Warlord

NINE

SERIOUSLY, HARRY, WHAT IN HELL DOES Langley brass think they're doing, wasting a precious resource like me? And hell, you, too?" Stokely Jones said to Harry Brock. "Whole town is blowing up and every damn day they send us out on these dipshit stakeouts? We're overqualified for this kid stuff, man. Must be twenty feds down here from D.C. working the Memorial Hospital case."

"Try forty," Harry said. He knew the president.

America had a new president now, Tom McCloskey, the tall, rugged, former Colorado rancher who had been the vice president in President Jack McAfee's administration. McCloskey had been elected in a squeaker against longtime Senator Larry Reed. Reed, for reasons seemingly unknown to anyone but himself and his head-in-the-sand backers on the Hill, wanted to defang America. To withdraw funding for missile defense systems at home and overseas. To slash military budgets and bring the boys home, wherever they were. To close Gitmo and send all the terrorists back home so they could make more baby terrorists to send back to America.

A major component of the campaign platform of Reed's opponent Tom McCloskey, and McCloskey's veep candidate, ex-Naval Chief of Staff David Rosow, had been countering the mounting terror threat from within America's borders as well as from without. McCloskey believed homegrown terrorists posed America's biggest threat at the moment. And that only eternal vigilance and military might at home and abroad could save an increasingly fragile Republic.

America, President McCloskey had asserted in his stump speeches, was in the midst of what he called "The Third Wave" of domestic terrorism. The first wave occurred on September 11, 2001, the culmination of years of attacks on America and the west by al Qaeda, a group consisting of Saudi, Yemeni, and other identifiably Arab men. Bin Laden soon realized the United States would guard against such foreigners in the future. Future attacks would have to draw on a new talent pool.

To circumvent added security measures, bin Laden recruited terrorists with French, British, and other passports. Men like "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, traveling on a U.K. passport. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the infamous "underwear bomber." Or the U.S. Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood who murdered American soldiers, and the "Times Square" bomber who'd been removed from an Emirates airliner just before it pulled back from the gate. This, McCloskey asserted, was the "Second Wave" of terror. The "Third Wave" consisted of U.S. citizens and residents, legal or not, who can fly under the radar of new security measures created to thwart first-and second-wave operatives.

He cited the direct link between 1960s radical H. Rap Brown and the twelve men charged with felonies in connection with the fatal firefight of a Detroit imam with FBI agents. Brown converted to Islam while in Attica prison and was allegedly running a terror network from his prison cell in Colorado. Criminals, McCloskey said, were undergoing Muslim prison conversions at the rate of thirty-five thousand a year. All potential "street operatives" who could and would support the terrorist agenda. Plainly, he said, the fundamentalist ideology has sunk deep roots into American society.

The tight presidential race had ended suddenly on the night of the last nationally televised debate. Responding to yet another sarcastic question about his "cowboy qualifications" from Senator Reed, McCloskey had squared his big shoulders, looked directly into the camera, and said, "Frankly, Senator Reed, I think Americans voting for you are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders."

Senator Reed never recovered.

And, after what had happened at Jackson Memorial in Miami a couple of weeks ago, it was beginning to look like McCloskey had been right.

"Okay, forty feds, Harry. And are we assigned to that task force? Biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11? No, not us, we're sitting out here day and night doing frigging stakeouts."

Harry, who'd heard this rap many times in the prior week, couldn't even be bothered to shift his gaze to Stoke from the half-naked blonde currently sashaying across the crosswalk with a teacup dog at the end of a pink leather leash studded with zircons as big as the Ritz.

Brock was wondering how the hell either of them, dog or woman, could walk upright with all that weight up front.

"I could live in that bra," Harry mused. "Very happily. I'm dead serious. I hate my apartment."

"What?" Stoke said.

"The crosswalk, are you blind, the crosswalk."

Stoke, who, according to their mutual pal Alex Hawke, was about the size of your average armoire, was wedged behind the steering wheel. He pressed forward, peering at the woman through the Suburban's grimy windshield as he polished off what remained of his Whopper. One sure way to commit suicide? Put yourself between Stokely Jones Jr. and the pickup counter at a Burger King.

"I mean it, Harry. I got serious shit to do," Stoke said, using his napkin, watching the blonde jiggle by.

"Yeah? Like what?" Harry said.

"Like getting my damn GTO detailed, for starters. Okay? Maintain its high CDI factor."

"CDI? What the hell is CDI?"

"'Chicks Dig It.' Critical."

"Funny. What else?"

"Hell, who knows? Have a Thai massage. Learn Spanish. Finish reading Shogun. Stuff like that."

"Shogun? When did you start reading that?"

"Hell, I dunno. When did it come out?"

Harry looked at him and sighed. "You know what? I should have just stayed with the Corps. I don't know why the hell I ever left."

"Once a Marine, always a Marine. Why did you bail?"

"I dunno. I was standing on a street corner one night in Baghdad smoking weed. I thought I had the world by the balls and then I looked down and saw the balls in my hand were my own."

STOKE AND HARRY WERE PARKED on Ocean Drive over in South Beach, with a nice view of the wide sandy beach, swaying palms, and rolling blue ocean to their right. To their left, an unbroken line of art deco hotels, shops, and restaurants. It was pretty early in the day, and most of the local SoBe residents were still sleeping it off.

Miami was definitely not "the city that never sleeps." Hell, it was the city that never woke up, least till round midnight. Unless, of course, you had huge buildings blowing up smack-dab in the middle of town. That was an attention getter.

Jackson Hospital was a real wake-up call, Stoke thought, in a lot more ways than one. According to the latest intel reports, Sword of Allah had combined forces of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan to become the most powerful terror network on the planet. And now they'd proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that their reach extended deep inside the United States. What was frightening? They were turning American prisons into terrorist training camps.

Stoke had thought he was moving out of the terrorists' crosshairs when he left Manhattan.

Stokely Jones had finally said good-bye to his hometown of New York City for this beautiful stretch of ocean, and it seemed like he couldn't get enough of it. When his sainted mama had passed, the sale of their old house in Bayside, Queens, and an apartment in LeFrak City had paid for Stoke's penthouse condo in the sky over on Brickell Key. He loved having the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay for his new front yard.

Fancha, his fiancee, a well-known singer and a pretty good song-writer from the Cape Verde Islands, said he loved the ocean because water, all water, even the water he drank, was nature's way of "purifying his soul," whatever the hell that meant. He didn't like her equating his soul with tap water. Mess with my mind, he had told her, but don't go disrespecting my soul.

Stoke hadn't been listening, but apparently Harry had been talking awhile because he now heard the CIA man saying, "… so, anyway, I can't sleep, I'm channel-surfing, and I get this cable show called Black Gay Men Speak Out, which is fine, no problem. God bless 'em. But I'm thinking, why don't they ever, I mean ever, have a show called Straight White Guys Speak Out? Y'know what I'm sayin', Stoke? Think about it. Hell, maybe I'll get some guys, pals of mine, do a pilot. See what happens."

"Can I be on the show? I ain't white, but I'm straight. That's 50 percent. Just shoot me, you know, from the waist up when I come on the set."

Harry looked over at him, shaking his head.

"Why don't you come up with your own show, Stokely? Huh? Is that an idea?"

"I already came up with my show and believe me, you won't be on it."

"Let me ask you a serious question. If you have sex with a prostitute against her will, is that considered rape or shoplifting?"

Stokely looked over at Brock, thinking: In Nam, in the godforsaken brown-water Delta, back in the day, in or out of combat, Harry would have been just the kind of guy Stoke and the other black dudes in his outfit would have seriously avoided.

A good soldier, just one too many shades too white for the brothers. Orange County white is how Stoke saw Harry. From some semi-ritzy development called Santa Rosita, if Stoke remembered it right. "The Town That God Forgot," Harry always called it, making some kind of joke about the place.

You just couldn't completely trust a guy who'd grown up in a gated community.

There had been times, over the years they'd worked together, that Stoke thought Harry Brock was just a complete waste of space. But Brock was a true patriot and a badass and he had saved Stoke's best friend Alex Hawke's life one time in the Amazon jungle. That overcame a whole boatload of Harry's negatives.