They were inside a secure transmission area. The base, a stone’s throw from Abu Dhabi and not far from Dubai, was used by the UAE air force, but also by the French and, most important for their purposes, the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing of the U.S. Air Force. Its mission was mostly recon and air refueling, but it could do some damage when it wanted to and its presence there, in the heart of Sunni Arabia, was a powerful reminder that the Great Satan still had some punch left in him.
Both Danny and Devlin knew that every word they said would be recorded and that every keystroke on a computer terminal would be logged. Friendship only went so far, especially among natural enemies. So they were using a double Playfair cipher to disguise the real purpose of their communications with Washington. They had worked out the key phrase and grid on the flight over, and for two experienced pros, it was a fairly simple matter to send back a stream of official-sounding but innocuous reports to the DoD, which would in turn be decoded on the spot and relayed from the SecDef to the Building in Fort Meade.
“You know they’re playing us, don’t you?” said Devlin when they were back outside. The temperature was over one hundred degrees, and even the waters of the Gulf looked like the beach in hell. “We think we have a mission, but Tyler is as cunning as a snake. He’ll piggyback some damn thing or another on top of what we’re doing. That way, if things go south and we have to abort, or get captured, he can leave us ‘rogues’ hanging out to dry and walk away.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Not to me. My official job is track down Emanuel Skorzeny and terminate him. My personal job is to find Maryam and get her out, and muss the Iranians’ hair. Your job is to fly me in and fly us out from the rendezvous point—Maryam, me, and whoever tags along. The Hornets will take out the missiles. And our job is to stay in touch with Byrne at the NYPD and try to terminate the bomb at its source.”
“I have one other job.”
“What’s that?
“To come home.”
“Which is why you’ve got the job you do. Look, no one can fly a chopper like you and I know your men are your equal in skill.”
“Better. Younger.”
“So you’re going to succeed where those poor bastards of Operation Eagle Claw failed. They failed because shit happened and the command lost its nerve and Carter pulled the plug. They failed because we weren’t ready for desert warfare back then. We didn’t know we’d be fighting these same damn people for the next thirty years and more. Which is why, this time—”
“This time, we’re going to get it right.”
“Damn right we are. Jesus, it’s hot.”
“Not as hot as it’s going to be.”
They got out of the sun and headed for the base canteen. A cold beer would taste great right about now, and the nice thing about the Emirates and the other playpens nearby was that you could actually get one. A wise man once said that living in the old Soviet Union was like living with your parents for the rest of your life, but the U.S.S.R. was like a vacation at a topless beach in St. Tropez compared to the Arab world, where sin was resolutely hidden and more often to be found in Paris or London than Doha or, God knew, Riyadh.
Devlin bought the beers. The base was pretty quiet. Whatever Tyler was planning wasn’t going to come from this direction. Danny drank, wiped his mouth, pointed east.
“That’s where SOAR got its start. Even Carter could figure out that to the mobile belonged the future, and that if we ever again were going in to a place like Tabas, we’d damn sure better be prepared.”
“And we are.”
“Think we’ll come back?”
“You will, as long as you dodge the haboob.” That would be the fine desert sand mist that had brought down Carter’s choppers.
There was no further need to go over the plan. Timing was everything. As soon as Maryam was able to get a signal out, they would move. It was all in her hands now.
“Code names?” asked Danny.
“Pick yours. I’ve got mine.”
“Black Hawk will do just fine. You?”
“Malak al-Maut.”
“Malak al-Maut?” repeated Danny. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ought to know. You’ve heard me say it enough times.”
A big grin spread across Danny’s face. “The Angel of Death.”
They shook hands. “It’s a dirty job,” said Devlin, “but somebody’s got to do it.”
It was good to finally meet a friend.
“What about the name of the op?” asked Danny.
“Only name it can have: Operation Honey Badger.”
“The one that never got off the ground. The second rescue operation.”
“Terminated on account of a presidential election. The minute Reagan took the oath of office, the hostages were released.”
“End of story.”
“But not end of problem.”
He felt his Android buzz. There was no bother about taking the message—it had been coded and rerouted so many times that it would be indecipherable to all but him. He looked at the display:
QOM. DANGER. HURRY.
Devlin looked at Danny: “Let’s roll.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
New York City
“Captain Byrne? I’m Hope Gardner.”
Frankie looked at the woman standing in front of his desk. She’d been brought from Stewart directly to the CTU in a car with its rear windows tinted both inside and out and a partition between her and the driver. The location of the Counter-Terrorism Unit was still a secret, and Byrne wanted to keep it that way.
“Very pleased to meet you. I gather we shared some experiences on Forty-second Street during the . . . late unpleasantness. Your husband is a mighty fine man, Mrs. Gardner.”
“He’s not my husband . . . yet,” she said, and that explained it all.
“Then I wish you both nothing but the best, when the time is right. All I can say is, your fiancé is a lucky man.”
Hope looked down. “Thank you, Captain Byrne.”
“So let’s both make him proud. Here’s the deal. I understand that the man who flew the police helicopter for me over the East River—‘Martin Ferguson,’ I think he called himself—is on assignment somewhere classified, and very dangerous. I further understand—nobody told me this, but I’m not as dumb as I look—that he’s with the man who saved my life—”
“—and ours. He got us to the hospital after . . . after the building collapsed . . .”
“Well, whoever he is, he is one hell of a guy and I hope some day I can shake his hand.... So the bottom line is, right now, you are to be the secure line of communication between Mr. ‘Ferguson’ and my department. Which tells me something I am very unhappy to hear.”
“What is that, Captain?”
“It tells me that Washington doesn’t trust my department. It tells me that my department is leaking to somebody. It tells me that I have a mole in my department who is sharing information—not with the enemy, as far as I can tell, but with the FBI.”
“And is that a bad thing? I thought that the whole point of learning from 9/11 was that there shouldn’t be walls between . . . between, you know, all those agencies.”
“This is one wall that needs to stay in place, for a lot of reasons,” replied Byrne. He paused a moment to collect himself, trying to decide exactly how much to tell the attractive woman sitting across the desk from him. He decided to tell her everything; a world of deception was not something the country could afford at this moment.
“Mrs. Gardner—”
“Hope.”
“Hope, we have very strong reason to believe that there is a nuclear device hidden somewhere in the Mount Sinai Medical Center uptown.” He watched her carefully for a reaction. Nothing. Good. “In fact, information has just come to light that means were are certain of it. This bomb, based on the telephoned warnings we’ve received, is set to go off within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and my detectives, members
of the NYPD bomb squad, and personnel from the Atomic Energy Commission are all on the site. I will do my damnedest not to put you in any danger, but I want to be very clear with you that it can’t be ruled out.”
“You mean the bomb could go off. What would happen then?”
“Depending on the yield—and mind you, we’re not certain the technology really exists to fashion such a device; for all we know, it may just be a dirty bomb, although a very dangerous one—it could destroy the Upper East Side and render much of the island of Manhattan uninhabitable for a hundred years. There would be a tremendous loss of life.”
“I understand.”
“And worse—yes, there is a ‘worse’—it would completely panic the country. After 9/11 we still had some spunk although, if you want my opinion, we reacted in exactly the wrong way. Instead of cowering, and rushing to assure the Muslim world we meant it no harm, and putting a bunch of Muslim-looking bylines in the New York Times, we should have taken the fight right overseas—not to Afghanistan, who gives a shit about Afghanistan, but right to Saudi Arabia, where we should have deposed the royal family and taken the Saudi oil fields into protective custody, to preserve the supply of energy for all the world. Wait, I’m not finished.
“Instead of treating our own people like potential terrorists every time they get on an airplane, we should have shut down immigration from the Middle East, expelled all the ‘students’ from that region until they could be vetted, and cut off all travel and technology to the Islamic countries—thrown a cordon sanitaire around them until they learned to act like civilized human beings. And then allowed them to kill each other until they had sorted themselves out and were ready to play nice with the rest of the world again. If ever. That way, your kids could get on a plane and not be pawed by the TSA gorillas, OPEC would have been broken, and we—especially we here in New York—could resume our lives without fear.”
Hope looked at him in amazement. She’d never heard anybody talk like this.
“Now you see why I’ll never be elected president,” said Byrne, rising. “Do you think you can handle a trip uptown, have a look around?”
“Of course, Captain.”
“Great. Now, how are you going to communicate with Mr. ‘Ferguson’?”
“Danny. His name is Danny. Danny Impellatieri. With this.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out something that looked like a stripped-down smartphone and showed it to Byrne. “They told me it was a prototype, a direct line to him, totally secure.”
“And I’m sure they’re right. Now put that thing away and don’t let anybody see you using it. There are a couple of people at the hospital you need to meet.”
They got into one of the secure blacked-out cars in the basement. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but it’s for your own protection.”
“I’ve seen New York already, Captain,” said Hope.
The ride uptown was uneventful. They went in through the hospital’s VIP entrance on Madison.
But it didn’t matter. She was right there, as Byrne halffeared.
“Hello, Captain Byrne,” said Principessa. Byrne looked around. She was alone—no team, no cameras, no sound guys. “Don’t worry, I won’t bite.” She gave Hope the onceover. “Who’s your date?”
“Knock it off, Ms. Stanley,” said Byrne.
“It’s the same guy, isn’t it? Archibald Grant and this ghost you’re chasing. The guy who saved me . . . and the guy who saved you, too . . . Am I right?”
She really was much smarter than she looked.
“I’m afraid I’m busy just now, Ms. Stanley.”
“Principessa.”
“Whatever. Call my office and we’ll talk later.”
She blocked the way. She was a big, healthy girl who had long since learned how to use that body of hers as a weapon. She got close to him, dropped her voice. “What’s going on, Frankie? And who’s the dame?”
“What, do you think you’re in a road-company version of His Girl Friday? Gimme a break and let me do my job, lady.”
“I’m just trying to do mine. We ought to be on the same team, Captain. The Archibald Grant team.”
“Who’s Archibald Grant?” asked Hope, innocently. Byrne cringed. Principessa Stanley was like a shark, and she always headed toward the blood in the water.
“He’s a fake,” she said. “A character, a joker, who poses as a bigdome while saving the world in his spare time. He’s Batman and Superman combined and, you know . . . when you get him out from underneath that makeup and that fat suit, he’s probably hell on the ladies. Except that I gather he has a girlfriend, so I guess we’re both out of luck.”
There had been a woman in the car. A real babe. That’s what Sam Raclette had told her after he recovered from the car crash in New Orleans. She had paid Raclette to follow Grant after the RAND lecture in the Crescent City. Exactly what had happened to him when he was tailing a car with a man and a woman in it he wasn’t exactly sure, except that all of a sudden his car flipped over under the Pontchartrain Expressway and that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up in Charity Hospital.
“Come on, Captain. You know who he is, don’t you? You can tell me. I need something to take back to my boss, Jake Sinclair.”
Byrne took Hope by the arm and started walking. “Jake Sinclair is the last man on earth I’d want to help. So why don’t you run back to him like a good little girl and tell him mean old Francis Byrne won’t give you a thing.”
Byrne stopped and turned around. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked. He knew she was a good newswoman, so something must have brought her here. He said a silent prayer that it didn’t have anything to do with his case, but in his heart, it knew it did.
“I got a tip,” she said coyly. She took a step or two backward. Make him come to her, now that she had his attention.
He bit. “What kind of a tip?”
“That some big shot was coming up from Washington on a national-security case. I figured I’d show up and say hello.”
Byrne let go of Hope and walked back to Principessa. He dropped his voice. “I ought to rip that fucking wig right off your head. You know something, tell me.”
“Oooh, trying to scare the little girl,” mocked Principessa. The chick had balls, he had to give her that. She’d taken just about the worst that Raymond Crankheit threw at her and had survived. She wasn’t about to be intimidated by him.
Whether she was or was not, however, was immediately rendered moot as a taxi pulled up in the underground driveway. Byrne knew instantly who it was. The last person on earth he wanted to see.
A man got out of the car. Principessa sashshayed over to him—that really was the only word to describe her motion—and greeted him with a kiss as he got out. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Byrne and Hope Gardner.
He let out a short, barking laugh. “Old home week. Hello, Frankie,” said Tom Byrne, deputy director of the FBI.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Baku–Tehran
If there really was such a thing as a controlled purple rage, thought Mlle. Derrida as their plane taxied along the runway, Emanuel Skorzeny was managing it. The news of Amanda Harrington’s defection had not surprised her in the least. She had warned him, but he would not listen. Men were such fools around women, which is why she could never love a man.
She sat near him, in case he wanted company. The 707 was always ready to leave at a moment’s notice, and everything went smoothly. All they had to do was file a flight plan and get landing permission from the Iranian authorities and they were on their way. It cost one of Skorzeny’s shell companies a fortune to keep his personal plane in a constant state of readiness, but what did it matter? He could just manipulate another currency or indulge in some other arcane aspect of international high finance and the expense would be covered.
“Don’t say anything,” he said to her.
“I didn’t.”
They flew in silence for a while. Maryam’s co
mputer lay closed on the table in front of him. Mlle. Derrida wished she had a book.
“Confound your damnable silence,” he said.
She took that as a cue. “Would you care for some music, sir?”
“When I want music, I shall ask for it.’
“Then what do you want?”
“I want your opinion.” That almost never happened.
“May I ask in regard to what, M. Skorzeny?”
“Regarding what? Regarding what just happened? How did she do it? Why? I am both troubled and puzzled at the perfidy of women, Mlle. Derrida.”
“You know what they say, sir—the only thing that men and women can agree on is that neither sex trusts women.”
“In that case, I cannot understand your, how do they say these days, your ‘sexual orientation.’ ”
Emanuelle Derrida laughed. “I make love with them,” she said. “I didn’t say I trusted them.... Do you have a plan, sir?”
“ ‘We,’ Mlle. Derrida. Do ‘we’ have a plan is the question. And the answer is, yes, we do.”
She wasn’t sure if she liked hearing that. M. Pilier had met his untimely end the last time Skorzeny had had a plan. From what she’d heard of that event, she was quite sure she didn’t want to come up against either the man or the woman when someone’s life was on the line—in this case, hers.
“My arrangement with Col. Zarin was simple—Miss Harrington was to deliver the lady in Tehran. What happened to the lady after that was none of our concern. In exchange, we were to be given access to the Iranian nuclear program’s first live-fire test.”
“What?” asked Mlle. Derrida. This was the first she had heard of that.
“You do understand that what we have been doing with the laser projections, through our contacts in CERN in Switzerland, was simply prologue. The Iranian government needs a bit of theater, a pretext, in order to proclaim the Coming of their Mahdi, and that is what we have provided them. Conflict on a global scale, all for the nugatory price of a little technology and a piggyback ride on the comatose clods at NASA. If America wishes to abdicate its role in space, there is certainly no reason for others not to take advantage of it.”
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