He stood and walked calmly around the square sectional sofa. On the wall hung a photograph. It was a photo of a handsome young man in a lacrosse uniform, the word Princeton on the jersey. The player’s hair was wet with perspiration. Eye black was painted in stripes beneath each eye. The photo was of his dead son, Alexander; the chosen one, the one he had loved; the one Dewey Andreas had killed.
Aswan stared for a moment at the photo, then stepped slowly back toward Nebuchar.
Pasa laughed as he watched Aswan.
“What’s so funny?” asked Nebuchar.
“You are,” said Pasa, still laughing. “Both of you. You’re in love with a dead man. You spend your life chasing ghosts.”
“I told you to shut the fuck up, Pasa,” warned Nebuchar, his eyes flaring in anger.
“Perhaps
you
should shut the fuck up now,” said Pasa. “If I had handled this little project, Andreas’s skull would have been stuffed and mounted above the fireplace long ago.”
Nebuchar pulled out his Glock .45 G.A.P and aimed it at Pasa’s head.
The pistol cracked loudly as a single bullet tore into Pasa’s right eye and ripped a hole through the eye, kicking his entire body backward.
“I warned you.”
Aswan looked, stunned, at the dead man on his couch, then at his son.
“You do realize that is the number three man in all of Hezbollah, yes?” asked Aswan.
“Was,” said Nebuchar.
“I can’t guarantee your protection.”
“Since when have you ever protected me?”
PAYA LEBAR AIR BASE
ROYAL SINGAPORE AIR FORCE
REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE
The F-111 swooped in and landed on the main runway at Paya Lebar Air Base. The jet taxied to a stop next to a large, black windowless plane with a Frisbee-like object on top, the CIA’s E-3 Sentry AWACS.
The sun was out. Dewey looked at his watch: 7:15
A.M.
A set of portable air stairs was rolled quickly to the side of the F-111.
“Thanks for the lift,” said Dewey.
“Anytime,” said the pilot. “Good luck.”
Dewey climbed down and walked fifty yards across the cement tarmac, where a bald man in a coat and tie stood, holding two Styrofoam cups filled with coffee. As Dewey approached him, he extended one to him.
“Hi, Dewey,” said Polk. “I’m Bill Polk. Welcome to Singapore.”
Dewey took the coffee cup, but said nothing. He ascended the air stairs into the A-3, followed by Polk. The jet’s door closed and within two minutes the mysterious-looking black plane was barreling down the runway at Paya Lebar.
At the conference table on the big plane, Dewey was joined by Polk, who sat across from Dewey, and two other men, Will Drake, an operative within the CIA’s Political Action Group, and Van Bradstreet, an operative from the CIA’s Strategic Operations Group.
Both Political Action Group and Strategic Operations Group were divisions of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. The two divisions were the Kevlar-tipped front edge of the CIA bullet. Its members were the elite of the elite. PAG managed political, cyber, and economic analysis as well as covert offensive activities involving the manipulation of various political, economic, and technological systems within foreign countries. PAG’s members were drawn heavily from elite graduate programs at Ivy League schools. They tended to be brainy, multilingual, highly intellectual, out-of-the-box thinkers who enjoyed solving problems—and causing them.
SOG was the CIA’s front-edge paramilitary force; the first guns into foreign land. SOG operatives were drawn primarily from Delta and SEAL, and were smart, secretive, and brutally tough. During missions, SOG operatives carried no identification or articles of clothing that could identify them as American.
Drake, a senior-level case officer, was leading the analysis of who to replace El-Khayab with. Only twenty-nine, Drake had been pulled away from his honeymoon in Morocco. Drake knew the Pakistani military hierarchy, and Polk needed him.
Van Bradstreet, the SOG operative, was designing the operation along with Polk, as well as handling logistics for getting the team in place and supporting them once they were in-country.
“We have three hours to Bagram,” said Polk. “Let’s talk about your team first.”
One of the CIA operatives on board brought a plate with a turkey sandwich on it over and placed it in front of Dewey.
“Thanks,” said Dewey. “Give me a rough summary of the time line, will you?”
“Sure,” said Polk. “Van, what do we have?”
In front of Bradstreet was a laptop. He punched a few keystrokes. At the end of the conference table, a large plasma screen on the wall lit up. On it was a map of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
“It’s six
A.M.
,” said Bradstreet, pointing at a clock on the cabin wall. “We have until noon tomorrow to take out El-Khayab. That’s thirty hours.”
“Okay,” said Dewey.
“We’ll get you to Bagram by noon,” said Bradstreet, pointing to a red marker on the map where the U.S.’s Bagram Airfield was located. “From Bagram, we’re going to chopper you to Gerdi, a little shithole near the Afghan-Pakistan border, here.”
Bradstreet pointed to another marker, just to the left of the bright yellow line that ran through the mountains demarcating the two countries.
“Gerdi to Rawalpindi will take anywhere from six to twelve hours depending on border searches, traffic on the Khyber Pass, and other unforeseen shit. Let’s call it nine hours. By late evening, you’ll be in Rawalpindi, next door to Islamabad. From there, you’ll have twelve hours to find El-Khayab’s replacement, move troops into position, and take out El-Khayab.”
“Chopper to the border?” asked Dewey. “Daytime? Have things calmed down up there?”
“No, they haven’t,” said Bradstreet. “Taliban are everywhere. But we should be okay.”
“The main concern during the chopper ride is getting hit by a surface–to-air,” said Polk. “Joint Special Operations Command is running a border incursion to the north. JSOC has two separate platoons from the 101st Airborne working across the border twenty miles above Gerdi, hopefully dragging any Taliban in your flight path out of the area. You should be safe.”
“What about the border crossing?”
“It’ll be tricky,” said Bradstreet. “But so will the ride down the Khyber Pass. In addition to the main checkpoint at Torkham, we’ll need to worry about the ad hoc checks the Terries are doing along the highway to Peshawar.”
“‘Terries’?”
“Taliban. They’re stopping trucks with increasing frequency. If they find you, they will kill you. With your eyes, your looks, we’re gonna need to conceal you. Let me take care of that.”
“How?”
“We have a relationship with a trucking company owned by a midlevel Taliban. I recruited him myself. You’ll be hidden in a compartment in the back of the truck. I’ve done it. I was the first to ride the route, and I’ve ridden the route now six times.”
“So the same guys America’s been fighting for a decade are going to deliver us to Islamabad?” asked Dewey.
“The Taliban’s like any organization,” said Polk, smiling. “There’s always some bad apples. It’s just that their bad apples are our good apples.”
Dewey raised his eyebrows.
“Not every Taliban is a fuckhead,” said Bradstreet. “This guy’s not bad, just corrupt. I’ve been to his house. He’s a survivor. As for the run down the Khyber Pass, we have an understanding: if he ever once fucks me, I will light him up from the sky with one of our Reapers.”
“How much do you pay him?”
“Fifty thousand bucks a load. If we stay on schedule, you’ll be in Peshawar by dinnertime, and Rawalpindi sometime late tonight. What happens next is somewhat dependent on who we install as president.”
“Okay,” said Dewey, between bites. He glanced at his watch. “Let’s talk about the team.”
Polk emptied his coffee cup, then crushed it in his hands.
“It’s a four-man job,” said Polk. “Depending on who we select to replace El-Khayab with, there will be at least one, maybe two multistage assaults. If I were there, I’d want some extra hands to carry the load.”
“I want Deltas,” said Dewey. “On the size of the team, I want to understand the design of the incursion before we decide on how many men I’ll need. At least two, maybe three. My gut tells me two.”
“That’s awfully thin.”
“It’s the way I like it.”
“Okay.”
Bradstreet took a stack of manila envelopes and held it out.
“Here’s the list of Deltas we have in theater,” said Bradstreet. He pushed the small stack of folders toward Dewey. “That’s Iraq and Afghanistan and one guy in the UK. JSOC is standing by on our orders. You should review the group right now. We’re going to be scrambling to get whoever you select to Bagram in time to make the Khyber run work.”
“Got it,” said Dewey. He started flipping through. “Do you have former Deltas in here?”
“Yes,” said Bradstreet. “Everyone’s in there, including a couple of guys who are private contractors now.”
“Okay,” said Dewey. He opened the first folder.
There were sixteen Deltas or former Deltas in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Dewey flipped through all sixteen files before going back for deeper dives. The ages ranged from twenty-four to thirty-six. The photos told him little, but they were interesting to look at nevertheless; they all looked different. Three were black, a couple were Hispanic. One looked Arabic. The rest were white. Some were big, others looked smaller and more academic. The only trait they all had in common was the look in the eyes. Blank, far away, detached, wary; mean.
Dewey opened the manila folder on the Arab-looking Delta:
Millar, Alex
DOB: 9-17-87
POB: Karachi, Pakistan
Dewey read on. Millar had been born in Pakistan, the only son of a history professor at the University of Karachi. Millar’s mother had died in childbirth, and his father had never remarried. Originally, his name was Arshad Mehr, but his father had had it changed when they emigrated to the United States in 1998, at the age of ten. He’d grown up in Chicago. His father had joined the faculty at the University of Chicago, becoming a professor of Near Eastern languages. Millar had gone away to boarding school, attending Groton School, then went to West Point. After West Point, Millar had joined Rangers, then been recruited into Delta. He was only twenty-five, but that didn’t worry Dewey. Dewey liked the way he looked; he would blend in. He also knew Punjabi and Urdu, two of the main languages in Pakistan.
“Millar,” said Dewey, pointing to the photo of the Middle Eastern–looking Delta. He looked at Bradstreet. “This says he’s on a JSOC consignment to Langley out of London. First question: Why?”
“We’re assessing him for Special Operations Group,” said Polk. “London is just an address; he’s doing a lot of traveling. He’s young, but last week he successfully killed a midlevel Hezbollah IED builder named Saa who’d been running a small bomb school. Millar handled it by himself. Went in as a recruit and they bought it. He was inside the house for three days, picking up intel on how they’re making them and where they’re sourcing materials, who’s paying. Then he killed Saa and two others, destroyed the building. It was a smooth operation.”
“Can you get him here on time?” asked Dewey, looking at Bradstreet.
“Yes,” said Polk. “Just try not to get him killed. These guys who can speak the language are worth their weight in fucking gold.”
Dewey finished his sandwich as he looked through the remaining files. He stopped on one file in particular that was thicker than the others, mainly because he found its contents entertaining.
Iverheart, Rob
DOB: 8-1-1979
POB: Los Angeles, California
The photo on the cover showed a blond-haired, good-looking man with a beard and mustache. Iverheart grew up in Bakersfield, California, attended public schools through high school, then went to USC. It took Iverheart six years to graduate from USC; his files showed that he’d gotten into trouble on numerous occasions while at USC; twice for fighting, one time even getting arrested for disrupting the peace. He was suspended for a semester, the third and last time he’d been suspended from USC. The file showed a series of letters between Iverheart’s uncle, who was on the university’s board of trustees, and the then-president of the university. It was clear that political influence had kept Iverheart at USC. He graduated with a 1.8 GPA.
Attached to Iverheart’s transcript there was a notarized “Letter of Understanding” signed by Iverheart in which he agreed, after his disrupting the peace arrest, that if he was allowed to continue as a student at USC, he would enlist in one of the four branches of the U.S. military upon graduation. Iverheart had done so, enlisting in the army. Inside the army, Iverheart was assigned to the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Iverheart graduated first in his training class at Bragg. But what caught Dewey’s eye was the fact that Iverheart won the boxing championship at Fort Bragg while in the 82nd Airborne. He beat the four-time Bragg boxing champion, a Delta who weighed twenty-five pounds more than him. Iverheart had been selected for duty in Colombia, setting up kill teams deep in the jungles of the country and helping train the Colombian Army in the methods of interdiction and jungle warfare. One evening, while on leave in Cartagena, Iverheart had been at a bar and saw a man whom he recognized as a high-level member of the North Coast Cartel named Papa Rodriguez. Though off duty, Iverheart had nevertheless followed him, tracking him first to an apartment in Cartagena, then the next morning, into the jungle. Iverheart’s initiative led to the capture not only of Rodriguez but also the discovery of a new cocaine processing facility and the arrest of a dozen other cartel operatives. He was asked to join Delta a week later.
“I like this guy,” said Dewey. He pushed the file toward Polk.
“Rob Iverheart,” said Polk. “He’s running around Kabul somewhere.”
“Let me get someone on that,” said Bradstreet, standing up and walking toward the front of the plane.
“Let’s discuss leadership inside Pakistan,” said Polk. “I want to patch Hector and Jessica in.”
Polk nodded to Drake. He picked up his phone and dialed. In a few seconds, he placed the handset down and put the speakerphone on.