Luke Stone 04 - Oppose Any Foe

by Jack Mars

  Susan began. “Mr. President, I would like to—”

  “Considering the sensitive nature of the airspace above Syria,” Vasil said, “and the very real danger of this type of encounter taking place, the Russian military is scrupulous in submitting flight plans to the American military command. This courtesy, however, is not reciprocated.”

  “May I speak?” Susan said.

  “Of course.”

  “Mr. President, to assuage your fears, I would like to inform you that the weapons in question cannot be detonated. They are warheads designed to be used with a legacy missile system, which was decommissioned and destroyed more than twenty years ago. Without the proper system to launch them, and the missiles to deliver them, the warheads cannot reach the velocity, and therefore the energy on impact, needed to detonate them. Further, the warheads cannot even be made operational without the correct codes to activate them.”

  Putin barked out a sentence in response.

  “If they cannot be used, Madam, then why would someone steal them?”

  “In all likelihood, to scrape the radioactive material from them, either for use in a small-scale dirty bomb–type weapon, or as part of an attempt to secure the material for an ongoing nuclear weapons development program.”

  It was a missile all its own. The only country in the region with those aspirations that didn’t already have the bomb was Russia’s friend Iran.

  “Weapons development program? Come now.”

  Susan decided to run with that concept. “The warheads have built-in fail-safes, booby traps if you will, that make it nearly impossible to access the core of the weapon. The only actors that would have the resources or the facilities to work with these weapons are nation states. A ragtag terror group would be more likely to disperse a cloud of uranium in their own faces.”

  Putin began to say something.

  “Need I remind you, Mr. President,” Susan said, “that the most lax country in the world when it comes to safeguarding nuclear materials, and weapons of all kinds, is Russia. I won’t even touch upon the Chernobyl disaster and its implications.”

  Putin was in the middle of talking, but Susan kept going. He wasn’t going to do the man thing and just talk over her, not if she could help it. He might be the great dictator in his own country, but Susan didn’t live there. He’d had his say. It was her turn.

  “Thousands of Soviet-era weapons are on the market in Third World countries, particularly in Africa. My country routinely buys these weapons and destroys them to keep them out of the hands of the same terrorist groups you abhor so much. Nuclear facilities throughout the former Soviet Union were left open and unguarded for years, and as you know, a significant amount of radioactive material has gone missing from these facilities. Your country has proven very reluctant to share the exact details of how much material is missing, or where it might have gone.”

  Now there was silence.

  “Further,” Susan said, “Russia is a well-known sponsor of state terrorism. The Assad regime in Syria, as well as the Iranian regime, have used poison gas on their own subjects over a period of decades, right up to the present moment. Where do these countries obtain their chemical weapons, sir?”

  There was a long pause over the line. It went on and on. Had they hung up? It sounded like open space. Far away, there seemed to be a whistling sound, like the winter wind howling across the Great Plains at night.

  “Hello?” Susan said.

  “President Putin has just left the chamber,” Vasil said. “He would like you to know something further. Should the missing weapons be used in an attack on Russia, any Russian territory, or against Russian citizens in any way, we will consider it an unprovoked act of nuclear war by the United States against Russia. And we shall respond in kind.”

  “Is that all?” Susan said.

  “No, there is one more thing. President Putin wishes you a good evening, Madam President,” Vasil said. “He enjoyed speaking with you.”

  “Thank you, Vasil. Please give the President my regards.”

  Susan hung up the phone. She looked around the room. Ten people were hanging up their own telephones. Kurt Kimball made a slicing motion across his throat to someone in the back of the room.

  Susan sat back and put her hands on top of her head.

  “I think he’s starting to warm up to me,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  October 22

  4:22 a.m. Mediterranean Time (10:22 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time—October 21)

  Jalmeh, Syria

  The radio was dead.

  That was okay. Swann wasn’t answering anyway. Luke had never known Swann to go to sleep on a job, but he supposed it was possible he had dozed off.

  He and Ed were approaching the waterfront. Sitting tight until morning wasn’t in either of their DNA. They had hugged the ruined buildings, racing in and out of the shadows, communicating through hand signals and eye movements. They had barely spoken the entire time. One was the left hand, one was the right hand, and they knew exactly what the other one was doing.

  Now, they were in a narrow stairwell, dark as pitch. They moved through it silently, night vision goggles on, weapons ready. At the top of the stairs was a doorway. The flimsy door moved in the breeze, opening and closing, creaking, and sometimes slamming hard against the doorjamb. That was good.

  Ed was first. He pushed the door open the smallest crack, and held it there for a moment. Through the tiny sliver, Luke saw two men on the rooftop. They stood at the parapet, rifles on their shoulders, watching the harbor below them.

  Luke could shoot them both from here, but it would make too much noise. Ed pushed the door wide, and Luke dashed through it. He darted around the edge of the small outbuilding formed by the stairwell. It was made of slapped together cement. He crouched there, perfectly still.

  In a moment, he glanced around the corner. The guards were chatting quietly, laughing about something. One of them lit up a cigarette. Luke reached to his calf and slipped the knife away from the tape holding it to his leg. Just around the corner, the door creaked again, and suddenly Ed appeared.

  Ed pointed behind them and around the outbuilding. He was going to go the other way. Luke nodded. Luke held up his knife to show Ed, as if to say, “You’re going to need one of these.”

  Ed shook his head.

  Luke shrugged.

  Ed went around the back. Luke crept to the edge. He glanced around the corner. Thirty yards to those men. Probably five or six seconds with these boots and this gear on. Okay. As he watched, Ed appeared, coming from the other direction.

  The big man walked toward the guards. Now they spotted him. Ed had his hands in the air. One of the men said something in Arabic.

  Luke burst around the edge, knife in hand. One second. His heavy footfalls crunched on the gravel roof. Three seconds, four.

  The men heard him, turned to look.

  Ed attacked, grabbing his man by the head, twisting his head viciously to the right.

  Luke hit his man chest high. He plunged his knife hard into the man’s breastplate. It punched through. He clamped a hand over the man’s mouth, feeling the bristles of the jihadi’s beard. He stabbed again, and again, in and out, fast, like the piston of a machine. The man struggled and squirmed, but Luke kept jabbing.

  The man’s arms fell to his sides. His eyes were still open, and he was alive. Luke tilted his head up, hand still crushing his mouth, and swiped the serrated blade across the man’s throat. A jet of blood pulsed out. Done.

  Luke kept the man’s mouth covered until he was gone.

  He glanced at Ed. Ed was still twisting the other man’s head. He wrenched it with hard, jerking motions, his teeth gritted from the effort. Finally he got the sound he wanted—an audible SNAP.

  “Ain’t like in the movies,” Ed whispered.

  They sat against the parapet for a moment, divvying up the men’s weapons. They both had AK-47s and extra magazines for them. They each had cheap pistols that Ed a
nd Luke discarded. Neither of these guys were booby-trapped or wearing suicide vests. They weren’t in the martyr game—they had expected to live another day.

  Luke looked through cracks in the masonry. Three boats were moored below them, across the wharf. The one they wanted—the Helena—was the largest one, in the middle. Luke put the night vision on them. He spotted two men on the upper decks of each of the other boats, more guards. Half a dozen men congregated on the dock at the entry to the Helena.

  “I’ll come in from the left,” Luke said. “See that warehouse loading dock?”

  “I see it,” Ed said.

  “We’ll triangulate our fire. I’ll be right behind there. When you see me show up, give me thirty seconds, then blow that boat on the left. Put it right between those two guys and send them to see Allah. Drop down and reload. I’ll give you covering fire. They’ll draw to me. When they do, you pop up and take out the boat on the right. With a little luck, I’ll have taken out half those guys in the front by that time. Then we finish up the leftovers.”

  Ed nodded. “Beautiful.”

  “Okay, brother,” Luke said. “See you on the ground.”

  As he went down the stairs in the dark, he had a moment when Bill Cronin’s face flashed in front of him. Luke had killed him, it was that simple. He couldn’t say that Bill was a decent man and hadn’t deserved it—Bill had deserved it in spades, if anyone did—but it wouldn’t have happened. Luke called him, brought him on this job, and now Bill was dead. It was an ugly, ugly reality. A lot of people had died on missions with Luke Stone. He should come with a warning label—could be hazardous to your health.

  He shook those thoughts away. It was time to focus. He moved down an alleyway, silent as a ghost. When he came out, he was right where he wanted to be. He slid along the walls to the warehouse dock. He raised a hand for two seconds, then disappeared.

  He crouched, checked the MP5. Fully loaded. Full auto.

  A moment passed. Then he heard the sound.

  Doonk!

  A second later: GA-BANG!

  Light flashed and the sound wave hit him. He popped up, the explosion ahead and to his left. A man was on top of that boat, walking in circles, engulfed in fire. The upper deck of the boat collapsed onto the bottom. The men in front of the Helena were pointing and shouting, but not running or taking cover.

  Luke gave them a burst from the gun. It bucked in his hands as he sprayed them. The sound was loud, an ugly blat of automatic fire. Two, maybe three went down.

  Luke ducked and hit the ground. He crawled like a worm away from where he had just been. Bullets whined off the dock above his head, ricocheted. The wooden side of the building began to collapse, shredded by machine gun fire. Chunks of it rained down around him.

  Doonk! The hollow M70 sound came again.

  Luke smiled as he kissed the dirt.

  GAA-BOOOM! Bigger than before. Ed must have hit a gas tank or some kind of weapon storage. Someone was shrieking.

  Luke crept to the edge of the platform. Three men were still in front of the Helena, crouched, firing at the rooftop now. Clowns. These were the guys the entire civilized world was worried about?

  Luke popped up again and dropped two of them with another spray from the MP5. The third one escaped back up the gangplank to the Helena.

  Now Luke ran for the boat. He reached the plank in seconds. Three men squirmed on the ground in front of the boat. He paused, and finished each of them with a blast from the gun. No sense having one of them jump up and follow him inside.

  Two others were already shredded, their bottom halves separated from the top. They weren’t going anywhere. All around him, the two boats burned, quickly becoming infernos. The opening of the Helena was a gaping black maw. For a second, Luke considered waiting for Ed. But it wouldn’t do—they had the initiative right now, and the longer it took to get inside, the more time that last guy, and whoever else was still here, would have to regroup. Luke wanted them in disarray and on the run.

  He dropped the night vision over his eyes and ran up the plank.

  He passed into a wide hallway, half expecting to take a bullet in the first second. He hugged the wall, moving low and fast, head on a swivel. There was a heavy door across the hall from him. He went to it, yanked it open, and ducked back behind it.

  He scanned the inside. The boat was a car and truck ferry. There were two tractor trailers parked inside the holding bay, side by side. In front of them was the man who had run inside. The man glowed green. His hands were in the air. In one hand he held a white handkerchief.

  “I give up!” he shouted in a thick English accent. “My name is Nigel Sayles, and I surrender.” He was panting like a dog that was too hot.

  Luke drew a bead on him and moved slowly into the chamber. His eyes were everywhere at once. “Get on the ground.”

  The guy was crying now. “I’m nineteen years old. I come from Manchester. This was all a terrible mistake.”

  “On the ground, I said.”

  This was exactly how they did it. Set a decoy in front of you, get your attention, then the sniper hits you.

  “I didn’t mean it!” the kid screamed.

  Luke shot him. He dropped his aim and popped him with a short burst in the lower leg, breaking the bones in his calf, knocking off a chunk of meat from there. Then he ran to the kid, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him back into the shadows between the two trucks. The kid shrieked in pain and terror.

  Luke put the muzzle to his head.

  “Who else is here?”

  “Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!”

  Luke jabbed him with the gun. “Listen, kid! I don’t give a damn where you’re from, you ISIS scum. I’ll kill you right now. Who else is here?”

  “No one!”

  He jabbed him again. “Who else is here? Three seconds before I pull this trigger… One… Two…”

  “No one! You killed the last lot of them. I swear to God.”

  The kid was sniveling now, holding his shattered leg. “Oh my God. I’m shot.”

  Luke was breathing heavily.

  “If you so much as move, I will come back here and blow your brains out.”

  Luke went around to the back of the trailers. The trailers were beat to hell, strafed and pockmarked with gunfire. The doors were locked with heavy padlocks. He shot them off in turn. The kid screamed again each time he did. Luke threw open the doors of the first truck.

  “What the—?”

  The inside of the trailer glowed green in the night vision. It was empty. Just a big empty truck. He went to the other truck, threw that one open as well. The same thing—nothing.

  “What’s in it?” a voice said.

  He turned and a huge man with broad shoulders stood in the wide doorway. A man carrying an AK-47, with a battle helmet on his head, and night vision goggles.

  Ed.

  “Nothing,” Luke said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “We gotta go,” Ed said. “The boat’s on fire.”

  * * *

  “Ow! Ow, that hurts!”

  Luke dragged the kid by his good ankle along the dusty ground. To the east, light was coming into the sky.

  Behind them, all three boats were a raging inferno now. The two flanking boats had set the Helena aflame. There was a stiff breeze off the water—embers were flying across and alighting on the warehouses across the wharf. The air was dry as a bone. The whole neighborhood could go up in a few minutes.

  Ed had looted some more weapons from the dead men near the gangplank to the Helena. He carried a stack of rifles and pistols in various states of neglect.

  “Who are you guys, man? You don’t know how to maintain your weapons? Do you know how to do anything? We capped your whole squad without taking a scratch. All your boys are dead back there.”

  The kid didn’t answer. He was crying, his teeth clenched. He grabbed at his ripped out calf. Luke dragged him into a space between buildings and dropped his leg. The kid rolled in agony on the
ground.

  “Please don’t kill me,” he said.

  Luke shook his head. “Shut up. I’ll kill you just for talking.”

  Ed dropped his stack of guns nearby.

  They were protected on three sides in this little alcove. The only opening was from the water, and there didn’t seem to be anything out there. A highly-trained sniper at 2,000 yards, barely visible from here in a tiny rowboat, rolling on the sea—well, that seemed a little far-fetched. Those guys liked stability.

  Still, they couldn’t stay here forever.

  “What do you think, Ed?”

  “I don’t know what we’re gonna do with this punk, man.”

  Luke glanced down at the kid. He was on his side now, rolling just slightly. At least he wasn’t talking anymore. “Let’s let that sit for a minute. I’m talking about the bombs. They weren’t on the boat. Where are they?”

  Ed leaned against the edge of the alcove, AK-47 hanging by his side, scanning the wharf in either direction. Luke looked past his big shoulders. To the right, the flames were three stories high. Black smoke erupted from the center of them.

  Ed shrugged. “Simple enough. It was misdirection. You’d do the same. They made us think they were going one way, and they went the other way instead. Maybe they’re back in the port city in Turkey. Maybe they never left the base.”

  “The bombs left the base,” the kid said.

  “Shut up, punk. I’m about to put my gun in your mouth.”

  “They sent the bombs to Russia.”

  Luke squatted down next to the kid. He pawed through the pile of guns that Ed had dropped, picked out an old Ruger pistol that looked pretty clean. He popped the magazine out—fully loaded. He checked the barrel. It seemed okay. He slid the mag back in and drove it home. The gun probably wouldn’t blow up in his hand.

  He pressed it to the kid’s temple. “What’s your name again?”