No Fortunate Son (Pike Logan, #7)(20)
Billings started to grumble when the door opened. Alexander Palmer entered with the same NSC staff weenie from before. He still looked as if he were a rabbit in the wolves’ den.
Kurt waited on President Warren to dismiss him, noticing the man was haggard from sleepless nights. Warren said, “Good enough, Kurt. Have a seat for the update.”
Kurt nodded, understanding without words that the president already knew what was about to be briefed and that it wasn’t going to be good. He thought about expanding on his statements to Billings, conveying the danger the mission was placing on the Taskforce to the only man in the room who really mattered, then thought better of it. He took his seat at the rear of the room.
The staffer booted up his laptop and without any preamble said, “We got this through the White House website contact page. The email address is bogus and the ISP terminates in Guam. We’ve already explored the ISP with in-country assets and got nowhere. It’s clearly a redirect.”
On the screen, Kurt read:
Dear Mr. President. You never answered the question we posed on Reddit, so we have to assume you thought it rhetorical. It wasn’t. You just conducted a strike against a harmless wedding party in Yemen, and because of it, you have forced our hand. We ask once again, are all lives equal? Will you continue such actions when the end result involves something you hold dear? There are seven innocent families weeping over the loss of loved ones in the Sada’a Province. Who will weep in your inner circle from this attack? Nobody. But someone will weep. We promise.
Kurt had read about the strike in his daily intel update. The al Qaida propaganda machine was saying it was a wedding party, which had been picked up in the press, but the intel track had shown a terrorist convoy. It was hard to determine what the convoy actually was, but regardless, inside that convoy had been three definite terrorists, now dead. The chatter afterward had confirmed that. Along with the loss of four civilians with an indeterminate heritage.
The staffer said, “Given the enormous number of comments that are directed at the White House contact page each day, it took over twenty hours for the Reddit thread connection to reach someone who understood the significance. By the time we had begun tracing the digital trail, a package had been delivered to the front gate of the US embassy in Brussels. Inside was a DVD recording and the hands and feet of a human being.”
A low murmur went through the room, and Kurt had a horrible intuition about why the secretary of defense—a principal in the Oversight Council—wasn’t attending.
The screen flipped to an MP4 movie, and the lights went dim. Kurt saw a person hunched in the center, a hood on his head, surrounded by men wearing kaffiyehs that covered their faces, each brandishing an AK-47. There was no sound. The hood was removed, and he saw the secretary of defense’s son. The boy began to cry in silence, and the man to his right held up a section of poster board displaying the words EXPERIENCE THE PAIN.
The man began to flip the poster boards like a high school YouTube video, each one with a different sentence about the casualties of United States policy. The last placard read, AND NOW IT IS YOUR TURN. REAP WHAT YOU SOW.
The man behind the captive raised his barrel, placing it on the back of the boy’s head. There was a second pause, and then he pulled the trigger. The frontal lobe of the skull exploded outward, taking the eye orbit with it in a shower of gore. The secretary of defense’s son fell forward, his mouth open, his jaw the only thing remaining as a human face.
13
Startled gasps filled the room, followed by murmurs. President Warren held up his hand and everyone grew quiet, subdued by the intimacy of the death. Something they ordered often in their duties but now were forced to see in hyperreal detail. It left them dumbstruck.
As if he were talking about the national orange crop, the staffer said, “DNA and fingerprint testing has proven that the body parts delivered in Brussels match Curtis Oglethorpe, Mark Oglethorpe’s son. We believe the video is genuine, as is the Reddit thread and White House comment. Furthermore, we believe that all of the missing have been taken as leverage against our policy of armed counterterrorist drone strikes.”
He finished and looked to Alexander Palmer for guidance on what else to say.
For his part, Palmer looked to the president of the United States.
President Warren said, “Gentlemen, the entire fabric of our country is now under attack. The barbaric method is new and unique, but the outcome is the same. An attack against our ability to defend the nation. And it’s effective. I’ve already given orders for all strikes against terrorist targets to halt immediately. What I want to know is how we’re going to get them back. And barring that, what we’re going to do about it.”
Kurt heard the words, and the enormity of the stakes came home. There would be no evenhanded discussion of how best to use the Taskforce. The administration was going to destroy anything tangentially associated with the video. And after seeing it, Kurt was more than willing to light the fuse.
Ignoring the emotion, Kerry Bostwick, the director of the CIA, said, “So we’re still feeling that it’s an Islamic group?”
Palmer snorted at the question.
Billings said, “Well, what the hell else could it be? The name on the contact is Abu Mustafa, the target of the action is our drone strikes, and the men in the video are clearly Arabic. Yes, it is an Islamic group. We need to focus on transits to Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia. Places where they feel secure. That’s where the hostages are going. That’s where Curtis was killed.”