Jack Coughlin - Kill Zone

“We’re not going that way,” Swanson answered.

“But the Israeli army is all over those hills,” Middleton shot back. “It’s the quickest way out of here, and solid protection when we reach them.”

“There are just as many Syrian soldiers on this side of the border, General, and they all will be looking for us. Hold on.” Kyle found a narrow, paved frontage road that paralleled the main distant highway and skidded onto it with a sharp right turn that took them off the pavement. He intentionally clipped a traffic sign, crushed roadside brush, and shifted into a lower gear to dig deep ruts, leaving a clear trail before entering the northbound road.

The general was shoved against the door by the force of the turn and yelped in pain. “You’re going north? Toward Damascus?”

“Of course not.” Kyle stopped the truck and did a three-point turn to head back the way they had come, careful to stay on the pavement. He jumped out and used a small bush as a broom to erase marks of his reversed turn. The bush went into the truck bed and he headed east again.

“We’ll double back for a couple of klicks. The stuff I did back in the village and the claymore ambush worked better than we thought. It slowed them down so much that I haven’t seen the BTRs or anybody else on our tail. There are no headlights coming this way, so I think they stopped to regroup and call for help.” He mashed the accelerator, tearing along the quiet road.

“There’s a little road back here that heads south. We’ll get on it for a little while, then hole up for the day. They’re going to have a lot more choppers up as soon as daylight comes, so we can’t run in the morning hours. Both of us need rest, too. I haven’t slept in two days and you’re hurt.”

Middleton leaned back against the seat. “Not the way I’d do it, Gunny.”

“I know. It’s hard to stay still when the natural inclination is to haul ass, but this is how to best exfiltrate enemy territory and get out of here alive. Right now, they don’t know where we are, and probably will conclude that we are heading straight for Israel. So we have to do something else, and going north to Lebanon isn’t an option.”

The countryside rolled by as the sky lightened to a warm gray, and as the very edge of the fiery sun showed above the horizon and into his eyes, he found the road and turned right. The Syrians would try to cordon off all of the escape possibilities. Swanson felt exposed and vulnerable with morning coming on so rapidly, the sun seeming to point at him, giving away their position. There was nowhere to hide.

HELLO, RALPH. AREN’T YOUsupposed to be on the other side of the world?” General Hank Turner returned Colonel Ralph Sims’s salute and shook his hand. Turner introduced Sims to a three-star air force general with short silver hair who sat behind a huge desk in a spacious office where pictures of airplanes covered the walls.

Lieutenant General Peter Brady, commander of the 11th Air Force, also shook Sims’s hand, and his dark eyes examined the disheveled appearance of the commander of the 33rd Marine Expeditionary Unit. “You look a little worse for wear, Colonel. Have a chair. Coffee?”

“Thank you, sir, I will. I just came in on a meteor, that NASA X43-D scramjet.” Sims was wearing a borrowed air force jacket over his short-sleeved summer uniform. What was appropriate wear in the warmth of the Med offered little comfort at Elmendorf Air Force Base outside Anchorage, Alaska. Only a few hours earlier, his uniform had been crisp and starched, and now it was a mass of deep wrinkles.

General Brady’s eyes narrowed. “Colonel, there is no such aircraft, but I would like to know how the hell you were riding in it.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. I’ve never heard of such a plane either, and I’m not quite sure how I ended up in the back seat. The pilot told me to get in, and I did.” He sat down, wrapping his palms around a warm mug. “Forgive my appearance. I barely had time to change out of the flight suit before your command sergeant major hustled me over here.”

General Turner refilled his own cup. “I heard you were on the way with something special, so I sat here while my plane kept being repaired over and over. I heard that the Sergeants’ Network has been busy, so a lot of pretty smart people must think your news is important enough to hold the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on the ground. I am curious.” He sat in a big leather chair and crossed his legs. “Let’s have it, Ralph.”

Sims took a long drink of coffee and felt the warmth go all the way to his stomach. “No disrespect to General Brady, sir, but I believe you should have this on an ‘ears only’ basis.”

Turner waved his hand. “Pete Brady and I go back more than twenty years. I value his counsel. He can listen to whatever you have. Proceed.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll give you the short version, then answer any questions that I can.” He handed the plastic-enclosed envelope and note to Turner and stood by silently while the two generals passed the order between them.

“This was delivered personally to Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson by the senior military aide of National Security Advisor Buchanan,” the colonel told them. “It was to be destroyed as per instructions from Buchanan, but the Gunny managed to sneak a copy, which was what the aide unknowingly burned. This is the original,” Sims explained. “Then Swanson went in with the Force Recon team on the Middleton mission as scheduled, but did not plan to obey the order. When the choppers crashed and it was assumed Swanson was dead, my Top brought that letter to me. Swanson had planned to bring General Middleton out of there safely.”

Brady slid the letter back into its envelope. “So you flew halfway around the world to hand-deliver this to Hank?”

“Yes, sir. It was too hot for a messenger and I intentionally bypassed a couple of layers in the chain of command. This is way above my pay grade, General, but I think it has to be illegal for a civilian bureaucrat who has never been elected to anything to use the clout of the White House to order the assassination of a kidnapped American general.”

Turner had uncapped an elegant old-style fountain pen and made some notes in a little book. “Bet your ass it is. Does Buchanan know that you were coming to see me?”

“I don’t see how, sir,” said Sims, taking another sip of coffee. “The only people who knew about the letter, other than Buchanan and his aide, were Swanson, Top Dawkins, and me. Now Swanson is dead. Since Buchanan believes the letter was destroyed, he would see no loose ends.”

General Pete Brady glanced out of the window. It was dark outside. Rain scratched at the glass. “He figured it out, Colonel.”

“Sir?” Sims asked.

“About an hour ago, Homeland Security jacked the terrorist warning level all the way up to Red, and an attack in Washington killed the Jordanian ambassador.” He handed Sims a news story downloaded from the Internet. “Not that we have much to worry about up here in Alaska, but it certainly got our attention.”

“I received a separate message, ultra-encrypted, from the National Command Center, authorized by none other than Gerald Buchanan,” said General Turner, beginning to pace around the office. “You are to be arrested on sight, on a charge of treason, no less. You are to be held here until Homeland Security personnel can pick you up for questioning. There’s a cheery thought. How do you reckon he knew to send that message about you, who are supposed to be in the Med, to me, who is stuck up here in Alaska?”

Ralph Sims bit his lip. Arrested?

General Brady reread the order. “We couldn’t figure why he would want you in custody so bad. Now we know. The alert level should have nothing to do with you being tagged as a bad guy, nor with the strange message direct to Hank, but I don’t believe in coincidences.”