Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  • • •

  “Quiver, Sherlock,” Jon announced. “Arrowhead has cleared the facility. I need a readout on any other hostiles in our area.”

  “They’re all headed your way,” Marisa told him. “Everyone is coming to the party. Evacuate the area as soon as practical.”

  “Roger Wilco. By the way, now would be a good time for you to make that phone call.”

  He pulled the Barrett’s trigger, this time shooting at no one in particular.

  U.S. Embassy

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Phone call? Marisa asked. Then she remembered. What are you up to, Jon? She pulled a cell phone out of her desk and dialed his number.

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  “Arrowhead, Sherlock,” he called out over his headset. “Suggest you head straight for the truck. We need to evac this area now. I’ll meet you there. Over.”

  “I copy, out,” Kyra said, gasping her response. He watched her turn through the scope, running in a horizontal line along the hill now away from his position. It would still take her another fifteen minutes to get to the vehicles if she could keep up her pace. Jon swung the rifle back to the base. The SEBIN soldiers were still cowering behind every building and car they could find. Jon emptied the Barrett’s clip at them as fast as it would fire.

  There was no time to break down the antenna. He pulled the cable out of the satellite transceiver and shoved it under the rock, then threw the antenna into the trees. Then he slung the rifle over his back, drew his Glock, and ran down the hillside.

  • • •

  The tree branches clawed at her face. Kyra knocked them aside but they tore at her, slowed her down, as if they were trying to hold her for the SEBIN soldiers she could hear in the distance. They knew she couldn’t be far. Jon and the darkness were her only allies now.

  Her lungs ached, her legs burned. Her boots felt heavy, getting heavier with each step. This wasn’t like racing through the Caracas streets as she’d done the year before. Then the ground had been hard, smooth pavement, and she’d been able to see every obstacle as the SEBIN had chased her. Now she could hardly see the next few feet, the ground was soft and soaking up what little energy she had left. She was close to the truck, another half mile to go, but the terrain was uneven and it would be like running twice that distance.

  The soldiers sounded closer now, but it was impossible to judge distance by sound in these hills. She heard dogs barking and wondered if they were wild or if they were SEBIN themselves, tracking hounds that the Venezuelans had called out.

  She forced herself up a small ridgeline, then down, around another, and finally she saw the road where she’d left the truck. She couldn’t make out the blind she’d built around the vehicle in the dark, and the moonlight wasn’t penetrating the tree cover well. She felt a second wind rush into her chest and she accelerated, reaching the wide gravel trail and leaving the brush behind.

  Kyra turned right and ran down the road a hundred yards until she found the pile of brush and branches that she’d heaped on her ride. There was another truck there . . . the Toyota 4Runner from the embassy garage. Jon must have driven it here, she realized. She looked down and saw the skid marks on the road and the crushed plants that led to the tires. He’d slammed his brakes and slid the truck to its parking spot, then gotten out and run for the woods.

  Hurry up, Jon. She fumbled for her keys, then started the hardest job of the night.

  She sat in her truck, the engine off, waiting for her partner as she heard yells and barks from the forest, growing a little louder with every minute.

  • • •

  The smartphone finally rang in Jon’s pocket. “It’s me,” Mari announced.

  “We’re compromised,” Jon said, telling her the obvious. She wasn’t the audience for this call. “Contact the other teams and tell them to fall back.” He ended the call and threw the phone into the woods as far as his arm could manage without causing him to break stride.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  “Yes!” Cooke was practically yelling now.

  “What other teams?” one of the analysts called out.

  “He’s kicking the hornet’s nest, kid,” Drescher told him. “All of them at once.”

  “You two!” Cooke pointed at a pair of analysts. “I want satellite coverage of every joint facility in-country that the Venezuelans and Iranians have ever set up, right now! Get NRO and NGA on the phone. If they have an issue with it, tell ’em they can call me.”

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  Jon finally came crashing through the trees. Kyra jumped out of the Ford as he ran for his truck, pulling his rifle over his head without breaking stride and setting it in the truck bed. “Got any M67s?” he asked, out of breath.

  “Good to see you too.” Kyra turned back to the Ford, leaned the seat forward, and searched behind. She found the grenades hidden under her seat and tossed one to him. Jon tossed his keys in return, pulled a knife from his pants, flipped the blade and cut a strip of cloth from his shirt as he ran to his own truck. He pulled a small oil can from the back, opened it, and doused the cloth in motor oil, then tied the strip around the grenade, knotting it down hard and pinning the spoon to the body.

  The yells of the soldiers and the barks of dogs were louder now.

  Jon depressed the cigarette lighter in the truck’s dash, waited for it to heat, pulled it out, and touched it to the cloth band around the grenade. It took a few seconds for the flame to ignite, black smoke rolling into the air. Jon pulled the pin out of the grenade, tossed the burning load into the Ford, then he threw Kyra the keys and ran behind her for the other truck. Kyra crawled into the driver’s seat, brought the Toyota to life and put the gas to the floor before Jon’s door was closed. The SUV crawled up the low embankment and the tires dug into the gravel, spinning out for a few seconds, then found traction and the truck jumped, speeding as the wheels clawed against the small rocks. Kyra cranked the wheel hard left when they reached the main road, rubber on asphalt, and the truck started picking up real speed.

  Jon turned his head and looked back.

  The cloth strip wrapped around the explosive in the Ford burned through and broke. The spoon on the thermite grenade released, allowing the aluminum powder inside to mix with the iron-oxide filler. The chemicals ignited, heat erupting inside the small can and racing to four thousand degrees in seconds. Molten iron began to spill out and the burning aluminum oxide flashed, brighter than a flare, lighting up the night for hundreds of feet in every direction. The burning compounds ignited the upholstery and began burning through the seats, the floor, and then the truck body below. It took twenty seconds for the fire to hit flammable fuels and a small explosion burst out from under the vehicle, scorching the brush beneath.

  “Nice,” Kyra said, seeing the pyre burning in her rearview mirror.

  “It’ll draw the search parties,” Jon told her. “If they don’t figure out in the next few minutes that we had a second truck, they’ll assume we’re still on foot. That’ll let us put some distance between us and them.”

  “We can hope,” Kyra said. “Where are we going?”

  Jon shook his head. Kyra sighed and let out a long breath. She pressed the gas, sped up, and drove along the dark road, heading east.

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  They drove in the dark and silence for twenty kilometers until Kyra saw a cut in the woods that was lightly overgrown with brush. She pulled off onto the trail and found a string of decrepit concrete buildings a quarter mile off the road, shops abandoned by their owners, how long ago she couldn’t tell. The village was both too small and too far from Puerto Cabello to be properly called a suburb, but she could see the glow of that town’s lights above the trees, maybe ten kilometers distant and still bright enough to wash out the smaller stars above.

  One of the cement shacks had a rusted garage door t
hat Jon opened with difficulty and Kyra shuddered at the grinding sound as the door’s wheels ground against the metal tracks. She pulled the truck inside and killed the motor. Jon closed the door, easier this time with gravity’s help, and the quiet of the forest around them invaded the truck. There were no lights, no sounds of motors in pursuit.

  “I think we’re clean,” Kyra offered.

  “I think you’re right.” Jon ran his hands through his hair, then dropped his head back against the seat. “I guess I’ve slept in worse places.”

  “Like either of us will be able to sleep after that,” Kyra said. She opened her door, stepped out, and reached for her pack in the truck bed.

  “You’d be surprised. The body tends to collapse after intense stress is relieved.”

  “I’m not there yet,” she told him. Her hands were shaking, whether from the stress or the adrenaline finally burning off, she didn’t know. “I got it, Jon. I was right. That building at the south end was a security shack. The video cameras connected to the base system there and I was able to tap the line and get video from the rest of the base. We’ve got to upload the file. It’s almost twenty gigabytes . . . almost filled up the iPad’s storage. It’s going to take a while to transmit.”

  “I left your transceiver on the hill.”

  Kyra stopped, then cursed. “You didn’t bring one?”

  “Just a short range unit so I could talk to you. I was in a bit of a hurry going out the door. Can you get a cell signal out here?” he asked.

  Kyra checked the iPad. “No.”

  “We should keep our heads down tonight,” he suggested. “We can try to move into Puerto Cabello tomorrow . . . get close enough to get a call out.”

  Kyra nodded, suddenly too tired to come up with another plan, much less argue with Jon’s. She leaned over. “Thanks for coming. Saved my tail.” And she kissed him on the cheek for the second time in three days.

  “You got lucky,” Jon said.

  “Better lucky than good any day.”

  “Luck can’t outrun stupid forever,” he told her.

  DAY SIX

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The truck was a smoking hulk, wisps of charred rubber and upholstery rising in the air like strings. The metal frame was still hot and the vegetation beneath was a black waste for several meters around. Even identifying the make and model would be difficult.

  Elham stared at the burned wreckage and suppressed the frustration trying to rise in his chest. Emotion was not helpful at such moments, a lesson the SEBIN soldiers encircling the area clearly had not learned. Elham knew curses when he heard them in any language.

  One of his own subordinates walked over, his Kaybhar rifle slung across his back, a cigarette hanging from his mouth smoked down almost to the nub. “What news?” Elham asked him.

  “From what I can discern, there was a second vehicle here; we can tell that much from the tracks. But the trail disappears at the road. They went east but beyond that, we know nothing,” the soldier said.

  “Where is Carreño?” Elham asked.

  “The infirmary,” the soldier replied. “He encountered one of the spies in a small building at the southern end of the facility and received a fierce beating for his trouble. The rumor is that he was thrashed by a woman.”

  Elham looked at the man, surprised. “A woman? Then he is more pathetic than I believed,” he announced.

  “Indeed. These latinos talk forever of their manliness, but a woman puts one of them in the hospital? And we’re trusting them with the security around the operation?”

  “That is not our decision to make,” Elham said, failing to keep the disgust out of his voice. “Why was the woman inside that particular building?”

  “The SEBIN won’t tell us what the building is for, but our men scouted the area and one of them managed to look inside. It appears that it was a security access point. It is possible that the woman might have been able to access the facility computer network or the security feeds from there.”

  Elham grunted. “She couldn’t penetrate the chemical plant, so she attacked a weaker point that let her see inside the building anyway?”

  “It’s a possibility. We don’t know for sure. I doubt our hosts will tell us anything. They don’t want to admit their failures.”

  “You’re surely right,” Elham agreed, then exhaled a long, slow breath. “This has the feel of a military operation. A spy infiltrates while another provides overwatch from the hill with a long rifle. And the floorboards of that truck are melted out, so it was burned with some kind of thermite grenade.”

  “The SEBIN are convinced it was CIA or American Special Forces.”

  “They might not be wrong,” Elham conceded. “But we cannot discount the Israelis. In either case, until we can prove otherwise, we must assume the worst case, that the woman has identified the cargo and its location. We have to find her and her companion.”

  The soldier nodded in response. “They only have one truck now. They must be traveling together.”

  “I agree,” Elham said. “These spies must be caught, but I don’t trust these SEBIN to execute that mission.” He looked around the forest and back up the hill. “Have a squad assemble near the southern fence by the ordnance field in two hours. I have to report to Ahmadi, and then I want to search the hills around the southern perimeter. Given the direction of the shots, the shooter must have been there.”

  “Yes, sir.” The soldier walked off to fetch a radio from their own vehicle. Elham turned back to the smoking truck frame and studied the carnage. This operation might be entirely compromised, he thought. If the woman had accessed the network, she might already have transmitted the data to . . . who? Who are you? Elham thought. The frustration rose in his chest again, begging to run free. He dismissed it. Enough mistakes had been made and he could not count on these new opponents making any of their own.

  CIA Director’s Conference Room

  Drescher walked in, a stack of Styrofoam trays in hand, which he set on the table. “Breakfast, ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of the director’s chef. Poached eggs Erato with crab and hollandaise. Bagels and lox for the kosher among us. Either way, it beats a load of sugar bombs and coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts in the cafeteria.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” one of the junior analysts muttered as he fought his way through the crowd to the table and took his tray.

  “Gratitude, children, gratitude,” Drescher counseled. “I’ve been gone fifteen minutes. Somebody tell me something new?” The group muttered, mouths full of food, but it was apparent no one had anything to report. The senior watch officer frowned, scanned the group, and noticed one analyst in the far corner, disconnected from his surroundings. He was a young black man, business-casual dress, focused on his computer screen. Drescher wandered over and looked past his shoulder at the monitor.

  “What’ve you got for me, Holland?”

  The analyst looked up for a half second, then put his eyes back on the screen. “The records of all the companies that secured bonds to cover any IRISL cargo ships transiting to Venezuela in the last year.”

  “And?” Drescher asked.

  “I don’t know if it’s worth anything.”

  “Show me,” Drescher ordered.

  Holland pointed at the screen. Drescher leaned over and stared at the records, then squeezed the younger man’s shoulder. “For that, you get to miss breakfast. Come with me.”

  CAVIM Explosives Factory

  The SEBIN director’s phone sounded in his pants. He lowered one arm to retrieve the phone and the doctor wrapping the bandage around his torso was forced to stop for a moment until his patient lifted the phone to his ear.

  “Carreño.” The SEBIN director sounded weak.

  “This is Avila,” came the basso voice through the phone. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in th
e medical building at the Morón facility.”

  “You’ve seen the news?”

  “I have,” Carreño admitted. To deny it would have been feckless.

  “The Americans have penetrated the project,” Avila said. It was an admission of the obvious, meant not to educate his subordinate but to knife him in the ribs.

  “I’m aware. I encountered an American spy last night inside the facility.” At least he assumed she had been American.

  The phone went silent for several seconds. “And you captured this spy?”

  “No,” Carreño told him, another admission that would have been equally feckless to dispute. “She caught me by surprise as I entered the south security hub—”

  “She was inside the security hub?!”

  The SEBIN director hung his head only because he knew the president couldn’t see the act of disgrace. The doctor finished wrapping his ribs and taped the bandages in place. “Yes. We attempted to detain her, but a sniper in the woods covered her escape. Our patrols executed a search but failed to find them. But their vehicle was burned.”

  “So they’re on foot now?” Avila asked.

  “No. We found a second set of tracks once the sun rose. We are searching a ten-kilometer radius.”

  “And you’re sure she was American?”

  “No,” Carreño admitted. “Some of the Iranians feel she might have been Israeli.”

  He heard Avila let out an angry hiss. “Israeli? The Mossad? They are more vicious than the CIA, if such a thing is possible,” Avila sneered. “Fix this, Andrés. The Iranians will be nervous.”

  Carreño was quite sure that nervous wasn’t the appropriate word. “We will deal—” he began, but the call disconnected before he got the second word out of his mouth.