Aside from the drop-off one hundred meters behind him, the spot was ideal: He was in range and sight of the entire compound. The tangos seemed to be slumbering away or at least they weren’t loitering about. He took out his binoculars for a quick scan of the perimeter. Their only sentry post with four men was set up at the entry to the pit, but that was over a kilometer away from the camp.
The tangos were a trusting bunch.
Working as fast as he could, he set up the 240-Golf’s tripod and bore-sighted the AN/PVS-17 night vision scope so that the crosshairs were aligned with the barrel. He fed the first rounds of the ammo belt into the machine gun.
“CHALK ONE this is TIN MAN. In position and standing by,” he said over the encrypted radio.
“Copy that,” Stone said.
With everything ready, he took out his thermal binoculars to confirm that they were targeting the right tents with the Claymores. The desert landscape held onto the summer heat as if it remembered the chill of the Uzbek winter and it made most things look shades of yellow and orange, but the dark red of body heat couldn’t be mistaken. He guessed he was looking at three to four hundred tangos, snoozing away in three tents.
Now Iggy could start searching for Camille. Prisoners tended to be kept separated from others and he hoped to find a structure with only a few heat signatures inside. A terrorist training facility was not the type of place that usually held prisoners, so that made it even more likely they’d lock her up somewhere alone—if they hadn’t already killed her. He shoved that thought from his mind as fast as he could.
He started with the structures closest to the entrance of the mine and worked his way toward the raiding party. In each structure he picked up several bodies and assumed they were tangos sleeping wherever they could find a good spot. The body density was far greater than he was looking for, so he kept scanning.
In the middle of the camp, he found something. The pattern appeared to be a single individual with two others positioned less than three meters away. He swapped the thermal imaging binoculars for standard night vision ones. The structure appeared to be a small tent, but it was difficult to see much more because of the camouflage netting blowing in the wind. The pattern was consistent with a prisoner being held by two guards, but he couldn’t imagine anyone stupid enough to hold a prisoner in a tent. It was more likely the camp’s head honcho. He radioed Stone instructions for one of them to check it out after they had infiltrated the camp. Switching back to the thermal binoculars, he kept searching.
Please be alive.
Chapter Eighty-Three
The CIA program’s original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.
—The Washington Post, November 2, 2005, as reported by Dana Priest
Shangri-la
“Hunter?” Camille said in an intentionally weak voice, just in case it wasn’t him. Then fell to the ground, pretending to whimper as she moved toward her cache of buried nails. No one answered, but she heard breathing and kept herself turned toward it while she ran her fingers along the exposed wooden frame, searching until she found the knot that marked where she had buried the nails.
“Cut the bullshit, Camille.”
Joe Chronister.
“Joe? Thank god you’re here.” She lied. She had no illusion that he was there to rescue her. If he was in the heart of the terrorist camp, it could only mean that he was somehow working with the tangos. The only question was, was he working on his own or with the CIA? At that moment, it didn’t matter much. All she really cared about was surviving to wreak revenge on al-Zahrani. Her fingers sifted through the sand until she found the nail. “He raped me.”
“Stay where you are. I’ve got a Glock trained on you in case you can’t see it.”
He shined a flashlight on her. She squatted, so he couldn’t easily see that her legs weren’t tied and she contorted her face before she looked up. He had a false beard and was dressed like a muj in a dishdashah. As a smart operative, it was a safe assumption that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. She would have to plan her attack accordingly. She shielded her eyes with her forearm, holding up her bound hands to help paint the picture of a distraught female prisoner. It wouldn’t take much acting.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Camille. You fucked things really good. I set you up for a nice little excursion to Ukraine. You would’ve kept your pretty ass safe.”
“He violated me, Joe.” Her voice cracked and she whimpered. She forced herself to flashback to al-Zahrani rooting around on top of her and let herself feel the pain until she started crying.
“Pretty impressive operation, we’ve got here, isn’t it? You’re one of the few people who can really appreciate the brilliance of what I’ve got going on here. Everything you see here—Rubicon is pulling the strings.”
Camille cried harder, then started sobbing. She fell into the part far too easily. She knew she was in danger of believing herself a victim and losing her edge. She pulled herself back and began moaning, breathing through her mouth as if she couldn’t stop crying.
“Enough of the fucking theatrics. You listening to me?” Joe stepped closer.
Camille rocked herself as she whimpered. Joe Chronister was not someone she had ever thought of as needy, but she realized then that he had a strong need for her to appreciate his work. The more she ignored him, the more he talked.
“I told al-Zahrani he could keep you a couple of nights so it didn’t look bad in front of the boys, then you’re coming over to us at BALI HAI. It’s our duck blind that we use to keep an eye on this goddamn place. It’s also a prison—and a well built one I might add, thank you KGB. It’s a hundred feet down inside an old gold mine that dates back to tsarist times. BALI HAI is the jewel in our newly privatized little gulag chain. With Congress and that Post reporter Dana Priest breathing down our neck about Agency-run black sites, we’re putting them under new management—privately-run prisons, just like stateside. You don’t even need presidential approval when the other motherfucker is the one who’s doing it. That’s the beauty of outsourcing—plausible deniability. Gotta love it.”
She looked up, counting on her puffy eyes. “He raped me. They had AKs. They pinned me down and held me,” Camille said in a near-whisper. “They held me while he…” She gasped for air and then continued “raped me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Is this for real? You’re sniveling like my goddamn wife, for christssake. Pull it together, Camille. What the hell happened to fuck you up like this so fast?”
“Al-Zahrani,” she whispered as quietly as she could. “He, he…raped me.”
“I can’t hear you. What’d you say?”
Chronister bent down toward her and Camille sprang.
She shoved the nail deep into his left eye as she twisted her body at a forty-five-degree angle so she would be clear in case he managed to discharge the weapon. He screamed and the flashlight fell to the ground as he raised his hands up to his eye. Camille put her hands over the hand that was holding the gun. She guided his right hand across his chest underneath his left armpit to avoid any bulletproof vest, then she twisted his wrist into a downward angle. She pulled the trigger, sending a round through his heart and lung.
“That’s for Jackie and the others, you asshole,” Camille whispered before letting him drop.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Shangri-la
&nb
sp; Hunter was a kilometer away from the camp’s perimeter when he heard a single gunshot from somewhere directly between him and the compound. He stopped and held his closed fist in the air and GENGHIS halted. Neither man could see anything, so Hunter radioed Iggy.
“TIN MAN this is SABER TOOTH. Request IR recon. One click, my twelve o’clock.”
“SABER TOOTH, TIN MAN. Two heat signatures inside a small fixed structure at your twelve o’clock.”
Hunter started running as fast as he could toward the shack. If Stella was wounded, he might still be able to save her.
Camille didn’t want to touch Chronister, but forced herself to run her hands over his body in search of a knife or other weapons. He was traveling light with only a smashed roll of Mentos in his pocket. She devoured them. Al-Zahrani’s tennis-shoe taste wouldn’t leave her mouth.
Using the water bucket as a bidet, she washed herself although she knew it would take a while until she felt clean again. She took longer than she should have, but less time than she wanted. The polyester jilbab made a lousy towel and she hated wearing it, but her pants were left in al-Zahrani’s tent. The bastard probably kept her panties under his pillow. She spat, but it didn’t help.
She stripped Chronister of his Glock and Kevlar vest, put it on, then pulled up the jilbab so she could run. Lying on her back near a wall, she kicked as hard as she could with both bare feet. The plywood splintered.
The cooler night air felt good as she sprinted toward the camp and al-Zahrani’s tent.
Iggy’s voice came over Hunter’s earpiece. “SABER TOOTH this is TIN MAN. I’m tracking a runner three hundred meters and twelve o’clock from your position, leaving the structure.”
Hunter scanned the area, but was too far away. The lights of the tango camp extended his NVG’s range, but he couldn’t see out more than two hundred meters. The thought of Stella, lying only a few hundred meters from him, bleeding out, made him push harder.
Fifteen seconds later, he could see a shack. He ordered GENGHIS to continue into the camp and take out the generators. If the runner really was Stella at the edge of the compound, he could always call GENGHIS back, but if it wasn’t, he wanted the advantage of total darkness as soon as he could get it.
GENGHIS sprinted ahead past the concrete pillars of the construction site while Hunter circled to the front of the shed. Tools were thrown into a pile just outside the door as if someone had hastily emptied it. His experience told him that’s where they had held Stella. He slipped inside, fanning his weapon from side to side in case someone was there. Then he saw the body and dropped to his knees.
“Oh, my god. Stella.”
Then he saw a bearded face and an under-the-arm gunshot wound, angled to avoid body armor and pierce vital organs. A dead tango and an operator’s signature.
Stella’s alive.
Hunter heard Ashland’s voice over the earpiece. The guy sounded out of breath. “SABER TOOTH. Ashland here. Don’t shoot me. Can I come in?”
“Cleared to enter,” Hunter said, then keyed his mike. “SABER TOOTH to CHALK ONE. Confirmed one dead tango. Suspect GRACKLE is the runner. GENGHIS, attempt intercept.”
GENGHIS confirmed the order as Ashland came into the shed and bent down beside the corpse. “Jesus. That’s Joe Chronister.”
Hunter looked more closely at the tango, then he recognized him. He’d seen the man before, clean-cut and dressed as a Westerner—the interrogator he knew as Zorro. “Who the hell is Joe Chronister?”
“The CIA SOB who put both of us on that flight to hell.” Ashland tried to catch his breath.
“What the hell is the CIA doing working with Rubicon? Oh, forget it. Until we get the lights out, you’re the only one of us who can walk into that place after her without alerting them. You better haul ass right now or I’m shooting you right here.”
It was a new moon and Camille could barely see where she was going. At least her feet were untied so she could run, but her bound hands threw her off balance. She could see the flicker of the lamps of the debating circles in the mess hall.
She moved into the deeper shadows along the base of the cliff rising above the compound, but the ground was a giant mound of loose debris that had fallen from the rock face. The study groups’ lamps were dim, but bright enough to reach the rubble. Rather than double back and move along the edge between the tent and the drop-off to the next lower level of the mine, she lay flat on her belly and crept like a sniper. Even though the jilbab was partially tied around her waist, her knees kept catching on the cloth, tripping her and pulling it loose.
A minute earlier, GENGHIS had been able to see someone running ahead of him at the edge of his sight, then the figure disappeared. The closer he got to the first tent, the more the light from the tangos’ lamps increased the range of his night vision, but he still couldn’t see her. That girl was sure slippery and if he wasn’t running toward a few hundred tangos, he would’ve enjoyed the chase a lot more. He keyed his mike, “SABER TOOTH, GENGHIS here. Contact with the runner has been broken. Proceeding on to generators.”
There was a rock pile blocking Hunter’s passage between the tent and the ridge. He didn’t like to risk sky-lining by walking along the drop-off on the other side, but it was so dark, only a stargazer would notice someone moving between the camp and Orion’s belt. He decided to veer around the tent and hug the edge of the cliff that dropped to the lower level.
He tapped Ashland on the arm and whispered. “This way.”
Ashland pulled off his NVGs and his comm set and stuck them into his duffle bag. Then he walked straight ahead into the light of the camp.
Hunter ran as far as he dared, then dropped to his knees to lower his profile and crawled along the edge. He heard Ashland speak to the men in Arabic as he walked on into the heart of the camp.
Camille was shocked at the tangos’ lack of internal security, but she wasn’t about to complain. They were sleeping everywhere and they all had AKs at their fingertips, but there were no lookouts, no sentries anywhere. As she crawled past the second row of barracks, she was starting to think she might be able to escape or at least die trying. Al-Zahrani was in a tent, not a fortress. If she took him out quietly, she might be able to steal one of their trucks and get away. She just needed a knife to free her hands and slit his throat.
The half-dozen electric lights hanging outside were dim, but enough for her to see and be seen. Camille searched for one of the snoozing terrorists who was separated from the herd. Along the outside of the group, a teenager wearing a knife attached to his belt was curled up on his right side on a rug that was too small for him. She crept over to him and held her breath while she slowly slipped his knife from its sheath.
Suddenly he rolled over on his back and opened his eyes. Stella shoved her right forearm down on his mouth to mute any screams. The knife was in her right hand, positioned behind his left ear. She raked her forearm across his mouth, thrusting the knife into the soft spot behind his left ear. She kept her arm pressed against his mouth for a few seconds in case he used his dying breath to scream.
Back in the shadows, she cut off the rope and rubbed her sore wrists, then moved them in a luxurious range of motion. But if she was going to pull this off, she needed full movement and not only in her wrists. She crept back to the dead tango, grabbed his ankles and dragged him into the darkness where she undressed him.
His stinky clothes were liberating, even if they weren’t the best fit. She rolled up the pant legs and tried on his sandals. They were several sizes too big. The hard sandy ground wasn’t too punishing and her bare feet were quieter anyway, so she pushed them aside. Slinking back to his sleeping mat, she kept her body out of the light and stretched her arm as far as she could as she reached for his AK. Violating every safety rule she knew about firearms, she grabbed it by the barrel and pulled it toward her.
Careful to stay away from light, she worked her way over to al-Zahrani’s tent. For the home of the leader of the world’s most sophisticated and mo
st wanted terrorist organization, al-Zahrani’s tent was modest. It was also poorly guarded like everything else. Earlier in the evening she had noticed the two guards at its entrance, but security on the other sides seemed to have been ignored, aside from one small light illuminating the back. She followed the shadows as far as they would conceal her and she was about to dash into the lit area when she noticed the adjacent plywood structure with the satellite dishes and antennae—the al Qaeda home office. A few meters away from her was enough intelligence to roll up the organization’s entire network—or at least severely damage al-Zahrani’s faction.
She couldn’t live with herself if she managed to escape from the tangos and didn’t take a few extra minutes to pull off an intelligence coup—one that would make her a legend. Since they were on generator, they had to be using laptops. It wouldn’t take her that long to grab a computer or two.
Ashland wasn’t about to waste his time looking for the girl when he was so close to the mother lode of intelligence on SHANGRI-LA and al Qaeda. Since he looked like one of them, he was able to move quickly past the tents toward the fixed structure with the satellite dishes that they had seen in blow-ups of his photos.
If Paris only knew their agent that the CIA captured yesterday was now walking through the front door of al Qaeda’s central administration. Soon enough the president of the republic himself would be hanging the National Order of Merit around his neck, Ashland was certain. He went inside, pulled on his night vision goggles and switched them on. The office was empty and he speculated that the terrorists were prohibited from sleeping in the headquarters, all the better for him.
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