Jonathan saw them just as she said the words—two round, red reflectors of the type you might see on a bicycle, mounted at about ten feet to two massive hardwoods that rose like columns from the ground to the sky. If he used his imagination, Jonathan could see a snow-covered path—it would be a vast overstatement to call it a roadway—that led deeper into the woods.
“I think that’s it,” Jonathan said. “The GPS shows that we’re right on it.”
“Well, let’s be sure,” Boxers said. “Because once we start up there, we won’t be turning around for a while.”
Yelena leaned forward until her head was even with theirs. “Are you sure you can fit it there at all?”
Boxers turned the wheel and gunned the engine to get traction. “The important parts will.” He fishtailed just a little as he threaded the needle through the trees, shearing the right-hand sideview mirror from its mount. He laughed. “I’ve always said that nothing performs like a rental car.”
Jonathan made a mental note to have Venice scare up the name of a local body shop.
Over the course of the next half mile or so, the pathway opened up a little, but not much. If another vehicle were coming the opposite direction, there would have been an interesting standoff.
“Here we go,” Jonathan said at last. He pointed toward another gap in the trees. “That’s the entrance to Striker’s property.” From the looks of the ground, no one had driven this way in several snowstorms. The coating of white was pristine, undisturbed.
Boxers made the hard left, this time clearing the tree sentries with room to spare.
“This Striker guy,” David said. “He doesn’t like people very much, does he?”
Jonathan chuckled at the understatement. “No, he doesn’t. Never did, actually.” While Oppenheimer had delivered Jonathan in and out of more than a few hotspots, the SOAR guys didn’t interact all that much with the Unit guys outside training and missions—Fort Campbell was a long way from Fort Bragg—so all Jonathan knew of the guy was that he seemed intense, intelligent, and, frankly, scary. He took wild chances and had the medals to prove it, but Striker’s heroism came with a suicidal edge that made Jonathan nervous.
Jonathan had seen Striker only once since the man had retired on disability, and on that occasion—a training seminar on infiltration strategies—Striker seemed . . . spent. To Jonathan, it seemed that when that bullet took away his ability to fly for Uncle Sam, it took away the pilot’s sense of self. He didn’t like people enough to return to headquarters as an instructor, and, from what Jonathan picked up through scuttlebutt, he’d just sort of disappeared to the old family homestead in Vermont and surrounded himself with the mechanical creatures he loved.
The Cadillac struggled some with the depth of the snow on the ground, but Boxers plowed on, never letting up on the throttle, and somehow finding traction despite bottoming out more than once.
The Oppenheimer spread was an impressive one, easily thirty acres, an equal mix of woods and fields. Being this remote, and knowing Striker’s personality, Jonathan imagined that Oppenheimer was a survivalist at heart, living off the vegetables he could grow in the short summers and the meat he could shoot from his kitchen window.
“This is beautiful,” Yelena said.
“A real slice of New England,” Becky agreed. “The way Norman Rockwell pictured it.”
Even the clapboard farmhouse looked like something from a postcard, with its gables and a wraparound porch that appeared to surround the entire structure. The house sat atop the long, gradual slope that rose from the opening in the fence, and as they came closer, what had initially looked like three large barns became more obvious as hangars for Striker’s pet helicopters. Protected from the direct wind and snow by heavy timber walls, the double doors on one of the structures was gapped just enough to make out the unmistakable nose of a Vietnam-era UH-1 Huey. It was officially called an Iroquois, but Jonathan couldn’t remember a single time that he had heard anyone refer to it that way.
“Park next to the Suburban,” Jonathan said, pointing to the forest green SUV that sat either in the yard or in the driveway. It was impossible to tell which.
As they pulled to a stop, Boxers asked, “How do you want to play it? He’s always been a little twitchy.”
“We’re just old friends who are paying a visit,” Jonathan said. “I briefed him on the phone, and Mother Hen was supposed to call him and remind him we were on the way.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s not still twitchy,” Boxers said.
He made a valid point. “Y’all stay in the truck till we get everything settled,” Jonathan said to the others.
Jonathan didn’t own any winter camouflage gear, so he and Boxers had opted for their standard black 5.11 Tactical kit, minus the ballistic vests and heavy rucks, which they left in the vehicle. Jonathan made sure that his Colt was visible and accessible. He didn’t expect to use it, but twitchy people tended to get twitchier if they thought you were trying to conceal a weapon from them. If the weapon was in plain sight, they didn’t feel duped.
Up close, where the paint was peeling, and the sag in the porch steps was obvious, the house lost a lot of its charm.
Jonathan climbed the four steps to the porch and stomped his feet, ostensibly to remove the snow from his boots, but also to make as much approaching noise as he could.
He’d just raised his hand to knock when the door pulled open.
Striker beamed a delighted smile. “Jonny-boy,” he said, pushing open the fraying screen door. He’d lost a lot of weight and grown a lot of beard since Jonathan had last seen him, and his bald pate—now ringed with gray rather than black—gleamed white as bone. His pallor, combined with his Santa beard, painted a picture of ill health. The cane didn’t help to improve the image.
Jonathan extended his hand. “Hello, Striker,” he said.
“I don’t answer to that name anymore, Jonny. Call me Carl.”
“Only if you call me Digger. I’ve
never
responded to Jonny.”
“It’s a deal.” As they shook, Carl’s hand felt cold.
“You remember Boxers,” Jonathan said, gesturing to Big Guy.
Another big smile. “The man who always caused me to rework my fuel charts.”
Boxers didn’t much like being teased about his size, but he managed a smile anyway as he shook Carl’s hand.
“Come on in, boys,” Carl said. “Let’s get caught up.”
“I have some other people to introduce you to,” Jonathan said. He waved for the others in the car to join him. “One of them is going to startle you a little.”
Becky led the way up the stairs, followed by David, and then Yelena. Jonathan introduced them one at a time, and then, when it came to Yelena, he paused for a moment for the recognition to materialize. The First Lady still wore her frumpy clothes, but she had removed all the feature-altering prosthetics.
Carl scowled. “Why are we all looking at each other like this?”
“I just wanted to give you a moment to recognize her.”
Carl added pursed lips to his scowl. “Do we know each other? Please don’t tell me I fathered one of your children.”
Jonathan suppressed a laugh, but of course Boxers didn’t, and Yelena just looked appalled.
“This is Anna Darmond,” Jonathan said, and Yelena presented a demure hand.
“Hi, Anna.” Carl shook her hand—her fingers, really, the way you’re supposed to shake a lady’s hand if you’re of a certain age. “Why do I sense that I should have just heard a deep organ chord when I did that?”
Boxers crossed his arms and smiled even more broadly. “Yeah, Boss, why is that?”
Jonathan felt himself blushing.
Becky took a shot at it. “Anna Darmond,” she said. “
The
Anna Darmond.”
“Are there a lot of them to choose from?” Carl wasn’t getting it.
“She’s the First Lady of the United States,” Becky said. She seemed to take pride in uttering the syllables.
“Huh,” Carl said. “Well, welcome to Vermont. I gotta tell you, though, you needn’t campaign here. Tony’s got my vote for sure.”
“I bet he doesn’t tomorrow,” Boxers said.
Jonathan shot him a glare.
“Come on in, have a seat and get warm.”
The inside of Carl’s house hadn’t seen a dust cloth in a very long time. The low-angled morning light made the sun itself look dirty as it shined through the cloud of motes. The fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room was packed with mismatched furniture, making it look smaller than it actually was. Lots of old-style guns-and-cannons early American upholstery on sagging, overstuffed cushions. Jonathan noticed as many kerosene hurricane lamps as modern ones, calling into question the reliability of the electrical service. The heat from the woodstove made Jonathan wish he’d worn shorts and a T-shirt.
One chair in particular—the one that sat closest to the front window—was surrounded by well-read and bookmarked magazines. At a glance, Jonathan saw copes of
Flying
,
Helicopter
, and
Aviation Week.
Given the collection of pornography that adorned the walls, everything from the merely risqué to truly offensive, he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see copies of
Woman Pilot
in the mix as well.
“Sit, sit, sit,” Carl said. He made a beeline for his chair, and let the rest fend for themselves. After he sat, he lifted a mason jar half-filled with clear liquid. “Can I offer anyone some vodka?” he asked. Then he looked to Jonathan. “Oh, that’s right, you’re a scotch fan. I can put some shoe polish in it for you.”
The others were appalled, but Jonathan got it as the joke it was. He was also halfway surprised that Boxers didn’t take him up on the offer.
“So,” Carl said, clapping his hands together. “I understand that we’re going to invade Canada.”
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR
T
he first thing Nicholas noted as consciousness returned was that he had free access to his hands. Clearly time had passed—it was nowhere near as dark as it had been before—but as far as his brain was concerned, he’d been in the back of the van just a second ago, talking to—
“Josef!” he said. His vocal cords sounded crusty, and his voice came as a hoarse whisper. His eyes snapped open. “Joey, are you here?”
It took effort to sit up. His body felt beaten—bruised and stiff. As he rose, a heavy wool blanket fell away, and he felt enveloped by a shroud of cold.
“Joey?”
He heard a snore from behind him, and he turned to see his son on the floor, likewise wrapped in a heavy blanket identical to his, a sort of red-and-blue tartan plaid. Josef’s eyes were closed and his face looked peaceful, his color good. Nicholas moved to wake him, then decided not to. What would be the point? Let the boy sleep through all the worry.
Awareness came in fragments. Nicholas sat in a tiny unfurnished room whose floor was made of heavy wood and whose walls were stone. Up high, near the ten-foot ceiling, cold air rolled in through a half-moon window that was blocked with bars.
Could this be a prison?
Stupid question. It could be anything at all, just as this could be any day at all. Given the temperature of the place, it could even be Russia. And that would be the place they would be taken, wouldn’t it? Why else would Russian-speaking kidnappers snatch them away in the middle of the night?
Could this be Tony Darmond’s way of getting rid of the familial thorns in his side?
He pushed it away. That was the dullness of his brain talking. Even if weren’t preposterous, it would make more sense just to kill them. To keep them around was just a liability. No, this was about something, but that wasn’t it.
As he twisted in place to stretch his back, he noticed that someone had dressed him in a thick sweat suit. They’d even put heavy socks on his feet. Was it ridiculous to feel gratitude toward your kidnapper? Was that what the famed Stockholm syndrome was all about?
He brought his legs under him to stand, and he realized that his bladder was full to bursting. In the same moment, he saw the old style chamber pot throne in the corner, with a roll of toilet paper on the floor next to it.
“Oh, wait till Josef sees this,” he mumbled aloud.
Gathered with the rest around the steel-and-Formica dining room table, Carl Oppenheimer seemed pretty much disinterested in knowing
why
they were invading Canada, but completely absorbed in the how of it all.
Jonathan shared the latest satellite imagery of Saint Stephen’s Reformatory, now just over an hour old. What he saw concerned him.
“Last night, there were no guards outside this facility at all,” he observed. “Now they’ve got them at the main gate, and then outside the entrances to the interior buildings. He zoomed in with the SkysEye imagery and saw men that were dressed in various styles of heavy clothing, each of them holding a rifle that was either at a loose port arms or slung over their shoulder.
“No uniforms,” Boxers said. “That’s encouraging.”
“Why?” David asked.
“Because it implies a lower level of organization and training.”
“Implies?” Yelena asked.
“Nothing’s certain in this business, ma’am,” Jonathan said.
“I saw
Black Hawk Down
,” Becky said. “Untrained people can do a lot of damage.”
Jonathan didn’t reply. He’d lost some friends in that battle, and didn’t want to open the door to all that.
Carl remained silent as he studied the photos, and then turned his attention to the topographical maps along with some flight charts he’d pulled out of a file cabinet next to the woodstove.
“If you’re thinking of fast-roping into there, I can’t help you,” Carl said. “We’d get shot out of the sky and I’ve got no suppressing fire.” His expression turned apologetic. “I bought a pair of seventies-era miniguns on the Internet a few weeks ago, but I won’t be able to get them in shape in time.”
“Jesus,” Boxers said.
Jonathan kept a straight face. “Just as well. I wasn’t thinking about a three-thousand-rounds-per-minute spray and slay anyway.”
“Spray and slay?” Becky said. “Really? This is funny poetry to you?”
“I didn’t know that I was trying to be funny,” Jonathan said.
Boxers added, “And it’s a damn fine tactic when a bunch of people are trying to make you dead.”
Becky opened her mouth to say something, but Jonathan silenced her with a raised hand. “Nope,” he said. “Both points have been made. The topic is closed.”
Jonathan had no compunction against using overwhelming force to send bad guys to their maker, but in this case, where every round from the minigun that did not hit its target would travel on for miles until it found a different one, the weapon posed too high a risk for the population of Ottawa.
“I was thinking we’d come in from the water,” Jonathan said. “There’s a place on the outskirts of Ottawa, a warehouse on Ridge Road, where there’s going to be a car and a boat waiting for us. It’s mostly in the middle of nowhere, a hundred twelve miles from here as the crow flies. I figure Boxers will fly us to that spot, and we’ll offload.”
“Big Guy isn’t flying anything,” Carl said. “I’m the only one who flies my birds.” The reversion back to code names was not lost on Jonathan. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it felt significant.
“Striker, I can’t do that to you,” Jonathan said.
“I won’t let anyone else risk their lives for me,” Yelena said.
“How’d I get on the short friggin’ list of honor?” Boxers growled. To Carl, he said, “I’ll fight you for the pilot’s seat if you’d like.” That came with just enough of a smile for it not to be offensive.
“No need to fight,” Carl said. “You’ve got no bargaining power. My birds, my fuel, my rules.”
“We’ll pay you,” Jonathan said. “No one expects you to foot the bill for this.”
“You going to go to jail for me if you crash my chopper on Canadian soil?”
“You’d rather be the one to crash it?” Jonathan said.
Striker’s pallor reddened up. “I’ve never crashed anything. Even after my foot was blown off, I kept that aircraft in the air.” He pointed a finger at Boxers. “Can you say that you’ve never crashed anything?”
Big Guy recoiled from the question, then smiled. “I could say it,” he said. Boxers was as good a pilot as Jonathan had ever seen, but thanks to circumstances that were mostly beyond his control, he’d endured a few hard landings along the way.
“Um,” Jonathan said. That was it. Just “um.” He needed to word his next question carefully. “The stakes are really high here, Carl. Be honest with me. And with yourself. I can’t help but notice the cane. Are you really up for this anymore?”
Carl bristled, and then recovered, all over the course of maybe a second. He looked like he wanted to make a speech, but smiled instead. Jonathan was beginning to dislike the smile. Carl nodded once and said, “Yes.”
Jonathan recognized the challenge to mix it up more, but he let it go. He sensed that Striker somehow needed this mission. He was reckless back when he did this every day. Jonathan had no desire to die on an op because some cowboy pilot couldn’t do his job.
For right now, though, Carl had one undeniably good point: Jonathan had no leverage. He supposed he could create it if he needed it—hell, he could steal the chopper from him if it came to that—but the ripple effect of that as word spread through the Community would be devastating to Jonathan’s business. Worse, it would undo a reputation for integrity that he’d spent a lifetime building.
Rule one in Jonathan’s unofficial code: You never betray a friend.
They had time yet.
“How much equipment do you have to transport?” Striker asked. Just like that, it was back to business.
“All of us,” Jonathan said, “plus about four hundred pounds of weapons and equipment.”
“How much of that do you expect to expend?”
Jonathan shifted in his seat. It was bad form to discuss the practical details of a raid in front of people who found the phrase “spray and slay” offensive.
“Hopefully, none of it,” Jonathan said. “In a perfect world, we’ll knock on the door and they’ll hand over the PCs without argument.” He looked at Becky as he spoke, and she looked away.
“As a practical matter, probably a lot,” he said to Carl.
“Are any of your weapons traceable?” Striker’s entire demeanor had changed. The aging hippie vibe had been replaced with the soldier he used to be.
“No,” Jonathan said.
“What have you—”
“Let’s just leave it at no,” Jonathan interrupted. “Nothing’s traceable.” The reality was that Jonathan retooled the barrels and receivers of all of his weapons after they’d been used on an op, and during all that work, his bare skin never touched the weapons. It was a bit of overkill, considering that his fingerprints didn’t exist in any known file, but the little things could add up over time.
No one else in the room needed to know any of that.
Boxers said, “If you’re choosing which aircraft to use, don’t forget we’re going to be two people heavier on the way out.”
“But lighter in equipment.” As Carl leaned over the table, his hair dangled in the middle of his performance charts and he pushed it away. “Do you really need all these people?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “I need two for an exfil team. Actually, I could do with one, but since they’re not pros, nobody should work alone.”
“And the third one?” Striker asked.
“I promised them they could all come along.”
“You know we’re right here, right?” David asked.
The others ignored him. “When did an op become an amusement park ride?” Carl asked.
“Yeah, Boss, when did it become an amusement park ride?” Boxers said.
“We don’t have the benefit of a trained army,” Jonathan said. “The two of us can do a lot—we
do
do a lot—but sometimes, we can’t do everything. We’ve had fair success getting more out of civilians than civilians thought they had to give.”
“Yeah, okay,” Carl said. “I get that. But why more people than you need?”
“Because they’ve all got a stake in this,” Jonathan said. “If I were them, I’d want to be here, too.”
Striker turned directly to the others. “You know you can get killed, right? Worse, you know you can get shot through the spine and be a quad for the rest of your life. Or through the gut and have to eat and shit through tubes.
That’s
the kind of risk we’re talking about. No video games, no do-overs, just real no-shit shoot-orbe-killed firefights. Is that really what you want to get into?”
“Jesus,” Boxers said. “Now
I
don’t want to go.”
The speech had its desired effect. Yelena, David, and Becky all looked suddenly a little sheepish.
“I thought you said we’d be in support roles,” Becky said. “Why would we have to do any shooting?”
Jonathan explained. “Carl von Clausewitz said it best two hundred years ago: no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. We’re developing a plan that should work, and should result in the fewest number of people on either side getting hurt. But for the plan to work, the enemy has to do what we want him to. Enemies don’t like to do what
their
enemies want them to do. In fact, they’re going to try to get us to do stuff to help them hurt us. It’s as dynamic an environment as you can get.”
Boxers added, “And why it’s so friggin’ unfair when you newsie types try to be lounge chair quarterbacks after the fact and tell the soldiers who were in the shit what they should have done when people were shooting at them.”
“Easy, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “Same side, remember?” To David and Becky: “You have to excuse him. This is our first time with embeds.”
“Are you crazy?” Carl said. “They’re
reporters
?”
“We’ve had this discussion, Striker. Among us, I mean. Let it go.” He let silence defuse the moment. “So, now you know the risks even better.”
“You forgot to mention getting arrested by one of two governments—or maybe both—for the whole invasion thing,” Yelena said. “He’s my son. Everything you said is worth it.”
“It’s what they tried to do to me anyway,” David said. “What the hell?”
Becky said nothing for a long moment. Finally, she asked, “Is somebody going to teach me how to work a gun?”
Len Shaw stood at his office window, looking past the front wall of the prison across the water to the western edge of the city’s skyline. This place truly would make an outstanding hotel, he thought. Ottawa was an underappreciated jewel of a city. It had so much to offer both in summer and in winter. Skating on the Rideau Canal alone was reason enough to brave the frigid temperatures.
There was something poetic, he thought, in transforming a prison—a place of such misery—into a property that could bring happiness to so many. Likewise, it was tragic that in the interim it would be headquarters for such violence.
This was it for Len. He’d made that decision following his discussion last night with Dmitri. It took a lot of hatred and anger to drive the kind of zealotry that made the Movement what it was. Intellectually, at an academic level, he understood that if American power were not toppled, then the rest of the world would soon possess no power at all. In the United States, the wealthy became wealthier as the people became willing puppets to go to war to demand the resources of yet more powerless puppet regimes.
Even more than that, Len still mourned the loss of so many colleagues who were either killed or imprisoned when that Poltanov bitch betrayed them all. Should she pay? Yes. Was he ashamed that she’d been able to rise to such elevated levels of power with none of them even noticing for so many years? Yes.