develop into a hand-to-hand, life-or-death situation. All of them were nuclear scientists or engineers, not combat specialists, who’d signed on with the NNSA to help stop terrorist nuclear attacks on the U.S. Their eyes were wide; this was something completely new for them, and they were paying attention to what they were being told, and no one noticed that someone without credentials around his neck had come in.
It was an opening act that McGarvey and Lundgren had used at all the other training sessions like this one, their special ops assignment to bring all twenty of NNSA’S Rapid Response teams up to real-world speed.
A couple of mechanics were working on an F-15D Eagle jet fighter on the far side of the hangar, and parked in the middle of the big space was a MH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter, its rotors drooping, nobody around it just now.
McGarvey hung back to give someone a chance to spot him, and in that brief few moments of inaction his thoughts were drawn back eighteen months and a horribly black haze dropped over him like a dense smoke cloud from an oil fire. His last assignment as a freelance field officer for the CIA before he’d quit for good — he hoped — when the organization he’d gone up against had murdered his son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, who’d been codirector along with McGarvey’s daughter, Elizabeth, of the CIA’s training facility outside Williamsburg. Todd been on his way back there after meeting with an old friend in Washington when a pair of gunmen forced him off I-95 in broad daylight and shot him to death, putting a final insurance round into the back of his head even though he had already been dead.
But that wasn’t the end of it. McGarvey had struck back, and in retaliation the same group had buried an IED in the road at Arlington Cemetery’s south gate where McGarvey’s wife, Kathleen, and their daughter, Elizabeth, were leaving after Todd’s funeral, killing them both. And just like that he’d been alone; everything he’d worked for all of his life wiped out; the real reason, if he was being honest with himself, that he had made a career in service to his country was that he’d wanted to make America safe not simply for Americans, but specifically for his family, for the people he loved. And he knew a lot of people over at the CIA and National Security Agency and every other U.S. intelligence agency who felt the same, because it sure as hell wasn’t about the money, or for most of them not even the thrill of operations, of being in the know.
Nothing was the same for him after that day. Todd’s death had hardened his soul, but killing Katy and Liz had eliminated it. His enemies, America’s enemies, any enemy had become fair game. Any method reasonable. No trials, no plea bargains, no deals, just destruction. He’d been an assassin for the CIA, his operations sanctioned, or at least most of them after the fact, but now everything was different. Simply put, he’d become a killing machine, and the job he’d been hired to do by the NNSA was to train its rapid response scientists how to recognize and deal with such a person, which had been a good thing for him, because at least for now he was in the role of a teacher and not of a killer.
Just lately, however, he had begun to chafe at the bit. Tough times and rough beasts were gathering for a strike. He could feel it in his bones, sense it in what for him had become like a strong electrical charge in the air, and his heart had begun to harden further.
Still no one in the group Lundgren was talking to had looked up, and this is how it was every other time, even though word must have spread from the other teams. It was a sloppiness that could get them killed one of these days, and stop them from preventing an act of nuclear terrorism, and it pissed him off.
He pulled his Wilson Tactical Supergrade Compact .45 ADCAP pistol out of the holster at the small of his back under his jacket and strode the last thirty feet to where the nearest man in the group stood listening to Lundgren tell them to make sure to maintain a peripheral awareness at all times and jammed the barrel of the pistol into the man’s temple.
Before the man or anyone else could react, McGarvey cocked the hammer. “You’re dead,” he said, and he pulled the trigger, the firing pin slapping on an empty chamber.
“Jesus H. Christ.” The man reared back, almost going to his knees.
McGarvey withdrew his pistol, ejected the empty magazine which he pocketed, slapped another into the handle, and charged the weapon before he reholstered it. “You weren’t listening.”
“We’re not some fucking cowboys here!” the group’s team leader, Dr. Stephan Ainsle, shouted. He was a youngish, curly-headed man with a prominent Adam’s apple and intensely dark eyes, and he was shaken, too. They all were. But Lundgren had warned them from the get-go to keep on their toes, to expect the unexpected; it was a vital part of the job they would be expected to do once they were fully trained.
“Then you’d better learn to get on the horse, Doctor, or else you’ll be worthless to the program.”
“We’ll see about that,” Ainsle said, and he started to turn away, more frightened than he wanted to admit than angry.
“You’re not in the program until we sign you off,” McGarvey said, holding his temper in check. He’d seen guys like this coming out of the Farm, with attitudes that got them killed or at least burned within their first ninety days in the field. It wasn’t the training, it was the certainty that they were superior to the trigger-pullers. They were the intellects who would solve every problem with their minds, with superior reasoning. And such a line of thinking was common among these types.
Ainsle looked at the others on his team, still not convinced to open his mind. “I don’t need this shit.”
“But we need you, Doctor,” McGarvey said. “You signed on to the program because you obviously thought so, too. If you’ll listen up maybe we can teach you how to survive long enough to find and disarm a nuclear weapon before it detonates, maybe in downtown Washington or New York.”
It had become a matter of face now, Ainsle’s education versus a pair of men he took to be nothing more than well-connected thugs, even though he might know something of McGarvey’s background. But unless he was convinced that he and his entire team would be scrubbed, which, in McGarvey’s estimation would be too bad, he would walk away now. They’d left the safety of academia, for whatever reasons, to volunteer for some tough training, and at least a two-year commitment to serve their country in a potentially hot zone. They were definitely needed.
“I know why you guys are here, and it sure as hell isn’t for the glamour or big bucks; you won’t have a new theory named after you, at least not while you’re with us. Nor will your names ever get in the media. No awards, no Nobel Prizes, no advancement at your labs.” McGarvey managed to grin. “Hell, you probably won’t even get women out of this.”
One of the younger scientists smiled and shook his head. “I knew it,” he said. He glanced at Ainsle and lifted a shoulder.
Still Ainsle, who was currently working on a government-funded fusion research project at Cal Tech, hesitated, and McGarvey wanted to go over to him and wipe the smug, superior expression off the man’s face. But he loosened up, so that they could all see it.
“Come on, Doc, make my day,” McGarvey said.
“Dirty Harry,” Ainsle said, and the others laughed. “All right, so I’m an asshole. But I’m a goddamned smart asshole and I want to help stop the bad guys.”
“Good enough,” McGarvey said. “Because from this point on I want you to keep two things at the front of your minds. It’s not a matter of
“And the second is to expect the unexpected,” Lundgren said from behind them. He’d slipped away while the team had given McGarvey its full attention. It was a part of what he called his and McGarvey’s dog and pony show.
They turned around.
Lundgren stood over a medium-sized aluminum suitcase that contained a Russian-made compact nuclear demolition device. The cover was open and a single red light flashed beneath a LED display that was counting down, and had just passed sixty seconds.
Ainsle was the first to recover. “That’s a realistic-looking mock-up.”
“You willing to bet your life that it’s a fake?” McGarvey asked. In fact it wasn’t a mock-up, though its physics package had been removed. The Russian-made gadgets leaked a lot more rems than ours did.
“We have equipment that can neutralize the firing circuits,” Ainsle said. “We’ve gotten this close, the rest is easy.”
“Fair enough,” McGarvey said. “Do it.”
Ainsle glanced toward the Rapid Response team van parked just outside. “Our stuff is in the van.”
“Get it.”
