Connor wrestles with the transponder. “It won’t turn back on.”
Penny’s hands shake. “They’re gaining.”
“This is an unmarked attack helicopter,” Zach yells. “If we don’t contact them, they’ll blow us up!”
Connor’s voice is surreally calm. “Penny, you see the parachute pack clipped to the ceiling? I want you to take it down and put it on. Robson, you ever jumped before?”
“In the Bahamas. Once!”
“Then you know what to do.”
“Jump at a hundred and fifty feet?” Zach’s voice comes through. “We’ll die!”
Connor pulls the mouthpiece close. “Just do it.”
Penny reaches up with her right hand and undoes the clasp. The harness is heavier than she expected. “There’s only one!”
“Put your arms through the straps.”
“No!” Penny yells. “What about you?”
“Most parachutes can take two people.”
“Most?”
“Hurry!”
Penny shuffles the straps over her shoulders and slides her legs through the harness.
“Loosen the chest strap as much as you can.”
On the screen, six dots draw closer.
“What now?” Penny yells.
Connor twists, so his back is to her. “Help me get my arms through the straps.”
She hugs her arms around him, trying to fasten the harness around his chest. “I can’t—quite—”
“Too tight.” He takes a deep breath. “Unbuckle it and help me get my arms out.”
“No!”
“The buckle’s gonna snap,” he yells. “We’ll both die!”
“They’re five minutes away,” screams Zach. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Connor,” Penny shouts, suddenly remembering. “Liza’s cord! Is it still in your pocket?” She pulls out the thin steel cord and wraps it around the weak buckle, over and over, tight as she can.
“Penny, when I say go, you take us up as fast as you can.” Connor shouts into the mouthpiece. “Robson. Are you set?”
Zach croaks, “You’re crazy!”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes!”
The dots are drawing nearer.
“Penny, go!”
She yanks up on the collective grip. The air slams down at them as the helicopter soars up one, two thousand feet. Her ears pop as the dusty valley spreads beneath them. The dots on the radar race closer.
“On count of three, Robson!” screams Connor. “One, two, now!”
Zach leaps from the plane, his dark hair whipping wildly.
Penny gulps.
“Hold the grips.” Connor undoes the seat buckle. “I’m gonna put the helo in hold. Face my back and lock your hands around my chest. You won’t hear me without the earphones. Just jump with me when I squeeze your hand. Feet up when we get near the ground! And, Penny?” he catches her eye. “I’m sorry about that aspirin.”
“Don’t die,” she shouts.
“I won’t if you won’t!”
Penny pulls off the earphones. The noise is physically painful. She hangs on to Connor. Together, like contestants in a three-legged race, they maneuver toward the open space where the helicopter door should be.
A red flash from the radar monitor.
Penny cranes her head. The text on screen reads: MISSILE ALERT.
Below, two thousand feet of air. Beneath that, only rock.
Connor squeezes her hand.
And they jump.
34
* * *
FREE FALL
The roaring air pillows around them as they fall.
Penny’s fists lock around the buckle and the thin steel cord that binds it, eyes squeezed shut.
They plummet toward the rock.
If the buckle breaks—
If the cord snaps—
—then she’d rather die with her eyes open.
Penny forces herself to squint over Connor’s shoulder, into the wind. Far below, she can make out Zach’s white parachute zigzagging toward the wide, sandy-colored valley floor. Cold air tears at her loose clothes and snaps back her braid. It’s so loud, she can’t even hear the helicopter anymore. She cranes up, into the huge bright vastness of the sky, to see the Apache hurtling toward the wrinkly, sand-colored hills.
Connor reaches back and activates the parachute.
The shock as the chute opens knocks the wind out of Penny’s lungs.
She feels the harness cut into her waist, and clings harder to Connor, feeling the ache in her arms.
The buckle cracks.
Connor’s hands grip around hers.
She feels the steel cord strain.
But it holds.
Now they’re flying, swooping almost gently toward the ground. She can make out tiny specks of color in the distant sky—hot-air balloons?
The empty helicopter continues on its arc, straight into the rocky flank of the hill. Penny can’t hear the huge, flaming explosion. But she can feel the force of it in the sudden swerve of the parachute.
As the smoke rises from the wreck of the Apache, Connor and Penny float down past the ridges on either side of the valley. He’s mouthing something over and over, like a mantra, but she can’t hear anything.
The cliff faces are riddled with hundreds of caves.
On the ground, Zach’s tiny figure stands up, struggling free of his parachute.
Sixty feet from the ground.
Penny’s hands, locked around Connor, shake with adrenaline. She can’t even scream.
Forty feet.
Twenty.
Connor folds his knees up, preparing to land. Penny barely remembers to pull up her feet before she slams tailbone-first into the dusty ground. Three bumps, and they skid to a halt. The parachute settles behind them.
Buzzed on relief and joy, Penny lets out a whoop.
“It worked!” Connor is laughing as if he can’t stop. “It worked!”
Penny yanks the broken harness buckle out of the tangled cord. Her hands are still shaking as she helps Connor out of the harness.
Zach runs toward them, his deflated parachute balled under his arm. His knee is bleeding.
“We did it!” Penny calls.
Zach is shouting, but his voice is faint in her ringing ears. She can’t quite make out his words. He’s pointing upward.
A tiny missile zings overhead and explodes the wreck of the Apache into a second, larger inferno.
Penny licks her dry lips. “That seems redundant.”
Zach pants into earshot. “Drones!”
About a mile off and rapidly approaching are what look like six curved, windowless gray planes, two larger than the others.
“Reapers,” shouts Connor. “Run!”
Arms still stuck in the harness, Penny scoops up the billowy-soft parachute and races toward the shelter of the caves.
The three of them pile into one of the smaller openings in the rock. It’s surprisingly cool inside, the pale cave walls as smooth as unglazed pottery. The cave isn’t drippy or dank, but dusty dry, with the rich mineral scent of stone the wind has ground down for millennia.
“They’ll have heat sensors,” Zach pants. “Get all the way to the back!”
Penny shucks off her parachute harness and feels blindly for the back wall of the cave—which isn’t there. She gropes into the blackness. “How far back does this cave go?”
Connor whistles. The sound echoes far away into the dark.
“There’s a breeze coming up,” Zach says, astonished. “It must be ventilated.”
“I read that in Byzantine times, people built underground cities in Cappadocia to shelter from invaders,” says Penny. “If this is part of an underground city, the tunnel might lead back to the surface.”
“What if it’s caved in?” Connor protests. “Or what if it’s just a natural rock formation?”
Penny feels her way forward. “There are stairs carved into the stone.”
“I think I saw this movie,” says Zach. “We find the Ark of the Covenant, and the blonde turns out to be a Nazi.”
Connor grins. “Wasn’t the heroine secretly descended from Leonardo da Vinci?”
Penny crosses her arms. “Either of you comedians got a better idea?”
Outside, six drones growl low over the valley.
Zach digs a lighter out of his pocket. The tiny flame throws all of their faces into shadow.
“We can’t go back out there,” says Connor.
“Maybe you could.” Zach’s voice is quiet, and startlingly fierce.
Connor tenses. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The second I saw you, I suspected you were here to take me on a little black-site vacation. But I wasn’t sure until I saw those Reapers. Birds like that don’t fly without a nod from Langley.”
“Zach, listen to me,” says Penny, “I convinced Connor to come help save you—”
“You think you did.” There’s a danger in Zach’s calm. “Because, hey, he’s not an intelligence officer specifically trained to manipulate vulnerable people.”
“As if you’re not?” snaps Connor.
“I get why Christina wants me out of the way,” says Zach. “But I couldn’t figure out why she’d send Penny with you.” He shakes his head. “And then it hit me. Bait.”
“Let’s get something clear,” says Connor. “I came to Mor Samuel for one reason. To get the information you got from Mehmetoğlu. The proof about what Melek Palamut and her father were up to with the Hashashin. The proof Christina will do anything to hide.”
“You think it’s Palamut?” Zach stares at them both in the darkness. And then he starts to laugh. Not an angry laugh, but deep and infectious.
“Want to share the joke with the rest of the class?” says Connor.
Zach catches his breath. “I’ve got to hand it to her. That woman knows her shit. You’re just her type, too. Captain America. Not so experienced that you’re expensive to replace, but, oh, so loyal. I bet she told you I was a traitor. I bet she even tried to smear Penny.” His smile fades. “But I bet she forgot to tell you it was a suicide mission.”
Penny looks at Connor. “Just how psycho is this boss of yours?”
“Oh, Christina is perfectly sane,” says Zach. “She’s just scared.”
“Is she a traitor?”
“Christina?” Zach sounds amused. “The woman bleeds stars and stripes.”
“Then why is she trying to kill us? A car bomb, an assassin, Reaper drones? What the hell is all this for?”
“Sometimes the old clichés are the truest.” Zach flicks the lighter and moves toward the mouth of the tunnel. “I know too much.”
The tunnel slopes down into the cold of the earth. Penny can stand almost straight, but both of the guys have to crouch over. Stairs blur into a narrow slope, barely wide enough for the three of them side by side.
“You’ve got to understand,” says Zach. “It wouldn’t take much to bring Turkey from bad to catastrophic.” In the faint flicker of the lighter, it’s hard enough to see two feet ahead in the tunnel, let alone to read his face. “Either Palamut drives the country off a cliff, or someone shoots the bastard and they have a civil war.”
Penny’s eyes are growing accustomed to the darkness. The bluish dot of Zach’s lighter casts strange shadows on the curving walls.
Zach continues, “The border with Iraq and Syria is a potential war zone seven hundred miles long. The Kurds are sick of Palamut taking their taxes, then bombing the shit out of their villages. Palamut’s sick of Kurdish separatists murdering his policemen. Then there’s a metric fuckload of Syrian refugees and a crap economy.”
Connor sounds dry. “You pack that much fertilizer in a barn, it’s going to explode.”
“Bingo,” says Zach. “And where does that leave the U.S. of A.? It’s time to be realistic. Trying to get rid of batshit Islamist fundamentalists by drone-striking their villages is like cleaning your sheets by washing them in dog shit. Stability costs years and billions and hearts and minds. It’s never going to happen. So you make the best of reality. If we’re going to have batshit Islamist fundamentalists, then we need batshit Islamist fundamentalists we can rely on. This operation was designed to get us in on the ground floor.”
Penny is getting dizzy. “By financing terrorism? That’s crazy!”
“Worked in Saudi, didn’t it?” Zach helps Penny over a waist-high rockfall.
“Apples and oranges.” Connor sounds terse. “If this is our strategy, why haven’t I heard about it?”
“For the same reason I hadn’t,” Zach says bitterly. “I bust my ass in this country for three years, trying to get some decent HUMINT on the Hashashin. And then, back around Easter, I step into a little kiraathane. And there’s Martin MacGowan, my station chief, playing backgammon with one of the Hashashin’s top dogs, the Old Man of the Mountain.”
“So?” Connor edges around a hole in the rock floor. “Sounds like a great source.”
“Yeah. Except I’d been tasked a PowerPoint for the quarterly review. Puff stuff for Langley—we’re the post-est with the mostest, give us more money, blah blah. That night was the Ankara Station St. Patrick’s Day party, at MacGowan’s house. I get MacGowan alone, ask if I can use the Old Man of the Mountain recruitment in my PowerPoint. MacGowan gets furious. Tells me to take it out and never mention it again. The next day, Langley tells me my job’s on the line.”
“So that’s why,” says Penny.
“Oh, Jesus.” The flame reflects in Zach’s mortified eyes. “They told you—?”
“I told her what Christina told me,” says Connor. “About you and MacGowan’s wife.”
“I knew it wasn’t true,” says Penny.
“It is and isn’t.” Zach ducks under a bulge in the ceiling. “When I first got to post, I was still grieving Jess. I did some stuff I’m not proud of.” His voice is quiet. “For what it’s worth, Kate MacGowan told me they were about to get a divorce. A lot of people at post knew. But I had no idea MacGowan ever found out. It was all over years ago.”
“So you told CIA it was over,” says Connor. “And no one believed you.”
“No.” Zach flicks the lighter. “But I wasn’t about to let them screw me over like that.”
“What did you do?” asks Penny.
“I pulled every string I had. No go. I swallowed my pride and begged MacGowan for more time. The Agency said I could stay through the summer. They started making noises about revoking my clearance. My whole career was on the line. Not that it’s so great. But it’s all I’ve got. And my kid’s counting on me.”
“Oh, Zach.”
He squeezes Penny’s hand. “And then I got my miracle. A message slid under my door one night—just pencil and paper, from Eylo, a Kurdish peace group based in Diyarbakır. They claimed they had proof that the U.S. government was giving American weapons to the Hashashin.”
Zach drops to his knees; the ceiling is barely three feet high.
“Oh, please.” Connor crawls after him, wounded arm clutched against his stomach. “That is the definition of garbage intelligence. Have you seen the protocols for supplying weapons to Syrian nonstate groups? The Hashashin wouldn’t qualify in a million years.”
Penny crawls last, almost blind in the darkness, groping along the tufa stone. She tries not to notice her muscles seizing up.
“Let me tell you a story.” Zach’s voice echoes slightly in the tunnel. “Once upon a time in Syria there lived a band of Shia freedom fighters. They were kind of like Robin Hoods with AK-47s—hated Assad, no known ties to any terrorist groups, pretty open-minded about other sects. And most important, they were determined to destroy ISIS. Now, these Robin Hoods were a pretty tiny group, but they were unbelievably effective. Disciplined. Their branding was solid, too. The Hashashin? It sounds awesome and medieval, as if they’re going to start scaling harem walls with daggers in their teeth. The group’s founders actually met getting their master’s de
grees in computer science—smart guys. Their online presence was slick as hell—whole thing felt like an AO video game. Rebels you could really root for. CIA started paying attention. My boss, Christina, thought the Hashashin could take out ISIS for us. She thought all they needed was better equipment.”
Penny makes a face. “Arming Islamist guerrillas who named themselves after an assassin cult?”
“The former President shared your skepticism,” says Zach. “But Christina, she was convinced that she knew best. She secretly approached someone high up at the State Department. Somebody ambitious. Asked for his help delivering the weapons. If things worked out, he’d get all the glory. If not, they’d both deny everything.”
“Why State?” says Connor. “Why not DOD?”
“State was on pretty good terms with the Kurds,” says Zach. “Christina’s special someone asked a Kurdish group named Eylo to smuggle a few truckloads of boxes, supposedly full of medical equipment, out of Turkey and across Rojava, supposedly for antiregime hospitals. The Hashashin retrieved the boxes, and blammo—overnight they’ve gone from the Iron Age to the most teched-out anti-ISIS militia in Syria. The problem was, that drew lots of new recruits. The group absorbed thousands of foreign fighters—brutalized Afghans and Iraqis with dangerous ideas. Robin Hood and his Merry Men stopped being so tolerant. In less than six months, they were gunning down U.S.-allied forces and making public vows to ‘destroy America.’ And staging all those fucking beheadings.”
“I’m still not buying it.” Connor shoves himself back onto his feet as the tunnel rises. “If that were true, why haven’t the Hashashin gone public with it?”
“ ‘We took handouts from the CIA’? Doesn’t play so well with that sexy-rebel brand identity of theirs.”
“Zach,” says Penny, dusting pebbles off her palms, “if a bunch of terrorists were running around with state-of-the-art American weapons, wouldn’t someone somewhere have noticed something?”
“Someone did. You remember last month, the Hashashin bombed that maternity ward in Aleppo? I’ve seen credible reports they used American bombs.”
Connor is unmoved. “Stolen American bombs.”
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