by Larry Bond
“I don’t want it.”
“Well, good. Then I won’t have to worry that you might be prejudiced.” McCarthy’s lips turned up in a half smile. “I’d like you to go on to Baghdad ahead of me and make an assessment. I know Mr. Bellows’s resume is impressive. And I know he’s personable. He and I even get along, for which there is something to be said. But that’s not what I truly need to know.”
“Jonathan…Mr. President—”
“Jonathan is fine when we are alone. Go ahead, tell me what I don’t want to hear but must hear.”
“You’re putting me in a difficult position.”
“Now I thought that was your job description.” McCarthy smiled again, and this time traces of it lingered on his face as he continued to speak. “You might find an excuse to visit Tel Aviv and Palestine and the other countries in the region as well, ahead of my visit. Take their pulse, as it were. I suspect that you should be in the area as this Special Demands project runs its course.”
“Yes, sir, of course,” said Corrine, who hadn’t been thinking that at all; she had plenty of work to do in Washington, and her role was to supervise the First Team’s operations, not take part in them. Then again, she was looking for an opportunity to talk to Ferguson in person. He could blow her off too easily on the phone and made a regular habit of it.
“I’ll leave as soon as I can,” said Corrine.
“Now, now. No need to rush,” said McCarthy. “Give yourself twenty-four hours to wrap things up. And make sure that your secretary knows how to get in touch with you.”
“I will.”
McCarthy started to leave but then turned back. “Now you remember one thing. If you get hurt, I’m going to have to be the one to tell your daddy. And neither one of us wants that. So you be careful, heah?”
~ * ~
2
CAIRO
THE NEXT AFTERNOON …
“Before you blow your top,” Corrigan told Ferguson, “listen to the whole deal. This is a good one, Ferg. A real good one.”
“Corrigan, I don’t blow my top. Your top, maybe.” The old wooden chair creaked as Ferguson leaned back. It felt so rickety, he thought it was going to send him in a tumble to the floor at any minute. Ferguson, Rankin, and Guns were sitting in a secure communications facility in the Cairo embassy, a room within a room with an encrypted communications link back to Washington. They had the option of using video and seeing Corrigan as they spoke, but the vote not to do so had been unanimous.
“So tell me what the story is,” said Ferguson. “Why are we being jerked off one wild goose chase and put on another?”
“How’d you know there was a new assignment?”
Ferguson rolled his eyes for the others. “Spill it, Jack,” he told Corrigan.
“Khazaal. Nisieen Khazaal.”
“That’s it?”
“The name doesn’t mean anything to you? Jesus, Ferg, where have you been? This is only the most infamous Iraqi scumbag going. I bet Rankin knows who he is.”
“Yeah, he’s at the top of the Who’s Who of World Scumbags,” said Rankin.
“Where did we get this?” asked Ferguson.
“Mossad. Came from the top. I think Parnelles huddled with Ms. Alston, and here we are.”
Corrigan gave them everything he knew about Khazaal, which wasn’t all that much. The Israelis either didn’t know or wouldn’t say where exactly he was going. The Agency had several indications that he had moved west from the Tikrit area—a favorite of Rankin’s—and theorized that he was near the border, though not yet across. Several groups tied to his organization had transferred funds into bank accounts used by smugglers, and Iraqi intelligence had several leads about where he was in the western desert.
“Yeah, Iraqi intelligence,” said Rankin. “Hajjis with IQs equal to their shoe sizes.”
“The assignment is to locate and apprehend,” said Corrigan, ignoring him. “Apprehend as in arrest, as in bring him back alive.”
“And what do I do when he tells me to get bent?” said Ferguson. “Rhetorical question, Jack,” he added quickly. “Mossad involved?”
“No. They’re tied up.”
“Where’s Thera?”
“I put her on a plane to Athens. We’ve asked for a liaison from the Iraqi security service. Where do you want him?”
“Paradise,” said Rankin.
“I don’t know yet,” said Ferguson. Mossad’s posture struck him as odd; if they bothered to pass something along, they almost always provided a complete dossier and at least a liaison to feed back notes. “Listen, I want to talk to Parnelles.”
“Why?”
“I’m having some trouble with my 401K.”
“We don’t have a 40IK plan.”
Guns and Rankin both started to laugh. Ferguson grinned, relaxing a little. “Get him for me, will you?”
“I can’t just snap my fingers and get him on the line.”
“Use the bat phone, Robin.”
“Come on Ferg. Parnelles is traveling. I don’t know where he is. I can leave a message.”
“Tell him I want to talk to him, not you. Say it’s important.”
“OK. Listen, Corrine wants you to meet her in Tel Aviv. She wants to talk to you. She’s pretty upset about Cairo.”
“What about it?”
“You didn’t run the operation by her. She wants you in Tel Aviv—”
“I’m not going to Tel Aviv.”
“Hey, Ferg, you can’t blow her off. She’s the boss.”
“All right. Let me talk to her.”
“She’s not here, Ferg. It’s the middle of the night over here. Like four a.m.”
“The way you’re calling her Corrine and everything, I thought you were at her apartment.”
“Ferg.”
“Go wake her up.”
“Come on.”
“Look, I’m not going to Tel Aviv. Why should we go to Tel Aviv from Cairo?” He looked at his watch. “Thera’s going to Athens?”
“Yeah.”
“Hold her there. Tell her I’ll be in tonight or maybe tomorrow.”
“What should I tell Cor— Ms. Alston?”
“Tell her I’ll be in Athens. Actually, probably Incirlik, with Van and the Ranger boys.”
“She really wants to talk to you.”
“My phone is on twenty-four/seven.”
“What about Rankin and Guns?”
“They can get their own girl.”
“Ferg, listen. Alston is going to be pissed.”
Ferguson tossed the phone on the table. The others looked at him. Ferguson folded his arms across his chest but then reached across and picked it up.
“You OK, Ferg?” asked Corrigan. “Maybe you need a rest.”
“Yeah, a nice long rest,” Ferguson said. “So Alston wants to chew my butt in person, huh?”
“Well, I don’t know that she wants to chew you out.”
“Oh, come on, Jack. But hey, who knows? Maybe some hot-looking blonde who graduated magna cum laude at daddy’s law school can run covert ops better than I can.”
“Listen, you don’t have to like it,” said Corrigan. “You just have to do your job.”
“You know what, Jack? I’m going to take your advice,” said Ferguson. “Tell Corrine she can look me up in Syria if she wants, because I don’t have to like it, but I have a job to do.”
I his time when he tossed the phone, he got up and left the room.
~ * ~
3
OVER SYRIA
THREE NIGHTS LATER . . .
A cold hand grabbed Thera Majed as she fell from the aircraft, wrapping itself around her throat and squeezing tightly. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she felt her eyeballs freeze over. She was breathing oxygen from a small bottle strapped to her side—a necessity when parachuting from 35,000 feet—but even her lungs felt as if they had turned to ice.
“Looking good,” yelled Ferguson over the short-range radio they were using to communicate.
Guns and
Rankin had gone out first. Thera’s unfamiliarity with the procedure had cost the second pair a few extra seconds, which at four hundred knots translated into nearly two miles.
And counting.
Between the wind howling around her and the tight helmet, Ferguson’s words sounded more like “luck of gold,” and it took a few seconds for Thera to decipher what he was talking about. By the time she figured it out, the Douglas DC-9 she’d jumped out of had disappeared.
Thera struggled to get her body into the “frog” position she’d learned nearly two years before at the Army Airborne school. Since that time, she’d made no more than two dozen jumps, only three of which had been high-altitude, high-opening forays like this one, and none had been at night. Everybody said it would be easy—her body would remember how to do it once she stepped out of the plane—but the only thing her body remembered was how cold it had been . . . not half as cold as this time.
Ferguson, arms spread and legs raised as if he were a miniature aircraft, zoomed toward her. On his left wrist he wore a large altimeter, which had a sound alert wired into his helmet’s earset. On his right he had a CIPS device that looked like a large compass. An arrow dominated the dial, showing the direction to their destination and a countdown of the mileage. A pair of lightweight night-vision glasses were strapped beneath his helmet like goggles. The aircraft had been going nearly four hundred knots when they jumped out, which meant they were, too. Their trajectory to the landing zone had been calculated before takeoff, then tweaked ever so slightly a few minutes before the jump to account for the wind.
“Let her rip,” he told her, the altimeter buzzing in his ear as they fell through 30,000 feet.
Thera’s first tug on the handle was too tentative, and the parachute failed to release. But her interpretation of the problem was that she wasn’t in the proper position—true enough, as it happened, though this had nothing to do with the chute deploying—and she struggled to push her head downward and get her arms out before trying again. As she did, something whipped by and tapped her on the head.
It was Ferguson. Worried that she was having problems, he shaped his body into a delta to gain speed in her direction, then flared out to slow down. He misjudged his speed slightly in the dark as he pulled close and rather than paralleling, flew past. He recovered, sailing to the left and then back around, inching forward.
It felt like inching. In fact he was moving at over a hundred miles an hour.
“We have to pull now,” he yelled into the radio. “We’re getting off course. Hey! Hey! You ready? Ready?”
Thera thought Ferguson was the one having trouble, and she started to maneuver toward him.
“Pull!” said Ferguson, motioning at her.
She reached to the handle and yanked, feeling the gentle tug of her harness as the chute unfolded above her. And now it really was like they said it would be: her arms moved up as she took stock of the chute and herself, making sure the cells had inflated properly and orienting herself with the aid of a GPS device wrapped around her right wrist. She was back in control or at least as much in control as anyone being held up in space by engineered nylon could be.
~ * ~
R
ankin reached the bluff overlooking the Iraqi border ahead of Guns. He put down the bike and increased the amplification on his night-optical glasses, which looked like a pair of very thick sunglasses. The wrap-around glasses combined generation-four infrared and starlight enhancement technology with electronic magnification to a factor of ten. While not as powerful as the new gen-four devices being tested by Army Special Forces units, the glasses’ light weight was more than fair compensation; they were more than powerful enough to illuminate the rocky desert terrain below.
Rankin could see a warren of “rabbit” holes and days-old tracks through the gritty soil. The holes were the entrances to tunnels used by smugglers, who used them to avoid the new Iraqi government’s surveillance aircraft and patrols.
“What’d you do, tune the bike?” Guns asked, walking up next to Rankin.
“Less wind resistance.” Rankin rested his right hand on his Uzi as he surveyed the desert. While the fewer than ten thousand American troops still stationed in Iraq were concentrated near Baghdad and the northern oil fields, Rankin figured the Iraqis and certainly the Syrians could stop the smugglers if they really cared to. But smuggling goods was a lucrative business, especially for the local commanders who averted their eyes.
“We can put the main post down in the those caves. Watch the border from here,” Rankin told Guns. “Let’s go mark a landing spot for the Rangers.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Ferg?”
“He knows where we are.”
~ * ~
T
hera stepped forward as the ground finally came up to her legs. She twisted slightly and crumpled to the ground as she landed, falling on her side. It wasn’t pretty, but at least she was down. She got up, expecting Ferguson to fall on top of her any second. Gathering in her parachute, she looked around for a convenient place to hide it. Ten yards away a small collection of boulders huddled together on the ground. That would do.
With the chute stuffed between the rocks, she took stock of her situation, checking her position with a GPS device. Their rendezvous point was about five miles away, on a ridge overlooking the nearby valley.
She was supposed to hit no farther than a mile away. It was an inauspicious start to her first real mission with the team. She knew Ferguson only by reputation. Depending on whom you talked to, he was either easy to get along with or the biggest SOB in the world, but everybody agreed he was driven; he’d probably be mad that she had fallen so far away.
Thera checked her radio, then decided it would he better not to call in until she was a little closer. Trudging in the direction of the rendezvous area, she’d gone about a quarter of a mile when a rich baritone echoed in her headset.
“Oh come tell me, Sean O’Connell, tell me why you hurry so.”
“Ferg?” she said.
“I’ve got orders from the captain,” sang Ferguson, “for the pipes must be together, by the rising of the moon.”
Thera dropped to one knee, scanning three hundred and sixty degrees around her. The only thing nearby were rocks.
“Where are you?” she said. “Ferg?”
The sound of a motor in the distance made her freeze. She brought her submachine gun up.
“Ferg?”
“Yee-hah!” he shouted over the radio.
Thera whirled in time to see the shadow of a motorbike fly over the rise behind her. The bike had two very large mufflers at its side to dampen its engine sound.
“Ferguson,” she said.
“You’re expecting someone else?” he asked, skidding down the hill.
“How did you get down so fast?”
“Hop on. The bikes landed back on the other side of the hill. I just about tripped over them when I came down. Good thing you took your time going out; we would have been all night finding them.”
~ * ~
T
wo hours later, Ferguson watched as a large Pave Low helicopter skimmed across the desert terrain toward the chemical glow light Rankin had placed to guide it. The chopper shook the desert as it rumbled a few feet over the terrain, flying low to avoid the Syrian radars to the west. The Pave Low’s immense blades kicked a sandstorm around it as it flew. Ferguson shielded his night glasses as the bird settled in. A company’s worth of Rangers augmented by two Delta veterans and an Iraqi intelligence officer began emerging from the rear. The men and their equipment had been detailed to support the First Team, providing on-ground security and extra eyes at their base of operations in the desert wilderness. Additional troops were on call to be used for the actual “snatch,” assuming conditions allowed.
Ferguson watched for the Iraqi intelligence officer accompanying them. He wasn’t particularly hard to spot; more than twice the age of most of the soldiers, he walked with a nervous hop away from the hel
icopter, ducking even though it was unnecessary.
“Fouad Mohammed?” yelled Ferguson when the man reached him.
“Yes,” said the Iraqi.
“Bob Ferguson. Call me Ferg. Step into my office.” He motioned back to a run of rocks twenty yards away where he’d parked his bike. The landing area was about a quarter mile from the small caves and overhangs where they’d located their base camp.
