There was a packed line for Wet and Wild, over a hundred people in bathing suits even in this weather. One teenager, probably about fourteen, was arguing with her parents. She had the one flattest stomach Mike had ever seen. She stopped arguing and frankly stared as the GT drove by.
“They’re going to get through,” Mike said, thinking about that lovely little girl lying on the ground twitching like a dying cockroach.
“You are prepared?” Farzad asked the assembled fedayeen.
“Yes, Haj,” Jamal said. “We are prepared to sacrifice ourselves. We will strike the infidels as they have never been struck. This will make us heroes beyond even the martyrs of the Twin Towers.”
“Stay near to cover,” Farzad said. “When the panic starts, mingle into the crowds. Then you know what to do. We will strike as one and the Satan will tremble.”
“… Yes, sir, I understand,” Colonel Olds said, hanging up the phone and trying not to curse.
Colonel Freeman Olds had spent most of his career in staff positions. He was, in fact, very close to a perfect staff officer. He was meticulous in the extreme and could juggle multiple tasks quite effectively. He was also a workaholic, putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day pretty much consistently.
However, one of the reasons that Olds had had, in his opinion, far too few commands was hidden in his generally excellent reviews. It was not so much that negative terms were included as certain positive ones were missing. He had hardly noticed but phrases like “capable of critical decision making under pressure” were notably absent. That’s because what many of his reviewers had realized was that he, well, wasn’t. He could make recommendations and create multiple scenarios, but to get him to make a hard decision — one that could negatively affect his career if he was wrong — he had to be cornered like a rat in a trap.
He had been just as meticulous and risk avoidant in building his career. He had carefully gotten all the merit badges, worked the buddy system, gotten all the right positions at all the right times. His time as a battalion commander had, admittedly, been less than perfect but that was understandable. The battalion he took over had been terribly poorly managed and undisciplined in the extreme. It could hardly be his fault that it had failed the annual Army Readiness and Testing Evaluation Program. He had managed to argue that to various people who, despite the unit being decertified for combat operations after two previous trips to the sandbox, had kept him from being relieved and forcibly retired.
But he was well aware that this position was his last chance to get stars. If he could manage the conditions carefully enough, if he could avoid serious incident, he’d pin on stars by the end of the year.
The fly in that ointment was this Kildar character. The local FBI office, Orange County, City of Orlando, all the other federal and state groups in the task force, they were all on board with the plan. Maintain a low profile. Make the public aware that there was a threat but also ensure they knew the powers-that-be were on the situation. Avoid serious incident. Reduce public strain. Deconflict the situation.
This joker’s idea of deconflict, though, was “kill them all and let graves registration sort them out.”
Which was why he had called an old friend from the Point. The general was a couple of years ahead of him and despite being, in Olds’ opinion, less than stellar in the brains department he’d managed to pin on stars almost four years ago. The general was also in a very good position, the Plans office in the Pentagon. Oh, he might complain that he wanted to get back to the sandbox, preferably with a command, but Olds knew he was just doing the Good Soldier routine. Plans and Ops ran the Army; commanders just followed Plans and Ops’ directives.
But it also put him in an excellent position to deal with this Kildar fellow. So Olds had explained his problems, leaving out that Jenkins had threatened to kill him. The general had been pretty busy, which might have explained the bluntness of his response. It boiled down to a.) Jenkins got things done, b.) Jenkins had the support of the CJCS and the President so the general couldn’t do anything if he wanted to. He’d added that the colonel might want to pay attention to actions in his AO and not spend time trying to get his support personnel changed.
Which left the colonel pondering his Rolodex. If this Jenkins character really did have support all the way to the CJCS — he refused to believe the idiot had presidential backing — then it would take a line of attack outside the chain of command to get him removed.
He picked up his telephone and dialed a number in Washington. There was more than one way to skin a Kildar.
“Anything?” Mike asked as he walked in the suite.
There simply weren’t any houses for rent big enough to take even the teams he’d brought with him. So he’d rented a floor of an off-Disney hotel. He wasn’t going to be at what he considered ground zero.
“No,” Greznya said. “There is nothing. Jay is trying to determine who the drops were going to but without any more drops… We’re still getting the take from Katya but so far we haven’t picked up any sign that Gonzales is directly involved.”
“They had one more boat,” Mike said. “But nothing to pick up and no fueling point.”
“So what are they gonna do?” Britney asked.
“Strike at us,” Mike replied. “They’ll either try to hit the yacht or snatch somebody. Not much they can do else. The VX is in the hands of the U.S. government.”
“Are you going to bring the harem over?” Britney asked.
“Hell of a choice, isn’t it?” Mike asked. “But, no, I’m going to leave them at the estate with Vil and Yosif’s team, what’s left of it. Let ’em get a tan. If the Colombians want to tangle with those teams they’re free to. Besides, the farther away from me they are the better.”
“Hey, I was driving around with you all day!” Britney pointed out.
“I know,” Mike said. “Which was silly, but with you around I look like some businessman with a doxie. I don’t have Katya and next to her, you’re the girl most likely to survive. And if you don’t, well, that’s why you wear a uniform.”
“That’s pretty fucking cold,” Britney said.
“Pleased to meet you, won’t you guess my name?”
“Senator Grantham’s office.”
Steve Worrel was the Senior Defense and Intelligence Staffer for Senator Pat Grantham. He had been an Army intelligence officer, worked briefly for the Agency, then gotten out and gotten a “real” job. Shortly after hitting civvie street he’d gotten into politics as a volunteer, then worked his way up to staffer to a senator. But given that most of the senator’s committees were related to domestic affairs rather than military, he wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination the senator’s most senior aide. Hadn’t been, rather.
When someone started blackmailing the senator with videos that certainly appeared to be of the senator not only in bed with a young woman, two actually, but strangling one of them to death, he had gained some prominence. That was because he knew the people to call to, discreetly, start checking out the DVD. People who could pull it apart, electron by electron, to try to determine who had made it, where it was made. In the meantime, the senator had tap-danced. The main demand of the blackmailers had been to kill a conservative judicial nomination. The senator had instead held the nominee up in committee, arguing that to vote against him would have been too much of a reversal to stand up. And hoped like hell that Steve would pull his chestnuts out of the fire.