Primary target anthology, p.106
Primary Target Anthology, page 106
“It’s your neck on the chopping block, Don.”
“Dick, it’s my neck. I don’t care about my neck anymore.” His voice nearly broke when he said the next words. “I just want Margaret back.”
“Then tell me what you need,” Stark said.
Don told him.
* * *
Don’s cell phone was on the table in front of him.
Far away, another telephone was ringing, but no one was answering. In the meantime, he was watching the departure board with intention. The cancellations and delays were everywhere. This airport was a restricted security zone. They couldn’t get the planes in here in the first place. And that meant they couldn’t take off again.
Philadelphia: CANCELLED
Fort Lauderdale: CANCELLED
Nassau: CANCELLED
BWI: CANCELLED
But here was something interesting. Frankfurt, Germany: ON TIME. The plane must have already been here when the attacks took place. How much did you want to bet there were still a couple of empty seats on a flight to Germany?
The phone picked up.
“Stone.”
“Son, it’s Don.”
“Don, how are you doing? Where are you?”
“I’m at the airport in San Juan. Listen to me. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Don nearly stumbled over what he was about to say. He said it with equal parts joy and terror. Margaret’s life, and the life of the President of the United States, were going to be in the hands of the Special Response Team. He wouldn’t have it any other way. But he needed the horses to run with this, and he didn’t want even one of them to feel they were forced into anything.
“Shoot,” Stone said.
“We are green light,” Don said. “We will have the things we need. The supersonic passenger plane from the Alaska operation is at Joint Base Andrews, and is being fueled right now. That thing can run like a rocket ship, and should be able to get you out ahead of the target. We will have a refueling plane, where and when we need it.”
Stone’s breath made a sound. It sounded like a city bus with a hydraulic lift to help disabled passengers on board.
“Perfect,” Stone said.
“Get a group of volunteers together,” Don said. “But be clear. No one is assigned to this. It is volunteer only. Anyone who does not want to go, one hundred percent, without hesitation, does not go. There is no fallout from that. That’s my promise.”
“Understood,” Stone said. “I will communicate that.”
“Also, information about the operation is top secret. No one knows about this, and not just because loose lips will sink ships. This is not a sanctioned operation. It is not an operation at all. It does not exist. A friend is going all the way out on a limb to help us, and it cannot come back to him under any circumstances. Whatever happens, we are on the hook for everything. We will deny getting assistance from any quarter. We thought it up, we did it, no one else knew. Win or lose, we are probably going to be broken apart and scattered to the winds after this.”
“I’m comfortable with that,” Stone said.
For a split second, but no more, Don’s heart broke for the kid. Stone had no sense of self-preservation at all. It was at once both incredibly heroic and a terrible tragedy. Luke Stone was willing to die for a cause. Not just once, but again and again and again. It was going to come back to bite him one day.
Don had once tried to explain to him what a 401(k) was, and how it worked. He nearly laughed at the memory.
“You might wander in the wilderness for the next forty years, son. It could mean your career.”
“Don, I don’t have a career without you. If you haven’t realized that yet, I’m not sure what else…”
“It could mean your life,” Don said.
“I’m ready,” Stone said.
Don shook his head. “Then stop wasting time talking. Go. Put your team together and get on that plane. Now.”
“What are you going to do?” Stone said.
Don looked at the departure board again. Frankfurt was still ON TIME. Don glanced at his watch. It was 4:25. The flight was scheduled for 5:15. He was a high-priority passenger, and could breeze through the security check.
If he went now, right this second, he might still make that flight. From Frankfurt, he could almost certainly catch a plane to… somewhere.
“I’m going to meet you in Africa,” he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
12:30 a.m. East Africa Time—October 16
(5:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time—October 15)
Crowne Plaza Nairobi Airport
Jomo Kenyatta International Airport
Nairobi, Kenya
The place cost Sean Casey eighty-nine bucks for the night.
That was about what you’d expect to pay for a Days Inn off a highway exit somewhere in West Arkansas. But this was a five-star hotel a mile and a half from the airport, in one of the most important cities in Africa.
A tall, slim man, with close-cropped blond hair and long legs, he was dressed entirely in black—black dress shirt and dress pants, along with black Italian leather shoes. He looked like he was headed to a disco.
Despite the hour, he sat sprawled on a lounge chair beside the rooftop pool. The pool had theoretically closed a couple of hours ago, but a twenty-dollar bill for the man who had come to close it had worked wonders. No one had been back since then.
Casey’d had a late dinner at the in-house restaurant, Velocity, and he’d ordered the chicken burger Lazizi style. He wasn’t sure what “Lazizi” meant, but it was pretty good. The restaurant was outfitted in purple neon, which didn’t necessarily agree with him. He drank beer with dinner, along with a glass of Glenfiddich eighteen-year-old from Scotland.
After dinner, they’d sent him up to the pool with an expensive bottle of South African white wine, and a glass to drink it from. The wine was gone now.
They had also offered him a girl. That was kind of them, and thorough, but he declined. He had to be up early in the morning. He might have made a mistake. Had he accepted, the girl would probably have been gone by now, too.
Sean Casey’s name was not now, nor had it ever been, Kevin Murphy. Casey’s Canadian passport was full of stamps, with additional pages stapled in to house all the entries and exits, and the visas that made his stays possible. He was a compulsive traveler, and a man with extensive funds to indulge his passion. He had been nearly everywhere, and he was on his way to even more places.
Like tonight, for example.
His original plan, and it was a good one, had been to fly into Zanzibar and spend a few days catching some sun and wandering the streets and bars of the Old Town. Then he would book a safari across the Serengeti—it was late in the dry season, and prime animal viewing time. After that, depending on how he was feeling, he might book a weeklong climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. He was in the neighborhood, and in no hurry to get anywhere else, so why not?
But then his plans had changed, and rather abruptly.
Nairobi was where he intended to catch his connecting flight to Zanzibar. And while here at the airport, he had noticed that Air Force One had been hijacked, with the American President on board. You might even say that the President of the United States had been taken prisoner. The news had been hard to miss, since it was blasting across every TV screen in the airport.
Not that a Canadian adventure traveler named Sean Casey would be interested in something like this. He enjoyed the world and its people, but in a breezy, nonpartisan way. The whys and hows of international politics were outside his bailiwick.
Even so, he found himself with a sudden urge to go to Mogadishu, Somalia.
Sean Casey had a saying he liked: “Everybody gets everything they want.”
Not everyone would agree with this idea, but through long experience, he’d found that it was more true than it was false.
He wanted to go to Mogadishu. And naturally, there was a flight from Nairobi to Mogadishu readily available. It was at 7 o’clock tomorrow morning on Jubba Airways, and it would take roughly one hour and forty minutes. So if the plane took off and landed on time, he would find himself in Mogadishu a little before 9 a.m.
Sean Casey wouldn’t know anything about things like this, of course, but if for some odd reason Air Force One was also headed to Mogadishu, it was unlikely to arrive until 11:30 in the morning, maybe a bit before noon. Which would put Sean Casey in the city two or three hours early, just enough time to head to Baakara Market, ask a few questions, meet helpful local people…
…and load up on heavy weaponry.
He stared up at the night from his lounge chair and grunted.
“The Mog,” American soldiers who had seen combat there called it, though Casey wouldn’t know anything about that, either. Canada tended to steer clear of the kind of entanglements that got America in so much trouble.
In recent months, the situation in Mogadishu had stabilized somewhat, largely because the city had been taken over by hardline Sunni extremists. They had driven most of the warlord-run militias to the outskirts of the city. They had even taken much of the surrounding countryside. Casey had to hand it to them—they were a highly organized and motivated group of people. Their interpretation of Islam was so strict, and their punishments so severe, that it had settled all the ne’er-do-wells and chaos junkies in the city down a little bit. For now.
Taking temporary advantage of the lull in the action, a small, cold-water backpacker hotel had opened in downtown Mogadishu. It was just blocks from where an American Black Hawk helicopter had once crashed during a failed operation to capture a Somali warlord. The hotel, helpfully named Friendship House, catered to the craziest, most rugged tourists on Earth. Sean Casey was one of those tourists. He was part of the tribe, and there was a room booked in his name.
Casey wondered how his like-minded lunatics were going to feel about the tsunami of violence headed their way. There they would be, writing postcards at outdoor café tables, enjoying the relative calm while sipping strong black coffee, and then suddenly…
Casey smiled at the thought.
Casey, whose name was not Kevin Murphy, thought that Mogadishu would make an ideal destination for him. Recent events suggested that the city might present him with certain opportunities.
It might even help him expunge the record of Kevin Murphy, whoever that might be, on the off chance that such a record might need expunging.
Also, and he might as well admit this to himself, being one of the good guys was fun, and had its perks. You could be one of the good guys, and get the public accolades from that. You could be on the team, and experience that kind of high school camaraderie. You could collect a good guy check. And you could simultaneously be one of the bad guys (bad might even be a strong term for it), and line your pockets in a way that the good guys never did.
Anyway, good guy or bad guy, whatever role he ended up playing, he might as well admit the following to himself as well: he liked action. He lived for it, maybe. He was a moth drawn to the flame.
Also, he’d heard Mogadishu was nice this time of year. There were beautiful beaches on the coast there.
And the water was full of sharks.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
7:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
“Bleak,” Luke said.
“Brutal,” Ed Newsam said.
“Unspeakable,” said Mark Swann.
Luke looked at Trudy Wellington and Brian Deckers. They looked back at him, Trudy expressionless and inscrutable as ever, Deckers with eyes wide open and seemingly confused.
Big Daddy Cronin was not with them. He had stayed behind in DC to get a message to Tracey Reynolds, the CIA agent on board Air Force One.
“What are we talking about?” Deckers said.
“The mission,” Luke said.
“Oh,” Deckers said. His face darkened. He was a young guy, the type who probably looked forward to and enjoyed missions. He wouldn’t be working at the SRT if he didn’t. But to Luke, and probably Ed, and apparently Swann, missions were becoming a job. And emotionally, this was the toughest and most daunting job of all: getting Margaret back alive.
Luke had called Becca from the SRT offices before he left. He told her the hard thing, the thing he always told her, and always dreaded telling her: that he was going away on a mission. Of course she knew what it was. It was the reason he had left the house this morning, two days before he was even officially reinstated.
“Luke, tell me they’re not sending you to somehow get Air Force One back. You don’t have to do that. After all you’ve done, you don’t have to do anything for them. For Pete’s sake, get them to send someone else. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s a suicide mission. Did you see what happened at that airport? Did you see how they—”
“Don’s wife, Margaret, is one of the hostages,” Luke said.
Becca was quiet for a long moment. The silence on the telephone line stretched out between them. Margaret had been a guest at their house. They had been a guest of her and Don many times. Margaret had burped baby Gunner. She had shown Becca how to make the tightest blanket swaddle on the planet, a swaddle so tight and comfy and reassuring that Gunner often drifted right off to sleep.
Don was Luke’s mentor, and Margaret…
It was almost too hard to think about. The worst part was Luke had advance warning that something like this was going to happen, and he hadn’t acted on it. Could he have stopped the hijacking from taking place? Probably not. Could he have given Don a heads-up? Might that have led Don to take extra precautions, at least for him and Margaret?
Yes.
“Oh my God,” Becca said.
“Yeah,” Luke said.
“Is Don on the plane?”
“No,” Luke said. “They were in separate cars. Margaret rode with the President. Don’s car got flipped in the attacks. He’s okay, but he’s still in Puerto Rico. I know him, he doesn’t give much away, but he’s shattered by this. And their daughters…”
His voice trailed off.
“What’s going to happen?” Becca said. “Will they hurt her? Will they… do anything to her?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. Hostage situations can get very bad. I’m going to try to get her back. Her, the plane, the President, all the innocent people on board.”
Becca’s voice was almost a whisper. “How will you do that?”
“Sweetheart, you know I can’t describe it to you.”
She sighed. Then he heard her tears begin. She didn’t say anything. There was no arguing with this, no decision to be made, and she knew that. Becca’s own mother was not very motherly. Margaret was not a surrogate mother to her, but Luke knew she was close to Becca’s heart.
Time was moving.
The next thing was the hardest to say. He was leaving her and Gunner again, and he was clear within himself: he was willing to die to get Margaret back. That meant he might never see his wife and child again.
“Honey, I’ve got to run,” he said.
“I love you, Luke.”
“I love you, too.”
“Please get Margaret back,” she said.
“I will if I can.”
“And please come back to me in one piece.”
He had no answer for that.
Now, aboard the plane, Luke glanced at Trudy. Again, he couldn’t read anything in her face. Becca’s reaction to Margaret being a hostage was immediate, emotional, even visceral. Trudy, who was arguably closer to Don and his family than Luke and Becca, seemed to have little reaction at all.
Trudy was tougher than Becca, true. But even so. Her response seemed flat, carefully guarded. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe if she allowed her emotions to run free, she would fall to pieces.
Better to remain functional until the mission was over. She could always fall to pieces later.
The experimental airplane rocketed across the darkening sky. They’d been in the air about fifteen minutes, and were moving very fast. Luke could feel the speed.
He glanced out the one available window in the cabin. It was already dark ahead of them—it was autumn, and the days were getting shorter. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and deep green, almost black. Behind them, fading fast into the distance, was the giant megalopolis that was the east coast of the United States of America. The sun gleamed orange and yellow as it teetered on the far horizon.
They had flown in this plane before. It had transported them at twice the speed of sound across North America, from the Washington, DC, area to the town of Deadhorse in the Alaskan Arctic. There, they had participated in a nighttime, underwater Navy SEAL assault on an oil rig held by Serbian terrorists. Then they had returned to DC in the same plane, the same night.
“Back in time for breakfast,” Don had described it before they left. And as much as the mission itself had been a horror show, the breakfast part was right.
Luke had traveled in many, many airplanes, but never another quite like this one. Everything about it was unusual. Its airframe had an odd shape. It was very narrow, with a drooped nose like a bird dipping its beak into the water. The rear stabilizers had an odd triangular shape that Luke hadn’t seen on any other plane. You’d almost say the plane wouldn’t fly at all.
Inside, the cabin layout was also unusual. Instead of being set up like a typical corporate or Pentagon jet, with bucket-type seats and pull-out tables, the thing was configured like someone’s living room.
There was a long sectional couch along one wall, its high back blocking where there would normally be small oval windows. There were two recliners facing it, and between the couch and the chairs, a heavy wooden table, like a coffee table, bolted to the floor. Even stranger, directly across from the sofa was a large flat-panel television, blocking where the other row of windows should be. The TV showed an image of a cartoon plane juxtaposed against a map of the world. The plane was out over the Atlantic Ocean, moving east toward Europe and Africa.
