The DMZ

  It was obvious by now that the pilot had less combat training than the other two guards, and as Rick slammed into him with his body, he went flying backward under the wing.

  Against Julie’s ear, Nouri screamed out a harsh phrase. It was clear he was ordering the guard who still held a weapon to shoot. The soldier instantly sighted his machine gun on Rick and tightened his finger on the trigger. But before he could shoot, the other guard had thrown himself again at the Special Forces officer, blocking his line of fire.

  Rick went down hard, and to Julie’s horror as he hit, she saw a small dark object roll away from his out-flung hand and settle against the wheel of the plane. Then Rick’s forearm took the soldier across the throat. As the man’s head snapped back, Rick grabbed him around the neck. Using the man’s body as a shield, he rolled back to his feet, and only Julie knew that his glance around was for the grenade he had dropped.

  In the face of his companion’s plight, the other guard lowered his weapon. At his hesitation, Nouri screamed again against Julie’s ear. Then, with what even Julie’s ignorance of his language could guess to be a curse, he raised the Uzi and fired.

  Julie’s heart stopped beating.

  It was like one of those slow-motion moments in an action movie, as though time itself had decelerated. The exaggerated jerk of the guard as the burst struck him in the chest. Rick’s forearm slowly dropping away from the man’s neck. The limp body sliding down to the concrete, leaving a rapidly expanding stain on Rick’s fatigues. As though he were simply sitting down to take a rest, Rick slid down beside the sprawled body, and in that instant Julie knew he was dead and wished she were dead too.

  Then Rick groaned, and as one hand came up slowly to clutch at the side of his chest, Julie’s heart took its next beat. A moment later, his hand still clutching at his ribs, he rolled over to his knees and raised his head. He was still alive! By some miracle—or maybe the ammo vest he wore—he didn’t seem seriously hurt.

  Though that wouldn’t be for long.

  The remaining guard once more had his weapon up, and beside Julie’s ear the Uzi was rising again. Though in real time scarcely sixty seconds had passed since Tim McAdams’s bumbling recognition and the pilot’s warning shout, Julie could already hear the running feet of reinforcements erupting from the cambuches. Julie cast around frantically for—anything! Please, God, we can’t have lost! This can’t be it!

  And there it was just a short distance away—the machine gun that had flown out of the grasp of the now-dead guard. Julie could not reach for it; Nouri’s iron grip still held her fast. But only two strides from the gun, unattended now by anyone except an unarmed technician, stood Tim McAdams.

  He hadn’t moved since the pandemonium evoked by his incautious action had broken out, his handsome profile unreadable in the dark as he watched, his tall, broad outline looming over the white-coated figure beside him, and if in reality there had been little time to react, it seemed to a resentful Julie that he could have done something!

  “Tim!” she screamed in English. “The gun! Pick up the gun!”

  “No!”

  Julie heard Rick’s hoarse denial with astonishment. Then at last, Tim was moving, striding forward to snatch up the machine gun in two quick steps. To her relief, the ease with which he raised it showed that he was no stranger to weapons. But that relief turned to cold horror as Tim brought the weapon to bear, not on Taqi Nouri or on the guard who was closing in on Rick, but directly at the center of Rick’s ammo vest.

  “Why don’t we do this the easy way, Enrique—or whoever you are,” he said pleasantly. “Unlike my colleagues, I would rather not test the effect of a high-speed bullet on the skin of that plane. But then, I don’t need to, do I?”

  He made a very un-American hand gesture. “Perhaps your little friend here can talk you into being a little more cooperative.”

  Julie cried out with pain as the barrel of the Uzi dug viciously against her cheekbone. Slowly, Rick’s hands rose in surrender.

  “That’s better!” Tim said affably. He directed a low phrase to the white-coated technician beside him. Julie’s confusion and horror deepened as the man opened a work pouch around his waist and took out what the glimmer of a dropped flashlight revealed to be a syringe. As he strode over to Rick, who was still on his knees, she stared in disbelief.

  “Tim—are you crazy? What—what are you doing?”

  “Oh, he knows exactly what he’s doing!” Rick interjected bitterly. He didn’t flinch as the technician slapped the syringe against his neck. “Though I doubt very much his name is Tim McAdams. Is it?” he asked bitingly. “Or that’s he’s even an American—missionary or otherwise.”

  “Then …” Julie stared at Tim, but he wasn’t trying to deny Rick’s incredible charges. Julie hardly felt the sting against her own neck as the horrible implications sank in.

  “That’s right!” Rick’s speech was already thick with the drug. “He’s one of the bad guys! An Iranian intelligence agent is my guess!”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT HE was an Iranian agent?” The question must have followed Julie into unconsciousness because it was the first to rise to her lips as she became aware of her surroundings.

  She was seated in a gray box of a room, the walls unpainted cinder blocks. A lone fluorescent tube was suspended from the ceiling; under her feet, the floor was rough cement.

  The room’s only other occupant, Julie had already discovered, was Rick, bound as she was to a hard-backed wooden chair placed in the center of the room.

  Julie guessed they were in the building with the satellite dish. On hand-built tables around the room she saw electronic equipment—an enormous two-way radio, a sat-phone setup, computer monitors, and two television screens shifting through images of trees and an airstrip that at the moment were no more than flickering shadows. So it was still night outside.

  She eyed the communications equipment longingly. If they could just reach that phone! Only it wasn’t just the ropes that held the two prisoners to their seats but the lingering paralysis of whatever drug they had been given. Even that small turn of her head to survey the room had left Julie with the deep lassitude she remembered from the injection she’d received at the guerrilla camp, and she didn’t have the strength to strain against the ropes. The reason, no doubt, their captors had risked leaving them alone in this place.

  “It wasn’t hard.” Rick’s answer came with an effort. “Once you’d tipped me off that the guy wasn’t a missionary. That last night in the camp, I saw the expression on his face when you came out with that. You had him! Only you figured he might be part of some covert operation. I knew he wasn’t. At least not on our side.”

  “But—why?” Julie demanded, bewildered. “How could you be so sure—that he wasn’t on our side, I mean? Undercover, like you. I mean, he seemed so … so American!”

  “Simple.” Rick tried to shrug and discovered that he couldn’t. “U.S. intelligence will use just about any cover in the book. But there are two that have been off-limits for decades—by Congressional law, not any ethical considerations on the part of the intelligence community. Journalists and missionaries. The reason being easy. If they’re caught or even come under suspicion, they place every legitimate charitable organization or member of the press who works in these remote areas in jeopardy.”

  Julie could appreciate that. How many times had her parents and even she herself been routinely accused of being American spies during her childhood years in San Ignacio?

  “And whatever tales people like to tell of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, I can assure you that is one injunction that is taken seriously.”

  The rise of Rick’s chest as he took a breath tightened his bonds, and Julie saw a grimace of pain crossing his face.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked anxiously.

  At least they’d had the decency not to let him bleed to death. At some point while Rick and Julie had been unconscious,
Rick’s ammo vest and shirt had been cut away, and though the rusty brown of dried blood still streaked the tan of his bare skin, a wide bandage had been slapped across his side. Julie realized suddenly that the stiffness of her own speech wasn’t totally due to the drug but to the soreness of her face and jaw where the butt of the machine gun had struck her.

  “I’m fine!” Rick answered shortly, not with irritation, but because another breath had tightened the ropes across his bandage. “It just creased my ribs. Anyway, the other side doesn’t share that ethic. So if this Tim McAdams wasn’t who he said he was—a journalist or a missionary—then he not only wasn’t one of ours, odds were he was the mole who fingered you to Aguilera.”

  Julie gave her head a disbelieving shake that she immediately regretted as it sent the gray walls swirling around her. “And all this time I had pretty well decided it had to be Sondra Kharrazi. Just because she was originally from somewhere in the Middle East—or her parents at any rate. And she was always asking questions, and Comandante Aguilera admitted she was the one who told him we’d gone out the gate. Tim—it still doesn’t seem possible. He’s so blond, for one thing!”

  “Iranians are Caucasian too,” Rick reminded her. “And not all brunette. Or he may be Iraqi. But even if that plane out there spells Saddam Hussein, it’s pretty clear that Taqi Nouri is running this show. And they have an intelligence network the CIA would give its teeth for. There are a lot of Iranians who come to study—and live—in the U.S. It would be easy enough to feed in someone loyal to the ayatollah’s regime. No, I’m betting McAdams is Nouri’s man.”

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” Julie demanded, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice. “I thought we were done with keeping secrets! If … if you’ve known since that night in the camp, how could you keep letting me think he was a hostage—worrying about him?”

  “I had no proof.” Rick winced again as another attempt at a shrug tightened the ropes across his bandage. “Not until I saw him here. And any suspicions I had were irrelevant at the time. I didn’t expect we’d come across him again. Besides, the guy seemed to be a friend of yours—how close I didn’t know. Maybe it was a bad call. I seem to be making plenty of those lately. But I didn’t think you needed anything else to worry about.”

  “He was a friend,” Julie whispered. That was what hurt. All the times Tim McAdams had comforted her and cheered her up, even told her to trust God. “He was so good. Pretending he was a prisoner with those guards at his heels. Getting me to talk about my family and my job and even my feelings about the guerrillas. Offering to help. And all the time he was just trying to get me to admit that I’d lied to Comandante Aguilera, that I really was CIA or something. And when I thought I gave him away that night—it was really the other way around.” Julie remembered with a shudder that ice-cold sensation of death she had felt as the two men’s eyes had locked. “That’s when he realized it was you and not me who was the spy.”

  “Yes,” Rick said, “I figured that as soon as I found the second tracking device. You thought maybe someone else who spoke English—Aguilera or one of the guards—had overhead you. I knew no one else in the camp beside myself understood English, and so did McAdams, evidently. Once you suggested he take a look at the guerrillas and not the press team …”

  Rick was charitable enough not to finish, but Julie had already moved on to a horrible realization.

  “Oh, no!” she whispered, appalled. “I remember now—those voices I heard talking when I was coming out of the drug that first time back at camp. The ones that mentioned the musulmanes. I was so out of it, I couldn’t recognize their voices—just that they were familiar. Afterward I thought it had to be Comandante Aguilera and Manuel Flores or even you. But one of them was Tim! Only he was speaking in Spanish, not English. I guess that’s why it didn’t click. He was the one who said it was none of their business what the musulmanes were up to. And when they saw I was awake, Tim pretended he was unconscious. And I bought it! If I’d just been thinking straight, maybe …”

  Julie blinked hard at the single window opposite her. Its glass pane framed a patch of the same unrelenting darkness that the surveillance images revealed, proof that less time had passed than Julie would have thought from the stiffness of her muscles.

  Unless more than one day and night had gone by. Not that it mattered now. The despair and pain Julie had been holding off since she’d opened her eyes on these walls broke over her in a flood that was carrying her down into that blackness out there. She closed her eyes convulsively. All that effort … their own sacrifice …

  “No—don’t even think it!” Rick said quietly from beside her.

  The urgency of his order opened Julie’s eyes. “What—?”

  “You’re thinking you should somehow have been able to stop this if you’d just put the pieces together earlier. And that all of this, your sacrifice, your life—that it’s all been for nothing, just as it was for your parents.”

  “How … how did you know?”

  “Because I’ve thought it myself. If I’d put the pieces together earlier. If I’d broken radio silence and gotten something off to Colonel Thornton. If I hadn’t been careless enough to let that radio get broken. If I hadn’t brought you with me here tonight …” The pain that crossed Rick’s face wasn’t from his wound. “But we made our choices based on what we knew—you said that back there in the woods. And the choice we made—no matter how this turns out, it was the right thing to do, you know that! Don’t be sorry you made that choice.”

  Julie was silent for a moment. “No, I’m not sorry. I won’t fall back into that again. My parents’ lives—and their deaths—were not meaningless, however little I could see God’s reasons for it at the time. And all of this—even if it hasn’t turned out as we hoped, it wasn’t in vain. It never is when you give yourself for another person. And if none of this makes sense to me—why God would let it end this way, why He would let us fail and let all those people die …”

  Julie took a deep breath. It was easier to do so this time. “I choose to believe that it does make sense to Him. And if I had to make the same choice all over again to come here tonight, I would.”

  Slam! Her resolution was tested immediately as the door to the room banged open and two guards burst in.

  “Well, well! Look who’s awake!” Tim ducked his blond head through the door frame, the white-coated technician at his heels. Smiling, he crossed the room to stop in front of Julie’s chair, giving Julie only a view of his belt buckle until he took her chin between his large thumb and forefinger and tilted her face up to meet his twinkling gaze. “Hello, Julie. What a surprise! I certainly never expected to run into you again.”

  Still under the effects of the paralysis, Julie couldn’t even twist her face away from his grip, so she glared up at him helplessly. Tim chuckled at her mutinous expression, his blue eyes bright and merry. “Hmm, you don’t look quite as happy to see me as the last time we met.”

  Releasing her chin, Tim perched his large frame on the corner of the nearest table. “Truth is, I’m rather sorry to see you too, Julie Baker,” he said cheerfully. “Believe it or not, when I heard you’d escaped from Aguilera, I was kind of rooting for you to make it back to civilization. Who would have ever dreamed you’d make your way here instead!”

  Tim shook his head disbelievingly. “I warned these guys their security needed beefing up. Those surveillance cameras are just about worthless, as you’ve shown us, and the local wildlife have set off the motion sensors so often, it would take an earthquake to get the guards to budge now. But the hardware came from our Iraqi allies, and they don’t like taking advice. No wonder they lost the Gulf War! Granted, they do have a point. In two years, we hadn’t had a soul through here except a few wandering natives until your tree-hugger buddies showed up. Brought here, of course, by those same wandering natives who later brought you.”

  He wagged his head in mock commiseration. “And let down by the same! I could have told you, Julie, n
ot to count on your little native friends. They’re an ignorant, superstitious lot who will bolt at the drop of a hat if you don’t keep them under lock and key. Though we did obtain one useful asset from them while they were helping us build this place.”

  He nodded toward the white-coated technician, who had been removing a collection of rubber-stopped vials from the front pouch he wore and laying them out on a table. “Raman here is one of Iran’s finest biochemists, trained in one of your U.S. universities. He’s been having some fun with the poison they use on their blow gun darts. As you’ve found out, it produces a paralysis of the body—very much like a black widow spider uses on her prey. My colleague here has managed to modify it with a touch of scopolamine and a few other ingredients that are beyond my vocabulary, and he’s produced a very effective combination truth serum/prisoner restraint.”

  As Tim talked, the biochemist took out a syringe and plunged the needle through the rubber stopper of one of the vials. Julie shrank back against her bonds as he drew its contents up into the syringe. Oh, please, God, not again!

  Seeing her flinch, Tim let out his booming chuckle again. “Hey, not to worry! He won’t knock you out again. On the contrary, this will put you back on your feet.”

  He nodded to the white-coated Raman, and as Julie felt the sting of the needle against her neck, he went on cheerfully, “See? What you just got there was the antidote. You’ve run into it once before, though you were out at the time.”

  As Raman stepped over to Rick, Tim added, “No, we have what we want out of you two. And quite a tale that was! Stumbling over that village. Running into a bunch of natives you knew when you were a kid. And they just happened to know the way to this base! Almost too much coincidence if we didn’t know you had to be telling the truth. I have to tell you, my boss, Taqi Nouri, is madder than a lake of brimstone, if you know what I mean, at how close you two came to blowing this operation.”