She held still for moment, then made a chopping motion with her hand. The red light atop the camera went out.
She turned back to the Army officer. “OK, we’ll see you in three hours. Where is the briefing being held?” She scribbled down the directions, although she had no intention of being there. She managed to convey the impression of a disgruntled reporter but one that was willing to play by the rules. To her advantage, the officer assigned to the area was not part of the regular Army public affairs organization. Had he been, he would have known immediately what she had in mind.
Once they were all loaded up with the local affiliate and headed back down the road, Pamela turned to her cameraman. “You ready?”
The reporter from the local affiliate looked at her uncertainly. “Ready for what?”
She waved him off impatiently. “None of your business. As soon as we get around the next corner, stop and let us out. Then be back here in three hours for the press conference. Other than that, I don’t want to hear anything out of you. Got it?”
“What are you going to do?” the reporter asked.
“Got it?” she repeated, glaring at him. When he did not answer, she said, “Stop the van. Now!” The man driving ignored the local reporter and quickly brought the van to a halt. She and her cameraman jumped out, paused for a moment at the side of the road to survey the terrain. Then, without a backward glance, they began hiking up the hill.
An hour later, the two were on a peak overlooking Bull Run. Both were scratched, sweating, and bleeding in a few spots. The cameraman had even seen a couple of snakes, but he was being a trouper about it.
As Pamela surveyed the area, she gave a low whistle. He was already taping. “That doesn’t look like a plane crashed there. Not unless it had damned good aim.”
Below them, floodlights illuminated the charred remains of a small building. Two men were hosing down the remains. There were four Army vehicles there, including one that looked like an ambulance. All in all, the activity looked too military for the NTSB to be involved. Whatever had happened was already over, and this was simply the cleanup — or cover-up.
Pamela pulled out binoculars and focused on the area. What was it, a military facility? Or a civilian house? Whatever it had been, there was no evidence of any aircraft crashing into it, not the slightest trace of debris. Not that she had believed that from the very start.
In addition to a large number of military types, there were also a few civilians. Just behind the site, in an open field, she taught saw two helicopters. They were both powered down, waiting.
“You want to do a standup?” the cameraman asked.
She shook her head. “Not until we’re further away. You never know how sound will carry in the mountains.”
He shrugged. “Up to you.”
“Let’s just watch for a while. Be ready, in case anything starts happening.” No sooner had she said that than there was a flurry of activity, and two men emerged from the burned-out remains of what had to be the basement. They carried with them three bright orange body bags that they very carefully passed up to a man standing at ground level. A priest appeared, made a few brief motions, and the bags were loaded into the ambulance.
The camera clicked as the cameraman recorded it all. Pamela just watched, barely able to breath from the anticipation.
“Don’t move,” a voice said quietly. “Don’t move a muscle.”
Both Pamela and her cameraman froze. They’d been in enough situations like this before to know that obeying was their best bet of staying alive.
“That’s good — real good. Now, just keep it up while we have a brief look-see at your equipment.” Pamela heard movement behind her, but did not turn her head to look. She heard her cameraman swear quietly as he was relieved of his equipment. Hands moved over her roughly, opened her pack, and she was subjected to a thorough pat-down.
“OK, you can get up. Let’s move slowly.” Drake did as she was told, turning slowly around to face the intruders. She sucked in a sharp breath and knew why the voice had sounded so familiar.
The man shook his head quickly, cautioning her to keep quiet. “Let’s go down to my vehicle, shall we? Your story isn’t here. But I can hook you up with the guys who are going to be in the middle of it. You ever heard of a guy by the name of Abraham Carter?”
As Pamela followed her CIA contact to his vehicle, she couldn’t help smiling.
The Kuwait/Iraq border
Friday, September 14
1100 local (GMT +3)
Staff Sergeant Joe Parker hated the desert. Raised in the mountains of Kentucky, proficient with a firearm even before he learned his alphabet, he had grown up under the sheltering protection of the Appalachian Mountains. He knew how to lose himself in thickly wooded forests that climbed the sides of the mountains and the narrow valleys that stretched between them. He understood the rhythms of the sun, the way the weather affected the animals and the terrain, and how to use the light and the weather to his advantage.
But this — this damn desert — was as completely alien as the moon. Dawn came suddenly, no long lingering shadows to hide you. Night came on equally fast, one moment light, then boom — darkness. The abrupt demarcation between light and dark seemed as dangerous and alien to him as the flat terrain that stretched out to the horizons, unbroken by any rise in elevation other than the occasional sand dune. He felt exposed and naked on the bare flat land. In theory, he knew that his desert-colored camouflage and the other concealment measures that they took worked well, but in his heart he never believed it.
The one thing he was grateful for was that the terrain made patrols more straightforward, if more dangerous. You drove or flew over somewhere and you saw what you saw. There was no puzzling out the shadows of the trees, no looking for odd shapes along a wooded ridgeline.
Although he’d slowed down some in the last two years, the result of deteriorating cartilage in his knees, Parker still led area patrols from time to time, if only to keep his hand in and show the youngsters how it was done. At thirty-two, he was considered an old man in the service. The average age in the Army was twenty-two.
This day was no different from any other one. They had been transported by truck to the drop-off point along with their gear and then set out to patrol their area. Another patrol headed off the opposite direction, and they remained visible for a long time on the flat terrain.
Sweat sprang up immediately on the nape of his neck and traced small streams down his back. The perspiration would slow down later on as he became dehydrated and accustomed to the heat.
“On the horizon,” his point man said, holding up a hand to stop their forward progress. “Look.”
Parker squinted in the direction that his point indicated. He raised his binoculars to his eyes, silently damning the deterioration in his eyesight over the last decade. When he was the point’s age, he could have seen it without the binos, too.
It was a small hump on the horizon, barely visible. Not moving, dark gray-green against the sand. A vehicle of some sort — nothing to indicate it was moving, no sand or clouds in the air around it.
“The intel photos showed a couple of abandoned trucks in the area,” he said. “Might be one of them.”
“Wonder if there’s anything left in it,” Point said.
“Worth looking at,” Parker said. “Come on.”
Kuwaiti air base
1230 local (GMT +3)
Captain Arless “Airless” Handshaw had been pulling alert for the last four hours, and he was getting pretty sick of it. They’d gone to an increased state of alert the day before, for some unknown reason probably having to do with satellite reconnaissance photos, and duty in the United States Air Force had begun to feel suspiciously like military service. With two F-15’s on runway alert, that meant that the pilot and navigator-bombardier sat in the cockpit for four hours at a time, the aircraft connected to a huffer to supply electrical power, waiting for the word to go. The paperback he’d slipped into one
pocket of his flight suit made the boredom bearable, but there was not much he could do about the heat. Despite the supply of electrical power to the aircraft cooling system, the temperature inside the cockpit had been rising steadily over the last hour. It was, he suspected, somewhere around ninety-five degrees right now, but he avoided checking to make certain. He was miserable — no need to confirm it with instrumentation.
This was not how service in United States Air Force was supposed to be. Particularly not for pilots. Alerts should be pulled in air-conditioned bunkers sitting immediately adjacent to the airfield, the aircraft kept in the high state of readiness by the enlisted technicians. If necessary, the pilots could burst out of the bunker, clamber up the boarding ladders, finish off the preflights, and be airborne in well under five minutes.
So what was the point of sitting here? A few minutes here and there — yes, sure, he understood that could spell the difference between a successful mission and not, but he still felt that there had to be a less unpleasant way to do it.
“Flight One, Tower. Radio alert launch, rollout authorized.” A stream of numbers followed, and the tower ended with the demand “Acknowledge.”
He jumped at the first squawk, then slipped the paperback into his pocket and grabbed his grease pencil to jot down coordinates. “Flight One, acknowledge. Say again coordinates.” He scribbled them down, and punched them into the onboard flight computer, verifying that the check sum matched up with the last digit of the sum of the other numbers. Coordinates were vitally important in this environment, where there were no landmarks or terrain to guide off. “Say again the composition?”
“Unknown. Reconnaissance launching right now, along with extraction. Provide air cover to extraction team, then join on Blue Leader for alternate attack profile.”
Great. Baby-sitting the helicopter to get the troops out. By the time they got them safely out of the area, whatever it was that was kicking up sand would be flaming bits of metal on the desert. It wasn’t that he begrudged the others the primary attack mission — hell, he had his chance at times — and sure, the troops deserved to get out safely. It was just that after sitting for four hours in the scalding cockpit, he ought to be entitled to a little more fun.
All around him, alert aircraft were spinning up, rolling out for the runway. He scanned the area behind them, watching as the helicopter at the far end of the field rose steadily into the air, then settled down and turned north. Nothing between here and there that should be a danger to it, at least not according to the briefing. Most of the antiair sites were little more that piles of molten metal now, although there was always a chance that someone had managed to sneak a mobile setup or Stinger into the area.
He gave the helicopter a slight head start, then launched and vectored over to it. He checked in with the helo pilot, confirmed good comms and their destination, watching with envy as the others streaked off to attack a truck convoy. As the helicopter progressed toward its target, he circled the airspace above, keeping a sharp eye out for any movement or trouble.
Fifteen minutes later, the primary mission was complete. The small band of Marines had boarded the helicopter in just a few seconds and the helo was heading for base. Freed from his baby-sitting duties, he checked in with Blue Leader One.
“Just about done,” Blue Leader replied. “You want a piece of the action, you got to show up earlier.”
“Like I had a choice.” He shook his head, disgusted. Last out, last in. The others would be headed for the officers club by the time he got his bird buttoned up for the night.
“Join on us,” Blue One directed, confirming his suspicions. With a sigh, he turned toward the other aircraft, about thirty miles away, and headed for the tail end of the pack.
Helicopter
1300 local (GMT +3)
“They sure took their sweet time,” a corporal muttered, his voice barely audible over the hard chop-chop of the helicopter’s blades. “Any longer and we would have to set up a base station.”
“Wasn’t bad,” Parker corrected. “Sometimes they don’t show up at all.”
There wasn’t much point in trying to carry on a casual conversation while in the helicopter. The noise drowned out just about everything, even if there had been anything to say. Each man was alone with his thoughts, seeing the images again of the blackened, distorted bodies rendered almost inhuman by the heat. It didn’t take long for a dead body to spoil in this weather, even given the lack of moisture in the air. The bloody corpses swarming with flies, skin green and sagging, would remain with them for many days.
“What do you think happened to them?” the corporal shouted, oblivious to his squad mate’s desire not to talk. “Were they dead?”
The staff sergeant shook his head, not because he didn’t want to know but because he didn’t want to face the possibility. There was something damn odd about the whole business, real damn odd, starting with the fact that the spooks had ordered in an air-retrieval mission instead of expecting them to hump it back to their rendezvous point.
1305 local (GMT +3)
“Looks like they missed one,” Airless’s bombardier remarked, touching the button to focus the display. “One truck, maybe. Not ours.”
“You can tell that from the radar?”
“No. I asked. Everybody’s safe and home in the barn.”
“It’s not moving,” Airless said dubiously.
“Then even you ought to be able to hit it.” His bombardier snorted at the gibe.
“What the hell.” Airless put the F-15 into a hard turn, banking toward the target. Forty, maybe fifty seconds away — they’d shoot a quick round into it, watch the flames, and then at least feel like they’d done something for God and country. Not as satisfying as hitting a moving target, but better than nothing at all. “Control, diverting to investigate target of opportunity.” Target of opportunity, hell. It was probably just a broken-down vehicle. Not much of a contribution to the war.
“Roger, acknowledge. Area clearance granted. Weapons free.”
Well, that was something. At least no one was going to hassle him about wasting ammo on it. He felt slightly better.
“All yours,” the bombardier said.
“I’ve got it.” Like the bombardier could have done something about it anyway.
The target was dead ahead, alone. It looked like a normal two-ton truck. There was no movement around it. Might be playing possum — but Airless would have to check it out.
He swung around for another pass, dropping down and losing altitude, his hands placed over the controls ready to yank her into afterburner and grab some altitude if anything so much as shivered down there. But there was no reaction, not on the pass.
“At least they could move around some,” his bombardier bitched.
“It’s better than nothing.” Airless swung around for the final pass, transferring his finger to the weapons selector switch. One missile — no more. He waited until the last possible moment and toggled it off. The F-15 shuddered slightly as the weapon left the wings. He broke hard to the right, clearing the area, putting distance between himself and what would soon be a fireball, turning back at the last moment so that they could both watch the impact.
“Yeah!” the bombardier said. The missile hit, and the truck disappeared in a fireball of glaring yellow and brilliant orange that seared the eyeballs. Black smoke boiled out from it, forming a pillar in the still air to match those further away on the horizon from the first team’s attack.
“Control, felt a good one. One shot fired, one truck destroyed. Unless otherwise directed, I’m heading back to base.” He waited, on the off chance at the controller might have another target for them, but was immediately disappointed with a crisp “Roger, acknowledge, return to base.”
“Better than nothing,” Airless said again, still feeling a slight sense of disappointment. “Better than nothing.”
FOURTEEN
Couer D’alane, Idaho
Saturday, September 15
&n
bsp; 0800 local (GMT -7)
Tombstone Magruder surveyed the assembled crowd, matching the names he’d read in the briefing folder with faces. The crowd was broken into several small groups, each studiously ignoring the other. Clearly, the different law-enforcement agencies were not used to working with each other, or at least not as comfortable with it as the U.S. and the Canadian military personnel were. The military people mingled easily, exchanging stories of the last time they’d met and catching up on each others’ careers.
Funny that folks from two different nations had more in common than the FBI and the CIA.
Or, at least the FBI and CIA want me to think that. The thought would bear exploring at a later date.
Finally, when he judged the time was right, Tombstone stepped up to the podium. Everyone immediately fell silent, the casual conversations mere gambits to cover for the fact that they were waiting for him to speak.
“Thank you all for getting here on such short notice,” Tombstone began. “I’m Thomas Magruder, formerly of the United States Navy. This is my uncle, Matthew Magruder.” He gestured to his right, where his uncle was standing slightly behind him.
“Tombstone,” one voice in the back called out, amused. “You still going by that?”
Tombstone smiled. “I suppose. I’ll probably answer to it, anyway. OK, so now you know who I am. I know your names, but I haven’t got those matched up with faces yet.” I do, but no point in letting you all know that, not if you’re so intent on pretending you don’t know each other. He pointed to the right front corner of the group. “Start here, senior person introduce your people.”
A bluff, rough-featured man stepped forward. He was wearing a sports jacket but looked uneasy in it. “Hank Greenfield, FBI.” He introduced the man and woman with him, adding, “For what it’s worth, we’re familiar with the area. I was on site when the Smart incident went down.”
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