Luke Stone 04 - Oppose Any Foe

by Jack Mars

  “What?” he said. It was all he could manage.

  “Eight of the warheads were recaptured during the battle. But at least eight others are gone. American military police have captured a man they believe was involved. In effect, they rescued him from a patrol of Turkish airmen who were about to murder him. There were serious casualties on both sides, and it isn’t clear who is cooperating with whom. We need information from this person, and quickly. The Turks are demanding his release to them. We assume they will kill him as soon as we comply.”

  “Okay,” Luke said, still not getting it.

  “We need you to go there,” Susan said. “We need you to take control of the interrogation and, if possible, the entire investigation.”

  “I don’t speak Turkish,” Luke said.

  “We’ll get you a translator.”

  Luke shook his head. “No good. Interrogations work best when the communication is direct. Let me think about it. I may have someone. When do you want us to go there?”

  Susan didn’t hesitate. “Now.”

  Now?

  “As soon as you can get back on the plane. We’re behind the ball on this, and falling further behind every minute.”

  Luke felt the exhaustion creeping into his bones. His eyelids were heavy. If he closed them, he might be asleep in seconds.

  “Okay,” he said. “Make sure they keep that prisoner alive until we get there. I can’t question a corpse. And in the meantime, let me make some arrangements. I’ll be back in touch in a little while.”

  He hung up the telephone and looked at the team. They all stared back at him.

  “Belgium was never the target. The big airbase in Turkey, Incirlik, was hit this morning. They made off with at least eight nuclear warheads. It looks like an inside job. Our guys captured someone they think was involved, and they want us to go there and head up the investigation. I guess we’ll skip that dinner in Brussels.”

  “I was going to get the snails,” Swann said. “You ever have them dipped in melted butter? Man. Better than lobster.”

  Luke shrugged Swann off. Maybe Luke was overtired, but he felt like this wasn’t a great time for wisecracking. He looked at each of his people in turn.

  “This is where it gets serious. They’re asking us to go into what right now is a war zone. There’s a coup attempt happening right now—these things have a nasty habit of turning into civil wars. In the middle of all that, there’s the missing nukes.”

  “I’m in,” Ed Newsam said. Luke knew that would be his response without having to ask. Ed was a war machine. This was the kind of responsibility he was paid to take on, and this was also the kind of thing he lived for.

  “I’m in,” Mark Swann said. No surprise there, either. Swann was not a fighter, but he was Luke’s go-to tech guy. He had repeatedly kept Luke and Ed alive in the craziest circumstances.

  Luke looked at Mika. She was young, and she was inexperienced. She had never been involved in something like this before. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “What do you think, Mika?” he said. “You can’t let these guys decide for you. They’re older, and they’ve both been through the wringer. They know what to expect. You don’t have to do this. It’s not in your job description. You could potentially help us from here, or go back to Washington and do it from there. You have nothing to prove to me, or to anyone.”

  Mika shook her head. “It’s better for you if I come, isn’t it?”

  Luke wouldn’t lie to her. He nodded. “It is better. Having immediate access to you is better than having to call you. But again—”

  “I’ll come,” she said. “I’ll ride with the legends.”

  Luke almost laughed. Ed and Swann smiled. Neither man probably knew what to make of this tiny young woman just out of school. Luke sure didn’t.

  “Okay, then there’s no rest for the weary. I need you to start pulling down the details about what happened last night, and the background on it. Get us those nukes and how they work. The bad guys have something in mind for those things, or they wouldn’t have taken them.”

  “Okay, Luke. Will do.”

  Luke looked at the other two. “You guys know the CIA special agent they used to call Big Daddy?”

  Ed shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Swann nodded. “Yeah. I know of him. I thought he was retired. Actually, I thought he got his hands dirty on something, and they pushed him out.”

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “He had the dirtiest hands in the business. But I think we should bring him back in, if he’ll do it. Ten years ago, I was on loan to the CIA from Delta. Big Daddy built my cover and inserted me into Iraq. He was my lifeline. Nobody gets to the meat of an interrogation as fast. And nobody alive knows the Middle East like he does.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  8:57 a.m. Eastern European Time

  Santorini Island, Greece

  When the telephone rang, Big Daddy jumped.

  The phone didn’t ring here, not really. Not that phone. He glanced at it. It was an old-style wall phone, hanging in his kitchen, a long cord dangling from it. He glanced out the window, at the whitewashed buildings stacked along the rugged cliffs, and beyond that, the deep blue of the Mediterranean. The day was already bright, if just the slightest bit hazy with sea mist.

  His real name was Bill Cronin, though people rarely called him that anymore. He was a bear of a man, well over six feet tall, heavyset, with a thick beard that had once been blond, and now was trending toward white.

  He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of swimming trunks and flip-flops. His skin was deeply tanned from the searing sun of the Greek islands. He had the look of a man who had worked with his hands for many years—it wasn’t far from the truth.

  He was cooking a big omelet, with fava beans, onions, peppers, and mushrooms, all of it grown in his own tiny backyard. The eggs were from his neighbor’s chickens, which tended to wander all over the neighborhood, and even turn up here at his feet once in a while, pecking at whatever scraps and leftovers they found on his stone floor.

  The phone was still ringing. There was no answering machine connected to it, no voice mail. If he let it go, maybe the person would eventually just hang up. It must be a wrong number, anyway. No one had this number.

  “Honey,” a voice called from the other room. “Are you going to answer that?”

  He glanced at a small sign affixed to the stone wall of the kitchen.

  Grow old with me, the sign read, the best is yet to be.

  He picked up the phone, but he didn’t speak.

  “Big Daddy?” a voice said.

  “There’s no one here by that name.”

  The voice changed its mind. “Bill? Is this you?”

  “Who may I tell him is calling?”

  “Bill, it’s Luke Stone. Cut the crap. I know your voice anywhere.”

  The name echoed out of the past like the sound of an air raid siren. Big Daddy spent much of his time trying to forget everything that had happened. But of course he remembered the face that went with that name, and the person.

  Luke Stone, a man who had gone deeper undercover as a Western mujahid than anyone Bill had ever known. He vanished, and Bill had been sure he was dead. When Stone finally resurfaced, he was on the run—he had wiped out a squad of Al Qaeda to rescue an Iraqi doctor and the man’s daughters. They were all marked for death. Luke had blown a carefully crafted cover that had taken two years to create to save a family of the Baha’i religious minority from execution. So Bill had gone in himself and gotten them out—what the hell else was he going to do?

  Luke Stone was not the first person that Bill Cronin wanted to hear from before nine in the morning.

  “How did you get this number?” he said.

  “I asked around. You’re easier to find than you probably think.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “I need you. You might not have heard, but somebody stole nuclear warheads from an airbase in Turkey last night. They escaped, and the trucks they
were driving disappeared. It looks like an inside job, seventy miles from the Syrian border.”

  Big Daddy went numb listening to the details of the heist. He was fifty-nine years old. He had done his time fighting these insane wars. He wasn’t that person anymore. He didn’t like that person. He didn’t like the things that person did. And he didn’t like the way his own government had flushed him down the toilet when the things he did went out of fashion.

  He liked being the person he was now. He liked waking early and snorkeling in the crystal waters of the Aegean Sea. He liked walking home up the steep hills and buying bread in the local bakery. He liked sitting on his terrace in the evening, drinking wine and watching the sun go down in the west. Neighbors would stop by and join him. They didn’t know what he used to do, and they didn’t ask. That’s how he liked it.

  He lived here with a woman. She liked to put up signs everywhere. Some of them were meaningful. Some of them were silly. There was one in the corner. He glanced at it. If you’re waiting for a sign, it said, this is it.

  He stared out the window at his terraced vegetable garden as Luke Stone’s voice rambled along. Stone seemed to think there was no doubt that Bill would leave here and join him in his mindless quest. Why did he think that?

  Big Daddy knew why.

  The terrorists weren’t really Muslims. That’s what had become clear to him during his long years of fighting them, spying on them, infiltrating them, and killing them. They pretended they were Muslims, but really they were nihilists. They were murder junkies—they were addicted to the thrill of killing and dying. They had no long-term plans.

  There was not going to be a caliphate—the men who talked about creating one were not interested in the dreary work of governance. They couldn’t build systems, or maintain ones that already existed. They couldn’t deliver the goods that a society delivers, and they didn’t care to. They wanted to loot, and rape and pillage, and move on. They didn’t care if they lived or died, and they didn’t care if anyone else did. They were having fun. They would kill everyone on Earth if they could. These were the ones who had stolen nuclear weapons. It was an ugly thought.

  You couldn’t negotiate with people like this. You couldn’t reason with them. You could not cajole or threaten them. So at some point, Bill had stopped trying. He had changed his focus to breaking them. He had become very, very good at it.

  Stone was done talking. “What do you think, Bill?”

  Big Daddy shook his head. He was, quite literally, too old for this.

  “No,” he said.

  “I need to interrogate a Turk,” Luke said. “I don’t speak Turkish.”

  “So get someone to translate.”

  “You know that’s no good.”

  Bill did know. He spoke Arabic. He spoke Turkish. He spoke Farsi. He spoke Chechen. He spoke Russian. He liked to break men in a language they could understand.

  “Look,” Stone said. “You got a raw deal. I know that. No one drew clear lines for you, then they decided you were out of bounds. Nobody gets that better than me.”

  “I was tarred and feathered,” Bill said. “And run out of town on a rail.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about that,” Stone said. “But I’ve got something real here. It’s a mission, and I’m holding it in my hand. Don’t tell me you haven’t wanted one, because I know you have. Show me a spy who doesn’t want a mission, and I’ll show you a spy laid out in a coffin.”

  “Who do you work for now?”

  “I work for the President of the United States. I report directly to her. No middlemen.”

  Mmmm. That was interesting. What would they call it?

  A shot at redemption.

  “I need a Middle East guy,” Stone said. “If you won’t do it, they’re gonna give me some kid.”

  “All right,” Big Daddy said. “I’m in. I need to clear up a couple of things here, and then I’ll be there as soon as I can. But just so you know, I’m on an island. It’s pretty far flung.”

  Stone didn’t miss a beat. “I can send an airplane.”

  Big Daddy nodded. Of course Stone could send a plane. When things happened, they happened fast. “Okay.”

  After they hung up, he stood quietly in the kitchen. The eggs cooked on, nearly forgotten. After a moment, she came in. She slid in behind him and put her arms around his thick stomach. She rested her head against his back.

  She had been very beautiful once, and she was still was, but it was different now. Age changed everything. She was like him, a refugee from the work. She’d had many names over her career, so many that people had come to call her by a code name. It was the name that Big Daddy called her by now, and in fact thought of her as: Q.

  They had settled here because it was beautiful, but also because there was nowhere for them in America anymore. You can’t fight to the death for thirty years, and go home again. Not to a place where the people mindlessly watch empty entertainment on TV all night, and obsessively take pictures of themselves during the day. Not to a place that rejected you and called you a disgrace to their high ideals.

  This was home now.

  “What was that call about?” Q said.

  He didn’t answer her right away. But after a minute, he did. “You know.”

  “Is it bad?”

  He nodded. “Looks that way. I doubt they’d ever call me otherwise.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Luke Stone.” The name would be familiar to her.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  He nodded again. “Yeah.”

  A long moment passed between them. It was nice, just to stand here. Nothing had happened yet. Maybe if he stood here long enough, nothing would happen.

  “Are you going to go?” she said.

  “I think maybe I will.”

  He turned to face her. He was nearly a foot taller than she was. She stared up at him now, her deep brown eyes piercing him. When she was young, she was someone they could never put their finger on. She was an enigma, a cipher, here one minute and gone the next. She could look at a person with the utmost sincerity and tell them dangerous lies. She could knowingly send men to their deaths.

  She wasn’t that person now, if she ever had been. Maybe, unlike him, she had only been doing her job.

  “Don’t die out there, Big Daddy,” she said now.

  He laughed, but didn’t feel it. His age hung on him like a heavy overcoat, extra weights sewn into the pockets.

  “I’m not planning to,” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  9:45 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (4:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  The Skies over Central Europe

  He had swallowed the pill about twenty minutes ago, and it was just starting to hit his bloodstream now.

  He could feel the changes happening. His heart rate was up. His vision was sharper. His mind was more alert. Before, he had been asleep on his feet. Now he was awake. He was confident. He was eager for information. These were the same feelings a normal person might get from a strong cup of coffee, only vastly exaggerated.

  Dexies. They’d been Luke’s friend for a long time.

  “The W84 thermonuclear warhead,” Mika said, looking closely at her tablet.

  Outside the plane, the skies were overcast and gray. There was more turbulence than normal. Luke barely felt it. Inside, his team sat in a group, all eyes on Mika. She had been compiling research since the moment they heard they were going to Turkey.

  “It’s a small two-stage weapon, meaning that the bomb actually detonates twice. The first stage is a relatively small fission explosion, which causes the much larger fusion explosion in the second stage. I’m sure you’ve seen this in archival film footage of nuclear explosions—a first detonation when the bomb hits, followed by a gigantic mushroom cloud causing secondary explosion.”

  Luke nodded. Newsam and Swann did the same.

  “These warheads are considered obsolete. They were designed for tactical strikes against the Soviet Union
during the Cold War. They offer yields up to one hundred fifty kilotons—for your reference, the Hiroshima bomb was roughly fifteen kilotons.”

  “In other words,” Ed Newsam said, “these bombs are ten times the size of the one that caused the Hiroshima explosion.”

  Mika nodded. “Yes.”

  “How many people died at Hiroshima?” Swann said.

  “No one is quite sure. The estimate is about a hundred forty thousand in the initial bombing and the three months that followed. But there is no agreed upon assessment of how many died of cancer, lung diseases, and other ailments in the years after that.”

  “A million people could die from just one of these bombs,” Swann said.

  “Oh yeah. And they made it out with eight of them. We don’t know what state of repair they’re in, but I think we have to assume one or more of them are operational.”

  “How can they launch the bombs?” Luke said.

  Mika shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. They need the codes.”

  “Let’s just assume they have, or can get the codes,” Luke said. He wasn’t ready to share what Susan had told him. He would do it when they absolutely needed to know.

  Mika nodded. “Okay. This is the strange thing. If they have the capability to steal or decrypt the nuclear codes, then they’ve stolen some difficult bombs to use them with. Those warheads are designed to be fitted to a Tomahawk missile variant which was retired at the end of the Cold War. The missiles were supposed to be launched from mobile ground-based platforms that rode around on the backs of tractor-trailer trucks. The trucks can be camouflaged to blend in with a variety of landscapes. The system was intended for limited nuclear skirmishes that were supposed to take place along the European-Soviet border. The idea was wholly imaginary, as even the Pentagon admitted that the confusion caused by a limited nuclear exchange would likely lead to full-scale ballistic missile attacks, and mutually assured destruction within a short time. It was a flawed concept, and as far as we know, the launch platforms, along with the missiles, were all decommissioned and destroyed, certainly by 1992.”