Promise To Defend

“Of course,” Barrins said, a tremor audible in his voice.

Campbell watched as Barrins ground out his cigarette and settled his forearm on the armrest, bringing his fingertips closer to the pistol’s butt. Before it all was over, Campbell knew he’d make a play for his gun. It didn’t matter. He had the bastard dead to rights. He could’ve killed him before, but he wanted to drag it out. Toy with the little troll before taking him out.

“You’ve been with us how long now, Jonas? Ten years?”

“Twelve. I’ve been with you twelve years. I joined shortly before—” he caught himself, nearly choking on the words “—I mean, before the change,” he said, referring to the elder Campbell’s death.

Campbell leaned back in his chair, not letting his eyes drift from Barrins’s.

“The President asked that we bring you aboard, as a personal favor to him. From my father’s standpoint, that was good enough. My father trusted the Man. He trusted you. Implicitly, I might add. I trusted you, too, after he died. It was the way I honored his memory.”

“Thank—”

Campbell silenced him with a gesture. “Let me finish. What my father created, what his father created before him, is vital to national security. The Cadre is the only thing that stands between anarchy and the government’s continued operation, should the country suffer a decapitating strike.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do. Many in Washington consider us a cold war relic. They believe I’ve overstepped my bounds, selling arms to raise money and assassinating those I deem a threat to national security. The President wants to pull the plug on the entire operation. Do you know why this operation has succeeded since 1954?”

“Because—”

“Because of loyalty. Unlike other covert programs, we’ve built in a certain level of loyalty—security, if you will—by keeping this a multigenerational project. Most of the men and women working for the Cadre are third or fourth generation. They’ve been raised from their youth, trained in warfare, politics, medicine, agriculture, to step in and take over the country should something happen.

“We’re what the media likes to call a ‘shadow government.’ And we maintained security by keeping to ourselves, never bringing aboard outsiders. We often went into the real world, worked at companies, fought in wars, lived in regular society, but we always came back. This system always worked. We remained a secret to all but a handful of legislators and administration officials.”

Barrins squirmed in his chair. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Where are you going with all this?” he blurted, his voice taut.

Campbell smiled. “Where? Where, indeed? As you know, I file reports with the President. I let him know where things are. I don’t tell him about the illegal weapons sales. I don’t tell him when I kill a high-ranking Chinese or North Korean official. Yet he knows these things and it puzzles me. So much so, in fact, that I had to sit back and think. I had to ask myself, ‘Who had the most to gain from betraying me?’”

Barrins’s piggish eyes began darting right, left, looking everywhere but at Campbell.

“After that, I took it a step further. My father was assassinated, I believe, by the very government we serve. And if that same government infiltrated the Cadre with a rogue agent, what might that person do. Kill me, perhaps?”

“Surely you don’t think…” Barrins protested.

“I don’t think,” Campbell said. “I know.”

He mashed a button under his desk with a boot-clad toe.

The door behind Barrins opened and a man entered the room.

His hand dwarfed the SIG-Sauer P220 he carried. Barrins clawed for his weapon. He emitted a small whimper as he realized he’d never complete the move.

The bigger man’s handgun cracked twice, the bullets drilling through the seat’s backrest and into Barrins. His body seized up and he gagged. Blood frothed at his lips as they worked soundlessly.

“You see, Barrins,” Campbell continued, as though the words still registered with the dying man. “I looked at two things, ability and motive. You had access to the most critical intelligence. I fed you some of it as a test. The rest you stole with good, old-fashioned tradecraft, particularly hacking into our most secure servers and drilling your subordinates for information. Your motive? Well, you’re a kiss-ass, a weak-willed kiss-ass and you couldn’t help but please the President. I’m sure money changed hands, too. But I think that was secondary.”

Barrins shifted around in his chair. Struggling fingers grasped his Beretta’s grip. The SIG-Sauer cracked once more and a bullet cored into Barrins, shattering his spine before exiting his stomach and lodging itself into Campbell’s armored desk.

Campbell shook his head, made a clucking noise with his tongue. “Poor, misguided bastard,” he said. “He just didn’t understand who he was fucking with.” With a gesture, he beckoned the shooter to step from the shadows and enter the library. “Ellis?”

The big man took a couple more steps into the room, holstering the side arm as he did.

“Sir?”

“Let the others know. This betrayal changes nothing. Nothing. Soon it will be a different world. I don’t care what it takes to create it, we will have a different world. Let everyone know that.”

“Gladly,” Ellis White said.

Mexico

CONCLUDING HIS PRAYERS, Hassan Salih stuffed his weathered copy of the Koran into his pocket, then checked his wristwatch. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. It was time.

He rose to his feet. Dusting off the seat of his pants with his right hand, he hefted his canvas duffel bag and slung its carrying strap over his shoulder. After spending hours crammed inside the sweltering tunnel, breathing the dust-laden air as they sat in stony silence, the sudden burst of movement grabbed the attention of the others. They all turned to regard him.

He met their expectant gazes and said, “Come, brothers. It is time to perform God’s work.”

Still silent, the others stood, shouldering their gear bags as they rose. Turning, Salih started down the narrow passage, which was carved into the desert floor. From what he’d been told, the tunnel had been dug by a Mexican drug cartel and used for transporting narcotics into America and cash south of the U.S. border.

This night it was to be used to smuggle something much deadlier. He and his fellow warriors had come to the United States looking to draw blood from the Americans. As with many of the men accompanying him, Salih was young, just twenty-six years old. He’d graduated from university in Riyadh four years earlier, armed with a degree in Islamic studies but sentenced to a life of state-sponsored welfare. Humiliation and rage seemed to be his most constant companions as he’d searched for meaningful work, but to no avail. With nothing but time on his hands, he’d spent his days in religious schools, studying the Koran, deepening his faith, speaking with others who shared his anger and frustration over the circumstances he and his brothers faced.

Part of the blame, he knew, lay with his own country’s government. The royal family was as addicted to Western money as America was to his homeland’s oil. The Saudi rulers encouraged immigrants—men and women from Pakistan and other Muslim nations—to take jobs that rightfully should go to the Saudis.

But it was America that propped up the royal family, supporting it with weapons and money, even as the Saudi people continued sinking into an ever-deeper quagmire of humiliation and rage. Meanwhile, the royal family with its palaces, private jets and portfolios of American stocks ignored the rage simmering all around it. It continued to do business with a country that sold weapons to the Israelis, which in turn, used them to hunt and murder other Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Fortunately a few true believers within the government still understood the plight of the Arab people. They had been more than happy to give him the money he needed to travel to training camps in Afghanistan where he’d learned to shoot and fight. God had blessed him, placing him in Afghanistan as the United States had brought in its damnable weapons to overthrow the Taliban. Salih had watched several of his friends die under the onslaught of machine-gun fire and so-called daisy cutter bombs unleashed from America’s flying warships. Though a piece of him died each time a comrade fell, he’d held on to the anger, using it to fuel his battle against the Americans.

When it became apparent that Afghanistan was largely a lost cause, he’d traveled to Waziristan, the territory along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. From there he’d traveled to Iraq, only too eager to engage the enemy again. In Afghanistan, he’d found himself in the unfortunate position of battling against warriors from the Northern Alliance. But in Iraq, he’d been blessed to engage the real enemy, the Americans, face-to-face. Using a rocket-propelled grenade, his aim guided by God, he’d downed a Black Hawk helicopter, killing five American soldiers. His rejoicing had come to an abrupt end when, a few days later, he’d taken a bullet in the chest, forcing him to be smuggled out of the country and into a Syrian hospital for treatment. After that, he’d heard that his name and face had become known to the Americans, forcing him to abandon the Iraqi conflict to avoid arrest. It wasn’t that he feared death. Quite the contrary; he feared being taken alive, where he could potentially be co-opted into helping the Americans and potentially destroying all he held dear. Unwilling to let that happen, he’d moved to Paris.

During his time in Europe, he’d prayed many times a day for the chance to exact revenge on the Americans in their own land. During his time in France, he’d been approached by recruiters from the Arm of God, a group of like-minded warriors ready to exact revenge on the West for its transgressions in the Middle East. Once he’d agreed to join, things had moved quickly for him and the other recruits. There’d been more training in Somalia, not just weapons and assassination techniques, but lessons on American culture and speech training to nearly eliminate what Westerners would consider an accent.

Since he’d joined the group, he’d found a seemingly endless stream of money and weapons. For that, he considered himself truly fortunate, a humble warrior handed a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

He would repay God for the opportunity by killing as many Americans as possible and facing his own death with pride, courage.

He walked the next half mile or so keenly aware of the excitement buzzing in his stomach as he anticipated the upcoming events. As he moved, he cast the flashlight’s white beam over the narrow passage. He heard the steady, plodding footsteps of his fellow warriors and the occasional frenzied scratching of a rodent scurrying away. The light hit a wall, indicating the tunnel’s end. To his left, he saw a ladder that led into a small farmhouse on the American side of the border.

Reaching the ladder, he extinguished the light, shoved it into the back pocket of his blue jeans and grabbed for the first rung.

At the top of the ladder was a trapdoor fitted with two locks. When the top of his head came within a few inches of the door, he reached inside the breast pocket of his shirt, felt around until he located a pair of keys. Slipping one key into the lock farthest from him, he gave it a twist, but left it in the keyhole. Following the same procedure with the second lock, he felt his breath hang in his throat as he turned the key. According to his contact in Mexico, a biker named Ed Stephens, the door was fitted with an explosive charge set to detonate if the locks weren’t opened in a certain order and the keys left in place. Grasping the handle, he gingerly pushed the door open and breathed a sigh of relief when it came free without incident.

Within minutes he had exited the tunnel. His comrade, Jamal Hejazi, a short man with unkempt hair and narrow shoulders, stood at his side.

“We should look around,” Salih said, “while the others unload the equipment.”

Hejazi nodded.