“We go,” said Emma.
The guide smiled broadly and began barking orders at the porters and engineers to get to the chopper. Emma did not smile, though she had equally compelling reasons to get up the mountain. Her future survival would depend on it. She phoned Balfour and informed him that they were completing fueling and would be taking off again in minutes. All further communication would be conducted via radio.
Emma climbed into the copilot’s seat and pulled the door closed. The helicopter lifted into the air, buffeted by the gusting wind. The town of Chitral passed below, a maze of mud walls and battered buildings laced with thousands of colorful prayer flags. The pilot pushed the stick to the left and the aircraft banked hard, leaving behind the high plateau and advancing into the towering, shark-toothed mountains.
Behind her, the guide and the engineers sat bunched together, looking miserable. The porters were crammed along with the equipment into the aft cargo bay. Emma shifted in the seat and stared out of the Perspex canopy. An infinite landscape of peaks and valleys beckoned. The wind calmed, and she felt as if she were floating into the jaws of a great white beast. The altimeter read four thousand meters, but already the mountains soared high above them. The broad, snowy faces threatened to graze the helicopter’s skids, passing so close that she was certain she could reach out and scrape her palms against the exposed rock.
Emma roused herself from her daydream, reminding herself of the importance of the mission. It was a rare rebuke. Normally her single-minded focus was her strongest suit. And so she readily admitted to having been drifting for a while now. Days, if not weeks. Her destination never varied: it was the past that drew her. And now, looking at the mountains, feeling as if she were being swallowed whole by them, she heard its siren song more strongly than ever.
She knew only one person who loved the mountains more than she did.
“His name is Ransom. He’s a surgeon. We think he’s exactly the ticket to provide you the cover you require.”
The photograph showed a tall, lanky man in jeans and a parka carrying a rucksack. Dark hair with a hint of gray, strong nose, sturdy lips, and black eyes that made her look twice.
“Rather on the intense side, isn’t he?” said Emma as she slid the picture across the table. “He looks more like a student than a surgeon.”
“He’s finishing up a fellowship at Oxford in plastic surgery. Apparently he’s the real deal. Has offers from hospitals all over England and the States.”
“Is he one of us?”
“Good Lord, no,” said General John Austen, the air force two-star who had stood up Division several years before. “And we don’t want him to be. He just turned in his application to work for Doctors Without Borders.”
Emma took back the picture. “A do-gooder?” she said, not entirely trusting.
“Aren’t we all?” Austen opened a file on his desk. “We want you in Nigeria. The deputy minister isn’t playing ball. He’s making noise about terminating some contracts with our friends in Houston. Thinks his country is more than capable of drilling their own oil and seeing it to market.”
“And I’m going to convince him otherwise?”
“Either that or kill him,” said Austen.
“Come now, General, you don’t mean that.” It was the other man in the room who spoke. The fat one who insisted on wearing short-sleeved shirts and was constantly perspiring. Emma remembered his name: Frank Connor. “The deputy minister has been dipping his finger in the till for quite some time now. We’d like you to collect evidence of his greed and remind him where his true interests lie.”
“Or else I’ll provide the information to the prime minister,” said Emma, “who’ll string him up with piano wire and cut off his balls with a rusty knife.”
Connor frowned. “Accurate and persuasive.”
“I still say we kill him,” said John Austen. “But I will defer to Frank, seeing as how this is his operation.”
Connor went on: “We’re putting you into Doctors Without Borders a month ahead of Ransom. We’ve wrangled you a job as a mission administrator. Basically, you’ll run the whole show. Don’t worry, we’ve got a few weeks to bring you up to speed. Get close to Ransom and we’ll fix a transfer for him to Lagos. The Lagos mission is staffed by locals, so it’s imperative that Ransom request that you accompany him. No one’s going to be looking at a doctor and his trusted colleague.”
Emma didn’t like Africa. It was too hot, too humid, and had far too many creepy-crawlies. “How long?”
“Start to finish? Two months in Liberia. It’s up to you to see how quickly you can get the job done in Nigeria. Best case, six months.”
“And after?”
“The usual. You break it off with the doc. We pull you out. Take sixty days and go lie on a beach somewhere.”
Emma looked at the photograph again, and she felt a current pass through her. Ransom was handsome, to be sure. But there was something about him that disturbed her. It was his eyes. Like her, he was a believer. And so he was dangerous. At once she warned herself to be wary of him. Six months was a long time. “Where did you find him?”
Austen took back the picture and slid it into his file. “None of your business.”
The helicopter landed on a rock-strewn plateau at 4,500 meters. Emma shouldered open the door and jumped to the ground. The cold hit her like a hammer. To the east, a track of cumulus clouds streamed past the summit of Tirich Mir. During the hour’s flight, the sky had turned a curdled gray. Heavy weather was approaching.
Emma dug the Magellan GPS out of her pack. The device put the distance to the bomb at twenty-two kilometers. But that did not take into consideration the 1,500-meter gain in elevation, the lack of a well-marked trail, or, most trying of all, the thin air. Alone, she might cover that stretch in six hours. She looked over her shoulder at the porters unloading the equipment. Each would carry a load weighing forty kilos. They would be fine. Near them stood the two engineers, batting their arms for warmth. One took a few steps, then bent double and put his hands on his knees. They would not be fine.
Emma walked to the guide. “Get those men some oxygen,” she said. “And tell the porters to hurry. We move out in twenty minutes.”
She watched the guide run off, then turned her attention back to the darkening sky.
Trouble.
24
“You have thirty seconds to walk into a room and commit everything you notice to memory,” said Danni.
“Like what? The color of the curtains? Kind of bedspread? I don’t get it.”
“Both of those. But also the location and type of desk. Do the drawers have locks? What’s on the counters? How do the windows open? Is there an alarm system? Anything that your instincts tell you is important.”
Jonathan stood next to Danni on the front steps of a run-down villa in the hills above Herzliya. It was past two in the afternoon. The morning’s robin’s-egg blue sky had given way to sodden gray clouds. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and raindrops had begun pelting his cheek. Mentally he prepared himself for the task at hand. Closing his eyes, he willed his mind to become a blank slate able to capture everything it saw. He drew a breath and ordered himself to be calm. But all the while a voice shouted in his head: “You have to do better!”
The morning’s work had been an unmitigated disaster. Danni had run him through five more courses. The route varied, but the objective remained the same. Spot the four tails. Each time, he had failed. His senses weren’t as dull as a butter knife. Sandstone was more like it.
Danni opened the door and led him into a foyer with concrete floors, a high ceiling, and paint chipping off the walls. They ascended a flight of stairs and stopped at the first room on the right. “Thirty seconds.”
Jonathan opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was pitch black.
Panicked, he ran a hand over the wall until he found the light switch. The question was whether to turn it on. He decided he must, or what was the
point? He flicked the switch, and a bulb hanging from a threadbare wire threw a weak light around the room. Should he move or stay still? He took a step, and the floorboard groaned loudly enough to be heard in Syria. There was a king-sized bed with a ratty cover and four filthy pillows. There were two night tables with several books stacked on each. A chintz sofa took up one corner, a standing mirror another. He took another step, and the ungodly floor creaked even louder. If he were being judged on stealth, he had failed already. For some reason he found himself staring at the curtains, which were purple with green polka dots. At the far end of the room sat an imposing desk with lion’s paws for feet. He tried to see if it had locks, but the light was too dim, and the sensitive floorboards left him nervous about making so much noise. So far he’d seen nothing of the least interest to an intelligence agent.
Frustrated, he decided to forget about the creaky floor and set off on a circuit of the bedroom. He rushed to the desk and tried the drawers. All were locked with an old-fashioned key. There was a television with some papers on top of it, and next to it an electric fan. He kept moving and found a closet. The door was open. Inside was a safe, and on it another stack of papers. He reached for the papers just as a hand shoved him headlong into the closet. He hit the floor and turned in time to see Danni closing the door.
“I said, ‘Look, don’t touch,’” she said.
“How did you get across that floor without me hearing you?”
“Be quiet and tell me everything you saw.”
The dark in the closet was absolute. Jonathan pulled his knees to his chest and tried to re-create the bedroom. “A king-sized bed, some dirty pillows, a desk that I couldn’t open, and a stack of papers on top of a safe.”
“What about the diamonds?”
“What diamonds?”
“And the Kalashnikov?”
“Come on.”
“You didn’t see the terrorist hiding behind those horrid curtains?”
“Danni, let me out of here.”
“You’re right, there were none of those. But did you at least notice something else by the side of the bed?”
Jonathan imagined the night tables bracketing the bed. He saw two stacks of books, three on one side, four on the other. There was more. A pair of glasses. A pack of chewing gum. Trapped in the dark, he was able to examine his memory as if it were a photograph. “Yes,” he said. “On the right table, there’s a box with a black button on it.”
“That’s a panic button. Balfour keeps one identical to it next to his bed. He is paranoid to a fault. And the television?”
In his mind’s eye, Jonathan made a new circuit of the room. An old twenty-inch cathode-ray model sat in one corner. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Anything on it?”
“Papers.”
“Can you see what they say?”
“No … I mean yes.” His mind’s eye held a clear image of bold writing across the top of the paper. “‘Weapons and Armaments Available for Immediate Sale,’” said Jonathan with surprise, reading from the picture in his memory. “There are lots of items under it, but I can’t read them.”
“Try harder.”
“M4 automatic rifles. Grenades … ammunition … The rest is a blur.”
The door opened, and Danni helped Jonathan to his feet. “Are the papers his?” he asked. “Do they belong to Balfour?”
“They’re out-of-date. Otherwise they’re authentic.”
Jonathan walked directly to the television set and picked up the papers. His recall had been accurate. He looked at Danni, amazed. “Well?”
“Not bad.”
25
Sometimes you had to pull in a marker.
Frank Connor tossed the piece of metal in the air and caught it in his palm. For a moment he gazed at the chunk of misshapen lead. The odds were fifty-fifty, no better. Fourteen years was a long time, and memory warped the past. Too often, people remembered events as they wished they’d happened. Still, Malloy was an honorable man, as most Navy SEALs tended to be. If he said no, Connor wouldn’t blame him. After all, he was asking a lot.
Slipping the metal into his pocket, Connor turned up the collar of his coat against the rain and locked the door of his car. It was a secure government lot, but that didn’t mean it was safe.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, was situated on the grounds of Fort Belvoir in the rolling hills of northern Virginia, not far from Arlington National Cemetery. Its brief was simple enough: to provide imagery and map-based intelligence solutions to the U.S. defense establishment and private industry. The NGA was a jewel in the crown of the intelligence community, one of the sole agencies that produced an actual physical product that could be used to tangible effect by both public and private organizations, and as such, a moneymaker.
Connor entered the smoked-glass doors of the West Tower and presented himself to the security desk. “I’m here to see James Malloy. He’s expecting me.”
As he waited to be cleared, he looked around him. The complex consisted of three buildings. The West Tower and East Tower each stood six stories and were built like the two sides of a clamshell. In between them stood the Core, an eight-story glass cylinder that housed the NGA’s Source Directorate, where all mission-critical operations were conducted.
“Go ahead, sir. Mr. Malloy’s office is in the operations office on the sixth floor of the Core. Someone will be waiting for you on the landing.”
Connor slipped a visitor’s ID around his neck, passed through security inspection, and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened and he stepped into the welcoming arms of six-foot-three-inch, 220-pound James Malloy. “Frankie, good to see you.”
Connor stood awkwardly, briefcase in one hand, as Malloy hugged him. “Likewise, Jim. How’s tricks?”
Malloy released him and ran a hand through his black hair. “Just made watch officer.”
“Watch officer? Nice. You must be putting in the hours.”
“Just doing the job,” said Malloy.
“How many years now?”
“Five. You were right about me being a good fit. I owe you.”
“Nonsense,” said Connor, but his hopes rose a notch.
His relationship with Malloy dated to the ’90s, when Malloy was an operator attached to SEAL Team Six working in Bosnia. During a hunter/killer mission targeting the rebel leader, Radovan Karadžić, Malloy and his team were caught in an ambush. Malloy alone survived and was taken captive. Connor heard the news and sent a Division asset to recover him. The affair got messy before it even began. There were gunfire and civilian casualties, along with a dozen or so Bosnian regulars killed. In the end, the asset’s cover was blown. It was a disaster all the way around, except that Malloy had escaped with his life.
Malloy set off down the hall at a demon’s pace, with Connor struggling to keep up. It was hard to believe the man had a prosthetic leg, but of course, that was the point. Unable to meet the SEALs’ rigorous fitness standards, Malloy had left the navy and moved to the civilian side of things. He’d worked for a few of the bigger private contractors before Connor arranged for him to come back to the government. It was time to see if his good deed would pay off.
“Take a seat,” said Malloy.
His office was an open desk on a raised platform in the middle of the operations center. From it, he surveyed an impressive array of computer monitors, video screens, and high-tech gadgetry running 360 degrees around him, allowing him to supervise all real-time collection of data carried out by satellites tasked to the NGA.
“I came to ask a favor,” said Connor as he pulled his chair closer.
Malloy smiled uneasily. “I figured as much. I heard about your promotion, too.”
Connor leaned closer and explained about the cruise missile that had been lost when an air force B-52 went down in the Hindu Kush in May 1984. “We believe that someone’s found it and may be trying to sell it on the black market to a rogue nation or fundamentalist cell.”
&nb
sp; “How good is your intel?”
“Near-actionable. The problem is, I don’t know exactly where the bomber went down.”
“With all due respect,” said Malloy, “why am I hearing this from you? Seems to me that if we’re talking about a nuclear-tipped ALCM, I should be fielding calls from Langley, the Joint Chiefs, and maybe even the commander in chief himself.”
“There are other issues.”
“Such as?”
“The incident was hushed up by the air force. As far as they’re concerned, the missile is sitting at the bottom of a thousand-foot crevasse. It’s not something they’re eager to see dredged up. Anyway, I’m not quite there yet. For all I know, the whole thing could turn out to be a wild goose chase.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Connor shrugged. “I’m here.”
Malloy considered this. “What is it you need from me?”
Connor started him off easy so as not to scare him away. “Historical data. I need you to check and see if you have any imagery for the area dating from May 1984. I’m looking for evidence of a plane crash.”
“In those mountains? You’re talking about a couple of thousand square miles. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. You’re going to have to give me something more specific.”
Connor removed a folder from his battered satchel. The topmost sheet held the final map grid coordinates to which the air force had narrowed its search.
“Better,” said Malloy. “So we’re talking a fifty-square-mile search grid right smack on the border of Afghanistan. As I recall, there was something big going down in that part of the world in ’eighty-four.”
“The Russian invasion was at its peak. The Red Army had a hundred and twenty thousand men stationed in the country. It was about then that the agency started supplying arms to the mujahideen. It pays to think we had at least one bird making a pass somewhere in the region every day.”
Malloy typed a stream of commands into his workstation. “No go,” he said, frowning.
Rules of Attack Page 14
