That they had not indicated things were not going according to plan. The thought made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. Maybe they were watching him…
Harun dismissed the thought angrily, turning his focus back to the task at hand. Fear had no more place in his future than mercy did.
A cold chill seemed to seize hold of him as he remembered his uncle’s words of the previous morning.
“…
“
He would never forget the light in Shirazi’s eyes as he crossed the room to lay a hand on his shoulder. “
So it was, in very truth. Harun stamped his feet in an attempt to restore circulation to his freezing toes, steeling himself against the doubts that plagued his soul.
This was the will of Allah…
The call came just as Harry had checked his bags. “Afternoon, Danny. What’s the good word?”
“Not good,” Daniel Lasker replied. “Our back-up team arrived on-site at Richards’ apartment in Falls Church to find Agent Sarami lying near the back of the apartment, knocked unconscious. His gun and satellite phone were both stolen, along with his wallet. We’re doing an inventory on the apartment as we speak, but nothing seems to have been disturbed.”
“Blast it!” Harry exclaimed in frustration, startling the woman in line ahead of him. “I told him to stay put. Any luck running the tags on that Suburban?”
“That’s where it get’s interesting, Harry. We ran it through the Homeland Security intranet, but the Bureau has put a Level-1 Priority block on the tag. Our best guess is that they’re running a big investigation and-”
“Don’t want other agencies stepping on their toes,” Harry finished for him, thinking aloud. If anyone had thought that the bureaucratic infighting would be cleared up by the reorganization following the 9/11 attacks, they should have known better. If anything, things had only gotten worse.
“Does Kranemeyer want me to come back to Langley? I’ve not boarded yet.”
“No. Everything is still go-mission. Contact information for Richards will be uploaded to your TACSAT when you land in Israel. He’s in position.”
“Copy that.”
It was cold on the valley floor, the type of cold that makes up in bitterness what it lacks in actual temperature. The two men waited in the shadow of the cliff, out of the sight of any watchers.
“Thanks for coming,” Thomas said after a long moment.
“My sister told me to bring you back alive,” was the reply, Sirvan’s tone filled with amusement.
Thomas flushed, thankful for the darkness to hide his face. He could still see the look in Estere’s eyes as the two of them had left camp-the look of a proud young woman holding her emotions fiercely in check.
The young Kurd cleared his throat. “Time?”
“Five minutes to drop,” Thomas replied, cupping a hand round the luminous dial of his dive watch.
The silence was well-nigh unbearable, just a faint breeze there below the cliff. Thomas found himself holding his breath, waiting senselessly for the sound of airplane engines. They would be flying too high, he knew that. Coming in with their transponder disguised as that of an airliner.
The laser designator was there, fifty meters ahead of them, hidden in the scrub brush of the valley floor.
Waiting.
It came like a ghost out of the night, the parachute a faint shadow in the pale light of the crescent moon.
The two men exchanged a tight-lipped smile before leaving their cover. So far, so good…
“They’re not leaving,” the man announced grimly, eyeing the old antebellum mansion with binoculars aimed through the tinted windshield of the Suburban.
“You read the audio transcripts, Vic,” his companion retorted. “A security detachment was dispatched twenty minutes after you took out Sarami.”
The man called “Vic” sighed. “Call the rest of the team and tell them to rendevous with us in Falls Church. Time for Plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“Sit tight and wait,” came the terse reply.
They drifted into the village from the north, a pair of strange, misshapen figures shuffling awkwardly forward.
The thick biosuits made communication difficult, so the two men communicated largely by hand signals, punctuated by an occasional hissed instruction.
Death hung over the village like a cloud as they moved forward, picking their way through the detritus of human life. Mutants in the land of the dead.
A girl of perhaps five years of age lay across the threshold of her home, her face still distorted in the agony of death, her body bloated from a day in the sun. Thomas looked down for a moment in pity, then passed on. He could hear Sirvan whispering a prayer behind him.
They both stopped beside the body of a middle-aged Kurdish man, lying on his belly in the dust of the street. His arm was splayed out from his side, the flesh ridged with black veins of blood.
Thomas looked over at Sirvan and saw the Kurd nod through the helmet of his biosuit. The two men knelt by the body and Thomas drew his combat knife, laying it beside him as he moved to roll the body over.
Suddenly, Sirvan’s hand descended on his arm with a grasp of iron as a gasp broke from the Kurd’s lips.
“
“What?” Thomas demanded in surprise.
Sirvan’s index finger shot out, pointing below the dead man’s armpit. There, stretching from beneath the bloated body, barely visible in the shadow, was a thin wire.
The corpse was booby-trapped.
“A pressure trigger,” Sirvan whispered, struggling to make himself understood. “If we roll the body from off the mine…”
He didn’t need to finish. Thomas knew all too well what he was talking about. A bouncing betty. Once the pressure came off the trigger, the mine would bounce two or three feet into the air and detonate, spraying shrapnel in every direction.
