Fires of War Read online

  LARRY BOND’S

  FIRST TEAM

  FIRES

  OF WAR

  Forge Books by

  Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice

  Larry Bond’s First Team

  Larry Bond’s First Team: Angels of Wrath

  Larry Bond’s First Team: Fires of War

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  Contents

  Halftitle

  Dedication

  Title

  Copyright Notice

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Act I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Act II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Act III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Act IV

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Act V

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Epilogue

  1

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  LARRY BOND’S FIRST TEAM: FIRES OF WAR

  Copyright © 2006 by Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bond, Larry.

  Larry Bond’s First team : fires of war / Larry Bond and Jim DeFelice.—1st hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-30713-2

  ISBN-10: 0-765-30713-8

  1. Intelligence officers—United States—Fiction. 2. Americans—Korea (North)—Fiction. 3. Nuclear weapons—Korea (North)—Fiction. 4. Korea (North)—Fiction. I. DeFelice, James. II. Title. III. Title: First team : Fires of war. IV. Title: Fires of war.

  PS3552.O59725L39 2006

  796.075—dc22

  2006011717

  First Edition: November 2006

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN 9781429920513

  Author’s Note

  The First Team and the Joint Services Special Demands Project Office are entirely fictional.

  Although the author has relied upon his research into the operations of certain actual nuclear facilities and related entities, the commercial entities, nuclear facilities, and waste sites described in this book are a product of the author’s imagination.

  Dramatis Personae

  FIRST TEAM

  Bob “Ferg” Ferguson

  Sgt. Stephen “Skip” Rankin, U.S. Army

  Sgt. Jack “Guns” Young, U.S. Marines

  Thera Majed

  SUPPORT PERSONNEL

  Col. Charles Van Buren, commander, 777th Special Forces

  Jack Corrigan, mission coordinator

  Lauren DiCapri, mission coordinator

  WASHINGTON

  Corrine Alston, counsel to the president

  Jonathon McCarthy, president of the United States

  Thomas Parnelles, CIA director

  Daniel Slott, deputy director, CIA

  Josh Franklin, assistant secretary of defense

  Senator Gordon Tewilliger

  James Hannigan, legislative assistant to Sen. Tewilliger

  SOUTH KOREA

  Park Jin Tae, businessman

  NORTH KOREA

  General Namgung il-Tan, commander First Armed Forces

  Dr. Tak Ch’o, scientist, Peoples’ Waste Site 1

  ACT I

  Heartless time floats,

  A dream, on and on . . .

  —from “The Seventh Princess,” traditional

  Korean song for the dead

  1

  SICILY

  “Dance?”

  The blonde took a step backward, clutching at the collar of her blouse as if it had been wide open.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Come on. You look like you could use a dance.” Bob Ferguson gestured to the side of the open piazza, where a small jazz band was playing. “They’re playing our song.”

  “This isn’t dance music,
” said the woman stiffly, “and you’re very forward.”

  “Usually I’m not,” Ferguson turned to the woman’s companion and pleaded his case, “but I’m here on holiday. Tell your friend she should dance with me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ferguson laughed and turned back to the blonde. “I’m not going to bite. You’re British, right?”

  “I am from Sweden.”

  “Coulda fooled me.”

  “You’re Irish?”

  “As sure as the sun rises.” He stuck out his hand. “Dance?”

  The woman didn’t take his hand.

  “How about you?” Ferguson asked, turning to the other woman.

  “I’m Greek.”

  “No, I meant, would you dance?”

  Thera Majed hesitated but only for a moment. Then, shrugging to her companion, she stepped over to Ferguson, who immediately put his hand on her hip and waltzed her into the open space near the tables.

  “Hello, Cinderella,” whispered Ferguson. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine. What’s going on?”

  “I felt like dancing.”

  “I’ll bet. What would you have done if Julie accepted your offer?”

  “I would have enjoyed two dances.”

  Ferguson whisked her out of the way of a hurrying waiter.

  “There’s no one else dancing, you know,” said Thera.

  “Really? ’But I only have eyes, for you.’ ” Ferguson sang the last words, grabbing a snatch of a song.

  “Why are you contacting me?”

  “Itinerary’s changed,” he said, spinning her around.

  “What’s up?” she asked as she came back to him.

  “Everything’s being moved forward. Some sort of push by the UN. You’re leaving for Korea in the morning.”

  Ferguson danced her around, improvising a stride slightly quicker than a standard foxtrot to swing with the jazz beat. He’d learned to dance as a teenager in prep school—the only useful subject he picked up there, according to his father.

  “We’re not going to have time to get security people on your team,” he whispered, pulling her back.

  He felt her arms stiffen and started another twirl.

  “You all right, Cinderella?” he asked her, reeling her back in.

  “Of course,” said Thera.

  “We’ll have people standing by. Relief caches will go in while you’re down South, exactly where we’d said they’d be. Plan’s the same; you’re just not going to have anyone on the IAEA inspection team with you.” He stopped and looked at her. “You cool with that?”

  The IAEA was the International Atomic Energy Agency. After two months of training, Thera had been planted on the agency as a technical secretary; her team had just finished an inspection in Libya.

  “I’m OK, Ferg. We shouldn’t make this too obvious, do you think?”

  “Hey, I’m having fun,” he said, leaning her over.

  He glanced toward the Swedish scientist, who was watching them with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and outrage. Ferguson gave the blonde a smile and pulled Thera back up.

  “If you want to bail, call home. We’ll grab you.”

  “I’m OK, Ferg. I can do it.”

  “Slap me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Slap me, because I just told you how desperately I want to take you to bed.”

  “I—”

  “ ’I only have eyes, for you. . .’ ”

  “I won’t,” said Thera loudly. She took a step back and put her hands on her hips. “No.”

  “Come on,” said Ferguson. “We’re obviously meant for each other.”

  Thera told him in Greek that he was an animal and a pig. The first words sputtered. She imagined herself to be the technical secretary she was portraying, not the skilled CIA paramilitary looking for violations of the new Korean nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

  And she imagined Ferguson not to be her boss and the man who had saved her neck just a few months before but a snake and a rogue and a thief, roles he was well accustomed to playing.

  Though he was a handsome rogue, truth be told.

  “Go away,” she said in English. Her cheeks were warm. “Go!”

  “Should I take that as a no?” Ferguson asked.

  Thera turned and stomped to her table.

  She seemed to take that well,” said Stephen Rankin sarcastically when Ferguson got back to the table. “What’d you do, kick her in her shins?”

  “I tried to, but she wouldn’t stand still.” Ferguson sipped from the drink, a Sicilian concoction made entirely from local liquor. It tasted like sweet but slightly turned orange juice and burned the throat going down, which summed up Sicily fairly well.

  “You think she’s gonna bail?” Rankin asked.

  “Nah. Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t think that. I’m asking if you think that.”

  Ferguson watched Thera talking with the Swedish female scientist. He could still smell the light scent of her perfume and feel the sway of her body against his.

  She wasn’t going to quit, but she was afraid. He’d sensed it, dancing with her. But fear wasn’t the enemy most people thought. In some cases, for some people, fear made them sharper, smarter, and better.

  Ferguson thought Thera was that kind of person; she’d certainly done well in Syria, and there was as much reason to be afraid then as there would be in North Korea.

  He jumped to his feet to chase the thought away. “Let’s get going, Skippy.”

  “One of these days I’m going to sock you for calling me Skippy.”

  “I wish you’d try. Let’s get out to the airport.”

  2

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Ms. Alston? Ma’am?”

  Corrine looked up from her computer to see Jess Northrup, poking his head in the doorway.

  “President was wondering if you could wander into his office in about five minutes,” said Northrup, who as an assistant to the chief of staff was the president’s schedule keeper. “Senator Tewilliger’s in there.”

  “Thanks, Jess.” Corrine hit the Save button and stood up. “How’s the car?”

  Northrup’s face, which had been so serious his cheeks looked as if they were marble, brightened immediately. “Paint job over the weekend,” he said. “Assuming matters of state don’t interfere.”

  “You promised me a ride with the top down.”

  “Soon as it’s done.”

  Northrup’s car was a 1966 Mustang convertible he’d started rebuilding soon after Jonathon McCarthy won reelection as senator nearly four years before. McCarthy was now president, but Northrup’s car still lacked key items, among them an engine.

  “Do you have a fresh yellow pad?” she asked her secretary, Teri Gatins, in the outer office.

  “Wandering into the Oval Office?” said Gatins.

  Corrine returned the assistant’s smirk. Having an aide “spontaneously” interrupt him was a favorite McCarthy tactic for cutting short visits from people like Gordon Tewilliger, who were too important and dangerous to blow off but too dense to take all but the most obvious hint that it was time to leave.

  “You have that appointment with Director Parnelles at Langley on Special Demands this afternoon,” said Gatins as Corrine took the notebook. “Should I get you a sandwich?”

  “I’m not really hungry. It’s only eleven.”

  “I’ll get corned beef,” said the secretary, picking up the phone.

  The president’s office was only a few feet down the hall, but in that distance Corrine transformed herself, consciously changing her stride and stare. Senator Gordon Tewilliger was not, technically speaking, an enemy, but he was far from a friend.

  Very far. Though he was a member of McCarthy’s own party, there were strong rumors that he was thinking about launching a primary fight against him. The election was a good three years away, and Tewilliger had steadfastly denied that he was interested in the
job, but even the news-people thought he was testing the water.

  Corrine winked at Northrup, knocked once on the door, and pushed inside.

  “Well, now, if I didn’t know any better, Gordon,” said McCarthy, eyes fixed on Tewilliger, “I might think one or two of those projects there smelled of pork.”

  “Pork?”

  “Pork might not be the proper word in this context.” McCarthy came by his South Carolina accent honestly—his forebears, as he liked to call them, had been in the state since before the revolution—but sometimes it was more honest than others. At the moment it was honest in the extreme.

  “I expect that many of those programs are important programs in their own right,” added McCarthy. “One or two of those highway patrol elements, I believe, should be funded through Transportation. And in a case or two of high priority relating to homeland defense, those items might be added by our budget director, working in close relation with your staff, of course.”

  Senator Tewilliger, who for a moment had felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach, now felt like a man pulled from the ocean. He knew it was partly, perhaps mostly, a game—he’d seen McCarthy operating in the Senate and was well aware how smooth he could be—but still, in that instant he felt grateful, even flattered, that the president was going to help him.

  Then he felt something else: the absolute conviction that he, Gordon Tewilliger, deserved to be the next president of the United States. McCarthy couldn’t be trusted with power like this.

  Corrine cleared her throat. “I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something.”

  “Well, now, Miss Alston, I am always in the middle of something,” said McCarthy. “Isn’t that right, Senator?”

  “Yes. Corrine, how are you?” Tewilliger nodded in Corrine’s direction.

  “Senator Tewilliger and I were just discussing how important the security of Indiana is. He has been doing quite a bit of work to ensure that we do not forget the state in the upcoming homeland defense bill.”

  “Just keeping the home fires burning,” said the senator.

  It occurred to Corrine that, had McCarthy lost his bid for president, she could well be working for Tewilliger right now, as counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee; he had inherited the chairmanship when McCarthy left.

  Then again, she and Tewilliger had clashed in the past, and it was much more likely that he would have fired her. He liked his aides and staffers to be people he could push around.