Tariq’s SUV was gone, as were half the trucks, but there was still a substantial contingent of gunmen on the wharf. Jet settled in three blocks away to wait for the terrorists to call it a night, and when they did, to follow them to wherever they were holed up. If Tariq had managed to survive her attack, he would no doubt be surrounded by his most loyal entourage, but once she figured out where he’d gone to ground, she could relay the location to headquarters so they could deal with him.
She removed the sat phone from her satchel and powered it on. When the director answered, she gave him a quick report.
“You’re positive all of the nerve gas was destroyed?” he asked.
“All that was in the truck. It’s possible there’s more at the hotel.” She described the building and told him the cross streets. “You’ll probably want to organize something just in case.”
“We’re already on it. You have no idea whether Tariq’s still alive?”
“Negative. Assume the worst – that he escaped unscathed.” She told him that she was lying in wait so she could follow the gunmen, and it earned her another grunt.
“Very well. Let us know when you find his headquarters.”
“Will do.” She paused. “Did Leo make it out alive?”
“Yes. He’s in stable condition, and he’ll pull through.”
“Great. Which brings me to my final question: how do I get out of here?”
“We’ll arrange for an evacuation. Don’t worry about it.”
“If you say so.”
Jet hung up and powered the phone off. She had no idea how the director would evacuate her, but she was confident he would find a way. He might be a conniving old man, but he’d never lied to her, and his word was typically gold. If he said he would do it, he would.
She slid the phone back in the satchel and patted her spare magazine for the MP7A1, glasses glued to her eyes, watching the gunmen from a safe distance and counting the minutes until they realized there was no chance of the nerve gas making it, and decided to pack it in.
Chapter 48
Jet had snatched five hours of sleep after her stakeout, but her revving mind wouldn’t allow her any more, and she was running scenarios as she paced around Leo’s apartment. She’d eventually followed three of the trucks from the waterfront to a mansion in the embassy district, and judging by the number of gunmen sitting in trucks around the grounds, she intuited that it was Tariq’s Tripoli headquarters. Lights had been blazing in the windows, even at two in the morning, and she’d stayed in place to surveil the guard schedule until there was a change at dawn.
Most of the men had seemed undisciplined and overly apprehensive, but a few had appeared more serious and methodical and probably had military experience, judging by how they carried themselves and their weapons. Jet guessed that they were operating on six-hour shifts, and there were easily a hundred men on the grounds during the time she spent watching it.
Jet was listening to a small transistor radio as she showered when the music was interrupted by the deep voice of an announcer.
“We have a special broadcast from an honored guest here in Tripoli. Tariq Qaddafi called in, and the station feels it is in the best interests of our listeners to put him on the air. Mr. Qaddafi? You’re live.”
“Thank you.” A pause. “I’ve traveled a great distance to return to my homeland. For some time I’ve felt a calling to change its direction after seeing how foreign meddling nearly destroyed it. So I am here, in Tripoli, and have agreed to become the new head of state now that the puppet government imposed by the West has turned tail and fled. As my first act, I will impose Sharia law, so that we may return to being a moral nation rather than the whore of foreigners who care little for our well-being.”
Tariq spoke for ten minutes without interruption, and by the time he finished, Jet was seething with rage. He’d not only managed to survive, but seemed certain that his power grab would be celebrated by most of his countrymen. He’d stated that he was now the de facto ruler of Libya and would be negotiating on its behalf in all matters – a convicted felon and known terrorist of the lowest order.
The image of Salma being shot sprang to Jet’s mind, and her teeth ground at the memory.
She toweled herself dry and thought through her possible actions. First, she’d call the director and give him the bad news. That call would determine how she proceeded.
Jet pulled on her pants and shirt, which were stiff from being hand-washed and dried by the open window, and moved to the table where the satchel with the sat phone rested beside the MP7A1, her expression as grim as it was determined.
Tariq blinked away sleep and sat up. The room was pitch black, and he couldn’t make out his hand in front of him. Something had awakened him, but he wasn’t sure what. Perhaps gunfire or an explosion from somewhere in the city? There was still sporadic shooting as his men took over districts, sometimes having to fight criminal gangs or pockets of resistance block by block. He figured it would be a week before the entire city was contained, and he wasn’t worried – Akmal’s men had drummed up sufficient support for him as the new ruler of Libya that a return to normalcy was all but assured once the last of the resisting factions threw in the towel.
His radio address had gone well, and it had been replayed every hour on all local stations throughout the afternoon, lending legitimacy to his claim of having assumed command of the country. He’d studied successful coups while imprisoned, and they’d all had the same thing in common: assumption of control by a strong leader with a clear vision and a promise to bring order to the land. Tariq’s vision was as clear as they came, and he was a powerful speaker, he knew, and burned with the passion of the righteous, which was evident to anyone who listened.
A rustle from nearby drew his attention, and he was reaching for the pistol on the nightstand by his head when a female voice spoke from only inches away, and the cold, sharp bite of steel against his throat stopped him.
“You almost pulled it off,” Jet said. “But almost doesn’t count, does it?”
She drove the razor point of the survival knife up through the base of Tariq’s chin, into his mouth, and finally into his brain with the heel of her hand. He jerked like a beached fish and stiffened as the point gouged through his cerebrum, and then Jet was retracing her steps on catlike feet to the window through which she’d entered, as Tariq expired on the bed.
The curtain rustled as she slipped through it, and she rappelled down to the ground floor and darted for the wall over which she’d come, the guards so focused on threats from an armed force that they’d left the grounds vulnerable to a lone assassin, being positioned to fend off a large attack rather than stop a single threat. A mistake that she’d exploited, and which had just altered the country’s history.
The director had okayed her suggestion that she perform the sanction rather than targeting the building with a cruise missile, and she’d accepted the job willingly, eager to have Salma’s murderer subjected to the same brutal justice he’d employed on her.
Jet reached the wall and checked the surroundings. The nearest gunmen were in the back of a gray pickup fifteen meters away, talking in low voices, their rifles pointed into the air, their attention on the approaches rather than on the compound itself. Jet withdrew a grenade that had been in Leo’s safe, pulled the pin, and tossed it at the truck.
When it exploded a few meters from the vehicle, the blast was deafening. Screams of alarm shattered the night, and then she was over the wall and running across the street, a figure in head-to-toe black who moved like smoke through the darkness and had vanished before the guards knew what had hit them.
Chapter 49
Tel Aviv, Israel
The driver who’d met Jet at the airport pulled away, leaving Jet standing in front of a simple row house in a downscale community four kilometers outside town. Jet walked to the front and slid the key the driver had given her into the lock. The bolt opened, and she stepped inside to find a spartan two-bedroom home wi
th cheap finishes and cheaper furniture.
“Matt? Hannah?” she called, setting the keys on a long, narrow table in the foyer.
“Mama!” Hannah’s voice cried from down the hall, and tiny footsteps drummed their approach and the little girl appeared from around a corner. She threw her arms around Jet’s legs and hugged her tight, and then looked up at Jet’s face with a sunny smile.
“Hello, angel! You look happy,” Jet said, smoothing her hair.
“Matt and I were playing catch in the backyard.”
“You were, were you? That sounds like fun.”
Matt entered the hall and walked over to Jet, who embraced him and gave him a long kiss before disengaging. He looked her up and down with concern and then took her hand and led her into a small living area with a worn couch and a pair of dilapidated easy chairs.
“Welcome home,” Matt whispered in her ear as they sat on the couch. Hannah ran to the sliding glass door and pointed at a small strip of artificial grass.
“Look, Mama! It’s way better than the other house.”
Jet smiled in agreement. “It is indeed.”
Hannah slid the door open and skipped outside. Matt’s expression was etched with concern. “You know what happened, obviously.”
“Yes. They’ve identified the man. Or they think they have. A freelance hit man. Russian.”
Matt looked away. “Who do you think he’s working for?”
Jet shrugged. “The list’s too long to be useful. The main thing is that the director said he’s confident he can keep us safe.”
“Confident?” Matt repeated, skepticism clear in his tone. “This bastard was sitting outside Hannah’s school. How did they find her? Or you and me, for that matter?”
Jet frowned. “There might be a leak in the organization.”
“In which case we’re never going to be safe.”
“Israel is a small country. As long as we stay out of sight, we should be fine. The borders are tightly controlled – more so than anywhere else in the world.”
“Which is all good. But we still had a Russian hit man at Hannah’s school. So whoever hired him knows about her, and me. The question is how.”
“And who. But one issue at a time. I’ll talk to the director tomorrow about how exactly he intends to keep us safe.” She leaned into Matt and kissed him again. “The mission was a disaster.”
“David’s sister?”
“Didn’t make it.”
Matt shook his head. “Then what was the point?”
Jet watched Hannah playing in the yard, hopscotching to an imaginary pattern, her smile beaming in the afternoon sun. She looked back at Matt and sighed heavily.
“The point was to try.” She told him what had happened, and how the mission had finished up.
Matt’s eyebrows rose. “So they hit the hotel with a cruise missile?”
“That’s right. And the Americans are forming a new coalition government.”
“Which will probably be about as effective as the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or the last one in Libya.”
“Not my problem. I did what I had to do.” She took Matt’s hand and snuggled against him. “Just like we’ll do whatever we have to in order to stay together and keep Hannah safe.”
He shifted on the sofa. “Yes, we will.”
She yawned. “I haven’t gotten that much sleep this week. You feel like taking a nap?”
Matt offered a crooked grin. “What about Hannah?”
“She’s a good napper too. Let’s see if she’s interested.” Jet made to rise and then paused. “Does our bedroom have a lock on it?”
He nodded. “First thing I checked.”
“Then let’s tell her Mama’s tired.”
“Good idea.”
It was her turn to smile. “I’m full of them lately.”
<<<<>>>>
Thanks for reading JET XV ~ Sahara
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Turn the page to read an excerpt from
A Girl Apart
Excerpt from
A Girl Apart
Chapter 1
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Emilia ran tired fingers through her thick ebony hair as she and a pair of co-workers pushed through the iron gates of the factory grounds. They offered waves to a grinning security guard and continued down the cracked sidewalk, the darkness enveloping the street as the spotlights from the compound faded behind them. In the dim light she squinted at her fingers, whose nails were worn to the quick by another twelve-hour shift on an assembly line that never stopped. She sighed. Although barely out of her teens, Emilia had the hands of a middle-aged fishwife, and her joints ached like those of a geriatric, not a slim young woman with a quick smile and a bouncing step.
The gloom deepened as the trio hurried along the empty street. Their shift had ended earlier, but Emilia had been forced to delay their departure for an unplanned meeting with her supervisor. Exhaust and sewage wafted on the breeze along with the pungent smell from the nearby Rio Grande river basin, its brown seepage only a few hundred meters away separating them from the United States and its world of impossible luxury and boundless prosperity.
“Slow down, Rosa,” Emilia said. “This isn’t a race.”
Rosa, the tallest of the three, her long legs wrapped in skintight jeans, her makeup garish as a showgirl’s, slowed and twisted her head toward Emilia. “You may not have a life, but I do, and I have a date tonight, so I need time to get ready.”
Emilia rolled her eyes. “You have a date every night.”
The third girl laughed, her eyes dancing as they flitted to Emilia. “You would too if you weren’t so standoffish.”
“You mean selective, don’t you, Marisol?” Emilia replied. “Is it my fault I won’t hop in the backseat with every shop clerk or truck driver with a smooth line?”
“Don’t knock it,” Rosa said with a shrug.
The glow of a street cart illuminated a corner of the empty intersection as they approached, and Marisol’s nose twitched at the aroma drifting from it. “Just a small one,” she said, and Rosa nodded.
“Not for me,” Emilia said, eyeing the fresh churros hanging from a bar over the cart front. “My mom’s making dinner.”
“This is dinner for me,” Rosa countered, smoothing her blouse over her flat stomach.
“That and a dozen Tecate Lights,” Marisol said, and the girls laughed.
The vendor wrapped their selections in brown paper and exchanged them for a few pesos before returning to his newspaper, the evening rush over, his only hope now to pick up a few stragglers late to work on the night shift. The maquiladora section of the city was a buzz of activity when the crews changed, but deserted much of the rest of the time. With over three hundred plants turning out everything from printers to hair dryers, the area along the border was a magnet for those without options, but nobody lingered in the factory strip after dark – the crime in Juárez was infamous, and even if you minded your own business, robbery or worse was a constant threat.
Emilia checked her watch as her friends chewed on the fried confections, cinnamon dusting their hands as they ate. Her stomach growled and Rosa eyed her, one brow
raised, hip cocked at a saucy angle. Emilia laughed at the vision, her friend’s provocative outfit completely out of place on the dusty street.
The wages Emilia made amounted to a little over a hundred dollars a week, paltry even by Mexican standards, but better than nothing. With no degree or vocational skills, young women in the border town were limited in how they could make a living, and those uninterested in prostitution or serving fast food were faced with grim choices in a labor market constantly swelled by a surge of unskilled Central American workers hoping to build nest eggs before sneaking across the river to the promised land beyond.
The girls finished their treats, wiped their hands on scraps of paper that served as napkins, and proceeded down the street toward a larger intersection with a dozen bus stops within a block of each other. Rosa’s cell phone chirped from her back pocket as they passed a narrow alley, where an emaciated dog with drooping teats from a fresh litter foraged for scraps near a pile of garbage.
“Hello?” Rosa answered, and then giggled at something the caller said. Emilia and Marisol exchanged a knowing look, and Emilia shook her head as they slowed so their friend could fake amusement at whatever her latest suitor was saying.
A pair of dim headlamps swung from behind them and bounced over the uneven pavement. Rosa chattered on her phone as the vehicle approached, but Marisol slipped her arm through Emilia’s, her expression troubled. Ciudad Juárez had long been synonymous with unexplained disappearances of young female factory workers, and even though the crime wave had abated, rumors still circulated about this girl or that who’d ended her shift, left for home, and was never seen again.
Sahara Page 25