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  Kurt said, "Come on, Pike, I can't run an exercise for two months."

  "I know, I know, but there's got to be a happy medium. I mean, the exfil plan is dictating my operation. I'm told a boat exfil for the target at oh-two-hundred tomorrow, but I don't even know if I'll have the target. It's canned. Way too canned. I need to make my men think. To solve problems. Not sit back and wait on headquarters to feed us the answer."

  "Whoa. Hold on," Kurt said. "Have you ever been on an exercise that duplicated combat? Ever? I can't invent the variables that will happen in combat and still maintain control over the exercise. You know that. Especially with this unit. Compromise on an exercise is the same as compromise for real. We have nothing to fall back on."

  "That's not what I meant. This one actually did duplicate com.bat exactly for the reasons you just stated. The stakes became very, very high. It's just that you never used to hand us answers. Back in the unit you trusted us to solve the problem, and enjoyed making the problem hard. It's like you threw these teams together and don't trust them."

  Kurt was considering what to say when Pike's next words gave him pause. "And I'm with you. I'm not sure I trust the team you gave me either."

  "What do you mean?"

  Pike relayed last night's activities, ending with, "You forced me to take this double-oh superspy as a two IC, and he's show.ing his ass."

  "Pike, we're not in the unit anymore," Kurt countered. "We have a much, much harder mission and we're going to need to leverage the expertise. It's not all door-kicking, and the CIA guys know that arena better than us."

  "Bullshit! He might know the tactics, but his judgment is shit. Send me, Retro, and Bull to the damn training courses. This isn't rocket science."

  "I don't have time to do that. I'm under some pressure to get operational. Bottom line: I expect you to lead. Get him to do what you want. It's no different than the leadership challenges you had in the Ranger regiment."

  "Jesus, sir! That was a long time ago with way less sensitive missions than what you're asking me to do now."

  Kurt bristled at the exchange, letting a little of the pressure he was experiencing seep out. "End of discussion, damn it. I've got a target and I'm briefing the Oversight Council in an hour. I'm trying to get Alpha authority to send you overseas. You want me to pick the other team?"

  The Taskforce called each phase of the operation a different letter of the Greek alphabet, with alpha being the initial introduction of forces. Which, to this point, had never happened. The pixilation of the screen did nothing to hide Pike's surprise.

  "A live target? No exercise?"

  "Yes. In Yemen. An easy one. A confidence target. No kill/capture on the terrorist."

  "What's his status?"

  "He's a passport guy. Someone that knows the identities for

  operational terrorists. We don't want to take him out and spike that he's blown. We just want his computer." "And you think we're ready to do that? Operational cover's ready?"

  "You tell me."

  Pike paused, and Kurt could see he was torn. Soldiers like him were few and far between. Ones that would always run to the sound of the guns, always want to be on the X in the middle of the mission. But one who also had the intellect and judgment to back off when necessary, to assess and explore both friendly and enemy weaknesses which is why he had been recruited in the first place. Kurt knew Pike would make a call he believed in, just as he had with the exercise.

  "Sir, you remember when you had us all read about the formation of the OSS? Saying there were parallels with today's fight? Well, there are. The OSS grew too fast and tried to do too much initially. They made a lot of mistakes, but nobody was looking because it was World War Two. We don't have that luxury."

  "So you're saying let this guy go?"

  "No. I'm saying we need to learn from OSS's mistakes. From our mistakes. The success or failure of this organization won't be with the widgets or the cover. It will be with the men. Sooner or later we're going to be called upon to snatch a guy in a sovereign country without a trace, and we can't do that with teams made up of someone else's idea of what right looks like."

  "Meaning?"

  "I'll go get this guy's computer. I'm pretty sure we can do that. But when this is done, we need to establish some assessment and selection criteria. Something created by us for us."

  Inwardly, Kurt breathed a sigh of relief and realized he had been trying to do too much on his own. He hadn't trusted his men, precisely because of the reasons Pike had stated. Outside of the ones he had personally recruited, like Pike, he had no idea of their capabilities.

  But he did know the capabilities of some. And it was time to leverage that.

  Chapter 4

  Inside the parking garage under his office, Kurt waited in his car on his deputy commander, absently watching some workers cementing a brass placard next to a door.

  Blaisdell Consulting. A simple bit of camouflage that hid what really went on upstairs. Just like the Office of Strategic Services's building on E. Street in World War II.

  Pike had been right about the OSS. While they eventually had become very effective, initially they made a tremendous amount of mistakes, most centered on bad ideas propagated by people who didn't have the skills for the arena they were entering. People who had been selected solely because of friendships or prior working relationships. The one area that had proven successful was Operation Jedburgh, in which Special Forces had parachuted behind enemy lines into France, Belgium, and Holland. Those teams had gone through a rigorous selection process prior to becoming operational, a fact that hammered home what Pike had said.

  He saw George W olffe through the glass of the door and pulled the car around. Soon they were crossing the Roosevelt Bridge, leaving Clarendon behind and entering Washington, D.C., with George engaging in small talk.

  Getting bogged down in traffic, Kurt stopped the chitchat with a pointed question. "How were the CIA guys picked for Project Prometheus? Who made those decisions?"

  Although he had come over from the CIA's National Clandestine Service, George Wolffe had been handpicked by Kurt and was a close friend as well as second-in-command of the entire project. The question caught him off guard.

  "Why? Is there a manning issue?"

  "I don't know. Might be. Could also just be a little bit of wolfpack infighting for alpha male."

  "Well, unlike you, I didn't get to handpick from the NCS. I nominated and then was told who was coming over. I could have vetoed, but that would have just left an open spot. The power brokers who are read on to this project aren't exactly one hundred percent supportive. They think we're stomping on their turf."

  "So how do you know if the guy's worth a shit? What's the cut line? No offense, but my guys have all been through multiple assessment and selection courses to get to where they were before I asked them to join. How does the CIA do that? Is it just the course at the Farm?"

  "No. It's more of a performance check after that. Seeing how they act under pressure in situations that I felt we would encounter. There aren't any tea-and-crumpet guys on the list. All were picked from hardship tours. Who's this about?"

  "Kranz. Pike thinks he has some judgment issues. What do you think?"

  George said nothing for a moment, choosing his words. "He's one of the guys that was forced on me as a replacement for my choice, who was 'unavailable.' He's done some seriously dangerous work in his career, but I don't really know him. After checking, the word I got back was that he was a little bit of a blowhard, but competent."

  Kurt pulled up to the West Wing security gate of the White House and said, "Competent may not be enough for what we're asking him to do."

  * * *

  Kurt fidgeted at the head of the table, waiting on President Payton Warren before starting his briefing. He went over in his mind what he was going to say at this meeting, the first Oversight Council conference where he would ask permission to launch a team.

  Already seated when he arrived, the secretar
y of defense and the secretary of state had tried to get an inside look, but Kurt had begged off. The director of central intelligence had simply said hello to George, then remained silent.

  Five minutes past the appointed time, President Warren entered the White House situation room, followed by his national security advisor, Alexander Palmer.

  The president nodded at Kurt, then sat at the head of the large conference table. "Looks like we've got everyone here. Let's go. I'm on a bit of a timeline."

  Kurt started with a status review, delineating progress on the various cover businesses being established for operations, the construction timeline for the Blaisdell front office in Clarendon, and an update on the two concurrent exercises being conducted, one in Charleston, South Carolina, and one in Kansas City, Missouri. He left out any mention of Pike's close call with the police, simply stating that the exercise was progressing.

  Alexander Palmer asked, "So we're on track to go operational in two months?"

  "Yesterday I would have said yes, but something came up this morning. I think we can go operational right now."

  Before anyone could ask a question, he flipped to the next slide, showing an acerbic Arab male; he was young, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-eight, with a full mustache.

  "This is Muhammad bin Qasim, otherwise known as Abu Khalid. He's a digital graphics designer and uses those skills as a passport forger for al-Qaeda. He's currently located in Aden, Yemen, and I think we should go after him."

  "Okay, how does that change anything on our side?" the DCI asked. "We've got a ton of names on the list. None of them makes us prematurely operational."

  "A couple of things," Kurt said. "One, we don't want to take him out. Just get the data off his computer. Thus, we don't need to worry about the whole exfiltration problem of leaving a sovereign country with a terrorist in tow, which we currently don't have the capability to do.

  "Two, he works for a water desalinization plant. This plant has just asked for bids on surveillance system upgrades due to the unrest over there. The closest business cover we have to completion is Advanced Surveillance Solutions. We can use that to bid and win the contract. We can get over there and flesh out future operational actions with little risk."

  President Warren said, "So you're asking for our first Alpha? Are you sure we're ready? We blow this, and we blow more than just the mission."

  Kurt knew what he was really saying. If the mission was compromised, ripping the lid off an intelligence operation that existed off the books and outside the legal scrutiny of congress the president's brand-new administration would be destroyed, with the men in this room more than likely going to jail. But he also knew that the president had understood those risks when agreeing to Project Prometheus in the first place.

  "Sir, that's exactly what I'm asking. Everyone here saw the Surefoot series of capability demonstrations. They've got the skills to do it, and it's a simple Alpha introduction of forces. No Omega operational authority. Let's get a team in the game. All they'll be doing is building a pattern of life on Khalid. If it looks like we can access his database, we'll come back for Omega."

  The secretary of defense asked, "Which team do you want to send?"

  "Pike's team. He's got a solid mixture of guys who can walk and talk the surveillance business, from infrared cameras to digital recording. One guy, Retro, is a little bit of a computer geek. He keeps up on all that stuff on his own. And Pike's also got Jesse, a trained Arabic linguist."

  Palmer said, "So you have the infrastructure and requisite cover skills. Are you sure they're ready for this mission? Can they execute?"

  "They're proving that right now in Charleston."

  "They haven't proven anything yet. Let's see what happens in the next twenty-four hours before I give you my vote."

  Chapter 5

  I'd been sitting in my vehicle for about three hours, starting to get a little antsy because of the location, when I finally got the call from Retro that the beacon was on the move.

  The real estate office had provided a link to the target's beddown site, which happened to be in North Charleston in an area that was most decidedly not the nice part of town. While I was sure that I wouldn't blow the target by my location, I wasn't so sure that the neighbors around here wouldn't do it for me. No doubt they thought I was a cop and had been spreading the word around about my presence.

  Something to remember. The threat isn't only the target.

  At least this part of the exercise was proving beneficial. Trying to penetrate this area was like trying to penetrate Fallujah. Getting the beacon on the target's vehicle had been fairly challenging, given that we didn't blend in at all and the vehicle itself had been located on the street in front of a dilapidated town house.

  I'd sidelined Kranz because of his shenanigans the night before, ignoring his pleas that the beacon was CIA kit and therefore somehow his mission. I'd sent in Retro and my squid insteadRetro because he was a little bit of a techno-geek, and Reaper because I was feeling him out. Testing his left and right limits.

  So far Reaper had proven pretty damn solid. But we still had the night to get through yet.

  I looked at my watch, seeing it was close to midnight. With an exfil boat at two in the morning, we were pushing things. We had the intel indicator saying he was "potentially meeting with an unknown" and a location, but we didn't have a time.

  Retro finished his initial report, telling me that the beacon appeared to be heading toward Interstate 26, to downtown.

  I kicked over the engine, wondering how many people flipped open their cell phones at the same time, and headed in the direction of the beacon track.

  I had three vehicles operating as singletons, which made mounted surveillance pretty tough, but I wanted the spread in case we lost the beacon, so I only had one vehicle with two men.

  I'd given the job of surveillance chief to Kranz one, because I wanted to give him a chance to prove himself, and two, because he had a hell of a lot more experience at this than I did. I was just another pair of eyes on this mission.

  I entered the freeway headed south, trying to catch up to the target, currently being tracked by Retro and Bull from the two-up vehicle.

  I had little idea where the other vehicles were located, but that knowledge was unnecessary. If they were in the hunt, they knew what to do-which was to stay the hell out of the way until Retro called for a change-out of the eye. That wasn't going to happen anytime soon, because he was hanging back, using our technology to keep tabs.

  At least that's what I thought until his next call.

  "Kranz, lost the eye. Beacon track is wigging out."

  Kranz said, "Last location still I-26?"

  "Yeah. But we're passing exits left and right."

  I should have kept my mouth shut, let Kranz run the surveillance, but I couldn't help myself. "Retro, this is Pike. What's up with the beacon?"

  "Pike, that thing is a piece of shit. I swear, for being so top secret, it amazes me how old-school our capabilities are. FedEx has better tracking on a day-to-day basis. The beacon we're using has some sort of proprietary software package that only gives a trace and a grid. It doesn't even place it on a map."

  "I didn't ask for a review. I asked what was wrong."

  "I'm telling you what's wrong. It's something developed by the intelligence community for the intelligence community. Its technology is four years old, which means it's prehistoric. We need to start leveraging commercial infrastructure instead of this stand-alone, make-a-fortune-with-a-contract bullshit. Bottom line is the beacon works on satellite feeds, and the target broke the view of the sky."

  I thought about what I knew of Charleston, and it clicked.

  "He's already off the freeway. Into the spaghetti section where I-26 goes into downtown. He's underneath a bridge somewhere.

  Check the map. Where would that be?"

  Bull came on. "Meeting Street. He got off at that exit. Everything else is up high. Meeting goes underneath."

 
; "Retro, how long does that thing take to lock back on?" I asked.

  "About five minutes. Once signal is broken, it goes through a ridiculous self-test. He's in the open now, but we won't get signal."

  Kranz replied, "Understood, but let's not assume the beacon failed because of a sky-view. Reaper, keep going straight into the crosstown. Bull and Pike, get off at Meeting Street. Bull, go south on Meeting; Pike cut left to East Bay and troll south, paralleling Meeting. Jesse, take King Street to the west and go south as well. I'll back up Reaper on the crosstown."

  I was surprised by the call. Actually impressed. Maybe he does have some skills on this shit.

  I said, "Roger," and exited the freeway.

  Heading toward downtown, I began to review the hit we'd planned. The meeting itself was supposed to occur at the old city jail, a historical landmark that was now home to some sort of architecture school. We'd conducted a reconnaissance earlier and figured we could get out clean because the area was smack-dab in the middle of a government welfare housing area, with little to no foot traffic. There were no other commercial establishments in the area, and the building was just as advertised: a jail from the eighteenth century, deserted and dilapidated, with parking and easy access. No cameras or other surveillance systems, which worked both for the target and for us.

  I continued down East Bay and found myself reflecting on how cool the city was. I'd never been to Charleston before, but it had grown on me in the week I'd been there. I was at that stage in my military career when you start thinking about where you want to end up, and this place looked pretty good. Heather, my wife, wanted to stay in North Carolina, but I was having none of that.

  Need to get her down here for a weekend. See what she thinks.

  My thoughts were broken by Retro.

  "East Bay it is. Got the beacon stopped close to Market Street. Corner of East Bay and Pinckney. Looks like a parking lot near the carriage barns."