Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  “How long has he been in custody?” Luke said.

  She referred to a sheet of paper. “Uh, approximately seventy-two hours as of this moment. By the time he leads you back to Parr’s hideout, figure more like four days.”

  “So they’re going to be suspicious of him,” Luke said.

  She nodded. “Probably. The story goes that he was picked up by a patrol, spent a few days in jail, then was released with the two of you.”

  Ed Newsam shook his head. “That story is going to last exactly—”

  “It only needs to last long enough to get you to Parr’s hideout and in the door,” Trudy said.

  “Then what?” Newsam said.

  “Then you arrest him.”

  Newsam stared at her, the faintest echo of a grin on his face. But he didn’t say anything. Luke silently commended him for that. When Trudy had first pitched Luke the idea for this mission, he hadn’t been able to keep quiet about it.

  “All three of you are going to be wearing GPS units,” Mark Swann said. “The car you ride in will have a strobing transponder embedded on the roof—it’ll be visible from the sky by our guys, but not on the ground by Parr’s guys.”

  “Unless he has command of a satellite or a drone,” Newsam said.

  Swann shook his head. “I highly doubt it. The guy has gone all the way outlaw. The US military controls those skies. Parr is trying to stay invisible. He’s not flying anything.”

  “Two Black Hawks with Ranger squads on each are going to be trailing you,” Trudy continued. “Also, if need be, there will be an Apache gunship on call. You can call in reinforcements or a heavy airstrike at any time.”

  “So the whole game…” Luke began.

  She nodded. “Yes. You’re following the informant down the rabbit hole, and confirming that he has led you to Parr. Once in Parr’s presence, you make the positive ID on him. At that point, Parr can surrender to you or he can die. The choice will be his to make.”

  “And we’re dangled there in front of him like fresh meat,” Newsam said.

  “Well, not in so many words,” Trudy said. “But…”

  “Yes,” Mark Swann said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  May 6

  11:05 a.m. Arabian Standard Time (4:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  The Embassy of the United States in Iraq (aka the Republican Palace)

  The International Zone (aka the Green Zone)

  Karkh District

  Baghdad, Iraq

  “How was the trip in from the airport?” Big Daddy Bill Cronin said.

  He was a bear of a man. Tall, with a thick body, big shoulders and arms, and a bushy red beard maybe softening now and going a bit gray. Luke had known Big Daddy for a few years. Two years ago, Big Daddy had been his CIA handler when Luke went deep undercover here in Iraq.

  “Fine,” Luke said.

  And it had been fine. If fine meant riding at high speed in a convoy of armored Humvees, each one with passengers packed in like sardines, heavily armed soldiers hanging out the windows, aiming their guns at anything and everything every inch of the way, and screaming curses in Arabic at any and all human beings they passed.

  The convoy didn’t take any enemy fire on the trip, and that was fine.

  “And the landing? How was that?”

  “The pilots stuck the landing, to coin a phrase,” Luke said. “A few people puked, but we came in safe and sound.” The second leg of their trip had been a flight from Germany aboard a medium-sized passenger jet. The plane had come down to the Baghdad airport in corkscrew fashion, banking hard left and dropping fast the entire way, to thwart any rocket attacks from the ground. When the plane hit the runway, the pilots braked hard, bringing the plane to an abrupt stop.

  “Very nice,” Bill Cronin said. He looked at the rest of Luke’s crew.

  “Did you guys enjoy your first Baghdad special?”

  “I was one of the people who puked,” Trudy said.

  “So was I,” Swann said.

  Cronin smiled. “It’s a rite of passage. I’ve done it a couple of times myself.” He looked at big Ed Newsam.

  “You?”

  Newsam shook his head and smiled. “I don’t puke, man.”

  Cronin shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing, buddy.”

  Bill Cronin wore khaki slacks, shiny black shoes, and an open-throated dress shirt, which at this time of the morning was beginning to soak through with sweat. There was no air conditioning in Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace.

  He walked briskly, leading them down a series of wide marble hallways, all of them teeming with people. Crowds of people zigged and zagged, squeezing past each other in each direction. People sat in wheeled office chairs at makeshift desks pushed up against the stone walls, typing into computer keyboards or jabbering into telephones, their voices echoing off the twenty-foot-high rounded and tiled ceilings. Wires snaked across the floors, or ran along the walls, bundled with heavy black duct tape. People in various stages of sweaty undress tried to catch a few minutes or hours of sleep on military-issue cots, the cots lining stretches of hallway in single file like ants.

  Here and there, areas were sectioned off with plywood, some hung with canvas drapes or tarps, making instant offices or maybe bedrooms. The plywood boards were spray painted with series of letters and numbers. Luke was tired from the trip, but he figured the designations would make sense to him if he stopped for a moment to think about them. A couple of the plywood walls were adorned with American flags.

  “The old place is looking good,” Luke said. “Like Calcutta.”

  He had spent several days here in an earlier time, soon after the building had been abandoned, and then looted. In those days, barely anyone was here, there was no electricity, and a handful of international troops held the approaches against all comers.

  The area that had coalesced into the Green Zone had once been the wealthiest neighborhood in Baghdad. Saddam had lived here in the Republican Palace, of course. But the whole district had been filled with mansions of varying sizes, upscale apartment houses, fashionable restaurants and shops. When the American invasion came and the bombing started, the residents all left with whatever they could carry.

  When Luke first arrived in Baghdad in 2003, few people understood that all these places were up for grabs. You could move right in, on a first-come first-served basis, if you had the right mindset and the firepower to protect yourself. Combat units on patrol took over several of the mansions.

  A couple of units even took the Palace. Since it was among the easier places to fortify and protect, within short order it became the bizarre, grandiose, and yet rudimentary and rustic headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Government. No electricity, no air conditioning, no running water, portable lights only, and nearly constant mortar attacks. It looked like things had settled down some since then.

  Big Daddy shrugged and shook his head. “It’s gotten crowded, for sure. What can I say? It’s the safest place in town. Almost nobody can get into the Green Zone who doesn’t belong here. Fanatics smuggle a bomb or a grenade in once in a while, and people still blow themselves up at the checkpoints on a regular basis, but if you don’t happen to be standing outside the gates when it happens, then you’re fine. We still take mortar fire sometimes, but it usually doesn’t reach, and the walls are ten feet thick anyway. Also, the swimming pool in the back has water in it now, and it’s open for business. Everybody wants to be here, and never mind the crowds.”

  They passed a gaggle of people taking notes as a tall jarhead captain lectured them about something or other.

  “I’ve got a conference room reserved up ahead here, so we should be fine,” Bill said. “We can get away from all this noise.”

  He turned down a short, narrow corridor. At the end was a heavy wooden door which he opened without a key. The room was dimly lit by battery-operated lamps sitting on a table made from a thick wood slab sitting on two sawhorses. There were no windows. Instead
, the walls were covered in a tiled mosaic showing a desert oasis scene, possibly from a time at the dawn of civilization.

  Two men sat at the table. Both stood when Bill Cronin, Luke, and the team came in. The first, a tall man with close-cropped gray hair, stood ramrod straight in a United States Army camouflage uniform with no identifying marks. Luke knew right away what that meant. The second man was smaller, younger, with sandy hair, a haggard, doughy face and a bit of a paunch. His skin was pale despite being in the middle of a desert—he looked like he didn’t get outside much. He was smoking a cigarette and sweating profusely. The climate didn’t seem to agree with him.

  “Agent Luke Stone, this is Colonel Radis of Joint Special Operations Command. This is Mr. Montgomery from the British Embassy.” Cronin made a funny bird’s feet gesture with his fingers when he said the words British Embassy. Luke also knew what that meant. The man didn’t work for the British Embassy.

  He introduced his young team to the two men.

  “Won’t you all sit down?” Colonel Radis said. “We’ve got water for everyone.”

  Luke and his group sat. Bill Cronin remained standing. Eight or nine generic plastic bottles of water were on the table in front of them. Trudy and Swann reached for bottles. Ed Newsam was apparently too cool for that. Luke reached and took one.

  “We know you just came in, and you must be eager to get to your accommodations, so we’ll go through this as quickly as we can,” Radis said.

  “I think we know most of the details of the operation,” Luke said. “Trudy received a great deal of information before we left, and she briefed us on the flight.”

  Radis nodded. “Good. We’ve got some classified material here that may not have been transmitted to you because of its delicate nature. The fewer eyes with the opportunity to see this information, the better. And I believe it will increase your understanding of the situation.”

  “Okay,” Luke said. “Hit us.”

  Montgomery put a series of photographs on the table in a row, one at a time. Luke picked one up, glanced at it, and handed it to Trudy. Then he picked up another one. They were photos of abandoned palaces, similar in nature to the one they were in, but in worse shape. Walls were pockmarked with bullet holes or half destroyed by mortar fire. Fixtures were ripped out and missing. Trashed furniture and equipment lay heaped in piles. Pyramid-shaped rock slides of rubble lay against ruined walls. Burnt-out skeletons of trucks and cars sat side by side in parking lots. In one photo, a bust of Saddam Hussein wore a medieval equestrian combat helmet on his head—as though Saddam had been a horseback warrior during the Golden Age of Islam.

  Luke smiled at that one. Saddam looked like a child playing make-believe.

  “As you may know, Saddam was in power here for nearly twenty-four years,” Montgomery said. He spoke with a clipped, upper-crust English accent. He had an oddly high-pitched voice. He seemed like an odd man in many ways. Spooks often were.

  “And during that time, he built between eighty and one hundred palaces for his own private use, as well as the use of his family, Baath party officials, friends and business partners of his, and his many mistresses. He wasn’t shy about looting Iraq’s treasury, stockpiling priceless antiquities looted from his own country, from Iran during the war in the early 1980s, and from Kuwait during his occupation there in 1990. Unmarked cash, much of it in American dollars, cars, gold, diamonds, anything you can imagine.

  “He moved much of this hoard to banks outside the country, but some of it is still right here, hidden in his palaces, but also in old weapons depots, in underground bunkers and caves. We believe the value of his secret fortune runs into the many billions of dollars. Indeed, Saddam was probably one of the richest men on Earth.”

  “And this widely known fact is classified because why?” Ed Newsam said.

  Montgomery raised an index finger. “It isn’t as widely known as you may believe. There are hundreds of thousands of troops—American and coalition—not to mention reporters, aid workers, and international observers tramping through this country right now. There are millions of Iraqis, many of them in unsanctioned militias. If everyone knew the size of this fortune, the war would become more of a free-for-all money hunt than it is currently.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” Newsam said. “Would we?”

  “Our soldiers have a mission here,” Radis said. “And it isn’t looting and grabbing.”

  Ed smiled his arrogant young smile. His teeth gleamed white.

  “No? What is it then?”

  “Show them the other pictures.”

  Montgomery came out with a new pile of photographs. He placed these on the table, one by one, in a grid, as he had done with the others. Luke picked up the first of these and winced.

  It showed what looked like a five-year-old girl, ripped apart by machine gun fire.

  “These are disturbing,” Colonel Radis said.

  The next one showed a pile of bodies, women and children, their robes soaked with blood. The wall behind them was pockmarked, as though it was being used by a firing squad.

  “We believe this is the work of Parr and his group,” Montgomery said. “All of these photos were taken in the past few days.”

  “Why is he doing this?” Luke said.

  “Edwin Lee Parr has gone insane,” Radis said.

  “Clearly insane,” Mark Swann said. He was looking at the photos from behind his hand, his fingers opened half an inch.

  “Parr and his group have been working with Sunni informants, some of whom were former officials in Saddam’s regime, and some of whom were in the Iraqi military. This is how he’s been so successful in discovering Saddam’s hidden treasure. Our intelligence suggests that Parr and his group currently have hundreds of millions in American dollars alone in their possession, and possibly hundreds of millions more in gold and silver bars, and diamonds. The local people are now well aware of what he’s doing and what he has. Parr is trapped in the Sunni Triangle with no way out of the country. But the country is awash in weaponry, and Parr has obtained his share of it. With no way out, he is holding his own and maintaining control by increasingly harsh means. He has been targeting women and children, especially the women and children of local elders who stand up to him. More and more, he is taking the women hostage and using them as human shields.”

  Luke felt his heart sink. This was supposed to be an arrest. He was the police now. But he had a young partner who showed him no respect, and the man he was supposed to arrest was a psychotic committing atrocities against a civilian population.

  Terrific.

  “We are concerned that Parr is going to attempt a run for the Syrian border.”

  “What good will that do?” Luke said.

  “If he makes it that far, it’s possible that corrupt border guards and the Syrian military will accept payoffs from him, and smuggle him and his men to the Turkish border. Perhaps they can obtain new identities along the way. If they make it to Turkey with some of their millions, and with new identities, then they might as well be in Europe at that point.”

  Luke looked at Bill. “What are the chances of that happening?”

  Bill shrugged. “He’s been pretty good so far. My guess is he could make it, but it would take a lot of bloodletting to pull it off.”

  “How many human shields does he have?” Ed Newsam said. It seemed like the first serious comment or question he had made since Luke met him.

  “We think probably at least fifty,” Montgomery said. “And he will certainly kill all of them if he has to. He’s desperate, he’s shown no compunction about killing, and if anything, he seems to have, shall we say, an increasing appetite for it.”

  “So what’s next?” Luke said.

  “You guys get some rest and some decent food in your stomachs,” Radis said. “We’ll get our informant cleaned up a bit—that will probably take a few hours. He’s had a couple of long question and answer sessions he’s sleeping off.”

  Luke glanced at Bill again. Big Daddy
made a face to indicate disapproval, or possibly disgust. Big Daddy was known as an unpleasant interrogator. Among that group, most were dispassionate, almost like scientists carrying out experiments on rodents. In Luke’s experience, Bill seemed to take an active dislike of his subjects. The more he hurt them, the more he started to hate them.

  “The informant believes he knows exactly where Parr is,” Montgomery said. “That was another fact we didn’t want to transmit. Tomorrow morning, before first light, we would like you gentlemen to go in there.”

  “Arrest Parr?” Luke said.

  Big Daddy did a small head shake.

  “If he’ll see reason,” Radis said. “Sure, arrest him if you like. We’ll take it from there.” Briefly, Luke thought of the CIA black site that existed at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Something told him that the justice Parr was going to see wasn’t going to involve a judge and jury back in the United States.

  “Edwin Lee Parr is beyond reason,” Montgomery said.

  * * *

  Trudy Wellington riffled through some papers on the desk.

  “The man we’re about to see is Davis Cole, thirty-six years old. Ex-Marine with combat experience in several theaters. Ex-convict who served thirty months in the New York State prison system for manslaughter. The case apparently involved a fist fight that started in a Manhattan bar—the result of an argument over the results of a professional hockey game.”

  “I guess he won that argument,” Ed Newsam said.

  The four of them were sitting at a table in a small room. In front of them was a glass partition which Bill Cronin had said was one-way glass. On the other side was another wooden table—with one chair. When Cole came in, they would be able to see him, but he wouldn’t be able to see them. Also, the interrogation room was mic’d—Cole’s voice would carry into this room, but he wouldn’t be able to hear them.