Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (dark books to read TXT) 📕

down in Tonga and pay reparations for damaging the one and sinking their sub. And he wants me to make an apology at the United Nations! All because he and his henchmen got caught trying to steal my gold!”

Dosetti struggled to suppress a smile. Smitherman was doing a fine job of backing himself into a corner. One from which he could never escape without serious political damage. Meanwhile, her backchannel efforts to become the candidate to replace him on the ticket immediately after his poll data plummeted were looking better all the time.

“Stan, calm yourself before you have a stroke. Remember what the doctor said about your blood pressure. You sure don’t want the voters to know those particular numbers.” She waited a beat for him to stop ranting, close his eyes, tap his temples with his fingertips, and calm himself down. A tactic he had certainly learned from that Tibetan shaman he had employed and moved into his own quarters at Camp David, all to help the president relax. A bit of trivia Dosetti already had placed with key leakers, poised to share with the press. That quirky move alone would give her Texas and Iowa. “Now, why don’t we just play hardball with Tan Yong. Voters love that shit. Remind the Chinese that we now have in custody the people in his regime who were trying to make off with the gold for themselves. Make sure they know that this whole affair was almost certainly a coup attempt, at least based on what they are telling us.”

“Yeah, about that,” Smitherman replied, the scarlet starting to return to his face. “He is demanding that we repatriate both of the Yon brothers. ‘My most trusted military leaders,’ he called them. Says he’ll back off Taiwan if we do.”

“And?”

“I’m going to agree to that. We can spin it that we stood up to the Chinese over Taiwan and they blinked. And we make a big deal out of having sent the Chinese packing without any shooting on our part. Nobody will have to know about that trigger-happy submarine jockey and the lost PLAN sub, right? If anyone complains about our giving back the brothers, they were just criminals that we extradited. That’ll play pretty damn well in Peoria.”

“No one cares about Peoria anymore. It has to play on Wall Street and in the media,” Dosetti reminded him. “The gold?”

“We blame that all on King What’s-his-name. Never could get that guy’s name right. Anyway, it’s all his fault. We could have gone in there and gotten a reasonable portion of it, provided thousands of jobs in the process, and shared the wealth with the world’s emerging nations. You know, piping water to the Sahara. Building toilets in the Congo. Right? Hell, we’ll get the press office to figure out the right angle.”

Smitherman paused to take a big drink from the whiskey-and-water on his desk. Angling for leverage. He was back in his natural element. But Dosetti knew those same leakers to the press would soon share the fact that Smitherman was stone-cold drunk every night by the time he went to bed. “In the meantime, we need to figure out how we’re going to pay for all the campaign airtime and social media crap we contracted for when we thought we could tap into all that gold. I’ve got calls in to a couple of PACs that…”

Dosetti settled back in her chair, hardly listening. Her conversations with her Wall Street backers and the party leadership were going to be even more interesting than she had previously hoped.

And to think, only a few months ago, she was angling only for the senate or vice-presidency. Now? Now the whole enchilada was hers to gobble up.

Ψ

Jon Ward slid from the driver’s side seat of the rental car. His son, Jim, climbed out of the passenger side, stretching out the kinks from the short but cramped ride from the airport. But before either could complain any more about the dearth of full-size rental cars at Daniel K. Inouye International, they heard somebody yelling their names.

Tom Donnegan came bounding out the door of his house and charging toward them down the driveway. He grabbed both his visitors in a massive, three-way bear hug.

“Lord God a’mighty, it’s about time you two war-horses showed up to pay homage!” He stepped back and looked the younger Ward up and down. “Jim-boy, you’re looking a little peaked and underweight. How in hell you gonna save the world if you’re so weak and scrawny? I figure you need some of Louise’s cooking. Woman’s been in the kitchen since she heard y’all were coming.” He turned to Jon Ward. “Hey, where’s the smartest and best-looking one in the family?”

“She’s on the twenty-hundred United flight from SFO,” Ward answered as they walked toward the front door. “I was hoping we would have time to sit out on your lanai, sip some mai tais, and swap stories until it’s time to swing back down to the airport and collect her and her six suitcases of stuff.” He pointed at his subcompact rental. “We’ll need to borrow your Land Rover to haul it.”

“Sounds like a plan. Papa Tom’s Uber Service, open for business.”

After a stop with more hugs with Louise Donnegan, the three made their way out onto the lanai and its spectacular view of Pearl Harbor. A submarine was making its way past Ford Island, outbound. Donnegan peered through his mounted telescope, told them the sub’s hull number and name and its likely destination and mission. The man still clearly kept up with the comings and goings in his beloved US Navy.

They settled in with their drinks, a platter of pu-pus, and idle catch-up conversation until Tom Donnegan finally asked the question they all knew was coming.

“How did that whole China thing turn out?”

Jon Ward took the lead. Papa Tom may have retired, but he still held his clearance status and was often consulted, not just by Jon, his successor, but others throughout