Authors: Stephen England
The CHRYSALIS cabin
West Virginia
“You know, this could look like a postcard.”
Harry glanced up from the laptop’s screen, from the Korsakov dossier he’d been poring over. Carol was standing beside the kitchen window, staring out at the falling snow.
“Stay away from the windows,” he said, watching her out of the corner of his eye. Small as they were, hardened as they might be—there was no sense in not taking precautions.
There was no response, and for a moment he wondered if she had even heard his words. She took another
long sip of her coffee. “A Christmas postcard.”
He rose from his chair and crossed the kitchen to stand behind her. She was right. It did look a lot like a postcard—wet, heavy flakes falling straight down out of a gray sky, coating the mountainside in a heavy blanket. Weighing down the evergreens. “As well it should,” he said, placing a hand on her waist, “with Christmas only ten days away. It
is
a beautiful sight.”
“It’s hard to think of Christmas, with him gone.” She looked up into his eyes. “I did love him, Harry. I truly did, despite all the years apart.”
She didn’t pull away from his hand. “He knew that,” Harry whispered, his lips only inches away from her ear. He took a deep breath, trying to ignore the emotions roiling within his heart. This wasn’t safe, caring never was. He had to focus on the mission. Say what needed to be said—what she needed to hear. “And he loved you more than life itself.”
Minutes passed before she spoke again, a long, ragged sigh escaping her. “When I was three, he came home for Christmas. Home from where, I don’t know. All I know is he brought me a
matryoshka
.”
A genuine smile touched his lips. “A wooden nesting doll.”
“Yes,” she replied, watching the steam rise up from the mug of coffee in her hands. “Dolls within dolls, each one smaller than the next. It was the last Christmas present he gave me as a child. The next year, he was just gone.”
There was nothing to say, so Harry didn’t say anything. Sometimes silence was the only effective tactic.
Tactic
. He could have cursed himself for thinking of it that way.
“Half a dozen times I nearly threw it away,” Carol continued. “I hated him so much for leaving us. But I could never quite bring myself to it. It was only as I grew older that I realized my father was a lot like the
matryoshka
. Layers within layers, hardness concealing the man beneath. A man I could forgive—a man I could love.”
Her voice caught and she stopped talking abruptly. Harry just stood there, wanting to say something, but the words felt empty on his lips. It was the price of having spent a lifetime dealing in manipulation and deceit. Soon, you didn’t know how to handle a relationship without manipulation—and you couldn’t care for anyone you were playing.
There was nothing he could say to her that he hadn’t said a thousand times before, working an angle. Nothing.
He stepped back, suddenly aware of her warmth, of his hand on her waist, of their closeness.
“I’m getting worried about Sammy,” he announced, changing the subject as he moved to the window—ignoring his own advice. “He should have been back by now.”
“He
is
back,” a cold voice announced from the stairs to the bunker. Startled, Harry and Carol turned almost as one.
Samuel Han stood there across the kitchen from them, still dressed in his parka, his snow-encrusted boots dripping onto the wooden floor.
His Sig-Sauer was drawn, held loosely to his side. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
9:30 A.M.
Dulles International Airport
Virginia
On a normal December day, Dulles would have been crowded with holiday travelers. The sight of the lone Gulfstream on the tarmac, surrounded by blacked-out Suburbans, was a reminder that this day was anything but normal.
Following the bombing at Langley, National Terrorism Advisory alerts had gone out across the country, and all civilian air traffic into the District of Columbia had been diverted.
Unfortunately, Vic thought as he pushed open the door of his SUV, the same could not be said for ground traffic. Even with their official status, the trip from Alexandria to Dulles had taken over an hour. With suspects still on the loose, the government had decided to minimize the panic by restricting media access. It was having the opposite effect.
A drug deal gone bad ten blocks from the Capitol earlier in the morning had resulted in three DOAs—and brushfire rumors that it was another terrorist attack.
Klaus Jicha was standing near the stairs of the Gulfstream as Vic and Marika approached.
“Everyone ready?” Jicha asked, looking pointedly at his watch. The HRT leader was a huge man, towering above Vic. A knit cap was pulled down low over his ears to the back of his collar, obscuring what there was of a short, very thick neck. Overall, it gave him the appearance of an immense bulldog.
Altmann nodded, extending a hand. “I’m Agent Altmann, the Special Agent in Charge. We’ll be ready as soon as your men can load up.”
“You’ve had my men sitting on their thumbs for the last forty-five minutes, S-A-C.” Jicha ignored the proffered hand.
“Unexpectedly heavy traffic, Agent Jicha,” she retorted, not backing down an inch. “We’re coordinating with local LEOs to clear the route on the way back out. It’s still going to be a long ride, so I trust your team has packed MREs.”
Vic took a look up at the sky, at the sun beating down on the mounds of dirt-brown snow piled up at the edges of the airport. “Why can’t we go in by air? A couple Blackhawks and we could be there by zero-eleven hundred. It’d give us a much better target window.”
Altmann and Jicha exchanged glances, then the big man cleared his throat. “It’s snowing in West Virginia, Caruso. Nothing’s flying in or out. We go in by road, or we don’t go in at all. Now, let’s get this circus on the road.”
9:32 A.M.
The CHRYSALIS cabin
West Virginia
“What are you playing at, Sammy?” Harry demanded, taking a step forward to place himself between Carol and Han.
The Sig-Sauer came up, held rock-steady in the SEAL’s hands. It was about the only thing that was steady, fire blazing in Han’s eyes. “You said you weren’t followed—you
promised
me you weren’t.”
Harry shook his head, moving another cautious step. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was just a matter of getting close enough to take the gun…
“I’m talking about Russians—Korsakov and his team.”
“Here?”
“You’ve got that straight,” Han replied. “I found tracks on the northern ridge—two men. They were watching the cabin last night.”
Harry shook his head. “It’s deer season, Sammy, hunters all over these mountains—what makes you think it was
Spetsnaz
?”
“I followed them.” The pistol was wavering now, perspiration flecking Han’s brow. “I tracked them through the snow to the road and found them by their vehicle. They were packing serious heat—automatic weapons. It looked like a command and control vehicle.”
Harry exchanged glances with Carol. Something had gone horribly wrong. He made a cautious move toward Han, his hand outstretched. “We can work through this, Sammy. We’ve done it before. Just give me the gun—don’t want anybody getting hurt here.”
“That’s impossible, Nichols,” Han replied, staring at Harry down the barrel of his semiautomatic. “People always get hurt when you come around—like you’re some sort of grim reaper. I should never have let you stay.”
It took everything in him not to flinch at the words, but he’d been walling up his emotions for years. You learned not to take anything personally. “I got you into this, Sammy,” Harry began, watching the eyes of his old compatriot, “and I’ll get you out. You have my word.”
The former SEAL laughed, a short, sneering bark. “Your
word
? I know exactly what that’s worth. Or have you forgotten that I worked with you? That I was like you once? We did what was best for the mission, the devil take everything and everyone else. And you haven’t changed. No, Harry, you’re not getting me out. You’re staying here.”
Harry looked from the face of his old friend, out through the window into the driving snow. It wasn’t like they had many other options. At length, he nodded. “All right, Sammy. We’ll play this your way.”
4:57 P.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
When the cellphone in his pocket buzzed with an incoming text, Carter was grabbing a double espresso in the CIA’s cafeteria. Anything to keep himself awake for the ride home.
Ron placed a ten-dollar bill down on the counter and flipped the phone open as he waited for his change. Inflation being what it was, there wouldn’t be much of it.
There were two words printed there on the screen. CALL ME.
It wasn’t a request.
Thirty-five cents. The change almost wasn’t worth taking, but Ron swept it into his pocket all the same, dialing a number as he headed for the door.
“What’s going on?” he asked when the phone was picked up on the second ring.
“That’s what I was going to ask you.” Tex’s voice. “I’d like to know why a full surveillance team has been dedicated to my apartment.”
“Word around the office is that they wanted you pulled back in and put on the box. Kranemeyer told the Banker you’d gone hunting. My guess is that someone’s checking out his story.”
“Anything else?”
Carter cast a long look around as he reached his car. The number of guards overseeing parking had been doubled ever since the bombing that had taken Ames’ life.
“Yeah,” he said, sliding into the driver’s seat of the Hyundai. He fingered the USB flash drive in his pocket as though assuring himself of its presence. A deep breath. “We need to meet.”
5:24 P.M.
The CHRYSALIS cabin
West Virginia
There was one fundamental truth about high-capacity magazines, one that every shooter—from the weekend marksman to the clandestine operator—knew.
They took many times longer to fill than they did to empty. Which is why you didn’t want to be reloading them in the middle of a firefight.
Harry extended his thumb, pressing a twentieth cartridge between the aluminum lips of the SCAR’s magazine. He didn’t like being on the defensive, but there wasn’t much choice. Prepare for war.
Carol was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up nearly to her chin as she leaned back against the wall of the bedroom. There was an open box of .308 beside her, the long brass cartridges looking strangely out of place in her hands.
She must have felt his eyes on her, because she looked up suddenly, meeting his gaze.
It was a self-conscious moment, for a reason he couldn’t quite place his finger on. He cleared his throat, looking away as he placed the loaded magazine beside the SCAR.
“Sammy seems better now,” she observed.
Harry nodded. “It’s the PTSD. Some guys experience claustrophobia—panic attacks. Sammy—he was never like that. He just got angry. It comes and goes.”
There was a long moment before she spoke again, but he could see the question in her eyes. Dreaded it. “What he said—was it true?”
“About me?”
A nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak. He turned back to his work—unable to look her in the eye. Holding the magazine upright in his hand, he inserted it into the mag well of the SCAR, pulling back on the charging handle. Locked and loaded. “Yeah, it’s all true. Every last word of it.”
Silence. He reached for an empty magazine and a fresh box of cartridges. “I’ve done a lot of things in fifteen years. Regret many of them.”
“Why?”
“You asked how I ended up at Langley.”
No response. It didn’t matter. Why he’d decided to tell her he didn’t know, but he was certain that it was a bad decision.
“It wasn’t a childhood dream.” An ironic half-smile touched his face. “Anything but. I was studying at Georgetown in ’97—my junior year.”
Harry glanced over and could see her mentally calculating the years. He smiled. “My folks were serious over-achievers—I entered college early. The Agency came knocking in the fall of that year. They were recruiting for their Middle Eastern desk, and well, that was my area of studies. Langley was just starting to wake up to their need of people who knew the region, its people, its languages. I’d always loved languages, loved learning them, watching how they related to each other. But the intelligence community wasn’t for me. I had other plans for my life. So I turned them down.”
He couldn’t read the expression on her face, but she had stopped loading. No way to tell if that was bad or good. He slipped another brass cartridge into the SCAR’s magazine, testing the tension spring with his thumb. “My best friend didn’t. His name was Robert, but everybody called him Rob. As the only two Christians in our class, we’d grown close. Brothers in all but blood, as the saying goes. He signed an agreement with Langley allowing him to finish out his Georgetown classes via e-mail. That wasn’t common back in those days. I’ll never forget that last day in the dorm room, kneeling together in prayer as he prepared to leave. I didn’t realize then that I’d never see him again—alive.”
“What happened?” Carol asked, her voice quiet.
He took a deep breath. Hadn’t allowed himself to think about it in a long time.
Years.
“As typical of a bureaucracy, Langley had woken up to their need of his skills several years too late. The following August, a man named Mohammed al-‘Owhali drove a truck filled with TNT and aluminum nitrate into the American embassy in Kenya. Rob had been assigned to Station Nairobi, as an analyst. He was killed instantly.”
“And you joined the Agency?”
“It didn’t take the seventh son of a seventh son to see what was coming—all you needed to understand was the theology of fundamentalist Islam, the nature of its people. Most Americans still don’t know how much money the
Ikhwan
poured into Stateside universities in the ‘90s, trying to keep this country blinded. It worked.”
He saw her nod at the mention of the Muslim Brothers. She knew.
“And you never looked back?”
It was a long time before he could answer the question, or at least it seemed that way. His vision narrowed, the weak light of the Coleman glittering off the brass in his hand. When he spoke, it took a mighty effort.
“Nothing there,” he replied, looking down at his hands. “There’s no going back once you’ve taken the mark of Cain.”
6:07 P.M.
The Denny’s
Elkins, West Virginia
“What’s their ETA?” Korsakov asked, leaning across the booth toward Viktor. It was only the third time he had asked in the past forty minutes.
The boy waved dismissively, focusing in on the laptop. “Ten minutes.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“They’re updating,
tovarisch
. The weather is a problem.”
That was for certain. Monitoring the progress of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was maddeningly slow work. “They’ll need a couple hours to get in place in this snow. We should have time.”
“What are they using for intel support?”
The boy took another sip of his Coca-Cola, glancing at the image of the polar bear on the glass bottle. “A KH-13 spy satellite—equipped with thermal imaging.”
Yuri swore, his eyes fixed on Korsakov’s face. “They’ll see us the moment we go in.”
Viktor held up a finger, a smile dancing in his eyes. “Unless…”
“Unless
what
, Viktor?” Korsakov demanded. It was clear that the boy was enjoying himself, but time was critical. No time for games.
“The spy sat will come in range in the next hour. Three hours over target. Then, gone.”
Yuri shook his head. “No good. They could launch the assault any time within the window—we have to be on that mountain.”
“
Nichevo
,” Viktor replied. It was his moment of triumph. “It won’t matter if their network is blinded by a worm.”
“You can do this?” Korsakov could have laughed.
A smile. “
Da
.”
6:21 P.M.
The National Mall
Washington, D.C.
He wasn’t cut out for field work. That much Ron Carter knew. If he’d ever held any romantic delusions of the spy business, they were evaporating as the grass of the National Mall crunched beneath his feet.
It was a deuce of a place for a covert meeting. If he had to have guessed, Thomas had picked the spot. The New Yorker had always had a regrettable flair for the dramatic.
On any normal night, the mall would have been filled with tourists, enjoying the sight of D.C. after dark. It was deserted now.
A lone security guard walked past, pushing his bike over the icy grass. He didn’t give Carter a second glance.
On a bench near the WWII memorial, Carter found the signal, a vertical line of yellow chalk against the wood. What was this, the Cold War?
He brushed the dusting of snow off the bench and sat down, easing the strap of the laptop case off his shoulder.
The HP booted up quickly and he went to work, preparing.
The sound of footsteps—someone moving off to his left and Ron glanced up, his fingers trembling. Was every moment in the field like this?
It was nothing, just a drunk moving up the pathway—his swaying form backlit by the lights of the Memorial. As Carter watched, the wino tilted a small bottle of vodka back and emptied it in a single draught.
Ron shook his head, turning back to his laptop. He found himself wondering if the drunk would survive the night.
Singing, as the man wavered closer—an off-key rendition of a rap song. He was about to pass the bench when he turned suddenly, placing a hand on Carter’s knee. “How’s it goin’?”
Thomas’s voice. Ron nearly came out of his skin. “Don’t do that to me!” he exclaimed, punctuating his words with a curse. A flair for the dramatic. Yeah, right.
Thomas collapsed onto the bench beside him, laughing. “I thought that was one of my better impressions. Had enough practice.”
“Could we get down to business?” Tex materialized out of the darkness from the opposite direction.
Carter nodded. It was going to take hours for his heart rate to go back down. He inserted his thumb drive into the USB port of the laptop and brought up a picture. “Can you tell me who this is?”
Tex took a seat. “It looks like Harry sitting there with his back to the camera—the other man’s Sammy Han.”
“Yeah, I know, those are obvious,” Carter replied. “Look at the woman sitting at the
other
table. I had to digitally enhance her face.”
He heard Thomas’s sharp intake of breath, and knew that he was right. “That’s Rhoda Stevens—when was this shot taken?”
“January of 2013. Over eight months after I attended her funeral.”
7:19 P.M.
The CHRYSALIS cabin
“With any luck, we should be able to take out roughly half of the assault team at the entry point,” Han observed, looking up from his work. He finished taping the last packet of C-4 to the frame of the door and tested the knob. Locked. Reaching up, he unfastened the heavy deadbolt. It was going to stay that way. A strong kick would send the door
crashing inward—and detonate the explosives. “Any idea of Korsakov’s actual strength?”
Harry shook his head.
“Oh, joy,” the SEAL murmured. “At least tell me you have an estimate.”
“Judging from his previous ops, I’d say he brought 10-15 men into the country. Two of them are dead. You do the math.”
“We can figure on at least three-quarters of them assaulting the house—probably Korsakov himself will hold back to provide command and control—a few snipers in the treeline.” Han gestured from the wired door and windows down the long corridor that led to the bunker. “We’ve got the two Claymores in the corridor—they should take out more of the assaulters if we camouflage them well enough. Any survivors? They’ll be caught between you and I when they enter the bunker—enfilading fields of fire. No chance to react. No quarter.”
The former SEAL paused as the reality of his own words washed over him. His body shuddered and he leaned against the doorframe. “I don’t know if I can do this, Harry. You give two decades of your life to your country and what do you get out of it? A broken marriage—a wife that hangs up every time you call. Two little boys that don’t even remember they once called you ‘daddy’. Visions of the men you’ve killed haunting you at night. It doesn’t matter how much they deserved to die—you don’t remember that when they visit you in your dreams. I don’t need any new ghosts.”
Harry looked up from wiring the Claymore mines. Linked together, they would spray the passageway with ball bearings, eviscerating anything in their path. “I know, Sammy.”
“I know you do—you think I’d bother telling someone who didn’t understand?” Han walked over and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “We were brothers once, you and I—and I would give my life for yours. I’m not going to desert you now. But I
will
remember your role in bringing this day to pass.”