from behind the barn.
“Six,” the mujahed grunted.
“Including Farid?”
The mujahed hesitated a fraction of a second. It was enough to tell McGarvey that he was lying. “Who sent you? Was it bin Laden or Ali?”
“Screw you.”
“I didn’t come here to lead the missile attack. I came to make a deal.” McGarvey took the rifle from the mujahed and tossed it aside. “I won’t kill you if you give me your word that you and Farid will return to the camp.”
The mujahed shouted something in Persian as Farid came around the corner of the barn. McGarvey rolled left and fired three shots as Farid brought his rifle up, all three of them hitting the young man in the chest and driving him backward.
McGarvey turned around. The mujahed he had wounded in the leg had reached his rifle and he was snatching it out of the dirt as McGarvey fired one shot, catching the man in the temple, killing him instantly.
Farid was still alive. He was struggling to pull a pistol out of his vest, but he was too weak to do it.
McGarvey got up, walked over and crouched down beside him. Blood covered his chest, and bubbles were forming over the lung shot. His face was deathly pale, flecks of foamy blood on his lips. He was a dead man and he knew it.
“I didn’t want to kill any of you.”
Farid whispered something in Persian.
“This should never have happened to you. To any of you, but the killing and terrorism has to stop. No more jihad.”
Farid was very young, and as McGarvey watched the life drain out of his face, a great sadness came over him. Along with it he thought about Sarah, sincerely hoping that she had come out of the missile attack okay, and about his own daughter who, because of her father, had almost been killed three times. A waste, all of it was a terrible waste. The sins of the fathers were to be suffered by the sons. Only now McGarvey was afraid that the daughters would somehow bear the brunt.
Farid whispered something else in Persian, and then was still.
“Goddamnit,” McGarvey said, and he sat back. “Goddamnit to hell.”
The CIA was on emergency status. The most effective deputy director of Operations that the Company had ever known was stuck in bad land and all the stops had been pulled to get him out of there.
Adkins had temporarily assigned Elizabeth as acting assistant to Otto Rencke, who had set her up at a computer terminal in his offices. She was working on flight plans from Riyadh don the Gulf and across Pakistan to Kabul, the most direct route, and the one that made the most sense, considering what her father was facing. But she was also working out several alternative routes, including one that passed through Indian airspace, and the much longer way, northwest through Syria and Turkey, then straight east over the former Russian republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea and then Turkmenistan.
The Russian route, as she thought of it, would be tough. Flight clearances might take days, if they were ever given, and there would have to be a refueling stop somewhere. In addition, that route put the flight path over northern Afghanistan where the rebels fighting the Taliban had Stinger missiles. They were shooting down anything that came within range.
Elizabeth sat back and pushed a wisp of blond hair off her forehead. She hadn’t had much time to worry about her father all day, but relaxing for a moment she tried to envision what he was going through, and it sent a shiver up her spine. Waiting was infinitely more difficult than doing, she decided. In the field, on the run, you were too busy to spend much time worrying about what might happen. The adrenalin was pumping, inner reserves were kicking in and everything you’d learned in training and from previous missions-the good ones as well as the bad — became foremost in your mind. When your survival was at stake, your focus tended to be sharp. But sitting here waiting, wondering, fretting, was the pits.
Rencke came in from a staff meeting at 5:30 p.m. Elizabeth jumped up. “We’ve got Pakistan,” he said, dumping an armload of file folders and computer printouts on his already-overflowing conference table.
“Thank God,” she said. “When do they get airborne?”
“They left fifteen minutes ago.”
Elizabeth’s eyes went automatically to the halfdozen world clocks on the wall. The one for Kabul read 0500. Rencke knew exactly what she was thinking.
“It’ll be broad daylight when they touch down,” he said. “Around ten in the morning, his time. But there wasn’t much else we could do, Liz. The airport closes down after dark. Besides, they have to think he’d want to make a try under cover of darkness. This might throw them a curve.”
“It might also make it impossible for my father to even get close to the airport, let alone make it to the airplane.”
“The longer he stays there, the greater the risk he faces,” Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other, but stopped. “Oh, wow, Liz, I’m really scared. But your dad’s pretty smart, he’ll figure it out. And he’s tough too.”
Her heart softened. “Okay, Otto, take it easy. How do we get the ETA to my father?”
“When he gets to the ambassador’s old compound in Kabul he’s going to call me.”
“You said that his phone battery was low. What if he can’t call?”
Rencke looked even more forlorn. “There’s no phone in the compound, I checked. But even if there was he’d have to go through their international exchange, and the Taliban control every call out of the country.”
“Could he get to one of the other embassies?”
“He might.” Rencke shook his head in frustration.
Elizabeth tried to put herself in her father’s place, think what he might do. “Maybe he could rig up a battery charger.”
“There’s no electricity to the house. No water, no sewer, nothing.”
“I thought there was someone living there, like caretakers.”
“So did I. But right now there’re only a couple of Taliban guards stationed outside.” He brightened a little. “One good thing, all the rioting is concentrated downtown at our old embassy for now.”
“For now,” Elizabeth repeated glumly. “He’s got to get out of there, Liz, and he knows it. There’s too much at stake now. We need him back here or we’re going to be in some very big shit.”
This was something new. She looked at him. “What do you mean? What else is going on?”
Rencke was getting agitated again. “This is eyes-only shit. The big enchilada. It’s why your dad took the chance going over there in the first place.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, shit, Liz. Oh, goddam shit.” Rencke suddenly stopped moving. “It’s lavender again. It’s bin Laden, he’s got a nuclear weapon and he wanted to give it to us, but the missiles ruined that deal. Your dad was going to talk him out of it. That’s the real reason he went over there.”
Elizabeth was stunned. “I thought it was about Alien Trumble.”
“That too. But unless we nailed bin Laden in the raid, he’ll be coming after us big time, and your dad is the only one who knows him well enough now to figure out what he’s going to do and how to stop him.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“The Russians. It’s just a demolitions device, around a kiloton, but it’s real little. Eighty pounds, fits in a suitcase. It could do a lot of bad stuff to us.”
The telephone on Rencke’s desk rang. He whipped around and snatched it up. “What?” he demanded.
Elizabeth was numb. She hadn’t any inkling of the real reason her father was going over to meet with bin Laden. She’d known that something big was in the wind, but not what. This news was simply staggering.
“Five minutes,” Rencke said, subdued. He broke the connection and called the security desk downstairs. “This is Rencke in the DO. Major Horn is coming across from the NRO’s Photo Interp Section. Give her a pass and have an escort bring her up here as soon as she arrives.”
“Who’s Major Horn?” Elizabeth asked.
Rencke went to his conference table and started taking everything off it, stacking the files and printouts in
