Authors: Christopher Reich
Connor was a man of habit. As always, he walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk, turning the lights on and off to mark his progress through the house. Next he went to his second-floor den, sat down in his recliner, and made himself watch one of the late-night television hosts’ monologue. Ten excruciating minutes passed before he rose and walked up the last flight of stairs to his bedroom. He drew the curtains, changed into his pajamas, then lay on his bed, leafing through an issue of
Foreign Affairs
, not seeing a single word.
In his mind, a single phrase played over and over.
Someone is watching
.
At twelve-forty he turned off the lights. Frank Connor’s official day was over.
Five minutes later, he threw off the covers, lumbered out of bed, and walked through the bathroom and into a musty back closet reserved for discarded clothing. Pushing aside a few moth-eaten blazers, he set his shoulder against the wall and pushed. The wall spun on a gimbal to reveal a comfortable study beyond, outfitted with green carpeting, a sturdy desk, and a large captain’s chair. The room had come with the house, courtesy of its original owners, abolitionists who had helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad. (There was a secret stairwell, too, leading to a garden shed on an adjacent property. He was not the first occupant interested in escaping from prying eyes.) The air inside was cool and smelled of lemon. He pushed the wall back into place and pressed a button that secured the door with a sixteen-inch titanium rod. Safe in his private office, Connor sighed. He could finally go to work.
He sat down and logged onto Intelnet, his agency’s secure server. His first order of business was to access his mailbox. He was pleased to note that the Strategic Air Command had finished cleaning up the picture of the American munition that Lord Balfour had shown to Emma. Computer processing had sharpened the focus tenfold, and as he gazed at the weapon he could make out the rivets on its steel skin.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered.
Peter Erskine was right: it was no five-hundred-pound conventional bomb. Not by a long shot. An attached simulation showed what the weapon would look like when freed from the snow. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of military technology would recognize it as a cruise missile. SAC had labeled the weapon an AGM-86.
Connor had more than a rudimentary knowledge of military technology. Before joining Division, he’d worked as a procurement officer for the Defense Department and spent much of his time with companies like General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Lockheed. He knew all about a cruise missile’s specs. He knew that it could fly close to the speed of sound with a range of over a thousand miles. He knew it could be launched from a ship or dropped from a plane, and that either way it could hit a target the size of a Volkswagen Beetle with 98 percent accuracy. He knew that it could carry a conventional warhead containing high explosives or a nuclear warhead with a yield of up to 150 kilotons, ten times the size of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
One hundred fifty kilotons
.
Connor sat up in his chair. He felt short of breath. A sharp pain speared his chest and he stiffened. Desperately he opened his mouth to breathe, to relieve the profound discomfort, but an immense, unyielding pressure had clamped down on his chest. His throat and lungs were paralyzed.
And then it was gone. The pressure lifted. The pain vanished. Connor sucked down a draft of air, feeling his entire body come back to him. The episode had lasted fifteen seconds.
Stress, he told himself as he stood and poured himself four fingers of Mr. Justerini and Brooks. Anyone would feel the same if he’d just gotten a glimpse of Armageddon.
One hundred fifty kilotons
.
He lifted his glass and toasted a world gone to hell.
He was aware that the air force had lost nuclear weapons on a few occasions, but to the best of his knowledge it had recovered them without incident. He also knew that as a safety precaution, the air
force had halted all bomber flights with armed nuclear weapons in 1968. The cruise missile in question wasn’t manufactured until the 1970s. Logic therefore dictated that whatever Balfour had found, and wanted Emma to help retrieve, was not an armed nuclear weapon.
But where was logic in explaining how that kind of weapon, either conventional or nuclear, had ended up high in the mountains of Pakistan or India in the first place?
There were two things that Frank Connor had learned during thirty years of government service: people lie, and anything is possible. He took these as the fundamental truths of his profession, and it was his ruthless exploitation of both that had fueled his climb to the directorship of Division.
Which brought him back to the present.
Somewhere there was a bomb,
possibly nuclear
, and somehow he had to get it.
He glanced at his wristwatch. The time was 1:23. It was an appropriate time for a mission to begin.
Connor logged off Intelnet. For a while he sat in the dark, contemplating the events of the day. Unlike Erskine, he was more concerned about Emma Ransom than about the discovery of the cruise missile tucked away high in a distant mountain range. For the moment the missile was contained. It was a threat. It posed near unimaginable danger if in fact it carried a nuclear payload, armed or otherwise. But any imminent danger was a way off.
On the other hand, Emma Ransom was either dead or faced torture and imprisonment. Either prospect pained him greatly.
Emma was special. Emma had sacrificed. Emma had given of herself, as he had given of himself.
Connor rose and crossed to the far corner of the room. With difficulty, he kneeled and pulled back a section of carpet, revealing a safe with a biometric lock. He opened it and retrieved a sturdy leather-bound volume. He needed a breath to regain his feet, and several more to make it back to his desk. Seated, he cracked the volume and turned the pages slowly, staring at the photographs affixed to each page.
Against every rule of practice, Frank Connor had assembled an album of every man and woman who had worked as an operative at Division. There were only photographs. No names. No dates. Just faces. Still, it was a fundamental breach and he knew it. He had no excuses. His heart needed none. They were his family.
He stopped at a page halfway through and looked down at the young woman with twisted auburn hair and spectral green eyes. She looked so young. Not innocent. Emma had never been innocent. But young and eager, and, by God, so willing. He had never known anyone so capable and so driven.
He closed the book and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. Something stirred inside him. Not sorrow. Certainly not guilt. He had forsaken his conscience years ago. Something stronger. A call to duty. He owed her.
Connor picked up his phone and placed a call to the Middle East. A male voice answered.
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I’ve got an assignment for you,” said Connor. “Strictly off the record.”
“Isn’t it always?”
It was one o’clock in
the afternoon in the United Arab Emirates when the man pulled onto the shoulder of the highway from Dubai to Sharjah. He put the Land Rover into park and stared out the window. A sea of undulating dunes spread to all four corners of the horizon with nothing to differentiate one patch of earth from the next. For a final time he checked the coordinates of his handheld GPS against those he’d received two hours earlier from Frank Connor. The map indicated his position as twenty-six kilometers southwest of the Sharjah Free Trade Zone. He was in the right place.
Climbing down from the cab, the man made a circuit of the vehicle. He stopped at each tire, inserting a pen into the air valve until he’d bled fifteen pounds of pressure. Finished, he ran a sleeve across his forehead while looking in either direction for approaching vehicles. No cars were visible. Even so, he wouldn’t have been overly concerned. Tours of the desert were popular among visitors. The logo of Dubai Desert Adventures adorned the vehicle’s doors. To all passing eyes he was just one more guide. If anyone wished to look closer, the glove compartment held a valid guide’s license, his operating permit, and a log of customers dating back two years. As cover it would withstand a cursory inspection, but little beyond that. It was the best he could do on short notice.
The man slid behind the wheel and shoved the gearshift into first. The Land Rover lurched forward, the underinflated tires gripping the sand nicely. Sky filled the windscreen as the vehicle climbed a dune. The next moment the nose fell, and blue was replaced by brown as the car slid down the back side. His destination was an anonymous point in the desert thirty kilometers due west, where Emma Ransom
had last been seen. Satellite imagery taken after her video feed was cut showed the heat signature of six vehicles departing from the airfield and traveling deep into the desert. Enhancement of the images identified five of the vehicles as belonging to the national police. The sixth was a Mercedes SUV and belonged to Prince Rashid.
“One of my operators is missing,” Connor had said when he’d called hours earlier. “This one is a priority. To be found at all costs.”
The man drove for an hour, his neck growing tense from the vehicle’s continual rising and falling. One kilometer from the destination, he crested a rise and braked before the Land Rover could plummet down the other side. Cautiously, he stepped out. The dune sea ended just ahead, giving way to a moonlike expanse of hard sand, rock, and scrub. With his binoculars, he scanned the landscape. Almost immediately his eye caught a patch of color where none should be. There, precisely where the satellite had last mapped Prince Rashid’s position, was a black garment impaled on a thorn bush.
Lowering his binoculars, he listened. The desert was a vacuum and sound traveled far. He heard nothing. Senses on alert, the man guided the vehicle down the last dune. Leaving the motor running, he walked to the bush and removed the garment. It was a cotton T-shirt, and he noticed at once that all of its labels had been cut out. It was a spy’s garment, and as such, verification that Rashid had brought Emma Ransom to this place. One corner of the shirt was dry and crusted, and when he ran a thumb over it, it came away the color of rust.
A few meters away, tire tracks raked the dirt. The man approached and observed a storm of footprints in a semicircle around a smoothed patch of sand. Cigarette butts littered the area. Kneeling, he ran his fingers through the sand. He came away with various rocks and pebbles and sticks. There was something else, too. A tooth. A human molar with a silver filling.
The man returned to his car and drove over to a dune that looked down on the spot where Emma Ransom had been tortured, and more than likely executed. Using his binoculars, he studied the area. After a moment he spotted a set of tire tracks leading farther into the desert and, centered behind the tracks, a rough furrow. He knew the rumors
about the prince. It was not the first time Rashid al-Zayed had dragged someone behind his car.
The man followed the tracks until they ended abruptly one kilometer farther on. He stepped down from the car and surveyed the area, but he found only a single set of men’s footprints. One impression was exceptionally clear and showed a partial name of the shoe brand. He snapped a few photos with his telephone and sent them to Connor with the hope that some of his technical whizzes might be able to deduce something or other. He kicked around the sand, feeling miserable.
And then he saw it—a chunk of plastic no bigger than a thumbnail. He brought it closer. It was a cellular telephone’s SIM card, the all-important chip containing the telephone’s user information: numbers, addresses, photographs, and records of calls made to and from that apparatus. Near the SIM card, blood had dried into a hardened pool, as black as obsidian.
Rising, he made a final walk around. With a heavy heart, he placed a call to Connor.
“You were right. Rashid took her out into the desert with all his buddies and had some fun with her.”
“Any sign of her?”
“I found her shirt, a tooth, and a SIM card. There’s a lot of blood, too.”
“Jesus.”
“I wouldn’t hold out much—” The man stopped mid-sentence. “Holy shit.”
“What is it?” demanded Frank Connor.
The man bent at the waist and peered at something in the sand. “She’s alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m looking at her footprint. She walked out of here.”
The MV-22 Osprey flew high
over the blue waters of the Persian Gulf, maintaining a speed of 180 knots on its course south-by-southwest from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Seated in the passenger compartment, Jonathan Ransom glanced out the window as a pair of F-18 fighters whizzed past a mile to port. The helicopter passed directly above a guided missile cruiser, the Stars and Stripes flying boldly from the fantail. For the last ten minutes they’d been overflying the naval vessels of Carrier Task Force 50. He’d left one war zone only to enter another.
“Touchdown in six minutes,” said the pilot.
Jonathan checked his shoulder harness, making sure that the belt fit tightly across his chest and waist. The Osprey dipped its nose and began a rapid descent. He had the sensation of being sucked into a vortex against his will.
Since climbing onto the chopper at Tora Bora one week earlier, he’d been constantly on the move. From Tora Bora to Bagram. Bagram to Camp Rhino. Camp Rhino to the embassy in Kabul. Back to Bagram. At every stop he’d endured another debriefing. He’d related the events as best he could. He’d asked to go home. Always he received the same answer: “In due time.” And he waited to be moved again.
The aircraft touched down. Two MPs led the way to a hatch in “the Island,” the imposing tower rising from the flight deck. Jonathan followed, climbing a set of stairs to reach the flag bridge. His destination was an anonymous wardroom with a table and chair and an American flag stuck in one corner like an afterthought.