Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Reagan’s EO had extended the CIA’s power to order cooperation and the sharing of information from other federal agencies. Bush’s order gave the Director of National Intelligence, a cabinet-level official, expanded power to order and approve clandestine activities abroad and overseas, establishing a chain of command that pointedly did not require the direct involvement or sanction of the president, giving him or her plausible deniability should things straddle the lines of legality...or go south.

Fucillo’s recent EO had brought Net Force into the mix. Its purpose was to give the organization the same authority as the CIA to require cooperation from other agencies, and to put DNF Michaels on equal footing with the DNI in planning and ordering clandestine ops.

Michaels had only green-lighted Scalpel after consulting with Morse. In fact, she had been the one who convinced him to proceed with it, against his reservations.

And now it looked like the Wolf had anticipated the operation and taken advantage of the base’s vulnerability on a night Carmody and his support team were hundreds of miles away in Western Romania. Maybe that would prove untrue, and the timing would turn out to be coincidental. But Morse doubted it. Which opened up some profoundly unsettling questions about how that top-secret information might have been compromised...and left Morse very concerned that Scalpel was itself a trap.

Divide and conquer. If that was the enemy’s stratagem, and her people had fallen prey to it...

POTUS had to be looped in. Net Force was her signature initiative, and she’d pushed it through against a shitstorm of political and bureaucratic opposition. She needed to know about the Romanian situation while it was developing, not after word leaked out. And it would on the Hill. At near light speed. It always did in spite of all precautions.

Morse picked up her receiver and pressed the speed dial for Fucillo’s secure cell.

She answered on the second ring.

“Carol, hello.” She sounded like she was already bracing for trouble. A phone call on Thanksgiving eve wasn’t quite as dreaded as a 3:00 a.m. call. But it rarely brought good news. “Is everything all right?”

“Marie,” she said, “we have a problem...”

12

Satu Mare District, Romania

Senior Sergeant (MOS) 09L Joe Banik heard the sounds of a motor and snow chains, turned to his left, and saw a pale smudge of light out past a hump in the cracked country blacktop. A full two minutes passed before the truck came bouncing into sight.

“Hee’sha’er,” Banik said, giving his dog, Ellie, the Hebrew command to stay. The Malinois was one of the select few bred and trained by Alex Michaels, who used stringent Israeli K-9 certifications.

Banik waited at his post near the blown, crookedly leaning castle gate. The vehicle was an ancient double-cab Dacia pickup, its yellow, rust-spotted paint job reminding him of nothing so much as a bruised banana peel. The truck rattled and clattered down the slope, pulled over to the gravel shoulder on his side of the road, and then halted about ten feet off.

After a moment, the driver’s door opened and the cab lights went on. Banik glimpsed its occupants through the windshield, a couple in their sixties or seventies, probably husband and wife. The woman in the passenger seat was wide and thick and wrapped in a heavy shawl. The man behind the wheel was wider and thicker and wore an old-fashioned flatcap and car coat. He laboriously pushed through his door and approached Banik with stiff-legged difficulty, his baggy brown pants tucked into knee-high winter boots.

The sergeant waved him back. “Margeti mai departe, bunicule,” he said in Romanian. “Go home, grandfather. It’s unsafe out here.”

The old man disregarded him. He walked up to within two or three feet of Banik and stopped, looking warily down at the dog, then up at his face. His coat was ratty and threadbare and about two sizes too snug.

Banik was thinking he looked as desperately in need of maintenance as his truck.

“The lights are out,” he said, steam puffing from his mouth. “We have no electricity. No phones.”

“More reason to stay off the road.”

The man’s gaze went briefly to the MP7 on Banik’s shoulder, moved past him to the blown gate, then returned to Banik’s face.

“What happened there?” he asked.

“Nothing to worry you.”

“We live nearby. We hear guns. Other things. How can we not worry?”

Banik didn’t answer. There had been rattles of gunfire from the estate just before he’d seen the pickup’s headlights. A loud bang. The sounds traveled a long way in the hills.

The old man nodded toward the estate grounds. “Who are you?” he said. “Are you with the Wolf?”

Banik didn’t answer.

The old man looked straight into his eyes. “I do not think so,” he said. “ Si tu nu arata ca un Rus... I do not think you are Russian, either. They have a certain look about them.”

There was a long pause. Banik didn’t know what being or not being Russian had to do with anything. But he couldn’t worry about it right now.

“Grandfather, please—”

“When the lights went out and we heard the shooting, I told Lati, ‘I wonder if they come tonight.’ The gendarmes have told us to be ready.”

Banik stood silently in the falling snow. He still had no idea what he was talking about. “Go back to your wife,” he said. “Take her home.”

“There is no invasion?”

“Not tonight.”

The old man looked down at the Mal, then back up at him. “Who are you?” he asked again.

Banik said nothing. He heard more noise from the estate grounds. Unmistakable stitches of gunfire and what he guessed were racing engines. The old man listened with heightened interest, as if wondering what it all meant.

They had that in common, Banik thought.

The man stayed where he was another few seconds. If he was sixty, he would remember living under Communism and the dictator Ceaușescu. In his time, he had probably accepted and ignored a lot to stay out of trouble, probably buckled under plenty of men with authority and guns.

Finally, he dipped his head, a long, low nod like a tired mule. His submissiveness left Banik feeling crummy. He was another powerful outside force asserting itself on the old man’s life without so much as an explanation. Banik didn’t like it, but he was, ultimately, exactly that.

“Noapte buna,” the old man said, his head down but his eyes on Banik’s eyes. After a moment he lowered them to the Mal. “A good and safe night to you, too.”

He turned toward his pickup without another word. Banik watched him walk back to it, listening to the harsh noise from the estate grounds. Then another sound caught his ear. Separate, distinct, high overhead. Pausing outside the truck, the old man also heard it. He turned his eyes up to search the snow and darkness, the cab lights washing over him through the half-open door, ribbons of fine white powder blowing dustily over and around his boots. In the passenger seat, his wife looked initially impatient for him to get inside with her. But an instant later, she heard something, too. Looking puzzled and nervous, she tilted her head to peer through the windshield.

The buzzing was loud, dense, and collective, like an assembled cloud of wasps. Banik felt Ellie tense slightly against him as she sniffed the air, her short, black fur rippling, smooth as oil, over her muscular flanks and shoulders.

He looked up toward the humming noise but was blinded by the pulses of snow overhead. Then the pickup’s door slammed shut. Back inside with his wife, the old man pulled a U-turn and struck off toward home, his engine wheezing and knocking, his tailpipe burping exhaust as he climbed the hump in the road.