Hell or High Water

by Julie Ann Walker

  Uncle John whistled, and Leo looked over to find the old man’s hands now resting ever so casually on the big duffel bag. “You really are James Bond, aren’t you?” his uncle said. “Or Jamie Bond. You know, since you’re a girl and all,” he added unnecessarily.

  “But that’s not the real kicker,” Olivia continued, wiggling her eyebrows at his uncle, “because all of that technology is pretty standard in today’s spy market. What isn’t standard is the adhesive on these tracking devices. It’s embedded with nanotechnology that transmits a warning signal if the apparatus is tampered with.

  “So far, we haven’t received any such signal. So the weapons were tossed or the whole damn boat sank. Either scenario sucks, and have I mentioned how much I hate that guy Murphy?” She blew out a breath and shook her head. “But regardless of what happened, we have to get those CWs back. We can’t leave three capsules of chemicals lying around on the ocean floor that, if combined and aerosolized, could take out the population of a small city.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Wolf cursed. “Just what kind of stuff are we talking here?”

  “Methylphosphonyl difluoride, cyclohexylamine, and cyclohexanol.” She rattled off the list of tongue-twisting agents like a bona fide chemical engineer.

  Leo wondered if it were possible for a person to shit their own heart. “Cyclosarin?” he demanded. “You let these sonsofbitches escape with the mixture for cyclosarin?” It was one of the most deadly nerve agents ever to come out of a German laboratory. He thought he’d been joking when he named her one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “Jesus H. Christ, Olivia!”

  “Why am I picturing you with your pinky held to your lip while you stroke a hairless cat in an ominous fashion?” Bran asked her, eyes hard as stone.

  “Huh?” She frowned at him.

  “You know, Austin Powers?” When her face remained blank, Bran added, “Dr. Evil? How long has it been since you watched a movie?”

  “Look,” she said, her tone defiant, “if we could’ve planted fake capsules, we would have. But these types of weapons have elaborate QR codes etched into their casings. Those QR codes can’t be duplicated with any sort of precision. The OPCW made sure of that.”

  “The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” Wolf clarified for Leo’s uncle’s sake.

  “If the mole or moles wanted to,” Olivia continued, “they could have had the tangos snap a picture of the code for verification, and it would have been easy to check that code against the OPCW’s online manifest.” When no one said anything to that, she continued to plead her case. “Was it a risk using the real chemicals as bait? Yes. Undoubtedly. But catching the traitor or traitors, plugging the leak in the Intelligence Community, and potentially saving the necks of agents and civilians alike made the reward worth the risk. We just…”—she sighed and threw her hands in the air—“we just didn’t bargain for all of this.”

  Bran glanced around the kitchen as if he was expecting to see someone other than the six of them and Meat who, after finishing his kibble, had immediately retired to the doggy pillow shoved beneath the freestanding, farmhouse-style sink. The big, furry dope was sprawled on his back, legs spread wide, cock and balls all on display, and snoring loud enough to rattle the windowpanes.

  “Okay, I get it,” Bran said. “So you and Morales saw an opportunity and you took it. But then where the hell are these contractors you were talking about? Why aren’t you with those spostatas”—the New Jersey Italian in him came out when he got worked up or tipsy, and it was like being in the middle of a Sopranos episode—“instead of here with us?”

  She squinted at the clock on the wall. Like everything else, patience was finite, and Leo could tell she had just about reached the limit of hers. He couldn’t blame her, of course. I mean, she’d allowed frickin’ chemical weapons to be stolen and then sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Her and Morales’s asses were definitely in a bind here.

  “None of the contractors are dive specialists,” she admitted, slicing her hand through the air like a karate chop. She used the gesture as punctuation. A physical exclamation point. “But don’t you worry, Morales has already had them transfer to Key West and rent a boat. They’ll meet us out at the, uh, the code name we’re using during transmissions is ‘the package.’”

  “Clever.” Bran snorted, and Leo watched Olivia’s lips curve into a frown as her eyes glinted with… What was that emotion he saw on her face? Derision? Determination? Or desperation, perhaps?

  Well, whatever it was, it made his heart clench and the deep breath he dragged into his lungs burn. Then again, maybe that last part was due more to the fact that the air inside the kitchen smelled strongly of chicory coffee mixed with the rather pungent aroma of the tuna casserole his uncle seemed to live on.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “if we pull anchor now, we should arrive at the capsules about the same time the contractors will. Which is good since we have no idea what we’ll be dealing with out there. I’m hoping that if the boat sank, it pulled the terrorists down right along with it. But since Morales can’t take the chance of accessing our satellites to search the area without potentially alerting the moles to our little operation…” She let the sentence dangle, shrugging.

  Leo sensed Bran and Mason’s gazes landing on his face. Carefully, feeling as if everything he’d worked so hard for during the last two months was on the line, and that Fate, in the form of one curvaceous female, was slicing at the rope, he said, “So you’re tellin’ me that not only do you want us to dive down and recover your lost capsules, but you also think it’s possible we’ll only be able to do that after a firefight with eight card-carryin’ al-Qaeda militants?”

  “It’s not out of the question.” She met his gaze head-on.

  Any other time he would have appreciated her no-bullshit approach. Not today. Because today she was attempting to involve him in a mission that would put an indefinite hold on his search for the Santa Cristina. Bad enough. Worse still was the fact that said mission might just be enough to get him and his men…his friends…killed. And that would pretty much obliterate any chance they had of keeping their promise.

  Right. The thought sucked so hard he figured there was a hickey on his brain.

  Looking around at his crew, Leo made a decision that went against everything he’d stood for since the day he attached his Budweiser, the pin of the Navy SEAL brotherhood, to his dress whites. “I’m afraid you’ve wasted a trip, Olivia,” he said, the words threatening to slip backward from his lips to lodge in his throat. “We weren’t jokin’ when we bugged out. We’re done. Finished. Kaput. Which means this is now a case of not my circus, not my monkeys. I suspect you and Morales can find a team of contractors with divin’ credentials that’ll allow you both to continue to keep this whole thing on the down-low while keepin’ us out of it.”

  Olivia’s eyes rounded. Yessir. She hadn’t been expecting that. Leo was even a bit shocked himself. But before she could open her mouth to utter a word of protest, the sound of Wolf pushing back from the table, the legs of his chair scraping against the linoleum floor, interrupted her.

  The man stood to his full six-foot, one-inch height and looked Leo square in the eye. “You know I’ve always followed your lead, LT. And this whole thing stinks like a jackass festival, for sure. So even if we hadn’t made that promise—”

  “Promise?” Olivia asked. “What promise?”

  “I would understand why you’d want no part of it,” Wolf continued, ignoring Olivia’s interruption. “But before you go making any decisions, there’s something you should know.”

  Wolf’s words, as well as his troubled expression, had Leo’s stomach dropping to the floor of the kitchen so hard he was surprised he didn’t hear a resounding splat. “What’s that?”

  “That historian, or translator, or whatever you want to call him, emailed and said he hadn’t been prepared for the sheer volume of documents we sent his way.” Oh right. The documents from Seville. How could Leo have for
gotten about them? Two words—he answered his own question—Olivia Mortier. “If we want him to translate all of them, he says he’ll need another two weeks and another ten grand.”

  “Ten grand?” Leo bellowed, causing Meat to hop up from his pillow. In sleepy confusion, the silly mutt let loose with a loud woof!

  Cock-a-doodle-doooooooooo!

  Leo winced, turning to see the rooster—Li’l Bastard, apparently—perched on the porch railing right outside the kitchen window. The multiple cups of coffee might have taken care of his headache, but that fat chicken’s ridiculous vocal stylings were enough to send a hammer-strike of pain smashing into his skull.

  Or perhaps the throb in his temples had less to do with the rooster and more to do with the fact that the universe was seriously screwing him over and leaving him standing there holding double handfuls of shit.

  Unable to contain himself a moment longer, Uncle John unzipped the duffel bag, pulling the edges wide. The scriiiiiitching sound of the zipper seemed particularly loud in the sudden silence of the kitchen, but not nearly as loud as his uncle’s exclamation of, “Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty! Would you look at that!”

  And there it was in all its greenback glory. Half a million dollars. Olivia had certainly delivered after blowing their mindholes with her tale.

  Leo’s heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder his T-shirt wasn’t fluttering. He turned to her and watched one black brow slowly slide up her smooth forehead.

  “So,” she said, jutting out her stubborn, adorable, irresistible chin, “shall we go retrieve my missing chemical weapons, Lieutenant Anderson?”

  Chapter Four

  12:12 p.m.…

  His name was Banu az-Harb.

  At least that’s what it secretly was now…ever since he opened his eyes to the one true faith and threw off the identity of Jonathan Wilson. Ever since he realized his Caucasian ethnicity, degrees in criminology, and unassuming white-bread background made him perfect to infiltrate the CIA. And ever since Allah revealed that if he was patient, if he was smart and cunning, he could be one of the most useful and celebrated soldiers in the great and terrible holy war raging around the globe.

  For nearly ten years he’d kept up Jonathan Wilson’s gun-toting, Mickey D’s-eating, rootin’-tootin’, American good-ol’-boy facade. Going to barbecues and football games. Wearing Polo shirts, loafers, and khaki slacks. Working his way up the ranks of the CIA, watching his security clearance rise higher and higher, and all the while amassing contacts the world over.

  He grinned, thinking about the time The Company was poised to catch the leader of the AQAP—al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He’d been able to warn the man minutes before the operation went down, and the revered commander had escaped. His smile widened when he remembered coming across a bit of Intel regarding the transportation of nearly two dozen decommissioned Soviet tanks. The convoy had been due to pass close to the Lebanese border, and his quick actions in contacting the Hezbollah fighters active in the region meant that now their righteous group had ten IS-4 heavy-duty battle tanks on their list of armaments.

  There had been other instances, of course, when he’d dropped the right piece of information into the right ear at the right time. And he was proud of each and every act of treason against the nation that was his birthplace but that he no longer considered his home. Unfortunately, to date he had yet to find The One Thing guaranteed to rain down death and destruction the likes of which the country hadn’t seen since 9/11. The One Thing that would ensure his name would be splashed across the headlines and live on into eternity.

  Then, yesterday morning while reading a Company-wide memo, his eyes had alighted on one line item near the bottom. Almost like an afterthought. Apparently, a small chemical weapons shipment, taken from the al-Assad regime, was being stored at a warehouse right on the water in Guantanamo Bay. Due to remain there a mere twenty-four hours before it was slated for transport to the mainland where it would be destroyed.

  According to the memo, the warehouse’s security system had suffered a major malfunction—alarms, cameras, everything was down. But the powers-that-be had decided to take a hope-for-the-best stance. They surmised that nothing too nefarious could happen to the shipment in such a short time.

  Fools! he’d thought, staring wide-eyed at his computer screen and nearly hyperventilating with excitement. His cock had hardened just like it always did when he came across something of interest, something that could help him forward the cause and make a name for himself. You’re leaving a cache of chemical weapons right there for the taking. And so close to the American coast, too. This is it! This is The One!

  Time had been of the essence, of course. And he’d wasted none of it before contacting his sources in Cuba. Following his precise instructions, those holy fighters had managed to locate the chemicals, spirit them from the base to the boat they’d purchased, and set sail for the backwaters of south Florida where Banu had agreed to meet them.

  Unfortunately, halfway into their journey, disaster struck…

  Apparently, the vessel his contacts had acquired was sixty years old and full of poorly patched holes. That’s Cuba for you. And since the men weren’t exactly sailors, they hadn’t realized there was a problem until it was too late. Their boat had sunk beneath them like a lead weight, taking one of his assets with it while the remaining seven escaped in a dinghy.

  When Nassar, Banu’s point contact, had called via satellite phone to give him the news of the vessel’s unexpected end, he’d punched a hole in the wall of his DC apartment and thrown the bag he’d been packing clear across the room. But Nassar had quickly informed him that he’d taken a GPS reading just before the boat went down. He knew the coordinates of the wreck.

  Fat lot of good that does us had been Banu’s initial thought. But then an idea occurred to him…

  A quick Google search of the underwater topographic maps of the area had assured him that all was not lost.

  Glory to Allah! All the knowledge he’d gleaned during those family vacations to the Virgin Islands, all those diving expeditions his father insisted he go on where he’d learned about neutral buoyancy and absolute pressure, the Rimbach system and outgassing, were finally going to come in handy for something more than simple self-indulgence and entertainment. Sure, it would be dangerous. A dive that deep was always dangerous. But he’d read the literature, knew the right gear to use and the right gases to mix and—

  “I have programmed the coordinates into the GPS, brother,” the guy sitting beside him in the rented fishing boat said. His English was amazingly good. And with his shaved face, floppy fisherman’s cap, and T-shirt printed with a picture of a stick figure on a boat holding a rod and reel that read Go Deep, one would never know by looking at him that he was anything other than what he was pretending to be. A captain taking a handful of tourists out for a little deep-sea fishing. Unfortunately, playing a part was apparently where the man’s aptitude ended. Which was why Banu was just now embarking on the mission to retrieve the weapons a whole flippin’ five hours after he arrived in Miami.

  At first, the man—his name was Ahmed—had brought him dive tanks with the right mixtures but the wrong concentrations. Then the guy forgot to include the high-performance buoyancy controller Banu needed, even though Banu had asked for it specifically. And to top it all off, poor clueless Ahmed had rented the wrong size boat. The original vessel had neither the horsepower nor the fuel capacity to get them where they needed to go, much less bring them back again.

  But now, finally, Banu had his equipment and the right boat, even if it did come with the ridiculously sophomoric name of Breaking Wind—I mean, who does that? Some fat, pompous, ill-witted American, no doubt—and he was ready to set sail.

  He slid on a pair of Oakley sunglasses and glanced around the various fishing rods at the four dark-skinned men Ahmed was bringing with them. Banu was pretty sure they didn’t speak a lick of English, though they were dressed like any other American t
ourist in T-shirts, ball caps, and cargo shorts. Of course, the Russian AK-47s they’d stowed beneath the bench seats on deck were about as far from the red, white, and blue as you could get.

  “How long will it take us to get there?” he asked, his gaze skimming over the turquoise water beyond Miami’s Rickenbacker Marina. Dragging in a deep breath that brought with it the smell of fish and sun-warmed salt water, he found himself anticipating the rest of the day. A day that would end with him being hailed as a hero.

  “It is approximately one-hundred-and-fifty nautical miles to the sunken trawler,” Ahmed answered. He made the word “approximately” sound one syllable too long. “At twenty knots, and depending on wind and current, we should be there in…six, maybe seven hours. Of course, it could take longer since we must pick up the others.” The others being Banu’s assets, who’d run out of fuel trying to maintain their position near the downed vessel. They were now floating aimlessly in the middle of the ocean.

  “But the tide is pushing them toward us. So it should not take us too far out of our way.” Ahmed clapped a large, brown hand on Banu’s shoulder. And when he leaned close, the scent of chai tea lingered on his breath. “Then you will go down and retrieve the chemicals, and you will finish this thing you began all those years ago. It will be as Allah intended. You will strike a great blow for our cause. Until then, relax, enjoy the ride, and let your mind be at peace, brother.”

  Peace?

  His name was Banu az-Harb. Loosely translated, that meant “child of war.” Peace wasn’t part of his makeup, nor would he want it to be. Peaceful men didn’t end up in the history books…

  * * *

  12:14 p.m.…

  “What do you think?” Madison “Maddy” Powers asked as she peered through the binoculars at the small boat…no, more like a rubber dinghy, really…bobbing haphazardly on the glistening waves. Had there not been bright-orange fabric on the sides of the little boat, Captain Harry, the skipper of the Black Gold, her father’s hundred-thirty-foot motor yacht, might have sailed right by without ever seeing the—she did a silent head count—seven men who were crammed onto the tiny vessel.