Read The Fourth Horseman Online
Authors: David Hagberg
“More? How can you be sure?”
“If this Messiah claims that the Taliban are friends of Pakistan, his first move will be to get as many WMDs into their hands as quickly as possible. It’s no secret that our intention is to neutralize as many as we can.”
“Yes,” Miller said. “My concern is an Indian preemptive strike. The entire region could go up in flames. The loss of life would be nothing short of catastrophic.”
“Telephone Mr. Singh,” Haaris said. Manmohan Singh was India’s prime minister, who held the actual executive power. “He’ll listen to reason. And have you spoken with Sabir?” Nasir Sabir was Pakistan’s PM.
“Not yet.”
“Then, Madam President, I strongly suggest that you send the teams in immediately. And once they have accomplished their mission, contact both PMs to let them know what you have done and that the U.S. will continue to stand by as an ally to both nations.”
“It’s possible that India will strike as soon as they find out I’ve launched the teams.”
“Not while our personnel are on the ground there. But every minute that you delay could mean the loss of more weapons to the Taliban.”
“They wouldn’t have the means to launch them.”
“If they have the cooperation of the air force they will,” Haaris said.
“Thank you, David. Have a safe trip home.”
Page remained on screen after Haaris was off.
“Let me know as soon as he clears Pakistan’s airspace,” Miller said.
“Okay.”
Miller cut the connection.
Everyone around the table stared at her, their expressions even darker than before, their mood easy to read.
“Discussion,” she said.
“There’s no question but we launch now,” Kalley said. “Haaris was right, we mustn’t delay.”
“He’s a CIA analyst.”
“Whom everyone trusts,” Secretary of State Fay said. “Haaris is the last word on the Pakistan question. The agency has built an entire desk around him.”
“No one at the Pentagon doubts his expertise,” Secretary of Defense Spencer said, and Admiral Altman agreed.
“The man has never been wrong.”
And that was one of the main sticking points for Miller. The man was never wrong. It was a condition in people—especially in her advisers—that she’d always found disturbing.
Before her election, she’d been only a one-term junior senator from Minnesota, but before that she had been the dean of the University of Minnesota. It had been an important job, heading one of the leading universities in the U.S., the job made more interesting because of the geniuses who answered to her administration.
But she had, for the most part, let them do their own thing. Before she had taken the job, a friend of hers who was the dean of a small but prestigious Northeastern college had given her a piece of advice that she’d always thought was sound.
“Venerate your geniuses—the straight-A students who will go on to do major things, win prizes, bring honor to your school. But take special care of your C and even your D students because they are the ones who will go out into the world and make millions with which they’ll endow your new library or science wing.”
It was the same for her in the White House. She was bombarded by geniuses—eggheads—but it was the workers in the trenches, the ones with real-world experiences, that she most admired. The problem was that Haaris was both an egghead and a man of the world.
“If the Taliban are truly in charge—or at least are partners—they will retaliate,” she said.
“We don’t have a choice,” Secretary of Defense Spencer replied. “We have to strike now.”
“We won’t get them all.”
“No,” Spencer said. “But we’ll get most of them.”
Politics, Miller had decided early in her campaign for president, was like chess. The opening moves for control of the center board were decisive. A master against a mere journeyman could force a checkmate in the first four or five moves. But against an out-of-control wild man who was likely to do the totally unexpected, even the superior player sometimes had serious trouble.
Like now.
The screens lit up in red, and a moment later Page was back on. “Madam President, we’ve had a nuclear incident in Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. It may be a detonation of the weapon taken from Quetta Air Force Base. We have a WC-135 Constant Phoenix aircraft operating out of Kandahar that is measuring particulates in the atmosphere, and we’ve a seismic confirmation of a ten-kiloton-plus event.”
Haaris came on. “We can see it off to the north,” he said. “Definitely a nuclear explosion.”
“Have you been affected?” Miller asked. She felt numb.
“Physically we’re okay. Have you sent the teams?”
She looked at the others, and nodded. “They’re on their way.”
The Gulf water one hundred yards off Florida’s west coast was in the mid-eighties, and Kirk McGarvey, just finishing his five-mile swim for the day, was warmed up—his body heat keeping just ahead of the drag from cooler water. Sometimes like this in the mornings just after dawn, he felt that he could swim day and night forever. Across the Gulf to the Bay of Campeche if he wanted to.
He was in his early fifties with the solid build of an athlete, the stamina of a man much younger and the grace of a world-class fencer, which in fact he had once been. He was not an overly handsome man, but a certain type of woman found him very good looking because of his almost always calm demeanor even under the most trying of circumstances. When McGarvey—Mac to his friends—showed up you just knew that everything would turn out fine. It was an aura that he radiated.
After his air force days with the Office of Special Investigations, he’d been snapped up by the CIA, where at the agency’s training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, he had gone through the field operator’s course with the highest marks ever recorded. He’d been a natural for special operations from the beginning. And he’d been groomed to think on his feet, which came naturally to him, and to kill with a variety of weapons, including sniper rifles, pistols, knives, garrotes, and if the need arose, with his hands.
A sailboat heading south toward the Keys was low on the horizon, just a couple of miles out, and McGarvey considered taking out his own forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, docked behind his house on Casey Key, about seventy miles south of Tampa. Maybe down to the Dry Tortugas, then ride the Gulf Stream up to the Bahamas, maybe spend a month or so before the hurricane season started in earnest.
It was a trip that he and his wife, Katy, had taken several times since moving down here from the Washington, DC, area. But she was gone now, assassinated with an IED meant for him. They’d been attending the funeral at Arlington for their son-in-law, Todd, a CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Mac was riding in a separate limousine from Katy and their daughter, Elizabeth, when theirs in front ran over the powerful explosive before his eyes. There’d been little or nothing left of the car, and almost nothing of Katy, Liz and their driver.
Since then he’d taken a few freelance assignments for the Company, but his heart had never really been in them, let alone the day-to-day business of enjoying life as he had before their deaths.
Nor did he think now that he was ready to solo his boat to places where people—couples—would be enjoying themselves. Laughing, playing, making love.
He would head back to his house just across the road from the beach, take a shower, have a little breakfast and then head up to his office in the philosophy department at the University of South Florida’s New College campus in Sarasota. He taught Voltaire during the fall and spring semesters to a bunch of gifted kids, who were so liberal in their views that sometimes it was all he could do to stop himself from smiling indulgently at them. But most of them were seriously bright, and they had the habit of asking some seriously difficult questions. He loved the challenge.
But before September rolled around he needed to put some work into the book he was in the middle of writing, about Voltaire’s influence not only on Western thought since the eighteenth century, but especially on the United States’ fledgling democracy. It would be a hard sell to the kids, but he’d had a personal connection with the Frenchman’s philosophy and its direct effect on the U.S., starting with the Civil War.
He was about to start back toward the beach when he glanced again at the southbound sailboat in time to spot a speedboat heading from the north almost directly toward him. It wasn’t uncommon to see boats like that coming so close to shore, especially along Casey Key, where a lot of millionaires maintained seasonal homes. Tourists who wanted to get a glimpse of someone famous sometimes came up on the beach and walked around.
McGarvey angled back toward the shore and put real effort into his swimming, his progress aided by an incoming tide and a light westerly breeze. A woman standing on the beach began waving at him. She looked vaguely familiar, but the distance was too great for him to make out more than the fact that she was a woman and that she was gesturing.
Two minutes later he could feel the buzz of the outboard motors as well as hear their high-pitched drone—two of them, he thought, maybe two-fifty or three-hundred horsepower each—capable of pushing a boat with the right hull shape to speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour.
He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the center-console boat just a dozen yards away and heading directly for him.
The water here was less than ten feet deep, and he immediately dove for the bottom, jackknifing with a powerful kick.
A couple of seconds later the boat passed over him, its propellers roiling the water and setting up a double-helix current that sent him tumbling up and then downward again, totally out of control, his shoulder slamming into the soft sand of the bottom.
Kicking off he reached the surface in time to see the speedboat making a tight turn back toward him, one man at the helm, another hanging on to a side rail on the console. But making such a tight turn was a mistake. It had cost them almost all of their speed for the sake of the distance the wide turn had taken.
He maintained his position low in the water, bobbing up and down with the residual wake.
The second man aboard pointed toward him, and the guy at the wheel gunned the engines. But they were too close for the boat to come back up on plane and gain any real speed.
As the boat reached McGarvey, its bow was high, impairing the helmsman’s sight line straight ahead.
At the last possible moment, McGarvey kicked to the right like a matador stepping aside to let the charging bull pass, allowing the bow of the boat to just brush his shoulder.
He hooked his left arm over the gunwale of the boat, just ahead of its stern, and allowed the building momentum to yank him out of the water and deposit him just aft of the transom.
Both men were dark-skinned, and Mac got the immediate impression that they were Middle Easterners—Afghanis, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis—before the lookout twisted around, a big Glock 17 in his hand.
McGarvey lurched forward and to the left, slamming his bulk into the back of the helmsman just as the lookout fired a shot that went wild.
The helmsman, shoved off balance, held on to the wheel so he wouldn’t fall. The boat turned sharply to the left and headed back toward the shore.
It was what McGarvey had expected would happen and he’d braced himself against the rail.
The lookout fired again, the second shot going wide, and in an instant McGarvey was on him, snatching the pistol out of his hand and tossing it overboard. He butted the man in the face with his forehead, then pulled him forward and down, smashing a knee in the guy’s jaw.
Shoving the man aside, Mac turned to the helmsman, who was trying to turn the boat away from the beach, which was getting alarmingly close.
With one hand on the wheel the man looked back, a Glock 17 in his left hand. Just before Mac could reach him he jogged the wheel sharply to the left and then to the right.
Mac was thrown off balance back against the rail.
The boat steadied, and the helmsman aimed at McGarvey’s chest, center mass.
At that moment a bright red spot materialized just above the bridge of the man’s nose and he fell backward against the console, blood spurting out of the bullet wound in his forehead.
Mac regained his balance at the same moment the boat’s keel lurched against the bottom, less than ten feet from the beach, the engines wide open.
He managed to leap off the boat and stay clear of the props as it reached the beach, hurtled up over the first dunes and smashed into a large palm tree, the force of the impact ripping both engines free of the transom, the dual fuel tanks going up with a bright flash and an impressive boom that echoed off the fronts of the houses just across the beach highway.
McGarvey picked himself up from the surf as the woman who had been gesturing came toward him at a run. He was a little dazed from the second impact against the ocean floor, and it took him just a moment to realize that the woman was Pete Boylan. She was dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt.
“Jesus, Mac, are you okay?” she demanded breathlessly. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties, with dark red hair, blue eyes and movie-star looks. She had started her career in the CIA as an interrogator, but by happenstance over the past couple of years she had worked on a number of assignments with McGarvey. She was holding a Wilson nine-millimeter compact tactical pistol in her left hand.
“I’ll live,” he told her, brushing the sand off his chest and shoulders. “That was a hell of a shot at a moving target at that distance. I don’t think more than a handful of people in the Company could have pulled it off. Thanks.”
She laughed more in relief than in humor. She was in love with McGarvey and she made no bones about showing it. “It was my fifth try, and I thought there was just as good a chance that I’d hit you instead. But the advantage was his. I had to try.” She looked critically at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”