by Larry Bond
Brushing the sand and dirt from his face, Ferguson pulled off his shoes and borrowed pants, stripping to his bathing trunks. Then he waded into the surf, splashing water on his face and hair, shaking his head like a St. Bernard clearing its water-logged coat. It was an overcast, muggy day; insects buzzed around him. He reached into his shirt pocket for his small pillbox and took his medicine, washing it down with seawater as he had the other day. Then he sat back in the bushes, trying to plot out his next move.
When he first heard the helicopter, he didn’t think much of it. But as it gradually got closer Ferguson decided to move to a spot where he couldn’t be seen. His bicycle lay fifty yards farther south, in a ditch by the dirt road he had taken here. It was too far to retrieve without being seen.
A clump of low trees sat ten feet away. They wouldn’t provide a lot of cover, but they were better than sitting out on the rocks. He moved back and stood behind the trunks of two, flattening his body against them. He thought there was a possibility the helo had been sent by Van for him, but as it came closer he saw that it was an Aerospatiale Gazelle, an oldish general-purpose type used by the Syrian military and painted in the swirls of Syrian camouflage. And it was definitely looking for something, if not him; it moved at a deliberate pace down the shoreline.
The chopper flew south about a hundred yards then slowly circled back. It skittered slowly toward a small wedge of sand and rocks to Ferguson’s left, looking very much like it intended to set down.
He decided he’d make a run for it when it did. If he could get to the highway he might find a place to hide or even a truck or something to hop onto. The helicopter took its time descending, however, and for a moment he thought, perhaps wishfully, that it was going to move on. It leaned ever so slightly to one side, shuddering as its pilot momentarily lost his touch five or six feet above the ground.
When he saw that, Ferguson bolted. The ground was hot against his bare feet, but he didn’t stop, sliding into the ditch in front of the highway as the helicopter’s engine revved. Ferg crawled on all fours for about ten yards, then dashed across the road. The helicopter moved along the water behind him. A truck appeared from the dip in the road ahead, moving slowly up a long grade. It was an old farm vehicle, struggling to make it up the long hill, and he thought he might be able to hop in the back fairly easily. The only question was whether the truck would get there before the helicopter pilot flew over the roadway and spotted him.
Ferguson squatted in the ditch, waiting. The chopper started over the land. As he waited for the truck, Ferg saw a car coming down from the north; it was tempting to wait for it, since it was going in the direction he eventually wanted to take and surely could go faster than the truck. But it might not stop for him, and he had no weapon to use to help persuade the driver. With a split second to decide, he stayed with his original plan, rocking forward and then leaping up as the truck passed. In two bounds, he had his hands on the wooden stakes at the rear; he swung up his feet and held on.
The rear was filled with crates of lettuce going to market in Latakia. As he pulled up and got into the bed, the helicopter passed overhead. Ferguson looked back toward the beach area and saw that it had dropped several soldiers, one of whom was running toward the road.
Except it wasn’t a soldier. It was Thera.
~ * ~
16
NEAR AL FATTAH, IRAQ
“Remember that restaurant on the road leading to town, Stephen? They had great beer. Always cold. How do you think they got beer there?”
“They made it at a still. They just put it in some old bottles they had.”
“No way.”
Guns checked the map as he drove, listening to the two men describe how much Tikrit and the surrounding area had changed over the past year. It was as if they were speaking about a place they’d lived all their lives, not one they’d spent only a few weeks in. But they’d been glad enough to get out of there after the last place they checked proved to be nothing more than a fruit stand.
Neither man had said anything about what had actually happened when they’d been together two years before. Guns didn’t figure there was much sense prying, especially where Rankin was concerned, and, besides, driving through this part of Iraq required every ounce of attention he could muster.
The attacks that were a regular feature of life during the first year of the occupation were well in the past, but animosity toward Americans still ran deep. Guns and Rankin had donned generic green fatigues as soon as they arrived in Iraq, and there was no question of fitting in. Even the children they passed gave them dirty looks.
The last delivery they had to check was in Al Fattah, which lay to the east of Tal Ashtah New, roughly forty miles by road north of Tikrit. As they had at all of the other stops, Guns took his M4 with him when he got out of the vehicle; even though the day had turned very warm, he pulled on the bulletproof vest. Rankin did the same. Only James left his in the car. He’d taken it with him but hadn’t bothered to put it on.
They’d refined their story by now and presented themselves as inspectors trying to make sure that goods had been properly delivered. Armed men asking about packages might draw stares in other countries; in Iraq it seemed to be par for the course. Nobody seemed surprised by their questions, though getting them to cooperate was more than a little difficult.
The drop-off point had been a lumberyard. A man who said he was the manager led them around to the back and showed them two large pallets of two-by-fours the trucks had brought. He offered copies of the paperwork, but they declined. The yard covered roughly five acres with enough construction materials to build an entire city. There were piles of bricks and stone and sand, huge cement pipes, old timbers, even long I-beams of steel and a heap of scrap metal. Many of the items had been salvaged from wrecked buildings, but there were new materials as well, including PVC pipe and massive coils of electrical wire. Most of it was out in the open. A new building was going up at the far end of the yard, near a rusting railroad siding. It was only half completed, and in fact had been that way for a while, but the manager waxed eloquent about the booming business, talking excitedly about how great their opportunities were now that democracy had come. Security was an important concern, he added; they were always trying to get more and better guards, and worked with the American authorities to do so. He meant it as a hint; contractors were forever changing jobs here.
The manager was one of the few Iraqis they’d met who didn’t openly sneer at them. His guards were armed with American Ml6s, and Guns guessed that they had been trained by one of the firms that had helped provide protection during the early days of the occupation.
Rankin looked at the men and thought any one of them could have been gunning for him two years before. He checked through the yard, then went out and looked at the train siding. There was a single car there, an old tanker with the word kerosene stenciled on the side in English. The thing smelled as if it were leaking: one joker with a cigarette and the whole damn place would go up. He walked down a ways, saw some old tires and discarded sewer pipes along with another pile of battered bricks.
When they got back in the car, Rankin stared at the fence.
“You ever do any construction work, Guns?”
“No.”
“You, James?”
“Work with my hands?”
“I never heard of getting wood by airplane,” said Rankin. “That’s not the sort of thing you fly in.”
“We looked around the place pretty good,” said Guns. “I’m sure they could hide some guns and such but nothing as big as the missile we’re looking for. I looked in all the wood piles. There were no crates that I saw.”
“A lot of toilet seats,” said James. “No missiles.”
“We’re out of range here anyway. Over a hundred miles.”
“Maybe it was here and they moved it,” said Rankin.
“Easy enough,” said Guns. “Doesn’t help us now.”
“What do you think about that ra
ilroad track?” asked Rankin.
“Pretty rusty. Tanker car on it looks older than you.”
“What do you think, James?”
“I think we should get something to eat. And then a whole lot of vodka.”
Rankin considered that. “Where would you get vodka in Tikrit?”
“Tikrit? You don’t want to go there.”
“Wasn’t my question.”
“Couple of places. There’s a Russian bar on the north side. They’ve got real stuff. Or they used to. Before the war.”
“Let’s check it out now.”
“You really want to go there, Stephen?”
“No. But that’s where we’re going. Tell Guns the turns, all right? I have to call in.”
~ * ~
M
ost of the people in the bar were involved in the oil industry in some manner, even though Tikrit itself was hardly an oil-producing center. Following the occupation, Russians had filled many of the middle-level management jobs in the oil industry, both in the field and in the offices. Company management—in general foreign—trusted them more than they trusted the Iraqis; the Iraqi workers didn’t resent taking their orders quite as much as they would have an American’s.
Guns’s Russian worked well here. The bartender asked him where in Russia he was from. Moscow was an easy and noncommittal answer; but he supplemented it with a mention of Chechnya, saying he’d served there until recently and peppered his conversation with geographical details he remembered from their last mission. Without mentioning Vassenka by name, he said he was looking for a friend who’d come to Iraq very recently and also knew Chechnya. The bartender didn’t seem interested, and Guns simply took their drinks over to the table where James and Rankin had already sat down.
Ten minutes later, a man approached them, speaking volubly in Russian about atrocities in Chechnya. Guns thought it was a test and said nothing. Finally Rankin decided their best course was to leave. As they got up, the man became more vocal. They left money on the table and started for the door. As they reached it, the bartender came out from around the bar, tapped Guns on the arm, and suggested that he look for his friend in Balad, a town to the south a little less than fifty miles north of Baghdad.
“Jurg, right?” said the bartender.
Guns nodded.
“He was still looking to hire men yesterday. Perhaps he will have room for you on his crew.”
“Spasiba,” said Guns. “Thank you.”
~ * ~
17
CYPRUS
Saved by Van and Thera—the helicopter was actually a rental that Van Buren’s men had painted a few days earlier in case it was needed—Ferguson returned to Cyprus. While waiting for some replacement clothes from town, he vanquished his hunger with a large steak and got an update from Corrigan.
The Defense Department analysts brought in as consultants were having a field day poking holes in the theory that the SS-N-9 would be used in Iraq. The fact that the missile was a naval weapon seemed to them to rule out any possibility of its use on land. Admittedly, it was designed to travel at low altitude over open terrain, where it would have an unobstructed flight path, but it could be used over land, and Vassenka was supposed to be enough of an expert to make sure it would work. If the missile had been fitted with a GPS guidance system, it stood an extremely good chance of hitting its target. Whether it was the optimum tool for the purpose wasn’t the point. Vassenka himself would undoubtedly have preferred something along the lines of what NATO called the SS-12 Scaleboard, a large, liquid-fueled rocket with a range of roughly five hundred miles. Or for that matter a Scud, fitted with a similar guidance system.
Ferg thought that Vassenka might be able to fit the Scuds with GPS kits; along with alterations to the notoriously fickle steering fins and so-so engine, the improvements would make the missile considerably more effective than those Saddam had used during the first Gulf War. The location of these Scuds was admittedly a huge question. Most of the analysts doubted that the resistance could be hiding more than one or two, though they conceded that Vassenka might have been “retained” to supply some from Korea or elsewhere along with rocket fuel and his improvements.
In any event, with the rocket fuel confiscated and Khazaal dead, the Scuds no longer seemed to be a threat. Rankin and Guns were checking leads on who might be left in Khazaal’s organization, making sure they didn’t have the Scuds. It was a long shot, and this wasn’t their sort of work, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that they hadn’t turned up anything.
Which brought them back to the Siren missile.
“I’m with the intel guys on that,” said Corrigan. “You wouldn’t use it against an urban target. It flies too low.”
“For somebody like Vassenka, that’s not going to be a problem,” Ferguson told him. “If he can make a Scud accurate, he can make a Siren missile bit something in a city.”
“You don’t even know for sure that there was a missile.”
“Don’t start, Jack,” said Ferg.
“I’m just pointing out—”
“Let me do the thinking, OK? Birk doesn’t lie about what he’s selling,” Ferguson added, softening his voice a little. “Make sure Rankin knows I think the Siren might be a real threat. Tell him not to pay too much attention to the intelligence people. Not that he ever does.”
“There’ll be extensive coverage of the area where the missile could be launched from,” Corrigan said. “Even though they don’t think it’s possible, they don’t want to end up looking like fools. Predators, a Global Hawk, all sorts of aircraft will be overhead.”
“All right.”
“Airborne jammers will block the Glosnass and GPS satellites if there’s a launch,” added Corrigan. He was referring to devices designed to block the signals the guidance systems used to orient themselves. “A lot of systems are in place.”
“Didn’t the Air Force use a GPS bomb to destroy one of the Iraqi jammers during the war?” asked Ferguson.
As a matter of fact, the Air Force had, but jamming remained more art than science. Even if the GPS system was successfully blocked, the missile would carry a backup internal guidance system; the best defense was to find it before it launched.
“You going to Iraq?” Corrigan asked.
“I have some things to check out over here,” said Ferguson. “I don’t know at this point that I can come up with anything that Rankin or CentCom won’t.”
“I’ll tell him you said that.”
“You’ll give him a heart attack. Have you found Islamic Justice yet?” Ferguson added, serious again.
“Come again?”
“Birk’s yacht, the Sharia?”
“We told you, it’s not in Syrian waters or anywhere nearby.”
“Is that a no?”
“Yeah, that’s a no.”
“I have a new place to look: off Israel.”
“Israel?”
“Fifty to sixty miles from Jerusalem.”
“Ferg, we have every available photo expert looking around Baghdad for the missile launchers.”
“Get me the satellite photos and I’ll look.”
“Ferg, to pick out a yacht that size ... All right. It’ll take a few hours.”
“E-mail them as soon as you can. I’m not sure where I’ll be.”
~ * ~
F
erguson found Thera waiting outside the secure communications shack.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“A little early.”
“Not by the time we get there.”
“We’re going to Iraq?”
“No. I think Rankin can handle that all right. I have another wild goose chase for us. Grab your gear. Pack some sensible shoes.”
“Always.”
“And a bathing suit.”
“I have my diving suit.”
“Bathing suit. It may come in handy.”
~ * ~
18
BAGHDAD
LATER THAT NIGHT …
The security people had already heard about the Russian missile and Vassenka by the time Corrine spoke to them. They were skeptical, especially when they heard that the missile had supposedly been delivered to Tikrit.
“It’s well out of range,” an Air Force major told her. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“The idea was that they would move it,” she said. Corrigan had arranged for Rankin to give her a briefing an hour before. They were following a lead on Vassenka, though she had gathered from Corrigan that it was a long shot.