by Larry Bond
The rest of the day and evening were equally unproductive. The majority of the local Iraqi community were employed with the Iraqi Petroleum Company at its massive processing and distribution facility a few kilometers north of town. Fouad had directed him toward the local intelligence contact, who as he predicted was useless; the nonofficial contacts were more thoughtful but had not heard that Khazaal was in the area. Ferguson left bugs in the café they frequented, arranging for an uplink just in case. But if the meeting was taking place here, it remained a well-kept secret. Ferguson wandered through the clubs where the drug dealers hung out; he could have bought huge portions of dope and smaller quantities of weapons, but information was much harder to come by.
Several hours of wandering the bars and casinos of Latakia had given Ferguson a splitting headache but not appreciably more information. He walked into the Blu Note a little after one a.m. and headed for the rest-room, where he tried fighting off the headache with a small dose of Cytomel as well as aspirin. The thyroid hormone sometimes gave his system a jump start, but it didn’t tonight, and he didn’t have to put on much of an act to look like one of the disaffected Europeans as he sauntered into the bar area.
The jazz singer he’d seen the night before was back. Ferguson stared at her, looking at Corrine from the corner of his eye. She had a table with her marines and Delta troopers. Two members of the Lebanese police force sat across from her but seemed to be undercover.
Two other people were watching her from across the room. Ferguson decided they were probably Syrians, though it was difficult to tell. He sipped a seltzer, working out how to approach Corrine without blowing his cover; even though he was leaving town, he didn’t want the Syrians to pick up on him, if possible.
Easiest thing to do would be to wait until she went to the restroom.
Or just bag the in-face meeting. It was unnecessary.
He leaned back against the bar, turning to the right in time to see a possible diversion come through the door in tight jeans and an equally snug red camisole top. She smiled at Ferguson and walked toward him.
He reached for his bankroll when a man ran into the room behind her. Clearly out of place, he wore a long raincoat, his eyes wide. Someone behind him shouted. Ferguson cursed, reaching to his back for the big Glock. He steadied, fired, and suddenly his headache felt ten times worse.
~ * ~
~ * ~
1
TRIPOLI
From the inside, it felt like a slow-motion kaleidoscope, a cut and jumble of color and action and sounds, none of which made any sense to Corrine.
On the outside, she saw a man enter the club, heard someone shout behind him.
He’s going to kill us, she thought to herself.
The man’s head exploded, but his body didn’t. A bullet had caught him.
Ferguson’s.
Ferguson!
The CIA officer jumped over the rail from the bar, gun in hand. The bodyguards leapt to their feet. One ran up toward the suicide bomber Ferguson had just killed, double-checking to make sure the man was dead. The other three were pulling her toward the door. Someone nearby jumped up, and just before any one could blast him waved a Lebanese police ID.
Ferguson saw the room as people: the blues singer, frozen at her piano; the two Syrians trying to get out the door; two young men, teenagers really, running for the back.
And then he realized what the hell was going on.
“No!” he yelled, shooting both of the young men. As they fell, the small submachine guns they’d had beneath their clothes, Mac-11s, fell to the floor.
Ferg bolted out the door behind the marines. Two cars were pulling up.
“No!” he shouted. “Out of here! It’s a trap! It’s a kidnapping! These guys are terrorists. Back through the front!”
One of the car doors opened. Ferguson fired once, then pirouetted in time to get a gunman coming down the alley. The marines started to fire at the gunmen appearing from the cars. Corinne ducked and began running back into the building.
“Yeah, that way,” said Ferguson. “Go! Go!”
Fie grabbed her and threw her through the doorway. As the bodyguards followed, he grabbed the small smoke grenade he had inside his belt, yanked the pin with his teeth, and whipped it behind him. Then he took another and threw it into the room ahead of them.
“Go! Front door! Go!” he yelled as the bomb exploded.
Ferg grabbed Corrine by the back of the shirt and pulled her with him through the pandemonium. One of the bodyguards took hold of Corrine by the right arm and Ferg let go, swooping down to grab the hideaway gun near his ankle. One of the bodyguards grabbed a chair and smashed out a front window. Ferguson heard an automatic rifle popping behind him somewhere, he grabbed at Corrine and helped throw her through the window.
Their driver and escort—more embassy Delta boys—had pulled the Mercedes up. The escort leveled an M249 squad-level machine gun at Ferguson as he came out with the others.
“He’s with us!” yelled a marine. “He’s ours!”
A distinct look of disappointment registered on the man’s face.
Corrine kept insisting that she was all right and could run on her own, but no one listened. They wedged her in the back, all six of them in the Mercedes. Their second vehicle, an SUV with a local driver, pulled up behind them, but there was no time to parcel out the seating arrangements. The Mercedes driver stomped the gas, and the car whipped forward. One of the marines screamed as his ankle got caught in the door, but he managed to get his foot inside as they skidded forward.
Four blocks later, the Mercedes and SUV veered onto a side street so that they could rearrange themselves. Ferguson pulled himself out of the back and flipped over into the front.
“Not here, not here!” he yelled. “This is the last place we want to be. That’s a mosque. Get us the hell out of here. Down the block, go. Go! Go!”
The driver gave him a dirty look.
“Go!” said Ferguson. He pulled his gun up, the small one, though the driver probably didn’t appreciate the difference.
“Listen to what Ferguson says,” Corrine yelled.
“Left, quick right,” said Ferguson, struggling to get his bearings straight as the car lurched into gear. They made it over to Abou Ali Square and headed south.
“All right, there’s a place we can get to beyond the town and get a helicopter in,” said Ferguson. “It’s scoped out.”
“I’m not leaving,” said Corrine.
“Bullshit you’re not leaving. Somebody just tried to kidnap you. Or assassinate you.”
“So I’m supposed to run away?”
“I don’t necessarily disagree with your attitude,” said Ferguson, turning around. “But given that you’re not here for any real reason except to kick in my teeth, I think you ought to get out while the getting out is good. You’re just a target now.”
Corrine, seated between two marines, realized Ferguson was right. But leaving town felt too much like running away.
“Hell, you were going tomorrow anyway,” said Ferguson, pulling out his phone. “Besides, it’ll get you out of another one of those tours.”
Corrine laughed, more out of relief than anything else.
~ * ~
O
ne of the Delta boys had been shot in the arm; one of the marine boys had sprained or possibly broken his ankle in the escape. Otherwise they were unharmed. Ferguson told Corrigan to hustle in the MH-6 helo they had stationed offshore for an emergency bailout. It was sitting on a barge about ten minutes’ flying time away; they made it to the rendezvous point three minutes before the helo did.
“Who do you think did this?” Corrine asked as they waited for the chopper.
“Ordinarily I’d say the Syrians, but they looked a little surprised.”
“There were Syrians in the club?”
“They followed you in. Second bet would be some of the people you had dinner with.”
“They were government people and business
men.”
“Is that supposed to rule them out?”
“Was it Khazaal?”
“If blaming him will get me permission to kill him, then sure.”
“Ferg.”
“No, I doubt it was Khazaal. He’s not here. Probably it was some group of local crazies trying to score big who heard that you were around.” He could hear the helicopter in the distance. He pointed at two of the bodyguards. “You two guys are on the ground with me. Everybody else goes home.”
One of the men started to object.
“No, listen to what he says,” said Corrine. “He’s with the CIA.”
“Well, don’t tell everybody.” Ferguson smiled. The helicopter had already started to glide in. “There’s not enough room for everybody in the chopper. It’s all right. You’re safe with me. I’ve had my rabies shots.”
Corrine started for the helicopter, then turned back. “Thanks,” she told Ferguson.
“For what?”
“For saving my life.”
“I was saving my own. You just got in I lie: way.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not unless I’m out of ammo.”
“I wanted to tell you something. I saw a man in the hotel whom I saw with Mossad.”
“Probably an officer,” said Ferguson. “Maybe he runs some agents up here.”
“He denounced me.”
“What?”
“He denounced me.” Corrine had to yell to make herself heard over the chopper. “He said his name was Fazel al-Qiam and he’d been a rep to the UN, an Arab. He denounced me.”
“Did he spell that?”
“No.”
“I’m just kidding. Thanks, I’ll check it out.”
“Can the helicopter get me down to Beirut?”
“Why?”
“I’m supposed to be there tomorrow.”
“It’ll take you to Oz if you want. Go.”
“Thanks, Ferg.”
“Yeah. I’ll hate myself in the morning.” Ferguson turned to the marine and Delta bodyguard staying behind. “Beer’s on me boys. But let’s find a place with a calmer floor show.”
~ * ~
2
CIA BUILDING 24-442, VIRGINIA
The CIA and American intelligence in general were often faulted for not knowing much of what was going on in the world, but to Thomas Ciello, the criticism was not only unfair; it was wrong-headed. The CIA and its brother and sister agencies knew a great deal, so much, in fact, that it was impossible to know exactly what they knew.
Which was the real problem. Even someone like Thomas, who had made a career of knowing what the Agency knew, couldn’t possibly know everything. All he could do was skim and skim and skim, use search tools that made Google look like a disorganized orangutan, and occasionally— only occasionally—take wild guesses.
The wild guesses usually led nowhere. The search engines, however, helped him match the name of a Russian weapons expert with a place he didn’t expect to find him: Syria. Northwestern Syria, as a matter of fact, where Jurg Vassenka had booked a ticket on a rare flight to Latakia from Cairo via Damascus.
Vassenka was an expert in several weapons systems. The one that was most interesting in this case, given the Iraqi connection, was the Russian R-11/SS-1B, more popularly known as the Scud.
Thomas soon realized that Vassenka’s arrival in Latakia would not actually be all that unusual; the Syrian resort on the Mediterranean was a popular place for arms dealers, one of the many facts that the CIA knew that he didn’t. But by then Thomas had found more data on Latakia, including intercepted e-mails from several months before between Khazaal’s Iraqi group and a mosque in the city.
As he started to type the information into a brief report, he glanced at Professor Ragguzi’s manuscript on his desk. After he spoke to Corrigan, he promised himself, he would write an e-mail to the professor and point out his error on the UFOs. Surely a man as great as Ragguzi would appreciate knowing that he had made a mistake ... as impossible as that was to contemplate.
~ * ~
3
TRIPOLI
Even if he hadn’t already made up his mind that Lebanon was a wrong turn, the kidnapping would have cinched it for Ferguson. Had it been successful, the attempt would have brought down the wrath of the local authorities on the radicals in town, something Khazaal wouldn’t have been foolish enough to want.
Figuring out precisely who had made the attempt on Corrine was a problem for smother day, if not an entirely different agency. Ferguson’s goal at the moment was to get out of the country without expending any more ammunition. Syria was the logical destination, but going over the nearby northern border involved document contingencies that would be hard to finesse for his two companions, Special Forces/Delta Sergeant Gordon Ranaman, and Marine Corporal Winchester Abbas. Ferguson decided that it would be considerably quicker to smuggle them across the border in the mountains to the northeast, which involved a great deal of driving, or go by sea, which not only would have meant procuring a boat but also would have deprived him of the car. So he chose the mountains.
There were many things Ferguson could have done with Abbas’s name, but the marine had won a rather unfortunate tag from a drill instructor upon his initiation to the Corps: Grumpy. Ranaman was already using it, and Ferguson saw no reason not to do so himself. Ranaman’s name was pronounced like rain man, thus suggesting Monsoon.
Nicknames decided, Ferg parceled out shifts for driving and sleeping. Two of the three men would stay awake while the other caught what rest he could in the backseat.
Which was how Ferguson came to be woken by this conversation:
“You know where we are?”
“On the road he told us to take.”
“You think we should stop?”
“They’re going to shoot us if we don’t.”
“They may shoot us if we do stop.”
“Looks to me like we can count on it.”
Ferguson bolted upright in the backseat. “Floor it,” he yelled, pulling out his big Glock.
They’d come upon a preborder checkpoint manned by Syrians to cut down on smuggling. Fortunately, the checkpoint was manned by only two soldiers who were a bit sleepy and slow to realize that the Mercedes wouldn’t stop. Unfortunately, the men a half mile away were much more awake, considerably more numerous, and better shots. They proved all three as the Mercedes rounded a curve down the pass on a narrow road leading to the border. The first few shots missed. The second set of rounds bounced harmlessly off the armor-plated hood. The next hundred or so, all fired by a light machine gun, did varying amounts of damage to the fenders and door but did not slow Grumpy, who was driving like a true marine: foot hard on the accelerator.
“Go, just keep going,” Ferguson said, pulling on his night glasses. There was an obstruction set up in the middle of the road, but Grumpy managed to get the Mercedes past it by plowing through a ditch, sideswiping the Syrians’ vehicle, and then barreling through a fence and down an embankment. When the car finally stopped, Ferguson grabbed his pack.
“End of the line guys, come on.” They jumped out into the field and began to run, about twenty or thirty seconds ahead of the Syrians.
“What if this a minefield?” said Monsoon.
“Hey, good idea,” said Ferguson. He reached to his belt and pulled out one of his small pin grenades. As he pulled the pin, he screamed in Arabic, “Mines! Mines!” and rolled the grenade on the ground, following it with a second and more warnings.
After the second grenade exploded, Ferguson cupped his hand around his mouth in a way he hoped would throw his voice and began yelping that his leg had been hurt. Whether his crude attempt at ventriloquism worked or not, the Syrians didn’t bother following.
“Now what do we do?” asked Monsoon when they were finally sure they were clear.
“One rule from now on,” Ferguson told them. “Never let me sleep through the good parts of the movie. Wake me up. OK?”
&
nbsp; “Yes, sir,” said Grumpy.
“It’s all right. I forgot marines drive faster than most normal human beings,” said Ferguson. “I thought I had another half hour before we got close to the border.”
The other men laughed.
“All right. Next thing we do is find ourselves another car. And figure out where the hell we are.” He glanced at his watch. “But first I have to call home.”