12
As Kurt raced as fast as he could through the DC traffic, George Wolffe said, “They didn’t give you any indication of what this is about?”
“No. But it’s serious. I haven’t seen this much activity since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Everyone’s spinning. And it’s going to leak. Only a matter of time.”
“Who are the players?”
“The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is going bonkers. He’s a powerful guy, and his twins are gone. The SECDEF wants to start bombing Pakistan. And that fucking governor of Texas is raising holy hell.”
“What about the vice president?”
“Surprisingly, I haven’t heard much from him. They’re really hoping to keep that under wraps. Can’t see how that’ll happen, though.”
“This meeting is Oversight Council only, right?”
“Yeah. Something’s broken free.”
As they pulled into the lane for White House security, George considered his words, then said, “I hate to be a CIA stickler about sources and methods, but we’re starting to blend Taskforce activities with the traditional intelligence architecture. The pressure to share is going to be enormous, and we’re going to be compromised.”
Kurt showed his identification to the uniformed Secret Service manning the gate at the West Wing, waited until he was checked off a list, then pulled through. He said, “Maybe. Maybe not. We can use the director of Central Intelligence. Thank God he’s a Council member. We can feed all of our intelligence into the CIA, and they can sanitize it for the FBI. Hopefully they’ll do the same in return.”
“That’s not going to be timely. And what happens if we find one of them? Are we going to conduct an assault? Or call for someone else?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
“We need to start. If we conduct a rescue, successfully or not, we’re going to end up splashed on the world stage. We might be able to hide who did it from the public, but we won’t from all of the other elements involved. And some of those elements will forget the gratitude in one news cycle, especially if the press continues to push. After all of the other crap that’s happened in the intelligence world, they’ll throw us to the wolves to save their elective ass.”
Kurt parked and said, “Yeah, I know. I’m worried about having to make a call like that. As bad as it sounds, it might be better to let them go. I’m not sure their lives will be worth all the lives that will be lost if our counterterrorist capability is eviscerated.”
“Maybe you should bring this up to the president. He knows the stakes.”
“Maybe. But not just yet. We aren’t at that stage, and odds are we won’t be. Police work is what will solve this, and we can’t do direct interface. Waiting on the CIA to feed us what the FBI learns from a host-country liaison is way too slow. Someone will beat us to the punch. Or it’ll just all go bad without our ability to help.”
George climbed the cracked granite stairs in the Old Executive Office Building, replying, “I hate to say it, but we’d better hope so.”
Kurt rounded the corner, seeing the Secret Service flanking the conference room doors, knowing that meant President Peyton Warren was attending this meeting. Knowing that couldn’t be good news.
They showed their badges and passed into the room. Unlike the bedlam last time, there was stone quiet, all eyes on them as they entered. A discomfiting feeling, given that Kurt had no idea why he’d been summoned.
He looked at the president and said, “Sir, I . . . uh . . . is the Council expecting a briefing on something? Because I don’t think I got the memo.”
“No. We’re expecting some biometric results, then an update. You can give us yours while we wait.”
Kurt nodded at George to take his seat, then said, “Well, I don’t have a lot. I’ve got four teams in the air, each headed to a disappearance location. Honduras, England, Okinawa, and Belgium.”
“What’s taking so long? We gave the order to launch over two days ago.”
That came from Secretary of State Jonathan Billings, the same prick who had pulled Pike Logan from his operational capacity. Worried about Pike’s habit of pushing the envelope, he now wanted it both ways. Wanted the envelope pushed to the point of compromise. Or maybe he just didn’t get it.
Kurt said, “Sir, I don’t have a division of commandos sitting around waiting to launch. I had to redirect teams that were on operational missions. Two on Alpha, one on Omega, and one running Assessment and Selection.”
The Taskforce called every stage of an operation a different Greek letter, each representing an escalation of potential actions. Before a mission moved to a different stage, the Oversight Council had to sanction the elevation.
Alpha meant the introduction of forces to explore a potential target. Basically, poke around a little bit and develop whether he or she was actually out to harm the United States. Omega, the last letter in the alphabet, meant that the target was an imminent threat and the Oversight Council had granted permission for hostile action, either to capture or kill the target.
In this case, nobody seemed concerned about the potential threat or the Omega authority given. It didn’t matter that a team that had been granted permission to remove an impending danger to national security was now being redirected to hunt for hostages. Something that wasn’t even in their mission profile. Instead, Billings was pressing the time lag.
Kurt looked around the room for the secretary of defense, knowing he understood the intricacies involved with moving forces on the chessboard of global operations. For the first time, he noticed the man was absent.
Focusing back on Billings, Kurt said, “Sir, it takes time to get them redirected. It’s not like they can just jump on a plane. It takes time to close out cover contracts and get deployment assets on station. Time to assess whether the redirect will spike host-nation intelligence services. Time to establish a new cover mechanism in the redirect country. Time to ensure the new cover status they’ll be operating under will withstand scrutiny. It’s what I talked about before. This isn’t our forte. We’re not an alert force that can turn on a dime.”
Billings started to grumble when the door opened. Alexander Palmer entered with the same NSC staff weenie from before. He still looked as if he were a rabbit in the wolves’ den.
Kurt waited on President Warren to dismiss him, noticing the man was haggard from sleepless nights. Warren said, “Good enough, Kurt. Have a seat for the update.”
Kurt nodded, understanding without words that the president already knew what was about to be briefed and that it wasn’t going to be good. He thought about expanding on his statements to Billings, conveying the danger the mission was placing on the Taskforce to the only man in the room who really mattered, then thought better of it. He took his seat at the rear of the room.
The staffer booted up his laptop and without any preamble said, “We got this through the White House website contact page. The email address is bogus and the ISP terminates in Guam. We’ve already explored the ISP with in-country assets and got nowhere. It’s clearly a redirect.”
On the screen, Kurt read:
Dear Mr. President. You never answered the question we posed on Reddit, so we have to assume you thought it rhetorical. It wasn’t. You just conducted a strike against a harmless wedding party in Yemen, and because of it, you have forced our hand. We ask once again, are all lives equal? Will you continue such actions when the end result involves something you hold dear? There are seven innocent families weeping over the loss of loved ones in the Sada’a Province. Who will weep in your inner circle from this attack? Nobody. But someone will weep. We promise.
Kurt had read about the strike in his daily intel update. The al Qaida propaganda machine was saying it was a wedding party, which had been picked up in the press, but the intel track had shown a terrorist convoy. It was hard to determine what the convoy actually was, but regardless, inside that convoy had been three definite terrorists, now dead. The chatter afterward had confirmed that. Along with the loss of four civilians with an indeterminate heritage.
The staffer said, “Given the enormous number of comments that are directed at the White House contact page each day, it took over twenty hours for the Reddit thread connection to reach someone who understood the significance. By the time we had begun tracing the digital trail, a package had been delivered to the front gate of the US embassy in Brussels. Inside was a DVD recording and the hands and feet of a human being.”
A low murmur went through the room, and Kurt had a horrible intuition about why the secretary of defense—a principal in the Oversight Council—wasn’t attending.
The screen flipped to an MP4 movie, and the lights went dim. Kurt saw a person hunched in the center, a hood on his head, surrounded by men wearing kaffiyehs that covered their faces, each brandishing an AK-47. There was no sound. The hood was removed, and he saw the secretary of defense’s son. The boy began to cry in silence, and the man to his right held up a section of poster board displaying the words EXPERIENCE THE PAIN.
The man began to flip the poster boards like a high school YouTube video, each one with a different sentence about the casualties of United States policy. The last placard read, AND NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. REAP WHAT YOU SOW.
The man behind the captive raised his barrel, placing it on the back of the boy’s head. There was a second pause, and then he pulled the trigger. The frontal lobe of the skull exploded outward, taking the eye orbit with it in a shower of gore. The secretary of defense’s son fell forward, his mouth open, his jaw the only thing remaining as a human face.