ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE ONE of your little mental earthquakes now?” General Bradley Middleton did not take his hand from the AK-47 or stop scanning the darkness moving around the truck.
“You better hope I don’t.” Swanson kept his eyes on the road, watching a landscape painted green and black in his NVGs. He maneuvered around potholes, driving as fast as he dared without lights. “You know what I like best about being a sniper?”
“What?”
“I get to pick my partner, so at least I’m with someone I like. Unlike now.”
The two men settled into an uncomfortable silence as Swanson drove due west. Every kilometer they covered added to what he considered a growing debt of good luck that would not last forever. They were about six klicks out of Sa’ahn, had seen no other vehicles, and the truck was running smooth.
“There’s a McDonald’s up the road a couple of miles,” he told the general. Swanson was extending an olive branch because they had to work together. In this kind of situation, there should be only one enemy. “We can stop and get coffee and a Big Mac.”
Middleton actually grunted what might have been a laugh under other circumstances. He wanted to back off, too. “I prefer Burger King. Double Whopper with cheese. Flame-broiled.”
“Of course you would. You argue about everything?” Kyle asked.
“Yep. I’m what they call a contrarian.” Middleton sucked in a sharp breath, and his words were hoarse.
“I was lying about the Mickey D’s.” He handed the general a canteen of water. “We’ll be able to eat in a little while. How you feeling?”
“Been better. Been worse.” Middleton paused, and seemed lost in thought and more focused. He said, “Who sent you to kill me?”
Swanson slowed and steered off the road to avoid a ragged, deep hole. A sharp bump like that might make the broken rib puncture Middleton’s lung. “Gerald Buchanan, the national security advisor, wrote the order directly to me on official White House stationery. He didn’t give a reason, just the assignment. If the mission to rescue you failed, I was to shoot you.”
“He can’t do that.”
“Well, he did.” Kyle pushed the accelerator back down to regain his speed, and another kilometer passed beneath their wheels. “He bypassed the military chain of command by handling it through the CIA, which has used me once in a while. It was handed to me by a guy from his office.”
“Why would he want me killed?” Middleton asked.
“Beats the hell out of me, General. But you do tend to piss people off. Why were those American mercs involved?”
“They worked for Gates Global. That’s who organized the kidnapping, I think, because of my opposition to the military privatization bill. They were going to let the damned jihadists chop off my head anyway, so why would Buchanan send you out to do the same job, other than as an insurance policy in case that plan failed? There must be a direct link between Gates and Buchanan.” He sucked in another breath with a grimace.
Kyle removed his night-vision goggles. The black sky was showing the first signs of the new day, and he could make out shapes along the road. “General, keep in mind that our whole rescue mission was a setup. We were flying into an ambush. We were never supposed to succeed. I might not have even gotten through. Only somebody pretty high up could have gotten that information to the mercs. Buchanan would have been in the loop somewhere.”
“Damn. I need to think about this for a while.” Middleton fell silent.
Pinpoints of headlights crossing the road far ahead were easily visible in the remaining night. “Those have to be trucks on the main highway between Damascus and Amman,” Kyle said. “End of the road for us.”
Middleton watched the busy traffic, drivers hurrying with their loads to reach their destination before the sun rose and the heat of the day baked the roadways. “So we wait for a break and just scoot across. The Golan Heights are what, about thirty or forty klicks straight west?”
“We’re not going that way,” Swanson answered.
“But the Israeli army is all over those hills,” Middleton shot back. “It’s the quickest way out of here, and solid protection when we reach them.”
“There are just as many Syrian soldiers on this side of the border, General, and they all will be looking for us. Hold on.” Kyle found a narrow, paved frontage road that paralleled the main distant highway and skidded onto it with a sharp right turn that took them off the pavement. He intentionally clipped a traffic sign, crushed roadside brush, and shifted into a lower gear to dig deep ruts, leaving a clear trail before entering the northbound road.
The general was shoved against the door by the force of the turn and yelped in pain. “You’re going north? Toward Damascus?”
“Of course not.” Kyle stopped the truck and did a three-point turn to head back the way they had come, careful to stay on the pavement. He jumped out and used a small bush as a broom to erase marks of his reversed turn. The bush went into the truck bed and he headed east again.
“We’ll double back for a couple of klicks. The stuff I did back in the village and the claymore ambush worked better than we thought. It slowed them down so much that I haven’t seen the BTRs or anybody else on our tail. There are no headlights coming this way, so I think they stopped to regroup and call for help.” He mashed the accelerator, tearing along the quiet road.
“There’s a little road back here that heads south. We’ll get on it for a little while, then hole up for the day. They’re going to have a lot more choppers up as soon as daylight comes, so we can’t run in the morning hours. Both of us need rest, too. I haven’t slept in two days and you’re hurt.”
Middleton leaned back against the seat. “Not the way I’d do it, Gunny.”
“I know. It’s hard to stay still when the natural inclination is to haul ass, but this is how to best exfiltrate enemy territory and get out of here alive. Right now, they don’t know where we are, and probably will conclude that we are heading straight for Israel. So we have to do something else, and going north to Lebanon isn’t an option.”
The countryside rolled by as the sky lightened to a warm gray, and as the very edge of the fiery sun showed above the horizon and into his eyes, he found the road and turned right. The Syrians would try to cordon off all of the escape possibilities. Swanson felt exposed and vulnerable with morning coming on so rapidly, the sun seeming to point at him, giving away their position. There was nowhere to hide.