Emerald Buddha

Chapter 17

General Brad Holt strode to his car, parked in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s security lot, and after a sweep of the area, started his vehicle and pulled through the gate. Twenty minutes later he was changing from his uniform into sweats at the apartment he kept for dalliances, and ten minutes after that he was at the gym. Two other men with military bearings and the clipped hair of career officers sat in the dressing room. After a hard look from Holt, they followed him onto the outdoor terrace, where several tables and chairs awaited them, the area empty.

“All right. Let’s make this quick. You’re both up to speed with the train wreck in Thailand, correct?” Holt asked.

The shorter of the men, Colonel Sam Daniels, nodded. “Our sources at the CIA have no idea what went wrong. This came out of left field.”

“They couldn’t find their asses with both hands,” growled the third officer, Major Henry Lorre.

“Be that as it may, we have to assume they aren’t the only ones on the game board now. Until proven otherwise, we have to proceed as though there are unidentified hostiles,” Holt said.

“Right, but it’s not our play. What can we do differently?”

All three men were members of the Department of Defense covert operations group: the Defense Clandestine Services, responsible for, among other things, the military’s black ops and wet work — assassinations, torture, kidnappings, terrorist attacks against unfriendly regimes. While officially the group didn’t exist, the reality was that the CIA often acted in its own best interests, for motives known only to its leaders, and the DOD sometimes needed to employ tactics that, if Congress had been aware of them, would have been shut down and their planners jailed. Their recently aborted mission in Pakistan was a classic example: word of it had been leaked online by a website that delighted in breaking top-secret information — information that in this case could have only come from one place — the DOD’s own servers.

“I know we said we’d stay out of this one, but I think the situation has escalated to the point where we can’t take a passive role anymore. We need to send our own people in.”

“I thought the idea was to keep it deniable.”

“That hasn’t changed.”

“I disagree. My vote is to watch and wait. We try to launch a concurrent effort, and it could blow up in our faces,” Daniels said.

Holt considered the input. “What do you think, Henry?”

“Much as I’m inclined to want to take control, I don’t see anything we can do that’s not already being done. We have to trust that if there’s something to find, the supposed experts will find it. Ferrying in a bunch of commandos is unlikely to end well, or we would have already done it.”

“So we do nothing? That’s the consensus?” Holt asked.

Both his subordinates nodded. Holt hated that answer, but knew in his gut it was the right one, even if his instinct was to commission outside contractors to go in. The DOD often hired third-party organizations to carry out more sensitive missions, especially when it wanted deniability, which was essential in this instance. But Holt would go with his group’s advice — for now.

The men went back inside, where Holt would pump iron for an hour while the others returned to their offices. Holt moved out onto the floor without saying anything more to them, selected a chest press, and pegged the weights at the maximum. Even at fifty-three he was built like a bear and had the strength of two younger men, and he was fighting the inevitable ravages of time every step of the way.

He did three sets of twenty reps and moved to the next machine in his circuit, his mind working over the problem he was facing. What should have been straightforward had turned into a downed plane with a high-profile civilian involved. And now the CIA man on site had been taken out. If it could get any worse, he couldn’t see how.

After a career in the military, Holt was a realist, under no illusions about how things worked or anyone’s competence. He had more ugly secrets swirling around in his head than anyone should, but that was the life he’d chosen. Someone had to make the tough decisions — weigh the unthinkable and authorize the unmentionable. It went with the program. Civilians didn’t understand it, and he didn’t expect them to. Ignorance was bliss, and it was better for everyone if they focused on buying more unnecessary crap and voting for the talking heads of the professional liars who wrote their scripts. Holt had nothing but contempt for the population he was charged with protecting, and he did so without expecting their thanks. That they would have hated him for what he did in their name was immaterial. They were fat, dumb children, to be treated as such.

Holt moved to the barbell area and began his curls, his arms burning from lactic acid rushing to the damaged muscles. He forced himself to continue through the pain. That which didn’t kill him made him stronger, and he would approach this latest challenge like he did all others — fighting. The hearings had been a major irritant, but the DOD had been able to stonewall the politicians sufficiently so that no irreparable damage was done.

But the situation in Laos was a wild card that bore watching. If there was damaging material that had survived the crash, and it fell into the wrong hands…

Holt shook off the anxiety that seared through his stomach and moved to the pull-up bars, where he would do a hundred, as he had every other day for the last thirty-something years. As he began his routine, he comforted himself with the thought that exercising restraint when there were as many unknowns as they faced was often more effective than going in with guns a-blazing.

That said, he would be monitoring the CIA-sponsored group’s progress with interest, and planned to make a few calls once he was finished that would ready a crisis team from one of his military contractors and get it into position in Thailand.

“Just in case,” Holt said to himself. “Better safe than sorry.”