by David Poyer
He took another step, feeling the wind tearing at his uniform as the helicopter made another low pass. The rotor-wash whipped up paper cups, fast-food wrappers, discarded receipts.
Turning his back on the wind, forcing his reluctant legs into motion, he lurched the last few yards and sank to his knees.
* * *
Squatting in front of the satchel, he tried to fight down the terror. His throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow. He could barely think. But he had to. He might have only seconds left.
The warbler circuit. They’d use that for the detonator.
In that pressurized moment he realized that though his body was on the edge of animal panic, he could still think. Still act. As he’d always been able to when decisions had to be made.
If it ended here … better than in an abandoned factory in Bosnia.
If you run, you meet the bullet.…
“Keep those idiots back!” he screamed at McKoy.
“Get away from it!” the agent howled back, face mottled dark. Past him the spectators milled. Dan couldn’t believe it. They were pointing cameras. Chattering on cell phones.
Dan nodded, but for reassurance, not to acknowledge an order. He switched his attention back to the blackly waiting satchel. Reviewing his options as McKoy shouted again, swore, voice cracking raw. As Marine One, blades clattering with a hellish racket, banked and headed off, rotor-chop fading into the honking of stalled traffic. At least the president was safe. Whatever that was worth.
He put out fingertips and brushed the leather surface.
Maybe he should back off, as McKoy was telling him to. But screw McKoy! Once the president was safe, the protective detail wasn’t in charge anymore.
He was the military aide. This was his responsibility.
He rubbed his face, trying to focus. This … thing was no crude homemade, strapped in duct tape and pushed into a mailbox. This was professional. He didn’t even want to think about by whom. Not right now.
He remembered the guy who’d carried the briefcase into Hitler’s bunker.
Somebody had tried to motivate him. Make him just like von Stauffenberg. Make him want to be a killer. An assassin. Or at least to look exactly like one, after the fact.
The honking had stopped. McKoy wasn’t shouting anymore either. The quiet felt eerie after the tremendous racket from the helo.
He could almost hear the case ticking. Though of course it wouldn’t tick.
Forcing his hands to function, he unsnapped the broken latches once more. He lifted out the “device,” as McKoy had called it. Then glanced around, judging the crowd that now entirely surrounded them. McKoy, assisted now by a rent-a-cop from the mall, was trying to move them back. But the public wasn’t cooperating. They kept edging in. Didn’t they have any fucking police here? Or any sense?
He couldn’t just cut the cord. Whoever had put this together would have anticipated that.
The smart thing would be to just leave it. Retreat, call the D.C. bomb squad, help McKoy keep the crowd back. But it might go off then. And whoever the conspirators were, they’d flee, or go to earth.
To try again. And maybe, next time, succeed.
It might explode. And kill him.
Last chance here, he told himself. You really should do the smart thing and back off.
But if it exploded … they might never find out who’d made it. Where it had come from. And who had made him the patsy.
And that, at the end of everything, made it his problem. To figure out, or die trying.
Taking a deep breath, he lifted the plastic case in both hands. The battery pack came up with it, dangling on the cord.
Leaving the satchel behind, he carried the bomb toward the bank. The crowd at the ATM edged back. Remembering the Beretta at last, he pulled it out of his belt and held it up. A gun: that they understood. Shrieking, they scattered, dropping purses and checkbooks and Dillard’s bags.
He set the thing down near the wall of the bank, hoping the brick, and whatever reinforcement they had around the vault, would stop any flying debris from the blast.
He cocked the pistol, and aimed.
THE AFTERIMAGE ARLINGTON
NATIONAL CEMETERY
The grass, as green that spring as grass ever grew. The breeze, soft as any had ever blown.
On the hillside overlooking the river men and women in uniform stood at attention. Civilians in dark suits and black dresses stood with bowed heads, self-conscious amid the military ceremonial, the funereal ritual.
The crack of rifles, three times three, shattered the air and echoed from the serried rows of stone.
When the last note of Taps died away, the gathering broke up. The participants, subdued, came back along the wending paths two by two or in straggling groups.
Dan, in a new set of blues, paced alone, hands locked behind him. He blinked now and then, caught up in his thoughts rather than the bright day.
They’d found Garner Sebold’s car parked by the Tidal Basin. A presentation .45 lay on the passenger seat, and a bloody blossom bloomed against the driver-side window. The media had speculated endlessly. The fringe pushed their ever-more-bizarre theories on talk radio and the Web, aimed, as usual, at the administration. They said De Bari’s Mob contacts had planted the bomb, to rally the public behind an unpopular chief executive. They opined darkly that Sebold had been murdered, to pin the blame on a distinguished public servant. No, another said; De Bari had had him killed when it looked like they were closing in on Don Juan Nuñez, who worked for the first lady’s crime family.
Others whispered that the heart of the plot had been the army. Disgruntled senior officers. A small cabal, “a few bad apples”—but then it only took a few. Dan knew that Sergeant Ouderkirk, Major Upshaw, and others were in FBI custody. Ulrich Stahl, Knight, and two other Joint Staff generals had submitted their resignations. Geraldo B. Edwards had announced his retirement from politics. Medical reasons, his spokesman had said. He was too ill to handle the pace of the vice presidency, and wanted to spend more time with his family.
Yet others speculated on more obscure forces. The shadowy Islamic organization that had underwritten International Blessings. The cartel, whose technique—radio-detonated explosives aboard an aircraft—had clearly been borrowed from the Tejeiro assassination.
But in the end, the only wholly truthful thing anyone could say was that the investigation was in progress. Where it would finish, what its findings would be, and whether they’d be made public in his lifetime, Dan could not even guess.
He knew he didn’t understand all of what had just happened. Sometimes he suspected he didn’t understand any of what had happened, close to the crux of history though he’d been. Revenge, corruption, misguided patriotism, institutional loyalty—any and every motive might have been involved. If Sebold and other high officers had been the movers behind the plot, no doubt they’d thought themselves justified. But they’d needed a tool. A violent loner. A loose cannon.
Enter Dan Lenson.
He could not believe his own blindness. He’d been manipulated. Used. His distrust for authority, his impatience with procedure had made him the all too obvious choice. Move by move they’d advanced him across the board, toward the castled king. Programmed him, like some half-sentient weapon, to make his final mission credible to those who would peruse it for generations to come.
How many other assassins over the bloody course of history had been fashioned as he had? How many Booths and Brutuses, Montholons and Cordays, had struck at the behest of those who stayed in the shadows, to profit from the crimes they’d set in train?
He trembled when he thought how close he’d come to infamy. And how close even yet he was to condemnation. The questioning had been hard, and lasted for days. Even now, men still followed him. Whether for his protection, or his doom, he did not know.
* * *
When he raised his eyes a figure in a black coat barred his path. They looked at each other without speaking. Finally he nodded
to her, and bent his head. They fell in together, her heels clicking on the bricks.
Beneath a shadowing oak they stood together, looking out over the sunlit downhill and the white city beyond. If he turned his head Dan saw two men some distance away. They wore ties and light topcoats. They stood before one of the headstones, not quite looking in their direction.
“Your friend called me,” Blair said. “From the Secret Service. McKoy.”
“Yeah. Barney.”
“After what he told me, I had to talk to you. To see how much of this was my fault.”
“None of it was your fault, Blair. It was all mine. My … stupid and unjustified suspicion. Of you. Of others. But it was also just very, very cleverly done.”
“You really thought I was … sleeping with the president. In Russia.”
“Somebody told me you were there. In the middle of the night. I saw the Secret Service outside his suite.”
“But you wouldn’t believe me when I told you it was work.”
“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t. And I’m sorry.”
Who had called him that night in St. Petersburg to tell him he needed to check on his wife? He didn’t know. Maybe the investigation would reveal it. Most likely, he suspected, it would not. He was on leave now, stripped of official duties. He didn’t think he was going to get any medals for this tour. In fact, depending on how far up the conspiracy reached, he’d be lucky to stay alive.
He knew now his wondering about the next threat had not taken into account the most dangerous quarter of all.
The greatest menace to his country had never been terrorists, or assassins, or even hostile ideologies. It was those who worked not for the common good, but for their own power.
“So how are you doing now?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s damned lonely. Out here in the cold.”
“Is the Navy going to take care of you?”
“I talked to some people I know.” He laughed. “I do have friends. They’re not exactly De Bari fans either, but they’re not part of this. They say the smartest thing for me would be to get as far away as I can.”
“I think they might be right. At least for now.” She touched his sleeve.
“That’s what I figured too.”
“And how about us, Dan?” She took his hand, but didn’t meet his eyes. “Okay, it’s time for me to say it. When you needed help, I was ready to point it out. But I wasn’t exactly there for you when it got rough, was I?”
“You tried. I wasn’t a very good listener, though.”
She nodded soberly. “Okay. We were both assholes.”
“Well, that’s what we still are. In a lot of people’s books.”
“Something in common?”
“I guess.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m still not happy you could think that about De Bari and me. But I’m sorry I didn’t see what was happening either, and try to help.” She bit her lip; he saw this wasn’t easy for her, either. “Uh—shall we try it again?”
He didn’t have to think about that. “I’d like to,” he told her. “I’d like that a lot.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“I always loved you. And I still do.”
“I love you too,” she said. She coughed, and rubbed her eyes, and he saw she was weeping. He’d never seen her cry before. It didn’t seem like her. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. And I’ll try not to be such a fucking asshole this time. We’re both tough to live with, I guess. And we’re both so fucking busy. So maybe we deserve each other. Oh—damn it—I’m crying. God, I hate that,” she said furiously, looking around as if afraid someone would take a picture.
“It’s not a problem,” he told her. “I feel that way myself sometimes. Maybe you should just let go more often.”
“Just let go, huh?”
“Not in meetings, though.”
“No, not in meetings,” she said. “Not in this town, anyway.”
He tilted her face up and wiped the corners of her eyes gently with his thumbs. She closed them and took a shuddering breath, and laid her face against his shoulder.
Holding her, pressing her against him with his still painfully skinned palms, he looked past her, down on the alabaster city.
He thought of what Washington, and America, had been when he was young, and of how much had changed. From protest to conformity. From openness to secrecy. From confidence to carefully inculcated fear.
Sometimes he thought the dream of democracy might be ending. As it had for Rome long before. Bringing a new imperial age. Dictatorship. Slavery. And unending war.
If the choice was empire, then the threat was clear. The threat would be America herself—her power, her violence, her blind, crusading arrogance.
But he couldn’t allow himself to believe that. Not yet.
A crippling fear lurked deep in his country. It always had. But then, so did courage.
And so far, courage had always won.
Read on for an excerpt from David Poyer’s upcoming novel
KOREA STRAIT
Available from St. Martin’s Press
The smooth-surfaced sea heaved slowly under a cloudless aramanthine sky. It was just before dawn. There was no wind. Not a ripple marred the ever-changing, everlasting interface between water and air. But it rose slowly, then fell away along the worn steel of the hull, all but imperceptibly, as if the sea were breathing.
One- to two-foot swells at most, Dan judged, leaning over the side to gaze down into bottomless turquoise. Every hundred feet or so, a wave broke with a quiet splatter. It left a patch of ivory froth rocking, slowly melting, till the clear blue welled up again from far beneath. Small silvery fish hovered in the hull-shadow, fluid rippling commas poised tensely between quiescence and alarm.
Beside him a Major Zach Carmichael, U.S. Army, who was beyond any reasonable doubt Defense Intelligence, was telling him about the Maritime Department of the North Korean Reconnaissance Bureau. “That’s who’s most likely running it. The most elite of all NK special forces. Disciplined. Tough. Sworn never to surrender. They caught one before, in a fishing net. When they got it to the surface, they were all dead.”
“Drowned? Hull breach?”
“Shot each other, far as we can tell. Last one used a grenade.” Carmichael sounded as if he admired this.
On the flight out, on a ROK helo, he’d looked down to see the lights of fishing boats setting out, nodding their way toward their salty crop-fields from the flickering yellow lights of hamlets that clung to blackened zinc cliffs. Rocky islets dotted the coast. As first light rose, the pilot pointed out North Korea in the distance. Dan gazed out on a hazy, featureless sweep that gave no hint that anything human had ever existed. Save, far away, the contrail of an MIG patrolling the Northern Limiting Line, the naval extension of the DMZ out to sea.
They’d droned out till the land fell back and vanished in a nebulous mercury blurring. Gradually a ship emerged from the rosy haze. From her anachronistic, towering masts, her dented gray steel sides, she’d slid down some Stateside shipway during World War Two. They’d circled, the copilot barking into his throat mike in abrupt Korean, then moved over the bluff bow for the transfer. He’d dangled, rotating slowly on a sling, till Koreans crouched against the rotorblast reached up, receiving them like gifts from Heaven. First Dan, then Shappell, then Carmichael.
Now they stood aft on the main deck, looking out on a wide rounded counter. The stern was flat and almost featureless except for two large centerline hatches, a towing chock, a stanchion with the stern light, and bitts spotted to port and starboard. The black steel underfoot was scarred and dented with decades of dragged chains and dropped shackles. So many layers of old paint scabbed it, it looked like the Black Hills seen from above. A canvas awning reminded Dan of The Sand Pebbles. But wherever she’d been built, she was Korean now. They swarmed over the fantail. The divers just now lifting their helmets above a gently heaving froth of bubbles, slowly making their way
to a rigged-out platform and boat-ladder, were Korean, too. She was at diving stations, with hoses and lines flemished out across the deck. Tanks, weight belts, suits, regulators were lashed to the gunwales or laid out on canvas. Beyond them, patrolling the horizon, prowled the low wolf-gray silhouette of a destroyer.
“She was once USS ship,” a junior officer told them. “USS Grasp. Now Chung Won.”
“So what exactly you people got down there?” Carmichael asked him. He fiddled impatiently with the Nikon around his neck, glancing at the divers clambering awkwardly up the ladder.
“Enemy submarine,” the ensign said.
Shappell muttered “Aha.” Carmichael focused his telephoto and snapped a couple frames of the divers.
“How deep?” Dan asked. The guy cocked his head, considering, then called to a squat man in slacks and a blue windbreaker. His face was leathery, like that of an old tortoise.
“Kim Baksa nim!”
“Ke miguk sa ram del yi yo? Yi chok ue ro de rigo o si yo.”
Dan bowed and shook hands. The man in the windbreaker said he was Dr. Kim, in charge of the salvage operation. Carmichael asked again what they had.
“It appears to be a Sang-o,” Kim said, choosing each word. “Which means ‘shark.’ It is most likely either embarking on, or returning from, a reconnaissance mission. They come out of Toejo-Dong, and transit south across the Tongjoson-man. Sometimes they attempt to land agents.”
“How’d you find it?”
“It broached, we are not sure why. Perhaps an accident. We did not detect it until then. Our units fired on it. Then it either sank, or was scuttled when they realized we had detected them.”
“Wicked,” Carmichael said. He advanced the film and took a picture of the Korean, but at the last moment the doctor turned away.
Dan had memorized everything the U.S. Navy knew about the Sang-os, which wasn’t much. The North Korean People’s Navy operated three classes of submarines. Sharks were the middle rung, small diesel-electrics built in-country to a native design at the Nampo or Wonsan shipyards. Naval Intelligence estimated their operational depth between three and four hundred feet. They carried a crew of twenty with torpedo and mining capabilities. Their max speed was about nine knots at snorkel depth. They came in two variants, attack and infiltration. Even that was a guess … which meant it would be an intel coup to get their hands on one, or even get a close look.