Luke Stone 04 - Oppose Any Foe

by Jack Mars

  “But they kept the warheads around?” Swann said.

  Mika shrugged. “Yes.”

  Ed laughed. “If you know about the military, you know they never destroy everything. The launch platforms are out there. I’ve been on a lot of battlegrounds in my days, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff that pops up. To me, it makes sense why they took the small warheads and left the B61 missiles behind. They don’t have airplanes that can carry the B61. But maybe they can launch the small warheads from the ground.”

  Luke nodded at the truth of that. “In that scenario, they’ve got the warheads now, and they probably have the missiles and a way to launch them. Another option is that they don’t have the missiles or launch pad, or don’t even have the codes. Then we could be looking at a dirty bomb. Mika, how likely is that?”

  He realized he was putting her on the spot.

  “My guess?” she said.

  “Your best guess.”

  She exhaled, as if she’d been holding her breath. “They have the missiles and the launch pads. Maybe they hired a rogue Chinese aerospace firm to reverse-engineer the hardware needed from old specs. Maybe, like Ed says, that hardware is just lying around out there and on sale. But I doubt it’s a dirty bomb.”

  “Reasoning?” Luke said.

  She shrugged. “There’s a lot of radioactive material in this world that’s easier to steal than intact, operational warheads. My data tells me that three entire squads of hardened jihadi fighters went to their deaths to make sure the trucks escaped. Unless they plan to detonate those warheads, then those men were better deployed on battlefields.”

  Luke nodded. He agreed with her call on this. In a sense, that was the worst news possible. Dirty bombs were bad; 150 kiloton explosions were much, much worse.

  But he liked the way she was starting to think. Maybe she’d been nervous on the earlier flight—she seemed calmer now, more relaxed, and more willing to test some ideas on them. That’s what he wanted, and needed, from her—someone who was willing to take a flier, someone who was willing to be wrong in order to be right.

  “You have IDs on those fighters?” Ed said.

  She nodded. “A few have been identified so far, mostly because they had records and fingerprints on file with Interpol or our own government. I’ll give you a taste. Alixey Kurchaloy, age thirty-seven, also known as Alix the Chechen. Began his career as a teenager fighting in the First Russian-Chechen war. Implicated in the bombing of a Russian passenger jet in 2001, which killed a hundred forty-seven people. A fixture on battlefields throughout Iraq and Syria since at least 2004. Thought to have masterminded the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Najaf in 2009 during Ramadan, an act which killed ninety-three people. He’s a big one.

  “Next is Abdullah al-Sistani, age forty-five. Former commander in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. Fought against the United States as a young conscript during Operation Desert Storm, then again during the Iraq War. Taken prisoner and held at Abu Ghraib for eighteen months. Upon release, he went underground and joined Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2013. This guy was probably in charge of the attack—the fact that they sent him on a suicide mission is pretty close to astounding.”

  Luke raised his hand. That was all they needed. “Okay, so they were willing to sacrifice valuable personnel for this operation. What does that tell you?”

  “It tells me that no matter what, they didn’t want the operation to fail.”

  “And if they really can launch the missiles, what type of damage are we talking about?”

  She shook her head. “Bad. Devastating. The missiles, assuming they’re still operational and in the same working order as when they were built, have a range of up to two thousand miles. As we said before, the warheads can deliver an explosion ten times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. If they deploy the missile launchers in a chaotic war zone, for example in Syria, they’d be hard to spot until it was too late.

  “The cities within easy range, and which would likely be completely or mostly destroyed by just one of these bombs, include the following: Damascus, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, Baghdad, Teheran, Riyadh, Dubai, Beirut, Ankara, Istanbul, Athens, Astrakhan, Sebastopol, and Sarajevo, among many others. To be honest, although I doubt thirty-year-old missiles would be likely to manage it, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and even Rome would all be within theoretical range.”

  They were all looking at Luke now. He found he didn’t have much to add.

  “We’ve got to get those warheads back,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  12:50 p.m. Eastern European Time (6:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Incirlik Air Base

  Adana, Turkey

  “You know something, Ahmet,” Bill Cronin said in fluent Turkish. “And you want to tell me all about it. Don’t you?”

  The man chained standing up and facing the wall inside the empty room said nothing. He was blindfolded, but even with the rag obscuring part of his face, it was easy to see that he was bruised and beaten. His mouth was swollen. His face was covered by sweat and some blood, and the back of his white T-shirt was stained with perspiration.

  He was secured to the wall with thick chains. His bare feet were also chained around the ankles. All of the damage to this man had been done before Bill even arrived—the Turks knew how to treat their own.

  “Go to hell,” the man said.

  Bill smiled. “Oh yes, Ahmet knows something, all right. And in a few minutes, he’s going to tell us what it is.”

  Bill leaned in close to the man’s face. He could smell the sweat on the man, the body odor, and the fear. This was the part that Big Daddy didn’t like about himself—he enjoyed this. He would lose himself in it, if he wasn’t careful.

  “I have your work records,” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “I’ve seen photos of your wife and your three… beautiful… children.” He let the words linger.

  “I know where they live. You don’t want me to visit them, do you?”

  Bill was here in this dungeon beneath the military base with Luke Stone and his partner Ed. Was this what Stone was hoping for when he called Bill—to unleash this part of him? Bill imagined it was.

  The three men stood in a rough triangle around Ahmet, looking at his broad back. In Bill’s right hand was an eight-foot bullwhip. To his left was a table with a few photographs on it.

  “Strip his shirt off,” he said.

  Ed walked up to Ahmet, and in his own strong hands, ripped Ahmet’s white, sweat- and blood-stained T-shirt apart, revealing Ahmet’s tattooed back.

  “You ready, Ahmet?”

  Ahmet didn’t answer. It seemed like he was through talking. He was probably preparing himself for what was sure to be gigantic mental effort. In fact, it was probably going to be a spiritual effort as well. It was going to be a test of endurance. But endurance had its limits, and Bill was just getting warmed up.

  He worked his wrist around, getting a sense of the bullwhip, its weight, its motion, and how it would handle. It had been a long time since he’d held one of these. Just holding it raised some odd memories from out of the mists of the past. Good memories, in one sense. Nightmarish, in another.

  “I can’t tell you how much this takes me back,” Bill said to Ahmet. “It just takes me way back to the good old days.”

  He gave the whip a few practice swings. It howled, it hissed, and then, on the fourth or fifth try, it CRACKED. The sound of it echoed off the walls of the big empty chamber surrounding them. Ahmet knees buckled at the sound of it.

  Good boy, Ahmet. Lay down for me. Let’s do this the easy way, shall we?

  Bill fired the whip across Ahmet’s back, bringing a red welt almost instantly to the surface. Immediately, Ahmet fell to his knees. He howled. He began to weep abjectly, his entire body shaking with sobs. Bill had only hit him once so far, and he’d actually pulled it a bit. He was sure it stung, but holy hell. Not this much.

  Oh well. He settled in for the effort. It had been
a long time since he whipped a man. It was a form of punishment that was long out of favor, but Bill had used it before. The memory was still there in his muscles, along with the knowledge that if this went on long enough, his right arm would gradually become sore from exertion.

  He fired another lash with the whip. Then another. Then another. The whip hissed and crackled.

  He knew that you could whip a man to death. But of course, that wasn’t the plan today. Ahmet was already cowering on the ground, the chains that bound him pulling his body into a strange contorted shape similar to a lost soul burning in the crackling flames of hell. Bill stopped, glanced at Luke and Ed, and shrugged. The man was already broken. It was Break #1, Bill knew. There would have to be others.

  “Show him the pictures,” he said.

  Bill watched as Stone took the photos off the table. He walked over to the man kneeling on the ground and removed his blindfold. Ahmet’s eyes were squeezed shut. Luke slapped his face. The man was sniveling and crying.

  “Open your eyes!” Bill barked in Turkish.

  Ahmet did for a second, just long enough to glance at the photo in Luke’s hand. It was a photo of Ahmet’s wife. It was a glamour shot, a little bit sexy, with the wife reclining on a couch, fully dressed in tight jeans, a short abaya dress and hijab over her head. Incredibly chaste for the nude beaches in southern France, but flirting with years of hard labor in Saudi Arabia. Bill imagined Ahmet had paid a professional photographer to take that photo.

  “We have you,” Bill said. “We can have her, too.”

  “They’ll kill me if I tell you anything,” Ahmet said.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “That’s true. But better you than your wife and your children. We can protect them.”

  Stone held the photos of Ahmet’s children under his face, a boy and a girl—cute kids. Ahmet barely looked at them before squeezing his eyes shut again. Bill had sympathy for him, he really did. Ahmet was in a bad place. He had run out of options. Ahmet had made some poor choices in the recent past, and now his future looked very grim indeed.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you whatever I know.”

  Ed Newsam raised an eyebrow, and Bill shrugged.

  “Four lashes, in case anyone’s keeping score,” Bill said.

  “That was easy,” Ed said.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “But looks can be deceiving.”

  He squatted on his haunches and turned his attention to his prisoner again. “So Ahmet, let’s do the first thing. Tell me who you’ve been working for.”

  “The Kurds,” Ahmet said without hesitation. “The Kurdish Peshmerga. They want to—”

  Bill punched Ahmet hard across the face. The impact snapped Ahmet’s head around and he fell to all fours. Bill looked at his own hand. There was a scrape across his knuckles. As he watched, it started to bleed.

  It didn’t really hurt, but it did annoy him.

  “Liar!” Bill shouted.

  It was always the Kurds with these people. That was the first line of defense. The Kurdish minority in the south… every act of sabotage, every explosion, every downtick in the economy, every overcooked dinner… It was the Kurds!

  To Americans, the Kurds were that independent-minded, battle-hardened people who just wanted their own country. They were lovable underdogs. To the Turks, they were demons from hell, people who secretly had horns, sub-humans, conniving, manipulating, undermining everything.

  When a Turkish prisoner lied, he would start with the Kurds. After that failed, he would move on to the Armenians. Eventually the Armenian thing would collapse—in Bill Cronin’s experience, then and only then could you get to the real story, the reason why you came.

  He wrapped his big hands around Ahmet’s neck. Slowly, he began to apply pressure. It felt good to use his hands this way—they were still strong, they were still huge, like grizzly bear claws.

  “The Kurds?” he said.

  Ahmet could barely speak. The breath was going out of him. His face turned red, then a shade of purple. His eyes bulged.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, the Kurds.”

  Bill spit in his face. He applied more pressure.

  A squeaking sound came from Ahmet’s throat—his air passage was totally blocked.

  “Big Daddy?” Stone said behind him. “Bill!’

  Bill released Ahmet’s neck and let the man drop. Ahmet’s head bounced off the stone floor. He wheezed alarmingly, trying to suck in oxygen. He was weeping now.

  Bill turned and looked up at Stone. “Stone, this is my gig, okay? This is what you called me in for. The first thing you need to know about Turks is they’re inveterate liars. They blame everybody but themselves for their problems. We’ll get there, but you have to let me work. All right?”

  Stone shrugged. “Don’t kill him. We clear on that?”

  “Clear as a bell.”

  Bill turned back to Ahmet. The poor man was a puddle on the ground.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” Bill said. “Who do you work for?”

  “The Armenians,” Ahmet said. “I’m a spy for the Armenian government.”

  Bill shook his head. He almost laughed. He stood and picked up the bullwhip again. He looked at Luke and Ed.

  “We’re gonna be here a little while.”

  * * *

  Luke paced the halls of a three-story building on the American side of the air base. Ed Newsam and Bill Cronin walked at his sides. Ahmet had spilled the beans and they had a lot to do.

  “What will the Turks do with Ahmet?” Luke said.

  Bill shrugged. “They’ll kill him. But it’ll take a couple of weeks.”

  Luke looked at him.

  “You have to understand, and I’m sure you already do. He betrayed them. He was involved in a plot that killed men on this base, and made the entire country look bad. They lost eight nuclear weapons to a bunch of extremists.”

  Luke shook his head. “Then we’re keeping him.”

  “I never knew you to be soft.”

  “It’s not soft. I might want to question him again later. I can’t do that if he’s dead.”

  Bill shook his head. “I don’t know, Stone. You’re a guest here. You’re playing on their turf. I’d recommend against it, but that’s up to you.”

  Luke glanced at him. “Thanks.”

  He pulled his phone out and speed-dialed a number. Swann answered on the first ring. “Swann.”

  “Swann, where are you right now?”

  “I’m with Mika. We’ve got a little command center set up on the eighth floor of a hotel... Mika, do you know what the name of this place is?”

  There was some cross-talk as they gabbled back and forth. The upshot was they didn’t know where they were. That was okay. His people were tired.

  “I don’t know what this place is. They wanted us off the base because we’re civilians and they’re expecting another attack. So we’re here. It’s okay. We came in by chopper. I went down to the lobby for a Coke. They’ve got the place sandbagged, with concrete barriers out on the street in front of the doors. There’s a bunch of middle-aged former black ops guys turned mercenaries standing around with big guns down there, checking their bank balances on their telephones.”

  “Okay, Swann, never mind all that. We got some intel confirmation that the trucks were en route to Syria. Did you get any satellite imagery?”

  “Just letting you know that we’re probably safe over here.”

  “My heart is warmed by that fact,” Luke said.

  “And I got some satellite imagery, yeah.”

  “Do you care to share it with me?”

  “Sure, if you like. I was able to pinpoint both trucks. I triangulated them using American, Russian, and Israeli spy satellites. They took separate routes out of town, but both circled back and got on the road directly south from here, to the port city of Karatas. I lost them in some cloud cover that came in, but I spotted six ferries or tankers that left early this morning from Karatas, all within two h
ours of the theft. Three tankers went into the open ocean—I was able to track them down, including their owners. All three are legitimate container vessels playing routine trade routes. Two headed toward Western Europe, Italy and Spain, to be precise, and one headed across the Mediterranean with a next port of call in Algiers. I called those into my people at NSA—Interpol is waiting for the ones that went to Spain and Italy, and will board and search upon their arrival. Algeria is a little trickier. We have that one under surveillance, and the Italian navy is going to intercept before it reaches port.”

  Luke nodded, pleased. “Okay, good work. The others?”

  “Two Turkish passenger and vehicle ferries, which are open to the public and run scheduled routes, and which the Turkish police have already intercepted and searched. Nada.”

  “And the last one?”

  “Those are probably our boys,” Swann said. “They left Karatas and made a short crossing to the Syrian port of Jalmeh. The city had been held by the government, but was suddenly overrun by ISIS ten days ago. That fits—if they were planning to sneak nukes into the country, it makes sense to take and hold a port, at least for a little while. The town is under heavy bombardment by the Syrian army and the Russians. From what I could tell, the boat made it into port. I can give you the coordinates of where it’s currently docked. I’m monitoring that spot now, and I haven’t seen anything loaded onto or off that boat since it got in.”

  “Awesome, Swann. Keep an eye on it. Any other options?”

  “Sure. The other possibility is they brought the bombs into Karatas, and holed up in a warehouse along the docks. It was morning by the time they got there, and they probably want to travel at night. I’ve taken the liberty of asking our Turkish allies to shut down that port. They wouldn’t cooperate, something about being busy right now, so instead we’ve got choppers from the base flying routes along the waterfront, watching anything that tries to leave, and relaying that information first to the base, then back to me. If they’ve still got those nukes in Karatas, they can’t leave by water or on the road without us seeing them. They could try to drive out again, but the roads are crawling with checkpoints. The Turks are belatedly limiting highway traffic in response to the uprising.”