permission.”
“What if I’d screwed up? Turned this into an international incident?”
“Why ask the question? You didn’t.”
I couldn’t believe he’d risked so much solely on my actions. It altered my opinion of him. Raised it exponentially.
I said, “Well, there’s always next time.”
He smiled and said, “We’ve got to get the detainees out to the desert. Skyhook’s on the way. Kurt wants this wrapped up quickly, get us out of here before someone connects the dots. I’m flying home tomorrow with the support package. You guys switch hotels, stay for one more day, then head out.”
The door opened, and Jennifer entered, sending a flutter to my stomach I wasn’t used to feeling. I ignored Blaine.
“Jesus, what the hell have you been doing? I’ve been worried sick.”
She gave me a wan smile and said, “I had some car trouble. A flat tire.”
I noticed her hair was wet, and she was now wearing jeans and a long-sleeve shirt rolled down to her wrists. “You changed clothes. What’s up? You took the time to take a shower before contacting us?”
She shifted back and forth and said, “I sent you a text. I sweated like crazy changing the tire. I just wanted to freshen up a little.”
She looked around and said, “What’s going on? Where do we stand?”
I explained the situation, then said, “As for where we stand, I was just asking that very thing.”
Blaine said, “What else is there? I told you what’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours.”
“What about Lucas?”
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Pike, hey, I get the guy tried to kill you, but he’s not a security threat. His information panned out. He’s gone, and the Taskforce isn’t going to hunt him.”
I saw Jennifer’s jaw drop. I said, “Are you serious? He killed Ethan Meriweather, along with his entire family. He’s still designated as a DOA target.”
DOA stood for Dead Or Alive and was a Taskforce designation that was rarely used. Almost one hundred percent of the time, we wanted the information inside the terrorist’s head. DOA meant the target was a distinct and urgent threat to national security, and we’d deemed the loss of information through interrogation less important than neutralizing him. Very few targets met that definition in our little world. Most terrorists like that were vaporized by a predator drone in areas within which we couldn’t operate.
I’d never had a DOA target, but the teams that did jokingly said it stood for “Dead On Arrival,” since nobody in their right mind would continue trying to capture a guy when it was authorized to kill him. Much, much easier to do. Lucas had earned the title when he’d murdered the family of a Taskforce member.
“Pike, I get that. If it was up to me, we’d go hunting right now, but we’ve worn out our welcome on this op. Orders are to get everyone home and let things cool down. No more overt actions. Period.”
Before I could answer, Jennifer blurted, “You can’t let him go! He’s a murderer. We need to catch him.”
Both Blaine and I jerked our heads to her, startled at what she had said. An uncharacteristic outburst from someone who was as close to a bleeding heart as the Taskforce had.
Blaine said, “I hear you. I really do, and we’ll get him eventually. He’s just not a strategic threat. I have to agree with Kurt on this one. Yeah, he’s a shithead, but he’s not a Taskforce shithead. He’s someone else’s problem.”
I saw Jennifer clenching her jaw so tight the muscles rippled in her cheek. She said nothing else, and honestly, I was good with it.
“So get these guys to the Skyhook and call it a day?”
“Yeah. Can you handle that?”
“No issues at all. We’ll use the same DZ that the equipment came into. Jennifer can find it easy.”
“Then get moving. I’ll send the alert and the L-one-hundred will be here three hours after nightfall.”
Thirty minutes later we had two four-wheel drive Nissan Pathfinders loaded up, Decoy and Brett in one with the two terrorists bundled in the back, and Jennifer and I leading the way to link up with the L100, the sun setting on the horizon.
The Skyhook was an extraction technique invented in the late 1950s. Used operationally only a few times, it had remained in the U.S. inventory until the 1980s, when the Department of Defense decided it was easier to fly in a helicopter than risk the damage to a human using the extravagant system. I’d done a lot of borderline things in my career, but testing this capability was at the top of stupid, which is why we only used it for terrorists.
The system had actually been used by Hollywood more than by the CIA or DOD-appearing in multiple movies-and had eventually been phased out when helicopters began to do aerial refueling that gave them the ability to reach over great distances.
It still worked for us because our problem wasn’t reach. It was explaining what the hell we were doing in the country. Thus, having a plane conducting an overflight on a registered flight plan, then dip for a span of seconds to intersect the package before returning to flight altitude, solved a lot of extraction problems for folks we couldn’t get through immigration.
Bouncing across the desert, Jennifer did nothing but steer and navigate, never once asking me about anything that had happened. That and her demeanor told me something was different. She had an aura melting off of her that permeated the entire vehicle. Maybe something only I could sense, but it was there, filling the cab with its stench. I said nothing, waiting for her to open up.
Eventually, she said, “What do you think about Lucas? You going to let that go?”
“What do you mean? I don’t really have a choice. He’s an asshole, but I’m not going to chase his butt all over the world.”
She looked at me for a long pause, reading my face. When she returned to the road, she said, “What about Ethan’s family? Isn’t that enough?”
“Yeah, that’s definitely enough, but I don’t have the team or the intel to chase him. He’ll turn up.”
“What if I told you I had the intel? That inside his room I found where he’s going? Would that be enough?”
“What kind of game are you playing? Why are you asking?”
She looked at me again, and I saw a door slam closed. “Nothing. Just asking. It doesn’t matter to me either.”
64
We reached the pickup grid without speaking again. I knew something was wrong, but was genuinely unsure of what to say or how to act. I let it ride.
Decoy and Brett unloaded the two prisoners while I laid out the kit, consisting of nothing more than a specially constructed rope and a helium balloon. Jennifer attached the battery wires for what looked like an ordinary pocket calculator to the antenna lead of the radio, giving us the ability to hear the aircraft’s encrypted transmissions through the stereo in the Pathfinder. It was a simple decryption device that translated the radio calls of the aircraft, transmitted using a standard FM frequency on the radio dial. The hitch was we couldn’t speak back verbally. That didn’t mean we couldn’t communicate.
Both of the terrorists had been sedated with a special drug that was not unlike controlled substances used on every college campus in America. It gave a sense of euphoria while inhibiting conscious thought. They were coherent, but just barely, looking around with glazed eyes like they were trying to understand what was happening. They had enough coordination to put on the special jumpsuits for the ride, completely oblivious as to why they were doing it.
Ten minutes out, Jennifer fired up the Pathfinder and dialed the radio to the correct frequency. I stood by with an infrared pointer, barely able to make out the terrorists thirty feet away in the dark, sitting back-to-back in orange jumpsuits.
