One True Patriot Read online

  Halfway down he spun around, just as they appeared at the top, then ripped into both faces with a silenced six-round burst and rushed back up to keep their weapons from somersaulting and making a racket. The Koreans tumbled onto their backs, their Bizons bounced on their chests, and Steele’s shell casings pinged down the stairwell. He froze, but he could hear loud voices and laughter emanating from behind the wooden door—enough to cover the ruckus.

  He sure wasn’t cold anymore. He was pouring sweat and badly needed some water, but it wasn’t exactly break time yet. He yanked off the breakaway Hezbollah smock, wiped it over his blood-spattered face, and tossed it over his shoulder. Then he reached back for a long dishdasha “man dress” from his ruck and pulled it over his head, covering the Krinkov. From a butt pouch under the ruck he pulled a brass finjan.

  The small coffee urn was only a harmless prop, but it would buy him a few seconds inside. He couldn’t just toss a grenade in the room. There might be some innocents in there, maybe a child. Kids were his red line.

  He pulled out the pistol again, loaded a fresh magazine, press-checked the weapon, and tucked it under the robe. Then he gripped the finjan in his left, turned the doorknob, and hunched his posture like a submissive chai boy.

  It was actually a pretty nice suite, with a glass-topped bar to the left and a flat-screen TV. In the middle of the room was a large low coffee table with a heavy Moroccan mosaic top, flanked by cushy green leather chairs left and right, and one at the far end, in front of a large picture window. It took all of three seconds for Steele to assess.

  A Syrian general sat on the right, mustached with chest medals gleaming. To the left sat a Korean man wearing a black Nehru-type jacket, next to a fat Iranian in a charcoal business suit, no tie. The woman facing him across the table was a middle-aged blonde, wearing a Hillary-style mustard pants suit.

  The table was strewn with blueprints and ceramic Turkish coffee cups on glass coasters. Right in the middle was a silver, foot-long replica of a Qader missile, mounted on a miniature launch vehicle. It looked like something from Toys “R” Us.

  The quartet had been laughing about something. As Steele closed the door and shuffled over with his finjan, they stopped, glanced at him, then carried on with their conversation, all in Arabic.

  He bowed twice in obsequious dips, muttered, “Masa al khyr yasaditan”—Good evening, masters—and shuffled to the table. They ignored him. Except for the North Korean, who cocked his head to the side, looked down at Steele’s boots, then back up to his face. Steele caught the flash of alarm in his eyes and knew the jig was up. He pointed at the missile model and said, in plain English, “That’s gonna look great in my man cave.”

  He dropped the finjan, pulled out the pistol, and shot the Korean in the forehead. The woman screamed and the Iranian flipped himself out of his chair and ran for the bar. But he was too fat to hurdle the top and Steele shot him in the back of his skull. The Syrian on the right was already up and had decided to fight, but Steele backhanded him in the throat with the pistol butt and shot him twice in the chest.

  The Russian woman was on her feet and still screaming. Steele didn’t like killing women, and for a split second he thought he might just blow out her kneecaps and leave it at that. But then she came up with a Makarov pistol from her purse and fired a round point-blank at his chest. The .380 ACP bullet pierced his robe and clanged off his Krinkov, slamming the subgun into his ribs.

  He shot her in the chest and then the bridge of her nose. She lurched backward over the chair, her black heels twitching in the air.

  He heard shouts now from down in the lobby and the thunder of boots on the stairs. He pulled off the dishdasha, leaped for the doorway, armed a Russian F-1 grenade, tossed it down the stairwell, and slammed the door. The hollow bang shook dust from the ceiling as he yanked a thirty-foot length of nylon rope from his ruck and snapped the carabiner to one leg of the table.

  Steele pulled his gloves on, stuffed the missile model and blueprints into his ruck, shattered the window with a burst from the Krinkov, tossed the rope outside, and was on the ground in another six seconds. But he didn’t run from the back of the building to his bike. He walked, as he tried to calm his pulse and smeared streams of sweat from his neck.

  Three Russian medics were squatting over the corpses in the street. They raised their heads as he walked right past them, mounted the bike, booted the starter, and took off.

  The only comm device Steele had on his person was a Mini-LR-MIB—a Miniature Long-Range Midwave Infrared Beacon. He clicked the button hard with his thumb in his pocket and hoped to hell it was working.

  He doubled back on his infil route but diverged when he got to the Byblos Bank and bounced from the road onto the railroad tracks. He thought he heard engines roaring up the parallel road behind him, but he didn’t expect any sirens—just pissed-off Russians with guns. Sure enough, a flurry of wild shots zipped through the tree line, breaking off branches. He gunned the Taurus, the railroad ties making his teeth chatter.

  He took the hard corner back onto Khaled Ibn Alwaleed and almost crashed the damn bike. A little kid in an oversize coat and sandals was standing in the middle of the road. Christ! Steele dumped the Taurus, jumped off it, snatched up the bug-eyed boy by his waist, and sprinted to the maw of an alley. He sat the kid down, fumbled in his pocket for a Kind Bar, squeezed it into his little hand, tousled his dusty hair, and said in Arabic, Don’t move. Then he ran back to the bike.

  A minute later he was standing between the exfil buildings and struggling into his parachute harness. He ran to one side, snapped one cable carabiner into his right D ring, then did the same with the left as the steel line above went taut. He pulled on his helmet, kissed the Krinkov, and flung it behind a pile of rubble.

  He looked up. Nothing yet.

  At the far end of the road, a Russian ZiL troop carrier careened around a corner, roared like an enraged lion, and bore straight at him. AK-74 barrels appeared from both side windows of the cab and started spitting fire, lime-green tracers cracking through the air around him and biting off chunks of concrete.

  Now would be a good time! he howled inside his head. And then he saw the twin spinning propellers.

  The SpecOps C-145A was screaming above the road, just behind the truck and a hundred feet up, and he could see the jungle penetrator with its auto-link whipping below the open cargo bay. A crew chief must have been lying prone in the bay with an M240-B, because as the aircraft passed the truck, it opened up on the cab with a wicked stream of lightning-white tracers.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, folded his arms, and tucked his helmet into his chest. He heard the smack of steel snatching steel above, a short scream of whipping cables, and he was yanked like a meat puppet into the sky at 150 knots.

  He opened his eyes at two hundred feet and looked down past his whipping boots. The truck had smashed into a concrete building and exploded in a yellow-orange ball of fire.

  These foreign drivers never know when to yield, he thought.

  And then he was up and away.

  Chapter 3

  Neville Island, Pennsylvania

  There were still some feathery wisps of smoke rising from the ruins of Eric Steele’s house. He thought that was strange, given that two months had passed since the place had burned to the ground. But maybe that was how beloved homes gave up their last ghosts.

  He stood in the gravel driveway, hands in the pockets of a navy peacoat, Steelers cap on his head. His green eyes were locked on the broken timbers and charred black walls, but they were seeing something else.

  It was that day back then, when he’d finally gotten a short break after sweating through a battery of reassessment tests for the Program, and had come home to Neville Island for some R&R. He’d built that house with his own hands, renovating it from the old Dravo Corporation warehouse where they’d once manufactured landing craft for the Normandy invasion. It had taken him a whole year, and when he was done he thought he’d fashioned an isl
and fortress on a par with Camelot.

  The reinforced concrete walls had Krieger level-four blast doors, security cameras, motion sensors. He’d installed a state-of-the-art safe room with closed-circuit air supply, ballistic glass on all the windows, an armory that could rival Charlton Heston’s private collection, and a kitchen to make Martha Stewart drool.

  That day a couple months back was supposed to have been a nice quiet afternoon, hosting his mom with a couple of fat steaks in the broiler, a bottle of good wine, and some family nostalgia. But right after she’d shown up, so had Aleksandr Zakayev, along with two teams of Russian killers. He’d done his best to fight them off, killed a bunch of them, but his small armory was no match for RPGs and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons. He and his mom had finally had to book it in his 1967 GTO, which wound up peppered with bullet holes and upside down in a ditch. His adoring mother had gone into a deep coma, and he’d gone off for revenge.

  The thing in Aleppo hadn’t cured that rage, or quenched his disquiet about the recent past. Nor would any of it bring back the people he loved.

  Bobby “Demo” Cortez.

  Just saying the man’s name in his head made him hurt from his guts to his furrowed dark eyebrows. Demo had been his “keeper,” a term they used in the Program for what the intel spooks usually called a “handler.” But to an Alpha operator, a keeper was much more than just a field manager. Demo had been his battle buddy for years, a mentor, a wise man much like a samurai’s monkish guru. He’d also been Steele’s best friend in the world, and he’d died in his arms in a bouncing, freezing Zodiac boat in the middle of the Arctic Sea, after a raid that had gone to shit.

  Demo wasn’t replaceable. And now that Steele had time to reflect on the loss, he wondered if he was just marking time continuing with the Program. He felt like a ronin—a samurai who’d lost his master, doomed to wander the world in search of a meaningful mission.

  He blew out a long sigh and wished he had a cigarette, but he’d given up smoking way back in the 10th Mountain Division. Once in a while he still had a cigar, but you couldn’t suck smoke and do the job. It required every healthy lung cell, and all of your heart.

  Then he thought of Meg Harden. He suddenly saw her compact five-foot-five frame, her glossy black hair and turned-up nose, and those dimples and rare smile that could melt a man’s shoes. He saw her in bed, flushed and purring and satisfied, at least for the moment, and he wondered if he loved her. He’d loved Demo, and he loved his mom. But he wasn’t sure he had much left for anyone else.

  He also wasn’t sure that he’d loved his father, Hank Steele, because he’d never really known him. A Green Beret back in the day, Hank had hardly been in their lives. And then he’d disappeared, forever, filling Eric with an endless sense of longing and loss.

  At the end of Steele’s last mission, just prior to Aleppo, he’d finally caught up with Gabriel, the stone-cold killer responsible for Demo’s death. And just before Steele put a bullet in his head, Gabriel had tried to barter for his life with some phony crap about knowing the secret of Hank Steele’s fate.

  If you kill me you will never find your father, he’d said.

  It was a hard choice to make.

  Truth, or dare? Redemption, or bluff?

  He’d killed him anyway. And now, he couldn’t help but regret it. Gabriel had possibly held the key to opening up Steele’s Pandora’s box of sorrows and heal his tormented soul. The idea of it made his eyes glisten as he stared at his decimated home and felt enraged by his burdens of loss and revenge.

  That anger was something he’d have to learn to manage. But it was also the engine that made him the Alpha he was.

  He started and snapped from his dark reverie when he felt a hand touching his elbow. His mom had been waiting for him in the brand-new 1967 GTO he’d bought and had apparently run out of patience. He turned and looked down at her. She was still such a lovely woman, and the long pink scar on her forehead was nearly invisible now, concealed by her brunette curls dangling over it. His chest swelled with gratitude that she was still alive.

  His mom squeezed his arm and pulled him close, and she smiled that beatific smile and jutted her chin at the ruins of his house.

  “I think those steaks are overdone,” she said. “Come on. I’ll buy you dinner.”

  Chapter 4

  Paris, France

  The woman across the table from Jonathan Raines was absolutely stunning. Her name was Geneviève, the daughter of an Egyptian-born contemporary French artist named Emile Sadat, whose impressionist oil color works were the talk of the Parisian elite and featured in exhibitions at the Louvre. Geneviève worked as her father’s curator and assistant, and turned more heads at the museum than the Mona Lisa.

  Her long raven hair swooped across the back of her caramel neck and fell past her ample breasts to her waist. She had sleek dark eyebrows, large amber eyes, a small Roman nose, and lips so full that they seemed unreal. At five foot seven, her figure was that of gymnast who’d grown too tall for her sport, and the long, cobalt-blue slitted sheath dress she was wearing didn’t have one wrinkle or bulge.

  She was perfect. And for that reason alone, Jonathan Raines knew that he shouldn’t have been there.

  Raines was an Alpha with the Program—Stalker Six to be precise—and he hadn’t had a decent leave in the past two years, so Paris seemed like a prime selection. Fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, Raines usually operated in Central or South America, and rarely had a chance to enjoy the luxuries of the Continent. Before being selected for the Program, he’d spent eight years as an air force PJ and combat controller, and before that he’d completed a master’s degree in art history. So, Paris was the place to fill your eyes with breathtaking art, and apparently breathtaking women.

  Professionally speaking, he was wary of Geneviève. He’d aced all the counterintelligence courses and briefings at Langley, the DIA, and in-house at the Program, where the cranky old instructor-spies warned you incessantly about “honey traps.” Those were attractive women (or men, if you were gay) who’d strike up a casual conversation on a bus or park bench somewhere, get into your pants, and eventually lure you into an ambush. An Alpha learned never to trust a cold approach by anyone, not even a wrinkly old woman asking for help with finding her cat. Anyone could be working for the opposition, and the unbreakable rule about these ad hoc strangers was: If you don’t absolutely know, don’t go.

  But it hadn’t happened that way with this girl. Raines had taken a room at the Montmartre Bed & Breakfast on Rue Muller, a quirky little place where all the guests intermingled and any swarthy dangerous strangers would stick out like sausages in a punch bowl. He’d slept for two days straight, wandered the rain-washed streets of Paris, and had finally gotten over to the Louvre to take in a Monet exhibit. It just so happened that Emile Sadat was also displaying his works that day and giving a lecture to a hundred art tourists. Geneviève had been there by her father’s side at the podium.

  Raines had approached her—not the other way around. If that was a setup, it had to be the most miraculous honey trap in the history of espionage and special operations.

  He invited her out for dinner. She demurred, brushed him off, then was suddenly standing there when he exited the Louvre. Then she offered a non-Parisian apology for being suspicious and rude. She’d agreed to a dinner date, but nothing more.

  That was fine with Jonathan Raines. He didn’t expect a one-night fling with a creature like Geneviève. Still, he thought it over one more time, almost changed his mind, then decided she was “clean.”

  He should have listened to his instincts. . . .

  Her name was not really Geneviève Sadat. She was actually Lila Kalidi, an assassin and mercenary with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And Emile Sadat was not her real father. He played that role well, but his artwork was cover for his true occupation as an explosives smuggler and gun runner for the Muslim Brotherhood in France. As a matter of fact, Emile couldn’t even watercolor by number—his works were
created by a trio of Algerian art students who were paid very well to paint and shut up.

  Lila was, in fact, very knowledgeable about art. She had an advanced degree in the subject from the Sorbonne and spoke French fluently, along with English, Arabic, German, Spanish, and Russian. However, her real father had been a founding member of Hamas, a bomb maker who’d murdered hundreds of Israelis and was called “the Plunger” for his affinity for TNT. His head had been removed from his body by the Israeli General Security Service, Shabak, when they’d planted plastique in his cell phone in Gaza, with technical and surveillance support from American intelligence assets.

  That was enough to make Lila conclude that Hamas had grown much too soft for her tastes, which was why she’d attached herself to PIJ and a few other “subset” clients. She made them pay dearly for her wet work, though she thoroughly enjoyed killing American, Israeli, and British colonizer infidels. She had a second-degree black belt in Russian Systema and had aced the small arms and sniper school run by the IRGC outside Isfahan in Iran. In between jobs, she lived the high life, and made no apologies for it to anyone.

  “You are very Parisian, Geneviève,” Raines said.

  They had taken a table in one of the grand inner rooms of Le Café Marly, on the ground floor of the Palais du Louvre itself. The walls were red and gold, the doors and wainscoting lacquer black, the plush chairs in royal blue brocade, and the dishes were all stamped with the café’s moniker.

  “How do you mean, Jonathan?” She sipped her champagne and regarded him with a twinkle over the rim of the glass.

  He smiled. “You insist on speaking English, even though I’m fluent in French.”

  “I enjoy practicing my English.” She shrugged and tugged at a pearl choker. “And fluency is a relative term, n’est-ce pas?”