“He’s lying.”
“Shut up!” someone told him, and then a rifle butt slammed into his ribs. Perhaps a seed had been planted after all. The blow knocked the wind out of him momentarily.
Then Al-Tariq stormed back into the room, his dishdasha swishing against his cane, which he raised above his head and brought down swiftly against the side of DeLuca’s neck, but a glancing blow that DeLuca took more on the shoulder than the neck. He gritted his teeth, though he was beyond pain now, the anger he felt inside huge but cold. His ear felt like it was on fire, glowing red hot, and he felt a trickle of blood flowing down his neck and into his collar.
“You killed my son, my Hassan,” Al-Tariq said.
“Hassan was killed by looters,” DeLuca said. “By Iraqis. He died from his injuries in the hospital.”
“You killed him,” Al-Tariq said, more dispassionately now. “So this is what will happen to you. Do it. Show him.”
He realized what it was that had smelled like gasoline when a chainsaw started up, somewhere behind the camera. He braced himself, but at the same time, he heard a loud yelp as two men entered, carrying Smoky in their arms, one at his front quarters, the other at the rear. They pressed the dog down on the table, the dog fighting with all his strength to escape their grasp, until a third man joined in to hold him still, and then the man with the chainsaw brought the blade down just above the animal’s collar, pressing into the beast’s neck until the air filled with flying fur and flesh and blood, the creature shrieking with fear and pain.
But then it was over as the head came loose. The two men holding down what remained threw the carcass in the corner, as the head rolled over on its side. Al-Tariq picked it up by one ear and set it in DeLuca’s lap, prying the eyelids open so that the head was staring up at DeLuca, Smoky’s tongue lolling grotesquely to one side, no longer attached at the back.
“You Americans enjoy having these things in your laps, so I will give you a companion,” Al-Tariq said. He tapped the skull twice with his cane as the blood, still warm, trickled down DeLuca’s legs, the gray matter from his brainpan spilling as well. “Good doggy. Isn’t that what you say? I want you to think about this, David DeLuca. When I come back, you will tell me everything you can tell me about how much you and your government know about me. If you do not, your wife will receive a tape in the mail and she will see this happen to you. If you help me, I will shoot you once and that will be enough. The choice is yours.”
“Guard him. Leave the door open so that you can hear him. I want the old camera set up. Where did Jamal go? Somebody find him and bring him to me,” Al-Tariq said, his voice growing fainter as the distance between them grew.
DeLuca tried not to look at the dog’s head. Perhaps there was no distinction to be drawn between necessary and unnecessary cruelty, and yet during his entire career, first as a counterintelligence agent, then as a police officer, and again as CI, he’d drawn such lines, the difference between a Mafia hit that killed a hit man in a barber chair and one that killed the barber, too. Unlike some cops, he still believed there were people who were innocent. Animals, too.
He felt an anger and a sense of resolve growing inside him, the Italian kind, cold and controlled for now, but only until the time was right to turn it loose. He slowed his breathing, trying to clear his thoughts. Was the sandstorm still blowing? Had anybody seen the car? Could anybody see it now, where it was parked?
He was staring at the door when he heard a soft buzzing sound, nearly undetectable, a fly, he thought, and then he saw it land on the table in front of the television monitor. He wondered if the smell of Smoky’s blood had attracted it, though it was a strange-looking bug, more like a June bug than a common housefly. It took off again, rising vertically from the table and hovering in front of the camcorder before turning, moving forward until it hung in the air a foot in front of DeLuca’s face, its wings flapping invisibly. In the center of the bug was a small red light, about the size of the head of a pin. DeLuca recalled Scott telling him about the Robofly, the tiny raisin-sized UAV that DARPA had been developing, but he hadn’t thought it was ready for deployment. The red light blinked in a dot-dash/
dash-dash-dash/dash-dot-dash pattern, repeated it a second time, then dropped to the floor. It took DeLuca a while to remember his Morse code: “A-OK.”
He heard voices.
The voices grew louder, a man calling out in Arabic.
He saw Khalil, standing in the open doorway.
“He’s still alive,” Khalil said.
“Not for much longer,” the guard replied.
“Can I talk to him?”
“Mohammed said . . .”
“I brought him in,” Khalil said. “I was made to stand by his side while he killed Arabs. I think I should be allowed to speak to him.”
Khalil and the guard entered the room. The young Kurd approached him, turning to see the picture on the television monitor. He looked at the head in DeLuca’s lap. He left DeLuca’s field of vision, then returned, holding a baseball bat in his hands.
“What is this?” he said. “Is this an American baseball bat?”
“Yes,” the guard said. “Louisville Slugger.”
“How do you use it? Like this?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Where did you get it?”
“We got it on e-Bay,” the guard said. Khalil gave the bat a test swing. “You know that you cannot hurt him. Mohammed would be angry.”
“I won’t hurt him, I promise,” Khalil said, waving the bat in front of DeLuca’s face to menace him.
“This man said the vaccine they gave us will not work,” the guard said. “Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” Khalil said, lifting the bat over his right shoulder, striking a batting pose, “but I don’t think you have to worry about it.”
“Why not?”
Khalil swung the bat back, then brought it forward, striking the guard hard across the bridge of his nose and dropping him where he stood with a skull-shattering blow. DeLuca knew, from the sound of bone splintering, that he was dead before he hit the ground.
“That’s why not,” Khalil said in unaccented English.
“You look like you used to play ball,” DeLuca said.
“I was a walk-on my sophomore year at Vandy but it took up too much of my time,” Khalil said.
Khalil’s real name was Sergeant Dennis Zoulalian, an Armenian-American from Dallas, originally. He’d been DeLuca’s best student at Fort Huachuca, graduating at the top of his class and still in possession of many of the CI school records, fastest lock picked, most pushups, fastest time in the two-mile run, and so on, but his most phenomenal skill had been his ability to pick up languages. He was one of those genetically gifted linguists who could pick up a new language like Tagalog or Czech and be speaking it fluently and without an accent six months later. He’d been deep undercover in Kurdistan since 1999, building a contact base while lying low, his swarthy good looks and his innate charm making him a natural candidate for undercover work. DeLuca had chosen him to work Adnan, but only DeLuca had known “Khalil’s” true identity. The other members of his team thought he was who he said he was, a young, happy-go-lucky, entrepreneurial Kurd looking to make a buck.
“What’d you say to Vasquez?” DeLuca asked while Zoulalian worked to free his arms and legs of the duct tape that held him.
“I told him to count to a hundred,” Dennis said. “Fucking sandstorm. Their plan was to pop you into a second car at one of the checkpoints but leave your transponder in the first car, so that Mack and Danny and the others would follow the wrong vehicle. When the storm blew up, they told us to drive straight in. I drove as slow as I could, but the goddamn storm wouldn’t quit.”
“Has it yet?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been up top since we came in.”
“Where are we?”
“Ar Rutbah Salt Works,” Zoulalian said. “Eighty klicks north of Ar Rutbah and about twenty to Syr
ia. UNSCOM was here twice but they didn’t find anything because Saddam’s guys only told them about the upper level of the tunnel system. Call me crazy, but if I was searching an enemy country for WMD, I don’t think I’d use the maps the enemy gave me. But that’s just me. From the looks of it, Al-Tariq has been setting this place up since Gulf One. Only his top guys knew about it. I couldn’t get a handle on him either, until Adnan sold you out.”
“That wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be, was it?” DeLuca said, standing and rubbing his wrists where the duct tape had pulled off the hairs on his arms. He took a few steps to stretch his legs, first gently setting Smoky’s head down next to the body in position where it belonged. “I gotta say I was sort of wondering where you were. That could have been me if the camcorder was working.”
“Not to worry,” Zoulalian said, kneeling and searching the fallen guard for weapons or anything else they could use, handing the AK-47 he’d carried to DeLuca. “I fucked up the tapes, just in case. The spare camera, too. Besides, I was watching the whole thing on Fly-o-Vision.” He picked up the Robofly and put it in his pocket. “They’re rechargeable. Sends the picture wireless to my PDA.”
He reached into the bag he carried and handed DeLuca his transponder, his satellite phone, and his Smith and Wesson.
“I couldn’t find your Beretta,” he said.
“This’ll do,” DeLuca said, putting his gun in his pants pocket.
“I brought these, too,” Dennis said, handing DeLuca his pain pills. “Sorry about the whack on the head, but . . . you know.”
“I know,” DeLuca said, pocketing the pills. “Maybe later.” He checked the battery power on his phone. “What the fuck was up with trying to bring a bomb in at the gate? Were you trying to convince Adnan you were with him?”
“That’s the way I played it,” Zoulalian said, “but honestly, I have no idea how that got there. Somebody planted it on me.”
“Adnan?”
“No way,” Zoulalian said. “But believe it or not, there’s a lot of other guys out there who don’t like me.”
“I’m sure they would if they got to know you,” DeLuca said.
“So what’s the plan?” Zoulalian said. “I was hoping you had one.”
“What are we looking at?”
“Twelve guys, or thirteen, counting Adnan, or actually twelve again, subtracting this guy. One guy’s upstairs at the door at all times, and one guy walks the perimeter, but the rest are down here. There’s an elevator but it only works with a key. Fat boy couldn’t get in and out without it so I’m guessing he keeps the key. Him, Ibrahim, and Abu Waid are the top three. The others are just flunkies. The elevator opens at the bottom on a big main room with a bunch of computers and a kitchen and a TV connected to a satellite dish up top. There’s a room for living quarters off the main room. They got a bunch of small arms and a couple RPGs but that’s about it, as far as I can tell.”
“Desktops or laptops?”
“Both. Al-Tariq only uses a laptop.”
“Then that’s the one we want. Communications?”
“Some kind of land line, I think, but I couldn’t spot anything driving in, due to the storm. It’d be underground anyway, if you were thinking of cutting the lines. We could find it, but it would take time. Needless to say, we’re too deep for the sat phone or the transponder.”
“Could we cut the power?”
“Maybe, but we’d lose the lights,” Zoulalian said. “The salt mines go on for miles. Big enough for two trucks to pass each other, but it’s a total maze. I’d hate to be stuck in there without lights. Not with Injun Joe on the loose.”
“Any BW or WMD?”
“Wish I knew,” Zoulalian said. “Hate to guess wrong.”
“What have we got going for us?” DeLuca asked.
“Other than our enormous American penises?” Zoulalian said. “Just what we’ve got on us. Your .357 and an M-12 I had in the car. I have another M-11 in the car, but that’s still up top. And his AK.”
He gestured toward the dead man at the bottom of the stairs.
“I think I’d better use one of my life lines to phone a friend. Right now I’m thinking we go up to the surface, order pizza, and then come back down and kill everybody and get the laptop. Something like that. Unless you have a better idea.”
“Not at the moment,” Zoulalian said.
The corridor was lit by a string of bare bulbs, one every thirty feet or so. At the end of the corridor, DeLuca saw a half-opened door, bright lights shining through the aperture, throwing a ray down on the concrete floor. Zoulalian covered him as he stepped quietly in the opposite direction, turning left up a flight of stairs and through a door, holding it open for his teammate and letting him pass through it before closing it quietly.
It seemed like their boots were loud as thunder against the metal stairs, but they didn’t have the luxury of taking their time. The trouble would start as soon as someone discovered DeLuca was missing from the chair where he’d been bound. They’d locked the door, but that wouldn’t buy them more than a few seconds.
At the third landing, they passed through another set of doors to where an iron catwalk, fifty feet above the floor, carried them across the original salt pit, now roofed over with corrugated tin hung across a latticework of steel rafters, joists, tie beams, posts, and struts stitched together with wire cables, though many of them were sprung or rusted through. At the far end of the pit, the catwalk turned right where a set of eight thick cables pulled the elevator up a pair of guide rails along the wall, in lieu of an actual elevator shaft. A series of rungs bolted to the wall next to the rails served as a kind of service ladder. Where the catwalk turned right, two flights of open stairs led to a door in the opposite wall and, beyond that, four more flights rising to one final door and the surface. A guard was posted outside that final door. The final set of stairs was the deepest of all, with twenty steps from landing to landing. DeLuca and Zoulalian paused at the bottom.
“Trade me your rifle,” Zoulalian said quietly in Arabic. “Time for Khalil.”
He called out to the top of the stairs.
“Abdullah! Are you there?”
The door at the top of the stairs opened. DeLuca stayed out of sight.
“What?” The man at the top called out. “Who is it?”
“It’s Khalil, Abdullah—how are you, my friend?” he said, walking slowly up the stairs as he spoke.
“Abdullah comes next. I’m Zafir.”
“I’m sorry, Zafir. We’re looking for Jamal.”
“I’ve already told them—if Jamal was here, I would know it.”
“So you haven’t seen him, then?”
“No, I haven’t seen him. I don’t know why . . .”
The guard was quieted in midsentence when Khalil grabbed him by the rifle and threw him violently down the steps. He made less noise than DeLuca thought he would as he fell. DeLuca had drawn his .357 in case a final shot was required. It was unnecessary. He knew by the angle of the head when the body landed that the man was dead.
The temperature rose fifteen degrees as DeLuca walked the last twenty steps to the surface. Beyond the door was a shipping office, long since abandoned, with a brace of elevator doors next to a dysfunctional water fountain. He went to the window. The night sky was ridiculous with stars, the dust storm long past. On the horizon, he saw the slender sliver of the new moon, signaling the end of Ramadan.
“Where’s the guard on the perimeter?” DeLuca asked, speaking in Arabic in case the man was somehow within earshot.
“I don’t know,” Zoulalian said. “There’s a big storage dome in that direction and machine shops and garages and whatever—he could be anywhere.”
“Keep your eyes open. What time is it?” DeLuca asked.
“No idea,” Zoulalian said.
DeLuca looked at the screen on his sat phone. It was twenty minutes before midnight, or 3:40 back home.
“Where’s the car?”
“In the
loading dock. They made me park it where our birds couldn’t see it.”
“Get the M-11,” he whispered in English. “We might need it.”
While Sergeant Zoulalian ran to the Mercedes, DeLuca stepped carefully outside and knelt by a stone wall, where he hoped the reception would be better. Speaking low, he dialed his son’s number, because he wasn’t quite sure whom to call first.
Scott sounded out of breath when he answered.
“I just got your signal back. Where’ve you been?”
“Little busy,” DeLuca said. “Sorry I lost you. I need support.”
“It’s closer than you think,” Scott said. “Get out of there ASAP. The strike is coming down in fifteen.”
“What? Say again.”
“Twenty-three fifty-five hundred hours, nonnegotiable,” Scott said. “CENTCOM made the call when they lost your signal. LeDoux talked them into waiting until midnight, but they couldn’t budge past that. They’re going to take Al-Tariq out before he sends the go.”
“How did they know where to hit if you lost me?”
“We bugged the car.”
“Scottie, this is nuts,” DeLuca said. “We need the names. You can’t . . . Tell them to abort.”
“Personally, I agree, but CENTCOM says right now, stopping the go is the priority. ‘Id al-Fitr starts at midnight. They think they can get the names later.”
“Negative,” DeLuca said. “Abort. Without the names, you got a thousand free agents.”
“Can’t be done,” Scott said. “The B-2s left Missouri six hours ago. I’d never get the call in in time. Just get out of there. I’m ordering you, Sergeant.”
“Nice try, Lieutenant,” DeLuca said. He knew if they’d scrambled B-2s out of Whiteman AFB in Missouri, it meant they were sending large ordnance, precision-guided “smart bombs” and bunker busters at least. Even tactical nukes. Using first-strike nukes had long been deemed unthinkable, but using tacticals on remote desert outposts where the collateral damage would be zero was less unthinkable than it was considering some other targets.
“Dad . . .”
“Tell the pilots to zero on my transponder—I’ll leave it on the roof to mark. They’ve got to put it down the elevator shaft. I’m going back in for the names.”
Team Red Page 34
