by Sean Parnell
“When did this come in?” It was the only question he could think to ask as his eyes lingered over the subject line of the paper.
“Just now,” Allison replied.
“OGA convoy traveling from Algiers to Tunis, this is . . .” Rockford trailed off, not believing the words typed on the paper. “Has this been verified?”
“Yes, sir. Twice. Cutlass Main already has Stalker 7 activated and standing by.”
Rockford’s disbelief came from the fact that “OGA,” or “Other Government Agency,” was an acronym that referred to the CIA or one of its subordinate units like SOG. Rockford was an avid poker player, known for his ability to quickly calculate the odds of a winning hand. He tried to calculate the odds of a CIA team and a Program asset being ambushed in the same country on the same day. He quickly came up with the answer.
Zero.
The Vice President turned to look back into the Situation Room and found Styles observing him coolly.
He forced himself to smile and held up one finger before turning to Allison.
“Looks like this meeting is about to get cut short.”
Chapter 10
Tunis
The scratching sound of the razor blades put Nathaniel West’s teeth on edge. It reminded him of the basement in Argentina. He still wasn’t sure how long he’d spent in the darkness. Two weeks? Three? Sitting there with bandages over my eyes while those fucking rats tried to chew through my boots.
He took a cigarette from his ear and stuck it between his lips. How long does it take to get some paint off a damn window? he wondered, looking at the two men scraping at the black paint.
He dragged the match across the striker on the outside of the box, and the flame blossomed, revealing fingers mottled with scar tissue. When he bent his neck, dropping the tip of the cigarette to the flame, the scars only got worse.
The abandoned building didn’t have power, and vagrants had used the bottom floor as a communal restroom. The entire bottom half of the building smelled like piss and shit. That was why they were upstairs.
West smoked idly, watching the sunlight progress across the concrete floor. By the time he put the cigarette out beneath his boot, his men were done, and what had started out so very dim was now a spotlight that revealed two men in the center of the room.
The “package” had a black bag over his head, but was otherwise unrestrained. West knew he wasn’t going anywhere the second he yanked him out of the Suburban and saw that he had pissed himself. The other man was a different story. He was a CIA contractor, and the team leader of a seven-man security detail that was supposed to transport the package from Algiers to Tunis. He was in way over his head, but just to be sure, West had him zip-tied to the chair. At first he’d planned on laying him out with the other six he had left on the edge of the highway with a hollow point through the eyeball.
Waste not, want not.
“What frequencies are you using?” the South African demanded, squinting against the beam of sunlight coming through the window while yelling at the man with the hood over his head. It acted like a spotlight, and caused the blood-splattered cricket bat he held in his hands to shimmer.
“I already told you.”
West didn’t blame the guy for talking, even though it had cost him a thousand bucks. Villars had bet him that he could get the guy talking in less than ten minutes. Once the bat came out the contractor would have told West what color panties his wife wore if it made the pain stop.
Villars hit him anyway, swinging at the man’s shins like he was trying to send one deep over the wall at Fenway.
CRAAAK.
Good form, West thought. Most guys are all arms, but he really gets his hips into it.
“This guy’s done, take a break, big man,” he said. “Give me the cards, we have shit to do.” He stripped the hood off the other man’s head. “Hey, Ali Breul, long time no see.”
The Iranian scientist blinked in the sudden light, and when his eyes adjusted a look of horror crept across his face. A stain appeared on his leg, followed by the smell of urine. West shuffled the cards in his hands, a twisted smile curling at the edge of his lips.
“Glad to see you remember me, buddy.”
“But . . . but you’re dead.”
“That’s what they tell me. Obviously the details of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” West taunted. “Unfortunately we don’t have enough time to play catch-up, but I want to ask you something.” He stepped out of the way, making room for his men to set a crate between them. “You ever play three-card monte?” he asked, switching to Arabic.
“No.”
“Seriously, never?”
The man nodded. He was sweating and afraid. “Nathaniel, why are you doing this?”
“Because it’s a cool game.”
He knew what Breul was talking about, but didn’t care. The scientist was vapor-locked, and having a hard time focusing. He kept looking toward the CIA officer tied up next to him.
“Hey.” West snapped his fingers at him. “You have to pay attention if you want to win.” He fanned the cards in his hands, picking out three that he wanted. “I learned the secret in Spain from a guy on the corner. Just another hustler. He called it Encontrar la Cabrona—find the bitch. That guy took me to the cleaners, I think he took me for a grand, but it was worth it. You know why?”
“I don’t want to do this.”
West ignored him.
“Because I learned something. It’s what you don’t see that gets you.”
“Don’t listen to him, Breul,” the contractor said.
Thump.
West could tell it was a body shot without even having to look up. Punching someone in the body sounded different from hitting them in the face. West looked over his shoulder. The contractor’s mouth was stretched in a silent scream, but he wasn’t making any noise because all the air had just been knocked from his lungs.
“Like I was saying, all you have to do is find the queen. Now, usually you use a traditional deck, but that’s boring. So I had one made up. Here’s what you are looking for, the queen of hearts.” West flipped over the first card. It had a picture of a naked woman with a big heart tattoo on her chest. It had obviously been cut out of a porno mag. “You find this one and I let you go. Pretty easy.” The second one he flipped over had a picture of the contractor on it, taken from a telephoto lens. “Now, here’s where it gets real. If you pick this one, he dies,” West said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
“Don’t tell him shit, Breul.”
“Villars.”
It was a backhand this time. A sharp pop to the face followed by a grunt of pain.
“I wouldn’t listen to him if I were you. I know the CIA said they were going to keep your family safe, but guess what?” West asked, flipping over the final card.
There was a picture of a woman in a hospital with a newborn cradled in her arms, and it got Breul’s attention. Pure terror crossed the Iranian’s face.
“Surprise, it’s a boy,” West said. His whole demeanor changed in an instant. “Sorry you had to find out this way, but I want you to know that the CIA can’t protect them. Not from me.”
“Please, don’t . . . don’t hurt them.”
“We are in this together, man. I believe in you, all you have to do is find the bitch.”
West started out slow, hopping the queen over the card to the left, bouncing the three cards back and forth five or six times. Then he stopped and looked up.
“Where is she?”
“In . . . in the middle.”
West flipped it over, revealing the queen.
“See, I told you.”
Breul blew out a long breath, a look of relief.
“Don’t get excited just yet. That one doesn’t count, because I was just showing you how it worked. Here we go, best two out of three.”
He moved faster this time, scarred hands blurring over the box, cards jumping back and forth and Breul trying to keep up. Then he stopped.
“Find the bitch.”
“I didn’t see. It was too fast.”
“You have to pick one.”
“I don’t know.”
“Villars . . .”
“Wait, the one on the right.”
West held up his hand and heard the South African stop behind him. He flipped the card over, revealing the picture he’d taken of the contractor.
“Nope.”
He pivoted, watching as Villars produced a thick plastic bag. He shook it open and then yanked it over the contractor’s head.
“His name was Jackson, father of two, married to his high school sweetheart, Janice.”
Jackson tried to hold his breath while fighting against the zip ties. He banged his legs while trying to shake himself free. Behind him, Villars held the bag tight over his face. Finally the contractor’s brain told him that he was running out of air and his mouth snapped, sucking the plastic tight against his lips.
“What do you want?” Breul asked.
“You know what I want,” West said, hands back on the cards.
“I’ll tell you anything.”
“I know you will. You want to know why I love this game? It’s like life. You think you are paying attention,” he said, holding up his index finger like a scarred exclamation point, “but what no one tells you is that the house always wins.”
Breul was weeping now, and West knew he almost had him. Just a final push to get what he wanted. He rose to his feet. “I know what you’re thinking, old friend.” West pointed to his arm and winked. “Eric is going to find me. Problem with those data pins is that they still work on the same frequency they did when I was an Alpha.” He pulled a device the size of a calculator from his pocket and held it in front of Breul’s face. “You would think they would change something like that, but oh well. It does make me wonder what would happen if I pushed this button.” He pressed the key with his thumb. The device beeped twice and a message flashed on the screen.
“Jamming signal,” he read. “Well, that’s not good.”
He saw that Breul understood what he was talking about, and a second later the Iranian began to talk.
“I left the device in . . .” he sobbed.
“You’re almost there,” West prodded.
Breul paused. His eyes shot to the card with his wife holding the child he had never seen and then he clenched his jaw and shook his head from side to side.
“You really want to do this?” West asked.
A tear fell from the corner of Breul’s eye, sliding off his cheek when he shook his head.
“Go to hell,” he hissed.
“Fine with me.” West got to his feet. “I tried to do this the easy way,” he said, glancing around the room. He spied a rusted toolbox left by the previous inhabitants and walked over. He flipped the toolbox lid open with the toe of his boot and bent down. “Hey, looky here,” he said, grabbing a five-pound hammer and holding it aloft.
“You know what a weltanschauung is?” West asked, glancing to Villars as he walked back to Breul. “Am I saying that right?”
“No idea, boss.” The man shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter,” West said with a wave of the hammer. “It’s a personal philosophy.” He knelt in front of Breul and placed his hand lightly on the man’s thigh.
“So I’m lying on my back, face all burned to shit, and I start thinking about how I lived a good life and did all the right things, and it hits me. That stuff is all a bunch of bullshit. I realized something in that moment.” The muscles in West’s hand flexed, fingers clamping down on Breul’s thigh.
“Please,” the Iranian begged, trying to move his leg to no avail.
West continued talking, raising the hammer to shoulder level, where he let it pause.
“I realized that good guys always lose.”
West punctuated the statement by swinging the hammer down on the top of Breul’s foot, which crunched beneath the impact. The Iranian went rigid, his arms tensing against the flex cuffs holding him to the chair, a feral scream pouring out of his stretched mouth.
“We can play ‘this little piggy’ all day long, Breul,” West yelled, hammering Breul’s foot a second time, and then a third, “or you can tell me where you put my fucking nuke.”
“Algiers,” the Iranian screamed, tears running down his face.
West got to his feet. “All of that could have been avoided,” he said, smirking at Breul’s mangled foot. “But nooooo, Ali Breul had to be a tough guy. You and Steele deserve each other, you know that? Put ol’ clubfoot in the truck,” he said, pointing to one of his men.
“Let’s go start a war,” West said to Villars on his way out the door.
Chapter 11
Inside the Osprey, Eric Steele watched the dot begin to move as the pilot cut the throttle and pushed the nose down. They were coming in hot, nap-of-the-earth, which gave the lumbering twin-engine aircraft a smaller profile.
Steele was about to let the pilot know the target location when the screen went blank, followed by the words “signal failure.”
What the hell?
Breul was moving, but without the link to the pin, Steele had no idea where to tell the pilot to go. They were blind. Steele knew the manual better than the engineers who’d written it and feverishly began troubleshooting the device. He ran through the most likely problems, switching out the batteries, checking the antenna connection, and restarting the device. Still nothing.
Think, man. You have to do something.
His heart pounded in his chest. The SEALs were ready to go and he could see the coast through the cockpit. He slipped his knife out of his left pocket, flicking the blade open with his thumb. Using the tip of the knife, he pried the back plate off the unit, revealing a bird’s nest of wires.
One chance.
He ignored the doubt. There was only one solution; something was jamming the satellite signal. Assuming the pin was still online, Steele was going to circumnavigate the problem. He pried one of the wires free, envisioning the wiring diagram in his head. Yellow was satellite, and he severed it from the motherboard and carefully stripped the sheath, exposing the wire’s core.
“Commo cord,” he said, looking at the SEAL with the radio on his back. The man nodded and rummaged in a pouch on his gear. A second later he had a two-foot section of coax cable, what radiomen called a pigtail.
Steele cut the end of the pigtail, exposing the wire inside. He deftly twisted the two exposed wires together, then connected the other end to the radio attached to his plate carrier. The radio beeped when he unlocked the face and dialed the frequency to 1003 MHz, which was the frequency assigned to Ali Breul’s data pin.
Steele closed his eyes and offered a silent prayer to whoever was listening, then got to his feet. He paused at the door, thumbing the GPS’s menu button until a digital compass appeared on the screen.
“No whammies, no whammies,” he muttered to himself.
In theory, without a satellite connection, the modified GPS would lock on to the only signal in the city operating off of 1003 Mhz. It would think that was north, and if he was right, the compass heading would lead him right to Ali Breul’s data pin.
Where are you, buddy?
The compass’s index line bounced back and forth while Steele held his breath. He knew the pilots were going to start bitching about fuel soon, and while he waited for the makeshift compass to lock down, he could feel the seconds ticking away.
Please work.
He slipped a miniature spotting scope from his pack and moved to the door, and when the compass locked down, he was ready. At a hundred feet above the ocean, the city of Ben Gardane looked like a pencil smudge on the horizon. He held down on the autofocus button, and when it zoomed in he saw three Hilux trucks running north along a road. The spotting scope was equipped with a range finder, and Steele depressed the button with his index finger. He held the reticle steady on the center vehicle, the one with the hooded man in the backseat, and a second later the infrared laser bounc
ed back, displaying the heading in red numbers at the bottom of the optic.
He yanked the pigtail from the radio and flipped the frequency back to the internal net that allowed him to communicate with the pilot and the SEALs.
“One hundred eighty-two degrees. Three trucks moving north, target is in the rear of the second Hilux.”
The pilot responded by pushing the throttle forward, and Steele braced himself against the bulkhead to keep from falling out. Behind him one of the crewmen lifted a braided fast rope from a bag attached to the floor. Steele stuffed the GPS in his pocket, aware of the crewman fastening the rope to its mounting bracket.
Steele dumped the range finder into his assault pack, retrieved a pair of thick gloves from the same pocket, and zipped it up before putting them on. The H&K rifle followed, and once it was strapped to his body, he tugged the gloves over his hands and looked down through the hatch in the floor. Unlike in the Pave Hawk he would be fast roping below the Osprey instead of using the door, and when he looked down, it was immediately obvious why the aircrews called it the hellhole.
He gave the rope a tug, keeping a tight grip with his left hand while the city flashed below them. They were moving fast, and the Osprey’s velocity made it almost silent. The pilot maneuvered parallel with the convoy, then at the last minute swung the bird sideways to intercept.
I’m coming, brother.
Steele kicked the rope out and the Osprey bounced and swayed from the updraft rushing off the city. The fast rope snapped wildly in the air, and that was when Steele saw the little girl.
She was standing in the middle of the street, unaware of the trucks bearing down on her. From Steele’s point of view she looked incredibly small, standing there face upturned and staring at the helo. The pink ball she was carrying fell from her hands in slow motion.
She was about to be run over, and Steele knew he had to go.
The rope burned his hands and the inside of his legs. He had to hold on tighter than usual because neither the rope nor the helicopter was steady. It felt like he was trying to stay on a hurricane. The heat came through his hiking boots like his feet were on fire. He had two options: let go and break his legs, or take the pain and possibly walk away.