The Ascendant: A Thriller (21 page)

It was a pair of cinder-block structures, both one story high, with corrugated tin roofs, meant to simulate a peasant home in Iraq or Afghanistan. A
ring of razor wire encircled the huts. The captain’s voice rang out on the radio: “Corporal. Air support in place. On your mark to destroy.”

Miller scanned the encampment. No movement. They had to be in there. Or maybe they had scattered out into the brush first thing? The exercise had started at 0500, so they would have had time to disappear into the wilderness. Didn’t matter. He was about to give the go-ahead to simulate destruction of the shacks when he saw movement in a doorway. A man stepped out of the shack and into the open. Immediately, Miller raised his rifle and sighted him. Dead. Recorded in the chip in his scope. A corresponding device in the killed soldier’s rifle should have chirped, alerting the Marine that he was now officially a casualty of the exercise.

But the Marine outside of the hut kept walking. Miller lowered his rifle and took up his binoculars again. The man was waving his hands. And he wasn’t in uniform. In fact, Miller found it hard to believe that he was a Marine at all. He was dark-skinned, wearing a sweatshirt, and potbellied, as wide around the middle as he was tall. And he was not a tall man. Five foot two, Miller guessed.

“Corporal Miller? Your word?”

“Uh. Hold off, sir. Something’s up.”

“Come again, Corporal?”

“There’s a noncombatant at the objective.”

“Not possible, Corporal. The objective was swept by MPs right before the exercise. Only Marines in there. You are mistaken.”

“Well,” Miller said, looking through the binoculars. “I don’t think this guy is a Marine.” Behind the squat, fat man, another man stepped out of the shack. And then another, and another, a dozen in all, one after the other, all with their hands above their heads. A few of them were women, and Miller could have sworn two were kids.

“Sir, are you watching on the Cobra cameras?”

“I am now, Corporal. Halt the exercise and find out who the hell those people are!”

“Will do.”

Corporal Miller signaled the rest of his platoon to move onto the mesa surrounding the shacks. The Marine regiment moved slowly, guns drawn, across the open ground and to the edge of the razor wire. The Cobra gunships moved off another two hundred yards, kicking up dust farther from the encampment.
When Miller got within twenty yards of the shacks, he blinked twice, trying to register the reality of what he saw in front of him. There were a dozen people, all Asian, ranging in age from elderly to maybe ten years old, wrapped up in sweatshirts and down vests. One of them was sipping coffee. A young woman was cradling a baby in an over-the-shoulder snuggly. A teenager was filming the whole thing on his cell phone.

“Who are you?” Miller shouted at them.

The portly man smiled and waved Miller closer. He yelled, “Can’t hear you!”

Miller moved closer, as did the ring of Marines—fifty in all—who surrounded the shack. “I said who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

The portly man bowed slightly. “I’m Leonard Chang. We are the Chang family. We own the King Fu Chinese restaurant in Oceanside.”

Miller recognized the man immediately. He’d seen him at King Fu any number of times, wandering the tables, smiling, seeing if the food and service were up to snuff. King Fu was his favorite Chinese restaurant outside of New York City.

“We have coffee for you,” Leonard Chang said. He motioned to a pair of men, who darted into the shacks and came out with platters crammed with styrofoam cups filled with steaming coffee. “For all of you,” Leonard said. He waved the Marines closer. A dozen moved closer and grabbed cups of java.

“But how did you get here?” Miller asked.

“Garrett Reilly asked us to come. He paid us one hundred dollars per person. He said this was a war game. Is he right?”

A chill ran down Corporal Miller’s spine. Garrett Reilly was the douche nozzle from the bar. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie. Leonard Chang flashed a cell phone at him. “This is a war game, right? Garrett told me to tell you that this cell phone is a pretend detonator.”

Corporal Miller winced. Oh shit. He keyed his microphone, but he knew it was too late. They’d been tricked. He yelled, “Sir, we got hosed! We’re at the wrong place!”

Leonard Chang smiled at the Marine Corporal: “He told me to tell you that I am a suicide bomber. And I just blew you up. You’re all dead. That was fun, huh?”

C
aptain Anthony Marsden screamed into his microphone: “Cobras, lift off! Get the fuck out of there this instant!” The flaps of the field tent practically vibrated with the intensity of the captain’s rage. His support staff, a dozen lieutenants and sergeants, winced at his profanity. The secretary of defense was standing in a corner, behind them, watching silently. He would not be happy. A second lieutenant peeked at the SecDef over his shoulder. Even in the gloomy darkness, the lieutenant could see that his blue eyes were radiating deep, deep disappointment.

Alexis Truffant, on the other hand, wanted to laugh out loud. She had been standing at the secretary’s side for the past hour, listening to him mutter about the stupidity of the project, about how there was no place for a character like Garrett Reilly in the armed forces, about how he would cut General Kline’s funding at the DIA to zero after this. And now, Garrett Reilly had tricked them. They’d challenged him to a duel, and he didn’t show up. And he still won. She had to admit it, as much as she was loath to: the guy was fun to watch. He did not think like an Army officer. She wasn’t sure how he thought, but it confused the hell out of the military lifers.

“Cobras backing off.”

“Look for those bastards anywhere on the battlefield! This is not over. Search and destroy. They’re out there someplace.”

“Yes sir. Cobra One, over.”

Captain Marsden wheeled on his staff. “How the hell did those people get on the base? They all work at a fucking
restaurant
?”

A young lieutenant edged forward. “Sir, yes sir. Everybody knows the
Chang family. They deliver to base all the time. Everybody loves their food, sir. They probably drove on last night with deliveries and just stayed.”

Alexis must have let out a tiny snort of amusement, because Duke Frye turned to her immediately. “Do you think this is funny, Captain? Are you amused by this?”

“No sir,” Alexis said, spine straightening.

“Because I thought I heard you laughing.”

“I coughed, sir.”

The secretary gave her a long look.

Captain Marsden pointed at the laptop on the nearest table. “That GPS program right there says the objective is five kilometers away. Due south. But they went one click west. How the fuck did our GPS systems not coordinate? How the hell did my men get led to the wrong shack? Someone needs to answer that question for me.”

“He hacked the system,” a sergeant ventured. “He scrambled all the coordinates.”

“There’s no way it could be hacked, sir,” a lieutenant answered quickly. “It’s on a secure network. Nobody can get in.”

“They can if they have the access codes.”

Heads in the tent snapped around as Garrett, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt, and a Yankees baseball cap, sauntered into the tent. He looked windswept and slightly out of breath; his right cheek was still bruised eggplant purple. A few of the support staff reached for their sidearms, but nobody drew a weapon. Garrett smiled, waved. “Hey, all. Good morning. You’re all dead, by the way. My team has already surrounded the tent. We blasted it full of bullets. You know, virtual bullets. I think it would be cool if you all, like, lay down and acted dead or something.”

Captain Marsden started toward Garrett. “This field tent was not part of the exercise!”

“Not part of
your
exercise, but it was part of
mine
.” Garrett stepped over to the lieutenant at the GPS laptop. “Anyway, the answer to your question is that I collected the access codes from the base server and sent them to a friend of mine. She went in and reprogrammed your GPS servers so they collected data off a false download signal, full of fake topographical data. It wasn’t easy, but she’s good. Really good.”

Duke Frye stepped past Alexis into the center of the tent. “You gave out military access codes to a civilian hacker?”

“She’s not really a hacker. She’s a game programmer in New York. I mean, she has hacked. But long ago. And she never got caught, she’s not black hat, so no criminal record or anything.”

The secretary fumed at Garrett: “Do you realize how many laws you broke?”

“I won. Wasn’t that the point?”

“You cheated. That’s not winning.”

“You guys doubled the number of battalions against me without telling me. Isn’t that cheating too?”

“Arrest him, now,” Frye barked. He waved to a pair of master sergeants at the edge of the group. The sergeants, surprised by the order, hesitated. The bigger of the two looked to his captain, who nodded vigorously: Do it.

Alexis stepped into the path of the oncoming sergeants, blocking them both. “He changed the parameters of the game. That’s not cheating. It’s why we chose him in the first place.”

Secretary Frye lowered his voice threateningly. “You really want to take his side in this, Captain? Because if you knew he was giving out access codes, then you will be court-martialed just as quickly.”

“She didn’t know anything about it,” Garrett said. “I did it on my own. And if you want to send me to jail for it, fine.” He put out his hands as if ready to be cuffed. “But I think it’d be kind of ironic to arrest me for behaving like the enemy you’re looking to defeat.”

The two sergeants looked to the secretary for further orders. Duke Frye scowled and waved them forward. “Take him away.”

“No!” Alexis shouted, sidestepping the first sergeant. She grabbed his wrist and had started to put him into an armlock when a voice rang out, gruff and unhappy.

“He’s not going anywhere.” General Wilkerson, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped into the tent, flanked by a pair of aides, navy commanders in white dress uniforms and blue windbreakers. Captain Marsden, his entire support staff, and Alexis all snapped to attention.

Secretary Frye blinked in surprise. “General. When did you . . . ?”

“Last night. I was in San Diego.” He walked up to Secretary Frye and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t want to make you look bad in front of these men, but you’re going to have to let him go.”

Frye stiffened. “You don’t have the authority.”

“The president wants him in Washington by nightfall.”

Frye’s face tightened. He jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Of course I won’t contradict the president,” he hissed.

Wilkerson put his arm around Frye’s shoulder. “There are no more rules anymore, Duke. No more rules anywhere.”

Frye let out an angry breath as HQ radio blared to life. It was the pilot of the lead Cobra gunship: “Sir, we picked up their tracking GPS signal. Enemy is hiding in Mess Hall Seven, off Basilone Road. Should we engage?”

Everyone in the room looked to Garrett, who turned his hands palms up, in a gesture of sly amusement. “We figured you guys would stash tracking devices in our gear, so we left it all in the mess hall this morning. Not really fair if you’d followed us from the get-go.” Garrett smiled. “But my guys have no coats, so they’re kinda cold outside. Can we call it a day?”

Captain Marsden grabbed the microphone. “Negative, Cobra One. Field exercise is terminated. Return to base.”

T
he Marine Humvee spun gravel as it roared down from the hilltop HQ tent. Garrett sat in back, next to Alexis. General Wilkerson sat in front with the driver. His two aides rode in a follow vehicle. The sun had risen over the mountains; the California chaparral was alive in an explosion of yellows and reds.

“There’s a naval transport waiting for you at Miramar,” Wilkerson said. “Pack your stuff and get down there in the next hour. They’ll fly you direct to Andrews. The president would like to meet you first thing tomorrow morning.”

“The president of the United States?” Garrett asked.

“Yes, that president,” Wilkerson grunted.

The Humvee pulled up in front of their barracks. The general craned his head back to look at Garrett. “Reilly, I’d advise you to stop pissing off the secretary of defense. He’s a very powerful man. Screw with him too much and he will tear out your heart and eat it while you’re still breathing. You get my meaning?”

“Yes sir,” Garrett said, liking the general more and more with each moment.

“I was considering giving you another piece of counsel—which was to stop being such an asshole to everybody, all the time—but it seems to work for you, so carry on.” The general stared at Reilly, then shrugged. “Now get the hell out of my Humvee.”

Garrett and Alexis scrambled out of the vehicle. The moment the back door closed, the Humvee rumbled off in a cloud of dust. Alexis watched it go, shaking her head in disbelief. “The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just advised you to keep acting like an asshole. That’s got to be some kind of a first.”

“What can I say? I’m a trailblazer.”

Garrett went to his room and stuffed what few clothes he’d accumulated into a backpack, then met Alexis in the building’s open, central room. She had a duffel bag ready at her side. Celeste, Bingo, and Jimmy Lefebvre were standing across the room. None of the three was carrying bags. Garrett pointed to them. “They’re not coming?”

Alexis shook her head no.

“I think they should.”

“They weren’t asked.”

“They’re part of the team.”

“I don’t have transit orders for them.”

Garrett sat down on a rolling office chair. “They don’t go, I don’t go.” Alexis stared at Garrett, astonished. He smiled at the team. “You do wanna come, right? Washington, D.C.? The Lincoln Memorial?”

Lefebvre laughed in amazement. “Not sure I’ve ever met anyone quite like you.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Garrett asked.