Dead or Alive Read online

  “Freeze! Don’t move, don’t move!” he shouted, but the figure kept moving, left arm coming into the light, hand holding a revolver. “Drop it!” Jack shouted again, gave him another beat, then fired twice, both shots striking center mass. The figure fell back into the doorway. Jack turned again, back toward the Dumpster, moving until he could see around its corner, looking for—

  And then something slammed into his back, between the shoulder blades, and he staggered forward. He felt the blood rush to his head and thought, Ah, shit, goddamn it . . . He bounced against the Dumpster, left shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, and tried to pivot on his heel toward the source of the gunfire. . . . He felt another round slam into his side, just below his armpit, and knew it was too late.

  “Hold!” a voice shouted over a bullhorn, followed by three rapid whistle blasts that echoed down the alley. “Cease exercise, cease exercise!”

  “Ah, man ...” Jack muttered, then leaned back against the Dumpster and exhaled heavily.

  The man who’d just shot him—Special Agent Walt Brandeis—stepped out of the doorway and shook his head sadly. “My God. To die like that, son, with a green paint splatter in the middle of your back ...” Jack could see the half-smile playing across Brandeis’s lips as he looked Jack up and down, then clicked his tongue. “It’s just a plain shame, that’s what it is.”

  Down the alley, Dominic came jogging around the corner and stopped in his tracks, then said, “Again?”

  Here’s the problem, Jack: You were—”

  “Hurrying, I know.”

  “No, not this time. It’s more than that. Hurrying wasn’t your real problem—it was part of it but not really what got you killed. Care to take a guess?”

  Jack Junior thought it over a moment. “I assumed.”

  “Damn right you assumed. You assumed the target you saw in that door was the only one in there. You assumed you’d put him down, then stopped worrying about it. It’s what I call Ambush Relief Syndrome. You won’t find it in the textbooks, but it goes like this: You survived an ambush, a real near thing, and you feel like you’re golden. In your head you subconsciously relabeled that door and the room inside from ‘uncleared’ to ‘cleared.’ Now, if this was real life and there had been two of them in there, your average dumb criminal probably would’ve opened up on you the moment his partner did, but there are always exceptions out there—like that rare creature, a smart bad guy—and exceptions get you killed.”

  “You’re right,” Jack muttered, taking a sip of Diet Coke. “Damn.”

  Along with Brian, who’d sat out the last exercise, he and Dominic had regrouped in the break room after being debriefed by Brandeis, who hadn’t pulled any punches, former President’s son or not. He’d told Jack basically the same thing Dominic was saying, only in a more entertaining fashion. Brandeis, a native Mississippian, had an aw-shucks, Will Rogers way about him that took some sting out of the criticism. Some, but not all of it. What’d you think, Jack, that you’d come here and walk out an expert?

  Like much of the FBI’s Quantico urban tactical training facility known affectionately as Hogan’s Alley, the break room was a Spartan affair, with plywood walls and floors, and Formica tables that looked like they’d been beaten with hammers. The course itself was anything but slapdash, though, right down to its bank, post office, barbershop, and pool hall. And dark doorways, Jack thought. That sure as hell felt real, as had the paint-ball pellet he’d caught between the shoulder blades. It still itched, and he suspected he’d see a good-sized welt later in the shower. But pellet or not, dead was dead. He suspected they’d used paintballs for his benefit. Depending on the scenario being run and the agents running it, Hogan’s Alley could be a lot louder and a lot hairier. Jack had even heard rumors that the HRT—the Hostage Rescue Team—sometimes went live fire. But then again, those guys were the best of the best.

  “What about you? You don’t pile on?” Jack asked Brian, who sat slumped in his chair, rocking on two legs. “Might as well get the full lecture.”

  Brian shook his head and smiled, nodding at his brother. “His turf, cuz, not mine. You come out to Twenty-nine Palms and we’ll talk.” The Marines had their own frighteningly realistic urban combat training center called MOUT—Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. “Till then, I’ll keep my mouth shut, thank you very much.”

  Dominic rapped a knuckle on the table before Jack. “Cuz, goddamn it, you asked us to bring you here, right?”

  The steel in Dominic’s voice was unmistakable, and Jack was momentarily taken aback. What is going on? he wondered. “Right.”

  “You wanted to feel what it’s really like, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, then stop acting like a little boy who got caught cheating on the spelling bee. This ain’t about lectures. Nobody gives a shit who you are, or whether you made some rookie mistake your third time out. Hell, the first ten times I ran this course I caught a bullet. That doorway you missed? They almost named that damned thing after me, the number of shots I took there.”

  Jack believed him. Hogan’s had been training FBI agents for twenty-plus years, and the only ones who shot it perfectly were the ones who’d run it so much they saw it in their dreams. That was the way of everything, Jack knew. Practice makes perfect was not a cliché but in fact an axiom, especially in the military and in law enforcement. Practice cut new grooves into your mental wiring while your body developed muscle memory—performing the same action over and over until muscle and synapse worked in unison and thinking was erased from the equation. How long does that kind of thing take? he wondered.

  “Come on. ...” Jack said.

  “Nope. Ask Brandeis. He’ll be happy to tell you. I took plenty of his bullets. Shit, the first two times I walked right by that door and got killed for it. Look, I’m not all that keen on telling you this, but the truth is you did damned good your first time out. Scary good. Hell, who would’ve figured it . . . My brainiac cousin a gen-u-ine gunslinger.”

  “Now you’re humoring me.”

  “No, I’m not. Really, man. Jump in, Brian. Tell him.”

  “He’s right, Jack. You’re really rough around the edges—hell, you crossed Dom twice in the Laundromat—”

  “Crossed?”

  “When you’re stacked up outside a room, you know, just before you go in, and then you split up inside, one group moving to the heavy side, the other to the light side—”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “In the Laundromat you sidestepped and tracked your gun outside your zone. Your barrel crossed me—right across the back of the head, in fact. A real no-no.”

  “Okay, so lesson number one: Don’t point your gun at your friends.”

  Brian laughed. “That’s a way of putting it, yeah. Like I was saying . . . you’re rough around the edges, but you’ve got great instincts. What, you been holding out on us? Do some training with the Secret Service when you were a kid? Maybe a few vacations with Clark and Chavez?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, none of that. I mean, yeah, I shot some guns but nothing like this. I don’t know. . . . It just seemed to play out in my head before it was happening. ...” Jack shrugged, then smiled. “Maybe got a little of Dad’s Marine DNA. Hell, who knows, maybe I’ve just watched Die Hard too many times.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so,” Brian replied. “Well, whatever it is, I wouldn’t mind having you on my six.”

  “I’ll second that.”

  They raised their cans of Diet Coke and clunked them together.

  “About that, guys ...” Jack said tentatively. “You remember that thing last year . . . in Italy?”

  Brian and Dominic exchanged glances. “We remember,” Dom said. “Hell of a deal, that.”

  “Yeah, well, I was thinking I wouldn’t mind doing some more of it—not that exactly, maybe, but something like it.”

  Brian said, “Jesus, cuz, are you talking about unplugging from your keyboard and living in the real world? I can see
the devil lacing up his ice skates as we speak.”

  “Very funny. No, I like what I do, I know it makes a difference, but that stuff is so intangible. What you guys do—what we did in Italy—that’s the real deal. Hands on, you know? You can see the results with your own eyes.”

  “Now that you’ve brought it up,” Dominic said, “I’ve always meant to ask you: Did any of that bother you afterward—not that it should have, necessarily, but let’s face it: You were kind of dumped ass-backward into a shitty situation—if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  Jack considered this. “What do you want me to say? That it bothered me? Well, it didn’t. Not really. Sure, I was nervous, and there was a quarter-second just before it happened where I thought, What the hell am I doing? But then it was gone, and it was just me and him, and I just did it. To answer the question I think you’re trying to ask—no, I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over it. You think I should have?”

  “Shit, no.” Brian looked around to make sure they were alone, then leaned in close, forearms on the table. “There’s no should about it, Jack. You either do or you don’t. You don’t, and that’s okay. The asshole deserved it. First time I popped a guy, Jack, he had me dead to rights. It was kill or be killed. I put him down, and I knew it was the right thing. Still had a few night-mares, though. Right or wrong, whether he deserves it or not, killing a man ain’t a pleasant thing. Anybody who thinks it is is a little touched in the head. All that gung-ho stuff ain’t really about killing; it’s about doing the job you’ve trained your ass off to be good at, taking care of the guys to your left and right, and coming out the other side with all your fingers and toes.”

  “Besides, Jack,” Dominic added, “that guy in Italy, he wouldn’t have just up and quit one day. He would’ve cost a lot of people their lives before somebody sent him on his way. For me, that’s the deal-breaker. A bad guy deserving what he gets is all well and good, but what we’re doing—what this whole thing is about—isn’t revenge, at least not for its own sake. Playing it that way is sort of like shutting the barn door after horses get out. Me, I’d much rather stop the guy who’s planning on opening the barn door in the first place.”

  Brian stared hard at his twin brother for a couple of beats and then shook his head and grinned. “I’ll be damned. Mom always said you were the philosopher of the family. I just never believed her till now.”

  “Yeah, yeah ...” Dominic muttered. “Not so much philosophy as math. Kill one, save hundreds or thousands. If we were talking about decent, law-abiding folks, that’d be a harder equation, but they’re not.”

  “I agree with him, Jack,” said Brian. “We’ve got a chance to do some real good here. But if you’re thinking about doing this kind of stuff because you think revenge is the answer, or that it’s all James Bond shit—”

  “That’s not what—”

  “Good, because it ain’t, not even close. It’s ugly shit, period. And revenge is a piss-poor motivator. It makes you sloppy, and sloppy is dead.”

  “I know.”

  “So what’re you going to do about it?”

  “Talk to Gerry, I guess, and see what he says.”

  “You better have one hell of a pitch,” Dominic said. “Hell, as it stands Gerry took a risk hiring you in the first place. Your dad would have a fit—”

  “Let me worry about my dad, Dom.”

  “Fine, but if you think Gerry’s just going to hand you a gun and say, ‘Go forth and make the world safe for democracy,’ you got another think coming. If you were to buy the farm, he’d be the one making the call.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  “So,” Jack said, “if I talk to him, you guys’ll back me up?”

  “For what it’s worth, sure,” Brian replied. “But this isn’t a democracy, Jack. Assuming he doesn’t shoot down the idea on the spot, he’ll probably run it by Sam.” Sam Granger was The Campus’s Chief of Operations. “I doubt he’s going to ask us.”

  Jack nodded. “Probably right. Well, like you said, I’d better make my pitch a damn good one, then.”

  14

  AUTUMN WAS HERE. You could tell from the wind and the ice pack, which had begun pulling away from the coast to reveal the black water of the Arctic Ocean. It could not be colder without turning to ice, and there was plenty of that still in sight, just to remind one that summer up here was fleeting at best. Mother Nature remained as grim and heartless as ever, even under a sky of crystal blue and a few cotton-ball white clouds.

  This place was not unlike his first Navy posting to Polyyarniy twelve years before, just as the Soviet Navy was starting to shut down. Oh, sure, they had a few ships left, most of them tied at the working ports of the Kola Fjord, manned by men who stayed in the Navy because they either had to or had nothing to go home to. There were a few ships with crews composed almost entirely of officers who actually got paid a few times a year. Vitaliy had been among the last men drafted into the former Soviet Navy and, to his astonishment, found himself liking the work.

  After the mindless basic training he’d been made a junior starshina, or petty officer, and a bosun’s mate. It had been hard, backbreaking work but satisfying, and it had ended up giving him a useful trade. He’d profited personally from the demise of the Soviet Navy by buying at a discount an old but well-maintained T-4 amphibious landing craft that he’d nominally converted into a passenger craft. Mostly he took scientific parties, exploring the region for obscure reasons beyond his interest, while some were hunters looking to convert a polar bear into an expensive rug.

  His charter for the week was waiting for him down the coast at a small fishing village. Two days ago he’d preloaded their equipment—a GAZ truck with all-wheel drive, new tires, and a fresh paint job, equipped with a heavy-duty A-frame, taking delivery from an anonymous driver who, like him, had probably been paid in euros. As any good captain did, Vitaliy had inspected the cargo and had been surprised to find the truck stripped of all identification codes, right down to the one on the engine block. While such a task wasn’t particularly complicated, and neither did it require a mechanic, something told Vitaliy that his charters hadn’t done the work themselves. So they’d come here, bought a GAZ in good condition, paid someone handsomely to strip it, then hired a private charter. Plenty of money to spread around and overly concerned with anonymity. What did that mean?

  But there was no point in being too curious. Smart cats knew the danger of curiosity, and he liked to think he was smart enough. The euros would also take care of his memory, something in which his party seemed supremely confident; the leader of the group, clearly of Mediterranean descent, had told Vitaliy to call him Fred. It wasn’t so much an artifice as it was a moniker of convenience, almost a private joke between them, and Fred’s smirk during their initial meeting had confirmed it.

  He watched his charter party come aboard and wave at him, and with that done, he signaled to Vanya, his engineer/deckhand, who cast off the lines. Vitaliy started the diesel engines and pulled away from the dock.

  Soon enough he was in the fairway and headed out to sea. The black water didn’t exactly beckon, but it was where he and the boat belonged, and it felt good to be heading back out. All he needed to make the morning perfect was a tranquilizer, and that Vitaliy handled with an American Marlboro Lights 100 cigarette. And then the morning was perfect. The local fishing fleet had already cleared the harbor—such dreadful hours they worked—and the water was clear for easy navigation, with only a slight chopping breaking on the marker buoys.

  As he passed the breakwater, he turned to starboard and headed east.

  Per his instructions, Adnan had kept his team small, himself and three others that he trusted implicitly, just enough bodies to do the heavy lifting but not enough to present a problem when the inevitable conclusion to their mission arrived. He didn’t mind that part of it, actually. He would, after all, suffer the same general fate as his compatriots. A sad necessity, he thought. No, his biggest worry was that they mig
ht fail. Failure here would undoubtedly have a resonant effect on the larger operation, whatever that might be, and Adnan would do everything in his power to make sure that didn’t happen.

  His life. Adnan smiled at the notion. Nonbelievers saw all this—trees and water and material possessions—as life. Nor was life defined by what you ate and drank and defiled with your bodily lusts. The time you spend on this earth is but preparation for what comes after, and if you are devout and obedient to the one true God, your reward will be glorious beyond imagining. What was less certain, Adnan realized, was his fate should he succeed here. Would he be given greater missions, or would his silence be more valuable to the jihad? He would prefer the former, if only to continue serving Allah, but if the latter was to be his destiny, then so be it. He would meet either outcome with the same equanimity, confident he’d lived his earthly life as best he could.

  Whatever was to come, he thought, was in the future, and he would let that worry about itself. In the here and now he had a job to do. An important one, though he wasn’t sure how exactly it fit into the larger picture. That was for wiser minds.

  They’d arrived at the fishing village the day before, after parting company with the driver who was to deliver their truck to the docks and into the hands of the charter captain they had hired. The village was largely abandoned, most of its occupants having moved on after the waters had gone barren from years of overfishing. What few villagers remained kept to themselves, scraping by as best they could as autumn moved toward winter. Adnan and his men, bundled in parkas and their faces covered in scarves against the cold, had drawn little attention, and the hostel manager, who was only too surprised and happy to have paying customers, asked them no questions—neither about where they had come from nor about their future travel plans. Even had the manager asked, Adnan couldn’t have answered if he’d wanted to. The future belonged to Allah, whether the rest of the world knew it or not.