Mike Maden - Drone

Annie worked her sources hard for weeks even as she turned new ones, chasing leads on the IED suppliers. She favored the “aggressive” interrogation of captured insurgents and had been reprimanded twice for the physical harm she’d caused to those in her severe custody. She once even sifted bare-handed through the shredded remains of a dead insurgent after he accidentally detonated a device he was trying to set. But it was a piece of hard intel shared by a friend in Israel’s Mossad that finally pinpointed Baneh, Iran, as the target.

Annie’s request for a satellite redeploy over the city gave her superiors the visual confirmation they needed to order an airstrike. But the request for an airstrike was denied from higher up the chain of command. President Bush’s political opposition had drawn a line in the sand at the Iraq-Iran border. The Republicans were afraid they wouldn’t get the war they wanted so badly if they asked for a declaration of war; the Democrats were too afraid to oppose a war that had gained such widespread popularity among the public. A compromise was reached. The undeclared Iraq war could continue indefinitely, but Iran was strictly off-limits. Reelection was the driving reality of Washington politics.

The reality in Iraq, however, was that dozens of people were getting injured or killed by Iranian-built IEDs every day, and the severity and frequency of the attacks were increasing.

In Annie’s mind, the gutless politicians back home were just as guilty of the carnage as the Iraqi insurgents.

“They’re all dick holsters,” Annie grunted again. She crushed the paper into a hard little ball and threw it across the room.

“You’ve got to let it go, Annie,” Troy said.

“I can’t. You know that.”

“What else can we do?”

“We could go in ourselves.”

“We’d never get approval.”

“Who’s asking for permission?”

“No support? On a mission like this? Good chance of getting killed that way.”

“Maybe. But more of our people will get killed if we don’t. Guaranteed.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Is that your head or your dick talking?”

“You mean my head or my heart?”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“Both,” Pearce said.

“Sorry. Pick one.”

“Okay. Heart.”

Annie dropped in Pearce’s lap. She pulled a handful of hair behind her ear. That was her tell. Pearce braced himself.

Annie’s bright eyes bore into his.

“Sorry, mister. Wrong answer. We didn’t come over here to go steady. We came here to win a war. Right?”

Pearce took a deep breath. Old ground.

“Right.”

She smiled. “Good boy.” She affirmed his answer by patting his broad chest with her hands. Felt something in one of his shirt pockets. It was the ring, of course. But this wasn’t the time.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She started to say something but held her tongue.

Pearce thought about asking her what she was going to say, but he knew she wouldn’t answer. Her mind had already turned to the mission.

Annie slipped off his lap and grabbed her cell phone. “I’ll handle logistics,” she told Pearce as she dialed. “You handle Mike.”

The President’s Dining Room, West Wing, the White House

Pearce took his hand off the doorknob, turned around, and took his seat.

“Unfortunately, it took the death of my son to wake me up to what’s been going on down in Mexico. The horrific violence. The sheer volume of drugs like methamphetamine and brown tar heroin flooding into our country, killing our children. I was too damn busy making a pile of money in the IT industry, or running a state government, to pay attention to any of it.”

“We had to deal with the heroin trade in the Sand Box,” Pearce said. “It was a primary revenue source for the bad guys. Some of our guys got caught up into it, too.”

Myers took another sip of coffee. Pearce drank his tea.

“Mike briefed you on the ambush of the Marinas ?” Myers asked.

“Yeah. Somebody obviously leaked. They find out who?”

“Not yet. Probably doesn’t matter. If they find the guy—or gal—there’ll just be another one next time. I’m afraid the Castillos were sending us a message, and they set those poor young Marines on fire to make sure we got it. They want us to know that the Mexican government can’t fight this war, let alone win it.”

“And neither can you, at least not with American troops. Otherwise, you’ve broken one of your campaign promises, right?”

“It wasn’t just an empty campaign promise to win votes. Too much blood and too much treasure have already been spent fighting the War on Terror for more than a decade now. If we invade Mexico, we’re probably in for another ten years of bloody warfare. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m not even saying we couldn’t win it. But the American people don’t have the will to start another war right now, let alone to make the necessary sacrifices to see it through.”

“So what’s your plan? Where do I fit in?”

“I can’t fight and win the drug war. But I’ve got to send my own message. I can’t control what Castillo does in Mexico, but I’ve got to keep him from crossing the border at will and killing American citizens with impunity.”

“Hire more Border Patrol agents. Call up the National Guard. Seal the border.”

“Can’t. At least not now. The budget freeze cuts across every department of government, Border Patrol included. And troops on the border are considered racist, fascist, and xenophobic by the rabid left and increasingly so by the middling center. Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass what they think, but the political reality is that the moderates in Congress won’t authorize troops on the border or slash other welfare programs to beef up the Border Patrol. More important, a great deal of trade takes place across that border. We gum it up too much, and we hurt the economies of both countries.”

“That doesn’t leave many options,” Pearce observed. “Maybe it’s best to let this dog lie.”

“I was raised with the belief that action is morality. It’s quoted so often it’s a cliché now, but Burke’s aphorism is still true. All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.”

Pearce shook his head. “The only problem with that kind of thinking is that every zealot with a suicide vest thinks he’s the good guy fighting evil, even when the bus he blows up is full of innocent civilians.”

“I’m not talking about ideology or politics. I’m no moral crusader. I’m talking about putting down a rabid dog before it bites somebody else. My job is to save American lives. I think that’s something you understand quite well.”

Once again, Pearce had to process for a moment. “So what do you want to do?”

“I believe in Occam’s razor. In this case, the simplest solution is the best one. I want to send Castillo a clear message. Blood for blood. I’m convinced he killed my son, so I’m going to kill one of his sons. Tit-for-tat.”

“A telegram would be cheaper.”

“I’m willing to pay the price,” Myers said.

“Why only one son if they’re both killers?”

“So Castillo won’t retaliate. He gets to keep one son alive if he keeps a cool head. The dead son will be a daily reminder to him to keep his war on his side of the border.”

“But what if he does retaliate? You take out his other son? Then he retaliates again. Then what do you do?”

“You were CIA. You must have read about the Phoenix Program?” She was referring to the CIA program that assassinated key Vietcong leaders during the Vietnam War.

“We studied it. A lot of mistakes were made.”