by Joshua Hood
He grabbed a glass of water from the top of the podium and took a sip, fighting the urge to wipe the sweat collecting on his brow.
“Yes, James,” he said pointing to a reporter from the Washington Post.
“Can you tell us a little about the intel that drove the operation?”
“You need to be more specific.”
“Did the intel come from a drone, signal hit, or an asset on the ground?”
“We utilized all of those methods, and I have to say that the CIA did an excellent job collecting the necessary intelligence, which allowed the president to make an informed decision,” he lied.
“Mr. Secretary?” a middle-aged woman asked from the edge of the room.
Cage didn’t need to look at the seating chart to know who the woman was, because he had handpicked her for this exact question.
“Yes, Wendy?” he said casually.
“Is there any truth to the rumors that an unknown group of fighters have conducted an armed incursion into northern Iraq?”
“I’m not sure where you are getting that information,” he replied.
“Well, sir, according to my sources, combined al Nusra and Islamic State fighters have already taken Rabia and are currently besieging Tal Afar. Can you confirm that?”
“At this time, the Pentagon has no knowledge of any incursions, but as I have said before, the region as a whole, and Iraq in particular, have become a hotbed of insurgent activity since we left.”
“Well, on that same note, a video was posted on Al Jazeera that shows what they claim is an American operative from the DIA having his head cut off. The video claims that this man was taken during the operation you spoke of in Syria. Does your office have any information on that?”
Cage took another sip of water, feeling the electric current arcing through the room. He knew he was playing a dangerous game, but he was all in, despite the cost.
“Wendy, on the record, I know nothing about the video. But off the record, I can promise you that it is just a matter of time before we get hit again. If we do not take a more proactive approach, there will be another attack—I can promise you that. The two groups you spoke of, al Nusra and the Islamic State, have had nothing to do but plot their next move since we pulled out of Iraq. Syria has become a breeding ground for radical jihad, and as much as we want to hide our heads in the sand, the fighters there are just waiting for an opportunity to strike.”
• • •
Thousands of miles from Washington, David Castleman handed a roll of dinars to the taxi driver and stepped out into the street. He’d been traveling for most of the day, and he needed a shower almost as badly as he needed a drink.
There was a special place in his heart for Beirut, a city that had seen better days. The spy had his first posting here, and for some reason he had never let go of the apartment he had bought so many years before.
The smell of the ocean greeted him like a long-lost friend, and he wished he had time to walk down to the beach. Instead, he veered into an alley and headed west toward his destination.
Like everything else in David’s life, the apartment was small and unassuming, and as he made his way up the familiar paint-chipped stairs, he had the feeling that he was finally home. He paused outside the light-blue door. Immediately he became alarmed when he noticed the seal he’d put on its side hinge was gone. His hand slipped to the Colt .45 stuck in his waist.
He brought up the pistol. The knob turned easily, and the door swung silently open on well-oiled hinges. The spy stepped silently over the threshold, the barrel of the .45 leading him into the entryway.
A solitary ceiling fan spun lazily in the center of the main room. The curtains billowed gently from the breeze coming off the ocean. The view was breathtaking, but his attention was absorbed by the man sitting on the couch.
“Hope you don’t mind I let myself in,” Captain Brantley said, holding up a bottle of beer.
“You could have locked the door,” David replied.
“Yeah, sorry. I can’t believe you still carry that old tack driver,” Brantley said, getting to his feet.
“It’s a classic, just like me.”
“Hey, whatever works, boss.”
CHAPTER 27
* * *
Mason sat in the passenger seat trying to sleep as Zeus drove them east toward Iraq. Even though he was exhausted, sleep refused to come. Instead, all he could think of was finding Boland’s disembodied head in that shitty farmhouse in Syria, staring sightlessly up at him.
The horrors of war weren’t anything new, but this demon wouldn’t let go. The guilt was the worst part, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that it should have been him.
Mason knew that there had to be a reason, a link between the cause and the effect, but he couldn’t see it. Both Renee and David had the innate ability to extrapolate the big picture from random bits of action, but he didn’t dare call them. He still didn’t know whom he could trust.
The question at the forefront of his mind was, why? Anderson had to have an angle, something that justified launching the mission in the first place. Mason knew that if he could just figure that out, he might be able to get in the game.
He had no doubts that someone had tried to kill him with the Hellfire strike. But that was nothing new. Mason knew he had more enemies than friends, but what in the hell could Anderson gain by killing Boland?
Opening his eyes, Mason glanced in the rearview mirror and caught the edge of the coarse blanket peeking over the backseat. Boland deserved a better shroud, but that was all they could find. As he stared at it, he felt a helpless rage boiling up inside him.
“Did you sleep?” Zeus asked.
Mason didn’t answer. He bounced a smoke out of the pack of Pine cigarettes he had taken from Boland’s pocket. He snapped open his dull gold Zippo and touched the flame to the end of the yellowed cigarette.
The first drag was acrid, burning the back of his throat as it rushed to his lungs. The smokes were made in South Korea, and they reminded him of his time in Afghanistan, when he’d first started smoking. Boland had bought a carton from a local man, and told Mason they were American. He’d never smoked before, and his teammate had laughed hysterically when he almost puked on the dirt floor.
“Mason, what are we going to do with Mr. Boland?” Zeus asked in Arabic.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“We can’t carry the body around with us. It’s not exactly sanitary.”
“I’m not burying him in this shithole.”
“I’m not saying we should. I just think that his family might—”
“I hear you,” Mason snapped.
He could tell by the patience in Zeus’s voice that he wasn’t finished. “Look, I know what you’re going to do. I’ve seen that look before, but it’s going to get bloody, and I don’t think they are ready,” Zeus whispered, motioning to the sleeping men in the back.
“Don’t you even think about cutting me out of this,” Grinch replied in his broken Arabic as he opened one eye. “T.J. was my friend too, and someone has to pay for what happened.”
Mason cracked the window, letting the smoke trail out into the desert. Men like Boland were supposed to die in a pile of their own brass, he thought grimly, not tied to some fucking chair. Suddenly it all seemed so pointless.
Mason knew that he was slowing down, and even though he would never say it out loud, it scared him. He was only thirty-two, but he felt twice that. His leg bothered him every day, and there was only so much damage a man could take before his number finally came up.
But the worst part was that he didn’t know anything else. If he gave it all up, what was he going to do? Mason had always wanted to be a soldier—that’s what he was—and without that one constant, he knew he’d be lost.
“You have a family,” he said, turning to look at Grinch.
“So? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“A lot. Zeus and I, we have nothing—this is
all we know,” Mason said, opening his arms to encompass the filthy truck. “Is that what you want?”
“Why don’t you just call the colonel?” Blaine piped in. “You think he’d let this stand?”
“Anderson is the problem.”
Blaine was surprised by Mason’s harshness. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve worked with Anderson, back before all of this, and he’s not the guy you think he is.” He turned himself halfway around, so the men in the back could see his face. “You guys know me, you know what I’ve done and what I’ve been through, so I hope you will listen to what I’m about to say. This mission has his fingerprints all over it, and you can bank on the fact that Anderson is in this just as deep as al Qatar. There is no way a colonel sends two strike teams into an unsecure objective, in broad fucking daylight, unless someone told him to.”
The two men didn’t respond, trying to process what Mason was saying. He had told them about his time in the Anvil Program, and his exploits during Iraq and Afghanistan were legendary.
David had let him handpick his recon team, and the first thing he’d done was to tell his men all about his time on the run. He had never lied to them and wasn’t about to start now. Soldiers like Grinch and Blaine needed to believe in the men they followed and instead of alienating them, Kane’s honesty made them work tirelessly to earn his approval.
Mason went on. “I don’t know how, but I am going to find al Qatar, and then I’m going to kill him—and anyone else who was involved. I’m warning you: we can’t trust the task force, and nobody is going to be coming when we get in the shit. And after that’s all done, if I make it out alive, I’m going to get Anderson.” He wanted to make sure they realized that. “So, if I were you, I’d be on the next thing smoking, and I’d never look back.”
He wasn’t sure he liked their replies. “I’m in,” Grinch said without hesitation.
“Me too. Just tell me what to do.”
Mason looked over at Zeus, who shrugged behind the wheel. “I’d rather be sunning on the Riviera, but what the hell . . .”
Mason was glad it was all settled. This was the kind of team he wanted. “Okay, but before that, we have to get someone out here to recover Boland.”
“How the hell are you going to do that without calling Anderson?”
“I’m going to use this,” he said, holding up the dead man’s beacon.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
Renee waited for as long as she could before slipping out of her room in search of Mr. David. She knocked softly at his door, but after getting no response, she headed to the operations area in hopes he might be there.
The ops center was quiet and dark, with the major source of light shining dimly from a laptop onto Dustin Toomes.
“Dustin,” she said, approaching the man. He was wholly absorbed in some DVD that was playing on his laptop.
The analyst jumped as she put her hand on his shoulder. He yanked the bulky earphones off his head. “Renee, wh—what are you doing up?” he stuttered.
Toomes had been taking a lot of shit from the operators who’d returned from the mission, and he wore a resigned expression as he steeled himself for still another attack.
It was time to flip the script. “How’s it going?” she began sweetly.
“It’s been a shitty couple of days. Anderson’s sending me back to the States,” he said with a sigh.
“That sucks,” she said, pretending outrage. “You’ve been a real asset.”
Though it was a lie, he was grateful to hear it. “Thanks, that means a lot.”
“What are you watching?”
“It, um, it’s Return of the Jedi,” he said sheepishly.
She knew exactly how to play the analyst. “That’s my favorite one. You know, my dad loved Star Wars. We used to watch them all the time on VHS.”
“Really, I never would have guessed,” he replied.
“Look, I need a favor,” she said, cutting to the chase.
A frown filled his face immediately. “Renee, I can’t talk about—”
She raised her hand, cutting him off. “Just listen to what I have to say.” She casually pulled over one of the rolling chairs and took a seat.
“People died,” she said. “We trusted you, and the intel was wrong.”
“I feel like shit, but there is nothing I can tell you about the source, or anything else.”
She expected Toomes to say that. “I don’t need you to tell me about the source. I already know who it is.”
“That’s not possible,” he said.
“Al Qatar.”
He was astonished, giving himself away. “How the hell—?”
“That’s not important right now, Dustin,” she said, leaning close. “Look, I know that someone fed you the source, and you were acting on good faith. You’re not a bad guy, you didn’t want this to happen, but the fact is that you’re still responsible.”
Dustin’s shoulders began to shake. She laid a hand on his arm, consoling him. He tried hard to hold back the tears, but Renee’s gentle touch had broken through the wall, and everything came tumbling out.
“Al Qatar was cleared by Boland. I checked him out before sending it up. He had the creds and had worked with the CIA before. I didn’t know.”
Renee kept stroking his arm softly. “What happened to Boland?”
“What do you mean?”
“Before the mission, Boland disappeared for a while. What happened? Where did he go?”
The analyst wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his sweater and then glanced over his shoulder to make sure they were alone. “You have to understand, this came from the top.”
“Higher than Anderson?” she asked, feigning surprise.
“It all started in Washington. The DOD found a way to use cell phone towers to jam communications over a small area.” The technology involved started to get him excited. “It’s genius, really, and easy to use because it works off organic sources. All Boland had to do was plug them in and leave ’em.”
“What happened?”
“Khalid grabbed him. No one has any idea how he knew they were even in country, but he grabbed Boland just as he crossed the border. Washington kept a lid on it, and when he managed to escape, he convinced someone that he could get the case back.”
Renee did her best to hide her fury. “So that was the whole reason we launched the operation?”
“Exactly. I was given al Qatar’s name and a bank account, and the agency wired him two million in exchange for the target location. You know the rest.”
She sure as hell did. A lot of good men had died. “How do I find this al Qatar?”
“Shit, I don’t know.”
His excuse didn’t sound convincing, and she probed further. “Isn’t that your job?”
“Yeah, but I can’t log into the system without leaving a trail. I’m already in deep shit as it is.”
“This is your chance to make amends for the men who died out there,” she pointed out, making herself sound stern, “and you’re worried about your own ass? I thought you were better than that.”
This argument hit home. “You have to believe me, there is nothing that I can do,” Toomes insisted.
“What if I wire half a million into your account and then I tip off a guy I know in the FBI?” Renee was coming up with the plan on the fly, but she couldn’t think of a better way to get the man to do what she wanted.
“Why would you do that?”
“The question is, why would you do it? You think they are going to put you in jail? Hell, no, what they will do is send someone like me to your house, and I will happily put a bullet in the back of your head.”
“Jesus,” he moaned.
She reverted back to the gentle approach. “Find al Qatar. I know you can.”
Dustin saw the light at last. After exiting out of the movie, his fingers began flying across the keyboard. Different programs popped up on the screen as he typed prompts into the command line.
Renee had no idea what he was doing, but as long as he got what she wanted, she didn’t care.
She glanced around the TOC, praying that no one disturbed the man as he worked. The keystrokes sounded incredibly loud as he hammered away, his hands a blur. Soon one of the windows showed rows of numbers scrolling vertically through what she assumed was a phone-tracking database. Meanwhile, he opened another program and typed in his access code.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Boland had a program on his cell phone that captured any phone call made close to him. The program,” he said, pointing at the scrolling window, “runs those numbers to an NSA database, looking for any patterns.”
“What kind of patterns?”
“Once a number is captured, we are able to slave the originating phone, and capture all outgoing and ingoing calls. So even if it is not active, we still know who that person called or whoever called him.”
She checked surreptitiously over her shoulder again, so he wouldn’t get nervous. “How long is this going to take?”
He was entranced by the numbers. “Could take all night—I have no idea. Wait, here we go.” He pointed. “A phone called this number in the States three hours before we launched. That same number called another phone the same day as the operation, and again today.”
“Can you find out whose phone it is?
“No, all it tells me is that one of the phones was purchased in Virginia.”
That linked up Washington, DC. “Okay, what about the other number?”
“It’s a satellite phone. One call originated in Syria, and the second call came from . . . it came from Iraq.”
“What are the chances that it’s al Qatar?”
“Renee,” he said, like she didn’t understand the complex world he lived in, “I can’t give you an answer to that without a hell of a lot more time. I can track the phone, tell you where it is right now, but the only way I can tell you whose phone it is would be to have eyes on it.”
Al Qatar was an Iraqi who had definitely been placed in Syria earlier that day. Where else would he go after the operation? Renee knew it was a gamble, but she had learned long ago to trust her gut. It was all she had, but she could work with it.