Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  Calm yourself! he thought. Avila wouldn’t bring him to the airport for an execution. If the Venezuelan wanted him dead, he could have ordered the convoy to stop at any point. There had been a few dozen men in the trucks. They could have pulled him and Elham from the jeep, shot them both, and left them to rot in the woods at a million different places. No, to bring them to this point just to kill them made no sense. Avila wanted the Iranians off his country’s soil, not dead, surely. But Avila was playing the game, trying to benefit himself. Ahmadi understood that, so he understood Avila, no? He knew what he would do in Avila’s place and this possibility was frightening.

  The armed soldiers finished opening the hangar door and Carreño’s driver started to move the jeep forward again. The uniformed guards stared as they approached and Ahmadi was sure there was murder in their eyes. He curled his hand around his gun as the truck approached the line and he started to pull it out—

  Elham put his hand on Ahmadi’s and shoved it roughly back down. “Don’t be stupid,” he said in Farsi. “They outnumber us. Don’t give them any excuse. I will talk to them, then join you inside.”

  The driver pulled the jeep into the hangar, turned right, and parked it under the far end of the Boeing’s left wing.

  Ahmadi sucked in a breath and quietly praised the God he rarely obeyed.

  • • •

  Someone had pulled the rolling stairs into place and opened the Boeing’s door. Ahmadi reached the top and put his hand inside his pocket, getting a grip on the pistol as he put his foot down on the carpet. He turned the corner and looked into the cockpit. There was no pilot, no copilot, and Ahmadi cursed. He turned back—

  Two men stood in first class. One was a sailor, U.S. Navy by the uniform. The other was grubby, dressed in cargo pants, tan boots, his clothes dirty and face unshaven and unwashed, with a handgun holstered in a thigh rig and an M4 carbine hanging from a shoulder sling.

  “Hossein Ahmadi,” the uniformed man said. The American man in grubby clothes translated the sailor’s words into Farsi.

  “I am he,” Ahmadi replied in English, contemptuous. “Why are you on my plane?”

  “Mr. Ahmadi, my name is Captain Albert Riley of the USS Vicksburg. On behalf of the president of the Unites States of America and acting with the authority of the UN Security Council, I am here to accept your surrender.”

  “My surrender?” Ahmadi said, almost sneering at the man. “You have no authority here. We are in Venezuela and this plane is Iranian territory—”

  “I beg to differ, sir,” Riley told him. “You have no diplomatic credentials and this plane is not a registered diplomatic aircraft.”

  “We are still in Venezuela,” he argued.

  “True enough,” Jon said. “Presidente Avila and President Rostow have reached terms of agreement regarding your custody. Technically speaking, you’re being arrested by members of the Venezuelan police, who are standing outside this aircraft, and being transferred to U.S. custody for transport to the USS Harry Truman until such time as we can arrange an extradition flight to the United States of America. We’re just going to skip past the step where they arrest you and go straight to the part where you get transferred to our custody.”

  • • •

  Carreño stood by the base of the stairs, listening as one of the SEBIN soldiers whispered in his ear. The director looked up at the plane door in amazement. “And we’re to cooperate?” he asked. The soldier nodded. “Who is their representative?” he asked.

  The soldier pointed behind his superior. Carreño turned—

  —the woman who had beaten him within an inch of his life was standing within two meters of him. “You,” he said bitterly.

  “Yes, me,” Kyra said in Spanish. “Keep your hands out of your pockets or I’ll finish what you started.”

  “What I started—?”

  “You remember the bridge over the Guaire?”

  Carreño’s mouth fell open. “That was you.”

  “That was me. How’s the nose?”

  “You won’t touch me again,” Carreño sneered. “You’re not here for that now.”

  “Nobody said I couldn’t take on a little side mission,” she replied.

  “Touch me and I’ll have you shot.”

  “No, you won’t. Gentlemen?” she yelled.

  Several squads of U.S. Marines marched around the side of the hanger. Where they had been hiding in the dark, Carreño had no idea. “Let’s not start anything ugly,” the woman said.

  An Iranian soldier approached. “You are the American in charge?” he asked in good English.

  “Out here, yes,” Kyra replied.

  “My name is Sargord Heidar Elham of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.”

  • • •

  “I’d be happy to call Presidente Avila,” the Navy captain said. “He can explain—”

  “Don’t bother,” Ahmadi growled. “I don’t want to speak to that kosskesh—”

  At that moment Elham passed through the plane’s door, followed by Carreño and a woman dressed in cargo pants and a T-shirt, armed with her own pistol and M4.

  Ahmadi turned his glare to his countryman. “You know what they’re doing?”

  “I’ve been told,” Elham replied.

  “Are you going to stand by and let them do this?”

  “Yes,” the soldier told him.

  “What?” The blood drained from Ahmadi’s face. “You said now was the time to act—”

  “And I am acting. I kept you pacified until we reached the airport,” Elham told him.

  “You knew?!”

  “I suspected,” Elham said. “As I said, they lost all of their cards to play when the American spies escaped. But it was not entirely true that we were their only cards. The warhead is no card at all for them as long as it sits on their soil, which left you as their only card. I am nobody, a nonentity to the Americans, and that makes me of no worth at all. It also means that I have little to fear so long as they get you.”

  “You betray me!”

  Elham exploded, grabbing Ahmadi by the shirt and slamming him against the bulkhead. Jon and Kyra raised their carbines, fingers on the triggers. Carreño jerked in surprise and the younger woman thrust her M4 at him, the end of the barrel not a meter from his face and the SEBIN director lost control of his bladder. Jon carefully raised a hand, put it on the young woman’s gun, and gently lowered her weapon.

  “You’re a coward and a fool,” Elham hissed at his superior. “I’ve dealt with you death merchants before. You never fight yourselves. You build weapons that men like me have to use, soaking ourselves in blood while you sit at home drinking and whoring. And you tell everyone how wonderful it would be if you could build and fire the ultimate weapons that would kill thousands upon thousands. Then you start mewling because someone dares to point a weapon at you.”

  “But we have the warhead! We can—”

  “Look out the window, you idiot!” Elham ordered him. He released Ahmadi so the man could turn his head.

  Ahmadi leaned over the seats and raised one of the window covers. Across the hangar, American Marines were unloading the warhead crate from the back of the cargo truck. Venezuelan and Iranian soldiers were standing around, making no move to stop them . . . were, in fact, holding their formation outside the hangar. If they aren’t stopping them, they’re cooperating, Ahmadi thought. “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Those are U.S. Marines,” Jon replied.

  “It is over,” Elham told him. “Now give me the pistol in your pocket.”

  Ahmadi gritted his teeth, hissing through them, and pulled the gun. The armed Americans shifted their rifles. He glared at them sideways, then thrust the pistol against Elham’s chest. “I should kill you.”

  “That would be very difficult without a clip in the gun,” Elham said.
>
  “What—?” Ahmadi twisted the pistol and checked the grip—empty. “Why give it to me—?”

  “I gave you what you wanted so that you would do what I wanted, which was to sit down, do nothing, and be silent,” Elham said. He pulled the gun from Ahmadi’s hand. “And so you did.”

  “You are a traitor,” Ahmadi said, his voice cold. He turned back to Jon and Riley. “I presume that you would grant me asylum in exchange for information—”

  Faster than Jon’s eyes could follow, Elham dropped the empty pistol while pulling a second Sig Sauer P-229 from the small of his back. He raised the gun to Ahmadi’s head and pulled the trigger. The 9mm round punched through Ahmadi’s skull and buried itself in the bulkhead, spewing blood and viscera in its wake.

  Ahmadi crumpled to the floor, the carpet underneath turning dark red.

  “Put it down!” Jon yelled, his carbine less than a foot from Elham’s chest. Pulling the trigger would gut the soldier at that range.

  Elham obeyed, kneeling and setting the pistol on the floor next to Ahmadi’s shattered head, then stood and raised his hands where Jon could see them. “You have nothing more to fear from me,” he told him. “Ahmadi was a fool, but I could not let you have him. He was a dead man from the moment he set foot on this plane.”

  Jon stared at the Iranian soldier, then waved him off the plane. “Surrender to the Marines on the tarmac.” Elham nodded and walked out through the hatch.

  Kyra stepped in behind him, then stopped and faced Carreño. “Your people shot me in the arm,” she told him. “That night on the bridge.”

  “We all do our duty.”

  Kyra smashed his face with the butt of the M4, dropping him to the floor by Ahmadi’s corpse. Then she walked down the rolling stairs.

  • • •

  Jon stood on the tarmac and watched as the Marines finished securing the warhead in the CH-46E Sea Knight helo. Kyra moved in next to him, her carbine hanging loose from its harness. He looked up at the Boeing and watched the SEBIN soldiers lowering Carreño’s prone form on a stretcher. “They weren’t very happy when you cracked him in the head again.”

  “I wanted to shoot him in the arm,” Kyra said. “It would’ve been fair.”

  “Maybe,” Jon said.

  “The president’s not going to be happy about Ahmadi taking one in the head. We could’ve ripped Iran’s entire nuclear program open with him in custody,” Kyra said.

  Jon nodded, exhaled, then finally asked the question he’d been wanting to avoid. “Have you contacted Vicksburg?”

  “Just got off the radio with them,” she said. “Jon . . . Marisa died. The doctor said that the shrapnel he pulled out of her chest looked like a fragment from a .50 round. The bullet must’ve hit the Seahawk and splintered. The piece that hit Marisa nicked one of the arteries leading to her heart and tore up her lung. She never woke up.”

  Jon just nodded slowly and said nothing. “The Venezuelan military doesn’t have any .50 rifles in their inventory. Their snipers use Dragunov rifles . . . they shoot a 7.62-millimeter round. But the Iranians have Steyr rifles. Those shoot .50 millimeter rounds.” He looked over at Elham, sitting next to Ahmadi’s wrapped corpse in the Sea Knight, hands bound with zip ties.

  “You think he did it,” Kyra said, following the direction of his eyes.

  “It doesn’t change anything whether I’m right or wrong.”

  “Yes, Jon, it does,” she said. “All the time.”

  DAY NINE

  The Oval Office

  “What can I do for you, Cy?” Rostow asked. The Secret Service agent closed the door behind the director of national intelligence as he entered. The president stood behind the Resolute desk, shuffling papers and arranging them in a leather portfolio. “I’ve got a briefing in ten minutes in the Press Room.”

  “I understand, sir, I’ll keep this short,” Marshall told his superior. He took his place opposite the desk and stood stiff, almost a military stand of attention. “I’m here to ask you to refuse Kathy Cooke’s resignation.”

  “Refuse it? I ordered it.” Rostow glanced up at his chief intelligence adviser, an unhappy look. “And I’m going to announce it in the briefing. Denied.”

  “Then you’ll be announcing mine as well,” Marshall told him. “If you refuse, I’ll direct my own public affairs officer to release a statement to the Post to that effect.”

  Rostow stopped moving papers, stared at Marshall, then sat down in his high-back Gunlocke chair. “What is this about, Cy?” he asked, his voice tinged with anger. “Cooke’s retiring a hero. Her people recovered a nuclear warhead. She goes out on top, but she’s going out.”

  “Mr. President, when I accepted this post, I was aware that you have no particular use for the intelligence community, which is fair enough. You aren’t the first president to look down on our profession,” Marshall started. “Over the last year, I’ve gotten to know Kathy Cooke. She’s an honorable public servant and a fine leader who has acted in the best interests of this country and her people. Under her command, the CIA could be a tremendous asset to your administration. But you’ve only ever looked at her as a means of garnering political capital and you hate CIA for reasons I can’t fathom. Once this event broke, I had hoped that we could perform in a way that would change your opinion, but instead, I have been deeply disturbed by the callous way you’ve treated her and her officers. I should have intervened on her behalf sooner, but once we learned there might be WMD in Venezuela, I felt it important to support the effort to find it and eliminate it even if I didn’t approve of your decisions.”

  “Tread carefully,” Rostow warned.

  “I’m your principal intelligence adviser, sir,” Marshall reminded him. “Or at least I’m supposed to be. In that capacity, I feel that I owe you my honest opinions. And in my opinion, you and your national security adviser demonstrated poor judgment through the crisis and are doing so again now in asking Kathy to resign—”

  “How dare you!” Rostow cut him off.

  “I dare because I’m a career military and intelligence officer and I will not serve under a man who is willing to sacrifice intelligence officers for his own political ends!” Marshall said, refusing the interruption, his own temper flaring. “I’m a flag-rank military officer, so I understand and appreciate ambition—”

  “I thought military officers also understood insubordination,” Rostow said, quietly furious.

  “I understand it perfectly well. And I’m prepared to accept the consequences of my choices, sir,” Marshall told him, undeterred. “But frankly, sir, you wanted your own Cuban Missile Crisis and you were perfectly willing to endanger American lives to get it. But worse than that, you didn’t even expect Kathy’s people to succeed. You were setting her up to fail so you would have an excuse to fire her. You were willing to endanger American lives just to force Kathy out of her office and save some political capital in the process. That I won’t abide.”

  Rostow glared at Marshall. “She serves at the pleasure of the president.”

  “As do we all. But there is an inherent, unspoken trust among federal servants and soldiers that their president will treat them fairly, and that he certainly won’t treat them like expendable assets for political ends. You violated that trust, as many of your predecessors have before you. I won’t be a party to it and I will resign before I become part of that machine.”

  Rostow leaned back in his chair, studying the DNI with a cold look. Marshall held his gaze, then went on. “But honestly, I don’t think you want that to happen. The problem with being part of a Cuban Missile Crisis is that historians will spend the next hundred years picking the event apart. With legacies come inspection. Journalists will question every decision that was made, every word that was said. They’ll be asking to talk to each and every one of us until we’re all dead. And I can’t speak for Kathy, but my recollection of events and your beha
vior in particular will be shaped very heavily by the next decision you make.”

  The president laughed, disbelieving what he’d just heard. “That’s a bluff. Everything that just happened is classified. I could order you not to talk and send you to jail if you did.”

  “You could, but the press has a way of finding out details even when nobody is talking,” Marshall countered. “And you won’t hold this office forever. Everything will get declassified in twenty-five years, assuming one of your successors doesn’t decide to release it all sooner. It might not happen for a decade or two, but it will happen, and maybe sooner than you think. And Kathy is only in her late forties. She’ll outlive us both.”

  “Blackmail, Cy?”

  “That’s not my intention, but I suppose it depends on what your true priorities are, sir,” Marshall informed him. “But there is a clean way out.”

  “And what is that?” Rostow asked.

  “Promote her.”

  “Promote her?!” the president repeated, incredulous. “Please, Cy, you’re wasting my time now.”

  “Did you know she was Navy before she came to CIA?”

  “I read that somewhere,” Rostow replied dismissively. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “In the Navy, it’s accepted that the captain of a ship has more freedom to act than an admiral behind a desk.” Marshall nodded. “The intelligence community is no different. The CIA director is more powerful than I am in a lot of ways and I think you know that. So here’s my suggestion—I still don’t have a deputy. You nominate her for the post, Congress will confirm her, probably unanimously. You’ll get to install your own man as CIA director. She’ll become the deputy DNI, she won’t have an agency under her immediate command. She won’t have as much power to act, but she gets to serve and retire on her own terms.”

  The president paused to think. “And I look good for promoting the first woman CIA director to a higher post?” Rostow commented, staring at the Seal of the United States on the Oval Office ceiling.