All Necessary Force (6 page)

She began going hand over hand toward the gap. The men saw what she was doing and tried to block her, one jumping up on the bar himself and swatting at her legs. Without breaking speed, she flipped underneath the rafter, swinging her legs up and over it, until she was crouched on top. She moved with astonishing speed on the two-inch beam, scuttling right to the gap.

I saw her poke her head through the hole, then fall to the ground on our side of the wall. She advanced to the table warily, recognizing me and Knuckles but unsure if that was good or bad. Our faces were stoic.

She didn’t sit down. Without fanfare, she said, “I’m looking for some inbred rednecks with shit for brains.”

I replied, “I can understand why. They can be quite handsome.”

The correct answer caused her to visibly sag. She pulled the strap over her head, set the thermos in front of me, and collapsed into a chair, her head coming to rest on the table.

I leaned over and rubbed her shoulder. “Congratulations. You’re done. I was beginning to worry about our trip to Angkor Wat. Looks like you get to go after all.”

She looked up, but said nothing, the exhaustion on her face giving me a pang of guilt. And a little pride.

“How’d you get past Radford?” I asked.

She smiled, the blood between her teeth and gums making her look feral. “He slapped the hell out of me. Just about knocked me out. I
started faking, crying and blubbering, and that chauvinistic son of a bitch actually turned his back to me and walked away.”

I glared at Turbo, who was studiously studying a computer monitor. “Where’s Radford now?”

“Unconscious in the rental car. You might want to get a medevac to him. His arm’s out of socket.”

That’s one I won’t have to deal with.

Turbo came over and shook her hand, which must have pained him, but not as much as the pain I was going to bring to him in the next few minutes.

“Jennifer, why don’t you go clean up,” I said. “There’s a trailer out back. I’ll come get you in a minute.”

When she was gone, I said, “Turbo, go into the bar and line up your team. I’d like to talk to them about following instructions.”

Turbo looked at the door, then back at me. “Uhh. I can handle that.”

“No, I don’t think you can. If they’d like to put on protective gear, I don’t care, although they didn’t give Jennifer the same chance.”

He looked a little incredulous. “You think that piece of ass is worth taking on my whole team by yourself?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Knuckles scowl at the verbal slight, then slowly rise like a wraith.
That’s got to look scary.

He said, “I want the asshole that hit her first.”

H

Five minutes later, he was hooked up via voice-over Internet protocol through his laptop. It was completely unsecured, but with the enormous amount of digital traffic on the Internet, it might as well have been encrypted by the NSA. There was no way the Great Satan would be able to randomly pluck this call out of cyberspace, even if they were already listening to Rafik’s cell phone. Discovery would have to be luck because Rafik changed locations—and thus his IP address—every time he called. He had the contact do the same. It was like having a cell phone that changed numbers every time he dialed, thwarting the ability to monitor it.

The contact gave Rafik good news. All of the cells had managed to penetrate their respective electric company’s security and plant the virus. It had not gone without incident, however. He relayed what had happened to Keshawn.

Rafik frowned. “Yet you said all were successful. How did he prevent the discovery from getting out?”

The contact paused for a minute, then said, “He killed him. Don’t worry, though. Keshawn knew what to do with the body. He’s experienced in law enforcement techniques. It’ll look like a robbery in a poor section of Baltimore. One near another substation that the man had visited earlier in the day, so it fits.”

Rafik grinned. He felt like shouting in triumph. Al Qaeda had been
trying for years to recruit members who didn’t look, talk, or act Arabic. Men who could easily pass into the lands of the Far Enemy and wreak havoc. All that had gotten them so far was a couple of fat Americans who created a lot of press but couldn’t fight their way out of a baby’s crib.

Rafik had taken a different tack. Instead of trying to get non-Arabs to come to al Qaeda, he went to them. The idea came to him when he learned that Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, and José Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber, had both converted to Islam in prison. Planting a Muslim chaplain in the New York prison system, he began to recruit in earnest, using America’s own freedom of religion against it.

The prison had turned out to be the perfect recruiting ground. All of his converts could blend in anywhere precisely because they were Americans, born and raised. The recruits also had no compunction about breaking the law and were used to using violence to obtain their goals. Finally, they came to his chaplain already despising their country’s authority. There wasn’t a lot of quibbling over innocents.

At the core, they were all looking for someone to blame for their own failings, something to identify with that would provide them honor and a reason to exist. It was no different from a Palestinian living in squalor in a refugee camp. Rafik had gladly provided that something, first through the pacifist teachings of Islam, then, when he had culled out the potential mujahideen, through the concepts of jihad in a smaller prayer group. No one in the prison system monitored his chaplain’s preachings.

His idea wasn’t just to convert as many as he could to the jihad but to build a cohesive fighting cell for a spectacular attack. It had taken years, but now it was paying off in unexpected ways. No infiltrated transplant could have averted discovery as Keshawn had done. The mission would have been over.

The contact asked, “When will we insert the real virus? Like I said before, we should have done that initially, instead of this test case.”

“That is the real virus,” Rafik said. “We won’t be risking a second insertion. You can initiate it remotely, right?”

The contact’s voice became agitated. “Yes, of course, but that virus
will only disrupt their early-warning software. It won’t do anything to the system itself. What good is that? Was I supposed to give the men a different one?”

“Calm down. You did what I asked. Computer attacks can be fixed in hours. Worst case, they go without power for a day or two. We need to physically destroy parts of the system to cause a long-term effect.”

“That’s the same problem. They’ll just put in repair parts. That’ll take less time than cleaning out a virus. Why on earth would you risk such a complicated plan? I can do the same thing using my computer.”

“There are some components that don’t have spares. Some critical components.”

The contact persisted. “If it’s so critical, it will be heavily protected.”

“You’d think so,” Rafik said, “but the Americans don’t do anything until
after
an attack. I found the components in their own vulnerability assessments.”

“How will you attack them?”

“I’m working on that now. It’s why I’m in Egypt. Just be prepared to receive an airplane in the next couple of weeks. I’ll give you the details when you need them.”

Rafik could hear the disbelief in his contact’s answer. “We have worked together for a long time, but now I fear you’re misleading me. I won’t continue like this. You have never kept things from me before.”

“It’s for your own safety. You live inside the Far Enemy. If you get captured, I want to be able to continue. Maybe not immediately, but soon enough. It’s bad enough that you know all the names of the cell. Trust me, I have found an Achilles’ heel. Just leave it at that.”

Kurt paced outside the Oval Office, hoping to catch five seconds of the president’s time. He had never done anything like this before, only coming to the White House when summoned. The phone call from Cambodia had changed that.

He knew it was incredibly frowned upon to attempt to ambush the president, but he really didn’t have a choice. He was about to divert the
next Taskforce mission for personal reasons, and he needed the president’s approval. He also needed a little of the president’s big stick to cut through some Army bureaucracy.

“You sure he’s coming back here before his meeting with the finance committee?”

Sally, the president’s secretary, smiled. “Yes. He always comes back here before heading out again. Gives him a breather without interruption.”

Kurt inwardly winced. “I won’t be long. I promise.”

“What I can’t figure out is how you got past the chief of staff in the first place. Nobody else gets to ambush the president.”

Nobody else runs an organization that can bring down his entire administration with one mistake.
“I don’t know. Just lucky, I guess.”

Sally was rolling her eyes when President Payton Warren entered the reception area, talking with a scrum of people bringing him up to speed for his budget meeting. He did a double take when he saw Kurt. Without waiting for Kurt to speak, he said, “Okay, everyone have a seat out here. I’ll be back in…”

Kurt said, “Five minutes, tops.”

After closing the door and shaking hands, President Warren said, “This must be bad news. Did Jennifer get sent to the hospital or something?”

When Kurt had agreed to let Jennifer attempt Assessment, the biggest obstacle had been that she was a civilian. They could camouflage the death or injury of any military or CIA member simply by claiming a training accident, but a civilian would be exponentially harder. Friends and family would have to buy the story, something that would be very, very difficult to control.

“No. Nothing like that. Believe it or not, she passed with flying colors.”

President Warren smiled. “Good for her. I’ll bet that’s caused a little barking.”

“Yea, it has, but they’ll get over it. In the end, they all respect ability, and she has it. Actually, she
is
part of the reason I’m here.”

“Okay. What do you have?”

“Well, Pike’s taking her, along with Knuckles’ team, on a cover development trip to Cambodia in two days. Get the business ready for operations. I need to divert them.”

“And you came to me? Sounds like Oversight Council business.”

President Warren was referring to the council that supervised Taskforce activities. Made up of thirteen people, including the president, they were the only ones who knew of the Taskforce’s existence, and they approved every mission as a single body. All the council members were either in the executive branch of government or private citizens. None came from the legislative branch.

“It’s personal. And not worth the council’s time. I got a call from the defense attaché at the embassy in Cambodia. He’s a friend of mine.” Kurt paused a second, then continued. “Apparently, someone turned in some artifacts that belonged to my father. It may lead to his body.”

Because of the Taskforce bond, the president was as close to Kurt as to any of his advisors. In some ways closer, since Kurt wasn’t part of the political machine. The president could relax around him, be himself without being on stage as the head of the most powerful country on the planet, or worrying about leaks for political gain. After getting used to being in the president’s presence, Kurt had relaxed as well. One night, late, after an Oversight Council update, Kurt had told him the story of his father becoming MIA on a secret mission during the Vietnam War. The Army had recovered the remains of the entire team minus Chris Hale, the team leader. No one knew why he wasn’t among the others in the wreckage of the helicopter. Kurt had been ten years old at the time. It had eaten at his soul every day since. He knew the president would understand.

“That’s great news… isn’t it,” President Warren said. “What did they find?”

“It’s not great news yet. Just good news. They found a rucksack pretty much destroyed by the elements. Inside was a Nikon SLR camera, a recon journal, some rotting Army T-shirts, and other odds and ends. The Nikon and the journal were packed in a waterproof rubber sack. They were the only things marginally serviceable.”

“What makes you think they were your father’s?”

“They were able to make out his name written in one of the T-shirts.”

The president nodded. “Okay. Sounds like it might be real. What do you need Pike’s team for?”

“Sir, I’d like to send him to the embassy to get the stuff. I know it’s breaking the rules, getting his team involved with a defense attaché who has nothing to do with his cover, but he’s headed there tomorrow, and JPAC is going to take forever. The equipment won’t help them find my father. Whoever turned it in will do that. I really want that camera and journal before it ends up lost in bureaucratic limbo.”

Kurt knew that the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command would do everything they could to recover his father, as they did for all investigations into MIAs from America’s wars overseas. He also knew that they were understaffed, and that for every person’s remains recovered by the command, there were probably three hundred bogus stories to investigate. Chris Hale was now at the bottom of that heap, with the camera and journal—the only thing left of Kurt’s father—tied up waiting its turn.

President Warren said, “That’s it? You just want Pike to swing by the embassy while he’s in-country?”

“Uhh. Well, no. My buddy can’t release the gear to Pike. There’s a huge trail of custody that has to be followed. Eventually, it ends at me, but I was hoping you could make some calls and cut through the red tape.”

The president smiled. “That’s easy. I’d be glad to do it, but I think you’re a little paranoid. Nobody’s going to give a shit about a camera from 1970.”

T