by Robert Gandt
It was time for Ali Massouf to emerge from concealment. He was supposed to supposed to move up with the RPG-7 grenade launcher. With the bullets pinging around him, Omar’s impatience swelled. Why isn’t Ali—
The exploding round from the Russian-made weapon made a metallic sound, like a collision of freight trains. Omar saw something, perhaps a door from the Hummer, careen through the air. Someone screamed in agony. A cloud of greasy smoke billowed into the air.
He rose from the depression to check the results. Ali and his squad were emerging from the wadi, approaching the destroyed Hummer.
The enemy soldiers were a mess. Two were dead, badly mutilated. The American was writhing on the ground, his right leg nearly severed at the knee. One of the Kuwaitis was on all fours, dazed and wounded, trying to crawl away.
Ali watched them without pity. He cradled his submachine gun in his arms and looked across the smoking Hummer at Omar.
Omar nodded. Ali turned to the crawling man and fired a burst into him. He moved over to the American with the damaged leg. The wounded man—a sergeant, Omar judged by the black insignia—glowered up at him. Omar finished him with a burst to the forehead.
“Where is the Iranian?” said Omar. “Bring him quickly.” One of the Sherji trotted back to the wadi where they’d concealed themselves. Seconds later he returned, pulling a stubble-bearded man by the elbow. The man’s wrists were bound in front, and he wore the shabby blue uniform of the Iranian navy.
Omar picked up the MP5 that lay next to the dead American. He checked it, then walked over to the Iranian prisoner.
The Iranian sensed what was coming. His eyes filled with terror. “Please,” he said in Farsi. “In the name of Allah—”
The dull crackle of the MP5 drowned out his words. The Iranian toppled backwards, his chest stitched with the burst of nine-millimeter bullets. He lay spread-eagled on the desert floor, his eyes staring straight into the sky.
“Untie his wrists,” ordered Omar, “Position him with a weapon over there, across the road.” He threw the MP5 back on the ground next to the body of the dead Kuwaiti soldier.
At that moment he heard it. The first faint whopping noise.
Rotor blades.
He cocked his head, listening. The other Sherji watched him anxiously.
“Ours or theirs?” inquired Ali.
He listened for another several seconds to be sure. Yes, he was certain. The distinctive thrum of a French-built helicopter’s blades.
“Ours. The Dauphin, coming back for us.”
The Dauphin was an armed utility helicopter. It was the sole remaining war bird in the inventory of the Bu Hasa Brigade.
While he waited for the helicopter to arrive, Omar surveyed the carnage around him. One dead American and three Kuwaitis. A good count, he reflected. Too bad they weren’t all Americans.
< >
Manama, Bahrain
“Welcome back, old girl.” Tyrwhitt raised his glass. “Now that they’re gone, let the party begin.”
She saw that he had ordered another bottle of wine. Bronson’s own glass was still half full. He looked bored.
“Something must have happened,” said Claire. “Why would the Reagan be going back to sea so quickly?”
“Ask him,” Tyrwhitt said, nodding to Bronson. “I’m not supposed to know such things, at least in public.”
Bronson gave her his dead-eyed gaze. “Your news bureau has the story by now,” he said. “A terrorist action. A nasty one against an oil tanker.”
“What will the Reagan Battle Group do? Retaliate?”
Bronson gave her a humorless chuckle. “Even if I knew, do you really think I’d divulge it to a reporter in a restaurant? Get serious, lady.”
“You could tell me off the record. Chris can tell you that I respect confidentiality.”
“Your husband isn’t qualified to decide such things.”
Whatever that meant, she guessed it was an insult. Tyrwhitt didn’t seem to mind. He tossed down half his wine and said, “Your boy friend seems rather antisocial. Don’t you find him boring?”
“Not at all. Sam was annoyed that we weren’t alone this evening.”
“Pity. Were you going to spend the night together?”
She bristled, but she kept her voice level. “I know it’s difficult, Chris, but try not to be obnoxious.”
“Well, since the poor chap’s been called away, I’ll step forward and do the right thing. I’ll take his place.”
“Chris, you’re unbelievable.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“It means you’re a presumptuous ass.” She said it too loud. The group at the next table was staring. A waiter carrying a tray of dinners stopped and gave her a wary look.
Tyrwhitt was pleased with himself. He set his glass on the table and gave her a round of applause. “That’s my girl. Another classic performance.”
He’d done it again, she realized. It was an old trick of his—getting her riled up with some outrageous insinuation, pushing her crazy button and watching her go ballistic.
She’d obliged him as usual, and with that thought she laughed too. For all his faults, Chris Tyrwhitt was one of the funniest men she’d ever known. That was one of the reasons she fell for him back in Washington several years ago.
It was after she’d broken up with Sam Maxwell, and he’d gone off to NASA. She’d only known Tyrwhitt for a couple of months before they were married. He was good looking, witty, and, when he felt like working at it, could be a competent journalist. What she learned later was that Chris Tyrwhitt seldom worked at anything except drinking and philandering.
Some of that, she realized now, was a front. The philandering and drinking part was all true, but there was a side to him that he hadn’t revealed. The side that caused him to disappear inside Iraq and be shot as a spy. Tyrwhitt was a better man than she had believed.
Careful, girl. She had fallen once before for that disarming, Crocodile Dundee humor of his. The way he turned everything around and made you laugh with him. Chris Tyrwhitt could charm a girl out of her knickers.
Be careful, she warned herself again. You learned your lesson.
Or did you?
< >
Persian Gulf
Where are the others?” asked Akhmed, sticking his head up from the aft hatch. “Muhammad and Yusef and the other Sherji? Where have they gone?”
“I sent them to the rendezvous point,” answered Abu. “We’re late. If the helicopter crew doesn’t see us, they won’t wait.”
They made it to the ancient port of Bandar-e Basht just before dawn. As Abu expected, no one occupied the drab dwellings of what was once a fishing village on the extreme northern coast of Iran. The village had been deserted since 18 March, 1981. That was the day an officer of Saddam Hussein’s army fired a canister of Sarin gas into the Iranian garrison bivouacked in the village.
Since then Bandar e Basht had been considered uninhabitable. In the view of the few surviving villagers, the village would be forever unfit to live in.
Which was why Abu Mahmed had chosen this place to dock the boat. The village was close—less than an hour’s helicopter time—to Mashmashiyeh and the safety of the low marsh country. At exactly sunrise, the Dauphin was supposed to retrieve them from the old road intersection on a plateau above the village.
But time was running short. Already the eastern sky was pink with the first glow of dawn. Abu still had business to conclude.
He regretted giving up the boat. It was too risky to take it all the way upriver to Mashmashiyeh. There was no way to conceal it from the airplanes and satellites and unmanned spy craft of the Americans. By daylight, they would be scouring the Gulf for the speedboat that attacked the Bayou Queen and killed one of their helos.
The boat would have to sacrificed. But Akhmed didn’t know that. Not yet. Like all peasant fishermen, he had a sentimentality for boats, even ones that he had stolen.
“Secure the boat,” Abu ordered. “You and I will
sweep the cabin for traces of evidence that could identify who used the boat.”
“I have done that already.”
“Do it again. We can’t be too careful.”
Akhmed glowered at him from the hatch, giving him another of those insolent looks, then turned and went back inside. Abu suppressed a smile. He wanted to freeze that insolent expression in his memory. It would be the last recollection he would have of Akhmed Fayez.
Carrying his canvas satchel over one shoulder, he followed Akhmed down the hatch and into the main salon. “Check the forward cabin,” he called. “I will look in the aft.”
He waited until Akhmed disappeared inside the forward cabin, then he entered the aft cabin and lifted up the hatch that exposed the engine compartment and the fuel tank. The reek of oil and diesel fuel and stagnant water struck his nostrils like a wave of polluted seawater.
He could hear Akhmed rummaging in the forward cabin, opening lockers, slamming the doors of compartments.
Now.
He reached inside the satchel and felt the hard oval shape of the RGO-78 fragmentation grenade. It was the same old Warsaw Pact weapon procured by every guerrilla organization since the 1980s— the Mujahedeen, Al-Quaeda, Hamas, Shining Path. And the Bu Hasa Brigade.
Wrapping one hand around the grenade, Abu squeezed the spring-loaded grip. He reached inside with his other hand and pulled the safety pin free. Glancing up forward, making sure Akhmed was still in the forward cabin, he released the grip and lowered the satchel onto the greasy shelf between one of the engines and the main fuel tank.
The grenade was armed and counting down.
Forcing himself to be quick but deliberate, Abu exited the aft cabin and ascended the short ladder to the boat’s cockpit.
As he stepped onto the old stone ledge that served as a dock, he heard Akhmed’s voice behind him. “Did you forget something?”
Abu continued walking. “No.”
“Your satchel. Where is it?”
Abu didn’t stop walking. Over his shoulder he said, “In the main cabin. Get it for me.”
Akhmed was replying with something unintelligible—a Yemeni insult—when the muffled Whump of the grenade obliterated his words.
Then came the secondary explosion. The fuel tank.
Abu whirled in time to see the deck of the speedboat levitate from the hull. From the bowels of the boat erupted a pulse of flame, spilling across the gray surface of the harbor and lighting the dawn sky. Inside the blaze Abu glimpsed the dark shape of something human—Akhmed Fayez— arms outstretched, his scream lost in the roar of the inferno.
For several minutes Abu watched the boat burn. Soon nothing was left except a charred shell, which finally yielded to the weight of the two diesel engines, tilted and slipped beneath the surface. A smoking oil slick spread over the harbor where the speedboat had been.
Abu turned his back on the empty mooring. The sun was just breaking the horizon above the village. In the distance, up on the plateau, he heard the first faint beat of helicopter blades.
< >
Manama, Bahrain
“Share a cab?” said Bronson.
“No, thanks.” Tyrwhitt set off down the street, leaving Bronson standing in the street in front of Cico’s.
To hell with Bronson, he thought. He felt like walking anyway. After you’d been in a prison like Abu Graib, the act of walking alone—no guards, no leg chains, no escorts, in any damned direction you pleased—became one of life’s sweetest pleasures.
An even sweeter pleasure, of course, would be having Claire with him. That wasn’t an option tonight, but he had the impression that she was coming to her senses. She was getting over the infatuation with the fighter jock. One of the unexpected results of his being shot and imprisoned by the Iraqis was that Claire seemed to have a new appreciation of him and their marriage.
Not that he hadn’t given her cause to judge him harshly. He hadn’t exactly been a model spouse. But she knew that his dalliances were always brief and never serious—the occasional consul’s wife, a flirtatious stewardess, a nightclub singer. Nothing of consequence.
In any case, that was behind him. Since his wounding and capture, he had been forced to look at his own mortality, and he had decided to change his ways. Living a more or less chaste life with Claire made a lot more sense than the old days of wretched excess. For Claire he would mend his life style. She was worth the sacrifice.
He walked at a brisk pace, following Salmaniya Avenue through the center of Manama, past the rows of closed merchant shops and into the yellow-lighted section of the old city. The evening was warm, a fresh wind rolling across the narrow expanse of water that separated the island of Bahrain from the Saudi mainland. As he walked, his leather soles made a crunching sound on the graveled roadside.
His thoughts returned to the conversation at the table in Cico’s.
The prisoner. Where had Maxwell gotten the idea that there might be such a prisoner? It had to be more than a coincidence.
Was it the wife?
He wondered again what possessed him to place the call to the woman in Virginia. Gallagher was her name. Formerly Rasmussen.
The idea had been germinating like a seed in his brain for weeks. He was unable to erase from his memory the recollection of a prisoner—it had to be the American pilot—with whom he’d had a brief dialogue that night in Abu Graib. The Iraqi guard had overheard them and given them each a beating. But the American’s voice had remained with him, still clear in his memory.
Why should I care?
That was the strange part. He shouldn’t care. Prisons in the Middle East were filled with lost souls who had vanished into the maw of Arab politics. One more made no difference.
But something had compelled him to make the call. He wanted to tell the woman that her lost husband might still be breathing the air of this world. It was a way of expunging from his memory the guilt of knowing a prisoner was there—and left behind. He fantasized that the call might trigger a succession of events, leading like a string of dominoes all the way to Bahrain.
The thought made him smile. If Bronson knew that the true source of the rumor about an American prisoner came from inside the CIA, he would be apoplectic.
Tyrwhitt walked the outer circumference of the roundabout at the King Faisal Highway, then headed westward again toward the center of Manama. He doubted that anyone was tailing him, but if they were they’d be in for a tiresome hike.
He glanced at his watch. Almost ten o’clock. Technically, he was in violation of Bronson’s standing order that all meetings with outside agents be cleared by him. But Bronson would have nixed this meeting, citing his distrust of free lancers like Mustafa.
Mustafa Ashbar was an Iraqi whose services Tyrwhitt had used off and on since his early days in Baghdad. He trusted Mustafa for personal reasons. The Iraqi had saved his life on two occasions.
Tyrwhitt made one pass by the Sabah bar on Zubara Avenue, then doubled back and went inside. He found Mustafa at his usual table in the back corner, hunched over an Arabic newspaper, sipping at a tall drink. Tyrwhitt chuckled. Mustafa had been corrupted by his years of exposure to western culture. Now he had an abiding fondness for Jack Daniels whiskey.
Mustafa looked up. “Were you followed?”
Tyrwhitt shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Mustafa smiled, showing an uneven row of yellow teeth. “You’re the one who should worry, not me.”
Tyrwhitt ordered a beer and pulled up a chair. In many ways, he thought, he and Mustafa were alike. Mustafa worked both sides of the street. While he accepted payments from the CIA, he was probably in the pocket of the Iranian secret police. Maybe the Kurds. Maybe even the Israeli Mossad. Mustafa was a pragmatist, not a patriot.
Tyrwhitt guessed Mustafa’s age at somewhere around forty, maybe older. He came from the primitive marsh country of lower Iraq. His face had the leathered, gaunt look of a Bedouin, but his hair and mustache were jet black, and he moved with a young man’s easy agil
ity. Tyrwhitt knew for a fact that Mustafa could kill with the speed of a cobra.
Mustafa produced a pack of Marlboros. Another western corruption. He lit one and exhaled a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth, a mannerism lifted from old American gangster movies.
“So?” said Mustafa. “The American aircraft carrier has just arrived in Bahrain. Now it is leaving already. A very short visit. Something bad must have happened.”
Tyrwhitt nodded. “It will be in the newspapers and television in the morning. A rocket attack on a tanker, and a killing of some border guards in Kuwait.”
“Who was it this time? Not the Iraqis. They’ve lost their taste for terrorism. Iran, perhaps? Or one of the jihad groups? The game never ends, does it?”
“Do you still have contacts in Iran? In the Bu Hasa Brigade?”
Mustafa swirled the last drops of whiskey in his glass. “Perhaps.”
“Someone willing to talk to me?”
“It depends on what you wish to talk about.”
“The usual things. Weather, politics, football.”
Mustafa smiled. “It will require many thousand dinars. Such people take football very seriously.”
“Can you arrange it?”
“Of course.” He tossed down the remainder of the Jack Daniels. “Enough business. Let’s have another drink.”
< >
Masmashiyeh, Iran
Al-Fasr’s anger had reached the flash point.
“You made a grave mistake,” he said, glowering at Abu Mahmed. “Why did you destroy the American helicopter?”
“There was no choice. He would have attacked us. He would have stopped us in the gulf, and we would be taken prisoner.”
Al-Fasr didn’t reply. He turned from Abu and glared out the window, trying to control his anger. In his heart he knew Abu was correct. The helicopter would have opened fire on the boat, stopping it so it could be boarded. That would have been unfortunate.
It was bad luck, the helicopter arriving when it did. He had expected that the boat would make it to Iranian waters before the Americans reacted.
