Team Red
Page 6
However, if Al-Tariq were alive, then the likelihood that he’d given WMD to Al Qaeda operatives, or trucked them into Syria, as Ali had suggested, was greater than ever, particularly now that Al-Tariq had more incentive to use them and less to lose. Things like sarin, VX, bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax, dirty bombs, or even suitcase nukes could be headed for the United States (or Great Britain, or any of the other countries in the coalition) in a kind of shotgun approach, where even if 90 percent of his agents were caught, another hundred suicide bombers would get through.
The first thing to do would be to check the DNA on the syringes DeLuca had in his shirt pocket, each in its own zip-locked evidence bag.
“Colonel Reicken will see you now,” Specialist Washington told him, pointing toward the door with a pencil. She mouthed the words, “Good luck.”
Reicken insisted that subordinate personnel hold their salutes until he returned them. It was one of the many things DeLuca found irritating about the man. Another was that he kept fourteen individually wrapped caramels on a plate on his otherwise fastidiously tidy desk, never thirteen, never fifteen—fourteen. He didn’t eat them himself. He didn’t offer them to his guests. They were there to make some sort of statement, a humanizing gesture, perhaps. DeLuca had a sense Reicken was dying for somebody to ask him, “Hey, Colonel, what’s with the caramels?”
DeLuca wasn’t going to be the one to ask.
At a time when DeLuca’s team sometimes ran three or four missions a day in 120-degree heat, without cool water to drink, Reicken’s office featured an air-conditioner in the window and a refrigerator full of things many of the men dreamed of at night: lemonade, iced tea, Popsicles, ice cream . . . Reicken had initially offered such things to DeLuca during office briefings (as a way to get his men to like him?), but DeLuca turned him down. If his team couldn’t have Popsicles, he certainly wasn’t going to eat one.
The trick to playing Reicken was to get him to think whatever it was you wanted him to do was his idea, so that he’d get credit for any successes, and to make sure that if there were any risks involved, he wouldn’t be blamed for any failures.
“Sergeant DeLuca,” Reicken said. “Sit down, please.” He scanned the memo DeLuca had sent him, his eyes moving back and forth behind his wire-rimmed self-dimming bifocals. Reicken didn’t like to meet with anybody unless he had a memo to read first, telling him what to expect from the meeting.
DeLuca waited.
“So,” Reicken said at last. “What is it that I can do for you? Because if I’m reading this right, you want me to reopen a closed blacklist file, when I still have a whole country full of nasty individuals out there trying to kill my soldiers. Have I read that right, Sergeant DeLuca?”
“You have, sir,” DeLuca said. “And if you wouldn’t mind, sir, if you could just give me the memo back, I was hoping that we could both forget I ever mentioned the idea.”
“Have you seen Al-Tariq’s file?” Reicken asked. “Because as far as I can tell, Sergeant, we have DNA, we have fingerprints, we have humint—we even have tissue samples from the damn body. Do you know how infrequent it is that we get confirmation with 100 percent confidence on blacklist case files? Do you really think it’s wise to reopen this case?”
“Not at all, sir,” DeLuca said. “I guess the idea that Al-Tariq could still be alive sort of freaked me out at first, but I can see now that I probably overreacted. Personally, it’s a little embarrassing.”
“Well, don’t be too hard on yourself,” Reicken said. “These guys have had their whole lives to practice lying. I haven’t met one yet I thought I could trust. Just for the record, what was it that this Ali . . .”
“Ali Hadid al Dujayl,” DeLuca said.
“This Hadid guy—what was it about him that you found so convincing?”
“I was leveraging his kid,” DeLuca said. From the look of confusion on Reicken’s face, DeLuca knew the lieutenant colonel hadn’t read his report on yesterday’s mission. “He took a shot at us, but it was pretty clear he was just defending his family. I was pretending like there was no way I could let him go, so the guy started telling me a story to save his kid. But I realized last night, a guy is going to say anything to save his kid, right? He said Al-Tariq was trying to recruit him.”
“Who? Ali?”
“No, his son. Kamel. But when I saw Al-Tariq’s file again last night, it became pretty obvious that Ali was talking out his ass. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not have this go in my file.”
“Just a minute,” Reicken said. “Let me just play devil’s advocate here for a minute. Let’s just suppose Al-Tariq was alive—that would be a bad thing, right? You said he said Al-Tariq was trying to recruit the kid. I’d say that’d be a pretty damn good reason to turn the guy in. It’s been my experience that the vast majority of these guys are doing their level best to get us to do their dirty work for them. You think Ali might have a beef with Al-Tariq?”
“Well, he used to work security for him. And his brother’s Ba’ath party. I’ll be talking to him shortly about unrelated matters. You think Al-Tariq is worth going for? If, as you say, there’s a chance he’s alive? Because I’d hate to waste time . . .”
“Is he worth going for?” Reicken said. “If you’d read the file, you wouldn’t have to ask. I don’t think the Kuwaitis would offer one day’s worth of their gross national product if he wasn’t worth going after. You think the Al Qaeda connections are solid? You think he’s got what he needs to put the Sunnis and the Shiites together?”
DeLuca shrugged.
“What it might take to get the Sunnis and the Shiites together is beyond my expertise. They’ve been enemies for five hundred years.”
“That may be true,” Reicken said, “but the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
DeLuca had bet Mack five bucks he could get Reicken to say that.
“He certainly had the resources to throw around,” DeLuca said. “But as you say, he’s been taken off the list, so why waste our time? Then again, if he’s not dead, it wouldn’t look bad if we were the ones who got him. Be quite a feather in your cap.”
“What’s the hard evidence?” Reicken asked. “You say you have a syringe?”
DeLuca was about to correct his commanding officer—he had two syringes—but changed his mind.
“If Al-Tariq used it, it’s got to have his DNA on it. And fingerprints, unless somebody else shot him up.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Reicken said. “I often think of the old saying about the horse that needed the nail and the king couldn’t find one so the horse fell down or whatever it was. At the very least, we can send the evidence to Gillem.”
DeLuca reached into his shirt pocket and extracted one of the two syringes he’d taken from Ali Hadid. Reicken held the zip-locked bag up to the light and examined the contents.
“And you’re certain this is an insulin syringe?” he asked.
“My sister was diabetic,” DeLuca said. “I recognized the smell.”
“That’s tough,” Reicken said. “Does she still have it?”
Reicken knew why DeLuca had reenlisted, but apparently he’d forgotten.
“No, sir, she doesn’t,” DeLuca said.
“Well good, then. I’ll see to this. Specialist Washington will give you the forms you need to fill out to request the lab work. I’ll review it when you’re done.”
“Any idea how long it might take to hear back?” DeLuca asked.
“From Gillem? God only knows. I heard somebody say they’re running three months behind because of personnel shortages.”
“Any chance we could mark this priority and get a rush on it?”
Reicken cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Let’s not get carried away, DeLuca,” he replied. “You said yourself the man is dead. If all we’re doing is throwing another shovel full of dirt on his grave, I don’t see where’s the hurry. Anything else?”
“Not at this time, sir.”
“Dismi
ssed, then. Oh yeah—and congratulations.”
“For what, sir?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you? You’re the new team leader.”
“What about Doc?”
“Sergeant Christopher is gone,” Reicken said. “I’m not really at liberty to say why, but apparently he’s been having some mental problems.”
Back at Tent City, the team quarters were deserted, the cot where Doc had bunked stripped and empty, his footlocker gone. This wasn’t making much sense. DeLuca hadn’t seen anybody the day before when he returned from Ad-Dujayl, and he’d fallen asleep early. Dan Sykes was still sleeping when he went to breakfast, but he was gone now. DeLuca crossed to the “women’s quarters”: Men and women shared the same large tent, but with one end curtained off with ponchos hung from jury-rigged clotheslines. They shared the same bathrooms and showers as well, though there, a sign was posted listing gender-specific hours. Women had been given three times the hours in the bathroom than the men had, but there wasn’t a man in the unit who found that remotely surprising. He called over the curtain and asked for Mack, but she was nowhere to be found.
He returned to his cot. This was his home now, a large dark green canvas wall tent first deployed during the Korean conflict, with holes where the hot desert sun shone through and too many patches to count—nothing but the finest equipment for the National Guard. Tent City so strongly resembled the set from the TV show M*A*S*H* (save for the wall of sandbags surrounding each tent) that somebody had hung a sign that said “Suicide Is Painless” underneath the wet-ball. The thermometer hanging from the post in the center of the tent said it was 103 degrees, which was nearly subarctic compared to what it had been other days.
What did Reicken mean, Doc’s been having some mental problems? There had to be some kind of mistake. Doc (he’d been trained as a medic) seemed to have a lot on his mind sometimes, but who in Iraq didn’t? He’d transferred to the 419th from the 431st after “philosophical differences” with his CO, but that had nothing to do with his mental state—Doc was as sane as anybody. There had to be more to it.
He set the syringe on the bed beside him and examined it for a moment. It was obvious that he couldn’t afford to go through channels and wait three months or more for the lab reports to get back from Fort Gillem. It was equally obvious how to get around that. In his footlocker, he found the Motorola 9510PP satellite phone he’d taken out a home equity loan to buy before being deployed. It had been a three-thousand-dollar investment, but Bonnie had insisted on it as a condition of his reenlistment and deployment. In the old days, you had to wait in line for your turn to call home, and when your turn came, you only had fifteen minutes, with army censors listening in. Now half the soldiers in country had their own sat phones, on discounted monthly GI Special plans from companies like Iridium or Globalstar or Thuraya. One of the worries counterintelligence had was that any soldier with a traitorous inclination and a sat phone could call in troop positions to the enemy and there was little the army could do about it. Soldiers could transmit messages, photos, e-mail, without any censorship or oversight.
It was going to get somebody into big trouble, DeLuca knew.
DeLuca’s phone was the best civilian money could buy, a 1,900 maH high-capacity device with Internet service at 10 kbps, computer connectivity, an IrDA port, Vibracall, voice mail, e-mail, instant messaging, and picture-phone capabilities at 2,400 bps. It had taken him three days just to program it, using the Easy Start Up guide that came with it, and half the time, he still didn’t know how to use it.
He looked at his watch. It was just after 1000 hours. That made it two in the morning back in Boston. He dialed a number, figuring his old friend would still be up.
“O’Doherty,” she answered. “I hope this is the pizza boy.”
“I thought I’d catch you still up,” DeLuca said.
“David,” she said, a smile evident in her voice. “How are you, dear? I was afraid you’d blown up.”
“Not yet,” he said. “You’re going to, though, if you eat pizza at this hour.”
“Just who would I be watching my figure for now, David?” she asked.
“How are the cards treating you?”
“As ever. Last night I had a sixty-five low on the flop and Walter drew a perf’ at the river to beat me. I think I lost four dollars on that hand.”
Gillian O’Doherty had been the chief coroner and medical examiner for Suffolk County, Boston, since the late seventies. She and her husband, Bobby, had been part of DeLuca’s poker group since the group began. Now Bobby, a Vietnam vet, like Walter Ford, and a good cop, was gone, and Gillian spent most of her time working in her laboratory in an old brick building (scheduled for demolition, once a more modern facility could be built) attached to Tufts Medical School at the edge of Chinatown. She’d just finished her final round of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma when she lost Bobby, but she carried on through it all—she could just possibly be the flat-out toughest person DeLuca had ever met, and between the Rangers and the PJs and the SEALS and the Special Ops guys he’d worked with through the years, he’d met some fairly tough individuals. She was planning to retire, once she’d managed to catch up from a backlog of cases. She probably would have been a brilliant surgeon, had surgical positions been offered to women back when the young Irish girl from Quincy graduated from medical school.
“I take it this isn’t a social call,” she said.
“I wish it was,” he said. “Actually I’ve got a problem I was hoping you could help me with.”
He explained the situation, that he had a syringe with DNA on it that he needed identified against DNA taken from the body of a most likely dead Iraqi bad guy, just on the chance that he might still be alive.
“Can you tell how old the DNA sample on the needle might be?”
“They can ballpark it within a few weeks,” she said.
“Good enough,” he said. “How soon do you think you could get something for me?”
“The FBI lab has always been pretty good to me,” she said. “Maybe a week to ten days from when I get the sample. Possibly sooner. How important is it?”
“Hard to say,” he told his old friend. “It’s likely I’m wrong, and if I am, it’s not a big deal, but if I’m right, we might be looking at an EOTFWAWKI scenario.”
“I’ve always hated all your military acronyms. What’s that in plain English?”
“E-O-T-F-W-A-W-K-I,” he said. “End of the fucking world as we know it.”
“Not again. I’ll get right on it. I’m going to need the previous findings.”
“Check your e-mail. I’ll attach the file.”
“You can do that? It isn’t classified?”
“It is, but I can do that.”
“Don’t forget the McCallums that’s waiting for you,” she said, referring to the bottle of fifty-year-old Scotch she’d told him she’d keep to toast him when he returned.
“I haven’t,” DeLuca said. “Listen, Gillian, did you ever meet my brother-in-law Tom? Miecowski? Elaine’s husband?”
“No, but you talked about him. NYPD, right?” she said. “Attached to the DEA?”
“He’s with Homeland Security now,” DeLuca said. “New York office. I’m going to cc him on this, just so I know I’ve got somebody there who’s up to speed who’ll take my back if I need it. I think I know where to get some support from the Army, too. Anyway, I’ll send you Tom’s e-mail address and tell him you’re going to copy him on whatever you find.”
“Whatever you say, David. I think my pizza boy is here. My cell phone is ringing and it’s most likely him at the door and I’ll need to let him in.”
“I’m glad you locked it. You were always too close to the Combat Zone for me.”
“Robert felt the same way,” Gillian O’Doherty said. “He used to come pick me up when I worked late, no matter how late it was.”
“I still don’t like the idea of you walking to your car all by yourself at this hour,” DeLuca said.
He’d lain back on his cot to think when he heard something beneath his pillow. He reached under it and found an envelope with his name on it. He recognized Doc’s nearly illegible handwriting. Inside the envelope, he found a note:
Dave—first of all, congrats to the new TL. I’m sure you’ll do a better job at it than I did, though I think we had our moments, didn’t we? I’m off to Bragg to straighten this business out. You’re going to hear a number of things about me that aren’t true. For your own good, I’m not going to tell you what’s going on, but I want you to know that I never lied to you. Best of luck. If Reicken hasn’t told you yet, remember to take special care of Dan.
Doc
He was rereading the note when Dan Sykes entered the tent. Doc had explained the situation with Danforth Taylor Sykes, son of Danforth Sykes, Sr., long-term Republican congressman from Palo Alto and the number-two man on the House Armed Forces Committee (with a senator, a governor of California, and three Army generals also perched in the family tree). According to Doc, the plan was to give Dan enough combat experience to make him electable, down the road, but not enough to get him killed. DeLuca liked him. Despite his background of privilege, he didn’t want to stand apart. He wouldn’t have liked it if he’d known he was being handled with kid gloves, a directive that had, according to Doc, come down from the highest levels.
“Where’ve you been?” DeLuca said, folding the note and putting it back in the envelope. “What happened to Doc?”
“That’s where I’ve been. I was at the TOC. Doc’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“On a plane, if he hasn’t landed already. We came back from talking to the mayor, and there’s a memo that Reicken wants to see him ASAP. I go to dinner, and when I get back, he’s packed up and out of here. I just figured maybe he’d been transferred or something, but this morning they tell me at the OMT that he’s been chaptered out and now he’s being held at Fort Bragg for questioning.”