PLEDGE OF HONOR: A Mark Cole Thriller (5 page)

2

It was still early, but President Ellen Abrams was already at work, ensconced within her private study with some of her key aides, in preparation for the emergency meeting of the National Security Council which had been scheduled for nine that morning.

She wasn’t concerned that anyone would miss it; every single person on her staff would have seen the incident in London on the breakfast news and would already be on their way in to work. The attack might not have happened on American soil, but the United Kingdom was a key ally and – what was more – what could happen there could just as easily happen in the United States, and if school attacks were the new thing, then a very real threat to national security had just emerged.

Abrams had just finished speaking on the phone to the British Prime Minister, Adam Gregory, and – as well as expressing her condolences – had made sure she’d found out as much up-to-date information as possible.

‘Okay,’ she said to the people in the small room, ‘it seems to be just what’s been reported on the news so far. Lone wolf attack, three British men, no known links to terrorist groups, apparently self-radicalized via the internet. All three dead, and the Met haven’t managed to locate anyone else involved, as yet. Witness testimony and CCTV show just the three of them, and apparently they all lived together in one apartment, rarely hung out with anyone else.’

‘What are the latest figures?’ asked Clark Mason.

‘Forty-one children confirmed dead so far,’ Abrams replied, a pained expression across her face, ‘with more probably to be added – there are over two hundred casualties, many of them critical. Fourteen adult deaths that we know of at the school, seven more at the synagogue. Six police officers dead too.’

‘Shit,’ Mason said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Sixty-eight dead, that’s got to be the most from one of these crazed lone wolf attacks so far.’

‘By a long way,’ Abrams confirmed. ‘A
long
way.’

Nobody had to say that it was the first time that children had been specifically targeted too; it was too obvious – and perhaps just too painful – to mention.

A phone rang then, and Noah Graham reached into his pocket to retrieve his cell. The Director of the FBI looked at the screen and mouthed the words –
My contact at MI5 –
and Abrams nodded her head, allowing Graham to take the call. In such a fluid situation, protocol was the last thing she was concerned about. Graham started to greet his friend from Britain’s internal security service as he left the room.

‘We’ve got our people talking to SIS too,’ said James Dorrell, Director of Central Intelligence, ‘we should have some usable information from them before too long.’

Abrams nodded. The Secret Intelligence Service was Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, the equivalent of the CIA, and they might well have further details about the three men – if they’d traveled abroad, who they might have met with, if they’d received training in any of the myriad terrorist camps spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

‘We’re already reviewing security protocols at elementary schools, high schools, kindergartens, colleges and universities,’ said Dylan Crow, Secretary of Homeland Security. ‘We’re mobilizing resources so that we can protect the most vulnerable sites, just as a precautionary measure.’

Abrams nodded her head. ‘Do it,’ she said, knowing that some of her political colleagues might object – it could be seen as a knee-jerk reaction, a sign of weak leadership. But where children were concerned, she just wasn’t willing to take the risk. Despite it appearing to be only the lunatic actions of three British radicals, there was always the small possibility that it was part of a bigger plot, a plot which might include similar attacks within the United States. If she didn’t authorize extra protection in light of the events in London, and then something happened here at home, then Heaven help her.

‘Might I suggest closing schools for the day?’ Crow said next, and Abrams didn’t respond immediately, giving the idea some thought.

Rosalind Warren, Secretary of Education, cut in quickly before the president had time to answer. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Schools open in under an hour, most already have staff in, plus kids at morning clubs, pre-school care and so on. Parents will have left for work already, it’d be a logistical nightmare getting in touch with them, arranging pick-ups. I just don’t think it’s workable.’

Abrams nodded her head again. ‘You’re probably right, Rose,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it would work right now. Dylan,’ she said, turning back to Crow, ‘authorize whatever resources you have right now, get schools covered right away and report back to us at nine in the situation room, at the meeting.’

‘Yes ma’am,’ Crow said, standing to take his leave.

‘Besides which,’ Warren said as he left, ‘I think there’ll be plenty of parents who’ve heard about this on the news who’ll be keeping their kids at home today anyway.’

‘I know my grandkids aren’t going in,’ confirmed General Pete Olsen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. ‘Why take a chance, right?’

‘Why, indeed,’ Abrams said, knowing that it was an entirely different decision with children than it was with adults. Adults might choose to confront the threat head on, go to work to show the terrorists that they wouldn’t – couldn’t – be cowed. But with kids, it was something else altogether.

‘Sons of bitches,’ Abrams said softly, and there was muttered assent around the room. Kids, dammit. Wasn’t anything sacred to these people anymore? Was nothing out of bounds?

‘Are we going to do anything more proactive?’ asked Dorrell. ‘Help out our British friends more directly?’

Abrams managed not to look at Olsen, or Catalina Dos Santos, Director of National Security, before she answered. ‘That’s something for discussion,’ she replied, knowing that Mark Cole had already been called in for a meeting that would directly follow this one. ‘But let’s just say that right now, all options are on the table, and we’re not going to let our friends down.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Dorrell answered with his first smile of the morning, ‘I know we won’t.’

3

The president had wanted him there fast, Cole considered as he sat in an anteroom for the meeting to finish, and that was for sure. Once she’d found out where he was, she’d ordered a Secret Service detail to leave their duty station at the Vice President’s residence at the nearby United States Naval Observatory to pick him up and race him through early rush-hour traffic to the White House.

To most of the people here, he was known as Doctor Alan Sandbourne, expert in international affairs at the Paradigm Group and a key intelligence adviser to the president. As such, his presence there didn’t seem at all out of place.

It wasn’t long before he was called in by the president’s secretary, and he was greeted with a cup of strong black coffee waiting for him on the small table which sat in the center of the cozy study.

Abrams, dos Santos and Olsen greeted him warmly but – after only a modicum of small-talk – got straight to business.

‘I know we’re taking things slowly with Force One at the moment,’ Abrams said, ‘and we don’t want to rock the boat while Miley’s still out of action and Jones is at JSOC.’

Cole nodded his head; the only operations he had ongoing at the moment were long-term deep cover ops which had already been well established. Jake Navarone in Moscow was one of these, and his work insinuating himself into the machinery of the Russian government was just about to start bearing fruit; but direct action missions had been curtailed for the moment, while Cole’s organization rode out the current storm.

‘However,’ Abrams continued, ‘we need someone we can trust over there, to keep an eye on the investigations and report back to us in real time what you find out.’

‘“You”, as in “me”?’ Cole asked, eyebrows raised.

Abrams nodded her head. ‘Yes Mark,’ she said, ‘you. I know we can trust you, and that’s really the most important thing here. You’ve worked in London before, you know the place.’

He did indeed – the last time he was there, he’d been forced to escape from the Met police, MI5
and
a hit-team of US killers ordered by his corrupt ex-boss. He knew the city all too well.

‘I think I’m still wanted there,’ Cole said jokingly.

‘All in the past now,’ dos Santos said. ‘Besides which, they never even had any idea who you really were.’

‘My cover?’ Cole asked.

‘Mark White,’ dos Santos said, ‘FBI international liaison officer, all set to be plugged straight into Scotland Yard and MI5.’

‘Does Graham know about this?’ Cole asked.

‘He’s on board,’ Abrams answered, ‘he’s already spoken to his counterparts at MI5, got you an in with their investigations team.’

‘Me as in me, or me as in Mark White?’

‘White,’ Abrams answered. ‘Noah’s got thirty-five thousand people under him, he’s got no idea who’s who. We plugged in a name, he authorized it.’

‘You’ll meet a few other Feds in London,’ Olsen warned him, ‘stationed there as liaisons, training officers and the like, so make sure you know what you’re talking about when it comes to Bureau business. You don’t want anyone asking questions.’

‘But you’re there – or rather, Mark White – is there on my authority,’ Abrams said, ‘so if you run into any problems, just have them call the White House.’

Cole nodded. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘and what if I find out that there’s something else going on, that it’s not just three guys with a death wish?’

‘I will leave it to your discretion,’ Abrams told him. ‘If you find out anything, run with it. If it leads you anywhere, deal with it. Anything minor, report back to us; anything critical, you know the score. If there is any sort of threat to the United States, you are authorized to do everything in your power to eliminate it.’

Cole nodded his head again.

The ex-government assassin, once known only as ‘the asset’, knew exactly what the president meant.

And if he found anyone else still alive who had helped with the attacks on those poor children, they would not be alive for much longer.

4

‘These crimes are unforgiveable,’ Adam Gregory, the British Prime Minister, intoned gravely as he conducted his first public statement of the day.

He had already visited the scenes around East Lane, been escorted around the ongoing police investigation at both the school and the synagogue while being filmed by most of the major television networks.

Now he was back at 10 Downing Street, his official residence. The rain had abated somewhat, and he stood at a podium set up directly outside the mansion house, the world’s media gathered around him.

‘Unforgiveable,’ he continued, ‘and hideous in the extreme. The aim of this attack – one of cold, cowardly, barbarity – is simple. It is to make us cower in fear, make us change our way of life, make us change who we are. By targeting children,’ he said with disdain, ‘
children
, these people – and whoever they may work for – have shown their true hand, shown their religious zealotry in all its true colors. They are not freedom fighters, they are not idealists, they are not motivated by religious virtue or spiritual gain – they are terrorists, they are criminals, and I am meeting with my full cabinet after this conference to discuss the measures we will take to combat the extremists who live among us. Rest assured, our response will be in proportion to the threat we are now facing from these criminals.

‘But for now, I do not wish to dwell upon what we are going to do, I want to spend some time commemorating the victims of this cowardly attack, and to pray for the lives of those injured.’

Mark Cole was watching Gregory’s speech from a bar stool, as it played on the television perched high up on the wall of the Old Dominion Brewing Company at Washington Dulles Airport. He sipped from a glass of oak barrel stout as he waited to board his flight, and turned to Bruce Vinson, the Paradigm Group’s public director and Force One’s chief of staff.

Vinson wasn’t coming with him to England, but the two men had decided that it was best that they meet up before Cole left; and because Abrams wanted Cole on the next flight out of there, meeting up at the airport was the only option available to them. The bar was located after the security checkpoints, but Vinson’s ID enabled him to bypass the lines without a ticket.

‘Sounds angry,’ Vinson said, as Gregory listed the names and ages of those killed in the attack.

‘Can you blame him?’ Cole answered. He was sure that Vinson – English by birth – would be pretty upset himself.

‘Can’t say that I do, Mark old chap,’ Vinson answered. ‘And I’m pretty glad we’re going to be playing some sort of role in the follow-up, I can tell you that.’

‘Do you think it was a lone-wolf attack?’ Cole asked.

‘Looks like it,’ Vinson answered. ‘On the surface at least. Initial reports indicate that the men seem to have been radicalized by the internet, similar story to what we’ve seen before. Poor backgrounds, strict upbringings, unemployed or low-paid service jobs, feelings of disillusionment with the system. They start to believe they can immortalize themselves through their actions.’

‘But?’ Cole asked.

‘But,’ Vinson continued, ‘where would three poor young men get the money from to purchase those weapons? The rocket launcher especially, they don’t come cheap, you know. You can’t just pick them up on the street either, especially in the UK, which has some of the strictest arms restrictions in the world. So where did they get them? Who paid for them?’

Cole nodded his head. ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ he said. ‘Self-radicalized or not, they would have needed other people behind them, higher level contacts.’

‘Absolutely. Which is why I’m glad you’re going to London, Mark. The police there are good, the Security Service too, but I don’t want anything to get missed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Cole said, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

‘Don’t worry about it, old chap. It would be equally horrific anywhere it happened.’

Cole nodded, checked his watch and looked over to the screen which displayed boarding gates. He still had time before he had to go. ‘You heard from Navarone yet?’ he asked Vinson, his voice tinged with just a hint of concern. Jake Navarone – a SEAL Team Six man permanently seconded to Force One and Cole’s second-in-command – was undercover in Moscow, on the direct orders of President Abrams.

He had been tasked with infiltrating the government of hard-man Russian President Mikhail Emelienenko, a leader who Abrams – and the entire US National Security Council – were particularly disturbed by.

Emelienenko had succeed Vasilev Danko as leader of the Russian people and – whereas Danko had been a signatory and continued supporter of the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States, China and Russia – the new president was cast very much in the Soviet mold. He believed that his nation should be preeminent in the region, and there were consistent rumors that he was fomenting civil unrest in many nations that used to once be part of the Warsaw Pact, with the aim of reuniting them under some sort of post-Soviet banner. He clearly only paid lip service to the defense treaty, and Abrams and her intelligence analysts were convinced that he was holding out on his partners. All of the agencies – the Paradigm Group and Force One included – suspected that his continued support of the treaty was merely to mislead other countries while Russia prepared for possible action in the Ukraine, or the Baltic states. Such action could simply be the creating of tensions which could push pro-Russian governments into power in those countries, or – of more direct concern – could also be anything up to direct military invasion. And the last thing Abrams wanted was for Nato’s eastern frontier to be threatened, as all-out war could well result.

Navarone had been in place for months now, and was working towards penetrating the leadership to learn what he could about Emelienenko’s intentions and possible plans but – after early positive contacts, and promises of the mission nearing the fruit-bearing stage – he hadn’t been heard from in over two weeks.

Cole knew from his own experiences that such gaps in communications sometimes simply couldn’t be helped during such operations, and could be completely innocent; but he also knew that it could mean that Navarone had been compromised, caught, imprisoned, or even killed.

‘Nothing yet,’ Vinson replied uneasily. ‘And don’t think I’m not just as concerned as you are. But I’ve got people looking into it for us, other contacts we have over there. We’ll know what’s happening with him soon enough. I can’t believe he’s got as far as he has. Damned brave man, that Navarone.’

Cole nodded. Brave was only the half of it; he was ruthlessly capable too. He also had a way with the ladies, which was actually the route he was using to get information.

With false papers attesting to his previous service within th
e
Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska
, Russia’s elite Airborne Troops, he had been taken on as a security guard within the Russian White House, home of the country’s government apparatus. The private secretary of the nation’s second-in-command, Prime Minister Boris Manturov, also worked within the
Bely Dom
, and Navarone wasted no time in working his magic on her.

A spinster, her husband having died fighting in Chechnya, Veronika Galushka was a lonely woman absorbed by her work but secretly crying out for human company; and, more specifically, male company.

Navarone provided the shoulder she needed, and his last report to Cole was that his strategy was starting to work; she was already giving away state secrets during ‘pillow talk’, and didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned about the security implications. Now all Navarone had to do was to guide her, get her to find out specific information.

But he had gone silent, and the ramifications were decidedly worrying. What if his cover had been blown? What if he hadn’t been using Galushka, but she had been using him?

Cole dreaded to think what fate would await his friend and comrade if caught; the torture chambers of the Soviet-era Lubyanka might now be a museum, but that only meant that new locations had been found for such actions, not that they had been erased from the Russian arsenal altogether.

‘Okay. I guess there’s nothing we can do about it now, anyway,’ Cole said finally. ‘But keep looking.’

‘Of course.’

‘Is there anything else?’ Cole said, checking his watch again.

‘There’s still been no luck finding out what’s happened to the crate that went missing from Shahid Dastgheyb,’ Vinson replied, referring to a Revolutionary Guards base in Iran’s Fars province that was supposedly producing as many as five different chemical weapons, as part of a secret program codenamed ‘Baasat’.

The chemical weapons plant was located close to the town of Bajgah, just outside the province’s central city of Shiraz, and was built into the side of a mountain. A naval base at nearby Ahmad Ibn Mousa was supposedly used to train the Guards’ naval personnel, but US intelligence suggested that it was actually used as a transport hub to ship the chemical weapons to depots and storage facilities across Iran.

Shahid Dastgheyb was thought to produce mustard and nitrogen mustard gases, phosphor chlorine, CX gas, and sarin. There were also rumors that its scientists – some on loan from the sanctioned Malek Ashtar University – were actively working to produce a sodium cyanide bomb which could be delivered as artillery shells, cluster bombs or missile warheads.

Pretty unpleasant stuff – but about par for the course, Cole figured, for the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was morally questionable at the best of times.

The regime kept pretty good controls of its stockpiles though, with regular inventory checks and copious bureaucratic paperwork. It was just such a stock-take, actually, that had shown the authorities that an entire crate of chemical weapons had gone missing en route from the Shahid Dastgheyb production facility to the Ahmad Ibn Mousa transport hub.

The chief officer at Shahid Dastgheyb had tried to cover up the loss, but investigators from the Intelligence Unit of the Revolutionary Guards soon discovered that a terrorist group had intercepted the shipment and made off with the product. Embarrassed, plant officials had simply pretended it had never happened; the same IURG investigators, however, soon discovered that certain officers had been paid off by the terrorist group – believed to be an offshoot of Islamic State – to look the other way.

The officials in question had been executed on the orders of the Ayatollah soon after, and Cole thought there might just be something in Iranian efficiency after all.

Force One had come across the information from NSA intercepts of conversations between IURG headquarters in Tehran and the Shahid Dastgheyb base; a worldwide intelligence warning had been subsequently put out, as chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists was hardly the most ideal scenario, but no agency had as yet found out where the weapons were, or exactly who had them.

‘I don’t like them being out there,’ Cole said. ‘Let’s keep looking, keep pressure on our friends in the region to follow up on it.’ He took a swing of beer and looked back at Vinson. ‘That everything?’

‘Just more trouble in Nicaragua,’ Vinson said, and Cole sighed.

Nicaragua again. Ever since the Chinese had decided to build a new canal to rival that of Panama, there had been one problem after another. The fifty billion dollar project, approved in 2013, was being managed by the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company, who had also been granted a fifty year concession on the shipping route by Nicaragua’s National Assembly.

There were claims of massive corruption, environmental damage – especially to Lake Nicaragua, huge engineering overspends, and one legal challenge after another.

But the main damage was being done by groups of farmers, incensed that their lands were to be appropriated by the state, to help make money for a private, foreign company. Their protests were becoming more and more violent as the months wore on.

‘What now?’ Cole asked.

‘There’s been an attack on one of the work parties there, an eleven-man engineer group from HKND, it’s left three people dead. The farmers are suspected, but there are also rumors of a more organized, paramilitary-style protest group. The Chinese haven’t reacted well.’

‘What are they saying?’

‘They’ve demanded that the National Assembly allow them to station a military force there, to ensure the security of the project.’

‘A Chinese military force?’ Cole asked in surprise, and Vinson nodded his head in response. ‘Surely they’re not going to let them do that?’

‘The Nicaraguan government is considering the request as we speak. And I think – with the right palms greased, of course – they’ll find in China’s favor. After all, they don’t exactly have the world’s most transparent, corruption-free leadership, do they? And China has money to burn.’

‘So China will have a military foothold in South America?’

‘I think it will do soon, yes. Something it’s been looking to accomplish for quite some time.’

Cole paused, considering the ramifications. The United States and China were defensive partners, of course; but the Mutual Defense Treaty was looking more and more like something that was more dream than reality. He had already seen what could happen under alternative forms of government – the coup by General Wu which had almost ended in nuclear war just a few short months before was proof enough of that. The status quo had been restored, with the politburo reinstated after US military intervention – mainly in the form of Cole’s Force One – but it was troubling that the new President, Chang Wubei, was still refusing to repatriate those lands stolen by the Wu regime.