PROLOGUE
“Is it traumatic when an officer kills a person?”
It was the third sympathetic-but-awkward question that Timmonsville, South Carolina, police officer Leon Rollins’ front-seat passenger had posed. So, despite the cruiser’s AC, Leon sweated as he drove southeast from Timmonsville.
Leon’s momma had taught him that patience was a virtue. But college sophomore criminal justice major Becka Forsyth, all one hundred eleven freckle-faced pounds of her, apparently didn’t sweat, was as white as Leon wasn’t, and was sorely testing his patience.
Leon shrugged. “No Timmonsville officer has killed a person since I’ve been wearing this uniform.” He didn’t say that watching a friend killed was more traumatic than killing an enemy. He had experienced both too often, when he had worn a different uniform.
This July 4 holiday weekend morning, Timmonsville’s five officers were spread wide, racking up holiday pay directing traffic at fun runs and parades.
Becka reached out and fiddled with the shotgun locked to the dash.
Leon said, “Please don’t screw with that.”
Leon regretted flexing his “Ride-alongs-in-back” rule for a college kid who actually appreciated the police. Besides, all they were doing was driving to question a witness who lived out in the county, who had last night seen kids downtown, tagging the Dollar General store’s windows.
The quiet two-lane Leon and Becka now traveled, South Carolina State Highway 403, was also the Cale Yarborough Highway, named after the NASCAR driver who was the town’s most venerated native son. On a wooded stretch a mile north of the highway’s intersection with Interstate 95 they approached a spanking new white delivery van pulled off on the opposite northbound shoulder.
An apparently male silhouette was visible through the van’s bug-splattered windscreen in the van’s passenger seat. The driver’s side door was open and the driver’s seat unoccupied. A dark-skinned, but not African American, male wearing a bright red ball cap, with its purchase tag still attached and flapping in the breeze, stood alongside the van apparently staring at its hood.
Leon slowed the cruiser as it drew even with the van. The man, with his back to them, waved a circled thumb-and-forefinger “okay” as he trotted thirty feet to the wood line. There he unzipped, turned his back, and took a leak.
Leon flicked his eyes to the rearview as he kept rolling past the van. A half mile further, he spun the cruiser around in the Floyd’s Convenience Exxon parking lot, just before the interstate ramps, and drove slowly back toward the van.
Becka straightened. “What’s up?”
“What did you notice back there?”
“Oh. Not his dick, if that’s what you mean. The van’s brand new. Maybe fresh off the boat from the port at Brunswick, down by Savannah.”
“Why would you think that?”
“It’s a Horangi Bruiser. The Horangi plant in west Georgia only builds SUVs and sedans. Bruisers are imported from South Korea. Sometimes they drive them to the dealerships instead of trucking them. If a dealer doesn’t have enough cars coming in to fill a transporter. Probably did come up the freeway. Because the van’s grille and the windshield have way more bug splatter than you’d expect from low-speed in-town driving.”
Leon raised his eyebrows. Maybe the criminal justice system could use more bright college kids like Becka.
He said, “And?”
“He was wearing a brand-new Georgia Bulldog hat. That’s not a capital crime, even in South Carolina.” She pointed back toward the convenience store. “They probably sell every hat in the SEC there. He probably just turned the wrong direction onto a road he’d never been on before. He looked like a Mexican newcomer. But even citizens make that mistake.”
Leon nodded. “True. But let’s assume you’re right. Those two drove that van up the interstate from Brunswick. Stopped at a gas station and bought something. Then turned the wrong way to get back on the freeway. Everybody has done that. But how many people who did that didn’t already use the gas station bathroom, while they were in there?”
Becka shrugged. “When you gotta go, you gotta go. Peeing by the side of the road’s not a capital crime either, at least in my family.”
Leon said, “The Georgia plate on the back of the van’s so old and dirty I couldn’t read it in the rearview when we passed. Not a cardboard manufacturer’s or dealer’s tag.”
“Then why didn’t you stop back there?”
“Didn’t want to spook ’em.” And I needed a second to weigh whether stopping at Floyd’s, and kicking out my civilian, was worth the risk of them getting away.
Becka said, “Now what?”
Leon pointed at the screen mounted to the console between them. “When I’m close enough to read the tag, I’ll run it. By the way, my life-experienced eyeballs tell me he’s a ‘newcomer,’ alright. But from someplace that ends in ‘stan,’ not Mexico.”
“That’s profiling.”
“Damn right. Becka, like you said, nothing we saw is a capital crime. But it’s something worth a second look. Good police work starts with noticing things that are just a little off.”
By the time they stopped behind the van, Leon knew that the tag should have been on a two-year-old blue Horangi Bruiser registered to a pet grooming business outside Savannah, not on a shiny new white Bruiser. Something was more than a little off.
Becka said, “Now you call for backup?”
“This is Timmonsville. This morning I am the backup.” He pointed at the separate radio he could use to request assistance from the Highway Patrol. “So, now—”
The driver wearing the Georgia cap hopped out of the van, then walked back along its side toward them, smiling and waving. In addition to the cap, he wore jeans, a zipped-up windbreaker two sizes too big on a warm day, and cheap joggers. The outfit looked like it had been on a shelf in a Walmart a day earlier.
Leon kept his eyes on the driver, while he felt for, then lifted, the loudspeaker mic. He heard his own words boom, “Sir, please step back inside the vehicle.”
The driver raised both hands and shook them above his head. “Is okay! All empty! I show you!”
Leon hissed, “Fuck!” He thumbed the mic again. “Sir, please get back inside the vehicle! Immediately!”
The man ignored the order, stepped around to the van’s rear and flung open its doors.
The van’s rear compartment was as shiny white, and as empty, as the inside of a floor model fridge at Home Depot.
Becka said, “Well, so much for the twenty-five underage sex slaves hypothesis.”
Leon adjusted his gear, flicked on his bodycam, and reached for his cap.
Becka said, “Let me go talk to him.”
Leon peered at the driver. The man remained beside the van’s open rear doors, shifting foot to foot.
He thumbed the mic again. “Get back inside the damn van!” Leon turned to Becka. “What? No!”
“Leon, female interventions with immigrants escalate to confrontation thirty percent less often than male interventions.”
“They teach that at college?”
“No. I follow @ProgressiveLawEnforcement. Leon, just because you’re a hammer doesn’t mean every citizen is a nail.”
He turned his face away and muttered, “Jesus Christ.”
He definitely should have locked her in the backseat cage.
Slam.
She was out the door, smiling, waving to the guy, and tugging on her TPD Ride-along souvenir blue ball cap. In that instant Leon realized that, in her navy blue polo and slacks, she looked way too much like a cop.
“Dammit!” Leon opened his door, climbed out, then sheltered behind it. He peered around the window frame, right hand resting on the Glock holstered at his waist.
Becka crossed half the twenty yards that separated the two vehicles when the van’s passenger door flew open.
The passenger was out in a heartbeat, his movements professionally economic, the rifle instantly apparent.
“Gun! Becka! Gun!”
From ten feet away, the passenger raised the rifle to his shoulder and shot her through the head, twice.
She had been so focused on the driver that she probably never even saw it coming. That was a blessing. Two rounds. AK-47. Blood. Bone chips and brain tissue sprayed like shrapnel. It was fucking Helmand Province all over again.
Leon fired once, struck the big passenger with the rifle in the shoulder. The impact only knocked the guy back one step.
Both of them charged him.
“Allahu Akbar!”
Well, of course. What the hell else had he expected on a deserted road in the prime terrorist target of Timmonsville, South Carolina?
He concentrated his fire on the wounded one, even though he was farther away, because his AK was powerful enough to shred the cruiser’s door like it was cardboard. Finally, the guy dropped to his knees, then flopped face down on the asphalt.
The unarmed guy had closed to within five yards.
Leon shot until empty.
It wasn’t clear whether the guy pressed a detonator concealed in one fist, or whether the final round Leon fired detonated the vest beneath the man’s too-big jacket.
* * *
Leon, teeth gritted as he lay in the hospital bed, thumbed the button on the pain med dispenser so hard that his fist trembled. The damn machine had cut him off, so he squeezed the nurse call button.
The duty nurse, carrying a syringe on a tray, bustled in faster than a morbidly obese sixty-something white divorcee should have been able to.
Leon shook his head.
Why did it seem like half of every hospital’s staff, who of all people ought to know better, looked more like a heart attack waiting to happen than their patients did? Maybe they hadn’t spent enough time starving through Parris Island Basic at Gunny Cobb’s “voluntary” Fat Man’s Table.
She consulted the analogue watch pinned to her scrub top, over her presumably laboring heart. “You’re due, Hon.”
She plugged the syringe into the IV bag port suspended above his left arm, flicked the syringe’s barrel with a fingernail, then said, “You’re gonna need these. There’s more federal people on the way up to visit with you.”
“What flavor this time?”
“The flavor that don’t tell you what flavor they are. And Yankees to boot.”
* * *
The head Yankee of the pair shuffled in. Old, bald, skinny, and white, he wore black-rimmed glasses. They were big and thick enough to be safety goggles. He had sweated through his shirt, and carried his suit coat, with his tie stuffed in the pocket. Welcome to South Carolina.
The woman with him was half his age, and still wore her suit jacket, which fit over athletic shoulders. She wore her jacket, Leon assumed, more because the bulge beneath it at her waist announced “pistol in a belt holster” than because she didn’t feel the heat.
Her eyes, brown and lovely in a café au lait face, darted around the room, just like the eyes he saw in his bathroom mirror every morning. Like she had learned the hard way that the only safe place was the one you had already left in one piece.
Goggle Man said, “Thank you for seeing me, Officer Rollins.”
Leon turned his head toward the catheter tube that tethered him to the IV bag on the stand alongside his bed, and at the vacant space beneath the bedsheet. The cruiser’s door behind which he had sheltered had saved his life, but had not saved his exposed lower left leg.
Leon said, “I had a choice? Just so you know, DHS and the bureau already debriefed my ass off.”
Goggle Man nodded. “I do know. I read the transcripts on the plane. My focus is different.”
“What focus is that?”
“You saw combat. In the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. And you indicated you assumed immediately that the two men who you shot were Arabic, or at least Muslim—”
“Seriously? That’s what you’re here about? I didn’t shoot them because I wanted to violate their civil rights. Or get some back for my friends. I shot them because they were trying to kill me. And because they blew an innocent kid’s head off. It might surprise you to know I’m quite sensitive to the civil rights challenges of being a minority in America.”
“That’s not what I’m here about at all. There’s not much left of the one who wore the body bomb. Anything about him suggest a connection to East Asia? Manner of dress? Documents, or vocabulary neither Arabic or English?”
Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling. “I think his clothes were made over there. Like everybody else’s clothes.”
“Just the two? Nobody escaped into the woods?”
“Read. My. Bodycam. There was no mysterious Chinaman.” Leon turned to the pretty lady who was packing. “Is this guy for real?”
She turned her head and stared out the window.
Goggle Man said, “Your Ride-along passenger, Ms. Forsyth, worked for Georgia Power?”
“She was a criminal justice major, interning for the summer with security at Vogtle.”
He nodded. “The nuclear power plant northwest of Savannah.”
“Was there a question in there I missed?”
“Any reason to believe she had been exposed to radiation?”
“I think she sat in a chair at the plant monitoring security cam screens. She was a kid on a Ride-along. Her aunt is a clerk for the city of Timmonsville. Becka was visiting for the holiday weekend.”
Leon turned his face away from the pair of them. As tears filled his eyes, he whispered, “And now she’s dead. Because of me. Charge me with whatever you want. Or tell me what it is that you want. And tell me what she died for. Or leave me be.”
Leon swallowed, heard a phone ping, and when he turned his face back he saw that the old man had bent toward the woman, while she displayed a phone screen to him.
The old man stiffened, like he had been stabbed in the back. “I’m sorry, Officer Rollins. I genuinely am. I didn’t come here to add to your grief. I wish you the best, and I thank you for your service. And I wish I could tell you more. But I can’t. Something has come up.” Goggle Man turned, and left without another word.
As the woman followed him out, she turned and looked back at Leon. He could have sworn her brown eyes glistened.
* * *
Ten minutes, and one happy button click, later the female suit returned, alone.
She closed the door behind her, plucked the TV remote from the bedside table, switched to a music channel and upped the volume.
Leon said, “Where’s your asshole partner?”
“He’s not my partner, he’s my responsibility. And something really did suddenly come up. I handed him off to the other person in my detail, who’s driving him to reboard his plane.”
She removed her jacket, folded it, then hung it over the back of the room’s chair.
Leon nodded toward the pistol she wore on her trousers’ belt, a .357 Sig Sauer. “What are you, then? The muscle? Come back to cuff me to the bed so I can’t flee?”
“If that’s what turns you on, Marine.” She smiled. “He’s not really an asshole, just out of his comfort zone. He understands suborbital mechanics, and throw weights, and gaseous diffusion enrichment. He doesn’t understand people who’ve lost limbs and friends in the suck.”
Leon stared past her. “But you do?”
Unsmiling, she unbuttoned the left cuff of her starched white blouse, then rolled her sleeve up to her elbow.
Maybe she really was the muscle, come to beat the crap out of him.
She said, “I came back here because one percent of us do ninety-nine percent of America’s bleeding. Sometimes we bleed wearing one uniform, then we come home and bleed again wearing another. Sometimes we come back home, then bleed again, but the government says we have to do it wearing a suit, as a civilian. Then the ninety-nine percent thank us for our service while they tell their kids not to play with ours, because our service changes us in ways that make them uncomfortable. I can’t make that right for you. Or for me. But I can give you the straight answers your sacrifice has earned.”
He stared at the sunken place in the sheet, below his knee, where his leg had been until the other day. “How would you know what I’ve sacrificed?”
She swung her left leg up onto the bed and tugged her trouser cuff up, displaying a shoe, laced over a thin black sock, and above that a silver metal tube prosthesis. “Helmand Province, 2010.” Then she turned up her left forearm and pointed at an Oreo-sized eagle and anchor tattoo on it. “Parris Island, 2006. Semper fi, Sergeant Rollins.” She sat side-saddle on the bed’s end then poked a finger at him. “Semper fi or not, after I leave here, you will forget this conversation happened. If any living soul ever hears one syllable of what I’m about to tell you, I will hunt you down and saw off your other leg. Then your nuts. Before they lock me up or shoot me. Are we clear, Sergeant?”
Foggy as he was, he stiffened. “Clear enough, ma’am.” Civilian muscle or not she still sounded like a Marine officer.
She said, “The pair you and your partner pulled up behind were Islamic radicals who had infiltrated the United States. I’m guessing you got that at ‘Allahu Akbar.’ But not just any Islamic radicals. They matched the bigger one’s DNA to an Egyptian elite operator called the Crocodile. They’ve Hellfired him, and somebody who they think is his brother, without result, three times. They think the brothers split up, then dropped off everybody’s radar, six months ago in Yemen.
“The Horangi Bruiser van, that was probably stalling out on the two of them, was being hauled from the port at Brunswick to Horangi’s plant in western Georgia. For Horangi’s annual national dealer show-and-tell. It’s a standard van. But with an experimental fuel cell drivetrain. It’s a trade secret, and it stalls a lot. The two you shot hijacked the van off a one car flatbed, then shot the transport driver through the head. They hid his body, and the flatbed, in the woods.”
Leon turned his eyes to the ceiling. “His bad luck. And ours. You think they were planning to plow the van through a crowd in Atlanta?”
She shook her head. “Waste the terrorist equivalent of SEAL Team Six on a suicide mission that any radicalized U.S. citizen could accomplish with the family car? My protectee, the former physics professor, would call that an inefficient conversion of mass into energy.”
He frowned again at her pistol. “Since when does the U.S. hire civilian bodyguards for physics professors?”
“Since the Israelis assassinated four of the Iranian nuclear weapons program’s top civilian scientists, inside Iran. That started in 2010. It changed the rules of the game.”
“I didn’t even know there was a game.”
“Well, there is. And somebody just broke all the rules.”
“Nuclear?” He nodded. “The Vogtle plant. They were going to crash the van into a nuclear reactor?”
She shook her head. “The reason he asked about your passenger’s radiation exposure was because, with her employment history, it was at least possible she might have experienced an anomalous exposure. The medical examiner was curious enough that he checked her body with a Geiger counter. She was clean. But the body next to her, the guy you shot, autopsied at between three and six grays exposure.”
“That’s a lot?”
“Three to six grays? His hair would’ve fallen out in another week. And before that, he would have been so sick he wouldn’t have given a shit. Three crew members on the ship that brought the van from South Korea to Savannah did develop radiation sickness symptoms. One died.”
“The van? The van was radioactive?”
“The van was deactivated where it sat, in the police impound lot yesterday. After they cleared a fifteen-mile radius, on the pretext of a hazmat spill.”
“Deactivated?”
“By a robot. That didn’t care how many grays it absorbed. The bot’s been moved to temporary storage at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Georgia, along with the van, and the bomb.”
“No. There was no bomb in that van. It was empty. I saw it myself.”
“The bomb wasn’t in the van. It was built into the van.”
He swallowed. “Wait. The guy blew himself up twenty yards from that van. The nuke was a dud?”
She shook her head. “His boss, the Crocodile, had the activating plug in his pocket. They would have inserted the plug when they got closer to their target.”
“Target? Where do you think—?”
“The smartphone the guy also had in his pocket was providing turn-by-turn directions to Ford’s Theater in Washington. A symbolically significant ground zero. Located centrally enough between the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court that even a twenty-kiloton ground burst would waste them all. And on the Fourth of fucking July.”
“Jesus!” Leon clicked the happy button again.
“They’re sure he wasn’t involved. The rest is complicated. We’re sure the van originated on the Korean Peninsula. We’re sure the North Koreans are still too unsophisticated to deploy an ICBM we can’t defeat. Much less a reliable nuke small enough to fit on an ICBM, yet. Now we’re sure they are capable of custom-building a clunkier, larger, Hiroshima-style enriched-uranium device, that could be made to look like part of a vehicle drivetrain. As long as the device was built into a big fat drivetrain package so unique that no ordinary mechanic or inspector would know what it should look like anyway.
“The radiation sickness we think resulted from physical contact with manufacturing residue. U-235 doesn’t emit anything close to the radiation plutonium does. The DPRK’s human intelligence network in South Korea is deep enough, and ruthless enough, to slip a doctored van, or components used to doctor a van, into the South. Then onto a ship, outbound to the U.S.”
“To the U.S. is easy. Into the U.S. is hard.”
She shook her head. “Our best defense against terrorist contraband is the perception you just expressed. But three trillion dollars’ worth of stuff enters the U.S. every year. Most of it by sea, through over three hundred ports. We can’t check it all.
“We concentrate on stuff from funky places, with crappy port security, where people don’t like us. South Korea’s our friend. Horangi’s a good corporate citizen. It employs thousands of car-building U.S. citizens. It was transferring a vehicle from one of its factories to another, in its own ship, with legitimate business reasons to bypass normal vehicle prep, customs, and security procedures.”
“But they hijacked the van.”
“Exactly. The two suicide bombers didn’t risk getting caught at the port, where security was tight. They just stole the van back later, in the hinterlands, where ‘homeland security’ is just cops like you. The United States was very lucky the cop happened to be you.”
She continued, “By the way, a hazmat truck caught fire. You stopped to help. It exploded. The truck’s driver and your Ride-along passenger were killed. You were wounded. Sad. Tragic. End of story. Got it? Leon, the U.S. doesn’t want to advertise how close this call was. Like my protectee says, if you want to drop a single nuke on the U.S. the surest way is ‘one if by sea.’”
“The line is ‘One if by land.’”
She shrugged. “In 1776, maybe. Sending a message about attacking the United States is more complicated now.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning when somebody test-fires missiles into the Sea of Japan, the United States sends a proportionally responsive message. When somebody beheads an American journalist in the Middle East, the United States sends a proportionally responsive message. When somebody delivers a viable nuclear weapon into the continental United States, that would have glassed central Washington while the President was congratulating Girl Scouts in the Rose Garden, and with seven hundred thousand extra people in the kill zone for the National Mall Fireworks, we send a different message.”
“Send it to who?”
“To the only alliance in the world crazy enough to try it. An Islamic splinter faction, so schizophrenic it can’t decide whether it’s Shia or Sunni, that would have been glad to claim credit for the whole operation. And a North Korean infrastructure that was delusional enough to think that we’d accept that version, even though we would have eventually found North Korea’s fingerprints all over this.”
Leon swallowed. “We’re at war?”
“Not war like you and I bled in. And not for long. My protectee, like lots of scientists, is a dove. He insisted on a face-to-face with you to nail down the Korean connection, before the U.S. acted. He’s on his way back to D.C. because the hawks decided, an hour ago, that they already had the connection nailed down. I think they just sent him down here so they wouldn’t have to keep arguing with him.”
“You’re saying—?”
“As we speak, the biggest shitstorm of drone, B-2, and cruise missile strikes, electronic warfare and cyber warfare, conventional military and paramilitary operations, and covert ops, in the history of shitstorms is preempting North Korea’s conventional weapons capability along the DMZ, destroying its strategic missile capabilities in place, and decapitating and paralyzing its infrastructure, from the top down.”
Leon frowned as he shook his head. “But everybody knows—”
She smiled. “That we’re powerless to prevent North Korea from inflicting massive civilian casualties in Seoul during the first hour of a war? Leon, the U.S. conceals from our enemies what we actually can do just as effectively as we conceal from our enemies what we actually can’t do. Civilian casualties in Seoul are projected under one hundred. And we’re simultaneously waxing every suspected Islamic radical we’re tracking that ever looked cross-eyed at an American, no matter where they are.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Our friends and enemies around the world are being quietly told that if the risk, collateral damage, violations of sovereignty, and secrecy make them uncomfortable, they should thank us for responding with conventional weapons instead of nukes. This time. But that in the event of a recurrence, the unpublicized policy of the United States shall be to respond immediately and in kind against any nation even suspected of complicity. And that if they don’t like it, they can go fuck themselves.”
“That’s insane.”
“My protectee doesn’t say ‘insane.’ He says, ‘rash and irresponsible.’ He threatened to resign over the policy when they discussed it. I think they’ll fire him before he gets the chance to quit.
“But Leon, my brother, and his kids, live in D.C. You and your partner saved their lives. And the lives of maybe a million innocent people like them. It probably wouldn’t sound rash or irresponsible to any of them. The “war on terror” didn’t end today, after twenty years. But today its rules changed.
“I thought you deserved to know that. Because, rumors aside, probably nobody else with a clearance below Top Secret ever will.”
The two of them sat silent, as though straining to hear distant explosions.
Finally, she stood, slipped back into her jacket, and turned to leave.
Leon called after her. “Hey, you got a name? Maybe after I get out of here you and I could—”
She turned in the doorway. “Ginger. But you can call me Lieutenant. Like my husband and my kids do. They got used to the leg. So did I. So will you, Leon. I swear.”
She blew him a kiss, then left him staring at the empty hallway.
Leon stared up at the ceiling.
America had just responded, to a single nuke that almost destroyed an American city, by escalating its response up to the conventional-warfare Mother of All Covert Shit Storms.
With North Korea gone as the last truly rogue nuke supplier, and with the terror organizations willing and able to use nukes decimated, this “One by Sea” was surely the last nuclear bomb that could, or would, be smuggled into the U.S.
But if, in the future, somehow, somewhere, somebody did get hold of a nuke, then set it off inside America, we were going to nuke the crap out of the prime suspect then ask questions later. And the remaining prime suspects were nation-states that could, and would, nuke us back.
Leon rolled his head back and forth on the pillow and whispered, “Son of a bitch.”
Then, like the good Marine he would be until the day he died, he set about sucking it up, carrying on, and forgetting what he had just heard.