THE WHITE HOUSE
“HE DID
“Not at all. You heard me right.” Major General Bradley Middleton, the commander of Task Force Trident, was seated in a brown leather chair in front of Hanson’s desk. A small fire burned in the fireplace, giving off a faint, pleasant tinge of smoke. “Gunny Swanson stole a nuke last night.”
“Good Lord. The man never does things by half measures, does he? Just outright stole it?”
“Like a thief in the night, Steve. He broke into the Khobz military facility, found the tactical nuclear warhead mounted in its very own APC beside the missile launcher and drove off with it. With CIA help, a heavy-lift CH-43 helicopter made a rendezvous with him in the desert about twenty klicks outside of town and Swanson took the APC straight on board. The TNW is secure in the weapons bay of the USS
“Incredible. The Saudis have no clue?”
Middleton shook his head and ran a hand over his close-cut hair. A big smile spread over the square jaw. “No. That’s the real beauty of it. Swanson also snatched up some terrorist beforehand and abandoned him inside the missile storage building, where he was killed during a shootout with the Saudis. They look at the corpse as proof that the terrorist was part of the group that had also attacked the Khobz oil workers’ compound. He actually was to be part of a rebel RPG team that ambushed a convoy rushing out of the military base. So the obvious conclusion was that his terrorist buddies took the TNW. Is that confusing enough?”
“And Swanson is okay?”
“Yep. The chopper dropped him off on a stretch of beach north of Khobz and he walked back to the CIA safe house. He radioed a report to Major Summers in Kuwait and she forwarded it to me.”
Hanson stood up, holding the yellow legal pad on which he had made notes. “This might be a game-changer, Brad. We know something the Saudis don’t, about their own nuclear weapon.” The chief of staff lapsed into a terrible Hispanic accent for a quirky Ricky Ricardo imitation from
“Right.” Middleton laid a folder on Hanson’s desk. “Steve, you keep that copy so you can brief the boss and I’ll privately feed you any more details as they come up. The CIA and the Pentagon obviously already know about what happened, but I told them to keep the secret compartmentalized since it was a black Trident operation. I told them that President Tracy would land on them hard if there were any leaks. So, you need anything else?”
Hanson placed the folder atop his tablet and headed for the Oval Office. “Yeah. Tell Kyle to find another one.”
31
KHOBZ, SAUDI ARABIA
NO LOOSE ENDS. KYLE Swanson remained absolutely still, concentrating totally on the final stages of the fighting that had unrolled at the mosque only 400 meters from his hide. The window on the far side of the shadowed room was open and his emotions were replaced by purpose.
Since the Saudi authorities did not know what had happened to the nuclear warhead, other than that it had disappeared, he intended to keep the mystery tight and intact. To do so meant he was going to have to kill some people. That did not bother him, because in his judgment, they were enemy combatants. Swanson’s personal habit was that when presenting a gift to an enemy, one should wrap it very carefully so as to keep their attention on the unimportant things, like the shape of the box or the crinkly yellow paper wrapping, and not the bomb inside. The trick was as old as the wooden horse at Troy and usually worked. Today, he would add a final flourish of distraction on his theft at the base by tying a big bloody red bow.
Kyle had returned to the safe house just before daylight and found both Homer and Jamal busy closing up shop, arranging det cord and explosives in a pre-arranged pattern that would not only destroy the structure but make it cave in upon itself.
“The Boykin Group is out of business,” Homer declared. “It won’t be long before the Saudis start wondering about how a handful of foreign workers just happened to have enough automatic weapons, ammo, and grenades to whip a pretty big onslaught of rebel bad guys. Come dark, we will be gone.” He rubbed his eyes, and then looked fondly around the well-stocked basement that had been maintained over the years. “Shame to lose all this, but we’ve got no choice. Our cover is blown.”
“Probably,” Kyle agreed. He got a cup of coffee and sat on a foldout cot. “How’d it go out there?”
Jamal was planting C4 bricks beneath the communications console, and his voice had a dim echo. “The soldiers in the Saudi relief column were pretty pissed off that they had been ambushed back at their own front gate. Came barging in on the left flank of the rebels with lots of firepower and pretty good maneuvering. The terrorists were pushed back into the urban area.”
Homer was puttering with a timing device. “That’s when we gathered up our toys and came back here. A while later, when they got the word that their nuke was gone, the Saudis went big league mean and are still bringing in more troops and armor and attack helicopters. It has degenerated into house-to-house fighting.”
Kyle finished his coffee. “I assume that all of the action is pointing toward the mosque?”
“Yep,” replied Homer. “That’s their problem. Despite the king being assassinated and the nuke being gone, the commanders are hesitating. They are squared off against the Religious Police and the Committee on Virtue as well as the rented terrorists, which means a Muslim-on-Muslim showdown.”
Swanson walked over to the sand-table model of the city and studied the area. “Will they attack the mosque?”
Jamal came out from beneath the counter and got busy with a screwdriver and pliers to pull out hard drives and memory boards on phones and computers. “No doubt,” he said. “They have to capture the mosque in order to get some prisoners to question about the nuke.”
Homer agreed. “I wouldn’t want to be in the same room when the prisoners are being asked to assist with the investigation. Gonna be messy.”
“Torture,” Jamal agreed.
“Big time. They know that anybody will crack under torture, sooner or later.” Homer’s eyes suddenly came up and met the steady gazes of Kyle and Jamal. “You think the prisoners might actually convince the Saudis that they really
Swanson walked into the armory cage. “We won’t take that chance.”
