The last call in his mailbox was from Adnan, who wanted DeLuca to call him immediately. He left a number. He had something urgent to discuss.
“I told him who you are and what you have done,” Adnan said.
“You told who?”
“Abu Waid,” Adnan said. “He wants to meet with you. Just you. Not with a convoy to come to him. The others would know he is doing this and they would kill him. I can take you to him, though. I told him I could do this.”
“Why does he want to meet with me?”
“He will give Al-Tariq to you,” Adnan said. “He said he would do this. He knows that Al-Tariq is crazy. So he will give him to you, to stop this thing. We must move quickly.”
“What does he want in return?” DeLuca asked.
“He wants to be governor of Irbil. I told him you were the one who got Imam Sadreddin’s men on the governing council. I told him you were a powerful man in the occupation. Can you do this?”
“Of course I can do this,” DeLuca lied. “That’s the deal? Al-Tariq in exchange for the governorship of Irbil? Tell him I will meet with him. And that I would like it to be soon. Today.”
“I will tell him,” Adnan said.
At sea, 150 miles east of Cape Cod, Mahmoud Jaburi stood the night watch. It was a calm evening, and there was little to attend to, the boat adrift, with a mild breeze blowing down from the north, suggesting that the first storm of autumn was approaching. There were things he needed to do to get ready, so he placed a bookmark in the book he was reading (Moby Dick, for the third time) and moved to the barbecue grill at the taffrail. There, he removed twenty-four receipts from his briefcase, Federal Express “sender’s copy” invoices, which he placed in the grill. He turned on the propane, pressed the ignition button, and burned the receipts.
He watched the flames. When the flames died, he dumped the ashes in the Atlantic, and then the only light onboard was the glow from the old-fashioned brass oil lantern he used to read by, and not another light or human being in sight, in any direction. This was what he liked about the sea, what Melville and Captain Ahab seemed to understand, the way the sea returned man to his original world, where he could be alone and face to face with God in the most intimate of ways. The only evil at sea was the evil you brought with you in your heart (Ishmael understood this), but at sea, where there were no temptations, that evil had no power.
He looked at his compass to locate where Mecca was, said one last evening prayer, then went below, to where his family slept. They’d had a great day, even managed to chase a whale for a few leagues before the beast submerged and lost them. His children looked so peaceful. He went to the galley, where he’d left the gun he’d bought, then returned to the cabin where his children were. Using a pillow for a silencer, he put the barrel of the gun to his son Asgher’s temple and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, he chided himself for failing to chamber a round, did so, then fired a shell into his son’s brain. He quickly did the same to his daughter, Nesreen. The noise woke Aafia up, causing her to come running. He let her see what had happened, because she needed to understand, then fired a bullet into the back of her head.
He could not explain to them the suffering they were avoiding, but he would do so when he met them again in Paradise, and they would thank him.
Few people truly understood how large the ocean was, and how much of the world was covered by water, and how hard it was to search for something on the sea, even something as large as a forty-four-foot sailboat, even with the latest satellite technology. Scott DeLuca had been watching his screen for over an hour, patched into an old NSA Lacrosse bird that, for the last fifteen years, had been tasked to watch for Soviet nuclear submarine traffic. All the registered ships in the North Atlantic quadrant could be accounted for, a fleet of purse seiners out of Gloucester, the Coast Guard cutter Cuttyhunk on its regular patrol, a number of private boats, but nothing remarkable. Then he saw something of possible interest, a sudden flare of light and heat in an otherwise cool, dark sea, in the approximate area where Ford had asked him to look. Scott marked the spot, to have a closer look at first light, and then, on a hunch, called the Pentagon to ask them to launch a G-Hawk to make a flyover. It would take a few hours for the UAV to arrive on scene, but it could be worth it.
Chapter Nineteen
DELUCA’S FIRST MISTAKE WAS THAT HE DEcided not to swallow his transponder, as he had before his mission to Iran. He decided not to because of the difficulty he’d had recovering the device on the “back end” of the trip, something he didn’t particularly care to repeat. Or perhaps that was just part of a bigger, more generalized mistake, the mistake of letting his guard down, perhaps because Richard Yaakub had been apprehended, or because he was just getting sloppy.
He’d met Adnan and Khalil at the south gate at 1600 hours. Vasquez was with him, as was Smoky, brought along to sniff for bombs or biological weapons. DeLuca told Adnan he’d speak with Abu Waid alone, and without a convoy, but he wasn’t going to travel completely without backup. Dan thought he should have been the one going with his team leader, by virtue of seniority, until DeLuca told him he needed Dan to drive the trail vehicle, out of sight and beyond the horizon, following directions from Scottie, who would be monitoring his father’s position.
Khalil’s car was a 1983 Mercedes, the upholstery on the dashboard long ago shredded by the desert heat. Adnan was in the passenger seat. They headed west from Balad on Highway 1, crossed the Tigris, and drove out of the valley so fertile it had spawned civilization itself, and after a while, into a desert so flat and barren that civilization had yet to find a place to take root. Waid had wanted to meet in the desert, out in the open, where it would be quickly evident if anyone were following them. Dan would have to leave a twenty-mile gap between them, lest his dust be visible to anybody with binoculars. They were to travel west until they saw a man dressed in red with a camel. The man would tell them which way to turn, and then they would see another man, ten miles down from the first. The second man would give them further directions, and that way would bring them to Abu Waid.
“There will be a sandstorm today,” Khalil said confidently.
“That’s not what our weather birds told me this morning,” DeLuca said.
“Arabs don’t need those things, boss,” he said, pointing to his nose. “We can tell by the smell of sunrise.”
“Don’t listen,” Adnan said. “He’s a mountain Kurd who thinks he’s desert Arab.”
The sun was fierce. DeLuca wanted to look behind him, though he knew Mack and Dan would be far back. A pair of Predators circled overhead, at Phil LeDoux’s insistence, both of them hunter-killers armed with Hellfire missiles. DeLuca hoped the technology supporting him turned the odds in his favor, but you couldn’t count on technology, any more than you could count on the kindness of strangers. You could only count on yourself, and your team.
They raced past the empty oilfields, driving west toward the Syrian border, across a vast salt flat where the windblown dust obscured the road. DeLuca grew apprehensive. They should have seen the first man with the camel by now, he thought. Vasquez looked uneasy as well, fingering the safety on his rifle, the younger man in battle gear while DeLuca traveled sterile and unarmed. He wasn’t agoraphobic, but there was something about such wide-open spaces that left him disoriented, without a tree or hill or distant mountain anywhere to let him reset his internal compass. He looked at his watch. It was too early for the sun to be going down, and yet the light seemed to be giving out.
Then he saw it, a wall of dust rising in the west, where the winds generated by the Jebel Ansariya range crossed the inland steppes to stir the dust from the Syrian desert and carry it eastward, a vague dimness that would progress from a flesh-colored sky to one of orange, then sepia, then dark brown and then perhaps one as dark as night, though it was still midday.
Khalil stopped the car.
“Something wrong?” DeLuca asked him.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Khalil said. “I
have desert air filters. I think we are almost there.”
“Yes?” Adnan said.
“Yes,” Khalil said, wheeling about and throwing his arm over the seat to point a .45 automatic in DeLuca’s face. Adnan pointed a similar gun at Vasquez, who raised his hands in the air. “Put your hands behind your head—now!” Khalil commanded.
“You, keep your hands on your head!” Adnan ordered Vasquez. The dog, who’d been lying on the seat between DeLuca and Vasquez, sat up. “Keep him quiet or I kill him now!” Vasquez held Smoky’s mouth shut with one hand as Khalil got out of the car and opened DeLuca’s door.
“Wait just a . . .”
“Shut up,” Khalil commanded, hitting DeLuca on the side of the head with the barrel of his gun. “Shut up! Put your hands at your neck.” He quickly searched DeLuca, removing the transponder from his breast pocket. “This is how you think they will find you—let’s see how they find you in our desert now,” Khalil said, and with that, he flung the transponder into the darkening sky. DeLuca could feel the dust filling his throat and lungs. “Watch him, Adnan,” Khalil said, shutting DeLuca’s door and circling behind the car to open Vasquez’s door and pull him violently from the seat, throwing him to the ground. He took Hoolie’s weapon from him and commanded him to get to his feet, slamming the butt of the rifle into the small of Hoolie’s back, causing him to stumble. DeLuca watched as Khalil marched Vasquez into the desert, the two figures obscured by the sandstorm until they were silhouettes in a shapeless sea of orange. He saw Vasquez kneel on the ground. He saw Khalil move around behind him, and he saw him fire. Vasquez fell. Khalil stood over him, firing six more times before he stopped.
Khalil returned to the car and handed the rifle to Adnan. Then he went to the trunk and found a pillowcase, which he put over DeLuca’s head, binding his hands behind him with a roll of duct tape.
DeLuca felt the car start again.
The two men in the front seat conversed in Arabic.
“Do you think he can breathe?”
“He can breathe.”
“There was no reward for the other one?”
“Nothing.”
“Perhaps we should have brought him with us.”
“Let the sand fleas feed on his corpse. You said the Fat One only wanted this one.”
“Yes.”
“Then be happy. We turn him over and we are finished with this business. Tak beer.”
“Praise Allah. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah,” Adnan muttered, sounding like he wasn’t completely convinced.
DeLuca understood because his Arabic was better than his German, a fact he revealed to no one, since it was almost always to his advantage to have people think he didn’t know what they were saying. He spoke Arabic with an American accent, he knew, but his comprehension was good. Not even Sami knew.
He rode for another hour. His luck could hardly have been worse. Surveillance satellites and UAV cameras could penetrate fog and clouds, but they couldn’t penetrate sand. Without his transponder, there was no way anybody would be able to follow the car. Sandstorms could last for days.
The car stopped.
Men yelling.
“That’s him?”
“That’s him. The famous Mr. David.”
“He doesn’t look so tough.”
“Enough! Let us by.”
He was pulled from the car. A man held him by the right arm, another by the left. He was brought into some sort of building with a squeaky iron door, through another door, and down a fight of stairs. He heard men calling in the distance in front of him.
“Tell them Adnan is here and he’s brought the man with him.”
“Where? I want to see him.”
He was led down several more flights of stairs—he counted seven sets of sixteen, which put him, by his blind reckoning, well underground—through a door and into a space where the voices echoed to suggest a large cavern or cave. He guessed he was in some sort of mine, though there was no musty smell, the air dry as could be.
Finally he was led down a corridor and turned roughly into a smaller room, where he was forced to sit in a chair, his hands retaped to the back of the chair, his legs to the chair’s front legs. Khalil had taken his pain pills from his pocket. He was thinking he could use one about now.
He sat in the dark, he couldn’t be sure for how long. Perhaps it was an hour. Perhaps it was two. He heard a hissing sound, coming from what he thought could be a ventilation system. He heard a distant mechanical throbbing. Generators? Water pumps? Air-conditioners? Occasionally he heard the murmur of faroff voices, though never anything distinct or clear. He thought he smelled gasoline, or perhaps motor oil.
The door opened. The footsteps of two men. Three? They seemed to be building something, or setting something up.
“Hand me that. Not that one—that one.”
“This one?”
“Yes. Where did you put it?”
“I didn’t have it.”
“I told you to bring it.”
“It was just here.”
“This will have to do . . .”
“Is that it?”
“I think it’s ready.”
“We should test it . . .”
“Which is the one. That one?”
“I think . . .”
“You think?”
“It’s not mine. I’ve never used one like this.”
He heard the crackling of plastic wrap. Someone opening a pack of cigarettes? Was he going to be burned?
Ten or fifteen minutes later, a group of men returned. Someone shuffled around him, circling him, dragging his feet, a different-sounding walk from the others, like an old man taking short old man steps, breathing heavily through his nose.
“Take it off,” he heard a voice say.
Someone jerked his head back suddenly by pulling on the hood over his head. Pain shot down his neck and across the top of his skull, but he couldn’t let them know how much it hurt. The hood came off.
The room was dark, until the light from a video camera shone in his face. Then a black and white television came on, the TV sitting on the table next to the camera. DeLuca saw a picture of himself on the monitor, a trickle of blood still on his cheek from where Khalil had hit him.
“Do you know who I am?” a voice behind the camera said.
“Mohammed Al-Tariq,” DeLuca said.
“I am his brother, Dawud,” the voice said. “Mohammed is dead.”
“Dawud is dead,” DeLuca said. “We found his body on the roof, where you put it.”
“It was Mohammed’s body that you found,” the voice said.
“Mohammed has diabetes,” DeLuca said. “The body did not. And you have ketones on your breath.” He’d once teasingly called his sister Elaine “Juicy-Fruit breath.”
There was a silence.
“What is your name?”
“You know who I am,” DeLuca said.
“I do,” Al-Tariq said. He came forward until his face was side-lit by the light from the camcorder. He looked thinner than he had in the pictures from his file, but the man who stood before DeLuca was still pushing three hundred pounds. He’d grown a beard as well, black with a lot of gray in it. He walked with a cane, and had an oxygen tube held in place beneath his nose by an elastic strap that went around the back of his head, the tube attached to a portable bottle that hung from his shoulder by a sling. His eyes bulged, suggesting a thyroid condition, and one of them didn’t seem to focus where the other one did, the left one staring at DeLuca, the right one looking slightly over his shoulder. “Start the tape,” Al-Tariq said in Arabic to someone behind him. “Just tell me one thing I don’t know, Mr. DeLuca—does your wife, Bonnie, have a VCR?”
DeLuca didn’t answer.
He heard voices whispering in the darkness behind the camera.
“It’s not working.”
“What do you mean, it’s not working? I can see his picture on the monitor.”
“Yes, that, but the tape is the wro
ng kind. The tape itself.”
“What do you mean, the wrong kind?”
“These tapes don’t work in this camera. I told you that.”
“You did not.”
“I did too. This is not my fault.”
“Do they work in the old camera?”
“Yes.”
“Well then get the old camera.”
“Yes, but that one, the batteries are not charged.”
“Then charge them.”
“I don’t know where the adapter is.”
“Well look for it. It’s here somewhere.”
DeLuca said nothing. He’d been told, before the war ever started, to expect to see such videos, and that similar tapes had circulated among various terrorist organizations for years.
“Why did you come here?” Al-Tariq asked.
“I had an appointment with Abu Waid,” DeLuca said. “He said he was willing to betray you, in exchange for being appointed to a government position in Irbil.”
“Abu Waid said this?”
“That’s what I was told.” His hope was to sow a modicum of dissent behind enemy lines, so to speak, but it was a hope that was immediately dashed.
“Abu Waid,” Al-Tariq said, “is this true? Do you want to be mayor of Irbil?”
“Governor,” a voice in the darkness said, laughing. “Ibrahim can be mayor.”
“Shut up!” Al-Tariq barked.
The room was hushed.
“The videotape is not working,” a timid voice said.
“Why not?” Al-Tariq demanded to know.
“There’s a problem. We need to use the old camera. Abdullah is looking for it now.”
Al-Tariq breathed angrily through his nose, then left the room.
DeLuca waited in silence, aware that there were still three or four men in the room behind the camera’s light.
“Did you know that the vaccine he gave you, to take and to give to your wives and families, won’t work? It’s not going to protect you, or your children. It’s tea. That’s all,” DeLuca said. “Taste it. There is no vaccine.”
Team Red Page 33
