At sunset on the fourth day, the Caliph and the three Khan brothers escorted him out the front door to the old Mercedes. Wearing one of the cheap dishdashas he had borrowed from al-Zaeim, he shook their hands and bid farewell, reluctantly putting his faith in Aslan Khan’s assurances that there would be no problem getting him back home to the States. While the ISIS stronghold of Raqqah was still surrounded by their enemies, the borders of Syria were long, and porous. The Russians were to be feared, as were Hezbollah, and the Iranian Quds Force and Revolutionary Guard “volunteers,” but they could not be everywhere. Most of the minor guard duty was performed by the Syrian Army, who were poorly trained conscripts from Bashar Assad’s own Alawite tribe. They had no particular love for Iran, the Russians, or anyone else beyond their own narrow circle, but no particular hatred for ISIS, either. After all, they were also Sunni, not like the hated Shia in Baghdad and Tehran. So, when it came to getting Shaw out, one group was as corrupt and incompetent as the next.
Mergen and Batir Khan drove the Mercedes northwest on a dark, unpaved road into the rocky desert beyond Raqqah, eventually reaching an unmarked road crossing that was blocked by another Syrian Army truck. Batir drove up to it and had a brief, smiling conversation with one of the Syrians. Batir handed the Syrian a thick envelope and the two men smiled again, shook hands, and the Mercedes drove further out into the desert. Twenty minutes later, Shaw saw a familiar white Toyota pickup truck parked by the side of the road, and the same crotchety, leather-skinned old man who drove him down from Sanliafa standing next to it.
Shaw uttered an audible sigh as Batir Khan parked next to the truck, Mergen got out, and opened Shaw’s door. He shook his head and slowly got out, resigned to his fate. Behind him, he heard car doors close. Batir turned the Mercedes around and he and Mergen waved and drove away, leaving Henry Shaw and the old man staring at each other once again. As usual, the old man said nothing as he reached back inside the truck, pulled out the filthy headscarf and kaftan, and handed them over. “Been there, done that,” Shaw thought as he looked up at the dark sky for divine intervention. He knew there was no arguing with the old goat, so he took the scarf and wrapped it around his own head, put on the kaftan, and got in the passenger seat of the truck for what he knew was going to be a long, uncomfortable trip home.
Back in the house in Raqqah, Aslan Khan walked over to the basement door, opened it, and waited for Abu Bakr al-Zaeim to take the hint and go down on his own. The Caliph frowned, slowly got off the couch where he sat, and walked to the head of the stairs. Khan waited impatiently for him to descend; but this time the Caliph stopped, looked up at him, and asked, “Do you really think the operation we planned for Shaw stands a chance of succeeding, Aslan? Do you think the American can save us?”
Khan stared down at him and sneered, realizing just how gullible this little creature he created really was. “Of course not, but our operation here has about run its course, al-Badri,” he said, calling the frightened little itinerant preacher from Fallujah by his real name. “We have no Air Force, no Navy, and we are outmanned and outgunned at every turn here in Syria. So, it is up to you and your speeches to hold our people together long enough for my brothers to strike and drive a stake into their hearts in America.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“I am the man behind the curtain, al-Badri. But you…? Your face has been on the cover of Time Magazine, the New York Times. You, they want, my Caliph.”
“But our cells in north Africa and Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and western Europe? Can we not build on that once again?”
“Pipe dreams. We have lost our chance to take Damascus and Baghdad, our two historic capitals. Without at least one of them, we are doomed to wither and die out here in the desert with the scorpions and the jackals. That is why the bold new plan for a massive strike against America, one that will shatter their confidence and fan the flames of the faithful, it must succeed. It is a master stroke they will not recover from for years.”
“You mean what you have Shaw working on? To build ISIS cells in America?”
“Shaw?” Aslan laughed aloud. “The ghost of Sal-a-din? The ‘Redeemer’? His ‘sword’? Indeed! The man is a dilettante and a fool, a con man who came here to get his photograph taken with you, nothing more. The only thing his ‘mission’ will accomplish is to create some distractions, some smoke and mirrors to keep the FBI looking the other way while my brothers undertake the real strike,” he said as his eyes grew cold and hard, and he pointed to the basement stairs again. “Time is growing short. See to it that you remain useful to me, al-Badri. That is, if you don’t wish to become one more of the ‘unpleasant’ smells down in the basement,” he said as he held the door open. “Go on, your bed awaits you.”
The old man drove west along a series of back roads and dirt tracks. They crossed the Euphrates River on a rickety two-car ferry, and then continued southwest through Al Bab, around Aleppo, and finally to Burj Islam. It was a small fishing village on the rocky coast above Latakia in the narrow strip of Syria that fronted on the eastern Mediterranean coast between Turkey and Lebanon. It took them two full nights to get there, hiding in the rugged back country during the day. Before the old man turned him over to the captain of a small fishing boat, he handed the captain a wad of money for the seventy-five-mile crossing to Mari, a small fishing village on the south coast of Cyprus.
As the old man got back in his truck to drive away, Henry Shaw walked over to him, nodded, and extended his hand. “Thank you. You are an ornery old son-of-a-bitch, but you got me here, and I guess that counts for something,” Shaw said. The old man smiled and nodded back, his head going up and down like a bobble-head doll as he muttered something in return in Turkmen. They shook on it, probably agreeing that they were both ornery sons-of-bitches, but Shaw took the opportunity to remove the shemagh and the filthy kaftan, and toss them in the back of the Toyota before he turned toward the fishing boat. It looked even more dilapidated than the white Toyota, and Shaw could smell the stench of rotting fish from the dock. The thought of being locked away in one of its holds turned his stomach.
Neither the winds nor the currents wanted to cooperate, and it took most of the next day for the small boat to make the crossing to Cyprus, fighting ten foot seas the whole way. Henry Shaw had never been much of an open water sailor, other than a handful of fishing trips and two sailing excursions out of Nags Head, so he remained below deck the entire time. When they finally arrived in the small harbor of Mari, the captain told him in broken English that there was a bus stop in the center of the village at the top of the hill, handed Shaw ten euros, and told him the bus would take him to Nicosia; then he turned the boat around and headed back east as fast as it would go.
Three hours later, wearing the cheap dishdasha he had borrowed from the Caliph, a pair of peasant sandals, and smelling of rotten fish, Henry Shaw found himself standing in front of the wrought iron gates of the US Embassy in Nicosia. After explaining his plight to two frowning Cypriot policemen and then to two heavily-armed US Marine guards who were even less sympathetic, he was finally escorted inside the embassy with nothing on him but a bad sunburn and a couple of small euro coins. They walked him through a metal detector, wanded him from head to foot, and left him sitting at a table in a small interview room for the better part of an hour and a half. The door was locked, and he suspected there was a guard posted outside, but where did they think he was going anyway?
In addition to the small table, the room had three cheap wooden chairs. He spent the next two hours telling his story to a man in an ill-fitting, rumpled business suit who identified himself as FBI Special-Agent-In-Charge Tom Pendergrass, who asked him the same questions in slightly different ways over and over again. Pendergrass was thirtyish, pudgy, with thick, black-framed glasses and unkempt hair that made him look like Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory. Eventually, a second, older man in a better-tailored suit came in and joined them. He identified himself as “Johnson, from Cons
ular Affairs.” He had a short, military haircut and the cold, dead eyes of a shark. Shaw took that to mean he was CIA and probably the Alpha Dog in the room. However, Pendergrass was the one who carried the manila file folder with Shaw’s name on the tab. That meant he was in charge, even if he never opened it. Perhaps he had read the contents so many times he didn’t need to look inside again. Or, perhaps there was nothing in it to begin with.
Johnson stared at him for a few minutes, so Shaw confidently broke the ice by turning back to Pendergrass and asking, “The FBI? Here in Cyprus? Who’d have guessed.”
“We have ‘local assistance centers’ in a number of the world’s ‘hotspots’ these days,” Pendergrass told him. “You’ve traveled around quite a bit, I wouldn’t think it would come as a surprise to you, Mister Shaw.”
“ ‘Professor,’ if you don’t mind, Agent Pendergrass,” Shaw corrected him with a thin smile. “It’s a little idiosyncrasy of mine. You see, my father will always be Mister Shaw to me; so, when anyone calls me that, I start looking around to see if he’s come in the room.”
“All right, Professor… I guess we can do that,” the FBI Agent smiled back. “So, let’s review that story of yours one more time for the benefit of Mr. Johnson here,” he said as he looked down at some notes. “Kidnapped in Turkey, escaped, snuck aboard a fishing boat, landed on a strange island…,” he asked as he glanced inside the folder, “You don’t teach music, do you? This sounds an awful lot like Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“No, I assure you it wasn’t Gilbert and Sullivan, Agent Pendergrass,” Shaw answered, realizing these people weren’t fools, and he would need to be careful. “It was quite terrifying. I was convinced they were going to kill me, or even worse. By the way,” Shaw asked as he pointed at the folder. “Does that mean I have an FBI file now?”
Pendergrass ignored him. “You were doing research in Eastern Turkey on a UNESCO grant, as I understand.”
“Lucky me. Yes, I am a sociologist, studying minorities in the eastern provinces. I’ve visited the region many times and never had problems before. But the first night in Sanliafa, when I left my room to go to the bathroom, four masked men abducted me. My guess is to hold me for ransom. I don’t know if it was me they were after, or just the first foreigner they saw, but they threw me in the back of a truck, and that was that.”
Johnson, from “Consular Affairs” stared at him for a moment, and asked, “Are you aware that the Turkish secret police, the MIT, had you under surveillance the minute you left the airport? They said there was no sign of a kidnapping, and you disappeared on your own.”
“Is that who they were? The secret police? Wow! I knew there were two men in cheap suits and an ugly sedan who followed us from Ankara, but we thought they were the Mafia or something. When the kidnappers carried me down the stairs, I saw one of those guys asleep in the lobby and the other was asleep in their car. No wonder they never saw anything.”
It was obvious that neither Johnson nor Pendergrass was buying it, but Shaw kept talking anyway. “They threw me in the trunk of a car and drove away. I guess we went out into the desert, because it got so hot in there that I passed out. Finally, they stopped and threw me in a filthy wooden storage shed. I figured that was the last chance I’d get, so I pried a couple of boards off the back window, climbed out, and ran. The stars were out and I knew a handful of constellations from back in the Boy Scouts, so I headed west and kept on going. I walked, hitched a ride on a truck, and stole a bike. I kept going west, until I heard some seagulls and finally smelled the ocean. I found a small fishing village. I was flat out exhausted and it was the middle of the night, but I found an old boat, dragged it into the water and began rowing. When I reached the breakwater, I managed to get the sail up, but that was when I heard men shouting at me. Then they started shooting at me. I heard a couple of bullets hit the water and then the hull of the boat, but I kept low and was soon out of range.”
“The local Cypriot police searched the coast above and below Mari, but they couldn’t find an abandoned, fifteen-foot sailboat with Turkish markings anywhere.”
“Maybe someone stole it back?” Shaw smiled.
“Are you sure that’s how you got here in the first place?”
“It was night, I was exhausted. When I reached the open sea, I collapsed in the bottom of the boat and fell asleep.”
“The open seas between here and Turkey were running 10 to 12 feet last night,” Pendergrass said, somewhat incredulous. “Were you in the Navy?”
“No, I was a Marine.”
“Yes, that was in your ‘file,’ along with the Bad Conduct Discharge.”
“We all do silly things when we are young,” Shaw answered. “Even CIA agents.”
“But we don’t cross seventy miles of ten- to twelve-foot seas alone in a boat like that.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Shaw shrugged. “Look, I’m not a sailor, I had no idea where I was or where I was going, except to get away from them. This morning, I finally saw land and steered the boat onto a small beach. I didn’t have an anchor or anything. Maybe it blew away. Anyway, I walked up the coast until I came to a small town. Some men told me I was in Cyprus, on the south coast, and the local priest was kind enough to give me a few coins for the bus. Now I’m here. End of story.”
The two men stared across the table at him. Finally, Pendergrass coughed, looked at the file again, and said, “The Turks confiscated your things in Sanliafa — your clothes, books, car, and your passport. They questioned your driver about it. He told them you left voluntarily in the middle of the night, headed south for Syria, and you paid him to keep quiet about it.”
“Of course they’d say that,” Shaw retorted. “They probably tortured the poor man. You know what that country’s like.”
The two governments men stared at him. “Pardon me for asking,” the CIA man said, “but do you have money? You or your family?”
“Me? Heavens no. I tried to explain to the kidnappers that I was just a poor university professor doing some research, but they didn’t care. They probably thought my College would pay a lot of money to get me back. Little do they know,” Shaw laughed.
The two men looked at each other. “Well,” Pendergrass said, “I wouldn’t plan on going back to Turkey any time soon. They say you were meddling in revolutionary causes, and they’ve declared you to be persona non grata.”
“Figures,” Shaw shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “All right. So how do I get out of here and back home? I have no money, no papers, nothing.”
The two men stared at each other again, and at him until him for a moment, until Pendergrass finally spoke up. “As usual, your Uncle Sam will take care of you, Professor. It may take a few days to arrange it all, but we’ll get you home. Meanwhile, we’ll get you a hotel room, some expense money, a temporary passport, and an airplane ticket… with a loan, of course.”
“Of course,” he smiled across at them. “And, if you don’t need anything else, gentlemen, perhaps you can spot me twenty dollars, so I can get a meal? I haven’t had anything to eat in three days.”
After they sent Shaw off in a cab to a small local hotel, Pendergrass turned to ‘Johnson’ and asked him, “Well, what do you think, Herb?”
“Total bullshit. I don’t know what that guy’s up to — drugs, women, smuggling…”
“I agree. I’d like to think he’s just another stupid American college professor trying to play terrorist…”
“Or maybe not-so-stupid terrorist trying to look like a stupid college professor.”
“Whatever, that arrogant son-of-a-bitch is into something, big-time.”
“Agreed. And they’re the ones who always think we’re the stupid ones. To me, that Bad Conduct Discharge is the icing on the cake,” Johnson said. “How’s a guy with a record like that ever get into a school like UCLA or Harvard, anyway, much less hired as a teacher?”
“Since Vietnam, none of those schools want to hear anything DoD has to say.”
/> “You’re right. It probably got him some bonus points.”
“Tell you what, let’s both write this guy up.”
“Yeah, something tells me we haven’t heard the last of the ‘good’ professor Shaw.”
“I’m gonna pass it on to our SAC in Charlotte,” Pendergrass said. “Fayetteville is part of his area. Other than chasing down moonshiners and watching NASCAR races, they haven’t got a damned thing to do down there anyway.”
“Build Shaw up enough, and maybe you can get transferred back there to keep an eye on him yourself.”
“You think so? Because I’m sure as hell tired of this rock pile.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Flying from Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus to Charlotte’s Douglas International Airport in North Carolina took Henry Shaw five flights and almost thirty-eight hours of clock time. The tickets they gave him ping-ponged him from one second-tier European airport to another, sandwiched in a narrow middle seat in a series of old, worn-out airplanes. Intentional, no doubt. And those thirty-two hours did not include the initial dusty, “goat and chicken” ride on a local commuter bus from Nicosia to Larnaca. Normally the trip back to the US took less than half that time, but most international travelers did not have a vindictive FBI agent playing travel agent for them. To be fair, Special Agent Pendergrass told him that the government would buy him a ticket to get back home, but he never said how uncomfortable and inconvenient he would make it. Still, Henry Shaw had a long memory. It might take him a while, but he would make Pendergrass pay for treating him like this. After all, he wasn’t a traitor or terrorist, not yet anyway.
The $400 in cash that the embassy gave him as a “travel advance” was enough to buy a pair of blue jeans, a coarse, long-sleeve shirt, and cheap blue blazer. They were hardly up to his standards, but they were the best he could find in Nicosia. The peasant “Jesus sandals” he had worn since Turkey would have to do, because he needed enough money for the room and some decent meals until he got home, and for a pay phone at London’s Heathrow Airport. That bastard Pendergrass had stuck him with a five-hour layover in London, in the middle of the night, when it became a noisy, smelly, third-world village. With nothing better to do, Shaw used the time and some of his remaining cash to check his voicemail at the office, at his house, and on his cell phone.
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 12