Primary Command

Somewhere behind him, a lone bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.”

Six young Army Rangers carried the gleaming casket, draped in the American flag, to the open gravesite. Martinez had been a Ranger before he joined Delta. The men looked sharp in their dress greens and their tan berets, but they also looked young. Very, very young, almost like kids playing dress-up.

Luke stared at the men. He could barely think about them. He took a deep breath. He was beat. He couldn’t remember a time—not in Ranger school, not during the Delta selection process, not in war zones—when he had been this tired.

The baby, Gunner, his newborn son… wouldn’t sleep. Not at night, and hardly in the day. So he and Becca weren’t getting any sleep, either. Also, Becca couldn’t seem to stop crying. The doctor had just diagnosed her with postpartum depression, complicated by exhaustion.

Her mom had come out to the cabin to live with them. It wasn’t working. Becca’s mom… where to begin? She had never held a job in her life. She seemed baffled that Luke left every morning to make the long commute to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. She seemed even more baffled that he didn’t reappear until evening.

The rustic cabin, beautifully situated on a small bluff above Chesapeake Bay, had been in her family for a hundred years. She had been going to the cabin since she was a little girl and now acted like she owned the place. In fact, she did own the place.

She was making noises that she, Becca, and the baby should relocate to her house in Alexandria. The hardest part for Luke was that the idea was beginning to seem sensible.

He had started to indulge fantasies of arriving at the cabin after a long day, the place dead silent. He could almost watch himself. Luke Stone opens the old humming refrigerator, grabs a beer, and walks out to the back patio. He’s just in time to catch the sunset. He sits down in an Adirondack chair and…

CRACK!

Luke nearly jumped out of his skin.

Behind him, a seven-man team of riflemen had fired a volley into the air. The sound echoed across the hillsides. Another volley came. Then another.

A twenty-one-gun salute, seven guns at a time. It was an honor that not everyone merited. Martinez was a highly decorated combat veteran in two theaters of war. Dead now, by his own hand. But it didn’t have to be that way.

Three dozen servicemen stood in formation near the grave. A smattering of Delta and former Delta operators stood in civilian clothes further away. You could tell the Delta guys because they looked like rock stars. They dressed like rock stars. Big, broad, in T-shirts and blazers, khaki pants. Full beards, earrings. One guy had a wide, closely cropped Mohawk hairdo.

Luke stood alone, dressed in a black suit, scanning the crowd, looking for something he expected to find: a man named Kevin Murphy.

Near the front was a row of white folding chairs. A middle-aged woman dressed in black was comforted by another woman. Near her, an honor guard made up of three Rangers, two Marines, and an Airman carefully took the flag from the casket and folded it. One of the soldiers lowered to one knee in front of the grieving woman and presented the flag to her.

“On behalf of the president of the United States,” the young Ranger said, his voice breaking, “the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your son’s honorable and faithful service.”

Luke looked at the Delta guys again. One had broken away and was walking alone up a grassy hillside through the white stones. He was tall and wiry, with blond hair shaved close to his head. He wore jeans and a light blue dress shirt. Thin as he was, he still had broad shoulders and muscular arms and legs. His arms seemed almost too long for his body, like the arms of an elite basketball player. Or a pterodactyl.

The man walked slowly, in no particular hurry, as though he had no pressing engagements. He stared down at the grass as he walked.

Murphy.

Luke left the service and followed him up the hill. He walked much faster than Murphy did, gaining ground on him.

There were a lot of reasons why Martinez was dead, but the clearest reason was he had blown his own brains out in his hospital bed. And someone had brought him a gun with which to do it. Luke was about one hundred percent sure he knew who that someone was.

“Murphy!” he said. “Hold on a minute.”

Murphy looked up and turned around. A moment ago, he had seemed lost in thought, but his eyes had come instantly alert. His face was narrow, birdlike, handsome in its own way.

“Luke Stone,” he said, his voice flat. He didn’t seem pleased to see Luke. He didn’t seem displeased. His eyes were hard. Like the eyes of all Delta guys, there was a cold, calculating intelligence in there.

“Let me walk with you a minute, Murph.”

Murphy shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

They fell into step with each other. Luke slowed down to accommodate Murphy’s pace. They walked for a moment without saying a word.

“How are you doing?” Luke said. It was an odd nicety to offer. Luke had gone to war with this man. They had been in combat together a dozen times. With Martinez gone, they were the last two survivors of the worst night of Luke’s life. You would think there’d be some intimacy between them.

But Murphy didn’t give Luke anything. “I’m fine.”

That was all.

No “How are you?” No “Did your baby come?” No “We need to talk about things.” Murphy was not in the mood for conversation.

“I heard you left the Army,” Luke said.

Murphy smiled and shook his head. “What can I do for you, Stone?”

Luke stopped and gripped Murphy’s shoulder. Murphy faced him, shrugging Luke’s hand off.

“I want to tell you a story,” Luke said.

“Tell away,” Murphy said.

“I work for the FBI now,” Luke said. “A small sub-agency within the Bureau. Intelligence gathering. Special operations. Don Morris runs it.”

“Good for you,” Murphy said. “That’s what everybody used to say. Stone is like a cat. He always lands on his feet.”

Luke ignored that. “We have access to information. The best. We get everything. For example, I know you were reported AWOL in early April and were dishonorably discharged about six weeks later.”

Murphy laughed now. “You must have done some digging for that, huh? Sent a mole in to examine my personnel file? Or did you just have them email it to you?”

Luke pressed on. “Baltimore PD has an informer who’s a close lieutenant of Wesley ‘Cadillac’ Perkins, leader of the Sandtown Bloods street gang.”

“That’s nice,” Murphy said. “Police work must be endlessly fascinating.” He turned and started walking again.

Luke walked with him. “Three weeks ago, Cadillac Perkins and two bodyguards were assaulted at three a.m. while entering their car in the parking lot of a nightclub. According to the informer, just one man attacked them. A tall, thin white man. He knocked the two bodyguards unconscious in three or four seconds. Then he pistol-whipped Perkins and relieved him of a briefcase containing at least thirty thousand in cash.”

“Sounds like a daring white man,” Murphy said.

“The white man in question also relieved Perkins of a gun, a distinctive Smith & Wesson .38, with a particular slogan engraved in the grip. Might Makes Right. Of course, neither the attack, nor the theft of the money, nor the loss of the gun was reported to the police. It was just something this informer talked about with his handler.”

Murphy was not looking at Luke.

“What are you telling me, Stone?”

Luke looked ahead and noticed they were approaching the John F. Kennedy gravesite. A crowd of tourists stood along the edge of the two-hundred-year-old flagstones and snapped photos of the fire of the eternal flame.

Luke’s eye wandered to the low granite wall at the edge of the memorial. Just above the wall, he could see the Washington Monument across the river. The wall itself had numerous inscriptions taken from Kennedy’s inaugural address. A famous one caught Luke’s attention:

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU…