“How was your flight?” he asked, putting on a professional smile. Peterman was a big man, fair-haired and solid-looking, but starting to go to fat.
It had been a while since Scorpion had been called upon to deal with the basic field ops level of the CIA. He didn’t have the patience for what CIA old hands liked to call the “usual kiss-kiss before you screw the poor bastard in the ass.”
“What’s on Rabinowich’s mind?” he bluntly asked Peterman.
Dave Rabinowich was a world-class musician, mathematician, and hands-down the best intelligence analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. He was one of only two people in the entire U.S. intelligence community who could have gotten Scorpion to come to Yemen on such short notice.
T he naadil knocked and came in with bowls of saltah and glasses of nabidh date juice. Neither man spoke until the naadil left and Scorpion had checked outside the door to make sure no one was listening.
“This isn’t Rabinowich’s deal,” Peterman said, shoveling in the stew with a scoop of malooga bread. “Try the saltah. It’s pretty good here.”
“Are you insane?!” Scorpion snapped, getting up and heading for the door. “The only reason I’m here is Rabinowich-and he’s not part of it? And tell that idiot outside pretending he’s one of the qat crowd not to follow me or I’ll send him back with his Oakleys shoved so far down his throat he’ll be shitting glass for a week. Enjoy your meal.”
“Wait!” Peterman gasped. “We need your help.”
“Is this one of Harris’s deals? Tell Harris to go f- Never mind, I don’t care what you tell him,” Scorpion said. Bob Harris was deputy director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, and he and Scorpion had had their run-ins. The last time, in Saint Petersburg, had been the worst. Now, Scorpion wanted no part of Harris’s operations.
As he opened the door to leave, Peterman said, “We have a double who says he can deliver Qasim bin Jameel.”
Scorpion hesitated. Bin Jameel was not only the leader of AQAP in Yemen, but at the moment the operational head of al Qaeda worldwide.
“No good,” he said, closing the door, coming over and taking his seat again. “You need someone local.”
“We had someone local. McElroy. One of our best. He’d been in-country three years.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know,” Peterman said.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“He’s gone. Missing.”
“Missing, or you just haven’t found the body?” Scorpion asked.
Peterman’s face reddened. He didn’t answer. The two men looked at each other. From outside, Scorpion heard the loudspeaker call of the muezzin for the midday Dhuhr prayer. Don’t do it, something told him. There’s something wrong here.
“We can’t use local,” Peterman muttered.
Worse and worse, Scorpion thought. It meant the local CIA station might have been compromised. No wonder Rabinowich had sent him a message that included the emergency code: Biloxi. To some of the better brains in the CIA, Yemen was a bigger threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan, and it sounded like Alex Station-CIA-speak for the task force assigned to al Qaeda-was falling apart. He watched Peterman take a sip of nabidh juice. One of the CIA’s agents was missing-possibly being tortured at that second, Scorpion thought-and if someone didn’t fix it, they’d lose a dozen more. If he was any judge, this guy Peterman was in way over his head.
“What about an SAS?” Scorpion asked. Special Activities Staff teams were the CIA’s paramilitary units specifically designed to perform deep-penetration rescues, extractions, and other high-risk operations. Scorpion’s own first CIA assignment had been in SAS, whose teams were comprised of ex-Delta, Navy SEAL, or USMC Reconnaissance types who then underwent advanced training that made even those formidable special units look like choirboys.
“We don’t have the intel,” Peterman said bleakly, meaning they couldn’t use SAS because they had no idea where McElroy was or what had happened.
Neither man spoke then. It was salvage; the worst, highest risk type of mission.
Whatever you do, don’t do it for McElroy, Scorpion told himself. Even if he was alive, whatever was left of him wouldn’t be worth saving. Plus, AQAP would be sitting there, waiting for whoever came over the fence after him. The prize was bin Jameel. It was a little like buying a lottery ticket. You didn’t expect to win, but the payoff was so big, you didn’t want to kick yourself for not taking that one-in-a-hundred-million chance.
“What was McElroy’s op?” Scorpion said finally.
“Predators,” Peterman said.
The Predator drone, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, was the Pentagon’s primary antiterrorist weapon. It could hover over a target for forty hours and fire Hellfire missiles from 25,000 to 35,000 feet high, too high to be seen or heard from the ground.
“The Hellfire is keyed to the cell phone’s GPS,” Peterman said, taking a cell phone out of his pocket and handing it to Scorpion. “Just have the guy press Send and leave it somewhere. They’ll have sixty seconds to get out.”
“And if the Predator has engine trouble or there’s a screwup somewhere?” Scorpion said, hesitating to use the word “leak.” At this point he had no way of knowing who or what was the problem. For all he knew, he was looking across the table at the problem.
“We’ll have two Predators on station; one for backup.”
“Did McElroy also have a cell for the Predator?”
Peterman reddened. The implication was obvious. It was his op and he had screwed it up. He nodded.
“Perfect,” Scorpion said.
B ut nothing about the RDV had gone down the way Peterman was supposed to have set it up. Jabir parked the Land Rover near the Ma’rib gun market, its canvas stalls filled with M-4s, AK-47s, and small pyramids of M67 hand grenades piled on old rugs. The safe house was a brick building a block from the market, its arched windows outlined, Yemeni style, in white. A half-dozen heavily armed tribesmen-Bani Khum, by the look of them-squatted near the building’s front door, their cheeks bulging like chipmunks with qat.
Scorpion studied the building. Next to the safe house was another brick apartment building, its roof about ten feet below the roof of the safe house. If he had to, he figured that would be the way out. He told Jabir to wait till he went in, then move the Land Rover across from the second building and keep the weapons ready and the engine running.
Ahmad al-Baiwani was waiting for Scorpion on the roof of the safe house with ginger coffee and bint al sahn honey cakes spread under a tarpaulin shade. A bearded, heavyset man, he wore an American suit jacket over a traditional futa — style skirt and trousers, and the shaal turban of a qadi of the Bani Khum. As a qadi, or tribal leader, al-Baiwani was of the second highest social class, lower only than a sayyid, a descendent of the Prophet. Scorpion himself was disguised as a qabili, or ordinary tribesman, of the Murad. Speaking in fusha standard Arabic, after the usual elaborate pleasantries, Scorpion asked about “the American,” McElroy.
Al-Baiwani said he had never seen McElroy. No one had.
“You know of the hadith of Bukhari when the Prophet of Allah, rasul sallahu alayhi wassalam, ” peace be upon him, Scorpion said, “spoke of the greatest of great sins and said, ‘I warn you against giving false witness,’ and kept repeating it over and over till his companions thought he would never stop.”
“What are you accusing me of?” al-Baiwani asked, glancing at his guards to make sure they were watching.
Before Scorpion could respond, he heard the sound of car doors slamming. He got up and looked over the side of the roof. Below he saw three black SUVs that hadn’t been there before. A number of armed AQAP tribesmen got out and headed toward the building door.
“Who’s coming?” he asked, putting his hand on the Glock 9mm hidden in his robe. Al-Baiwani’s guards tensed, not sure what to do.
“Your asayid Peterman said you wanted bin Jameel.” Al-Baiwani gestured as if to say, I gave you what you asked.
The al Qaeda leader himself, along with a bunch of his men, were on their way up. Scorpion took the cell phone out of his pocket, pressed the Send key, then slipped it under his cushion. He had sixty seconds before the
