by Mike Maden
“Mr. President, I’m so terribly sorry to inconvenience you,” Logan said as he pulled to a stop. He removed his gray felt Stetson. His bright blue eyes contrasted with his thick but short-cropped silver hair. He was five years younger than Ryan but the deep lines in his rugged face aged him considerably.
“I knew you had the smarts to figure out what I was trying to tell you. And I can’t thank you enough for allowing me to inconvenience you at this ridiculous hour.”
Ryan smiled. “It’s a little past Arnie’s bedtime, but I think it all worked out.”
Ryan shook Logan’s hand. The Texan’s grip was crushing. The former Naval Academy tight end had been nearly as big as his bodyguard when he played football. Tragically, a catastrophic spinal cord injury from a late hit by Notre Dame in his senior year put him in a wheelchair forever, ending both his collegiate football career and his dream of following in his father’s footsteps into military service.
As physically impressive as he still was, Buck Logan’s greatest strength was his first-rate mind. His father had built a great regional trucking firm after the Korean War, but it was Buck who transformed it into a global logistics operation, with land, sea, and air assets. To satisfy his longing for military service, Logan had also built a top-tier private military contracting outfit. All together, Buck had forged White Mountain Logistics + Security into one of the largest and most reliable private-sector contractors servicing the DoD and several other federal departments.
But despite his outsized achievements in business and academics—he finished his USNA degree in civil engineering with a 4.0—Buck still lived in the long shadow of his famous father.
Logan nodded at Arnie. “Then my apologies to you as well, Mr. van Damm.”
“Please, it’s just Arnie.”
“Can I get you something to eat? Drink?” Ryan asked.
“No, sir, I’ve already put you out. I’ll be brief.” Logan motioned to the two empty wingback chairs. “Please, don’t stand on my account.”
Jack and Arnie took their seats.
“So, Buck, what’s this all about?” Ryan asked.
Logan sat up straighter in his motorized chair. “First of all, let me get it off my chest. As you’ve already figured out, I lied to you this afternoon, Mr. President, and I can hardly forgive myself for that. But the truth of the matter is, I didn’t have much of a choice. I’m in one hell of a pickle, and I’m afraid my personal security situation has been compromised. I just didn’t feel comfortable speaking with you on an unsecured line. Lucky for me, I own a fleet of private planes, so arranging an unscheduled flight up here wasn’t a problem, and I wanted to look you in the eye when we spoke.”
“I can appreciate that, Buck. So, let’s get to it. What’s going on?”
“The bottom line is that one of my ships—technically, a ship I was leasing for a single transport—was sunk seven days ago in the South Pacific.”
“Why lie about it?” Arnie asked.
Logan reached around behind his chair, pulled a file folder out of his seat pocket, and handed a couple of e-mail printouts to Arnie.
“As you can read there, that sinking was no accident. I was sent that note seventy-two hours before it happened. I was told to transfer ten million dollars in Bitcoin to a Dark Web address or else they’d sink one of my shipments. What concerns me is that they must have known it wasn’t my ship—only my cargo. Not many people have that information.”
“And that’s why you believe there’s someone on the inside of your organization—and why you couldn’t speak on the phone.”
Logan grinned. “That’s why I’m your biggest supporter in Texas, Mr. President. Sharp as a tack, and blunt as a hammer.”
“Why didn’t you contact us when you received this threat?” Arnie asked.
Logan laughed. “Are you kidding me? What was I going to do? Come crying to you guys because somebody said something mean to me? A non-specific, non-credible threat? What could you have done to prevent it? I’ve got operations all over the globe. It’s not like you were going to put Marine detachments on all of my ships or provide me with destroyer escorts.
“Besides, for all I know, this was sent by some ‘Nigerian princess’ riding a laptop somewhere in Romania.”
Logan blew air through his bleached white teeth, his face reddening. “Nobody’s gonna push Buck Logan around—sure ’n hell ain’t gonna squeeze ten million U.S. government dollars outta his wallet with a goddamn e-mail!”
Jack and Arnie exchanged a look. Logan was losing it right in front of them.
Logan saw their reaction.
“Sorry about that, gentlemen. I’m a little off my game, as you can well imagine. I lost seventeen million dollars’ worth of civilian cargo—mostly drilling pipe, steel fittings, generators. Nothing for Uncle Sam, mind you. Not to mention the poor bastards who went down with the ship, whoever they were.”
“You have insurance, don’t you?”
“Flip over to the second page. After the sinking, I was contacted again. Told in no uncertain terms: Do not contact your insurance and do not contact the authorities or more sinkings will follow. Given the circumstances, I was inclined to believe them.”
Logan pointed at the pages again. “You can see there, they listed out every one of my scheduled shipments for the next thirty days, and each one of my flagged vessels. I lose a few more of those, and I’m ruined, no matter what I do.
“If I don’t file insurance claims on the Jade Star cargo, I’m out of pocket on the losses. And if I do file a claim, my insurance rates will skyrocket and then these bastards said they’d sink another one. If they sank a second boat, I’d have to file a second claim, and then my insurance would get canceled. And if that happens, then I can’t carry goods and I’m out of business. Either way, my pooch is royally screwed.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Cross my fingers and pray. Three days ago, they sent me another letter demanding twenty million dollars—ten for the first letter, and ten for not believing them.”
“What did you do?” Arnie asked.
“I paid the bastards. What else could I do?”
“Have they threatened any more of your ships?”
“No, they said this was a one-time payment.”
Arnie pressed further. “And you actually believe them?”
“Whoever these shitheads are, they’re smart. I doubt I’m the first one they’ve done this to and probably not the last. It’s one thing to swipe a few apples from the neighbor’s tree but there’s no point in cuttin’ it down ’cuz then the apples run out.”
“You don’t know how right you are, Buck. There have been several other unexplained sinkings, along with yours,” Ryan said.
“I’ll be damned.”
“They must have been threatened the same way you were,” Arnie said. “Same conditions.”
Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Who else have they hit?”
“Big companies with deep pockets, like yours. All in the Pacific, just like yours.”
“And they haven’t said anything, either?”
“No. You’ve told us the most—and that wasn’t a hell of a lot,” Ryan said. He leaned forward. “No idea at all who’s behind this?”
Logan shifted around in his chair.
“I’ve thought long and hard on this. Could be a political group. Could be a religious outfit. Or it might just be your run-of-the-mill, greedy-ass pirate. They all have the same motive: money. The question is, what do they want to do with that money?”
“Something tells me you’ve ruled all of those out,” Ryan said.
“Motive ain’t enough. You gotta have the means, which tells me we’re talking about a blue water navy. As I’ve noodled on it, I think we’re talking about the Russians.”
“Why the Russians?” Arnie asked. “That seems like a real stretch.”
Logan leaned forward. “But the Russkies have eight deepwater surface vessels and eighteen-plus submarines just in their Pacific Fleet—hell, they got more subs in their navy than we do.”
“I’ll grant you they have the means,” Ryan said. “But what’s their motive?”
“That’s what I can’t quite figure out. Maybe they’ve had some kind of breakthrough in their underwater operations or their hypersonic anti-ship missiles and they’re running real-world tests. Any Russian-flagged ships sunk?”
“No.” Ryan wondered if Logan was onto something. “Not U.S.-flagged or Chinese-flagged, either.”
“But you’re missing the obvious, Buck. They hit you up for cash,” Arnie said. “That’s not a military operation.”
“Are you kidding me? Russia is run by the world’s richest gangsters. They love money, the dirtier the better. What better way to hide their testing program than to pretend it’s a piracy operation—and make some serious bank on the side doing it?”
Ryan and Arnie exchanged another look. Maybe Logan wasn’t crazy after all.
“You said you think you have an insider on your hands. What are you doing about it?” Arnie asked.
Logan shifted around in his chair again, unable to get comfortable. It was obviously a losing battle.
“I’ve got my most trusted security people sniffing around to find out who the backstabbing sumbitch is, but no luck so far.”
Arnie held up the blackmail threat. “Your IT people must have searched for the source of this e-mail? Chased down the Dark Web bank account address?”
“Jumped right on it. But you know that computer stuff—VPNs and firewalls and such. They couldn’t find anything we could grab ahold of. And we all know how good the Russians are at that kind of thing.”
“You never struck me as a man who left his fate in the hands of others,” Ryan said.
Logan grimaced, obviously in some discomfort. “Believe me, I’m not. I’m going on the offensive and putting my security team on this. I’ll find the bastards who did this, come hell or high water, and God help them when I find them.” Buck pointed a meaty finger in their direction. “You two gents have to color inside the lines, I don’t.”
“If it really is the Russians, you’re taking on a helluva risk,” Arnie noted.
“No worries on that account. I have a few arrows in my quiver I’m not afraid to loose.”
“We can’t sanction any illegal activities,” Arnie said.
“No, we can’t,” Ryan said. He stood, ending the meeting. “But if you do find out anything, Buck, you be sure to let us know.”
Buck smiled and winked. “Will do, Mr. President. Will do.”
16
PHILIPPINE SEA
The Don Pedro was lashed by heavy rains in a rolling sea, making a steady five knots beneath a hard gray sky. The wiper blades slapped away the salt water sheeting the bridge windows where the captain stood, joking with the first officer. It was a powerful storm by any measure but according to the weather radar would pass within the hour. The large, purse-shaped tuna nets were stowed away and the booms secured while the deck crew huddled dry below playing cards, grabbing shut-eye, or cleaning weapons, waiting for it to pass.
Héctor Guzmán was no sailor but the rise and fall of the boat in the running swells had no ill effect on him as he sat in his small, private cabin, staring at a laptop screen.
Dark, beardless, and with a long sharp nose that flared at the base, Guzmán’s looks favored his mother’s purely Indian ancestry. But he was a head taller than anyone in his village, and stronger than any man by the age of fifteen, the genetic gift of his father’s mixed Spanish and German heritage. His badly pockmarked face was puckered with divots and irregular scars, like a rotted orange skin punctured by shoe spikes. With such a face, he paid double for whores who would have him willingly. The whores who wouldn’t he took by force and made them pay dearly in other ways.
The men under his command both on and off the water assumed his facial defects were the product of battle—a shotgun blast to the face, or perhaps even burns. It added to his reputation as a fearsome and indestructible fighter, both of which were true. But in fact, the scarring was merely the aftermath of a virulent skin condition from his childhood.
Guzmán examined the photo on the laptop intensely, a pair of wireless AirPods stuck in his ears. It was the blue eyes and dark beard in the photo that caught his attention.
“Who am I looking at?” Guzmán demanded. “He looks like an operator.”
“According to our contact at the CNI, he is an American by the name of John Patrick Ryan, Jr.,” the operator said through the AirPods, his throaty vowels betraying his Russian accent. “He goes by the name of Jack. Works as an analyst for a privately held financial services firm, Hendley Associates, owned and managed by an ex–American senator by the name of Gerald Hendley. Apparently, Ryan was an acquaintance of Moore and that is his interest in the case.”
Guzmán scowled at Ryan’s picture. He had only just learned about van Delden’s death secondhand, and that a man matching Ryan’s description was involved. He doubted it was possible this Ryan guy in Spain was the same guy who killed van Delden in South Korea, but his instincts told him to pay close attention.
The Russian operator’s name was Bykov, one of Guzmán’s smartest. He had a real genius for killing. Munitions and remote-controlled detonations were his specialty. The Slav’s deep-set hazel eyes and flat face were offset by his crooked nose. Bykov was concerned enough about the situation in Barcelona to reach out and that was worrisome. Ryan had been in touch with the American consulate, twice met with an agent of the CNI, and made contact with Moore just before the explosion.
“He’s not an operator? Not with any agency?”
Guzmán’s own English was superb, and nearly without accent, taught to him by a spinster Baptist missionary lady who served in a nearby village when he was a child.
“We did not find anything else on him in our database, which is extensive.”
It was extensive, Guzmán agreed. And expensive. One of his best investments. If this Ryan character wasn’t on it, it was possible he had been scrubbed. That made Ryan even more problematic.
The boat yawed violently beneath Guzmán. “That’s all you have on him?”
“I have his home address in Alexandria, Virginia. His driver’s license says he’s one hundred and eighty-seven centimeters tall, and weighs eighty-nine kilograms, and by the looks of him, I’d say that was all muscle.”
His old friend van Delden was a physical monster, second to none in close-quarters combat, but this Ryan guy was no wimp, either, according to Bykov’s description. Was it possible a financial analyst was able to take out his number two? No. Impossible.
“There is one other thing. The CIA bitch told Ryan the name ‘Sammler.’”
“What does Ryan know?”
“Nothing, according to our CNI friend. Moore just mentioned the name to Ryan as she died.” Bykov chuckled. “Last thing she thought about before going tits up.”
“Something isn’t right about this guy.”
“I did a little of my own checking on Hendley Associates. They handle big international accounts, mostly corporate, sometimes individuals. In my experience, these high-end finance guys hide their identities as best they can because they work with a lot of shady characters. It gives them an advantage in negotiations and protects them from the more dangerou
s elements. I’ve seen it before.”
Guzmán scratched his beardless chin. “I don’t buy it. This Ryan cabrón ‘accidentally’ shows up to a meeting with a CIA agent that he already knows just as she’s about to meet the target? The next day he goes to the U.S. consulate and meets with the CIA chief of station while he is also working with the CNI. You really think this is just a finance guy?”
“If you feel he is a threat, I can make him a borscht easily enough.”
Guzmán grinned at Bykov’s little joke. Making Ryan a borscht was the Russian’s way of saying he would make the man into a blood-red soup, dissolving his corpse in a barrel of acid, the same way the Mexican cartels disposed of their opponents—sometimes before they were dead. It was a gruesome but effective way of destroying DNA evidence.
Something told Guzmán that Bykov was right. And the Russian operator was, after all, the man on the ground.
But if Ryan worked for a big financial firm run by an American ex-senator, that meant he had powerful and influential friends. If Ryan really was just a financial analyst and had no real connection to the operation in Barcelona, it would be an unnecessary mistake to eliminate him—an “unforced error” as they said in American baseball, which he loved with a passion.
Yet, Bykov was onto something. If Ryan was a threat, he needed to be eliminated. Things were too far along now. They couldn’t afford to have Ryan throw sand into the gearbox. Whether Ryan was merely a businessman or a security operative, if he posed a threat, he needed to be eliminated. But Guzmán needed evidence that Ryan was, in fact, a threat. More important, he needed to know if Ryan was responsible for van Delden’s death.
“What do you propose, Bykov? You’re the man on the ground.”
“When Ryan left the restaurant, our eyes met, though only briefly. Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps not. But he has the look of a predator and that makes me nervous.”
“Was he carrying a weapon?”
“Not that I saw, though I admit, I didn’t have much time to observe him.”
“Your recommendation?”