by Jack Mars
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
9:03 p.m. Eastern European Time (3:03 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Adana, Turkey
“Luke can you give me a strobe, so I can get a look at your location?”
“What if the Russians are up there with you?”
Swann shrugged. He stared into the computer screen, watching the Little Bird and the pickup truck burn. A handful of ISIS fighters were left on the street, hiding in doorways and alleys, firing at the building Luke and Ed were most recently in. They took up positions around that front doorway, but made no attempt to enter the building. They had about one-fifth of the men they’d come with.
“The Russians were doing fast bombing runs. They’ve got a few choppers out over the water now, looking for the bird I downed. I think the Russians are the least of your worries.”
A green light appeared on a rooftop, three quarters of the way back down the block. It blinked every three seconds.
“Okay, I see you.”
“How do we look?”
“Well, the bad guys are digging in where you fired from. They don’t look like they’re in any hurry to come inside, though.”
“How far are we from the boat?”
Swann smiled. Of course. These gung-ho lunatics had survived an aerial dogfight, a helicopter crash, and a firefight by the skin of their teeth. Now they were going to go after the original objective.
“You are almost three miles from the boat. It is south and west of you. There’s nothing but ugly between you and there. You’ve got a pitched battle going on half a mile to your south—I don’t see any way you can make it through. There are running gunfights damn near all the way to the docks. The Syrians are pushing through with heavy guns. They’re taking out entire buildings. God help any people still inside of them.”
“We know. We can see it from here.”
“I’d say you want to wait that thing out.”
Luke didn’t respond. The moment dragged on.
“Luke? It’s a shit storm. You won’t make it through there.”
“I heard you the first time, Swann.”
Swann shook his head. He glanced up at Mika, who was staring at the screen with wide owl eyes. Mika was undergoing a trial by fire just witnessing this, and her face showed it.
“Luke,” Swann said, “we’re supposed to report to the Situation Room. I need official status on Bill Cronin and the pilots.”
“The pilots died in the crash,” Stone said without hesitating. “Cronin died in the shootout. He was wounded, and volunteered to stay behind to draw fire.”
“That’s confirmed?”
“I saw him die,” Luke said. “And the chopper is scuttled. Bill took it with him, wherever he went.” A long moment passed. “What do you suggest we do down here?”
Swann shrugged. “I’d say find a dark corner to hole up in. If the battle dies down, or the lines shift, a corridor might open up. Mika and I will keep an eye on it.”
“All right. I’m going to sign off. The last thing we’ll need is for this battery to die. Just about everything else has gone wrong, so why not that?”
* * *
The hours passed.
Swann sat alone and dozed in the darkened hotel suite. His headset was still on. He had turned off most of his set-up to conserve power. The hotel was still blacked out. From his windows, if he cared to look, he could see the skyline of the city of Adana. There was still sporadic fighting going on out there. He could hear the gunshots, and the rare explosion, from here.
On the monitor in front of him, Stone’s green strobe blinked every few seconds. It cast an eerie glow around the room. He minimized the screen—the blinking bothered his eyes. In the next room, he could hear the sound of Mika’s gentle snoring. Mika was out of her depth here. That was okay—Swann didn’t judge it. She was young. Maybe she would grow into this kind of thing, maybe she wouldn’t.
He had called Washington. The conversation hadn’t gone well. The aide to the National Security Adviser had been curt, to say the least. Swann had dealt with her before—Amy was her name, and she’d been friendly enough in the past. Well, that made sense. Luke had lobbied for this mission, and it couldn’t have gone much worse. One hundred percent SNAFU. Three dead, an engagement with a Russian helicopter, destruction of same, our owned downed chopper in the battle zone. Two operatives stranded on a rooftop in ISIS-held territory. We weren’t even supposed to be there. But we went in because there were stolen nukes on a boat at the docks.
Jesus.
“There isn’t much hope of keeping this a secret anymore, is there?” Amy had said.
“Secret from who?”
“I don’t know. The Russians. The media. The world in general.”
Swann shook his head. “Oh. No. I don’t see how. The Syrians on the ground and the Russians in the sky have been slicing the ISIS fighters to pieces the past hour. It’s only a matter of time before they break through and find our chopper.”
She was about to sign off.
“Amy, we need to get those guys off that roof. And we need to recover those bodies.”
“I’ll let them know.”
Now, Swann sat and stared into the darkness. He drifted. Luke and Ed were not far from the port, just a few miles. They could walk that distance in half an hour, if there weren’t hundreds of fighters and a wide open killing zone in the way.
He spun his chair around to face the terminal. There had to be a route there—maybe go straight west to the water, steal a boat, and come south. Anything. If they snatched a boat, they could also get out into international waters. Hell, maybe the Syrians had cleared out the ISIS fighters by now, and small children were laying roses along the boulevards. Luke and Ed could dance to the docks.
He pulled the screen up. There was an instant message on his desktop. It was an internal NSA messaging service, encrypted, secure, but used for unclassified communications. It was probably somebody from work. He opened it.
“Swann?”
The user ID was one he didn’t recognize.
“Yes.”
He waited several seconds while the cursor blinked.
“You sent Stone the wrong way. And people died.”
Swann didn’t answer. What was this? He’d made a report to Kurt Kimball’s aide, somebody at NSA had gotten wind of it, and now they were going to taunt him? There were a lot of jerks in this business, and there was a lot of professional jealousy. Luke Stone stepped on toes—it was what he did. Stone had been winning it his way for a long time, and people out there had been dying to see him and his team taken down a peg.
Don’t count us out just yet.
“I know where the warheads are. You don’t.”
Swann waited.
“Not on the boat.”
Okay, enough is enough.
“This is a United States National Security Agency messaging service,” Swann typed. “Identify yourself.”
“You made a mistake. Meet me in Adana. I will show you the error of your ways.”
It was possible, Swann knew. The boat had been his best guess. The trucks had gone to Karatas, right down to the port. But the weather made it impossible to tell if they’d gone on the boat or not. Still, the Turks had Karatas locked down. If the bombs were still there, they weren’t going anywhere.
How does this person know about this?
Okay, he would play along. “Are they still in Karatas?” he typed.
The cursor blinked.
“No.”
A moment passed.
“Never made it to Karatas. Decoy. I will show you.”
“Show me now,” Swann typed.
“Can’t come there. Not safe. Meet me at the Sabanci Central Mosque. Public place. Easy to reach. Any taxi will take you.”
Swann’s heart skipped a beat. “When?”
“Now.”
Swann stared hard at the screen. He thought about taxis. They were funny things. They kept running, even while bombs dropped and gunmen ran in the st
reets. Stranger than taxis, of course, was this mystery person who claimed to know where the stolen nukes were.
“How did you access this…” Swann started to type, but a new message appeared.
“Come alone. If I see anybody… a soldier, a cop, anybody… I’m gone.”
Swann logged off the service. He could try to hack the guts of it, and find out where those messages had come from. But what would he discover? The person said they were in Adana, and if he managed to find anything, that’s probably what it would be—an IP address here in the city, and in all likelihood, on the military base. Watching you, watching me. That was the game they all played. Some American spy agency, or sub-agency of a sub-agency, skunk works, lone wolves, moonlighters, somebody… They’d been monitoring this whole thing as it unfolded, but for whatever reason, they couldn’t step into the light.
It was like in his early days at the FBI—one time he provided radio support on a drug house raid, and when the agents went in, they busted half a dozen guys, three of whom were undercover cops from the local police department.
Swann was an intelligence analyst, a desk jock, not really a spy. He knew that about himself. But you know what? He could hack it. He could do this stuff. Being around people like Stone and Ed Newsam helped. But in the end, you either had it in you, or you didn’t. Swann had it in him.
He stood and shrugged into his jacket. He went to his bag and pulled out his gun—a matte black Glock nine-millimeter, just like Luke Stone carried. He touched the handle of the front door to the suite.
In the other room, Mika stirred in her sleep and rolled over.
He wouldn’t bother her with this. After watching that battle earlier tonight, she seemed like she’d lapsed into shock, and this… meeting, he guessed you’d call it… was way outside standard protocol.
Anyway, he’d probably be back in an hour.
* * *
“Here he comes,” a voice said in Jamal’s ear.
Jamal stood in the shadows under some trees, just off the grand boulevard that led to the gigantic Sabanci Mosque. With power out in the city, the mosque and the water around it—normally so beautifully lit in green, or gold, or red—was lit instead by burning torches. That was beautiful in its own way, and reminded Jamal of the time of Muhammad.
He glanced back at the sprawling complex with its great dome and six tall minarets, reaching to the sky. He wondered what the Prophet might think of a place like this—traditionally designed, but totally modern, and built in 1998.
The man named Swann approached. Jamal knew him on sight—tall and thin, with stovepipe legs and long hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore jeans and funny checkerboard sneakers, and a leather jacket. He wore expensive black square-framed eyeglasses on his face. He looked nothing like a military man or a special operative. He looked like a man who had never been in a fistfight.
Jamal stepped out into the walkway.
“Swann.”
Swann turned to him. They stood about ten feet apart. The nearest torch burned perhaps thirty feet away, and it was dark here. Swann’s face flickered orange in the flames. His eyes showed confusion, then recognition. Then they returned to confusion.
“How are you, my friend?” Jamal said.
“You?” Swann said.
Jamal nodded. “Yeah. Me.”
“Okay,” Swann said. “You want to talk?”
Jamal shook his head, as if to lament the awkward position in which he found himself. “I’m afraid not.”
Swann glanced to his right and his left, as though he might run. Instead, he pulled a gun from inside his jacket. Jamal made no move. A tiny projectile flew from Swann’s left. It was barely visible, and it made a sound just at the edge of Jamal’s hearing.
Sssssssspppp.
Jamal stepped quickly, closing the distance between them in one second. A small black dart was lodged in Swann’s long neck. It was administering a drug that would hit the man’s bloodstream instantly. Swann’s eyes fluttered. His gun dropped from his open hand and clattered on the pavement.
Jamal hugged him as his body went limp, then slowly lowered him to the ground.
“Got him,” Jamal said into the microphone concealed inside his collar.
Within seconds, two large men emerged from the shadows on the other side of the walkway. One pulled the dart from Swann’s neck, as the other removed Swann’s glasses and pulled a black canvas bag over the thin man’s head. He cinched it tight around Swann’s neck. He dropped Swann’s glasses onto the ground.
One man took Swann by the arms, the other by the legs. They nodded, hoisted him into the air, then walked away with him, back into the small knot of trees from which they’d emerged. In almost no time, it was if Swann had never been here at all. The only evidence of him was the black eyeglasses lying on the paving stones.
Jamal crunched them under his boot as he walked away into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
6:13 p.m. (12:13 a.m. Eastern European Time)
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
“Come to order, please. Order, everyone!”
The room was packed. Coffee cups, empty food trays, and discarded sandwich wraps littered the conference table. Staffers huddled with decision makers, gabbling, pointing at data, swiping through screens.
The sharp clap of Kurt Kimball’s hands broke through the noise.
Yet another break, followed by yet another call to order. Susan had reached her limit—Kurt’s thunderous hand claps had her at the end of her rope. The hours kept slipping by, and things kept getting worse. Susan’s advisers, and their staffs, didn’t seem to have any answers. The situation was slipping out of control.
“Okay, Kurt,” Susan said. “Sum it up for us, if you can.”
Kurt raised his eyebrows.
“This is what we know. Agent Stone’s helicopter was intercepted by a Russian helicopter gunship over the ocean near the port of Jalmeh in western Syria. The port is where we believe the stolen nuclear weapons are docked, aboard the Greek freighter the Helena. We believe the Russian helicopter was lending air support to Syrian army tank and infantry units trying to dislodge ISIS fighters from the port.”
Kurt took a breath. “The fight was a mismatch. Agent Stone’s helicopter was shot down and crashed a few miles away, within a densely populated residential zone of the city. The Russian helicopter was then shot down by a drone circling the area, piloted by Stone’s team member Mark Swann, who gave us the report. The Russian chopper went into the sea about a mile west of the port. Preliminary reports we’ve intercepted are that there were no survivors.”
“Do we know who fired first?” General Loomis said.
Kurt shook his head. “We don’t, but it hardly matters. Three hours ago, we were in direct conflict with a Russian military helicopter. We are in a very dangerous situation. We didn’t communicate the presence of our helicopter, or the reason for its presence. But by now, since the news of the nuclear theft has been leaked worldwide, I’m sure the Russians are well aware of why we were there.”
“What is the status of our helicopter and its personnel?” Haley Lawrence said.
Kurt cleared his throat. “The helicopter pilots, Captain Wayne Alvarez and Lieutenant Ian Rogers, both died in the crash. The helicopter itself has been destroyed. It was scuttled by Bill Cronin, who died in a firefight with ISIS ground forces after the crash.”
“Bill Cronin is dead?” General Loomis said.
Kurt nodded. “Mmm-hmmm.”
Loomis shook his head.
“Where is Agent Stone?” Susan said.
“Agent Stone and Agent Newsam are alive as of the last report. They survived the firefight with ISIS troops, and intend to make their way to the docks to investigate the Helena. Communication with them is limited, and the area is a live war zone. Whether they reach the Helena or not, I’m not sure we have many options as to how to extract them again. General, if you have any ideas, I think we’d love to hea
r them.”
Loomis scowled. “I told you people last night that I had drop teams ready to go. But you went with Stone instead, an aging cowboy who operates without oversight, and we see how that worked out. We can still turn the situation around, but it will take a change in tactics. You guys wanted to use a scalpel. Now it’s time to go with a hammer.”
Loomis looked around the table. His eyes flashed anger. Clearly he was one of these military people who thought civilians had no idea what they were doing. He turned his hot eyes on Susan, but she was having none of it. She returned all the heat he gave her, and more.
“Please enlighten us, General. We’ve never neutralized a threat before.”
He shook his head. “This is what I suggest. We bomb that ship, and sink it right there at the dock. The warheads are not activated, as far as we know, and will easily withstand a bombardment with the kind of conventional weapons needed to sink a small freighter. If ISIS wants those bombs, they can send divers down to bring them up from thirty feet of water.”
And if the bombs aren’t even there?” Haley Lawrence said.
“Simple,” said the general. “The Turks have Karatas in lockdown. We take over for them, put about a thousand troops on the street, and search every warehouse, freighter, ferry, and truck in the entire city. It’ll take a couple of weeks, but if we cut the road out, and shut down the port…”
Kurt shook his head. “We’ll need the cooperation of the Turks. They’re currently putting down an insurrection, and I’m not sure we’re going to get agreement from them to put our troops in their streets.”
Loomis frowned. “We don’t need their cooperation. We don’t need their permission. They are Turkey. We are the United States of America.”
“What if they are activated?” Susan said.
“Excuse me?” the general said.
“The warheads,” she said. “The terrorists stole them for a reason. Presumably it wasn’t to decorate their homes with. What if they somehow activated the warheads, and we drop bombs on them?”