’re the last men out. Eyes sharp, heads on a swivel. Nobody moves against us. If A-team goes inside the boat, you two hold the drop site, you two move up and hold the entryways.”
He pointed with his index and middle finger at each duo when he gave them their assignments. Their faces were so young! Was that what he looked like when he was a Ranger? He felt like he was diagramming a play for players on the junior high school basketball team.
“Are we clear?”
“Clear.”
“Ed, you with me?”
Ed had wedged himself standing up in the doorway on the other side. He was propped behind a big door-mounted M240 machine gun.
“Always,” he said.
“Crowd control, but we’re not shooting girls today.”
“Only with my love gun,” Ed said.
“We are shooting bad guys, though. You’ve got all the latitude you need to interpret that. I want to drop eight men, and bring nine back up. Everybody healthy and happy. The men on the boat? I’m not going to lose sleep, all right?”