The Forgotten Soldier: A Pike Logan Thriller (16 page)

30

T
urning to Creed, I said, “Does that help?”

He whirled to the keyboard and said, “As a matter of fact, it does. Pandora sends location information every damn time you use it. It’s evil shit, but works for us. I’ll have to find his brother’s username, then crack his password, but with the information we have on him, it shouldn’t be that hard.”

Through a Department of Defense database, he pulled up everything we had on Guy’s brother, including email accounts, AKO login, and anything else the DoD required of its soldiers, then used that to mine the web for associated usernames, hoping that he—like most people—duplicated passwords and login credentials. At the same time, he started a devious little program that began a brute force attack against the Pandora login, throwing everything he found at it. He started his work, digging deeper and deeper, and I turned to Kurt.

“Sir, what’s the real mission here? I understand bring him home, but what if he’s actually onto something? What if he’s fighting the good fight?”

Kurt closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Just get him home. Whatever he’s doing, it’s not right. We can’t have individual justice. If he’s correct on the death of this brother, we’ll deal with it, but he can’t do that unilaterally.”

I took that in, considering just saying “Roger that” and driving on with the mission. But I couldn’t.

I said, “Sir, he’s got a lot of information on the guys from Qatar. My mission in the Caymans wasn’t smoke and mirrors. I get he might be off the reservation, but they
did
kill his brother. They deserve to be put down. It’s a Taskforce mission.”

Kurt bristled and said, “Pike, don’t go there. Don’t. Just get him back. I can’t throw away . . .”

I waited, but he didn’t finish. I said, “Can’t throw what away? This unit? Seriously? Is that what we’ve become? More worried about our own asses than what’s in front of us? Sir . . .”

“Pike, leave it alone.” He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Fuck, this is getting way out of control.”

I said, “Nothing is out of control. You control your own destiny, and what’s right is right.”

He rubbed his eyes and I saw the absolute pain of what Guy was doing. What I had done in the past. He said, “You have no idea what you represent. We are an organization that is antithetical to everything the United States represents. You do what you can for the good of the nation, but you represent the worst. We have more power than any element in the United States arsenal, and every bit of that power is predicated on secrecy. We fight for the good, but Guy has become the bad. I’ll burn down the organization before I’ll take the bad.”

The statement was so harsh I wasn’t sure where to go with it. I said, “Sir, surely you don’t think—”

Creed cut me off, saying, “I’ve got penetration. I’ve got the Pandora account. It was used mainly at Fort Meade for the last three months.”

I heard the location and immediately thought of my own deployments, when I wasn’t as top secret as I was now. Keeping my eyes on Kurt, I said, “That’s the satellite dish from Afghanistan. The IP address reroutes to Fort Meade. Go later. What do you have?”

Creed said, “I got a trace here in DC. The latest trace, as of yesterday, is Athens, Greece. Before that . . .”

Creed didn’t want to say it. I looked at him, knowing it would be bad. “Before that, what?”

“Before that, the login was from Key West, Florida.”

The words sank into the room like a dismal fog. Kurt said, “Shit. He’s gone over.”

I now knew we had to make a choice. It wasn’t just me talking a man off the ledge anymore.

I said, “Sir, what do you want me to do?”

“Bring him home.”

“And if I can’t? What are my rules of engagement? He’s going after all of them, and he’s going to find them.”

Kurt paused, then said, “End it. One way or the other. There is more riding on this than just a single man.”

I saw Jennifer fold inward, looking like she felt sick. I said, “Sir, I don’t know if I can do that. I’m telling you up front. You’re asking me to kill an American soldier.”

He bristled, saying, “I
never
said that. Never. Jesus. I’d never ask you to do that. I’m asking you to solve the problem.”

I faced him head-on. Looking him in the eye. “Sir. You know where this is going. I’ll bring him back if I can, but you picked me for a reason. I know where his mind is. I know what he’s capable of. And he’s going to do it. He’s going to kill every single damn one of those guys from Qatar. Unless I stop him, and I can’t promise how that will occur.”

Kurt said nothing. Just stared at the wall, feeling the disaster, and knowing he was the commander. The one to give the order.

Finally, he said, “Pike, I can’t let it happen. Even if it’s right in your mind. I need you to interdict him. Period. Can you do that?”

I glanced at Jennifer, seeing revulsion floating in her expression. Next to her, Nicholas Seacrest showed confusion, not sure what he was being asked to volunteer for.

I said, “Yeah. I can do it.”

Kurt relaxed and said, “Thank you. Look, bring him home. I don’t want any killing, of the Qatar guys or him. You’re the only one who can do that.”

Repeating a quote by the assassin from
In the Line of Fire
, I said, “Because we can’t have monsters roaming the quiet countryside, now can we?”

31

B
rushing his teeth inside his hotel room, washing away the grime from forty-eight hours of eating junk food, Guy heard his phone buzz. A three-phase jarring vibration, it was distinct, telling him the GPS fence had been broken. He was surprised, and pulled the toothbrush from his mouth. Not because it had triggered, but because of the time. It was going on six p.m., and the target had been back at the yacht for only a couple of hours. Guy still had preparations to make, but the alarm caught him short, making him wish yet again that he had a team. Someone to track the man twenty-four/seven. A group of Operators he could insert in and out, instead of just himself trying to maintain a blanket on the target.

After escaping from Nikos’s thugs, he’d taken a commercial flight straight to Heraklion, Crete, getting out of the furnace of Athens. It was an overnight sail on a routine ferry, but only forty minutes by air. He knew two simple facts: One, his target was meeting a man on the island, and two, he was taking another yacht to get here. Not knowing where the meeting was to occur, or even when, Guy had conducted a stakeout of the Heraklion harbor. In truth, the boat could have docked anywhere, involving a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree search of every cove. It was an island, after all, but Guy had heard Heraklion mentioned, and figured a boat that size would not port at a simple harbor with nothing but a slip of concrete to moor against.
No, it would anchor at a habitual place. Somewhere with electrical power and other amenities. Every coastal city in Crete had one, but Guy was betting it would be the Heraklion harbor, the one for the island’s capital. He knew it was guesswork, but it was a fairly good one. Even given that guess, the surveillance hadn’t been easy.

He had initially focused his reconnaissance effort on a location that would allow him to continually observe the slips. There was none. The harbor—like most harbors—jutted out from the city itself, surrounded by a seawall, without any place to camp out and watch. He’d hoped for a hotel overlooking the slips, but was out of luck, the closest he could find being a mid-price hotel called the GDM Megaron, which had a view of the sea but certainly wouldn’t work for surveillance. It did get him close enough to react if the boat ever arrived, though, so he made it his temporary tactical operations center.

In Athens he’d purchased and downloaded a unique Android app that let him access thousands of open-source webcams around the world, from zoos to traffic cameras. It was a time-wasting way for the average user to gaze across the continents at a beach they would never visit, but it had a double use as a poor man’s surveillance application. Guy had used it to search for cameras in the Heraklion harbor. He’d found one way out on the seawall, watching the entrance to the harbor and the large ferry lines that came and went, but none of the boat slips themselves.

The only thing this harbor had that others didn’t was an ancient castle, sitting in the water on the seawall about two hundred meters out, protecting the harbor from intruders who were no longer relevant. It was an archeological treasure, famed for its history, and not something he could use for the long term. But he could use it for pinpoint mechanics once the yacht entered.

He decided to split the difference, leveraging the webcam app to identify the Qatari vessel arriving, then the fortress for the start of a pattern of life. From there, he would—hopefully—inject the target’s
phone with another application, called OneSpy, which would allow him to covertly monitor the target, both for cell phone content and location, freeing him up from close-in surveillance.

The castle itself was something from the seventh century, and was connected to the land by a concrete walkway along the top of the seawall. He’d investigated and saw it was being renovated, with the backside blanketed in scaffolding and signs proclaiming construction hazards, but he saw nobody working. It looked as if they’d run out of steam and had just left the scaffolding in place. Easy to climb, and because of the renovations, it was closed to tourists for the foreseeable future. Especially with the horror show of the Greek economy.

He’d purchased a hide-site survival package of olives, salami, and water, then sat on his hotel bed, alternately watching the feed on his laptop and the BBC channel on the television. Living on room service, refusing to shower or to leave the monitor for more than a bathroom break, his enclosure beginning to take on the peculiar smell of hide sites in the past, he finally saw the boat he was waiting for. At dusk, a hundred-footer flying the jack of Qatar entered past the seawall.

He’d left his room, running to the harbor, the first time he’d broken the plane of the door in a day and a half.

He’d watched the boat moor, taking note of the slip, and had sprinted back up, getting his surveillance package. Cloaked in the gathering gloom, the castle itself blocking the view from the harbor, he’d climbed the scaffolding lashed to the walls, reaching the rampart on the top. He laid out his kit, positioned his spotting scope, then settled in, doing the same thing he’d done in his hotel room.

Sitting and watching.

Eventually, dawn had broken, and the boat had begun to stir. He followed the crew members with his scope, then saw his target on the deck, eating breakfast. He waited until the man appeared to be close to finishing, then surveyed the base of the castle. On the land side, fishermen were repairing nets and prepping their boats for the day.
On the ocean side, with the exception of a couple taking an early stroll on the seawall, there was nothing. He packed his belongings and waited until they’d turned around, heading back toward the city. He slung his pack and scrambled over the side.

He reached the rock walkway just as another couple rounded the corner. They looked at him curiously, but continued strolling. He ignored them, moving toward the land, his eyes on the towering yacht, the biggest in the harbor.

He saw a figure walking down the gangway but was too far to get a facial identification. He quickened his pace, intersecting the man at the juncture of the seawall, the gangway for the harbor funneling all straight to that point.

It was his target.

He fell in behind and began to follow, once again letting his quarry dictate his actions, thinking through his mission.

Killing a man was easy, especially if one didn’t care about the future. But Guy needed to learn about the others. That’s what he told himself, even if it didn’t really explain his quest.

He wanted absolution. Needed to know what he was doing was just. Wanted to believe it, even without sanction, but the man in Key West had provided no information other than the location of Haider.

Guy had entered the bathroom in Key West with the naïve belief that the man would tell him what he needed to know. The man had not.

He had fought like a demon until the bathroom was bathed in blood, and Guy had learned only one thing: the location of Haider. He’d left the island wondering if he’d murdered an innocent man, not a small thing in his mind. Guy had killed many men in his life, but all in combat. In the line of fire. This one was eating at him, growing in power, draining his ability to continue.

Late at night, when the bad man came and he couldn’t sleep, he told himself he wasn’t a terrorist. Not a murderer. He focused on his
brother’s face to obtain blissful sleep, and then was tortured by his dreams. He desperately wanted to prove he was in the right. That required questions, along with staying alive to pursue the answers.

He followed the target most of the day, the man staying on foot for the duration. There were only three interesting stops, none involving a meeting. The first was at a car rental—one of the many dotting the city. The target spent twenty minutes inside, but left without a vehicle.

Guy had wanted to enter the facility and learn what had transpired, but he had yet to implant his virtual tether, so was forced to follow the target. Leaving there, the Arab wandered up 25 Avgoustou Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare that went through the heart of the city. He went to the second stop of interest. The Alpha Bank of Greece.

Guy watched him go in, but didn’t follow. He took a seat at a Starbucks on the corner, unable to escape the ubiquitous smiling green icon even here in Crete. The target exited twelve minutes later, carrying a zipped bank bag. A bank bag bulging with cash.