William Tyree - Line of Succession

Yesterday they had been quickly — and quite prematurely — declared fit for duty after only four weeks of basic training. Last night they had received a crash course in checkpoint security procedures by two retired Iraqi War vets. With no relief scheduled, the soldiers took turns sleeping in the Stryker. For food, they had raided the walnut grove on the other side of the interstate. Around midnight, a pickup truck had approached with no sign of slowing down. On the vets’ advice, they had fired on it. The truck’s driver and three passengers were killed instantly.

“Okay then,” Abrams told them, “I’ll just wave my guys through, then we’ll be on our way. Okay?”

The guardsmen nodded and lowered their weapons. Abrams waved the Hummer through and put some distance between himself and the guardsmen. The Hummer rolled forward, its windows tinted as dark as a limousine’s. As they drew close, the Hummer’s passenger-side windows rolled down, revealing the barrels of M4 carbines that opened up with deafening thunder and twittering flashes of light.

The guardsmen were cut down before they could even get a shot off. Abrams opened the rear driver’s side door and high-fived his USOC crew. “Freaking National Guard doesn’t even speak English,” Abrams said to his colleagues in the SUV. “You believe that?”

Abrams heard a ruckus coming from the Stryker, which was parked some 20 feet away. The Stryker’s engine groaned to life and someone inside threw it hastily into gear. Abrams braced himself for the wrath of its 105mm machine gun, but the vehicle did not fire. It merely began moving away.

Abrams pulled a Javelin anti-tank weapon from the Humvee and knelt down on the asphalt. It took him less than two seconds to take aim and launch the missile. A millisecond later the Javelin slammed into the Stryker, transforming it into a hunk of flaming scrap metal.

The third Guardsman scrambled from the burning mess, his uniform aflame. He ran at full speed toward the walnut grove. Abrams marveled for a moment at the sight of the Guardsman, who looked like a streaking two-legged asteroid. He watched for a moment longer before pulling his sidearm and placing a single shot through the man’s spine. “Damn!” somebody shouted. Indeed. At more than fifty yards, with a pistol, it was a hell of a shot.

Abrams spat, clicked his weapon on safety, piled back into the Humvee and raided the cooler for something to eat. He needed to pack in a couple thousand calories between now and their arrival in the city. He chugged the first of several protein shakes as they rolled past the lit sign that read WELCOME TO BALTIMORE.

Fort Campbell

5:05 a.m.

Eva’s Under-Secretary was in hysterics. “Are you seeing this?” the squeaky voice on the phone said. “Greenbacks are down by double digits against the Euro, the Yen, the Yuan, the Pound, even the Canadian dollar. We’re down a full ten percent against the Canadians.”

“Finally,” Eva said as she walked toward Colonel Madsen’s office. “At long last, America’s seniors can stop crossing the border to buy cheap prescriptions.”

The Under-Secretary didn’t appreciate Eva’s gallows humor. “With all due respect Madam Secretary, we’ve can’t absorb further currency erosion. This is a major emergency.”

Eva stopped just outside Madsen’s office. She was on her last nerve, but she had to remind herself that the situation looked far different here at Fort Campbell than it did in a living room in Northern Virginia. It was time to delegate some busy work. “Great idea,” Eva said. “You’ve got my support to get the team together. I expect a full proposal by this time tomorrow.”

“Really?” the Under-Secretary chirped. “I’m on it! Thank you so much!”

With her staff temporarily appeased, Eva hung up, peered into the Garrison Commander’s office and found Madsen just getting off the phone himself. He looked up at Eva with bloodshot eyes. “The two Special Ops units you authorized are with Carver and O’Keefe in Baltimore,” he said.

Eva looked like she’d been broadsided. And she had been.

“Special Ops,” Madsen iterated. “I said those units you authorized are with Carver and O’Keefe now. In Baltimore.”

Eva realized she was living on a couple of power naps and a dozen energy drinks, but she was quite sure she hadn’t ordered any supporting units to Baltimore.

“Something wrong?” Madsen said. He handed her a printout of the email from EHudson@fortcampbell.mil ordering two units of Green Berets to Baltimore. “You wrote this, right?”

But of course she had not. Still, she considered her options. Admitting that Agent Carver had pulled an end run would undermine the Colonel’s confidence in her authority. She decided to avoid the question and take the matter up with Carver upon his return. “Is there anything else, Colonel?”

“Uh, yeah. Are you ready for this one? Intel ID’d the guys that went after you up in Martha’s Vineyard. Their names showed up in the database.”

“Which database?”

“DOD’s. Both were retired Marines.”

She remembered seeing the men’s bodies on the Edgartown Street moments after Agent Rios had gunned them down. She envisioned the tide of fluids running down the sidewalk and the thickets of brown hair atop their heads. But she had not looked at their faces. Despite Carver’s assertions that this was not the work of Allied Jihad, she had subconsciously assumed the assassins were foreign. Russians, maybe, or North Africans or extremist Saudis. Those nationalities fit the stereotypes. Those ideas were somehow palatable. Now she was faced with the possibility that her own countrymen — soldiers, no less — wanted her dead.

“Not active duty?” Eva said.

“No.”

“I need to see their files for myself.”

“For some reason, the files are sealed. The Joint Chiefs could authorize a look. Barring that, you’d have to call the President and get an executive order.”

An executive order. That would be nice. That would be everything.

Eva thanked the Colonel, walked back to her office and dialed Agent Carver. As the phone rang, she opened the drawer and took out the bottle of Ativan. She removed one pill and broke it in half. Just to take the edge off.

Baltimore

5:15 a.m.

Carver, O’Keefe and the twelve Special Ops soldiers of Viper Squad gathered next to a pair of grey Humvees on the city’s western edge. In what was easily the most dilapidated slum Carver had ever seen, it was still dark enough that the strike force blended into the shadows. Except for a few lunatics jawing on the other side of the street, the streets had been emptied by Ulysses patrols sent in to enforce martial law.

Master Sergeant Hundley, a square-jawed soldier who resembled a walking side of beef, handed out battle gear. Green Berets had the best of the best — state-of-the-art body armor, night-vision goggles, hands-free radios and a new prototype assault rifle that carried forty-round clips and weighed less than five pounds.

This wasn’t Carver’s first mission with Hundley. While in CIA counter-terrorism, Carver had led a joint op with Hundley’s recon unit in the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hundley had seemed far too fearless for his own good, and Carver was somewhat surprised to find that the Sergeant was not only still alive, but also that he still had the arms and legs he had been born with. All but one of the Green Berets in Hundley’s unit were combat veterans; three had prosthetics, including a Staff Sergeant with artificial legs that were every bit as nimble as the real thing.

“Saddle up,” Carver called out. The men and women of Viper Squad slid into either side of the unit’s Humvees. Nico was cuffed into the second vehicle — not because they needed him for this leg of the operation, but because there was nobody else to babysit him.