DELUCA’S FIRST MISTAKE WAS THAT HE DEcided not to swallow his transponder, as he had before his mission to Iran. He decided not to because of the difficulty he’d had recovering the device on the “back end” of the trip, something he didn’t particularly care to repeat. Or perhaps that was just part of a bigger, more generalized mistake, the mistake of letting his guard down, perhaps because Richard Yaakub had been apprehended, or because he was just getting sloppy.
He’d met Adnan and Khalil at the south gate at 1600 hours. Vasquez was with him, as was Smoky, brought along to sniff for bombs or biological weapons. DeLuca told Adnan he’d speak with Abu Waid alone, and without a convoy, but he wasn’t going to travel completely without backup. Dan thought he should have been the one going with his team leader, by virtue of seniority, until DeLuca told him he needed Dan to drive the trail vehicle, out of sight and beyond the horizon, following directions from Scottie, who would be monitoring his father’s position.
Khalil’s car was a 1983 Mercedes, the upholstery on the dashboard long ago shredded by the desert heat. Adnan was in the passenger seat. They headed west from Balad on Highway 1, crossed the Tigris, and drove out of the valley so fertile it had spawned civilization itself, and after a while, into a desert so flat and barren that civilization had yet to find a place to take root. Waid had wanted to meet in the desert, out in the open, where it would be quickly evident if anyone were following them. Dan would have to leave a twenty-mile gap between them, lest his dust be visible to anybody with binoculars. They were to travel west until they saw a man dressed in red with a camel. The man would tell them which way to turn, and then they would see another man, ten miles down from the first. The second man would give them further directions, and that way would bring them to Abu Waid.
“There will be a sandstorm today,” Khalil said confidently.
“That’s not what our weather birds told me this morning,” DeLuca said.
“Arabs don’t need those things, boss,” he said, pointing to his nose. “We can tell by the smell of sunrise.”
“Don’t listen,” Adnan said. “He’s a mountain Kurd who thinks he’s desert Arab.”
The sun was fierce. DeLuca wanted to look behind him, though he knew Mack and Dan would be far back. A pair of Predators circled overhead, at Phil LeDoux’s insistence, both of them hunter-killers armed with Hellfire missiles. DeLuca hoped the technology supporting him turned the odds in his favor, but you couldn’t count on technology, any more than you could count on the kindness of strangers. You could only count on yourself, and your team.
They raced past the empty oilfields, driving west toward the Syrian border, across a vast salt flat where the windblown dust obscured the road. DeLuca grew apprehensive. They should have seen the first man with the camel by now, he thought. Vasquez looked uneasy as well, fingering the safety on his rifle, the younger man in battle gear while DeLuca traveled sterile and unarmed. He wasn’t agoraphobic, but there was something about such wide-open spaces that left him disoriented, without a tree or hill or distant mountain anywhere to let him reset his internal compass. He looked at his watch. It was too early for the sun to be going down, and yet the light seemed to be giving out.
Then he saw it, a wall of dust rising in the west, where the winds generated by the Jebel Ansariya range crossed the inland steppes to stir the dust from the Syrian desert and carry it eastward, a vague dimness that would progress from a flesh-colored sky to one of orange, then sepia, then dark brown and then perhaps one as dark as night, though it was still midday.
Khalil stopped the car.
“Something wrong?” DeLuca asked him.
“Don’t worry, boss,” Khalil said. “I have desert air filters. I think we are almost there.”
“Yes?” Adnan said.
“Yes,” Khalil said, wheeling about and throwing his arm over the seat to point a .45 automatic in DeLuca’s face. Adnan pointed a similar gun at Vasquez, who raised his hands in the air. “Put your hands behind your head—now!” Khalil commanded.
“You, keep your hands on your head!” Adnan ordered Vasquez. The dog, who’d been lying on the seat between DeLuca and Vasquez, sat up. “Keep him quiet or I kill him now!” Vasquez held Smoky’s mouth shut with one hand as Khalil got out of the car and opened DeLuca’s door.
“Wait just a . . .”
“Shut up,” Khalil commanded, hitting DeLuca on the side of the head with the barrel of his gun. “Shut up! Put your hands at your neck.” He quickly searched DeLuca, removing the transponder from his breast pocket. “This is how you think they will find you—let’s see how they find you in our desert now,” Khalil said, and with that, he flung the transponder into the darkening sky. DeLuca could feel the dust filling his throat and lungs. “Watch him, Adnan,” Khalil said, shutting DeLuca’s door and circling behind the car to open Vasquez’s door and pull him violently from the seat, throwing him to the ground. He took Hoolie’s weapon from him and commanded him to get to his feet, slamming the butt of the rifle into the small of Hoolie’s back, causing him to stumble. DeLuca watched as Khalil marched Vasquez into the desert, the two figures obscured by the sandstorm until they were silhouettes in a shapeless sea of orange. He saw Vasquez kneel on the ground. He saw Khalil move around behind him, and he saw him fire. Vasquez fell. Khalil stood over him, firing six more times before he stopped.
Khalil returned to the car and handed the rifle to Adnan. Then he went to the trunk and found a pillowcase, which he put over DeLuca’s head, binding his hands behind him with a roll of duct tape.
DeLuca felt the car start again.
The two men in the front seat conversed in Arabic.
“Do you think he can breathe?”
“He can breathe.”
“There was no reward for the other one?”
“Nothing.”
“Perhaps we should have brought him with us.”
“Let the sand fleas feed on his corpse. You said the Fat One only wanted this one.”
“Yes.”
“Then be happy. We turn him over and we are finished with this business. Tak beer.”
“Praise Allah. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah,” Adnan muttered, sounding like he wasn’t completely convinced.
DeLuca understood because his Arabic was better than his German, a fact he revealed to no one, since it was almost always to his advantage to have people think he didn’t know what they were saying. He spoke Arabic with an American accent, he knew, but his comprehension was good. Not even Sami knew.
He rode for another hour. His luck could hardly have been worse. Surveillance satellites and UAV cameras could penetrate fog and clouds, but they couldn’t penetrate sand. Without his transponder, there was no way anybody would be able to follow the car. Sandstorms could last for days.
The car stopped.
Men yelling.
“That’s him?”
“That’s him. The famous Mr. David.”
“He doesn’t look so tough.”
“Enough! Let us by.”
He was pulled from the car. A man held him by the right arm, another by the left. He was brought into some sort of building with a squeaky iron door, through another door, and down a fight of stairs. He heard men calling in the distance in front of him.
“Tell them Adnan is here and he’s brought the man with him.”
“Where? I want to see him.”
He was led down several more flights of stairs—he counted seven sets of sixteen, which put him, by his blind reckoning, well underground—through a door and into a space where the voices echoed to suggest a large cavern or cave. He guessed he was in some sort of mine, though there was no musty smell, the air dry as could be.
Finally he was led down a corridor and turned roughly into a smaller room, where he was forced to sit in a chair, his hands retaped to the back of the chair, his legs to the chair’s front legs. Khalil had taken his pain pills from his pocket. He was thinking he could use one about now.
He sat in the dark, he couldn’t be sure for how long. Perhaps it was an hour. Perhaps it was two. He heard a hissing sound, coming from what he thought could be a ventilation system. He heard a distant mechanical throbbing. Generators? Water pumps? Air-conditioners? Occasionally he heard the murmur of faroff voices, though never anything distinct or clear. He thought he smelled gasoline, or perhaps motor oil.
The door opened. The footsteps of two men. Three? They seemed to be building something, or setting something up.
“Hand me that. Not that one—that one.”
“This one?”
“Yes. Where did you put it?”
“I didn’t have it.”
“I told you to bring it.”
“It was just here.”
“This will have to do . . .”
“Is that it?”
“I think it’s ready.”
“We should test it . . .”
“Which is the one. That one?”
“I think . . .”
“You think?”
“It’s not mine. I’ve never used one like this.”
He heard the crackling of plastic wrap. Someone opening a pack of cigarettes? Was he going to be burned?
Ten or fifteen minutes later, a group of men returned. Someone shuffled around him, circling him, dragging his feet, a different-sounding walk from the others, like an old man taking short old man steps, breathing heavily through his nose.
“Take it off,” he heard a voice say.
Someone jerked his head back suddenly by pulling on the hood over his head. Pain shot down his neck and across the top of his skull, but he couldn’t let them know how much it hurt. The hood came off.
The room was dark, until the light from a video camera shone in his face. Then a black and white television came on, the TV sitting on the table next to the camera. DeLuca saw a picture of himself on the monitor, a trickle of blood still on his cheek from where Khalil had hit him.
“Do you know who I am?” a voice behind the camera said.
“Mohammed Al-Tariq,” DeLuca said.
“I am his brother, Dawud,” the voice said. “Mohammed is dead.”
“Dawud is dead,” DeLuca said. “We found his body on the roof, where you put it.”
“It was Mohammed’s body that you found,” the voice said.
“Mohammed has diabetes,” DeLuca said. “The body did not. And you have ketones on your breath.” He’d once teasingly called his sister Elaine “Juicy-Fruit breath.”
There was a silence.
“What is your name?”
“You know who I am,” DeLuca said.
“I do,” Al-Tariq said. He came forward until his face was side-lit by the light from the camcorder. He looked thinner than he had in the pictures from his file, but the man who stood before DeLuca was still pushing three hundred pounds. He’d grown a beard as well, black with a lot of gray in it. He walked with a cane, and had an oxygen tube held in place beneath his nose by an elastic strap that went around the back of his head, the tube attached to a portable bottle that hung from his shoulder by a sling. His eyes bulged, suggesting a thyroid condition, and one of them didn’t seem to focus where the other one did, the left one staring at DeLuca, the right one looking slightly over his shoulder. “Start the tape,” Al-Tariq said in Arabic to someone behind him. “Just tell me one thing I don’t know, Mr. DeLuca—does your wife, Bonnie, have a VCR?”
DeLuca didn’t answer.
He heard voices whispering in the darkness behind the camera.
“It’s not working.”
“What do you mean, it’s not working? I can see his picture on the monitor.”
“Yes, that, but the tape is the wrong kind. The tape itself.”
“What do you mean, the wrong kind?”
“These tapes don’t work in this camera. I told you that.”
“You did not.”
“I did too. This is not my fault.”
“Do they work in the old camera?”
“Yes.”
“Well then get the old camera.”
“Yes, but that one, the batteries are not charged.”
“Then charge them.”
“I don’t know where the adapter is.”
“Well look for it. It’s here somewhere.”
DeLuca said nothing. He’d been told, before the war ever started, to expect to see such videos, and that similar tapes had circulated among various terrorist organizations for years.
“Why did you come here?” Al-Tariq asked.
“I had an appointment with Abu Waid,” DeLuca said. “He said he was willing to betray you, in exchange for being appointed to a government position in Irbil.”
“Abu Waid said this?”
“That’s what I was told.” His hope was to sow a modicum of dissent behind enemy lines, so to speak, but it was a hope that was immediately dashed.
“Abu Waid,” Al-Tariq said, “is this true? Do you want to be mayor of Irbil?”
“Governor,” a voice in the darkness said, laughing. “Ibrahim can be mayor.”
“Shut up!” Al-Tariq barked.
The room was hushed.
“The videotape is not working,” a timid voice said.
“Why not?” Al-Tariq demanded to know.
“There’s a problem. We need to use the old camera. Abdullah is looking for it now.”
Al-Tariq breathed angrily through his nose, then left the room.
DeLuca waited in silence, aware that there were still three or four men in the room behind the camera’s light.
“Did you know that the vaccine he gave you, to take and to give to your wives and families, won’t work? It’s not going to protect you, or your children. It’s tea. That’s all,” DeLuca said. “Taste it. There is no vaccine.”
“He’s lying.”
“Shut up!” someone told him, and then a rifle butt slammed into his ribs. Perhaps a seed had been planted after all. The blow knocked the wind out of him momentarily.
Then Al-Tariq stormed back into the room, his dishdasha swishing against his cane, which he raised above his head and brought down swiftly against the side of DeLuca’s neck, but a glancing blow that DeLuca took more on the shoulder than the neck. He gritted his teeth, though he was beyond pain now, the anger he felt inside huge but cold. His ear felt like it was on fire, glowing red hot, and he felt a trickle of blood flowing down his neck and into his collar.
“You killed my son, my Hassan,” Al-Tariq said.
“Hassan was killed by looters,” DeLuca said. “By Iraqis. He died from his injuries in the hospital.”
“You killed him,” Al-Tariq said, more dispassionately now. “So this is what will happen to you. Do it. Show him.”
He realized what it was that had smelled like gasoline when a chainsaw started up, somewhere behind the camera. He braced himself, but at the same time, he heard a loud yelp as two men entered, carrying Smoky in their arms, one at his front quarters, the other at the rear. They pressed the dog down on the table, the dog fighting with all his strength to escape their grasp, until a third man joined in to hold him still, and then the man with the chainsaw brought the blade down just above the animal’s collar, pressing into the beast’s neck until the air filled with flying fur and flesh and blood, the creature shrieking with fear and pain.
But then it was over as the head came loose. The two men holding down what remained threw the carcass in the corner, as the head rolled over on its side. Al-Tariq picked it up by one ear and set it in DeLuca’s lap, prying the eyelids open so that the head was staring up at DeLuca, Smoky’s tongue lolling grotesquely to one side, no longer attached at the back.
“You Americans enjoy having these things in your laps, so I will give you a companion,” Al-Tariq said. He tapped the skull twice with his cane as the blood, still warm, trickled down DeLuca’s legs, the gray matter from his brainpan spilling as well. “Good doggy. Isn’t that what you say? I want you to think about this, David DeLuca. When I come back, you will tell me everything you can tell me about how much you and your government know about me. If you do not, your wife will receive a tape in the mail and she will see this happen to you. If you help me, I will shoot you once and that will be enough. The choice is yours.”
“Guard him. Leave the door open so that you can hear him. I want the old camera set up. Where did Jamal go? Somebody find him and bring him to me,” Al-Tariq said, his voice growing fainter as the distance between them grew.
DeLuca tried not to look at the dog’s head. Perhaps there was no distinction to be drawn between necessary and unnecessary cruelty, and yet during his entire career, first as a counterintelligence agent, then as a police officer, and again as CI, he’d drawn such lines, the difference between a Mafia hit that killed a hit man in a barber chair and one that killed the barber, too. Unlike some cops, he still believed there were people who were innocent. Animals, too.
He felt an anger and a sense of resolve growing inside him, the Italian kind, cold and controlled for now, but only until the time was right to turn it loose. He slowed his breathing, trying to clear his thoughts. Was the sandstorm still blowing? Had anybody seen the car? Could anybody see it now, where it was parked?
He was staring at the door when he heard a soft buzzing sound, nearly undetectable, a fly, he thought, and then he saw it land on the table in front of the television monitor. He wondered if the smell of Smoky’s blood had attracted it, though it was a strange-looking bug, more like a June bug than a common housefly. It took off again, rising vertically from the table and hovering in front of the camcorder before turning, moving forward until it hung in the air a foot in front of DeLuca’s face, its wings flapping invisibly. In the center of the bug was a small red light, about the size of the head of a pin. DeLuca recalled Scott telling him about the Robofly, the tiny raisin-sized UAV that DARPA had been developing, but he hadn’t thought it was ready for deployment. The red light blinked in a dot-dash/
dash-dash-dash/dash-dot-dash pattern, repeated it a second time, then dropped to the floor. It took DeLuca a while to remember his Morse code: “A-OK.”
He heard voices.
The voices grew louder, a man calling out in Arabic.
He saw Khalil, standing in the open doorway.
“He’s still alive,” Khalil said.
“Not for much longer,” the guard replied.
“Can I talk to him?”
“Mohammed said . . .”
“I brought him in,” Khalil said. “I was made to stand by his side while he killed Arabs. I think I should be allowed to speak to him.”
Khalil and the guard entered the room. The young Kurd approached him, turning to see the picture on the television monitor. He looked at the head in DeLuca’s lap. He left DeLuca’s field of vision, then returned, holding a baseball bat in his hands.
“What is this?” he said. “Is this an American baseball bat?”
“Yes,” the guard said. “Louisville Slugger.”
“How do you use it? Like this?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Where did you get it?”
“We got it on e-Bay,” the guard said. Khalil gave the bat a test swing. “You know that you cannot hurt him. Mohammed would be angry.”
“I won’t hurt him, I promise,” Khalil said, waving the bat in front of DeLuca’s face to menace him.
“This man said the vaccine they gave us will not work,” the guard said. “Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” Khalil said, lifting the bat over his right shoulder, striking a batting pose, “but I don’t think you have to worry about it.”
“Why not?”
Khalil swung the bat back, then brought it forward, striking the guard hard across the bridge of his nose and dropping him where he stood with a skull-shattering blow. DeLuca knew, from the sound of bone splintering, that he was dead before he hit the ground.
“That’s why not,” Khalil said in unaccented English.
“You look like you used to play ball,” DeLuca said.
“I was a walk-on my sophomore year at Vandy but it took up too much of my time,” Khalil said.
Khalil’s real name was Sergeant Dennis Zoulalian, an Armenian-American from Dallas, originally. He’d been DeLuca’s best student at Fort Huachuca, graduating at the top of his class and still in possession of many of the CI school records, fastest lock picked, most pushups, fastest time in the two-mile run, and so on, but his most phenomenal skill had been his ability to pick up languages. He was one of those genetically gifted linguists who could pick up a new language like Tagalog or Czech and be speaking it fluently and without an accent six months later. He’d been deep undercover in Kurdistan since 1999, building a contact base while lying low, his swarthy good looks and his innate charm making him a natural candidate for undercover work. DeLuca had chosen him to work Adnan, but only DeLuca had known “Khalil’s” true identity. The other members of his team thought he was who he said he was, a young, happy-go-lucky, entrepreneurial Kurd looking to make a buck.
“What’d you say to Vasquez?” DeLuca asked while Zoulalian worked to free his arms and legs of the duct tape that held him.
“I told him to count to a hundred,” Dennis said. “Fucking sandstorm. Their plan was to pop you into a second car at one of the checkpoints but leave your transponder in the first car, so that Mack and Danny and the others would follow the wrong vehicle. When the storm blew up, they told us to drive straight in. I drove as slow as I could, but the goddamn storm wouldn’t quit.”
“Has it yet?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been up top since we came in.”
“Where are we?”
“Ar Rutbah Salt Works,” Zoulalian said. “Eighty klicks north of Ar Rutbah and about twenty to Syria. UNSCOM was here twice but they didn’t find anything because Saddam’s guys only told them about the upper level of the tunnel system. Call me crazy, but if I was searching an enemy country for WMD, I don’t think I’d use the maps the enemy gave me. But that’s just me. From the looks of it, Al-Tariq has been setting this place up since Gulf One. Only his top guys knew about it. I couldn’t get a handle on him either, until Adnan sold you out.”
“That wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be, was it?” DeLuca said, standing and rubbing his wrists where the duct tape had pulled off the hairs on his arms. He took a few steps to stretch his legs, first gently setting Smoky’s head down next to the body in position where it belonged. “I gotta say I was sort of wondering where you were. That could have been me if the camcorder was working.”
“Not to worry,” Zoulalian said, kneeling and searching the fallen guard for weapons or anything else they could use, handing the AK-47 he’d carried to DeLuca. “I fucked up the tapes, just in case. The spare camera, too. Besides, I was watching the whole thing on Fly-o-Vision.” He picked up the Robofly and put it in his pocket. “They’re rechargeable. Sends the picture wireless to my PDA.”
He reached into the bag he carried and handed DeLuca his transponder, his satellite phone, and his Smith and Wesson.
“I couldn’t find your Beretta,” he said.
“This’ll do,” DeLuca said, putting his gun in his pants pocket.
“I brought these, too,” Dennis said, handing DeLuca his pain pills. “Sorry about the whack on the head, but . . . you know.”
“I know,” DeLuca said, pocketing the pills. “Maybe later.” He checked the battery power on his phone. “What the fuck was up with trying to bring a bomb in at the gate? Were you trying to convince Adnan you were with him?”
“That’s the way I played it,” Zoulalian said, “but honestly, I have no idea how that got there. Somebody planted it on me.”
“Adnan?”
“No way,” Zoulalian said. “But believe it or not, there’s a lot of other guys out there who don’t like me.”
“I’m sure they would if they got to know you,” DeLuca said.
“So what’s the plan?” Zoulalian said. “I was hoping you had one.”
“What are we looking at?”
“Twelve guys, or thirteen, counting Adnan, or actually twelve again, subtracting this guy. One guy’s upstairs at the door at all times, and one guy walks the perimeter, but the rest are down here. There’s an elevator but it only works with a key. Fat boy couldn’t get in and out without it so I’m guessing he keeps the key. Him, Ibrahim, and Abu Waid are the top three. The others are just flunkies. The elevator opens at the bottom on a big main room with a bunch of computers and a kitchen and a TV connected to a satellite dish up top. There’s a room for living quarters off the main room. They got a bunch of small arms and a couple RPGs but that’s about it, as far as I can tell.”
“Desktops or laptops?”
“Both. Al-Tariq only uses a laptop.”
“Then that’s the one we want. Communications?”
“Some kind of land line, I think, but I couldn’t spot anything driving in, due to the storm. It’d be underground anyway, if you were thinking of cutting the lines. We could find it, but it would take time. Needless to say, we’re too deep for the sat phone or the transponder.”
“Could we cut the power?”
“Maybe, but we’d lose the lights,” Zoulalian said. “The salt mines go on for miles. Big enough for two trucks to pass each other, but it’s a total maze. I’d hate to be stuck in there without lights. Not with Injun Joe on the loose.”
“Any BW or WMD?”
“Wish I knew,” Zoulalian said. “Hate to guess wrong.”
“What have we got going for us?” DeLuca asked.
“Other than our enormous American penises?” Zoulalian said. “Just what we’ve got on us. Your .357 and an M-12 I had in the car. I have another M-11 in the car, but that’s still up top. And his AK.”
He gestured toward the dead man at the bottom of the stairs.
“I think I’d better use one of my life lines to phone a friend. Right now I’m thinking we go up to the surface, order pizza, and then come back down and kill everybody and get the laptop. Something like that. Unless you have a better idea.”
“Not at the moment,” Zoulalian said.
The corridor was lit by a string of bare bulbs, one every thirty feet or so. At the end of the corridor, DeLuca saw a half-opened door, bright lights shining through the aperture, throwing a ray down on the concrete floor. Zoulalian covered him as he stepped quietly in the opposite direction, turning left up a flight of stairs and through a door, holding it open for his teammate and letting him pass through it before closing it quietly.
It seemed like their boots were loud as thunder against the metal stairs, but they didn’t have the luxury of taking their time. The trouble would start as soon as someone discovered DeLuca was missing from the chair where he’d been bound. They’d locked the door, but that wouldn’t buy them more than a few seconds.
At the third landing, they passed through another set of doors to where an iron catwalk, fifty feet above the floor, carried them across the original salt pit, now roofed over with corrugated tin hung across a latticework of steel rafters, joists, tie beams, posts, and struts stitched together with wire cables, though many of them were sprung or rusted through. At the far end of the pit, the catwalk turned right where a set of eight thick cables pulled the elevator up a pair of guide rails along the wall, in lieu of an actual elevator shaft. A series of rungs bolted to the wall next to the rails served as a kind of service ladder. Where the catwalk turned right, two flights of open stairs led to a door in the opposite wall and, beyond that, four more flights rising to one final door and the surface. A guard was posted outside that final door. The final set of stairs was the deepest of all, with twenty steps from landing to landing. DeLuca and Zoulalian paused at the bottom.
“Trade me your rifle,” Zoulalian said quietly in Arabic. “Time for Khalil.”
He called out to the top of the stairs.
“Abdullah! Are you there?”
The door at the top of the stairs opened. DeLuca stayed out of sight.
“What?” The man at the top called out. “Who is it?”
“It’s Khalil, Abdullah—how are you, my friend?” he said, walking slowly up the stairs as he spoke.
“Abdullah comes next. I’m Zafir.”
“I’m sorry, Zafir. We’re looking for Jamal.”
“I’ve already told them—if Jamal was here, I would know it.”
“So you haven’t seen him, then?”
“No, I haven’t seen him. I don’t know why . . .”
The guard was quieted in midsentence when Khalil grabbed him by the rifle and threw him violently down the steps. He made less noise than DeLuca thought he would as he fell. DeLuca had drawn his .357 in case a final shot was required. It was unnecessary. He knew by the angle of the head when the body landed that the man was dead.
The temperature rose fifteen degrees as DeLuca walked the last twenty steps to the surface. Beyond the door was a shipping office, long since abandoned, with a brace of elevator doors next to a dysfunctional water fountain. He went to the window. The night sky was ridiculous with stars, the dust storm long past. On the horizon, he saw the slender sliver of the new moon, signaling the end of Ramadan.
“Where’s the guard on the perimeter?” DeLuca asked, speaking in Arabic in case the man was somehow within earshot.
“I don’t know,” Zoulalian said. “There’s a big storage dome in that direction and machine shops and garages and whatever—he could be anywhere.”
“Keep your eyes open. What time is it?” DeLuca asked.
“No idea,” Zoulalian said.
DeLuca looked at the screen on his sat phone. It was twenty minutes before midnight, or 3:40 back home.
“Where’s the car?”
“In the loading dock. They made me park it where our birds couldn’t see it.”
“Get the M-11,” he whispered in English. “We might need it.”
While Sergeant Zoulalian ran to the Mercedes, DeLuca stepped carefully outside and knelt by a stone wall, where he hoped the reception would be better. Speaking low, he dialed his son’s number, because he wasn’t quite sure whom to call first.
Scott sounded out of breath when he answered.
“I just got your signal back. Where’ve you been?”
“Little busy,” DeLuca said. “Sorry I lost you. I need support.”
“It’s closer than you think,” Scott said. “Get out of there ASAP. The strike is coming down in fifteen.”
“What? Say again.”
“Twenty-three fifty-five hundred hours, nonnegotiable,” Scott said. “CENTCOM made the call when they lost your signal. LeDoux talked them into waiting until midnight, but they couldn’t budge past that. They’re going to take Al-Tariq out before he sends the go.”
“How did they know where to hit if you lost me?”
“We bugged the car.”
“Scottie, this is nuts,” DeLuca said. “We need the names. You can’t . . . Tell them to abort.”
“Personally, I agree, but CENTCOM says right now, stopping the go is the priority. ‘Id al-Fitr starts at midnight. They think they can get the names later.”
“Negative,” DeLuca said. “Abort. Without the names, you got a thousand free agents.”
“Can’t be done,” Scott said. “The B-2s left Missouri six hours ago. I’d never get the call in in time. Just get out of there. I’m ordering you, Sergeant.”
“Nice try, Lieutenant,” DeLuca said. He knew if they’d scrambled B-2s out of Whiteman AFB in Missouri, it meant they were sending large ordnance, precision-guided “smart bombs” and bunker busters at least. Even tactical nukes. Using first-strike nukes had long been deemed unthinkable, but using tacticals on remote desert outposts where the collateral damage would be zero was less unthinkable than it was considering some other targets.
“Dad . . .”
“Tell the pilots to zero on my transponder—I’ll leave it on the roof to mark. They’ve got to put it down the elevator shaft. I’m going back in for the names.”
He threw his transponder on the flat roof of the shed that housed the elevator’s hoist mechanism, told Zoulalian to leave the car running, and explained that he was going back for the laptop. Zoulalian handed him the machine pistol.
“Not by yourself, you’re not.”
“I’ll explain on the way down,” DeLuca said as he raced for the staircase. “This place is going to light up pretty good in a few minutes.”
They’d only gotten as far as the office when the doors to the supply room kicked out and they heard a woman’s voice shout, “Freeze, motherfuckers—throw down your weapons!”
DeLuca stopped in his tracks, raising his arms above his head.
“I didn’t know you had such a potty mouth, Colleen,” he said. Mack lowered her weapon, as did Sykes and Vasquez, who stood to either side of her.
“We’d just taken out the guard when we heard voices,” she said. She looked at “Khalil.”
“It’s all right—he’s with us,” DeLuca said.
“We were looking for a way down,” Dan said, gesturing toward Vasquez. “We found this guy in the middle of nowhere after the storm cleared.”
“I appreciate the help,” DeLuca said. “Follow me. Eyes on.”
They took the steps two at a time. DeLuca led the way, followed by Sykes, Vasquez, MacKenzie, and Khalil.
He kicked through the doors and led his team out onto the catwalk, pausing by the elevator rails and gazing into the shaft below where the cables ran down into a hole in the floor of the salt pit. He’d heard pilots brag that the telemetry on their smart bombs was good enough to hit a medium-sized pizza from twenty thousand feet. He hoped they were right, because anything but a direct hit wasn’t going to cut it. The elevator wasn’t moving. That was good.
He’d taken three steps onto the catwalk when he heard shouts down below, then gunfire.
That was bad.
DeLuca made it across just as three men burst through the doors below and onto the landing, the first looking up and firing on them. There was nowhere to take cover, the treads of the catwalk open iron grates. Mack, Dan, and Hoolie returned fire as Khalil retreated toward the elevator shaft, a position from which he’d have a better angle. A second guard took up a position beside the first, firing toward DeLuca, who was closest, his location protected by the metal stairs, the guard’s rounds ricocheting wildly off the iron and throwing sparks into the chasm below. DeLuca fired a burst from his M-11, grabbing a guywire with his left hand and leaning out to get a better angle, the machine pistol kicking violently in his right arm, one of his rounds knocking a guard from the landing. A second man fell as the third burst through the door with a shout, leveling a shoulder-fired RPG at Khalil and firing. The detonation of the grenade briefly lit the abyss, affording DeLuca a glimpse of the debris below, like a massive flashbulb going off, but the grenade missed its target, allowing Khalil to return fire with one of the AK-47s taken from the dead guards, joined by fire from Dan and Hoolie. MacKenzie raced ahead to catch up with DeLuca at the stairs. The man with the RPG fell over the railing, dead, and then the room was quiet, the air filled with smoke and smelling of cordite.
“Khalil—are you all right?”
“I’m good, Mr. David,” Zoulalian called back.
“Let’s go!”
“You go ahead,” Zoulalian shouted. “The walkway is gone. There’s a gap. In the catwalk. Maybe fifteen feet. From the grenade. You go—I’ll find another way.”
DeLuca raced ahead, stepped over the bodies clogging the lower landing, and bolted the first set of stairs, then the second, his team close behind him. At the third, he heard footsteps below, but he didn’t have time to be cautious, so he pressed ahead, spraying the hall in front of him with bullets as he emptied the M-11 to clear the way. He heard gunfire coming up from below at the last turn of the stairs. He dove low onto the landing, firing with his Smith and Wesson .357 as a man beneath him tried to duck for cover, but the man was too late, falling face down as DeLuca fired two more rounds into him to make sure. He stopped to pick up the man’s weapon, a Tec-9, to replace the M-11 now that it was empty. Mack, Sykes, and Vasquez paused next to him.
“Down these stairs, turn right and right again, then a long, straight hallway,” DeLuca said, trying to catch his breath. “I guess we fight our way down it.”
“Me first,” Hoolie said, showing him that he had a grenade in each hand.
“Go go,” DeLuca said. “We’ll make noise.”
Where the corridor turned a corner toward the main room, they stopped, DeLuca knocking out the light bulb overhead with the barrel of the AK-47 he carried. Someone fired a burst of machine-gun fire at them from the door of the room where he’d been held. He gestured to Hoolie to show him where the room could be located.
“You’re low, I’m high—don’t stand up until I stop firing. Mack, you cross, Dan, stay here until we go but hold your fire. On three. One, two, three.”
He stood up, firing his Tec-9 toward the door, making sure, as best he could, that his rounds carried high along the ceiling. Hoolie scrambled to the door, dove to the floor sliding headfirst, and threw a grenade into the room. It exploded a moment later, the blast throwing debris out the opened door. He got to his feet and entered the room, where DeLuca and the others joined him a second later. The explosion had ripped the camcorder from its power supply and knocked over the tripod upon which it was mounted, but the light was still working on battery power, throwing enough illumination across the floor to reveal the body of the man who’d shot at them and, beyond them, the body of the German shepherd.
“Aw Jesus,” Vasquez said, panting, exhausted, his gaze fixed on Smoky’s lifeless corpse. “What was he doing in here?”
“You didn’t do it,” DeLuca said softly. “He was already gone. Come on. Moving out. How many grenades you got?”
“Just two,” Vasquez said.
“One on the door and one inside,” he told Vasquez. “Let’s go.”
They worked their way quickly down the hall, room by room, until they heard a sudden burst of fire coming from inside the main room that sent them scrambling for cover. A second exchange of gunfire told them a struggle of some kind was going on inside the room but not directed at them. DeLuca led the others to the door, where he peered through the crack. He saw Adnan rise to his feet and fire in the direction of the elevator, then duck again behind an overturned table.
“Now!” DeLuca said, shouldering the door open and rolling once, then firing at a man he recognized as Abu Waid, who took cover behind a pair of large metal filing cabinets. Waid fired back, forcing Mack, Sykes, and Vasquez into the hall. When DeLuca stood to take him out, he thought at first that his gun had jammed, only to realize his clip was empty.
He reached for his .357, as Waid raised his rifle, pointing it straight at DeLuca’s heart and smiling.
The elevator doors behind him opened.
Abu Waid turned, squeezing off several rounds before Khalil cut the man in half with a burst from his M-12.
A door at the opposite end of the room opened.
DeLuca recognized Ibrahim Al-Tariq as he bolted through it.
DeLuca squeezed off three shots from his .357 but missed.
Sykes ran to give chase.
“Don’t shoot!” Adnan said, rising to his feet, his rifle leveled at Mohammed Al-Tariq, who lay wounded on the floor, next to a table where DeLuca saw a laptop computer. Al-Tariq was bleeding from where he’d been shot in the leg. Adnan had shot him.
“What’s through here?” Dan Sykes asked, standing at the door where Ibrahim Al-Tariq had fled.
“The salt mines,” Khalil said.
“Let him go,” DeLuca commanded. He turned to Adnan.
“Lower your rifle,” DeLuca commanded.
“No,” Adnan said.
“Lower it!”
“No!” Adnan said, in a voice filled with an anguish that came from deep inside him. “He killed my family. He killed my wife. He killed my son, and my daughter. He tortured them. He made my wife watch while he tortured her children. It should have been me, but he killed them, and it was my fault. So now I will kill him.”
“Adnan . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Adnan said. “The only way I could get to him was to give them you. I’m sorry, but it was the only way. I didn’t do it for the money.”
“We know,” DeLuca said. “That’s why we picked you. We knew what you would do.”
Developing human intelligence was a murky business. You had to move into communities where a hundred people had a hundred different reasons to do a hundred different things. The trick was finding someone with the strongest motivation to do the same thing you wanted to do. He’d searched his files, before ever leaving Kuwait, looking for someone he could use to take apart the Mukhaberat. He’d rejected a huge number of candidates before coming across the file for Adnan bin Saddem, a man whose family had been slaughtered by the head of the Mukhaberat. DeLuca had been improvising at first, feeling his way, trying to work his informant the way he’d worked the gang bangers back home, subtly reminding him of what he hated and who he loved and what he could do to help. When he’d learned that Al-Tariq himself might still be alive, what he wanted came more into focus. They knew Adnan was bright, and filled with a thirst for revenge, and that he could go places they couldn’t go, so they’d used him, the way a hunter uses a bird dog to run ahead and flush the game. When Adnan started making his own play, saying he’d heard someone mention the possibility that Al-Tariq had a brother, DeLuca and the others had gone along with him, to see where he might lead them, and as they’d hoped, he’d led them to Al-Tariq himself.
“Do you mind if I have a look?” he asked Adnan, who continued to point his weapon at Al-Tariq. Adnan shook his head.
DeLuca crossed to Al-Tariq’s laptop, where he saw a screen filled with Arabic script. He called Zoulalian over and asked him to translate. Zoulalian read the words on the screen.
“You have mail waiting to be sent . . .” he read. “It says ‘send now,’ ‘review mail,’ or ‘send later . . .’”
“Click on ‘review mail.’” Zoulalian did so. “What does it say?”
“Praise Allah,” Zoulalian read. “Proceed to your assigned targets immediately. God is with us. Have faith, for you are the chosen one thousand.”
“Delete that,” DeLuca said, “and write, ‘Stand down and await further instructions,’ and then hit send. But copy the block of addresses first. And put it on a floppy.”
“David,” Sykes said from the opposite doorway. “You gotta see this.”
DeLuca crossed the room, stepping over the bodies of two guards whom Adnan had apparently killed when he’d first begun his assault on the men who’d killed his family, and joined Sykes. Beyond the door, where the maze of tunnels composing the salt mines began, he saw rack after rack of shelves, and on the shelves, large glass jars filled with human body parts preserved in formaldehyde. The rumors about Al-Tariq were true.
DeLuca pulled the door shut.
“Ibrahim . . .” Sykes said.
“He’s not going anywhere,” DeLuca said. He looked at the screen on his sat phone. It was eleven-fifty-one.
“We gotta go, people!” he called out, just as an explosion up on the surface shook the earth and made the lights flicker. Somebody had arrived early. “Adnan—leave him. Khalil . . .”
“Laptop’s in my bag,” Zoulalian said, frisbeeing DeLuca the diskette. DeLuca caught it and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“Adnan,” DeLuca repeated, as another explosion shook the room, plaster dust trickling down from the ceiling. The lights flickered again. He really didn’t want the power to go out.
“Go,” Adnan said. “I will stay. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.”
“La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah,” DeLuca replied.
The elevator was inoperable, but given that any number of JDAMs, JSOWs, and “Daisy Cutters” were about to rain down on them in general and the elevator shaft in particular any minute now, the elevator wasn’t DeLuca’s first choice of transportation anyway.
They took the hall and the stairs in leaps and bounds, with Sykes in the front and DeLuca bringing up the rear. The catwalk over the salt pit swayed with each detonation up above, the air thick with dust that made the dim lights even dimmer. They were forced to stop at the end of the catwalk where the RPG fired earlier had left a fifteen-foot gap. Disconnected, the end of the catwalk rolled from side to side beneath their weight, unstable now. A single bomb dropped through the roof covering the pit would kill them all.
“Back up—back up,” Dan Sykes shouted, stripping off his battle gear and dropping his weapons to the floor below. “There’s an aluminum ladder on the far wall . . .”
“What are you doing?” Vasquez asked him.
“I used to do the long jump in high school.”
“So did I. What was your best jump?”
“Seventeen-five.”
“Go for it—mine was sixteen-eight.”
Sykes backed up thirty feet as the others cleared the way for him, then raced the length of the catwalk as it wavered from side to side, throwing his body out across the void. He landed hard against the tangled metal of the opposing span, pulled himself up, and ran for the aluminum ladder. He returned, extended the ladder to twenty feet and lowered it across the gap, where Vasquez caught the other end.
“Go go go!” DeLuca shouted, holding the end in place as Khalil shimmied his way across on all fours. Once on the other side, he helped Sykes secure the far end.
“Mack, you’re next,” DeLuca said.
An explosion topside rocked the roof. The lights blinked off for a few seconds, then came back on.
“Now, MacKenzie!” She dropped her weapons, then crawled hesitantly out onto the ladder, which twisted and bowed beneath her weight. She was halfway across when the lights went out, and this time, they didn’t come back on, pitching the room into total darkness, to where DeLuca couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. “It doesn’t matter, Colleen—just feel your way. Stay low and centered. Tell me when you’re across.”
It seemed like an eternity, but then he heard Sykes call out, “We got her.”
“You’re next,” DeLuca told Vasquez.
“Why don’t . . .”
“Now!” he growled.
He waited, holding his end of the ladder as steady as he could, the catwalk still swaying in the darkness, creating an odd sensation, because he couldn’t see anything, but he could still feel it moving.
“I’m good,” Vasquez shouted back.
“Hang on,” DeLuca said, taking the belt from his pants and tying his end of the ladder to the catwalk as tightly as was possible, which wasn’t very tight at all. He reached blindly out into the darkness in front of him, feeling for the first rung, then the second, then the third, keeping the side rails of the ladder between his legs and pulling himself forward with his arms.
Six rungs.
Seven.
How much farther?
Then the ladder twisted beneath him, skewing sideways toward vertical. He fell off to the left, hanging on to the side rail of the ladder with both hands.
“DeLuca!”
“I’m still on,” he called back, kicking his leg up, trying to find something to throw it over, but there was nothing there. He tried again.
An explosion rocked the room, causing him to lose his grip with his right hand. He felt his left hand slipping.
He kicked again.
Nothing.
He reached up with his right hand.
Nothing. Where the fuck was it? Where was the goddamn ladder?
He felt the fingers on his left hand peeling away as another explosion shook him.
He couldn’t hold on any longer.
He let go.
Someone grabbed him by the left wrist, pulling him up. He reached for whoever it was with his right hand. His rescuer grabbed him by the right wrist.
“I got you,” Sykes said.
DeLuca felt himself being pulled bodily onto the far end of the catwalk.
“I don’t know how you saw me . . .” he began.
“NVGs,” Dan said. “Everybody hold hands and follow me.”
He led them to the end of the catwalk, then right and through the far doors, where they scrambled up the stairs as Sykes called out directions.
“I don’t understand why they haven’t blown this place up yet,” MacKenzie said.
“They soften the target first,” Vasquez said as they raced up the stairs. DeLuca vaguely understood the procedure, attacking a hard target first with GPS-guided JSOW five-hundred-pound penetrating warheads, then a couple of two-thousand-pound Mark 84s JDAMs, and then a GBU 28 “Bunker Buster” or two, five-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs that were twenty-five feet long. That was what they’d used on Mohammed Al-Tariq’s home the first time they’d attacked him from the air. It felt like they were being a bit more thorough this time.
They reached the office. One of the walls had been blown out, the roof hanging low enough that they had to duck to pass beneath it.
“This way,” Zoulalian said, racing toward the car. The others followed, the way lit now by the stars above and by a number of fires burning in the various outbuildings. DeLuca thought at first that it was a miracle that the car was untouched, until he remembered how accurate the precision-guided munitions being used were. Perhaps they’d spared the vehicle intentionally.
On the other hand, it was possible that they intended to blow it to pieces if they saw it move.
He hit redial on his sat phone and threw it onto the back dashboard of the car, all five of them piling in as fast as they could, the car spraying gravel behind it as they sped away, Zoulalian at the wheel.
They’d reached the front gate of the salt works when a tremendous explosion launched the old Mercedes four feet straight up in the air. DeLuca felt the air rush from his lungs at the concussion. They landed with a crash, the car bottoming out, but they kept going, managing to put another forty or fifty yards behind them before a second massive explosion rocked the vehicle a second time, sending it fishtailing in the sand as Zoulalian struggled to regain control.
“Bunker-busters,” somebody shouted.
“I got a 130 directly above us,” Sykes called out, staring up in the sky with his night vision goggles. “I’ve got a parachute.”
They all knew what that meant. C-130s were used to drop the largest nonnuclear bomb in the Air Force’s arsenal, the BLU-82 or “Big Blue,” also called a “Daisy Cutter.” The “Daisy Cutter” had been originally developed during the Vietnam War as a device used to clear landing zones for helicopters, the shock wave blowing down everything that was more than half an inch high for hundred of yards in all directions. BLU-82s were considerably larger than the weapons used during the Vietnam War, massive fifteen-thousand-pound devices packed with 12,600 pounds of GSX gas slurry explosive, used to clear minefields, wipe out tank divisions, or delete entire building complexes from the face of the earth. They were also called “vacuum bombs” for the way they sucked all the air out of the sky. Too large to fit through the bomb-bay doors on any of the Air Force’s conventional bombers, Daisy Cutters were dropped from C-130s by parachutes attached to static lines, and if DeLuca remembered correctly, it took about thirty seconds from the time they left the plane to the time they went off, about twenty or thirty feet above the ground.
Zoulalian’s foot pressed the accelerator to the floor, but the car was old, the road slushy with dust and sand, and it was impossible to go fast enough.
From nowhere, a set of headlights appeared. DeLuca saw a Bradley M3A3 fighting vehicle approaching them at top speed. Both vehicles slammed on their brakes and came to a stop, facing each other.
A man ran from the back of the Bradley, waving his arms to hurry them into the armored vehicle. It was Preacher Johnson. As they scrambled in on top of each other, Johnson handed them oxygen bottles.
“Seatbelts if you can, and if you can’t, hang on to something!” Johnson shouted as the massive vehicle spun 180 degrees on a tread and roared away, its six-hundred-horsepower Cummins VTA-903T diesel engine at full capacity. A second later, the inside of the Bradley was lit by a flash of light through the rear portholes. DeLuca struggled with his five-point harness, hearing it click just as the shock wave hit them.
The thirty-four-ton Bradley was lifted off the ground by the blast, as easily as a spring breeze might blow an empty French fries bag across a McDonald’s parking lot, tumbling three times end over end in one direction, then barrel-rolling four times in the opposite direction as air rushed in to fill the vacuum created by the blast before the vehicle came to a stop upside down.
All was quiet, save for a soft hissing sound.
“Is anybody hurt?” he heard Johnson call out. “Report, please. Anybody dead, speak up now. Check your buddies. Who we got? Y’all sing out now.”
“MacKenzie, okay,” DeLuca heard Mack report, coughing from the dust.
“Vasquez okay.”
“Sykes good.”
“Khalil okay.”
“Sergeant Pink okay.”
“Sergeant Green fucking all right. Hoo yah.”
“Mr. David?” Preacher Johnson asked. “Are you still with us?”
“I’m thinking,” DeLuca said. “Just gimme a minute.”
A minute later, they were standing on the desert floor, looking up at the stars, and at the salt works in the distance, where a carpet bombing from what Vasquez guessed were vintage B-52s launched from the Air Force base on Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, were dropping wave after wave of firebombs, probably five-hundred-pound MY-77 Mod 4s, Vasquez suspected, and no one had the strength to argue with him. Preacher Johnson guessed they were making sure that any escaped viruses were thoroughly incinerated. Al-Tariq was gone. So was Adnan. There was no need to look for bodies.
DeLuca reached into his shirt pocket and removed the floppy disk. It was undamaged. Zoulalian reported that the laptop computer Al-Tariq had been using was intact as well.
DeLuca reached into his pants pocket and found the plastic bottle of pain pills that Sergeant Zoulalian had been kind enough to bring him, but he was discouraged to discover that at some point during the previous skirmish, a bullet had shattered the medicine bottle, blowing a hole in his pants as well. He reached in again and dug deep until, at the very bottom of his pocket, he found a single capsule.
“Anybody got any water?” he asked. “I think I’m going to have a headache.”