“Keep moving. Don’t stop.” Stutler pushed him.
Hunter slowed down and didn’t say a word. He knew the team was bound by rules of engagement that were tighter than the plastic ties around his legs. Killing him in an escape attempt was undoubtedly permitted, but they all had been in the sandbox long enough to know better than to shoot a bound Iraqi in the middle of a crowded market. As far as the masses were concerned, Hunter was one of them, another innocent victim of the evil Americans. The old Arab proverb kept running through his mind: never give advice in a crowd. Hunter worked the scissors around in his hands to the right angle, then he stopped.
“Move, I said. Now!”
Hunter dropped to his knees, lowered his hands and cut at the plastic tie at his ankles.
“Get up, you asshole.” Stutler grabbed Hunter under the arm and pulled him to his feet.
Hunter shuffled forward as if his legs were still bound. He instinctively turned the scissors so that they pointed toward Stutler, but he knew he couldn’t bring himself to stab a fellow Bushman, so he stopped, threw back his head and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allah is great!”
Hunter saw a piece of a brick fly toward Stutler, then a hail of rocks pelted the operators and angry shouts closed in from all directions.
The last thing Hunter saw was a chunk of concrete flying toward his head. It was painted green, the color of the Prophet.
Chapter Twelve
“They’re pretty freewheeling,” the former CIA official said of the military teams. He said that it was not uncommon for CIA station chiefs to learn of military intelligence operations only after they were underway, and that many conflicted with existing operations being carried out by the CIA or the foreign country’s intelligence service.
—The Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2006, as reported by Greg Miller
Camp Tornado Point, Anbar Province
Camille opened her mouth, then closed it slowly. Resting her chin on her hands, she stared some more. The betrayal sliced so deep, she didn’t know what to believe. Hunter’s story had never felt quite right and she had always sensed he was hiding something. She took a deep breath and pursed her lips. “You’re telling me Hunter was engaged to someone else when he was engaged to me? I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll do the job,” Joe Chronister said.
“How do I know this is true?”
“Because of how it resonates. You know it’s true, Camille. Deep down inside, you know it.”
Chronister gave her another stack of photos. On top was one of Hunter with a woman who looked like she had stepped out of the pages of a Neiman Marcus catalog. The bitch was obviously edgy, high-maintenance and totally out of Hunter’s league. She was probably insane, which would make her within his reach, but not his grasp—his favorite type of gal, totally Hunter. “He could never afford a woman like that—not even if his official death had absolved him of alimony and child support.”
“But you know he’d have the hots for a broad like that, don’t you?”
Camille tossed the photos onto the desk. “Pictures can be doctored. Give a trained monkey Photoshop and you could be showing me shots of Marilyn Monroe giving him head.”
“Stella—Camille—he faked his death so he could get away from you to be with her. It wasn’t cold feet, it was a hot—”
“Stop. Don’t say it.” Camille held up her hand and looked away from Chronister so he couldn’t see her fighting back tears as she remembered his lame excuses. Hunter had played her for a fool and she let him do it—over and over again.
“But in case you want more evidence, here are some intercepted emails between—”
“Email is the easiest thing in the world to fake. Untrained monkeys can do that.”
Chronister reached back into his attaché and pulled out a thick dossier. He handed it to Camille. “You’ll also find copies of several handwritten cards, love notes and letters with his signature.”
Camille flipped through the pages, shaking her head. The handwriting was his. The adoring sticky notes were familiar—too familiar. She slapped it closed and pressed her hands against each side of it.
“I’ve seen enough.”
“No, you haven’t. I still have copies of statements from his joint bank account with her. Three months ago when Rubicon started raiding Black Management job sites, it went from chronically overdrawn to a six-figure surplus.”
Camille threw the folders onto the desk and looked at Chronister. “As I said, I’ve seen enough. You have my attention. So why isn’t the Agency handling this job in-house?”
Chronister took a deep breath. He recognized the look on Camille’s face and he liked what he saw. Things were progressing better than he had hoped, thanks in no small part to the Marine father-figure who had unknowingly softened Camille up for him. In thirty-two years with the Agency, he had recruited hundreds, maybe even thousands of spies, convincing them to betray their countries for one reason or another. Money. More often than not money made them do it, but sometimes it was for love, other times for revenge. Every once in a while some poor sap gave his country the Judas kiss out of a belief in peace, democracy or the American way. The real art in turning someone into an agent was getting under their skin and figuring out what they needed deep down inside. And he knew exactly what Camille needed. There was something she yearned for from both her father and from him—an apology. They had both pushed her relentlessly and made her promises that she could become something that she would never be allowed to be because of her gender: a Special Forces operator.
The only difference between Chronister and her father was that her father had really believed it could happen for her one day. In the late eighties, after her father had taken her along on a covert mission to Soviet Uzbekistan to clean up some Agency business and he had debriefed them both, Chronister knew he had to have her working for him. He had never seen raw talent like hers. When she was old enough, he had dangled the opportunity to enter the CIA’s paramilitary force in front of her to convince her to join the CIA over the Marines, even though he knew a woman didn’t have a chance with the Agency’s Special Activities Division either.
He glanced at Camille so see if his dramatic pause had gone on long enough. She was starting to look concerned.
“Is something wrong?” Camille said. “I asked you why the Agency isn’t handling the hit in-house.”
Chronister took another handful of M&Ms and talked while he chewed them. He took a deep breath and looked directly at her with the most remorseful expression he could muster. “Because I owe you.”
He caught a glint of hope in Camille’s eyes. She wants it.
“What do you mean, you owe me?”
“I’m facing retirement. Things look different when you get older and that lifelong dream of a fishing cabin in Michigan is only a few months away.”
“What are you saying?” Her face softened, but her arms were still crossed.
“I’m saying you start to regret mistakes when you get older. Maybe even want to make things right.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Maybe. Like I said, you were like a daughter, but I shouldn’t have protected you. I should’ve sent you over to Iggy and the Special Activities Division with my blessings. You would’ve made a damn fine operator for them.” He sighed and shook his head, pretending not to notice the tears he saw welling up in her eyes. “Camille—Stella, forgive me. I’m sorry.”
She turned away for a second and wiped her eyes. It almost felt genuine to him as he got up and hugged her. He cared for her.
He really did.
As he hugged her, he thought about how perfectly his plan was falling into place. He had worked too long and hard on SHANGRI-LA to allow one of Force Zulu’s wannabe spooks come in and fuck it up. The last thing he wanted was the Pentagon muscling in on the project. Convincing Camille Black to take out Stone was the cleanest way to get Zulu off his ass. The Pentagon would write i
t off as a crime of passion, a lover’s spat. No one would suspect the CIA’s hand in the murder of a US military spy. It was too bad he could never explain it all to her, because Camille was one person who would really appreciate the genius in his design.
He touched her face and wiped away a tear
Camille pulled away and sat down. “Sorry.” She averted her eyes in shame from the tears. “What’s your timeframe?”
“Soon as possible. But it’s not a straightforward wet job. We need information from Stone. He’s had SERE training from us and the Marines. He’s not only been a guest of Saddam without breaking, he was held by the North Koreans for weeks before we bought him out. You’ve seen his fingernails. The man is not a talker.”
“He’ll talk to me. What do you need?”
“Stone is a bit player trafficking arms to al-Zahrani because his wife has high maintenance costs. But he knows who al-Zahrani’s main man is inside Rubicon. I need you to extract this information for me, then kill him. You can make it as slow and painful as you want.” Chronister knew the Force Zulu types—they were the über-patriots who teared up when they heard the “Star Spangled Banner.” One of them would never work with al-Zahrani’s organization, unless he was doing so under orders, orders that were bringing him too close to SHANGRI-LA. He wanted to know Stone’s mission, but doubted even Camille could get it out of him.
“You sure you don’t want him back alive?”
“Come on. You know how the world works. If an Agency analyst betrays us, US courts try him for treason. If a case officer betrays us, we eliminate him. Stone betrayed us.” Chronister took another handful of candy and ate a green one. “Stone’s made a fool of you—more than once. What say you, my dear?”
Chapter Thirteen
A former US army colonel, Alex Sands, declared: “The whole point of using special operations is to fight terror with terror. Our guys are trained to do the things that traditionally the other guys have done: kidnap, hijack, infiltrate.”
—New Statesman [London], May 17, 2004, as reported by Stephen Grey
Anbar Province
Hunter lay with his eyes closed, half awake, half asleep. He was aware that he was dreaming in Arabic and that made him happy. The unconscious didn’t bother messing around with a language it hadn’t mastered. As he floated toward greater consciousness, he realized he wasn’t dreaming in Arabic, but was listening to it. His forehead throbbed and he remembered the concrete fragment coming at him. He couldn’t sense anyone’s presence nearby, but he didn’t want to take any chances, so he kept his eyes closed and tried to make out what was being said, but the voices were too distant and muted. Then he heard a loud thump and a voice shouting in English.
“Help me! I’m Jackie Nelson. If anyone can hear me, I’ll reward you. American dollars. Help me.” The voice was hoarse and it seemed to be coming from the next room.
Muj. The tangos had somehow snatched him and he knew far too well what they did to their American prey—internet beheadings, bodies dragged through the streets, and severed heads delivered to American bases. He had long ago vowed he would take his own life and as many of theirs as he could before they did anything like that to him.
Lying motionless so he didn’t alert any mujahedin guards that he had come to, Hunter peeped, but saw no one, so he opened his eyes and sat up on the stained sleeping mat on a filthy floor. He was still wearing the clothes he had stolen from the Iraqi carjacker. The room was empty and the door was shut, but the window had no bars and no glass. A warm breeze blew through it.
“If you can hear me, help me! Get the Americans. Reward. Dollars. Dinar.” The voice weakened as she repeated herself.
When Hunter stood, the blood rushed from his head and he saw swirls of flashing light and blackness. He sat down again, took a deep breath and waited for his blood pressure to rise. His lips were chapped, his mouth dry and he was hungry, but he was no longer zip-tied. Why had the tangos cut him free? At once he understood: the muj weren’t his captors—they were his liberators.
Hunter opened the door and stepped into the main room. Most of the outside wall was missing and the gnarled wreckage of a bombed-out car was visible through the hole. A sliver of a mirror clung desperately to the opposite wall, which was pitted with craters from the blast. A small perimeter had been cleared of debris around a makeshift table constructed from a door and saw horses. Scattered about one end of the table were a brick of plastic explosive, wires, detonators, pliers and a Colt long gun. Three men sat around it, each with an AK-47 at his feet, and a teenager leaned against a wall, an AK slung over his shoulder.
Hunter forced his thoughts into Arabic. “Marhaba.” He nodded his head in greeting as he waded through the rubble.
“Marhaba,” they said, echoing one another as they looked up. Two were twins, probably in their late teens, no older than twenty, and the oldest of the three couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.
“Thanks be to Allah that you saved me from the Americans.” Hunter placed his closed fist over his heart and bowed his head. Cries from the trapped American woman drifted through the walls. He ignored the hostage’s desperate pleas and wished she would stop before she got them both killed. Any English he heard could break his concentration and cause a deadly slip of the tongue. “I am in your debt.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the twenty-something one said. He avoided eye contact with Hunter. “Do you have a name? I am Fazul.”
“I go by Mu’tasim,” Hunter said. He had practiced this moment over and over, expecting to someday go deep undercover with the tangos. His Egyptian-accented Arabic was fluent, but he knew there were too many subtleties, too many opportunities to use an awkward word or the improper inflection. “But my given name is Sergei.”
The men laughed. “Sergei. You’re Russian?”
“I kill Russians. I am Chechen.”
“Chechen? So that’s why the Americans want you. I’ve trained with Chechens. They know no fear. I’ve seen a single Chechen with an AK-47 kill an entire platoon of Marines. They shot him, but he kept at them.” Fazul picked up the AK and pointed it at each of his friends, pretending to shoot them one by one. “He killed them all—even the Marines who ran.”
Hunter forced a laugh. “Allahu akbar. What else is there to say?” Other than “You fucking lying muj. Marines do not cut and run.”
“Who are you with, Sergei?”
“I’m on my way home, insh’allah—Allah willing. I’m no longer with a cell and if I were, you know I cannot say.”
“No. I mean, which leader do you follow? Abdullah or al-Zahrani?”
Hunter hated politics, but he knew enough about them to understand that he hadn’t been captured by ordinary insurgents, but by the much rarer al Qaeda cell—or at least al Qaeda wannabes. The last thing he wanted was to get trapped in the middle of the growing schism inside al Qaeda over bin Laden’s successor. He wasn’t even certain what that was all about. He had heard rumors that bin Laden had finally died, but those had been floating around for years and he was pretty sure bin Laden was still alive in the secret prison in Afghanistan where he had been held since Hunter’s team of operators had captured him in early 2002 in the mountains of Waziristan. The US government had wanted to avoid creating a martyr or rallying al Qaeda supporters into seeking his freedom by increasing attacks on American targets, so it instead made the al Qaeda leader fade away. Hunter wasn’t officially read into the project, but he knew that the CIA and Pentagon immediately took joint control of al Qaeda, feeding its lieutenants with useless orders which rendered the organization ineffective. It cost the Administration plenty in terms of political capital because the public believed it still hadn’t nabbed bin Laden, but the fiction was a small price to pay to keep the world and America safe.
Hunter didn’t know what had happened, but something with the plan had clearly gone wrong over the past year. The best he could figure out was that a couple of bin Laden’s more ambitious lieutenants either had figured
out the American scheme or simply had sensed a weakened leader and staged a silent coup. Both Abdullah and al-Zahrani had declared bin Laden dead and were now fighting each other for control of al Qaeda. The internal violence in the organization had escalated so much in the past year that the two main factions were inflicting more casualties on each other than on the West, mirroring the Iraqi civil war between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. Hunter took a deep breath as he looked around the terrorist safe house for clues as to which sect the tangos were with. He found none and said, “I follow the only true heir to bin Laden.”
“Of course.” Fazul smiled. “And his name is?…”
The teenager pushed himself away from the wall, stood straight and pointed his AK at Hunter.
“Long ago in Chechnya I pledged my life to bin Laden, may blessing be upon him. Now my loyalty is with…” Hunter studied them for signs that it was time to go on the offense. If he caught the right moment, he could use Fazul’s body to absorb the boy’s bullets while he reached for a weapon. He continued, “…al-Zahrani.”
Fazul put his hand on Hunter’s shoulder and held it there for a few moments. “You are a wise man, Sergei.”
And a lucky one.
Fazul’s cell phone started vibrating and a synthetic muezzin beckoned to midday prayers, “Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar. Ashhadu an la ilaha illahhah…”
Hunter knit his eyebrows, then smiled as he stared at the phone. Fazul picked it up, allowing it to finish playing the call to prayer. “It has a timer to play the adhan five times a day and it adjusts to the new time each day or if you move into a different location. It even has a direction finder for Mecca.”
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