The Fallen: A Derek Stillwater Thriller

by Terry, Mark

  “With orders to shoot on sight, I assume.”

  Puskorius hesitated. “Sir—”

  “Shoot them on sight.”

  “Yes sir, but it’s possible that they will try to take hostages. I’m still waiting on intel about the oil platform. There could be a couple hundred people working on it. And the cruise ship could have anywhere from a thousand to two or three thousand people. And we’re spread a little thin.”

  “Thin?”

  “The closest SEAL teams are at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, Florida, sir. They’re heading out as we speak, ETA twenty-five minutes.”

  “That’s too long.”

  Johnston said, “The Coast Guard’s on their way. We’ll be coordinating with the SEAL teams.”

  Newman continued to pace. Johnston thought Newman was struggling to look presidential. Not necessarily act presidential, but to be perceived as presidential. For a moment he felt sympathy for the man. Learning the job in the middle of the crisis wasn’t easy, and few could live up to it. Still, he thought Newman was thinking about political repercussions more than thinking about the actual crisis at hand.

  Newman said, “I don’t like it. This has gone to hell. Puskorius, why in hell didn’t your people shoot down that helicopter before they offloaded?”

  General Puskorius said, “Civilians were in the area, sir.” He wrenched his gaze off President Newman and studied the conference table, littered with coffee cups, notepads, and the remnants of a hastily eaten lunch. He glanced over and caught Johnston’s gaze, who shot him a brief head nod to indicate he was backing him.

  Puskorius said, “It was a bad idea to allow these prisoners free, sir. The United States has a policy of not negotiating with terrorists.” The words hung there like a noxious cloud of gas.

  Johnston thought that President Newman was trying to point the blame somewhere else, and Puskorius threw it right back at him. He wondered how long Puskorius would last as chairman of the Joint Chiefs if Newman turned out to be the long-term president. He knew that if this day didn’t end with a living, breathing Jack Langston that left Newman president, his own political career would be over as well.

  President Newman’s eyes fixed into slits. “As I’m sure you’re aware, General, the United States has a public policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but we have often had back-channel negotiations ongoing when there have been hostages involved. And that doesn’t change the fact that the military screwed up!”

  Puskorius was about to respond when Lt. General Akron raised a hand to get everyone’s attention. “We’ve got another message from Secretary Mandalevo—” He trailed off as he brought the incoming e-mail up on the main plasma screen.

  5 BG NOW. DS OK. NEG ENTRY. BI

  They studied the message. FBI Director O’Malley said, “5 BG NOW? Does that mean they’re down to five?”

  Secretary Johnston’s phone rang and he picked it up. “Johnston here.” He listened for a moment and said, “We believe there are only five of them left in the ballroom now. We don’t know why the numbers have dropped. And yes—”

  Johnston said to the room, “Snipers took out two of the terrorists who were patrolling the lobby of the Cheyenne Center.”

  “Thank God!” President Newman said.

  Johnston didn’t respond to that. Back on the phone he said, “We have reason to believe there are five of the terrorists remaining, and that Derek Stillwater is still alive. We’re not sure—” His gaze flicked to the message on the screen. “Hold off on your entry until we give the signal. Yes. Hold.” He hung up and looked around the PEOC. “What the hell does “NEG ENTRY and BI mean?”

  Akron swallowed. “The message appears to have been cut off. At least, I think so.”

  CIA Director Ballard was on the phone. “Admiral? Yes. I want to know if that BlackBerry signal is—” Ballard’s round face grew pale. “Yes sir. Thank you.” He slowly hung up. “The NSA says Robert’s BlackBerry is either turned off or dead. The signal’s gone.”

  All cell phones, including BlackBerry’s and other wireless devices, kept in constant communication with local cellular towers unless they were shut off. The National Security Agency had tapped into all cellular and satellite communications in a fifty-mile radius of the Cheyenne Resort and had their entire staff monitoring all communications.

  “What does that mean?” President Newman said. “Is he dead? Did his battery die? What?”

  Ballard said, “We don’t know, Mr. President. It’s possible he was caught.”

  President Newman eyed the messages: NEG ENTRY. BI. “What does NEG ENTRY mean?”

  Akron said, “It might mean we shouldn’t try to enter the building.”

  “Why?” President Newman demanded. “Why would Mandalevo say that? Is it possible that these people— El Tiburón or Pablo Juarez or whoever the hell he is— caught Bob sending messages and is sending one of his own to confuse us?”

  Silence fell as everybody considered that. It was Akron who said, “I suppose it’s possible, sir, but why tell us that the numbers were down to five? And would Juarez tell us that Stillwater was still alive?”

  Johnston tried to think of what BI might mean. Or what it might start, but came up completely blank. “Sir,” he said to President Newman. “Agent LeVoi and Ms. Khournikova are getting set up to enter the building. We need to let them know our decision. Should they go in or not?”

  President Newman clenched his jaw. He turned and studied the cryptic message on the computer screen, then turned back to Johnston. “Tell them it’s a go.”

  “Mr. President,” interrupted FBI Director O’Malley, “with all due respect, perhaps we should—”

  “Director O’Malley, it’s already been pointed out to me that we shouldn’t negotiate. Juarez said we comply or Jack Langston dies. We and the Colombian government can’t comply and I do not want Jack Langston to die. Director O’Malley, order your people to proceed.”

  With an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach, Secretary Johnston watched the Secret Service director phone Agent Brenda LeVoi. “Agent LeVoi, proceed with your operation when ready. The timetable is yours.”

  Johnston thought: Did Newman just sentence everybody in that building to death?

  Chapter 77

  For a moment Derek stared at the bomb. With a hiss, he quickly scuttled backward until he reached the opening to the crawl space and dropped to the floor. He felt ill. His stomach churned, his head throbbed, and his hands shook. He knew it wasn’t just all of the day’s battles catching up to him. It was him.

  He fell to the floor, back against the wall, and propped his head in his hands. The world swirled around him and his stomach roiled. Sprawling on his hands and knees, he vomited, sucking bitter air in and out of his lungs. Spangles and fireworks danced on the screen of his closed eyelids. The unmistakable sweet smell of rotting bodies filled his nostrils. Derek shook his head, instantly regretting the action as his headache intensified.

  He crawled away from his mess and lay down on the hard floor, forearm over his eyes.

  Coffee, you bastard!

  It was just like Coffee, a master strategist, to create backup plans within backup plans. They had been trained in the same place in the same way by the U.S. Army. While Derek had specialized in biological and chemical warfare, Coffee had focused on Psyops— psychological warfare. A linguist, he had often been charged with interacting with locals, both as a trainer and as a propagandist. Derek doubted if Coffee had much more than basic field training from the CIA before slipping into Chechnya undercover and infiltrating the culture. Of course, while there he had led Chechen rebels in guerilla warfare and terrorism against the Russian government, as practical a training ground as any for becoming a full-fledged worldwide terrorist.

  He drifted for a moment, lost in his own thoughts, a million emotions and memories flickering through his brain. He thought of his ex-wife, Simona. Reaching into his back pocket, he retrieved his wallet. The ID in the battered
trifold identified him as Michael Gabriel, as did all the other supporting evidence. But there was a photograph of Simona.

  He wondered if he would ever see her again, then gave himself a quick mental kick. He hadn’t seen her in years. She was a doctor in Texas. She’d never remarried. Neither had he. Sometimes, when he let himself, he wondered what that meant. Did she still love him? Did he still love her? It was his career that had trashed their marriage— years in the military, followed by years working with U.N. weapons inspection teams. He had been thinking about her a lot over the last couple years.

  Biological and chemical warfare and terrorism were the tiger tail he had caught early in his military career. It was like the fascination of watching two scorpions try to sting each other to death. Fear of it drove him to try to prevent it. Yet he couldn’t let go of it, couldn’t look away. He had seen its devastation firsthand in Iraq. Included in his files were details of secret missions into North Korea and Iran, Pakistan, and Africa, where he worked as a contract analyst for the CIA. What he had seen struck fear deep in his gut. A shrink once told him, “You’ve spent most of your career looking through the gates of hell. You’d be nuts not to be a little bit nuts.”

  Why couldn’t he let it go?

  Images: rotting bodies of Kurds in northern Iraq, sprayed with sarin gas from helicopters; nighttime grave digging in Pakistan, performing field autopsies on corpses believed infected by biowarfare agents, victims of surreptitious government-led testing on human beings; staring at huge corroded bioreactors in Russia that showed all evidence of manufacturing genetically engineered smallpox to be used in long-range missiles.

  Get it together, Derek!

  Derek sat up, looked down the hallway and spied a restroom. He walked down to it, pushed his way in, and turned on the cold water, splashing it on his face, washing his hands, rinsing out his mouth. He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was covered with small scratches and scrapes. His hair was littered with dust and debris, and his eyes looked sunken and dark.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  The image in the mirror nodded and grinned. He thought the grin made him little a little bit demented.

  “What do you think?” he asked himself. “Can you disarm it?”

  On the sink in front of him he laid out his tools. The Emerson knife. A small flashlight. A screwdriver he’d been dragging around with him all day. A set of keys and his utility tool. The utility tool was like a Swiss Army knife with a number of gadgets including scissors, knife blades, a corkscrew, and a pair of pliers.

  Around his neck was a St. Sebastian’s medal, a steel four-leaf clover, and ju-ju beads, the latter given to him by a friend who survived Somalia. “They saved my ass, dude. And you need luck more than I do.”

  St. Sebastian had been an officer in the Imperial Roman army, a captain of the guard in the third or fourth century. He was reported to have healed the wife of a fellow soldier, and then began to convert soldiers to Christianity. He was arrested and tried as a Christian, tied to a tree, and shot with arrows. Sebastian miraculously survived and continued to preach, though his ministry was short lived. The emperor had him rearrested and beaten to death.

  Derek thought there was probably a lesson there. You could view Sebastian surviving the arrows as a miracle and a sign of God’s favor, but what were you to make of the second and final execution? That God decided to bring him home, he had proven his faith the first time? Or that God was sending you a message the first time and you were too stupid to pay attention to it?

  During the fourteenth century plague victims prayed to Sebastian, which is how he became associated with plague. Which is why Derek wore his medal around his neck, figuring he could use all the benevolent oversight he could get.

  Derek wasn’t quite up to praying to saints, but he rubbed his thumb over the medal, thinking very dark thoughts. Taking a deep breath, he put all his tools away, turned, and walked back toward the crawl space. He was as ready as he was ever going to be.

  Chapter 78

  A Bell UH-S Huey military helicopter roared in over the main building of the Cheyenne Resort and landed in the circular drive in front of the central entrance. It had barely touched down when the hatch door slammed open and a dozen armed soldiers jumped out and sprinted for the front doors, where Secret Service agents waited.

  The Special Forces team quickly assembled in a conference room that had been turned into an operations center. Special Agent LeVoi stood at the front of the room with Irina Khournikova. As the twelve men gathered around, LeVoi felt a sharp twinge of doubt.

  She was not military. Brenda had a law degree from the University of Michigan. She had always wanted to be part of the FBI. It was, she often thought, her first love— which probably explained her three failed marriages. She was finally accepting that it was okay; she was doing good things in the world.

  And she had ambitions in the bureau. She’d like to be the first female director of the FBI. Now it was time to live up to her ambitions. She felt in over her head, but she had asked for this and it was the time to rise to the occasion. LeVoi did the talking, not wanting to cause problems with the soldiers’ chain of command by having them take orders from a Russian.

  LeVoi pointed to the 3-D CAD/CAM images of the Cheyenne Center and the troika of the Cheyenne Center, International Center, and Colorado Springs Center projected on the walls. She drew their attention to the sketches of the Cheyenne Center. “Group Alpha?”

  A soldier raised his hand. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with short blond hair and a square jaw. “Captain Ray Stanchfield. I’ll lead Group Alpha. Lieutenant Jorge Ruiz—”

  A wiry soldier with dark penetrating eyes raised a hand.

  “— will handle Group Bravo.”

  LeVoi nodded. “We’ve got our people as well. We have very little time to coordinate. You will be running the entry op; I’m coordinating from here.” She introduced Irina Khournikova. “She’ll be going in with Group Bravo. She is very familiar with the tunnel.”

  Ruiz eyed her. “You got combat training?”

  “Yes,” Irina said. “Russian Army and FSB. You are familiar with Spetsnaz?”

  “Yeah,” Ruiz said. “Bunch a pussies.”

  The team laughed. Stanchfield started to say something, but Irina smiled and said, “Then I’ll make sure you go in first, Lieutenant. I’ll cover your ass. You wouldn’t want a pussy to show up your Special Forces, would you?”

  LeVoi said, “Enough. Group Alpha takes the roof. There are three Service snipers up there already. We will download all these maps to your PDAs and we have printouts as well. Who are your demolition experts?”

  Two of the soldiers raised their hands. “Good,” LeVoi said. “The tunnel doors are apparently wired from the inside with Semtex. Our evaluation is it’s booby-trapped. It can also be set off by a signal from a PDA that the lead terrorist, known as Pablo Juarez, has with him. The world leaders are also wired with explosives.”

  One of the demolition experts, a slight man with sensitive features and a whispy red mustache, stepped forward to study the CAD/CAM configurations. He said, “We can get those jammed, right?”

  “Yes, but it causes problems with our own equipment.”

  He scratched his jaw and looked at Stanchfield. “If the timing’s right, though—”

  Stanchfield nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

  LeVoi ran them through the logistics of the two-pronged entry plan. She didn’t like the short preparation time. It was that lack of intel and planning that had killed the previous assault team. She hoped there were no more surprises, but didn’t think that was likely. Operations of this complexity always went to hell minutes after they started. She didn’t express her doubts, but said, “People, time is very tight here. We have to move in the next five minutes.”

  She hesitated, then brought up a photograph of Derek Stillwater on one of the walls. “This is a friendly. He’s been picking these guys off all day, one at a time. We have evidence to
suggest that he’s still alive. If you see him, do not shoot him. He may be a very valuable asset. He’s a troubleshooter with DHS and a former Green Beret.”

  Ruiz said, “A brotha.”

  “Keep an eye out for him.”

  “Will do,” Ruiz said. “We’re ready to kick some terrorist butt.”

  Stanchfield gave LeVoi a thumbs-up. “We’re ready.”

  LeVoi turned to Irina Khournikova. “You?”

  Khournikova nodded. She reached down and picked up an assault rifle that had been propped in one corner. She looked at Lieutenant Ruiz. “Ready to rock and roll, Lieutenant?”

  Ruiz grinned. “Ladies first.”

  Khournikova led Group Bravo out of the resort at a brisk trot.

  Stanchfield was on his radio to the U.S. Space Command stationed at Peterson Air Force Base. “When I give the signal, shut all satellite and radio communications down around here for five minutes. Five off, then on until my next signal. And, Captain, that next signal will mean we want the leaders safe and they have to be shut down. Understand?” He waited. “Affirmative. Out.”

  He turned back to LeVoi. “Let’s go.” His group ran after him and loaded into the Huey, which promptly lifted off and flew toward the Cheyenne Center.

  LeVoi was on the phone with Secretary Johnston and everybody at PEOC. She checked her watch. They had twelve minutes before Pablo Juarez planned to kill President Langston. The clock was ticking. “Sir, Project Judgment Day is underway.”

  Chapter 79

  Derek crouched in the crawl space and studied the bomb. He thought, I am way in over my head with this thing. He was trained to defuse bombs, though it wasn’t his primary expertise. It wasn’t the bomb itself that worried him— well, okay, it worried him. What worried him the most were the tripwires.

  He settled back to think. The bomb appeared to have two kinds of triggers. One was physical— Coffee had set up a crisscross of what looked like fishing line around the device. The second was the lasers, not unlike those used in garage door openers. The actual beams weren’t visible, but Derek had no problem seeing the lasers themselves with their glowing red eyes.