Cold Shot (39 page)

“I received a call from the American president. They know everything, Diego,” Avila said. “They know where the warhead is now—”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but they do. The security of this operation has been destroyed and we cannot allow a war with the United States. They would topple us and give the country back to the capitalists. It would destroy the Bolivarian revolution,” Avila said.

“I can’t disagree with that. We have always been playing a dangerous game,” Carreño agreed.

“I had hoped that if you could catch the American spies that we could trade them for our survival. But now they’re gone, we are left with two choices, and using the warhead would mean war. You understand this?”

Carreño had to force himself not to look to the backseat. “Yes.”

“Good. You are with Señor Ahmadi?”

“Sí.”

“Let me talk to him,” Avila ordered.

•    •    •

Ahmadi saw Carreño swivel in his seat and offer the handset. He frowned, took it, and held it to his ear. “What?”

“I’m very pleased to hear that you are unharmed, my friend,” Avila said.

Anger erupted from inside him and Ahmadi made no attempt to contain it. “We were very nearly killed, my
friend,
” he said, the sarcasm in his voice countering the title. “Our facility at Morón is
gone
—”

“I am aware,” Avila replied, trying to calm him down. “Diego told me everything earlier. It is a great loss for both our countries, but that is a problem to be solved in the future. At this minute, we must deal with our immediate problems as they stand. Once we do that, we can find a new way forward. You and the cargo are the two most important assets that remain, so what matters now is your safety,” Avila assured him. “We have your aircraft waiting for you at the airport with a full tank of fuel and I have arranged for a secure destination. I don’t want to share its location on this line, but you will be safe. You have my word before God Himself.”

Something is wrong,
Ahmadi thought. “And you will meet us at the airport?” is what he finally said.

“I don’t think that would be wise. Without question, the Americans are trying to track my movements. I wouldn’t want to lead them to you and endanger your safety any further.”

He won’t come,
Ahmadi thought. “Very well. Be well until I see you again.
Asr be kheyr
.”
Good night.

He passed the phone back to Carreño. “They are setting us up, I think,” he said to Elham in quiet Farsi. He was sure that the SEBIN director couldn’t understand their native tongue.

“Why do you say that?” Elham replied, following the civilian’s lead in the choice of language and keeping his own voice low.

“Avila has always been an obsequious twit but this is different. He has always flattered me to get what he wanted. Now he flatters me to get me to do what he wants. There is a difference,” Ahmadi said.

You would know,
Elham thought.
You understand flattery from both sides, don’t you?
“What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking that we are pariahs now. These men want to give us up to the Americans for their own benefit.”

We? You are the pariah. The Americans probably have no idea who I am.
“It’s possible,” Elham conceded. “They lost all of their cards to play when the American spies escaped. Now we two and the warhead are their cards.”

“What can we do?”

Now you listen to counsel?
Elham wanted to scoff.
You plunge the world into chaos and then expect others to save you from your own stupidity.
Still, Ahmadi was an important man with secrets that could hurt their homeland if they ever came to light. The government might not be excited to have him come back at the moment, but neither could the soldier just let the Americans have him.

Elham considered the options, then he spoke. “You must start thinking like a soldier . . . think of strategy and tactics. We do nothing for now,” he told Ahmadi. “We have no leverage as long as we are separated from the warhead.
That
is our only asset. The Venezuelans won’t use it on their own soil and the Americans know it. We have no such inhibitions, so once we load it on the plane, what the Venezuelans think won’t matter and the Americans will bargain directly with us. They will perceive us to be very dangerous people. So we do nothing until we reach the plane, and then we act.”

“Very good, I agree,” Ahmadi told him.

You would have agreed with anything, I told you, wouldn’t you?
Elham thought. Ahmadi was intelligent, devious in his own way, but he was not cunning. That failing was going to be the end of him, Elham was sure, and maybe sooner rather than later, depending on the next few hours.

USS
Vicksburg

11°22' North 67°49' West

75 miles north of the Venezuelan coast

“This is stupid,” Jon said, holding out the cable from Langley. Kyra had watched him as he’d read it through, which had taken him three tries. Her partner was distracted.

Kyra took the paper and read it. “They seriously think the Venezuelans are going to cooperate?” she asked.

“Kathy says we’ve got their word,” Jon responded.

“Because we’ve been able to trust that so much for the last twenty years,” Kyra scoffed. “This is not a good idea.”

“It’s that or the president starts bombing things again. And orders are orders,” Jon said. “How long until we move out, Master Chief?”

“We’re at Ready Fifteen, right now,” Master Chief LeJeune responded. “Captain has already called for flight quarters and the pilots have a ‘green deck’ as soon as the Seahawk gets topped off.”

“How’s our station chief?” Kyra asked.

“She’s in surgery,” LeJeune responded. “Doc Winter is good but we’re not exactly a full-service hospital, if you get me. She’s critical. He’s trying to keep her stabilized so we can evac her out to
Harry Truman
on the other Seahawk.”

“Jon, I can take care of this if you want to stay with her,” Kyra offered.

“No,” he replied, anger in his voice. “We’ll need to visit your armory,” he said to the sailor. “A Barrett’s no good at close range and we’ll need something bigger than Glock 17s.”

“I’ll ask the captain, but I’m sure we can accommodate,” LeJeune advised.

“Jon, go down there,” Kyra said. “She needs you—”

“She’s unconscious. There’s nothing I can do for her,” he said. “And we have our orders.” He walked out, leaving Kyra staring at him as he went.

Simón Bolívar International Airport

Maiquetía, Venezuela

Carreño’s driver turned the jeep onto the airport access road and pulled through the gates that led to the hangars beyond the landing strips. The convoy of cargo trucks pulled aside to park, one excepted, that continued on behind the SEBIN director’s jeep.

It was full dark now, the moon hanging low in the sky just above the flat Atlantic horizon. Ahmadi saw no aircraft on the runways, which he supposed was the fault of the Americans and their no-fly zone. It was a perverse irony that it actually helped the Iranians now. No flights meant passengers and airport workers had no reason to be here, leaving the airport and the tarmacs empty.

“There.” Carreño pointed at one of the hangars. A group of soldiers, at least a small company, stood in a formation in front of the metal building. “The building is secured, as promised.”

Ahmadi grunted, felt Elham poke him gently in the ribs. He looked down. The soldier passed him a pistol in the dark, below the level where Carreño’s driver could see the exchange in his rearview mirror. Ahmadi took the small gun and slipped it into his coat pocket.

The Venezuelan soldiers started to roll the hangar doors open. The interior lights were on and he could see a Boeing 727-200 parked inside. But the engines were silent, he realized, and the exterior lights unlit. He could see that from the tarmac more than a hundred yards away. The nav lights, the taxi lights, the strobes . . . all were dark.

Where’s the pilot?
Ahmadi thought, panicked. He should’ve been aboard. The SEBIN were supposed to be guarding the plane but he’d hoped the pilot would’ve had the good sense to get aboard—

They didn’t bring the pilot,
Ahmadi thought, angry. Or had the SEBIN detained him? The Iranian’s mind was racing now and he couldn’t slow it down. He tried to think about nothing, to calm his shaking hands.
Focus on the plane.
Elham was right. If they could make it to the plane—

But the SEBIN cordon stood between him and the Boeing . . . at least three dozen uniformed soldiers, every man armed with an assault rifle, any one with enough firepower to butcher him like a pig, to do to him what he’d told Elham to do to those Somali pirates.

Calm yourself!
he thought. Avila wouldn’t bring him to the airport for an execution. If the Venezuelan wanted him dead, he could have ordered the convoy to stop at any point. There had been a few dozen men in the trucks. They could have pulled him and Elham from the jeep, shot them both, and left them to rot in the woods at a million different places. No, to bring them to this point just to kill them made no sense. Avila wanted the Iranians off his country’s soil, not dead, surely. But Avila was playing the game, trying to benefit himself. Ahmadi understood that, so he understood Avila, no? He knew what he would do in Avila’s place and this possibility was frightening.

The armed soldiers finished opening the hangar door and Carreño’s driver started to move the jeep forward again. The uniformed guards stared as they approached and Ahmadi was sure there was murder in their eyes. He curled his hand around his gun as the truck approached the line and he started to pull it out—

Elham put his hand on Ahmadi’s and shoved it roughly back down. “Don’t be stupid,” he said in Farsi. “They outnumber us. Don’t give them any excuse. I will talk to them, then join you inside.”

The driver pulled the jeep into the hangar, turned right, and parked it under the far end of the Boeing’s left wing.

Ahmadi sucked in a breath and quietly praised the God he rarely obeyed.

•    •    •

Someone had pulled the rolling stairs into place and opened the Boeing’s door. Ahmadi reached the top and put his hand inside his pocket, getting a grip on the pistol as he put his foot down on the carpet. He turned the corner and looked into the cockpit. There was no pilot, no copilot, and Ahmadi cursed. He turned back—

Two men stood in first class. One was a sailor, U.S. Navy by the uniform. The other was grubby, dressed in cargo pants, tan boots, his clothes dirty and face unshaven and unwashed, with a handgun holstered in a thigh rig and an M4 carbine hanging from a shoulder sling.

“Hossein Ahmadi,” the uniformed man said. The American man in grubby clothes translated the sailor’s words into Farsi.

“I am he,” Ahmadi replied in English, contemptuous. “Why are you on my plane?”

“Mr. Ahmadi, my name is Captain Albert Riley of the USS
Vicksburg.
On behalf of the president of the Unites States of America and acting with the authority of the UN Security Council, I am here to accept your surrender.”

“My surrender?” Ahmadi said, almost sneering at the man. “You have no authority here. We are in Venezuela and this plane is Iranian territory—”

“I beg to differ, sir,” Riley told him. “You have no diplomatic credentials and this plane is not a registered diplomatic aircraft.”

“We are still in
Venezuela,
” he argued.

“True enough,” Jon said. “Presidente Avila and President Rostow have reached terms of agreement regarding your custody. Technically speaking, you’re being arrested by members of the Venezuelan police, who are standing outside this aircraft, and being transferred to U.S. custody for transport to the USS
Harry Truman
until such time as we can arrange an extradition flight to the United States of America. We’re just going to skip past the step where they arrest you and go straight to the part where you get transferred to our custody.”

•    •    •

Carreño stood by the base of the stairs, listening as one of the SEBIN soldiers whispered in his ear. The director looked up at the plane door in amazement. “And we’re to cooperate?” he asked. The soldier nodded. “Who is their representative?” he asked.

The soldier pointed behind his superior. Carreño turned—

—the woman who had beaten him within an inch of his life was standing within two meters of him. “You,” he said bitterly.

“Yes, me,” Kyra said in Spanish. “Keep your hands out of your pockets or I’ll finish what you started.”

“What I started—?”

“You remember the bridge over the Guaire?”

Carreño’s mouth fell open. “That was you.”

“That was me. How’s the nose?”

“You won’t touch me again,” Carreño sneered. “You’re not here for that now.”

“Nobody said I couldn’t take on a little side mission,” she replied.

“Touch me and I’ll have you shot.”

“No, you won’t. Gentlemen?” she yelled.

Several squads of U.S. Marines marched around the side of the hanger. Where they had been hiding in the dark, Carreño had no idea. “Let’s not start anything ugly,” the woman said.

An Iranian soldier approached. “You are the American in charge?” he asked in good English.

“Out here, yes,” Kyra replied.

“My name is
Sargord
Heidar Elham of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.”

•    •    •

“I’d be happy to call Presidente Avila,” the Navy captain said. “He can explain—”

“Don’t bother,” Ahmadi growled. “I don’t want to speak to that
kosskesh—
”

At that moment Elham passed through the plane’s door, followed by Carreño and a woman dressed in cargo pants and a T-shirt, armed with her own pistol and M4.

Ahmadi turned his glare to his countryman. “You know what they’re doing?”

“I’ve been told,” Elham replied.

“Are you going to stand by and let them do this?”

“Yes,” the soldier told him.

“What?” The blood drained from Ahmadi’s face. “You said now was the time to act—”