Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  As soon as McGarvey showed up, they would take him out. And for that job they’d been supplied with a variety of weapons including four RPGs, and the new Heckler & Koch M8 carbine.

  Against those odds and that firepower, and with the element of surprise, al-Turabi knew that there was no way they could fail. In a few hours McGarvey, and anyone standing next to him, would die.

  Al-Turabi bumped across railroad tracks, then turned down a narrow lane between derelict warehouses in which a community of squatters had sprung up over the past few years. The police did not bother them this far south, because they were out of the public’s eye, and seldom caused any trouble. One of the members of the Baltimore cell had suggested the mission be staged from here, and he’d been spot on. It’s as if they were invisible.

  The service door on a building marked CAPITAL CLEANERS rumbled partway open as al-Turabi approached and he drove up the ramp and inside.

  One of his mujahideen was there, an M8 slung over his shoulder, and he closed the door, as al-Turabi stopped at the rear of the building where the other two cars and the two vans were parked.

  Odeah came over when al-Turabi got out of the car, and they embraced. The others who were sitting around on packing crates and chairs, making last-minute checks of their weapons and loads, which had been laid out on a tarp, looked up. They were expectant, but they had been in other battles before, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Madrid and London, so al-Turabi knew that he could count on them.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Odeah said. “Everything is finished here. How did it look?”

  “I didn’t see anything other than the normal security. A couple of cars at the Memorial Drive gate. A couple of Park Police on patrol in pickup trucks. The marine at Kennedy’s grave. And, of course, the closed-circuit television cameras here and there throughout the cemetery grounds.”

  “Our sheriff ’s department vans shouldn’t attract any attention,” Odeah said. “How about visitors?

  “About what we’ve been seeing for a weekday,” al-Turabi said. “Nobody suspects a thing. After all, almost everyone there is already dead.”

  “There’ll probably just be the family and maybe a couple of officials from the Agency with their bodyguards,” Odeah said. “It’s just a simple funeral for one of their spies.”

  Al-Turabi glanced at the array of weapons, and at his men. “And Kirk McGarvey,” he said. “Let’s not forget him.”

  Odeah lowered his voice. “I still say that we should find out where McGarvey and his wife are staying, and kill them there. It would be much less risky.”

  Al-Turabi’s temper flared. “Are you afraid of martyrdom, Imad?” he asked sharply.

  “Not at all,” Odeah answered matter-of-factly. “But I do not want to give my life meaninglessly.”

  “Nothing for the jihad is meaningless,” al-Turabi said, just as matter-of-factly. “If we all die killing McGarvey, it will be worth the sacrifice.”

  “One man,” Odeah said in wonder.

  “Yes, but a man very special to bin Laden.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  BETHESDA

  Gloria’s apartment was on the second floor of a condominium-garden apartment complex off Old Georgetown Road on the outskirts. A half-dozen buildings skirted a nine-hole executive golf course, with a lot of walking paths, the fairways defined by dense woods.

  McGarvey, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and subdued gray tie, his 9mm Walther PPK holstered at the small of his back, parked his Range Rover in front, walked upstairs to her door, and rang the bell.

  He’d not been able to calm Katy down before he’d left, and her deepening fear and premonition that something horrible was about to happen weighed heavily on him. Leaving the safe house he’d felt as if he were walking away from her again, like he’d done in the old days; abandoning her, instead of remaining by her side until he could make her understand and accept that what he was doing was vital.

  “It’s open,” Gloria called from inside.

  McGarvey let himself in. A short corridor opened on the right to a small kitchen, to the left on a bedroom, and straight ahead to the well-furnished living room with sliding-glass doors that looked out on the condo complex pool and beyond to the golf course and woods. “What if I was one of the bad guys?”

  Gloria laughed from the master bedroom off the living room. “I saw you drive up,” she called. “How are we doing on time?”

  “We’re good,” McGarvey told her.

  “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll just be a minute,” she said. She came to the bedroom door. She was dressed only in a black lace bra and matching thong panties, her dark skin glowing. A small white dressing covered the gunshot wound in her left hip. She smiled. “There’s beer and wine in the fridge. Pour me a white, would you?”

  She was a beautiful woman, with a fantastic body. McGarvey grinned. “I will, if you promise to put on some clothes.”

  She put one hand up on the door frame and struck a provocative pose. “I thought you said that we were good on time.”

  “Not that much time,” McGarvey said. He went into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he ordered over his shoulder.

  Gloria laughed throatily. “Too bad,” she said.

  McGarvey was flattered, despite himself. In another time, another place, when he was young and single, he would have taken her up on her offer. Gladly. Such things were not unknown in the Company. In fact it was sometimes encouraged. A couple in the field seemed to pose less of a threat than the lone officer. It was a psychological thing. Though such pairings were one of the reasons that the divorce rate was so high among CIA officers.

  There wasn’t much else in the fridge except for a six-pack of Michelob Ultra and an open bottle of Pinot Grigio, but she and her partner had been out of the country for a long time. He found the glasses in the cabinet over the sink and poured her some wine, then went back into the living room.

  “You can come get your drink if you’re decent,” he called to her.

  She came out of the bedroom. She hadn’t put on her shoes, but she was wearing a modest black dress that came down almost to her knees. It wasn’t zipped up in the back yet. “Better?” she asked.

  “Better for my heart,” McGarvey said.

  She laughed. “That’s good to know,” she said. She came over, took the wine from McGarvey, and took a sip. “Thanks,” she said. She looked up into his eyes. “Aren’t you having anything?”

  “After the funeral maybe.”

  She put her glass down on the coffee table and turned around. “Zip me up, please.”

  He reached for the zipper, but she reached around for his right hand and placed it against her breast as she turned her lips to his and kissed him.

  “Nice,” she said huskily.

  “Very,” McGarvey told her, and he kissed her again, more deeply, holding her for several long moments, before parting.

  Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. “We have time,” she said.

  McGarvey smiled gently. “All the time we want,” he told her. “But it’s not going to happen.”

  “Later?” she said hopefully.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, and I’m complimented that you want to go to bed with me.”

  Her face fell and she shrugged. “It was worth the try,” she said. “No offense ?”

  “None taken. It’s just that I’m a man who happens to be in love with his wife.”

  She nodded, but didn’t lower her eyes though she was clearly disappointed. “Lucky her,” she said. She turned around. “Just the zipper this time. Scout’s honor.”

  EN ROUTE TO ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

  The shortest route to the cemetery would have been through downtown, but the quickest was around the city on the Capital Beltway, then the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the river, the city off in the distance like an ancient Rome with its monuments in white marble.

  “Thank you for coming with me today,” Gloria said. She’d
been quiet since they’d left her apartment, embarrassed by what she’d tried. And now as they got closer to Arlington the reality of what had happened in Cuba was finally starting to sink in.

  McGarvey had read all of that from her body language and her reaction on the Parkway as they passed the mileage sign to the cemetery. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her.

  “If I had followed orders, Bob wouldn’t have gotten killed,” she said, staring out the window.

  “You were set up. Weiss is probably on the payroll. No matter what you did or didn’t do he wasn’t going to let you take your investigation any further.”

  She turned and looked at McGarvey, her jaw tight. “I will be there when the man is brought down,” she said. Her eyes glistened, and she shook her head. “But I don’t know what I’m going to say to Toni and the kids.”

  McGarvey never knew what to say in these kinds of situations either. “The truth,” he suggested. “She deserves at least that much.”

  “Yeah,” Gloria said, and she turned away again to stare out the window.

  McGarvey had taken a look at her personnel file. Ever since her husband had been captured and killed by Cuban intelligence she had thrown herself into her work. She was a damned fine field officer, even driven, but she had to be desperately lonely. According to Internal Affairs’ latest annual background investigation, she did not date. The only man currently in her life was her father, and they only occasionally saw each other. Her mother was dead, what relatives there were in Cuba who hadn’t been rounded up and shot after her father had defected were out of reach, and there never had been children.

  Ten minutes from the cemetery, McGarvey telephoned Rencke, who answered on the first ring.

  “Pavlosk is a wash,” Rencke said sharply. He sounded angry with himself. “Weapons up the ying yang, waiting for anyone to pick them up, but no Kilo boats. Just derelict nukes.”

  “Any possibility one of them could be activated?”

  “Most of the reactors have been cut out. The others leak like hell. They’d be death traps. The crew would never make it to Panama.”

  “What’s next?” McGarvey asked.

  “Let Louise do her job with the NRO’s assets, and in the meantime I’ll keep looking,” Rencke said. “We’ve at least eliminated one possibility.”

  “Keep on it, Otto. We have to know where he’s coming up with a boat.”

  “He might already have one, ya know,” Rencke said. “Could be he’s already on his way.”

  “That’s what worries me most,” McGarvey agreed. “The boat we can’t find.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

  Al-Turabi lowered his binoculars and glanced at his watch. It was precisely four o’clock as a black Cadillac limousine with government plates pulled up and parked at the head of a line of nine cars and the long hearse. He was crouched in the back of one of the PWCS vans parked one hundred meters up the gently sloping hill from the gravesite. He’d not spotted McGarvey yet and he was beginning to get worried.

  The six men crowded into the van with him were all dressed in deputy uniforms, with the correct badges and identifications, so they’d not been questioned by Park Police when they’d entered at Columbia Pike. But all the planning would be for nothing if McGarvey never showed.

  His men were looking at him as he turned back to the silvered window and raised his binoculars to see who got out of the limo.

  Two bulky men, in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, jumped out of the front seat, their heads on swivels as they swept the area immediately adjacent to the gravesite. One of them spotted the sheriff ’s van and looked directly at the silvered window behind which al-Turabi was watching him, but then, apparently satisfied there was no threat, turned away.

  The second van with Odeah in charge was parked fifty meters farther away from the south gate where the three cars were waiting. Between them they would catch the mourners in a cross fire from which nobody could possibly survive.

  One of the bodyguards turned his head and his lips moved. Al-Turabi realized that he was speaking into a lapel mike. The bodyguard looked up and nodded at his partner, who opened the rear door on the passenger side.

  A slightly built man with sandy hair got out first, and al-Turabi instantly recognized him as Richard Adkins, the director of the CIA. He turned and helped a tiny woman, dressed in black, a veil covering her face, out of the limo. She was followed by a boy, dressed in a dark suit, and a little girl, dressed like her mother in black, but without the veil.

  They would be the spy’s widow and family, al-Turabi figured. Well, they couldn’t begin to guess that they would soon join the man they’d come to mourn this afternoon. One happy little American family together again. It would be interesting to be at the gates of Paradise to see how Allah received them. They would get no martyr’s welcome.

  Adkins said something to his bodyguard, and then he took the widow’s arm and they headed the few meters down the slope across the grass to where a knot of about fifteen or twenty people had gathered on folding chairs around the open grave and the flag-draped coffin. The bulk of the Pentagon loomed large in the background, and the sound of traffic on Washington Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Highway was constant.

  But McGarvey was not among them, and al-Turabi was beside himself with fury. The funeral service was about to begin and their target had not shown up. How in Allah’s name could he have been so wrong? What was he going to tell bin Laden? And what would Odeah, who’d been perfectly correct to suggest killing McGarvey at home, report to bin Laden?

  “Where is he?” Odeah radioed from the second van. “Do you see him from your position?”

  Al-Turabi wanted to scream at the bastard for breaking radio silence. It was only supposed to be for an emergency.

  One of the bodyguards, who’d followed Adkins and the family down to the grave, suddenly stopped and brought his right hand up to his ear. Someone was speaking to him.

  He turned and looked up the road, his eyes passing the sheriff’s van. He was searching for something or someone. And it suddenly came to al-Turabi that Odeah’s transmission had been monitored. The infidel bastards knew that something was about to happen.

  Adkins and the family had reached the gravesite, and the mourners had all got to their feet. At that precise moment, a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind a tree thick with foliage.

  Al-Turabi was struck dumb. The man was saying something to the bodyguard up the hill. Al-Turabi focused on his face. It was McGarvey. He must have gotten to the cemetery first, and had been hiding like a coward all this time.

  A good-looking, dark woman had gotten to her feet with the others, and she stepped to the side. There was something about her that seemed familiar to al-Turabi. She seemed to hold herself like a cop; probably an intelligence officer.

  “It’s him,” al-Turabi told his men. “Radio Imad, we go now!”

  The hair on the back of McGarvey’s neck was standing on end. Neal Julien, who had been his bodyguard when he was DCI, was trying to get Adkins’s attention. It was something about an intercepted transmission.

  “Here in the cemetery?” McGarvey called up to him.

  “Yes, sir!” Julien shouted back.

  Adkins, finally realizing that something was going on, started to turn toward his bodyguard, when the Anglican minister in his dark coat and white collar suddenly exploded in a bright flash of blood, chips of bone, and big pieces of flesh and muscle.

  A split instant later a tremendous bang rolled across the gravestones and trees.

  The mourners, covered in blood and carnage, with more body parts dripping from the tree branches, were slow to react, having no comprehension of what was happening.

  But McGarvey knew exactly what was going on. The minister had been in a direct line from a firing position up the hill. Whoever had fired what was probably an RPG had missed their intended target, but they wouldn’t stop for long to reacquire.

  “Get
down!” he shouted. He was at Toni Talarico’s side in two steps. He scooped her and the children in his arms and bodily hurled them to the ground as a second RPG slammed into the tree he’d just stepped away from with a loud flash-bang.

  Almost immediately automatic weapons fire from two positions up the slope from the gravesite tore into the mourners who had been too slow to move, tearing into their bodies.

  Julien had shoved Adkins to the ground behind the coffin, shielding the DCI with his own body as bullets slammed the earth all around them.

  McGarvey pulled out his pistol as he rolled over, in time to spot the shooters who were crouched behind one of the sheriff ’s vans that had showed up just a few minutes ago. He’d seen them pull up and figured they were part of the security arrangements. He held his fire because they were way out of effective range for pistols.

  But Gloria was down on one knee, firing at the nearest van, as was Adkins’s other bodyguard, who suddenly cried out and was flung backwards.

  More automatic weapons fire raked the gravesite from the second van fifty meters farther down the hill, and it was clear that their principal target was McGarvey.

  “Stay down,” he told Toni and the children, and he jumped up and headed at an oblique angle toward the second van.

  Immediately, the terrorists concentrated their fire on him, leaving what remained of the funeral party in relative safety for the moment.

  McGarvey raised his pistol as he zigzagged through the trees and opened fire on the second van, emptying his magazine as quickly as he could pull the trigger.

  An RPG round passed his left side with an audible whoosh and a split instant later a grave marker a few feet in front of him disintegrated with a loud bang, flying chips of marble cutting his face.