Primary Valor

by Jack Mars

“Best case scenario,” Buzz said.

  Luke looked at him. He was standing in the boat, a very fit old man with a black matte pistol in his hand. The gun gave no reflection. He had pulled the engine up and forward so it was off the sand and rocks.

  Already, Buzz began to unload gear from the boat. Luke went to the boat and pulled his gear out. They were here, and unchallenged. It was real. Now it was time to climb the mountain. Bowles got his pack. Luke strapped the sniper rifle case onto his back. It was heavy.

  “I’ll see you boys on the other side,” Buzz said. “I’ll be laid up in some bushes, waiting for you. No sense taking the plane until you get there.”

  He looked at them. “Make it brief, will you?”

  Luke gestured at the boat. “What about this?”

  Buzz shrugged. “Normally I’d scuttle it, but I’m gonna tie it up to a palm tree instead. You never know. If we can’t get the plane, we might find ourselves looking for another way out. If something happens to me, don’t forget this thing is here.”

  “See you over there,” Luke said.

  He and Bowles headed single file up into the dunes, Luke in the lead. Large crabs skittered and darted around them, clicking and rattling their claws as they plunged into dark holes in the sand. The men crouched low and moved quickly through the high grasses. Luke scanned ahead of him, looking for soldiers hiding in the grass.

  More nothing.

  They passed through the trees, and in another moment, came upon the trail. It was old and disused, but still obvious. It was like a tunnel, snaking to the left through dense underbrush. The mountains were over that way, towering high above the beach.

  They moved without speaking. The trail wound ever upward. After a few moments, they reached a set of steep, rough-hewn steps. The breeze had died. It was a humid night, and the air was jungle dense back here in the bushes.

  They climbed the steps, which plateaued maybe three stories higher, and then they picked up the trail again. There were spots where the trail was broken or washed out, and fell away to the ocean, now several stories below. It was easy enough to take large steps across these gaps.

  They moved in darkness, depending on starlight and the acuity of their eyes. A little higher, and the trail dead-ended at the cliff face. Rusty iron rungs were bolted into the stone, and went straight up into the darkness above their heads.

  This was the first ladder, and the longest one.

  Luke grabbed the first rung.

  “Wait a minute,” Bowles said, his voice just above a whisper.

  Luke looked at him.

  Bowles was patting his vest and the pockets of his black cargo pants. He looked at Stone, his eyes wide with what? Embarrassment?

  “I’m missing three magazines for my gun. They must have fallen out in the boat.”

  “What?” Luke said. His voice was more like a hiss than a whisper. He couldn’t contain his exasperation. “I thought you said you’ve done this before. How did you—”

  “I don’t know,” Bowles said. “They must have fallen out. I need those magazines.”

  “No kidding,” Luke said. “Didn’t you do a gear check on the beach?”

  He tried to picture Bowles back on the beach, but he couldn’t see it. Luke was former Delta. You checked your own gear in Delta. There was never any need to babysit anyone. That was true in Delta, and just as true on the Special Response Team.

  “I’ll go back,” Bowles said. “I’ll run. I’ll see if they’re in the boat, and I’ll run right back here. Maybe Buzz is still there, and he has them.” Bowles gazed up the cliff face. “I’ll meet you at the top of the ladder. All right?”

  Luke shook his head. What else was he going to do? Leaving Ed behind for this clown was suddenly starting to smell like a bad move. Luke had been spoiled by people like Ed, and by Swann, and Trudy, and even by Kevin Murphy. Ed had been a little twitchy recently, but he was a consummate pro. He would never do something like this. It wasn’t even possible.

  “When I reach the top of this cliff, I’ll wait ten minutes,” Luke said. “I’ll scope out the trail ahead of us a bit. But I’m not going to hang around all night. We have a job to do, and we don’t want to do it in the daylight.”

  Bowles nodded. “Understood. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He turned and headed back down the trail, moving fast. In a few seconds, he was already gone.

  Luke sighed and turned back to the ladder. He started to climb, his hands moving along the iron. He took it slowly at first, not trusting the strength of the rungs. He tested each one, pulling on it hard, trying to press it down. Five rungs up, and a rung was missing. It wasn’t bad. He reached past it to the next higher one and pulled hard on that one. It was bolted securely. He yanked himself across the gap.

  “Bowles,” he said. He could picture Bowles falling off this thing, breaking his back, and not dying. Then Luke would have to carry him over his shoulders, up the ladder, up the rest of the trail, then rescue the girl with Bowles the giant albatross around his neck.

  Up and up the ladder went. Luke scaled it quickly now, trusting the rungs a little better than before, each test a quick grab and pull now. He broke into a sweat. Between his pack and the gun case he was carrying some weight, but it was okay. The straight vertical climb was cooler and in a sense easier than the rugged, overgrown hike. The higher he went, the less heavy the air.

  The dizzying fall dropped away behind him. He saw it from his peripheral vision, but he did not turn and look down.

  He tuned the height out and focused on his climbing instead—hands and boots on the iron rungs, one step at a time, his own breath in his ears, his heart thumping, the gear weighing him down, the night wind blowing around him.

  After what seemed a long time, but by his watch was only five minutes, he reached the top of the ladder and pulled himself up and onto the cliff. He lay for a moment on solid rock, breathing heavily. He took his pack and gun case off and rolled onto his back. He watched white clouds skid across the dark sky, as he let his breathing subside.

  “Bowles,” he said to the sky. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “What happened, Bowles? Did you forget something?”

  Bowles moved out of the thick bushes and onto the sand. Large crabs ran in front of him toward the sea. The water shimmered, waves washing in.

  The old duffer had dragged the Zodiac up the beach and away from the tide. He had tied it to a palm tree right at the edge of the sand. Now he was sitting on the gunwale, facing back toward the ocean and drinking from a canteen.

  Bowles came closer and saw that Buzz Mac was drenched in sweat. It was a hot, humid night, and Buzz was an old man, after all. He was a tough bird, Bowles would give him credit for that. Most guys his age wouldn’t dream of coming on an operation like this. He was probably saving up some energy before making the hike across the island to the airfield.

  Well, he needn’t worry about that.

  “Some people will forget their own heads if it’s not attached,” Buzz said. He gestured behind him. “I left the magazines you dropped for you. They’re in the boat.”

  “Thanks,” Bowles said. He stepped over the gunwale. Buzz’s broad back was to him now. Buzz took another long gulp from his canteen. Beyond him, Bowles saw the white foam of the breaking waves. It was a pretty night.

  “I knew Stone didn’t drop them. The guy’s a machine. I imagine he had an aneurysm when you told him you had to go back.”

  “Yeah,” Bowles said. He slid the six-inch serrated hunting knife from its sheath at his side. It didn’t make a sound. “He did.”

  Buzz nodded. “He should. This isn’t the rookie leagues, kid.”

  In one move, Bowles stepped up, grabbed Buzz around the mouth with one hand, then ripped the knife across his throat with the other. It took less than a second, and he cut very deep with the knife, severing the major blood vessels there.

  Buzz tried to scream, or make some sound, but it was already too late.

  �
��Mmmmm!”

  Bowles renewed his iron grip on Buzz’s mouth. It was important that this happen silently. Stone was up the mountain now, but sound traveled.

  Blood jetted from Buzz’s neck. It looked black in the dark night. He bucked and jerked for another few seconds, Bowles’s hand clamped tight around his mouth. After a moment, the blood pressure sank away as the heart slowed. Now the blood just flowed out, pouring down the man’s chest.

  Bowles pushed him forward onto the beach. The body sprawled there in the sand. Bowles breathed heavily, his chest heaving. His arms trembled the tiniest amount. It had been an effort, but not much of one, to kill Buzz. The man barely put up any resistance at all. He was too old, too weak. And Bowles himself was still young, and still strong.

  Bowles thought of other times when he had killed men in close quarters like this, times when he exhausted himself, when he lay side by side with his defeated foe and retched on the ground. When his entire body shook, his teeth chattered, and he thought he might have a heart attack afterwards. Nothing like that had happened here.

  Bowles stared down at the corpse of Buzz MacDonald. He felt nothing about the man. Well, not nothing, but almost. He felt that Buzz was foolish for coming out here. The guy was playing cops and robbers long after he should have stopped. He’d lost his edge long ago. And now he was dead.

  The American hero. The legendary grand old man, the man who was doing special operations a generation before the idea existed.

  Bowles shook his head and sighed. He really should leave Buzz here for the crabs, but it wouldn’t do. Buzz needed to disappear for a little while. He grabbed Buzz by the arms and dragged him down to the water, leaving a bloody trough of disturbed sand in his wake. He waded out to his thighs and let Buzz go, then pushed him in deeper. Buzz began to move with the waves. His body seemed boneless, like a jellyfish. He turned over and over as he moved with the tide.

  “Idiot,” Bowles said. “Goodbye.”

  These guys, the Special Response Team. What was it? A bunch of overrated cowboys, bluffing and half-assing their way to oblivion. What was Buzz even doing here? He came out as a favor for an old friend? He came out because he was bored? What in the world? Did they offer him any money to die like this?

  Bowles was getting paid to be here, that much was certain. Yes, he was getting his salary as an FBI agent, assigned to be out here babysitting a mission that was already going very wrong. And yes, he was getting his per diem payment as a CIA informer infiltrating and working undercover as an FBI agent.

  But he was getting a lot more money than that, wasn’t he?

  Yes, he was. He was getting paid as a freelancer to destroy the mission. This one job would deliver him, in cash, close to what Stone probably got all year in salary.

  He shook his head again. These people, Luke Stone and his rabble, didn’t understand where the real money was, and where the real power lay. They were on the wrong side. Bowles supposed they thought they were working for America. But there was no America, not really, not in the way someone like Luke Stone thought of it.

  There were the rulers, and there were the governed. There were the helpless, hopeless, powerless masses, and there were the people who ran the show. The trick was to figure out who was who, and work for the right ones.

  That’s what Henry Bowles really did for a living.

  Buzz Mac was about ten feet out in the water now, drifting down the beach. Maybe he would drift out to sea. Maybe he would wash up somewhere further down. Maybe a bull shark would come and eat him. Bowles supposed it wouldn’t matter in the end.

  He walked up the beach to the Zodiac. He still had his knife out. He plunged it into the boat, driving it through the tough fabric, putting his weight on it to force it through. Then he ripped backward several inches and pulled the knife out. He went around to the other side and did the same thing over there. The boat was deflating fast. In a little while, it would be as flat as a ruptured tire.

  Bowles looked up at the mountain. Somewhere up there, Luke Stone was waiting for him, hoping to complete the mission, save the girl, make America proud. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “No way out, Stone,” Bowles said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  9:25 p.m. Central Standard Time (10:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  The skies near St. Simon’s Saw

  The Caribbean Sea

  “Stone!”

  Ed Newsam punched the wall of the plane one last time. The plane was so old, he almost felt he could punch a hole in it.

  It had taken him this long to calm down. For the first several minutes, he had imagined going out the jump door anyway, finding Stone in the dark sky, grabbing him tight around the middle, and forcing him to pull the cord with the man he rejected attached to him.

  Ed shook his head and took another deep breath. That stuff only worked in the movies. All he’d do was kill them both. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he wouldn’t even find Stone out there, and he would just plummet all by himself at terminal velocity into the turf.

  Whew! He’d seen a couple of guys go like that during his time in the military. One guy, the chute malfunctioned. The other, the guy just didn’t open it for some reason. No one would ever know why. The first guy bounced about four stories into the air. The second guy, the ground was soft bottom land, watery, mud. He just went right into it and became embedded.

  Neither option looked good.

  Ed got up from the bench, crossed the plane, and pulled the jump door closed. He wasn’t going out there, and he knew it.

  He knew something else, too. Stone was right. Not about keeping him off the mission. And certainly not about tampering with his parachute. That was an amateur play, strictly bush league. Ed would let him know that.

  But he was right that Ed was off his feed. This job had gotten to him. It was like being stabbed in the heart, finding that kid in the ice chest. He’d become unhinged. In fact, sitting here reflecting on it, he realized that he barely remembered what had happened since then.

  Okay. But Stone should have pulled him aside and talked to him about…

  He shook his head again. Who was he kidding? That would never have worked. Ed knew himself better than that. A good talking to, huh? “You’re putting yourself and others at risk. You need to snap out of it. You’ve got a child on the way.”

  From Stone, of all people?

  Luke Stone, who never met impossible odds he didn’t like? Luke Stone, who had no personal hobbies other than being shot, blown up, stabbed, and dropped from the sky? Luke Stone, who spent the night before his own baby was born in a firefight with Islamic extremist militants on a cold mountaintop in northern Iraq?

  Yeah, a conversation with Luke Stone wouldn’t have done much. If anything, Ed would have dug in deeper.

  But this? Being stuck here on the plane after Stone had jumped out with Bowles was a wake-up call of the first order.

  Stone hadn’t done that lightly. And now he was on the ground with a makeshift team that included their FBI minder Bowles, whose special ops record he didn’t choose to share except in the vaguest terms possible, and Buzz MacDonald, who was so old that he needed to lubricate his joints with 10W-40 just to move.

  Ed didn’t like it. If it went wrong, it was going to get ugly down there. Those guys would never make it out of there on their own. Stone, maybe. The other two?

  Ed got up, went to the cockpit door, and knocked on it. He heard it unlock on the other side and open an inch. He pulled it open the rest of the way.

  They were sitting side by side in the small cockpit, the dark night everywhere through the windshield ahead of them. On the right was Rachel, the brawny, fiery redhead. She was a mixed martial artist in her spare time, and Ed reflected that a couple of years ago, he wouldn’t have minded grappling a few rounds with her. On the left was Jacob, the tall, bespectacled glass of water who never seemed to have much to say. Elite soldier or not, as body types went, Jacob was closer to Mark Swann than to Luke Stone. Jacob was li
ke Swann with a sense of discipline, but without the sense of humor.

  These two were military pilots from the Night Stalkers, the160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, who had graduated to working with the SRT.

  “Hi, Ed,” Rachel said. “We heard you rattling around back there. Why didn’t you jump? Is everything okay?”

  “Stone pulled me at the last second,” Ed said. “Long story.”

  She nodded. “Ah. One of those.”

  “One of those,” Ed said. “Exactly. Listen, refresh my memory here. What are your orders now?”

  “We’re headed back to the airfield in Jamaica,” Rachel said. “The SRT plane is waiting there. After we land, we’re done. Our day is over. I was thinking it might be nice to call in sick and stay a couple of days, but sourpuss here…”

  “Any chance we can stick around here instead?” Ed said.

  “Here?” Jacob said. “Where’s here?”

  Ed shrugged. “Here. In the sky. Near the objective.”

  Jacob shook his head. “We’re pretty far from the objective at this point. You’ve been beating the walls back there for a while. Anyway, we don’t really want to hang around. We’re flying a bit of a junker, and anybody who’s watching probably thinks we’re a drug plane. If we loiter in these skies long enough, we’re liable to get some attention, and not the kind we want. Also, there’s the fuel issue. We don’t have an infinite amount.”

  Ed nodded. “What about the airfield in Honduras called Amistad?”

  The pilots looked at each other.

  “It’s supposed to be a last resort,” Rachel said. “If we go there, we have to announce ourselves. If we announce ourselves, people will want to know what we’re doing there. We are civilian aviation. That close to Darwin King’s island, someone is going to know something’s up. We could blow the cover off the mission. We’re only supposed to use that place in an emergency. Those are our orders.”

  She turned about halfway around and looked up at Ed.

  “Is there an emergency?”