White: A Novel (14 page)

“I know this man,” Mitchell said. He set the beach photo back on his credenza.

“Yes, you do,” Trask remarked. Nothing escaped the chief executive.

“Chile, 1972. During the coup. Ellis claimed he worked for ITT, but I made him for DoD in about three seconds. He attended all the embassy functions. Always seemed to be looking for information about Allende’s business schedules and motorcade routes as I recall. Serious bugger.”

“Fifth Special Forces, Fourth Psychological Operations Group—military operations other than war,” Trask advised. “He cut his teeth with MAC-V-SOG and the Phoenix program, training Montagnard hill people to fight our guerrilla war in Vietnam. During the 1970s, he developed and coordinated CIA-led insurgencies in Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. After that he moved to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to work on a highly classified, long-lead operation known as Project Megiddo.”

“I knew he was black, even then.” Mitchell smiled. “He wasn’t one of our Agency guys, but he had that quality, you know? Part of the community. Couldn’t fake it by reading a bunch of le Carré novels in those days. We still had secrets that seemed worth keeping.”

Mitchell took the remote from Trask and flipped through a series of surveillance shots. Most looked at least a couple years old.

“Where is he?” Mitchell asked.

“Texas,” the chief of staff said.

Mitchell returned to his desk and picked up a newspaper. The headlines screamed of murder in the heartland. The death toll kept climbing as new bodies were discovered in the wreckage of planes and buildings. Though initial stories had focused on the new terror group Ansar ins Allah, the finger-pointing had already begun. Some accused the new Democratic administration of complacency. Others argued that the Republican war in Iraq had inspired anti-American hatred. And then there were stories about Borders Atlantic and its Quantis phones. Why this technology? Why now? Why sell it first to the Saudis? The uniquely American contagion of blame had started to spread, and Jordan Mitchell could feel the first symptoms of a very dangerous ague.

“We’re sending Waller in after them,” Mitchell said. “Maybe he can find out what the good colonel has gotten himself into since our days planning revolution in Chile.”

JEREMY AND FRITZ
turned off I-395 at the Pennsylvania Avenue exit, the only vehicle on the road. Billy Luther had radioed directions to a block of old brick warehouses along the Anacostia River. As he’d said down in Quantico, the Washington field office’s surveillance group had tracked a suspected al Qaeda sympathizer to some kind of meeting in a burned-out section of DC’s worst remaining ghetto.

“Nice place,” Lottspeich observed as they drove to within a block of the crisis site. Snow had covered the worst of it, but abandoned cars littered both sides of the road. Garbage stood in piles higher than some of the surrounding buildings; graffiti covered broken brick facades; worn-out mattresses, rat-infested couches, and piles of twisted, rusting steel provided the only contrast.

“I think the Realtors would call this a transitional neighborhood in a parklike setting.” Jeremy laughed.

“Yeah.” Lottspeich chuckled. “Plenty of wildlife: stray dogs, rats, and a flock of Safeway sparrows.”

Plastic shopping bags drifted like winter birds on the gusting winds. The dogs and rats had gone into hiding.

“At least the snow is keeping everyone inside.” Jeremy spotted one of the WFO surveillance vehicles parked behind an abandoned outbuilding and used his four-wheel-drive traction to pull up beside it. “Amazing what a little weather will do for drug interdiction efforts.”

Lottspeich rolled down his window once Jeremy had parked. He turned toward a middle-aged black woman in the other car. She wore a white North Face parka, gold-framed Givenchy glasses, and a nose ring.

“How’s the sledding?” he asked.

“Sledding?” She laughed. “Honey, this here is the ancestral home of the crack rock. Only winter sports we got is shooting up, whorin’ around, and sleepin’ in.”

“Good thing I brought a gun.” Lottspeich laughed back. He liked her immediately. “I understand you guys are looking for a couple highly trained long-range precision rifle specialists.”

The woman’s radio crackled, and she held up a blue-and-gold lamé fingernail. Had to be at least an inch long.

“Ten four,” she said, responding to something neither HRT sniper could hear. “Like I said, you boys better get you asses up there.” She turned back to Lottspeich. “Our source just got a call from the principal, said they looking to move within the hour.”

She pointed to a three-story building distinguished by a bell tower and a couple hundred broken windows.

“That’s your rooftop over there. We got a couple guys on top can show you around.”

Neither man said much as they climbed out, pulled their collars up around their necks, and pulled shooting rucks and rifle cases from the back of the truck.

“Hope that wise ass o’ yours is waterproof, honey,” the woman called after them. “’Cause its gonna get both wet and cold up theya.”

Jeremy and his partner trudged off through the snow. They could hear her laughing all the way to cover.

“I DON’T EXPECT
you to believe me,” GI Jane assured Ashar. “Not after the way you have been treated. But I really have no interest in causing you further discomfort. I think you don’t know a single thing about what brought you here. Is that true? Do you even know why you have been arrested?”

Ashar shook his head. This woman sounded sincere, but he didn’t dare trust her.

“I was kidnapped, held in the back of a truck, and then blown up,” Ashar said. He had told the others the same thing, but they did not believe him. “I am an American citizen. My family will be very worried about me.”

“Of course they will. But we’re going to let you go as soon as you help us with a few very important matters.” Jane tried to sound sympathetic and sincere, but she had been thinking too much and sleeping too little for false sentiment.

“I need you to tell me exactly what happened yesterday in Los Angeles.”

Ashar tried to decide whether or not she was baiting him.

“I was on my way to work,” he said. “A white man in a van drove up beside me to ask directions, and then he pointed a large handgun at me.”

“You work at a clothing store?” she asked. She had read his dossier and knew its details well. “The Gap.”

“Yes. I was walking because my car was in the shop for brakes and the store is just a short distance from my apartment.”

“But you had come from your mosque, is that right?”

Ashar looked surprised.

“Yes, I teach religious studies there on Tuesdays. I go to work after classes.”

“What happened next?” Jane asked. “Tell me about the white man.”

“This white man, he had a full beard and sunglasses beneath a ball cap. I could not see much of his face, which made me wonder when he rolled down his window to ask me directions. And then I saw the gun, and I felt sick at my stomach. There has been so much violence against Arab Americans, especially since the bombings.”

“What happened next?” Jane asked.

“He got out of the truck—and it was a very busy street, but no one stopped. He got out of the truck and forced me into the back. He climbed in after me and secured my hands and legs with tape.”

“Did he say anything to you?” she asked.

“Nothing at first. But he drove me somewhere, by the airport where I was arrested, and then he told me not to run, that he wouldn’t hurt me.”

Jane nodded and jotted something in her notebook.

“Would you recognize this man if I showed you a photo?” she asked.

Ashar shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, perhaps. The glasses and the beard, I’m not so sure.”

GI Jane reached into her pocket and produced a Palm Zire. She touched the screen three times with its stylus and turned it toward Ashar.

“Look at these photos. Do you see the man who kidnapped you?”

Ashar looked closely, allowing himself a moment of hope that this woman might believe his story. He scrolled through dozens of photos. They were all white men, some with beards, some with glasses, some in color, some in black and white.

“I don’t know,” he said. “These pictures are so . . .”

Something caught his attention. His eyes sprung open.

“Wait . . . wait. Yes, that’s him!” A rigid smile broke out across his face. “This is the man who took me! You see, this is him.”

GI Jane turned the PDA back for a look.

“Thank you, Ashar,” she said, tucking the Zire back into her pocket. “See, I told you that I believed you.”

“Does that mean I can go now?” he asked. Ashar felt hope for the first time since this awful experience began.

“I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible for a while,” GI Jane said. There was no point in explaining. She had what she had come for.

“But when?” he pleaded. “When can I return to my family?”

“That’s way above my pay grade,” Jane responded, standing and moving back toward the kitchen. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

COLONEL BUCK ELLIS
had been born into a life of violence. Literally. His mother had given birth to him in the passenger seat of a car wreck. There, amid the gnarled chrome and torn cloth wreckage of a 1947 Ford, Ellis had summoned his own first breath and screamed bloody murder. The first man on the scene had been a Baptist minister who felt so moved by what he saw that he drafted the next Sunday’s sermon in homage and preserved it in a cellophane sleeve so the miracle child would have it as a keepsake when he got older.

Both parents had died that night on a slick patch of Houston asphalt, leaving him to an alcoholic uncle and his regularly beaten wife. The sermon had gotten lost in the constant moves and revolving foster homes of a throwaway youth.

“Two-man entry, two-room clear!” he called out. Bone hard and superbly fit at sixty-four years of age, the colonel wore his hair in the same flattop style he’d adopted in grade school. He stood outside a cinder-block structure called the House of Horrors and counted down a checklist of safety issues. People from all over the world paid $1,785 a week to visit the Homestead, and as lead instructor, he wanted to make sure they walked away healthy enough to reflect positively on his preachings.

Two-man entry, two-room clear.
He remembered the first time he’d heard those words, working with the Brits’ Twenty-second Special Air Service back in 1980. He’d been passing through their garrison at Hereford when Iranian terrorists took over the Iraqi embassy at Princes Gate.
What a hell storm that had turned into.

So many hell storms. Thirty years in the military, all but three of them in Special Forces. He had been there that August day at Fort Bragg in 1961 when President Kennedy handed Colonel Donovan the reins. After that, it was war, both preparing for it and fighting it. Vietnam: He’d served so much time in Southeast Asia the army actually moved his young family to Thailand so he could visit them every couple months when he cycled out for debriefings.

It had all been war, it seemed. Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Panama, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Chechnya, Philippines, Colombia. The countries ran together sometimes in an endless swirl of police actions, invasions, insurgency suppressions, and peacekeeping missions. “Domino games,” he called them. Always somebody else’s.

No matter. The mission remained the same: protect America from all threats foreign and domestic. Communism, terrorism, hedonism, don’t-give-a-damnism, whatever they called it at the Pentagon, he knew the truth. What kept America free and secure was a fundamental belief in the one Lord and savior Jesus Christ. The Jews and Muslims and the rest of the nonbelievers would rot in hell with all those who doubted.

Soldier, spy, or savior, Colonel Buck Ellis had devoted his life to making that so.

“Door breach on one,” he called out.

Two men in black Nomex flight suits and body armor hugged the wall, MP-5 submachine guns trained on a door. Ellis had affixed a C-4 “slap charge” just below the knob, simulating what the unit’s explosives expert would have done in a full-team entry.

“Stand by, I have control.”

Control?
he wondered.
What man ever has control?
Only Yahweh, the one true and almighty God had any power in this world. Only Yahweh had delivered him from an impossible youth to a military career of great distinction. Only Yahweh had shown him the power of faith, the one way. Only Yahweh had led him to a life worth fighting for.

“Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . BOOM!”

Ellis touched off the charge, tossing the door like a corn husk in a hurricane. The two men rode the overpressure through a cloud of smoke, entered, and ran their assigned routes.

“Two steps in, two steps off the wall,” Ellis had told them during classroom instruction. “Get through the door in a hurry. Avoid the ‘vertical coffin.’ Crisscross to confuse anyone not injured in the initial blast. Key on weapons. Multiple shots on every target.”

He’d become quite a legend within the community. During the past decade, the Homestead had grown from a small facility with just two instructors into a nationally recognized training facility with uniformed weapons experts, bunkhouses, two helicopters, a mile-long racetrack, and shooting ranges capable of handling anything short of ICBMs.

“Even got a gift shop,” his aunt had proudly said the one and only time she visited, years after that mean old alcoholic husband of hers had disappeared without a trace.

Pop, pop, brrrrrrrp, pop . . .

Ellis followed his students into the House of Horrors, watching over them as they moved, making mental notes that he would use later to make them better warriors. That was the point, after all—to teach these students the fine art of war.

Close-quarter battle—CQB—this afternoon, tactical handgunning tomorrow, unstable platform shooting the next day. Each basic five-day course included the essentials of small-unit tactical maneuvers. Anything more than that required a letter from some law enforcement agency and a larger check.