All that had led her to the Café Schilling on Charlottenstrasse in Böblingen, Germany, just outside Stuttgart. Now she only used the name Fannie Legat. Her main job while she was in the area was to plan attacks against U.S. military personnel and other targets if she were ordered to. But funding had been an issue for many months now. It seemed the Zionists and the Americans controlled most of the money in the world, at least to hear her superiors tell it. But it was true that attempting a large-scale attack required money. She had several confederates living comfortably in an apartment near the center of Stuttgart who had been running up tabs at local restaurants and other businesses. But the men were true believers and would gladly give their lives to help in the ongoing struggle.
As she sipped some coffee in the middle of the night at an outdoor table next to a palm tree—the café was trying to have a Mediterranean look—she noticed an athletic-looking U.S. Marine major with short brown hair, reading a report while picking at a piece of toast.
Maybe this could be an opportunity while she waited for funding to come through.
4
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.