by Larry Bond
“You know Khazaal?” Ferguson asked the Iraqi.
“I met him some years ago,” said Fouad, whose ears and bones still reverberated from the helicopter ride. He greatly preferred quieter modes of transportation, though he knew better than to mention this to the American; in his experience Americans never found machines quite noisy enough.
Fifty-three years old, Fouad had dealt with a number of Americans over the years, beginning with his very early service as a glorified gofer and eavesdropper for the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. Stationed in Cairo at the age of twenty-two, he had kept tabs on various expatriate movements and Jews: easy work, though the detailed weekly reports often took two or three days simply to write. By the Iran-Iraq War he had progressed to a liaison officer working with the CIA. Out of favor for a while, he had been sent north into exile in the Kurdistan area until just before the start of the Gulf War, when he worked on a group assigned to prepare for the defense of Baghdad. After the war he found his way to the great sanctions shell game. For the first few months he helped hide evidence of banned weapons from weapons inspectors but soon turned to the more critical task of trumping up evidence of continuing programs to impress the fading dictator and keep external enemies at bay. Fouad lay low in the northern Kurdish region after the second Gulf War until friends in the government convinced him to come to work with them. A brief job with an American security contractor had renewed some of his CIA ties; eventually Fouad found himself back in service with the interior ministry’s security apparatus, serving as a liaison to “external services,” the latest euphemism for the CIA.
“You think Khazaal would go through one of the tunnels?” asked Ferguson, sitting on a rock near his motorcycle. “I thought he liked to travel in style.”
“We all adapt,” said Fouad. Something about the American was very familiar.
“All right.” Ferguson wasn’t sure if Fouad was parroting the intelligence report he’d seen or if he was its author. In his experience, the Iraqi intelligence people demonstrated a wide range of abilities, from extreme competence to extreme ineptitude. As a rule, the more confident they made themselves sound the less able they were. “So we watch for a car that meets him?”
“Possible. It may be a wild goose chase.”
“Not what I want to hear.”
“You want the truth or what you want to hear?” said Fouad, who knew that the latter was almost always preferred, especially by Americans. Putting the question bluntly sometimes saved problems and sometimes not.
“Truth. Always.” Ferguson smiled at him. “But all truth is relative.”
Fouad shrugged, though he did not agree; God’s truth was absolute, after all.
“What we think will happen is that he’ll come across the border on foot, get picked up and driven to one of the abandoned military camps northwest of here, where a plane will meet him,” said Ferguson. “We’re going to stake out the camps so we can hit them when he’s there. On the other hand, he may just take a car all the way across the desert. If that happens, we take the car.”
“What if you miss?”
“Then we punt. We find out where he’s going, and we try to get him there. Problem is, we’re not sure where he’s going. Unless you are.”
“There are so many rumors about Khazaal you can make something up, and it is just as likely to be true.”
“We think tomorrow night,” said Ferguson. “What do you think?”
Fouad could only shrug.
“Can you ride a motorcycle?”
“Not well.”
“You’re my passenger then. Come on.” Ferguson picked up the motorcycle.
Fouad hesitated. He did not like motorcycles and had had several bad experiences with them. “I knew a Ferguson once,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“In Cairo. And during the war with Iran.”
Ferguson realized that Fouad was talking about his father. But he only started the bike and waited for Fouad to get on.
“That was my dad in Cairo,” he said after they reached the base camp. “He had a bunch of jobs over here during the Cold War.”
“Yes, I can see him in your face.” A very solid officer, thought Fouad, not a liar, like many. Good with Arabic. How much like the father was the son?
“Anna saiiiid jiddan himuqaabalatak,” lie said in Arabic. “I am very glad in meet you. Your father was a very dependable fellow.”
“Anaa af ham tamaaman,” replied Ferguson, using the rudimentary phrase a visitor to an Arabian country would use to show he understood what was being said. But then he continued in Arabic: “I understand perfectly: you’re trying to butter me up because you think I’m just another CIA jerk who’s easily turned by a compliment.”
“No. Your father was a brave man. And you speak Arabic well, though with an Egyptian accent.”
“Grammar school in Cairo. Before the nuns got a hold of me.” Ferguson laughed.
The son was like the father in many ways, thought Fouad. A thing both good and bad.
~ * ~
4
SYRIA, ON THE BORDER WITH IRAO
THE NEXT NIGHT . . .
Rankin turned to the Iraqi and gestured at the car that had turned off from the highway. It rode across the open desert, approaching the foothill two miles away. “Is that for him?”
“Who can tell? But the car is like the one that left from Thar in the afternoon, an old Mercedes.”
Just like a hajji, thought Rankin: never a straight yes or no.
Thar was a small town on the other side of the border. Iraqi intelligence officers there had prepared a list of half a dozen suspicious vehicles, all with single drivers. The theory was that the vehicle would go over alone and wait for Khazaal to slip through, a practice often employed by criminals and others trying to escape the country without documentation. The Mercedes would have been thoroughly searched before being allowed over the border.
Two shadows came from the rocks. “You see a face?” asked Rankin.
Fouad shook his head.
Rankin looked over at Guns, who was using his satellite radio system to talk to Corrigan back in the Cube. The radio had a “local” discrete-burst mode for short-range communications with other team members on the ground and a longer-range mode that used satellites to communicate. The latter was easier to detect; though the transmissions were encrypted and virtually unbreakable, the presence of the radio waves could lead someone to the user.
“Where are we, Guns?” asked Rankin.
“I just uploaded the video. They’re looking at it.”
“What’s the UAV see?” Rankin asked. A Predator robot aircraft, or “unmanned aerial vehicle,” was orbiting overhead, helping with the surveillance. It would follow the vehicle to a spot where it could be ambushed.
“Nothing so far.”
“Tell Ferg what’s going on.”
“Already have,” said Guns.
“Hold on,” said Rankin. “There’s another car coming.”
~ * ~
T
he trick was to let the Mercedes get far enough from the border area so that any of the local smugglers and Syrian spies nearby wouldn’t be tipped off but to not let it get so far away that they couldn’t stop it. With two cars, the task became more complicated, especially once the two vehicles got on the nearby road and headed in different directions. Ferguson and Thera staked out the first car, which was moving northwestward; Rankin and Guns followed the second, traveling two miles to the south.
Just to make things even more interesting, a third one appeared soon after the second made its pickup. Two Rangers were detailed to follow that one, staying close enough to trail them but not take them unless ordered to do so by Ferguson.
The first car took a turn off the highway onto a packed dirt road in the direction of an abandoned military outpost a few miles west of the border. The road wound around a series of dry streams, or wadis, and loose sand traps. Since they were on motorcycles, Ferguson, Thera, and the two R
angers traveling with them were able to sprint ahead and check out the site. Ferguson sent the Rangers down the road to watch, in case his hunch about where the Mercedes was going proved wrong. As he and Thera approached the camp, Fouad warned that a Land Rover was parked in front of one of the buildings. The Iraqi had taken over for Guns and was watching the Predator’s video feed. The vehicle had not been there in the afternoon’s satellite snapshot. Ferguson and Thera got off their bikes and went to scout the base. A low ridge sat to the south about a quarter mile from the fence. Standing at the top, Ferguson could see most of the base area.
“There,” Ferguson told Thera, pointing to the second building in the row. “You can just barely make out the shadow inside.”
“How many people?”
“At least two.” He pointed to the road beyond the complex. “Maybe they’re forming a caravan here. Or maybe waiting for a plane. You could land our MC-130 on that road at the back there.”
Ferguson dropped down, sliding to the bottom of the hill. They were no more than fifteen minutes ahead of the Mercedes; if they were going to take it here, they had to get a move on.
“What we have to do is take out the guard by the gate, then the person or persons in the building,” Ferguson told Thera. He took the M203 grenade launcher from his pack and stuffed a dozen plastic shells in his pants pockets, which were already bulging with magazines for the MP5N submachine gun. His vest had concussion and smoke grenades, along with ammo for his pistol and slugs for his shotgun, which he had over his right shoulder.
“Are we taking these guys prisoner or what?” asked Thera.
“Khazaal’s the only one we have to apprehend alive,” said Ferguson. “But, yeah, we dunk these guys if we can. Have your gas mask ready. Crossbow?”
Thera held up the weapon, which was very similar to the type used by deer and other game hunters in the States. A marriage between a miniature rifle and high-tech bow, the weapon fired a titanium arrow over fifty yards, was as accurate as a rifle at that range, and would send its missilelike arrow through the side of a skull. It could also fire two different types of nonlethal ammunition: a syringelike dart with a fast-working anesthetic and a lollypop-shaped hard plastic arrow that was supposed to stun someone struck with it. The anesthetic was related chemically to sodium thiopental, the barbiturate commonly known as truth serum. It worked even quicker though it left the subject feeling as if he or she had a full-body hangover. Thera didn’t trust the lollypops and had left them back at the base camp.
“Wait until I’m outside of the buildings if at all possible,” Ferg told her. “But if you have to shoot, shoot. He doesn’t have a vest. Shoot at the chest.”
Ferguson jogged to the west side of the base, taking advantage of the wadi near the fence, which obscured the view. He found a hole under the fence and crawled into the compound between the two warehouse buildings at the southern end of the compound.
Thera used a drainage ditch to cover her as she closed in on the guard. She found a brace of weeds thirty yards from the entrance and got into firing position. The guard, clearly bored, stood with his gun down against his leg. She took a grenade out just in case—no sense fooling around if she missed—and put her MP5N within easy reach.
“Thera, where are you?” hissed Ferguson in her ear.
“Here,” she whispered. “Just tell me when.”
Ferguson hunkered on his haunches. There was no sign that there were more people than the guard and the one whose shadow he’d seen in the large building to his right. The building had a window at the back; he was tempted to try and get in that way but decided it was too risky. Nor did he have anything to use to booby-trap the exit.
“Thera?”
“Yeah?”
“After you take out the guard, I want you to get to the west side of the southern-most building, all right? There’s a window there. You think you can cover it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No but. Wait until I’m ready if you can.”
Thera steadied the crossbow, zeroed in on the guard. She’d first used a bow when she was twelve years old, hunting with her father at his cabin in the Catskills. He was a New York City detective back then, two years divorced from her mother, a much heavier drinker than now. She could feel his hand on her shoulder, gripping gently, his thumb pressing as the buck walked toward them in the field.
The guard turned toward her. Suddenly he started to bring up his rifle. Thera pulled the trigger on her crossbow. The weapon made a whispery thwang as it shot. She watched through the scope as the arrow struck the guard flat in the chest. He shook, stunned, not quite comprehending what had happened. Then he started to grab at the arrow, stopped, raised his gun again, then fell off to the side, knocked unconscious by the massive dose of synthetic narcotic in the warhead.
Ferguson heard Thera’s heavy breathing over the radio and realized she’d shot the guard. He moved up the side of the building, reached the corner, and glanced toward the front. He saw no one. He checked the grenade launcher—he figured he would hit anyone coming out in the chest with the tear-gas round, which would knock them down at very close range—then knelt on one knee to wait for Thera.
Thera ran to the stricken guard, made sure he was down, then grabbed the dart and his rifle and went to the back of the building. Ferguson caught a glimpse of her as she ran.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Let me catch my breath.”
“Not enough time. Use the gun if you have to. Get your mask on.”
Without knowing exactly how the building was configured, Ferguson decided on a simple, two-step plan: tear-gas grenade in window, then duck. Standard grenades needed about fourteen meters to arm; this was a precaution against the grenade going off too close to friendly troops. The arming mechanism in these rounds allowed them to explode as soon as they struck something.
Ferguson rammed the metal butt end of the grenade launcher through the window, breaking the glass. Then he pumped the round inside and grabbed his shotgun. A man emerged from the building; Ferguson fired point-blank at the man, striking him in the chest, neck, and face with the plastic pellets in the shell.
“Ferg?” asked Thera.
“Watch the back, watch the back,” he yelled, reloading the M203 and pumping another round inside the building before running over to the man he’d shot, who was writhing on the ground. Though the shotgun pellets were plastic, he’d been so close to Ferguson that the round cut as well as bruised his face, and he wailed in pain, temporarily blinded. Ferguson put him temporarily out of his misery with a shot of Demerol.
As he rose, he heard Thera scream.
~ * ~
5
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Judy Coldwell waited for the bank clerk to leave the safety-deposit area before opening the box. Her fingers trembled as she picked up the passport and the envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills.
As she had hoped but also feared, she had been called on to fulfill her brother’s mission. It would not be easy. The church was under attack. The Reverend Tallis had been arrested. So had other elders, perhaps all of them. The bank accounts in the United States and Cayman Islands had been frozen, according to the FBI press release she read on the Internet.
Tallis had managed to send her a one-word message: Latakia.
Coldwell knew that meant Latakia, Syria, and that she should go there. Beyond that, however, she was unsure exactly how to proceed. She knew that her brother’s mission would have been to contact groups interested in attacking holy sites. She knew where to get the necessary authorizations (and find willing bank officers) to enable her to access the group’s hidden overseas funds. But she did not know what groups Benjamin had been dealing with.
Latakia had been a favorite spot of arms dealers and other smugglers when she last visited roughly three years before, and she guessed that whomever Benjamin had been dealing with had arranged to meet him there. Whether they would accept her as a replacement or not remained to be seen. Tra
veling to Syria was not easy for an American, but that at least would not be a problem; the passport in her hand indicated she was a Moroccan of French and Italian descent.
Whatever must be done would be done. Generations were counting on her to bring forward the next age.
Coldwell glanced at the passport. She would have to get her hair cut so that it matched the photo, but by tomorrow afternoon, Judy Coldwell would no longer exist. Agnes Perpetua would have taken her place. The tickets for the first leg of her journey were already waiting at the airport to be claimed.
Coldwell put the passport and money into her purse, then closed the box.
“I’m done here,” she told the clerk outside. “Done.”
~ * ~