The Cabal

by David Hagberg

  Through passport control and customs a young man came up to them and without a word handed Kangas a thick manila envelope then turned around and walked away, lost in the crowd almost immediately.

  “Welcome to the hot zone,” Mustapha said. “Make sure it isn’t a fucking letter bomb, because that kid was for sure not our quartermaster.”

  “Too light,” Kangas said, and he and Mustapha went down the corridor to an empty boarding area and opened the envelope. Remington had provided them with five thousand in U.S. currency, mostly hundred-dollar bills, a pair of presumably untraceable credit cards, and confirmed reservations for a suite at the new Baghdad International Airport Hotel and Business Center, along with a photo of Harry Weiss, their on-the-ground Admin contact, who would meet them once they checked into the hotel.

  “This keeps getting better,” Mustapha said.

  “There’s always a catch,” Kangas said. He was beginning to get a seriously bad feeling between his shoulder blades. He’d never really trusted Remington, and with this added luxury he was becoming even more distrustful.

  “Yeah, taking McGarvey down,” Mustapha said. “We’ve already seen the bastard in action.”

  “He won’t be expecting us,” Kangas said, but he wasn’t so sure.

  The hotel was on the airport property and just down a walkway from the terminal. Big and ultra modern, especially by present-day Iraqi standards, the place reminded Kangas of hotel/business centers in places like Dubai. Everyone was in a hurry, everyone seemed to have bags of money, and everyone smiled at everyone else without meaning it. It was, he suspected, a dangerous place. But it was handy to the airport, so once their business in town was finished they could get back here and get out on the first available flight. Admin had provided them with open-ended tickets, which meant they could hop aboard any flight. Their first-class status gave them priority.

  The lobby was plain and functional, yet luxurious at the same time. The clerks, almost all of them young, dressed in identical gray blazers with gold buttons, bustled seemingly everywhere.

  The clerk at the reception desk brought their reservations up on his computer, printed out the arrivals document, and had Kangas sign it. “Welcome to the Baghdad International Airport Hotel, gentlemen. A credit card will not be necessary, your firm has arranged for all of your expenses.”

  “Right,” Kangas mumbled.

  The clerk handed them each a key card. “Will you be needing help with your luggage?”

  They had each carried only a single overnight bag. They’d be staying only as long as was absolutely necessary. Hopefully they’d be in and back out in twenty-four hours or less. “Not necessary,” Kangas said.

  They took the elevator up to their twelfth-floor suite, the balcony looking toward downtown Baghdad, about fifteen miles away. In addition to a pair of bedrooms with king-sized beds and separate Jacuzzis, the sitting room was well furnished with a modern couch and chairs, a desk, a large HD plasma television, and a well-stocked minibar. A guest half bath was just inside the entry hall.

  The red message light on the telephone began blinking at once and Kangas answered it.

  “Message from Mr. Weiss. Please meet him in the lobby bar at your soonest convenience,” a recording of a woman’s voice said. “If you would like to hear this message again, please press one.”

  “Our quartermaster wants to meet downstairs in the bar,” Kangas said hanging up.

  “That was quick,” Mustapha said.

  “The sooner the better.”

  Although security at this hotel was probably reasonably tight, this was Baghdad, and Kangas felt vulnerable without a weapon, something he expected their quartermaster was going to fix first thing.

  They used the stairs to the tenth floor, where they made sure the corridor was empty before they took the elevator to the lobby. It was an old survival trick they’d learned in the CIA. Never willingly give up any information about yourself. In this case, by taking the elevator from the tenth floor, anyone spotting them emerging into the lobby wouldn’t necessarily know they were staying on the twelfth. It was minor, but such little things in the field added up.

  They recognized Weiss, seated at a booth in the far corner of the lobby lounge, from his photograph. Kangas thought he looked like a poofta, the same as Remington: narrow, sloped-shoulders; light, sand-colored hair; and tiny round face with droopy eyes that seemed to see nothing.

  But he looked up from his drink as Kangas and Mustafa came over, and motioned for them to sit across from him. “You assholes look like shit,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you, too,” Kangas said, letting Mustapha slide in first. He never liked for his movements to be confined.

  “First class doesn’t mean you show up drunk. Do you have any idea who the hell you’re going up against?”

  “We’ve seen him in action, we know,” Mustapha said. “But he won’t be here until sometime tomorrow. By then he’ll be road weary, but we’ll have had a good night’s sleep and a big breakfast.”

  “And this city belongs to Admin,” Kangas added.

  “I speak the language, do you, prick?” Mustapha said.

  Weiss sat back. “Okay, if this weren’t so important to Roland I’d tell you guys to get the fuck out of here first thing in the morning. As it is I hope you go up against McGarvey one hundred percent. If you miss the smallest step he’ll have you for lunch.”

  “We’ll take care of our business,” Kangas said. “What about our equipment?”

  “In a leather satchel at my feet. Wait five minutes after I’m gone, then pick it up and take it to your room.”

  “Where will he be staying?”

  “The Baghdad Hotel where a lot of journalists who don’t care to stay in the Green Zone hang out,” Weiss said. “Give me the photo you got at the airport.”

  Kangas had figured Weiss would want it back. He handed it over. “Not a very good likeness.”

  Weiss gave them both another appraising look, before he got up. “Stupid bastards.”

  As soon as he’d left, Kangas reached under the table for the satchel, then slid out of the booth, Mustapha right behind him, and they left the lounge, holding up just at the entrance to see which way their quartermaster was heading. But Weiss was nowhere to be seen.

  “Not bad,” Kangas had to admit. The man might have looked like a poofta but he knew his tradecraft.

  FORTY-ONE

  Heading north from the border away from the head of the Gulf, toward Basra, the night turned warm, even sultry. This, Hadid explained, was the region of the famous Fertile Crescent, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, near the Garden of Eden.

  More oil rigs dotted the horizon, and to McGarvey the area seemed anything but fertile. It was mostly desert now, and when a breeze blew it stank of oil and natural gas.

  “We’ll have no trouble until after Basra,” Hadid said, checking his rearview mirror often. “It starts to get bad once we get near An Nasiriyah. The convoys take the route on the west side of the river, but we’ll cross over and take the eastern route. It’s about the same distance, but I know it better.”

  “Wouldn’t we be safer traveling in the middle of a couple of convoys?” McGarvey asked.

  Hadid glanced at him and shook his head. “No,” he said, and he checked his rearview mirror again.

  For the moment they were alone on the road, though in the distance behind them they could make out the lights of an oncoming car or perhaps the convoy that had been directly behind them at the checkpoint. It was time for the weapons.

  Hadid pulled over and they all got out and went around to the back of the car where Hadid opened the lid and brought out a Glock 17 for McGarvey with a silencer and three magazines of ammunition plus three AK-47s with the satchel of spare magazines, which went to McGarvey, Saddam, and the woman.

  They all piled back inside the car and Hadid pulled away before the oncoming lights had reached them.

  Saddam and Miriam both handled the AKs with practi
ced ease, checking the actions, loading the weapons, and racking rounds into the firing chambers as McGarvey was doing the same.

  The woman looked up, catching McGarvey watching her. “Little children know how to use this weapon,” she said.

  “Have you ever killed a man?”

  Her lips compressed, but she didn’t look away. “More than one,” she said. “I didn’t care for it each time.”

  “Most people usually don’t,” McGarvey said.

  They had switched positions at the stop; McGarvey now riding shotgun in the front seat with Miriam and her son in the back, watching for trouble on either side of the road and to the rear.

  The night was pitch black here, except for the Range Rover’s headlights. And it was beginning to cool down.

  Miram said something to her husband in Persian, and Hadid looked in his rearview mirror. “Someone back there seems interested in us, I think.”

  McGarvey looked back and he could see that the headlights were moving up on them very fast. “I don’t think it’s the convoy.”

  “No, it’s only one maybe two pairs of lights,” Hadid said. He was searching for something on either side of the road.

  Miriam said something else, her tone urgent.

  “This will do,” Hadid said. “Hold on, it’s time to give them a little surprise.”

  He jammed on the brakes suddenly, doused the lights and swerved off the road to the right, across a shallow ditch, and headed for a small concrete block structure, just reaching it as a Toyota heavy-duty pickup truck roared up and without slowing down careened off the road.

  “Shoot now,” McGarvey shouted, and he opened fire with the AK-47 at two figures dressed in black braced in the bed of the pickup truck with what looked like an M249 squad automatic weapon, which was a Belgian-made 5.66mm light machine gun mounted on a pedestal. One of the guys was a shooter the other the loader.

  Miriam and Saddam began firing at the pickup truck at the same moment the M249 began banging away, several rounds slamming into the rear of the Range Rover before Hadid hauled the car behind the building, and there was no target for several beats.

  “I’m going to try to get behind them,” Hadid shouted, as they reached the far end of the building and he hauled the big SUV around the corner.

  The Toyota was right on their tail, but didn’t have as tight a turning radius, so the rounds from the M249 went wild out into the desert night.

  Two seconds later, Hadid shouted something in Arabic as they came back to the front of the building, where another Toyota heavy-duty pickup truck was waiting in ambush just off the side of the road, and he swerved hard to the right.

  “Stay on our rear,” McGarvey shouted to Miriam and the boy at the same moment they started taking incoming fire from the second pickup truck. McGarvey opened fire with his AK-47, walking the rounds across the field as Hadid jinked left and right, in an attempt to keep out of the line of fire.

  For just an instant the Range Rover and second pickup truck were in perfect alignment, and McGarvey hit the shooter and loader and walked his rounds forward to the driver and passenger, taking them out, running dry in the next instant.

  The first pickup truck had careened around the corner from behind the building and opened fire as McGarvey reloaded, and swung around to fire toward the rear.

  Miriam and the boy were both down, blood everywhere, and once again Hadid swung hard right putting the Toyota in a perfect firing position. McGarvey took out the shooter and loader in the bed, and emptied the remainder of the AK-47s thirty-round magazine into the cabin.

  The pickup truck suddenly swerved sharply to the left, its front left fender slamming into the side of the building, slewed away and rose up on its right side flipping over, its engine screaming up the scale until something loud popped and the Toyota ended up rocking on its roof.

  Hadid jammed on the brakes and pulled to a stop, the night suddenly very quiet.

  He pulled out a pistol, jumped out of the Range Rover, and started toward the upside-down pickup truck.

  McGarvey put down his weapon and reached over the back of the seat, making a quick check of the woman and boy. They were both dead. Miriam’s chest was blown half away by the machine gun’s rounds, and Saddam’s face had been destroyed, the back of his head completely gone.

  “Khalid,” McGarvey called, a great sadness coming over him, along with a deep, deep bitterness. All such a terrible waste.

  McGarvey turned around as Hadid fired once into the cab of the pickup truck, then reached inside and dragged out a body. He said something, and then spat on the body.

  McGarvey got out of the Range Rover and walked over, as Hadid went around to the other side of the Toyota.

  “Sunnis,” Hadid said, looking up. “The bastards will do anything to break the peace. They have no morals, Mr. Tony. No real religion.”

  “Your wife and son are dead,” McGarvey said. There was no way of softening the blow. The situation was what it was.

  Hadid shook his head, his mouth open, but then he went back to the Range Rover and stood at the rear passenger door. He dropped his pistol on the ground and began to beat his chest with his right hand, a high-pitched keening wail coming from the back of his throat.

  McGarvey walked back to him. “We’ll return to Kuwait now so you can attend to your family.”

  After a long time Hadid looked at him, shook his head, then gazed at the bodies of his wife and son. “They were Sunnis and they have no morals,” he said. “They cannot be allowed to win this war.”

  The Sunnis felt the same about the Shi’ites, but McGarvey said nothing. The deep division between the two Muslim sects was something a westerner could not really understand. The rift was even deeper than between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland in the sixties and seventies.

  “I will take them to the home of Miriam’s uncle in Baghdad. They will receive a proper burial before the sun goes down,” Hadid said. “If you will help me we will place them in the secret compartment in the back. Hopefully there will be no further trouble for us tonight.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Sandberger, having drinks with a couple friends from a rival contractor service, Decision Infinity, looked up as Harry Weiss came into the barroom of the new Ritz-Carlton Baghdad in what had been the Green Zone. It was around ten in the evening and he’d been expecting his point man on the McGarvey issue about now, but he didn’t much care for the look on Weiss’s face.

  “Sorry, gentlemen, but business calls,” he said. He finished his martini and got up.

  Jerry London, DI’s CEO grinned. “Trouble, I hope,” he said, and his exec, Ken Brody, glanced over at Weiss standing at the bar and raised his glass.

  “Bloody well hope old Harry has brought you shit news, you son of a bitch,” he said, laughing.

  “I hope you get syphilis and your dick rots off,” Sandberger replied and the two men laughed.

  “The game starts in my suite at midnight,” London said. The CEO and execs of most of the contractors usually got together at least once a week for high-stakes poker, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Sandberger said and he walked over to where Weiss was waiting, and the two of them left the bar, crossed the lobby, and took the first elevator up to the eighth floor.

  Neither man spoke until they were safely inside Sandberger’s suite. Contractor firms were under fire again in Washington, and the CIA sill maintained a strong presence in Iraq, and especially here in Baghdad. No public spaces—barrooms, dining rooms, elevators, and even corridors—were ever completely safe from electronic surveillance. Only individual rooms and suites that were swept on a regular basis, as was Sandberger’s, could be considered private.

  “They’re here,” Weiss said. “Drunk, as you figured they might be.”

  “I don’t care unless they get themselves in trouble tonight,” Sandberger said, but in fact he did care. McGarvey was no one to screw around with. Captain Kabbani had been so self-assured that it h
ad been obvious he had no real idea what the former CIA director was capable of. And there was a very real possibility that his people would have failed tonight, and McGarvey would actually be showing up here sometime in the morning.

  “They’re a couple of loose cannons, but I think they understand who they’re up against. They oughta be sober and rested by morning, unless they’re complete idiots.”

  “They know their tradecraft, and neither of them has ever been afraid to pull the trigger.”

  “Do you think McGarvey will make it this far?” Weiss asked.

  “I think it’s a possibility that we have to consider,” Sandberger said.

  “What can I do?”

  Weiss was Admin’s on-the-ground CO here in Baghdad, and to date he’d done a credible job. Such a good job in fact that Sandberger was torn between bringing him back to Washington to take overall command of operations or leaving him here. He would decide after the McGarvey business was settled and Foster finally got off his back. But Weiss would have to name his own successor, and it would have to be someone good.

  “He has reservations at the Baghdad Hotel. Go over there and keep your eyes open. I want to know not only if he shows up, but if he’s alone.”

  “If I have the chance I’d like to take him out myself,” Weiss said.

  “No,” Sandberger shot back. “Kangas and Mustapha are expendable, you’re not.”

  It was a little past two-thirty in the afternoon in Washington when Sandberger used his encrypted sat phone to reach Remington at his home, and he was more than a little angry that his partner wasn’t in the office, and he said so.

  “I’ve never punched a clock, and I don’t intend to begin now, old man,” Remington replied. “Is there anything that I’ve mishandled to this point for the company?”

  The man’s British sarcasm rankled, but Sandberger held his temper in check. Remington had been a steady if unimaginative hand from the beginning. “Your people are here, and drunk.”