Cold Shot (4 page)

Kyra holstered the Glock, then slung the bag and the HK over her shoulder, and walked back toward the range house.

•    •    •

The jogging trail was a mile of wide gravel and cleared dirt through the pines and old-growth trees, with poison ivy and Virginia creeper on the sides to keep runners on the path. It started by the main road that ran past the dining hall and her billet, bordered a field of unexploded ordnance, or so the signs warned, then curved west into the woods. The Virginia humidity was still on the rise in late spring and the evening air was cooler than normal for this time of year. It had been getting dark when Kyra set out, but the moon was full and she plowed on through the night. She’d even decided to tackle the challenge course despite the inherent danger of attacking such obstacles in the dark. Broken ankles and torn ligaments were real possibilities, as was spending the night in the forest a mile from her billet, crippled, until some other jogger came along in the morning to help her back. But daylight wasn’t a luxury or even a friend in the intelligence business . . . it was the enemy often as not, something to be shunned. Darkness was the ally for those who weren’t afraid of it.

An intelligence officer who was afraid of the dark was in the wrong business.

Kyra pushed through the course and made it back to her billet in time to catch the bar with time to spare, a hot shower notwithstanding. She’d missed dinner, but she’d had the dining-hall chow enough times to know that was no great loss and there were plenty of all-night dives close by.

Kyra rested her elbows on the hardwood trim that lined the bar counter, set her glass down on the granite top, and scanned the room. It was almost empty. The flat-panel televisions were all tuned to news channels that were recycling the same stories for the second time since she’d arrived. The fireplace behind her was framed by a pair of elephant tusks mounted on wooden bases that sat on the stone hearth. She couldn’t imagine how they had made their way to the Farm, or how the Agency had even allowed it, but she supposed that some cowboy from the Special Activities Center had smuggled them in. Three men were playing pool badly at a nearby table. One lonely soul was throwing darts at an old board to her left and Kyra hoped the young man didn’t have aspirations of becoming a professional.

Her cell phone rang, a Bruce Hornsby song that turned the bartender’s head. Kyra looked at the screen on the phone, then smiled. “Hey, Jon.”

“You’re at the bar, aren’t you?” he asked without preamble.

“Yep.”
Really, Jon?
Where’s the trust?

“Beer?”

“Ginger ale,” Kyra answered.
And proud of it.

“Ginger ale and what?”

“And ice.”

“Good for you.” He wasn’t being condescending, she knew. Kyra wasn’t an alcoholic, but she’d come close and working a job where one’s coworkers were hard drinkers was a prescription for trouble. Jon knew it and was being protective, which was a rare thing for him. She’d learned to appreciate it, slowly.

“How was the range?” he asked, changing the subject.

“It was good. I requalify on the Glock first thing in the morning.”

“I heard you were shooting the place up with the heavy artillery.”

Kyra half smiled and wondered who at the Farm was part of Jonathan’s network of informants. “I wanted to play with something that had a bit more kick.”

“The joys of life are in the small things, I suppose,” he said. “You’re wrapped up down there?”

Here it comes.
She was surprised he’d taken this long to get to the point. “Just the one test left, yeah,” Kyra admitted. “Why?”

“I need you back. The director gave us an assignment this morning,” he told her. “We have to track down a ship.”

“And you haven’t found it by now?” Kyra teased.

“I have some thoughts, but I thought you might like a chance to look things over.”

That’s generous.
It was also unusual, for Jon anyway. Jonathan didn’t like letting a puzzle lie unsolved and he was stubborn and socially distant, so these kinds of gestures were as close as he ever came to admitting any affection for her, and they were rare. Kyra checked her watch. She couldn’t get to Langley until well after midnight at the soonest. “I’ll head out first thing after my range test,” she said.

“Get here by lunch.” Jonathan disconnected.

Kyra set the phone back down.
Well,
she thought.
That calls for something a bit stronger
.

She tapped the counter. “I’ll take a Coke.”

•    •    •

The rising sunlight was cutting through the river fog when Kyra decided it was time to leave. Then she stood there another ten minutes anyway. Jonathan could wait that long. If he complained, she would blame the delay on traffic. Route 95 north was always an iffy proposition and the Washington Beltway was forever a tangled mess. It would be a lie but the view here was worth a sullied conscience.

Kyra sat on a fat granite boulder on the shoreline, no coat, enjoying the morning air. She did love the Farm. It was very much like home, Scottsville, which sat farther inland along a Virginia river like this one. This would be a fine place to end a career, teaching a new generation of case officers their trade. But that would be years away if ever.

She looked east along the trail and found the spot she was looking for. It was overgrown now with cattails and marsh grasses. Pioneer had sat there a year ago the day after she had exfiltrated him from China. He had lived here for three months after so they could debrief him and set up his new life. She had seen despair in the man’s eyes that afternoon, the first time he had realized the full price he would finally pay for treason. To never go home again . . . she couldn’t imagine it. Kyra had sat down beside him that afternoon for an hour, saying nothing because she spoke no Mandarin and he spoke almost no English. It occurred to her that this place, which felt so much like home to her, must have felt like an alien world to him.

The day they moved him out, she’d driven him to the airfield. He’d learned a little more English by then and was able to offer a broken farewell. They loaded him on the plane and she watched as it took off into a cloudless sky and disappeared. Now she wondered where he was. She knew the Clandestine Service wouldn’t tell her anything. Pioneer was no longer an Agency asset but his case was compartmentalized as heavily now as it ever had been.

Kyra heard movement in the brush behind her and she turned. A family of white-tailed deer, unafraid of humans, was grazing near her truck, which she’d parked on the paved one-lane trail that doubled as a bike path along the shoreline.

Time to go,
she thought, and this time she forced herself to move. Kyra trudged up to her Ford Ranger and crawled in. The deer looked up when she started the engine but didn’t run.

She drove out to the main road and it took five minutes to reach the main gate. Kyra rolled down her window and passed her badge to the guard at the shack.

“You coming back?” he asked.

“Not today,” she said.

He filed her badge away in a box to be recycled. “Have a safe drive.”

Kyra nodded and pulled out onto the highway and pushed the truck ten miles over the limit.

CIA Headquarters

The traffic had mostly stayed out of Kyra’s way but the Agency parking lots hadn’t been so cooperative. A failed twenty-minute search for something better left her parked by the Mail Inspection Facility and had given her more than a quarter-mile walk to enter headquarters.

Kyra navigated the crowd by the cafeteria, then finally bypassed it altogether through a stairwell by the library that opened into the 2G corridor. Kyra plodded down the empty hallway, swiped her badge against the reader, and the door to 2G31 Old Headquarters Building clicked open.

She didn’t bother to announce herself. Jon’s door was cracked open and the vault was small enough that he would hear her entrance.

“The file’s on your desk,” he called out from his office.

Kyra dropped her satchel by her chair then leaned over the desktop. A manila folder was laid open there, a photograph on top of the papers. She glanced at the picture and regretted it.

“And this couldn’t wait until after I had lunch?” Kyra asked him, staring at the photo. A burned, bloated carcass of an African male looked back at her. Kyra was not squeamish, but someone had died slow and ugly. She skimmed over the
Vicksburg
CMO’s description of the remains.

“Feel free to eat while we work,” he said over her shoulder, missing her point entirely. Kyra looked up, startled. She’d been focused on the gory photo and hadn’t heard him come over.

“Not a problem
now,
” Kyra said. Any semblance of hunger was gone. “I think this guy is a little beyond help.”

“True, but not the smartest observation you’ve ever had,” Jonathan said. “And not the problem at hand. The starting assumption is that he’s a pirate, tried to take a ship or actually managed it, and somebody dumped him back out into the Gulf of Aden. That’s not usually how pirate raids go down, so she’s wondering whether he didn’t target a ship that someone really cared about.”

“What if he wasn’t a pirate?”

“Then this entire mess is somebody else’s problem. But that would make him boring, so let’s ignore that for now.”

“Boring is good in this business,” Kyra countered.

“Says the woman who just spent a week shooting automatic rifles. Anyway, it’s the director’s assumption,” he pointed out. “And I like it because
it’s not boring.
”

“All right. No starting point in space or time?”
Of course not,
she realized. If they had that, any decent analyst could have found the ship. “So we have to deconstruct a scenario that we know nothing about, in reverse, and hope that it might provide some clues to what we should be looking for,” she observed.

“Correct,” Jonathan replied.

“And you waited until I got back to do this because . . . ?”

“I have my own thoughts but I want to hear yours,” he said.

Kyra stared at Jon, focused on his body language. The fifteen months she’d been in the Red Cell had been more than enough time to learn that Jon didn’t coordinate his analysis with anyone, even people he liked, who were few.
A training exercise? Or you need to prove something to someone?
“It’s a red team exercise,” Kyra said. “A decision tree. But decisions are subjective evaluations reached through education and cultural influence, which we don’t share with the subjects who made them. So you’re asking me to mirror image.”

“Mirror imaging isn’t entirely useless if you’re aware that you’re doing it,” Jonathan counseled her. “Strategies often are culturally dependent; tactics, not so much. The more basic your options, the less they care what country you’re from.”

“Okay,” Kyra conceded. She stared at the picture of the bloated corpse.
Funny how quickly you can get used to seeing that.
Her mind churned, Jonathan letting her sit in silence, totally comfortable and willing to wait on her. “So assuming he was a pirate engaged in a mission, there are . . . three possibilities for how he ended up in the life raft. First, his own crew did it, in which case the ship is probably still under pirate control and docked at one of the haven ports along the Somali coast. If that’s true, NSA will probably identify the ship from phone calls between the pirates and the ship’s owner. Or if the cargo really is that valuable or interesting, the pirates might offer the ship to any country or intelligence service willing to bid for it.” She shuffled through the other papers in the file. “I take it there haven’t been any intercepts or offers or we wouldn’t be doing this. So we can probably discount that idea.”

“I agree,” Jonathan said. “And the second?”

“The ship’s crew took the vessel back,” Kyra suggested. “But if the crew had the will and the firepower to retake the ship, the pirates probably never would’ve gotten aboard in the first place. So that doesn’t seem likely.”

“And the third?” Jonathan said, sounding like a proud parent.

Kyra paused for a brief moment. “Someone retook the ship from the outside.”

“Excellent,” Jonathan said, smiling. “So how do we narrow the candidate list of countries?”

“Lots of countries in the area have military units that could’ve done it. The ones that don’t could’ve hired mercenaries. So the real question is how the raid team got on board the ship.” Her thoughts turned back to the hard landing she and Jon had made on the
Abraham Lincoln
off the coast of Taiwan the year before.

“A good thought,” Jonathan said. “There are only three real possibilities for that. Airdrop from a cargo plane, fast-roping from a helo, or a rope climb from an assault craft. The first option would be the hardest. Parachuting from altitude onto a moving ship is doable but it’s the riskiest option, especially if it’s a night raid . . . leaves the men exposed to hostile fire for a relatively long period with no covering force.”

“Fast-roping from a helo solves that problem. That’s a short, fast drop while a door gunner lays down cover fire,” Kyra said.

Jonathan nodded. “A small boat also is a common option, though problematic depending on weather and the size of the vessel you’re boarding. If the target is a large cargo ship, that could be a long climb if you’re under fire.”

“The pirates did it,” Kyra noted. “Unless Somalis have graduated to helicopter boardings.”

“The crews of most cargo vessels aren’t heavily armed, if at all. That usually eliminates the ‘under fire’ part of the equation.”

“So if we assume a helo drop, they would’ve had to launch either from a nearby coastline or a vessel out in the Gulf that has a flight deck,” Kyra said. “Combine that with a special forces capability and I’d be looking at Israel, Iran, the Saudis, or Pakistan . . . maybe India at the furthest. How many countries are part of Task Force 150? Any of them looking good for it?”

“Seventeen,” Jonathan told her. “I looked it up. A lot of them are smaller European countries with no interest in smuggling anything through the Gulf worth a military raid to recover at sea. But the Russians and Chinese keep a presence in the area.”