And just like that, he snapped. It was quiet, like a twig snap. But he’d had enough. The man had contradicted him one time too many. Did he even realize who he was speaking to? Barrett pointed at the general with a long finger.
“The horse is already out of the barn. Is that what you’re telling me? Something has to be done! You and your shadow puppets made a stupid play, out on the edge all by yourselves, and now you want the official, popularly elected government to bail you out of your mess. Again.”
Barrett shook his head. “I’m sick of it, General. How does that sound to you? I can’t stand it anymore. All right? My instinct here is to leave those men with the Russians.”
David Barrett scanned the eyes in the room again. Many of them were looking away now, at the table in front of them, at General Stark, at shiny reports bound with plastic ring binders. Anywhere but at their president. It was as if he had made a particularly ripe-smelling boo-boo in his pants. It was if they knew something he didn’t know.
Stark instantly confirmed the truth of that.
“Mr. President, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you leave me no choice. One of the men on that crew has had access to intelligence of the most sensitive nature. He has been an integral part of covert operations on three continents for more than a decade. He has encyclopedic knowledge of American spy networks inside Russia and China for starters, not to mention Morocco and Egypt, as well as Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. In a few cases, he established those networks himself.”
Stark paused. The room was dead quiet.
“If the Russians torture this man during interrogation, the lives of dozens of people, many of them important intelligence assets, may as well be forfeit. Worse than that, the information those people have access to will in turn become transparent to our opponents, leading to even more deaths. Extensive networks, which we’ve spent years building, could be rolled up in a short period of time.”
Barrett stared at Stark. The gall of these people was breathtaking.
“What was that man doing in the field, General?” Acid dripped from every word.
“As I indicated, sir, Poseidon Research International had been operating for decades under no obvious suspicion. The man was hiding in plain sight.”
“Hiding…” Barrett said slowly. “In plain sight.”
“That’s what it’s called, sir. Yes.”
Barrett said nothing in response. He just stared. And Stark finally seemed to realize that his explanations were not nearly good enough.
“Sir, and again this is with all respect due, I had nothing to do with the planning or execution of this mission. I didn’t know anything about it until this morning. I’m not part of Joint Special Operations Command, nor am I employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. I do, however, have complete faith in the judgment of the men and women who do…”
Barrett waved his hands over his head, as if to say STOP.
“What are our options, General?”
“Sir, we have only one option. We need to rescue those men. As fast as we can, if possible before interrogations begin. We need to scuttle that sub as well, and that’s crucial. But this one individual… we need to either rescue him, or eliminate him. As long as he’s alive and in Russian hands, we have a potential disaster unfolding.”
It was a moment before David Barrett spoke again. The general wanted to rescue the men, which suggested a secret mission. But the reason they were captured in the first place was a security breach. There’s been a security breach, so let’s plan more secret missions? It was circular thinking at its finest. But Barrett hardly felt the need to point that out. Hopefully, it was clear to even the numbest imbecile in this room.
An idea occurred to him then. There was going to be a new mission, and he was going to assign it, but not to the CIA or the Pentagon. They were the ones who had brought this problem about in the first place, and he could hardly trust them to resolve it. It would be stepping on toes to give the job to someone else, but it was clear that they had brought this on themselves.
He smiled inwardly. As painful as this situation was, it also presented him with an opportunity. He had the chance here to seize some of his power back. It was time to take the CIA and the Pentagon, the NSA, the DIA, all of these well-established spy agencies, out of the game.
Knowing what he was about to do made David Barrett feel like the boss again, for the first time in a long while.
“I agree,” he said. “The men should be rescued, and as quickly as possible. And I know exactly how we’re going to do it.”
CHAPTER THREE
10:55 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia
Luke Stone stared down the trench at Robby Martinez. Martinez was screaming.
“They’re coming through on all sides!”
Martinez’s eyes were wide. His guns were gone. He had taken an AK-47 from a Taliban, and was bayoneting everyone who came over the wall. Luke watched him in horror. Martinez was an island, a small boat fighting a wave of Taliban fighters.
And he was going under. Then he was gone, under the pile.
It was night. They were just trying to live until daybreak, but the sun refused to rise. The ammunition had run out. It was cold, and Luke’s shirt was off. He had ripped it off in the heat of combat.
Turbaned, bearded Taliban fighters poured over the sandbagged walls of the outpost. They slid, they fell, they jumped down. Men screamed all around him.
A man came over the wall with a metal hatchet.
Luke shot him in the face. The man lay dead against the sandbags, a gaping cavern where his face had just been. The man had no face. But now Luke had the hatchet.
He waded into the fighters surrounding Martinez, swinging wildly. Blood spattered. He chopped at them, sliced them.
Martinez reappeared, somehow still on his feet, stabbing with the bayonet.
Luke buried the hatchet in a man’s skull. It was deep. He couldn’t pull it out. Even with the adrenaline raging through his system, he didn’t have the strength left. He yanked on it, yanked on it… and gave up. He looked at Martinez.
“You okay?”
Martinez shrugged. His face was red with blood. His shirt was saturated with it. Whose blood? His? Theirs? Martinez gasped for air and gestured at the bodies all around them. “I’ve been better than this before. I can tell you that.”
Luke blinked and Martinez was gone.
In his place were row upon row of plain white gravestones, thousands of them, climbing the low green hills into the distance. It was a bright day, sunny and warm.
Somewhere behind him, a lone bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.”
Six young Army Rangers carried the gleaming casket, draped in the American flag, to the open gravesite. Martinez had been a Ranger before he joined Delta. The men looked sharp in their dress greens and their tan berets, but they also looked young. Very, very young, almost like kids playing dress-up.
Luke stared at the men. He could barely think about them. He took a deep breath. He was beat. He couldn’t remember a time—not in Ranger school, not during the Delta selection process, not in war zones—when he had been this tired.
The baby, Gunner, his newborn son… wouldn’t sleep. Not at night, and hardly in the day. So he and Becca weren’t getting any sleep, either. Also, Becca couldn’t seem to stop crying. The doctor had just diagnosed her with postpartum depression, complicated by exhaustion.
Her mom had come out to the cabin to live with them. It wasn’t working. Becca’s mom… where to begin? She had never held a job in her life. She seemed baffled that Luke