“Go on.”
“There may be an American cruise missile for sale.”
“What kind? Tomahawk? ALCM?”
“A big one. An air-launched cruise missile. Swept-back fins. Whole package.”
“You said it was a rumor. Has your operator seen this thing?”
“There’s a photo making the rounds. Who knows if it’s real?”
Grant appeared unfazed by the disclosure. “If it is real, then the missile will be carrying a conventional warhead. I wouldn’t worry.”
“So it’s not the other thing?”
“A nuke? Are you kidding me?” Grant laughed as if this were the most far-fetched notion he’d heard in years and Connor was a damned fool for even considering it. “No way we’d lose a nuclear-tipped cruise without all hell breaking loose.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Connor. “Apparently it’s an old one. Maybe twenty years or so. Still, word is that the broker is claiming it’s a nuke.”
Grant began to tap his foot. “He’s bullshitting. There is no way on God’s green earth that anyone could get ahold of a nuclear-tipped ALCM.”
“Glad to know it, Joe.”
“Where did you say this thing’s for sale?”
“Pakistan,” said Connor. “Right on the Afghan border. Apparently someone stumbled across it high in the mountains. We’re talking very remote. It had been buried for years.”
At the mention of the word Pakistan, Grant froze. His foot stopped tapping, and the animated face turned waxen. “Now hold on, Frank. Your story’s changing awful fast. Are you telling me that someone actually has this thing? I mean, physically possesses it?”
Connor took his time answering, observing the steady blanching of Grant’s ageless features. “Not that I know of,” he said finally. “Like I said, there’s a photo, that’s all.”
“Just a photo?”
“Yeah.”
Grant regained his color. “Sounds like quite some story.”
“That’s why I’m here. You were a B-52 pilot. You used to fly around with those things in your payload every day. It’s impossible, right? We couldn’t lose a nuclear-tipped cruise missile and just forget about it?”
Grant sat forward, his jaw raised to defend his impugned integrity. “This is the United States of America you’re talking about, Frank. Not one of them ’stans or banana republics or African dictatorships where you boys conduct your dirty business. We do things the right way.”
“Good to know.” Connor put down the water glass, stood, and walked to the door. “You’ve taken a lot off my mind. I’ll be able to sleep better tonight.”
“Hey, Frank,” called Joe Grant, his smile back in place. “You still in contact with this operator?”
“Sure thing. Why?”
“Tell him not to believe everything he hears.”
19
The Toyota pickup rocked to a halt on the muddy track.
Sultan Haq clutched the dashboard, grimacing as pain racked his body. “Dammit,” he said, staring out the windscreen at the dense foliage pressing in on all sides. “I was here two days ago. Where has it gone?”
Haq threw open the door and stepped outside, fighting back the tangle of branches that threatened to envelop the truck. He sniffed the air, and his eyes watered with the scent of ammonia and wood smoke. He was close. He stepped to the front of the truck and gazed ahead. The track continued for a brief stretch, then curved to the right and was swallowed by forest. According to the route marker on his handheld GPS, he was in the right place. Yet no matter how hard he looked, he could see no sign of the security fence or the long wooden building or the corrugated tin roof and chimneys that carried away the toxic smoke.
Haq forced his way to the driver’s window and punched the horn three times. Not ten meters away, a swatch of foliage rustled and, as if by magic, disappeared. Two men clutching Kalashnikovs waved him forward. Haq saw the fence and the guard dogs, and behind them the abandoned lumber mill housing a refinery to convert raw opium into morphine paste. He signaled for the truck to advance, and followed it into the clearing.
Immediately the fence was secured. The foliage slipped back into place. The refinery was once again hidden from the outside world.
A haggard old man wrapped in black robes stood on the sagging landing, smoking an opium pipe. “How much?” he asked, his mouth a toothless, black hole.
“Five hundred,” said Haq, meaning five hundred kilos of raw opium.
“Bring it in.”
Sultan Haq ordered his men to unload the truck and leaned against the body as they carried bag after bag of raw opium into the building. Normally he would help, but his injuries prevented it. Bandages on his neck, shoulder, and forearms covered third-degree burns left by the American bombs.
A week had passed since his father’s murder at Tora Bora, seven tortured days during which he’d endured the blistering of his seared flesh. Seven days during which he’d mourned his beloved father, who had been his closest friend and most trusted counsel. Seven days during which he’d thought of nothing but the American healer, Ransom, and his treachery, and how he might one day meet him again and kill him. He knew that such sweet revenge would not be granted him. No matter. He would make do with punishing those who had sent Ransom. America would pay dearly.
Haq climbed three steps and entered the building. The first room was for intake and storage. Transparent plastic bags filled with raw opium crowded every wall, rising past the rafters. The process of refining the raw opium into morphine base began in the next room over. Haq looked on as men emptied bag after bag of the resinous, tar-like opium into great rusted oil barrels filled with boiling water and lime. The raw opium quickly dissolved into a clear brown liquid. Shreds of poppy plants, dirt, and residue sank to the bottom. The morphine alkaloid in the opium reacted with the lime slake to form a white rind of morphine paste on the surface. The boiling water was filtered and the morphine paste separated and taken to the next room, where it was placed in another barrel and reheated with concentrated ammonia.
As the paste solidified, it settled to the bottom of the barrel, becoming large brown chunks of morphine base. The rule was that ten kilos of raw opium made up one kilo of morphine base. The morphine base was taken into a separate room and wrapped into brick-sized blocks. It was now ready for sale and shipment to heroin laboratories.
The economics of the opium business were impossible to dispute, mused Haq as he walked through the dark, humid, foul-smelling rooms. One hectare of land under poppy cultivation yielded twenty kilos of raw opium. The market price for one kilo ran between $250 and $300. A farmer cultivating a single hectare could earn nearly $6,000 for his crop, a princely sum in a country where the average annual income barely reached $800. Haq and his clan controlled over 2,000 hectares of land suitable for poppy cultivation. This year’s harvest had brought in over 40,000 kilos of raw opium and would end up yielding nearly 4,000 kilos of morphine paste.
Haq sliced open a plastic-wrapped brick with his long curling fingernail and scooped out a pile of the brown base. One snort confirmed that the quality was exceptional. The pain from his burns subsided, and a sense of contentment took hold. He was tempted to take more, but discipline forbade him. He must ration the drug carefully, lest he become an addict like the production master. He would not shame his father so.
Haq chopped the block into quarters and slipped one into the folds of his jacket. It would provide useful in the coming days. A balm for his pain, so he might concentrate on more important matters.
A television was playing in a corner. Three addicts sat on the floor, entranced. Haq approached. “What are you watching?”
“Gangsters in America,” said one.
Haq picked up a DVD cover off the floor. “Scarface,” he said aloud. “Good?”
“Very. The Americans like drugs.”
Haq stared at the screen. A man was chained to a curtain rod in a shower. Another wielded a chain saw. The opium in his system combin
ed with the violent sound and images to transport him to another place. He was not home, but far away. He was at Gitmo. The room at Camp X-Ray was hot and smoky and smelled of sweat and vomit. A circle of anxious, well-fed faces surrounded him. A television blared in one corner. The same film always played. Three happy sailors cavorting across Manhattan, singing and dancing in their white uniforms. The volume was turned up very loud to drown out the unpleasant noises.
The questions began.
“Tell us what you were doing in Kunar Province during the months of July through November 2001.”
“I sell carpets. Persia. Isfahan. Very good quality.”
“Horseshit, Muhammad. You couldn’t tell a good carpet from a used shit rag.”
“Yes, sell carpets in Kabul.”
“Then why did we pick you up two hundred miles north of Kabul along with five hundred soldiers fighting for Abdul Haq?”
“Abdul Haq? I do not know this man. I travel. I sell carpets. I with him for safety. I no fighter.”
“A big strong brute like you, not a fighter?”
“I sell carpets.”
“Horseshit.”
“We heard you’re his son. Admit it.”
“No. Only sell carpets.”
And then the hood fell over his face and he was tipped backward and the water flowed into his face and he could not breathe.
And always when the hood was removed, there was the television blaring down at him, mocking him, mocking his culture. The three sailors singing and dancing merrily across New York.
He saw this forty-seven times.
Finally the red-faced men from the CIA believed him. By then he knew New York City well. The Bronx was up and the Battery down. And he despised it.
Haq felt someone nudge his shoulder, and the old, frightening images fled from his mind. He turned and looked into the toothless face of the production master. “Well?”
“Two days to finish,” said the production master.
Haq eyed the ziggurat of bricks stacked in the center of the room. He calculated there were approximately four thousand kilos, wrapped, weighed, and ready for shipment. With shrewd negotiation he might sell the lot for as much as $10,000 a kilo. Forty million dollars was not a princely sum. It was a conqueror’s sum. And he would use it to drive the crusaders from his land.
“Have the entire supply ready by then. I will be back the day after tomorrow.”
20
“How high up is it?” asked Emma.
“Six thousand meters,” said Lord Balfour.
“How was it found?”
“A local came across it.”
“What?” asked Emma with irritation. “He stepped outside his hut and tripped over it? You’re not talking to one of your toadies anymore. I need specifics.”
Balfour started out of his chair, only to catch himself. “He was traveling home from his father’s village on the other side of the pass. He made camp and came across it as he was collecting snow to melt for water. There had been an avalanche, and he saw the guidance fins protruding from the icefall several hundred meters up the slope. People here are ignorant, not idiots. He knew that something of that nature might be worth a lot of money. When he returned home, he told his brother. They took a picture of the missile and brought it to the regional boss of Chitral. The man is a friend of mine. He knew I would be interested.”
“That’s more like it,” said Emma.
“I’ll thank you to watch your tone.”
“I’ll thank you to answer me properly.”
It was midafternoon. The day was clear and warm, the air dry as a bone, the kind of day that the north of Pakistan produced in abundance in late fall. She sat in a high-backed leather armchair in Balfour’s study, with a cup of Darjeeling tea to keep her awake and a bottle of Vicodin to kill the pain. Balfour had other, more potent remedies should she need them. If weapons were his first love, narcotics came a close second.
He called his estate Blenheim, and Blenheim it was. Oriental carpets covered the parquet floor. There were Regency desks and Gobelin tapestries and life-sized oils of long-deceased (and surely unrelated) ancestors staring down from walnut-paneled walls, pretending to be Sargents or Gainesboroughs. Every time she glanced out the window, she expected to look upon the rain-swept hillocks of Oxfordshire. Instead she was granted a breathtaking view of the violet-hued mountains of the Hindu Kush.
“So no one else knows about the find?” Emma continued.
Balfour shook his head.
“You’re certain?”
“This is Pakistan. Certainty is not a word to us. We make do with ‘probably’ and hope for the best.”
Emma rose from her chair. “Show me the rest of the pictures.”
Balfour laid a series of eight-by-twelve color photographs on his desk. They showed the missile fully uncovered from a variety of angles.
“Six four seven alpha hotel bravo.” She read the identification number painted on the cruise missile’s belly. “You know what this is?”
“It’s an air-launched cruise missile manufactured by the Boeing Corporation circa 1980. Weapons are my business.”
“I mean what these numbers denote.” Emma pointed to a photograph showing a close-up of the missile where the identification number was clearly visible. “Designation ‘alpha hotel bravo.’”
Balfour sipped tea from his Wedgwood cup. “It is the American designation for a nuclear-tipped weapon,” he said, looking at her from under his brow. “Does that cause you any concern?”
“Why should it? Weapons are my business, too.”
Balfour threw his head back and laughed richly, his theatrical laugh. “I knew I was right to come for you. You and I are a match made in heaven.”
“Really?” said Emma. “I’d have thought it was more the other place.”
Balfour laughed louder.
Emma nearly smiled, feeling something close to fondness for the man. A little more than a week earlier, she’d never been happier to see anyone in her entire life.
After her beating at the hands of Prince Rashid, she’d lain in the desert for hours, broken in body and spirit. It was not only the pain of her injuries that left her without hope, but the circumstances of her betrayal. Over and over she’d played Rashid’s words in her mind. “Who do you work for? The CIA? The Pentagon?” It was Connor’s doing. There was no one else to blame. It was anger that drove her to her feet, to deny the impossibility of her situation. She hadn’t sacrificed so much to die alone in a foreign land. It wasn’t right. Not for all she had done. Not for a woman in her condition. She’d made it fifty steps before Balfour arrived, and she didn’t know if she could have made it one more.
He’d flown her to Pakistan aboard one of his jets. He’d seen to it that she received medical care and proper rest. But all the while she’d known there would be a price.
“Why do you trust me?” she’d asked when she’d recovered enough to ask why he’d come for her.
“Because you’re like me,” Balfour had answered. “You have nowhere else to turn.”
“What makes you so sure?” she’d asked, a rebel despite her bruised ribs, second-degree burns, and the angry scabs that covered her hips and shoulders and back.
“Thanks to Prince Rashid, the Russians know you’re a double. You can’t go back there. It’s obvious the Americans don’t want you either.”
“How do you know?”
Balfour had leaned close, so that she could smell the mint on his breath and note the long eyelashes that made his brown eyes glimmer. “The bullets, darling. Rashid told me that someone tipped him off.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?” Balfour’s dismissive tone convinced her he knew more than he was saying. “Someone on your side wants you dead. You can’t go home.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she’d countered, turning her head away so he couldn’t read the hurt in her eyes. “I can take care of myself.”
“Of course you can. But first I need your he
lp.”
Emma had said nothing. She could refuse him, but he could as easily kill her as let her go. In the end, it came down to actions. He’d saved her life. The fact that he’d done so to further his own aims changed nothing. She owed him. It was only later that she began to fashion her own plan.
“Give me a map,” she said, returning her mind to the present.
Balfour showed her to a round table in the center of the room where a detailed topographic map was laid out. For an hour they discussed the logistics of the operation—men, equipment, timing. And all the while she sensed his eyes on her, measuring, appraising, calculating. She had known that Balfour was in trouble, but she sensed a new impatience about him, a frisson of desperation that electrified his every movement.
She had more questions. To whom did he intend to sell the missile? How much did he expect to receive? Where would the transfer take place? But these were an intelligence agent’s questions, and she knew better than to ask.
She remembered Rashid’s shadowy associate, the solemn, robed man kept deliberately apart from the others. She realized now that his separation was not to prevent him from learning too much about Rashid’s transaction but to keep Emma, and perhaps even Balfour, from learning too much about him.
“How soon can you go up?” Balfour asked, barely able to keep his ostrich-skin loafers in one place.
“How soon would you like?”
“Two days,” said Balfour. It was a command, not a request.
“All right,” said Emma, hiding her uncertainty about whether her still fragile body would be up to the task. “Two days.”
It was then that Emma knew Balfour’s troubles were worse than she’d realized.
Retrieving the missile was key.
For him and for her.
21
“The first thing you need to learn is how to move between two places without being tailed. This requires two skills, the ability to spot who’s following you and the ability to evade them.”
Rules of Betrayal Page 12