Chapter 2
Twelve hours earlier
I saw Jennifer appear on the beach side of the Windjammer bar. She glanced around, then started sauntering up the wooden stairs.
Dressed in a bikini top and a pair of cutoff jeans, she had a ballcap on her head, her blond hair through the hole in the
back, her flip-flops slinging beach sand with each step.
Behind me I heard someone say, “Holy shit, this is going to be funny!”
I turned away from the computer monitor and said, “Creed, one more word and I’m going to slap that smile off your face.”
Creed’s face grew comically serious, and I glanced at Knuckles, my second-in-command. He was grinning too. I winked at him,
because honestly, I was working hard to suppress my own smile. I said, “How’s Amena doing?”
“She’s acting like a pro. Born to do this stuff.”
“Commo okay? Glasses working?”
“Yeah, glasses are working fine. So’s the commo, but I wish it wasn’t. She won’t shut up on the net.”
I said, “Yeah, I warned you about that. She thinks she’s Jane Bond.”
I turned back to the monitor, watching Jennifer enter the bar. I switched to our internal camera and immediately saw it was
cockeyed, with only half the table in view and the screen crooked. I shook my head and said, “Didn’t you test this view before
go time?”
Creed said, “That’s their job, isn’t it? I mean, they emplaced them.”
I turned to him and said, “I know it’s their training evolution, but you’re their team leader. It’s your job to make sure they’re meeting the standard.”
Creed looked crestfallen and I moved to soften the blow, saying, “It’s okay. We can still see the table and the Wi-Fi connection’s
good.”
It wasn’t fair to ding him too much because he wasn’t really a ground-force team leader, although this entire training event
was his idea. Bartholomew Creedwater was the team lead for our network operations cell—which was a polite way of saying he
was a hacker. Formerly a black hat, now a white hat, it was his job to staff and train the NOC, which was ordinarily done
solely behind a desk, but I’d let him go on a real mission once because we needed him on the ground, and he’d never forgotten
it.
He’d come to me with an idea for an exercise, where he’d take his newfound eggheads and put them out in the field to give
them a taste of what they were supporting.
I usually brushed anything he said about operations right into the trash can if it didn’t involve something like hacking an
ISIS sleeper cell, but his idea piqued my interest. I don’t know how many times I’d been given some gadget designed by the
NOC only to discover it wasn’t useful in the real world of clandestine operations. From counterfeit Armani belts embedded
with beacons that looked more like a weight belt for underwater operations, to gadgets with screens that were so bright you
couldn’t operate them without compromise after sundown, it might be useful to give the eggheads a taste of what we did to
help them with their next genius invention. And it sure as shit would be fun.
I’d taken the idea to our boss, George Wolffe, broaching a small exercise with the new egghead hires in my hometown of Charleston,
South Carolina. He was an old-school paramilitary officer from the CIA, so I leaned heavily into the operational aspects of
synchronizing the grunt on the ground with the hackers in the rear, highlighting that I’d used Creed on a mission before and
this was his idea.
As expected, he’d immediately balked, saying, “You just want to screw with them.”
Which, honestly, was a little true—but it would pay dividends.
I said, “No, sir, come on. Knowing what goes on with operations has helped Creed, and it will do the same for the new guys
to see what we do on the ground. I’m not talking about turning them into Operators, just giving them a taste of operations.”
“So you want to run an Omega exercise in Charleston for support personnel? Sorry, that ain’t happening.”
I held up my hands saying, “No, no, I’m not talking about having them do a hit. Just a little Alpha mission, using their tech
gear.”
We named each phase of an operation a different Greek letter, starting with Alpha for what the Pentagon brass would call operational
preparation of the battlespace, and we’d just call initial poking around, and ending with Omega, which the brass would call
a “kinetic endpoint,” and we’d call thumping some terrorist on the head.
He said, “Even so, we’ve already budgeted for this year’s exercises, and that’s not in it. I’ve got two full mission profiles
OCONUS next month and don’t have any assets to develop a CONUS one. No role players, no cover development, no nothing.”
“Sir, we don’t need role players. These guys are brand-new and they’ve never met my team. I’ll use them as role players with Creed as controller. All you’ll have to pay for is per diem while they’re there. No other Taskforce
assets.”
“And the cover development?”
“I’ll handle that. I live there, and we’re not doing anything overt. No breaching charges, no takedowns. Just surveillance.”
I could see I was swaying him, but he still wasn’t convinced. He threw out the final trump card, like I knew he would. “Still
can’t, Pike. The Oversight Council will never approve. They’re already skittish about OCONUS exercises. No way in hell will
they allow one here, on US soil.”
The Oversight Council was a board of thirteen members—both in and out of government—who oversaw our charter.
Since Taskforce missions were most definitely outside the bounds of the United States constitution, by the charter we were forbidden from operating on United States soil, and while an exercise wasn’t exactly “operating” on US soil, it still would give them fits.
I had known Wolffe would go there, and was ready.
“Don’t tell them we’re doing it.”
“What? Come on, Pike. I know you like running amok, but that’s a bridge too far even for you.”
He turned to walk away, figuring the conversation was over, and I pulled his sleeve, saying, “Do you have to tell them every
time an Operator goes to the range to shoot?”
He squinted his eyes at me, knowing I was going somewhere, but not sure of the destination. He said, “No.”
“Well, when Creed’s testing new kit from the NOC, do you get permission first from the Council?”
“No, of course not.”
“When they do the test, is it in a lab, or do you let them run around in DC, getting real-world results?”
I already knew the answer. Washington, DC, was such a mess on the electromagnetic spectrum, with every embassy in town trying
to intercept phone calls, bug conference rooms, remotely implant spyware, and every other manner of penetration that the network
operations center could test whatever they wanted without a spike. They didn’t ask for permission, they just did it.
He said, “I let them test in the city, but that’s not what you’re asking for here.”
“It is, really. They’re going to be testing kit, only in Charleston and in an operational manner—which is how it should be
tested anyway. It’s the same thing. The Oversight Council doesn’t even have to know.”
He stuttered for an answer to that, but I knew George Wolffe had a fatal flaw: he never wanted to tell the man in the arena
no. As long as I gave him an answer to every problem, he’d give me the go-ahead.
Wolffe considered for a moment more, then said, “Alright Pike. Per diem and nothing more. And if you get rolled up by the Charleston PD, expect to pay your own bail.”
Yes!
Which is how, exactly one month later, I was watching my wife dressed as a surfer saunter into a beach bar.