“Some people say you were the worst.”
Case returned a bitter smile. “Some said I was the best.”
“Fact is, we were the worst.”
“I don’t need saving.”
“You’re living outdoors. Winter is coming. You’re hooked on Percocet and the docs have cut you off. When this month’s prescription runs out you’ll be scrambling to find it on the street.”
“Paul Janson’s famously accurate research?”
“You’ll be dead by Valentine’s Day.”
“Janson’s renowned discerning analytic tradecraft?”
“You need saving.”
“I don’t want saving. Get out of here. Leave me alone.”
“I’ve got a van with a ramp.”
Doug Case’s pale, grizzled cheeks flamed angry red. “You got a van with a ramp? You got a van with a ramp? You got shooters in the van going to help you wrestle me up your fucking ramp?”
An awkward smile tightened Janson’s face. For the first time since appearing at the mouth of Doug Case’s railroad tunnel, he looked unsure. The man they called “The Machine” was suddenly vulnerable, and Doug Case pressed his attack.
“You’re falling down on the planning end, fella. No assaulters in the van. No rehearsal. No quick-reaction force backup. No contingency. You’re kind of, sort of, fumbling on impulse. Should have gone about this the way you’d plan a Cons Ops job. Tortured soul muddles toward atonement? And you’re going to get me straightened out?”
“More than straightened out. We’re going to put you back together with a life.”
“With a life? So first you’ll get me off the Perc? Then you’ll have shrinks fix my head? And when the docs get through you’ll find me a career that will employ my considerable talents? Go to hell.”
“You will be made whole.”
“Maybe even find me a girl?”
“If you want one, you’ll be whole enough to find one on your own.”
“Jesus, Paul, you’re as wired and freaked out as I am. Who in your mental wilderness do you imagine would pay for this fantasy?”
Janson said, “On my last job someone deposited a ton of money in my overseas accounts to make it seem I turned traitor. That someone no longer exists. Money will not be an issue.”
“If you ever do rope some poor fool into your pipe dream, you’ll need more than money. You’ll need help. Lots of it. You’ll need a staff. Hell, you’ll need an entire company.”
Again Janson looked unsure. “I don’t know about that. I’ve had it with companies. I’ve had it with institutions. I’ve stopped trusting any more than two people in one room.”
“Poor, tormented Paul. Trying to make everything right by saving the worst guy you know, singlehanded? What are you going to call this outfit? The Paul Janson Institute for Raising Fucked-up Former Field Agents Out of Deep Shit? No, keep it simple: the Phoenix Foundation.”
Janson stood up. “Let’s go, my friend.”
“This guy ain’t going anywhere. And I’m not your friend.”
“Maybe not,” Janson agreed. “But we’ve worked together and I could be sitting where you are, so we are brothers.”
“Brothers? Is your halo pinching?” Doug Case shook his head, scratched an armpit, and covered his face with his dirty hands. After a while, he lowered his left hand and spoke through the fingers of his right. “They called you ‘The Machine.’ Remember? Some operators they call an animal. Some a machine. A machine usually beats an animal. But not always.”
In a blur of coordinated movement drilled ten thousand times, Case’s left hand flashed from his knapsack pinching the barrel of a Glock 34 9mm automatic between thumb and forefinger. His right hand closed around the butt, forefinger curling into the trigger guard and his left pulled back the slide, loading a round into the chamber and cocking the pistol with the speed of liquid flame.
Janson kicked it from his hand.
“Fuck!”
Doug Case rubbed his wrist where Janson’s boot had connected. Should have remembered that Cons Ops combat instructors, the best in the world, had a saying: Lightning-fast; nano-fast; Janson-fast.
Janson scooped up the gun. He was suddenly grinning ear to ear, optimistic, full of hope, and absolutely convinced he could fix what was broken. “I see you’re not completely screwed up.”
“What gives you that idea?”
Janson tapped the Glock. “You replaced the crappy factory sights with ghost rings.”
He removed the magazine and pocketed it, removed the round from the chamber, snapped the knapsack off Case’s lap, removed two spare magazines from a side pocket, pulled a third from the waistband of his sweatpants, and handed the empty gun back to Doug Case.
“When do I get the rest of it?”
“Graduation day.”
Part One
The Mother of All Reserves
One
Vegas Rules,” said Janet Hatfield, captain of the Amber Dawn. Her three-thousand-ton offshore service vessel was running up the Gulf of Guinea on a black night, pitching and rolling in following seas. Her voice rang with quiet authority in the near silence of the darkened pilothouse. “What you saw on Amber Dawn stays on Amber Dawn.”
“You already swore me to Vegas Rules when we sailed from Nigeria.”
“I’m not kidding, Terry. If the company finds out I snuck you aboard, they’ll fire my ass.”
“And a lovely ass it is,” said Terrence Flannigan, MD, nomadic corporate physician, globetrotting womanizer, world-class snake. He raised his right hand and gave Janet Hatfield a sleepy-eyed grin. “Okay. I swear, again, to keep my mouth shut about Amber Dawn, about oil in general and deep-water petroleum exploration in particular, cross my heart and hope to die.”
The captain, a solidly built blonde of thirty-five, turned her back on the snake and ran an uneasy eye over her radar. For the past several minutes the screen had been throwing out a ghost target. The mystery pinprick of light fading and reappearing was too dull to be another ship, yet bright enough to make her wonder what the heck was out there. The radar was a reliable unit, a late-model Furuno. But she had the lives of twelve people in her care: five Filipino crew, six American petroleum scientists, and one stowaway. Thirteen, if she counted herself, which she tended not to.
Was the hot spot only sea clutter? Or an empty oil drum bobbing in the heavy seas, topping crests, hiding in troughs? Or was it something bigger, like an unreported, half-sunken hulk that she did not want to run into at fifteen knots?
It glowed again, closer, as if it were not merely drifting, but moving toward her. She fiddled with the radar, adjusting range and resolution. Otherwise, the sea looked empty, except for some large oil tankers a safe twenty miles to the west. A single land target at the top of the screen marked the summit of Pico Clarence, the six-thousand-foot volcanic mountain at the center of Isle de Foree, tonight’s destination. “Foree rhymes with moray,” she told visiting company brass new to the Gulf of Guinea oil patch. “Like the eel with the teeth.”
She glanced at her other instruments. Compass, autopilot, and a wide panel of gauges monitoring the diesel generators that powered the twin three-thousand-horsepower electric Z-drive thrusters all gave her standard readings. She stared intently at the night-blackened bridge windows. She grabbed her night-vision monocular, shouldered open a heavy, watertight door, and stepped out onto the stubby bridge wing into equatorial heat, humidity she could slice with a knife, and the brain-numbing roar of the generators.