Kevin Lee Swaim
Project StrikeForce
To Dave Wallace, who always told me I could.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all the active and retired military members who helped with this endeavor. Any mistakes contained herein are entirely mine. Special thanks to my beta readers. Your feedback was invaluable.
CHAPTER ONE
John Frist stood a rooftop away, watching people enter the Red Cross building, the traffic noise from Arlington Boulevard blaring in the background. He pulled at his jacket as the brisk January wind knifed through him and clutched his binoculars tighter. The cold sharpened the smell of the city, the car exhaust and asphalt mixed with the barest hint of rot from the mulch around the damp shrubs below. He scanned the building across the parking lot but nobody noticed the Ryder truck parked at the entrance. The lax security was rare in the DC area.
Who would bomb the Red Cross?
He had parked the Ryder truck just minutes before, quickly making his way to his rooftop perch. It took just seconds to disable the alarm on the rooftop door. He had reconnoitered the path the week before, looking for cameras, but the route through the side stairwell was clean. Even so, he kept his head down and the jacket pulled tight.
What would anyone remember anyway? Just a man in his late-twenties, dressed in slacks and a tan polo like the other office drones, his brown crew-cut grown shaggy and the hint of a five o’clock shadow.
The civilians inside the Red Cross building went about their jobs, unaware of how they had failed. He could picture them in his mind, asking each other about the game while getting their over-priced coffee or flirting with the pretty girl down the hall.
They were ignorant of the real threat to the United States; ignorant of what real Americans had sacrificed so they could remain fat, stupid, and happy. He missed his parent’s funeral, killed by a drunk driver during his second year in Iraq. He followed procedure, informed his CO, but when he called the Red Cross, the record was lost. They blamed it on the Army, but he knew better. Without the Red Cross verification, his CO denied his emergency leave.
The country was going to hell. He would never begrudge a man providing for his family, but the flow of illegals never ended. Before his deployment he thought illegals should be allowed to serve in the military as a path to citizenship, but now he understood it was a pipe dream. Illegals filled the cheap jobs companies needed to keep the economy humming. The politicians were fat and happy from all that money, a river of cash they rafted through on their way home to their nice houses and fancy cars.
That was about to change.
He worked the toe of his shoe against the roof ballast rock, his knuckles white as he gripped the binoculars. A school bus was pulling up to the front of the Red Cross, next to the Ryder truck. Were there kids inside? He stared through the binoculars. Yeah, kids. Maybe twenty. Maybe thirty. School trip, perhaps, coming to see the Red Cross regional headquarters.
Could he make it back down and across the parking lot?
No. It was too far. The kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Casualties of war.
He swung the binoculars around. His escape route was clear. The explosion would trigger car alarms for blocks, the bleating noise echoing among the buildings, the dust thick in the air, choking, making it hard to breathe. People would flood out of the building. They would gasp and cry — a few might rush to help. He would go with the flow of people down the stairs and escalators, gaping at the destruction. Some would head to their cars, shocked, and he would go with them, an innocent bystander among the sheep.
A stolen car waited in the north parking lot. A quick wipe clean and he’d ditch it soon after in a wooded lot a few miles away. A bus ride to his truck and he would be back at his apartment before lunch.
He bent and placed the binoculars on the roof, grabbed his cell phone, and hit the speed dial. The call connected.
There was a deafening roar as the shock wave slammed against him, knocking him back. He peeked over the edge and smiled in awe at the destruction.
The President of the United States of America sighed heavily, the sound echoing against the hardened concrete walls of his underground bunker, thirty meters below the White House. “I can’t believe it’s come to this.”
The other occupant sat perfectly straight in his chair, his thinning snow-white hair neatly combed, his large and weathered hands resting on the table. “This is our best chance. The decision won’t get easier.”
Fulton Smith, the Director of the Office of Threat Management, waited for the President to make his decision. He had been a confidant to many presidents over the years, from his first meeting with the hardened and vulgar President from Missouri to this young man from Texas. His job was to ensure the safety of the Union, a promise he made to Harry Truman as a young man and a promise he had reaffirmed to every chief executive since.
“How much will this cost?”
He handed the President papers from his metal briefcase.
The President scanned the document, his face pale. “Good Lord, we could build a stealth bomber for this.”
“You never said my budget was limited. This is the cost. Besides, we’ve already started.”
“Why do you even need me to approve this?”
“Because no matter how much power I wield, you are the President.”
“How did you manage to move that kind of money around? And all those people?”
Smith shrugged. “You know better than to ask. We don’t have to do this, Mr. President. Just say the word and we kill the project.”
The President stared off, lost in thought, and then shook his head. “What if it doesn’t work? What if he dies during the process?” The President stood and paced the small room, his feet shuffling against the blue carpet. “If this ever went public, it wouldn’t just hurt me. This would devastate the country. The people would never trust their government again. You’re sure you can keep this quiet?”
Smith raised an eyebrow.
“Of course,” the President said, “I forgot who I was talking to.” He paused. “It sounds like science fiction.”
“Not science fiction,” Smith said calmly, “an extrapolation of current technology, backed by a large amount of money and a very creative way of putting it together. We need this. I warned you. I told you Afghanistan would be messy and that Iraq would be a meat grinder. We had a plan to eliminate Hussein.”
The President glared. “What message would that send? We can’t just assassinate a sitting head of state whenever we damn well please. No, sir. I wanted the sonofabitch dead, but I wasn’t about to authorize that. Better that we went to war.”
“Even with all that’s happened?”
“We might have overstated the case, but Iraq was a threat and Hussein had to go. It had to be war, even a bloody one. Besides, you warned me about the consequences of assassinating Hussein. You argued against it as much as you argued for it.”
“War is very complex. There is always potential blowback. I’d have preferred to have assassinated him back in the eighties, but your predecessors wouldn’t authorize it. Too many unknowns with the Iranians. That’s why we need this program. We can stop problems before they become so unwieldy that the entire world gets sucked in.”
The President sat down and stared at the folder, as if expecting it to bite. “You really think this will work?”
Smith waited, the silence of the room broken only by the whispering of the air filtration system. “Mr. President, we need this. Bombs and missiles and planes are good when fighting a large military force, but to fight an idea? You need a targeted weapon. One man with superior technology. One man who can do what an army can’t.”