Crusader One Read online

  Munn’s eyes sprung open, but he didn’t look over; his face was frozen, as if he’d just heard the voice of a ghost.

  “Jack?” he whispered, keeping his gaze straight ahead.

  “Yeah, Dan. It’s me.”

  Munn turned his head slowly, his eyes wide with what looked more like terror than surprise. “Jack?” he said again, this time with a trembling voice. He blinked hard several times, and looked confused when Dempsey didn’t disappear. “But you’re dead. I saw your coffin in the hangar. I went to the funeral. Kate and Jacob were there . . .”

  “Jack Kemper is dead, my friend, dead and buried,” he said as gently as possible. “You can call me Dempsey now—John Dempsey.”

  Munn’s face turned red, and for a moment, Dempsey thought the man might be having a heart attack. But Munn spun off the stool with speed that took Dempsey by surprise—as did the force with which his fist flew toward the side of Dempsey’s face. He parried the blow with his right forearm, rotated his grip, and clutched Munn’s wrist. He pulled the last of his surviving Tier One SEAL brothers close.

  “Stop it,” he ordered as the surgeon stumbled from the bar stool. “It’s me. Dan, it’s me; I swear to God.”

  Munn shifted into a tactical stance they’d learned in the Teams and glared at him, his glazed and drunken eyes now alive and full of fire.

  “You sick son of a bitch,” Munn said, spittle flying from his lips and his drunken slur now barely noticeable. The surgeon swung again. This time, Dempsey chose not to block the punch; instead, he turned his head just before impact to lessen the blow. Still, he tasted coppery blood as the inside of his cheek split against his teeth. He dropped to a knee, both for effect and also hoping to preempt another blow. Munn needed to get a swing in, but Dempsey wasn’t keen on taking another punch.

  “How could you fucking do that to me, Jack? How could you let me think you were dead? How could you fuckin’ . . .” Munn choked on the words and tears streamed down his cheeks. “I died that day. I died with you and everyone else. I died with Thiel and Spaz and Pablo. My marriage died. You fucking asshole. How could you not tell me you survived?”

  Munn’s fists were balled at his sides, but Dempsey had the sense Munn was done throwing punches for now.

  “What the hell is going on here?” a voice boomed from behind the bar. “Everything okay, Doc?”

  “It’s okay,” Dempsey said, his hands raised to Munn in surrender. He watched as Captain Tony reached under the bar—presumably for the loaded handgun he concealed there. “I’m a friend of Doc Munn’s. Isn’t that right, Dan?” Dempsey asked, rising back to his feet.

  Munn stared back, his eyes full of rage, but said nothing.

  “He don’t look like any friend of yours, mister. So why don’t you get the hell out of here before I call the cops.”

  Munn’s shoulders sagged. Then he dropped to the floor, landing cross-legged before Dempsey. “It’s okay, Tony,” he mumbled to the barkeep. “I know him.” There was a pause, and then Munn looked up, red-eyed. “This man was my friend, but he sure as hell ain’t my friend anymore.”

  Dempsey reached a hand down to the former frogman. “Let’s go grab some breakfast and talk.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “I know, but I’ve got plenty to say to you, and it starts with an apology. I’m sorry for what I just put you through, and I’m sorry for bringing back all the pain. I know how you feel, because I lost everyone, too. And I had to suffer alone, just like you. But now I’m here, and regardless of what you might think, we’re still brothers.”

  “How?” Munn asked. “How’d you pull it off?”

  Dempsey answered the complicated question in a single word. “Jarvis.”

  Munn reached up and let Dempsey pull him to his feet, but then shook his hand free.

  “I’d like to pay his tab,” Dempsey said, turning to the bar owner.

  Captain Tony snorted. “Today’s or the whole thing?”

  Dempsey laughed and looked at Munn, but the man was staring at the floor.

  “The whole thing,” he said and handed over a credit card.

  “Well, you’re sure as shit a friend now,” the big man said with a chuckle, taking the card. “Sorry, Doc,” he added.

  Munn waved his hand over his shoulder but didn’t turn around.

  Dempsey signed the receipt for the $500 tab and added an absurdly generous tip.

  “Shit, make that my new best friend,” Tony said, taking the receipt and handing back his card. “See you tomorrow, Doc.”

  “I doubt it,” Dempsey said with a smile. “Thanks for being a friend to him.”

  “You taking him somewhere?” the bartender asked.

  Dempsey put his arm around Munn’s hunched shoulders, and as he led him out of the bar, he looked over his shoulder and said, “Yeah, I’m taking him home.”

  Munn hissed like some creature of the night and shielded his eyes as they stepped outside into the light of day. Dempsey led the doc to a restaurant across the street and selected a table in the back, seating Munn between him and the door so he could keep his friend’s six clear. The waitress stopped by a beat later, and Dempsey ordered two black coffees and two breakfast scrambles.

  “So, I hear you’re working in a VD clinic,” Dempsey said, breaking the silence.

  “It’s not a fucking VD clinic,” Munn grumbled. “It’s an urgent care center. I take care of all kinds of shit.”

  “Sure, on paper,” Dempsey said, defaulting to the ribbing that had carried them through many a tough mission on the Teams. “But the word on Duvall Street is that if you have the clap, then you go see Doc Munn on the night shift.”

  “Or if you need stitches,” Munn countered, with more than a little irritation.

  “Or have a foreign object wedged in an incompatible orifice.”

  “Or are having a heart attack,” Munn said.

  The coffees arrived, and Munn greedily took a long swallow. Then he looked down, and Dempsey watched him start picking at the gusset stitching along the knee of his Ridgeline pant. The doc was either planning his next zinger or drifting back to his dark place; Dempsey couldn’t tell which.

  “I’m not accusing you of having VD, Dan, just taking care of people with it,” Dempsey said, grinning.

  “Yeah, well, no different than taking care of Spaz back in the day, right?” Munn chuckled before catching himself. Dempsey watched his face cloud over again.

  “Yeah,” Dempsey said and let the silence that followed hang in the air while Munn wrestled his demons. With the massacre of the Tier One SEALs during Operation Crusader, they’d both lost their brotherhood. “It’s okay to remember them,” he said at last. “You just can’t let yourself get sucked down the vortex every time you do.”

  Munn looked up at him, the fog in his eyes now burned completely away by emotional and chemical sobriety. “How did you survive, Jack?” Munn whispered, watching the bartender putting away glasses and restocking her beer fridge for the next onslaught in a few hours. “You were in the TOC in Djibouti. It was hit right after the ambush in Yemen. Everyone was killed. Everyone. How did you manage to get out?” Then, something like an epiphany washed over his face. “Or . . . were you never actually there?”

  “Oh, I was there, all right . . .” Dempsey said, his voice trailing off while he decided what to say next. Certain questions needed to be answered for Munn to be of any value to Ember. The taste of that was bitter—doling out just enough information to ensure his lifelong friend became an asset of value. He swallowed down the revulsion at the cold spook he was becoming and reminded himself that there was a methodology to the madness. The same methodology Shane Smith had used on him. Right now, Munn needed purpose. Right now, Munn needed tough love. It was okay to throw the headshrinker handbook at his friend. If he failed, Munn would end up hunched over on some other bar stool, in some other bar, by some other beach. Dempsey couldn’t let that happen.

  He leaned in, his elbows on the
table, and held Munn’s gaze. “I know you have questions, and I’m gonna answer them as best I can, but first,” he said, and it hurt to have to say it, “I need you to call me Dempsey. I know that’s hard. It’s even harder for me.” He realized as he spoke that it wasn’t as hard as it used to be. In some ways, he barely remembered Jack Kemper, the man he’d been when Munn last saw him. “Call me John, or Dempsey, or JD—but Jack Kemper is dead.”

  “So, you’re a full-fledged fucking Jones now, is that it?” Munn asked.

  The words stung. As SEALs they had both shared a disdain for the spooks who breezed in with their fake names and half-truths and jacked up their Tier One operations. But then Jarvis had pulled back the curtains and let him look at the big picture that had been obscured from him his entire career as an operator.

  Dempsey shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said. “But John Dempsey knows things that Jack Kemper never did. The world don’t work the way we thought it did in the Teams.”

  “Ah, fuck that bullshit. They got you brainwashed, Kemp.”

  “It’s Dempsey, and no, Dan, they don’t. We both felt it before, but we chose to ignore it. Life is easier in black and white. Gray is fucking hard. Besides, do you really think that the people pulling the strings are morons? They’re not. That’s the lie we tell ourselves; it makes us feel better about our notch on the totem pole. At Ember, we can accomplish more in one week to neutralize a threat than we could have accomplished with a whole deployment back in the day.”

  “And you work for Jarvis?” Munn asked, his tone finally taking on a conciliatory note.

  Dempsey leaned back and crossed his legs. “Yep.”

  That would go a long way with Munn. It had with him. Hell, it would with anyone who had ever served under Captain Kelso Jarvis, the legendary SEAL officer and Tier One operator.

  Munn shook his head. “I knew Jarvis wasn’t just saying hi that day in the hospital in Tampa when you were recovering from spine surgery. He was recruiting you even then, huh?”

  The conversation stopped as the waitress walked up carrying their breakfast. As she set the two steaming egg scrambles down in front of them and left, Dempsey let his mind drift back to that day in the hospital. The memory was foggy now, like a fading dream. Had Jarvis been recruiting him? The Skipper had given him a card that day, but he’d been on pain meds, and the nuance of the exchange was probably lost on him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose he might have been—recruiting me for the future. At that time, Ember didn’t even exist. It rose from the ashes of Yemen and Djibouti—the tragedy that was Operation Crusader. I was the only one left alive from our unit to recruit.”

  “So, what do you—what does this Ember—need from me?” Munn asked.

  “I think . . . we need each other, Dan,” Dempsey said. Munn raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “I need you to help grow and develop my team. I need you to round out what is becoming the best frontline defense against the universe of threats trying to bring our country to its knees. Mostly I need you to help me finish what I started—to help me bury the last of the assholes who murdered our brothers.”

  He could tell that his words resonated with Munn, who nodded and straightened a bit in his chair.

  “And what is it that I supposedly need from you?”

  “A reason to get out of bed in the morning,” Dempsey replied.

  Munn nodded; he didn’t even try to argue this time. “So, I would be the medical support for your operational unit in this, this Ember thing?”

  “No,” Dempsey said, shaking his head. “Your surgical skills and trauma experience will be invaluable, obviously. As will your scientific mind. Baldwin will love you, by the way,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Who’s Baldwin?”

  “We’ll get to that if you decide to move forward,” Dempsey said, holding up a hand. “We are an insanely small task force and don’t have the luxury of having anyone just hanging out in case someone gets hurt. So no, I’m recruiting you for something above and beyond med support. We need your skills as an operator and your mind as a tactician every bit as much as we need your surgical skills.”

  Munn took that in as Dempsey’s thoughts drifted back to the terrorist attack in the Old Town Market in Omaha six months ago. Dan Munn the combat surgeon would have been the perfect teammate at his side that day. Yes, the future held an unlimited number of prospects for a man like Munn.

  “Wait . . . I would function as an operator?”

  Dempsey nodded. “Operator, field medic, tech guru, intelligence analyst, spy—everyone on the team cross-trains to wear multiple hats.”

  “I don’t know, dude,” Munn said with a sigh. “In case you’ve forgotten, it’s been a while since I kitted up. This body ain’t the same one I took down range back in the day. I’m fucking old, bro.”

  “Naaaah, old is a state of mind. Look at me.”

  “Yeah, look at you,” Munn said and laughed. “You’re forty, right?”

  “Thirty-fucking-nine, thank you very much,” Dempsey growled. “And I’m in peak physical condition . . . for a man my age.”

  They both were laughing hard now.

  The waitress returned, tossing her hair and smiling. “Can I get you beautiful men something harder to drink? A Bloody Mary maybe?”

  Dempsey smiled up at her. “Just more coffee,” he said, glancing at Munn to gauge just how strong the pull for alcohol may have become. Munn just nodded, lost in thought. She filled their mugs and left the brown plastic pot behind this time.

  “What about oversight?” Munn asked, leaning in, his voice enthusiastic and conspiratorial now.

  “We work directly for Jarvis.”

  “And what paper-pushing pogue does he report to?”

  “Direct line to the Director of National Intelligence,” Dempsey said. “No red tape. No bullshit. Ember is off the grid. It’s far more secret than even the Tier One. There’s no glass prison. No information blackout. We have the autonomy and the budget to get shit done—on time, on target.”

  “And you guys are hunting down the assholes who wiped out our brothers?”

  Dempsey nodded. “Among other things, yes.” If it were up to him, they would do nothing else but hunt down the enemy who had killed their brothers. But that was not how it worked.

  “Have you gotten any of them?”

  Dempsey smiled broadly. “Oh yeah. And we recently bagged a blast from the past who killed another buddy of ours.”

  “Who?”

  “Romeo.”

  Munn’s eyes widened. “You killed Mahmood Bin Jabbar?” he said, clearly astonished. “After all these years?”

  “When we found him, he was using a different name and fighting under the ISIS flag, but we bagged him and his friends, disrupting a massive terror attack here in the States.”

  “That shit in Nebraska and Atlanta? That was you guys? They said it was an FBI task force.”

  “That’s our MO,” he said. “It’s just like the old days in the Tier One. We can’t take credit for shit we do since Ember doesn’t exist. Right?”

  “Right,” Munn said, nodding. He locked eyes with Dempsey. “Okay, count me in. What now?”

  Dempsey took a deep breath and then said, “Before we get on the plane, I need you to be sure. There’s no going back from Task Force Ember. I can’t read you in, unless you’re all in.”

  “I work at a VD clinic, remember? There’s nothing here to go back to.” The SEAL-turned-surgeon held out his hand and Dempsey grasped it.

  “You’re sure?”

  “One hundred percent,” Munn said. “I’m in, Mr. Dempsey. All in.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Парк имени Гагарина (Gagarin Park)

  Simferopol, Crimea

  April 8

  0130 Local Time

  Never underestimate the power of murder. It is the ultimate tool, but one rife with contradiction. For those with political agendas, it can be used as either a catalyst or as a suffocant. For those seeking
power, it can be used to destroy the status quo or to preserve it. And for men like us to survive, our quarries must die. Fail to understand the nature of murder and you will never achieve mastery of our craft.

  That was what the Russian had said to him after confiscating his gun and mobile phone and kicking him out of the Renault hatchback miles from the park where his final assignment awaited. Dispatch the target and his training was over. Fail, and he wasn’t sure what would happen to him. This was not a business of second chances, and back in Tehran, his uncle was growing impatient.

  He wasn’t surprised that Arkady had taken his gun and his phone. The Russian spymaster was a product of the Cold War and a devout disciple of the old ways. Reliance on technology and firepower makes for a lazy, stupid spy, the old bear liked to say. At the moment, Cyrus Modiri was inclined to agree, because he desperately wished he had both items back in his possession. He’d spent the last three weeks being drilled and tested on how to dispatch an enemy with weapons of opportunity. It only made sense that this mission would test his cunning and creativity rather than the rote application of firearms, knives, and explosives. Arkady had given him no choice but to embrace the impotency of his circumstances and figure out how to use it to his advantage. It was up to him to find strength in weakness, and over the past hour he had seized an ironic opportunity the universe offered him to do just that.

  He glanced down at the toy poodle tethered to him via an eye-rolling, gaudy leash—white patent leather studded with faux jewels. The dog was walking in fits and starts, always stopping and looking back, insecure and uncertain in the relationship with its new master. The dog looked up at him now, open mouthed, and wagged its furry white tail expectantly. Cyrus tossed the creature a treat, which it snatched in midflight. The dog, whose name he did not know, had stopped barking and pulling thirty minutes ago. Its allegiance and obedience had been obtained easily with a single silencing blow to establish dominance, followed by measured affection and periodic food rewards. The animal was his now, despite how initially upset it had been watching its previous owner murdered in front of it.