Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “No,” LeDoux said. “He wasn’t crazy. Just inconvenient.”

  “We were also used as an OPFOR squadron,” DeLuca said. “To test security at NORAD II. They knew it was empty.”

  “They suspected,” LeDoux said. “They’re saying they couldn’t assume. Captain Martin is making inquiries. It wouldn’t be the first time that was done.”

  “Or the last. What’s the Sergelin connection?” DeLuca asked. “Was he the money, or was he the front for the money?”

  “When all this began, the Soviet Union was the only country that could shoot down Darkstar,” LeDoux said. “My sense is that rather than alienate them, it was better to bring them in as a junior partner.”

  “That explains why we got a ping from Sergelin’s helicopter the night Darkstar shot down Cabrera’s chopper,” DeLuca said. “To avoid friendly fire.”

  “One of my all-time favorite oxymorons,” LeDoux said. “Sergelin wasn’t working outside his government any more than Koenig was, though I’m not sure Koenig knew it. We’ve been working with the list of Soviet scientists your friend Gary Burgess gave us, by the way. Three of them have disappeared. So far. Sergelin’s been arrested.”

  “I’m not surprised,” DeLuca said. “So who used us? Who wanted Koenig out? Bowen?”

  “I think he had help,” LeDoux said.

  “Who?”

  “Off the record, it looks like it could be Air Force,” LeDoux said. “A lot of people were not happy when the STRATCOM took over NORAD. People at the Pentagon who didn’t like how Darkstar’s original mission changed. I’m told they hoped that if they gave Koenig enough rope, he’d shoot himself in the foot. To very badly mix a metaphor. And so he did. And then some.”

  In all his years in the service, DeLuca had seen rivalries and feuds between branches of the service erupt in virtually every avenue of endeavor. It was the same old shit, different day. The stakes were just higher this time.

  “Why Shijingshan?”

  “A demonstration,” LeDoux said. “A shot across the bow. The White House has been in trade negotiations with the Chinese for a while now.”

  “Gunship diplomacy?” DeLuca asked.

  “Except now the gunships are in orbit twenty-eight thousand miles away,” LeDoux said.

  “Was Peggy Romano working for Bowen or the Air Force? I handed her the disk Escavedo stole. That’s what they wanted all along, wasn’t it? She only gave Walter a fraction of what was on the disk, didn’t she? Just enough not to tip her hand. But why try to kill us with the oxygen bottles?”

  “She was working for the Pentagon. I didn’t know. She was supposed to take the disks, once you found them, and make sure no one else saw them. It looks like the oxygen thing was actually an accident,” LeDoux said. “There was a recall order issued on those bottles but the order hadn’t reached her yet. Apparently.”

  “Apparently,” DeLuca said. “Darkstar’s mission changed from what? From antisatellite to tactical?”

  “Not just that. In its original conception, it was supposed to be powerful enough to blast any asteroid that might be approaching earth into bits.”

  “Asteroids?” LeDoux nodded. DeLuca suddenly saw the story the newspapers were putting about about asteroids colliding as a kind of preparation. “We’re in danger—do something,” the public would say, and then the Pentagon could reply, “We hear you—we will.”

  “You’re saying this is a big case of mission-creep?” DeLuca asked.

  “Big case. From asteroids to satellites. To anti-UFO,” LeDoux said. “I know, I know. This is something they’re never going to cop to. The belief has been that the possibility of an attack from extraterrestrial forces is real enough to at least prepare for it. Too many pilots over too many years reporting too many things going zip in the night.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” DeLuca said. “So Mars really does need women? I saw a UFO, Phil, and then Gary Burgess explained exactly how it could happen.”

  “I know,” LeDoux said. “Midnight on the twenty-third, right?”

  “Midnight on the twenty-third,” DeLuca said.

  “Which was 10:00 A.M. Moscow time, which was when the rebel brigade attacking Sergelin’s pipeline got vaporized in Chechnya.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Those are opposite sides of the earth,” LeDoux said. “Darkstar could do a lot of things, but one thing it couldn’t do was be in two geostationary orbits on opposite sides of the earth at the same time.”

  “Then it was Darkstar3,” DeLuca said.

  “D3 wasn’t launched yet,” LeDoux said. “It was launched two days later. Maybe it was your imagination.”

  Suddenly DeLuca knew how Sami must have felt.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Meanwhile,” LeDoux said, “we’re not going to loan you out to any joint commands again. That was my mistake. After what you went through in Iraq, I thought I was lobbing you a softball. It’s my fault that it got to be more than that. We’re clamping down.”

  “Good idea,” DeLuca said. “We wouldn’t want the actual sharing of intelligence resources to compromise a well-oiled military machine.”

  “I don’t need your sarcasm,” LeDoux said. “I have plenty enough of my own to go around. Where are you going next?”

  “I promised my wife a vacation in the sun,” DeLuca said. “She found a spa in Arizona she wanted to go to, but I’m feeling a little burned out on the Southwest. I’m thinking of maybe Key West, or the Caribbean. I feel like I’ve inhaled a lot of darkness lately. I need a good sunburn.”

  “Leave your phone on,” LeDoux said. “We could be sending you to a sunny place some time in the near future.”

  “Where?”

  “Go on vacation,” LeDoux said. “Put it on your CI card. You’ve earned it. And kiss Bonnie for me. I’ll brief you when you get back.”

  “I almost forgot,” DeLuca said. “One last thing. There’s a lieutenant somewhere named Joyce Reznick, unless she got busted in rank, too. Koenig had her transferred to get her out of the way. Tell Captain Martin to find her and transfer her back. See if there’s a recruiting office in Provincetown or Northampton where we could put her to use. Okay? I’ll see you around.”

  About the Authors

  DAVID DEBATTO has served in the active-duty Army, Army Reserve, and Army National Guard as a German linguist, counterintelligence course instructor, and counterintelligence special agent. He served in Europe at the height of the Cold War in the late 1970s to early 1980s and in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 where his Tactical Human Intelligence Team (THT) hunted Saddam, WMD, and top Ba’ath party leaders. He is currently writing further books in this series for Warner Books along with Pete Nelson as well as articles for major publications such as Vanity Fair, Salon, and The American Prospect. He is also a frequent guest on major television and radio news programs giving his analysis of breaking stories in the global war on terrorism. David lives in Florida.

  PETE NELSON lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts. He got his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1979 and has written both fiction and nonfiction for magazines, including Harper’s, Playboy, Esquire, MS, Outside, The Iowa Review, National Wildlife, Glamour, and Redbook. He was a columnist for Mademoiselle and a staff writer for LIVE magazine, covering various live events including horse pulls, music festivals, dog shows, accordion camps, and arm wrestling championships. He’s published twelve young adult novels, including a six-book series about a girl named Sylvia Smith-Smith, which earned him an Edgar Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America. His young adult nonfiction WWII history, Left for Dead (Random House, 2002), about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, won the 2003 Christopher Award and was selected for the American Library Association’s 2003 top ten list. His other nonfiction titles include Real Man Tells All (Viking, 1988), Marry Like a Man (NAL, 1992), That Others May Live (Crown, 2000), and Kidshape (Rutledge Hill, 2004). His novel The Christmas List was publish
ed by Rutledge Hill Press in 2004.

  More explosive CI Action!

  See below for a preview of David DeBatto and Pete Nelson’s new novel

  CI: Mission Liberty

  available in October 2006.

  THE CAR BOMB HEADING FOR THE U.S. EMBASSY, a fifteen-year-old Isuzu passenger van carrying two sixty-four-gallon drums marked “ammonium nitrate,” enough to sink an aircraft carrier, was driven by a young man wearing a vest that appeared to be packed with C4 explosives. He was joined on his mission by four men in ski masks carrying AK-47s and glancing nervously at the mobs that were throwing stones and looting stores and burning everything that had the taint of “foreigners.” A fifth man rode on the roof, grabbing the roof rack for support whenever the vehicle hit a pothole or crossed one of the open sewers.

  Down an alley, they saw a group of men with machetes chasing three boys who slipped through a hole in a fence. At the next corner, they were slowed in their progress when four women with babies strapped to their backs crossed in front of them, carrying portable stereos still in their boxes. The palm-lined avenue called Presidential Way was strewn with debris, the smoking shells of burned and overturned cars, the blackened armor from what used to be a military half-track with two burned bodies falling from the back, one corpse with its head intact and one without. Groups of children dressed in cast-off clothing donated by American charities, wearing T-shirts bearing logos for Georgetown University or faded images of Britney Spears, huddled in doorways, aiming toy rifles and broomsticks at the passing vehicles and laughing. Mixed with smoke and cordite and the pungent aroma of raw sewage flowing in the gutters was the faint smell of tear gas in the air, lingering in the areas where government troops had beaten a retreat in the face of the onslaught. Uncontrollable mobs now surged through the streets of Port Ivory, driven forward by rebel troops in green forest camo uniforms and red berets. Many of the regular rebel forces hadn’t been paid in weeks and now took their compensation in the traditional way of conflict, seizing whatever they could load into their jeeps and trucks or carry in their arms, and in whatever pleasures could be gained along the way.

  The driver of the Isuzu, an Arab man in his early twenties, slowed as they passed the British embassy, where thick black clouds of smoke poured from the former colonial governor’s mansion beyond the cast-iron fence, the fire not enough to deter the gangs of looters darting in and out of the building, braving the flames in search of treasure.

  The Isuzu slowed again as it approached the American embassy, on the opposite side of Presidential Way from the British embassy. Their target was Ambassador Arthur Ellis, but they feared they were too late, the grounds of the American compound overrun by Ligerians and rebel troops, the top corner of the building blown away where a shell from a seized Ligerian tank had detonated, the windows all broken, pieces of roof tile scattered across the yard. A thick black plume of smoke poured from inside the embassy, the image captured by a film crew with Belgian flags taped to their shirts. There was a large U.S.-made M-113 military transport parked in front of the gates, where six men in green uniforms and red berets fired their rifles in the air in celebration, a response that was returned by the man on the roof of the van, raising his AK-47 in the air in a gesture of victory.

  A man whose uniform bore the insignia of a captain approached the van, smiling, his eyes hidden behind his wrap-around sunglasses, his machine gun hanging casually from a strap over his shoulder.

  “Where is the ambassador?” the driver of the van asked the captain in accented English. “We come for the ambassador.”

  “They moved him,” the captain said. “I don’t know when.”

  “Where did they move him?” the driver asked, at which point the captain pointed down the road with his gun.

  “To the castle,” he said. “They could not defend this place. We were too many. Too strong! They have their Marines, but not so many. We have them up a tree, man.”

  “I will see,” the terrorist leader said. He made a brief inspection of the castle. In the ambassador’s office, he found shredded papers, a wastebasket in which documents had been used to light a fire, and atop the fire, burned and melted CDs and videotapes. All had been destroyed. He returned to the van. The massive Castle of St. James loomed at the far end of Presidential Way, at the opposite end of the esplanade from the presidential palace, which was also under siege.

  “Can you take us there?” he asked the captain. “To the castle?” The captain nodded, glancing inside the van at the drums of explosives in the back. He ran to the transport and ordered his men to take their guns and get in. The troops moved slowly, too drunk to move any faster. The leader of the car bombers saw a man dump a half dozen empty beer cans out the rear of the truck in front of them.

  “We have an escort,” the man in the front seat said.

  “Praise Allah,” a voice from the back seat added. “God is great.”

  They heard machine gun firing from inside the soccer stadium, an open-roofed ring of concentric concrete risers where the banks of lights already blazed white as the twilight approached. There was no telling who was being killed inside the stadium or how many, though the men in the van saw a half dozen orange schoolbuses parked just inside the gates, as well as another dozen military transports. Throngs of barefooted onlookers pressed up against the fence that enclosed the parking lot to see if they could get a glimpse of what was going on inside, with mothers crying out for their sons and wives crying out for their husbands.

  The Castle of St. James loomed immense above the town, originally a trading outpost built in 1534 by the Portuguese and later captured by the Dutch and then by the British, both powers adding to its original fortifications, though in each case, the main defenses were focused inland, to protect the occupants of the castle from attack by Africans, and not towards the sea where an attack could come from rival colonial powers. It stood on a natural mount, its outer bastions and casements forming a wall that girded the fortress on three sides, its fourth side backed against the sea atop a natural rock precipice where the wild surf from the Bight of Benin pounded on the foundation and the rocks below. A barbican village had grown up around the castle, where Fasori traders did their business with the Europeans, first in ivory, then in gold, then in human beings, and now formed the oldest part of the city. Cannons from inside the fortress had destroyed the town of Port Ivory, or parts of it, on three separate occasions over the centuries, but the city was always rebuilt, brown and gray houses of wattle and daub and cinder block with red tile and corrugated tin roofs, open stalls, street vendors, shops and merchants, the air hazy and stinking of kerosene cook fires and curry, car exhausts and the open sewers that ran down both sides of the streets in shallow gutters, and everywhere, chickens, goats, sheep, donkeys, and mangy short-haired dogs with curly tails. And rats. Several shops near the castle were on fire, filling the air with black smoke and an acrid stench.

  The M-113 parted the crowds, the soldiers in it occasionally firing their rifles in the air in warning. Some who saw the Isuzu van behind the transport, filled with men in masks, seemed bewildered, while others cheered and blew kisses. The truck stopped at the base of a long curving stone ramp leading uphill for fifty yards to the castle’s main portcullis. The gatehouse forming an outwork at the base of the ramp had been seized, with loudspeakers set up atop one of the turrets, from which Radio Liger blared, inciting the crowd, a voice saying, “Kill them, kill them all, you have much work to do… ”

  The captain walked from the transport back to the van. He was smoking a cigar. When he offered one to the man in the van’s passenger seat, the man refused.

  “We have machine guns and RPGs on the roofs surrounding the castle,” the captain said, “and many SAM-7s hidden. SAM-9s. We think they will send their helicopters, and when they do, we will shoot them all down.”

  “Where are your SAMS?” the Arab in the passenger seat said in Arabic. The captain looked confused, so the man repeated the question in accented English.<
br />
  “We have one in the church steeple, there,” the captain said, pointing with his cigar, “and one is in the mayor’s office, right there. And we have another in the red truck over there. That one. Yes. I chose the locations myself.”

  “And the men firing them, they’ve been trained? They’re not your children warriors—they’re actual soldiers?”

  “Oh yes,” the captain said. “They are my finest. Hand picked.”

  “You’ve done well,” the Arab said. “Keep them there. Now move your truck, please.”

  “What will you do?” the captain asked.

  “We came for the ambassador,” the Arab said. “We have his family. He has said if we release them, he will take their place. Move the truck now.”

  The captain gave orders, and the M-113 was moved. The man atop the van attached a large white flag to the barrel of his rifle, and then the Isuzu began to inch forward up the ramp. The curtain wall forming the outer bailey was lower than the bulwark inside, allowing the American soldiers visible at the rampart’s embrasures to shoot over it, if they chose to, but they held their fire. The crowd below watched in anticipation. Many backed away, expecting a massive explosion as word spread that a car bomb had penetrated the American defenses. The Arab in the passenger seat saw a pair of fifty-millimeter guns mounted atop the parapet guarding the main gate and told the driver to slow down. When the gates opened, the van drove slowly through, and then the gates closed behind it.

  The driver parked in the inner ward, just in front of the castle keep, and then the men got out of the van. They were met by a pair of Marines, who escorted them into the historical museum’s main exhibit room. Ambassador Ellis, wearing a helmet and a flak jacket, accompanied by a half dozen Marine bodyguards, stood in front of a large glass exhibit case, inside of which was displayed a long flowing garment called, according to the brass plaque at the top, The Royal Sun Robe, worn, historically, by a succession of Fasori kings. The man who’d been riding in the passenger seat took off his ski mask, saluted, and then extended his hand to the ambassador.