Arctic Fire (9 page)

“I know,” Jack admitted softly. “I guess sometimes how different I am from everyone else in the family catches up to me.” He shook his head. “How different I am in every way. Even the way I think.”

Hunter rolled his eyes and groaned. “You have another one of those political arguments with Bill?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, I was over here one morning last week after we blasted that town in Afghanistan with cruise missiles, and Bill and I got into it.”

“You call him Attila the Hun again?”

Hunter knew him so well. “Nah, this time I called him Adolph. I’m tired of calling him Attila.”

“Did he tell you how you’re nothing but a bleeding heart liberal, and how you have no idea what it takes to run this country? And how you have no respect for the men and women of honor who keep you safe at night?”

“Doesn’t he always? And, for the record, I do have respect for those people, a lot of respect.”

“I know you do. You just wanted to see how hard you could get that vein in his forehead pumping, right?”

Hunter knew him so
damn
well. “I just think the United States ought to act with more compassion. Being the bully never makes anyone respect you. It pisses people off and makes them do stupid things. It makes teenagers take guns to school. And it makes terrorists fly planes into buildings.”

Hunter gazed out at the pastures. “Yeah, but I’m not sure compassion is the way either. Not with the freaks we’re fighting now.”

“Not you too, pal.”

“You know which side I come down on, Jack. You always have. Maybe I’m not as far right as Bill, but every once in a while we have to back up our rhetoric with some serious action. That is, if the rhetoric’s ever going to mean anything.”

“Even if that action means we kill children?”

Hunter rolled his eyes. “Come on, Jack, that’s not fair.”

“OK, OK.” Hunter was right. That wasn’t fair. “Do you have a problem with us torturing people we believe might be terrorists?”

Hunter thought about it for a few moments. “No, I don’t. I mean, as long as we’re pretty positive they are.”

“Jesus Christ, Hunt. You’re just like Bill. Down deep you think we ought to wipe those people off the face of the earth.”

“I do not,
damn it
. But I don’t want to be on top of the new World Trade Tower one day and see a plane hit the building twenty stories below me.” Hunter shut his eyes tightly. “I still think about those poor people who had to choose between being incinerated or jumping from a hundred stories up that morning. And I’m sorry, but I don’t have a problem with some water-boarding if that keeps the skies over our country safe. Or whatever else they use to make those people talk.”

“What if it’s you someday?”

Hunter gave Jack a WTF look. “What are you talking about?”

“What if they arrest you and start asking you crazy questions about things you’ve said on the phone or they want to know about people you’ve met with? What if they tie you upside down on a plank and start dumping cold water down your nose? What then, Hunt?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. No one’s going to arrest me for being a terrorist.”

“How do you know? They didn’t even give that guy in Yemen last year a chance to be tortured. He was an American citizen and they murdered him in his convoy.”

Hunter stared at Jack for several moments, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Are you talking about al-Awlaki? The dude who was a senior al-Qaeda guy?”

“Right,” Jack agreed. “That guy.”

“Come on, pal. Buy a ticket on the real world train and come to sanity town where it’s always warm and sunny. We’ve got a nice couch waiting for you on the—”

“How do you know he was an al-Qaeda leader?”

Hunter winced as though he were in serious physical pain. “I know what you’re going to say, Jack, but even the
New York
Fucking
Times
said he was. That wasn’t a case of our government lying to us, not even close. That was a bad dude we killed.”

“You never know, Hunter. I think we have to be very careful when we start executing our own citizens without a trial.”

“And I think we have to protect our good citizens any way we can,” Hunter replied loudly. “We have to trust our leaders to do the right thing.”

“That’s a big leap of faith in this day and age.”

“In
any
day and age,” Hunter agreed, “but we have to. That’s why we elect them.”

“I don’t know.” Jack finished what was left of his scotch and put the empty glass down on the wall. He closed his eyes as the realization that Troy was gone finally started sinking in. “Troy did deserve what he got, Hunt,” he said quietly. “But I’m not glad he got it, I’m not glad he died.” Why the hell had Troy gone on that damn crab boat? Why hadn’t Bill steered him away from it? Bill had that power over Troy, the only one in the world who ever had. “At least, I don’t think I am.”

Hunter patted Jack’s shoulder. “You better figure that out, my friend. And you better figure it out soon.”

“Yeah,” Jack agreed after a few moments. “I guess I better.”

Hunter finished his scotch and put the glass down on the wall beside Jack’s. “Have you ever wondered what Troy was really doing all this time?”

They were both facing away from the mansion, but when Jack heard what Hunter had said he turned to look at him. “What are you talking about?”

Hunter shrugged. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that Troy graduated from Dartmouth six and a half years ago, but he never settled down?”

“Not at all. Look, he was an endless-summer kid who never grew up. He loved how athletic he was and what he could do with all that talent. He loved being a rolling stone too. And he loved having all those different women.” Jack snickered. “And he loved that Bill paid for everything.”

“He was on the
Arctic Fire
to make money,” Hunter pointed out. “And he worked in that mine in Argentina two years ago.”

“He couldn’t possibly have made enough money doing those things to support himself in the way he wanted to live. He was a Jensen, remember? A
real
Jensen. He needed money, and he needed lots of it.”

“He wasn’t like that and you know it. He wasn’t materialistic.”

Jack was getting annoyed. “So what are you saying, Hunt? Spin it out for me.”

“I wonder if there was more going on with him than we realized. I’ve always wondered that.”

“Like
what
?”

Hunter shrugged again. “I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard he died.”

Jack grabbed his glass off the wall. “Ah, you’ve always been a conspiracy guy. Accept the situation for what it is. A rich kid taking advantage of what he fell into just by being born.”

“Maybe,” Hunter said quietly, “but maybe not.”

Jack waved at Hunter dismissively and shook his head. “I’m getting another drink.”

As he stalked toward the bar, Hunter’s words echoed in his head. Jack had been wondering the same thing for a while.

“G
OOD AFTERNOON
, Mr. President.”

Carlson rose stiffly from the leather couch and extended his right hand beneath a practiced smile of indifference that came to his face automatically within the walls of the Oval Office after so many years. This was the eighth administration he’d served, and it no longer impressed him that he had direct access to the person the public and the press called the most powerful man in the world. Now he was more impressed by people who actually risked their lives every day in the shadows. People like Shane Maddux.

“I trust you’ve been well, sir.”

“Of course, of course,” President Dorn answered cheerfully. “I’ve got the best job in the world, I’ve got a wonderful family, and I’ve got my health. I have no excuse for feeling anything but absolutely outstanding. It would be a crime for me to complain about anything, Roger.”

The president’s greedy display of appreciation for his good fortune was a function of being in office less than a year, Carlson believed. The pressure of making decisions that affected billions of people every day—many of them negatively—hadn’t gotten to him yet. As he’d told Maddux, Dorn’s infatuation with the job would wear off around the first anniversary of taking that momentous oath on the Capitol steps on that blustery January day. At that point being president would turn into a grind, just like every desk job ultimately did.

Carlson always looked forward to that anniversary because dealing with a new president and his administration became infinitely easier. By that one-year mark the president no longer questioned the morality of what was going on in the shadows. By that time he fully appreciated knowing that there were people out there quietly killing the enemies because he’d come to realize how many people wanted to kill him and, bottom line, how vulnerable he was despite all of the Secret Service’s efforts. In fact, after that first anniversary, the president usually started wanting more of what Carlson delivered—much more.

That was the progression with the liberals. The conservatives were in it up to their eyeballs right out of the gate, even before they took the oath—especially the neocons. They were the easy ones to deal with.

Unfortunately, President Dorn was as far left on the political spectrum as any commander in chief of the United States could be. He was a tree-hugger from Vermont who thought the ACLU was the most important group ever founded; that the death penalty was a barbaric ritual that only lunatics could support; and that the founding fathers had made a huge error in judgment when they’d decided that everyone had the right to bear arms. David Dorn made Bill Clinton look like Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan look like Joseph Stalin.

“Well,” Carlson said, “I’m sure we could get you off with a small fine and some community service if you did complain about something.”

The president laughed heartily. “You’re amazing, Roger.”

Dorn was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a full head of dark hair who radiated charisma as impressively as the core of a nuclear power plant radiated energy, and couldn’t have looked more presidential if he’d tried. In fact, Carlson thought of Dorn as the floor model. He just wished Dorn’s political views weren’t so severely left of left. He’d never cared about a president’s political affiliation before, but he was starting to with this one. He hadn’t fully dismissed Maddux’s words of caution.

“You’re in your seventies, right, Roger?”

“Seventy-three, Mr. President.”

“But you look fifty-three.”

That was crap, Carlson knew. His gray hair was thinning, he had deep creases at the corners of his mouth, crow’s-feet at the corners of both eyes, and he’d started to get those brown spots on his arms and legs. And though he didn’t really need the cane he used when he met with Maddux, he still hunched over when he walked because of a bad disk in his back that should have been operated on ten years ago—but there’d never been time. He looked like an older man because he
was
an older man.

Lately, he was feeling like one too. He was pragmatic, he always had been, and he knew his days of dealing with the constant pressure of running Red Cell Seven were numbered. It was almost time for him to be done with this crazy thing he’d been devoted to for over four decades. It was almost time to yield the awesome responsibility of this job to someone younger, and he knew exactly who that would be. There would be a quiet approval process, but it would be only a formality. He just needed to get President Dorn in line before he could turn over the reins to Shane Maddux and ride off into the sunset.

“And you act thirty-three,” the president continued, gesturing for Carlson to sit back down. “I hear people half your age can’t keep up with you.”

Carlson turned his head slightly to the side, as though he was deflecting the remark. How the hell would the president know that people half his age couldn’t keep up with him? How would the president know of anyone at all who was trying to keep up with him? He shouldn’t.

Maddux’s warning rattled around in Carlson’s brain again, but he shook it off. The president’s comment had to be just an innocent, off-the-cuff remark.