Rogue Forces

States?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“You can’t stay any longer?”

“No.” He looked at her, then asked, “When do you go back to Palmdale?”

“Day after tomorrow. I thought I was headed to Fort Leavenworth, but all that stuff suddenly went away.” She looked at him carefully. “Wouldn’t happen to know why all those State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency investigators suddenly disappeared, would you?”

“No.”

“Perhaps your Charlie became my guardian angel?” Patrick said nothing. She gave him a mock frown. “You don’t say much, do you, sir?” she asked.

“I asked you not to call me ‘sir’ or ‘General.’”

“Sorry, can’t help it.” She took a sip of champagne, then laced her fingers between his. “But maybe if you did some not-so-general type stuff, I’d get the hang of it.” Patrick smiled, leaned forward, and lightly kissed her on the lips.

“That’s what I’m talking about, Patrick.” She gave him a mischievous smile, pulled him closer, then said before kissing him again, “But that’s not all I’m talking about.”

CUKURCA BORDER CROSSING, HAKKARI PROVINCE, REPUBLIC OFTURKEY

THAT SAME EVENING

There was a small crowd of well-wishers along the road through the Cukurca border crossing post on the Turkey-Iraq border, waving Turkish flags and cheering as the lead vehicles of the Turkish Jandarma forces reentered their home country. Border guards held them back, and patrol dogs were led up and down the line.

It was a long, exhausting, and degrading trip home, thought General Bezir Ozek as he alighted from his armored car once he crossed the border, but this was making the whole embarrassing debacle somewhat worth it. The border post commander saluted, and a small ceremonial band played the Turkish national anthem. “Welcome home, General,” the commander said.

“Thank you, Major,” Ozek said, “and thank you for this reception.”

“Don’t thank me—thank the people,” the major said. “They heard you were coming home, and they wanted to welcome you and your men back from a victorious campaign against the PKK.”

Ozek nodded, not saying what he was really thinking: his campaign had been a failure, cut short by the coward Hasan Cizek. After the American air raid on Diyarbakir, Cizek completely disappeared, leaving the government wide open. Kurzat Hirsiz resigned and turned over power to Ays?e Akas, and the campaign to crush the PKK was over. He had spent the last week fighting off ambushes by PKK and peshmerga guerrillas as they made their way back home.

“Come, please, meet your well-wishers,” the major said. He leaned toward Ozek and said, “All security precautions have been taken, sir.”

“Thank you, Major,” Ozek said. He turned to the crowd and waved, and the crowd let out a cheer. Well, he thought, that sounded real enough. He started shaking hands. Men and women looked google-eyed at him, as if he were some rock star. Hundreds of hands were reaching out to him.

He was just about at the end of the crowd when he noticed one woman waving her right hand to him and carrying a baby in her left. She was most attractive, made even more so by the fact that she was nursing the baby, with only a light gauzy blanket over her bare breasts. He grasped her free hand. “Thank you, my dear, thank you for this welcome,” he said.

“No, thank you, General,” the woman said gleefully. “Thank you for your hard-fought battles.”

“I do my best to serve the people of Turkey, and especially beautiful women like you.” He took her hand and kissed it. “It is a job I treasure, just as I will treasure meeting you.”

“Why, thank you, General.” The gauzy blanket shifted slightly, and Ozek grinned as he peeked at her chest. Damn, he thought, he’d been out in the field way too long. “And,” she said, batting her eyes at him, “I have a job to do as well.”

The gauzy blanket dropped away, revealing beautifully firm sexy breasts…and a horribly mangled left shoulder, half a left arm…and a wooden stick with a rakelike end attached to the stump. “My job, to avenge the people of al-Amadiyah, is at an end, General, as is yours…courtesy of the Baz.”

And with that, Zilar Azzawi released the dead man’s trigger on the detonators connected to the twenty pounds of explosives hidden in the doll she carried like a baby, killing everyone within a radius of twenty feet.

About the Author

DALE BROWN is the author of numerous New York Times bestsellers, including Edge of Battle and Shadow Command. A former U.S. Air Force captain, he can often be found flying his own plane over the skies of the United States.