Free No Fortunate Son by Brad Taylor Page A

It’s not like they can just jump on a plane. It takes time to close out cover contracts and get deployment assets on station. Time to assess whether the redirect will spike host-nation intelligence services. Time to establish a new cover mechanism in the redirect country. Time to ensure the new cover status they’ll be operating under will withstand scrutiny. It’s what I talked about before. This isn’t our forte. We’re not an alert force that can turn on a dime.”
    Billings started to grumble when the door opened. Alexander Palmer entered with the same NSC staff weenie from before. He still looked as if he were a rabbit in the wolves’ den.
    Kurt waited on President Warren to dismiss him, noticing the man was haggard from sleepless nights. Warren said, “Good enough, Kurt. Have a seat for the update.”
    Kurt nodded, understanding without words that the president already knew what was about to be briefed and that it wasn’t going to be good. He thought about expanding on his statements to Billings, conveying the danger the mission was placing on the Taskforce to the only man in the room who really mattered, then thought better of it. He took his seat at the rear of the room.
    The staffer booted up his laptop and without any preamble said, “We got this through the White House website contact page. The email address is bogus and the ISP terminates in Guam. We’ve already explored the ISP with in-country assets and got nowhere. It’s clearly a redirect.”
    On the screen, Kurt read:
    Dear Mr. President. You never answered the question we posed on Reddit, so we have to assume you thought it rhetorical. It wasn’t. You just conducted a strike against a harmless wedding party in Yemen, and because of it, you have forced our hand. We ask once again, are all lives equal? Will you continue such actions when the end result involves something you hold dear? There are seven innocent families weeping over the loss of loved ones in the Sada’a Province. Who will weep in your inner circle from this attack? Nobody. But someone will weep. We promise.
    Kurt had read about the strike in his daily intel update. The al Qaida propaganda machine was saying it was a wedding party, which had been picked up in the press, but the intel track had shown a terrorist convoy. It was hard to determine what the convoy actually was, but regardless, inside that convoy had been three definite terrorists, now dead. The chatter afterward had confirmed that. Along with the loss of four civilians with an indeterminate heritage.
    The staffer said, “Given the enormous number of comments that are directed at the White House contact page each day, it took over twenty hours for the Reddit thread connection to reach someone who understood the significance. By the time we had begun tracing the digital trail, a package had been delivered to the front gate of the US embassy in Brussels. Inside was a DVD recording and the hands and feet of a human being.”
    A low murmur went through the room, and Kurt had a horrible intuition about why the secretary of defense—a principal in the Oversight Council—wasn’t attending.
    The screen flipped to an MP4 movie, and the lights went dim. Kurt saw a person hunched in the center, a hood on his head, surrounded by men wearing kaffiyehs that covered their faces, each brandishing an AK-47. There was no sound. The hood was removed, and he saw the secretary of defense’s son. The boy began to cry in silence, and the man to his right held up a section of poster board displaying the words EXPERIENCE THE PAIN.
    The man began to flip the poster boards like a high school YouTube video, each one with a different sentence about the casualties of United States policy. The last placard read, AND NOW IT IS YOUR T URN. REAP WHAT YOU SO W.
    The man behind the captive raised his barrel, placing it on the back of the boy’s head. There was a second pause, and then he pulled the trigger. The frontal lobe of the skull exploded