Loose And Easy

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Scotch.

General Richard “Buck” Grant dropped his duffel at the end of the bed in the guest suite at 738 Steele Street and walked over to the long row of windows overlooking the seventh-floor garage. A bottle and two glasses were waiting for him on a table next to the windows.

The Scotch at Steele Street was always the best of the eighteen-year-olds. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it.

He poured himself a short shot and took his first sip. For a long moment, he let it sit in his mouth, let it infuse his senses. For a long moment, he waited, wondering if anything could disguise the taste of betrayal.

No, he decided, swallowing. Not today.

Fuck. He tossed back the rest of the shot and poured himself another.

Everything at 738 Steele Street was the best, up to and including the operators. Hart and Hawkins made damn sure of it, and there wasn’t a goddamn one of them who didn’t deserve better than what he’d brought with him to Denver.

Fucking CIA.

Below him in the bays, Creed and Skeeter had their heads under the hood of one of Steele Street ’s most infamous American muscle cars. The Chevy Nova’s name was “Mercy” because she had none- so the story went, and Buck knew it for a fact. He thought Dylan had ordered the beast drawn and quartered years ago. The 1969 Yenko 427 Nova did her 0 to 60 mph in under four seconds. Buck had been in her once when she’d done it with Quinn Younger, SDF’s jet jockey, behind the wheel, and once had been enough. He hadn’t checked, but he was pretty sure he’d left part of his stomach and half his hair on the starting line. He didn’t like to admit it, but he really couldn’t afford to lose half his hair, so he kept it short, regulation buzz. What was left of it was one hundred percent iron gray, a hard color, on a hard guy, with a hard job. That was him-Hard-Ass Grant.

Geezus. He set the glass aside, still full. This was so much bullshit, the reason he was here, and what he’d been sent to do.

He lifted his hand to his face, covering his eyes, and he swore again. Shit like this is what gave guys like him ulcers.

And apparently, ulcers didn’t like their Scotch neat.

He let the pain run through his gut, rode it out, and took a breath. Then he picked up the glass and dosed himself with the second shot of whiskey.

His gaze shifted from Creed and Skeeter and the cars on the garage floor to his duffel. There was a very official folder inside from the Department of Labor containing photographs and a letter from William J. Davies, who’d been the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict when Special Defense Force had been created and put under Grant’s command. Davies had long since been kicked upstairs to an undisclosed position in an undisclosed government agency that didn’t have a damn thing to do with the Labor Department. The chain of command hadn’t really changed for Buck and SDF, but it had sunk deeper into the black water of the Potomac as the years had gone by, the wars had gotten more costly, and the necessary deeds had become less publicly palatable. Still, the chain of command had never been as deliberately obscure or the orders as black as what he’d gotten this morning. He’d opened the folder as soon as it had arrived in his office in the Marsh Annex east of Washington, D.C. He’d read the letter inside once, looked at the accompanying photographs, put it all back in the envelope, and immediately hitched a ride out of Andrews Air Force Base to Colorado.

The photographs had been damned startling, damned unnerving, and Buck had seen it all in his fifty-four years. He just hadn’t seen anything like this.

Davies had told him what to do. He hadn’t told him how to do it, and Buck had wanted to do it in person. Some information just shouldn’t be delivered over the phone, no matter how secure the line. He’d also figured if he was on deck with them when he briefed the team, he could manage the fallout. He’d also wanted to be on board during the initial planning phase of the requested mission.

Mission-he hated even putting the word to the deed. It was a goatfuck, a gut-wrenching goatfuck. Sometimes, being in this man’s army took almost more than he had to give. Everyone on SDF was going to know what that felt like and have to deal with it by the time they finished looking at those photographs, by the time he laid out the operation. The only alternative to dealing with it was anarchy, to willfully disobey a direct order, and the only alternative to mutiny was to lock the whole damn team up in some goddamn high-security prison and throw away the key until the mission had been accomplished by someone else. But then, that had been the problem, hadn’t it? No one, no one, had even gotten close to accomplishing the mission. Tasking SDF with the deed was about as desperate an act as he’d ever seen the government’s snoopand-spook apparatchiki reduced to miring themselves in-and they were “in,” the whole goddamn alphabet-soup boatload of them. Not that anyone would ever take responsibility for what had happened. In cases like this, the buck got passed around faster than a hot potato, getting kicked under tables and buried in crap, until everyone who had ever heard of it was either dead, exiled, or promoted out of the line of fire.

Politics was such a goddamn dirty business. It made war look like a cakewalk. Politics was such a goddamn dirty business; it made him sick.

He checked his watch. It had taken forever to get to Denver from Peterson Air Force Base, and there wasn’t a whole lot of the night left. He’d contacted Dylan in New York and asked for a meeting at Steele Street first thing in the morning. Besides Creed and Skeeter, Hawkins was in residence. Grant knew Dylan had told them to stay put. Zachary Prade was already on his way from Podunk, Montana, or wherever the hell his wife’s family ranch was located.

Trace, that was it. Trace, Montana, in Chouteau County.

Kid had done a flip-flop in Los Angeles, barely getting there before the word had gone out for him to come home. Quinn would be down from his mountain home in Evergreen before dawn. Smith would be getting into Peterson a little after midnight. Buck hoped the traffic between Colorado Springs and Denver had cleared out by then. The damn interstate had been a parking lot when he’d been on it.

And they needed Smith. He’d be good to have on board, a cool head, a cold heart. Smith could be counted on to keep appropriate emotional distance between himself and what the others would be feeling no matter how professionally they’d always conducted themselves. This damn situation would test them all.

There was no pulling Gillian and Travis off their mission. Politics again. Protecting senators on junkets in Third World countries, this one Bolivia, took precedence over just about every other damn thing. The trouble was, Dylan would instantly recognize the advantage of having Red Dog and the Angel Boy on the outside, if everyone on the inside found the mission parameters unacceptable and chose to exercise their marked instincts for independent thought-and who could blame them? Not Buck, not on this deal.

But neither was he going to condone or allow it.

His job was going to be to convince them not to abandon ship, to stay inside the system, to stay inside the rules. Working together, they could keep the sacrifices to a minimum. They were soldiers. He knew them. They would comply. He’d be damned if he lost his whole team due to a situation the CIA should never have allowed, let alone allowed to get so damn far out of hand that it had become a priority-one national security issue.

On the upside, he’d also brought the team something they needed: Juan Aurelio Ramos. The kid had proven himself in combat over and over again in his three tours of duty. Even with his last go-around in Afghanistan having gotten a little tight in places, and damn rough in others, Ramos had pulled through. He’d made it home in one piece, inside and out. Hawkins would take care of the rest, getting him trained up for the type of missions SDF took on. Training never stopped for any of them. It was the order of the day, every day. Ramos was officially SDF’s now-and Grant’s. All Buck had to do was keep the team alive long enough to use him.

Snagging the pair of highball glasses with the fingers of his right hand, he grabbed the bottle of Scotch with his left and walked out of the guest suite to the main elevator in the office. It was a hot summer night in Denver, and he was heading to The Beach-a couple of lawn chairs and a ratty piece of Astro Turf nailed to the roof of 738 Steele Street. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t be alone up there for long.