Target Omega

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Olivia realized she was leaning forward in her chair while listening to Dwyer, her forearms resting on her knees. She straightened self-consciously. “He must’ve been more than a little surprised to see his former BUD/S instructor and football recruiter. What else did he say?”

“Nothing. All business. He looked at our wounds and knew we needed evac, pronto. But we needed to get out of the canyon to higher elevation so our comms could work. He didn’t have any. He’s up there by himself in some of the most hostile territory in the world and the son of a bitch doesn’t even have a radio. Says it got hit by fire a while back. Anyway, he puts Ron’s body over his shoulder and we start climbing the slope.

“Now, it’s about four hundred feet — steep — to the top, and we’re already at altitude. Thin air. But he’s carrying Ron, plus gear, and not even breathing hard. The only thing he didn’t do was hum ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”

Olivia laughed, which prompted Dwyer to laugh in turn. The reason for Dwyer’s protective behavior toward Garin earlier in the day was becoming clear. The former BUD/S instructor didn’t merely respect his former pupil; he seemed almost in awe of him.

“It took us a while to get to the top. We were in pretty bad shape. But we get there and I radio in and a little while later, in comes a Chinook. We get loaded up and ready to go and Mike just walks away. The rest of us are yelling at him, asking him what the hell he’s doing, and he just says, ‘Gotta go.’ I tell him to at least take some comms and toss a radio to him. He just nods and takes off. Said maybe sixteen words the whole time. Everybody in that bird just looked at each other.”

Olivia glanced at the photograph of Dwyer in a hospital bed.

“Yeah, that’s me at Bagram right after all of this,” Dwyer acknowledged.

“Did he ever tell you what he was doing up there?”

“No. Playing avenging angel, I guess.”

“Michael the Archangel.”

“Mike never talks about any of those stories. But I suspect he was hunting high-value targets.” Dwyer put down his glass of Long Island iced tea. “Well, I’m sure you thought that story was totally useless.”

“Well, it doesn’t tell me anything about Garin’s connection to the Iranian/Russian matter, but it did give me insight into the man. He’s certainly not your standard-issue cog in the country’s war machinery, is he?”

“I tried recruiting Mike again a year later, this time successfully,” Dwyer said. “I left the teams shortly after my recovery at Bagram. My leg was messed up pretty bad and I couldn’t hack it anymore. So, while recuperating, I got the idea to form DGT and convinced Mike to be one of my partners.”

“Garin helped found DGT?” Olivia asked. “I remember reading in the materials that he went to work for a military contractor. I didn’t know it was DGT.”

“Yep. Like I said, the man’s got more than a few working brain cells. I guess he got tired of sightseeing in the Hindu Kush. My original idea was to provide logistical support for diplomatic missions. I saw that fighting a couple of wars had stretched the military’s capacity pretty thin. So we went to the Department of Defense, and then State, and someone decided to give us a try.” Dwyer shrugged his shoulders.

“A small contract at first that kept Mike, Ken Thompson — our other partner — and me busy for only about sixty days, providing an escort detail for some State Department people who were helping the Iraqi parliament get on its feet. Then, just as that contract was about to expire, we got another one to do the same thing for the USAID folks in Kabul.

“We were limping along for another month until Mike got the idea to go big. He somehow secured us a line of credit and bid on a big DOD contract to provide security for civilians in several locations throughout the world. We won and were off to the races. Then he got us to start diversifying — providing materiel, personnel, making ourselves indispensable to the global war on terror. We grew fast. It didn’t take long for Thompson to cash out. He’s sunning himself on a tropical island somewhere. Not long after, Mike left too, but not before making a pretty decent bundle of cash.”

“Why did he leave?”

“His grandfather had just died,” replied Dwyer. “Mike revered him. Said he was twice the man Mike was.”

“I thought operators don’t generally engage in hyperbole,” Olivia said.

“Yeah. I had to think about that one for a while too. But around the time of his grandfather’s death, the country was going through another period of self-flagellation. A large part of the media and political class claimed that the US was the locus of evil in the world, that we’d brought all the bad stuff, all the terrorism, on ourselves by being so imperialistic, chauvinistic, and racist. Blame America First.”

“I saw it among some of my colleagues. Individuals who didn’t realize how good they had it and, more importantly, why it was they had it so good. Disparaging the things that gave them their security, their privileged status, their very ability to criticize,” Olivia said.

Olivia smiled upon seeing Dwyer’s surprised reaction. It was rare to encounter a civilian with a cold-eyed understanding of the real world.

“I think Mike felt bound to defend the country he and his grandfather loved. As I said, he’s a Boy Scout. He wanted to be in the fight. He wasn’t content with supporting it. The things the talking heads were saying about America were what his grandfather had actually experienced in the Soviet Union.”

“Wait,” Olivia interjected, letting it sink in. “His grandfather was a Soviet émigré?”

“Right. As I understand it, he was an officer in the Red Army, fighting in Germany during World War II. When the war ended, the political officers adjudged him to be anticommunist, or at least an insufficiently zealous communist, and he was arrested, destined for death or a labor camp. Somehow, he escaped and made his way to the American sector in Germany. A few years later, he came to America.”

“Garin’s family is from Russia,” Olivia said as if pondering an unfinished puzzle.

“Mike still has some distant relatives there,” Dwyer said, hoping to add a piece.

“Go on.”

“Mike thought it was his obligation to both his grandfather and his country to serve the latter as best he could,” Dwyer said.

“So he became part of the counter-WMD strike force.”

“It was pretty clear diplomacy wasn’t containing the spread of WMD,” Dwyer said. “A.Q. Khan was selling nuclear know-how to anyone with enough cash; the North Koreans were doing the same. Chechens were trying to get their hands on uranium. Every thug between Syria and Burma had nuclear designs.”

“And the UN does nothing but pass toothless resolutions,” Olivia added. “The IAEA is at best worthless and at worst enabling. There’s no meaningful penalty for violating nonproliferation treaties.”

“The administration — the one preceding Clarke’s, that is — understood that negotiations to prevent the development of WMD have only been used by rogue regimes to play for time until they acquired WMD capability,” Dwyer said. “The administration also knew that even if tough sanctions were imposed, they would find a way to circumvent them. So direct covert action was needed.”

“And the strike force was created,” Olivia finished. “But why not simply use Delta or SEAL Team Six to do the job? They’re already trained in nuke detection, recovery, and disposal.”

Dwyer said, “The strike force isn’t designed for detection and recovery. Its sole task is to seek and destroy.”

“Does it have a name?

“I don’t know. I can tell you that I’ve heard the name Omega once or twice. I’m not sure if that’s the unit’s official designation or if it’s what the unit members called themselves.”

“Omega,” Olivia repeated. “Makes a perverted kind of sense. The last resort before oblivion.”

Before Dwyer could respond, the piercing sound of a commercial-grade security alarm startled Olivia. A gun materialized in Dwyer’s hand and the compact bodyguard appeared at his side in an instant, weapon drawn. The guard outside had his rifle up at the ready.

Dwyer seized her elbow and pulled her roughly in the direction of the hallway.

“Come with me,” Dwyer commanded. “Now.”