The Polaris Protocol pl-5

by Brad Taylor

  The explosion was huge inside the closed vehicle, the smoke and smell of burned powder filling it. The driver held up his hands, saying, “No, no. Please don’t.”

  The sicario said, “Move over. Get in the passenger seat.”

  The driver sat still in fear. “Don’t, please. Don’t kill me.”

  “Move over. Now.”

  “Why? Why why why?”

  The sicario pressed the barrel into his head and said, “Because I’m taking this car and I don’t want to drive sitting in blood. Move.”

  The driver began to cry, but he opened the door and pushed the body to the pavement. He turned around and said, “We weren’t going to hurt you. Please, I have a wife. A daughter.”

  The sicario paused, intrigued. He placed his black eyes on the man and asked, “What does that have to do with anything? Would having a wife and daughter prevent a fox from killing your chickens?”

  The driver was confused by the statement. He opened his mouth to speak, his lips sliding over his teeth, but no words came out. He looked at the sicario in fear, willing to say anything to prevent what was coming but having no idea what words would succeed. The sicario was disappointed. Another man who had no answers. He pulled the trigger, shattering teeth and severing the spinal cord. The sicario pushed him out of the seat, letting the body flop on top of the other man’s. He closed the door and backed out of the alley, the front tire rolling over an outstretched arm.

  He was unsure of his exact location, not having paid attention during the drive, and gave up trying to find the store he’d given them. Instead, he began circling the neighborhood, looking for the familiar black and yellow sign.

  He made several left turns and was growing frustrated when he saw what he wanted: a small grocery store with a placard advertising Western Union.

  He parked on the side, the passenger door pinned in by a wall to prevent some curious passerby from seeing the mess in the front seat. The store was empty, making his job infinitely easier. He turned and locked the front door, then went to the counter.

  The woman behind it had seen his actions, and when she saw his destroyed visage, she shrank back, praying under her breath.

  He said, “I’m not here to harm you. I want to withdraw a transfer from Western Union.”

  She nodded rapidly in relief and said, “I need the MTCN and your first and last name.”

  He said, “Arthur Booth, but I have no MTCN. What is that?”

  “The money transfer control number. It’s the number the person sending it should have given you so you could receive it.”

  He leaned into the counter and said, “I just want to know if a man named Arthur Booth received money. Can you check for me?”

  Trembling, she said, “I’m not allowed to do that. Please.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then said, “Is that what you really want to tell me?”

  A man outside rattled the handle of the door, then knocked. The sicario said, “Don’t turn this into violence. Check for me, please.”

  She began typing, and he went to the door. He opened it, said, “We’re closed for inventory,” then shut it in the man’s face before he could say a word.

  He returned to the counter and she said, “Yes. An Arthur Booth received four thousand dollars from a Western Union in the United States. The transaction has already been completed.”

  “Can you tell me where? What store did the transfer?”

  Her lip quivering, she said, “No. It doesn’t show that. It just shows it was completed.”

  “Who sent it?”

  “I don’t know. Usually you don’t have to give any information like that. The only person who has to show identification would be the receiver. To prove he was who he said he was.”

  She seemed to collapse in on herself, fearing what the sicario would do. He said, “He wouldn’t have to show identification even for that amount of money?”

  Seeing a lifeline, her eyes lit up, and she said, “Yes, yes. Maybe. That would be considered a suspicious transfer in the United States.”

  She began typing again, and he saw her exhale. “It’s here. The amount was flagged, and the sender had to provide his name and address.”

  She wrote down the information and handed it to him. He read it, seeing he would be going deeper into America than he had intended. The address was for someone named Peter Scarborough in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.

  He knew Booth was gone. Probably in the air, flying to America right this moment. The sicario had no idea where he would go or what he would do to hide.

  But this Peter Scarborough did.

  67

  “What was the heat state when you left?” said Pike. “What’s our compromise status?”

  Jennifer tried to turn her head, but Decoy held it in place, saying, “Stop moving. Look right at me and keep holding your hair back. I want you to follow this light with your eyes.”

  She did so, then said, “We’re good at the museum. They have no idea what happened. They heard some noises, but when the policeman brought me around, I claimed I’d been mugged. He asked about explosions and I said I had no idea what he was talking about. He took a statement from me, so he’s got my name, but I used our cover of Grolier Recovery Services. Made absolute sense to be there. And I had the pocket litter and identification to back it up.”

  Decoy said, “I don’t think she’s got a concussion, but we should get her checked out by someone who isn’t a witch doctor.”

  Pike said, “You’re the best we’ve got right now. Put that med-lab training to good use. Patch her up.”

  Decoy squatted down at her level and gingerly touched her scalp with an antiseptic. She gritted her teeth at the sting but said nothing, waiting on him to “accidentally” poke the wound in retaliation for her mistake.

  After dealing with the police, she’d been allowed to go. Well, more precisely, they didn’t seem to have any overarching plan, and she’d wandered off. Knowing bad news never got better with age, she’d called Pike. And told him what had happened.

  I had the Ghost and was escorting him out. Then I let him escape free and clear. By the way, he has my weapon as well.

  She didn’t use those exact words, but it had been the toughest phone call she’d ever had to make. She knew full well what the impact would be. While they had been on a high-speed chase complete with a firefight, she’d let a captured terrorist shackled with a GPS locator escape. Not only that, she had facilitated it. She knew her reputation was done. Now she was simply waiting on the fallout.

  Strangely enough, it hadn’t happened yet. The minute she’d walked in the room, everyone had taken one look at her and wanted to know if she was okay. At first she was convinced it was because she was female and they were showing a protective streak. But she knew the hotwash was coming. She’d seen them before as a bystander, brutal after-action reviews where they analyzed all mistakes to prevent future occurrences. Nobody was spared regardless of their position on the team, and that was where she would be fired.

  Pike said, “I think we’re good at the market as well. Decoy managed to get our SUV out of the area before the police showed up, and we weren’t stopped getting back to the hotel with the computer.”

  Decoy placed two butterfly bandages on her cut and said, “Amazing what a wad of cash will do for you in Mexico. Most expensive SUV I’ve ever purchased, but it was worth it. They even took out the registration history of the rental.”

  He rose and said, “She’s good to go. She’s going to look like an abused wife for a couple of weeks, but she doesn’t need stitches. The shoulder wound is worse than the head one, but that’s just a puncture from shrapnel. It’ll heal on its own.”

  Eyes downcast, she said, “Thanks.”

  He nudged her. When she looked up he winked and said, “I see what you’re thinking. Don’t. That was a gutsy move.”

  He went back to the anteroom of the suite with the rest of the team, leaving her alone with Pike.

  Here it
comes.

  Pike said, “You got any ideas at all where the Ghost was headed? Did he say anything?”

  “No. Nothing. He just begged for me to get the cuffs off. If I had done it sooner, I’d still have him. If I hadn’t waffled…”

  He sat down facing her. “Cut that shit out. Look, this was my mistake, not yours. I never thought they’d initiate a long-term outage before making the sale. Never figured those cuffs would be something to worry about.”

  “Pike, you don’t need to protect me. I know I screwed up. I know how much the Oversight Council thought this was a bad idea, and I proved them right.”

  He glanced at the door, making sure it was closed, then leaned in and kissed her forehead, right next to her wound.

  “You always think I’m protecting you because you don’t understand your own worth. You never have. What you did today earned the respect of every man on this team. They’re out there right now wondering what they would have done, and not all are sure they would have risked their lives to save the Ghost. They know it was the right call, but they’re wondering if they would have made it.”

  Staring vacantly at the ground, she said, “Pike, he was screaming in the dirt. I felt the cuffs vibrating. I had to do it. I thought the things were going to go off while I was working the lock…. I don’t know what I could have… ”

  He lightly punched her in the shoulder, knocking her back into the present. “Hey, you did good. Don’t dwell on it. Whatever you do, don’t let this action cloud something in the future. Keep your compass. It’s served you well in the past and will do so in the future. We’ll get him again. I told you, it was my mistake.”

  She didn’t believe him. About whose mistake it was, anyway. She did believe that he thought she’d done the right thing, and that meant a great deal to her. Like it always did. She wasn’t so sure of the team. Although Decoy had winked at her, giving her encouragement.

  But that guy is always trying to get in my pants. Would he have said it if he knew about Pike and me?

  Blood opened the door and said, “VPN’s up. Kurt’s on the line. Time for a disaster report.”

  Pike grinned at him and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a SITREP quite this bad where someone wasn’t KIA. This’ll be a record.”

  68

  I exited the bedroom with Jennifer in tow, wondering how I was going to spin this disaster. Well, that’s not true. There was no spin in our world. The facts spoke for themselves, and, unlike on the Sunday talk shows, the repercussions were for keeps. Whatever the reason, we had lost both the American and the Ghost. We’d captured the device, but it was apparently ticking down to a catastrophic GPS outage, and we couldn’t get into the computer to stop it.

  A disaster all around, and spinning words like a politician wouldn’t make the facts any different. Our job was to stop the catastrophe. Their job was to cloak how it was done, using their words to protect us. We each had our missions, and while theirs disgusted me, I understood the necessity of both.

  After some pleasantries, I told Kurt the entire team was in the room, just to let him know who was listening. They were mostly off camera, and I didn’t want him to say something that was only meant for me.

  He said, “I’m assuming since you’re all sitting here the meeting for the device is over. So, give me some good news. I have a council update in an hour.”

  I told him what we had with the computer, then how we couldn’t affect the countdown.

  He said, “And it’s going off in twelve hours?”

  “Was. It was going off in twelve hours. It’s down to about seven now.”

  “Seven. Great. Just perfect. That’s about the same time as Operation Gimlet.”

  “Have them strike early. What’s the big deal with that?”

  “We can’t penetrate the Syrian air defenses with a strike from a carrier group. It’s not like Afghanistan. We don’t own air superiority. Syria is one tough nut to crack, especially for a surgical attack. The strike package is a flight of B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. We need the stealth capability, but the trade-off is reaction time. The B-2s are the only ones that can accomplish the mission, and they’re already in the air. It’s a fifteen-hour flight, and they’re halfway to the target.”

  Shit.

  He continued. “Where’s the American? It’s his computer. Make him crack the code.”

  “Sir, he escaped.”

  I told him about the Ghost hitting the panic button, triggering early, and the meeting devolving into a nest of rabbits scattering at the sight of a hawk.

  He heard the story, then asked the next obvious question. “And the Ghost? Where is he?”

  I took a deep breath, then told that story as well. I saw him put his head into his hands on the screen. I said, “Sir, it had to be done. He was—”

  He looked up and interrupted. “Was what? About to escape? What the hell is going on down there? Where’s Jennifer? How could she let him get away?”

  From the side, away from the team and all by herself, Jennifer said, “I’m here, Kurt. I did what I thought was right. I made a bad call.”

  She looked like she wanted to crawl into a hole. Completely ashamed to be in the room. It aggravated the hell out of me, but I knew if I said something, it would have no weight. Kurt understood we were close, even if he didn’t understand how close.

  It turned out I didn’t have to say a word.

  Kurt said, “Jennifer, I understand you’re a civilian and haven’t been in the military, but the repercussions of this are going to—”

  That’s as far as he got. Blood stood up and moved into view of the camera, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sir, with all due respect, she made the right call. I’d have done the same thing.”

  Kurt said, “But you don’t understand what the council is going to say. You don’t understand how this is going to affect our operations. We’ll be pulled—”

  He was cut off by Decoy, who rose and crowded the camera as well. “Bullshit. You don’t get to pick what’s right based on what some council will think. It either is or it isn’t. And Jennifer’s call was right.”

  Kurt leaned back in his chair, rocking and thinking. An operator now working solely in the shark tank of politics, trying to remember what he used to know. What it was like on the ground. He turned back to the camera and said, “Yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. Maybe I’ve been in DC too long. The call was right. I’m with you, but that doesn’t solve my problem. Pike, you there?”

  I pushed through. “Yes, sir.”

  “You know I’m going to have to pull her. I don’t want to, but I need a head. With the report I’m about to give, I need something to show we’re not all fuckups. She’s going to get flushed. Before you say anything, we’ve got too much at stake. I have to get Oversight Council approval to continue, and I can’t get that without their thinking we’re tracking and correcting. They’ll need something tangible with this disaster of a report. Jennifer’s it.”

  I could see he didn’t believe in the decision. He’d been one of her biggest cheerleaders, against a he-man, woman-hating world within the Taskforce. He had wanted her to succeed. But, like me, he also understood the political dimensions of the fight. Jennifer was going to be sacrificed to allow Kurt to continue. To allow me to continue.

  The irony was debilitating. My team, who had initially hated the thought of a woman in their world, now believed in her as much as they did any man in the Taskforce, and the commander who had fought to allow my experiment to continue, who had believed in her from the beginning, was going to fire her.

  Knuckles stood up, squeezing into the group, now making us look like we were in some sort of carnival picture booth, with everyone trying to get in the frame. The one guy who was always calm, his face now radiated real anger.

  He said, “Tell that pack of pussies if they want to question our decisions they need to kit up and come downrange. I’m with the team. Jennifer’s call was good. Not only that, but it was pretty fucking
heroic. Any other organization would be giving her a medal, and those jerks want to cut her free?”

  I glanced at Jennifer and saw her sitting against the wall slack jawed. Amazed at the support.

  Kurt snarled, “I got it, Knuckles. I don’t like it either. That’s the world we live in. You want to find the assholes who are about to destroy our ability to wage war, not to mention our economy, or do you want to get called home? The Oversight Council doesn’t understand the world you live in. Some do, but most don’t. What they do understand is penalty, and I’m giving them Jennifer. It’s the price for playing, damn it. You know that better than most. End of story. Let’s move on to solving the damn problem. Pike?”

  Nobody said anything. The team looked at me, waiting for me to tell Kurt to shove it up his ass. I really, really wanted to, but he was right. I’d dealt with the Oversight Council and had glimpsed into their world. Not lived within it, but had seen enough to realize what he said was true. I knew how they acted and what buttons Kurt could push to allow us to operate. To succeed. In truth, I respected him for putting up with the BS he did to get the job done.

  In the end, I could fight Jennifer’s battle later. Right now, we had a much more serious concern. “Sir, this computer’s locked, so our first course of action is to get it open to shut off the GPS device.”

  “Get it up here. Let’s get the hacking cell on it. See if we can crack that thing before it’s triggered.”

  “I’m not sure you can do that in time. We’ve got seven hours, and this guy was a computer geek. The laptop’s probably got more booby traps than Indiana Jones. We need to find the American. He can open it. Haven’t you guys been able to do anything to neck it down? Who is he?”

  “We’ve got nothing. The guy’s got to be someone on the inside, or he wouldn’t be able to access the GPS constellation, but we’ve looked at everyone in the Air Force, starting with the Second SOPS and moving all the way out to the Fiftieth Space Wing headquarters. Shit, we even looked at the guys manning the gates. Schriever is clean.”