A Cold Day In Mosul (28 page)

"Do you think he remembers we made him summon the courier?" William asked.

"It's possible," Sam answered.

"Then wouldn't he use the spotter network to relay a warning to the Shura council?" William said.

"The Shura members won't break radio silence outside of certain agreed upon dates. They won't get anywhere near a radio until then. If Al Taaraz wants to notify Afri, he's going to have to use a courier."

"One of whom we're following right now," Ethan said.

"Exactly."

"He might have other couriers," Doug argued. "Or people who can get in touch with them."

"It's possible," Sam agreed. "But we're still a few hours ahead of any other couriers. The mission is a go."

Ethan drove on into the bleak Iraqi landscape.

"We should have killed the Accent driver," Doug said into the quietude. "Damn it. We've left too many loose ends."

"Probably," Sam said. "But we didn't know Al Taaraz had escaped at that point."

"It would've been a wise precaution," Doug retorted. "You made a mistake. Admit it."

Ethan leaped to Sam's defense. "Human compassion is never a mistake. It's what separates us from the men we fight against."

"Is it?" Doug said. "Then maybe that's why they're winning."

Ethan wanted to tell him that the terrorists weren't winning, but looking at how war-torn Iraq was, he couldn't really argue the point.

"You have to be a compassionless machine to win today's wars," Doug continued. "Why do you think DARPA is doing so much research into drones and other automated means of killing? Remove the human component. Remove the compassion. That's what wins wars, people. A robot army is every general's dream. Troops that'll obey every order without question. Without
compassion
."

Ethan couldn't help but think of the burning child. He truly hoped the dawn of the robot army never came.

Sam looked up from her laptop and stared into the same bleak landscape that Ethan saw.

"That's always been one of my weaknesses," she said, in a rare moment of candor. "Killing a stranger is harder for me, versus killing someone I know."

"That doesn't make sense," William said. "You don't know a stranger. It should be easier to kill them."

"That's exactly my point," Sam responded. "I know nothing about a stranger. I could kill any of you in a heartbeat, if you betrayed me. Because I know exactly who you are, and what the world will lose. But a stranger… he could have a family with ten young dependents, children who would die without him. He could be a composer who inspires millions. He could be a scientist on the cusp of a cure that will save thousands of lives. He could be any or all of these things."

"Or he could be some lowly goat farmer," Doug said bitterly.

"But that's the thing, I don't know," Sam said.

"Well the man who drove this car was definitely a farmer," Doug said. "Place still stinks of goats."

Sam nodded slowly.

"I still can't believe you'd find it easier to kill any of us, versus the farmer back there," William said.

"Remember the qualifier I added," Sam said. "
If you betrayed me
. Of course I wouldn't find it easy otherwise. Well, I suppose even if you did betray me, it would be difficult. Emotionally at least."

Ethan had to laugh.

"What's so funny?"

"Emotionally?" Ethan said. "What about physically?"

"We should spar sometime," Sam said, amusement creeping into her tone. "Your jiu jitsu against my kung fu."

Ethan grinned widely. "Kung fu? I've already won."

Sam's eyes twinkled. "We'll see."

* * *

Dmitri crouched beside the Kia Rio that had been abandoned in the gully. The driver's seat was steeped in blood. More blood covered the backseat. It was definitely the getaway vehicle, even if the license plate had been removed.

Three Islamic State pickup trucks were parked on the road nearby, near his small convoy. The Sunni fighters had spotted the suspicious vehicle abandoned in the steppe about half an hour earlier, and had called it in via their spotter network.

He touched the dried blood with one finger. A small, sticky portion coated his skin, outlining the lines and whorls of his fingerprint.

"Are you wounded, my old enemy?" he mused aloud. "No. Of course not. This is the blood of one of your minions. You devour those men closest to you. It is why you are called the Widow."

He finished his search of the vehicle. Anything of value had been stripped by the DIA operatives.

Dmitri glanced at the nearby highway, where empty chicken cages lay abandoned near the shoulder. The operatives had procured a new vehicle for themselves, of course. Likely that of a farmer. The question was, where had they disposed of the body?

Pyotr radioed from his search of the nearby steppe. "Kapitán. We found an Iraqi bound and gagged out here. He's still alive. Says he was robbed of his vehicle at gunpoint."

Dmitri found himself raising a surprised eyebrow. In her prime, the Widow would have never made such a mistake. A living witness, left behind?

Dmitri smiled. "You grow weak, Widow."

thirty

T
he green steppe was but a memory: the landscape had become flat desert intermixed with the occasional rocky outcrops. The ultra-fine sand of the desert—the "moon dust"—was coated in a layer of gravel. The road was no longer dirt, but compacted sand. The particulates in the atmosphere had thickened so that a dull orange haze hung above the distant horizon. Though the windows were closed, some dust permeated the Accent's vents, giving the interior an earthy, chalky smell.

Ethan pursued the target vehicle doggedly across that moonscape. He was so focused on the road and distant haze that he almost forgot he carried passengers: when Sam spoke, it unsettled him slightly.

"He's turning into a large village," Sam said, studying the laptop. "Pick it up, Ethan."

He accelerated, and in thirty seconds turned onto a side road. A few seconds after that he hit the outskirts of the village. The low-slung buildings bordering the road were made of either mud brick or stucco, and tinted the color of faded sand. Some of the properties were girthed in cinder block fences. Mini dunes had formed on the eastern walls of many homes, marking the abandoned residences. A subtle miasma of dust floated in the air, coating everything.

"He's driving into some kind of estate," Sam said. "It's surrounded by a cinder block wall. The grounds are obscured from the air by several palm trees." She glanced at the road. "Turn left up ahead. Then take the first right. William, get ready to launch the Hornet."

The village seemed empty save for the occasional unarmed Iraqi seated in the shade of a mud brick house, watching with idle curiosity as the Accent drove past. Ethan was worried the men were sentinels of some kind.

Guided by Sam, he drove onto a bumpy road behind a row of houses and then parked beside a long cinder block wall. Glancing at the laptop, he realized the estate lay beyond that tall fence.

"Will, get me eyes inside that estate," Sam said.

William launched the nano drone. The base station lay open in his lap. Doug, acting as his tripod, held the antennas out the opposite window near the roof of the car.

Sam streamed the Hornet's video feed to a small area on the right side of her screen.

Ethan watched the drone fly over the wall.

"Signal strength just dropped by about forty percent," William said. "But I'm still in the air."

"Find the target," Sam said.

Ethan stared at the video feed on the laptop. Date palms skirted past beneath the drone. The plants covered the inner grounds with such profusion that Ethan wondered if the estate was some kind of plantation. That seemed impossible, given the drought conditions.

"Wait a second," Ethan said. "Those aren't palm trees. They're tall umbrellas painted to
look
like palms. Those sandy gaps between the leaves are a dead giveaway... the gaps stay the same color, even when the sky is behind them."

"You're right," Sam said. "More subterfuge."

Near the middle of those painted canopies, the rooftop of a stucco building poked through. The Hornet accelerated toward it.

"There's a break in the ground coverage here," William said. "I'm dropping down."

The drone descended into a clearing. William yawed the Hornet, panning the camera across the umbrella poles. The view froze and pixelated often—the poles were likely metallic, and interfered with the signal. William stopped the yaw when he had a good view of the stucco building. He zoomed in.

"There," William said. "The Elantra is parked beside the building. Looks like—wait. There's another Elantra just in front of it. Same year and color. Both cars have drivers behind the wheels."

"Terrorist tradecraft," Sam muttered. On her laptop, she maximized the view from the Hornet so that it took up the entire screen.

Ethan saw the two vehicles on the display, and the stucco building beyond them. A man observed from the entrance to the house; he wore a white robe, and a black band secured a keffiyeh to his head.

"Who's the guy in front of the home?" Ethan said.

"Probably some random IS supporter," Sam said. "I'm sending his picture back to HQ. Maybe we'll get a hit."

Ethan focused his attention on the vehicles.

"Can you tell which driver is our courier?" Doug said.

"No," Sam answered.

"The second vehicle just turned around," William said. "Looks like it's headed for the exit."

"I see it," Sam said.

"I'm going in for a closer look," William told her.

"Going to be tricky flying between all those poles," Ethan said.

"I can do it," William said.

Ethan waited, his stomach in knots. The problem with flying FPV was that the single camera allowed no depth perception, and it was very hard to gauge the distance of surrounding objects. The constant video freezes and pixelation didn't help matters, but somehow William managed to get closer to the moving Elantra without hitting anything.

"It's not him," Sam abruptly announced.

"Are you sure?" Doug said.

"This guy has a full religious beard instead of a simple mustache."

"Maybe the courier relayed the message to him before we got here," Ethan said.

Sam reduced the size of the Hornet's feed so that the top-down view from the Predator filled the screen once more. The moving vehicle emerged from the cover of the fake palm trees and out into the open streets. When the Elantra hit the rural road, it turned eastward, heading back toward the Mosul-Baghdad highway.

"I don't think the courier talked to him," Sam said. "He didn't have time. We would have caught him walking back to his own vehicle, at least. That the new guy is headed toward the main highway and leaving the Al Hadar region tells me everything I need to know."

"Maybe he plans to double back at some point," Ethan said.

Sam tapped her chin. "Maybe. But my gut tells me he's not our man."

"You're going to rely on your gut for something as important as this?" Ethan said.

"What choice do we have?" Sam typed on the laptop. "I'm tagging him as a secondary target for JSOC. They have another Predator in the area, and a remote team will track him for us. They'll drop a couple of two-thousand pounders wherever he ends up, just to be on the safe side."

Ethan pressed his lips together. It was a suitable compromise, given the circumstances, though he didn't want to think about the potentially unnecessary collateral damage. He remembered, bitterly, the words Sam had spoken what seemed a lifetime ago:
Things are going to be different, working for me.

"You did the same thing with the original courier, didn't you?" Ethan said, remembering that she had been typing earlier after deciding not to pursue the first target.

"You know me all too well," Sam responded offhandedly.

More potential collateral damage. Nothing had changed at all.

"The remaining vehicle is on the move," William announced, bringing Ethan out of his head.

"Recall the Hornet," Sam told him. "HQ just got back to me on the white-robed man from the house. He's not in any of our files. I'm tagging his residence for future aerial surveillance."

William returned the quad to the clearing and accelerated skyward; in under a minute he had the nano drone back at the Accent, and he landed it just outside Doug's door.

"Nice flying, Tex," Doug said when he retrieved it.

"Yeah," William said. "Just hope my balls don't get irradiated." The latter comment was in reference to the powerful, suitcase-sized base station in his lap.

The courier returned to the rural road and headed southwest.

Ethan drove to the outskirts of the village and waited; when the target vehicle had moved four and a half klicks out, Ethan accelerated onto the road, continuing the elaborate game of cat and mouse.

He drove past three more tiny mud brick villages. There was still no sign of any Islamic State presence—no checkpoints, no flags, no militants. In fact the entire area seemed completely deserted. The only person they saw was a grizzled Iraqi leading a train of camels on foot, a man who regarded the Accent suspiciously as it went by. 

"Some kind of lookout?" Ethan asked as the camel train receded. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and realized William was observing the man through the binoculars.

"The haji hasn't reached for a radio," William said after several moments. "I think he's just a random trader."

Several minutes later the target arrived at a fourth village, somewhat larger than the last three.

"Close to within two klicks," Sam said.

Ethan floored the accelerator. He glanced at the laptop: the target vehicle approached a larger building—perhaps a mosque of some kind—and parked beside it under the screening branches of one of the many terebinth trees in the area. Those trees implied the presence of an oasis, perhaps with wells tapping into groundwater via an aquifer. Either that, or they were fake.