Acts of Vengeance

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN THE TAKEDOWN

“This is preposterous,” said Fletcher. “You’re telling me that Commander Parsons is not the spy?”

Adam Korchek, on the secure phone in the SCIF, said, “He never was.”

“How long have you known that?”

“Since I arrested him.”

He heard a spluttering noise from Admiral Fletcher’s end of the line. “You’ve got some explaining to do, Mr. Korchek. Without informing me, you went ahead and arrested an innocent man—”

“Knock it off, Admiral. I’m here to take down traitors, not play your silly little military etiquette games.”

A long silent moment followed. Korchek knew he had thoroughly pissed off a senior naval officer. He didn’t care.

When Fletcher again spoke, his voice was strained. “How did you know it wasn’t Parsons?”

“Because the encrypted stuff I found on his computer didn’t originate there. The origin codes, which my software can trace, came from a different computer. It had to have been planted on Parsons’s computer.”

“Are you going to tell me whose computer it came from?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“Go ahead.”

Korchek told him.

Several seconds of silence passed. “Oh, my God,” he heard Fletcher say. “Inform me as soon as he’s in custody.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Korchek said, and hung up.

From his battered leather briefcase he pulled out the Glock. After he’d checked the pistol, he shoved the clip back into the grip and slipped it into the holster in the small of his back. He could use the ship’s security detail to make the actual arrest, but that wasn’t his style. It would be like inviting someone else to finish off a piece of tail for you.

This was the part of the job that Korchek liked most. After the sleuthing, assembling the myriad pieces of the mosaic, zeroing in on the identity of your subject, then you got to take him down.

This was a big fish, and Korchek hoped the guilty scumbag would put up some resistance. Not a lot, just enough to make it sporting. That was the absolutely best part, when the perp saw that it was over and he tried to make a break. Then you could quite justifiably kick the shit out of him. Within limits, of course.

He waited until the two marine security guards showed up. They were waiting in the passageway outside the SCIF, in full combat gear, carrying their M16A2 carbines. That was all the firepower Korchek wanted for this job.

He had deliberately left the other three team members out of it. The two CIA types, Mosely and Grad, would immediately be on the line to their bosses back in spook headquarters, and the whole operation would then be micromanaged from Virginia. The other FBI agent, Bill Gould, was a trial lawyer by training, and his shtick was to analyze the shit out of everything before he ever made a move. By then the spy could be in Patagonia.

This would be Adam Korchek’s private little coup.

With the marines clumping along in trail, he left the SCIF and ascended to the O-3 level. He knew the area well by now. They passed the sign on the bulkhead that read OFFICERS COUNTRY, and entered the warren of staterooms.

He looked up and down the passageway, then approached the middle stateroom. He heard music — a modern jazz piece — coming from inside.

Korchek slipped the Glock from the holster behind his back. Holding the pistol at the ready, he paused to read the placarded name on the door: COMMANDER O.B. “SPOOK” MORSE, CVBG INTEL OFFICER.

The instant Morse turned the corner in the passageway, he knew. They were already there. They’d gotten inside his room.

A marine stood in the doorway, his back to him. How many were inside? Who was it? That FBI attack dog, Korchek?

For sure it would be Korchek.

Another minute and he would have gotten to the room before them. His pistol — the Beretta nine millimeter — was still in there. Now he was unarmed, no place to go, five hundred miles at sea.

A hunted man.

A spy.

For a fleeting instant he considered hitting the marine from behind. He was a martial arts expert, skilled enough to drop a man with a blow to the base of his skull. Then he’d grab the carbine. Whoever was inside was probably searching the room. With the advantage of surprise, he’d be able to kill them with the M16.

He dismissed the idea. Korchek was not a man to be taken by surprise. He was a cunning predator, waiting for him to do something stupid. Stupid ideas grew out of desperation. If he was to stay alive, he had to stop thinking like a desperate man.

This was the moment that Spook Morse knew would come someday. In his conscious mind he had deceived himself in a dozen ways, rationalizing that he was too intelligent, too careful, too experienced to be found out and captured.

Why had he taken such risks?

When he became acquainted with the cultivated Emirate Air Force colonel, Jamal Al-Fasr, during his assignment to the Fifth Fleet staff, it had seemed a mutually useful association. Al-Fasr would sometimes slip to him items about the Arab countries’ defense initiatives and future weapons acquisitions. In turn, Morse would feed him innocuous tidbits about coalition force dispersal and fleet deployments. Never anything sensitive or highly classified. It was the sort of exchange intelligence officers practiced all the time.

Then, while Morse was still assigned to the fleet post in Bahrain, two events changed his life. The first was his wife’s announcement that she was leaving him for a British RAF squadron leader with whom she’d been having an affair for two years. The second, which occurred almost simultaneously, was the Navy’s decision to pass him over for promotion to captain.

It was too much to accept. He, Spook Morse, who should have risen to flag rank and, at the least, to command of the National Security Agency, would be forever relegated to menial staff posts.

Then Jamal Al-Fasr made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

He hadn’t done it just for the money. It was something far greater than that. Justice. Honor. Revenge, even. He had been wronged and — damn them to hell! — they would pay.

The marine was backing out of the doorway.

For what seemed like an eternity, Morse and the marine stood in the passageway, twenty feet apart, exchanging gazes. The young man — he was white, about twenty years old — wore the standard Kevlar helmet, holding an M16 across his chest.

Staring at him.

Recognizing him.

Run. The command came from somewhere in the back of his brain, a primal directive. Run! Run like an animal.

Blindly, pell-mell, without direction, he sprinted down the passageway, around a corner to the left. Behind him he heard voices: “Mr. Korchek, it’s him! He’s heading for the hangar deck!”

The heavy clumping of boots echoed on steel bulkheads — whump whump whump — pursuing him like beasts from hell.

He collided with two men — junior officers engaged in conversation at the door before the ladder down to the hangar deck. One of the men, a lieutenant said, “Hey! What do you think—”

He stiff-armed the man out of his way, shoving him against the bulkhead. He scrambled down the ladder. “Hey, you!” he heard the lieutenant yelling after him. “Come back here, asshole!”

Morse had no idea where he was running to. In theory, it was possible to disappear aboard an aircraft carrier like the Reagan, which had as many enclosures and spaces as a medium-sized city.

He reached the bottom of the ladder and bolted into the hangar bay. For a second he stood there, surveying the scene. The cavernous area was filled with aircraft, wings folded, fastened to the deck with tie-down chains. Tugs chugged across the deck, towing fifty-thousand-pound warplanes like semitrailers.

Again, the sound of boots. Coming from the ladder above.

He darted across the hangar deck, then caught his shin on a tie-down chain and went tumbling across the rough, non-skid surface of the deck. The chain ripped into his leg. Blood spurted from his torn trousers. Painfully he climbed to his feet and hobbled aft, in the direction of the fantail.

“Stop him!” someone yelled. “Stop that man! He’s a fugitive.”

At this, a husky young sailor in blue chambray working clothes stepped from under the wing of an F/A-18, blocking his path. The sailor grabbed for his arm.

He let the sailor set himself, allowing him to yank his arm. Suddenly he shot his right hand forward, heel extended with his full weight behind it, catching the sailor beneath the chin. The man’s head snapped backward as if on a hinge, making a cracking sound. He toppled backward like a rag doll onto the hangar deck.

The sound of his pursuers grew louder. Boots pounding on the steel deck.

Run.

Running was difficult. His injured leg throbbed, and his breath came in short, hard rasps. The Beretta. Why hadn’t he kept the pistol with him? He should have been ready for this.

Where to run?

That way. Across the deck he saw daylight, clouds, an opaque sky and ocean. The elevator bay was open. The giant deck-edge elevator was used to transport jets between the flight deck and the big interior hangar deck. The elevator was topside now, flush with the flight deck. The great cavity in the side of the ship was open to the sea.

He ran toward the elevator bay. An EA-6B Prowler was tied down at the aft side of the open elevator well, and an F/A-18 on the forward side. His heart pounded. He fought the mounting sense of desperation that was seizing control of him.

At the deck edge Morse stopped, looking wildly around him. They were trotting toward him, thirty yards away. He recognized the burly, oily-faced Korchek, chuffing behind the two marines. He carried a pistol.

Morse was cornered. No place to hide, no options, not even a weapon…

He saw something — a locker mounted on the bulkhead behind him. Stenciled on the cover was

He snatched the cover open. Inside the locker was a stack of night signaling flares, another stack of smoke flares, and a box of pencil flares that deck crew wore in their flotation vests.

A box was labeled VERY PISTOLS. He tore the box open. It contained three of the brass-colored pistols. Beside it was another box — STAR SHELLS.

The Very pistol had been around for over a century. It was a short-barreled device that fired a single large-caliber signaling cartridge.

He picked up one of the pistols. He snatched one of the star-shell cartridges and shoved it into the pistol.

Clutching the Very pistol close to him, he ran to the edge of the elevator bay. He stood at the deck edge, peering out at the open sea.

“Hold it right there!” The voice came from behind him.

He continued gazing toward the ocean. The dark rim of a land formation jutted from the distant horizon. The coast of Somalia? Perhaps the Yemeni island of Socotra, nestled in the Gulf of Aden. It meant the ship was heading eastward.

“Turn around with your hands on your head,” he heard Korchek order. “The game’s over.”

Morse didn’t respond. A strange sense of calm had come over him. The urgent, cornered-animal desperation was gone, replaced by a cool detachment. He was again in control. He was Spook Morse, master of espionage.

He turned to face his enemies. His hands came up with the Very pistol.

Boom! He was shocked at the heavy recoil of the gun. For an instant he caught the look of disbelief on Korchek’s face. The star-shell signaling charge exploded in a blinding flash where the FBI agent’s face had been.

He was dimly aware of the muzzle flashes from the two M16 combat rifles as the 5.56-millimeter bullets tore into him.

Within seconds, a crowd had gathered around the elevator bay.

“Medic!” someone yelled. “Get the medics here on the double!”

“No hurry,” someone else said. “These guys ain’t going nowhere.”

The hangar deck officer, a lieutenant commander in a yellow jersey, charged across the hangar bay. He pushed his way into the crowd of sailors, wondering what was going on. From up in his control compartment he’d heard something that definitely sounded like gunfire. On his goddamned hangar deck.

Two marines stood there, wearing their combat gear. On the deck lay a man’s body, some guy in civvies. Ten feet away, at the deck edge, was another body in officer’s khakis.

The hangar deck officer pushed his way over to the civilian. He saw the guy’s feet, wearing wing-tip cordovans. Someone had covered his head with a towel. A puddle of fluid was spreading on the deck around him.

“What the hell’s going on?” the hangar deck officer demanded. Without waiting for a reply, he stooped over and removed the towel from the man’s head.

His face was a molten mass of bloody protoplasm. The stench of incinerated hair and flesh hit the officer in the gut like a hammer blow.

He recoiled from the sight. His hour-old lunch surged like lava from the depths of his stomach. He couldn’t hold it. He staggered to the deck edge and leaned out over the rail, heaving his guts out.

After a minute of concentrated barfing, the officer turned from the rail and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. Weakly, he walked over to the marines, making a heroic effort not to look at the faceless corpse in civvies.

“Okay, what happened?”

The senior marine, a corporal, told him.

The officer shook his head, his stomach still roiling.

He looked at the other body, the one in the officer’s uniform. The dead man wore silver oak leaves on his collar. At least half a dozen rounds had been fired into him. He lay on his back, his eyes staring sightlessly out to sea.

The hangar deck officer recognized him from the wardroom. He was an intelligence officer, one of those prissy staff guys who never wasted his time conversing with the working stiffs. The guy was a mess.

Torpedoes, air strikes, now a shootout on his deck. It had been a hell of a day. “Fucking incredible,” said the hangar deck officer.