PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller

by J. T. Brannan

  It wasn’t that he was afraid of capture, afraid of dying; he just had more to do, if he could make it.

  He saw armed men racing around from the sides and stopped, threw a grenade toward one group while pivoting and loosing off another burst of automatic gunfire toward the other.

  It caused enough of a pause for Massoud to react, racing across the green playing fields for the fences that led to the road beyond. He heard gunfire behind him, but he was too far ahead now, and the conditions were so bad, that he knew they wouldn’t hit him.

  Besides, with Allah on his side, how could they?

  Laying down a burst of covering fire, he climbed quickly over the fence to the road beyond; saw, moments later, two police cars headed his way and opened fire again, peppering the vehicles with high-velocity rounds until they crashed into one another, spinning helplessly out of control into the fence line.

  Elated, Massoud set off at a fast run down the road, his destination never in doubt.

  The young couple looked concerned, but Rabbi Levi Shavitz just shook his head.

  ‘Gunfire?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Have you seen this weather? It must be thunder.’

  Although, after spending many years in Israel, he had to admit that it actually did sound a lot like gunfire. But best not to add to the couple’s fears. This should be a happy time for them, discussing the arrangements of their upcoming marriage.

  Shavitz had known them for years, members of good local families who attended the synagogue regularly. Both sets of parents were also here, and they too were looking rather concerned, especially now that the sounds of sirens were blaring across what seemed to be every street in the area.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Ted Weintraub, the father of the bride-to-be. ‘Maybe we should take a look?’

  At this he rose, moving across to the windows and pulling back the gauze net curtain to look into the dark, rain-soaked scene beyond.

  ‘What can you see?’ his daughter asked.

  ‘The police cars are headed here,’ he said suddenly, turning back to the room. ‘But why - ’

  Shavitz’s attention was pulled from the panicking Weintraub then, as the door to the private study burst open, a dark-skinned bearded man surging forward into the room. Ammunition was draped across his shoulders in bandoliers and a machine gun rested in his hands, up and aimed at the group.

  ‘Please – ’ Shavitz started, but it was too late – the man was already pressing the trigger, cutting down everyone in the room in a blast of deafening, blinding gunfire.

  Everyone, that it, except for Shavitz himself, who could only look on helplessly as the young couple and their parents were annihilated by the ferocious firepower of the machine gun, eviscerated before his disbelieving eyes, the walls and floor of his study soaked with blood and tissue, broken bodies strewn this way and that across the furniture.

  ‘Get up,’ he heard the man say as the gun fell silent, and Shavitz realized only then that he was on the floor. He didn’t move, perhaps too shocked, but the heavy boot of the man on his ribs brought him back to reality in a flash. ‘On your feet,’ the man screamed, and finally Shavitz moved, pulling himself up.

  Immediately, the man seized him, twisting his hand around his neck while shoving the muzzle of the big gun against his cheek.

  ‘Come with me,’ the man whispered into his ear, and Shavitz had no other option but to comply.

  14

  Sergeant Dave Anderson of the Met’s specialist armed division – known internally as SO19 – watched in dismay as the third terrorist gunman showed himself in the main entranceway of the synagogue.

  Two gunmen were already down – one shot by his own people, the other shot by one of the teachers before being blown to kingdom come by his own grenade – and here was another, although Anderson had no idea if he was the last. Intelligence was hard to come by at this moment in time, reacting as they were to such a fast-moving, fluid situation.

  The school was secured now, emergency medical personnel in attendance for the wounded and more of his own men scouring the halls and classrooms looking for more bad guys.

  The Met had secured the rest of the surrounding area, locking everything down tight so that nobody could escape the net.

  But right now, Anderson was more concerned with what was happening in front of him. There’d been no time to set up sniper positions, so he and his men were doing what they could, shielding themselves behind their car doors like the cops out of some eighties TV action show as they tried to understand and deal with what was going on.

  ‘Release that man!’ Anderson shouted above the din of the rain and the sirens. ‘Be advised, we are authorized to use lethal force! I say again, release that man!’

  Even as he spoke, Anderson was getting a sight picture with his highly accurate Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine gun, and he knew the rest of his men would be doing the same.

  ‘I’ll kill him!’ the terrorist shouted back, barely audible through the storm. ‘You know I’ll do it!’

  The guy was good, Anderson had to admit, using the rabbi’s body in just the right way to shield himself from a shot. Through the wind and rain, the British police officer couldn’t risk firing his weapon; the last thing he needed on his conscience was the death of an innocent man.

  ‘Does anyone have a shot?’ Anderson asked into his radio, and was immediately hit by answers in the negative. Nobody wanted to take the risk.

  ‘Okay,’ Anderson shouted, knowing that until the higher-up officers got here, he was going to have to be the chief negotiator. ‘Tell us what it is you want, and maybe we can work something out!’

  Movement caught his attention out of the corner of his eye, and – still keeping his weapon aimed at the terrorist – he glanced sideways, saw the media trucks pulling up, cameras already out, reporters close behind.

  ‘Shit,’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘What the hell are they doing here?’

  But he knew he was powerless to change the situation; they were here now, and that was that. But when this was over, he was going to find out who’d let them past the police line and chew their ass out.

  As he turned back to the terrorist, he could have sworn he saw the man smile. Was that what he wanted then? An audience?

  With these psychos, Anderson supposed that anything was possible.

  ‘So how about it?’ Anderson shouted, all too aware now that this whole affair was being broadcast live to the world. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘The time for talking is over,’ the man said, and Anderson could see that he was addressing the cameras more than him. ‘Your politicians talk, yes – but then they act! Actions which have killed thousands, hundreds of thousands, of my brothers-in-arms across the world! But now it is our time to act, my time to act! Now watch this, you fucking western dogs!’

  As he finished his tirade, the man pushed his hostage forward and dropped his weapon, and for a moment Anderson was struck with indecision – the target was clear but now unarmed, should he take the shot?

  But before he could react, the man pulled open his combat jacket to reveal the suicide vest beneath, packed with enough explosive to –

  Anderson depressed the trigger of the MP-5, but it was too late; the man had already activated the system, and before Anderson’s rounds could hit their target, the vest exploded, a huge explosion that instantly incinerated both the terrorist and the rabbi, blasting upwards and outwards to take out the brick archway of the synagogue’s entrance, smoke enveloping the scene in a thick mist.

  The shockwave from the blast was caught by the car door, but it still punched him backwards onto his ass, shattering the windscreens of the other vehicles around him; and despite his ear protection, his ears were left ringing, his head fuzzy, disoriented.

  As he pulled himself back to his feet, he looked at the scene of devastation, the front entrance and much of the southern façade of the old synagogue now nothing more than a smoking, charred ruin.

  He looked across
to the news vans, saw that despite the blast, some hardy cameramen were still filming the devastation, and shook his head in sorrow and disbelief.

  It was too much.

  A school, a synagogue, children, a rabbi. Where was it all going to end?

  What did it all mean?

  But Anderson, as he surveyed the destruction, knew one thing for sure.

  Whatever had happened here today, it was surely only the beginning.

  PART ONE

  1

  The kick came in hard and fast, the hardened ball of the attacker’s foot narrowly missing Mark Cole’s face as he darted out of the way, one hand up to cover as the other moved in to grab the leg.

  But the leg was no longer there, retracted just as fast as it had shot out, leaving Cole grasping at nothing but empty air.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said to his daughter Michiko as they circled one another, looking for an opening.

  They were sparring in an octagonal ring located in the basement of a gym in Washington DC’s Glover Park, not too far from Cole’s home in the luxury enclave of Woodland-Normanstone Terrace. For the time being he’d stopped training at the gymnasium housed within the headquarters of the Paradigm Group, the Washington think-tank for which he worked, as it was coming under a lot of scrutiny from certain people.

  Clark Mason was the Vice President of the United States – with ambitions for even higher office – and had launched an investigation into the activities of the group. It had been stopped in its tracks when Bruce Vinson – the group’s director – had arranged a bit of blackmail against the VP, but Cole knew that the matter was far from over. Mason was convinced that the Paradigm Group was a front for a covert intelligence unit, operating beyond congressional oversight.

  He was right, too – the think-tank was a front for Force One, the world’s most sophisticated and ruthless counter-terrorism unit. Mark Cole – ex-Navy SEAL, ex-government assassin – was now the commander of Force One, hiding behind his cover as an intelligence analyst for the Paradigm Group.

  Force One was a unique organization, answerable only to the President of the United States herself, Ellen Abrams. Missions could only be authorized by three people – the President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director of National Intelligence. Nobody else knew that the unit even existed, which was how Cole wanted it to remain.

  Mason might have had his wings clipped, but Cole suspected that even now he still had people watching things at the group’s headquarters. He’d heard that he was becoming very friendly with Manfred Jones, a colonel in the US Air Force who had recently taken over as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. Jones had come in as a temporary measure after his boss, Lieutenant General Miley Cooper, had been injured during a parachute exercise; but the fact that he was there weighed heavily on Cole’s mind. JSOC was the body which controlled the use of America’s most elite warriors, the Tier One units from whose ranks Cole recruited operators for Force One’s missions – SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, Air Force Special Tactics Teams. They would be seconded to him for specific missions, on loan with no questions asked.

  Cooper might not have known directly about Force One, but he had suspected, and had played along; Jones was another matter entirely, and Cole had a very bad feeling about him. The last thing he wanted was for Force One to be outed by the JSOC commander, and so he had been minimizing the group’s exposure until the situation could be sorted out.

  One of the outcomes of this was that Cole had taken to having his early morning workout at the CrossFit gym in Glover Park. He didn’t know who he could trust at the Paradigm Group, and wanted to keep his distance as much as possible, at least for the time being.

  As he slipped a combination of punches – jab, cross, hook, cross – from his daughter, he admired her skill and speed, while also considering how lucky he was to have her here at all. It could so easily have worked out differently.

  Indeed, he considered as he fired out an attack of his own – round kick to the leg, pivot and kick with the other leg to the head – he had almost killed her himself when they had first met.

  She had been aiming a gun at him, and he had responded by shooting her first; it could so easily have been fatal, but for some reason Cole had aimed at her shoulder, putting her down but keeping her alive.

  Why had she wanted to kill him? It was a simple misunderstanding, but a major one. On leave in Bangkok while still a SEAL, Cole had fallen in love with a Japanese woman; they’d had an affair but – after being attacked by a Thai gang – they had split up, forced to go their separate ways. Cole had never had any idea that she had subsequently had his daughter, and Michiko had never known anything about her real father.

  It turned out that the Japanese woman had been fleeing from her abusive husband, a gangland leader within a powerful Yakuza family. Years later, he finally tracked down his unfaithful wife, who was living with her daughter in Australia. He had killed the woman, and had been about to kill the girl too, when his elder brother stopped him. He had noticed that she was using three computers at the same time, recognized some kind of genius within her, and ordered his younger brother to adopt her instead.

  And so it was that Michiko had been adopted into the Omoto-gumi, a major Japanese crime family, and relocated to Tokyo, where her expertise with computers allowed the gang to move into white collar crime, modernizing the ancient systems of corporate intimidation and blackmail for the digital age.

  Her new family told her that her father was an American soldier who had raped her mother and left her for dead, and so she had spent years trying to track him down so that she could take her revenge. Using her formidable computer hacking skills, she had finally located him, and had left the Omoto-gumi earlier that year to travel to America to confront him.

  After their first, all too violent meeting, Michiko had been sent back to Japan by Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Cole, concerned over his newly-found daughter, had subsequently traveled to Tokyo after her.

  He had finally found her, convinced her that he hadn’t raped her mother, had loved her; and had then fought against the might of the Japanese Yakuza to help free his daughter from their terrible clutches. In the process, he also managed to find and kill Michiko’s step-father, the man who had lied to her, and the man who had really killed the girl’s mother.

  Knowing that Japan was no longer the place for her, and wanting to connect with the daughter he’d never even known he’d had, Cole had arranged for her to return to the United States with him. She was now working for the Paradigm Group, where her formidable technical skills were being well used; and Cole knew that she also wanted very much one day to work for Force One itself.

  But one step at a time, Cole knew; she had been part of a global criminal empire for many years and – although she had been forced into it – he had to admit that he was still getting to know her. He felt he could trust her, but – in this business – a feeling just wasn’t enough.

  Michiko checked his leg kick with a raised shin, turned her hips quickly to catch the high kick with both her forearms before it could hit her head; but Cole instantly took advantage of the angle of her arms and span in towards her, gripping one of her forearms with vicelike fingers and inserting his other arm underneath her both of her own, trapping them in place. He continued his turn, levering her onto his hip and across his shoulders, turning her in a huge arc over and onto her back in a picture perfect judo seio nage shoulder throw.

  He let his fist go, stopping the downward punch less than an inch away from Michiko’s upturned face. Only now getting the breath back into her lungs, she exhaled slowly and smiled up at him.

  ‘Okay,’ she said as her father helped her back to her feet, ‘I’ll give you that one. But next time . . . ’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be different,’ Cole said, smiling himself, knowing that it wouldn’t be any different at all. Michiko was good, there was no doubt about it – she’d been trained by some of the top martial arts inst
ructors in Japan, many of whom normal members of the public would never have had access to – but Cole had done this his entire life, for real. Michiko had been trained, but Cole was trained and experienced, which made all the difference.

  ‘Next time, try not to leave yourself exposed,’ he told her. ‘You didn’t need to use both hands to stop that kick. You could have just slipped it, moved your head out of the way and left both hands free.’

  Michiko nodded her head. ‘You’re right,’ she said, grabbing a towel and wiping the sweat from her brow. ‘So what now?’

  Cole checked the time, saw that it was just after six in the morning. ‘I say we stretch off a bit, shower, then grab a bite to eat before work. How does that sound?’

  ‘Sounds good, if you’re buying breakfast,’ Michiko said.

  Cole laughed, starting to stretch out on the mats. ‘Don’t I always?’

  Cole stepped out of the shower a new man, refreshed and ready to face the day ahead. He started to towel himself off as he walked back to his locker, wondering where they should go for breakfast; there were a couple of good cafés nearby, but the gym also had a fairly decent place of its own.

  He’d ask Michiko what she’d prefer, he decided; he could eat anything at any time, and was happy to go along with whatever she wanted. Food was fuel after all, and anything would be good after a hard workout.

  The changing room was starting to fill up now, Cole noted as he reached his locker; when he’d arrived at five, he and Michiko had been the first ones there.

  ‘Hey man,’ the guy next to him said in greeting.

  ‘Hey,’ Cole said.

  ‘Hell of a thing in London, ain’t it?’ the man said next, and Cole felt his heart jump ever so slightly.

  ‘London?’ Cole said, opening his locker and reaching inside for his phone. ‘Must have missed it, what’s happening?’