by Sean McFate
Ensher didn’t like it. “I don’t think Abdulaziz or Khalid would take such risks.”
“Now is exactly the moment to take a risk, Ambassador, especially if you are a minor player with major ambitions.”
“Something you are familiar with, Mr. Winters,” Ensher said.
Winters didn’t know if that was a specific or a general observation, but Ensher disabused him of any doubt.
“I know of your misadventure in Ukraine. I know that you went, shall we say, beyond the mission mandate. Threatening the natural gas supply of Europe and the European economy. Tempting war with Putin. Bargaining with senior Russian officials beyond the purview of sanctioned channels.”
Winters was irritated by this hypocrisy, given what the Ensher Group did on a daily basis, but he couldn’t let it show. “I did what I thought was best to contain Putin,” Winters said. “It’s certainly more than what the White House has done. I’m still doing it in the gas fields of Azerbaijan and . . . other places.”
Those last words were a slip; he should never have divulged Apollo’s operations in Eurasia. He was letting Ensher get the best of him, and judging by his smug grin, the ambassador knew it.
“I’m a patriot,” Winters said.
Ensher smiled even more. “Is that why you are telling me this?”
“Yes. And because I assume you’ve been looking into Abdulaziz in light of recent events, and you know about his travels to Islamabad and Gwadar last year.”
“So you’ve suspected for quite some time?”
Yikes, Ensher was good. He was walking him into traps.
“Paris and Istanbul confirmed a few things, yes,” Winters admitted, with a show of reluctance. “But Abdulaziz kept the operation tight. Family tight. That’s why he sent his sons to do the exchange. You know how much the Saudis value their sons.”
“Not that much, apparently,” Ensher said. “I hear Mishaal is buried in the south.”
“Dead?” Winters couldn’t contain his surprise.
“Rehabilitation,” Ensher replied.
The ambassador’s level of knowledge was high. Larry must have taken yesterday’s tip about Abdulaziz and run with it.
“Assuming your theory is correct, Mr. Winters, it leaves one essential question.”
“Where are the nukes now?”
“Exactly.”
“Probably in transit from Pakistan. By sea. It’s easier to smuggle by sea than by air.”
“You would know,” Ensher said, but Winters refused to be distracted.
“Abdulaziz would not arrange to bring them directly into the Kingdom. Too many eyes and ears on the Saudi coast, especially if Khalid is watching. But there’s no border control in the Arabian desert. Hell, Henry, there’s no border in the desert. Which brings us back to—”
“Yemen,” Ensher said sternly.
“It’s not just lawless. It’s not just a war zone. It’s Abdulaziz’s war.”
“And you are prosecuting it for him.”
Winters smiled. “For us, Mr. Ambassador. I’m prosecuting it for us.”
Henry Ensher studied the man across from him, a man he realized he had underestimated for most of this conversation. “Do you have proof of any of this?”
“If I had proof, Ambassador, Abdulaziz would be dead already.”
The two men stared each other down, one trying to read the other, the other confident he was completely unreadable.
“We’ll check it out,” the ambassador said finally, rising to signal the meeting was over.
“You know where to reach me,” Winters said, extending his hand for a shake. Ensher didn’t take it.
“Wonderful to see you again, Henry,” Winters grinned. You smug bastard.
“Truly, the pleasure is mine,” you pompous bottom feeder, Ensher beamed back.
Chapter 14
“Turn off the Navtex,” Goncalves said.
“But Captain . . .” the radio operator began, before remembering that no one argued with the captain, especially on this ship. Even if turning the Navtex off meant they would be incommunicado with the world.
“And the AIS, too,” the captain said.
The radio operator complied. It was illegal to turn off the Automatic Identification System transponder, the device that let the authorities track every ship at sea, but the radio operator wasn’t surprised by the order. Captain Goncalves was a smuggler. He often ran dark, knowing the ocean was too big and the jurisdiction too dispersed for anyone to notice him.
“Good man,” the captain said sarcastically, as he left the compartment.
Capt. Emanuel Goncalves stood on the deck of his freighter and looked out at the Indian Ocean. The Eleutheria was an old bulker by today’s standards, with rust oozing from its every orifice, but Goncalves loved her like the child his long-dead wife had never been able to conceive. At three hundred feet, she was small enough to navigate almost any port, travel up rivers, and even drop cargo at shorelines, all very handy in his line of work.
It was their second day at sea, and so far the weather had been perfect. For a man like Goncalves, there was nothing better. He was fifty-eight but looked older, with deep wrinkles etched into his face, and he had been on the water since he was eight. Such was life in the Azores, the Portuguese Islands that lie a thousand miles from the nearest landmass. Everyone was a sailor, and sailors craved the open sea.
Freedom, Goncalves thought. Blue horizon in every direction.
Besides, the second day meant they were far enough away that nobody would see them. He had charted a course outside normal shipping lanes, past where the tankers and other ships were visible but not so far to attract unwanted attention. Not that there was anything untoward about this voyage or his ship, of course; they were just one more rust bucket steaming the Arabian Sea.
Goncalves worked his way aft.
“Morning, Captain,” said the first mate, a burly Macedonian smoking along the stern railing and watching the white foam of the wake below.
“No one must ever find the Dona Iluire,” the captain said. The alerts had been coming in all morning over the Navtex before he turned it off. Someone was searching for a cargo vessel, approximately 1,500 gross tons, sailing from Gwadar, Pakistan, heading west by southwest. Their size. Their route.
“We’re working on it,” the mate said.
“Work faster.” They had three days to their next port of call, and a lot of open ocean to cover.
“There’s something big going on,” the mate said, with a tinge of unease.
“I know,” the captain said. Forty years in the smuggling business and he’d never seen anything like this. A full-scale search across thousands of square miles of ocean for a cargo ship that had left port forty-eight hours earlier. Every coast guard cutter and naval frigate had a description on their bridge by now. But why? Who would go to such lengths to find a small freighter?
I’ve weathered worse storms, the captain thought. Heavy machinery filled his hold, nothing exotic. Inside the hidden compartments were crates of high-end electronic gear, or at least that was what it looked like to him. Nothing unusual, but surprisingly heavy. They took the contraband on in Gwadar and were well paid for their extra discretion, including taking on the name of a sister ship the smuggling company had secretly lost at sea four months ago. Goncalves made a habit of never being inquisitive, but he was worried now. What was he carrying?
A crew member trundled past, dragging a piece of cloth. He lowered the Panamanian flag and hoisted a Malaysian one.
“Just make sure we’re clean by sundown,” the captain said. The mate nodded and flicked his cigarette into the ocean. The burning butt twisted in the air, falling ten feet a second past two men dangling over the side of the boat on ropes, paint brushes in hand. Only the e of the old name, Dona Iluire, remained, soon to be obliterated by black paint; only the final a was missing from the new name, Eleutheria.
Dona Iluire meant “free woman” in Spanish. The new name meant “freedom” in Greek.
It was more than a jab at those who wished to haul smugglers to the brig; it was a life’s creed for Capt. Emanuel Goncalves and all of those like him. If you couldn’t be free of the system in the middle of the open ocean, where could you be free?
Chapter 15
“What’s our time hack?” Boon asked.
“Thirty minutes to city limits,” I said. “Inshallah.” It’s in God’s hands.
We were on the road to Sinjar, driving fast in blackout drive using only the moon and night-vision goggles. It was dangerous, but we made better time that way.
“How long do we stay on the hardball?” Boon asked, meaning the paved highway.
“As long as we can,” I answered. “We don’t want Farhan to slip by while we’re dicking around in the back country.”
“Curious, no patrols,” Boon said.
“Count your good karma,” Wildman answered.
“I don’t like it,” Boon replied.
I checked his profile as he drove in silence: stiff jaw, high cheekbones, nothing squirrely in the shape of his head. Kylah was right, Boon was a good-looking guy.
“How’d you do it?” I asked. “With Kylah, I mean.”
He smiled. “I figured you’d get around to asking.”
But he didn’t answer. Maybe that was part of his secret. He’d never let on that he was sleeping with Kylah, but it must have been going on for a while. Why had I never noticed? I guess I could have asked for more info. I guess I could have been asking him about his life all these years. But I didn’t. Instead, I leaned my head back and watched the moonlit landscape fly by. My mind wandered to Dvořák’s “Song to the Moon” from his opera Rusalka. A hundred years before Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Dvořák’s mermaid sings a song to the moon, asking it to tell the prince of her love. Things go badly from there. But the aria is like the mermaid herself: beautiful, poignant, and vulnerable. The music makes you want to reach out and grab her, hug her and tell her he’s not worth it. Princes can be found everywhere. Your hero is right here, Kylah, staring at the same moon in the same silver-black sky.
The moon winked. Or at least that’s what it looked like. I sat up and looked out the bulletproof glass, but all I could see was the distant hills to the north. No lights, no human settlements. Then a shadow blinked across the moon.
“Eyes right,” I said.
A minute passed. Nothing.
“Uh, boss, what are we looking for?” It was Wildman.
Good question, I thought. “Stand down. My bad.”
Three minutes later, we heard the unmistakable whine of a drone overhead.
“Bogie, ten o’clock!” Wildman yelled.
“Two o’clock!” he yelled seconds later. It was circling us.
“Should I get off the road?” Boon asked, calm as always.
“Too late,” I said, cursing my overconfidence. By now, it would have locked its Hellfire missiles on us. If it fired, we’d never know what hit us. There was no way to signal that we weren’t ISIS militants, cruising along in stolen American vehicles. Wildman’s Jolly Roger on the whip antenna didn’t help; it looked like a black ISIS flag, even close up.
“Let’s hope we aren’t worth it,” I said.
“Explains the lack of ISIS on the road,” Boon replied.
We held our breaths for a solid minute, keeping our pace while the drone whined overhead. It would be just our luck to be taken out by our own guys, but of course the drone operators wouldn’t see it that way. We were off the grid. They’d never figure out who we were, if they even bothered to check.
Eventually the drone whined off to the west, toward Sinjar.
“That’s your Buddhist karma,” I said to Boon, when it was out of range. “You must have been a hero in a past life.”
“I’m not a Buddhist,” Boon said.
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“My brother was a Buddhist. A monk. He was burned alive by heroin smugglers. I gave up on Buddha that day.”
“But you were a monk, right?”
“I was twelve. An apprentice.”
He was serious. I could tell it by the set of his jaw. Buddhism meant something to Boon, and whatever it was, he wasn’t a part of it. “So what are you?” I asked.
“I’m a merc,” he said.
Twenty minutes of silence later, Boon pointed toward a crag rising against the horizon on our right. It would have good overwatch of the city.
“Roger, let’s head there.”
We stayed on the highway until the hillock was at one o’clock, then we turned off road. Sinjar’s edge was only a kilometer ahead; to the north sat a mountain, long and flat on top, with steep sides. It was by far the largest thing around, so it had to be Mount Sinjar, where the Yazidis were trapped by ISIS. There were seven gray smoke columns near the mountain, barely visible in the purpling morning sky.
Air strikes, I thought. The United States effort was focused in this quadrant.
“Stick to the low ground,” I said.
Twenty minutes of creeping later, the morning sun was peeking across the horizon, turning the desert dirt Martian red and throwing long shadows off the rocks. We found a good place to conceal the vehicles, a small but deep saddle with a couple of boulders. The younger Kurds quietly ate their breakfast while Boon, Wildman, the older Kurd, and I reconned the area on foot.
Good thing. When we topped the rise, we saw Sinjar on the other side of a low, flat plain at the same moment we saw the militants. There were six, sitting below us in a natural shelter in the windward ridge, looking back toward the city. They had rugs spread around them, and they were talking casually as they ate breakfast with their fingers. The way they moved suggested familiarity with the land and each other, as did their peasant garb. If it hadn’t been for their AK-47s, they could have been Bedouin.
For a second I thought about sniping them out. We could take all six in two quick rounds, but it would attract attention—and who knew how many other jihadis were hidden among the boulders?
I signaled Boon, Wildman, and the older Kurd to move away from the edge, so that we wouldn’t be seen or heard. The jihadis should have posted a guard here. They hadn’t. I looked back to make sure the Humvees and Kurds were hidden. They were. I couldn’t see any dust tracks leading to this spot from the city side, but I could see other tracks leading to other locations along the rise. No truck in sight. These jihadis hadn’t driven up to this lookout. They must have walked. They might have been local shepherds, conscripted into lookout duty. Their AK-47s looked older than me; I wasn’t even sure they would fire.
“Not too bad in town,” Boon said. He was lying on his stomach and peering through his field glasses.
I flattened myself beside him and peered through my glasses at our objective. Sinjar was just another dingy, impoverished desert town: two-story buildings, brown on brown, no natural or artificial charm. It looked like every other settlement for a thousand klicks around.
Boon was right, there wasn’t much movement. ISIS checkpoints sat at main intersections around the city, but many appeared unmanned. Three were smoldering ruins. I looked up and saw two drones circling high above. Boon saw them, too.
“Death from above,” he said.
One drone banked sharply and took an attack profile. A Hellfire smoked off its rails and streaked toward the ground. A fireball, black smoke, and then, a few milliseconds later, a loud thunderclap. One less checkpoint.
“I want one of those,” Wildman whispered.
Allah’s vengeance, I thought. Or, as Boon put it, death from above. The militants below us must have seen it, too. They were jabbering loudly to themselves. When I peeked over the edge, they were packing up their meal. It looked like they were in a hurry.
Above us, the drones veered north and disappeared. Low on fuel, or maybe they hunted at night and always went home at first light.
“Three technicals, moving along the ring road around the city,” Boon said, staring through his binos.
“I’m seeing two more checkpoints being set up, nine o’clock position,” Wildman said.
“The mice come out when the hawk’s away,” Boon said, and I had to agree. If we’d been here at night, I might have chanced a dash across the plain. But with no drones, the ISIS lines became active, and I couldn’t see a clean way in. In any event, this ridgeline was probably crawling with ISIS.
“We’ll have to find another avenue of approach,” I whispered. “We’ll never get across this plain in daylight without being seen.”
“Not our worst problem,” the Kurd said.
He pointed south across the desert, and now I understood why the drones and jihadis had left in such a hurry. The morning sky was clear and blue, but a brown smudge was developing in the lower quadrant. I watched it grow, swirling upward and outward an inch at a time. It was a dust storm, headed our way. Fast.
Chapter 16
I ran halfway down the ridge toward our Humvees, calculating what needed to be done before the sandstorm hit. The Kurds must have seen the storm coming, too, because they had already dismounted the fifty-cals and removed the whip antennae, sparing them from what was to come.
“Can you lead us in?” I said to the older Kurd, when I was sure we were far enough down for the jihadis not to hear us.
“What?”
“Through the dust storm. Can you lead us?”
“You can’t see,” he protested. “You can’t breathe. It will—”
“We’re going. That’s not the question. Do you know Sinjar well enough to lead us to your friend once we get there?”
He stared at me for a moment, and I could feel the dust starting to whip up against my skin. He nodded.
“I’m going to calculate the course. Winch the Humvees together,” I yelled to Boon over the rising wind, “with the Kurds in front.”
I ran to the low point in the ridgeline where the Humvees would crest. The whipped sand was already abrasive, but I pulled out my compass and took a reading on the exact line we’d need to take to hit Sinjar. As I turned to leave, I heard shouting, and I saw one of the jihadis pointing toward me. His comrades looked right at me, then signaled to their friend. He turned and ran the other way, following them toward what must have been shelter.
