Twenty-seven hours later, Meredith sat in the dark at a plywood table, watching the gray-green feed from the drone on an overhead monitor. It was dark and cold there in the operational nerve center of FOB Hammer. Serious men and women in green uniforms crouched over scopes, speaking to one another in low voices. They used a mystifying jargon of acronyms that she had a hard time following. It was all the more difficult because her mind was still not quite right.
A flight surgeon had taken pity on her and given her a quilted Nomex flight jacket. A Marine first lieutenant had donated an MRE— Meal, Ready to Eat—to take down right after she’d landed. She was at least warm and well-fed now, thanks to her military hosts.
But her eyes were sunken with exhaustion, her mouth puckered with worry. She’d discarded Maggie O’Dea’s wig in favor of an efficient ponytail. A thick layer of makeup covered the emerging bruises. She knew she looked like hell and didn’t much care.
She still hadn’t heard from John. But watching the drone feed, she could at least see that he was in place now. In the white-hot blur of IR, he lay in a sniper’s position a few hundred yards from the sheep pen across the border in Iran, which they’d all started calling “the corral.” She had no idea how John had managed to get there or procure the rifle in his arms, but that was the kind of thing he was good at.
She stared at the screen, at him, willing some kind of telepathic communication. She wished desperately that they could speak for real, even for a few seconds. But he’d been ignoring the messages. Seeing him there, vulnerable, far away, she was willing to excuse his silence—for once.
She strained at the image to better understand his real status. Hurt? In danger? In contact with the asset? In the blurry projection of IR, she could see only the vague white shape of a man lying on his stomach.
He wasn’t wearing the IR reflector. But NSA had received intercepts that the IRGC was conducting a manhunt across Iranian Kurdistan—yet with no mention of Alut. With that kind of heat, Meredith assured all of them that John could have lost all of his gear in his surely perilous journey down from Turkey. Plans in the field with officers like John were all about improvisation. The man lying there had to be John, IR reflector or no.
A wider view from the side-scan video of the drone had revealed a compact Nissan Sentra parked alongside the road a few miles up. Its engine was still glowing white, though faintly. The official assessment was that John had probably left it there and snuck up on the ranch via a wide, circuitous route, extra cautious, as he was known to be. He must’ve done it during the day, before the drone had arrived on station.
The drone had arrived only a few minutes earlier, since every second on the wrong side of the border invited a shoot down from the IRGC Air Defense Force. Planned mission time over target was a max of sixty minutes, as long as they didn’t detect fighters heading toward it.
But since their man was there, the military operations team thought the hour would be enough. The modest car, the stealthy approach, the sniper’s tactical hide—all of it smacked of John. They’d looked to Meredith for confirmation of identity and she’d given it. A rumor in the ranks said she was the wife. If anyone should know, it’d be her.
Now, whenever the drone shifted to show that white blob of a human form, Meredith felt a weary surge of tentative satisfaction. She’d almost gotten John home. She’d almost given Grace her father back. Almost. If only goddamned Cerberus would show so she could call it a wrap. Then she’d deal with the dead Russian operative in her hotel room. Then she’d deal with Rance.
Every now and then she glanced over at his red-blond head. Rance was near the door, speaking with the DEVGRU CO as though he were one of the boys, a tough guy. He wore a khaki vest with cargo pockets and pressed olive pants of heavy twill. She wondered what that hard-bitten Navy captain would do to Rance if he understood what she really knew of Rance.
Or thought she knew, she reminded herself, ever the intelligence professional. She went back to staring at the image of John. What did she really know about Rance?
The presentation of evidence against him was damning at a circumstantial level.
Rance had called her, angry that she was in Dubai, not Doha. He’d said he would send a helicopter to get her out of there, up to Hammer. Yet in the ensuing interlude, quite the opposite had happened. She’d been ruthlessly attacked by the blond Russian operative, the same one who’d gone after John in Mumbai. Coincidence? No way. Verdict? Guilty.
But beyond a reasonable doubt?
If Rance really was a willing accomplice, an active agent of the SVR, then he was hiding it well. He’d shown no real surprise when she’d arrived at the dusty airfield. He’d mumbled an apology about the delay in the transport, true to form. All of his usual foibles were there: the fussiness about the operational details, the crankiness about John.
But he was also focused now, free of the distractions that had seemed to plague him over the past few months. Since Meredith had jumped out of the helo from Dubai, Rance had been quick to drill her for details. He seemed fully in command, impressively efficient at getting the DEVGRU team briefed up. None of that fit with someone running a side agenda.
It was all very confusing. If he’d really known about the blonde’s mission, he should have been shocked to see Meredith. Even now, slouching against the wooden wall, his posture showed nothing unusual.
He certainly couldn’t have known the blonde was dead now. No one knew except Meredith. After killing her, she’d pulled the bloody body into the bathtub, containing the leaky mess, covering it with a bedsheet. She’d also covered the floor stains with bath towels, as though it even mattered. She’d done it only so she wouldn’t have to look at them.
Meredith had done a quick scan for intelligence, an SSE, surveying the blonde’s luggage. There was a phone, locked, and no sign of a weapon. The clothing in the bag was a well-ordered array of fashion with English brands, a spare Emirates uniform, some frilly underwear. There was a makeup kit with expensive French labels. The big empty equipment case had stenciled Emirates serial numbers on it.
That was a nice touch, Meredith thought. A little too nice.
The SVR assassin had overlooked one small lapse in her concealment. Two small clear vials of liquid in the makeup case, presumably the drugs the blonde had been using on Meredith, had tiny Cyrillic markings on the bottom. There could be no mistaking it. The blonde was SVR.
Meredith had then sat up all night in the very closet that had acted as her initial prison, her phones blinking in front of her, the Glock across her knees. She’d reasoned that if the blonde had help, it would be coming through the door. She’d be ready.
She’d thought about calling CIA ops for reinforcements, but then reconsidered. If it was as bad as she thought, then there was no way she was going to tip off Rance.
Besides, even if Rance wasn’t the spy she believed he might be, she knew what his reaction would be. Meredith would be declared radioactive again, burned, a careless fool for going back to Dubai as a NOC officer. She’d be pulled off the op right before the critical meet. She sure as shit wouldn’t be sitting here in this operations center, watching the drone feed, confirming John’s presence.
She’d made her decision. She’d keep her mouth shut in defense of the mission. That was the most important thing, for now.
But she was still conflicted. After all, what was her role in jeopardizing the mission? Given the memory gap, unconsciousness, and searing headache, she now suspected she might have been injected with some kind of truth serum—sodium pentothal, scopolamine, or some other concoction SVR had cooked up. Had she revealed something to the blonde? Her official assessment was that the risk was slight. Anything she’d said to the Russian assassin had surely died with her.
Around three a.m., when her phone had rung with orders to Hammer, she’d cleaned up, gathered her wares, and left the room with a do-not-disturb sign on the door. Boy, would housekeeping be surprised when they finally entered with a master key.
The aftermath would be an agency disaster. But she’d deal with the fallout later. The important thing was that Meredith was here now, looking at John in that gray-green monitor.
The on-deck SEAL team was a mere hundred meters away from where she sat, suited up in combat gear, slumped around a fueled-up helo. The plan was to launch once John and Cerberus started heading toward the border, not a moment before. They figured it would take John about a half hour to cross over on foot, the same amount of time it would take to fly the SEALs there.
A rising murmur among the soldiers suddenly caught Meredith’s attention.
One of the Air Force noncoms saw it first, said something aloud, alerted the others. He used a laser pointer on the monitor. The drone zoomed in.
Two men, white with heat in IR, were coming up the road toward the corral. One of them carried an object. Another view revealed the telltale shape of an AK-47.
“Tighten up on the man with the rifle!” the DEVGRU CO barked.