One Rough Man (2 page)

I gave a description of the trailer and watched him take a seat in the coffee shop, confirming my fears.

“Okay, listen up. We’re going to keep the plan. If Baldy’s not a ghost, he’ll follow our target into the planned kill zone. We’ll let the target go through, then take him out. Acknowledge.”

“Pike, this is Knuckles . . . we can’t duplicate this hit twice in one day. We’re going to lose the target. We need to develop the situation, not start thumping people willy-nilly.”

“We won’t lose the target, because you’re going to tag him at his table. Using that beacon, we’ll take him down at the parking garage to his apartment. That was our contingency plan anyway. It’ll just be two hits instead of one.”

“Pike, that damn beacon hasn’t worked yet. We keep getting false positives. We’re liable to take out some old lady.”

Knuckles was my second-in-command, or 2IC. He’s a Squid, but I don’t hold that against him, since he’s a SEAL. He’s just like me, only he picked the wrong branch of service. His call sign was Knuckles, but it should have been Mother Hen, at least while we were preparing for operations. Once we were engaged it would be something like DeathDealingSlaughterMonster. Right now, Knuckles was in mother hen mode. He was a finicky perfectionist. Someone who wanted to ensure that every piece of kit, tactic, or technique was absolutely perfect before being used on an operation. It wasn’t that he was rigid, since he was one of the best on fluid operations, and he did have a point. If everything’s perfect when you start, then working through contingencies, or what we call “flexing,” is that much easier. If you start with something that’s faulty, then you’ll be flexing from the get-go. The thing is, every operation goes to shit at one point or another—like right now. Doesn’t matter how much you plan. You can either handle the curve ball or not.

“Look, I get the risk, but we’re running out of time. We don’t have enough people to track both guys. Just tag the target and use your judgment. If you can’t get him, you can’t get him.”

“What if the trailer’s not alone?”

Knuckles was thinking right along with me. “I hear you. We’ll develop the situation enough to confirm or deny he’s alone. If he’s got someone else working with him, we’ll pass. If not, we’ll take him down in the primary kill zone, leaving you and Bull with the contingency for the target.”

There was a pregnant pause, then, “Roger. Out.”

“Bull, keep your eyes on Baldy and see if he makes commo with anyone.”

I watched a homeless man approach our target.
Jesus, now what?
This was turning into a circus. I was about to call Knuckles and warn him when I realized that’s who I was looking at. Pretty damn good job of camouflage.

He shoved a cup at the target, begging for some change. The man ignored him. Knuckles grew belligerent, bringing out the manager.
I’m never going to hear the end of this
. Knuckles was breaking the cardinal rule of surveillance by interacting with the target. On top of that, he was creating a scene that would be remembered after the hit. He was going to be pissed that I forced this on him.

The manager came out shouting. Knuckles waved his arms, slinging coins from the cup all over the place. Bending down around the target’s ankles, he scrambled to get his precious money. In the blink of an eye, I saw him slip something into the cuff of the target’s pants.

The size of a micro-SD card, it was a passive beacon that worked like an E-Z Pass on a toll road. It would register every time it passed a special receiver. The good part was that the card didn’t need GPS or transmitting capability, along with the requisite battery source, so it could be made very, very small. The bad part was the beacon wouldn’t give a specific location. It would only confirm our suspicions as the beacon passed our receivers, which we had placed throughout the target’s habitual route. The final receiver was in the stairwell of the target’s parking garage. A team, hidden in the shadows, would deploy when the beacon signaled. Unfortunately, with the receivers’ track record, it could trigger if the wind blew the wrong way.

After watching Knuckles get chased away, I gave Bull a call. “Anything going on?”

“No. He’s looking at the target, but so is everyone else thanks to Knuckles’s little play. Hasn’t communicated with anyone.”

“Roger. Retro, you guys ready?”

“Yeah. We just don’t know what the trailer looks like.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll trigger. If it’s no good—”

“Break—break. This is Bull. Target’s on the move.”

Shit. That was quick.
Ready or not, the target was going to force our hand.

C
olonel Kurt Hale was almost run over by the scrum of advisors leaving the Oval Office. A few years ago, when the West Wing was still a novel experience, he would have felt a little awe. Today, he just felt annoyed that they didn’t bother to say excuse me, too intent in their own little world to notice him.

The president’s personal secretary saw his annoyance and grinned. “You leave the military and you could be just like them.”

Kurt smiled. “No, thanks, Sally. Can I go in?”

“Sure. You and his wife are the only ones he never makes wait.”

Kurt entered and saw President Payton Warren with his back turned, looking out the window, apparently deep in thought.

“Sir, you want me to come back later?”

He saw the president start a little, then turn with a smile. “No, no. Come in. I could use a discussion about something that’s truly important.”

The president shook Kurt’s hand warmly. “Let’s go to the study so we won’t be disturbed.”

Following the president, Kurt once again felt a little amazed at the position he was in. Originally he’d been just one of many men trying to help the president defend the nation, but their relationship had grown into a true friendship—albeit one still grounded in their respective positions. While the president had never served in the military, he had shown Kurt a keen grasp of the application of military power, using it as a scalpel when he could and a sledgehammer when he had to, but always only after he had analyzed all other options. As was not the case with other politicians Kurt had dealt with, he trusted the president’s judgment and commitment.

After Kurt was seated, Payton handed him what looked like a Hall-mark card.

“What’s this?”

“Something I want you to take back to the boys as a token of my thanks. Happy anniversary.”

Kurt noted the date on his watch. “Yeah, I guess it was today, wasn’t it?”

“Three years ago today. I’ll tell you, I figured I’d be impeached or in jail by now, but Project Prometheus has been pretty much flawless. And largely because of the efforts of you and your men, the country has remained safe.”

“I appreciate that, sir, but they’re your nuts on the chopping block. Not mine. And you were the one with the vision to see that the Cold War system in place wasn’t working for a war in the shadows.”

President Warren shrugged. “Come on. You never take any credit for the success. It’s the three-year anniversary. Take a damn moment to enjoy what you’ve done. I know what happened before I took office. That’s how I found you in the first place.”

Before 9/11 there was little need for an element like Project Prometheus. Everything was clear-cut. Everything was clean. The Department of Defense focused strictly on military endeavors and the CIA focused on what’s called “National Intelligence.” For Kurt and men like him it was the good ol’ days.
You tell me if the Soviets are going to attack, and I’ll tell you how to defeat them in battle.

After 9/11, the lines became blurred. Instead of focusing on state systems, everyone focused on the terrorist threat, with both the CIA and DOD thinking it was
their
mission. Kurt could see both sides, but the architecture in place had no room for the debate. Built for the Cold War, the system wasn’t designed for hunting individual men or small teams. Kurt watched the two organizations push and shove, unilaterally building up their own capabilities. At the time, he didn’t worry. The U.S. had figured out how to win before and would figure this out as well. Right after 9/11, he took the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan, figuring it was only a matter of time before the U.S. got serious on a global scale. Two years into the war, he had still been waiting.

To his disgust, he saw the sense of purpose begin to drift, watching the CIA and DOD do more fighting against each other than against the terrorist threat. He was convinced that they had spent so much time apart during the Cold War that they didn’t even understand each other, let alone trust each other.

Kurt voiced his opinions and waited on someone above him to fix the problems, but nobody seemed willing or able. When terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda conducted the Bali bombings in Indonesia barely a year after 9/11, killing over two hundred people, he realized that the status quo wasn’t going to work. He banded together with like-minded men in the intelligence community and set out to change things on his own.

Their initial proposal was simple: a true joint organization—a blending of both CIA and DOD clandestine assets on a habitual basis. Eliminate the duplication of effort and mistrust at the grassroots level. The end result would be a fusion of intelligence and direct action, a capability that could follow a trail until it died, literally. They eventually got the ear of the National Command Authority and the green light to give it a try.

Kurt smiled at the memory. “Yeah, that first effort was a lesson in futility. I can’t believe how naïve I was. We didn’t get a damn thing accomplished, unless you count making enemies. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have retired and would probably be working at Walmart.”

Instead of hitting the ground running, the unit immediately ran into problems. A new unit, no matter how good, still had to deal with the bureaucracy built for the Cold War.

Kurt had spent an entire year pulling his hair out trying to get men out the door, running into one problem after another. If the military members weren’t denied a deployment order by some pinhead in the Pentagon, his CIA members were denied participation because of a lack of a presidential finding for a covert act. He had felt like he was trying to run a marathon in waist-deep water. No sooner did he break through the red tape on the DOD side than he’d run into issues on the CIA side. Once he got past the Washington bureaucracy, he’d be kicked in the gut by the ambassador of the country in which he wanted to take action. Time after time, the ambassador, either a political appointee or a career diplomat, decided that the current elections in that country, or the coffee harvest, or the latest
New York Times
article, made it a bad time to go after a terrorist. Kurt knew it was nothing but a bunch of bullshit political quibbling, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, since the ambassador had the final word on anything involving the U.S. government in his domain.

Kurt finally got fed up. The Taskforce existed for twelve months before he threw in the towel. Not a single operation had succeeded
.
The unit was disbanded, with great fanfare and hooting inside the clandestine world, as the Cold War assholes reveled in its demise, their little bit of turf now free from threat.

“Yeah, sure,” said President Warren. “You’re not the retiring type. That first effort wasn’t futile. You made a lot of waves. Enough to be remembered, to get your name passed along to me as someone with an idea. The rest is history.”

After the failure of his first attempt, Kurt had taken an assignment to the Joint Staff at the Pentagon and had brooded for a while, trying to enjoy the status quo. He probably would simply have retired if it weren’t for the Madrid train bombings in 2004, which caused a presidential candidate named Payton Warren to begin a serious study of radical strategies to defend the nation.

Kurt remembered their first meeting well. When asked for his opinion, he hadn’t held back. Kurt
knew
things had to change. Al Qaeda wasn’t going to wait for the system to fix itself. What was needed was a shortcut, a revolutionary change. A task force capable of conducting operations on its own, outside the purview of the Department of Defense, the director of national intelligence, or any ambassador. The thought was compelling but dangerous. He knew he was talking about subverting the very thing that made the country what it was—the United States Constitution.

Surprisingly, Warren had listened, and eventually gave Kurt the backing to get it done. Project Prometheus would operate without official government sanction, but with a safety net. Should something go terribly wrong, the president would step forward and take responsibility. The flap would make Watergate look like a glass of spilled milk, but the threat was deemed worth the risk. The price of failure would be the presidency itself, with the repercussions shaking the Republic to its core.

The task force was implemented quietly. Nothing they did had the stamp of the U.S. government. Every action was under deep cover in the guise of an independent business, either American or something else. All the members were assigned to other units around the United States, with the permanent core cadre of logistics, communications, and command either “working” at CIA headquarters or “assigned” to J3 Special Operations Division in the Pentagon. Should the wrong people discover the unit’s existence, they would attack it without remorse. But so far it had operated for three years without a hiccup.

Kurt said, “Yeah, we’ve been pretty lucky. Let’s just make sure that history stays in the shadows. Hopefully I can keep you out of jail for a little while longer.”

President Warren chuckled. “Sounds good to me. Speaking of jail, you got anything going on right now I need to be aware of?”

Kurt was glad to leave the reminiscing behind and get down to business. “Yes, we do. You remember we’ve been tracking a facilitator in Jordan for close to a year, and we’re close to executing a takedown?”