Net Force (40 page)

    “What’s funny?” Howard asked.

    The TCS op touched controls. The image freeze-framed, and increased in size. “A little unsharp mask… thus,” the op said. “Look here. A message from the squad.”

    A crude hand-drawn image on the truck’s roof sharpened enough that Howard could make it out. It was a hand, holding up the two-finger sign for the letter V.

    V for victory. Howard smiled.

    “You owe me five, Sarge,” the op said.

    Howard raised an eyebrow.

    Fernandez said, “We had a small wager as to what the unit would draw on the truck roof, sir. I believe TCS Jeter here must have gotten to them with a bribe.”

    “What were you betting it would be?” Howard asked.

    “An, uh, illustration somewhat like, uh, this one, sir. Slightly different.”

    “One that featured
one
finger, sir,” the TCS op said. He kept his face deadpan.

    Howard grinned again. No matter where they were, no matter what they were up against, soldiers always found some way to relieve the monotony-or the tension.

    “Carry on,” Howard said. He walked back to the window.

    

    
Saturday, October 9th, 11:23 p.m. Grozny

    Plekhanov was getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth, when the doorbell to his house rang. His house was small, but nicely appointed, and in a neighborhood of such houses. Soon he would have one twice as big in a much better neighborhood. Everything in its own time.

    The bell rang again. It had an insistent quality.

    It was awfully late for someone to be calling. This could not be good news.

    He rinsed his mouth out, dried his face, then put a robe on over his pajamas. He stopped at the small writing table near the entrance, opened the drawer and removed from it the Luger pistol his grandfather had brought back from the German front in 1943.

    Pistol in hand, he peered through the fish-eye lens into the door.

    A very attractive young woman stood on the stoop. Her hair was in disarray and her lipstick smeared. Her dark blouse was pulled out of her pants, unbuttoned and wide open, revealing her unfettered breasts; her pants, blue jeans, were unzipped, and she held them up with one hand, clutching a wadded bra in the other hand. She appeared to be crying. As he watched, the young woman rang the bell again. He saw her sob.

    Goodness. A rape victim?

    Plekhanov lowered the gun and opened the door. “Yes? May I help you?”

    A man appeared from out of nowhere. He also wore jeans, a dark T-shirt and a blue Windcheater. He pointed a gun at Plekhanov’s face. “Yes, sir, you
can
help us.” He spoke Russian, but it wasn’t a local accent.

    The gunman reached over and gently relieved him of the Luger. “Nice gun,” he said. “Probably worth a lot.”

    A moment later, two more men joined the woman and the gunman. They seemed to materialize from the bushes and darkness. The other two looked to be cut from the same pattern-young, fit, casual dress.

    What was going on? Was this a robbery? There had been a lot of criminal activity of late. What did they want?

    The woman zipped up her pants and clicked the snap closed. She slipped her shirt off, put the bra on-some kind of one-piece sport thing-adjusted it, then slipped her blouse back on, buttoned it and tucked it in. One of the other men handed her a dark blue Windcheater.

    “No need to do any of this on
our
account, Becky,” the young man with the gun said.

    “In your
dreams
, Marcus,” the woman said.

    “If you would step back inside, Dr. Plekhanov?” the gunman said.

    His speech was correct, but Plekhanov still had not placed the accent. “You aren’t Russian, nor Chechen,” Plekhanov said.

    “No, sir,” he said. This was spoken in English.

    Plekhanov’s stomach twisted. They were
Americans
!

    He gestured with the gun. “Inside, Professor. You’ll want to change into something more appropriate for travel. We’re going on a long trip.”

    

    
Saturday, October 9th, 11:28 p.m. Urus-Martan

    “They got him!” Fernandez said. “They are en route, ETA twenty minutes.”

    The men in the room cheered. Howard let them, then said, “All right, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Get the birds on-line. We’ll celebrate when we’re back on our own soil.”

    Ten minutes later, Howard was outside in the dark, watching the pilots preflight the copters, when Fernandez came out of the farmhouse double-time.

    “Sir, we have a slight problem.”

    Howard felt his belly lurch and fill with several hundred butterflies who all wanted out, now. “What?”

    “Our squad’s ride just broke down. Squad Leader Captain Marcus says he thinks it blew a head gasket.”

    Howard stared at him. The
truck
broke down? That wasn’t even
in
the scenario! Jesus Christ!

    

    
Sunday, October 10th, 12:04 a.m. Urus-Martan

    

    “Where are they?” Howard asked.

    TCS-op Jeter was all business now, nothing funny in his voice. “Sir, GPS puts them in the city, south of the old Tets Komintern, in the new Visok Stal Oil Storage Area, close to the Sunzha River.”

    “How far from here?”

    “A long walk with a reluctant prisoner in tow, sir. I make it eighteen kilometers.”

    “Wonderful.”

    “Uh-oh. We’ve got incoming vox transmission. I’m unscrambling.” Jeter tapped keys.

    If the squad leader was willing to break radio silence, even with a coded transmission, that meant things either had gone, or were about to go, right to Hell.

    “Wolf Pack, this is Cub Omega One, do you copy?”

    “This is Alpha Wolf, Cub. Go ahead.”

    “Sir, we’re broken down in the middle of a giant oil-tank farm and we’ve got two security officers a hundred meters away, approaching us on
bicycles
.”

    Bike cops. Great. “Follow planned procedure, Omega One. Smile politely and wave your documents, they will pass muster.”

    “Yes, sir-oh,
shit
!”

    “Say again, Cub Omega One?”

    The captain’s voice came back, but he wasn’t talking to Howard: “Somebody shut him the hell up!”

    “Omega One, report!”

    There was a dead silence that stretched long.

    “Cub Omega One, reply.”

    “Ah, Alpha, we have a, uh…
situation
here. Our passenger started screaming bloody murder and these stupid damned cops just up and
opened fire
!”

    Next to Howard, Fernandez said, “Jesus, what kind of trigger-happy bastards are they? They can’t know who they’re dealing with.”

    “Alpha, we have returned fire, repeat, we have returned fire. Omega Cubs are all uninjured, say again, no injuries our squad, but we have one local down and the other has-has-” Proper report terminology failed him. “Has hauled ass behind a big fucking oil tank, sir. Stand by. Barnes and Powell, flank right, Jessel, left, go, go!”

    Howard waited for what seemed like another couple of thousand years. He exchanged glances with Fernandez.

    Captain Marcus came back on-line. “Sir, the downed local is… ah, defunct. He had a belt phone, and we have to assume the other one also carries communication gear, but we lost him. I would guess that we are going to have unfriendly company soon, Alpha. Please advise.”

    Howard looked at Fernandez. There was no choice. Nobody was leaving anybody out here. “Bag it up, troops! We lift in three minutes!”

    To the squad leader waiting on the other end of the scrambled comline, Howard said, “Stand fast, Omega. The pack is on the way.”

    “Copy that, Alpha. Thank you, sir.”

    “Let’s go, Julio.”

    “Yes, sir!”

    Howard and Fernandez ran for the helicopters.

    

    
Saturday, October 9th, 4:10 p.m. Quantico

    

    Michaels and Toni were in the small conference room, working on their second pot of coffee. As the doctor had predicted, Michaels was a lot more sore than he had been right after he’d been shot. It hurt to move, it hurt to stand still, it hurt to sit. He’d taken pills at home, to sleep, but he wanted to stay sharp while Howard’s operation was in progress. He had finally popped a couple of the pain tabs from their plastic-and-foil blisters, and washed them down with his fifth or sixth cup of coffee an hour or so ago, and the sharp stabbing pain had faded to a more-bearable
dull
stabbing pain. And despite all the coffee, he felt relatively mellow.

    “How’s your arm?” he asked Toni.

    “It was a nice clean cut. It doesn’t hurt much,” she said, “but it itches.”

    He had thanked her after it had happened, but he’d had plenty of time to think about it since. “You saved my life in that locker room,” he said. “If you hadn’t jumped that woman, she would have killed me.”

    “Rusty saved us both. I’d never gotten to her if he hadn’t come in and started yelling. Holding an ink pen and pretending it was a gun.” She shook her head.

    “I’m really sorry about Agent Russell,” he said. “I knew you were teaching him your fighting art. Were you, uh, close?”

    She hesitated for a moment. “Not really, no.” She stared into her coffee cup. “His parents are having the body flown back to Jackson, Mississippi, for the funeral and burial. That’s where he was from. They seem like nice people. I’d like to go, if that’s all right. It’s in a couple of days.”

    “Sure. After we get though all this-if we get through it-I wonder if I might get you to show me some of what you do-the
silat
?”

    She looked up from her coffee.

    “Lately, I don’t know why, I’ve kind of felt the need to know a little more about self-defense.”

    He smiled, and she matched his expression.

    “I’d be happy to show you.”

    “Might take a few weeks for me to stop gimping around.” He touched his bandaged leg.

    “I’ll wait.”

    He sipped at the coffee, then decided if he had anymore, he was going to have to have a bladder transplant. He put the cup down. “I wonder how it’s going. They are supposed to be done about now.”

    “I’m sure they’ll call as soon as they can.”

    “I’m sure. And I am confident that Colonel Howard will execute his mission.”

    She smiled again.

    “What?” he asked.

    “Nothing. I was just remembering something from a long time ago.”

    “Yeah?”

    “Between my junior and senior year at John Jay, I moved to an apartment with two other students. My brother Tony had lost his job, so his wife and two kids moved in with my parents while he went to Maine to find work.

    Things were a little crowded at home. We lucked into a rent-controlled place that actually had heat
and
windows that would open. Building is probably a parking lot by now, but it was perfect for three girls away from home for the first time.

    “Anyway, one of my roomies was an Eye-tie like me, that was Mary Louise Bergamo, from Philadelphia; the other was a tall, lanky black woman from Texas, a volleyball player, Dirisha Mae Jones. She was the funniest person I ever met. She was always coming up with these little homespun homilies she’d gotten from somewhere. One night we were drinking cheap wine and making a lot of noise and she defined ‘confident’ for us.

    “ ‘Well, girls, listen here. There’s this black man, name of Ernest, who is married to this here beauuutiful woman, Loretta, but Loretta is gone up and leave him ‘cause Ernest got fired from his job-even though it wasn’t no fault of his own.’ ”

    Michaels grinned. Her imitation of her friend’s Texas accent was pretty good.

    Toni continued: “ ‘So Ernest gets up one morning and puts on his best tie and his only white shirt and his Sunday-go-to-meeting pants, and leaves the house to go to this job interview. Ernest knows he don’t get this job, his woman is gone leave him. He also know the good old boy doing the hirin’ don’t particularly
care
for men of color, so he got to be sharp.

    “ ‘By now, though, it’s lunchtime. On the way to the interview, Ernest stops at Rick’s Pit Barbecue, where he orders a double helping of pork ribs and a beer to wash ‘em down. So while he’s waiting for Rick’s boy James to dish up the ribs-which are drenched in about half a gallon of hot, greasy barbecue sauce, and which are the absolute best ribs anywhere in East Texas, and pretty much in Central or West Texas, too, and that’s
sayin
’ something-while he’s waitin’, Ernest walks on over to the phone and calls up Loretta. Says to her, “Honey, shake out your blue dress-we gone go out dancin’ tonight to celebrate my new job.”

    “ ‘Now, a man that eats ribs wearing a white shirt he
knows
got to stay clean,
that
’s a confident man, girls.”

    Michaels laughed.

    “I like seeing you do that, Alex. Laugh. You don’t do it enough.”

    Michaels felt a little stab of something through the pain medication. Something in her voice. She liked him. It made him feel a little uncomfortable, but not
too
uncomfortable. “There have been better times for it. So, what happened to them? Your roommates?”

    “Mary Louise went to law school-Harvard-then home to go into practice with her father’s firm. She was on the team that took the State versus Pennco Housing to the Supreme Court last year and won.”

    “And the woman from Texas?”

    “Dirisha joined the Woman’s Pro Volleyball Tour right after she graduated. Played for three years, was on the Nike Team that won the Four Woman Outdoor Championships a couple of times. She retired from the circuit, wrote a book about her adventures, got a job as a sports columnist for
The New York Times
. Got married a few years ago, had a baby, a boy. Want to guess what she named him?”