Jon glared at her. “Nineteen sixty-two.”
“Darn right, nineteen sixty-two. And the world almost ended. The only reason it didn’t is because the Russians are rational. The mullahs in Tehran, maybe not so much,” she reminded him. She reached out her hand and put it on his. He didn’t pull his away, but he didn’t look at her. “We have to know before they move that cargo even if we have to risk some people.”
“This isn’t ‘some people,’” he protested. “She’s not some random warm body out there who you never have to talk to—”
“I know she’s your friend and I wish I didn’t have to recommend the option to the director, but I think I do,” Marisa broke in.
“You’re going to get her killed.”
“I truly hope not.” Marisa pressed the button again, turning on the microphone. “Arrowhead, this is Quiver. If approved, when can you proceed?”
CAVIM Explosives Factory
Kyra’s heart hammered against her ribs. “I’d have to return to the truck, grab some gear. And I couldn’t move before nightfall anyway.” She checked her watch. “Three hours?”
“Copy that, Z–minus three hours,” Marisa came back. “Get your gear, check in when you get back. I’ll give you the green light or not.”
“Roger that.” Kyra shut down the phone and stared at her watch again. Three hours. The risks in her plan suddenly felt so much larger than they had just a few minutes before.
Kyra grabbed the HK, then crawled out of the blind and started to run down the back side of the mountain. Two miles to the truck, two miles back.
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
Marisa touched the speakerphone and shut it down, then dipped her head, trying to catch Jon’s eye. “I am sorry,” she said. She couldn’t tell whether he believed her. “We’ve got three hours. I’ll call the director. If the task force can come up with a better option, we can still call it off—”
“They won’t,” Jon said. “Kathy will have to approve it and Kyra will run down that mountain straight at the enemy like she always does.”
Marisa was afraid to answer. There was no question that Jon knew both women better than she did and the station chief desperately wanted to know how. But the man refused to open up and she couldn’t ask him all of the questions that had been backing up in her mind for a decade now. “I’m sorry I don’t have anyone to send her for backup—”
“Yes, you do,” Jon told her. He threw down the headset.
CIA Director’s Conference Room
She wasn’t used to seeing the room like this. The conference room was usually clean, the space swept by security after every meeting to make sure that none of the Agency’s most sensitive information could ever leak to the next guest, who could be a reporter, a Hollywood actor, even a foreign intelligence chief. Now Drescher’s task force had taken over the room and papers were everywhere. The map of the CAVIM facility on the table was so large that Cooke wondered where they’d found a printer big enough to run it off. Smaller maps were pinned up, photographs and intelligence reports scattered around the rectangular hardwood table, and the conversations were a chaotic mass of overlapping arguments that quieted only a little when she entered.
Drescher saw the director enter through the rear door and he broke loose from the small group he’d been directing to make his way to meet her.
“I heard you got a call from the station,” Cooke said.
“Ten minutes ago,” Drescher confirmed. “Somebody down there came up with a plan. They’ll be sending us a cable in an hour or so, but for now we’ve just got a verbal brief. It’s bold.”
“Show me,” Cooke ordered.
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
“Jon!” Marisa was practically yelling at him as he ran down the stairwell. “Jon, stop!”
He ignored her orders, then finally obeyed once he reached the bottom of the stairwell, turning and shoving his finger in her face. “Don’t you tell me that it’s too dangerous to go. Not after you practically gave her the green light.”
“You’re not a field officer.”
“You know I can handle myself.”
She couldn’t deny it. “It’s dumb to put you both at risk,” she said.
“If it’s too risky for both then it’s too risky for one,” he said. “If you really believe that, call her and pull her back.” He pushed the door to the garage hard enough to slam it open against the concrete wall and stomped toward the equipment alcove.
“Jon, at least wait until we hear from Headquarters! The director might not even approve the plan—”
“If she does and I’m still here, there won’t be time for me to get out there before Kyra goes in.”
“And what if Cooke tells you to stay?”
“I don’t plan on being here when you finish talking to her.”
“This is insubordination!” Marisa told him, fuming.
“Lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t care which,” Jon told her. He grabbed a backpack and turned to the gun locker.
CIA Director’s Conference Room
“That’s not bold, it’s crazy,” Cooke announced. She stared down at the hand-drawn lines marking boundaries, fences, and buildings on the map. The rest of the room had finally gone quiet when Drescher started briefing the director. “Does anybody think it will work?” she asked the room.
Drescher shrugged. “All the real security is a half mile north around the chemical plant itself. That’s the place with all the heavy patrols and cameras pointing every which way. It doesn’t look like they’re too worried about somebody getting through the fence that far from the main building. We don’t know the specs of the security cameras along the fence line so we can’t calculate their field of vision, but the point of entry into the ordnance field is as good a guess as any. Assuming she doesn’t get blown up, the real question is whether she can tap the feeds coming off the rest of the camera network from inside that shack. Not to mention the feeds could be encrypted. Still a lot of variables that we can’t control inside the president’s time frame.”
“Is anyone going to come up with anything better?” Cooke asked.
“Not likely,” someone called out, a face and voice that Cooke didn’t know.
“We’ve got more intelligence gaps on this factory than a sieve has holes,” another analyst agreed. “We can’t begin to plan anything because every possible option has so many failure modes that we can’t get past the first step. We just don’t know that much about the place. We might as well be calling this Operation Flail.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Drescher agreed. “Give us a year and we’ll tell you everything about that place down to the brand name on the toilets. Give us one day and this plan is probably the best you’re going to get. There’s no way we could have come up with it. Station could because they’ve got eyes on the target.”
“Any way we can help her out?” Cooke asked.
“Track the patrols using thermal imaging,” another person suggested, this one a case officer who’d run a few field ops of her own. “Call them out if they start moving on that sector. That’s about it.”
Cooke nodded silently. “You’re with me,” she told Drescher.
“Yes, ma’am,” Drescher replied. “Keep working,” he told the room. “I want this place torn apart. You miss nothing. You overlook nothing. We’ve got an officer on a mountain ready to go into that place and if she gets killed or captured, it will not happen because we missed a better option. You get me?” The room muttered angry assent as Drescher and Cooke walked out the door.
“President’s a flamin’ idiot,” someone muttered.
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
“I used to be able to change your mind,” Marisa told him. “When did that change?”
“When I couldn’t chang
e yours when it counted,” Jon told her. He zipped up the pack, scanned the garage, and set his course for a Toyota 4Runner. “I wanted you to stay.”
“I thought about it,” she told him, hopeful that it might make a difference.
“I don’t care what you thought about. I care what you actually did,” he told her. “Intentions count for nothing.”
“Things have a bad habit of going sideways whenever we’re together,” Marisa protested.
“They’ve always gone sideways for me even when you weren’t around. But we’re not together so you don’t have to worry about that,” he said. Jon threw his pack inside the truck.
“I’m the station chief, Jon. It’s my job to worry about it.”
“Just keep feeding me the intel until I get back with her.”
“Jon, wait.” Something in her voice stopped him . . . quiet surrender. He’d heard that from her a few times, not often, years before.
Marisa held her face in a rigid mask as she walked over to a tall cabinet, opened it with a key, and pulled out a long black case and a PRC-148 radio. “You should take these.” She gave him the radio, then laid the case on the workbench. She flipped the locks and lifted the lid.
Jon stared down. “I thought you said they took all of the good stuff,” he told her.
Marisa shrugged. “I didn’t let them have everything. And if you’re determined to run back out into the field, I figured you could do something useful with it.”
“I don’t know if I can use it. I haven’t used one since al-Yusufiyah.”
“Please don’t go.”
Jon turned his head far enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. Marisa had never surrendered easily to him but he knew it when he saw it. She looked at him, her head bent low, trying to catch his gaze.
“Jon, you didn’t used to be mean. I don’t like it. But I saw it coming. That’s why I left. I couldn’t stand to watch that happen to you.”
“You couldn’t stop it. Nobody could,” he said. He closed the lid on the black case.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Jon looked sideways at her, sucked in a nervous breath, and she could tell he was deciding whether to talk. She didn’t give him the chance. “Jon, don’t do this. I don’t want you to go through it again—”
“I don’t have time for this.” He suddenly lifted the long case and put it into the truck behind the seat, then threw himself into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in. “Mari, if this op goes south and Kyra and I have to run, there still might be an opportunity to turn all of this to our advantage,” he offered.
“How so?” she asked, both sad and grateful for a reason to talk business.
“I assume the SEBIN monitor cell-phone calls?” he asked.
“Yeah, they do. They can’t break the encrypted ones but anything in the clear gets heard,” she assured him.
“Just be ready to call me on an open line if she gets blown. Then get ready to start watching some overhead imagery.” Marisa looked at him, suspicious. “Just trust me.”
“You’re thinking three moves ahead again, aren’t you?” she asked him.
“It’s my thing.”
“I hate your thing, Jon,” she told him.
He finally smiled, that small half grin she remembered. She walked to the far wall, pressed a button, and the garage door rolled up. Jon pulled out, stomping on the gas as the truck touched the asphalt outside. She followed him out, and watched him go until the truck passed through the embassy gates and rolled out into the Valle Arriba.
CAVIM Explosives Factory
Kyra kept her distance from the truck, watching for a half hour, then closing her eyes and listening for another five minutes. She saw no signs of movement, heard no sounds, and crept down the hillside slowly. There was nothing, no signs that anyone had disturbed the truck. She finally shifted some of the camouflage she’d erected and let herself in. The tech ops bag was behind the driver’s seat. She closed the door, replaced the foliage, and sprinted back into the woods.
She reached the summit this time in an hour. Kyra wished that she could take the HK but had to settle for the Glock. For this she would have to travel light and quiet. She applied camo paint to her face, an act that would mark her as a spy every bit as much as the sidearm or her other gear. She was beyond cover stories now. There would be no talking if this went badly, only gunfire and a mad race through the hills that she would probably lose.
There was a large, flat rock ten yards from the blind. It was almost beyond her strength to move it, but she managed to shift it a few feet. She dug out a hole large enough for her radio minus the antenna, placed it inside, and moved the rock back over it, leaving a small space open underneath facing the valley. The antenna she left on the ground. She covered the opening with some netting and biomass that she scrounged from the hillside, then stood back and looked at the work. It wasn’t perfect, a little too obvious to her eye, but she knew what to look for. If someone stumbled across the antenna, they could trace the cable to the pit under the rock, but the odds were against that in the dark. It was more important that no light from LST-5’s LEDs leaked out through the makeshift cover. That job was done and the covered hole would serve well enough.
The PRC-148 that Kyra strapped to her vest only had a four mile range, so she programmed it to talk to the LST-5, which would transmit it back to the embassy. That done, she secured the headset, wisps of her dirty-blond hair falling back over it. Finally ready, Kyra sat under the thin clouds and looked up at the sky until the sun had vanished and the Milky Way was stretched out across the sky. Time to go . . .
In a moment, her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it against her ribs and her breathing had picked up, her lungs pumping air at a furious rate. Adrenaline surged through her system, hitting her so hard that she could feel the drug driving her to the edge of panic.
Kyra tried to detach herself from it all and pushed the memories aside of that moment aboard the Lincoln. She sat herself on the ground, legs crossed, arms folded, and focused her mind on the quiet scene above her. There was no Battle of the Taiwan Strait here, no Phalanx guns ripping the air apart as they tore antiship missiles from the sky. No shrapnel pinging against the hull armor or tearing through sailors on the deck.
Her breathing slowed, her heart less so, but after long minutes it finally began to obey.
Kyra opened her eyes. She turned on the PRC-148. “Quiver, this is Arrowhead,” she said.
“This is Quiver,” Marisa said.
“I’m ready. Do we have a green light?”
“Affirmative.”
“Moving out,” Kyra said.
She stood and marched down the hill, careful and deliberate.
• • •
There were no trails here, just trees and undergrowth thick enough to slow her progress to a crawl. It wasn’t so different from the Farm, but she couldn’t just hack through it. The growing dark was her friend but noise was her enemy now, so she moved slowly, choosing her steps. Kyra took an hour to reach the tree line. She was moving in a crouch by the time she arrived, trying not to disturb the small trees or the weeds. The sentry lights mounted above the factory’s security fence were throwing sharp shadows along the forest edge and movement would attract the eye.
She had misjudged the distance to the fence. Crouching behind the broken stump where the trunk had fallen out of the forest into the ordnance field, she saw that she was still a hundred yards from the fence but the security camera was pointed into the woods, as she’d thought.
The only thing that might see her coming from this angle would be human eyes. She spent another half hour watching in order to judge that risk and saw the occasional guard wander through the western end of the facility, more to smoke and relieve themselves than to watch for threats.
The sun was finally down, the moon taking its place,
large on the horizon. It wasn’t going to get any darker than this. As good a time as any. She touched her small earpiece. “Quiver, Arrowhead. In position.” She kept her voice to a whisper. The radio strapped to her chest reached out to the antenna back on the hill, and the signal went out to some satellite orbiting above.
“This is Quiver.” Long pause. “Can you hold?”
Kyra kept the curse to herself. If we’re going to do this, let’s do it. “Why?”
Another long pause. “You have a friendly inbound.”
Kyra frowned. “Who?” Did Langley send someone after all?
U.S. Embassy
Caracas, Venezuela
Marisa stared at the wall ahead, her mind twisted in knots. We didn’t assign Jon a code name. The radios were encrypted and the chances were excellent that the Venezuelans couldn’t break the cipher and listen in . . . but the Iranians were in town and she didn’t know their capabilities.
“A friendly,” Marisa repeated.
CAVIM Explosives Factory
Okay, so you don’t want to tell me. “ETA?” Kyra asked.
“Sometime in the next two hours.”
That doesn’t work. “If I’m not clear to go, I should withdraw from this position and try again tomorrow,” Kyra advised. “I don’t know how long I’ll need to reach the destination and I have maximum time to proceed now.”
Hiding behind the stump, she felt like time was stretched out and the answer took too long to come back, though it was only a few seconds. “Godspeed,” Quiver said. “I’m on the line.”
Kyra laid herself on her stomach in the dirt. Her heart was a hammer again, pounding hard enough that she could feel it in her stomach.
She pulled the Leatherman from the pocket on her sleeve, extended the blade, and began to move forward behind the tree, crawling in the dirt.
Cold Shot: A Novel Page 16
