Lucky asked, “Where did he get his military training? Kyle mention that at all? Army or Marine? Obviously, he got good at the game, but where did he learn it?”
Coastie shook her head and Janna did the same, then said, “Wait, wait, wait. Kyle did mention that he once kidded Luke about his military bearing and Luke answered that it was an old habit left over from his misspent youth at VMI.”
Lucky clapped his hands. “That’s where we start, then. VMI is in Lexington, Virginia, which is only about two hundred miles from here. I can drive down there tomorrow and check it out.”
“Okay,” Coastie said in a slow voice. “Only can you tell me first what’s a VMI?”
The four Pratt & Whitney jet engines on the C-17 Globemaster III had settled into a harmonic moan once the aircraft reached its cruising altitude of 28,000 feet, heading east. The old U.S. Air Force transport workhorse was carrying a monster M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, pallets of miscellaneous gear, and two passengers: Luke Gibson and Kyle Swanson. A routine puddle jump for the biggest cargo plane in the world, and the seventy-ton tank in its belly was being ferried to the European stockpile that needed to be reinforced because Russian president Vladimir Pushkin was making noise again. The last U.S. tank units had officially left Germany years earlier, but a pre-positioned source of heavy armor was always kept tuned up and ready for battle, if necessary.
Both men had been given olive-drab USAF flight suits with no insignia and settled into an upper-deck compartment for the long flight to Ramstein as easily as commuters taking a train from Connecticut to Manhattan. Swanson uploaded a game on a laptop, while Gibson plugged in the buds of his iPhone and closed his eyes. Swanson soon shut down the computer and pushed it away, dimmed the overhead light, and also began to doze.
Only three crewmen were on board for the routine hop, and the loadmaster looked in on the passengers, saw they were fine, and shut the hatch. “Our spooks are already asleep,” he reported to the pilot.
“Wonder what they’re up to. We had to hold takeoff for half an hour to let them get aboard,” the co-pilot said.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” answered the pilot. “Let’s put this bird on automatic and get us all to Germany.”
“They don’t look like James Bonds to me,” said the loadmaster.
“Staff Sergeant Baxter?”
“Sir?”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir. Awesome advice, sir.”
12
Marguerite del Coda, sixteen years with the agency, met them at planeside, heavy sunglasses tilted low on her nose. “I might have known,” she said when Swanson and Gibson stepped onto the tarmac. “I received a strange message from Langley that two ‘representatives’ from the office of the director of intelligence would be arriving. No names, no details other than to arrange transport onward. Welcome back to my little slice of America, guys. Get in the car.” She got into the front passenger seat, and the two operatives, groggy from the long flight, climbed into the rear. “Back to the office,” she told the driver.
No one spoke during the ride as the driver expertly wove through the complex of roads at the air base in southern Germany. Ramstein was home to the entire USAF headquarters in Europe and teemed with some fifty thousand Americans of various services. Because it was a central NATO point, thousands more rolled in the count. What had started almost a century earlier, when the Hitler regime cleared an airstrip out of dense forests, had grown into a modern military metropolis.
Riding del Coda’s pass, they cleared the checkpoints and she led them to her private office. She peeled off a gray jacket and put a big corner desk between them and her. It wasn’t neat, and the place smelled of stress. The CIA regional administrator dropped into a chair and fiddled with her dark hair for a moment while staring at them.
“This has something to do with all the scuttlebutt going around, I guess? You guys are being targeted by some fool?” Little stayed secret within the CIA itself, for despite restrictions they were, after all, spies.
Swanson sat in one of the two facing easy chairs, while Gibson took a place on the sofa. “Yup,” he said. “We might as well start our hunt by asking you some questions, Marguerite. You’ve been over here forever.”
“Fire away,” she said. Her brown eyes were looking past them, as if she were already thinking about other things. Del Coda flexed her hands, folded them on the desk, and brought her eyes back down. She had known both of these operators for a long time, because Ramstein was a central clearinghouse in the war-on-terror intelligence business.
“We’re looking for one of our former contractors who went over to the dark side.” Gibson thought she seemed a bit off her game. “Name of Nicky Marks.”
“Only thing I know is that he was a shooter,” she replied. “One of your recruits, as I recall.”
“Don’t remind me.” Gibson flushed. “Anyway, have you picked up anything about him lately?”
She shifted in the chair and the navy-blue shirt she wore tightened on her figure. “Nope, other than he killed some woman in Paris. You’re telling me that Marks is behind all this noise?”
Swanson shrugged. “We don’t know much of anything right now, Marguerite, except that he’s causing us a lot of trouble.”
She unconsciously chewed on her lower lip, her eyes drifting to a computer screen on one side of the desk. “Want me to run him through the system?”
Swanson looked over at his partner. “Sure, light him up. He has to know that the French and Interpol are looking for him on the homicide. No harm in us adding him to the watch list, which he would expect. Just don’t use our names at all.”
“We think he has a source inside the agency. That’s why we’re moving quietly. Nobody but you and Marty Atkins know we’re here.” Gibson looked serious, then flashed an ironic grin. “Maybe two or three hundred others.”
“Well, god damn it all!” She exploded out of her seat, picked up a plastic ballpoint pen, and broke it in half, flinging the pieces across the office. “I’ve got the drone program raising my blood pressure, the rendition flights still come through here, and thousands of Kraut demonstrators outside the fence line want to close us down. I do not need this!”
Gibson laughed at her outburst. The woman was famous for her volatility. “None of us do. Chill out.”
The regional station chief stomped around the room, following a faint track in the old Afghan maroon carpet, her mind whirling. “Okay, okay. I’m all right. Is there anything else I can do?”
“Pass the word, person to person, that we want to keep Marks as isolated from fresh information as possible,” Swanson said. “The less he knows, the better. You contact Marty directly on any developments.”
“Okay. All mission comms will be handled here,” she said, making a note.
The three agents fell silent while del Coda cooled down, then she asked, “Why are you going to Afghanistan, then? Why not Pakistan or Iraq?”
Swanson stood up. “He’s going home, and he wants us to follow him.”
“You realize that you may be walking straight into an ambush?” she said.
“Most likely. It’s his turf, but it’s our turn, Marguerite. We’re getting closer by the day.”
Her mental gears had begun turning, which was why she held such a high-ranking position in the agency. Del Coda had the uncanny ability to work multiple complex problems simultaneously, and she was considering options. “Okay, I’ll put Marks’s name out there, which will make him step carefully, but how about this, too? We tag the two of you for a drone strike?”