CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Standing outside Nadia Arbakova’s front door, one hip cocked to the side, Ronnie Garcia’s throat tightened as she watched Quinn and Thibodaux gear up. Dressed in black leather, with stiff riding boots and full-gauntlet riding gloves, the men reminded her of gladiators straddling futuristic machines out of an Alien movie. They mounted their bikes without speaking and roared down the driveway back toward Highway 270.
Arbakova’s murder had solidified everyone’s workday. Garcia would pay a visit to Agent James Doyle’s older sister, Tara, and see what the Air Force F-22 pilot had to say about her kid brother. The big boy biker with the Louisiana drawl and his darkly handsome friend would check out a couple of addresses on the guy who’d apparently tried to kidnap them that morning. They would all link up around 1500 hours at the Naval Observatory-the official vice-presidential residence-for an appointment with Nadia’s former boyfriend, Special Agent Doyle.
Ronnie put the tip of her index finger against full lips, eyes narrowed in thought. It would take some time to understand this one named Jericho. The Cajun dude had muscles on top of his muscles. Some women would be into that, but there was a brooding violence in the dark one that felt familiar to Garcia, as if she’d known him for a very long time.
Palmer and the others were still inside, letting the crime scene technicians go about their business while Bodington, no doubt, pitched high-level plans that didn’t involve Garcia doing anything more than carrying his briefcase.
Beyond the trees, the bikes threw up a spray of gravel, disappearing around the line of oaks along the deserted street. Ronnie sighed, jingling her keys in her fist. She looked at Arnie Vasquez, Palmer’s Secret Service driver. “You know that one?” she asked.
“You talking about Quinn?”
“Hmm.” She bit her bottom lip. “He married?”
“Not anymore.”
“Hmmm.”
“He’s a dangerous man, chica… muy dangerous.”
“Hmmmm.”
“Something else you want to know?”
“I’m wondering how he likes his coffee…”
Arnie smirked. “And just how do you want him to like his coffee?”
Garcia opened the door to her shiny black Impala and gave Vasquez a wink as she climbed in behind the wheel. “Strong, hot, and Cuban.”
CHAPTER S IXTEEN
Province of Nuristan Eastern Afghanistan 0700 hours Afghanistan Time
She was no diplomat-but Karen Hunt was a spy, and good spies knew how to be diplomatic when they had to be. Peering out the flat, elongated window of the concrete command bunker, she rocked back and forth on her feet, arms folded against the chill of the thin mountain air. She nodded toward the tiny window where she could just catch a glimpse of the gray crags that towered over the little copse of concrete buildings, sandbag bunkers, and double ring of concertina wire that that made up Camp Bullwhip.
“I mean, seriously,” she said. “It’s just like they told me it would be. This really is like living at the bottom of a Dixie cup.”
First Lieutenant Bryce Nelson, the camp’s ranking officer, glanced up from a table where he stood poring over a weathered topographic map. He was gaunt faced and world worn for a man in his late twenties. “Like I said…” He shook his head, then returned his attention to the map.
None of the soldiers wanted her here. They didn’t trust spooks-with good reason. Spooks sent them off into the mountains based on analysis and guesswork. Soldiers liked their truths more black and white. Camp Bullwhip was definitely on the shady gray edges of what could be considered a sane place to stick an American forward operating base.
Three of her first four days saw mortar attacks from across the silt-choked river that formed the northern boundary of the camp. An enemy sniper had set up shop on the fourth afternoon, zipping in potshots from the rocky crags above. The shooter hadn’t killed anyone, but kept soldiers pinned down for forty-five minutes until a couple of F15s dropped enough ordnance on the mountain to kill two dozen snipers.
The attacks had been halfhearted at best. They were testing, Hunt thought, like remote probes, methodically checking out the remote base’s defenses and troop response.
She’d left Kabul the week before in a Chinook helicopter with supplies and a reinforcement platoon of forty- two soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division. Once the athletic and youthful war fighters had climbed aboard and strapped themselves into his bird, the pilot had drawn a round of cheers when he’d announced he was honored to be flying an entire “can of American whoop-ass.”
From the moment she saw the isolated combat outpost she’d understood why soldiers who lived there felt their position was too exposed. It was twenty miles from the nearest support base and surrounded by high foothills in the shadow of the jagged Hindu Kush. It was only by dumb luck-and the Afghani insurgents’ general inability to shoot straight-that no one had been killed.
Lieutenant Nelson took a grease pencil from the sleeve pocket of his BDU shirt and made some notes on the laminated map. He was ready for patrol, dressed in full battle rattle except for his Kevlar helmet, which rested on the plastic folding table alongside the map.
“Our meeting with Mullah Muzari is when?” Hunt said, still gazing out the window. She was debating whether or not she should go ahead and put on her heavy flak vest to help ward off the bone-numbing chill. It had been cold in Kabul, but she found it almost impossible to get warm in the thin air of the mountains. Lieutenant Nelson, from Sweetgrass, Montana, seemed impervious to the cold. He kept the space heater at a low simmer when Karen felt a roaring boil should be the order of the day.
“Meeting is at oh-nine hundred,” Lt. Nelson said.
Karen yawned, rubbing her eyes with a hand grimy from a week at the remote outpost. “That’s what?” She looked at the Seiko dive watch on her wrist. “Two hours from now? The village is only two clicks away.”
“It is,” the LT said, his boyish dimples withdrawing into the worry lines of his face. “But we’ll need to do a sweep of the village before we sit down for our tea party. I’ll have to post guards and send a patrol into the mountains above us to keep an eye out for snipers. That takes a little more time than just a stroll into town.”
Nelson was twenty-six, but the stress of a month in command of an indefensible base surrounded by mountains and crawling with Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin had chased the youthful sparkle from his brown eyes.
The HiG was an insurgent group that had formed decades earlier to repel the Soviets. They were violently opposed the U.S. occupation and though fierce competitors with the Taliban, they could at least agree on their visceral hatred of the Americans.
Hunt had been assigned to the outpost with one mission: to find out if there was a viable chance for peace with Mullah Muzari, an HiG commander who’d been on the U.S. government’s capture or kill list since late 2006. He’d recently been making noises about wanting to negotiate. The folks at Army Intel and the CIA had put their big giant brains together and decided Hunt should fly in and see if he was for real.
Clean water was always at a premium and, like everyone on the base, Lieutenant Nelson looked as if he’d slept in his clothes for the past month. Hunt didn’t want to think about how she looked. She wore desert camo and a matching ball cap to cover her short, easy-to-care-for brown hair. She wasn’t actually in the military, but the uniform kept her from presenting a more appetizing target to any snipers in the mountain hidey-holes that overlooked the camp. As one of the Agency’s few female paramilitary intelligence officers, Hunt kept herself fit to the extreme. One might see a man in her position with the beginnings of a middle-age spare tire, but Karen
