Luke Stone 03 - Situation Room

by Jack Mars

  He was stationed in the far east of the Korean peninsula—a wild and untamed region. If he kept to the woods and the high elevations, stayed out of sight in the daytime and moved only at night, he might successfully cross the Demilitarized Zone without being seen. If he made it through, he wouldn’t be the first. If he was shot dead by troops along the border, he also wouldn’t be the first.

  He navigated by the sun and the moon. As long as they rose on his left, and moved to his right across the sky, he knew he was going the right way.

  But lately, he wasn’t so sure anymore. Voices had begun to speak to him, telling him that he had mixed up his left and right. They told him confusing things, like the sun rose in the west and then moved north.

  Why would it do that? Didn’t it used to…

  He shook his head violently to clear it. He didn’t know what the sun did.

  The voices openly mocked him. They called him a worthless collaborator, and told him that his mother and younger sister had been sent to a work camp, where they were being raped and tortured because of his cowardice.

  He could hear the voices whispering even now.

  Worthless.

  Coward.

  Your mother will die so slowly. She is crying out for you.

  He stumbled along a wooded path. He could barely walk now. He watched his feet, tripping over each other. His boots were worn away to almost nothing. One of his bootlaces was untied. He didn’t care. He didn’t care if the boots just fell away and left him barefoot. He would just keep walking until he died. He should stay off the path, he knew this, but he didn’t think he could go overland anymore.

  He had given up his plan. He no longer moved only at night. He just walked until he collapsed. When he woke, he got up again and kept walking. Sometimes it was day, sometimes it was night. Sometimes he didn’t notice what it was.

  He no longer knew if he was headed south. He had no idea if he had made it across the DMZ. He had no idea if South Koreans were really devils with horns, like he was taught as a child. He didn’t care if they were. All he wanted was for someone to find him, and kill him. It didn’t matter who it was.

  He just hoped that when the time came, they did it quickly and mercifully, with one bullet to the head.

  You are weak. Your sister screams, but you cannot save her.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Shut up!”

  Did he really say it? Or was it in his head?

  He was lying on the ground now. His skull hurt, especially in the back. He must have hit it on something hard, like a rock. He gazed up at the sky. It was pale blue, and white clouds slowly skidded across it. The sun was in the sky, but he could not tell if it was north, south, east, or west. It just was. The sun.

  And it was beautiful.

  A face appeared, then another, and another. Koreans, like him. They wore dark green uniforms. Two men held rifles pointed at him, while another’s hands roamed his body, touching his baggy uniform, feeling his bones.

  “He’s so skinny!”

  “He’s from the North.”

  “He looks like a corpse.”

  The dialect was different from his. They spoke the low speech of the South. It sounded strange and ugly compared with the classical Korean spoke in the North.

  A man looked down at him. “Do you have any weapons?”

  Kim shook his head.

  “Can you speak?”

  Now he nodded. His throat was very dry. His lips felt parched and swollen.

  “Say something, then.”

  It occurred to him, now that he was captured, that he might want to live.

  Your mother. Your sister.

  Yes, he knew that. It was horrible. It was unthinkable. A nightmare. He had run away and brought terrible things upon them. He could never be forgiven for that. And he would never forget it. But still…

  “I know things,” he said. His cracked voice sounded like the croak of a frog. “Important things. Secret things. There’s a big attack coming. Unstoppable.”

  He paused to rest his throat, then spoke again. “Don’t kill me.”

  The man above him shrugged. He glanced at the other men and then laughed. They all did. “He thinks we’re going to kill him,” the squad leader said. “We’re not going to kill him, are we?”

  He looked down at Kim again. “If only it were that easy.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  8:45 p.m.

  Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay

  Luke hadn’t been to this house in two months.

  The taxi pulled into the driveway of the summer cabin that had been in Becca’s family for over a hundred years. Down the hill from the house, the sun had just disappeared behind the waters of Chesapeake Bay.

  Luke had his phone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Kat Lopez, Susan’s chief-of-staff. Maybe she was finally listening to him.

  “It’s a Christian-based religion,” he said. “They call it the Church of Almighty God. They also call it Eastern Lightning. It’s actually more of a doomsday cult than a religion. They’re Chinese, but they have a headquarters in New Jersey.”

  “You believe they’re behind the attack?” Kat said. Kat had a chief-of-staff mind. She was someone who checked things off of lists.

  “No. Please be careful with that. I have no idea who was behind the attack. I’m saying that the church is a possible lead. It might have been them. They might be a cat’s paw for someone else. They might have nothing to do with it. The man I interrogated and who killed himself was a member of that church at one time. It’s a lead. That’s all.”

  “Okay, Luke.”

  “Okay, thank you, Kat.”

  They hung up and Luke gave the driver two hundred-dollar bills. He had no idea what the fare was to get out here. The driver seemed to think it was enough. He started pulling smaller bills out of his billfold.

  “Keep the change.”

  On the way over here, the driver had the radio tuned to news reports from the Metro attack. More than a dozen crashes and derailments had happened system-wide. The death toll was three hundred and growing. The subway system itself was shut down citywide. At least a hundred thousand people were still looking for alternative transportation. The entire area around the National Mall and the Capitol building was restricted.

  Luke had forced at least a hundred people back through the tunnels to an emergency exit. In one case, a woman’s legs had been broken—he slung her over his shoulder and carried her. He thought of the chaos those people had seen when they climbed to street level through the emergency exit. Bodies were piling up at the Metro entrance a hundred yards from them. People were running everywhere. People were on the sidewalks, gasping for air. Ambulances were everywhere.

  Luke had flashed his Special Response Team badge and commandeered a police squad car to take him, Gunner, and Becca out of the area. The cop drove them to a taxi hangout at the train station in Georgetown, where they caught a yellow cab all the way out here to the country house.

  As the taxi pulled away, Luke led his wife and son down to the house. The lights were all out. Becca didn’t use this place anymore. She and Gunner had been abducted from here two months before. The kindly old couple that lived in the nearest house, the Thompsons, had been murdered by the abductors. For Becca, there were too many nightmare memories in this house now.

  And yet, Luke had told the taxi driver to bring them here. He wanted his family as far as possible from the city. If any more attacks happened, this place would be safe.

  He unlocked the door, reached in, and turned on the lights. Then he led them inside. They were numb. He had seen this before, many times. The horror of what had happened, and what they had seen, was settling in. They were not able to function right now. Becca’s face was caked in soot. Her hair stood up in crazy tangles. She didn’t even seem to realize where they were, and that she didn’t want to be here.

  She went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer.

  “D
o you want a beer?” she said.

  “Yes. Please.”

  She opened them on the old metal bottle opener built-in to the ancient fridge. Generations of her family had opened beers, root beers, and Cokes on that thing. She handed Luke his beer and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Luke stood, holding Gunner’s hand. He took a sip of his beer. It was cold and delicious.

  He glanced down at Gunner. “Can I have a Coke, Dad?”

  “Sure, Monster.”

  Now Gunner went over to the fridge and pulled himself out a Coke.

  “You know,” Becca said to no one, “I killed a squirrel on the highway the other day. It was an accident. The poor thing just ran out suddenly from the grass along the side. I had no time to swerve, and there was too much traffic anyway. It ran right under my wheels. I felt it. The car went over it like it was a small bump in the road.”

  She looked up at Luke now. There were tears in her eyes. “I went home and cried afterwards. I was so… sorry. I never meant to kill that squirrel. But this… today… it was on purpose. They killed all those people on purpose.”

  Luke took another sip of his beer. “Yes. They did.”

  “How can you stand it?”

  He shook his head softly. “I can’t stand it. That’s why I try to stop it.”

  Becca started to cry at the table. She sat there, her chest heaving. Luke felt distant from her in this moment. She had hated his job for years, and she was divorcing him because of it. Now she had seen, up close, what he’d been dealing with all this time. He wasn’t sure how much sympathy he could muster.

  “Gunner,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  Gunner shrugged. “I feel okay. Glad we didn’t get killed or anything.”

  “Good. I want you to go upstairs, take a shower, and change into your pajamas. It’s getting late and we’ve all had a long day. And don’t make it a five-minute shower. Really get the dirt off.”

  “I don’t have my pajamas here, Dad. All my stuff is at home.”

  Luke’s shoulders sagged. Then he smiled the slightest bit. “I’m sure if you go upstairs and look in your dresser, you can find a pair of pajamas that you used to love, and which you can wear for one night. They might not be your favorite pajamas now, but I think you can bite the bullet this one time. Okay?”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Good man. I’ll be up to talk to you in a little while.”

  When Gunner was gone, Luke looked at Becca. Her crying had stopped almost as abruptly as it started. She stared at the table in front of her.

  “I have to go out again,” Luke said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back. I want you to know that you and Gunner are both safe here. No one is coming for you. What happened two months ago has nothing to do with what’s happening now. The people who are committing these attacks don’t even know who I am. Okay?”

  “Okay, Luke.” Her voice was not convincing.

  Luke put his beer on the table, kneeled down on the floor next to her, and wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t try to stop him. But she also didn’t melt into his arms. She simply sat, passively, in the same pose as before.

  “I love you, Becca. I love Gunner. I brought you both here because this place is safe. It’s further from the city than our other house.”

  She shook her head.

  “I can’t take it anymore, Luke. All these attacks. All this terror.” Now the stiffness went out of her body and she leaned into him. “It’s so horrible.”

  She started crying again, pressing herself against him.

  “I know, baby,” he said. He began to rock her. “But we’re okay. I promise you that. We’re all okay.”

  “You saved our lives,” Becca said.

  Luke thought of that fire spreading, moving into the train car, bare feet from them. The two of them wouldn’t have gone anywhere. They would have been trapped there. The thought of it brought gooseflesh to his skin.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I might have.”

  She pressed herself even tighter to him. “Thank you,” she said, her body wracked by sobs now. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  9:37 p.m.

  Deale, Maryland

  The surface of the water was shrouded in fog.

  Luke pulled up quietly to the boat dock. He had put Becca and Gunner to bed, given them both a mild sedative, and piloted his Boston Whaler across Chesapeake Bay from the Eastern shore.

  It was full dark now, perfect cover for the meeting he had planned. Two men stood on the dock. The area was deserted. In the small harbor, moored boats bobbed up and down in the gentle swells. Luke killed the engine, tied up, then jumped out to greet the men.

  “Guys, thanks for coming out here.”

  “Okay, Luke,” Mark Swann said.

  “How are you doing, man?” Ed Newsam said.

  Luke nodded. “I’ve been better. I thought I lost my wife and kid a few hours ago.”

  The three men stood on the dock. The fog had a damping effect. There was no sound anywhere. There wasn’t much to see. About a hundred yards away, out on a nearby road, a pair of car headlights went by, took a curve, and were replaced by red taillights.

  “So what are we doing here?” Ed said.

  “I want to run an idea by you,” Luke said. “I brought you out here so no one else could hear it.”

  Swann shook his head. “What good will that do? Either one of us could be wearing a wire.”

  “Exactly. So if word of this gets out, there are only two possible suspects.”

  “Okay, what is it?” Ed said.

  It was an outside the box idea, and one that he didn’t expect would meet with their approval right away. There was no sense holding back or hinting around. He might as well just say it. “I want to break Trudy out of jail.”

  “Luke, are you insane?” Swann said.

  Ed nearly laughed. “Man, you’re crazy. We’d never make it in, and we’d never make it out. And it would be a bloodbath coming and going. We’d probably just get Trudy killed, and maybe ourselves, too. There’s no way to break her out of there.”

  Luke looked at Ed. He could barely make out his face in the darkness. This was one time he wished he could see Ed’s expression.

  “So we need them to transfer her,” Luke said.

  The two men stood quietly while this sank in. Somewhere in the night, a lone seagull called. It was hard to tell how close or far it was. The seconds ticked away. Neither man told him how impossible it was.

  “I can’t let these attacks keep happening,” Luke said in a quiet voice. “No one seems to know what’s going on. I was at the Naval Observatory earlier today. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re sending a navy strike group to the South China Sea. They’re also planning to bomb Chinese container ships out of the water. We’re looking down the barrel at World War Three. And if that isn’t enough for you, they almost killed my wife and child. That makes it personal, at least for me.”

  “And Trudy?” Swann said. “What good can she do?”

  “I want to put the available intel in her hands,” Luke said. “See what she comes up with. I’ve worked with her for years. I think she spins the best scenarios in the business. It’s a long shot, but…”

  Swann shrugged. “I can probably hack into the Department of Corrections and get her transferred to another facility.”

  “Special transfer,” Luke said. “It has to be the middle of the night, and she’s the only one going. A van or a bus, it doesn’t matter. But no more than a driver, and at most two guards on board. Preferably one.”

  “What will you do to them?” Swann said.

  “I’ll treat them very, very gently.”

  “You’re asking us to put our careers on the line,” Ed said. “If we get busted…”

  “We won’t.”

  “If we hurt anybody…”

  Luke shook his head. “Ed, you worry too much. We’re not going to hurt anybody. And we’re doing a favor for an old fri
end. We might even save the world in the process.”

  Swann took a deep breath. “Okay. When do you want to do this?”

  Luke waited a beat.

  “How about now?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  9:48 p.m.

  United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC

  Susan and Pierre sat in the small sitting area of their bedroom, watching Michael Parowski on TV. He was on his fourth show in the past three hours. Without confirming anything, he had easily cemented his status as the next Vice President of the United States. He was also acting as the de facto mouthpiece of the administration in the wake of the latest terror attacks.

  Susan had said nothing to Pierre about the threats Michael had issued during their meeting. What she had done was ask for a meeting with some people who might counterbalance Michael’s presence, or even put Michael on his heels. That meeting should take place shortly.

  “This is what I can tell you,” Parowski said to the pretty blonde host sitting to his left. “I was with the President earlier today. She is firm and unwavering. She wants the American people to know that we are going to find out who is behind these attacks, and we are going to make them pay.”

  “Do you speak for the President?”

  “I do.”

  “What is the administration doing to protect the lives of Americans in the wake of these two devastating attacks, first on the Black Rock Dam, and then a day later in the heart of Washington, DC?”

  Parowski paused for a second.

  “He’s just going to pull something out of his butt,” Susan said. “He has no idea what we’re doing.”

  “Are we doing anything?” Pierre said.

  Susan shrugged. “What can we do? They can hit anywhere at any time. We have a list of over seven hundred possible targets. We can’t close them all. It would bring the country to standstill.”

  “I want to make something perfectly clear,” Parowski said. “The federal government, in concert with state and local authorities, is doing everything possible to protect the lives of Americans. We are increasing our police presence and our surveillance capabilities everywhere. Our intelligence agencies are working around the clock to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice. But I also want to say this.”