He tossed the magazines onto the empty seat across the aisle, settled back, and tried to puzzle together why he was being called back so suddenly. Sybelle’s guarded conversation had given him only some very broad parameters for consideration, but they were startling. First of all, she had mentioned Sir Jeff, and also had said it was the big boss calling him home, and emphasized “big.” His actual commander in Task Force Trident was two-star Marine Major General Bradley Middleton, and the general’s only boss was whoever happened to be the president of the United States.
More than a decade had passed since terrorists had flown fuel-packed civilian airlines into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and the Pennsylvania dirt. In response, the entire U.S. government had reshaped itself both at home and abroad to make sure such attacks never happened again, and that gave birth to the behemoth Homeland Security Department. Even that wasn’t enough, because the inevitable bureaucratic friction soon appeared along the seams of the various departments. Numerous plots had been foiled since 9/11, involving crude devices like explosive shoes and underwear, which proved the system worked as long as people remained alert and paranoid enough to maintain their vigilance.
There were always going to be maniacs out there who would try to kill Americans, but airplane hijackers had lost their advantage. The nature of air travel had changed dramatically: Now there were tedious searches by TSA workers before boarding, flight attendants would willingly die rather than open the cockpit door, and every passenger on the plane, from a semipro athlete to a college girl, was ready to jump on a hijacker like a pack of crazed dogs. The willingness of a terrorist to give up his life to achieve his goal was of no use when his targets were equally as willing to die to stop him.
The military had also finally changed to accept the talents of Special Forces; elite operations like the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy SEALs, and the futuristic technology of remote-controlled drones, had changed the landscape of the battlefield. The Pentagon had met the challenge of terrorism head-on, as had the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the rest of the alphabet agencies.
Nevertheless, there were still holes in the protection net, for publicity, budgets, congressional oversight, and the huge numbers of people supporting and carrying out any operation always tended to multiply over time. The heroes had become known. It had been a short step from that inevitability to the creation of Task Force Trident by people who still cared fervently about secrecy.
Trident was invisible by military standards, with a total roster of only five people, including General Middleton, who ran the show. The offices were in a hard-to-find area of the Pentagon, and the budget came out of Homeland Security via the Department of Agriculture. The team was far outside any chain of command other than Middleton’s reach to the president.
Sybelle Summers was the ops officer, and Master Gunnery Sergeant O. O. Dawkins handled the administrative end, working the inner paths of Pentagon power. Double-Oh could borrow anything in the arsenal, from individual troops to stealth bombers for a Trident mission. The team’s only non-Marine was a squid, Commander Benton Freedman of the Navy, a quirky geek whose proprietary electronic net could kick the combined computer butts of Google and Facebook without breaking a sweat. They called him “the Lizard,” a corruption of his college nickname of “Wizard.” Swanson handled the wet work. Few people even knew about Trident, but the president always knew where they were, in case they were needed. Like now.
He left his seat, went to the head with his Dopp kit, and studied his reflection as he shaved. Swanson was not a big man, standing five feet nine inches, and weighed exactly 176 pounds, with sandy brown hair. Only yesterday, he had been a beach bum wearing baggy board shorts, and now he was back in his Trident uniform of jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt. His Marine dress blues, on a hanger in Washington, carried the three gold stripes and two rockers on the sleeves to denote his USMC rank of gunnery sergeant, with rows of ribbons and awards, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. He loved the uniform and the Corps, which had been his home during long years of training, fieldwork, and assignments around the world and had taught him the trade of the sniper. In doing so, it had honed him into a fierce weapon.
He seldom wore the blues these days; he worked in places where he dressed the part he was playing. Jeans and sweatshirts today, maybe a business suit tomorrow, with authentic credentials to match the character.
Swanson cleaned his face of leftover lather, replaced the razor, then picked up the alleged sandwich and a can of tomato juice on his way back to his seat. The sandwich was tasteless. He took a few deep breaths, and his mind continued the shift back into the counterintelligence mode. It was like time travel, bridging the freedom he had enjoyed during the past few weeks back into the complex and deadly world of Trident, where only the mission existed.
He went to sleep to the hum of the dual engines, leapfrogging in time as the plane moved eastward. The four-hour flight would arrive in Maryland seven hours after he left California. Three hours he wouldn’t get to live.
The descent to land at Andrews was swift. The plane circled quickly and dropped into the approach path of the most exclusive airport in America, the one that Air Force One, the president’s official plane, called home. It was too dark for Kyle to see the trees when the little jet’s tires squealed as they caught the runway. The front tilted down until the forward wheels made contact, the reverse thrusters screamed, and the brakes clamped hard to slow the bird.
“We’re here, Gunny,” said the copilot as he stepped out of the cabin. “The flight OK for you?”
“Anytime the landings come out even with the takeoffs is good by me,” Kyle replied with a grin.
“Ain’t it the truth.” The pilot popped open the small hatch and dropped the stairs. “Snowing out there. Watch your step going down, it’ll be slickery.”
Sybelle Summers was waiting on the tarmac nearby beside an old Ford Crown Vic with a single blue light blinking brightly atop its roof. She was as tall as Kyle, with a classic face that never carried much makeup, and snowflakes were catching on the black hair cut to collar length. She wore leg-hugging stretch twill black pants and soft boots, a white sweater of Irish wool, a gray scarf hung loosely around her neck, a rock of a Rolex, and a lot of attitude. The only woman ever to pass the Marine Recon course, she had become a special ops and counterterrorism expert and was on a fast track to someday become a general, if she lived that long. There was nobody Kyle would rather have at his side if the going got rough.
Tonight, she had her game face on. A worn black leather gun belt was buckled around her waist, and a big gold badge flashed on her right hip, just in front of the holstered Glock 19.
“Working undercover, Lieutenant Colonel Summers?” he asked.
She thrust a padded nylon briefcase at him. It was zipped closed. “Homeland Security creds for you tonight and your .45 Colt ACP, loaded and racked with one in the chamber. Grab your gear and get in the car.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“This guy we were meeting tonight? He’s dead.”
2
The big car had a winter coat of scuffed black paint and dirty curtains of slush caked around the tires. Sybelle was at the wheel, and the big V-8 was thrumming at idle. After two weeks on the beach in California, the icy cold of the wet Washington winter slapped Kyle before he had even thrown his bags in the rear seat. When he climbed in front, the heater was blasting to fight the chill. Sybelle turned on the full rack of lights behind the grille and in the rear window, and a cop who had been waiting for her signal stepped into traffic and held up a hand to stop all oncoming vehicles. Bundled in a black jacket with a fur-lined hood and thick gloves, he looked like a grizzly bear. With a double yelp of siren to warn those in front, Sybelle took off.