Full Assault Mode (25 page)

Looking at his Rolex as the waitress set a large glass of sweet tea on a napkin, he took pleasure in the fact that he didn’t have to give the bad news to his old buddy Webber; the decision had been made well above him. On this one, Carlos was in receive mode.

Carlos spotted a well-tanned man with a close-cropped haircut, maybe a quarter inch or so, and a thick salt-and-pepper goatee enter the restaurant from the courtyard. He watched him look left for a few moments, scanning the area beyond the bar, then back right until they made eye contact.

Carlos took a sip of his tea and, with two fingers, flipped the white cloth napkin into the air before placing it down on his lap. Within a few seconds, the stranger had taken the seat across the table, reaching immediately for the lunch menu, signaling to Carlos that the bona fides had been passed and that, for the first time, he was looking straight into the eyes of Tungsten’s newest wannabe operative, Embed 0706.

“I thought you more of a ghost than reality,” Kolt said. “But I can see now you are just threadbare and broke back.”

“Come again?” Carlos said, straightening the napkin on his thighs.

“Sir, I’m sure you recognize Colonel Webber’s humor,” Kolt said, smiling. “He said he’d have my ass if I didn’t say those exact words.

“Touché!” Carlos said, beginning to like this kid more than he thought he would.

“Yes, sir,” Kolt said as he looked to the dark-haired, obviously very fit waitress. “I’ll have what he is having, thanks.” The waitress turned and walked away, her derriere still drawing both men’s attention. “I see why this is your favorite truck stop.”

“Please, son, call me Carlos.” Carlos extended his right hand over the table to Kolt.

“It’s not son, but Kolt. Kolt Raynor,” Kolt said, firmly shaking Carlos’s hand, ensuring his grip felt superior before releasing. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Carlos smiled and nodded. He knew this guy had a chip on his shoulder at times, a fact that was very clear in his file, but he also knew Kolt Raynor to be a man of commitment and sacrifice. After just a minute or so, Carlos could see how this guy could be an unshakable leader in combat. He had balls, for sure, a file full of medals validated that.

Whether or not he thought Kolt Raynor would make a good drinking buddy at a Falcon’s game, he had to be sure. Yes, the decision had been made above him, but Carlos had nearly forty years of clout. Even decisions by higher, given the correct data points, could be altered.

After reading Kolt’s file, Carlos had wondered why he had been recruited in the program at all, given his obvious strong ties to his teammates and his long track record of insubordination—two key data points that could be a vulnerability should his covert adventures overseas be compromised. But what gave Carlos the most pause was Kolt’s propensity to ignore traditional policies and play by his own rules. These flaws combined worried Carlos much more than they obviously worried his own leadership at Tungsten, or than could have ever worried his boss, Colonel Webber.

Carlos had questioned Webber as to why Kolt was sacrificing the potential for squadron command in a year. All he had to do was attend Command and General Staff College and suck it up in the classroom for a year, and then he would be back with the boys. Carlos realized Kolt felt enormously strong bonds with the men he was leaving behind. That’s a hallmark trait of a good leader—Carlos got that completely. But Carlos’s background didn’t include the military, and nobody had ever expected him to understand the incredibly tight bonds warriors can experience and nurture over time. Throw in multiple combat tours together, and the relationship was carved in stone. Carlos knew Kolt was a single man like himself, after two failed marriages, but having not been there for Kolt’s high-risk adventures across the globe, missions that good men were lost on while hundreds of bad men met their maker, he was beginning to feel a bit odd about trying to block Kolt Raynor’s acceptance into Tungsten.

Who the hell am I to judge this fucking warrior?

“You up for this, Kolt?” Carlos asked, signaling the small talk was over and the interview was beginning.

“Willing to give it a shot, for sure,” Kolt said, leaning back as the waitress set two plates of oxtail stew and beans down in front of them and topped off Carlos’s sweet tea.

With the waitress gone and the other tables far enough away to ensure their conversation remained private, Carlos said, “Total compartmentalization.”

“No problem,” Kolt said.

Carlos knew he’d been operating inside the darkest reaches of one special-access program after another, crisscrossing the globe numerous times and, so far, had lived to speak of it only during the postmission hot washes.

No, Kolt didn’t kill and tell.

“No nondisclosure agreements. No official ‘read-ons’ or ‘read-offs.’ No medals. In effect, no paper trail at all,” Carlos said without emotion or expression while maintaining eye contact with Kolt.

Carlos wanted to make sure Kolt got the picture. Delta Force didn’t exist to the world, which meant Tungsten didn’t even exist to Delta.
Fuck this up, Raynor, and you’ll be peddling sleeping bags and climbing gear in Southern Pines again.

“You need something, you go through me. Me only,” Carlos said. “All commo is secure. Encrypted e-mails, positive voice-activated caller authentication, weekly distress codes provided. When I call you,
PRIVATE CALLER
will display. Answer it. It will be me trying to sell you something as a persistent telemarketer. If alone and all is well, we’ll talk. If busy, hang up. If you are in a tight, share the distress code.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Kolt said. “I assume creds and aliases?”

“Naturally. But I think we’ll stick with your aliases from your former employer and nest the personal history into our database. Our analysts have reviewed their status and see no issues.”

“Makes perfect sense,” Kolt said. “Never know when some ass clown might yell out in a foreign airport at a chance contact.”

“Exactly,” Carlos said as he lifted his soup spoon and fork. “Dig in.”

Carlos didn’t want to waste time on the other details. Kolt would attend a full day of indoctrination briefs beginning in the morning at the Tungsten headquarters. His creds would be updated, driver’s licenses issued, passports validated, and pocket litter—restaurant matchbooks, business cards, and so forth from around the world, which would strengthen his operational cover for status—would be added. Of course, none of these field-craft props would be kept at Kolt’s apartment in the sock drawer, where they could easily be found.

These credentials would be passed back and forth by “dead drops” in and around the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Prior to arriving at the airport, a Tungsten representative, known as “saviors,” would make a scheduled service based on encrypted, e-mailed instructions. It might be an upscale burger joint in Buckhead, where his creds would be taped to the underside of a certain table. Another time it might be the fifth-floor waiting room at Grady Memorial Hospital, where he could find his creds waiting under the center cushion of the plaid couch. Regardless of the dead-drop spot, Kolt would locate the goods, swap his true creds with his alias creds, and depart the area. Immediately after Kolt’s departure, a savior would discreetly secure his true creds. Upon returning through Atlanta, he would hit another dead drop to swap his creds back before grabbing a cab to his apartment. Carlos knew none of this would be new to Kolt. These were skills he had learned well and used often in the Unit.

“So, how do you feel about operating on U.S. soil?” Carlos asked as he brought the cloth napkin from his lap to wipe the oxtail broth from his lips. “Any issues with that?”

“None,” Kolt said as he took in another spoonful of brown beans.

Charlotte, North Carolina

Sitting rather uncomfortably on the hotel carpet, Kolt could sense that the two terrorists to his left, Joma and Farooq, were wondering how Kolt—rather, Kolt acting as Timothy Reston—knew so little about the security procedures at his workplace. How he seemed to know exactly how to slip the authorities, had all the answers about that, but little else. When questioned about it, Kolt credited a lifetime of shoplifting cigarettes from the local drugstores and slipping the law, but Cherokee Power Plant was obviously harder to handle.

They had been at it for five and a half hours by now. Empty pizza boxes were stacked by the front door and jugs of water were at each of their sides. It was almost 2
A.M
., and it had been an exhausting night of planning in a local hooker hotel, the thick aroma of unbathed men stuffed in-between the two double beds making it that much worse.

Kolt did his best to answer the questions, trying to steer the plan to his liking, but it was increasingly difficult by not actually being Timothy the insider. Of the three, only the terrorist they called Abdul seemed to offer countersuggestions and engage often.

Carlos wasn’t kidding that day at Footprints Jamaica in Restaurant when he asked Kolt if he was good with operating inside the homeland. That said, masquerading as one Timothy Reston, senior access officer for the nuclear power plant that was about thirty miles southwest of the hotel where the current planning session was under way, Kolt wasn’t actually operating. If not for Kolt’s dumb luck on the bus returning to Sana’a with Nadal the Romanian, no intelligence agency on earth would have a single lead on the nuke plot. The pocket-size notebook, accidentally dropped by Nadal as he made a hasty exit from the bus, was proving to be a treasure trove of intel.

Within six hours of the SEALs running into a trap, the CIA had run the ten-digit number handwritten inside the notebook through their database. They quickly determined that American citizen Timothy Reston had turned on his friends, coworkers, and country. And, even though he had taken the time to delete his Internet communication with Farooq, enough of it was recoverable to understand the link. The notebook also revealed several odd two-word phrases, what were assumed to be code words of some sort, that were screened through the CIA’s historical cable traffic and then bounced against the National Security Agency’s MAINWAY database of several trillion phone calls, as well as PRISM, its clandestine mass-electronic-surveillance data-mining program. And because the Romanian cell and the nuke plot were obviously major threats to the nation, they ran the code words through the X-keystroke software program. The software was able to analyze the myriad of data on the Internet and sift through it, picking out the bits regarding “persons of interest” under any number of parameters.

According to Carlos, all the suspected code words checked out, but one in particular didn’t register under the NSA’s DISHFIRE blanket analysis. Handwriting analysis was inconclusive, but the assumption was that Nadal had scribbled “Sacred Indian” several times in his notebook.

Yes, Kolt wasn’t playing Kolt inside the hotel room that night, but he was trying to save the local population, and that clearly was the most important task. Kolt wanted to deal the cards his way, trying to drive the planning of an attack on an American power plant to where no innocent people got hurt. No, just the terrorists were to die.

But Carlos hadn’t made it easy.

Tungsten was adamant that Kolt not roll up Farooq’s cell—in good time, yes, but, for the time being, not until they were sure the cell was the only one in town. Terrorist chatter was heavy about a second cell, a fact the CIA and Tungsten actually agreed on. But this second cell was believed to be in Pakistan and had not yet reached the United States. It was a long shot, and certainly risky to Kolt’s health, but planting Kolt as Timothy Reston, the terrorist’s inside man at the power plant who had established a cordial yet cautious relationship online with the terrorist, was at the moment the only thread linked to parallel nuke plots and to Nadal the Romanian, whose trail had gone cold after he exited the bus in Sana’a.

If Kolt’s planning skills were still as sharp as they were when he was a Delta operator, he just might be able to survive the attack without anyone the wiser. But Kolt wasn’t sitting around the old Delta team room putting together a high-risk mission with the most professional and talented operators in the world. He was trying to shape an unprecedented mission to his liking. So far, with very little buy in.

Kolt leaned in with the others, three terrorist enemies of the state, and looked down on the spread of colored satellite photos of the Cherokee Power Plant pulled from Google Earth.

Joma and Farooq had become frustrated since it was becoming increasingly obvious that Timothy couldn’t answer the specific questions they raised. Kolt felt they had already decided that Timothy was either stupid or a lying infidel pig.

“My friend Timothy, I fear you are not being honest with us,” the smaller, narrow-shouldered terrorist wearing the green soccer jersey they called Farooq said.

“No, no, brother, I am just tired,” Kolt said. “Some of your questions I just cannot answer.”

“Why is that, Timothy?” Farooq asked. “Do you question our resolve in this matter?”

“Well, things in our strategy have changed since I left that department. They keep those things secret from everyone,” Kolt said, trying to sound convincing and invoke some sympathy from the three terrorists. “I no longer have access to those items.”

“OK, my friend. We have come a long way and have sacrificed much,” Farooq said. “We do not have our special equipment anymore, but brother Abdul has secured enough Semtex explosives, a water vessel, and weapons to ensure our strike will be a glorious occasion. But we must have your expertise to be fully confident.”

Before Kolt could reply, Joma threw the map he had in his hand in the air and jumped quickly to his feet. Kolt sensed his anger before he spoke a word and watched as the terrorist lifted his foot high in the air and stomped down hard on the Google Maps images.

“I am sorry, brother,” Kolt said, hoping to calm him some. “Tomorrow I will do better. I promise I will.”

“No, tomorrow is too late!” Joma said as he took the handle of a five-inch blade, seating his hand to the hilt and sliding it swiftly up and out of the leather sheath on his hip. With one continuous motion he jumped toward Kolt, raising his knife hand high in the air and striking down near Kolt’s neck.