The Ascendant: A Thriller Read online

  Frye bent low over the bed. Garrett could smell the coffee on his breath. “Is that supposed to be funny? Because it’s not.” He turned to Alexis, waving his hand in the air. “Close up this office.” He pointed to Celeste and Bingo. “Send the civilians home. The lieutenant goes to the War College. And you get yourself back to Bolling, where you can do some good, ASAP.”

  Frye marched toward the door. Lefebvre stepped forward. “Sir, if you could see your way to giving us one more chance. I believe we are beginning to do some good—”

  The secretary cut him off. “You can do good other places. And speak out of turn to me again and I will bust you to private. I don’t care how rich your daddy is.”

  Lefebvre’s face reddened. He saluted stiffly. “Sir, yes sir.”

  “The U.S. military can fight any war, any time,” the secretary said, leaving the room. “We train our own just fine, thank you very much.”

  “Your officers are morons.”

  The secretary froze. He turned slowly and reentered the room. “What did you just say?”

  Garrett staggered to his feet and fumbled for his bottle of Vicodin. He stuffed a pair in his mouth and dry-swallowed them. “I said, I can outthink any Army officer, outmaneuver any Marine commandant, on any field of battle, any time you want.”

  “All of a sudden you think you’re a field commander? Spend a few days at a Marine base and you think you can fight a war?”

  “Not me, personally. But I can lead troops. And I’ll make sure they take down your best.”

  “Garrett,” Alexis said, edging toward the bed, “the secretary is—”

  “You suggesting we put you in charge of a field exercise? A battle simulation?”

  “You can stack the odds. Five to one. Ten to one. I don’t care. But I’ve seen how these Marines are trained to fight. And I can take them to pieces.”

  “That’s preposterous. But even if it weren’t, why should I give you a second chance?”

  “Because you know—deep down inside, you know—that you don’t really have any idea of what you’re dealing with. And you suspect that I just might.”

  Silence enveloped the room. Secretary of Defense Frye stared at Garrett, blue eyes level and focused, for a good quarter of a minute. Then he said, “Tomorrow morning. Oh-five hundred. I’ll get a Marine colonel to set the sides. Win and you get to keep going. Lose and you get a court-martial. Drug use, assault and battery. You’ll spend the next ten years in a military prison.”

  Frye pushed past Alexis and Bingo and marched out of the room. Celeste, Bingo, and Jimmy Lefebvre stared, wide-eyed, at Garrett.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Alexis asked.

  “Guess so,” Garrett said, feeling at his ribs. “But I figured it was worth a shot.”

  36

  CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 9, 5:42 AM

  The sun lay just below the San Jacinto Mountains. The air was still. The yelp of a coyote broke the predawn quiet in a shallow ravine that wound its way down from the peaks of the scrubby Peninsula Range. Marine Corporal Jonathan Miller peered through the night-vision scope on his M4 carbine, scanning the low brush that ran off into the distance. He picked up the distinct green heat signature of a deer, then another one, but that was all. Nobody was moving up the arroyo toward Miller or his fire team. The enemy was not on the move. Which left an opening for Miller, and he told his squad leader as much.

  “Clear below us to two clicks.” Miller keyed his walkie-talkie and waited for the response.

  “Roll down to the next way station and hold for my command.”

  Corporal Miller waved his arm and made his way down the slope of the canyon. Behind him, twelve Marines rose up out of the scrub and followed silently. Miller checked the flanks of the canyon around him, and sure enough, two more squads of Marines, all part of the 1st Marine Regiment—Inchon, they were called, after the regiment’s heroics in the Korean War—appeared like ghosts out of the brush and moved toward lower ground. They were a rifle platoon, ground combat elements of the 1st Marines, headquartered at Camp Pendleton. Grunts. The shock team of the U.S. military. And they were about to inflict some serious shock on their fellow Marines, Miller thought to himself. On the poor suckers who had to fight for that asshole with the attitude. The jerk-off who had sucker-punched a Marine at Tio’s in Oceanside, and then got his butt beat by all the other grunts in the bar. Put his sorry ass in the hospital.

  Who picks a fight with a Marine in a Marine bar? A retard first class, that’s who.

  Miller’s team, back from its third tour of duty in Afghanistan, had jumped at the chance to participate in this morning’s field exercise. They were battle-tested hard-core shit-kickers, and they were more than happy to prove that to anyone who doubted them. And to make it even sweeter, rumor had it that the secretary of defense himself was monitoring the simulation back at field HQ. That would be some shit—winning a field exercise with the SecDef watching. Miller would tell his grandkids about that.

  And they would win this field exercise pronto. They had two rifle companies, a weapons platoon, two Super Cobra helicopter gunships, and a fleet of Humvees, all matched up against one puny rifle platoon. Thirty-six Marines. Led by the asshole bar fighter. Who were trying to hold a bunkered encampment between Miller’s position and the highway that ran through the middle of the camp. Good luck to them. It would be over by dawn.

  “Flanking maneuver. Coordinate GPS systems,” came the word from the company captain. The captain was in a field tent, on a hilltop, five kilometers behind them, supervising the exercise. Maybe, Miller thought, the SecDef is with him. Hot damn.

  Miller squatted in a dry riverbed. The three other men in his fire team settled in next to him. Miller broke out his GPS and plotted the course. The enemy’s bunkered encampment was three kilometers due south of his position. They could follow the dry riverbed, unseen, right to the edge of the encampment. Then the platoon would split into threes, encircle the encampment, and take the place with overwhelming force. The captain would call in air support when they were within 500 yards, effective firing distance for the M4 carbines his team carried. Standard procedure. Nothing fancy. Corner and kill.

  Corporal Miller radioed the other team leaders. “Everybody have the objective on GPS? Latitude 33.315037. Longitude minus 117.409859.”

  “Roger that.”

  “On it.”

  Miller turned to his team. “We’re point. Expect ambushes. That’s their only chance.”

  A young private squinted toward the faint light that was gathering over the mountains to his left. “They ambush us, we die.”

  Corporal Miller stashed his handheld GPS. “No. That’s the beauty. We got a whole ’nother company shadowing us. Alpha Company. They ambush us, Alpha ambushes them. Game over.”

  “No shit,” the private said. “I thought we only had two companies. I read that in the exercise parameters.”

  “Well, the parameters lied.” Miller smiled. “You can’t trust the planners. Overwhelming force is a bitch. And war is hell.”

  Corporal Miller’s team jogged quickly down the riverbed, stopping every hundred yards or so to check the GPS and reorient. Two platoons followed, tramping wordlessly in the dust. In twenty minutes they had closed to within 500 yards of the target. The sky to the east was fully orange now. In another twenty minutes it would be light out. The time to strike was now.

  Corporal Miller hissed into his microphone: “Captain, sir, we have not encountered any bogies. No ambushes. No sign of them.”

  The captain’s disembodied voice crackled over the walkie: “They’re waiting for a frontal assault. Proceed as discussed. Over.”

  Miller walked back along the line of Marines stretched out a hundred yards behind him, and tapped the fire team corporals, telling them each the same command: “You know the drill. Flank the objective. Wait for gunship fire suppression. Then take the position.” He walked back to the head of his team.

  “Let’s go.”

  Corporal Mill
er broke his men into a full run as they circled the encampment along the bottom of the dry riverbed. Using his GPS as a guide, he spread his men out around the objective, one man every twenty yards or so. When he reached the far edge of the bed, 180 degrees opposite the rest of the company, with the encampment between them, he dropped down and called in to his captain. “We’re in place and ready for air support.”

  “Roger that. Three minutes.”

  Miller settled down to wait. He’d barely had time to sip his water and check the night scope on his carbine when he heard the telltale thudding of the helicopter rotors. The Cobras, two of them, roared up from the ocean, and hovered, thirty feet off the ground, just beyond Miller’s view. Miller popped up from the riverbed, raised his binoculars, and took his first real look at the objective.

  It was a pair of cinder-block structures, both one story high, with corrugated tin roofs, meant to simulate a peasant home in Iraq or Afghanistan. A ring of razor wire encircled the huts. The captain’s voice rang out on the radio: “Corporal. Air support in place. On your mark to destroy.”

  Miller scanned the encampment. No movement. They had to be in there. Or maybe they had scattered out into the brush first thing? The exercise had started at 0500, so they would have had time to disappear into the wilderness. Didn’t matter. He was about to give the go-ahead to simulate destruction of the shacks when he saw movement in a doorway. A man stepped out of the shack and into the open. Immediately, Miller raised his rifle and sighted him. Dead. Recorded in the chip in his scope. A corresponding device in the killed soldier’s rifle should have chirped, alerting the Marine that he was now officially a casualty of the exercise.

  But the Marine outside of the hut kept walking. Miller lowered his rifle and took up his binoculars again. The man was waving his hands. And he wasn’t in uniform. In fact, Miller found it hard to believe that he was a Marine at all. He was dark-skinned, wearing a sweatshirt, and potbellied, as wide around the middle as he was tall. And he was not a tall man. Five foot two, Miller guessed.

  “Corporal Miller? Your word?”

  “Uh. Hold off, sir. Something’s up.”

  “Come again, Corporal?”

  “There’s a noncombatant at the objective.”

  “Not possible, Corporal. The objective was swept by MPs right before the exercise. Only Marines in there. You are mistaken.”

  “Well,” Miller said, looking through the binoculars. “I don’t think this guy is a Marine.” Behind the squat, fat man, another man stepped out of the shack. And then another, and another, a dozen in all, one after the other, all with their hands above their heads. A few of them were women, and Miller could have sworn two were kids.

  “Sir, are you watching on the Cobra cameras?”

  “I am now, Corporal. Halt the exercise and find out who the hell those people are!”

  “Will do.”

  Corporal Miller signaled the rest of his platoon to move onto the mesa surrounding the shacks. The Marine regiment moved slowly, guns drawn, across the open ground and to the edge of the razor wire. The Cobra gunships moved off another two hundred yards, kicking up dust farther from the encampment. When Miller got within twenty yards of the shacks, he blinked twice, trying to register the reality of what he saw in front of him. There were a dozen people, all Asian, ranging in age from elderly to maybe ten years old, wrapped up in sweatshirts and down vests. One of them was sipping coffee. A young woman was cradling a baby in an over-the-shoulder snuggly. A teenager was filming the whole thing on his cell phone.

  “Who are you?” Miller shouted at them.

  The portly man smiled and waved Miller closer. He yelled, “Can’t hear you!”

  Miller moved closer, as did the ring of Marines—fifty in all—who surrounded the shack. “I said who are you and what the hell are you doing here?”

  The portly man bowed slightly. “I’m Leonard Chang. We are the Chang family. We own the King Fu Chinese restaurant in Oceanside.”

  Miller recognized the man immediately. He’d seen him at King Fu any number of times, wandering the tables, smiling, seeing if the food and service were up to snuff. King Fu was his favorite Chinese restaurant outside of New York City.

  “We have coffee for you,” Leonard Chang said. He motioned to a pair of men, who darted into the shacks and came out with platters crammed with styrofoam cups filled with steaming coffee. “For all of you,” Leonard said. He waved the Marines closer. A dozen moved closer and grabbed cups of java.

  “But how did you get here?” Miller asked.

  “Garrett Reilly asked us to come. He paid us one hundred dollars per person. He said this was a war game. Is he right?”

  A chill ran down Corporal Miller’s spine. Garrett Reilly was the douche nozzle from the bar. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie. Leonard Chang flashed a cell phone at him. “This is a war game, right? Garrett told me to tell you that this cell phone is a pretend detonator.”

  Corporal Miller winced. Oh shit. He keyed his microphone, but he knew it was too late. They’d been tricked. He yelled, “Sir, we got hosed! We’re at the wrong place!”

  Leonard Chang smiled at the Marine Corporal: “He told me to tell you that I am a suicide bomber. And I just blew you up. You’re all dead. That was fun, huh?”

  37

  FORWARD OPERATING HQ, CAMP PENDLETON, APRIL 9, 6:58 AM

  Captain Anthony Marsden screamed into his microphone: “Cobras, lift off! Get the fuck out of there this instant!” The flaps of the field tent practically vibrated with the intensity of the captain’s rage. His support staff, a dozen lieutenants and sergeants, winced at his profanity. The secretary of defense was standing in a corner, behind them, watching silently. He would not be happy. A second lieutenant peeked at the SecDef over his shoulder. Even in the gloomy darkness, the lieutenant could see that his blue eyes were radiating deep, deep disappointment.

  Alexis Truffant, on the other hand, wanted to laugh out loud. She had been standing at the secretary’s side for the past hour, listening to him mutter about the stupidity of the project, about how there was no place for a character like Garrett Reilly in the armed forces, about how he would cut General Kline’s funding at the DIA to zero after this. And now, Garrett Reilly had tricked them. They’d challenged him to a duel, and he didn’t show up. And he still won. She had to admit it, as much as she was loath to: the guy was fun to watch. He did not think like an Army officer. She wasn’t sure how he thought, but it confused the hell out of the military lifers.

  “Cobras backing off.”

  “Look for those bastards anywhere on the battlefield! This is not over. Search and destroy. They’re out there someplace.”

  “Yes sir. Cobra One, over.”

  Captain Marsden wheeled on his staff. “How the hell did those people get on the base? They all work at a fucking restaurant?”

  A young lieutenant edged forward. “Sir, yes sir. Everybody knows the Chang family. They deliver to base all the time. Everybody loves their food, sir. They probably drove on last night with deliveries and just stayed.”

  Alexis must have let out a tiny snort of amusement, because Duke Frye turned to her immediately. “Do you think this is funny, Captain? Are you amused by this?”

  “No sir,” Alexis said, spine straightening.

  “Because I thought I heard you laughing.”

  “I coughed, sir.”

  The secretary gave her a long look.

  Captain Marsden pointed at the laptop on the nearest table. “That GPS program right there says the objective is five kilometers away. Due south. But they went one click west. How the fuck did our GPS systems not coordinate? How the hell did my men get led to the wrong shack? Someone needs to answer that question for me.”

  “He hacked the system,” a sergeant ventured. “He scrambled all the coordinates.”

  “There’s no way it could be hacked, sir,” a lieutenant answered quickly. “It’s on a secure network. Nobody can get in.”

  “They can if they have
the access codes.”

  Heads in the tent snapped around as Garrett, dressed in jeans, sweatshirt, and a Yankees baseball cap, sauntered into the tent. He looked windswept and slightly out of breath; his right cheek was still bruised eggplant purple. A few of the support staff reached for their sidearms, but nobody drew a weapon. Garrett smiled, waved. “Hey, all. Good morning. You’re all dead, by the way. My team has already surrounded the tent. We blasted it full of bullets. You know, virtual bullets. I think it would be cool if you all, like, lay down and acted dead or something.”

  Captain Marsden started toward Garrett. “This field tent was not part of the exercise!”

  “Not part of your exercise, but it was part of mine.” Garrett stepped over to the lieutenant at the GPS laptop. “Anyway, the answer to your question is that I collected the access codes from the base server and sent them to a friend of mine. She went in and reprogrammed your GPS servers so they collected data off a false download signal, full of fake topographical data. It wasn’t easy, but she’s good. Really good.”

  Duke Frye stepped past Alexis into the center of the tent. “You gave out military access codes to a civilian hacker?”

  “She’s not really a hacker. She’s a game programmer in New York. I mean, she has hacked. But long ago. And she never got caught, she’s not black hat, so no criminal record or anything.”

  The secretary fumed at Garrett: “Do you realize how many laws you broke?”

  “I won. Wasn’t that the point?”

  “You cheated. That’s not winning.”

  “You guys doubled the number of battalions against me without telling me. Isn’t that cheating too?”

  “Arrest him, now,” Frye barked. He waved to a pair of master sergeants at the edge of the group. The sergeants, surprised by the order, hesitated. The bigger of the two looked to his captain, who nodded vigorously: Do it.