Retribution (9781429922593) (3 page)

Back outside he glanced at his watch. It was a little past one, which still gave him a margin of at least thirty minutes before the retired SEAL Team Six assaulter was due to show up, but he wanted to be in place well before then.

No one was in the yard within the fence with its tank traps and machine-gun installations. He started down the white shell path. Almost immediately he caught the smell of someone smoking a cigarette, and it instantly brought back memories of when he was a kid stealing his father's Ernte 21 unfiltereds and sharing them with a couple of his friends on the way to school. He'd given up the habit once he'd joined the KSK because they'd robbed his wind. But they still smelled good to him.

He pulled up short. A bucket of red paint, a brush balanced on the rim, was set next to a log revetment about twenty feet long that protected a machine-gun nest behind a narrow slit. Barbed wire was coiled around the front and sides of the installation, and it looked to Dieter as if someone had been touching up the heads of the spikes or the bolts driven into the logs with Rust-Oleum to protect them from the corrosive salt-laden air.

The guy was nowhere to be seen, but the smell of his cigarette was strong on the very light breeze.

He'd been painting, but he'd put down his brush and had left for some reason.

“If it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't,” the instructors had drilled into their heads. “Recognize when you are walking into an ambush. It only takes one determined son of a bitch to fuck up your day.”

The SEALs had a saying that incoming rounds had the right of way. It amounted to the same thing he'd been taught.

Dieter pulled out his pistol and, concealing it behind his right leg, headed to the machine-gun emplacement. The smell of smoke was fading, and for a moment he was pissed off. Both guys were supposed to be inside the museum, waiting for their VIP to show up, and he was running out of time to deal with this kind of shit.

“Mind the wet paint,” someone off to the left said.

Dieter turned in time to see a fairly short man with a large beer belly, maybe in his sixties or early seventies, with only a fringe of white hair around his ears, dressed in paint-splattered white coveralls, walking over from behind an assault boat set up on a concrete stand. He was grinning.

“You a former SEAL?”

“No, you?”

The man stopped short. “You're German.”

Dieter shrugged deprecatingly. “Can't help who my parents were.” The American was too far away for a decent pistol shot. “I was in the German special forces, and I've always wanted to get over here to see the museum.”

“KSK?”

“Right. You must be Charlie. Pavcovich said I'd find you down here somewhere.” Dieter stepped forward and raised his left hand as if he wanted to shake.

Charlie stepped back a pace. “Something wrong with your other hand?”

“Not at all,” Dieter said and he brought his pistol out. “In fact I'm a rather good shot.”

“I'll be goddamned,” Charlie said. “We got a call a couple of days ago that someone like you might be showing up. Didn't say who he was or who the hell you were, but he was a German too.”

“Someone like me?”

“He said to call the cops if you did.”

“Maybe you should,” Dieter said. The only Germans he thought who might have given such a warning were from the BND—the German secret service. Pam had raised the possibility—no matter now slight—that the Bundesnachrichtendienst might come snooping around at some point. But not this early. Not before they'd even started.

Charlie suddenly turned and sprinted to the open gate in the tall fence. He crossed the narrow parking lot and disappeared through the sea oats toward the beach, jigging left and right as he ran.

Dieter stepped around the machine-gun emplacement and began firing, steadying his gun hand against the top log, one measured shot after the other. On the third shot the American yelped and staggered to the left, blood on his left thigh.

The fourth shot struck the former UDT operator high in his back, just below and to the left of the base of his neck. But the man would not fall. He hobbled over the rising sand dune.

Dieter went after him.

Charlie reached the waterline on the beach and then turned and looked at Dieter, an odd expression that was mixed with pain, but no fear, on his broad face. “You're here about our bin Laden SEAL. But why? You're not al-Qaeda?”

“Purely business,” Dieter said, and he shot the man in the middle of the forehead at nearly point-blank range.

Charlie Saunders fell back into the water, the light rippling waves washing over his face, carrying the blood away, his arms splayed out to either side.

No boats were anywhere to be seen. Nor were there any people on the beach. Dieter reloaded his pistol as he started back up to the main building to wait for the first bin Laden SEAL he would kill. The first of twenty-two, plus the CIA translator and the one EOD tech. The dog would get a free ride.

 

THREE

Peter Barnes glanced over at his wife Sally, her face scrunched up in the neutral expression that meant she was bored out of her skull, wanted to be anywhere except in a ratty old pickup truck heading to Fort Pierce, and was merely going for the ride because she owed him. Which in his mind wasn't really so.

She'd gotten sick almost to the day two years ago when he'd mustered out of the navy, and as it turned out his bone marrow was a match for hers and he'd saved her life. The problem was that their marriage had been on rocky grounds because of his three-hundred-day-per-year deployments, and nothing either of them could say or do seemed to make much difference.

Sometimes civilian life was a bitch. No one was shooting at you and you didn't have to watch for IEDs. No one was giving you orders—sometimes shitty ones that made no sense—nor did you have the responsibilities of looking out for your guys. And that was the problem: there was nothing to prepare for, nothing to get the heart beating, no actual reason for getting up in the morning.

One of the guys from Chalk One had written a book about taking out UBL, but Barnes's discharge after eighteen years landed him a job as a maintenance man for a condo association on St. Pete Beach. He'd thought about going to work for Xe or one of the other contractor services, but he knew that he would feel guilty as hell leaving Sally again. Yet he was drowning.

They'd come across the state through Orlando and were finally on I-95 heading south, just a few miles from the exit to Vero Beach; from there they'd take A1A south. Already they were late.

“We'll spend a half hour there, tops. Then I'll take you to lunch someplace,” he said.

“You coulda just mailed it,” Sally said without looking at him.

She was still pretty, still had her body because they'd never had kids—and in a way she was even more beautiful because her cancer had left her skin almost translucent.

“I want to hand it over in person,” Barnes said. The UBL book had been a big bestseller, but the journal that he'd kept was, in his mind, a hell of a lot more personal. And there was no one else right now that he could share it with except the guys who ran the museum and the people who visited every week.

“Whatever.”

He held his silence until they got off at the SR 60 exit into Vero Beach. “You okay, babe? Need to stop to take a pee?”

She shook her head.

Sometimes he felt so goddamned guilty because he wanted to get back into it, while at the same time he wanted to be there for her. He'd held friends in his arms on the battlefield and talked them through dying. He understood, he really did. And he'd been there for Sally as she nearly died.

He glanced over at her again. But looking into her eyes was different than looking into the eyes of a badly wounded SEAL. He loved her but he'd never felt the same camaraderie he felt with his teammates. And that drove him even crazier.

“We can stay at a hotel tonight. I can call and make an excuse. Nothing much is happening tomorrow. We'd be back by noon anyway.”

She finally looked over at him. “I just want to forget the years you were gone. Maybe if we'd had kids it might have been better, or maybe worse, I don't know. It's just that I always waited for someone to show up in a navy car, ring the bell, and tell me that you'd been killed somewhere in the mountains, or at sea, or in the middle of some fucking desert.”

Barnes tried to say he was sorry, but she went on.

“They couldn't even tell me what you were doing. I wouldn't know why you had died. Whether you'd thrown your life away for some bullshit political reason, you know. Someone signs an executive order and my macho husband runs off, jumps out of a plane, and gets his ass shot off.”

He had nothing to say. It was over; he was out of the navy and never going back. She was suffering from post-op depression and maybe even post-traumatic stress syndrome from waiting at home for the shoe to drop. Guys had committed suicide, but so had a lot of their wives.

“And then what?” she cried, tears welling in her eyes. “What about me? What was I supposed to do with the rest of my fucking life?”

“I'm back, sweetheart. I'm not going anywhere.”

“What about right now?” she demanded.

It was the same argument they'd been having for the past two weeks. “It's something I have to do. When we drive back home, it'll be over and done with. For good.”

“But not forgotten,” she said, and she turned away.

“No,” Barnes said, and he concentrated on his driving.

It was a long way into town from the interstate, and then past the power plant on the Indian River waterway and onto the barrier island—Orchid Island here, but called Hutchinson Island south across the St. Lucie County line.

Past the condos and beach developments, they finally reached the point where A1A was less than fifty yards from the water. The Atlantic was almost flat calm this afternoon, but way out in the east thunderheads were building, some of them into anvils, the tops blown off by the jet stream seven miles or so above the surface. They would be having some nasty weather by evening, and he made the decision to drive back to Vero when they were finished at the museum and check into the Holiday Inn Express just off the interstate. Tonight they could splurge on a nice dinner at the Ocean Grill right on the beach. He would make sure that they got a window table so they could watch the storm.

Once he'd been accepted into the elite DEVGRU, which was the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—SEAL Team Six—he begun making entries into his journal every day. Sometimes he bitched about the workload, especially on the Green Team, which was the nine-month training evolution. But at other times he was excited, especially during CQB—close quarters battle—drills that were a whole lot better than any 3-D video game, and his writing showed it.

During his first deployment to Iraq his writing became closer to the bone, especially about friends dying, their bodies shot to hell, brains leaking out of their eyes or where their noses used to be; scraping bits and pieces off the dirt road after an IED went off; dragging a bullet-ridden body back to a defensible position so that the ragheads wouldn't take it and mutilate it and hang the pieces from some roadside pole.

The journal had helped him get rid of a lot of his feelings, but sometimes at night in bed, or like now when he was driving practically on autopilot, a lot of that crap still came back in living color.

“You're doing it again,” Sally said.

He looked up out of his thoughts. To the south were the condo towers on the beach just beyond the museum.

“I knew this was going to happen. I would have bet good money on it.”

“Sorry,” Barnes said. There was no use arguing because she was right, and she knew that he knew it.

“Yeah.”

“We're almost there. One half hour, tops, and we'll haul ass. Promise.”

But she did not answer.

 

FOUR

Wolfhardt Weisse could have been Dieter Zimmer's older brother. Tall, broad chest, round face, intelligent eyes, and a bald head that looked as if it had been waxed and buffed. The difference was this: Zimmer was a German terrorist, while Weisse was a captain in the German intelligence service.

Driving up from Miami he had taken his time following Zimmer, whom he had traced all the way from Munich. The BND had evaluated his threat as interesting but not likely imminent. The real problem was the lack of follow-up intelligence: Zimmer was part of a suspected terror cell called the Black October Revolution, which for the past three years had been nearly impossible to penetrate.

The organization had nothing to do with any sort of a revolution. Apparently, it was a murder-for-hire group, mostly dirty ex-cops and former Bundeswehr soldiers, led, it was believed, by a woman, nationality so far unknown—maybe German, maybe American—who either had a lot of money or a well-connected banker.

The best they'd been able to do so far was to work out from wiretaps, the names of five suspected members, Dieter Zimmer among them, and their involvement in several contract killings in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly one in the U.S. But without any proof of wrongdoing on German soil they could only follow the five. Wolf had been assigned Zimmer, and no one at BND's new headquarters in Berlin near the Reichstag had been more surprised than he when Zimmer had suddenly flown to the States. Wolf had managed to get one of their tech people down from the German embassy in Washington to meet Zimmer's flight and place a GPS tracking beacon on the car the man had rented.

For the last twenty minutes it had been stopped at a location on a barrier island just north of the city of Fort Pierce.

The briefing he and the others had received six months ago by Oberst Hans Mueller, their project chief and liaison with the BfV, which was the domestic intelligence service, had been very specific.