by Alan Gratz
“We’re getting reports of a massive explosion just outside Nashville,” Mickey said. “A ten-alarm fire, by all accounts. I take it you found something?”
Dane told him all about the explosives—and the force that had been there to intercept us. Mickey whistled. “Sounds like a near thing you got out of there alive, then,” he said. “So it’s taken care of?”
“It’s taken care of,” said Dane.
“Then good work, all of you. It would seem Darius had one last good clue for us—and that the Women’s World Cup was just a diversion after all. You saved a lot of lives today.”
We ought to be celebrating that, I knew. Everything that we’d done, from the escape in DC to the thundering explosion at the warehouse, had all been worth it. We were heroes, even if nobody ever knew it. But none of us felt like celebrating then. Not with the lingering suspicion that one of us had sold the others out.
“There’s only one thing left to do now,” Mickey said. “Go after Darius.”
“Now that their big double-secret plan is busted, they don’t need him anymore,” I said, my stomach sinking. “What if they kill him before we get there?”
“It’s a possibility,” Mickey said. “I’m sorry, Kamran, but that’s the truth of it. We just have to hope Ansari still sees some use for him. I doubt the Lion will sacrifice such a useful pawn so easily. But he may do it anyway. You should be prepared for either eventuality.”
I nodded, but there was no way I was going to come to grips with the idea of Darius being dead. Not now, and not ever. There were three days until the Super Bowl. Three days until Haydar Ansari knew for sure that his plans had been foiled, if he didn’t know already. Three days until Darius Smith was expendable.
We had to find my brother before then.
Mickey told us to call again when we got to Arizona, and said his good-byes.
“You’ll notice he didn’t say anything about the size of the strike force that intercepted us at the warehouse,” Jimmy said when the call was finished.
“So what?” I said.
“So there was only one other person who knew we were going to be at that warehouse tonight and could have tipped off the bad guys,” Jimmy said. “Mickey Hagan.”
MICKEY? THE TRAITOR? IT MADE NO SENSE. WHY would he be in contact with Haydar Ansari? Why would he betray us? The man I knew wouldn’t do that. But of course I’d only known Mickey for a couple of months. Yes, he’d arranged for me to break out of the DHS facility, but what if he had some other reason for doing it? What if this was all some elaborate setup to make it look like Darius and I had been in on it all along?
I frowned as I climbed back into the van. Maybe Mickey and Ansari being in contact did make sense. Who better for a terrorist to have on his side than someone inside the halls of the DHS and the CIA, someone whom nobody listened to, but who heard everything? Somebody to warn him when the authorities were getting too close. Was that how Haydar Ansari had stayed two steps ahead of the United States at every turn? When it came right down to it, I realized, I didn’t know anything about Mickey Hagan. Not really. Even the story about his brother might have been made up.
For all I knew, he could be sending me, Jimmy, Aaliyah, Dane, all of us, into a trap.
We rode together in the van, each of us alone with our thoughts. Aaliyah drove and Jimmy sat up front beside her. Dane and I eventually went to sleep. In the morning, Aaliyah and Jimmy slept while Dane drove and I sat beside him. Never, I noticed, did three of us sleep while only one of us was awake. I guess we were all too suspicious of each other now. And I hated that.
Jimmy saw my unhappiness on my face when we traded places in Oklahoma City. “All part of the game, kid,” he said with a humorless smile.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, WE STOPPED AT A GAS station just outside Albuquerque and stretched our legs. We’d driven all night and into the next afternoon. It was less than two days until the Super Bowl, and we were seven hours away from Phoenix by major roads. But we weren’t taking major roads. It was going to take us at least another eleven hours, Jimmy figured, taking the back roads that kept us away from the authorities.
Eleven hours until we could begin our hunt for Darius.
I was restless. I wanted to be there already. Dane must have noticed, because he offered to work with me on some standing self-defense moves while Jimmy and Aaliyah were inside buying food. He showed me the most vulnerable parts of the body to attack, and we practiced attacking each other in the dusty, late-afternoon glow of New Mexico.
Dane blocked a kick at his knees, and I paused, catching my breath.
“I couldn’t take that gun from that guy in the warehouse,” I said.
“No,” Dane said. “I told you. It’s hard to do it on somebody stronger than you.”
“He would have killed me,” I said, blocking one of Dane’s slow-motion punches.
“You bought yourself time,” he said.
“Enough time for you to save me,” I said. “Thank you.”
Dane shrugged. “Sometimes it’s all about who’s got your back.” He blocked another of my attacks. Even though I did mine at full strength and full speed—at Dane’s insistence—he always stopped me.
“What about you, Kamran?” Dane asked. “You got my back?”
“Of course,” I said.
“So you weren’t the one who ratted us out?” Dane asked.
I dropped my fists. “Seriously? Seriously?”
“Your mom is Iranian. Maybe she raised you and your brother to be terrorists.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, from Dane of all people. “My mom raised us to love America,” I spat, growing angry. Dane threw a punch, and I batted it away. “Darius and I have a code. A code of honor.”
“This code have anything to do with becoming a martyr?”
“No!” I said. “It’s about being strong, and brave, and helping people.”
“Helping people die at the hands of your terrorist buddies?” Dane said.
I threw myself at him, fist pulled back to punch him in the face. Before I could even take a swing, he spun me around, twisted one arm behind my back, and used his other arm to put me in a choke hold. I fought uselessly to get free as he forced me to the ground.
“Stop. Calm down,” he said quietly in my ear. “Kamran, listen to me. I don’t believe you or your brother are terrorists, and I know you didn’t sell us out back there.”
I stopped struggling. “But—then why—?”
“I’ve seen you lose your cool before, and I wanted to show you what it gets you. You just made some bad decisions. Really bad decisions. Because you let your anger blind you. Do you see that?”
I was on my knees, arm pinned painfully back, with an ex–Green Beret about to strangle me. I could see that I had maybe made some bad decisions right then.
I nodded, and Dane let me go and helped me to my feet.
“You’re angry,” Dane said. “Anger can be good. It can keep you focused. Alive. If you control it. When it controls you, you’re dead. Trust me, I know.” He paused, and I saw something more in his usually stonelike face. Was it sadness? Regret?
“What were you angry about?” I asked. “Does it have something to with your other-than-honorable discharge?”
I regretted it almost as soon as I’d said it. Dane’s eyes flashed like he might put me back in that headlock and actually choke me, but then the fire went away and he was cool, collected Dane again.
“It has everything to do with my other-than-honorable discharge,” he said, and then he told me why.
“YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PTSD?” DANE ASKED.
I nodded. You couldn’t be a part of a military family without knowing about it. PTSD stood for post-traumatic stress disorder. People who’d been in really scary situations got it. Soldiers who’d seen active duty especially. You might get it even if you weren’t physically hurt yourself—just seeing other people get all shot up and blown up could do it. Once you had PTSD, any kind of stressful situat
ion could set you off. Maybe you’d have flashbacks, or nightmares. Maybe you’d lose the ability to connect with people, or feel depressed. Or maybe you’d get angry real easily and lash out at people for no reason. Hurt people.
“Got it good after the Battle of Khafji,” Dane said. “The army, they teach you to suck it up. Deal with stuff on your own. Soldiers generally aren’t ‘talk it out’ kind of guys, you know? So when I started to get the shakes, when I started to jump at every explosion, when I started to get angry at every little thing, I didn’t tell anybody about it. I chose to self-medicate. With pills. I knew how to find the right drugs in the med tent.”
“They caught you stealing medicine,” I said.
Dane shook his head. “I got away with it. Then one day we were on patrol, and I was so out of it from the meds I was on that I missed something. Buddy of mine almost got killed. Didn’t, but almost. Because I wasn’t there, you know? I was there, but I wasn’t there in the head. I didn’t have my buddy’s back.”
“Sometimes it’s all about who’s got your back,” I said, repeating Dane’s words back to him.
“Exactly. And out there, it was life and death, every minute of every day. I didn’t care if I flushed my own life down the toilet, but I couldn’t be a danger to my team. ‘I will not fail those with whom I serve.’ It’s part of the Special Forces Creed. I couldn’t let that one slide. So I turned myself in.”
Dane sat on a bench, his arms on his knees.
“For my honesty, I was given an other-than-honorable discharge—just one step above dishonorable discharge. Cut loose. Sent home—wherever that is for a soldier with no family. I took up residence on a bar stool in a dive bar in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and paid a year’s rent, one drink at a time. That’s where Mick found me.”
“Mickey Hagan?”
“He needed a man to do a job for him. Told me I was that man. But I had to get cleaned up first. He got me into rehab. Therapy. He was the only one to ever give me a second chance. I thought my life was over at twenty-four, but Mick changed all that. I mean, every day is still a challenge. I still get jumpy. Tense. Angry sometimes. But I control it; it doesn’t control me.” Dane paused. “So tell me about this code you and your brother have. This Code of Honor.”
I shrugged. “It’s just something we made up when we were kids.”
Dane looked off into the distance. “Jimmy calls all this a game. The spy business. It’s a sick game, if it is one. You play long enough, every part of you that ain’t bolted down gets stripped away. Friends, family, ideals—they come loose. They fly away, and one day you look down and you’re all that’s left. You and whatever code you live by. Call it a code of ethics or code of honor or whatever. It’s who you are inside. It’s how you live your life. How you, Kamran Smith, are gonna deal with everything the game throws at you today, tomorrow, and the rest of your life. If you really do have a code, you hang on to it. You lock it up tight, deep inside, and you live by it. ’Cause in the end, it’s all you’re really ever going to have.”
A BLUE ROAD SIGN SAID “THE GRAND CANYON STATE Welcomes You” as we crossed the border from New Mexico. On the sign were the star and sunburst of the Arizona state flag, the yellow and orange colors matching the sky as the sun rose behind us.
It was cool in the van, but not cold—the temperature was supposed to hit seventy-five degrees today. Late January in Arizona. I was glad to be back. The warmer weather as we’d driven west made me feel like I was coming out of hibernation. I was ready to wake up.
It took us another four hours to get to Apache Junction, on the outskirts of Phoenix, but we used the time to talk strategy.
“Show ’em the map,” Dane said from the driver’s seat.
Jimmy called up a detailed 3-D map of the Tonto National Forest on his laptop.
“Here’s the mountain you think you saw in the video,” Jimmy said.
“I know I saw,” I corrected him. “Superstition Mountain.”
“All right, all right,” Jimmy said, not wanting a fight. “I took still shots from the video and ran them through a graphic plotter.” On the screen, the image of the silhouetted mountain I’d seen in the video appeared, and then a 3-D map materialized on top of it, spun, reoriented itself on the horizon line, and settled in along the same contours of the shadowy mountain. “If this is the same mountain, this is where it was seen from.” The map swept down and away from us, the mountain growing smaller but more defined in the background, and there was a red pin stuck in the map in a small valley in the foothills. Jimmy clicked a button, and a pie-shaped wedge of a lighter color stretched out from the mountain to the foreground, encompassing the little red pin. “Best I can calculate based on the angle and location of that mountain compared to the sun,” he said, “that video was shot somewhere in this region. I figure their camp can’t be too far away.”
“There are caves in these mountains,” I said. “That’s where I’d be hiding, if it were me.”
“Right,” Jimmy said. “If it were you.”
He was back to the traitor business again, like I was leading them into a trap. I was about to tell him, again, that I wasn’t the one to betray us, but Dane interrupted.
“Enough, Jimmy. We need to get up into those mountains, but we can’t take the van. There are no roads. Not near enough.”
“We can go on horseback,” I said. “It’s easiest that way. I know where we can rent some.”
I didn’t take them to the horse ranch where my mom works. Worked. They would recognize me there. But there was another horse ranch I knew about a few miles away. I waited in the van with Jimmy while Dane and Aaliyah went inside to arrange our ride.
“I’m not a traitor,” I told Jimmy. He was packing electronic equipment into a backpack to take with him. “I didn’t betray us. I wouldn’t do that.”
“So you say,” Jimmy said.
I felt myself getting mad again. “I wouldn’t.”
“Look, kid,” Jimmy said. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s you. But somebody ratted us out back there in Nashville, and I know it wasn’t me. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of suspects.”
No, I thought. It leaves Dane and Aaliyah. And Mickey.
“Just watch your back out there, is all I’m saying,” Jimmy told me. He zipped up his backpack as Dane opened the sliding door.
“We’re good to go,” Dane said. “Tell Mickey we’re going in.”
“You sure I should?” Jimmy said.
Dane gave him a tired look. “Do it,” he said. “Then saddle up, cowboys. It’s time to ride.”
“WOW. I THINK I CAN SEE MY HOUSE FROM HERE,” I said.
We were crouching low on a mesa that had a commanding view of the canyons all around. The sky was high and cloudless and azure blue, and the desert air felt warm and dry on my skin. Saguaro cacti, the kind with the tall treelike trunks and arms that curved up like a ref signaling a touchdown, dotted the rocky foothills of the Superstition Mountains ahead of us. In the other direction, through the afternoon haze, we could see the urban sprawl of Phoenix.
And right beside us, tied up and gagged among the desert sand verbena the horses were nibbling on, lay the guard Dane had taken out.
The guard who’d been waiting to shoot us with a sniper rifle as we trotted, on horseback, along the trail into the canyon. Dane had caught the hint of a boot print and told us to wait in one of the little caves that littered the park while he investigated.
Aaliyah whistled now as she checked out the sniper’s gun. “IDF M24 SWS with a Leupold scope and bipod,” she said.
“You know your guns,” said Dane.
“You mean that guy could have shot us coming up over that ridge?” Jimmy said.
“If he was any good he could have shot us two ridges ago. This thing’s got a range of eight hundred meters,” Dane said.
My stomach twisted into a knot. I could have been killed before I even knew what hit me. Dane had saved my life. Saved all our lives. Again. But the snipe
r even being here meant there was a good chance that Darius and Haydar Ansari might really be hiding out somewhere in the park.
The rest of the guard’s gear sat on a dusty woven blanket spread out on top of the ridge—a pair of binoculars, a canteen, a walkie-talkie, and two long duffel bags.
Aaliyah unzipped one of the bags. “Ooh. He’s got an Israeli-made nine-millimeter submachine gun,” Aaliyah said, pulling out the gun. It was a small black Uzi, the kind of compact, single-hand machine gun bad guys are always using in movies and on TV. “There’s more ammo in here, too,” Aaliyah said.
“Take it and the gun both,” Dane said. He looked down at the unconscious sniper. Dane had tied a wound-up bandana around the man’s mouth so he couldn’t yell when he came to. “We won’t have much time now,” Dane said. “When he doesn’t report in soon, they’ll know something’s wrong.”
“Why don’t we ask him where they are?” I asked.
We had just a day and a half until the Super Bowl. I knew the deadline didn’t mean much—Haydar Ansari had no doubt already heard that we’d uncovered his plot to ship explosives to Phoenix in food trucks. He’d probably long since decided what to do with Darius. But to me, the Super Bowl marked a sort of last-gasp moment. The last chance to save Darius before the Lion devoured him. We didn’t have any time to waste wandering around the national forest, hoping we’d find some hidden cave.
“He won’t talk,” Jimmy said, nudging the unconscious guy with the toe of his sneaker. “If he does, he’ll just give us the runaround.”
Dane turned the long sniper rifle around and set it on the ground pointing the other way. He stretched out behind it, sighting through the scope.
“We don’t need to ask him,” he said. He rolled out of the way for Aaliyah to take a look. “Cave. Far side of the next canyon.”
Jimmy snatched up the binoculars to look, then handed them to me. The cave was a dark slit like a grimacing mouth in the base of the mesa. There were no people in sight, but with a little focus I could make out tire tracks in the dirt around it. ATV tracks.
