Back Blast: A Gray Man Novel

by Mark Greaney

  It was all so tiring to think about, and he had to concentrate on staying awake.

  He continued down I-95, passing through the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and here his head instinctively turned to the left and looked off into the dark. He knew the exit here onto I-64 well, because he had spent some of the most intense years of his life less than one hour directly to the east, beyond the coastal plain and all the way through the swamps at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Back before 9/11, when Court was just a trainee working to become a singleton operator in the Autonomous Asset Development Program, he spent two years in a sequestered set of small buildings just inside the protected area at the military and intelligence installation known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity. Here he’d learned tradecraft, foreign languages, survival skills, hand-to-hand combat, scuba diving, and dozens of other talents and trades, all of which turned him into one of the CIA’s best “one-man bands” of espionage. He’d been in his early twenties when he graduated from and left the compound at AADP, but he’d been back to other facilities at Harvey Point many times throughout the years. Each time he drove onto the grounds he looked off towards a swamp to the right of the road, and he’d wondered if back there on the other side of a thick copse of cypress, more young men were going through AADP training, hidden even from the rest of the men and women with Top Secret clearance allowed onto Harvey Point.

  He’d heard the Autonomous Asset Program had been disbanded and he’d thought himself to be the last surviving operative from the program, but Max Ohlhauser had told him the day before that AAP had been rebranded somehow, and that it remained operational.

  He wondered if the answer to all his questions was out there beyond the cypress trees and swampland, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and kept driving south, doing his best to instead brainstorm his operation to protect his dad. He began thinking back to a time long ago when the roads and farms just west of Jacksonville, Florida, had been his stomping ground. It would be surreal to be back on those roads, and he wasn’t looking forward to it, but he worried Denny Carmichael would stop at nothing to end this, and he wouldn’t think twice about sending foreign killers to target Court’s father.

  Think about something else, Gentry, he told himself, desperate to find a topic to concentrate on that wouldn’t wear his mind out for the next nine hours.

  For the first time on this drive, he reached to the knob on the radio, and he flipped it on. The speakers in this twenty-four-year-old truck were shit, and it took him several seconds to find an FM station that played something he could listen to, but as soon as he heard an old Allman Brothers tune, he stopped turning the dial, and he cranked up the volume as far as it would go.

  “Midnight Rider” was just about the perfect song for tonight. He wished he could just play it on a continuous loop until tomorrow morning.

  Court wore a green Caterpillar cap and a denim jacket; other than his Virginia drive-out tags he looked like a farmer or factory worker in any of the towns here in the Carolinas or northern Florida, his ultimate destination.

  This was nice, he told himself. His cover legend, for maybe the first time in his operational life, felt exactly like the original Court Gentry. He’d operated undercover as a dockworker in Ireland and a financial analyst in Singapore and a commercial diver in Brazil. He’d played the roles of a light-skinned Masalit tribesman in Sudan and a Canadian businessman in Italy and an Iraqi nomad in Syria.

  He’d played one hundred roles, easily, but he’d never once played the role of a hick driving his V8 beater and wearing a Cat hat and soiled denim, listening to Southern rock as the miles rolled by under his big tires.

  No, he’d never played that role. But he’d lived it.

  Despite the worries on his mind stemming from what he’d left behind in D.C. and the concerns he had about what he would find when he got where he was going, Court Gentry couldn’t help but feel good right now.

  He felt real. He felt American.

  He was hours from home still, but somehow it was as if he’d already arrived.

  58

  Matthew Hanley had spent most of the day out of the office, working in a conference room at Andrews Air Force Base. His Air Branch was still working on getting the four de Havilland Twin Otter aircraft upgraded and registered with a CIA shell company. Hanley didn’t have to spend his day at Andrews to help with the minutia of this—it was work beneath his rank and he had administrative people who did this sort of shit all day—but he had just wanted to get away from the campus at Langley for the afternoon, so personally attending to some of the intricacies of turning used turbo-prop puddle jumpers into hi-tech CIA transport aircraft had proved a good excuse to do just that.

  Around eight p.m. he piled his large frame into the back of his armored Camry and began the movement west back to his home in Woodley Park. Jenner was at the wheel, as before, but Hanley had given Chris Travers the rest of the week off. Travers had been suspicious, of course, had asked his boss what was up, and Hanley thought about lying to his man. Instead he went the opposite direction: the cold hard facts. Hanley told Travers Carmichael was trying to get him booted from the SAD, probably by ginning up a positive drug result. He promised to fight for Travers but insisted Chris go home and make himself scarce for a few days.

  If they couldn’t find Travers they couldn’t take a sample of his piss, Hanley explained, and, without a sample to taint, they sure as hell couldn’t frame him for abusing drugs.

  With Travers out a young Ground Branch paramilitary named Paladino rode shotgun in Hanley’s car, but it wasn’t just these two men in the Camry anymore. Now a Chevy Tahoe followed chase on Hanley’s vehicle, with four more armed SAD officers inside, and all six men would stay at Hanley’s house until Gentry was either captured or killed.

  Hanley was no longer worried about Gentry killing him, but he’d bumped up his detail anyhow. It was his way of giving the middle finger to Denny Carmichael. Denny had JSOC men following him, so Hanley surrounded himself with Ground Branch boys to keep the army-side goons far enough back to where he wouldn’t have to see them or deal with them.

  He recognized how silly he was being, but he didn’t give a shit.

  A half mile from his home Hanley asked Jenner to divert to an Italian tratorria on Connecticut. The two-vehicle convoy did as instructed, and Hanley dropped in to the half-empty restaurant and took a small round table in the back. He’d asked Jenner and the boys to sit and eat with him, but even though he was their boss, they declined.

  It was their job to keep him safe, they explained, not to pass him the garlic toast and listen to his old war stories about the Grenada invasion.

  Matt Hanley ordered raw oysters and a rare fillet, along with an entire bottle of Chianti for himself, and he sipped his wine and slurped his oysters, all the while sitting there and humming along to sad Dean Martin songs playing softly over the restaurant’s speakers. His men stood near the exits, their eyes out the windows and doors.

  Shortly after Hanley’s steak arrived, Jenner approached the table, his MP7 obvious under his suit coat.

  The director of the SAD said, “Sure you won’t join me for a drink?”

  “No thanks. Boss, there’s somebody here that wants to talk to you.”

  Hanley just looked up from his plate. “Well, who the hell is it?”

  “It’s that asshole TL from the Goon Squad. Forgot his name. The guy who died a few years back.”

  “Zack Hightower,” Hanley said. And then, “It’s fucking magic, huh?”

  Jenner just shrugged. “It’s the fucking Agency, sir.”

  Hanley chuckled, wiped his mouth, and took another sip of the Chianti. “Send him over. Maybe I can get the dead guy to drink with me.”

  Hightower appeared at the table and stood across from Hanley. He seemed nervous. “Uh, sorry, boss. I just wanted to apologize in person.�
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  “Pop a squat,” Hanley said, and Hightower sat down at the table while Hanley signaled the waiter. “Bring my old friend here . . .” He looked at Zack now. “You didn’t quit drinking, did you?”

  “Hell, no, sir. I was just fake dead, I wasn’t really dead.”

  “Bring him a Stoli on the rocks.” And then, “A double.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’ve put on a few pounds since I saw you last.”

  “And a few years.”

  “Same here on both counts,” Hanley said. He still seemed more interested in his fillet than in his company. “So . . . what’s the deal? You are Denny’s personal direct action arm now?”

  “No, sir. I was brought in to help them locate Violator.”

  “And you missed him, but you sure found Lee Babbitt, didn’t you? One round center mass. Three hundred fifty meters.”

  Hightower didn’t say anything. In the awkward silence his drink arrived. Hanley’s knife and fork scratched his plate.

  Eventually the director of the Special Activities Division looked up. “How did I know you zapped Babbitt, you ask?” He took another bite. “I didn’t. It was a guess. You just confirmed it with your non-denial.” He followed this with a healthy gulp of Chianti.

  Zack said, “I was told Babbitt was a clear threat to Agency operational security, and he was unwilling to—”

  Hanley interrupted, “Babbitt was a piece of shit. Fuck him. You did good.” Then he pointed his steak knife across the table. “But Gentry . . . Why are you after Gentry? Back in the day that kid would have died for you, no questions asked.”

  “I’m starting to ask myself the same question, sir. I had a little run-in with him last night.”

  Hanley smiled while he cut another piece of meat off his fillet. “I’m still trying to get my blood pressure down to normal from his visit to my place. He get the drop on you?”

  A pause. An embarrassed “Yes, sir.”

  Hanley shrugged. Not surprised. He was halfway through his dinner now. “What did he tell you?”

  “He doesn’t believe he did anything wrong on BACK BLAST.”

  “That’s it?”

  Hightower shook his head. He drank a third of his vodka in one gulp. “Sir, are you aware of any foreigners involved in the ideal hunt for Sierra Six?”

  Hanley looked at Hightower with genuine surprise. “Foreigners?”

  “Affirmative. Like, Gulf Arabs. Here in town. Part of the same operation.”

  “Of course not. I’m not involved in this hunt, but why the hell would there be Arabs in a CONUS agency op?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Gentry is alleging the men who killed Ohlhauser were part of some Muj unit.”

  For the first time since Hightower sat down, Hanley put his fork on the plate and leaned back from the table. “I know Denny is using a JSOC unit.”

  “Gentry would know Delta guys from Gulf Arabs.”

  “He would, indeed.” Hanley shrugged. “I don’t have a clue who they could be, but if Gentry says he saw them, then he saw them.”

  “I feel the same way, sir. I thought I’d start looking around while I’m out on the streets.”

  “I’d be interested to know what you find out.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Hanley seemed lost in thought now, so Zack finished his drink quickly and immediately stood up. “I appreciate your time.”

  Hanley reached into his pocket and took out a pen. He took the damp beverage napkin from under Zack’s empty glass and he wrote down a phone number. “Any time, day or night. This is me. No one listening. No one recording.” He looked up at Zack and extended his hand with the napkin. “Just me.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “You know, Zack . . . I told Court I couldn’t help him, and I can’t. But I sure as hell am not going to help the other side. When things settle after this, there is going to be a reckoning.” He picked up his steak knife and pointed with it again. “You’d do well to remember that, Sierra One.”

  Hanley watched Hightower leave, then he called for the check.

  59

  The Central Intelligence Agency’s Alexandria safe house, dubbed by the CIA Alexandria Eight, wasn’t a house at all in the conventional sense.

  It was so much more.

  On a fenced property that covered nine acres of grass-covered hills along North Quaker Lane, the main structure was a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot brick mid-Atlantic Colonial building. Built as a school of divinity in the 1850s, it had remained a college campus for seminarians for nearly a hundred years before slipping into private hands. In the 1960s the CIA bought the property, which had by then fallen into disrepair, and with money earmarked for overseas Cold War operations they rebuilt it as a veritable fortress, to be used as a safe haven for top CIA personnel in the event of an attack on the CIA HQ in nearby McLean, Virginia.

  The building was never used for its original purpose, but over the years it had been employed on those few occasions when both a large and secure safe house was needed in the Washington, D.C., area.

  There were twenty-six rooms on the property in total, spread across a north wing that was lightly protected with secure locking bolts on the doors and windows, a main central building with a dining hall, facilities for conferences and other common spaces, and a south wing that had all the security of a bank vault.

  The wings were two stories tall with long, low attics, and the central building was three stories, with a large open clock tower in the center that stood over the main atrium and a spiral staircase that rose from the atrium to the conference rooms on the second and third floors.

  As impressive as it looked on the outside, it was dramatically less so on the inside. During the War on Terror, the facility was all but mothballed, and large parts of the property had not been renovated since the early 1970s. Dark stained-wood paneling in the main hall and yellowed wallpaper in the bedrooms dated the facility, and it had the smell and feel of an old public school. Industrial antiseptic cleansers and many corners that were never dusted, and other than a few bedrooms and common spaces that had been used in the past few years a handful of times, most of the furniture dated back to the 1960s and early 1970s.

  Even though the decor and furnishings weren’t up to today’s standards, the entire building retained a network of antiquated but robust security measures. All the locks were pneumatic and controllable from a security room. In the event of an attack on the property, steel barriers could be lowered behind the doors and windows to seal in the occupants in the south wing, which had its own dedicated air supply, its own long-term food storage, even its own water tower that was protected in a small rear courtyard.

  Suzanne Brewer thought Carmichael’s decision to utilize Alexandria Eight was over the top, even considering the threat from Court Gentry, but Carmichael insisted, so she personally toured the location and oversaw bringing the pneumatic security system back online, and she ordered technicians to augment the property with more cameras, communications gear, and high-tech security measures.

  Carmichael arrived via motorcade at nine p.m. and he went directly to one of the bedrooms on the second floor of the south wing. This room also had an outer office he could use while here, as well as a huge adjacent conference room with a twenty-seat table, so the entire Working Group could begin holding their evening meetings here, instead of at Langley.

  With him here at Alexandria Eight Carmichael had DeRenzi and his entire twelve-man personal protection detail, along with another sixteen CIA security officers pulled off of static safe house work in the area.

  Carmichael toured the entire south wing and spoke with Brewer about adding a few more details to make the facility safer. Once satisfied all protective measures were in place, the director of the National Clandestine Service determined that, while there was no place safer than the CIA’
s HQ, running a close second now was Alexandria Eight.

  —

  Jordan Mayes arrived at Alexandria Eight a half hour later in the center of a three-SUV motorcade, feeling like the nucleus of an atom with eight bodyguards serving as the electrons. Together all nine men rolled up the long, straight driveway towards the massive building, checking in with a pair of parked Yukon XLs that blocked the drive halfway up.

  Everyone knew Jordan Mayes, of course, but he still had to show his ID to gain access, as did everyone on his security team, and a pair of German shepherds sniffed under the SUVs to make sure Gentry wasn’t riding below, holding on to the underside of one of the vehicles like a cartoon ninja.

  The three SUVs finished their journey up the driveway and arrived at the front door of the massive building. Here they passed four more guards, each one armed with an assault rifle, and they entered the grand hall of the former seminary. More guards here looked ready to deal with any trouble, but they were professionals, and they were also in the presence of the number two clandestine services executive in the Agency, so they merely checked his ID perfunctorily and pointed the way up a winding staircase to the right that led to the south wing.

  Mayes looked around as he headed to the open staircase that rimmed the grand hall. This place was a fortress, but he had expected nothing less as far as security. Suzanne Brewer had set up the defenses for Carmichael’s stay here, and she was nothing if not good at her job.

  Mayes climbed the stairs with four members of his detail, and at the top they passed through a wide doorway that opened into a hall that led north and south. Mayes knew from a phone call with Brewer that the door from the staircase into the hallway was iron and several tons in weight, and it was controlled by pneumatic pressure and flow-control valves so that it could pivot shut remotely and lock with wide internal iron bolts that could withstand a round from an Abrams tank. The entire south wing, in fact—doors, windows, even the walls themselves—were either steel-reinforced or protected by the pneumatic emergency security system, and the twelve rooms inside the protective cocoon could all go from wide open to locked tight in just seconds.