The Command (39 page)

Maybe he felt that, too—that they'd trusted him too far. Because he said lightly, “No dice? I'm striking out here?”

“She's right, we—have to get back to the ship.” Not the exact truth, but everybody knew sailors had to get back to their ship.

“Well, then. Shall I just drive you back?”

“That would be nice,” she said, exhaling. Feeling relieved. And at the same time, disappointed.

ON the way back. Harry talked about how he had to be back in Riyadh in a day or two. She thought he was taking them back to the hotel. Maybe he had one more pass left in him. If he did, she didn't know what she'd say. His skin felt so good, so warm, rough and smooth at the same time. Soon she'd be back on the ship. Back with grouchy old Bendt and the Porn King and bitchy Patryce. Back in her too-hot bunk under the intake, with two dozen other women crammed around her.

She pulled his face down to hers. And felt his hand slide under the sundress. She buried her face in his neck, starting to lose it as his fingers burrowed inward, found sweetness and began to probe and stroke until she arched against the seat and drew a long shuddering breath.

The next time she looked out they were back at the base, slowing for the gate. When she sat up and told him the guard wouldn't let the car in without a sticker, he'd have to let them off here, he spoke to the driver and they stopped a few yards away. He waited as she pulled her dress down and got halfway put back together. Then bent forward and kissed her hand, then her cheek. “Good night, my sailor,” he said.

For a minute she wavered. His bringing her back meant she could trust him. She almost got back into the car. She was shivering, her legs almost gave way as she stood. “Good night,” she said, backing away.

The black car glided off. They stood looking after it until, after a little while, it blended with the night.

A
ISHA huddled, crushed among the bulks of armed men, nothing
M
Vbut her own sweat cooling her under the heavy thick Kevlar. She had the SIG in a holster today, and she was wearing black gear. Tactical gear, the harness and elbow pads and entry gloves that looked cool in movies but were heavy and hot in the close air of the truck. Unfortunately, the vest wouldn't stop anything with more energy than a pistol bullet. And the rest of it, or so she'd heard from other agents, might once have had some intimidation value, but now just marked you as a target.

Fortunately, she wouldn't be first through the door, or even, probably, twentieth. The three panel trucks sat with engines and lights off near the Makarqah Quarter, the oldest part of town, where a truck was too wide to go. Others were circling around from the south, creeping through the sleeping streets until they, too, would be in position. Together, they held thirty of the SIS's SWAT-equivalent Special Action Teams. The raid was timed for 0430. She tilted her wrist.

0415.

She shifted, trying to bump out room to breathe. Beside her she smelled Diehl's heavy cigar funk. Across from her, the shadowed outline of an observer from the embassy.

General Gough was in the command truck, with General Bucheery. It looked the same as the others, but the sides and top were fiberglass, not metal, so the comm gear would work without telltale antennas. He'd said a few dry words at the midnight briefing, about how essential it was to work together. Bucheery had praised the interrogation team that had developed the information on which the morning's raid was based. Parts of his remarks were in Arabic, about how unpleasant tasks had sometimes to be performed, to save life and maintain order.

She didn't like to think about what that meant. She was afraid the
“unpleasant task” had involved the woman in Shawki's house. The NCIS couldn't get physical, but the host agencies they worked with were not always so concerned with the rules. The general went on to say that by “intense interrogation”—her mind flinched away again—of Shawki's wife, and working with what Aisha had caught on the phone, the SIS had taken one Rahimullah bin Jun'ad into custody.

Bucheery said bin Jun'ad, a would-be mullah with ties to radical groups in Egypt and Afghanistan, had been “persuaded” to give up the location of the stolen explosives, and other information about a plot to attack a United States installation in Bahrain. Bin Jun'ad had confessed to providing local recruits, but the actual leader was a shadowy figure he knew only as the Doctor. The Doctor was the primary goal of today's raid, along, of course, with the explosives and any weapons the group had managed to assemble or import.

Someone in the truck farted. The smell lay close and rank. She hated the idea of having to breathe in the actual molecules that had been in someone's lower gut a moment before…. She tilted her wrist again.

0420.

A few minutes later the word must have come through, because the back doors opened and the crush lessened as men jumped out. Quietly. No one spoke. She dropped to the dew-damp asphalt with them. Took position in line, and began jogging down the street, deeper into the ancient reticulation of the old city. No streetlights, just stars, straight up, a narrow band of them between the tops of two- and three-story buildings that lined the street with no setback whatsoever, in fact many with the upper floors levered out over the frontages till they almost met. The muted crackle of a radio ahead, and the scuff of boots. The distant sound of a television, on very early.

Sweating under the heavy vest, with someone treading on her heels, she took deep breaths, trying to steady the accelerating hammer of her pulse. Tipping her wrist back, glancing down at the luminescent hands.

0425.

DAN woke suddenly in pitch darkness. For a moment he didn't know where he was. Where was the little red light that marked the phone, the faintly illuminated circle of the closed porthole. Then he remembered.
He was in the in-port stateroom, they were working on the toilet in his at-sea cabin, and he'd shifted down here. He succeeded at last in resolving the direction of the bathroom. Then groped his way back to the too-short bed, wadded the pillow, lay back.

And stared into the darkness.

Blair had called from the States. A one-minute call from an army base before taking off for the funerals. She didn't sound as if she missed him. Didn't sound as if she was thinking about him at all, as if calling him was just another thing she had to get done. He replayed the last conversation they'd had. Then the days before it. Almost all of it, yeah, nice. For a while they'd recaptured what had brought them together in the beginning.

But the navy was tough on marriages. He could count on the fingers of one hand the classmates who were still with their June Week brides. Damn few … Claudia was having trouble, too … and now he was starting to hear the same lyrics from Blair. A house, settling down, building something. What, like she was building a career in the executive branch? Compared with politics, the navy was as secure a career as the post office. At least, since he'd made O-5, he was guaranteed retirement, unless he really and truly screwed the pooch. Which he'd almost done a couple of times already…. His thoughts spun on, a perpetual motion machine whirring in the dark.

He worried again about their exposed position, but not with the same intensity as when they'd first shifted out. What had the Senior called it? “Sitting here with our thumb up our ass.” But nothing had happened. He wondered if he should knock off the boat patrols. It soaked up a lot of man-hours. At least Schaad had looked at the quick reaction team procedures again, and they'd streamlined the procedures for getting weapons and ammo on deck. The trouble was, the easier you made that sort of material to get to, the fewer safeguards you had against theft and misuse. They were both security issues, but heightening one meant lessening the other.

He didn't want to think about that. Or about Hotchkiss, or the crew, or any of the hundreds of other things that occupied his mind when he was vertical. God! Couldn't he just sleep! He rolled impatiently and socked the pillow. Tried to breathe slowly and think of some pleasant scene. Some pleasant scene …

He hadn't been able to spend much time with Nan when she was little. But now and then he'd read his daughter to sleep. Then lain with her head on his chest, her breathing deep and regular. And gradually
his own slowed, and his thoughts began a slow spin into the freewheeling illogical vividness that preceded dream.

He was almost there when he remembered: Today was his admiral's mast.

His eyes popped open again as his brain surged back to battle speed. COMDESRON 50, Palzkill, the admiral, 1400. Why couldn't they at least make it early, why did it have to ruin his whole day? Would they actually relieve him? It was possible. CO's lost their ships every day. Well, not every day, but it happened. Christ, he couldn't worry about that. In fact, it might not be so bad, getting relieved. No, he didn't believe that. Christ,
why
couldn't he get to sleep!

0430. He lay totally awake, staring into the darkness with eyes wide open.

IT looked to Aisha like all the others, a three-story building on a street lined with darkened shop fronts, the steel knitting of antitheft gratings. With the noiselessness of shadows, silhouettes disappeared one after the other into a door. The translator said in a whisper they were headed for the third floor. That was where the Qari bin Jun'ad said the cell met, where they slept. The first floor was a shoemaker's.

The Americans stood next to one of the shops, trying to stay inconspicuous, or as inconspicuous as you could get in black gear. Aisha caught the twitch of a curtain above her, barely visible dark eyes taking in the activity below. Then a shade came down.

A thunder crack and flash shattered the darkness. The third-floor windows illuminated again to another flash-bang grenade. The embassy guy started forward, but the translator got him in time. “Not yet, sir,” he said, pressing him back. Diehl had his big revolver out, holding it down along his leg.

High above, a window slid up. A black-suited figure she only recognized as Major Yousif when he spoke called down, sounding not pleased, and in English: “The area's clear. Observers may come up.”

THE apartment was bare, as if no one had lived there for a long time. It was small, low ceilings spotted with age.

And maybe they'd learned something at the house in Muharraq, or maybe someone smarter was in charge, because they weren't tearing the place up. The entry squad was filing out, submachine guns pointed
at the ceiling. Evidence technicians in coveralls and rubber gloves were taking their places: opening the doors, closet and bathroom, starting to take apart the air conditioner.

She stood looking around, trying to let her senses work, if possible something beneath her senses, trying to kick-start any intuition she might possess. She could still smell them. Maybe from the old mattresses on the floor that showed where bodies had pressed them not long before. Maybe from the stale grease and sesame smell of cooking. She went into the bathroom. They didn't clean up after themselves, that was plain. Pubic hairs clumped in the bathtub drain. Yellow spots by the bowl. Sticky twists of food wrappers. But then, being a terrorist didn't indicate a high level of concern for others. And as traditional Muslim men, they'd be used to having someone, almost always a woman, to clean up after them.

One of the techs came in, glanced at her, saw the pubes, and began gathering them up, putting them into a plastic envelope. She thought he really ought to be using paper, for better evidence preservation, but he didn't work for her.

“They weren't coming back here,” she said.

“So where are they?” Garfield said, behind her.

She shrugged. “That's a good question. Left the country, I hope.”

“For where?”

She didn't know, so she didn't answer. She went back into the main room, to find it deserted. Then into the bedroom, and stopped, looking around.

Scraps of green-insulated wire, gray plastic wrap, hand tools, empty duct tape rolls littered a folding table. The techs were working their way through the wastebasket. On the floor: flyers and magazines. She picked one up. It was titled, in Arabic,
The Battlefield: The Safest Place on Earth.
There were other flyers, jihad material, some of it the same sort of thing she saw now and then in mosques back in the United States. And what looked like printouts, although she saw nothing like a printer or a computer.

She went slowly around the room, stepping around the techs, not touching anything. Phone. Copy machine. Fax machine. With a pencil, she lifted the flap of the copy machine. Sloppy people forgot things. Left originals in copiers, for example.

The glass was vacant, but she saw something behind the machine.

The paper had fallen between the copy tray, where it came out, and the wall. It lay curled up just below where the fax was plugged in.

Above it the other outlet was occupied by a square plastic box she recognized as a surge suppressor. But nothing was plugged into it. There was a vacant space on the tabletop beside the copy machine. A square space free of the dust and trash and shed hair that covered every other surface in the apartment.

She glanced behind her, to make sure no one was looking, and reached down. Got the paper in her nails, and tweezed it up into the light.

“Somebody's been at work here,” Diehl said, behind her. She nodded wordlessly, examining the paper. It didn't make sense. Curving lines and straight lines. A little crude drawing of a ship, childlike, with pointed prow and matchstick guns pointing up.

“That's the harbor,” he said, looking over her shoulder.

“Our harbor?”

“Minas Salman. Right there—see? There's the inner harbor, where the fishing fleet docks. There's our pier, at the ASU, I mean the NSA.”

“And the ship?” she murmured.

It must have hit them both simultaneously, everything coming together, the deserted apartment, the scraps of wire, the missing explosives, the crude chart. Because she heard him suck his breath in, too.