Primary Command

Luke didn’t doubt it. The shock of September 11, along with repeated setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad press at home… it had left a lot of people on this side of the fence feeling the same way. American equipment, training, and personnel were generally tip-top, but people were people, and when things went sideways, it hurt.

He let the information wash over him.

Don had promised him more people when he arrived in Turkey, deep cover operatives with local knowledge, fluency in the Russian language, and experience in fast-moving, hard-hitting black ops. Don didn’t say where they were coming from, only that they would be the best available. He had promised Luke methods for both him and Ed, moving separately, to enter Russia undetected. He had promised Luke any materials he wanted, within reason—guns, bombs, cars, airplanes, whatever.

A picture began to emerge…

Yeah. He started to imagine the broad outlines of it. In an ideal world… if he got everything he wanted… with the element of surprise… total commitment… and moving at warp speed…

He could see how this just might work.

* * *

“They used to call me Monster.”

Luke stared at Ed. They were the only two awake, sitting in the back seats of the plane. But now Luke was fading. Further up, Trudy was still curled into a ball, and Swann was sprawled out, his long legs crossing the aisle.

The window shades were down, but Luke could see bits of sunlight peeking in along the bottom edges. Wherever they were in the world, it was morning now.

Luke had just laid out the mission to Ed, as he was starting to imagine it. He was thinking he might get a little feedback. Did this part seem possible? Was there a gaping hole he was overlooking? What kind of weapons should they carry? What kind of equipment did they need?

Instead, he got this: “They used to call me Monster.”

It was all the answer he needed, he supposed. The man was a monster. If it came to it, he would go at this problem with half a plan and a handful of rusty nails.

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” Luke said.

Ed shook his head. He was half asleep himself. “Not because of my size. Because I was so evil. I grew up in Crenshaw, in LA. Four kids, I was the oldest. The closest thing to a grocery store in the neighborhood was a place that sold liquor, lottery tickets, and cans of soup and tuna fish. My mom couldn’t keep the lights on sometimes.

“I said, un-unh. It ain’t gonna be like this. It’s not right we gotta live this way, and I’m gonna fix it. I was out working on the corner at twelve, trying to get that money. I was running with the worst of the worst by fifteen, and I was worse than they were. In and out of juvie. I wasn’t fixing anything.”

Ed sighed heavily. “Ten of those nights, I could have easily died. People did. I was getting shot at long before I ever saw Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any of these other classified places I supposedly never went.”

He squinted and shook his head. “I came before a judge when I was seventeen. She told me I could now be tried as an adult. I could see real time in big-boy jail. Or I could get a suspended sentence and join the United States Army. Up to me.”

He smiled. “What else was I gonna do? I joined. I got to basic, drill sergeant there, name of Brooks, immediately had a hard-on for me. Master Sergeant Nathan Brooks. Didn’t like me, and decided he was gonna break me.”

“Did he?” Luke said. He had trouble picturing such a thing, but this wasn’t the first time he had heard something along these lines. “Did he break you?”

Ed laughed. “Oh yeah. He broke me. Then he broke me again. And again. I’ve never been broken so bad in my life. He saw me coming a mile away. Made me his personal project. He said, ‘You think you hard, nigger? You ain’t hard. You ain’t even seen hard yet. But I’m gonna show it to you.’”

“Was he a white guy?” Luke said.

Ed shook his head. “Nah. In those days, if a white man called me nigger, I’d have just killed him. He was a down home brother, from South Carolina someplace. I don’t know. He broke me right in half. And when he was done, he put me back together again, a little better than before. Now I was something other people up the line could at least work with, make something out of.”

He was silent for a moment. The airplane shuddered across a patch of turbulence.

“I never really found the right way to thank that guy.”

Luke shrugged. “Well, it’s not over. Send him some flowers. A Hallmark card. I don’t know.”

Ed smiled, but it was wistful now. “He’s dead. Maybe a year ago. Forty-three years old. He’d already been in the service twenty-five years. He could have retired any time. Apparently, he volunteered for Iraq instead, and they gave it to him. He was on a convoy that got ambushed near Mosul. I don’t know all the details. I saw it in Stars and Stripes. Turns out he was a highly decorated guy. I didn’t know that about him when he was running me into the ground. He never mentioned it.”

He paused. “And I never told him what he meant to me.”

“He probably knew,” Luke said.

“Yeah. He probably did. But I should have said it anyway.”

Luke didn’t disagree.

“Where’s your mom?” he said instead.

Ed shook his head. “Still in Crenshaw. I tried to get her to move out east near me, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving. All her friends are there! So me and my sister chipped in and bought her a little bungalow six blocks away from the old rat hole apartment building where we used to live. A chunk of my pay every month goes to paying the mortgage on that thing. Right in the old neighborhood I used to risk my life trying to get her out of.”

He sighed heavily. “At least there’s food in the fridge and the lights are on. I guess that’s all I care about. She says, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna mess with me. They know you’re my son. And you’re gonna come see ’em if they do.’”

Luke smiled. Ed did too, and this time the smile was more genuine.

“She’s impossible, man.”

Now Luke laughed. After a moment, so did Ed.

“Listen,” Ed said. “I like your plan. I think we can pull it off. A couple more guys, the right ones…” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s doable. I need to catch about forty more winks, and maybe I’ll have a few thoughts of my own, some things to add.”

“Sounds good,” Luke said. “I look forward to that. I’d prefer not to get anybody on our team killed out there.”

“Especially not us,” Ed said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

June 26

6:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Special Activities Center, Directorate of Operations

Central Intelligence Agency

Langley, Virginia

“It seems the president has lost his marbles.”

“Oh?” the old man smoking the cigarette said. It sounded like he had marbles in his throat. His teeth were dark yellow. Receding gums made them long. They seemed to click together when he spoke. The effect was horrifying. “Do tell.”

They were deep inside the bowels of headquarters. Most places inside the building, smoking was now off limits. But here in the inner sanctum? Anything was allowed.

“I’m sure you’ve already heard,” Special Agent Wallace Speck said.

He sat across a wide steel desk from the old man. There was almost nothing on the desk. No phone, no computer, not a piece of paper or a pencil. There was only a white ceramic ashtray, filled to overflowing with used cigarette butts.

The old man nodded. “Refresh my memory.”

“Yesterday he suggested that the crew of the Nereus be left to rot in Russian hands. He said this in front of twenty or thirty people.”

“Skip the easy stuff,” the old man said. They were in a room without windows. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it, and then let loose a plume of blue smoke. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet above their heads, and the smoke drifted upward toward it.

“Well, he walked that sentiment back. But he’s cut us and our friends out of the rescue operation, in favor of our new little brother at FBI.”

“Skip,” the old man said.

Wallace Speck shook his head. The old man looked like hell. How was he even still alive? He’d been chain smoking cigarettes since before Speck was born. His face was like ancient newsprint, turning almost as yellow as his teeth. His wrinkles had wrinkles. His body had no muscle tone at all. His flesh seemed to hang on bone.

The thought gave Speck a brief flashback to eating at a fancy restaurant one time. “How’s the chicken tonight?” he said to the waiter. “Beautiful,” the waiter said. “It falls right off the bone.”

The old man’s meat was anything but beautiful. But his eyes were still as sharp as razors, as focused as lasers. They were the only things left.

Those eyes regarded Speck. They wanted the dirt. They wanted the parts that people like Wallace Speck worried about sometimes. He could dig up the dirt, and he did. That was his job. But sometimes he wondered if the Special Activities Center of the CIA wasn’t overstepping its mandate. Sometimes he wondered if the special activities didn’t amount to treason.

“The man has trouble sleeping,” Speck said. “It seems he hasn’t gotten over the kidnapping of his daughter. He relies on Ambien to sleep, and he often washes his pill down with a glass of wine, or two. It’s a dangerous habit, for obvious reasons.”

Speck paused. He could give the old man paperwork, but the man didn’t want to look at paper. He just wanted to listen. Speck knew that. “We have audiotape and transcripts of a dozen telephone calls to his family ranch in Texas over the past ten days. The conversations are with his wife. In each call, he expresses his desire to leave the presidency, move back to the ranch, and spend time with his family. During three of those calls, he breaks down crying.”

The old man smiled and took another deep drag on the smoke. His eyes became slits. His tongue darted out. There was a piece of tobacco there at the tip of it. He looked like a lizard. “Good. More.”

“He has a sort of hero worship obsession with Don Morris, our little upstart rival at the FBI Special Response Team.”

The old man made a hand motion like a wheel spinning.

“More.”

Speck shrugged. “The president has a little dog, as you know. He has taken to walking it on the White House grounds late at night. He becomes angry if he runs across any Secret Service agents while he’s out there. A few nights ago, he came across two inside of ten minutes, and threw a temper tantrum. He called the night supervisory office and told them to stand their men down. He no longer seems to grasp that the men are there to protect him. He thinks they’re there to annoy him.”

“Hmmm,” the old man said. “Would he try to run away?”

“I would say it seems implausible,” Speck said. “But with this president, you never can tell what he’s going to do.”

“What else?”

“The political action group has begun to look at options for removal,” Speck said. “Impeachment is out because of the split in Congress. Also, the speaker of the House is a close ally of David Barrett’s and on the same page with him about most issues. He is very unlikely to pursue impeachment, or allow it to happen on his watch. Removal by the Twenty-fifth Amendment appears to be out as well. Barrett probably isn’t going to admit his inability to discharge his duties, and if the vice president attempts to…”

The old man held up his hand. “I get it. Skip. Tell me this: do we have Secret Service agents in nighttime operations on the White House grounds? Men who are loyal to us?”

“We do,” Speck said. “Yes.”

“Good. Now tell me about the Russia rescue operation.”

Speck shook his head. “We have no details. Don Morris is notoriously tight-fisted with information. But the bench isn’t deep over there, at least not yet. We can assume he’s given it to his two best agents, Luke Stone and Ed Newsam, young guys, both former Delta Force operators with extensive combat experience.”

“The ones who rescued the president’s unfortunate daughter?”

Speck nodded. “Yes.”

The old man smiled. His teeth were like yellow fangs. He could pass for the oldest of vampires, one who hadn’t tasted blood in a long, long time. “Cowboys, aren’t they?”

“Uh… I think they tend to shoot first, and then…”

“Are we planning to interdict? Derail their operation in some way?”

“Ah…” Wallace Speck said. “It’s certainly been on the table as an option. I mean, at the moment we don’t have that much…”

“Don’t do it,” the old man said. “Get out of their way and let it rip. Maybe they’ll get themselves killed. Maybe they’ll start a world war. Either way, it’s good for us. And if David Barrett does anything crazy, I mean really crazy, be ready to swoop in and take control of the situation.”

Wallace Speck stood to leave.

“Yes sir. Anything else?”

The old man looked at him with the ancient eyes of a demon. “Yes. Try to smile a little more, Speck. You’re not dead yet, so make an effort to enjoy your time here. This is supposed to be fun.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

11:20 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (3:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Port of Adler, Sochi District

Krasnodar Krai

Russia

“Are they sure they want us to play this concert?” Luke said into the blue plastic satellite phone in his hand. “I think it’s going to be pretty loud.”

He leaned against an old black Lada sedan, made in Hungary. The boxy little car reminded him of an old Fiat or Yugo, just not as fancy as those. It seemed to be made of welded sheets of scrap metal. It gave off a faint smell of burning oil. The faster it went, the more it seemed to vibrate, like it was coming apart at the seams. Luckily, it was not the getaway car.

Nearby, his driver, a heavyset Chechen named Aslan, was smoking a cigarette and urinating through a chain-link fence. Aslan preferred it if you called him Frenchy. This was because when Chechnya collapsed, he had escaped the Russians by disappearing to Paris for a few years. His three brothers and his father had all died in the war. Now Frenchy was back, and Frenchy hated Russians.

They were in an empty parking lot near the mouth of the Mzymta River. A moist, pungent odor of untreated sewage wafted up from the water. From here, a bleak boulevard of warehouses ran along the waterfront to a small cargo port, guarded by a gatehouse and razor-topped fencing. In the glow of weak yellow sodium arc lamps, he could see men moving around by the gate.

The grand old Communist Party dachas, the new hotels and restaurants, and the glimmering Black Sea beaches of Sochi were just five miles up the road. But Adler was as desultory and depressing as a Russian port should be.

There was a delay as Mark Swann’s reedy voice bounced all over the world, from encrypted networks to black satellites, and finally to Luke’s phone. Swann’s voice trembled with nervous excitement.

Luke shook his head and smiled. Swann was in a penthouse suite with beautiful Trudy Wellington, in a five-star hotel in Trabzon, Turkey. They were supposedly a rich young newlywed couple from California. If bullets started to fly, Swann would be watching it on a computer screen, nearly but not quite live, via satellite. That’s why his voice was shaking.

“We are green light,” Swann said. “They understand we might get some complaints from the neighbors.”

“And the disco ball?”

“Right where we said it would be.”

Luke gazed across at a rusty old mid-sized cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II, resting at dock. He mused that an old KGB torture specialist like Andropov must be spinning in his grave that this thing was named after him. It must be somebody’s idea of a joke.

The disco ball, of course, was the missing submersible, Nereus. Its GPS chip was still pinging from inside one of the holds on that ship.

“And the instruments?” The instruments were the crew of the Nereus.

“Upstairs in the closet, as far as we know.”

“Aretha? What does she have to say?”

Trudy Wellington’s voice came on, just for a second.

“Your friends are already partying on the beach.”

Luke nodded. Just south of here was the border with the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The Georgians and the Russians were currently at each other’s throats. Trudy suspected they were going to have a little shooting war one of these days, but hopefully it wouldn’t start tonight.

The Georgian beach resort town of Kheivani was right across that border. It was a quiet, sleepy place compared to Sochi. There was a retrieval crew on a dark beach there, waiting to receive the rescued prisoners, if any of this even got that far.

From the beach, the prisoners would be moved away from the border, deeper into Georgia, and then out of the country. Eventually, when they reached a safe place, they would be debriefed about this whole mess.

None of that was Luke’s department. By design, he knew nothing about how it would go. Don and Big Daddy Cronin had cooked up that part. Luke didn’t even know who was involved. You could cut his fingers off and gouge his eyes out, and he couldn’t tell you a thing about it.

“Has the big man joined the band?” Luke said.

Ed Newsam’s voice came on. A howl of wind and the roar of heavy engines nearly drowned him out. “He’s in the dressing room and ready to get on stage. The sooner the better, as far as he’s concerned.”

Luke sighed. “All right,” he said, and the weight of the decision settled onto his shoulders like a boulder. People were probably about to die. You knew that going in. You just didn’t know which ones.

“Let’s do it.”

“See you in Vegas,” Swann said.

“Be sure to catch the fireworks show,” Ed shouted. “I hear it’s gonna be good.”

The call went dead. Luke dropped the satellite telephone to the broken blacktop of the parking lot. He raised his boot and brought it down hard on the phone, cracking the plastic casing apart. He did it again. And again. And again. Then he kicked the shattered remnants through an open runoff drain and into the water.

He still had one more.

He looked up.

Frenchy was there. His face was broad and his skin seemed thick, almost like a rubber mask. His hair was jet black and swooped backward. He was clean-shaven to blend in better with Russian society. Normally, his people had thick beards for Allah.

Frenchy wore a dark, loose-fitting windbreaker jacket over his big body. The night was a little warm for that. His hard eyes stared at Luke.

“Yes?” Frenchy said.

Luke nodded. “Yes.”

Frenchy took a deep drag of his cigarette. He slowly exhaled the smoke. Then he smiled and nodded.

“I am happy.”

* * *

“Fast,” Ed Newsam said. He was speaking to no one. This was good because no one would ever be able to hear him.

“Very, very fast.”

He stood in the cockpit, his feet bare, hands on the wheel of a boat shaped like a giant wedge. The boat was long and narrow, with a very long bow. At the stern, there were five big 275-horsepower engines. The boat itself only had two seats.

In America, they would call it a Cigarette boat, or a Go Fast. In the days before satellite tracking, drug traffickers in South Florida used these things to outrun the Coast Guard. This boat wasn’t packed with cocaine, though.

In the nose of the boat, way up at the bow, was a tiny compartment. That compartment was packed with a small amount of TNT.

Ed ran hard in the night, lights off, bouncing over the swells. His engines roared, a huge sound. The wind howled around him. In front of him, maybe three clicks ahead, was the mostly dark coastline of Georgia. Behind him were the bright lights of Sochi. Sochi was enjoying its post-communist, big money heyday. Expensive boats like this were easy to come by.

In fact, behind Ed and running just as hard, was another speedboat.

That boat was driven by a nutty Georgian daredevil named Garry. Ed couldn’t see Garry back there. Garry’s lights were also off. And he couldn’t hear Garry. There was too much noise to hear anything. But he knew Garry was back there. He had to be.

Ed’s life depended on it.

Garry, along with Stone’s crazy Chechen driver, Frenchy, had been provided by Big Daddy Bill Cronin. Big Daddy was CIA, and they weren’t supposed to involve the CIA in this, but they did it anyway. The danger was that the CIA had sprung a leak somewhere.

“Bill Cronin’s paychecks come from CIA,” Don Morris had said. “But the man is a law and a world unto himself. If he gives us operators, they won’t be talkers. There will be no security breaches. I can assure you of that.”

So Garry was back there with Ed’s and Luke’s and everybody’s lives in his hands.

To Ed’s left, the east, there was a long stone seawall, jutting far out into the water. It protected a small port area. He ran the length of it, coming at it on a diagonal. He slowed, just a touch, and made the sharp turn in toward land.

He glanced at the sky, scanning for aircraft.

Nothing. All clear.

That seawall was topped with concrete docks. It ran parallel to land, a hundred meters from the shore. The seawall and the shore formed a narrow pass a thousand meters long. At the far end was the cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II.

Ed’s job was to punch a hole in it. A hole, maybe a small fire. Enough to cause a distraction, a misdirection. Enough to let Stone and Frenchy sneak onto the boat, release the prisoners, and maybe even scuttle that sub.

The Russians knew the Americans were watching them from the skies. So these docks looked like they had minimal activity. Just an old cargo ship, not too much security, nothing to see here.

But Ed knew there were gun men on those docks. Driving this boat up that pass was going to be running a gauntlet.

He reached the mouth of the pass. He took a deep breath.

“Garry, you better be there.”

He opened the throttle all the way. The engines screamed.

The boat burst forward, even faster than before.

Land raced by on either side of him, the seawall on his left, the shore on his right. But he kept his eyes on the prize. He could see it now, the Andropov, looming far ahead. It was docked perpendicular to him, showing him its whole length.

“Beautiful.”

To his left, men ran along the docks. He saw them as tiny stick figures, moving slow, much too slow.

He ducked way down, already knowing what they would do. An instant later, automatic gunfire ripped up the side of the boat. He felt it more than heard it or saw it. It was altering his course, the thudding impacts of the high-caliber rounds.

The windshield shattered.

The Andropov was coming closer, growing larger.

There was an iron bar on the floor. Ed picked it up. One end had a gripping tool, almost like a hand. He placed this onto the steering wheel. He wedged the far end into a metal slot welded onto the floor.

Old school, but it would do the trick. It would keep the boat going more or less straight ahead.

He glanced up. The Andropov was big now.

It seemed like it was RIGHT THERE.

“Uh-oh, time to go.”

He darted to the right side of the boat, away from the gunfire. He squatted, all the power in his legs, and leapt to his right, over the gunwale. He curled into a ball, like a child doing a cannonball at the local swimming pool.

The boat zoomed away while he was in the air.

Dimly, he had the sensation of falling, falling through the sky. A long time passed. He crashed into the water and for a moment the blackness was all around him. He moved through it like a torpedo, no feeling except the feeling of dark speed.

At first there was a loud roar, and then the muffled sounds of the deep.

For a moment, he thought about floating in the womb, bathed now in warm light. It occurred to him that the beacon light on his life vest had activated. The vest yanked him to the surface, back to the roar and the spray of the boat’s wake.

He gasped for air and dove again. For another few seconds, those gunners were going to be looking for him.

After that…

He bobbed to the surface again. Everything was dark—the night, the water, everything.

For a moment he could not see the boat. Then he spotted it. It was moving fast, dwindling, dwindling. It was tiny in the looming shadow of the freighter.

Ed dove below the surface again, to the safety of the darkness.