Ted Bell - Tsar

“Never far enough. Dispose of them.”

“It will be done.”

“And how is our old friend Putin these days? Enjoying his forced retirement to Energetika Prison?”

“Glowing with enthusiasm, I should say.” Nikolai laughed. “Still, I wonder why you don’t simply introduce him to the tree with no limbs.”

“Impale him? No, too quick an exit. I want him to sit in that cell and rot slowly, lose his hair, his teeth, and finally, when he’s fried from within, then he can wither and die and never trouble us again.”

Stoke flew commercial from Miami to Topeka, connecting through Charlotte. There was a young FBI guy waiting at the end of the jetway when he landed at Topeka airport. Navy-blue suit, white shirt, dark tie, buzz-cut sandy-colored hair. Spit-shined black lace-up shoes. Stoke liked him on sight. He had a solid Midwestern smile, and even better, he looked as if he could have made the Olympic wrestling team if he hadn’t chosen law enforcement. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.

“Stokely Jones?” the kid said, extending his hand.

“Yep,” Stoke said, giving him five of the best.

“Special Agent John Henry Flood, sir,” he said, flashing his badge. “I’ve got a chopper waiting right here at the airport to take us up to what used to be Salina.”

“Let’s go get ’em, John Henry Flood,” Stoke said. All he had was a carry-on with one change of clothes, his shaving stuff, and his SIG Sauer nine with two extra mags of ammunition. Special Agent Flood was already moving like a running back through the crowded concourse, and Stoke had to hustle to catch up. Kid was on a mission. Good.

They came to an unmarked exit off the concourse, and Agent Flood hung a left. A uniformed airport security guy was watching the door, and he opened it for them, right out onto the tarmac. The jet-black whirlybird was sitting right there, all warmed up, rotors spinning at flat pitch.

“Only way to fly,” Stoke said, smiling at Agent Flood. “Unmarked black choppers.”

Stoke ducked under the whirling rotors and followed the special agent around behind the tail. They scrambled aboard through the starboard-side hatch. The pilot nodded at them, shaking hands with each man as he climbed aboard. John Henry folded himself into a rear seat, and Stoke sat up front on the right. Both men donned their headsets and quickly got strapped in.

“Morning, gentlemen,” they heard the pilot say in their headsets.

“Morning,” they replied.

“Short trip, here we go.”

The pilot smiled at the two men, gave them a thumbs-up, and increased the collective pitch. The little bird lifted off the tarmac, climbed quickly, and took a northerly course, fast and low, skimming over a group of hangars and climbing rapidly en route to Salina.

Stoke turned in his seat and smiled at the FBI kid.

“You go by John or John Henry?” he said into his mike.

“My mother named me John Henry, sir.”

“No need to ‘sir’ me, John Henry. Call me Stoke.”

“Deal. Glad to have you aboard here. You’re Langley, right, you’re CIA?”

“Nope. I got a small private security operation in Miami called Tactics International. Work with the Agency, Pentagon, on special assignments. Mostly for a guy named Harry Brock. Heard of him?”

“Oh, yeah, we’ve heard of him, all right. Kinda legendary. He’s the one asked the Bureau to bring you in.”

“What have we got up there, John Henry? How do you see this thing?”

“A mess, sir. A quadruple homicide, the town mayor and her family murdered in bed, and a town wiped off the map.”

“Any leads?”

“A cell phone left on one of the victims. Had a message in Arabic to vacate the town by six A.M. yesterday. We traced the call to a cell tower in Tehran. Group called Arm of God claiming responsibility.”

“Verified?”

“No, sir.”

“Any idea why the Iranians would want to provoke us? I mean, they’re already walking a fine line, building nukes and threatening Israel with extinction. The ayatollahs giving us a perfect excuse to take them out doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now.”

“No, sir, it does not. We’re hoping you can shed some light on this. Harry Brock told my boss you might have a whole different angle on this Salina situation.”

Stoke nodded but didn’t reply. He wanted to see and hear what the FBI knew before he told them about the baker. He was thinking about the last time he’d seen Happy, when he was delivering his surprise birthday cake. The explosion had been huge. And Harry Brock had said the baker was a Russian-American assassin. Maybe KGB. What the hell was the KGB up to in Salina, Kansas?

SALINA AND HIROSHIMA had a lot in common. Stoke and Agent Flood drove silently through streets full of downed and blackened trees, block after block of houses and buildings burned to the foundations, piles of burned debris that filled entire intersections. The smell was unbelievable. A raw, choking cloud of smoke and rot hanging over everything. He saw charred corpses of dogs and other animals that had been left behind, now stacked in piles on what used to be street corners. A storm had moved through the night before, and the streets had a patina of grey mud and matted black dirt.

The day was cold and bright. When the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, there was an odd glittery quality to the surfaces of the black and desolate acres, as if it had rained glass an hour ago, or some giant had flung great handfuls of tiny silver coins over the town after it had been destroyed.

John Henry’s face was somber, and the conversation was minimal. He was staring straight ahead; he’d obviously seen enough of this wasted town to last a lifetime. Flocks of birds circled overhead, and it occurred to Stoke that they simply had no place to land.

“Where’s the first stop?” he finally asked John Henry.

“We’ve got a temporary HQ set up. A trailer up top of that hill over there. A state park called Hickory Hill. It’s a heavily wooded area, but it escaped the fire because of its height above the town. Also the Motel 6 where I’ve booked you a room. Not great, but it’s the only thing still standing.”

Stoke was gazing out his window, having a hard time dealing with such complete destruction. A fine old American town, with a lot of history he didn’t know and now never would. Gone.

“You know this is the heart of America, John Henry?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this town is, was, exactly halfway between the East Coast and the West Coast. And halfway between the northern and southern borders. Smack dab in the middle of the country when you open up a map. Right in the crease.”

“You think that’s intentional?”

“Yeah, I do. They wanted this to hurt.”

“Well, they sure as hell succeeded.”

“You had kin here?”

“I grew up in a big yellow house with green shutters, used to stand right on that corner.”

“I’m sorry.”

They drove up a narrow winding road that led to the hilltop overlooking the town. Near the edge of the cliff was the big silver Winnebago doubling as FBI headquarters. Stoke grabbed his door handle and smiled at Agent Flood.

“John Henry, I want you to cheer up,” Stoke said. “We’re going to catch this slimeball and nail his balls to the wall, okay? Don’t you worry about it.”

“How are we going to do that, sir?”

“Well, for starters, I know exactly who he is.”

“That’ll help,” John Henry said, smiling for the first time since they’d landed at Salina.

“Mr. Jones, welcome, I’m Agent in Charge Hilary Spurling,” the attractive blonde FBI lady said as Stoke and John Henry entered the trailer. It was cold as hell outside, and it felt nice and warm inside. Spurling was in her thirties, all business, but still a babe. She introduced him to the rest of the group. It included Bruce Barnett, the Salina PD’s medical examiner, a guy from the FBI’s Explosive Unit Bomb Data Center in Washington named Peter Robb, and the two uniformed officers Stoke had seen on CNN.