Full Assault Mode (32 page)

There was no point stopping to try and reason with Joma during the five-hour drive. He was in major vapor lock, and his clothes were still wet from swimming the Broad River. Worse, he kept asking the same question over and over—
Why am I still alive when brothers Abdul and Farooq martyred themselves?

Kolt gave up trying to answer that hours ago and let Joma tire himself out. He had enough to worry about. Kolt had never planned on martyring himself and so had kept an eye out for transportation. He spotted the ride underneath a tin shelter north of the narrow gravel that topped Old Seine Road. Kolt yanked off the blue tarp and dropped it behind the red Massey Ferguson farm tractor. Kolt and Joma had only moved maybe a mile and a half southeast of the plant.

It didn’t really matter that Joma was frantic, since Kolt could barely hear him. What pissed Kolt off more was the fact that the soaking-wet asshole was squeezing the shit out of him. Kolt wasn’t interested in commuter-friendly gossip, anyway; he was just interested in putting distance between the 2006 Kawasaki Ninja 650R they were straddling and the smoking problem area, and very thankful the bike came with matching helmets.

Kolt had broached the subject of his hostage wife several times with Joma. But Joma didn’t know where Cindy Bird was, at least that was his story. Actually, Kolt played the role of a grief-stricken and heartbroken husband, even whipping up a few crocodile tears, but still nothing. Kolt wasn’t even convinced Joma was lying, because he had a hard time understanding just what the motivation would be for Joma to keep that information close.

Which told Kolt one very important but disturbing thing.

Either Hawk is already dead, or there are other al Qaeda sleepers in town holding her still.

Awake before sunrise, and not looking forward to hearing Joma recite his early-morning prayers, Kolt jotted a quick note on the hotel stationery letting Joma know he was bringing breakfast back, quietly opened and closed the door, and walked down the dead street to the twenty-four-hour convenience store on the corner. He welcomed the short stroll, breathing in the clean West Virginia air, redolent with the aroma of local mineral springs mixing perfectly with the tang of thuja “Green Giant” evergreens and the natural fragrance of oak-hickory forests descending from the high peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Turning the corner past the fire hydrant, Kolt practically forgot what brought him to this ghost town in the first place.

Inside the store, Kolt grabbed a half-folded newspaper from the wire bin, recognizing the major story,
ARE WE WINNING? NUCLEAR ATTACK MAY BE JUST THE BEGINNING
. He put it under his arm to fix two cups of black coffee before pulling two egg-white croissants from the warmer and grabbing a pouch of Red Man from near the counter. After paying with a ten spot and pulling his change from the autodispenser, Kolt went back outside and began reading the article as he walked back to the hotel. Besides the fact that some undisclosed U.S. official had leaked the possibility of another imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil, he found what he was really after halfway down the last column. In bold black letters larger than the details, the citation read,
“American Hero Timothy Allen Reston, Nuclear Security Officer, Cherokee Power Plant, Badge #568, died 21 April 2013. Rest in Peace.”

Kolt continued to read through the generalities of his death, his hometown, where he went to high school, and what jobs he held before putting the paper in the hotel’s outside trash can. Kolt stood there for a few moments, debating what the hell his next step should be. He couldn’t remain on the run forever, another couple of days, three tops, and the gig would likely be up. He knew he really didn’t care to spend another day with Joma, sleeping with one eye open for fear he might go ape shit again and whip out a steak knife from the kitchenette. He’d had about enough of the Koran lesson, too, and Joma wasn’t willing, or was unable, to help him rescue Hawk.

Fuck it, time to get Carlos earning those top-shelf designer clothes he wears.

Kolt reached into his front pocket and pulled his cell battery out. He unclipped his phone, removed the cover, and mated the two properly. He watched as the phone powered on, searching and locating dozens of satellites and cell towers. Once it had fully synched, Kolt punched in the distress code for Tungsten and waited.

In less than two minutes, his cell rang.

“Hello,” Kolt said.

“Hello sir, my name is Ronald Epps, senior sales associate for the Best Buy Visa card. I was hoping”—

Kolt cut him off. He knew the protocol but was really in no mood to play spy games at the moment, nor had he had time to visit his secure e-mail account and acquire the password of the week.

“Carlos, I don’t have time to explain. I’ll leave the battery in the phone. We are in room fourteen,” Kolt said, mentally checking off the minimum amount of information Carlos would need to find him and knowing they could geolocate his position as long as the phone remained powered on.

“Authenticate zero-seven-zero-six,” Carlos demanded.

Holy fuck! This guy really is from central casting.

“I’m not alone,” Kolt said, ignoring the request for a code word.

“Get rid of her,” Carlos said.

Kolt was impressed how professionally astute Carlos was, realizing that if he was in a situation where he couldn’t talk, he wouldn’t have spilled what he had already. Kolt didn’t pick up any positive vibes, though, or for that matter any indication whether Carlos thought his embed’s brain housing group was entirely fucked.

“Not a broad, one of the terrorists from the attack,” Kolt said, keeping his voice as low as he could outside the room.

“You are shitting me!” Carlos said. “And he’s still breathing.”

Kolt picked up on the sarcasm right away. He couldn’t blame him for the response, since Kolt knew Carlos hadn’t agreed to handle him thinking he would get weak-kneed when the chips were down. Kolt could also see how it would sound odd, especially to someone of Carlos Menendez II’s storied past, without the proper context to hear that he is shacked up with an enemy of the state.

“Look, long story. But I need this guy alive,” Kolt said. “We are not armed, so don’t send the gorillas in, guns-a-blazin’.”

Carlos couldn’t let it go. “OK, Kolt, tell me why this terrorist is not dead yet?”

Just then, the dark green door to room 14 flew open. Kolt turned to see Joma standing in the doorway, a soiled wifebeater snug to his soft chest and belly above his pair of oversize camouflage pants, which Abdul had purchased from the army-navy surplus store in north Charlotte for them.

“Please, please answer, Mary.” Kolt pleaded into the phone as he bent over to allow Joma to observe his suffering. “I can’t live without”—

Joma interrupted him. “Timothy, what are you doing?” Joma demanded. “No phone calls. The authorities will find us.”

Kolt walked toward Joma with the natural urge to slap a flying-triangle choke on him right there in the parking lot. Just get it over with, do what Carlos expected him to have done already, pay back the faggot-ass in front of him for trying to break bad in the last hotel they were in together.

But as Kolt closed the distance, he remembered that Joma was still the only link to Hawk. He had to know something, and in time—if Hawk didn’t die in captivity first—he would come around. More than Hawk, or less, depending on who was asked, Joma would be the key figure on Tungsten’s colorful and confusing link-analysis chart, used to unravel the next phase of the nuke plot and eventually kill Nadal the Romanian. Waterboarding will be a whole lot more painful than the chilly ride on the back of the motorcycle.

“I bought you an egg sandwich. Your coffee is on the window sill behind you,” Kolt said.

“Yes, yes,
shockran,
” Joma said. “But, please, you must turn off your phone. No more calls to your wife.”

“It’s off,” Kolt said as he held it up to Joma and tapped the screen with his thumb a few times to convince him.

“No more phone calls,” Joma demanded. “Agreed?”

Agreed, motherfucker!

Tungsten headquarters, underground, Atlanta, Georgia

“That concludes my briefing gentlemen,” the analyst said as she wirelessly flipped to the last slide, titled “Questions?” and motioned to the gentleman-statue to bring the lights up a little.

Kolt set his borrowed pen down, sat back in the firm black leather midback chair, interlocked his fingers behind his close-cropped head, elbows winged to the sides, and smiled at the petite Peabody-looking analyst in the khaki pencil skirt and black sleeveless scoop-neck with matching two-inch heels.

She knew her shit, that much Kolt was certain of.

Without as much as a single stutter or misstep, she spoke about decisive point, synergistic execution, momentum shift, kinetic solution, and competent authority. Yes, in the last forty-two minutes this four-eyed bookworm must have hit on pretty much every commando buzzword in the book.

“Operation Shadow Blink, is it?” Kolt asked the briefer before raising a white Styrofoam cup to his lips and depositing a long stream of tobacco juice.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “That’s correct.”

“Well, I must have blinked one too many times, because you people are certifiable,” Kolt said with an even voice. “You are fucking nuts!”

“Excuse me, sir?” the analyst said, obviously taken aback by Kolt’s choice of words.

Carlos jumped in. “Ma’am, gentlemen: Can I have a moment alone with the embed?”

Kolt watched Carlos stand up as the others headed for one of two doors. Carlos nervously checked the gold cuff links on his Rolex-wrapped wrist and then straightened his plum-colored half Windsor before buttoning the top button on his Armani pinstripe, which had to have taken, easy, forty thousand silkworms to make.

After the last of the four left, two exiting through each door, Carlos stepped from in front of his leather chair and walked upright, chin high and confident, to the short end of the conference table, stopping toward the center of the room. At home inside Tungsten’s secure briefing room, Carlos knew to edge a foot or two to the left, toward the door, to stay out from the ceiling-mounted projector’s cone-shaped beam of light that was still throwing the “Questions?” slide on the large white drop-down screen.

“Look, Kolt, she couldn’t say it, but the president is pissed,” Carlos said calmly.

“He’s pissed? Hell, I’m pissed. We don’t kill innocent Americans. We got lucky at Cherokee—a lot of good people could have died. You guys knew that, and you let it go on,” Kolt said, standing up in anticipation of their confidential face-to-face getting a little heated.

“You knew what you were doing, Kolt. The trade-off—one American dead, a traitor at that—is potentially worth it.”

“Bullshit, Carlos!” Kolt shot back. “You were willing to trade a lot more innocent Americans if it led you to the bigger fish, willing to”—

Carlos cut him off. “Yes, Kolt, the president had a tough choice to make. He let the Cherokee attack happen, knowing it likely would result in innocent people dying and possibly get him raked over the coals about another failure by his intelligence community to connect the dots of an imminent attack, and his domestic law enforcement unable to stop … Yes, it took presidential-size balls.”

“I get that. Damn it!” Kolt said as he leaned at the waist and placed both palms flat on the glass-covered mahogany conference table. “I got it!”

“Then what exactly is the problem, Kolt?” Carlos asked.

Kolt felt a bit patronized, and was becoming a little irritated that the gray-haired Carlos was maintaining his cool while Kolt felt like breaking shit.

“Because POTUS is pissed off, and made a promise years ago about releasing the detainees at Gitmo, some thousand-pound brain gets a wild hair and thinks it’s a good idea for me and that shit bag Joma, wherever the hell he is now, to spend some quality time getting to know each other at, of all places, sunny Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” Kolt said, now pacing back and forth down one of the long walls, waving his hands like a big-city defense lawyer while he talked. “But wait for it … it gets better.”

“Calm down, Kolt,” Carlos said as still as a molded-hair men’s mannequin at Jos. A. Bank. “Why don’t you take your seat?”

Ignoring Carlos, Kolt kicked it into high gear. “Let’s drop embed zero-seven-zero-six and Joma the boy wonder into the middle of the badlands with a dozen freshly released and highly pissed-off terrorists on a sliver of hope that they somehow lead me to Nadal the Romanian or Z-man himself. C’mon, Carlos, I think I’ve seen that movie.”

Not backing down for a second, Carlos said, “Yes, that’s the plan, Kolt, with some minor differences from your colorful explanation.”

“I didn’t know I was signing up for this kind of shit. Who else is involved at this level?”

“You are it, Kolt. Nobody else ever screened for Tungsten has demonstrated the consistent potential”—

“To what, take an ass whooping over and over, too dumb to tap out?” Kolt said.

“Close, but before you interrupted me, I was going to say the consistent potential to both piss off everyone in command while at the same time demonstrating the courage of a god damned lion. Oh, and all with the personal backing of the president of the United States,” Carlos said. “And with that comes the blessing of your entire nation. Certainly not something given in haste.”

“Humping me won’t cut it, Carlos,” Kolt said.

“The White House is trying to prevent mass public panic after the Cherokee attack. Nut-job conspiracy theorists are not buying that there was no release of radiation.”

“There wasn’t, Carlos,” Kolt said. “I planned it that way.”

“We figured that, Kolt, but that’s not the issue,” Carlos said. “With lack of corroborating intel, POTUS just can’t activate a single state’s local law, and he is being pressured by the right to activate the National Guard and send them to every piece of critical infrastructure or large gathering of civilians possible.”

“That might slow them down, but it won’t stop an attack that is most likely in its final planning stages,” Kolt said, moving back to his rolling chair and sitting down.