Target Omega

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Brandt had been right, as usual.

After leaving the morning meeting with Dwyer, Olivia had stopped briefly at her apartment before going to Brandt’s office in the White House. She had informed Brandt that Dwyer had provided little useful information, but it seemed as if he might be holding back. Brandt predicted that Dwyer would be in touch again soon with more information. The first meeting had merely served as an opportunity for Dwyer to assess Olivia. Sure enough, a few hours later Dwyer called Olivia for another meeting.

Matt and his clone, whose name, Olivia learned, was Carl, arrived shortly after three just outside of the Old Executive Office Building to pick up Olivia in a Lincoln Town Car. Olivia didn’t know it but the vehicle was heavily armored, with bulletproof windows. Olivia sat in the rear. Matt and Carl, sporting light-colored summer-weight clothing and wide grins, sat in front. Their regular duties weren’t nearly as enjoyable as escorting someone like Olivia Perry.

When they arrived, Dwyer was in the library, talking on his cell. He motioned for Olivia to take a seat and pointed to refreshments on the coffee table. Matt and Carl left, but a short, wiry man with a Glock at the small of his back stood in a hallway immediately outside the library. On the patio beyond the French doors directly behind Dwyer, Olivia could see another man. He was wearing a white T-shirt, beige cargo pants, and sunglasses. An exotic-looking rifle of some sort was slung across his chest.

Olivia sat in a chair and looked at the photographs perched along several shelves of the bookcase closest to her. Some of the photos were of the Navy football team. A few more were of Dwyer and several other men in fatigues, standing on a beach. The largest was of Dwyer in a hospital bed, smiling and giving a thumbs-up signal despite the fact that he was covered with discolored bandages and looked as if he’d been caught in a hay baler.

Olivia looked back at Dwyer, the tone of his voice indicating that the call was coming to an end. Dwyer disconnected, walked over with a slight limp, and sat across from Olivia. “Thanks for coming over again. Too hot to sit on the patio this afternoon.”

“What about the guard outside?” Olivia motioned toward the window.

“He’s used to hot weather.” Dwyer grinned. “Believe me.”

“I notice that you seem to have more security this afternoon than you did this morning. I hope you haven’t concluded that I’m some kind of threat.”

Dwyer kept grinning. “Well, you certainly present a distinct hazard to Matt and Carl. Actually, I put on more security at the insistence of Mike Garin.” Dwyer examined Olivia’s face for reaction. If she was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“When did he do that?” Olivia asked casually.

“You seem to have expected that he’d call.”

“We thought he might,” Olivia said. “Michael Garin’s facing daunting odds. He needs help. There was a fair probability that he’d reach out to you because you’re his friend, and you have substantial resources.”

“But what made you think that I’d contact you again?” Dwyer asked.

“A hunch. Despite your not inconsiderable resources, Garin was likely to figure that being on good terms with James Brandt might be very helpful also. Garin would try to barter what he knows for whatever goodwill Mr. Brandt can provide. It was logical that he would call you and you, in turn, would call us,” Olivia explained.

Dwyer stared at Olivia. The Oracle’s apprentice was one quick study.

“But Mike was concerned you would go to the FBI if he asked me to contact you.”

“Certainly, that was one of the things he had to consider,” Olivia agreed. “But after he weighed the probabilities, he’d conclude that we’re less interested in the FBI than we are about Russian-Iranian WMD. And to be safe, Garin wouldn’t play his entire hand at once. He’d tell us just enough to keep us occupied and interested. This way we wouldn’t go to the FBI, even if we were so inclined, until we got all the info he could provide.” Olivia sat back and crossed her legs. “So, what can you tell me?”

Dwyer smiled and began to wonder if his calls were, in fact, secure. Garin, Brandt, and Perry seemed to be reading from the same script. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, as they say, we don’t know what we don’t know. So why don’t you start from the beginning? Mr. Brandt believes that sometimes seemingly irrelevant pieces of information can be useful. There may be things about Garin that neither he nor you think are pertinent, but might provide clues to what’s going on in the Middle East.”

Dwyer reached toward the table in front of him and poured a glass of iced tea. Long Island vintage. He offered it to Olivia, who shook her head. He took a sip before proceeding.

“Olivia, the first thing you have to understand is that I’m not a Mike Garin encyclopedia. Despite the fact that I’m a friend — I’d like to think a pretty good friend — there are big gaps in my knowledge about him.”

“Understood,” Olivia said. “We don’t expect you to know everything, of course. Just tell me what you do know. You recruited Garin to the Naval Academy, correct?”

“That’s right. Mike was a hell of a football player and a good all-around athlete. He could’ve gone anywhere, but he was cursed with a serious, almost debilitating affliction.”

“What was that?”

“Brains. In addition to the big football schools, Mike was being recruited by Annapolis, West Point, and the Ivies because of his grades and board scores. He chose Cornell, and as you probably know, he did pretty well there academically and athletically.”

“But he left after less than three years.”

“Not quite. He didn’t just leave. He got his degree. But he wanted to go into the service.”

“Did you have anything to do with that?”

“No. He did it on his own. Believed he had a duty. It may not be fashionable, but he really believes in ‘duty, honor, country.’ The next time I saw him was at Coronado. He was a member of a BUD/S class and I was an instructor. Do you know anything about BUD/S?”

“Sure, I’ve seen the movies, the TV shows. They’re everywhere. Cottage industry. I understand it’s some of the toughest military training on earth.”

“No, ma’am,” Dwyer corrected, “it’s the toughest training. The media really don’t capture how tough. Yeah, you may get some pushback from some of the other elite units around the world — SAS, Sayeret Matkal, Spetsnaz, GSG-9—but don’t listen to them. The dropout rate in BUD/S and SEAL Qualification Training is extremely high. The thing is, there’s really no way of telling who’s going to make it and who’s not when a new class first arrives. Some of the toughest, meanest, fittest SOBs drop out before Hell Week, and some guys with the faces of angels go all the way through. What you have to understand about success in the teams is that it’s a function of mental toughness. Show me a SEAL squad and I’ll show you eight men who have never quit, and will never quit, anything in their lives.”

“Where does Garin fit, SOB or angel?”

“Both. Mike’s one of the mentally and physically toughest men I’ve ever met. But he’s somewhat of a warrior-poet paradox. He’s a Grade A predator and yet he’s pure Boy Scout. Goes to Mass, prays the Rosary, rarely curses. But he can drink you under the table without so much as pausing to breathe, then rip out your liver to replace the one he just ruined. A ruthless Boy Scout, but a Boy Scout nonetheless. One of his mottos is Patton’s line, ‘Better to fight for something than live for nothing.’ I mean, the guy’s got mottos, for cripe’s sake,” Dwyer said, grinning. “He knows when to pivot, when to stand down. He’s very savvy, and he understands gray areas. That said, he really belongs in the twelfth century. Age of chivalry. Where everything’s black and white.”

“How can the Big Bad Wolf also be a Boy Scout? Especially after all he’s done?”

Dwyer brightened theatrically. “Thanks so much for letting me play amateur psychologist. It’s my true calling.”

“Seriously.”

Dwyer shrugged. “The Big Bad Wolf wasn’t always big and bad?” Dwyer offered. “When I recruited him for Annapolis, I was a grad assistant on the Navy football team, something to keep me occupied while I was recuperating from two broken legs.”

“How…”

“Don’t ask. Training accident.” Dwyer made air quotes with his fingers.

Olivia blinked acquiescence.

“When you recruit players, you’re actually recruiting the whole family — Mom, Dad, siblings, girlfriends — to encourage them to get the recruit to sign with you.”

Olivia nodded. “My father played for Bear Bryant.”

“No kidding? Really? Then you know how it goes. I got to know his sister, Katy, pretty well. Major babe, though she’s probably even tougher than Mikey. Over beers she tells me Mikey was a runt as a kid. Their mom had serious complications when pregnant with him and his twin. Doctors recommended she abort. Mikey was born almost three months premature. His twin died in utero. Mikey spent a long time in the NICU before coming home. Grew up undersize for most of his childhood, chronically ill. He wasn’t a Big Bad Wolf back then. He was prey, not predator.”

“That wouldn’t necessarily turn him into a Boy Scout. Some people might be resentful or vengeful once they got strong and healthy.”

“Look,” Dwyer said. “That’s about the limit of my psychoanalytic abilities. All I know is Mike is not someone you want as an enemy. You definitely want him on your side.”

“But he never became a SEAL. If he’s so smart and tough, why did he drop out?”

“He didn’t. Not technically, at least. Mike was going through all the evolutions during BUD/S and coming out at, or near, the top in all of them. He was definitely a candidate for honor man of the class. Push-ups, pull-ups, running. Didn’t matter how much or how many. He just kept plugging. Never lagged. And he seemed oblivious to the cold — getting wet and sandy all the time. Everybody else is frozen, teeth chattering. Guys were dropping out like flies. But there he was, with that determined look in his eyes. I’ll tell you, it can be unsettling. We sometimes get star athletes that come through. Many of them, most of them, can’t hack it. Not only could Mike hack it; he thrived. No, he didn’t DOR. He went to SEAL Qualification Training. But then he just disappeared.”

“DOR?”

“Drop on Request. Anyone dropping out just places their helmet on the grinder — an asphalt area — and rings a bell. No questions asked. Mike didn’t do that. He didn’t ring the bell. Like I said, he was in SQT and then he was just gone.” Dwyer shook his head as if still trying to sort out what happened. “Mike’s disappearance stunned the rest of the class and the instructors. Naturally, there was some talk — not much; we don’t dwell on those things. But people were trying to figure out what happened. We asked around a little. No one knew anything. There was some speculation that he got sheep-dipped, but that was about it.”

Dwyer noticed Olivia’s eyebrows knit in confusion. “Sorry. Sheep-dipped. Some thought he might’ve been snagged by the OGA — the CIA — and trained at the Farm, Camp Peary,” he explained.

“He wasn’t?”

“Hell, I still don’t know.”

“When was the next time you heard from him?”

“The next time I heard about him was more than a year later. Rumors of Garin sightings. One night, back when I was with Task Force 121 looking for Saddam Hussein, some guys came back to Baghdad Airport buzzing about how they got ambushed, but some guy with an M4 shows up out of nowhere and takes out eight of the enemy. When the smoke clears, he’s gone. But one of the guys who knew Mike from BUD/S claims it was him.”

“Was it?”

“Who knows? I asked Mike about it once and he just got quiet like he always does.”

“Like you did when I asked you about DEVGRU this morning.”

Dwyer pursed his lips. “Anyway, over the next year and a half, I heard the occasional Garin story. Someone saw him in the Ma’laab District in Ramadi. Then all the way over in Kandahar. And the stories.” Dwyer rolled his eyes. “The stories got more and more ridiculous.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they sounded like he was Batman or something: Garin wipes out ten al-Qaeda fighters with a dull can opener; Garin leaps tall buildings in a single bound. Unbelievable stuff.”

“You’re confusing superheroes,” Olivia needled. Dwyer could see that Olivia was becoming absorbed in the story despite its marginal relevance to Iranians and Russians. “Was it really Garin?”

“Again, don’t know. Sounded over-the-top. But operators aren’t generally given to hyperbole.”

“Do you know what Garin was supposedly doing in those areas, presuming it was him?”

“He never told me. But clearly, he was killing bad guys.”

“Do you believe the stories?”

“I believe one of them, that’s for sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I was there.”