by Ben Coes
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Nebuchar. “That is what you used to always say.”
Tonight, in a matter of hours, Aswan Fortuna would finally have his quarry. He thought briefly of the many hours, dollars, and lives that had been sacrificed searching for Andreas. The payoffs to various middlemen, arms dealers, corrupt intelligence officers. The lead that sent them to Australia, then the failure there too. He grinned. He considered the fact that he could simply have taken the year off, saved his money, and done nothing. For Andreas had found him. Now, for a mere pittance, Andreas would be dropped off like a FedEx package on his doorstep.
“That’s not the expression that comes to mind right now,” said Fortuna.
“And what is, Father?” asked Nebuchar, laughing and glancing at the four men seated with him.
Fortuna walked to the large door that opened out onto the terrace. He stared at Beirut’s twinkling lights in the distance.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord.”
68
CHAKLALA AIR FORCE BASE
RAWALPINDI
The door to the chopper opened. Two soldiers pulled Dewey from the backseat by his arms, then let his large body fall to the hard cement of the tarmac.
The two soldiers were joined by two more. The four men lifted Dewey and carried him more than a hundred feet across the dark tarmac. They carried him toward the rear of a large, dark green C-130 cargo plane.
A young Arab walked behind the soldiers, smoking a cigarette.
“Is that all you could get?” he asked, flicking the cigarette to the ground. “It’s a fucking cargo plane. We need a jet. A fast jet.”
The soldiers carried Dewey’s 225-pound frame up the rear ramp and into the cavernous, empty cargo bay. The soldiers dropped Dewey to the hard steel at the right side of the bay.
“We follow orders,” answered one of the soldiers, barely acknowledging the young terrorist. “It’s a six-hour trip. I’m sure you’ll survive.”
The Arab looked around the spacious cargo bay as the soldiers exited through the rear of the plane. Long canvas benches were strung on each side of the plane. Above, an array of equipment, piping, and electronics spread across the walls. He looked down at his prisoner. Blood continued to ooze from the American’s nose and mouth, forming a puddle in front of him. On his left shoulder, blood now coursed down from a long, wide scar that had torn along the edge.
The hydraulic buzz of the rear ramp interrupted the silence. That was joined by the sound of the big plane’s four turboprops sputtering to life.
After a few minutes, the plane began to move down the runway. The roar of the propellers grew louder, then the plane began a slow, steady roll down the tarmac, accelerating, picking up speed, then lumbering into the air.
* * *
Dewey opened his eyes. In front of him, across the cargo bay, the young Arab with the spiked black hair, who killed Millar and Iverheart, sat on an orange canvas bench, smoking a cigarette, his legs crossed.
Dewey felt pain in multiple locations. It emanated like electric current from his rib cage, shoulder, and stomach. There was nausea too, from Bolin’s last kick. He began throwing up on the ground. When he was finished, he struggled to move his head away from the vomit. The flex-cuffs around his ankles and wrists made it almost impossible to move.
The sound of the plane’s engines drummed out all other noise. Dewey felt the nausea again, but he held the vomit down inside his throat.
“You almost killed me there on the mine road,” the Arab said, flicking the cigarette across the cabin, where it landed next to Dewey. “This is where you hit me.”
He removed his leather coat. He pointed to a white bandage on his arm.
“Australia?” said the terrorist. “Do you remember? My name is Youssef. Enjoy the flight. Because when you get to Beirut, Aswan Fortuna is going to make you wish you were back in Cooktown getting eaten by a shark. By the way, you killed my brother. So I’m enjoying this.”
Dewey said nothing. A memory came into his mind. Why it came to him, at that very moment, he didn’t know, but it did. In his head, he had a vision of a small gray tombstone.
After killing Alexander Fortuna more than a year ago, Dewey had flown to Boston, then driven to his parents’ farm in Castine. He’d arrived at the cemetery at four in the afternoon. It had been a bitter cold day. He pictured it now and tried to remember what the cold felt like, the wind tearing off the ocean. He tried to remember walking down the fence line of the old cemetery.
He’d walked to the tombstone of his son, his only son, Robbie. It was the first time he had ever seen it.
Dewey understood then, at that very moment, as he thought of his own son’s grave, that Aswan Fortuna would never stop. The old man had hunted him to the ends of the earth for a reason. Finding Dewey had not only been predictable, it had been inevitable. In some strange way, Dewey respected what Fortuna had at long last accomplished.
Dewey felt his body shiver. He understood, in that moment, that what awaited him in Beirut would be a death unlike any man’s. It would be days, weeks perhaps, of torture, humiliation, degradation, but mostly just pain.
Dewey steeled himself. He fought through the nausea. He needed to fight now. He had to focus and he had to fight. If he was to avenge the cold-blooded murders of Alex Millar and Rob Iverheart, he needed to fight now. If he was to survive, he needed to swallow the pain. It was beyond skill now. Beyond training.
The bullet had been fired, and in that hellish moment Dewey grasped that he was trapped between the end of the gun and the target.
“Help me, God,” he whispered as the nausea returned and a fresh flood of blood-streaked vomit came rushing from his mouth.
69
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The phone on Jessica’s desk rang. She hit the green button on the console.
“Yes,” she said. She glanced at the clock on the wall: 5:34 P.M. “What is it?”
“I have CENCOM, Josh Brubaker.”
“Put him through.”
The phone clicked.
“Hi, Josh. Are they in Qatar yet?”
“I’m in contact with the pilot,” said Brubaker. “He’s still on the tarmac at Chaklala Air Force Base.”
“Are you kidding me?” she asked, incredulous. “It’s past midnight over there. Have you spoken with Polk?”
“Yes,” said Brubaker. “They’re en route back to the U.S. The operation is over. Should I have them turn around?”
“Dewey and the team should have been on the ground in Qatar by now, or, at the very least, up in the Gulfstream flying somewhere over the Arabian Peninsula, out of Pakistan.”
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” said Brubaker.
“Are you in the Situation Room?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Brubaker.
“I’ll be right down. Keep trying to reach him.”
She hung up the phone. She hit a red button in the right corner of the phone console. “Calibrisi.”
“Where are you?”
“Langley,” said Calibrisi. “Why? You want to celebrate? You deserve it. Let’s grab a drink at the Willard.”
“Hector,” said Jessica. “We have a problem.”
* * *
Jessica ran down the hallway and climbed on the elevator, inserting a thick black plastic card into the slot on the wall panel inside. The elevator descended two flights. She exited and walked through a security checkpoint, then into the Situation Room.
Six people were gathered in the room. All were members of the interagency group that had been assembled to monitor the coup. They were, if not relaxing, at least pausing in the aftermath of the successful takeover of the Pakistani government. Four of the large plasma screens displayed scenes from Pakistan, either live MQ-9 Reaper feeds of Islamabad, Karachi, or another city in Pakistan, or news, volume down, alternating between Fox, BBC, Al Jazeera, or CNN. On one of the screens, a replay of a Washington Redskins football game was p
laying.
Assembled were Josh Brubaker, an NSC staffer who was point on the Pakistan operation; Andrew Corrado, from the NSA; Tony Helm and Bo Revere, both from CIA; and John Balter, from the Pentagon, a marine serving on the staff of the secretary of defense.
Every person sat at the table, a computer screen and phone console in front of them on the table.
Helm, Brubaker, and Balter were each on the phone. When Jessica walked in, she went to the wall and stood in front of a large plasma screen.
Two of the screens displayed alternating aerial shots of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the lights of the city glowing in the evening darkness. The sight of orange clusters, small fires, dotted the screen. There were at least a dozen fires raging across the cities.
One of the screens replayed a blurry clip of Aiwan-e-Sadr, followed by a flash of red.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s the chopper sent in to pick up the team,” said Corrado, from the NSA, without looking up. He was typing on his computer. “Circa hour and a half ago.”
“Where’s it going?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m trying to do a patch of the Reaper feeds we have running.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m overlaying different Reaper video sequences of that particular flight path, at that particular time, trying to build a unified narrative.”
“Has anyone spoken with Bolin or someone on his staff?”
Brubaker hung up the phone.
“Yes. That was Martu, the head of Special Services Group. He said the chopper took off with them on it. He said it should have arrived at Chaklala more than an hour ago. He’s going to try and reach the pilot.”
“Do we actually believe him?” asked Jessica.
Balter, from the Pentagon, held up a finger. He was finishing a call. He listened for one more moment, then hung up the phone.
“That was Polk,” said Balter. “They were able to get a hard location on the GPS inside their earbuds. According to Polk, all three are still at Aiwan-e-Sadr. They haven’t left.”
“Maybe they left the buds there?” volunteered Revere from the CIA.
Jessica looked at Brubaker. “Find Bolin. Tell him I want to speak with him right now.”
Brubaker picked up the phone, directed the team back at the Pentagon to find Bolin. Within a minute, Brubaker’s phone buzzed. He hit it, then held up a finger, covering the mouthpiece.
“It’s Bolin,” said Brubaker. “You want privacy?”
“Put it on speaker,” Jessica said, stepping toward Brubaker.
“Good evening, Ms. Tanzer,” said the voice, a husky, deep voice in broken English. “What can I do for you?”
“Good evening, Field Marshal Bolin,” said Jessica. “We haven’t heard from Dewey Andreas and his team in more than an hour and a half. Where are they, sir?”
“I ordered them a chopper,” said Bolin. “It left more than an hour ago.”
“We’ve got their communications devices traced to Aiwan-e-Sadr,” said Jessica. “We can’t reach any of them. Our pilot is sitting at Chaklala and hasn’t heard a word from them.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” said Bolin, exasperation in his voice, “I’ve been a little busy, Ms. Tanzer. As I told President Allaire, I am grateful to you and to America for helping my country. I will look into it and get back to you.”
“Thank you, Field Marshal.”
The phone went dead. Jessica looked around the table. Her expression was blank. She tried to remain calm. She gripped the edge of the mahogany table and, out of view of everyone in the room, squeezed as hard as she could, trying to calm herself.
“Check out the screen,” said Corrado. “It’ll be choppy but I think I have it.”
Corrado stood up and moved to the left side of one of the plasmas.
On one of the screens, a video began to play, the first clip beginning at Aiwan-e-Sadr. The red flash of lights moved in a line away from the palace; the four lights the only part of the chopper visible against the black of night.
“That’s the chopper,” said Corrado, pointing at the lights. “We’re heading west now, toward Chaklala.”
“What time is it?” asked Balter.
“Twelve forty local time,” said Corrado. “Now here’s the first transition, from the first UAV to the second.”
The chopper’s path on the screen shifted as a new video stream replaced the last one. This one captured the same lights, but from a higher altitude.
“Here we’re getting closer to Rawalpindi,” said Corrado. “The chopper starts picking up speed here.”
The lights moved steadily across the black sky, the occasional sight of lights below sparking on the screen. The chopper moved across the screen.
“One more UAV patch,” said Corrado, pointing at the plasma. “On three, two, one.”
The view shifted once again. The screen displayed a new frame that picked up the red lights of the chopper coursing across the black sky, past an occasional cluster of lights. It moved across the screen, slowed, then stopped.
“The picture’s not great,” said Corrado. “But this is Chaklala. We know that because of this.” He pointed to a green light on the screen. “That’s our Gulfstream. According to the video, the chopper landed at Chaklala.”
Jessica glanced around the table, frustrated. The phone at the center of the table buzzed.
“CENCOM, I’ve got President Bolin for Jessica.”
“Go CENCOM,” said Jessica.
The phone clicked.
“President Bolin,” said Jessica.
“Ms. Tanzer, I may have something,” said Bolin.
“We do too, sir,” said Jessica. “In reviewing the—”
“Ms. Tanzer,” interrupted Bolin. “I am sorry to report that the chopper appears to have crashed while en route to Chaklala Air Force Base.”
A cold wave shot up from Jessica’s spine. She looked around the room, the shocked glances of the group greeting her eyes.
“Everyone aboard was killed in the crash, including several Pakistani soldiers,” said Bolin. “I’m very sorry. Andreas and his team were truly brave.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jessica calmly. “I’m in a bit of shock.”
“The chopper, I’m afraid, is still smoldering,” said Bolin. “We, of course, will do everything we can to find the remains and ensure they are returned to the United States.”
“Field Marshal Bolin—” Jessica said.
But before she could get her words out, the phone clicked out.
The Situation Room was silent for more than half a minute.
Jessica walked to the screen and stared at the shot of the chopper, sitting on the dim tarmac.
“Is there any way we tracked the wrong helicopter?” asked Jessica.
“That’s the only chopper to or from Aiwan-e-Sadr in the past twenty-four hours,” said Corrado.
Jessica stared at the screen. “What do we do?” she asked, a hint of helplessness in her voice.
“Why would he lie?” asked Helm from CIA.
Jessica stared back blankly at him.
“At the very least, we should get a team in there,” said Balter. “I’ve got Rangers we can send in from Kabul.”
Jessica’s face showed a stoned, shocked look. She turned from the screen. She leaned forward and pressed the speakerphone, which started ringing.
“This is Calibrisi. What is it?”
“We have a big problem,” said Jessica. “According to Bolin, the chopper crashed. Dewey, the others, they’re all dead.”
“My God,” said Calibrisi.
“NSA tracked the chopper,” said Jessica. “It didn’t crash.”
Corrado raised his finger. “I have something,” he said.
“What?” asked Jessica.
“The same UAV. Check it.”
The screen showed the chopper lights, then the screen went black.
“This is five minutes later, same aerial view.”
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The screen showed a line of yellow lights in the exact spot where the chopper lights had been.
“That’s a plane,” said Corrado. “Hercules.”
On the speakerphone at the center of the table, the sound of Calibrisi clearing his throat.
“It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it, everybody?” asked Calibrisi.
“What’s obvious?” asked Jessica.
“You’ve got a plane taking off?” asked Calibrisi. “Right after they’re flown to Chaklala by chopper? You can track it all you want, but you’re wasting your time.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Corrado.
Jessica stared at the plasma screen. “Beirut,” she said, finally.
“That’s right,” said Calibrisi on speaker. “Run the financials on Bolin. I want to know how much Fortuna paid him.”
“On it,” said Revere.
“The question is not, did Bolin sell Andreas,” said Calibrisi. “The question is, how much did he get.”
“How did Fortuna find out he was there?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Calibrisi. “We need to figure out a way to divert that plane.”
“I don’t have the flight path,” said Corrado. “We weren’t tracking it. Looking at the satellite feed, there are about a dozen planes now heading toward Beirut. I don’t know how we pick out our plane from the others.”
“What kind of plane was it?” asked Jessica. “Can we at least determine that?”
“It’s a cargo plane,” said Balter. “C-130.”
“How long do we have?” asked Jessica.
“The plane took off an hour ago,” said Corrado. “Assuming it was a C-130, that means it will land in Beirut in approximately five hours.”
“I’ve got something,” said Revere, slapping his hand down on the table.
“What?” said Jessica.
“Holy Toledo,” said Revere. “I looked at the Fortuna funds we have a track on. Half an hour ago, he transferred two hundred and fifty million to an account at the Bank of Zurich.”
“Can we get into that account?” asked Brubaker.
“Not if we’re going to stay within the boundaries of international law,” said Corrado.