'Nothing I couldn't handle and I very reluctantly gave her a pass, but if you needed any more certainty…'
'No, that ought to cover it.'
'I hear you. But you know, give me certainty anytime. I can deal with that any day over not knowing.'
'Maybe you're right.'
'Damn straight I am.'
Evan looked over at him. 'She really came on to you?'
Nolan nodded, solemn. 'And I didn't get the impression it was the only time since you've been gone. The girl's a stone fox, Ev. You think she's sitting home alone nights watching TV? Come on, she's human, life's short, and she's got a life back there. This isn't rocket science. You guys broke up before you came here. It's over. Accept it.'
Evan hung his head. He couldn't seem to muster the strength to lift it up.
Nolan couldn't let that happen. He wanted Tara. He'd gotten her and he intended to keep her until he didn't want her anymore, which might be a very long time. However, Evan's reaction caught him off balance; now he'd simply have to adjust. Fine-tune the mission. Keep him away from her.
All was fair in warfare anyway. And the old saying was right: in love, the same thing. You needed to be willing and able to adjust to the unexpected.
Evan Scholler was stationed in a dangerous place, after all, where anything might happen to him. Nolan could tweak the odds just a bit, give Evan a little something else to deal with instead of Tara Wheatley.
He reached over and hit Evan's arm, hard but friendly. 'You know what you need, dude? You need something to take your mind off all this, that's all.'
'And that's always an easy call here at party central.'
'Hey, there's things to do here. You just got to know where to look.'
'Right.'
'You doubt me?'
For an answer, Evan drank beer.
'The man doubts me.' Nolan shook his head in disbelief. 'Dude,' he said. 'Put your beer down. Come with me.'
Evan took a beat, then tipped his can up, emptying the contents into his mouth. When he finished, he got to his feet. 'Where we goin'?'
'Smoke-check party,' Nolan said.
'What's that?'
'Smoke-check the Muj. You'll love it.'
The spy for Jack Allstrong in the airport's adjoining neighborhood was an educated ex-Republican Guard officer, a Sunni named Ahmad Jassim Mohammed. No one knew the exact game he was playing, and this was no doubt the way Ahmad preferred things, but the pretense was that he had accepted the new, post-Saddam status quo and wanted to work with America and its allies to help rebuild his country. He'd gotten connected to Allstrong during the July mortar attacks on the airport, when under the guise of offering his services as an interpreter, he'd instead provided five thousand dollars' worth of information that had proved valuable in identifying several target houses in the airport's neighboring slum that had contained large caches of weapons, mortars, and other explosives.
Though no one, least of all Jack Allstrong, ruled out the possibility that Ahmad might in fact be a spy checking out airport conditions for the insurgents, and though the consensus among Nolan and the other executives at Allstrong was that Ahmad was using the American military presence to settle vendettas with his personal enemies among his former Republican Guard colleagues, the fact remained that his information tended to be correct. When the targets he'd provided were eliminated, the mortar attacks on the airport had abruptly come to an end. That was about as far as Allstrong or Calliston needed to take it. Allstrong had paid Ahmad for similar information several times now, and counted on the intelligence he supplied to keep a step ahead of the insurgency just outside his perimeter. And so far it was working.
No one had expected today's attack, but Ahmad had arrived at the compound in its aftermath. Now, in the sultry early night, he sat in the front seat of one of Allstrong's convoy vehicles. Ron Nolan was driving. Evan Scholler, in black fatigues, his Kevlar vest, and with four beers in his bloodstream, stood uncomfortably manning the machine-gun platform on the vehicle's roof. Behind him in the seats, two other black-clad Gurkha commandos checked their weapons.
The party rolled out of the main gate. Off to their right, they could sense, more than see, the slumlike contours of the mud-caked domiciles of the residents. A quarter mile or so outside of the compound, the Humvee veered suddenly right and began bouncing across the no-man's-land that separated the airport from the homes. Nolan killed the regular beams, leaving only the car's running lights on.
Evan squinted ahead into the night, unable to make out many details either to the sides or ahead of them. He wished he hadn't had those beers. He wasn't drunk, but he could feel the alcohol, and though Nolan had assured him that they faced little or no danger, just an awesome adrenaline rush, he'd also insisted that Evan wear his bulletproof vest, as all the others had done.
Evan thought he might in fact wind up needing all of his faculties, and couldn't shake a keen awareness that his reflexes might not be there for him in a pinch. So his mouth was dry, his palms sweaty, his head light. He was alone up here, half-exposed. Behind him in the car, he heard nothing-and that didn't help his nerves either.
What the hell was he doing?
In another minute, they'd entered the town itself. As they'd approached, Evan thought for an instant that the car might just try to crash through one of the yards, but evidently Ahmad knew where he was directing them. Suddenly they were in a street so narrow it barely fit them. It was lit only by the lights from within the houses, but the place wasn't dead by any means. The locals were outside smoking, talking-their Humvee picked up some kids, running along beside the car, whistling, calling out for food or candy.
The foot traffic forced them to slow down. Nolan honked from time to time, never stopping, forcing his way ahead, making the populace move out of his way. Evan, sweating heavily now, kept his hands gripped tightly on the handles of his machine gun, even as he heard Nolan call up to him. 'Stay cool, dude. Nothing happening here. We're not there yet.'
They turned left, then right, then left again, now down unmarked and unremarkable streets, into more of what looked like a marketplace area, closed up for the night, with few if any pedestrians. Nolan accelerated through the space and entered another quarter of the suburb. People still milled about, but less of them, and with far fewer children. Nolan made another turn and pulled up to a stop at a large open space in front of what appeared to be a mosque. Here the foot traffic had all but disappeared. The only light or sound-television and music-came from a two-story dwelling at the next corner down on their left.
The passenger door opened and Ahmad got out of the car, closed the door gently, then leaned back in the window and said something to Nolan. Then he turned and ran, disappearing into another of the side streets. Nolan killed even the running lights next, and then immediately they were moving, only to stop again sixty yards along, after they'd passed the house Ahmad had pointed out to them.
This time the engine went quiet. The radio music from the house was louder down here, providing cover for whatever noise they made as Nolan and his two commandos opened their doors and got themselves and their weapons out into the street.
They all gathered now down under and just to the side of Evan's position. They'd blackened their faces and hung grenades on their vests since they'd gotten into the Humvee and these two details chilled Evan, who could barely make out anything but Nolan's teeth in the darkness. He seemed to be smiling. 'I'm leaving the keys in the
