David Hagberg's New York Times bestselling Kirk McGarvey series continues in Retribution, with a deadly mission to take down a monstrous serial killer.
On May 1, 2011, a team of twenty-four members of US SEAL Team Six swooped down on the compound of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their mission, code-named Neptune Spear, was to find and kill the terrorist leader. The mission was a success.
Since that day, elements of the government of Pakistan have harbored a deep hatred for the SEALs who violated their sovereign territory. Now they've hired a team of German assassins to kill all twenty-four of the ST6 operators…and only one man stands a chance of stopping them: legendary former Director of the CIA Kirk McGarvey.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
David Hagberg's New York Times bestselling Kirk McGarvey series continues in Retribution, with a deadly mission to take down a monstrous serial killer.
On May 1, 2011, a team of twenty-four members of US SEAL Team Six swooped down on the compound of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their mission, code-named Neptune Spear, was to find and kill the terrorist leader. The mission was a success.
Since that day, elements of the government of Pakistan have harbored a deep hatred for the SEALs who violated their sovereign territory. Now they've hired a team of German assassins to kill all twenty-four of the ST6 operators…and only one man stands a chance of stopping them: legendary former Director of the CIA Kirk McGarvey.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
David Hagberg's New York Times bestselling Kirk McGarvey series continues in Retribution, with a deadly mission to take down a monstrous serial killer.
On May 1, 2011, a team of twenty-four members of US SEAL Team Six swooped down on the compound of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Their mission, code-named Neptune Spear, was to find and kill the terrorist leader. The mission was a success.
Since that day, elements of the government of Pakistan have harbored a deep hatred for the SEALs who violated their sovereign territory. Now they've hired a team of German assassins to kill all twenty-four of the ST6 operators…and only one man stands a chance of stopping them: legendary former Director of the CIA Kirk McGarvey.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429922593 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2015 |
| Series: | Kirk McGarvey Series , #18 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 846 KB |
About the Author
David Hagberg (1947-2019) is a New York Times bestselling author who wrote numerous novels of suspense, including his bestselling thrillers featuring former CIA director Kirk McGarvey, which include Abyss, The Cabal, The Expediter, and Allah’s Scorpion. He earned a nomination for the American Book Award, three nominations for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award and three Mystery Scene Best American Mystery awards.
He spent more than thirty years researching and studying US-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Hagberg joined the Air Force out of high school, and during the height of the Cold War, he served as an Air Force cryptographer.
David Hagberg (1942-2019) was a New York Times bestselling author who published numerous novels of suspense, including his bestselling thrillers featuring former CIA director Kirk McGarvey, which include Abyss, The Cabal, The Expediter, and Allah’s Scorpion. He earned a nomination for the American Book Award, three nominations for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award and three Mystery Scene Best American Mystery awards. He spent more than thirty years researching and studying US-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Hagberg joined the Air Force out of high school, and during the height of the Cold War, he served as an Air Force cryptographer.
Read an Excerpt
Retribution
By David Hagberg
Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
Copyright © 2014 David HagbergAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2259-3
CHAPTER 1
Atlantic coast Florida in mid-July lived up to its reputation as hot and muggy, the wind off the ocean doing nothing except increase the humidity, which Dieter Zimmer, driving north from Miami International, found almost unbearably oppressive. It was a few minutes after noon, and although he had the rental Impala's AC cranked up to the maximum, he was sweating profusely and hating every second of it.
At around six feet, with a thick barrel chest and a broad circular face under a spectacularly bald and shiny head, he stood out. It was something every trainer he'd had in the German army and for five years starting in '96 with the Kommando Spezialkräfte—the elite special forces—promised would make him stand out.
"You're the first stupid son of a bitch that the enemy will shoot," Sergeant Steigler told him the first day of training. "You're going to die for your country."
"No, sir, that dumb son of a bitch will be the first one I shoot. He'll die for his country."
"Ah, we have a General Patton amongst us," the sergeant said, and the name had stuck, finally shortened to Patton.
He turned off I-95 at the Fort Pierce exit and on the other side of the town drove across the bascule bridge onto Hutchinson Island and headed north on A1A, the Atlantic almost ominously calm, big thunderheads off in the distance to the east. Past a spate of condominium towers right on the beach, and a mobile home park on the land side of the highway, he slowed for a driveway to the right. The sign on the fence read UDT/SEAL MUSEUM.
Parking just outside the chain-link fence, the gate onto the grounds open, he sat for a moment watching as a Mercedes sedan passed on the highway. His target, he was told, would be driving a Ford pickup, dirty green with Florida tags, and wasn't expected to show up down here from Tampa until between one thirty and two. He was bringing something for the museum, and he definitely wanted no announcements. Since he'd gotten out of SEAL Team Six he'd supposedly wanted nothing to do with any publicity.
"I just want to get on with you, you know," he'd said. He'd been talking to an old friend and neither of them had any idea their phone call was being recorded.
Dieter had listened to the entire conversation two months ago in a hotel room in downtown Munich with the others. They'd been in the final planning stages for the first part of the operation they were calling die Vergeltung—the Retribution.
And he was here now, the countdown clock to the start at less than minus sixty minutes.
It was a Tuesday, and the only cars were those of the two attendants inside. No maintenance was scheduled for Tuesdays or Thursdays, and the likelihood of a casual visitor dropping by was slim. But Dieter was ready for that possibility.
He'd always hated the U.S. and everything about it. The prejudice came from his father who'd been an ordinary soldier and complained constantly about the American occupation forces with boots all over Germany. Taking up valuable real estate with their bases, especially the massive one at Ramstein.
"Fucking our women. Driving fancy cars. Paying twenty-five cents—one mark—for an entire four liters of gasoline while we have to pay fifteen times as much. Eating enough meat in one meal, which they buy at their commissaries, to feed a German family for a week."
He'd felt the esprit de corps in the KSK, which solidified his resolve, Germany for Germans, and had hoped in those end days of the cold war for the Russians just to try to come across the border. They would kick some serious ass all the way back to Moscow.
Getting out of the car, the heat slammed at him, especially at the top of his bald head. He realized that he should have worn a hat after all. Something else to be bitter about. And there was a long list in his mind.
He wore a Cuban-style guayabera shirt, yellow and a little thicker than the normal cotton ones, to hide the silenced subcompact conceal-and-carry Glock 26 with a suppressor. The pistol fired the small 9 × 19 mm round, but the magazine held ten shots, plenty for a close-order gun battle, which he intended this one to be.
Inside the gate a crushed-gravel path led through the grounds, toward the low-slung building. River patrol assault boats made of plywood and painted olive drab that had been used in Vietnam were set up on concrete stands, as were an original towed submersible that had been used in World War II to ferry the underwater demolition teams to find and blow up the mines just below the water line, a Huey chopper—also Vietnam era—and even a Mercury capsule, which had splashed down in the Pacific and was secured by a SEAL team.
A curved ramp led up the side of the museum's main building. There used to be a huge brass globe on the roof, on which all the countries were engraved. It had symbolized the battlefields since World War II on which the UDT teams, and later the SEALs, had fought and died. A lot of them heroes, some of them Medal of Honor winners. But it was gone now and Dieter couldn't understand why it had been removed.
Less than ten meters to the east, beach installations of the sort that had been used in World War II to repel the Allies from landing in places like Normandy—the ones the UDT guys were sent in to blow up—were on display to show what an impossible job they had. In fact this stretch of the barrier island had been used to train U.S. forces for the landing.
Dieter was a solider—or had been one—and a very large part of his thoughts were with these guys. They had balls, no doubt about it, and he had a real admiration for them. The only problem was they were Americans.
He had been taught to hate them, and yet sometimes when he tried to really examine his true feelings, he couldn't say why his hatred had become so intense, especially in the past couple of years working with Pam Schlueter. But she was a convincing woman, with connections to big money and a track record to prove her worth among men. He thought that she was probably nuts; they all did. But all of them thought they understood why her hatred ran so deep, and none of them could find any fault with her. Anyway it was because of her that they were in the business of killing—a business that all of them loved.
At the bottom of the ramp he walked past models of a pair of World War II UDT operators in bathing trunks, fins, and round masks. Their equipment had been crude at best, but they'd gotten the job done.
Inside he went straight back to the reception area behind a glass case displaying books and patches and other souvenirs that were for sale. A stack of the book No Easy Day, written by one of the SEAL Team Six assaulters who'd taken out Usama bin Laden, was laid out on the counter next to the cash register. An old man seated behind the counter looked up from a newspaper he was reading and smiled pleasantly. He was dressed in khakis and a blue polo shirt with U.S. NAVY embroidered over the pocket.
"Did you sign in? The book is by the door."
"I'll catch it on the way out," Dieter said.
"You're German."
"Yeah. No longer the bad guys."
The old man's name tag read PAVCOVICH. "Ain't it the truth."
Dieter figured the man was in his mideighties, maybe older, and had probably fought in the war. "You alone here today?"
"Charlie's out back. Doing some painting this morning. We've got a VIP coming in today. One of the SEAL Team Six guys who blew bin Laden away."
"I heard."
It took a moment for the old man to understand something wasn't right—the visit was supposed to be a secret. He started to open his mouth.
Dieter pulled out his pistol. "Let's go back to the office."
"You fucking kraut."
"Now," Dieter said, the pistol pointed directly at the old man's face.
"Screw you."
"If I have to kill you I will. But all I want is to duct-tape you to your chair and tape your mouth shut."
"And then what?"
"Then I'm going to have a talk with your VIP."
The old man got up from his stool and shuffled from behind the counter and down a corridor that led to the displays, to a small office. The door was open.
"Have a seat," Dieter told the man.
"You don't have any duct tape."
"Nein," Dieter said, and he fired one shot into the back of the man's head.
CHAPTER 2Dieter checked to make sure that the old man was dead, careful not to get any blood on himself, then went back out into the museum, closing the office door. He quickly went through the several rooms of displays to make absolutely certain that no one else was there, sorry in a way that it was totally impossible for him see the place the way it should be seen.
Two large rooms—almost warehouse size—were in the back. One of them displayed big pieces of war machinery—like an armored Hummer—while in the second room a young woman with earbuds sat listening to music behind a counter. The room was filled with racks of souvenir hats, T-shirts, and other UDT/SEAL kitsch.
She looked up and smiled when Dieter came in. He shot her in the forehead and she fell back, the smile still on her lips.
Maybe in another time, next year or something, he would come back. But he was lying to himself, something he'd been doing ever since he was a kid growing up in a small lake village south of Munich. He'd lied to everyone at first, and so often, that he'd begun to believe his own stories, so when he discovered how to cheat on exams in school, he didn't think of it as cheating. He was passing tests. He was telling people what they wanted to hear. He was telling himself what he needed to hear.
He holstered his pistol and checked the front door again to make sure no one had shown up. Then he let himself out the back way and followed a path to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of the property. The big service door was open. A Chevy pickup truck painted dark blue, the U.S. Navy markings blanked out but still legible, was parked just inside.
Holding up at the door he looked inside. "Charlie?" he called softly. "You around here someplace, buddy?"
No one answered, so he went in and took a quick look around. The place was a mess, but it was a fairly well-equipped machine shop, with a metal lathe, a table saw, a drill press, and other tools, including an electric welder and a portable air compressor.
Back outside he glanced at his watch. It was a little past one, which still gave him a margin of at least thirty minutes before the retired SEAL Team Six assaulter was due to show up, but he wanted to be in place well before then.
No one was in the yard within the fence with its tank traps and machine-gun installations. He started down the white shell path. Almost immediately he caught the smell of someone smoking a cigarette, and it instantly brought back memories of when he was a kid stealing his father's Ernte 21 unfiltereds and sharing them with a couple of his friends on the way to school. He'd given up the habit once he'd joined the KSK because they'd robbed his wind. But they still smelled good to him.
He pulled up short. A bucket of red paint, a brush balanced on the rim, was set next to a log revetment about twenty feet long that protected a machine-gun nest behind a narrow slit. Barbed wire was coiled around the front and sides of the installation, and it looked to Dieter as if someone had been touching up the heads of the spikes or the bolts driven into the logs with Rust-Oleum to protect them from the corrosive salt-laden air.
The guy was nowhere to be seen, but the smell of his cigarette was strong on the very light breeze.
He'd been painting, but he'd put down his brush and had left for some reason.
"If it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't," the instructors had drilled into their heads. "Recognize when you are walking into an ambush. It only takes one determined son of a bitch to fuck up your day."
The SEALs had a saying that incoming rounds had the right of way. It amounted to the same thing he'd been taught.
Dieter pulled out his pistol and, concealing it behind his right leg, headed to the machine-gun emplacement. The smell of smoke was fading, and for a moment he was pissed off. Both guys were supposed to be inside the museum, waiting for their VIP to show up, and he was running out of time to deal with this kind of shit.
"Mind the wet paint," someone off to the left said.
Dieter turned in time to see a fairly short man with a large beer belly, maybe in his sixties or early seventies, with only a fringe of white hair around his ears, dressed in paint-splattered white coveralls, walking over from behind an assault boat set up on a concrete stand. He was grinning.
"You a former SEAL?"
"No, you?"
The man stopped short. "You're German."
Dieter shrugged deprecatingly. "Can't help who my parents were." The American was too far away for a decent pistol shot. "I was in the German special forces, and I've always wanted to get over here to see the museum."
"KSK?"
"Right. You must be Charlie. Pavcovich said I'd find you down here somewhere." Dieter stepped forward and raised his left hand as if he wanted to shake.
Charlie stepped back a pace. "Something wrong with your other hand?"
"Not at all," Dieter said and he brought his pistol out. "In fact I'm a rather good shot."
"I'll be goddamned," Charlie said. "We got a call a couple of days ago that someone like you might be showing up. Didn't say who he was or who the hell you were, but he was a German too."
"Someone like me?"
"He said to call the cops if you did."
"Maybe you should," Dieter said. The only Germans he thought who might have given such a warning were from the BND—the German secret service. Pam had raised the possibility—no matter now slight—that the Bundesnachrichtendienst might come snooping around at some point. But not this early. Not before they'd even started.
Charlie suddenly turned and sprinted to the open gate in the tall fence. He crossed the narrow parking lot and disappeared through the sea oats toward the beach, jigging left and right as he ran.
Dieter stepped around the machine-gun emplacement and began firing, steadying his gun hand against the top log, one measured shot after the other. On the third shot the American yelped and staggered to the left, blood on his left thigh.
The fourth shot struck the former UDT operator high in his back, just below and to the left of the base of his neck. But the man would not fall. He hobbled over the rising sand dune.
Dieter went after him.
Charlie reached the waterline on the beach and then turned and looked at Dieter, an odd expression that was mixed with pain, but no fear, on his broad face. "You're here about our bin Laden SEAL. But why? You're not al-Qaeda?"
"Purely business," Dieter said, and he shot the man in the middle of the forehead at nearly point-blank range.
Charlie Saunders fell back into the water, the light rippling waves washing over his face, carrying the blood away, his arms splayed out to either side.
No boats were anywhere to be seen. Nor were there any people on the beach. Dieter reloaded his pistol as he started back up to the main building to wait for the first bin Laden SEAL he would kill. The first of twenty-two, plus the CIA translator and the one EOD tech. The dog would get a free ride.
CHAPTER 3Peter Barnes glanced over at his wife Sally, her face scrunched up in the neutral expression that meant she was bored out of her skull, wanted to be anywhere except in a ratty old pickup truck heading to Fort Pierce, and was merely going for the ride because she owed him. Which in his mind wasn't really so.
She'd gotten sick almost to the day two years ago when he'd mustered out of the navy, and as it turned out his bone marrow was a match for hers and he'd saved her life. The problem was that their marriage had been on rocky grounds because of his three-hundred-day-per-year deployments, and nothing either of them could say or do seemed to make much difference.
Sometimes civilian life was a bitch. No one was shooting at you and you didn't have to watch for IEDs. No one was giving you orders—sometimes shitty ones that made no sense—nor did you have the responsibilities of looking out for your guys. And that was the problem: there was nothing to prepare for, nothing to get the heart beating, no actual reason for getting up in the morning.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Retribution by David Hagberg. Copyright © 2014 David Hagberg. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Author's Note,
Prologue,
Part One: Four Years Later,
Part Two: Ten Days Later,
Part Three: The Next Five Days,
Epilogue,
Books by David Hagberg,
About the Author,
Copyright,