Free Cold Shot by Mark Henshaw Page A

a soldier’s life. Freedoms were always bounded by the whims of higher men. Decisions about cargoes and the fates of nations were not his to make and he was happy for that.
    CIA Director’s Conference Room
    The room was smaller than some of the other conference rooms in the building but more ornate than most. That was fitting, Kyra supposed. The CIA director met with presidents and every other kind of dignitary here on occasion. Like the rest of the CIA director’s office complex, no expense had been spared here. High-back leather chairs surrounded a real hardwood desk. Colored wooden seals of all the intelligence community agencies hung on the walls at eye level. The largest flat-panel monitor Kyra had ever seen hung between the U.S. and CIA flags standing in the far corners and it had taken her ten minutes to figure out how to drive the controller mounted on a touch panel rising out of the table.
    Cooke entered, seven minutes later than promised, and Kyra knew better than to ask the reason. “Coffee?” Cooke asked without preamble.
    “No, thank you. I’ve never had a taste for it.”
    “A tea drinker?”
    “Only sweet tea on hot days,” Kyra explained. “I’m a Virginia girl after all.”
    “You’d never have survived in the Navy,” Cooke mused. “It was good to see you again this morning, Kyra.” She poured her own cup, then seated herself at the head of the table.
    “It had been a while, ma’am.” More than a year, she realized. She knew Cooke and Jon made excuses to see each other on occasion, though not as often as either would prefer.
    “You can stop with the ‘ma’am,’” Cooke ordered.
    “My apologies, ma’am. It’s not optional. Southern upbringing.”
    Cooke shook her head, took her first sip, then set the mug on the coaster. “Show me what you’ve got.”
    Kyra pressed a button on the touch controller and a video feed appeared on the conference room monitor. Then she pulled a photograph out of a folder and held it out. Cooke accepted the paper, never moving her gaze from the screen. “I spent last night in the Ops Center with their IMINT team and we found this at 0330. That’s our best candidate for the Markarid . We can’t really confirm it’s her . . . hard to see the name on the side of the hull when you’re looking straight down and they probably changed it anyway,” she said, deadpan. “But she’s missing a raft from the starboard side.”
    Cooke’s head turned at that bit of news. “Nice call,” she offered. “What happened there?” She pointed at a spot on the photograph.
    Kyra pressed a button and the satellite video magnified by a factor of two. “It’s hard to tell. It looks like she suffered some kind of explosive damage to the superstructure, more than the crew could fix at sea. They covered it over with tarps and moved some cargo containers around to prevent anyone from getting a look at sea level. We’re just guessing at that but I think it’s a pretty good guess. The imagery analysts tell me that’s fresh paint higher up, above the tarp . . . probably to cover some scorch marks. They also tell me there’s not much aboard any legitimate cargo vessel that could tear up a hull like that . . . the worst thing they usually carry is fossil fuels, which would just burn the paint, not tear up the metal unless they did something spectacularly stupid.”
    “If they hosted a firefight, somebody might’ve gotten a bit happy with the high explosives,” Cooke answered.
    “That’s what Jon thought when he saw it,” Kyra conceded. “But it would take something bigger than a grenade to do that—” she said, pointing at the ship’s damaged island. “At least an RPG round. I guess Jon has seen a few go off.” She’d asked him for the particulars but the man had demurred.
    “Where is she now?” Cooke asked. “Where are we looking?”
    “Southwest of Grenada, almost due north of Caracas. She’s inside Venezuela’s coastal waters on a