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“Both.”
“Because if we are in negotiations over Amy Fitzgerald’s release, Langley claims to know nothing about it. The director was asked about it point-blank at this morning’s security briefing. Are you saying the DCI lied to the president’s face?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Myers made a forward rolling motion with his hand. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying you need to get back to Fitzgerald and tell him to sit tight. We’re doing everything we can.”
“Are we?”
“Of course, but we need to move cautiously. There’s more at stake than a girl stumbling into a place she had no business being.”
Myers threw up his hands. “For God’s sake, Dick! It’s not like she was some stoner blithely hitchhiking her way through Katmandu or Goa! She’s a doctor who was working in a frigging Red Crescent medical clinic, taking care of Iraqi women and children. Some of whom, may I remind you, are injured because they got caught in our own crossfire. I’d say that kind of dedication goes some way to winning hearts and minds, wouldn’t you?”
“As I recall,” Stern countered, “the International Committee of the Red Cross was warned that we couldn’t guarantee the safety of their personnel if they went into the Sunni Triangle before it was fully secured.”
“Small comfort to Patrick and Katherine Fitzgerald. And not really good enough when it comes to the media, either. She’s still one of ours. This makes us look really ineffectual.”
“Screw the media.”
“And the Fitzgeralds?”
“I feel their pain.”
Somehow, Myers doubted it. The man had ice water in his veins and no family that Myers knew of—thank God. Scary characters like this shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. “So? What can I tell the Fitzgeralds?”
“The situation is very sensitive.”
“And…?”
Stern exhaled heavily. “Tell them we’re making inquiries. Look, Evan, you’re a big enough boy to realize that there are much bigger issues at play here. Issues of major strategic consequence.”
“Such as?”
“America’s role in the region and in the world. Our ability to continue to be the only global power worth a damn. The last superpower.”
“And what’s that got to do with Amy Fitzgerald’s kidnapping?”
Stern drummed his stubby fingers on the desk, scrutinizing the younger man across from him. Once again, perched on his low armless chair, elbows akimbo, Myers felt like the not-very-bright truant in the principal’s office. He decided to demonstrate that he wasn’t as clueless as he apparently seemed.
“You’re afraid of alienating fundamentalists like this sheikh for fear we’ll lose access to Iraqi oil,” he said.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yes. As long as soccer moms and NASCAR dads want to exercise their God-given right to drive gas-guzzling SUVs, that is one consideration.” Stern shook his head. “Look, the Saudi regime is getting ready to implode. The House of Saud is being pressured to distance itself from us. U.S. oil companies have been losing contracts left and right in that country, and guess who they’re losing them to? None other than Lukoil.”
“Lukoil?”
“The Russian state oil company.”
“The Russians? A threat to us? Get real. They’re no superpower, not anymore—if they ever were. And Muslim fundamentalists hate the Russians, too. Look at what happened in Afghanistan.”
“Old news, young Evan. Conservative Saudis had no use for godless communists, it’s true, but these days, Moscow’s run by a conservative Orthodox Catholic. The Camel and the Bear are getting pretty damn cozy, thank you very much. The Saudis say Lukoil’s lower cost structure is the reason they’re getting all the contracts to develop new fields over there, but it’s never been about the money. Even if it were, the Russians are keeping their offers ridiculously low just to ingratiate themselves with the Saudis.”
“To undermine us?”
“Partly. The Russians want to pull the rug out from under Chechen rebels giving them so much grief. Those Chechens are being financed by Saudi fundamentalists.”
“As I understand it,” Myers said, “our oil companies started backing away from Saudi projects anyway in the wake of 9/11. I’m not surprised the Saudis are looking to deal with anyone but Americans at this point.”
“Yeah, they’re in a major snit, all right—which plays right into the hands of the Russians.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with Amy Fitzgerald’s kidnapping in Iraq.”
Stern sighed heavily, as if it should be self-evident to anyone but a moron. “The Russians have domestic oil reserves nearly equal to the Saudis’. About the only other country with that much oil still in the ground is Iraq.”
“There’s Iran, too.”
“Yes, but the Iranians haven’t learned how to play nicely with others, have they? Until they do, they’re a total write-off.”
“Okay, so you’ve got Russia, Iraq and the Saudis…”
“Right. The Russians and Saudis were already moving closer to Baghdad before we went in and toppled Saddam. Think of it—the three largest oil patches in the world, strategically linked and controlled by people who certainly haven’t got us in their bedtime prayers. If Moscow and Riyadh controlled Baghdad, they’d have us by the short and curlies, now, wouldn’t they?”
“And you think that’s their game plan.”
“There you go. We put it on hold when we invaded Iraq, but the question is, can we keep it together?” Stern kicked back in his chair and folded his hands over his ample sternum. “Think about it, Evan. Who has a bigger interest in promoting instability over there? If the anti-American forces in Iraq build up enough steam and we buckle and walk away, who’s left to come in and bring that country’s oil industry back online? Why, none other than the Russians, of course.”
Myers sat back in his own chair and stared at the older man. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“But—well, forgive me, Dick, but that sounds like old-school paranoia. You don’t think maybe you’re just a little jaded by your Cold War past? Seeing commies in the woods again?”
Stern scowled. “Need I remind you that the president of Russia was a senior KGB officer, raised on the sour milk of anti-Americanism? If you don’t think this is a big problem, then you’re in the wrong business, son.”
Myers shook his head. “In the meantime, what am I supposed to tell the Fitzgeralds about their daughter?”
“Tell them we’re doing our best. But do not,” Stern added, “do not, young Evan, promise them anything.” He drummed his blunt-tipped fingers on the brown leather desk pad once more. “And while you’re at it, encourage Patrick Fitzgerald to keep his own counsel, for God’s sake.”
“In other words, don’t go to the media.”
Stern’s hands rose, palm up, as if it should be self-evident. “Although it’s rather a case of shutting the barn door after the horses have already escaped.”
“What do you mean?”
“That damn reward. The jungle drums are already beating out the news of that bit of folly.”
“Well, can you blame them? It’s what I’d do if my daughter were kidnapped and I had the money.”
Stern shook his steel-gray head irritably. Shards of light flickered off his rimless glasses. “If Fitzgerald think she’s made things easier by offering a million-dollar reward, he’s sadly mistaken. He needs to lie low. Tell him that, for God’s sake.”
“And if he does? What are the odds of them getting their daughter back safe and sound?”
Stern shrugged. “One hopes for the best and prepares for the worst. Wars have casualties. You know that. I know that. Amy Fitzgerald should have known that before she blundered into the Sunni Triangle.” Before Myers could protest, Stern added, “Stay on top of the Pentagon and Langley. Meantime, I’ll see if I can find out anything on my end. That’s the best we can do.”
A few minutes later, once Myers had been escorted out of his office and out of the building, Stern wheeled in his chair and reached for a phone on the credenza behind his desk. He punched a series of numbers on the base, then listened while the system bounced the call across several international satellite links. The line picked up quickly at the other end, but the voice sounded groggy. It wasn’t just the scrambler encoding their communication, Stern realized, glancing at his watch. It was after midnight over there.
He didn’t bother to identify himself. “Kenner, look sharp!”
“I’m here. What’s up?”
Stern’s trained ear picked up the faint hint of an almost untraceable accent, although he knew that not one in a million other listeners would hear it. The man he called Kenner had American pronunciation and syntax down perfectly, and he used American colloquialisms with ease. It was only one of the reasons Stern found the man so useful.
“The Fitzgerald problem is looking to get out of hand,” he said.
“How so?”
“Patrick Fitzgerald has posted a million-dollar reward for his daughter’s safe return. He’s also calling in markers to pressure the administration to take action. What were you thinking of, standing by while they kidnapped the American woman?”
“They needed a doctor and the local clinic had just gone through a personnel shift.”
“And nobody knew it was an American there? A girl, for chrissake?”
“What can I say? The intelligence was faulty.”
“Nonexistent, is more like it. Enough is enough. It’s time to get this situation back under control. Got it?”
Stern barely waited to hear the assent from the other end before hanging up. He didn’t need to. Orders were meant to be followed. He had no doubt that his would be.
CHAPTER
5
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Iraq, the heart of the Sunni Triangle
The Brandywine team came out of the hills just after 1:00 a.m. There were four commandos with the forward unit that set out from the landing zone. They’d left the pilot and a base guard on backup at the LZ with the understanding that the chopper would pull back to a safer distance if there was any sign of enemy activity in the area. They had no desire to draw undue attention to their effort to extract the two Iraqi civilians from the insurgent-held town of Al Zawra.
Hannah was the lone woman in the advance group that headed down into the valley. Sean Ladwell, the team leader, was on point. Hannah and Marcus Wilcox were in the two and three positions, while OzNuñez was on rear guard. Nuñez, a former marine sniper, carried an M40A1 rifle, while the others had M-16s. In addition, each team member carried a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with sixteen rounds, half a dozen spare clips, plus a personalized assortment of backup guns, knives, fragmentation grenades and smoke bombs. Wilcox, a former NFL linebacker who’d quit pro ball on September 12, 2001, also had an M203 grenade launcher slung around his Kevlar’d torso. They were armed for bear but hoped to need none of it, slipping back to the LZ before sunup with their rescue targets in tow.
Four pairs of tan leather boots negotiated barren, rock-strewn terrain as they crept stealthily toward the target: the small market town of Al Zawra, population eight thousand, some fifty miles north of Baghdad. Four heads took constant, 360-degree readings of the terrain as they crept forward. Four pairs of eyes were fixed on the green-tinted shadows in their night-vision goggles, searching for any movement that would betray opposition forces. Hunting, too, for seemingly innocuous bumps in the terrain that could conceal improvised explosive devices.
The air, hot and arid, was laden with powder-fine grit. It was all Hannah could do not to sneeze inside the itching balaclava pulled over her head, nose and mouth, but she dared not make a sound that might announce their approach.
The caution was well warranted. They were coming in from the back side of the town that pressed up against the hills rather than via the main road off the Baghdad-to-Tikrit highway. Advance intel suggested that this flank was the most lightly guarded. The half-mile stretch of open ground between the foothills and their objective had also been aerial-surveyed with ground penetrating radar looking for land mines. Still, it paid to be ready for surprises. It could mean the difference between success and failure, life and death—or worse, capture. The gruesome images of recent hostage beheadings, flashed round the world via the Internet, were graphic reminders of the fate that could await them if they screwed up.
Hannah held her M-16 rifle clutched close to her body. Upon arrival at the first mission briefing at Brandywine International headquarters in Virginia a week earlier, she’d been greeted by wolf whistles and a few dubious propositions. Even though she’d been careful to show up wearing an old police academy sweatshirt, faded jeans and scuffed boots, her dark hair knotted behind her head and her makeup nonexistent, it had taken only a nanosecond for these clowns to jump to the conclusion that she was there to offer coffee, maps and maybe a hot-blooded romp to brave boys willing to risk their necks for a cause deemed worthy enough for a lucrative payday.
The kibitzing had faded fast, replaced by raised eyebrows and skeptical muttering when she was introduced and her role in the mission outlined. The grumbling hadn’t altogether died down since. They’d be happy to bed her, the grunts made clear, they just didn’t want to babysit her out here when their lives would be on the line.
Hannah informed them she didn’t need babysitting from anyone, thanks all the same. In any case, there was nothing they could do about her inclusion. It was a management call, and management had decided: she was in. She liked to think it wasn’t just because she spoke Arabic, but realistically, with even the team leader reluctant to have her along, she knew it probably was the tipping point. This mission—any mission in Iraq, these days—was risky enough. Without someone who spoke the local language, it could be impossible to pull off and maybe suicidal to boot.
Now, as they crept out of the hills, there was no distinguishing Hannah from the men, rigged out as she was in full paramilitary camouflage gear. She was on the tall side for a woman, five-eight in her bare feet, an inch more in her hiking boots. At least one of the men in the group was shorter, although Oz Nuñez was built like a Humvee, low, wide and solid. Hannah’s Kevlar body armor concealed a slender frame under her dark outerwear, while the balaclava and night-vision goggles obscured her long hair and deceptively delicate features.
Hannah’s fingerless leather gloves clutched the barrel and stock of her rifle. The gun was set to burst pattern, ready for any threat, but she projected outward calm as they crept toward their target. Only she knew that her heart was pounding against the khaki cotton T-shirt under her body armor, beating out the universal anthem of fatalists everywhere: When you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.
That about summed it up, she thought, as an itchy bead of sweat ran the rim of her goggles, then soaked into the lower part of the balaclava covering her nose and mouth. It was way too hot to be wearing complete covering, but they were going for anonymity and the intimidation factor here. Nothing said wet-your-pants scary like the Ninja warrior look.
The market town they were about to enter was under the thumb of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin, a militant anti-western Sunni warlord who’d managed to survive Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign of terror through sheer, Machiavellian bloody-mindedness, plus a close alliance with the dictator’s sadistic monster sons. Uday and Qusay Hussein had been killed in a shoot-out with U.S. forces the previous month. Saddam himself was on the run and his former soldiers had thrown away their uniforms, but all that meant was that there was no telling the players without a scorecard—and the scorecard kept getting rewritten. No matter how many times the administration back in Washington crowed “mission accomplished,” Iraq was descending into anarchy, with allegiances shifting daily.
Meantime, the ruthless Sheikh Salahuddin clung to control of his personal fiefdom. He was a force that would have to be reckoned with or eliminated, sooner or later, Hannah imagined, but as much trouble as the warlord was proving to be to coalition forces, the Brandy wine team hadn’t been sent to bring him down. Rather, its mission was to extract an old woman and her granddaughter living at the western edge of the town. It seemed like a lot of firepower for some granny and a kid, Hannah thought, but who was she to question orders?
Dawn was still a few hours off, but a searing wind stirred the fine sand that seemed to blanket the landscape. Hannah’s clenched jaws scraped grit over tooth enamel, while underneath the balaclava, the sweat on her cheeks and brow congealed into a gluey, sandpapery mud pack. Great. A dermabrasion facial, the repressed girlie-girl in her thought ruefully.
The group moved ahead stealthily, pausing now and again when Ladwell raised his hand. They pivoted, taking in every nuance of their surroundings. Even with night-vision goggles, it was a tough call to distinguish anything. The boulder-strewn, scrub-covered terrain was an abstract painter’s canvas of green, splotchy shadows. Whirlwinds of dust obscured the stars and the crescent moon overhead. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. The lack of light and definition, combined with their dusky camos and matte black weapons, would also render the team virtually invisible to any adversary. In theory, anyway.
If captured, they were hosed. No rescue would be mounted to save their sorry hides. Officially, they weren’t even here. They would not be counted among the dead, wounded and captured in this dirty little war where the enemy could be anyone from a Saddam fedayeen to an adolescent holy-martyr-wannabe body-wrapped in Semtex.
Despite the high risk, Hannah hadn’t hesitated to sign on for the mission. After all, if she bought it here, who would mourn? What family she had didn’t need her. Gabe would be the beneficiary of the hefty insurance policy that came with these contract jobs, so that if one day he wanted to escape the clutches of his father and the woman who was now his mom in all but name, he’d have the means to do it. As for Hannah’s police career, that had self-destructed, too, along with the rest of her once reasonably happy life.
Behind her were nothing but burned bridges. And when you’ve got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.
CHAPTER
6
Al Zawra, Central Iraq
Zaynab Um Ahmed awoke with a start, the ripe smell of leather filling her nostrils. A gloved hand was clamped onto her mouth. She struggled and tried to cry out, but her captor was relentless. Another hand bore down on her collarbones, exerting more than enough force on those frail bones to keep her pinned to the mattress.
Her first thought was for Yasmin, her twelve-year-old granddaughter, who’d been sleeping in the twin bed next to hers, but she could neither move nor see if the child was safe. No sound came from the other bed. Zaynab struggled and moaned, but the man holding her down was unyielding.
She turned her attention to the ghostly, nearly featureless head looming over her. The room should have been pitch-black, and yet was not. In a dim, reddish glow, she made out a pair of dark eyes, intently fixed on her. When Zaynab whimpered, the head gave a sharp, warning shake, and a whispered command sounded from that awful lipless face. “Shhh, grandmother! Be still.”
The old woman went limp, her terrified gaze darting left and right in that red spectral glow. There’d been no electricity in town for weeks now, ever since Salahuddin’s men had seized control of the area, taking advantage of the power vacuum left after the American invasion. No one knew whether Salahuddin had cut the power lines and telephone communications or whether the foreign forces had done it. All anyone knew was that the country was sliding into anarchy. This was what some people had feared would follow if Saddam were ever overthrown. No one loved the dictator, but in a nation rife with ugly ethnic divisions, the devil one knew was perhaps preferable to whatever supposed savior might follow—for some, anyway. Zaynab had known too much grief in her sixty-two years to believe in anyone anymore.
People said Salahuddin was the spiritual “younger brother” of Osama bin Laden, but Zaynab had her own take on the opportunist who was now terrorizing her town. After all, she’d known the little monster all his life. He was about the same age as her own children, but unlike Mumtaz and Ahmed, Salahuddin had dropped out of school at sixteen, becoming a drunk and a thug who was suspected of several sexual assaults. He had wormed his way into the inner circle of Qusay Hussein, but inevitably fell afoul of the dictator’s family and landed in jail. Some people said it was during his time in prison that he adopted the jihadist cause. Whatever the case, after he was released, Salahuddin disappeared—to Afghanistan, some said, to fight the Soviet invaders of that country.
He’d shown up back in Al Zawra only a few months earlier, calling himself “Sheikh” Salahuddin. Whether or not he was a follower of bin Laden, Zaynab thought, he certainly didn’t need the blessings of Al Qaeda to launch a so-called holy war. He had always had delusions of grandeur and been given to spouting the worst kind of hateful nonsense. Since he’d taken over the town, nothing had been working.
Zaynab tried to make out where this dim red glow in the room was coming from. Out of frugality and fear of fire, she was always careful to extinguish candles and oil lamps before she and Yasmin went to bed. Even on bright, moonlit nights, she kept the curtains drawn close against the dangers that lurked outside. But now, the room was a patchwork of black shadow and crimson light. The armed invaders—from her pinioned position on the bed, she could make out at least two others dressed in full military camouflage—were carrying shielded torches.
As Zaynab turned her gaze back to the soldier holding her down, a sense of weary inevitability and terrible sadness overcame her resistance. Of course these men had been sent to kill her and her granddaughter. Why not? Everything else had already been taken from her. Now, why not her precious granddaughter and her own useless life?
The soldier took away the hand on her shoulder, lifting one finger in warning. Zaynab felt too beaten down to move as he reached up, yanking off the balaclava that had obscured all features but those dark eyes.
Zaynab squinted, then blinked through her tears. This was not one of Salahuddin’s hooligans. In fact, it was no man at all. It was a young woman with the dark eyes of the forty-two virgins who were said to welcome devout men into paradise. Was she dead, then? And did the houris come to faithful women, too? How was it possible that the angels of paradise were dressed like soldiers, in camouflage shirts and trousers? Had things gotten so bad that even heaven was beleaguered by battling forces?
