After Derek Walsh watched Alena drive away in the cab, he intended to stop and have a hamburger and a few more beers, then grab a few hours’ sleep in the comfortable queen bed in his tiny apartment and head into the office as late as possible.
Although he admired farmers who were up before dawn working, he had little respect for the financial managers who would come in before the sun rose. He had read an article about how money managers contributed little to society. If everything were to go to hell and you needed a skill in the future, money managers would be out of luck. They didn’t build anything, cure anyone, protect anyone, or carry anything. It led to a fairly widespread depression among thoughtful money managers who considered their contribution to society.
It was a mild autumn evening, and surprisingly few people were on the street. He could’ve easily hailed a cab, but the nine-block walk would do him good. And one of his favorite diners was right on the way.
When he was about two blocks away from the office, he noticed two men at the far end of the block walking toward him. He was always alert, but these two seemed harmless enough. They were white; one of them was middle-aged, the other young and thin. They showed no interest in Walsh. His mind was on Alena anyway. Sometimes she was a ball of fire emotionally, but more often she displayed an aloof, cool demeanor and didn’t seem interested in anything intimate. He enjoyed having such a beautiful girlfriend, but if he looked at his life as a whole, he wanted to settle down and start having children. He’d fantasized about telling his son how he fought in the war and then moved on to Wall Street and made a fortune. He intended to do all this from the dock of their spacious home in the Florida Keys. That was his dream, anyway.
The two men were only about twenty feet away from him when Walsh looked up again and assessed them quickly. The older one was perhaps fifty and had a fading scar across the left side of his face. The younger man was barely twenty-five and had the wiry look of a meth user. He was prepared to file them away in his memory as they passed when he noticed the younger man reaching under a loose Knicks hoodie. The movement caught Walsh’s eye, and he immediately tensed and turned his body slightly as he’d been trained in the marines. It could be anything, but it looked like the younger man was reaching for a pistol.
It was that little reaction—training that had seeped through all the other bullshit in his head—that allowed Walsh to move quickly when the younger, slim man drew some kind of blued steel automatic from his waistband.
Walsh did not hesitate. The marines frowned on hesitation. He did exactly what he had always been taught. He literally sprang into action.
* * *
It was late, or early, depending on how you looked at it, but he couldn’t sleep, so Major Bill Shepherd had slipped off base.
He had managed a call to his former comrade Mike Rosenberg at the CIA and, like many other good military officers, used this back channel to get a better view of world affairs. As he had feared, the U.S. was mainly focused on Middle Eastern threats. The bombing in Berlin that had killed his friend Ron Jackson pointed to the rapidly expanding targets of the Islamic State.
Although the Russians were considered a threat, they weren’t, at the moment, killing Americans, so the administration devoted little effort to the sleeping bear. Washington was just going along with NATO’s actions to discourage aggression, which involved the U.S. forces in Europe. A few F-16s had been moved around, and a rapid deployment force was in the works, but not much else. If the balloon went up, the men of his brigade would be expected to do a lot. He wanted to be prepared.
He quietly studied the status report for his brigade. He couldn’t tell anyone he was secretly thrilled at the thought of combat and considered the possibility of moving the team into either Estonia or Belarus as part of a NATO response to any Russian activity. He knew to keep things quiet, and his unit was small enough to operate under the radar. But the army units on the same base were more obvious and some of their commanders realized they might have to act fast. The movement of dozens of tanks attracted attention. Everything was still theoretical, but just the thought of having a chance to knock out a T-90 or any other Russian armor was exciting, and the reality would mean his decision to join the marines would be completely validated.
Shepherd’s father and two brothers were in the navy. Although his father was a retired admiral, Shepherd had avoided the Naval Academy, then searched the New York area for an acceptable alternative. Not interested in West Point, he had to travel south to Lexington, Virginia, where he enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute. The college, formed in 1839, was the first state-sponsored military academy and had a proud tradition, most notably featuring “Stonewall” Jackson as an instructor. As far as the marines went, Shepherd considered Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, a highly decorated combat commander with five Navy Crosses, to be the academy’s greatest marine graduate.
Shepherd had completed one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, but his father didn’t view trading small-arms fire with insurgents as serious military activity. Even so, he was the only one of the three brothers to actually see combat. Military people sought action. No fighter pilot wanted to spend his entire career training. Kids on computers did that. Military personnel prepared for battle, and all of them wanted to make their country proud. They still talked of faith, glory, and honor. Shepherd knew that if the Russians made a move into any of the bordering countries, he’d have plenty of chances to see glory, find honor, and keep his faith. The old saying that there were no atheists in a foxhole was equally true when facing down Russian armor on a highway.
He just wished there were more assets in case the Russians tried something. The lack of leadership from the top of the U.S. government had led to an absolute debacle in the Middle East. Now, not only intelligence assets but more and more military assets were being directed at conflicts that had little hope of being resolved. Maybe if the United States had taken a more active role early on, things would be different, but a stuttering foreign policy and a spineless view of aggression now threatened the security of Western Europe.
Despite what U.S. officials kept saying, the world was a much more dangerous place. Perhaps not as many people were dying at the moment from military conflict, but the potential for a showdown between major powers was growing exponentially.
After talking with Mike Rosenberg, he wondered if his other friend from the unit who had left, Derek Walsh, missed the marines more than he let on. He was a big shot on Wall Street now but still managed to drop Shepherd a line either through e-mail or on Skype at least once a week. Maybe he’d try Walsh early tomorrow afternoon when it was midmorning on the East Coast. He’d seen both Mike and Derek at Ron Jackson’s funeral, and they all had been disturbed by his death. It made Shepherd want to focus on the assholes in the Islamic State, but he’d settle for Russians.
Just thinking of “settling” for the Russians reminded Shepherd of a training class he took at Quantico with Rosenberg, Walsh, and Jackson. They were all newly minted second lieutenants and just getting to know each other. Already they were falling into certain roles, with Jackson seeming wiser and more even-tempered than the others even though he was the same age. Rosenberg was already assessing situations and providing them with intelligence like any good G-2. Walsh could figure out their resources and tell them exactly where they could and couldn’t go based on their meager money and available transportation. And Shepherd was always the one who listened to everyone else, then acted, or sometimes acted, then listened to everyone else. They were the perfect team, and he missed them terribly.
During this training class, they had gone out for a beer in the little town called Woodbridge in northern Virginia. The place was packed; it was some kind of trivia night, and between the four of them they knew the answers to almost everything that came up. Soon girls were flirting with them, and as was his way, Shepherd was gathering phone numbers as fast as he could. He always found it easy to chat with women, and that made it possible to set up his friends as well. But that night he had chatted with one woman too many, and her remarkably fit and tall boyfriend and his three friends took exception.
None of them were in uniform, but most people in the area could tell a marine officer by the haircut and bearing. That didn’t deter these local rednecks in the least. Shepherd wanted to kick everyone’s ass, but he “settled” for just the one guy. Even then Shepherd knew he could trust his friends to have his back and never worried about the other men. He could focus all his attention on the loudmouth up in his face. As it turned out, Walsh, Rosenberg, and Jackson handled the other men with little problem. But the big man confronting Shepherd had a wicked right cross and knocked him off his feet almost immediately. That’s the way things worked out in bar fights, and he had to accept the sore nose if he was dumb enough to get into a fight in the first place.
Before he knew it, Shepherd’s friends were easing him out of the bar with a bloody nose and what turned out to be a really good black eye, but nothing more serious. Those were the three guys he could trust as long as he lived. Or, as it had sadly turned out, as long as they lived. Now he only had Walsh and Rosenberg to depend on, but he was glad he had them.
Shepherd’s mind dialed back to the present as he flipped a page to see just how many portable antitank weapons he would be able to scrounge up if the time came. From the corner of his eye he caught an attractive young woman sipping coffee at the edge of the café. She had dark brown, flowing hair and high cheekbones that set off deep green eyes. He couldn’t tell her nationality, but she wasn’t the typical fair German girl. She had a grace and style that pointed toward France or one of the United Kingdom countries.
Maybe it was time for a break from his work.
* * *
Neither of the men confronting Derek Walsh expected him to be so aggressive. And clearly the younger man didn’t know how to handle 220 pounds barreling into him. He bounced off Walsh, grazed the wall, and ended up on the sidewalk.
Walsh saw movement out of the corner of his left eye and instinctively raised his left hand to block a blow by the other man. At least he appeared to be unarmed. Walsh pivoted and threw his elbow into the man’s face, knocking him into the street. As he turned around, the man on the ground had his pistol up. Walsh didn’t hesitate to fall on him, holding the arm with the pistol in it. They struggled, and Walsh felt the strain in his respiratory system. His breathing became labored, and his heart pounded in his chest. What the hell did these guys want? He rolled on the ground, tossing the smaller man to one side while still holding the arm with the pistol.
The second man, the older one with a scar, somehow got back in the fight and took the gun from the man Walsh had in his grasp. The older man had the gun almost to Walsh’s temple when Walsh was able to raise his left hand violently and knock it away just as the man pulled the trigger.
The shot was deafening. It caused a dog to bark in the distance and made everyone at the scene freeze. The man brought the gun around again, but this time Walsh swept his leg and knocked him to the ground. A car came around the corner, the headlights raking the building and all three of them.
The younger man shouted something in another language. It sounded Russian. He started to run. Walsh made a fist and struck the older man several times in the side, feeling his ribs crack.
The older man struggled to his feet and managed to kick the gun away from both of them. As he stood, he staggered, then leaned down and scooped up the gun and set off running.
Walsh sat up and leaned against the building panting, watching both men disappear around the corner as the car that had scared them off came to a stop. He heard a woman’s voice say, “I just called 911.”
Walsh nodded and raised his hand in thanks. But he couldn’t help wondering why the men attacked him, and why, after he had the gun in his hand again, the older man chose to run instead of shoot.
In the distance he could hear a siren.