Jack Mars is author of the bestselling LUKE STONE thriller series, which include the suspense thrillers ANY MEANS NECESSARY (book #1), OATH OF OFFICE (book #2) and SITUATION ROOM (book #3).
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Copyright © 2016 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright STILLFX, used under license from Shutterstock.com.
CHAPTER ONE
June 6th
3:47 p.m.
Dewey Beach, Delaware
Luke Stone’s entire body trembled. He looked at his right hand, his gun hand. He watched it shake as it rested on his thigh. He couldn’t get it to stop.
He felt nauseated, sick enough to vomit. The sun was moving west, and the brightness of it made him dizzy.
Go time was in thirteen minutes.
He sat in the driver’s seat of a black Mercedes M Series SUV, staring down the block at the house where his family might be. His wife, Rebecca, and his son, Gunner. His mind wanted to conjure images of them, but he wouldn’t allow it. They could be somewhere else. They could be dead. Their bodies could be chained to cinderblocks with heavy shipping chains, and rotting at the bottom of Chesapeake Bay. For a split second, he saw Rebecca’s hair moving like seaweed, back and forth with the current, deep underwater.
He shook his head to clear it.
Becca and Gunner had been abducted last night by agents working for the men who had taken down the United States government. It was a coup d’état, and its planners had taken Stone’s family as a bargaining chip, hoping to stop him from toppling the new government in turn.
It hadn’t worked.
“That’s the place,” Ed Newsam said.
“Is it?” Stone said. He looked at his partner in the passenger seat. “You know that?”
Ed Newsam was big, black, and rippling muscle. He looked like a linebacker in the NFL. There was no softness to him anywhere. He wore a close-cropped beard and a flat-top haircut. His massive arms were dark with tattoos.
Ed had killed six men yesterday. He had been strafed by machine gun fire. A flak vest had saved his life, but a stray bullet had found his pelvis. Cracked it. Ed’s wheelchair was in the back of the car. Neither Ed nor Luke had slept in two days.
Ed looked at the tablet computer in his hand. He shrugged.
“That’s definitely the house. If they’re in there or not, I don’t know. I guess we’re about to find out.”
The house was an old three-bedroom beach house, a little bit rambling, three blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. It fronted the bay and had a small dock. You could pull a thirty-foot boat right up behind it, walk ten feet of dock, climb a few steps, and enter the house. Night was a good time to do this.
The CIA had used the place as a safe house for decades. In the summer, Dewey Beach was so crowded with vacationers and college-age party types, the spooks could sneak Osama bin Laden in there and no one would notice.
“When the hit comes, they don’t want us in on it,” Ed said. “We don’t even have an assignment. You know that, right?”
Luke nodded. “I know.”
The FBI was the lead agency on this raid, along with a Delaware state police SWAT team that had come down from Wilmington. They had been quietly amassing in the neighborhood for the past hour.
Luke had seen these things unfold a hundred times. A Verizon FIOS van was parked down at the end of the block. That had to be FBI. A fishing boat was anchored about a hundred yards out in the bay. Also feds. In a few minutes, at 4 p.m., that boat would make a sudden run right at the safe house dock.
At the same instant, an armored truck from SWAT would come roaring down this street. Another would come down the street one block over, in case anyone tried to make an escape through the backyards. They were going to hit hard and fast, and they would leave no wiggle room at all.
Luke and Ed were not invited. Why would they be? The cops and the feds were going to run this thing by the book. The book said Luke had no objectivity. It was his family in there. If he went in, he would lose his head. He would put himself, his family, the other officers, and the entire operation at risk. He shouldn’t even be on this street right now. He shouldn’t be anywhere near here. That’s what the book said.
But Luke knew the type of men inside that house. He probably knew them better than the FBI or SWAT. They were desperate right now. They had gone all-in on a government overthrow, and the plot had failed. They were looking down the barrel at treason, kidnapping, and murder charges. Three hundred people had died in the coup attempt, and counting, including the President of the United States. The White House was destroyed. It was radioactive. It might be years before it was rebuilt.
Luke had been with the new President last night and this morning. She was not in the mood for mercy. The law was on the books: treason was punishable by death. Hanging. Firing squad. The country might go old-school for a little while, and if so, men like the ones inside that house were going to get the brunt of it.
All the same, they wouldn’t panic. These were not common criminals. They were highly skilled and trained men, men who had seen combat, and who had won out against heavy odds. Surrender was not part of their vocabulary. They were very, very clever, and they would be hard to dislodge. A paint-by-numbers SWAT team raid wasn’t going to be good enough.
If Luke’s wife and child were in there, and if the men inside managed to fight off the first attack… Luke refused to think about it.
It wasn’t an option.
“What are you going to do?” Ed said.
Luke stared out the window at the blue sky. “What would you do, if you were me?”
Ed didn’t miss a beat. “I’d go in hard as I could. Kill every single man I saw.”
Luke nodded. “Me too.”
The man was a ghost.
He stood in an upstairs bedroom at the back of the old beach house, staring at his prisoners. A woman and a little boy, tucked away in a room with no windows. They sat side by side in folding chairs, their hands cuffed behind them, their ankles cuffed together. They wore black hoods over their heads so they couldn’t see. The man had left them without gags in their mouths, so the woman could speak quietly to her son and keep him calm.
“Rebecca,” the man said, “we might have some excitement here in a little while. If we do, I want you and Gunner to stay quiet. You’re not to scream or call out. If you do, I’ll have to come in here and kill you both. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Gunner?”
Beneath his hood, the boy made a sort of croaking noise.
“He’s