Presence of Mine Enemies Read online

  Presence of Mine Enemies

  Stephen England

  Also by Stephen England

  Sword of Neamha

  Lion of God: A Shadow Warriors Prequel Trilogy

  Shadow Warriors Series

  NIGHTSHADE

  Pandora’s Grave

  Day of Reckoning

  TALISMAN

  LODESTONE

  Embrace the Fire

  QUICKSAND

  ARKHANGEL

  Presence of Mine Enemies

  Copyright © 2019 by Stephen England

  Cover design by Louis Vaney

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Views expressed by the characters in this novel are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.

  To all those, in the spheres of both law enforcement and intelligence, who have gone undercover, risking their lives—and their very souls—in the pursuit of justice, this book is respectfully dedicated.

  “Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies. . .”

  – The Twenty-third Psalm

  “We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, we are dropping down the ladder rung by rung. . .”

  – Rudyard Kipling, “Gentlemen-Rankers”

  Prologue

  5:43 A.M. Central European Summer Time, June 11th

  An apartment

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

  Lights, flashing through the darkness of the night. Red, white, and blue. The colors of a flag, waving in the salt breeze over a destroyer’s fantail.

  The colors of death this night. The wailing of sirens filling the air, mournful and grim. Blood staining his hands as he cradled her body in his arms, looking down at her face—lifeless eyes staring back into his own. “Don’t give up on me. Don’t you dare give up.”

  The sound of his own voice, somehow alien to his ears. Distant and faraway. Filled with grief.

  Then the ground seemed to crumble from around him, her face melting away to be replaced by that of another, an older woman, her dark hair shot with silver.

  Tears of grief and despair shining in her dark eyes. Her voice trembling with anger. “You just turn your back and walk away from everything you’ve done—the lives you’ve destroyed. As if they never existed, as if they weren’t even real.”

  A pistol coming up in her hand, aimed straight at him even as fire blossomed from its muzzle. Bullets tearing through flesh and muscle. And then he was falling. Falling. Falling—

  The man came awake suddenly, his head coming off the folded jacket he was using for a rude pillow—his bare chest glistening with sweat, his entire body trembling as if caught in the grip of a fever.

  It was a dream. Only a dream.

  Except that it wasn’t, he thought, his breathing slowly returning to normal as he pushed himself aright, leaning back into the threadbare cushions of the couch. Glancing down to see the dark, discolored pockmarks on his lower abdomen still marking the place where the pair of .45-caliber bullets had ripped their way through his torso.

  Like all which had gone before it. . .all too real. Death coming for him, only to be turned away once again at the door. A welcome visitor, now long overdue.

  He pushed himself to his feet, feeling a dull pain shoot through his body as he rose, padding barefoot across the grungy, cigarette-stained carpet toward the washbasin. The hot, humid air of the Belgian mid-summer already pervading the apartment, the noise of the city street without clearly audible through the open window.

  Over two months, and a full recovery seemed yet beyond his grasp.

  The face of a stranger staring back at him from the mirror as he leaned heavily against the sink, drawn and haggard—a ghost of his former self. Only the thick stubble of his beard serving to hide the stark pallor of his cheeks. Eyes the color of blued steel gazing out from deep, hollow sockets.

  Eyes which had seen so much of life. Of death.

  “Bismillah,” he said, his lips moving ever so slightly as he turned on the faucet on full blast, water splashing into the basin. In the name of God.

  He used his left hand to wash his right, cold water running between his fingers as he washed up to the wrist before repeating the familiar ritual with the other hand—taking water into his mouth and swishing it around before spitting it back out into the basin.

  Purity. Ever the desire of the believer—purity in the eyes of one’s fellow man. And of God.

  God. Harry Nichols shook his head, running dripping hands up over his face and through his dark black hair. Stooping to wash his feet.

  He had spent a lifetime at war. Fighting evil. And yet somehow. . .he’d misplaced his own faith along the way.

  Lost somewhere amidst the mocking echo of unanswerable questions.

  He caught a glimpse of movement behind him as he straightened—the figure of his roommate just visible in the early morning twilight as he raised his right index finger toward the ceiling, beginning to recite the takbir.

  “There is no God but God,” he whispered, a shadow seeming to pass across his face, “and Muhammad is His Prophet. . .”

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  3:27 P.M., June 19th

  Alliance Base

  Paris, France

  The conference room was cool—almost cold, Anaïs Brunet thought, folding her arms as she stared down the table at the man in French military uniform sitting at the opposite end.

  Windowless and soundproof, buried deep within the nondescript, heavily-secured office building in the fifteenth arrondissement which had played host to the joint French-American counterterrorist intelligence center for the last five years—three of which she had spent overseeing its activities as the head of General Directorate for External Security, or DGSE, as it was commonly referred to in the media.

  “He’s only been under for three weeks, Lucien,” she said finally, clearing her throat. “It’s far too early to expect results.”

  If they came at all, she didn’t add. Attempting to insert an intelligence asset into an Islamist terror network was a hazardous venture at best. Particularly when the target was a community as insular and tight-knit as that of Molenbeek, Belgium.

  “I know, I know,” General Lucien Gauthier responded quickly, shaking his head. Himself a former Legionnaire, Gauthier had only a few years before been commanding troops in north Mali, rooting out jihadist strongholds there as part of what had been known as Operation Serval—and the switch from counter-insurgency to pure intelligence work as he took command of Alliance Base hadn’t been without its challenges for him. “But shouldn’t he have at least made contact by now?”

  Brunet shrugged. Their man had been in place for longer than the three weeks she had referenced, but it was only with his increasing proximity to their suspected targets that communications protocols had changed. “What would you rather LYSANDER be doing, mon general? Making contact with us, or making new friends among the Islamists? Armand has been able to confirm that he’s still alive—at least as of forty-eight hours ago—so I don’t see that we have a problem. . .”

  “We don’t, Anaïs,” Gauthier said finally, his voice trembling with intensity as he raised his head to look at her down the conference table. “We don’t—not yet. But the next time a b
omb goes off in this city—in Marseilles—in Nice. . .you’ve seen what’s going on in the United Kingdom, the riots in the streets. You’ve seen the protests outside the American Embassy here in Paris since last week’s drone strikes in the Sinai.”

  He took a deep breath before continuing, tapping his index finger into the oak of the table with each successive word. “We are living on borrowed time.”

  That much was hard to dispute, much as Brunet would have preferred to. She opened her mouth to respond, but the conference room’s door opened at that moment, admitting a middle-aged man a few years her senior in a dark, somewhat rumpled suit, his tie loosened at the throat—no doubt in an effort to beat the Paris heat.

  “Daniel,” she said, rising to her feet to greet the CIA’s Chief of Station Paris, Daniel Vukovic—a careerist from the Agency’s Intelligence Directorate who had spent the last several years in France. “Please, have a seat—we were just discussing LYSANDER.”

  4:13 P.M., Eastern Daylight Time, June 23rd

  The Russell Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “. . .raising serious questions as more details continue to emerge regarding last Thursday’s drone strike in the Sinai Peninsula, which killed upwards of thirty civilians in what appears to have been a failed attempt to take out prominent Islamic State cleric Umar ibn Hassan. Here to weigh in on the controversy surrounding this, is privacy rights activist Claire Zmirak. Claire, welcome—could you lay out for us the situation as you see it?”

  “Of course, Matt, thank you for the opportunity. I want first to make clear that. . .”

  Senator Roy Coftey grimaced at the sound of the woman’s voice, turning his attention back to the draft legislation on his desk as the CNN broadcast continued. The feeding frenzy hadn’t stopped since news of the disaster in the Sinai had first broken three days earlier, filling up cable news and spreading across social media at the speed of light.

  And on Capitol Hill, people were running scared.

  As they could be counted upon to do, the former Green Beret mused wryly, shaking his massive head. All the way back to the days when he’d led a Special Forces A-team into the jungles of a place its survivors remembered only as ‘Nam.

  A long, bitter war which he and his brothers had won, only for the politicians to lose. All of it for nothing.

  He’d come to Washington to change all that. To set things right. Three decades later, and what had changed?

  Perhaps he had.

  The drone strike had been a CIA operation, knowledge he was privy to as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The kind of operation he’d fought hard for the Agency to maintain control over. Conducted in complete coordination down to the last moments of targeting with the Egyptian military—something Cairo was now denying, exploiting its moment of sanctimonious moral outrage to the fullest.

  But despite all the safeguards, despite every last ounce of oversight, something had gone wrong out there in the desert. And now the usual suspects were howling for blood.

  “. . .I really think people like Mr. Carr are missing the big picture of this story,” Claire Zmirak said on-screen, her voice drawing his attention back to the television. “It’s not merely that this strike failed—that innocent civilians were killed, that Hassan was not among the dead—but that it was ever attempted in the first place. Umar ibn Hassan is an American citizen, born in Duluth, Minnesota, not thirty miles from my own hometown.”

  And he chose to wage war upon the land of his birth. Sic semper proditores. . .

  So always to traitors.

  But she wasn’t done, continuing on over an unintelligible interjection from her fellow guest, “And as an American citizen, he deserves his day in court—not to be murdered in a foreign land by his government. President Norton has to be held to account—this kind of indiscriminate murder by remote is what characterized the Hancock years and he campaigned on bringing it to an end, not perpetuating it.”

  But like all Presidents, upon arriving in the Oval Office, Norton had found reality to be something. . .different than he’d imagined, Coftey thought, muting the television as he prepared to get back to his work. Realpolitik. The province of those tasked with actually making the world work, far from the ivory tower.

  The senator’s cellphone rang a few moments later, his face growing longer by the moment as he listened to the voice on the other end. “Ellis is saying what?”

  He shook his head, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder as he stood, reaching for his suit jacket. This wasn’t good—wasn’t good at all.

  “He and I—we had a deal.”

  6:24 A.M., Central European Summer Time, June 24th

  The apartment

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

  “. . .the American government has yet to offer a thorough explanation of the role it played in the strikes, which claimed the lives of innocent civilians in the Sinai last week. They. . .”

  The voice of the French newshost continued as Harry Nichols entered the apartment’s small kitchen, the story out of the Sinai growing bleaker with every passing day. A failed Agency operation. Like more than a few he’d himself known over the years.

  “They’re killing us, man,” he heard a voice say, looking over to see his flatmate standing there by the refrigerator, a half-eaten, jam-smeared bagel in his hands as he stared at the small television. “All over the world—every day—they murder more of the faithful.”

  Yassin Harrak. One of the two brothers he shared the apartment with—both of them, second-generation immigrants from Morocco. The younger brother, Reza, was attending the University of Brussels—studying to become an engineer. Yassin. . .well, Yassin was working, or rather, looking for it.

  He hadn’t had a job in the time Harry had known them—it wouldn’t have surprised him to have learned that he hadn’t had one since leaving school. Many young Belgians didn’t, and those numbers got worse if you were Muslim. Much worse.

  It was hard to even say whether Reza’s degree would make that much of a difference.

  “They don’t care, none of them do,” the young man continued, shaking his head—a mixture of anger and despair written across his swarthy face. “They drop bombs on innocent women and children and they don’t care—so long as they’re safe. As long as it doesn’t touch them. And this won’t end until it does—until it touches them where they live. In the neighborhoods where they live, where their children play.”

  “Insh’allah,” Harry breathed, placing a hand on Yassin’s shoulder in a sympathetic gesture as he moved past him to the refrigerator, withdrawing a carton of orange juice. As God wills it.

  It was a familiar refrain, and one that had grown more so over the passing weeks, fueled by the escalating situation in the Middle East—the young man’s angst becoming more vocal. Along with his desire to strike back.

  Harry took a sip of the juice, setting it aside on the card table in the middle of the kitchen as he took a knife and began to spread jam across his own bagel. He had known of the Islamist sympathies of his hosts—it was, after all, why they had chosen to shelter him. And yet. . .

  “You were dreaming last night, brother,” Yassin’s voice began again from behind him, Harry’s breath catching in his throat—his blood seeming to freeze at the words. His knuckles whitening around the hilt of the butter knife. Turn and stab, high—deep into the throat. The blade wasn’t sharp, but it didn’t need to be. Drive the blade home and—

  “It was Syria again, wasn’t it?” the young man asked, turning off the television as he moved back to the table.

  The tension slowly beginning to flow out of Harry’s body at the question—his fingers trembling ever so slightly as he finished, laying the knife to one side. Calm down.

  “Yeah, it was,” he lied, glancing over at Yassin to find nothing but sympathy in the young man’s eyes. “It was like being back there all over again. It was like. . .”

  He shook his head, as if feeling something he co
uldn’t quite put into words. “There’s no way for me to explain it, to put it in a way you would understand. I—”

  Yassin smiled, putting a hand up to cut him off. “It’s all right, bro, it’s all right. I don’t need to. The part you played in the struggle of God, the wounds you received in the jihad against the apostate tyrant in Damascus. . .would that more of us had been granted such an opportunity.”

  “I saw men cut down by machine-gun fire trying to take regime strongpoints,” Harry said suddenly, as though he was unable to stop himself. Not looking at Yassin as he continued. “Tracers flying through the night. Men I had known, men I’d shared bread with just a few hours before—blown to shreds by artillery shells.”

  “Ushered into paradise as a reward for their bravery,” Yassin intoned reverently, something of a perverse excitement glowing in the young man’s eyes.

  “Alhamdullilah,” Harry responded, pausing for a moment before he went on. Praise be to God. “But out there in the night, when brave men are dying all around you, you can’t see paradise—you can’t hear the singing of the women who welcome a martyr to their bosom. All you hear is the screams.”

  2:07 P.M.

  Alliance Base

  Paris, France

  “. . .and of course, I will count on you to keep me apprised of any developments, Lucien,” Anaïs Brunet said, smoothing her skirt as she rose from the chair.

  “Certainement, madame le directeur,” Gauthier responded, looking for a moment as if he might revert to his military training and offer a salute as she turned to leave, the door of his office closing behind her as she walked quickly down the long corridor toward the elevator.