Tom Clancy Support and Defend Page 6

  Dom raised an eyebrow. “Well, now you’re talking.”

  She glared back at him. Annoyed.

  “Can I grab a quick—”

  “No, you may not. Lie down. I’ll take care of everything once we’re airborne. Right now we need to go.”

  Dom reluctantly returned to the couch, but he found he had more trouble sitting back down than he had standing. Sherman was by his side immediately, helping him down onto his back. She then lifted his legs and put them on the sofa, covering them with a blanket.

  He breathed a long, relieved sigh. Having his feet up reduced the pain in his ribs considerably.

  “Thanks.”

  She did not reply. Instead, she buckled him into the sofa bed, moved quickly to the hatch and shut it, then conferred with the pilot and copilot for a moment. Within a minute the aircraft was moving and Adara was back in the cabin, buckling herself in to a jump seat by the door.

  AS DOM LAY ON his back during takeoff, it occurred to him that this was not the first time he’d been injured and strapped down to this exact same sofa. He’d been shot in Pakistan a couple years earlier, and the long flight home had been an uncomfortable one. This time his wounds were not as severe, but there was another key difference between the two events. Back then the mood on the flight home had been ebullient, he and his teammates had just prevented a nuclear detonation, and it seemed his wound had been a small price to pay for the success of the operation.

  This time he was going home knowing a family of four, people he had come to care for a great deal, had died a fiery death, and he had a feeling he would be second-guessing his every action and reaction during the fight for a long time to come.

  The Gulfstream leveled off over India, heading east toward the Bay of Bengal. Their flight plan would take them over Thailand and Taiwan, then over the Pacific Ocean, to the U.S. West Coast. They’d stop in San Diego to refuel, and then fly the rest of the way back to the aircraft’s home base of Baltimore, arriving home sixteen hours after departing Kochi.

  Five minutes after takeoff, Adara returned to Dominic, who continued to feel like a piece of luggage. In an attempt to push the image out of his mind, he decided to press the issue of getting a drink.

  “Adara, I could use a Maker’s Mark on the rocks.”

  She knelt down and unfastened the restraining straps on the sofa, then began unbuttoning his shirt. “Sorry. It will have to wait. You don’t need a stewardess right now as much as you need a medic. I’m going to check you out, see what we need waiting for us back in D.C. I had the Indian hospital e-mail me your films and assessment, and I looked them over during takeoff. Nothing broken, but I want to look at the bruising on your chest.”

  Dominic reacted with restrained anger. “I’m fine, Sherman. I’ve spent an entire day in the hospital. I’ve been evaluated.”

  “Not by me, you haven’t.”

  “All I need is a drink and to be left alone.”

  But Adara Sherman did not back down. “If you are going to be an asshole about this, it will only take longer for me to do what I need to do.” She paused, and her tone softened slightly. “This is my job, Dominic. Now be a big boy and let me check you out.”

  Dom realized he was taking out his frustrations on Adara. He slowly sat up enough for her to get his shirt off.

  “I’m sorry. Tough couple of days.”

  She looked at his bruised torso. The right side of his rib cage was black and blue. “Yeah, I’d say so. What happened here?”

  “Fell down some stairs. Think I might have hit something on the way down.”

  She cracked a little smile. “What gave you your first clue?”

  After unwrapping the bandage on his chest and cleaning and debriding the puncture wound there, she did the same with his bandaged forearm. She then directed her attention to cleaning some smaller cuts and scrapes on his chest with antiseptic.

  “You don’t trust the Indian doctors?”

  “I trust them fine. But one thing I learned in Afghanistan: Wounds can’t be too clean.”

  Dom knew the woman had been a Navy corpsman, which in her case had not meant sitting on a ship passing out Dramamine. She had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, treating U.S. Marines, sometimes under fire herself. Dom had seen a lot of action in his years with The Campus, but he thought it was possible, even likely, that the attractive “flight attendant” had seen much more.

  Dom asked, “You still think about it? The war?”

  He was almost certain he would get some sort of professional nonresponse, but instead she stopped cleaning his wound for a moment. The cotton swab remained motionless, just barely brushing the damaged flesh on his chest.

  She looked him in the eyes. “Only every day.”

  Her eyes flicked away from his quickly, he could see her admonishing herself for her breach of professional distance, and she continued cleaning the abrasions without speaking.

  He winced with pain from time to time, but mostly he sat there quietly.

  When she finished the examination and the recleaning and rebandaging of his wounds, she left for a moment and returned with some painkillers and a bottle of water.

  “No, thanks,” Dom said.

  “Are you hurting?”

  “Headaches. Not bad.”

  She held out the pills again, and Dom shook his head. “I need to think. Can’t think on those.”

  “How ’bout I make you that drink?”

  He cracked his first smile in twenty-four hours, though it wasn’t much. “If you insist.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER ADARA moved up the darkened cabin and stood over Dominic, who now reclined on one of the leather captain’s chairs in the rear of the cabin. She used the light from a satellite phone to illuminate his face, expecting to find him already sound asleep. Instead, his dark eyes were wide open and full of intensity, and they looked up at her.

  She held the phone out. “It’s Mr. Hendley.”

  Dom took the phone and checked the time on a clock by the chair. “Hey, Gerry.”

  Gerry Hendley, director of both Hendley Associates, the financial management firm that served as the white side front for The Campus, and The Campus itself, was a former South Carolina senator with a deep southern drawl. “How you holding up, Dominic?”

  “I’m sure Ms. Sherman gave you the complete rundown of my injuries.”

  “She did. I’m asking you.”

  “I feel like I’ve been run over by a bus, but I’ll be fine.” He paused. “You have any intel on what went down?”

  “Figured that was all you’d care about, so I’ve been digging. ’Fraid I don’t have too much just yet. I talked to some friends at Langley. We know at least some of the terrorists were members of the Al-Qassam Brigades. They set sail from Yemen five days ago and hijacked an Indian cargo ship to move unmolested through Indian waters.”

  Dom leaned his head back on the leather couch and closed his eyes. “Al-Qassam? Fucking Hamas.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do we know why they targeted Yacoby?”

  Gerry said, “No, but I’m reaching out to my sources here in the U.S. and abroad to get an answer. All I know at this point is that Yacoby had served until fairly recently as a commander in Shayetet Thirteen.”

  “An Israeli naval commando? That explains a lot of the training he was putting me through.” He had a thought. “Al Qassam is Hamas’s army. They are more or less conventional forces. When did they start using suicide vests?”

  “Never. Due to the fact their op began in Yemen, we’re entertaining the possibility the guys with the vests were AlQaeda.”

  “Yacoby was one man, living abroad with his family, basically a soft target. Why would Al-Qassam use suicide bombers along with their gunmen?”

  “There is a lot of speculation about that. One theory, and it does make some sense to me, is that the plan was to assassinate Yacoby and then go take hostages at the synagogue or some other place where the Jewish people in the community congregated. The
AQ in the vests would martyr themselves, take as many Jews as they could, and the Palestinians would escape.”

  Dom nodded. “And this would mask an assassination.”

  “Exactly. They could make it look like Arik and his family got caught up in a jihadist attack on Jewry in the area, and not targeted specifically by the guys from Gaza.”

  Dom thought about it for a moment. “Make it look random to protect whomever it was who passed the intel about Yacoby and his whereabouts?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know. Let’s not overspeculate.”

  “Fair point.” Dom picked at the bandage on his arm, then said, “The more important question is, how did they find out about him?”

  Gerry said, “Unknown at this point. I wonder if the Israelis have a traitor on their hands.”

  “Shit,” mumbled Dom. Then he said, “You know what, Gerry? I was about two seconds away from getting a gun site on the back of the suicide bomber’s skull. I could have prevented their deaths.”

  “Don’t think like that. I know you did a hell of a job. The report from the Indians is you killed multiple attackers yourself.”

  Dom wasn’t listening. His mind was back at the Yacobys’ farm. “Arik had two boys.”

  “I know, son. I know.”

  “If I’d made it upstairs a little faster, I just might have—”

  Hendley’s southern drawl boomed over the sat phone. “You just might have been blown to bits with the rest of them! Look, Dom. I can’t tell you how to get past this. I’m sorry, but I don’t know.” After a pause he said, “You’ve been through this sort of thing before.”

  Dom had been through this sort of thing before. His twin brother, Brian, also an operative for The Campus, had died in his arms two years earlier. Dom knew he had changed since his brother’s death, and he feared the changes weren’t for the better.

  “With Brian, you mean?”

  “Yes. I was the one who sent you and your brother to Libya. That weighs on me every day.”

  Dom countered without reservation, because he’d never blamed Gerry for what happened. “You made the right call. What we were doing needed to be done. Brian just got the short end of the stick.”

  “And so did Arik Yacoby and his family. There’s nothing you can do about it, and no sense replaying that night over in your head for the rest of your life.”

  “Yes, sir.” Caruso forced the thoughts of the dead family in India out of his head. “What’s the fallout going to be for The Campus on this?”

  “Hard to say. We don’t know how al-Qassam knew about Yacoby, so we can’t gauge your exposure yet.”

  Dom knew what Hendley was thinking. “Until you know how the intel got out about him and his location, you don’t know if I’ve been burned as well. For now I need to stay away from The Campus. From the guys.”

  Gerry said, “Shouldn’t be hard to do. The rest of the team is spread out around the world. I’ll keep everyone where they are, but you take some time off. Just take it easy.”

  Dom chuckled into the sat phone, but his heart wasn’t in the chuckle. “I was already on stand down before this happened. Now you’re telling me to get lost.”

  “No. I’m telling you to get better. Ms. Sherman tells me you’ll need some recovery time. While you’re doing that, this situation will subside. I can instruct the pilots to take you wherever you want to go. You want Adara to find you a resort hotel somewhere in the Rockies? A beach house in Hawaii? Someplace you can take it easy until everything blows over?”

  “Honestly, Gerry, I just want to go home. Back to D.C.”

  “Fair enough. Get some rest, Adara will take care of you.”

  7

  HARLAN BANFIELD was a print journalist by trade; he’d been at it for more than forty years and he certainly looked the part. He was small and frumpy, with permanently messy silver hair and bright gray eyes that conveyed kindness and empathy even when they were locked on a politician he was interviewing for the purposes of writing an excoriating hit piece.

  Harlan’s day had begun in College Park, Maryland, at a breakfast meeting for an association of foreign correspondents. He’d been a foreign correspondent himself, with bylines from places as far away as Ho Chi Minh City and Montevideo, and even though he had settled down much in the past few years and rooted himself firmly to the D.C. area, he still liked to get together with other current and former globe-trotting reporters at the monthly breakfast.

  The meeting broke up at ten a.m., and soon after Harlan climbed into his nine-year-old Volkswagen and made the drive down to his one-room office in a high-rise on K Street, deep in the District’s downtown Golden Triangle. He had a morning of phone calls ahead before he had to head back out to lunch with old colleagues at The Washington Post.

  Banfield’s career began working the city beat for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the seventies. He served in New York with UPI in the eighties, before finally taking work as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He was based in Europe and the Middle East, primarily, but he was both an excellent journalist and a single man without a family, so he was sent to all the hot spots for twenty years before returning to D.C. to work at the Post’s office on 15th Street in the twilight of his career.

  Banfield was sixty-six now, but he had not retired. He still did some freelance work around town, writing mostly for various electronic media outlets.

  In addition to his work for hire, Banfield also authored a blog about D.C. lobbyists from a decidedly anti–D.C. lobbyist perspective. His blog got him some small attention inside the Beltway, but he wasn’t doing it for the mainstream, because Banfield’s blog, like his sporadic freelance work, was, by and large, a front.

  In truth, Harlan Banfield was much more than a journalist. He was also the U.S. liaison of an organization that called itself the International Transparency Project. The ITP’s website put their mission statement succinctly, identifying the group as a loose worldwide consortium of philanthropists, journalists, lawyers, and activists who endeavored to support government openness and accountability. They did this by seeking out, encouraging, funding, and protecting whistleblowers.

  The homepage of the ITP’s website displayed a picture of a sunrise over Washington, D.C., with the phrase “Truth vs. Power” in bold type above it. There was something telling about having D.C. on the homepage of the website. The organization was—ostensibly, anyway—designed to expose government malfeasance in every country on the globe, but in truth, ITP focused the vast bulk of its efforts on what it saw as the evil empire, the United States of America.

  Banfield didn’t hate America, though he thought it probable some of his foreign colleagues in the ITP did. Banfield just liked a good story, and nothing gave him a bigger thrill than unveiling closely guarded secrets. High-level government leaks were the coin of the realm around Washington, and Harlan Banfield loved serving as a clandestine clearinghouse for the biggest leaks in the Beltway.

  Banfield felt there existed in the U.S. a Deep State, a shadow government, wealthy and well-connected members of industry who were the true power behind the scenes. And working as the U.S. liaison to the ITP was his way of peeling off the superficial layers of government secrecy, in hopes of someday digging deep enough to find the truth about this shadow government.

  He wasn’t in it for any attention—members of the Project did not reveal their identities to the world at large. It was an attempt to minimize exposure to government surveillance, and in Banfield’s case, it had worked. As far as most people knew, he was just an aging foreign correspondent who’d long since been put to pasture, but he loved unlocking the secure doors around D.C.

  He pulled into his building’s underground garage a little before eleven a.m. It had started to drizzle, and he was glad to have a dedicated spot under cover. He’d just locked his Volkswagen and began walking toward the elevator, when he sensed a figure in the dark on his left moving between the cars along the wall of the garage.

  He stopped, clutching his
keys in his hand as if they might be some sort of adequate protection against a mugging.

  The figure came closer, but remained out of the light. He faced Banfield but said nothing.

  “Hello?”

  The man stepped into the light now. He wore a trench coat with the collar up and a knit cap on his head, pulled just above his eyes. He looked instantly familiar to Banfield, but it took him several seconds to identify him.

  “Ethan? Is that you?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Christ, son! You scared the living shit out of me.”

  “Where can we go?”

  “Why the dramatics? You could have just e-mailed me. Come upstairs. We’ll go to my office.”

  “No!” Ethan Ross said, lurching forward as he spoke. Banfield recoiled a little, but it was in surprise, not fear.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “Your office might be bugged. Your phone, too.”

  “Why would it be bugged?”

  “Let’s take your car. I know a place we can talk.”

  AT ROSS’S DIRECTION, they drove west through Georgetown and crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge into Virginia. Here they merged into the northbound lanes of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which ran northwest away from the D.C. metro area.

  “Shall I cancel my lunch meeting?” Banfield asked. Ross did not answer.

  “Do I need to stop for gas? How far are we going?”

  “Not much farther.”

  Banfield pressed his luck, doing his best to engage Ross in conversation, but the younger man just stared out the window of the car and did not reply.

  The rain was light but steady, and the only sound inside the Volkswagen was the soft whine of wet tires and the slow cycle of the wiper blades.

  After only a few minutes on the winding, hilly road, Ross told Banfield to take the next right, and immediately the sixty-six-year-old reporter realized they must be heading to Fort Marcy Park.

  The park was a wooded and secluded location, across the river and northwest of downtown D.C. It had been a real fort back in the Civil War, on a hill with sweeping views of both the Potomac and open farmland, and thoroughly fortified with earthen walls, dugouts, and trenches, many of which could still be discerned as unnatural-looking undulations in the landscape.