The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  The VTOL aircraft on the right descended. It set down ahead of them, beside the road, while the other two hovered at around 200 feet. The THP vehicles arrived almost simultaneously, spinning off the road, two on either side. Men with rifles got out and stood behind the open doors.

  “Holy shit,” Scroggins said. “It is us.”

  “Man, I swear I don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

  “Don’t tell it to me,” Scroggins said.

  “Yeah? How do I know this ain’t about you?”

  “I confess, brother. I’m a mule.”

  “I’m serious—”

  “And I ain’t, man,” Scroggins said. “Maybe you should call HQ.”

  Bell nodded. The Minotaur was at his side, and he picked it up.

  “Put your hands on the dashboard!” a mechanical-sounding voice blared from behind him. “Both of you, now!”

  Scroggins put his hands ahead of him slowly. Bell raised his, then rotated them down to the padded vinyl. The men didn’t know whether to look ahead or into the mirror. Armed men were emerging from the Osprey. They were covered head to foot, crouched behind raised weapons as they approached. It looked to Scroggins as if some of the automatic rifles were aimed beyond them.

  “Lower your weapons!” shouted an amped voice from the Osprey.

  “This definitely ain’t no drill,” Bell said.

  “Just thinkin’ that myself,” Scroggins replied. “I’m sure hopin’ they’re mad at each other and we just got caught in—”

  “Persons in the Trask vehicle,” said the voice from the Osprey. “Open both doors and emerge slowly.”

  “I’m guessin’ that means we have to take our hands off the dashboard,” Scroggins said. “On three?”

  “Huh?” Bell said.

  “We gettin’ out?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Shit, I just can’t figure this.”

  “I think we’re way past trying figuring anything,” Scroggins said. “One ... two ...”

  On three, both men reached out and pushed open the doors.

  “Nobody go shootin’ us!” Scroggins yelled as he swiveled in his seat and leaned his head out. His hands were raised as he stepped from the cab. “You guys hear me? Which way do we face?”

  The Osprey decided that for them. The rotor wash from the transport was pelting them with dead foliage, sand, and pebbles. Both men turned their backs to the air force detachment. Scroggins didn’t like what he saw ahead of them. It reminded him of pictures he had seen at the Atlanta History Center from the turn-of-the-century South: early police cars and armed officers ready to face bootleggers, bank robbers, and black men. Though his brain told him he’d done nothing wrong, he started to pray.

  “What do you want with these individuals?” someone in front of him said through a bullhorn.

  “That is classified,” replied a voice from behind. “Stand down.”

  “Stand down? Hell, we just got here,” the bullhorn replied.

  “We repeat. Stand down!”

  Lord Jesus, Scroggins thought. You don’t talk to Texas lawmen like that.

  The military unit continued to advance. Scroggins saw the men behind the doors growing restless.

  “Gentlemen, I’m just going to step from the line of fire,” Scroggins said.

  “You stay where you are!” the Texan bullhorn shouted back.

  “You will step backward and surrender, or we will seize you with whatever force is required!” the airman insisted.

  “I’m going to do what that guy says!” Scroggins pointed both thumbs backward after considering the two commands. The one from the air force definitely had a colder sound. He glanced at Bell, who nodded.

  The two men started walking back. Several airmen moved around them, toward the van. They were dressed in what had to be miserably hot long-sleeve camouflage uniforms with bulletproof vests, helmets, munitions belts, high boots, and goggles. There were four men in all. While two kept their weapons trained on the THP vehicles, the others opened the back of the van and went inside. They came out less than ten seconds later. One of them stepped wide, faced the mission leader, and ran his hand sideways across his throat. Scroggins guessed that meant what he could have told them if they’d asked: the cargo bay was empty. The four men rejoined the others.

  Scroggins continued moving backward. He was watching the Texans closely, his heart a solid mass in his throat. He saw one man—the man with the bullhorn—lean toward the man beside him. They seemed to be conferring.

  “Oh, man, tell me they ain’t gonna rush us,” Bell said to Scroggins as they cleared the front of the van.

  “If they do, dive for the fender and hug that baby.”

  Suddenly, a pair of Texans shouldered their weapons—one from behind each of the two nearest police vehicles. They rose from behind the doors with their hands raised shoulder high and started walking forward.

  “Now what the hell do they want?” Scroggins asked.

  He never found out. He heard boots clomp on the ground behind him, felt hands grab the fabric of his shirt at the shoulders and arms and remain there. He was turned around and found himself facing a pair of fliers with M4 carbines pointed past them—ugly little mosquito-looking black guns with barrels that made his knees turn to liquid. He was glad the hands were propping him up.

  The guns jerked in little sweeping motions. “Move!” one of the men behind him said.

  Bell and Scroggins half walked, half stumbled forward on liquid legs. Scroggins squinted into the hurricane winds caused by the rotors, tucked his chin into his chest, and pursed his lips tightly as he felt the dust and pieces of twig bite his face. He was helped up a step into the helicopter, still not looking, only feeling the darkness enfold him. The prickling pain stopped, and the noise changed from something harsh to something deep and throaty. Even as he was thrust into a seat and felt himself rising and tilting, he thought of something his grandmother had once told him after a tornado hit her Arkansas community: “Something ain’t so bad if you live to get a good story out of it.”

  He was praying again, hard, that this was something that would impress his grandkids one day.

  Lt. Samuel Calvin of the Texas Highway Patrol Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division lowered his hands as the choppers took off. Behind his dark aviator glasses his blue eyes remained fixed on the Ospreys, with a look that was somewhere between contempt and amusement.

  “Everyone stand down!” he said, half turning and shouting over his shoulders. “Except you, Munson.”

  “Yes, sir, Chief.”

  The men got to their feet, stretching cramped legs. They lowered their weapons, reached for bottled water, and stood at ease. Only Letty Munson remained where she was. She was still crouched, watching the retreating Ospreys through her binoculars, shielding them with one hand so the lenses wouldn’t catch and reflect the sun.

  “Doesn’t look like they’re taking any action,” she reported. “Those boys are headed home.”

  Calvin nodded. Low on his to-do list was hanging around—let alone walking over to the van—as the choppers cut loose with incendiary ordnance of some kind.

  “You were right, Lieutenant,” said the other man.

  “Appears so.”

  The two officers were standing behind the Trask Industries vehicle, one man on either side, their crisp light brown uniforms stained with perspiration under the armpits and around the collar.

  “They follow orders like they were written by the finger of God Himself,” the thirty-one-year-old said. “Sent for two individuals. They go back with two individuals.” The blue eyes lowered as he turned his sun-leathered face toward the van. “Check the cargo back, would you, Patrolman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Calvin was on the driver’s side and walked around it. People don’t always have the information you want, or else they lie, he thought with satisfaction as he approached the open door. Evidence does not.

  From the moment the THP came within visual contact of the van
—and the Ospreys—Calvin knew what he wanted. The van had Georgia plates. The men had been on the road awhile. Whatever they had done, whatever the navy wanted them for, it had most likely taken place during that drive. That meant the van would bear the fingerprints of whatever was at issue here. The military didn’t confiscate it because, Calvin—a veteran of four years in army intelligence—knew, HUMINT was prized above all. Get prisoners to talk. And they clearly didn’t want a showdown with the THP. Whoever was in charge of the operation snared the targets and got out.

  Calvin bent and looked into the driver’s side. He saw what he expected to see: soda cans, candy wrappers, coffee cups, two newspapers, and an iPod. The GPS was still on. He checked their route. Atlanta to New York to White Sands.

  They were headed there, anyway, Calvin thought. Why the rush? To keep them out of our hands, he decided.

  “The bay is clean except for muddy footprints,” the officer reported.

  “That’s why they were so shiny.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Ospreys,” he said. “They were cleaning them. Got the order to deploy real sudden.”

  He grinned. High school kids at a car wash. “Thank you, Carter. Go back to the vehicle. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The patrolman left and Calvin climbed in. He took the keys; never knew what else they might open. He checked the glove compartment. No one used it for maps anymore. There was a flashlight and a small tool kit. A first-aid kit was attached to the underside of the dashboard.

  There was one thing more. It was in the small compartment between the seats, along with a packet of registration material and a St. Christopher’s medallion. A cell phone, one unlike any Calvin had ever seen. He took it, and the charger, then used his Swiss Army knife to unscrew the GPS. He tucked it under his arm and went back to his own prowler. He was most curious about the phone but did not want to risk turning it on and triggering some kind of data self-destruct code in the phone’s program.

  “Take us back to division,” he said to the driver. “On the double.”

  The driver signaled the turnaround to the others, adding, “And put the spurs to the flanks.”

  Calvin didn’t know what he had in his little trophy, but he knew that it made him smile. He imagined one of two things would happen next: the choppers would come back when HQ found out they hadn’t swept the vehicle, or they’d dispense with the vehicular pat down and toast it from the air.

  Either way, Calvin scored that one for what his grandfather used to call “us Texicans.” But as the glow of their success faded, he began to wonder what was really behind the apprehension of two men who didn’t appear to have a clue what was happening. In light of what had occurred in Baltimore and New York, followed by the alert from Trask Industries, plus the emptiness of the cargo bay—it all suggested nothing good.

  He hoped to have some of those answers when they reached the mobile unit in New Boston. In the meantime, he texted a brief on-site report to the division leader so that Washington could be alerted.

  CHAPTER 26

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Oval Office meeting broke at 3:00 a.m. with word that a young student at Georgetown University had been found dead in his dorm room of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was a Lebanese citizen, and an FBI uniform was found in a burning pile in the bathtub. The smoke detector was what had triggered the security guard to break in.

  The only things found in the uniform were marbles.

  The president grabbed a few hours’ sleep upstairs, in the master bedroom, was showered, shaved, and about to go back to work when word of the Penn Station shootings reached him. He hurried down to the Oval Office. There were no new briefing folders on the president’s desk. In situations where intel was streaming and constantly changing, updates were typically delivered by the department heads.

  An intern arrived with a tray of coffee for the president. A second tray arrived and was placed on the coffee table for the others. FBI director Charles Cluzot was already there, along with Homeland Security chief Max Carlson and the CIA’s Bob Andrews. The press secretary had already convened her staff to discuss the talking points for her 10:00 a.m. appointment in the Briefing Room.

  That was postponed until noon after the first sniper attack. It was postponed again indefinitely after the second attack.

  National Security director Bruce Perry was also in attendance. He had flown back from London, where he had been meeting with his counterpart, Britain’s National Security advisor Sir Peter Gurney.

  The Oval Office became a clearinghouse, as information was received by the three intelligence directors and shared with each other and the president. It frustrated Brenneman and the others that no larger pattern seemed to be emerging. The events in two cities appeared to be random acts of terror, albeit most likely coordinated.

  “So we’ve got our FBI impostor,” Andrews said. “Another man of Arab descent with no priors and no apparent radical affiliations.”

  “What still bothers me,” Carlson said, “is that no one has claimed credit for any of these. Even the guys who claim credit for everything they didn’t do were caught flat-footed.”

  “Hold on a second,” the fifty-two-year-old Perry said. “This isn’t good.”

  Brenneman looked over the edge of his coffee cup at the bald-headed NSD. Perry was the former director of the nonpartisan National Assured Salvation think tank based in Savannah, Georgia. His appointment had taken a lot of heat from civil rights groups because NAS was an outgrowth of the Confederate group Assured Salvation, which was responsible for evacuating civilians of all races from war zones. Though many blacks had been saved, they were saved as slaves. Many who wished to wait for the Northern troops were forced out. For Perry—and for Brenneman—the Civil War was over and population centers were prime targets for terror. That was Perry’s specialty.

  Perry was not an alarmist. When he said that something wasn’t good, it was the equivalent of “Dear God in Heaven!” from other lips.

  “What is it, Bruce?” the president asked.

  “Sir, you are probably aware of DoD Protocol Eleven, in which all high-yield weapon transports are locked down in the event of an enemy attack,” he said. “The DoD issued a temporary alert after Baltimore, then lifted it for ordnance already in motion, then reissued it yesterday at eight twenty-two in the morning. It is still in effect.”

  “What’s on the hoof?” Cluzot asked.

  “The Texas Highway Patrol was alerted by Trask Industries AMRAD Division that a pair of prototype EPWs—earth-penetrating weapons—were en route to White Sands,” Perry said.

  “Hell’s silver bells,” Andrews said, sitting back.

  “Yeah,” Perry said. “A report from THP Intelligence and Counterterrorism says that the van went from Atlanta to New York with cargo for the NYPD. The GPS showed no stops other than Arkadelphia, Arkansas. When the vehicle was detained outside New Boston by a trio of Ospreys, it was empty and the crew was taken away.”

  “To White Sands?” the president asked.

  “Presumably,” Perry replied.

  “Who’s in command there?” the president demanded.

  “Looking, sir,” Andrews said as he studied his laptop. “Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert, since two thousand nine—”

  “Get him,” Brenneman said.

  For a long moment no one moved. That was typically the role of the executive secretary, but the president hadn’t asked her. He’d kept it in the room. There was no established pecking order, and no one wanted to take that ride down the totem.

  “I’ve got the number here, sir,” Andrews said before the president had noticed the hesitation. He moved to the phone. He had said it to the others in the room, using it to save face. He reached for the phone on the coffee table.

  “Could there have been an exchange at the motel?” the president asked.

  “I was just texting the THP to find out what the GPS says,” Perry said. “That may not help, though. Satellite coverage at
night ... We don’t do a lot of it along those remote stretches.” He finished the message and sent it. “The FR also indicates that the THP recovered a secure cell phone from the cab of the van,” Perry went on. “A Minotaur, standard issue for classified transport.”

  “Are they cleared to access the cell records?” the president asked.

  “If you sign a directive, they are,” Perry replied.

  “Draft it,” he told Perry. “The day I can’t trust a Texas lawman, the nation’s done, anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The president moved to the laptop on his desk to await the document. He would sign it electronically and forward it to the Texas Department of Intelligence and Counterterrorism.

  Andrews’s personal phone beeped as he was placing the call to White Sands. He checked the number, stopped the outgoing call.

  “Mr. President, it’s Ryan Kealey,” he said.

  “Put it on speaker,” Brenneman ordered.

  Andrews answered the phone as he walked to the president’s desk. It wasn’t a secure line, but there was no time to worry about that. Anything they knew, the enemy already knew.

  “Ryan? You’re on speaker—”

  “Good. Sorry I haven’t checked in. A lot’s been going on. The guy we were supposed to meet here, AD Alex Hunt, just shot and killed CIA agent Jessica Muloni of Rendition Group One. Said she was a suspected Muslim sympathizer. I can’t say if she was or wasn’t, but he shot to kill.”

  “This is Cluzot. With cause?”

  “She had her weapon drawn, was interrogating Reed Bishop, who she seemed to think had helped the assassin Veil escape,” Kealey said. “Sir, have you been notified about the shooting?”

  “No,” Cluzot said.