“The woman defied me,” Feng said. “She attempted to use me, and then she
“It would be cleaner to simply shoot her,” Azhar said.
“You speak of killing millions of Americans as they drive to work, and you dislike the thought of torturing one woman?”
“Killing millions,” Azhar said, “is war. The other, as you have pointed out, is personal. The two do not mix.”
“But you are wrong, my friend,” Feng said, walking forward now to meet al-Dahabi. “War is
23
Charlie Dean held himself motionless, staring intently upward at the sharp edge where rock met sky. He’d just seen movement — the head of a Tango sentry making his rounds about the caldera’s rim. The sentry vanished again and, after an agonizing wait, Rodriguez gave a hand signal and the four began crawling forward once more. The slope consisted mostly of loose cinders here, with a few chunks of larger rock, the hill rising now at a forty- five-degree angle. If any of them lost their footing, they would slide helplessly back down the slope, raising a billowing cloud of dust as they fell.
They picked their way forward cautiously, making certain of each step before they moved. They were only a few dozen yards beneath the crater rim now, and it was vital that they not be seen or heard by the sentries.
As the ground began leveling off, the four again unrolled their tech-Ghillies and secured them to ankles and wrists. Staying flat on the ground to avoid showing their silhouettes against the sky, they inched their way onto the edge of the caldera and had their first look down into the interior.
The view was much the same as the images transmitted by Lia yesterday, but from the opposite side of the crater. The helicopter sat on a level spot near an array of tents. Within a deeper portion of the crater to the right, a drilling derrick rose from a tangle of support structures and struts, the rumble of pumps and generators filling the bowl with noise. Ten or twelve men were visible — workers around the derrick, and guards carrying AKs. Two sentries were on the crater rim, the nearest a hundred yards away.
Several unarmed men were walking away from the helicopter, following a curving path that led to the deeper part of the crater to the right.
Dean pulled out his binoculars and focused on the group. There were three men, and two he recognized from file photos transmitted to his computer during his briefing for this op. The Asian man was Feng Jiu Zhu, formerly a major in China’s Ministry of State Security, now a vice president of COSCO, itself virtually a branch of the Chinese military. The other was Ibrahim Hussain Azhar, the Jackal, terrorist and cofounder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad.
He didn’t recognize the third man, the one carrying a satchel, but he was wearing the black-and-white checkered headscarf that served as a unifying symbol of solidarity for the Palestinians.
“Art Room,” Dean whispered. As he spoke, he reached down and removed the case containing his rifle’s SOPMOD kit from his leg sheath, opened it, and began removing the four-power optical telescopic sight. “I’ve got both Feng and Azhar in view. I have a clear shot. Request permission to fire.”
It was a long shot, he knew. The team’s orders were specific — to wait and watch until word came down the chain of command initiating the assault — but Feng and Azhar both were high-priority targets. Capping them now, before the assault teams all had even gotten into position, would decapitate the Tango force, perhaps panic them, and certainly leave them without anyone telling them what to do.
“Negative on that, Charlie,” Rockman’s voice came back. “The boss is seeing POTUS now. Let’s not drop him in hot water.”
“Copy.” He continued attaching the sight to his weapon’s rail, however, using the marks incised in the metal to put it solidly in its presighted configuration. He’d practiced this a lot at the range back at Fort Meade; the sight might be a hair off, but at this range, less than two hundred yards, it wouldn’t miss the aim point by more than an inch or two, making it plenty accurate enough for him to take a shot without needing to sight in the weapon anew.
With the sight screwed down tight, he brought the M4A1’s butt to his shoulder and peered through the sight. He could see the backs of all three men as they made their way down a steep trail into the deeper part of the crater.
“Art Room. Targets are descending into the northern part of the crater, down where the derrick is.”
“Copy that,” Rockman replied. “Do you see where the wall between the two drops off sharply? Kind of separates the two craters.”
“I see it.”
“The drop is about thirty feet, straight down. There’s a cave or a lava tube at the base of the cliff. That’s where they took Lia.”
Dean felt cold. “I copy.”
He watched them as they walked down the trail. He was
There was no telling how many guards might be with Lia now, though, or what they would do to her if a firefight broke out — and, far worse, the team hadn’t located the nukes yet. If the bad guys panicked, they might set something off, and that would make it a bad day for everyone.
So Dean kept watching the three as they rounded a corner at the bottom of the path and he lost sight of them.
“Art Room. Have you been able to reestablish communications with Lia?”
“That’s negative, Charlie. They took her into a cave, and we lost contact. We haven’t heard a word since.”
Dean studied the surrounding ground. He was currently at about the three o’clock position on the crater rim. If he could make his way over to about the one o’clock position, he would have a direct line of sight on the cave mouth, and he also spotted a broad, eroded gulley down the caldera’s interior slope there. The ground was broken, with lots of boulders, escarpments of bare rock, and even a few pine trees. It offered a good route for descending into the caldera.
Quietly, he told Rodriguez what he was planning, and the Marine nodded.
Akulinin said, “I’m in,” and the two slowly began making their way counterclockwise along the crater rim.
Lia heard the clatter of footsteps at the cave mouth and saw her two guards hastily stand and take on a look of unremitting vigilance.
She had no idea how much time had passed since they’d brought her here. The lava tube widened slightly, creating an underground room perhaps fifteen feet across, and while enough light filtered down from the opening to illuminate her surroundings, she couldn’t see the outside, or guess at the passage of time by the movement of shadows — especially now, with those two damned lights in her eyes.
She suspected that it had been at least two hours since she’d been brought here, which meant perhaps twenty-two hours or so since her capture. She hadn’t been mistreated in that time, exactly, other than being tied to a chair, unable to walk or lie down. There had been some psychological abuse, though. An hour ago, several men had brought in the two bright floodlights on folding tripod stands and connected them to a long power cord leading in from the outside. Then they’d set up a folding metal table against the black rock wall nearby, a six-foot-long table with several eyes attached around the edge that looked like attachment points for ropes or straps.
