“I’ll be there. You furnish the blondes.”
Curtis laughed and closed the call. The attache loved to party, and getting women and booze for him had been a good investment. No need to be angry at him. Javid was just a messenger boy. Curtis was peeved, however, at having his request rejected by General Gul at the ISI. With so much at stake, and the days counting down toward a major attack, was the ISI getting cold feet, playing him?
Curtis no longer had to paddle along the Dulles road like some grandma in a used Honda. He cut out from behind the passenger van and into faster traffic, ignoring the horn blowing and finger waving of other drivers as he stomped the accelerator and the BMW responded with a burst of blurry speed that catapulted him to ninety miles per hour. The speed limit was sixty-five, but Curtis had not spent sixty-five thousand dollars on a luxury muscle car to do the speed limit.
18
KYLE SWANSON LET THE night speak to him. He was fully alert, all of his senses constantly bringing in and updating information, but those people down below, except for the one guy who had stayed up and was walking around, were at the low point of their entire day: bored, tired, and hard asleep. The darkness felt heavy, and the steady grinding of big equipment up on the bridge was almost like white noise, lulling the brain into restfulness, assuring everyone that things were normal.
“OK,” he said, giving an easy shake to Beth Ledford’s arm. “Time to move out. Police up your trash. Leave no target indicator. No one should ever know that we were here.”
Beth sat up and arched her back to work out the kinks. The hump of a thick tree root had been digging into her shoulder while she slept, but there had been little room to shift positions. “Anything going on?” Half of the Snickers bar was still uneaten, so she wrapped it tightly and put it into the pack.
“Same old, same old. Most of them seem to be getting a good night’s sleep. They’re not professionals, that’s for sure. Hopefully, they won’t bother us, and we won’t bother them.”
Beth checked her CAR-15, made sure the flash suppressor had not been plugged by dirt, then slid down the night-vision goggles. “Ready. Are we coming back here?”
Kyle shook his head. “All hides are temporary, Coastie. We go down and look at the fallen bridge, then find another place. There will be plenty of opportunities in this junkyard. Remember what I told you earlier. With the cover of the night, we don’t have to crawl. Step with your toe down first, then ease your weight onto your heel. Toe-heel-toe. There is no hurry. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Got it?”
“I remember that lecture from the first time,” she griped. “Quit treating me like a baby. Let’s get out of here and take care of business.” She squirmed onto her knees, facing outward.
He left the hide without another word; one step, then another, then stood upright. The direct available light from the campfire was amplified further in his goggles by the faraway illumination at the big bridge, and Kyle took his time to do a 360-degree scan. Nothing was moving. Bizarre shapes and shadows were cast by rocks and brush and trees. Two more steps and he stopped again to wait for Ledford to emerge. When she stood, he held up his right hand and waved four fingers, motioning her to follow him downhill.
He covered the first ten meters in just a few moments and heard her moving behind him, trying to be quiet but sounding to him like a marauding buffalo. Remembering that she had a smaller stride, he shortened his own step. Yeah. That was better. They settled into a tandem glide.
The first hundred meters went by quickly on the gently sloping ground, and they worked around a couple of minor obstacles without incident. The dirt was hardened mud, and the flood had sluiced away most of the usual scree of little pebbles that would coat a riverbank. Swanson held up his fist and took a knee. Coastie did the same. They had a clear view of the old bridge, and he saw her lips tighten as she studied it.
The stubby old truss span was still firmly anchored at the end where the campsite was, but it buckled sharply downward about fifteen feet from shore, pulled by the weight of the steel after the far supports had given way years ago. The other end rested beneath the surface of the sluggish water. Most of the flooring was missing, and the bumpy rivets stood out clearly. It was a bridge that went nowhere, useless.
It was also an uncanny replica of the bridge from Beth’s childhood, the place from which she and Joey and their parents had gone fishing and swimming on hot summer days. She tried to visualize something she was overlooking, but there was nothing unusual about it at all. Not a thing other than its eerie familiarity.
“Is that it?” Kyle had kept his own eyes on the unstirring camp and was whispering into his throat microphone.
She nodded her head. “That’s exactly it, just as in Joey’s picture. He must have been standing about right here. I don’t see anything else. Can I move a little closer?”
“Low-crawl down another fifteen meters while I stay here and cover. No farther than that. No noise.” He put his rifle to his shoulder, pointing toward the sleeping patrol that dozed on unperturbed.
Beth eased into a prone position, cradled her weapon in her arms, and then propelled herself carefully forward on knees and elbows.
Kyle heard her breathing harder. No movement in the camp. Then his peripheral vision caught something changing. Coastie stiffened and froze, burying her face into the ground.
As Kyle watched in astonishment, a dark metal tube rose from the ground only a few feet to her right, a pipe of some sort that emerged ghostlike in the gloom with a soft, hydraulic hum. He quickly went flat, as still as a rock. The cylinder came up higher, the top covering slid back, and Swanson saw the reflection of light on glass. It looked like a submarine periscope, and it mechanically rotated twice to scan the entire area, then stopped and automatically closed its lid and slid back into its hiding place with a hiss.
The device had to be a remotely controlled camera, Kyle thought, which meant he had to assume their mission had been compromised. The idea of a soft infiltration had just changed. Not knowing precisely what had happened, he called for Beth to return, and she came back, low but fast.
“What the hell was that?” she whispered.
“Camera,” he said. “Must have been triggered by a motion detecting sensor around here. Just be glad it wasn’t a mine.”
“A camera? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Some kind of high-tech perimeter security system, but it doesn’t matter to us. We have to assume that we’ve been spotted, and that changes everything. We probably don’t have much time before an alert is sent out and wakes up those dudes on the patrol. Our mission plan changes.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Get ready to fight, Coastie. We’re ninety-seven meters from that group right now, no wind, downward angle, but I want to close to about thirty to make it point-blank. If the guy with the radio gets a call, we put them down right then. You take the two on the left, and I’ll do the two on the right and the guy in the middle. One center mass shot each.”
“We’re going to shoot them while they’re asleep?”
“No. We’re going to
Beth Ledford did the same. “What did he see, Kyle? What did Joey see?”
Swanson exhaled and sucked in a deep breath, ready to move. “He didn’t see anything at all at this bridge, other than it being a curious reminder of when you were kids, Coastie. So he went deeper up the valley toward the new bridge before they stumbled into trouble. His team probably did not even realize they were tripping hidden sensors as they went. Someone was watching.”
SERGEANT HAFIZ ESCORTED THE New Muslim Order—the NMO—team into the sick bay area, their footsteps hushed by soundproofing. The place was clean, with pure filtered air, the room temperature kept low by a thermostat on the central air and heating system. The almost sterile environment bore no resemblance to the outside world. Ayman al-Masri walked directly to the narrow bed where Chief Engineer Mohammad al-Attas lay tied
