The Kennedy Endeavor (Presidential Series Book 2) Read online

  “Yes.”

  “I want to be on the ground with them,” Ducharme said. “To keep the balance,” he added. “And, frankly, because I don’t trust you either. You’re holding something back.”

  “Then you better catch a quick flight,” Turnbull said. “It’s going to take them several hours to get organized and get moving but they’re a lot closer to the target than you are. They won’t be waiting on you.” He checked his watch. “Night is falling over there. Between getting the team alerted, a plan done, staged, and all the other stuff you know they have to do, the best we can hope for is time on target a couple of hours before dawn. We need to get it done before dawn or else wait through the day. I don’t think the Kurds are going to wait that long. And remember, Iran is almost sitting on top of the site.”

  “The Kurds won’t wait,” Ducharme agreed.

  “To get the packages out,” Turnbull said, “my people will need heavy lift.” He nodded. “I can arrange that too from assets in country. But only back to Iraq. Beyond that will take some more planning. Either a civilian contract company or the military.”

  “Let’s get the bombs out of Turkey first,” Ducharme said.

  “Correction,” Evie said. “We don’t need the bombs. They’re worthless. It’s the plutonium that’s the key.” She closed her eyes for a second. “But if we break the containment on the bombs’ integrity, then we have a radiation problem. So we do need the bombs.”

  “Right,” Turnbull said. “Get the bombs. That was the plan.”

  “I can arrange a fast flight for you, Duke,” Evie said, holding up Pegram’s card.

  Ducharme turned to Evie. “The thumb drive from McBride has more than just the information we read about the Jefferson Allegiance, right? I remember there was one excerpt about Kennedy under the section about the Jefferson Allegiance.”

  “Yes,” Evie said, “but that was well after the Cuban Missile Crisis and basically telling him not to be so aggressive and warning him about Vietnam.” She glared at Turnbull. “Which the Cincinnatians were pressuring him to commit more troops and resources into.”

  “While I’m going to Turkey,” Ducharme said, “you try to figure out what the hell happened back during the Crisis and afterwards.”

  “I will,” Evie said.

  Ducharme stood up. “Let’s get moving people.”

  Burns didn’t move. “You believe him?”

  Ducharme sighed. “We can’t afford not to.”

  *****

  Haney was seated cross-legged on top of the hangar holding the Jupiter missiles and the warheads. It looked like a natural outcropping in the foothills of Mount Ararat, but since climbing on top, he could see why the site had been chosen. The very faint outline of a road, switching-back precariously disappeared into the wadi they’d come up, ending at the metal doors and airshaft. Whoever had designed this place had taken a natural depression, covered it with metal and then covered the metal with rocks and dirt. The decades since had added to the camouflage. It was only because he knew what was beneath that Haney could even make out that there had once been a road.

  It was no longer a usable path for vehicles because either nature or an explosion had caused a massive landslide about two kilometers away, slicing through a ridgeline and creating an impassable crevice for a vehicle. Haney had pretty good fields of observation, able to see to the east and south, the direction from which he expected any Kurds to approach. Ararat was a bulk to the west and north.

  Haney had his pistol next to him along with all the spare magazines for it.

  Four.

  Sixty rounds.

  This wasn’t exactly going to be the Alamo.

  He glanced at his phone. He’d yet to receive an acknowledgement of his message from Washington. He was going to give it another thirty minutes and then he would have to blow his cover and contact the CIA. Let them know what he was literally sitting on top of, because this was bigger than even the Society, even though the Society was everything to him.

  He breathed a sigh of relief as the phone buzzed. He hit the encryption and a text message appeared:

  ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SITUATION

  HELP EN ROUTE

  HEAVY LIFT AS PART OF PACKAGE

  TO REMOVE WARHEADS

  GATHER WARHEADS TOGETHER FOR EXTRACTION

  WILL LET YOU KNOW ETA ASAP

  BUT ESTIMATE PRIOR TO DAWN

  PROTECT AT ALL COSTS

  TB

  Turnbull, Haney wondered. Why Turnbull and not Lucius?

  Gather warheads? Right.

  He fingered the medallion pinned to his shirt under his coat. It was silver, shaped like an eagle and hung on a tricolor ribbon. On one side, Latin words ringed an engraving on the chest of the eagle. The engraving was of two Roman Senators presenting a sword to another man: Lucius Quincitus Cincinnatus. It represented the Senate asking Cincinnatus, a former Consul of Rome, to come out of retirement and lead the army against invasion. They offered him the role of dictator, which he assumed.

  However, it wasn’t because of his defeat of the invaders for which history has noted him, but for his actions upon completion of the task given him: he resigned his role as dictator and went back to his farm. This was represented on the other side of the insignia with an image of Cincinnatus back at his plow. Later on, he was once more asked to be dictator to put down a planned rebellion, and once more, after succeeding, he gave up absolute power and went back to his farm.

  The Latin on the front side read: Omni relinquit servare replublican. ‘He abandons everything to serve the republic.’ On the other side was simply the Latin for ‘Fame.’

  The silver metal meant that Haney was a full member of the Society of the Cincinnati. But since it wasn’t a gold medallion, he wasn’t part of the inner circle, most of who (those still alive) were descending upon Washington, DC. He was a field operative.

  As important, and more necessary, he was the direct descendant of a lieutenant who’d served in the Continental Navy during the Revolution. He died shortly after starting his service, thus waiving the requirement of serving three years.

  The Society at least accepted death to be worthy of giving membership to descendants. But otherwise they followed the rules of primogeniture rather strictly, allowing only one descendent at a time to be a member. Haney had no siblings so that hadn’t been an issue.

  His father had died of a heart attack when he was young; collapsing at the breakfast table, facedown literally in his pancakes. His mother had followed in the family tradition and joined the military.

  She was killed in the first Gulf War, a conflict few remembered with all that had happened since.

  The Society had then stepped in, providing for Haney, sending him to the best schools, grooming him to be a member. In Haney’s world, one repaid debts of honor with honor of their own.

  Haney was the last in his line. He’d been married once, briefly. Then he’d accepted the hand he’d been dealt and that was that. There would be no other wife and no children. All he had was the Society and the values it represented.

  The Society of the Cincinnati is the oldest military organization in the Western Hemisphere. General Knox, chief artillery officer in Washington’s Army, put together the first meeting in Newburgh, NY in 1783, even while the British were evacuating New York City, their last presence in the Colonies after signing the Treaty of Paris, ending the war. The end of that occupation, Evacuation Day, was once wildly celebrated annually on 25 November in New York City, because of the harshness of British rule. Over 10,000 Continental service members had died on prison ships in New York harbor over the years, more than died in all the battles. It was war at its most base and bitter. The last shot of the Revolutionary War was fired on that day by a British sailor lighting up a cannon on a departing ship. Although the shot fell short of the jeering Americans lining the shores of Manhattan, it was a sign of the bitterness of years of war. When the Americans tried to pull down the Union Jack nailed to the flagpole in Battery Park,
they found that the British had greased the pole so it couldn’t be scaled. The Colonists quickly nailed cleats to the pole so that they could replace the flag with the Stars and Stripes while the British fleet was still in sight.

  But when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be a day of Thanksgiving, Evacuation Day faded away, forgotten by almost all. But not by the Society. And not by Haney’s family, because his ancestor had been one of those to die on those British prisoner ships.

  George Washington was elected the first President of the Society. It was almost prescient that he be tied to that ancient statesman/warrior because when Washington rode triumphantly into New York City on Evacuation Day, almost everyone was more than willing to make him dictator for life of the newly independent colonies.

  Washington said goodbye to his troops at Fraunces Tavern and rode home.

  When the country decided they needed a President, like the Roman Senators calling Cincinnatus off his farm, the country turned once more to Washington. He served his country once more and then, like Cincinnatus, rode off after his second term and retired back to his farm in Virginia.

  Haney’s musings were interrupted by movement to the south. He used his binoculars and spotted Nidar coming back up the trail with four other men. They were all armed with AK-47s.

  Haney nodded. The man had run back to the Kurdish village, gathered help, and was returning to take revenge for the deaths.

  And Nidar had also seen what was hidden here.

  As a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, Haney was a student of military history. There were times when an outnumbered and outgunned force managed to prevail. Haney’s goal was to gain time for the promised reinforcements from the Society. This was only the beginning.

  When in doubt, like Chamberlain at Gettysburg, it was time to take the offensive.

  Haney put the spare magazines in his front pocket. He left his pack where it was. Either he’d be back to reclaim it or it wouldn’t matter. He scrambled down off the top of the hangar and onto the trail. He ran down the trail, pistol in hand.

  When he reached the spot he desired, he slid into a rock chimney on the side of the trail and climbed up, feet on one side, his back against the other, until he was fifteen feet up.

  ‘No one ever looks up,’ his first platoon sergeant in the Marines had told him.

  Then he waited.

  It didn’t take long. The Kurds were running, fueled by the desire for revenge.

  Nidar ran by, followed by another and another and then the last two. Haney quickly reversed and let gravity help him climb down the chimney. He then chased after the Kurds, suppressed pistol held in front.

  He put on a burst of speed and then saw the last man. Like Sergeant York taking out the German patrol, he fired, the bullet hitting number five in the back of the skull and dropping him instantly. The fourth was in sight a second later and Haney took him out.

  This man’s AK-47 hit the rock trail with a clatter, causing the man in front to turn to see what had caused the noise. This only served to have the bullet enter his temple rather than the back of the head, but the result was the same.

  The second man spun about, bringing his AK up to fire, and Haney double-tapped him: once in the chest, once in the head. Nidar fired, spraying rounds.

  Haney felt something hit him, staggering him back.

  He fired, aiming low, a bullet into the firing shoulder and then two rounds into Nidar’s stomach. The Kurd doubled over from the dual impacts. Haney ran up to him, knocking the AK out of his hands and shoving him to the ground. Haney pressed his knee against Nidar’s stomach, causing him to hiss in pain.

  “Did you tell anyone else?”

  Nidar’s eyes met his, the hatred blazing. “More are coming. Many more. Not just for those you’ve killed. For what is in the cave. We know what it is worth. It could buy my people their freedom.”

  “Nuclear blackmail won’t work,” Haney said. “You’ll get squashed like a bug.”

  “We shall see.”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  Nidar spit at him, the saliva mixed with blood. “You will never make it away from here alive. This is our mountain. Our land.”

  “Maybe it’s no one’s mountain,” Haney said. He put Nidar out of his misery. Then he gathered all five AKs and the ammunition on the bodies.

  Finally he paused to check his own body.

  A round had torn through the muscle on the outside of his left shoulder. Bloody, but not fatal. Weapons slung over his shoulder, he headed up the trail toward his rucksack and the aid kit. It was growing dark and it was going to be a long, cold night.

  With the additional weapons, perhaps the Alamo would hold a bit longer.

  *****

  The program had been stolen from a British software firm. At least that’s what the firm claimed. The reality was the firm had sold it to the Iranians for a tidy profit, hiding the transaction through numerous cutouts, not only to avoid investigation by the authorities, but also to avoid paying taxes on it and to avoid paying their own developers their share of the profits. The two men who ran the firm were building a rather considerable fortune in overseas bank accounts selling their company’s software on the black market.

  Such was the underside of international commerce.

  It wasn’t quite as good as what the NSA used to spy on its own citizens but it was dependable and made it possible to automatically monitor all the cell phone and radio traffic along the western border of Iran. Even in this remote part of the world, the proliferation of cell phones and powerful hand-held radios produced an overwhelming amount of chatter. The program sifted through all that, searching for key words and phrases.

  One of those key words triggered an alert, and a young enlisted man put on his headphones and began to listen to the cell phone conversation that had initiated it. The analyst wrote down the intercepted chatter, but when he heard a certain word again, he raised his other hand and waved wildly, still writing.

  His supervisor stubbed out his cigarette and sighed, wondering what had excited the newest recruit to his listening post. Probably some sheepherder asking about some lost members of his flock and using some phrase like ‘kill them all.’

  He looked over the young man’s shoulder. His skin went cold when he saw what was being written. He grabbed a secure line and called the nearest military post.

  *****

  The key to a successful military operation is planning. Most of the TriOp front line operatives were ex-Special Operations. And while they were technically ex, that didn’t mean they’d left their training or expertise behind. The reality was that they—and tens of thousands like them—fought a shadow war, one that was rarely (if ever) reported on. One where casualties were never listed, coffins weren’t sent home flag-draped, but stuffed inside the cargo hold of contract airplanes. If they were sent back at all.

  Contracting out was a large part of the new way of war for the United States. Piled on top of a volunteer army, it further distanced those doing the dirty work from over 99% of the population. While the ‘war’ was officially done in Iraq, the battle for the country’s resources was far from over. TriOp’s primary mission since the withdrawal of most US Forces was now protecting corporate interests in country. With billions of dollars of American taxpayer money being poured into ‘rebuilding’ a country the Americans had pretty much destroyed, someone had to protect those doing the building, even though the graft, violence, and over-charging made it the equivalent of spraying a hose into an ocean. A multi-billion dollar hose of futility.

  It was the epitome of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex where even the military in this case was industrialized and incorporated.

  The warning order from Turnbull reached the TriOp field commander at their forward operating base outside of Mosul. They immediately went into mission planning mode, unhappy, as all soldiers always are, at the incomplete information they’d received. There was never enough good intel provided: Go
here in Turkey. Get someone and something. Call signs and identification codes, and that was about it. Vague. And vague in mission planning tended to get people killed.

  One thing that was certain was they were going to need a ride.

  And that was going to cost a lot of money. But for TriOp, bankrolled by the Society of the Cincinnati and its well-heeled benefactors, money was not a problem.

  Although there were plenty of rides from various other contract companies in Iraq to choose from, the parameters laid out in the mission tasking indicated there was only one option that could haul the package out.

  *****

  “I don’t trust Turnbull,” Ducharme said.

  “Duh,” Evie replied, which caused Burns to laugh, breaking the scowl that had been permanently etched on his face since things in the interrogation room had taken an unexpected turn.

  “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor,” the FBI agent said.

  They were in one of the many not so innocuous black SUVs with tinted glass various government agencies drove. Heading from FBI headquarters toward Andrews Air Force Base. Ducharme was slumped back in the rear seat, eyes closed. Burns was driving and Evie was in the passenger seat.

  “I was in the CIA,” Evie said. “Sometimes known as Clowns in Action. Sometimes known as other things. We did some good work and some not so good work.”

  “Do you really think, after over fifty years,” Ducharme asked, “that something about the Cuban Missile Crisis could cause such a problem that we shouldn’t notify the National Command Authority about some unsecured grade plutonium?”

  “Yes.”

  When there was nothing further forthcoming from Evie, Ducharme opened his eyes. He glanced at Burns, who shrugged, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Duke,” Evie finally said, “a bunch of people just died over the Jefferson Allegiance, a document over two hundred years old. Some of the material on Kennedy isn’t going to get declassified for another twenty-five years. Some of it will never see the light of day.