“Do you have a point?” DeLuca asked. “Or are you just trying to get on my last nerve?”
“Dave,” Sami said. “Scott told me you don’t like to fly.”
DeLuca stopped in his tracks.
“He shouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s a minor discomfort.”
“He said on a rough flight when he was younger, you started barking like a dog,” Sami said.
“One little yip doesn’t mean you’re barking like a dog,” DeLuca replied, walking more quickly now. “People yip. So what?”
“When’s the last time you jumped, then?” Sami asked.
“I had to stay current when I was an instructor at Devin,” DeLuca said.
“I looked at your records,” Sami said. “You had three training jumps, and before each one, you reported in sick. I don’t think you’ve jumped since Benning.”
“Look—I don’t want to talk about it,” DeLuca told his friend. “If you want to do something useful . . . go check the parachutes or something.”
The jumpmaster, a Sergeant Green, gave DeLuca and Dan a brief rundown of all the things they’d have to remember.
“You’ll be flying the latest MT-1X ram air chutes, double-layered squares with 375 square feet of rip-stop desert camo nylon, with an open nose that inflates to present a profile something like the wing of an airplane. Without any brakes, you’ll be flying forward at approximately thirty miles an hour. That means if you get a ground wind of thirty miles an hour, if you don’t land into the wind, you’ll hit the ground at sixty. We got very little wind today and there’s a windsock next to the LZ for us to watch, and I’ll guide you in, but be aware of that. On the mission, you won’t have a windsock, so listen to the nav. He’ll give you the vector. Release your chute immediately upon landing, unless you want to be dragged across the desert. You control your flight with your toggles. Toggle left to turn left, toggle right to turn right, both at once to brake your forward speed. Half-toggle, quarter-toggle, half-brake, full—we’ll have a chance to practice these things a bit. This is important—when you’re landing, you want to slow down as much as possible. Flare too late and you hit hard and break a leg. Flare too soon and you stall your chute, and you’re just as dead if you frap from a hundred feet as from ten thousand. You pull your chute by grabbing your D-ring, which is located here on your right chest strap, grab it and then throw a jab with your right hand. You should feel a tug. If you don’t, it might mean your chute’s trapped in the vacuum that forms directly above your back in free fall, so just bring an arm in and roll a bit to free it. If it malfunctions, which with these chutes happens once every two hundred jumps or so, or if you get a partial, pull your cutaway before deploying your reserve. You do not want to have your reserve chute get tangled with your main. Before you pull your main, wave your arms to signal anybody above you that you’re deploying and check over your shoulder and below—we don’t want people free falling through each other’s chutes. Worst-case scenario and you’re in a death spiral on your main with one side tangled, you’ll have knives to cut your lines, but you only have about twenty or thirty seconds. I’ll be on radio telling you what to do every step of the way, and I want you to listen to me but think for yourselves, too.
“Now, during free fall, you will become a human missile. Terminal velocity is going to be 125 miles per hour. If you find yourself in an uncontrolled tumble, simply spread out your arms and legs and arch your back as much as possible and you’ll come out of it. You will feel a sense of euphoria, like you’re floating on air, because you are floating on air. You may subconsciously wish to prolong this experience—you must maintain awareness. Guys have frapped, believe it or not, because they simply forget to open their chutes. I knew a photographer once whose job it was to take pictures of tourists on their first jumps, and he’d jumped twenty-five times in one day, and on his twenty-sixth and last jump of the day, he exited the plane and grabbed his camera but forgot to put on his parachute. Keep that sort of thing to a minimum. Maintain awareness. If you should drop below a thousand feet, it’s too late—it would take superhuman strength to brake your chute before you hit the ground . . .”
Sergeant Green continued. DeLuca was pretty sure complacency and euphoria weren’t going to be a problem, but he listened intently all the same.
Dan looked like a kid in a candy store, shifting his weight from side to side with his hands clasped behind his back as he took instructions. DeLuca saw Sami eyeballing the helicopter, chatting with the flight engineer and the pilot, then crouching low to examine the parachutes where they lay on the tarmac. Sami turned each one over, feeling inside them briefly, then returned to the flight engineer to ask him something. DeLuca saw a concerned expression on his friend’s face as he approached, asking to speak in private with Sergeant Green. Sergeant Green followed him to the parachutes and examined them a second time. He spoke to Sami, who then went to where DeLuca and Dan were standing.
“Let’s get some coffee, okay?” Sami said.
“What’s up?” Dan said, grabbing Sami by the arm. “We’re delayed?”
“There’s not going to be time for a practice jump,” Sami said.
“Because?” DeLuca asked. He knew Sami would give it to him straight.
“Because the chutes have been tampered with,” Sami said. “Somebody cut the lines. Reserves, too. The sergeant says they’re going to have to repack all the chutes before anybody can fly again. The FE gave me a description of the guy who delivered them, so I’m going to look into that. You arranged this through Reicken’s office?” he asked of Dan, who nodded. “Who did you talk to?”
“His secretary,” Dan said. “Washington.”
“So nobody else knew you were going to pull a training jump?”
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “I don’t think so. I mean, the flight crew knew, but . . .”
DeLuca came quickly to the same conclusion Sami had.
“Whoever it is is getting his information from Reicken’s office,” Sami said. “That’s where the leak is. You wanna call off the mission?”
DeLuca considered what the truck driver who’d dropped off his load at Moushabeck Shipping Ltd. in Beirut had told them. Something deadly had been shipped. There was no telling, yet, where it might have ended up, but there was a high degree of probability that it was in the United States already.
“No,” he said. “But let’s make sure we double-check the parachutes we use on the mission.”
Chapter Fourteen
HE GOT A MESSAGE FROM PREACHER JOHNSON that the mission was a go and scheduled for 0200 hours that night. He tried to catch a nap but wasn’t able to sleep, so he hit the “gym,” which was nothing more than a large tent full of free weights not far from the showers, hoping a light workout might tone his muscles up a bit for the job ahead and occupy his thoughts for a time. When he found himself setting personal bests in both the bench and overhead presses, he realized how much nervous energy he was expending and decided to cut back and save some of it for later. He was starting his last set when Mack interrupted him.
“You’ve got visitors. Front gate. Your boys are back.”
Adnan and Khalil were waiting for him at the front gate. Khalil had a walking cast on one leg, and limped accordingly. Adnan looked no worse for wear.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. David,” Adnan said. “I wasn’t sure that I would when we were separated in Sanandaj.”
Adnan explained that he’d avoided capture by diving into a stall at the bazaar where the merchant, a soap dealer, hid him. Later, Adnan tried to find out who’d taken DeLuca and the others and where they’d gone. Asking around led him to a man who claimed to be a member of Ansar Al-Islam. He wanted to know why Adnan was asking so many questions. Adnan lied and said he was looking to join a group, to do something, to defend his homeland. He was taken, blindfolded, to a village outside of Sulaymaniyah where he was beaten during his questioning. He recognized the voice of one of his questioners to be that of A
bu Waid, the former Mukhaberat chief and a lieutenant of Al-Tariq.
“How did you know it was Abu Waid?” DeLuca asked him.
Adnan didn’t seem to want to answer at first.
“I knew him. From before,” he said.
The fact that Adnan had escaped capture when the rest of them hadn’t had made DeLuca suspicious, thinking it possible that Adnan had set them up. His story made sense. Yet DeLuca also knew there was something Adnan wasn’t telling him. “You want to tell me how you knew him? That seems a bit unlikely for a lowly Republican Guardsman.”
Adnan looked at Khalil, then back at DeLuca.
“This Kurd,” he said. “I thought he had sold you to them. I thought he had sold me as well. I was raised to never trust a Kurd. But the man who hid me told me Khalil was hurt, trying to stop a man who had come after me. And then Khalil tells me how after you had escaped, you came and rescued him, when you did not have to. I think other men would have left him to die.”
Adnan looked at his feet, then sideways at Khalil before lifting his head again.
“I was not just Republican Guardsman,” Adnan admitted. “I was Mukhaberat. As I told you before. Each unit of the Guard contained at least one agent, to make reports if any soldiers appeared to be disloyal. During the war in Kuwait, I was given a rifle and told to shoot any man who ran away from that stupid war. Men who had fought for eight years against Iran. Men with families. I could not kill my friends, just because they wish to lay down their weapons, after so many years, rather than fight the United States, who we could never defeat. So I went with them when they surrendered, and I hoped my family had gotten out. But they did not. This is how I knew Abu Waid. He was my commanding officer. And he remembered me.”
“So what did you tell him?” DeLuca wanted to know.
“He wanted to kill me,” Adnan said. “For being a collaborator. I convinced him I was only doing it so that I could obtain information about the Americans, to give to mujahadeen, for the jihad.”
“Did he believe you?” DeLuca said.
“He wanted him to prove it,” Khalil interjected. “Adnan has asked me what I thought he should do. I said I thought you would know.”
“Abu Waid wants information,” Adnan said. “Something he can use against the Americans. I must prove to him that I can be useful as a spy. This was how a man could move up in Mukhaberat, by betraying somebody, to show your loyalty. I think he wants me to give up someone important. To take hostage. I don’t know what to do.”
DeLuca thought a minute. Betraying somebody to prove your loyalty seemed a bit Orwellian. Could he trust Adnan? Was he telling the truth?
“Do you think Abu Waid will take you in if you help him?” DeLuca said. “Did he say anything about who he was reporting to? Where his money was coming from?”
“He did not say,” Adnan said. “But I believe it is Al-Tariq. I heard them talk about someone they called ‘The Fat Man.’”
DeLuca considered.
“We can give you something,” he told his informant. “Miss Colleen will let you know. Come back tomorrow and she’ll brief you. Mr. Hoolie will be with her. Okay?”
“Thank you,” Adnan said. “I am sorry.”
“Don’t be,” DeLuca said. “If we can get you next to Al-Tariq, it might work out for all of us.”
He talked to Phil LeDoux about an idea he had, then called Mack and Vasquez in for a meeting. DeLuca explained that General LeDoux’s office was going to call and give them the location of Counterintelligence Headquarters, which they were to pass along to Adnan, to give to Abu Waid. Such information would undoubtedly invite an attack, DeLuca said, but the information had to be significant. He asked them if they had any questions.
“Just one,” Vasquez said. “I didn’t know there was a CI headquarters.”
MacKenzie looked at him.
“Oh,” he said. “I get it.”
“You sure you went to Harvard?” DeLuca asked him. “There’s a building on the edge of the post that’s been empty since we got here because it’s too vulnerable to rocket and mortar attack. It’s up to you guys to figure out how to make it look occupied. Timers on the lights, some fake antennae and dishes on the roof, maybe a couple of cars parked outside. Something tempting to blow up.”
“Like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone,” Hoolie said.
“Yeah,” DeLuca said to Vasquez. “Just like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.”
Omar Hadid called him at his private number an hour later. He’d spoken to a mother. She said her son had disappeared, six months ago, Omar said. At first she thought he was dead, or that the Americans had put him in prison, until she got a message from one of his friends, saying her son had been sent to America, chosen because he spoke English and because of his profession.
“What did he do?” DeLuca asked.
“He repairs air-conditioners,” Omar said.
“I appreciate your help,” DeLuca told him.
“One other thing,” Omar said. “I’ve been told that when my brother was killed, he was trying to surrender. That he had a white flag. Have you heard this?”
“I haven’t,” DeLuca said. “I’ll have someone look into it.”
Sami’s cousin in Beirut had looked at the records for Moushabeck Shipping Ltd. On March 18, the day before the bombing of Baghdad began, a shipment had arrived on a truck driven by two men, Faris Saad and Razdi Chellub, who signed off on the delivery invoice. All the other records of what they’d delivered and what ships might have carried the cargo had been mysteriously deleted from the company computers. Four ships left Beirut that week headed for the United States, two flagged out of Liberia, one out of Malaysia, and the fourth sailing registered as a Mauritanian vessel, the four ships headed for, respectively, Duluth, Mobile, Galveston, and Boston. Sami handed DeLuca a list of the names of the ships, including the S.A. White Crescent, which had arrived in Boston, after making various stops, on the third of May.
DeLuca called LeDoux back. LeDoux had bad news. The Pentagon wasn’t willing to put the name of Mohammed Al-Tariq back on the most wanted list, the evidence that he was dead still too compelling to warrant a change of status. LeDoux had a sense that something like terror fatigue was setting in. “We used to have just Hamas and Hezbollah and the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” LeDoux said. “Now we have the Sons of Islam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Mohktadi al-Sadr, Harith al-Dhari, the Association of Muslim Scholars, Jund al-Islam, Ansar al-Islam, Attawhid wal Jihad, the fedayeen, the Kata’ib al-Jihad al-Islamiyah . . . Throw in a new name like Alf Wajeh or the Thousand Faces of Islam and people roll their eyes and say, ‘Hey, call me back when they blow something up.’ Plus I think we’re getting resistance from the CIA. They’ve got nothing, so they’re not going to credit the humint from a little THT of ex-cops and unseasoned Guardsmen fresh out of college. Plus—and you’re going to hate this—apparently they talked to Reicken, and he said he wasn’t putting much stock in what you were bringing him.”
“He said that?” DeLuca asked.
LeDoux could hardly go against the Pentagon, but at the same time, he was scheduled to fly to Washington to meet with the secretary of defense and to testify before the Armed Forces Committee, where he would take it up again if the opportunity presented itself, and if it didn’t, he’d create the opportunity. DeLuca understood what LeDoux was saying. It was the kind of thing that could be a career ender. The army liked people who played ball and didn’t rock the boat, a fact that was true at any level and even truer at the highest levels. LeDoux had been told, once, to drop it. The Pentagon didn’t like to tell people twice what to do. Phillip LeDoux was putting himself on the line for him.
“In the meantime,” he told DeLuca, “have fun tonight. I know guys who’ve been dying their whole lives to get a HALO jump in under combat conditions. Just remember what we used to say in Germany . . .”
“‘If you can’t get out of it, get into it,’” DeLuca said.
He e-mailed his brother-in-law, Tom, Walter Ford, and Gillia
n O’Doherty, advising them of everything he’d learned, and to be particularly alert to anything unusual that might involve Boston Harbor or dockworkers, and in particular the ship S.A. White Crescent. Gillian was at her desk when she got the e-mail. She was able to instant message him back.
GODoherty: Hello David. What are you up to tonight?
MrDavid: Nothing much. You got my e-mail?
GODoherty: I did. I can’t think of anything that came in involving seamen or dockworkers off the top of my head, but I’ll check my files. I have something of a backlog, I’m afraid. I was hoping to catch up before they tear the building down and we have to move everything, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Speaking of which, I’ve been wringing the hand you sent me.
MrDavid: And?
GODoherty: Hard to explain or understand, actually. Here’s the problem. The DNA from the hand you sent me matches the DNA from the syringe and the DNA from Mr. Al-Tariq’s CID file. So the hand is/was his, and the syringe was one he used.
MrDavid: Perhaps I’m being dense here, but, uh, how could a severed hand use a syringe? The syringes were ones he’d used before he was killed. Is that what you’re saying?
GODoherty: No. You say he was killed on March 19, correct? That was when his house was bombed?
MrDavid: Correct.
GODoherty: I rechecked my previous data. The DNA on the syringes was not old enough to have been sampled prior to March 19. But that’s not the curious part.
MrDavid: It’s not?
GODoherty: No. Do you remember me telling you the fingerprints on the syringe matched the fingerprints in the file?
MrDavid: Yes.
GODoherty: Well, the prints on the syringe don’t match the prints on the hand you sent me.
MrDavid: But the DNA does.
GODoherty: Yes.
MrDavid: How certain are you?
GODoherty: Positive. In both cases.
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