The makeshift TOC was a flurry of activity, with all hands either deleting computer files, packing up equipment, or talking on the phone. I reached Jennifer’s voice mail yet again and felt a trickle of dread. I’d received a text from her saying she was inbound, but all I really knew was that it had come from her phone. So far, the entire mission had been a debacle, like we had been painted with a curse, and the lack of contact with her was beginning to go beyond the “worried” stage and into the “screw the mission” stage.
Not that I could mess things up any worse. We had barely made it out of the Burj Khalifa intact, with seemingly every first responder in the country rolling in to the alarm calls. The bottom of the basement had looked like someone had detonated a car bomb in it, with the elevator shafts completely destroyed. I would have been happy with simple mechanical damage, but that wasn’t the only thing left behind.
When I’d cleared my head enough to take stock, I’d seen the remains of quite a few people. Torn arms and legs, heads smashed beyond recognition, it was hard to tell how many people were dead. Not that it mattered. Only two counted: the sheikh of Dubai and McMasters. I was pretty sure they would be found in the pile and returned my focus on getting the hell out of the country. Someone else’s problem now.
There’d been a rumor that someone had survived, and Blaine had raced out of the TOC to see if he could run anything to ground. I knew he was just wishing. I’d seen the damage. No way anyone lived through a fall like that.
A television in the back of the room, on an English-speaking channel, was going on and on about the disaster. I’d eventually tuned it out, focusing on getting everything sterilized, but Decoy hadn’t. He got my attention.
“What?”
“They’re saying an elevator has failed in the Burj.”
“Okay. I don’t need to watch the news for that. I saw it.”
“No. They’re saying an elevator. Not elevators, plural.”
I stopped what I was doing, now paying attention.
“Did you see two elevators come down?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Blaine entered the room. Smiling. He should have been morose as hell, having given the order for a unilateral hit without Omega authority from the Oversight Council, then having it backfire in his face. He was done and should know it. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t cracked.
“What?”
“We’re okay. You did good work. Saved the day.”
I flipped closed the computer in front of me and said, “Mind explaining?”
“The Ghost placed explosives on both the cables holding the cars and on the emergency brake systems designed to prevent a catastrophe if the cables failed. Your EMP stopped one single charge from going off. The brake system that contained the sheikh and the envoy. They got a wild ride for a few floors, but no permanent damage.”
“So only one elevator came down?”
“Yeah. It’s not pretty. Probably had ten to fifteen people in it, half American. Not good, but certainly not the worst we could be facing.”
I sat back, no longer worried about packing up, letting the relief wash over me. Enjoying the small victory. And feeling a little guilty about calling this a victory when so many had died.
“Okay. I’ll chalk this up as a win. What’s Kurt saying? You going to jail?”
He grinned again. “No. The Council’s okay with it because of the end result. If we hadn’t executed, the envoy would be dead. Kurt’s just a little pissed that I didn’t call him beforehand. I’ll get my ass chewed, but that’s about it.”
I was surprised. “You didn’t call him at all? Even for a SITREP?”
“No. I figured he’d tell me to stand down and that it would be easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Now that was a gutsy decision.
“What if I’d screwed up? Turned this into an international incident?”
“Why ask the question? You didn’t.”
I couldn’t believe he’d risked so much solely on my actions. It altered my opinion of him. Raised it exponentially.
I said, “Well, there’s always next time.”
He smiled and said, “We’ve got to get the detainees out to the desert. Skyhook’s on the way. Kurt wants this wrapped up quickly, get us out of here before someone connects the dots. I’m flying home tomorrow with the support package. You guys switch hotels, stay for one more day, then head out.”
The door opened, and Jennifer entered, sending a flutter to my stomach I wasn’t used to feeling. I ignored Blaine.
“Jesus, what the hell have you been doing? I’ve been worried sick.”
She gave me a wan smile and said, “I had some car trouble. A flat tire.”
I noticed her hair was wet, and she was now wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt rolled down to her wrists. “You changed clothes. What’s up? You took the time to take a shower before contacting us?”
She shifted back and forth and said, “I sent you a text. I sweated like crazy changing the tire. I just wanted to freshen up a little.”
She looked around and said, “What’s going on? Where do we stand?”
I explained the situation, then said, “As for where we stand, I was just asking that very thing.”
Blaine said, “What else is there? I told you what’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours.”
“What about Lucas?”
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Pike, hey, I get the guy tried to kill you, but he’s not a security threat. His information panned out. He’s gone, and the Taskforce isn’t going to hunt him.”
I saw Jennifer’s jaw drop. I said, “Are you serious? He killed Ethan Meriweather, along with his entire family. He’s still designated as a DOA target.”
DOA stood for Dead Or Alive and was a Taskforce designation that was rarely used. Almost one hundred percent of the time, we wanted the information inside the terrorist’s head. DOA meant the target was a distinct and urgent threat to national security, and we’d deemed the loss of information through interrogation less important than neutralizing him. Very few targets met that definition in our little world. Most terrorists like that were vaporized by a predator drone in areas within which we couldn’t operate.
I’d never had a DOA target, but the teams that did jokingly said it stood for “Dead On Arrival,” since nobody in their right mind would continue trying to capture a guy when it was authorized to kill him. Much, much easier to do. Lucas had earned the title when he’d murdered the family of a Taskforce member.
“Pike, I get that. If it was up to me, we’d go hunting right now, but we’ve worn out our welcome on this op. Orders are to get everyone home and let things cool down. No more overt actions. Period.”
Before I could answer, Jennifer blurted, “You can’t let him go! He’s a murderer. We need to catch him.”
Both Blaine and I jerked our heads to her, startled at what she had said. An uncharacteristic outburst from someone who was as close to a bleeding heart as the Taskforce had.
Blaine said, “I hear you. I really do, and we’ll get him eventually. He’s just not a strategic threat. I have to agree with Kurt on this one. Yeah, he’s a shithead, but he’s not a Taskforce shithead. He’s someone else’s problem.”
I saw Jennifer clenching her jaw so tight the muscles rippled in her cheek. She said nothing else, and honestly, I was good with it.
“So get these guys to the Skyhook and call it a day?”
“Yeah. Can you handle that?”
“No issues at all. We’ll use the same DZ that the equipment came into. Jennifer can find it easy.”
“Then get moving. I’ll send the alert and the L-one-hundred will be here three hours after nightfall.”
Thirty minutes later we had two four-wheel drive Nissan Pathfinders loaded up, Decoy and Brett in one with the two terrorists bundled in the back, and Jennifer and I leading the way to link up with the L100, the sun setting on the horizon.
The Skyhook was an extraction technique invented in the late 1950s. Used operationally only a few times, it had remained in the U.S. inventory until the 1980s, when the Department of Defense decided it was easier to fly in a helicopter than risk the damage to a human using the extravagant system. I’d done a lot of borderline things in my career, but testing this capability was at the top of stupid, which is why we only used it for terrorists.
The system had actually been used by Hollywood more than by the CIA or DOD-appearing in multiple movies-and had eventually been phased out when helicopters began to do aerial refueling that gave them the ability to reach over great distances.
It still worked for us because our problem wasn’t reach. It was explaining what the hell we were doing in the country. Thus, having a plane conducting an overflight on a registered flight plan, then dip for a span of seconds to intersect the package before returning to flight altitude, solved a lot of extraction problems for folks we couldn’t get through immigration.
Bouncing across the desert, Jennifer did nothing but steer and navigate, never once asking me about anything that had happened. That and her demeanor told me something was different. She had an aura melting off of her that permeated the entire vehicle. Maybe something only I could sense, but it was there, filling the cab with its stench. I said nothing, waiting for her to open up.
Eventually, she said, “What do you think about Lucas? You going to let that go?”
“What do you mean? I don’t really have a choice. He’s an asshole, but I’m not going to chase his butt all over the world.”
She looked at me for a long pause, reading my face. When she returned to the road, she said, “What about Ethan’s family? Isn’t that enough?”
Where was this going?
“Yeah, that’s definitely enough, but I don’t have the team or the intel to chase him. He’ll turn up.”
“What if I told you I had the intel? That inside his room I found where he’s going? Would that be enough?”
“What kind of game are you playing? Why are you asking?”
She looked at me again, and I saw a door slam closed. “Nothing. Just asking. It doesn’t matter to me either.”