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Shangri-la

Hunter was a kilometer away from the camp's perimeter when he heard a single gunshot from somewhere directly between him and the compound. He stopped and held his closed fist in the air and G
ENGHIS
halted. Neither man could see anything, so Hunter radioed Iggy.

“T
IN
M
AN
this is S
ABER
T
OOTH
. Request IR recon. One click, my twelve o'clock.”

“S
ABER
T
OOTH
, T
IN
M
AN
. Two heat signatures inside a small fixed structure at your twelve o'clock.”

Hunter started running as fast as he could toward the shack. If Stella was wounded, he might still be able to save her.

 

Camille didn't want to touch Chronister, but forced herself to run her hands over his body in search of a knife or other weapons. He was traveling light with only a smashed roll of Mentos in his pocket. She devoured them. Al-Zahrani's tennis-shoe taste wouldn't leave her mouth.

Using the water bucket as a bidet, she washed herself although she knew it would take a while until she felt clean again. She took longer than she should have, but less time than she wanted. The polyester jilbab made a lousy towel and she hated wearing it, but her pants were left in al-Zahrani's tent. The bastard probably kept her panties under his pillow. She spat, but it didn't help.

She stripped Chronister of his Glock and Kevlar vest, put it on, then pulled up the jilbab so she could run. Lying on her back near a wall, she kicked as hard as she could with both bare feet. The plywood splintered.

The cooler night air felt good as she sprinted toward the camp and al-Zahrani's tent.

 

Iggy's voice came over Hunter's earpiece. “S
ABER
T
OOTH
this is T
IN
M
AN.
I'm tracking a runner three hundred meters and twelve o'clock from your position, leaving the structure.”

Hunter scanned the area, but was too far away. The lights of the tango camp extended his NVG's range, but he couldn't see out more than two hundred meters. The thought of Stella, lying only a few hundred meters from him, bleeding out, made him push harder.

Fifteen seconds later, he could see a shack. He ordered G
ENGHIS
to continue into the camp and take out the generators. If the runner really was Stella at the edge of the compound, he could always call G
ENGHIS
back, but if it wasn't, he wanted the advantage of total darkness as soon as he could get it.

G
ENGHIS
sprinted ahead past the concrete pillars of the construction site while Hunter circled to the front of the shed. Tools were thrown into a pile just outside the door as if someone had hastily emptied it. His experience told him that's where they had held Stella. He slipped inside, fanning his weapon from side to side in case someone was there. Then he saw the body and dropped to his knees.

“Oh, my god. Stella.”

Then he saw a bearded face and an under-the-arm gunshot wound, angled to avoid body armor and pierce vital organs. A dead tango and an operator's signature.

Stella's alive
.

 

Hunter heard Ashland's voice over the earpiece. The guy sounded out of breath. “S
ABER
T
OOTH
. Ashland here. Don't shoot me. Can I come in?”

“Cleared to enter,” Hunter said, then keyed his mike. “S
ABER
T
OOTH
to C
HALK
O
NE
. Confirmed one dead tango. Suspect G
RACKLE
is the runner. G
ENGHIS
, attempt intercept.”

G
ENGHIS
confirmed the order as Ashland came into the shed and bent down beside the corpse. “Jesus. That's Joe Chronister.”

Hunter looked more closely at the tango, then he recognized him. He'd seen the man before, clean-cut and dressed as a Westerner—the interrogator he knew as Zorro. “Who the hell is Joe Chronister?”

“The CIA SOB who put both of us on that flight to hell.” Ashland tried to catch his breath.

“What the hell is the CIA doing working with Rubicon? Oh, forget it. Until we get the lights out, you're the only one of us who can walk into that place after her without alerting them. You better haul ass right now or I'm shooting you right here.”

 

It was a new moon and Camille could barely see where she was going. At least her feet were untied so she could run, but her bound hands threw her off balance. She could see the flicker of the lamps of the debating circles in the mess hall.

She moved into the deeper shadows along the base of the cliff rising above the compound, but the ground was a giant mound of loose debris that had fallen from the rock face. The study groups' lamps were dim, but bright enough to reach the rubble. Rather than double back and move along the edge between the tent and the drop-off to the next lower level of the mine, she lay flat on her belly and crept like a sniper. Even though the jilbab was partially tied around her waist, her knees kept catching on the cloth, tripping her and pulling it loose.

 

A minute earlier, G
ENGHIS
had been able to see someone running ahead of him at the edge of his sight, then the figure disappeared. The closer he got to the first tent, the more the light from the tangos' lamps increased the range of his night vision, but he still couldn't see her. That girl was sure slippery and if he wasn't running toward a few hundred tangos, he would've enjoyed the chase a lot more. He keyed his mike, “S
ABER
T
OOTH
, G
ENGHIS
here. Contact with the runner has been broken. Proceeding on to generators.”

 

There was a rock pile blocking Hunter's passage between the tent and the ridge. He didn't like to risk sky-lining by walking along the drop-off on the other side, but it was so dark, only a stargazer would notice someone moving between the camp and Orion's belt. He decided to veer around the tent and hug the edge of the cliff that dropped to the lower level.

He tapped Ashland on the arm and whispered. “This way.”

Ashland pulled off his NVGs and his comm set and stuck them into his duffle bag. Then he walked straight ahead into the light of the camp.

Hunter ran as far as he dared, then dropped to his knees to lower his profile and crawled along the edge. He heard Ashland speak to the men in Arabic as he walked on into the heart of the camp.

 

Camille was shocked at the tangos' lack of internal security, but she wasn't about to complain. They were sleeping everywhere and they all had AKs at their fingertips, but there were no lookouts, no sentries anywhere. As she crawled past the second row of barracks, she was starting to think she might be able to escape or at least die trying. Al-Zahrani was in a tent, not a fortress. If she took him out quietly, she might be able to steal one of their trucks and get away. She just needed a knife to free her hands and slit his throat.

The half-dozen electric lights hanging outside were dim, but enough for her to see and be seen. Camille searched for one of the snoozing terrorists who was separated from the herd. Along the outside of the group, a teenager wearing a knife attached to his belt was curled up on his right side on a rug that was too small for him. She crept over to him and held her breath while she slowly slipped his knife from its sheath.

Suddenly he rolled over on his back and opened his eyes. Stella shoved her right forearm down on his mouth to mute any screams. The knife was in her right hand, positioned behind his left ear. She raked her forearm across his mouth, thrusting the knife into the soft spot behind his left ear. She kept her arm pressed against his mouth for a few seconds in case he used his dying breath to scream.

Back in the shadows, she cut off the rope and rubbed her sore wrists, then moved them in a luxurious range of motion. But if she was going to pull this off, she needed full movement and not only in her wrists. She crept back to the dead tango, grabbed his ankles and dragged him into the darkness where she undressed him.

His stinky clothes were liberating, even if they weren't the best fit. She rolled up the pant legs and tried on his sandals. They were several sizes too big. The hard sandy ground wasn't too punishing and her bare feet were quieter anyway, so she pushed them aside. Slinking back to his sleeping mat, she kept her body out of the light and stretched her arm as far as she could as she reached for his AK. Violating every safety rule she knew about firearms, she grabbed it by the barrel and pulled it toward her.

Careful to stay away from light, she worked her way over to al-Zahrani's tent. For the home of the leader of the world's most sophisticated and most wanted terrorist organization, al-Zahrani's tent was modest. It was also poorly guarded like everything else. Earlier in the evening she had noticed the two guards at its entrance, but security on the other sides seemed to have been ignored, aside from one small light illuminating the back. She followed the shadows as far as they would conceal her and she was about to dash into the lit area when she noticed the adjacent plywood structure with the satellite dishes and antennae—the al Qaeda home office. A few meters away from her was enough intelligence to roll up the organization's entire network—or at least severely damage al-Zahrani's faction.

She couldn't live with herself if she managed to escape from the tangos and didn't take a few extra minutes to pull off an intelligence coup—one that would make her a legend. Since they were on generator, they had to be using laptops. It wouldn't take her that long to grab a computer or two.

 

Ashland wasn't about to waste his time looking for the girl when he was so close to the mother lode of intelligence on S
HANGRI-LA
and al Qaeda. Since he looked like one of them, he was able to move quickly past the tents toward the fixed structure with the satellite dishes that they had seen in blow-ups of his photos.

If Paris only knew their agent that the CIA captured yesterday was now walking through the front door of al Qaeda's central administration. Soon enough the president of the republic himself would be hanging the National Order of Merit around his neck, Ashland was certain. He went inside, pulled on his night vision goggles and switched them on. The office was empty and he speculated that the terrorists were prohibited from sleeping in the headquarters, all the better for him.

He ignored the outer office since those areas were usually confined to low-level support staff and he ducked into the first private office he found to begin his collection. Binders filled one wall and he wished he could haul away a truckload, but instead he settled for yanking out every hard drive he could find. He flipped over a laptop and realized that even with a small screwdriver, he was looking at several minutes to remove the drive. He ripped the computer from its power cable and shoved it into his duffle bag along with his communications headset, then he went on to the next office.

 

In the al Qaeda offices Camille was reaching under a desk for a bag in which to carry the laptops when she heard the door open. Rolling under the desk, she aimed the Glock at the intruder. If he turned the lights on, she would have little choice but to shoot him, then run over to al-Zahrani's tent and give the bastard what he deserved before the whole camp swarmed her. She should've stuck with her primary mission objective like her father had tried so often to drum into her.

A rectangular hole was cut into the plywood wall, a makeshift window for ventilation. Enough light from al-Zahrani's security lamp came through it so that she could see the silhouette of a bearded male figure carrying a bulky bag. The interloper made little noise, moved over to the desk and set his bag on the floor beside her, but didn't seem to notice her. She heard him pull a binder from a shelf and flip it open. He could take hours studying the damn thing and she had to move on to her primary target. Camille shoved the Glock into her waistband and slid the knife from its sheath, preferring to eliminate him silently. Just as she reached out to slice his Achilles tendon, she heard Iggy's voice coming from the guy's bag. She had never heard such a welcome sound. She stopped and reached into the duffle bag. Her hand bumped into the headset's mouthpiece. In less than a second, her fingers oriented themselves and she put her thumb over the ear speaker in case there was more comm traffic while she was removing it. The intruder was probably part of a rescue team, but he could also be a tango who had killed an operator and stolen the comm set. He grabbed for the bag just as she jerked her hand back along with her prize. He stuck a laptop and some papers inside and hurried from the room, shutting the door behind him.

The moment she donned the headset, the compound went black. Camille smiled. She knew what the blackout meant:

Black Management has arrived
.

 

Hunter hugged the shadows, searching the areas between the buildings for anyone moving quickly as he worked his way to the second generator. G
ENGHIS
had already knocked out lights to the south portion of the camp. As he cut the generator's fuel intake line, he heard Iggy trying to get a response from Ashland, who was refusing to answer. The goddamn French spook had gone feral. He had known better than to trust the fucker. Within seconds of cutting the line, the generator fell silent and the lights went out.

Then Hunter heard over his comm set. “T
IN
M
AN
this is L
IGHTNING
S
IX
. Reporting for duty, sir.”

Hunter's eyes teared up.

“Copy that, L
IGHTNING
S
IX
. Good to hear your voice,” Iggy said smoothly. The man was a true professional. “What is your status and position?”