Dead or Alive Read online

  “So: recommendations?”

  “We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do it for us, can we?”

  And with that question, Jack had identified the real problem at The Campus. Since it didn’t exist, it couldn’t broadcast its hits to the official intelligence community and thereby follow things up via conventional channels. Even if they discovered oil in Kansas and got people rich, some bureaucrat or other would backtrack the notice just to find out who’d done it, and thus blow The Campus’s cover. Being supersecret could be as much a handicap as an advantage. Or even more. They could transmit a query to Fort Meade disguised as an Agency question, but even that was dangerous, and had to be approved by Gerry Hendley himself. Well, you took the bitter with the sweet. In a world where two or more heads were in fact better than one at problem solving, The Campus was alone.

  “I’m afraid not, Jack,” Bell replied. “Well, unless this Hadi’s on someone’s list by accident or the e-mail itself is innocuous, I’d say we’re looking at a courier.”

  While not the fastest means of communication, couriers were the most secure. Encrypted data and messages, easily hidden in a document or on a CD-ROM, aren’t something airport security folks were trained to ferret out. Unless you had a courier’s identity—which they might now have—the bad guys could be planning the end of the world and the good guys would never know it.

  “Agreed,” Jack said. “Unless he’s working for National Geographic, there’s something there. He’s operational or he’s playing support.”

  The kid thought operationally, and that, too, was not a bad characteristic, Rick Bell thought to himself. “Okay,” Bell told Jack. “Put it at the top of your list and keep me up to speed.”

  “Right,” Jack said, then stood up. He turned for the door, then turned back.

  “Something on your mind?” Bell asked.

  “Yeah. I want to have a sit-down with the boss.”

  “What about?”

  Jack told him. Bell tried to keep the surprise off his face. He steepled his fingers and looked at Jack. “Where’s this coming from? The MoHa thing? Because that ain’t real life, Jack. Fieldwork is—”

  “I know, I know. I just want to feel like I’m doing something.”

  “You are.”

  “You know what I mean, Rick. Doing something. I’ve given it a lot of thought. At least let me put it on the table in front of Gerry.”

  Bell considered this, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll set it up.”

  Nine thousand fucking miles and still no beer, Sam Driscoll thought, but only for a moment as he reminded himself yet again he could have just as easily made the hop home in a rubber bag. A couple of inches either way, the docs had said, and the splinter would’ve shredded either his brachial, cephalic, or basilic vein, and he might have bled out long before reaching the Chinook. Lost two along the way, though. Barnes and Gomez had taken the full brunt of the RPG. Young and Peterson had caught some minor leg shrapnel but had managed to climb aboard the Chinook on their own. From there it had been a short hop to FOB Kala Gush, where he parted company with the team, save Captain Wilson and his shattered leg, who accompanied him first to Ramstein Air Base, then on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. As it turned out, both needed the kind of orthopedic surgery in which Brooke specialized. And Demerol. The nurses here were real good with the pain meds, which had gone a long way to helping him forget that five days earlier he’d had a hunk of Hindu Kush granite sticking out of his shoulder.

  The mission had been a bust, at least in terms of their main objective, and Rangers weren’t in the business of failing, their fault or not. Providing the intel had been right and their target had ever been in the cave at all, he’d slipped away, probably less than a day before they’d arrived. Still, Driscoll reminded himself, given the shit storm they came through on the way back to the LZ, it could have been a lot worse. He’d lost two but had come back with thirteen. Barnes and Gomez. Goddamn it.

  The door opened, and in rolled Captain Wilson in a wheelchair. “Got a minute for a visitor?”

  “You bet. How’s the leg?”

  “Still broken.”

  Driscoll chuckled at that. “Gonna be that way for a while, sir.”

  “No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”

  “Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”

  “Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”

  “Young and Peterson?”

  “Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”

  “Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”

  “’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”

  “Both of us?”

  Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know about, Sam?”

  “No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”

  “All kosher in the cave?”

  “Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”

  “Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”

  It didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.

  “And how many sentries did you encounter?”

  “Two.”

  “Both killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.

  “After we policed everything up, we counted—”

  “No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”

  “Define ‘armed.’”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”

  “It’s in my report.”

  “Three, correct?”

  “That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.

  “The rest were asleep.”

  “With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”

  “You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”

  Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”

  “You shot them in their sleep.”

  Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

  “Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants. Add to that the statements of the rest of your team—”

  “Which you haven’t officially taken yet, right?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Because you know this is a load of crap, and you’d prefer it if I lay my head on the block nice and gentle and not make a fuss. Why’re you doing this? I was doing my job. Do your home-work. What we did up there is standard procedure. You don’t give gomers a chance to draw down on you.”

  “And apparently you didn’t give them a chance to surrender, did you?”

  “God almighty . . . Gentlemen, these idiots don’t surrender. When it comes to fanaticism, they make kamikaze pilots look downright spineless. What you’re talking about doing would’ve gotten some of my men killed, and that I won’t have.”

  “Sergeant, are you now admitting you preemptively executed the men inside that cave?”

  “What I’m saying is we’re done talking until I se
e a TDS lawyer.”

  35

  GOOSE CHASE,” Brian Caruso said, staring out the car’s passenger window at the scenery. “Worse places to do it, though, I guess.” Sweden was damned pretty, with lots of green and, as far as they’d seen since leaving Stockholm, spotless highways. Not a scrap of trash to be seen. They were ninety miles north of the Swedish capital; twelve miles to the northeast, the waters of the Gulf of Bothnia sparkled under a partially overcast sky. “Where do you suppose they keep the bikini team?” the Marine asked now.

  Dominic laughed. “They’re all computer-generated, bro. Nobody’s ever seen them in person.”

  “Bullshit; they’re real. How far is this place? What’s it called? Söderhamn?”

  “Yeah. About a hundred fifty miles.”

  Jack and Sam Granger had given them the briefing, and while the Caruso Brothers agreed with the chief of ops’s “long shot” assessment of the job, they also liked the idea of beating the bushes. Plus, it was a good way to sharpen their tradecraft. So far most of their work at The Campus had been in Europe, and the more time one got to train in a real operating environment, the better. They both felt more than a little naked without guns, but this, too, was an operational reality: More often than not, when overseas, they would find themselves unarmed.

  How exactly Jack had found Hlasek Air’s connection to Söderhamn’s tiny airport neither of them knew, but wherever the missing Dassault Falcon had ended up, its last known touchdown had been there. It was, Dominic explained, a lot like tracking down a missing person: Where were they last seen, and by whom? How exactly they’d go about answering those questions once they reached Söderhamn was another matter altogether. Jack’s suggestion, which had been offered with a sheepish grin, would probably turn out to be prescient: Improvise. To that end, The Campus’s documents people, who lived in some cubbyhole office in the bowels of the building, had provided them with letterheads, business cards, and credentials from the claims-investigation division of Lloyd’s of London, XL Insurance Switzerland’s parent company.

  It was early afternoon when they reached the southern outskirts of Söderhamn, population 12,000, and Dominic turned east off the E4, following aircraft pictograph signs for five miles before pulling into the mostly empty airport parking lot. They counted three cars. Through the eight-foot hurricane fence they saw a line of four white-roofed hangar buildings. A lone fuel bowser tooled across the cracked tarmac.

  “Good idea to come on a weekend, I guess,” Brian observed. The theory was that the airport would be lightly manned on a Saturday afternoon, which meant, they hoped, less chance of them coming across anyone with real authority. With greater luck they’d find the office staffed by a part-time minimum-wager who just wanted to pass the afternoon with a commensurate minimum of fuss. “Score another one for cuz.”

  They got out, walked over to the office, and went inside. An early-twenties blond kid sat behind the counter, his feet propped on a filing cabinet. In the background a boom box blasted the latest version of Swedish techno-pop. The kid stood up and turned down the music.

  “God middag,” the kid said.

  Dominic laid his credentials out on the counter. “God middag.”

  It took but five minutes of cajoling and oblique threats to talk their way into the airport’s daily flight logs, which showed only two arrivals of Dassault Falcons in the last eight weeks, one from Moscow a month and a half ago and one from Zurich-based Hlasek Air three weeks ago. “We’ll need to see the manifest, flight plan, and maintenance record for this aircraft,” Dominic said, tapping the binder.

  “I don’t have that here. It would be in the main hangar.”

  “Let’s go there, then.”

  The kid picked up the phone.

  The on-duty flight mechanic, Harold, was barely older than the desk clerk and even more unsettled by their appearance. Insurance investigator, missing aircraft, and maintenance records was a trio of phrases no flight mechanic wanted to hear, especially when combined with Lloyd’s of London, which had for nearly three hundred years enjoyed and wielded cachet like few other companies in the world.

  Harold showed them into the maintenance office, and in short order Dominic and Brian had before them the records they’d requested and two cups of coffee. Harold loitered in the doorway until Brian gave him a you’re dismissed stare that only a Marine officer can generate.

  The flight plan Hlasek Air filed listed the Falcon’s destination as Madrid, Spain, but flight plans were just that: plans. Once outside Söderhamn’s airspace, the Falcon could have gone anywhere. There were complications to this, of course, but nothing insurmountable. The maintenance records seemed similarly routine until they got past the summary and read the details. In addition to a topping off of the Falcon’s fuel tanks, the on-duty flight mechanic had performed a diagnostics scan of the aircraft’s transponder.

  Dominic got up, tapped on the office’s glass window, and waved Harold over. He showed the mechanic the maintenance report. “This mechanic—Anton Rolf—we’d like to talk to him.”

  “Uh, he’s not here today.”

  “We assumed as much. Where can we find him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Brian said, “What’s that mean?”

  “Anton hasn’t been to work in a week. No one’s seen him or heard from him.”

  The Söderhamn police, Harold further explained, had come to the airport the previous Wednesday, following up on a missing-person report from Rolf’s aunt, with whom Anton lived. Her nephew had failed to return home after work a week ago Friday.

  Assuming the police would have already done the customary legwork, Brian and Dominic drove into Söderhamn, checked into the Hotel Linblomman, and slept until six, then found a nearby restaurant, where they ate and killed an hour before walking three blocks to a pub called Dålig Radisa—the Bad Radish—which, according to Harold, was Anton Rolf’s preferred hangout.

  After doing a walk-around survey of the block, they pushed through the bar’s front door and were struck by a wave of cigarette smoke and heavy metal, and engulfed in a sea of blondhaired bodies either jostling for position at the bar or dancing wherever free space was to be found.

  “At least it isn’t that techno shit,” Brian yelled over the cacophony.

  Dominic grabbed a passing waitress and used his halting Swedish to order two beers. She disappeared and returned five minutes later. “You speak English?” he asked her.

  “Yes, English. You are English?”

  “American.”

  “Hey, American, that’s great, yeah?”

  “We’re looking for Anton. You seen him?”

  “Which Anton? There are many that come here.”

  “Rolf,” Brian replied. “Mechanic, works at the airport.”

  “Yes, okay, Anton. He has not been here for a week, I think.”

  “You know where we can find him?”

  The waitress’s smile faded a bit. “Why are you looking for him?”

  “We met him on Facebook last year. Told him next time we were over here we’d look him up.”

  “Oh, hey, Facebook. That’s cool. His friends are here. They might know. Over there, in the corner.” She pointed to a table surrounded by half a dozen twentysomethings in jerseys.

  “Thanks,” Brian said, and the waitress turned to go. Dominic stopped her. “Hey, just curious: Why’d you ask why we were looking for Anton?”

  “There were others. Not nice like you.”

  “When?”

  “Last Tuesday? No, sorry, Monday.”

  “The police, maybe?”

  “No, not the police. I know all the police. Four men, not white but not black. From Middle East, maybe?”

  Once she was gone, Dominic shouted in Brian’s ear, “Monday. Three days after Rolf’s aunt said he didn’t come home.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found,” Brian replied. “Shit, man, it just had to be footballers.”

  “So?”

  “You never w
atched the World Cup, bro? These guys like fighting more than they like drinking.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to get a reaction, then.”

  “Dom, I ain’t talking about boxing. I’m talking about rip-your-ear-off, stomp-on-your-guts street brawling. Add that whole group together and you know what you get?”

  “What?”

  “A mouthful of teeth,” Brian replied with an evil grin.

  Hey, guys, we’re looking for Anton,” Dominic said. “Waitress said you’re his friends.”

  “Don’t speak English,” one of them said. He had a latticework of ropy scars on his forehead.

  “Hey, fuck you, Frankenstein,” Brian said.

  The man scooted his chair back, stood up, and squared off. The rest of them followed suit.

  “Speak English now, huh?” Brian shouted.

  “Just tell Anton we’re looking for him,” Dominic said, raising his hands to shoulder height. “Otherwise, we’re going to pay a visit to his aunt.”

  Brian and Dominic stepped around the group and headed for the alley exit. “How long, you figure?” Brian asked.

  “Thirty seconds, no more,” Dominic replied.

  Out in the alley, Brian grabbed a nearby steel garbage can and Dominic picked up a piece of rusted rebar as long as his forearm, and they turned in time to see the door swing outward. Brian, standing behind the door, let three of the footballers come out and go for Dominic in a rush, then kicked the door shut on the fourth and stepped in, swinging the garbage can like a scythe. Dominic took out the lead footballer with a shot to the knee, then ducked a punch from the second and brought the rebar down on his extended elbow, shattering it. Brian turned as the door swung back open, rammed the garbage can’s rounded bottom edge into the bridge of the fourth man’s forehead, waited for him to go down, then tossed the can at the knees of the last two charging across the threshold. The first went down at Brian’s feet, then pushed up to his hands and knees, but Brian heel-kicked him in the head, dropping him back down. The last footballer, fists clenched and arms windmilling, was charging Dominic, who kept backing up, staying out of range, letting him come, before sidestepping and backhanding the rebar into the side of the man’s head. He crashed into the alley wall and slumped down.