by Allan Topol
* * *
Sarah McCallister stared into the bathroom mirror in the suite at the Four Seasons and was horrified. "My God, I look like a mess," she announced to the haggard, wrinkled face with bloodshot eyes that stared back at her. It had been another long night of anguish—the third since her Bobby's plane had been shot down—tossing and turning in bed, her chest and stomach muscles tightening to the point of agony when she tried to imagine the horror confronting poor Bobby. Twice she felt she was on the verge of a heart attack. And all the while Terry was in the same bed sleeping soundly, secure in the belief that the president, who owed him big-time, would secure Bobby's release. Finally, at four-thirty, she had moved to the other bedroom in the suite.
She couldn't stand to be with him in bed any longer. How could he sleep? He was the one who was responsible for what had happened to Bobby. He was the one who robbed Bobby of his childhood, who constantly raised the bar so high that no accomplishment was ever enough, who latched on to the absurd idea that his son would have a career in politics and one day become president, a blueprint that Terry would dearly have wanted for himself but was unable to achieve because of what he had done in his youth.
"Leave him alone, Terry. Let him live his own life," she had pleaded.
"Stay out of it," he had snapped back.
He had brushed her concerns aside and increased the pressure on Bobby, who didn't have Ann's courage to disobey him.
The idea of Terry's living vicariously through Bobby's accomplishments infuriated her, but she was helpless to do anything.
Terry had been stupid to drag them both from Chicago to Washington once he learned that Bobby's plane went down. He could have pressured Jimmy Grange and the president by telephone. They were no closer to Bobby in Washington than in Chicago.
Finally, around six o'clock in the morning, alone in her own bed, she had begun dozing off, sleeping fretfully, until the sound of Terry's voice woke her. He was on the phone barking orders to assistants in the private equity firm he had founded in Chicago. "Sell that interest... Buy that... Straighten out that company.... What am I paying you for...? We're not running a charity, for Christ's sake."
Even now, he was on the phone as she was splashing cold water on her wrinkled face. When the second line rang, Sarah raced across the room. It might be somebody with news about her Bobby.
"It's Jimmy Grange, Sarah."
She held her breath.
"There's been a development," Grange said. "I want to come over and brief you and Terry."
Her heart was pounding. "Good or bad?"
Grange hesitated. "We'd better talk in person."
"Don't do this to me, you bastard," she screamed. "Tell me whether it's good or bad."
Terry broke into the conversation from the phone in the living room. "Who is this?"
"It's Jimmy Grange. I want to come by and update you."
"Good or bad?" Sarah wailed hysterically.
"Come now," Terry told Grange.
The line went dead.
"Pull yourself together," Terry shouted from the living room. "Don't make an ass out of yourself."
She dressed in a black skirt and black blouse, prepared for mourning, and tried to comb her long brown hair. When that failed, she grabbed a rubber band from the living room desk that held Terry's business papers and tied it up in a ponytail, the way she had worn it when she was a student at Michigan. Thinking about Michigan depressed her even more. Terry had worn his hair in a ponytail then, too.
She was certain that her appearance—and especially her hair—startled Terry, but he didn't say a word to her about that or anything else. They sat on separate sides of the living room in plush chairs covered with burnt-orange velour. In silence he read the New York Times while she stared out of the window at M Street in Georgetown below, watching carefree tourists go in and out of little shops while she agonized over how much pain her Bobby was in now.
When the bell to the suite rang, she remained in her chair, grabbing the sides tightly with white knuckles, letting Terry answer it. She was bursting with anxiety to hear what this man she detested had to say. During the long presidential campaign two years ago, she had referred to Grange as the bagman. Terry raised money from wealthy people and corporate executives. Then he gave it to Grange, who periodically came to Chicago to collect the checks, hear about the contributors, and return to campaign headquarters in Washington.
"Okay. What do you have for me?" Terry said gruffly when the three of them were seated around a glass-topped coffee table with a vase of red roses in the center. Grange was on the sofa, Terry and Sarah at each side.
In the White House limousine on the way to the hotel, Grange had decided that he'd better mask the optimism he felt about Major Davis's rescue effort. The last thing he wanted was to build Terry up, only to have to deliver bad news if something happened to make the operation go south.
Grange began in a slow, hesitant voice. "We believe that a renegade unit of the Turkish military shot down Robert's plane. The Turkish government has failed to meet our deadline for dealing with the matter themselves. So we put a special-operations unit on the ground in the area where we think Robert went down. We believe that the rogue Turks are holding him in a small prison in the locale."
"How did you learn that?" Terry demanded.
"From an informer."
Sarah felt a sudden burst of excitement. This was the first confirmation they had that Bobby was alive.
Terry bored in on Grange. "How good's the informer?"
Grange shrugged. "Major Davis, who's in charge of the unit, is prepared to rely on him. That's good enough for the president."
"But Kendall's son's not the one down there, is he?"
"True."
"How many men in Davis's unit?" Terry was cross-examining Grange as if he were a trial lawyer confronting a hostile witness.
"Six. All highly trained."
Terry shot to his feet. "Six?" he said, raising his voice in incredulity. "Six fuckin' men? That's it?" He shook his head in exasperation. "There could be a whole division of Turkish soldiers guarding that prison."
"Listen, Terry," Grange said, now losing patience himself. Sure, he was sorry that it was Terry's kid, but he didn't need a tongue-lashing, no matter how much Terry contributed to the campaign. "It's a military action. We've got General Childress personally involved. He's air force too. He was a pilot himself. He knows what it's like. They're the experts. We have to trust their judgment. You wouldn't tell a surgeon how to operate, would you?"
Terry sneered. "I would if he wanted to cut me open with a pocketknife!"
Grange started to fire his own nasty retort, then choked back the words. Terry was pacing around the room like a caged predator. Grange glanced at Sarah, who was leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed. One of the buttons of her blouse was undone. She wasn't wearing a bra.
She opened her eyes and caught Grange leering at her, as he frequently did. The pig. She looked down and rebuttoned her blouse, then glared at Grange, who turned away.
She had first heard about Grange from Lucy Preston, Senator Preston's wife, in the ladies' room during one of the parties on inaugural weekend two years ago. Lucy had said, "Did you see how Jimmy Grange was looking at us when we walked by? He thinks he's superstud. Jesus, what a scumbag. Always on the make. And our distinguished new president isn't much better."
Lucy's words had made Sarah's blood run cold. Her own marriage with Terry had been less than ideal for years. Separate lives was an apt term to describe it. She knew that he slept with other women, younger ones, from time to time. Once she had confronted him with it. "That's what I do," he had said, not sounding the least bit contrite. His attitude was, Stay if you want. Leave if you want. She had stayed because she couldn't face herself after severing her ties to her family when she had decided to marry him.
His face red with rage, Terry stopped pacing and turned toward Grange. "We should be sending in a thousand troops, for Christ's sake." He wa
s shouting. "Supported by bombers."
Grange stood up. He refused to be a whipping boy. Terry had lost his sympathy. "The order's been given. The operation's under way." In fact, it wasn't, but Grange figured this was a good closing line as he beat a path to the door.
He was almost there when Terry cut him off and moved in tight, his hands gripping the lapels of Grange's expensive suit jacket. "If this doesn't work and you guys manage not to get Robert killed, which will be a miracle, I insist on being consulted before the next move is planned. Tell the president that."
Grange pulled away. "I'll let him know immediately. Meantime, stay here by the phone from seven on this evening. I'll call you the minute we know something. I hope to be able to tell you that your son is safe and in our hands."
"The way you clowns have planned this, that'll never happen," Terry yelled at Grange as the president's buddy was outside in the hall, beating a path toward the elevator.
Sarah couldn't remember the last issue on which she had agreed with Terry. On this one she did. In her mother's heart, she believed that Major Davis and his unit were never going to rescue her Bobby. Something awful was going to happen to him.
* * *
Maj. Charles "Butch" Davis looked up into the sky and gave a silent prayer of thanks. There was only a sliver of a moon. Even that was almost completely concealed behind dense cloud cover. Darkness was what he wanted. Darkness was what he had.
Butch Davis was thrilled to be on this mission. He had never known his father, a marine captain who had died as a POW in 'Nam, when Davis was only two. If there was one assignment he had yearned for in his fourteen years in the army, much of it recently spent attacking and searching caves in Afghanistan, it was rescuing an American held captive by an enemy. That was his own way of doing something for his father's memory, something no one had ever done for Capt. Warren Davis.
The six members of his special-operations force, an elite counterterrorist unit, were dressed in civilian clothes Ishmael had supplied, their faces colored with charcoal to simulate beards. Each of them was armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun. They were moving in two old battered cars along with Ishmael, who sat in the back of the lead car next to Davis, stroking his thick black beard.
The cars bumped over the pockmarked roads cutting through rough mountainous terrain. "How much farther?" Davis said to Ishmael.
"About two miles."
"We'll go the last half mile on foot," Davis said. His voice was calm. "Tell us where to stop."
Up in the front, next to the driver, Lt. Buddy Burns was peering out of the window, his eyes moving rapidly from side to side. "I don't have a good feeling about this, Butch," he muttered to the commander he had served under for two years in a Ranger unit in Afghanistan.
Davis shared Burns's anxieties. The car windows were open. Outside it was still, deathly still. This could all be an elaborate ambush, with Ishmael leading them into it like pigs to slaughter. There was something that bothered him about Ishmael. At some point they might have to cut and run. It would be up to him to decide when that was.
He took the revolver from the holster at his hip and pressed it hard against the side of Ishmael's head. In Turkish he said, "If you've lied to me and it's a trap, you will be the first to die."
The mountain air was chilly, but sweat was running down Ishmael's cheeks. "No trap," he said. "No trap," he repeated for emphasis.
Following Ishmael's instruction, the two cars pulled off the road near a large boulder, which concealed both vehicles. The five, other than Davis, jumped out of the cars, their eyes scanning the area, automatic weapons gripped tightly, ready to begin firing. Davis walked along the road, now dirt, and moved slowly, his gun trained on Ishmael, his eyes constantly roaming over the hostile mountainous terrain. The instant he saw anything suspicious, he would begin firing.
High on a hill, above the left side of the road and behind a rock, crouched Abdullah, an AK-47 in his hand. He had a straight shot at the American walking next to Ishmael. He'd like nothing better than to rip that American apart with bullets, even if the others killed him, which they probably would. But opening fire wasn't an option. He had been given strict orders. He knew what he had to do.
Ishmael had told Davis that there were only six guards in the small prison compound now, in addition to Lieutenant McCallister. Most of them would be asleep.
Davis was fifty yards from the compound. Straining his ears, he couldn't hear a sound. He raised his hand up over his head, signaling for the others to join him.
The plan was to encircle the small stone building and rush it from all sides. As they moved closer, Davis began getting a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was no noise at all emanating from the stone structure.
Once his troops surrounded the building, Davis turned Ishmael over to one of the others to guard. "C'mon Buddy," he said to Burns. "You and I are going in. Cover me with a gun. Gimme some light with your flashlight."
His automatic weapon tightly in his hand, Davis raced toward the front of the building. Burns was two steps behind, lighting the way. Uncertain where McCallister was, Davis was afraid to open fire.
The front door was wooden. Davis lifted his leg. With a powerful kick he smashed it open. The ground floor of the building was deserted and empty, devoid of furniture or any object.
On the right side Davis saw a staircase leading down. Bastards could be hiding there, Davis thought. He shouted down the steps in Turkish, "Anybody here?" All that he heard was the echo of his own voice. Cautiously he started down the stairs, squeezing the handle of the gun. From behind Burns lit the way.
Davis didn't see a thing. Didn't hear a sound. Nothing. Total silence.
He followed his nose—and an awful smell—to one of the three empty cells, where a toilet pail that hadn't been emptied stood in one corner. A prisoner had been here not long ago, he realized.
As Burns joined him in the cell and shone the light around, something on the dirt floor caught Davis's eye. "Gimme that," he said to Burns, reaching for the flashlight.
Davis moved the beam across the floor until he found what he was looking for. There on the ground, someone had scratched in the dirt the letters USA.
McCallister had been in this cell recently. Davis was now certain of that. "Go up and bring down Ishmael," he said to Burns. "I want to look around some more. Tell the others to watch the hills around the building. They could be up there, waiting for the best time to attack us."
Minutes later Burns pushed Ishmael roughly down the stairs and into the cell with the initials carved into the dirt. Ishmael was whining and sniveling.
"You lied to me," Davis shouted. "The pilot isn't here."
Ishmael was squatting down, cowering in a corner.
"You were part of a scheme to set this up so they'd have time to move the pilot. Isn't that right?" His voice had a sharp edge. He was furious.
"I know nothing," Ishmael wailed. "I saw them bring the pilot here. I had no idea he would be moved."
Davis shone the torch directly on Ishmael's face, into his eyes. Ishmael couldn't look at Davis. He turned away. The major had interrogated enough prisoners in Afghanistan to know when one was lying to him.
"Where did they take the pilot?" Davis demanded in a menacing voice.
Ishmael shrugged and held out his hands.
"I'm going to give you one more chance," Davis said as he handed Burns his automatic weapon and removed the pistol from a side holster. He pointed it at Ishmael's right knee. "You tell me where the pilot is, or I'll shoot your knees."
Ishmael cried out in fright. He couldn't say a word. That vile Abdullah had forced him to play the role of an informer to trick the Americans. His men were in Ishmael's house now, holding guns against his wife and children. A bloodcurdling cry of anguish poured out of his mouth. "Please, American. I don't know a thing."
Davis wasn't moved. "First one knee. Then the other. You'll never be able to get up the stairs and out of this building. You'
ll die here in this cell. Just you and that bucket of shit."
Ishmael's face was white with terror. "I don't know," he screamed. "I don't know."
Davis was convinced Ishmael was lying. The man knew far more than he was telling them. He gave Ishmael ten more seconds. When all he heard were more wails, he raised his gun, aimed, and fired twice into one knee, shattering bone and muscle.
"Ah! Ah!" Ishmael screamed out in pain. He rolled over onto his back, holding his blood-soaked knee and continuing to scream in pain.
"Now I shoot the other knee," Davis said, angry that Ishmael had deceived him, "unless you tell me where they took the pilot."
Burns was shining the light on Ishmael's face. Tears were streaming out of his eyes. Davis could tell the man was close to passing out. "Here goes the shot," he called out in a loud, booming voice to make sure Ishmael heard him over the man's cries.
Ishmael stopped screaming. "Istanbul," he mumbled in a barely audible whisper. "Istanbul."
Davis was down on the ground, his face close to Ishmael's, the man's beard brushing against his cheek. "What do you mean, Istanbul?"
"They move the pilot to Istanbul," he whispered. "No more shooting."
Now Ishmael was telling the truth, Davis decided. The Turks had transferred McCallister to Istanbul, where it would be damn near impossible to locate and to rescue him.
Davis turned to Burns. "Get a couple of men. Carry Ishmael upstairs and tie up his leg so he doesn't bleed to death. Then place him on the road we came in on. He'll survive until tomorrow morning. Somebody will come by then, and we'll be long gone from this hellhole of a country."
He removed a satellite phone from his jacket pocket. "I have to call Washington and tell them what happened." He sounded despondent.
* * *
The veins on President Kendall's neck and forehead were protruding and pulsing with rage when he finished listening to General Childress's report of what had happened to the Davis rescue effort. It was clear to him that the Turks were playing games... with his pilot and with the United States.
