Target.
Over the railing a figure was turning toward them. Ding laid the MP5’s sight over the man’s chest and fired twice. He dropped, and Ding kept moving. To his left he saw another figure but knew Bianco was covering it, and as if on cue, he heard a pop-pop. To Chavez’s right he saw the first of Weber’s team coming through the four-foot-tall oval hole created by the Gatecrasher, followed by a second, third, and fourth.
Ding veered left, moving toward the center of the room. Screams now. A mass of huddled bodies on the floor. Target. He fired twice and kept moving, MP5 tracking. Behind him he heard Showalter call, “Target, left,” followed by a series of overlapping pops.
Weber and his team had caught up with Chavez and Bianco now and were fanning out, each man covering a sector.
“Down, down, down! Everybody down!” Ding shouted.
To the right: pop, pop, pop.
Chavez kept moving, pushing through the center of the room, Bianco on his left doing the same, looking for movement…
“Clear,” he heard Weber call out, followed by two more.
“Clear on the left!” Bianco answered.
“Hall clear!” This from Showalter. “Checking the rooms.”
“On my way,” Ybarra called.
From Showalter’s hallway came a woman’s scream. Chavez spun. Ybarra, who had reached the entrance to the hallway, sidestepped right and pressed himself against the left wall. “Target.” Chavez sprinted to the hall and took position opposite Ybarra. Down the hall, a figure had emerged from the last room, dragging a woman along with him. The man had a pistol pressed to her neck. Ding peeked out. The man spotted him and turned the woman a bit, shielding himself. He shouted something in panicked Arabic. Ding pulled back. “Showalter, say position,” he whispered.
“Second room.”
“Target’s just outside the third door. Ten, twelve feet. He’s got a hostage.”
“I hear her. How’s my angle?”
“Half a head shot open.”
“Roger, say when.”
Chavez peeked out again. The man turned ever so slightly, squaring off with Chavez. Showalter, his MP5 shoulder-tucked, stepped up to the threshold of his door and fired. The bullet entered the man’s right eye. He crumpled, and the woman started screaming. Showalter stepped out and moved toward her.
Chavez let out a breath, then slung his MP5 and turned to scan the main room. Done and done. Twenty seconds, no more. Not bad. He keyed his radio. “Command, this is Blue Actual, over.”
“Go.”
“We’re secure.”
Once Chavez did his final walk-through and judged the embassy to be fully locked down, he radioed Clark and Stanley a firm “all clear.” From there, events moved rapidly as the report went from Tad Richards to his People’s Militia liaison, Lieutenant Masudi, then up the Libyan chain of command to a major who insisted that Chavez and his team exit the front door and escort the hostages out the main gate. In Rainbow’s temporary command center, Clark and Stanley, misunderstanding the demand, balked until Masudi explained in broken English that there would be no television cameras. The Libyan people simply wanted to express their gratitude. Clark considered this and gave his shrugged approval.
“International goodwill,” he muttered to Alistair Stanley.
Ten minutes later Chavez, his team, and the hostages emerged from the embassy’s main entrance amid the glare of klieg lights and applause. They were met at the gate by a contingent of Swedish Security Service (Säkerhetspolisen) and Criminal Investigation Department (Rikskriminalpolisen) officers, who took custody of the hostages. After two solid minutes of handshaking and hugs, Chavez and his team moved out onto the street, where a gauntlet of People’s Militia brass and soldiers offered yet more backslapping.
Richards appeared at Chavez’s side as they pushed through the crowd toward the command center. “What the hell’s going on?” Chavez shouted.
“Hard to catch the words,” Richards replied, “but they’re just impressed. No, amazed would be a better description.”
Behind Chavez, Showalter yelled, “At what, for Christ sake? What the fuck were they expecting?”
“Casualties! Lots of dead people! They didn’t expect any of the hostages to make it out, let alone all of them. They’re celebrating!”
“No shit?” Bianco called. “What’re we, amateurs?”
Richards replied over his shoulder, “They haven’t got the best track record with hostage rescue.”
Chavez smiled at this. “Yeah, well, we’re Rainbow.”
21
HAD HE BEEN in an objective frame of mind, Nigel Embling might have recognized his current mood as nothing more than self-indulgent crap, but at that moment it was his considered decision that the world was in fact going quickly and directly to hell. Later he would likely reevaluate that decision, but right now, sitting at his kitchen table over a cup of tea and reading the morning’s Daily Mashriq, one of Peshawar, Pakistan’s half-dozen daily newspapers, nothing he saw improved his mood.
“Bloody idiots,” he grumbled.
His houseboy, Mahmood, magically appeared in the kitchen’s doorway. “Something, Mr. Nigel?” Mahmood, eleven, was too happy and eager by half-especially at this time of day-but Embling knew his household would be a shambles without him.
“No, no, Mahmood, just talking to myself.”
“Oh, that’s not good, sir, not good at all. Touched, that’s what people will think. Please, if you would, be certain to save your talking for at home, yes?”
“Yes, fine. Go back to your studies.”
“Yes, Mr. Nigel.”
Mahmood was an orphan, his mother, father, and two sisters having died in the rash of Sunni-on-Shia violence that had plagued Pakistan following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Embling had all but adopted the boy, giving him food, board, a small stipend, and, unbeknownst to Mahmood, a steadily growing trust fund he’d inherit when he turned eighteen.
Another mosque burned, another faction leader found murdered, another rumor of rigged elections, another ISI intelligence officer arrested for stealing state secrets, another call for calm from Peshawar. It was a damned shame, all of it. Not that Pakistan had ever been the model of peace, mind you, but there had been some periods of mostly calm, though even that was just a sham, a thin film covering the cauldron of violence always boiling just under the surface. Still and all, Embling knew there was no place else for him on earth, though he’d never quite understood why. Reincarnation, perhaps, but whatever it was, Pakistan had certainly wormed its way into his life, and now, at age sixty-eight, he was firmly and irrevocably rooted in his adopted home.
Embling knew that most men in his position would be, and perhaps should be, afraid-an Anglo-Saxon Christian from England, birthplace of the British Raj, or “rule” in Hindi. For the better part of ninety years, from the mid-1850s to just after World War Two, Great Britain had held sway over what it called the “Indian Subcontinent,” which had at various times during its history included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somaliland, Singapore, and Lower and Upper Burma, today known as Myanmar, though Embling still and always would call it Burma, political correctness be damned. Though memories of the British Raj in Pakistan had faded with time, its impact had never completely disappeared, and Embling could see it and feel it every day he went out, in the stares from the old-timers in the market and in the whispered conversations between policemen who’d heard the stories from their parents and grandparents. Embling did nothing to hide his heritage, and he couldn’t have if he’d wanted to anyway, what with his perfect but ever-so-slightly accented grasp of Urdu and Pashto. Not to mention his white skin and six-foot-four-inch frame. Not a lot of natives with those traits.
Still, he was mostly shown respect, and that had nothing to do with lingering deference to the Raj but rather his own history. He had, after all, been in Pakistan longer than many of the people you might find in the Khyber Bazar market on any given day. How many years, exactly? he thought.
Give or take holidays or brief assignments to Pakistan’s neighbors… Say, forty-plus years. Long enough for his former (and sometimes current) compatriots to have long ago labeled him as “gone native.” Not that he minded. For all its shortcomings and all the near misses and dodgy spots he’d seen, there was no place for him but Pakistan, and in his secret heart he took it as a point of pride that they thought him so well integrated that he was “more Paki than Brit.”
Embling, at the tender and naive age of twenty-two, had been one of MI6’s many postwar Oxford recruitments, having been approached by the father of a schoolmate who Embling had thought worked as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence but who was in fact a scout for MI6-one of the few, in fact, who had warned his superiors that the infamous traitor Kim Philby was a less-than-stellar catch who would in time either muck up so badly he would cost lives or be tempted and slip over to the other side, which he did, working as a mole for the Soviets for many years before being exposed.
After surviving the rigors of MI6 training at Fort Monckton on the Hampshire Coast, Embling was assigned Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, or NWFP (or Pakhtunkhwa or Sarhad, depending on who you were talking to), which abutted Afghanistan, at the time just becoming a playground for the Russian KGB. Embling had spent the better part of six years living in the mountains along the border, making inroads with the Pashtun warlords who ruled the gray area of overlap between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If the Soviets put out feelers in Pakistan’s direction, it would likely come over the mountains and through the lands of the Pashtuns.
Save the occasional trip home to the UK, Embling had spent his career in the Central Asian Stans-Turkistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan-all of which fell in varying degrees and in various times under the rule or at least the sway of the Soviet Union. While the American CIA and his compatriots in MI6-officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, a term Embling had never taken to-were fighting the Cold War in the fog-shrouded streets of Berlin and Budapest and Prague, Embling was traipsing the mountains with the Pashtun, living on quabili pulaw dampukht (rice with carrots and raisins) and bitter black tea. In 1977, unbeknownst to his superiors in London, Embling had even married into a Pashtun tribe, taking as his bride the youngest daughter of a minor warlord, only to lose her two years later in a Hind airstrike when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Her body had never been recovered. He often wondered if that was why he’d stayed in Pakistan long after he’d retired. Was some sad part of his heart still hoping to find Farishta still alive somewhere? Her name, after all, when translated into English, meant “Angel.”
A pipe dream, Embling now thought.
A pipe dream, just like the idea of a stable Pakistan.
Seven thousand miles away in Silver Spring, Maryland, Mary Pat Foley was having a similar thought over a similar beverage-her one cup of half-caf/half-decaf reheated and salted coffee she allowed herself in the evening-but on a wholly different topic: the Emir, and the two questions that had plagued U.S. intelligence for the better part of a decade: where he was and how to catch the bastard. With few and only fleeting exceptions, and despite being the White House’s Public Enemy Number One, a position with which Mary Pat mostly disagreed. Certainly the guy needed to get caught or, better yet, put down for good and scattered to the winds, but killing the Emir wasn’t going to solve America’s problem with terrorism. There was even some debate over how much, if any, operational intelligence the Emir possessed; Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, now retired, tended to fall on the “not a hell of a lot” side of the argument. The Emir knew he was being hunted, and while he was a grade-A sonofabitch and a mass murderer, he sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to put himself in the operational need-to-know loop, especially nowadays, with terrorists having stumbled onto the beauty of compartmentalization. If the Emir was an acknowledged head of state sitting in a palace somewhere, he would likely be getting regular briefings, but he wasn’t-at least no one thought so. He was, as best the CIA could tell, holed up somewhere in the badland mountains of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. But that was the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack scenario, wasn’t it? Still, you never knew. Someday someone would get lucky and find him, of that she was certain. The question was, Would we get him alive or otherwise? She didn’t really care either way, but the idea of standing toe to toe with the bastard and looking him in the eye did hold a certain appeal.
“Hi, honey, I’m home…” Ed Foley called out cheerily, coming down the stairs and into the kitchen in his sweatpants and T-shirt.
Since retiring, Ed’s commute consisted of thirty or so feet and a half-dozen stair steps to his study, where he was working on a nonfiction history of the U.S. intelligence community, from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan. His current chapter, a damned good one if she said so herself, was about John Honeyman, an Irish-born weaver and perhaps the most obscure spy of his time. Tasked by none other than George Washington with infiltrating the ranks of Howe’s fearsome Hessian mercenaries stationed around Trenton, Honeyman, posing as a cattle dealer, slipped through the lines, scouted the Hessians’ battle order and positions, then slipped out again, giving Washington the edge he needed for an all-out rout. For Ed, it was a dream chapter, that little bit of unknown history. Writing about Wild Bill Donovan, the Bay of Pigs, and the Iron Curtain was all well and good, but there were only so many twists you could put on what had become old chestnuts of the espionage nonfiction genre.
Ed had certainly earned his retirement many times over, as had Mary Pat, but only a handful of Langley insiders-including Jack Ryan Sr.-would ever know to what degree the Foleys had served and sacrificed for their country. Ed, Irish by birth, had graduated from Fordham and started his career in journalism, serving as a solid if undistinguished reporter for The New York Times before slipping into the world of bad guys and spies. As for Mary Pat, if ever a woman had been born to do intelligence work, it was her, the granddaughter of the riding tutor to Czar Nicholas II and the daughter of Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, who in 1917 had seen the handwriting on the walls and slipped his family out of Russia just before the revolution that would topple the Romanov dynasty and cost the lives of Nicholas and his family.
“Hard day at the office, dear?” Mary Pat asked her husband.
“Grueling, absolutely grueling. So many big words, such a small dictionary.” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “And how are you?”
“Fine, fine.”
“Pondering again, are we? About you know who?”
Mary Pat nodded. “Got to go in tonight, in fact. Something hot in the pipeline, maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Ed frowned, but Mary Pat couldn’t tell if it was because he missed the action or because he was as skeptical as she was. Terrorist groups were growing more intel-savvy by the day, especially after 9/11.
Mary Pat and Ed Foley had both earned the right to be slightly cynical if it suited them, having witnessed firsthand the CIA’s internal workings and convoluted history for nearly thirty years, and having served at Moscow Station as husband-and-wife case officers back when Russia was still ruling the Soviet Union and the KGB and its satellite agencies were the CIA’s only real bugaboo.
Both had risen through the ranks of Langley’s directorate of operations, Ed ending his career as DCI, or director central intelligence, while Mary Pat, once the deputy director for operations, had requested a sub-lateral transfer to the NCTC-the National Counterterrorism Center-to serve as its deputy director. As expected, the rumor mill had gone into overdrive, speculating that Mary Pat had in fact been demoted from her DDO post and that her position at the NCTC was merely a waypoint on the road to retirement. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The NCTC was the tip of the spear, and Mary Pat wanted to be there.
Of course, her decision had been helped by the fact that their old home, the DO, wasn’t what it used to be. Its new name, the Clandestine Service, while it grated on both of th
em (although neither was under the illusion that the term directorate of operations fooled anyone, Clandestine Service seemed just a tad too flashy for their tastes), they also knew it was just another moniker. Unfortunately, the change had come at roughly the same time they felt the directorate had become less about covert operations and intelligence gathering and more about politics. And while Mary Pat and Ed each had his and her own unique-and frequently contrary-political views, what they both agreed on was that politics and intelligence were a bad mix. Too damned many in the CIA’s upper echelons were simply civil servants looking for a ticket punch on their way to bigger and better things, something the Foleys had never fathomed. As far as they were concerned, there was no higher calling than to serve in defense of your country, whether in uniform on the battlefield or behind the curtain of what CIA Cold War spymaster James Jesus Angleton had dubbed the “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Never mind that Angleton had very likely been a delusional paranoid whose witch hunts for Soviet moles had eaten Langley from the inside out like so much cancer. As far as Mary Pat was concerned, Angleton’s nickname for the world of espionage was dead-on.
As much as she loved the world in which she worked, the “Wilderness” took its toll. Over the last few months, she and Ed had started chatting about her eventual retirement, and while her husband had been characteristically tactful (if not subtle), it was clear what he wanted her to do, going as far as leaving copies of National Geographic open on the kitchen table, turned to a picture of Fiji or a history piece on New Zealand, two places they’d put on their “someday” list.
In those rare moments when she allowed herself introspection about something other than work, Mary Pat had found herself dancing around the critical question-Why am I staying?-without really tackling it head-on. They had plenty of money to retire on, and neither would lack for things to keep them occupied. So if money wasn’t the issue, what was? It was simple really: Intel work was her calling, and she knew it-had known it from day one with CIA. She’d done some real good in their time, but there was no denying the CIA wasn’t what it used to be. The people were different and their motivations obscured by ambition. Nobody seemed to be “asking not what their country could do for them.” Worse still, the tentacles of Beltway politics had wound their way deeply into the intelligence community, and Mary Pat feared this was an irreversible condition.
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