THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
MASTER GUNNERY SERGEANT DAWKINS set foot on the spotless deck of the Vagabond with supreme confidence, for he, too, was a creature of the sea, having spent much of his life on boats and ships, beneath the water in submarines or flying over it in planes and helicopters. It was good to be back in his element and out of Washington on this sunny Monday morning, ready to take his best bud, Kyle Swanson, on another hunting trip. He left his luggage aboard the bird, since they would be leaving again soon.
Swanson, Lady Pat, and Sir Jeff were waiting at the edge of the helo deck, and they took him to the stern, where a table beside the swimming pool had been set with china and silver utensils and white napkins. The chef had started the eggs when the helicopter was five minutes out, and now an enormous selection of delicious food was rolled out by a female crew member dressed in whites.
Double-Oh plunged into the meal, hardly aware that the others were only nibbling at the feast since they had already had breakfast. The conversation was mild chatter, waiting for him to finish eating before getting down to business. The four of them were family in many ways, except by blood. The brotherhood of spec ops warriors was tight, and the men had known each other for years. Lady Pat was their den mother.
Swanson had joined the Marines while still a teenager, and it was Dawkins, then a staff sergeant, who first discovered that the awkward boy had a remarkable ability in the unique craft of long-distance precision firing and was also a natural in combat. Over the years, as they both rose in rank, Dawkins remained Kyle’s mentor and eventually spun him off for use in special operations work by nonmilitary government agencies.
One of Kyle’s more interesting assignments had not involved combat at all but was serving as a special Pentagon adviser to Sir Jeff Cornwell in the development of a new-generation sniper rifle that they called the Excalibur. It took several years of off-and-on work by Swanson, and although he always kept people at an emotional distance, he was drawn in by the magnetic friendship Jeff and Pat offered. When he had introduced them to Shari Towne as the girl he planned to marry, she also was taken under the protective wings of the Cornwells. Family. Kyle had thought for a while there that he really had one. Then Shari was murdered, and Kyle almost came apart. Pat, Jeff, and Double-Oh had been helping piece him back together slowly over time. Keeping him busy was important.
Dawkins finally finished eating and filled his coffee cup again. Lady Pat motioned for the crew member to clear the table, and the four of them were soon left alone on the deck as a soft Mediterranean breeze blew across the stern of the Vagabond. Pat pulled a soft shawl of Scottish wool around her shoulders to stay warm.
“I am leaving for London tonight to attend a reception for the royal wedding and then spend a lot of Jeff’s money on new clothes,” she declared, looking at Swanson. “But before I leave you boys to talk about whatever the new mission may be, I have something serious to say to you, Kyle.”
He smiled. “What’s on your mind?”
“You are still grieving for our dear girl Shari. Her death left a hole in your heart, a deep hole that you think can never heal, and you think that withdrawing into all of this black ops work will protect you,” she said. “I did not like how you got so stupefied drunk that you didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You’re acting like some dumb ostrich sticking its head into the sand and thinking it cannot be seen. It isn’t working, is it?”
“Instant psychobabble from Dr. Pat? You know everything?” He was instantly defensive.
She stood, and he saw tears in her eyes just before she slapped him so hard that his ears rang. “Don’t you dare speak like that to me, Kyle Swanson! Do you believe that you are the only one who loved Shari? That your heart was the only one broken when she died? I still cry when I think of her. I am thankful that she was in our lives at all.”
“So how did you get over her, Pat? What’s the secret?” He was growing angry. He did not like to talk about Shari, even with Jeff and Pat and Double-Oh.
She had a hand on each hip and glared at him. “You think that Jeff and I got over her? How wrong you are. You never get over that kind of loss. You just…eventually…come to accept it as something you cannot change. The sun comes up in the morning, the clock ticks, and Shari will still be dead. You cannot climb into the coffin with her.” Pat pulled her wrap tight around her shoulders. “Wake up, Kyle. Shari’s been gone for more than a year, and you are condemned to live with the rest of us now. I want you back, the real Kyle Swanson, not some war junkie who is on his way to becoming an otherwise useless alcoholic.” She turned, shook her head, and walked away to the main cabin.
Swanson fell back in his chair. Jesus Christ. She just beat the crap out of me. Kyle had been disturbed for months when he could no longer mentally recall every detail of Shari’s beautiful face, nor smell her fragrance, although he could still imagine her touch and her laugh. He was losing her. She was fading over time. “What’s your opinion, Jeff?” he asked.
“What she said.” He drank some coffee and unblinkingly returned Kyle’s stare.
“And you?”
Master Gunny Dawkins picked up his briefcase and pulled out a folded map. “I’m your friend, not your confessor. Whatever it takes, as long as it takes. But if you get fucked up on booze or dope and get me killed, I shall be very unhappy. Now can we please move past this Oprah moment and talk about the fucking mission?”
Double-Oh laid out the map, pointing at a grid location close to the southwestern tip of Iran. “This is where the defector said the so-called Palace of Death was located, almost within rock-throwing distance of the border. We know from the satellites that there’s nothing important down there except the port town of Khorramshahr. Beyond that is just a lot of dirt, which is why the boss wants to put some boots down and take a look.”
“Could the walk-in just have been looking for a quick cash payment with his allegedly secret information?” Kyle asked. “Peddling bogus information to Americans is not exactly new in Iraq.”
“Not bloody likely if someone went to the trouble to assassinate him in the Green Zone. There was a reason.” Jeff sat back and folded his hands over a growing belly, the price of success. He was no longer young and jumping out of airplanes.
“That was a perfect stalk and shoot,” Double-Oh looked over at Kyle. “We’re sure it was Juba. The description from the hotel people matches what we know about him, and he did everything but leave his autograph. So somehow he’s involved, too.”
“Lots of loose ends,” said Kyle. “But why Iran? It would be a lot more credible if an Iraqi scientist emerged from Syria, since that’s where Saddam stashed his big weapons, up around al-Baida, and in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Iran and Iraq hated each other after eight years of war and a million casualties. I cannot see this level of cooperation, even so many years later.”
Sir Jeff picked up the map and studied it. “Unless…” They could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s brain. “At the end of that war, there were months of negotiations before the two sides agreed to the solution brokered by the United Nations. Very little was changed in the long run, but some deals were made concerning captured territory and the shared use of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.”
“History lesson number 42,” said Kyle. “What is your point?”
“What if this Palace of Death thing was one of the backchannel agreements, something even the UN people did not know about? Hussein and the ayatollahs overlooked their differences long enough to make a deal for the future.”
Double-Oh was interested. “Meaning us?”
“I’ll get to that. What was the major thing people remember about the Iran-Iraq War? The use of chemical weapons by Iraq to blunt Iranian frontal assaults. Later came the biochem attacks in the Kurdistan region. You certainly remember the Arab saying that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Both sides consider America to be the Great Satan, and both sides anticipated that sooner or later, one or both of them would be facing us in combat.”
Kyle finished his coffee. “So these crazies, the mullahs and Saddam’s thugs, start planning something way back in the 1980s? A jointly owned and operated bioweapons factory? Then they never used the product?”
“If they were trying to come up with something really new and effective and deadly, perhaps it just wasn’t ready in time for the Gulf War, and things tightened up quickly during the current war. The United States sold weapons to both sides during the Iran-Iraq fighting, and so much matériel and cash has been lost or stolen during the current war that it cannot even be counted. Throw in the massive support the United States supplied to the Afghan rebels that fought the Soviet Union and it is reasonable to believe they had access to plenty of raw materials and plenty of time for development.”
“So you think there really may be something to this Palace of Death idea?”
“The name is just a name, like Saddam’s ‘Mother of All Battles,’ but they have to call it something. Whatever is out there needs to be uncovered.”
“That’s the job. Kyle and I are heading down to Doha to pick up a MARSOC team, then go in early tomorrow morning.” Double-Oh stood and put away his map. “Give my apologies to Pat for my not being able to stay longer. I still have some money she hasn’t stolen from me at poker.”
Kyle shook hands with Jeff. “Tell m’lady I’ll be thinking about what she said…and for her to have a good time in London. I’ll be back in a few days.”
Sir Jeff slapped him on the shoulder. “Right. Only wish I was going with you.” He walked them to the helipad and waved as the helicopter lifted away.
THE MARINE ASSAULT TEAM arrived at Camp Doha in Kuwait as fast as it could be assembled and flown out of North Carolina. They boarded a plane on a sunny afternoon, flew most of the night, and got off to find themselves in the desert sun of Kuwait. A waiting helicopter ferried them to a secure barracks in the special operations sector of the sprawling American base at Camp Doha, north of Kuwait City.
Every member of the team had been to Doha before, during previous tours in Iraq. It was Little America. Uncle Frosty’s Oasis, the Marble Palace, the beach, and great Mexican food downtown at the La Palma. Pizza, camel races, ice cream. Doha was not a hardship post.
They knew, however, that this was not going to be vacation time, for the first thing they saw in their barracks was a stack of hazmat suits on a table by the door. They pawed through the stack and picked out correct sizes, tossed the suits onto the bunks, and followed Captain Newman over to a private room in a mess hall for chow. Afterward, he disappeared for a briefing, and the rest of them ambled back to their small barracks. Special operators do not linger in the daylight when starting a mission, and they were glad the sun was going down.
The lights were off, and Travis Hughes was the first one through the door, feeling for the switch. He was snatched from his feet by a big, meaty arm and thrown to the floor, where someone jammed a knee into his chest and pressed a knife to his neck.
Darren Rawls, the next through the door, thought Hughes had tripped and fallen. Then he felt a pistol barrel being jammed under his chin so hard that his head was forced back.
The lights snapped on. Master Gunny Dawkins removed the pistol he held on Rawls and looked furious. A guy with a black mask had Travis Hughes pinned to the floor.
“You people get in here!” Dawkins bawled in a parade ground voice. “You’re supposed to be hot shit MARSOC troops, and you are bumbling around like a bunch of Girl Scouts. Walked right into an ambush! You are on a mission, goddammit, and a lot of you would be dead by now if we were a couple of terrorists. There is no safe place over here, not even in Doha. So pull your heads out of your asses, right now!”
The other Marines sheepishly filed into the room and gathered around Double-Oh. The man in the mask sheathed his knife and held out a hand to Hughes. “Get up, Trav,” he said. The voice was familiar. The masked guy sat on a bunk, and Captain Newman entered, locked the door, and joined Double-Oh at the front. The attention of the men was totally in focus now because they had been professionally embarrassed by letting down their guard.
“Here’s the drill,” Newman said. He explained the snoop-and-poop mission and told them they would be providing fire support, if necessary, for Master Gunny Dawkins and the other man, who would be principal investigators.
Dawkins then took over. “I know that you do not like going into a possible firefight with someone you don’t know covering your back, so we have to break a rule here tonight. You all have clearance for Top Secret material, and you will never speak of what we are about to tell you to anyone, ever. Understood?” He looked around and received nods from each of the six men. Then he nodded, and Kyle removed his mask.
“This is Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson. Because of special ops purposes, he was declared dead back after the Syrian mess. We both now work for Task Force Trident, which you don’t need to know much about.”
“Haaaayyy! Shake!” hooted Travis Hughes, while others shouted “Dude!” and “Muthafucka!” and “Awrite!” They clapped, and a few gave him high fives. Everyone knew Swanson, or knew of him. “Quiet down,” barked Double-Oh. “Save the happy horseshit reunion crap for later. Right now, everybody get a couple of hours sleep. We leave at 0200 hours. Be ready.”
LONDON
Juba showed his pass and walked without incident into the media grounds in Kensington Park, carrying his bag of tools. A small army of technicians was laying down rivers of cable, lighting specialists were clamping big, glaring bulbs into position, soundmen were rigging microphones, and makeup artists flung powder puffs and eyeliner on the TV news readers while writers pounded out copy and producers pulled their hair in frustration. Juba was just another tech and made his way effortlessly through the dozens of production trucks and the forest of satellite dishes atop thin poles. He spotted the distinctive Edinburgh vans and went toward them.
A pretty young woman was seated on the steps of the truck, working on a laptop computer that was balanced on her knees. She looked up with a start when she realized someone was standing in front of her. He wore a technician’s purple and white jumpsuit with a belt of tools hung around his narrow waist. Even in the dark, he looked as if he had a deep tan. “May I help you?” she asked.
The man referred to a scrap of paper. “Are you Miss Drake?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Edinburgh All-Media. They sent me down to give the vans a last-minute look to be sure you don’t have any problems tomorrow. Is your engineer around?”
“Sure. He’s inside.” She led him into the cargo bay. “Harold? This tech is from the rental service and wants to see if anything is wrong.”
Juba followed her in, shook the hand of the engineer, and turned back to Kim. “Nothing is wrong, Miss Drake. Just a precaution, mind you. We want everything to go smoothly for you tomorrow. So, have you encountered any problems?” he asked Harold.
“Nope, but glad you came around to check.” The engineer had on a headset and was working a bank of lighted dials. “I’m setting the uplink to go live. Let me know if you need me.”
“Right. Won’t be a minute.” Juba studied the desktop area, dropped to the floor to look at the underneath wiring, and clicked a flashlight to see into small places. He opened the engine and played around in the compartment, climbed to the top and back down, then crawled beneath the truck, where he removed two cans of aerosol spray from his toolbox. Each was labeled as a commercial product that was widely used to blow blasts of clean air onto delicate computer components. Juba twisted the exterior coverings and pulled out the canisters within, then carefully attached them to small clamps above the exhaust pipe from the muffler. Tiny bits of explosive plastique were on the tips of the canisters, and he joined them with a common wire to a small detonator. It would go off when a certain cell phone number was dialed, and the contents of the canisters would be released.
While he worked, Kim Drake continued preparing for her upcoming live shot for the six o’clock evening news back home. She had managed to snare a good report, standing in front of the palace with one of those tall soldiers in the red coat and funny-looking fur hat. When she was done filming, she stepped away from the spot, and a press officer ushered in another reporter to do the same thing. The news director back home loved it and set the report for the evening news.
Juba finished just as Kim was doing her makeup at a mirror in the van. “Pardon, Miss Drake, if you don’t mind. May I snap a few photos of you and Harold and your cameraman? Hate to be such a bother, but the company wants some pictures for its adverts after you lot are gone. Drum up more business for us in the lean times, you know.” The request was so polite that they all agreed, and Juba took out a digital camera.
“Just wait until I finish my hair,” Kim called. “I look horrible.” He shot a series of pictures of Harold at the controls while he waited.
Kim snapped off the light and stepped forward. “Any time you’re ready.”
“Are you famous, Miss Drake?” He clicked two pictures.
“No, not yet. Working on it.” Broad smile, hands on hips, blond hair in helmet hairspray mode. American Idol.
“I find that difficult to believe. Obviously you’re talented, or you would not be here.” Two more pictures. “Very good. My thanks to all of you. The company will be pleased up to get these. You are okay here, so I’ll just be off now to check the other van. Some Italian chaps.”
He repeated the drill with the Italian van, where only a technician was on duty. There was one big difference. Inside the truck, Juba tilted the driver’s seat forward and unscrewed a panel door, and the aroma of fresh coffee filled the interior. “That smells good. Are you brewing a pot of coffee down there?” asked the man at the console.
Juba explained over his shoulder that they packed coffee around some of the more sensitive avionic components to absorb excess moisture because the damp climates of Scotland and England played havoc with the delicate equipment. In reality, the strong coffee smell masked the scent of the large brick of C-4 explosive attached to a small lead-lined box. Sniffing dogs had moved right over it during the final security inspections. Juba fished out his camera and took a few pictures, then reached inside the lead-shielded compartment and clicked a metal switch attached to the explosive, which lay beside a large aerosol canister. The weapon was armed. He set the timer on a backup detonator, poured in some fresh coffee beans to cover it, screwed the panel back in place, and lowered the seat.
“There. That’s it, now. I will be going along. Good luck.” The technician paid no attention as he left.
Kimberly Drake was in a pool of bright light, facing a TV camera on a tripod and smoothing her navy blue jacket over the pink button-down shirt. Her hair and the top half of her outfit were perfect, but since she would only be shown from the waist up, she also wore jeans and white sneakers. She held a microphone in one hand.
She seemed to be talking to herself, muttering as she rehearsed her report. As Juba passed, she glanced up. “Thanks for coming by,” Kim said. “Keep watching TV and maybe you’ll see me someday, rich and famous.”
Juba returned the smile. “I have no doubt of that at all, Miss Drake. I am sure that after tomorrow, the entire world will know your name.”
“One can always hope,” she said. “’Night.”