They didn’t show up on records other than being listed as a Special Forces training outfit, loosely connected to Delta Force and the Rangers. When stateside they formed a Red Team used in specialist training operations, and when deployed they were a unit called upon to do the Army’s dirtiest jobs. They maintained among the highest operational tempos of any unit in the DoD. They were fighters, good at it—perhaps too good, given that each man was broken in some way.
War did that, Harrington reflected. It broke and fractured and stressed until even the hardest of men reached a point of either no more, or no return. Most chose the former. These guys had chosen the latter.
These guys were ex-Delta, each busted out for psych and disciplinary reasons. They were given a choice: you’re out of the Army, dishonorable discharge; with all the bad press that private contractors have got over two wars, the legitimate end of the spectrum won’t touch you—you’re nitroglycerin waiting to go off. But we can help. We’ve spent millions training you, and we’ve already lost enough of our best. We won’t let you stay in your unit, but we’ve created a solution: you can join D Squad. If you do that, you still get to ride around in twenty-million-dollar Special Forces helicopters, you can still call in air strikes and million-dollar-per-launch tomahawks from billion-dollar submarines. You still get to play with all the best toys that money can buy. But you do as we say, and if you stuff up just the slightest little bit—well, that’s it. It’s Leavenworth for life on charges not even thought up yet. If you don’t go for it, you’re on your own, to join some third-rate mercenary outfit in Africa. Your choice.
So far it had worked out pretty well. In the three years D Squad had been operating, the DoD arsenal had held on to twenty-four of the world’s most highly skilled Special Forces operators. D Squad comprised four teams; each had six members. Two teams were currently on active duty in Afghanistan, the third was in Iraq hunting IS near the Syrian border, and team four was under his command. They had spent the last two months tasked to Cyber Command, testing the physical security of that division of the DoD.
Captain Harrington had been in the unit since its formation two years ago. Four of the five guys he trusted with his life; the sixth should be in prison, no question about it, but he recognized that the guy had proved useful on more than one occasion in the field. Harrington had been busted out of Delta after disobeying orders one too many times. A couple of his guys had been caught smuggling. Only one, to Harrington’s knowledge, had murdered unarmed Afghanis and staged the scene to look like they had been an armed threat. Mistakes happened, he got that, but this guy felt no remorse, and Harrington knew that there was more than they knew about—there had to be with a guy like that who’d spent five years at constant war.
These guys weren’t cops. They were never tested for doping. There wasn’t a guy on the team who wasn’t a juicer. Each had biceps the size of footballs, could bench their body weight in sets of twenty. They seemed to never stop moving, and never stop eating. Power bars and shakes; their mess room was like genocide for chickens.
The sum of all this? Six of the most roiled-up, angry, trained and tooled-up operators in the world.
And they were hunting Monica. And now Walker.
Harrington had debriefed the plain-clothed LAPD officers who’d been on security at the house. The officers were sheepish, knowing that a basic phone hack had taken them off target. They assumed that the bad guys who were carrying out these cyber attacks had sent through the bogus Homeland Security alert to get them off station, but Harrington knew better. He’d organized that order to get the two cops out of the way before he and his men had gone in.
Who was this Walker guy, Harrington now wondered as he headed to the two Suburbans parked at the police headquarters. The file bleeped through, and Harrington speed read through the file on Jed Walker, including the notes on his activities in New York and St. Louis.
Great. A goddamned vigilante was out there.
His phone rang. General Christie.
“Yes, ma’am?”
General Christie said, “I got your message.”
“My message?”
“What you just requested. On Jed Walker.”
Harrington stopped himself from commenting. The General was monitoring his phone and email and his request for the file.
General Christie said, “Walker is with Monica?”
“It appears so.”
“What’s his involvement?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Because you lost them.”
“Not for long.”
“How will you find them?”
“You said we had any resources we needed.”
“That’s true. Find Monica. Once you have her, call in and I’ll have a safe location for you to get to.”
“And Walker?”
“Just find Monica, whatever it takes.”
The General ended the call.
Harrington gave a hand signal for his team to get rolling. His crew had gassed up the cars and had eaten and were ready to roll. Caffeine tablets had been passed around. He suspected a couple of his crew may have taken something a little more aggressive in their quest to stay awake.
The driver of his Suburban, a good soldier named Kent, said, “Where to?”
“Southeast. Keep us rolling around there. We wait for an intel hit. They’ll show up soon. The way this town is networked makes it a small place to hide.”
The driver took off and the other Suburban followed. Harrington turned up the radio to catch the news commentary. They were speculating about what could be driving the group holding Jasper Brokaw. But Harrington couldn’t care less about motivations. He had his own mission to worry about.
•
In the motel room the news had been turned to a low whisper. The lights were off and the television gave out a glow.
Monica said, “I’m too wired to sleep.”
“Give it time.” Walker was on his bed, on top of the bed sheets with the thin blanket over him. He could be asleep inside a minute, if she’d just leave him alone. He decided to give her another two minutes, then he was shutting her out. She could talk to his snoring.
“What is it you thought about me?” Monica said. “Did you just reminisce? Or were you wondering about me, where I was and what I was doing, that sort of thing?”
Walker didn’t respond. A minute forty-five to slumberland.
“I thought of you,” she said.
A minute thirty.
“Not often. And not for long. But the memory was there. It was a good time. A weekend. In summer. Over in four days but it felt like a lifetime, at the time. What do they call that? The summer . . . the summer of a dormouse?”
Forty seconds. To shut-eye. Not the summer of a dormouse.
“I waited, you know? That summer and nearly to the next. I thought once you finished at the Academy, that something might happen. With us.”
Twenty-five seconds.
“Then I knew I was being stupid, and then I had a career and it was busy and ten years passed and I kept asking my dad about you—where you were and what you were up to and he’d never really say but when I pressed him to at least find out if you were okay he’d do it for me and that’d keep me going for another few months.”
Monica fell silent.
Two minutes had passed.
Walker was awake. And it wasn’t the coffee. He could sleep on caffeine as well as he could sleep on a Black Hawk going into a raid. The fact was, he’d thought about her, of course he had. But he’d had the on-off thing with Eve going on back then, the high-school sweetheart he married a few years after the Academy, before his first tour in Afghanistan. Had he thought about that Fourth of July weekend? Sure. On cold moments in the mountains with explosions tearing the quietude and bullets ripping the air and when the screams of men broke the night. It was one of his go-to memories when he needed to shut out the rigors of training against torture. When he had to replace in his mind’s eye what he’d seen on operations that went bad. When he needed to smile. It formed part of his happy place, which all soldiers had.
“Yes,” Walker said, his voice quiet in the room. “I remember that weekend. And I have thought about you. I’d heard from a service buddy that you’d married. And I guess that was it—the end of my thoughts about what could have been. As nice as it was, it was a summer fling, right? Between a couple of college students. Before we were married and lived lives and all that. Simple. Fun. Carefree.”
Monica was quiet. He heard her moving. The springs in her mattress as she shifted, trying to find a comfortable position, trying to find sleep.
•
Jasper couldn’t sleep. He was too wired. Jittery. Wondering, about the world out there. He could hear the television in the other, larger room, and he imagined the armed men seated around it. He was on a military-style cot bed, a kind of plastic canvas material over a collapsible metal frame. Every time he moved it squeaked and creaked. He looked up at the ceiling and wondered what was next.