Authors: Rick Jones
Route 1, Boston, Massachusetts.
September 23, Late Morning
Team
Leader had divided his unit into two groups: Alpha Team, consisting of five of
his most seasoned combatants, and Omega Team, left behind in D.C. to monitor
the political maneuverings of the White House and its law enforcement
constituencies.
To secure the hostages, Alpha Team
placed them in a military cargo truck that had been modified with a false
floor. Beneath the cargo bed was a compartment capable of carrying up to nine
people in tight quarters. To ensure safety throughout the transportation
process, the muffler system was customized so the noxious fumes were directed
away from the cargo space at all times. And since the hostages were immobilized
by a ketamine derivative, it was highly unlikely they would wake and panic and
find themselves cloistered in a dark compartment during the drive north.
Team Leader sat on the passenger
side of the cab, the radio tuned to an AM news station, just one of many he had
listened to during transport. He stared at the passing landscape with eyes that
seemed detached, yet fully aware.
Earlier that morning he had a
member of Omega Team place an easily-traced call to CNN
from a D.C. pay
phone. By then, the transport team was already nearly three hundred miles
north, the distance covered before a dragnet could be extended from the nation’s
capitol.
The timing and location of the
call was a red herring. He wanted Washington to believe that the Soldiers of
Islam were still in the D.C. area, so that the scope of their search would be
concentrated to a smaller radius. But the ruse failed. According to the news,
road blocks had been set up on all major highways north, west, and south of the
capitol, stretching as far as New York, Florida, and Texas.
Though he had considered his
strategy carefully, Team Leader was concerned about the blockades after their
military vehicle was stopped by law enforcement on two separate occasions in
New York. But when he showed them counterfeit documents claiming their vehicle
to be from the 75th Ranger Regiment, a division of the US Army Special
Operation Command, the vehicle was waved through without so much as a cursory
examination.
Once the truck exited the turnpike
and entered Boston central, the driver passed Government Center and negotiated
the narrow streets to a pre-established safe house located in Boston’s
Historical District.
The isolated building was an old
and vacant depository made of aged brick, which had cracked and discolored from
time and neglect. The first-floor windows were bricked over. The second- and
third-story windows, however, were merely boarded over with weathered plywood.
The trees surrounding the building were either dead or dying, their limbs
knotted like the arthritic twists of an old man’s hands. The area had simply
gone to waste.
A wrought-iron gate bearing a “No
Trespassing: All Violators Prosecuted” sign was securely locked with a thick
garland of chain wrapped firmly around the bars. Team Leader got out of the
vehicle, searched his pocket for the proper key, and undid the lock. Once the
vehicle passed through, he closed and relocked the gate.
The vehicle drove slowly down the
weed-laden driveway. Wispy branches from the trees above snapped as the top of
the vehicle forced its way through the canopy of skeletal limbs. At the end of
the driveway the truck turned into a vacant area behind the building.
There stood a dented fire door,
the only way in and out of the building. The entry had been reinforced prior to
the mission with a state-of-the-art titanium lock. Reaching into his cargo
pocket, Team Leader removed a remote unit and aimed it at the entry. When he
depressed a button the bolt mechanism drew back in a series of hollow, metallic
clicks, and then the red light on the remote’s faceplate turned green, an
indication that the door was unlocked.
Moving toward the entry, Team
Leader turned the handle, opening the door to a world that was truly blacker
than pitch.
J. Edgar Hoover Building,
Washington, D.C.
September 23, Mid-Afternoon
The FBI’s
conference room was much larger and less constrictive than the White House’s
Situation Room. The room had twenty-foot ceilings and was nearly 1600 square
feet. The walls were covered in dark walnut paneling, and serving as the room’s
focal point, an oil painting of J. Edgar Hoover watched over everyone with his
patented scowl. In the center of the room was a large table that held up to
three dozen people comfortably, with pitchers of ice water spaced every three
feet along the table’s length.
The FBI’s Deputy Director, George
Pappandopolous, sat at one end of the table. Normally a man of good cheer, he
seemed somewhat detached and disenchanted, his smiles false, his greetings
insincere. It seemed to Shari as if he had already resigned himself to losing
the battle over the pope’s abduction. She hoped this wasn’t the case.
Taking her assigned seat opposite
the deputy director, Shari knew that she was about to become the lightning rod
of attention.
To her right sat Billy Paxton, who
appeared displeased. He had always played the back-up role, never taking the
lead—always the electric violin to her Stradivarius. She had become an
insurmountable obstacle in his life, preventing him from elevating to the next
level. He was always being compared to her but never measuring up. So when she
said “Hello,” he simply ignored her.
As chatter circulated around the
room, Deputy Director George Pappandopolous leaned forward and clasped his
hands. Securing the attention of the room, he went directly to the core of the
matter.
“As you all know, the president’s detail
was dispatched by a radical terrorist cell who call themselves the Soldiers of
Islam. The incident falls under FBI jurisdiction, but we will nevertheless be
working with all international intelligence sources that are ready to aid in
the search and rescue of the pope and the governor. So let’s get one thing
straight: I don’t want anybody on my team sitting on vital data. There are
fifteen intelligence agencies in this country and dozens more worldwide, and
we’re to work closely with all of them. Is that clear?”
There was a unified murmur of
agreement.
“Here’s what I’ve got so far, just
to update you as to what’s going on,” he continued. “We haven’t received any
demands from the Soldiers of Islam as of yet. The only call received was the
one to CNN at approximately zero-seven-hundred hours. We do know, however, the
identities of all terrorists involved. You’ll find their cover sheets and bios
in front of you.”
The assembled agents opened the
manila folders before them and began examining the documents inside.
“We also know they had ties to
al-Qaeda and are presumed to have gone rogue, so we’ll need to develop a
strategy to communicate and make the necessary concessions without any
foreknowledge of their methods. By the direct authority of the attorney
general, Ms. Cohen, who is sitting opposite me, is to take command in this
situation with Mr. Paxton acting as speaker.”
Paxton winced as if a gas bubble
had lodged painfully in his chest. Is that what he had been reduced to? A
mouthpiece? It just seemed disrespectful. Especially for someone who received
Congressional approval to act on behalf of the American government in distant
lands.
“For those of you who may not
know, Ms. Cohen is an expert in counterterrorism and psychoanalytical strategy.
Therefore, the attorney general feels that Ms. Cohen is best qualified to
command this post. In other words, first there’s God and then there’s Ms. Cohen
who will be in direct contact with Chief Presidential Advisor Alan Thornton.
There is no other chain of command.
She . . . is . . . it
.”
Pappandopolous eased back into his chair. “Good luck,” he added, “because we’re
going to need it on this one.” He offered Shari the stage by directing a hand
toward her. “Ms. Cohen.”
Shari tilted her head in the
direction of the deputy director and thanked him. She opened her manila folder
and began to peel a page at a time from the stack of papers.
“All right,” she said. “The first
rule of thumb is to never assume anything, because everything changes and
changes quickly. Therefore, you have to make adjustments and decisions
according to the moment. We know the insurgents are Islamic and have an
unyielding conviction to die for a cause. So . . . what else do we need to
know?” She raised her hand and ticked off a finger with each question.
“One: How have they or their
associates operated in the past? Two: Will they release the hostages when their
demands are met or not? Three: Have their dealings with past HRT units been consistent or not? And four: Can we possibly predict a safe outcome based on their
past dealings? In other words,
know your enemy
.”
She lowered her hand; her voice
had gained strength and momentum with every passing sentence.
“We’ll need to get on this as soon
as possible. I want as much information on the remaining operatives as I can
get my hands on. Contact the CIA abroad, Mossad, the CTC, whomever it is you
need to contact to create the most complete dossier on each individual involved
with the Soldiers of Islam. Then we’ll need to create several strategies to deal
with them. And I’m going to need all of this at my fingertips when the time
comes to negotiate. We’re dealing with the human element here, which is always
difficult, but at least we’ll be in a position to act when the terrorists make
their next move.”
Shari’s speech was well-versed and
never missed a beat, which was more of a natural skill than a learned one.
Paxton, on the other hand, seethed
with contempt and rolled his eyes.
“Past history is usually a great
indicator of future behavior,” she continued. “If the group is rogue, we don’t
have a lot of past accounts, so we’ll have to come up with a format based on
their individual dossiers. Psychology, in this case, will become paramount. And
that’s where I’ll come in.”
Shari peeled off another page, but
never referred to it.
“We’ll play this based on our data
and according to the situation. If the situation seems to be heading in the
wrong direction, then we’ll have to shift course. That’s why we’ll need to
develop a series of schematics to deal with whatever scenario may arise.”
Shari gave each face a quick
examination. “Questions?”
There were none, the team
apparently resolved and ready for duty.
“Then let’s get to it,” she said.
Her briefing was quick and to the point.
During the next hour Shari moved
the staff to a workroom filled with personal computers, terminals, and phones,
then divided the assembled experts into groups of three and designated each
group a specific task according to their skills and strengths.
In essence, Shari Cohen was flexing
her muscles.
Somewhere Over the Atlantic
Ocean
September 23, Evening
Kimball
Hayden sat alone in the front of a Gulfstream jet cruising along at twenty-nine
thousand feet. The four members of his team were situated throughout the cabin,
sitting quietly, their moods matched by the depressive gray of the Atlantic
sky.
After drawing a deep breath and
releasing it in an equally long sigh, Kimball closed his eyes, trying to attain
a moment of peace. But when he closed his eyes, the images always returned:
snippets of his life, from his days as a teenager, trying to become an
appreciative glimmer in his father’s eye, to the moment of his epiphany in Iraq
as a member of the Force Elite.
His father, Daryl Hayden, was a
man of minimal presence. As a widowed father, having no social standing of his
own, he relied on his son’s achievements to confirm his own importance. By the
time Kimball was seventeen, he was a foot taller than and twice as broad as his
father. But Daryl didn’t credit his son for being strong, handsome, or
charismatic. The way he saw it, these were accidents of nature, not
achievements. In fact, Kimball felt his father resented rather than valued
these attributes. He spent his entire youth wondering why it was so easy to
please others—his classmates, his teachers—but so impossible to please his own
father.
He remembered in vivid detail the
night he first saw the glow of appreciation in his father’s eyes. He was
playing linebacker for his high school football team. It was Friday night. The
stands were full. And in front of thousands of people, he was being knocked off
his assignment by a center that was smaller than him. Repeatedly, Kimball was
sent sprawling as the running back ran to daylight through the gaping hole
Kimball was supposed to fill. Catcalls erupted; the coach was on the brink of
benching him.
When the tailback scored a second
touchdown, running through the seam that Kimball was supposed to fill, it all
proved too much for his father. So when Kimball went to the sidelines, his
father grabbed his facemask and twisted it, the man looking like a child before
his behemoth son. Spittle flew from his mouth in rage as he openly chastised
his boy, telling him he was an embarrassment to the Hayden name.
More wrenching of the facemask
followed, the violent tugging almost causing the coach to intervene. It
appeared Kimball’s father had lost his way in disciplining his son; the
incident appeared to border on abuse.
“Do not embarrass me!” he screamed.
“I want you to go out there and make something of yourself! You hear me? Push
yourself to the limit, Kimball! And when you think you reached that limit, then
push yourself some more! You got me?”
Kimball nodded.
“You look like a pansy out there!
I will not have a pansy for a son! You got me? Not one more time on your
backside!”
Another nod.
“Then get out there and act like
you belong!”
When he released Kimball’s
facemask, Kimball returned to the sidelines ready to prove himself.
When the next defensive series
began, Kimball became an animal. This time when the center approached him,
Kimball hunkered down to a low center of gravity and launched himself forward,
hitting the center so hard that the player fell backward and knocked the
running back off his route, causing other players to swarm in for a tackle of a
loss. As the pile cleared, it was apparent that the center was severely
injured. Blood foamed at the edges of his mouth from an internal injury, and he
had to be carted off the field. When Kimball looked up into the stands, he saw
his father standing there bearing a smile of approval and pride. It was the
turning point in Kimball’s life, the pivotal moment in which he finally shone
bright in his father’s eyes. Kimball had finally discovered the key to his
father’s approbation.
He was courted by numerous college
football programs; coaches around the country loved his aggressive tenacity on
the field. However, Kimball shunned the scholarships and decided to join the
Army Rangers instead. It was here that he caught the eye of the military
hierarchy. They noticed his determination and his remarkable strength and
agility. They also noticed that he seemed to thrive on pressure. The more
challenging the task, the more committed he was to completing it.
Soon, Kimball found himself under
a new command in the Force Elite, a governmental Black Ops unit known only by
the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the Force Elite, Kimball
assailed insurgents with incredible efficiency, earning a reputation as an
unstoppable warrior.
Since targeted assassinations were
banned by the Ford administration in ‘76, Kimball had become the first of a new
breed. Secret meetings were the norm in the Situation Room, where the ban went
unnoticed by future presidents and the JCS. At these meetings, Kimball was
often the focal point, spotlighted for his ability to carry out even the most
difficult missions with stoic precision.
In 1990 he was assigned to kill
three key members of Saddam Hussein’s Cabinet responsible for brokering deals
with Russian dissidents for high-grade plutonium. Not only was the plutonium
never delivered, but the Iraqi brokers were found shot to death in Chelyabinsk,
Russia by a Rav-.22LRHA, which happens to be Mossad’s weapon of choice for
assassinations. This weapon was the red herring that made Israel the scapegoat
for the killings.
From that moment on Iraq never
attempted to develop a nuclear arsenal in earnest.
In December of that same year,
Kimball was asked to commit another assassination. This time the target was
Saddam Hussein.
When Iraq ventured onto Kuwaiti
soil to pillage the country in August, the United States and the UN coalition
ordered Hussein to withdraw from the country immediately. However, several
months of wasted negotiation evolved before the commencement of the
counterattack by U.S. and coalition forces. It was during this period that
President Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff called upon Kimball to take out
Hussein before the allied assault began. They believed war could be averted if
the rank and file of the Republican Guard fell into disarray without Saddam
Hussein’s leadership.
Kimball asked no questions. He
only needed to know what he had to do, not why he had to do it. It was this
icy-cold fortitude that led his employers to consider Kimball practically
inhuman. He seemed to possess no conscience, no remorse, no care. He was a
perfect killing machine that seemed to take pride in that image. His commanders
saw him as larger than life, the same way his father saw him that night on the
football field. The feeling was indescribable.
As the window of opportunity lay
open and the negotiations continued, Kimball breached Iraqi territory.
Just then the Gulf Stream hit an
air pocket, causing the plane to dip sharply. When it leveled off Kimball
recalled the moments of his pride, a deadly sin in the eyes of God. And his
fall had come to him quickly.
He had been in Iraq for seven days
and was making his way toward Baghdad when he happened upon a flock of goats
herded by two boys, the older no more than fourteen, the younger perhaps ten,
each carrying a gnarled staff of olive wood.
Kimball remained out of sight,
with his back pressed against the sandy wall of a gully, listening to the goats
bleating only a few feet away. And then a shadow cast over him from the younger
boy, who had spied Kimball from above. The child’s small body was silhouetted
against the pure white sun, a diffusion of light shining from him like a halo.
And then the boy was gone, shouting, the sun assaulting Kimball’s eyes with a
sudden and terrible brightness.
Kimball stood, immediately
engaged his weapon, drew a bead and pulled the trigger, the bullet’s momentum
driving the boy hard to the ground. The older boy stood unmoving with his mouth
open in mute protest, his eyes moving to the body of his brother, to Kimball,
then back to his brother. When he took flight Kimball took a single shot, the
bullet killing the boy before he hit the surface.
Another bump of turbulence, this
time stronger, jarred Kimball from the memory. But when the plane settled back
into a smooth flight pattern, he closed his eyes once again and remembered what
he had for so long tried to forget.
He had buried the boys and their
staffs in the trench. Wordlessly, Kimball Hayden covered their bodies with sand
and scattered the goats. Once done, he sat beside the two small rises in the
earth and considered that maybe the White House brass was right after all.
Maybe he was inhuman.
And suddenly it was no longer a
game. The memory of his father’s approval on that Friday night when Kimball
openly maimed another player, the smile on his father’s face, and the
subsequent pats on the back no longer seemed to matter. He could not go on
living life as a game in which those around him were merely targets—especially
innocent children.
At that moment Kimball was greatly
tormented by what he had done. His cold fortitude was gone. He had reached his
limit. And though he could hear his father rage on about pushing further, he
could not. Every man has his limits.
If his father had been alive on
that fateful day rather than buried in a nondescript grave in an obscure
township, he most likely would have turned his back on his son, but Kimball
didn’t care anymore. His father was dead. Why was he still living for his
approval? Why had he ever fought so hard to please a sadistic man who required
him to deny his humanity? Kimball didn’t want to be emotionless anymore. He
deserved to feel pain, to feel guilt. He wanted to suffer.
Kimball remained by the makeshift
graves all that day. Even with the sun blistering his lips, he refused to take
cover. He recalled the moments when day turned to night. He laid between the
two mounds with a clawed hand on each rise of soft earth and prayed for
forgiveness—not from God, but from the boys.
His only answer was the soft
whisper of wind through the desert sand.
As he lay there watching the moon
make its trajectory across a sky filled with countless stars, Kimball Hayden
made a fateful decision.
On the following morning he headed
back for the Syrian border with President Bush and the JCS never to hear from
him again. The White House believed that Kimball Hayden had been killed in the
commission of his duty. Less than two months later, the man who was considered
to be without conscience was posthumously honored by the Pentagon brass, though
the true nature of his contributions was never made public.
Two weeks after his defection,
however, while Kimball sat in a bar in Venice drinking an expensive liqueur,
the United States and the Coalition Forces attacked Iraq.
He had been drinking and doing
little else since his defection, but he was becoming restless, anxious. It was
not in his nature to be idle, but he didn’t have the first idea what to do
next. A few days later at this same bar, a man wearing a Roman collar and a
cherubic smile took the seat opposite him without permission.
“I really want to be alone,
Father,” he told him. “It’s too late for me, anyway.”
Nevertheless the priest continued
to smile. “We’ve been watching you.”
Kimball could only imagine the
look he gave the priest. “I‘m sorry . . . you‘ve been what?”
“Kimball Hayden,” the priest said,
offering his hand. “My name is Bonasero Vessucci . . . Cardinal Bonasero
Vessucci
.
”
And a new alliance was born.
Kimball drew another deep breath
and let it go. The Gulf Stream was flying at an incredible speed.
The time was 1834 hours, Eastern
Standard Time.