Arctic Fire Page 12

  Speed Trap rolled his eyes. “Well, is it true? Has everything been dropped?”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  That seemed like an odd question. “Huh?”

  “When’s your damn birthday, Speed Trap?”

  “Um, the day after tomorrow.”

  “OK, well, I was saving it for a surprise, but now Grant’s ruined it. Yeah, everything’s been dropped. You’re free to get more tickets. But do me a favor this time, will you? Do it sober and don’t start swinging at the cop when he pulls you over. Learn to say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ to those guys. OK?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Happy birthday early.”

  “Thanks. That’s amazing.”

  “No problem. Don’t mention it again, kid.”

  Speed Trap’s ears perked up. “Why not?”

  “Damn it, Speed Trap!”

  “OK, OK. Sorry.”

  They went quiet again, and the only sound on the bridge was the constant hum of the two huge engines far below powering the Arctic Fire across the water.

  Speed Trap glanced to port and out onto a desolate ocean. He was trying hard to follow Sage’s order, but in the end it was impossible for him not to ask.

  “I was just wondering how you got those charges—”

  “Goddamn it, kid!” Sage roared. “What’s your problem?”

  It had been an incredible king crab season, the best ever, and Speed Trap didn’t want to jeopardize getting paid the huge amount of money he was owed. But he couldn’t control his curiosity.

  “It’s just that me and Grant were talking, and it seems like weird things happen on this ship. Like the time we picked up that guy in the raft last year in that place where we’ve never dropped traps before, and how he stayed in your room until we got to Dutch Harbor. Then there’s this deal with us getting all that new equipment so fast after we—”

  “Yeah, let’s talk about equipment,” Sage broke in. “Let’s talk about rafts specifically.”

  Speed Trap swallowed hard. “What about them?”

  “Why do we have a new one?”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s a new raft in the equipment room downstairs. And an old one’s missing. Why’s that?”

  Speed Trap shrugged. “Um, I don’t know. I’m not in charge of that stuff. Grant is.”

  Sage lit up a Marlboro and inhaled two lungs full of the cancer stick. “Is there something you want to tell me, Speed Trap?”

  Speed Trap tried to calm his pounding heart. As he was about to answer, he spotted something floating on the ocean several hundred yards ahead of the boat. “Hey, there’s a raft out there—”

  “I see it,” Sage interrupted, taking another drag from the cigarette. “Time for you to get below.”

  “What? Why don’t I help you—”

  “Get below!” Sage shouted. “Right now, Speed Trap.”

  Carlson climbed out of the Town Car and trudged to the back of it. “Good night,” he mumbled as he and Beckham came together at the trunk. The cold Washington night was making his bones ache. Suddenly he felt ninety-three, not seventy-three. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “I want that list of agents and assets, old man, and I want it by Friday at noon.”

  Carlson covered his mouth to cough. “You’ll get it.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see this spirit of cooperation from you, Roger. Frankly, I was worried that I wouldn’t get it.”

  “I’m too old to fight,” Carlson said as they shook hands. “And I do what my president tells me to do because this is the greatest country in the world and he’s the leader of it. OK, Daniel?”

  “OK,” Beckham agreed, his tone softening. He hesitated for a few moments, then handed Carlson a thin envelope. “In that envelope is a piece of paper that details the president’s specific information requests with respect to Red Cell Seven. Call me when you’ve answered everything. We’ll exchange the info in person. No e-mails.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Carlson shoved the envelope into his pocket and climbed back into the Town Car. For all his education, Beckham was an idiot, at least when it came to the commonsense aspects of intelligence work. It was amazing that he even thought he had to mention not using e-mail to transmit that kind of sensitive information.

  The ride back to Carlson’s Georgetown house took just ten minutes, and Nancy, his wife of forty-six years, was sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle when he came through the door. He smiled sadly as he sat down beside her and took her warm hand in his cold one. She was such a wonderful woman, still so beautiful to him even at sixty-nine. She’d always been so devoted, so loyal to the cause. They’d moved eleven times in those forty-six years, and she’d never complained once. She’d simply nodded and gotten to work every time he’d explained what had to happen.

  She’d only asked him once what he did. That was forty-seven years ago, on their first date. He’d told her he was just a boring Washington bureaucrat, but he’d asked her never to ask him again. And she hadn’t. She was old-fashioned that way.

  Nancy put the crossword down on the kitchen table and took both of his hands in hers when she caught the look in his eyes. “What is it, Roger? Oh, God, what is it?”

  After so many years together, they could read each other’s moods and minds so easily. “I love you very much, sweetheart.” He hadn’t said that enough over the years, and he was going to make up for it with the time he had left. “I have bone marrow cancer,” he explained softly. “I have six months to live.”

  CHAPTER 18

  BEFORE JACK could get to where Karen had fallen in the alley, she’d already jumped back to her feet and hustled to where her pistol had come to a stop beside a smashed vodka bottle.

  “You OK?” he whispered, ducking instinctively when a bullet deflected off the building beside them with a wicked echo. “Karen?”

  “It’s my left arm,” she answered, grabbing her gun off the pavement and taking off with Jack. They were almost to the end of the alley. “But it’s not bad,” she said softly. “The bullet just grazed me. It stings like crazy, though.”

  At the end of the alley they dashed right and raced across the street. Overhead lights and restaurants had given way to darkness and warehouses. The big commercial buildings rising up all around them were surrounded by tall chain-link fences topped with corkscrewing razor wire. For a few moments there was no gunfire, and Jack thought about calling 9-1-1.

  Then the bullets were back. A barrage exploded behind them, and the air was filled with flying steel again.

  “This way,” he said, bolting past her. “Come on.”

  They rushed down a narrow alley, between two chain-link fences that paralleled each other ten feet apart.

  A few strides into the alley a huge Rottweiler exploded from the darkness and hurled itself against the fence directly to Karen’s right. Its front paws and jaw were level with her head, and it barked furiously with its fangs bared.

  She screamed and veered left. As she did, she ran into Jack and both of them tumbled to the ground. But they were back on their feet quickly—as more gunfire erupted behind them.

  They took off again, darting right and left as the dog raced along the stair-stepped fence with them, barking madly as it kept up. As they reached the next street over, a pair of headlights flashed around a corner.

  “Over there,” Jack said, pointing across the street at a building that looked abandoned. Through the dim light he could see that most of the windows on the first and second floor were smashed out; the fence had been cut open in several places along the sidewalk, and a small door on one side of the building appeared to be hanging slightly ajar. “Come on!”

  He sprinted to the closest slit in the fence, slicing his palm on the sharp, exposed end of a steel wire as he pulled the links back for Karen to crawl through. Then he caught his ear on another wire as he climbed through the hole after her. “Jesus,” he hissed under his breath. He could feel blood trick
ling down his neck as he ran for the door to the building. “Friendly city you got here.”

  “Yeah, we don’t take crap from anybody. Now move!”

  Karen reached the door first, hurled it back, and they both piled through the opening one after the other as bullets smacked the wall around the door.

  It was pitch dark inside, but Jack sensed that they were in a large room because of the echoes the door made when it slammed shut behind them. He reached out and grabbed Karen’s wrist, pulling her along. As he pressed his back flat against the wall and slid along, it felt as if he were standing on a narrow ledge high up on the side of a building. He could feel those familiar butterflies starting to wake up in his gut, and he slowed down. Each step felt uncertain as he groped along the rough wall ahead of him with the hand holding the gun, and that fear of heights was suddenly screaming at him.

  Then his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the butterflies calmed, and he started moving more quickly. He could make out shapes on the large floor in front of them in the soft light coming from windows on the far side of the building. They looked like stacks of wood or metal, and some were eight or nine feet high.

  When they were several car lengths from the door, it burst open and both he and Karen turned and fired through the darkness. The door banged shut again, and Jack pulled Karen toward the closest pile. It was a stack of wood, and they dived behind it. When the door opened again they both pulled their triggers, but only Karen’s gun fired. Jack’s clip was empty, and he didn’t have another one.

  “Come on,” he whispered as he made it to his feet and then helped her up. Through the dim light he’d seen what looked like stairs against the wall just behind them. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Up those stairs.”

  “No, we should stay down here. Maybe we can find a way out. If we go up, we might get trapped.”

  “If we go up, it’ll take them longer to find us. We can buy some time to call nine-one-one and get the cops here. By now they’ve probably got all the doors to this place covered anyway.”

  “Could you really tell the cops how to get here?” Karen whispered. “I couldn’t and I live around here. The people at the door will get us way before—”

  The door burst open a third time, and Jack pulled Karen hard toward the stairs. The voices over there were growing louder, and it sounded to him as if a lot of people were pouring into the building.

  At the top of the stairway they hurried through a door. Then they turned and quickly climbed another set of steps to the third story. As they headed through the open doorway into the top level of the building, the hard floor turned to carpet and Jack realized that they were probably in what had been the administrative offices before the building had been abandoned.

  They rushed down the corridor through the darkness and turned into the next-to-last office on the left, where he pulled his cell phone out and frantically dialed 9-1-1. As the phone began to ring in his ear, he thought he could hear the faint sounds of footsteps coming up the metal stairs. Maybe it wasn’t going to take the people as long to find them as he’d hoped.

  “Jack!”

  His head snapped toward Karen’s voice as the 9-1-1 operator came on the line.

  “Let’s go!” she urged.

  Karen had raised a window at the back of the empty room and was waving him over. “What?” he asked, feeling those butterflies begin to rage in his stomach again. “What do you want?” But he knew exactly what she wanted. That was why the butterflies were back.

  “This is nine-one-one,” the operator called out in his ear. “What is your emergency?”

  “Hurry, Jack.”

  He moved to the window as the operator continued to ask for information, following Karen’s fingers with his gaze as she pointed down. The dark waters of Baltimore Harbor lay thirty feet below them. The side of the building went straight down into the water.

  “We’re jumping,” she said.

  The water looked freezing cold, and from where they were standing he couldn’t spot any way out once they were in it. “Like hell we are.”

  She grabbed his arm. “They’re gonna be here any second, and I don’t want to die. We’re way outgunned. This is our best chance.”

  “We don’t know how deep that water is,” he argued. “It might only be two feet right there. We’ll die.”

  “We know we’re gonna die if we stay here. We’ve gotta take the chance.”

  He hated to admit it, but he knew she was right. “You’re gonna have to push me out.”

  “What? We don’t have time for this crap, Jack.”

  “No, I’m serious. I think I can get on the ledge, but you’re gonna have to push me off.”

  “Why?”

  “No time to explain,” he said as he started carefully climbing. “Just do it.”

  “Jack, you’ve got to jump yourself,” she said, starting to climb out on the ledge too. “I don’t want to push you.”

  “You have to.” He could feel his body seizing up as he kept glancing down at the water. Another few seconds and he was going to dive back into the office so at least he had those walls around him again. “Just do it!”

  CHAPTER 19

  MADDUX SAT behind the wide mahogany desk in the farmhouse’s comfortable study. It was the same Virginia farmhouse they’d used earlier in the day to scare the hell out of Daniel Beckham.

  A sardonic grin tugged at his thin lips as he remembered the horrified expression that had raced to Beckham’s face when they’d told the bastard that the last step in the strip-search process was a thorough investigation of all body cavities. Beckham had screamed like a baby—before, during, and after.

  Maddux’s grin faded. Carlson had called ten minutes ago to deliver the sobering news that the rumors two of Maddux’s Falcons had unearthed about the president were true. Dorn was going to destroy Red Cell Seven. Carlson had apologized profusely for ever doubting the accuracy of the information—as well he should have, Maddux thought to himself resentfully—and then they’d started to plan.

  Red Cell Seven would not be destroyed—at least, not without a fight. Dorn and his people had no idea what they were in for. It would be a war, and it would be carried out hand to hand in places Red Cell Seven knew well and would be comfortable with. In places Dorn’s people would not be comfortable with—even the president’s shadow operators.

  During that telephone conversation, Maddux had considered coming clean with Carlson about what he’d done and how he’d acted without prior approval. He figured the old man might have understood the rationale now that he knew for certain President Dorn was a traitor.

  But, ultimately, he’d decided against it. Telling Carlson still wasn’t an option. He had to keep acting as if what had happened on the Arctic Fire was a terrible accident. He had to keep acting as if Troy Jensen had simply been lost in the line of duty. The same way he’d acted about Charlie Banks a year ago. He couldn’t tell Carlson he’d specifically ordered Sage Mitchell to throw those young men overboard, because there was still a chance the old man might go ballistic—especially about Jensen.

  Maddux glanced over the desk at Ryan O’Hara as he pushed aside thoughts of Troy Jensen and the coming battle with President Dorn.

  O’Hara was a good-looking African-American kid with sharp facial features who’d graduated from Dartmouth eighteen months ago. Since then he’d been excelling in an intense training regimen at several military bases around the country as well as undergoing a battery of psychological tests in Arlington and San Diego. The demanding process was designed to make certain he was worthy of getting to this moment, that he was worthy of joining Maddux’s elite crew of Falcons.

  A week ago Carlson had decided to officially accept O’Hara into Red Cell Seven. Given his scores in every category, O’Hara was one of the strongest candidates to ever come along, and he was the first African American to make it in. There had been thirty-nine other AA candidates prior to O’Hara, but they’d all missed the
cut.

  Which wasn’t surprising or in any way a result of prejudice. The attrition rate for all RCS recruits since the cell’s inception was 98 percent—only two in a hundred candidates made the leap. And the 98 percent who didn’t make it were sent to prized Special Forces assignments because they were still outstanding individuals who were completely dedicated to protecting the United States using whatever means were necessary. They just weren’t outstanding enough to be members of Red Cell Seven.

  “So, I’ve got a question,” Maddux began. His elbows were resting on the polished arms of the chair, and his fingers were positioned cathedral-style in front of him. “And it’s pretty obvious, at least, given that it’s my first one.” O’Hara had gotten a lot of hype from his instructors, and Maddux wanted to see the kid start living up to it right away. “Know what it is?”

  “Of course,” O’Hara answered confidently. “You’re asking about my name. You want to know how in the hell a black guy from east LA gets a handle like Ryan O’Hara.”

  The young man had that smooth air of invincibility every member of Red Cell Seven needed. But his was even more impressive than most of the other young men in the Falcon division. His was on that same level with Troy Jensen.

  Hopefully, he wasn’t as inquisitive as Troy—or as completely polarized when it came to right and wrong. Troy could have been a valuable asset for a long time. But he couldn’t see the shades of gray in between those two endpoints.

  “My father changed our family name from Jefferson to O’Hara forty years ago when he moved to California from Alabama,” O’Hara explained. “He told me he did it for me and my sisters, Meagan and Kristin, even though we weren’t born yet. He said he wanted the top universities around the country to think his kids were Irish because you don’t actually have to check the race box when you fill out college applications. It worked out pretty well too. I went to Dartmouth, Meagan went to Northwestern, and Kristin’s a junior at Stanford. I hate to say it, but it helped in a lot of ways growing up. Not just getting into college.”