He dropped the phone. “Dammit. Lost the signal.” He took up the radio again.
Hunt shot two more insurgents while she listened to Nelson give orders that chilled her to the core.
“Fall back, fall back,” the lieutenant shouted into the radio while he surveyed their situation as best he could with a wall of bullets flying overhead. “All able, form a new perimeter around the command bunker. Watch your dispersement. We’re gonna have to hold these guys off for a while… Fixed wings are twenty minutes out, Apaches are forty.”
Nelson had just ordered all his men to abandon his own position at the front gate. They were now nearly a hundred yards outside the new perimeter.
“Sit tight, LT,” McCrary’s voice crackled over the radio, nearly drowned out by gunfire and yelling. “I’ll get a squad together and we’ll come bring you in.”
“Request denied,” Nelson barked. “We’ll hold them off from our position. You see to your defenses… That’s an order.”
Insurgent shooting lulled for a moment as the fifty-cals opened up to drive them back from the gate. Three black turbans popped up from the river bank fifty yards west of the bridge. Hunt and Nguyen shot got two of them before the third ducked out of sight.
“How many do you think?” Hunt said, more to herself than anyone else.
“Three hundred…” It was Kenny, peering from under the shelter of Specialist Nguyen’s body. The look in his dull gray eyes reminded Hunt of a child that got his kicks from torturing animals.
The boy smiled as if he knew a deadly secret, raising his dirty brow slightly. “They’ve been watching everything you guys have been doing for two weeks, figuring out how to take the camp.” He grinned up at Nguyen, who looked back in slack-jawed amazement.
“Thanks for the chocolate bar,” the kid said. He gave a bored sigh, oblivious to the bullets zinging overhead. “Too bad they’re going to cut your filthy head off.”
With that, Kenny opened his fleece jacket. A black cylinder about the size of a can of deodorant rolled into the dirt toward Hunt. The boy’s hands shot to his ears. He ducked his head against Specialist Nguyen.
“Grenade!” Hunt screamed, a half second before the blast slammed into her chest.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
7th Fighter Squadron Langley Air Force Base Virginia
A curt airman wearing green digital camo BDUs and a pencil-thin mustache had disappeared with Ronnie Garcia’s ID what seemed like hours before. Now she stood outside the reinforced steel door, rocking back and forth from one foot to the other. Evidently, there was some concern about her level of need to be within spitting distance of a hangar full of F-22 Raptors.
Palmer had seen to it she was credentialed as a full counterintel agent for the CIA-but even in the shadow of the Agency’s headquarters, so few people ever actually saw CIA identification that she was met with a tilted head and arched brow-the universal expression for “… Sure you are…”
Garcia had stopped for a Diet Dr. Pepper on the drive in and was now sure some unseen Air Force security officer was having a dandy old time watching her do the potty dance outside the bunkered door. From the number of cameras and sophisticated satellite antenna arrays that bristled on the concrete block hangar, her misery was likely being beamed directly to the Pentagon.
The door gave a sudden electronic buzz and a metallic click. In a near state of panic, Garcia reached for the handle, but it was pushed open by a slender brunette in a green Nomex flight suit. The leather name tag above her right breast pocket identified her as Major T. Doyle.
The major winked a startling blue eye-a woman-to-woman wink.
“You know, they make us gals wear diapers when we fly,” she said in a comfortable Texas drawl. “Haven’t come up with a way to connect our lack of exterior plumbing to the relief tube… though they’ve tried some pretty uncomfortable dumbass ideas, let me tell you. Come on. The head is right down the hall here.”
“Thanks,” Garcia sighed, waving to the camera above the door. At least someone had been paying attention to her dance.
Her business taken care of quickly, Garcia met Tara Doyle outside the ladies’ room door. She was immediately struck by the major’s uncommon beauty. Thick hair, so black it shone blue in the stark light of the cavernous aircraft hangar, was pulled back in a loose ponytail. Glacier-blue eyes locked on Garcia and drew her down the side hall to a cramped office Doyle shared with another pilot.
Doyle dipped her head toward the vacant desk. “Speedo won’t be back for a couple of hours. You can grab his chair if you want.
Garcia rolled the padded chair around beside Doyle’s cheap wood veneer, DOD-issue desk.
The major kicked her desert-tan boots up on a stack of folders and leaned back with her hands behind her head. She was slightly built, a head shorter than Ronnie. Had it not been for the grace and maturity in the way she carried herself, the baggy fight suit would have made her look like a child in pajamas.
“All righty then,” Doyle said, with the swagger of someone accustomed to commanding a hundred-and-fifty- million-dollar aircraft. “What does the CIA want with a little ol’ jet jockey like me?”
“Just a few questions.” Garcia leaned forward in her chair, resting her elbows on her knees. She hoped it made her look more earnest. “Have you ever met a woman named Nadia Arbakova?”
“Sure. My baby brother’s lady friend. They both work for the Secret Service. I don’t think much of her, to tell you the God’s honest truth-she’s a little too much of a shrinking violet for my blood. Awfully damned needy…” Doyle lowered her eyes. “But I’m guessing you already knew that. Does this have anything to do with that congressman’s list of infidels?”
Garcia bit her lip. “There’s really no delicate way to put this-”
“Well, hell, don’t then,” Doyle said. She let her boots slide to the floor. “I’m a female pilot in a sky raining testosterone. Folks don’t sugarcoat stuff around here.”
“Arbakova is dead,” Garcia said. “Murdered.”
Doyle folded her hands in her lap. “Does Jimmy know?”
“Not yet. I’m on my way to see him after this. I understand he and Nadia have a relationship.”
“Had.” Doyle shrugged. “Jimmy broke it off a couple of weeks ago. He said she was starting to see the boogey man… Guess she had a right to.”
“Did she ever talk to you about that?”
Doyle shook her head, staring off into space. “The three of us went to dinner maybe three or four times. She was always the quiet one. Jimmy and I did most of the talking.”
Garcia glanced down at her notes. “Jimmy is Native American?”
“Northern Cheyenne,” Doyle said. “My parents adopted him when he was eleven. I was nearly seventeen. Mother and Daddy died in a car wreck about six months later.”
“Tragic.” Garcia gasped.
“You’re tellin’ me,” Doyle said. “The poor kid comes to us as an orphan, then we both end up parentless. I took care of him as best I could. I made sure he got through junior high and high school while I went to college on an ROTC scholarship.”
“Did you ever meet any of his Native relatives? Cousins, aunts, uncles?”
“Yeah,” Doyle said, tapping a pencil on the desk. “He had an aunt and uncle on the res in Montana. Anyhow, they couldn’t take care of him.”
“Can you give me their names?”
“I don’t remember, but I can find out. I don’t know if they’re even still alive.”
The major suddenly leaned across her desk, cobalt eyes focusing sharply on Garcia. “And that all leads me back to my original question. I’m smart enough to know the CIA doesn’t investigate the murder of a Secret Service agent. Is my baby brother mixed up in something he shouldn’t be?”
“I don’t know yet,” Garcia answered honestly. “Does the name Tom Haddad mean anything to you?”
“Nope,” Doyle said, leaning back again, arms on the rests of her chair like a queen on a throne. “Sounds
