Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  Adjo got out. He carried his MISR assault rifle angled down across his chest. Samra wore a P228 in his holster. Adjo walked toward his former superior officer, the defense minister having removed him from his post by emergency order at six a.m., two hours before. He wondered if Samra knew.

  “You have been relieved of command,” Adjo said as he approached. “And you used me.”

  “Would you have helped willingly?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “Then your wound is self-inflicted,” Samra said.

  “My only wound is having trusted a man who was not worthy of that trust,” Adjo told him. “Will you come back with me?”

  Samra did not reply. Adjo looked past him. Samra’s driver had opened the door but he was still in the car, both hands on the wheel. He was looking at Adjo, his posture indicating that he was not going to be a part of any gunplay. Either he knew the back of the plan had been broken, or he had remained at his post because news of the discharge had apparently not been delivered to Samra and the driver lacked orders to the contrary.

  Adjo continued forward. “I am here to arrest you.”

  “That will not happen,” Samra said.

  “I assure you, it will.”

  Samra unbuttoned his holster. Adjo’s heart pumped harder and he felt the rifle become more real in his hands. He did not stop.

  “Think about what you’re doing,” Samra urged.

  “I am not the issue.”

  “But you are,” Samra said. He was just a few meters away. “All I needed you to do was record our mechanical trick, our own staff. My intention then was to keep you out of danger. When we learned there was a real one, I needed you to bring it to us.”

  “Why not one of the people who was already working on your scheme?”

  “Everyone had a role,” Samra said. “I had to keep the MFO away, which meant involving my men in the local operations.”

  “ ‘Your’ men,” Adjo said. “They were Egypt’s men.”

  “And we were serving that master, all of us,” Samra said. “We have a long history together, a history of impressive accomplishments.”

  “I hope the court will consider those when they sentence you. Now—”

  “No!” Samra barked. “I will not go with you.”

  “One way or another, you will.”

  “Please, give me this. Allow me to go forward, into the shadows of a time when we were great. Permit me my dignity, at least.”

  Samra withdrew his gun. Adjo raised his.

  “I will not fire on you nor will I run,” the disgraced officer assured him.

  “You had those monks murdered—”

  “And I accept punishment,” Samra replied. “I only want to die with honor.”

  A shot cracked from Adjo’s gun. Samra dropped backward like a storm-blown tree.

  Blood from a hole through his forehead soaked the sand to a slushy consistency.

  Adjo looked at him. “No,” he said, and turned back to the waiting helicopter.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND

  “The Mukhabarat el-Khabeya found the remains of the fake staff in the ashes,” Harper said.

  Kealey had him on speakerphone as he sorted through his drawers and closet, tossing clothes onto the bed.

  “It worked like one of those magicians’ wands,” Harper went on. “You know, the kind where the magician holds one end and when he hands it to you the wand droops?”

  “We had very different childhoods,” Kealey said. “I never went to a circus.”

  “A birthday party?”

  “Not where there was entertainment,” Kealey said.

  “You never had trick toys, like gag chewing gum or fake dog poop?”

  “No, I had these rubber-band guns made from the slats of shipping crates. You attached a rubber-band to the muzzle, then looped it back over the trigger.”

  “If it was attached—”

  “You didn’t fire the rubber band,” Kealey explained. “You slipped things about halfway along the barrel, like thumbtacks or little squares of cardboard. When you released the back end of the rubber band, the object went flying”

  “I’m impressed, but not,” Harper replied.

  “If you weren’t good with your fists, and weren’t ready for a switchblade, that was pretty much all you had.”

  Kealey reached for an upper shelf of the closet and winced as his shirt pulled across his back. He had gotten burned in the Sahara and his skin was still sore, along with the rest of him.

  “I heard Adjo is getting a promotion,” Harper said. “Not for what he did at Sinai, but for killing Samra in a gun duel. Samra’s own driver testified that his superior drew first.”

  “He’s a fine soldier,” Kealey said. “He has a lot of initiative and heart.”

  “We had to talk the Israelis out of going after Durst,” Harper added soberly. “All former SS are on their hit list.”

  “I don’t like his worldview, but it didn’t sound as if he hurt anyone back then, and I don’t think he will in the future,” Kealey said.

  “I had to lie and say he was helping us, and them, in order to atone for his sins,” Harper said.

  “The son of a bitch,” Kealey said. “It never occurred to him that anything he thought or did was wrong. His granddaughter was different. I’m assuming they got back okay?”

  “No snags,” Harper told him. “It actually worked out for us, too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Venezuelans regarded this as a kidnapping, of course,” Harper said. “They didn’t make a fuss because they didn’t want to publicize the fact that we were able to pull it off despite the presence of their police. Ramirez might have had a word with them as well.”

  There was a pause that lasted until the phone sounded dead. Harper knew the name was unwelcome to Kealey. Kealey hadn’t realized just how much.

  To break the silence Kealey asked, “What do we do about Phair?”

  “ ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ ” Harper said. “You can’t say we didn’t ask for this, sending him back. Do you think he was playing us all along?”

  “I don’t,” Kealey said.

  “He wasn’t homesick?”

  “For what, poverty and the desert? I don’t think so. I believe, based on nothing concrete, that he was reminded of why he became a priest and a soldier. To bring comfort where it was needed in a battlefield.”

  “Whose?”

  “Apparently, anyone’s. He’s certainly not running away, he’s not a coward,” Kealey said.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that,” Harper said. “I guess—I just don’t understand how a man can come home—home, to the United States—and leave again. He could have found a way to work with his friends through us.”

  “After taking the Staff the way he did?” Kealey asked.

  “Point taken,” Harper said. “I’m still not sure why he did that.”

  “Because he thought it would work and was afraid we’d say no,” Kealey said. “I’ll admit, I felt a little like a sucker when I found out, but I can’t fault his thinking. He may even be the vanguard of a new way of doing business over there.”

  “How so?”

  “Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, the United States—the major doesn’t seem to care about borders. He cares about people. That’s how he survived all those years.”

  “You said he didn’t get along with Durst.”

  “No, I got along better with Durst. Phair couldn’t get past the confessional aspect. He wanted the guy to admit his sins.”

  “Doctrinaires make poor conversationalists,” Harper said. “Everyone shouts, no one listens.”

  “I don’t know,” Kealey said. “Phair was different with Adjo. In the major’s defense, none of the people he appears to have associated with in the Middle East espoused genocide.”

  “This is all Gail Platte territory. Me? I had enough trouble explaining to the president how we lost the Staff of
Moses. I tried, ‘Well, sir, technically we never had it . . .’ but he wasn’t buying that.”

  “Where did you leave it?”

  “I told him the truth,” Harper said. “He wasn’t happy, but he understands how it happened. His concern is not that a holy relic was lost but that it could surface again in a similar scenario.”

  “That probably won’t happen,” Kealey said.

  “I agree,” Harper replied. “Terrorists don’t like to repeat themselves. They figure, correctly, we’ll be watching that route.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking,” Kealey said. “The people who have it won’t let that happen.”

  “Oh? All they need is one greedy SOB to turn, go for the cash. That’s how most of the terrorist leaders get found, you know that.”

  “This is a matter of God,” Kealey said.

  “Matter of fact,” Harper murmured.

  “Is the army going to go after Phair?” Kealey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harper told him. “I don’t see how they can. They’re too busy finding guys who are shooting at us. If they do find him, though, the Internal Investigator’s Office won’t go easy on him. Not this time. Nor should it. He could have asked to go back, through channels. He could have resigned and gone back as a civilian.”

  “Phair obviously doesn’t put much faith in channels,” Kealey said. “He measures time in souls rescued and lives saved. His own security just doesn’t matter in the face of that.”

  “I’m not impressed,” Harper said. “Impulsive people worry me.”

  “Oh, he’s not as impulsive as all that,” Kealey said. “He just follows a different book of regulations.”

  “Sorry, I need to get off the phone now, Ryan,” Harper said. “I’ve got a scheduled call, West Coast.”

  Kealey could tell Harper was dangling bait. Did West Coast mean Hernandez?

  “No problem, I think we’ve covered everything,” Kealey said.

  “See you Monday,” Harper said.

  “See you Monday,” Kealey lied, and tapped off.

  He sat for a moment, thinking about Chaplain Major Phair. Kealey didn’t believe in praying, and he didn’t think he had the rank to ask God to shuttle a good luck message to Phair. But he did wish the cleric well. He wanted to believe that humanism and patriotism were compatible, and there wasn’t a better ambassador than James Phair.

  As for himself, he had another mountain to ascend. This one was in Connecticut.

  Kealey was doing one last check of his bedroom when his phone buzzed. It was an e-mail, and Kealey glanced at it out of habit. He stopped reading as soon as he saw the sender’s name: Dina Westbrook. The Icebreaker. Was she calling about Phair? Or had she been pulled onto the Hernandez carousel?

  Kealey shut off his phone and dropped it in the bottom of his duffel bag, then started piling clothes on top of it. Maybe he wasn’t coming down off this mountain, except for supplies now and then. Or maybe someday, he’d come down with some new ideas and a few clear messages.

  EPILOGUE

  BASRA, IRAQ

  Phair and Bulani parked the thirty-year-old Volkswagen Beetle down the street from the mosque. It was twilight, the darkness hiding the scars of an explosion that had damaged the face of the ancient structure. There were no streetlights, only the here-and-there glow from windows along the ancient street. Most of those were candles, since electricity was sporadic and temporary.

  Phair was nervous. Through family, Bulani’s Shiite wife had made arrangements for him and her Sunni husband to get together with elders of a moderate wing of the local religious community. The meeting had been organized quietly. Radicals would not have hesitated to kill both men out of hand just for being within eyesight of these sacred grounds.

  An old Ford Galaxie pulled up behind the Beetle. A man stuck his arm from the driver’s side window, palm down, and the headlights faded off.

  “That was the signal,” Bulani said. His tone told Phair more than that. It indicated that Bulani was anxious about getting out of the car and going over.

  Phair popped the door and stepped onto the worn-out asphalt of the narrow street. He wore a stubble of beard and a djellabah. Under his arm he carried something wrapped in terrycloth. He walked over to the Galaxie and stopped beside the open window.

  “Good evening,” Phair said in the local dialect.

  “Let me see it,” said the driver.

  “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Into the mosque,” Phair said.

  The two men in the car sat upright in alert, unhappy silence.

  One of them said, “If you are found out to be a Christian and he a Sunni, you will be killed, and him along with you.”

  “Either this is the Staff of the Prophet and God will protect us, or He will not and we may die,” Phair said. “I am willing to take that risk. How better to prove it is what I say?”

  “Part the waters,” the passenger said. “Show us a miracle.”

  “We of three faiths are here talking—is that not a miracle?” Phair asked.

  “It is simply good manners and the urging of my mother,” said the man in the passenger’s seat.

  “She wants her son, and her son’s sons, to survive,” Phair said.

  “The men in the desert—they lied about possessing such a thing,” the driver said to Phair.

  “The men in the desert were liars,” Phair replied. “I am not.”

  The men fell silent, their eyes on the Volkswagen.

  Phair turned, saw that Bulani had not yet left the car. Phair motioned for him to do so. The Iraqi obliged and stood facing the others.

  “We are here to seek common ground at the request of those who are dear to us,” Phair went on. “If the four of us can find that, then there are even greater miracles in store. Let us take the first step.”

  The men continued to look ahead. Apparently convinced that neither the priest nor Bulani was a threat, they got out of the car. The three men of Islam looked at each other with suspicion. It was not the fear of arms or violence that concerned them, Phair knew, but a fear of concessions and compromise, a dread of the changes they might bring.

  “ ‘None of you has faith unless he loves for his brother what he loves for himself,’ ” Phair said.

  The driver regarded him. “You know the holy text.”

  “I respect it as I respect my own,” Phair said.

  The man acknowledged the honor with a slight bow. In response, Phair displayed the bundle he had held under his arm. He removed a stick, charcoal with age, jagged from wear, physically unimposing. The two Shiite men looked at it. Even in the dark it seemed to become part of the cleric’s hand and arm and made the flesh more than it was just a few breaths before.

  It seemed to make them all a little greater.

  “Lead the way,” the driver said.

  “I will be proud to,” Phair said as he walked across the chipped curb through the darkness toward the mosque.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANDREW BRITTON was born in England and moved with his family to the United States when he was seven, settling in Michigan, then North Carolina. After serving in the Army as a combat engineer, Andrew entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he pursued a double major in economics and psychology. Visit his website, andrewbrittonbooks.com.

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