Annie pulled up a chair, sat beside Brooke, and used the mouse to steadily zoom in on the Zagros Mountains. As the eye in the sky homed in on the military encampment set at the bottom of a hill, Brooke felt like she’d been transported back in time. Goosebumps prickled her arms.
Bending over Brooke’s shoulder, Flaherty used a pen as a pointer. ‘A few hours ago, our deep-cover field agents ambushed four trucks on the roadway here,’ he said, pointing to the winding gravel ribbon running along the bottom of the screen.
Brooke could see bodies littering the ground around what looked like four pickup trucks left askew in the roadway. ‘God,’ she gasped. ‘Are those men dead?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘But trust me, they deserved it.’
‘Wait. Is that …’ She pressed her face close to the monitor and tried to make out another form heaped in the roadway. ‘A camel?’
‘Uh … yeah.’ Flaherty paused. ‘But that’s a story for another day. Annie, let’s get in closer.’
Annie tightened the zoom using the monitor’s touch-screen controls.
‘Anyway,’ Flaherty continued, ‘some of the militants escaped … went up this slope.’ Using the pen, he traced the approximate path. ‘Our guys pinned them down behind some rocks … here and here.’ He pointed to a structure that still stood, then to a blackened crater. He went on to explain how Jason had called in an air strike and that one missile had obliterated one of the rock piles, while a second had inadvertently blasted away the steel door that concealed the cave entrance. Then he told her that five of the militants had ducked into the cave opening. He wasn’t yet prepared to tell her that Fahim Al-Zahrani was among the survivors.
‘Wow,’ Brooke said, staring at the mini war zone. ‘It’s hard to imagine that this area was once a lush paradise.’
‘Really?’ Annie said.
‘Back in 4000 BC there was a huge village here,’ Brooke explained to her. With her finger she indicated the wide open plain to the west of the foothills. ‘A trading outpost inhabited by industrious, vibrant people. The major trade routes for ancient Persia ran through the mountain passes.’ She indicated the deep valleys connecting Iran and Iraq in the screen’s extreme upper right. ‘That’s how they brought in stone, timber and copper.’
‘Just terrorists moving through there now,’ Flaherty mumbled sarcastically.
‘So what happened to the people that lived there?’ Annie asked Brooke, genuinely intrigued.
‘Well, the simple explanation points to climate shift. Massive floods silted the soil, destroyed practically everything … made northern Mesopotamia unsuitable for crops. The survivors were forced to migrate east and west across Eurasia, and to the south as far as Egypt. In fact, starting around 4000 BC, the archaeological remains of human occupation completely disappear for nearly a thousand years in this entire region. It’s often referred to as the Dark Millennium.’
‘So how do you explain that the cave seems to have been occupied during that time?’ Flaherty asked.
‘According to the inscriptions on the cave wall, the floods were just beginning. Floods of epic proportion.’
‘You’re saying the world was flooded for forty days?’ Flaherty jested.
‘Not the whole world. But certainly the world these Mesopotamians knew. The oral tradition would have been passed on from generation to generation for over a thousand years before any written account was created. And like any fish story …’ She shrugged.
‘The minnow becomes a whale,’ Flaherty said.
‘Exactly.’
‘Flaherty!’ a stern female voice called from somewhere beyond the cubicles.
Instantly, Flaherty’s expression soured. He rolled his eyes.
‘Show time,’ Annie said, trying not to laugh. She patted his shoulder. ‘Time to talk to Mama.’
‘Fabulous,’ he groaned. ‘Just fabulous.’ Tonight’s Celtics game was slipping further and further from the realm of possibility.
The voice called for him again at the same time as his cell phone rang. The caller ID came up blank. He flipped open his phone. ‘Flaherty here.’
‘Tommy, it’s Jason.’
‘Hey. Hang on a just a sec.’
‘Flaherty! I see you!’ said the faraway voice.
Flaherty turned and spotted his boss, Operations Chief Lillian Chen. The petite 45-year-old Korean, dressed in a severe pants suit, threw up both her hands and made a summoning gesture.
‘Be right there,’ Flaherty said, holding up his hand, then pointing to his phone. Clearly short on patience, Chen shook her head, executed a crisp about-face, and disappeared around a wall.
‘Looks like someone’s in trouble,’ Annie said. Brooke grinned.
‘Sorry, Jason,’ Flaherty said into the phone. ‘What’s up?’
Flaherty listened intently as Jason got right to the point and told him about encrypted calls Colonel Crawford had been exchanging with someone inside an evangelical church in Las Vegas. The background check Mack had run through the NSA database indicated that the church’s leader, Randall Stokes, was a former Force Recon Special Ops commando who’d served time with Crawford in Beirut, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Jason said, ‘I’m guessing he’s somehow involved in what’s happening over here in Iraq. Stokes might even have something to do with the hit order on Brooke Thompson. I already spoke to Lillian, explained the situation.’
‘I can see that.’
‘She told me you wrecked your car and caused quite a commotion on the Mass Pike. That right?’
Flaherty sighed. ‘Affirmative. It was bit messy. I did manage to lose the assassin, though - permanently.’
‘Nice work,’ Jason said, impressed. ‘One other thing … I asked Lillian to check out that USAMRIID lead. She’s got people at Fort Detrick sifting the archives for anything sent in from Iraq back in 2003. If any biological tests were performed, we should have confirmation within a couple hours. In the meantime, I need you to talk to Stokes … in person. Lillian’s already made arrangements to get you to Vegas.’
No wonder the Chief was anxious to chat. A wrecked car, a major pile-up on the interstate, a thwarted assassination attempt
Brooke’s ears perked up. ‘Vegas?’ she muttered.
‘You’ll be leaving immediately. Lillian’s preparing a file for you with everything we know about Stokes. Plenty of juicy reading. So get to Logan ASAP and you can study up on him on your way out there. I don’t think I need to tell you that there’s a lot riding on this, Tommy.’
‘You can count on me.’
‘I knew I could. I’ll be in touch,’ Jason said, then ended the call.
34
IRAQ
‘For Christ’s sake, I could have invaded North Korea by now,’ Crawford said, glowering. ‘Are you ready yet?’ His eyes traced the fibre-optic cable from the PackBot’s rear to a large spool, which in turn patched into a suitcase-sized remote command unit, painted in desert camouflage. The unit’s unhinged hardshell cover was inset with a seventeen-inch LCD viewing screen; its base hosted a computer hard drive, keyboard and toggle controls. This space-age gadgetry was lost on Crawford. Results were the only thing he controlled. And it was high time to see some progress.
‘Almost there, sir,’ replied the bot’s technician - an attractive 28-year-old female with the sharp edges of a pageboy haircut sticking out below her helmet. Being a combat engineer, she was an expert with explosives, and was accustomed to using the bot to disarm or detonate roadside bombs and mines. But this was the first time she’d employed the gas-canister-firing apparatus, and she didn’t like the fact that Crawford was rushing things. ‘Just running the final diagnostics on the software utilities …’ She worked the keyboard and controls until the display synched with the bot’s onboard cameras. The live images panelled onscreen. She held her breath as the interface for the rotary firing mechanism came online. When no errors came back, she exhaled.
Below the mountain, Crawford surveyed the tight perimeter his marines had formed around the encampment.
