Operation Assassination

by Anne Fox

  “That doesn’t make you a little nervous?” Amigo asked Spud, settling into the seat across the aisle from him.

  “I’m naturally always a little nervous when it comes to things Hank,” Spud replied. “But if I tried to put her in a box, she’d hate it. And hate me for doing it. It would change her, and I’m not sure it would change her into a woman who would still love me. Which would be my own fault.”

  Overhearing, Cloud added, “Besides, she shot him during the training exercise. Twice.”

  Spud made a dismissive motion with his hand. “She was being a good perp for the sake of the exercise. You can’t expect a perp to spare you. Not if they’re intent on escaping.”

  “Which I found out the hard way,” Cloud remarked. “She kicked the shit out of me trying to evade capture. The good news is that Doc Rich says all the bruises are healing nicely.” He headed for the cockpit. Turning back a moment, he added, “At least she didn’t give me a boot in the face, or she’d probably have a couple more teeth in that little bag of hers.”

  Amigo was looking out the window toward the runway. “There they go. Via con Dios, amigo y amiga.”

  Spud leaned down and peered out the window next to Amigo in time to see the Archer lift from the runway. Clear of the ground and climbing, he watched as the Archer wagged its wings.

  “The two of them are having the time of their lives flying,” Amigo remarked.

  Sitting in the back of the Latitude, Voice was, as usual, face down with his tablet as the Latitude took off from Roswell. “Hal, Voice with Spud and Hank,” he said. Then, “How do the two of you hear me?”

  Hearing the communication in his earpiece, Spud responded, “I hear you fine, Voice.”

  “Hank?”

  Hearing his attempt, Spud said, “She takes her earpiece out when she’s flying, Voice. If you’re trying to test Hal’s joint communications capability, better try someone else.”

  “Shit. Hal, end.” He paused. “Hal, Voice with Spud and Amigo. How do the two of you hear me?”

  “I’ve got you,” Spud said.

  “Me, too,” said Amigo.

  “Success. Anyone else hear this comm?”

  Silence.

  “More success. I think I’ve got the improved comm routine worked out. Did you both get that?”

  “Yes,” Voice heard from both Spud and Amigo simultaneously.

  “That will be the next thing to work out,” Voice said. “I’ve got to get Hal to understand that one transmission needs to be delayed so we don’t talk all over each other. I wonder if I can get Hal to learn stress levels in our voices and have him give priority to the one expressing the most stress. Hal, end.” Voice went back to studying what was on his tablet.

  “Just a head up for personnel in the cabin,” they heard Crow announce over the cabin intercom. “We’re going to rock a little.”

  They felt the Latitude rock back and forth a couple of times.

  “That was just a pilot thing,” Crow announced. “We just passed Edge and Hank in the Archer and wanted to wish them a good flight.”

  Cloud stood leaning up against one of the unit’s black SUVs at Stafford Regional, watching the Archer turn onto the base leg to the runway. Looking good, whoever happens to be flying.

  The plane turned onto the final approach and lined up neatly on the runway, making a steady descent, until it touched down and rolled down the runway, decelerating until slow enough to make a turn onto a taxiway. At that point, he could see Hank at the controls. As she taxied in, parked, and shut down the Archer’s engine, he walked up.

  Edge climbed out onto the wing walk.

  “I thought Hank got the first leg out of Roswell,” Cloud remarked.

  “She did. We decided last night to just cut the flight into three hops and toss a coin for who would get two of the legs. She won the toss.”

  “Indeed I did, and I enjoyed every minute of it,” Hank said, emerging from the airplane. “That gives me a little under eight more logged hours of cross-country time.”

  “I’ve got to admit that my butt gets a little sore sitting still for longer flights,” Edge said.

  “Pays to have a smaller butt, I guess,” Hank retorted.

  “You know?” Cloud began, “It’s an oddity that, although you don’t have to sit quite so long in something like a Latitude, they do make the pilots’ seats more comfortable.”

  “Where’s Spud?” Hank asked. “I felt certain he’d be right here to assure himself that I didn’t crash somewhere.”

  “He said something about getting your quarters ready. I’m not quite sure what he’s got up his sleeve, but apparently it takes some preparation time. I’m supposed to tell him when we’re five minutes out from the BEQ.”

  They climbed into the SUV and headed back to Quantico, sharing tales of the flight with Cloud, Hank naturally sharing her observation that the FBO coffee was no better on the trip back from Roswell as it had been on the trip out.

  “Better get used to FBO coffee or start bringing your own, Hank,” Cloud laughed. “You’ve got a bunch of cross-country time and flight time you need to get under your belt to qualify for the commercial ticket.”

  “I’ll have to see if I can’t get Mike to order me a big Thermos. If I have to drink any more bilge sludge I’m going to die.”

  Arriving back at the BEQ, the three made their way through the hidden entrance and down the stairs.

  “The hazard with arriving late,” Hank observed, “is that you miss dinner and have to raid the kitchen for leftovers.” She headed off toward her quarters, checking her watch to see which of their two quarters Spud was in. Seeing him in the FT7 residence, she headed to the end of the hall and walked through her door.

  Spud was standing right inside the door. Taking her flight bag from her and setting it down, he took her by the shoulders and gave her a kiss. “Did you have a good flight?”

  “Awesome. I had two of the three legs, so I got quite a bit of time logged.”

  “Well,” Spud began, “I figured you’d be a little tired, a little stiff from having to be crammed in that little airplane for so many hours,” he continued, undressing her and guiding her toward the bedroom, “and a little hungry.”

  Hank gave him a look. “With what you’re engaged in right at the moment, I’d say maybe you’re thinking I need something else right now as well?”

  “I’m innocent,” he said, redirecting her into the bathroom. “But I figured you wouldn’t want to take a bubble bath in your clothes.”

  “For real? The stoic Secret Service guy has a bubble bath ready for me?” She turned and looked to find the bathtub brimming with bubbles and candles lit along the far edge.

  “You know I’m not stoic around you,” Spud said. “That behavior was totally reserved for when I was in the presence of the President.” He took her hand and helped her step into the tub and slide down until the bubbles were up to her chin. Then he moved a stool over next to the tub. On it, there was a plate of fruit and cheese.

  “You surprise me sometimes,” she said. “Planning on joining me?”

  “I figure you need rest after flying all day. Tomorrow’s a crash day. We can play all we want tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to let you soak, and I’m going to watch the news.” He leaned down and gave her a kiss, then turned and went out to the living area.

  Hank smiled, relaxed and soaking in the tub, noshing on fruit and cheese. You are one lucky gal to have a guy like Spud. She noticed that he had even left her fluffiest bathrobe draped across a chair for her. Reflecting that the soak in the tub was just what she needed, and for the reasons he’d mentioned, she luxuriated in the tub until the water began to get cold and her toes and fingers had adopted wrinkles.

  Time to get out before I start looking like a little seventy-year-old lady.

  Drying herself and wrapping up in her robe, she padded out to the living area in her bare feet, sitting next to Spud and snuggling against him.

  “You’re too good to me.�
� She held out her hands. “Look at my fingers. They’re all prune-y.”

  “Mm.” Spud was concentrating on what he was seeing on the monitor that was mounted to the wall opposite him.

  “Our illustrious President?” Hank asked, noting what he was watching.

  “Mm. He was fine just a little while ago, but now it sounds like he’s starting to slide into the ditch again.”

  Hank watched. “These women we have in Congress... I have to say how much I admire women. No one admires women more than me. But these women in Congress... They’re not like some women who are beautiful and who you just want to grab and kiss. These women are hags. The kind you’d find out in the woods somewhere, stirring a cauldron. They’re just... they’re just jealous, because my wife is a beautiful woman.”

  “What the hell did he just say?” Hank exclaimed.

  Spud got wide-eyed and shook his head. “From your reaction, I’d say you heard him correctly. And I see his handlers are trying desperately to pry him from the microphone.”

  Indeed, the staff around the President were steering him away as he kept turning back, trying to continue his tirade. One of them looked off to the side and made a throat-cut indication with his hand, apparently wanting the microphone to be turned off.

  “I hate to say it, but I’m sincerely hoping some effort is being made to remove him from office,” Hank said. “This country loses more credibility every time his choo-choo derails.”

  “Apparently, the ‘hags’ he’s talking about are the senators from California. They asked for an investigation into some of his financial dealings.”

  “Looking for a way to impeach him?” Hank asked.

  “Apparently.” Spud turned off the monitor. “I spent eight years safeguarding the President. Watching what’s happening right now depresses the hell out of me. You mentioned being stoic? I think I’d have a hard time keeping a straight face if I were safeguarding this President.”

  “Working on a crash day?” Voice asked, coming into the library and seeing Hank curled in her usual pose, feet up in the chair she was sitting in, book resting on her knees, reading.

  “Trying to keep caught up on the profiling work. Doc Andy went through Levin’s book that I’d already read to do up a basic profile of the kind of cases we might encounter. The most likely is a case totally domestic in origin, involving one or more bombings, and targeting a civilian or corporate group. Camp Chaos fit two of the three of those criteria. Sesogo was, indeed, home-grown, and though the cases we got involved in were assassinations – shootings, there were plenty of bombings as well. There were the arsons as well. He apparently liked to dabble in a little of everything.

  “The value of what Doc Andy has outlined is that it tells us what kinds of capabilities we might need in order to solve some of the ‘unsolvable’ cases we get handed.” She leaned her head back for a moment. “There are times when I wish we had a lab like the FBI’s forensics lab.”

  “You’re talking a bit of money.”

  “For everything we do, we’re always talking a bit of money,” Hank replied. “Look at what we got recently: two bizjets and a piston twin, brand new. And I’ll bet we didn’t get a ‘clandestine law enforcement unit’ discount on any of them. Which has really got me wondering: Where the hell does our money come from? How does the government fund a non-existent unit?”

  “It’s black money,” Spud said, coming into the room and sitting on the arm of her chair.

  “Black money? You mean, like money confiscated from criminals?”

  “Exactly. It doesn’t all go into the US Treasury. Some of it funds projects that the government would really not like the American people knowing about,” Spud said. “Most of it at the moment is cartel money, seized from stash houses. You’d be amazed how much cash gets recovered.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Hank replied. “I got to see a stash house up close and personal once. They had pallets loaded with stacks of hundred dollar bills in one of the bedrooms, and every closet in the place was crammed full of hundreds as well. I often wonder how many of those bills were handed over by my junkie brother before he got himself stabbed to death.”

  “So, I basically came to see why, instead of resting up and spending time with your lonely husband, you’re down here in the library.”

  “Catching up with Doc Andy. I should have taken a book with me to Roswell.”

  “When would you have read it? While you were putting in flight time, or while you were taking shots at me during the training exercise?”

  Hank grinned. “You’re never going to forgive me for eliminating you, are you? It was your fault, you know. Snipers make kills by being sneaky sonsabitches, so if you intend to capture one, you’ve got to be a sneakier sonuvabitch. A lesson hopefully you learned.”

  “Hmf. What are you reading this time?”

  She held up the book. “Erroll Southers. Homegrown Violent Extremism. Doc Andy identifies our most likely perp to be a born-in-the-USA citizen, someone who is naturalized, or someone who has lived here for some time. I’m reading this book in order to get a better idea of just what fosters such a person to get involved in terrorism. Of course, one of the things this book points out right in the beginning is that there’s no agreed-upon definition of ‘terrorism.’ So it’s sort-of like what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had to say about pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’”

  “The country is full of extremists,” Spud noted.

  “More than even I thought, and the FBI tries to keep track of them.” She consulted some notes she’d made on her tablet. “This book mentions sixteen separate extremists groups – and that’s just the mainline ones. Each one of those has fostered splinter groups as well. We’re talking dozens of organized groups, all hell-bent on disrupting the country, and most by violent means. And that’s organized groups. Now, if we started to talk about lone wolves, then we’re talking about a lot more. Look at the Unabombers and Timothy McVeighs out there. Trying to get them all is like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole.”

  “All makes you wonder what we’ll be called to help with next,” Voice muttered, face in his tablet.

  “What are you working on, Voice?” Spud asked. “You don’t believe in crash days, either?”

  “I want to make sure the new comm routine works perfectly. One thing I noticed is that it’s now possible for us to talk over top of one another, so I’m getting Hal to use a time delay and prioritize communications according to stress levels in the voices of the team. Right now, we can work around the problem by just asking Hal to isolate communications only to one or more people if, say, someone initiates a ‘team’ call and everyone talks at once. I figure the person who’s voice shows the most stress should probably be given priority. ‘Taking fire,’ for instance, generally involves a bit more vocal stress than ‘Heading your way.’ If I can get Hal to recognize stress, then it could send ‘Taking fire’ through first, then ‘Heading your way’ second. The learning curve for us will be to recognize when Hal has delayed a transmission and simply wait.” He shrugged. “I’m thinking that can’t be any more complex than learning how the bum tickers do things.”

  “How are you getting Hal to do all this?” Hank asked. “I don’t know about other people, but I don’t get a lot of time to talk to Hal, and when I do, I’m not generally under any kind of duress.”

  “Well, you know Hal listens to everything,” Voice explained. “I’ve had it listening to everything and recording it, then I play it and tag who’s talking and the level of urgency of the communication. When Hal makes additional recordings, I have it identify who’s talking and score the urgency, and I go through it afterward and make corrections that Hal uses to refine the algorithm. When I see that Hal has correctly tagged everyone and has given an appropriate urgency level to each communication, then I’ll consider the algorithm is working as it should.” He smiled. “It’s a real challenge when you consider that there are parallel communications going on all the time. Someone’s talkin
g to me, someone else is talking with Medical, etc. Which reminds me, Spud and Hank, I need you two to tell Hal to suppress listening to the two of you when you’re... enjoying yourselves. Hal is totally confused by that. It thinks what it’s hearing is top priority urgent. And it makes it hard for me to get anything done sometimes.”

  Spud and Hank both laughed, their faces red. “Ok. But I guess, in a sense, it is top priority urgent. At least for us,” Hank added.

  Hank snapped her book shut. “Cloud is supposed to be getting in soon with the Seneca. I need to talk with him and Crow about going out to pick up the architect for the Camp Chaos remodeling.”

  “I still seriously question bringing an architect here to our HQ to discuss how that facility is going to be remodeled as our new home base,” Spud said. “How you ever got that approved is beyond me, Love.”

  “This guy does a lot of high-end construction for prominent clients who don’t exactly want people to know they’re taking up residence in their backyard,” Hank said. “Plus, if he’s going to be building the new headquarters, we’re going to have to trust him and trust his construction crew as well. They’ve all been vetted, and he’s put in the threat of being out of a job should any of them talk about what they’ll be doing in Nebraska. When you meet him, you’re going to trust him as much as I do. I guarantee it.”

  Spud shrugged. “I just hope it doesn’t all go south for us. You’re going out to get him on your own?”

  “Well, with Cloud and Crow flying, of course. The entire flight should be about seven hours, so we’ll be out and back in the same day. I can use the time to do a bit more reading and study for my instrument knowledge exam.”

  “Sounds like Cloud, Crow, and Hank are back with the architect,” Edge said, hearing voices in the hall leading to Honor Way. The members of the unit were all gathered in the library, awaiting the architect’s arrival.

  “How are you?” they heard Doc Rich exclaim. “How’s the leg?”

  “Oh, you know. It gets a little sore,” they heard a man’s voice reply.