An Enemy Within (32 page)

Withdrawing a hand-held GPS from beneath her abayah, Alex pressed a button and got a reading. ‘Should be only four or five miles west to where I need to be,’ she said, shielding her eyes from the wind.

George looked up into the lightening sky, a frown on his face. ‘You must hurry,’ he said, without explanation.

Alex clambered into the driver’s seat, fiddled with the gear shift. ‘Which way’s reverse?’ George asked her to put her foot on the clutch then jerked the shift up and away. She nodded. ‘Seat belts?’

George held out his arms in a hopeless gesture, smiled and shrugged.

‘I guess I’m off then,’ Alex shouted. ‘Wish me luck. Thank you Abu Khamsin – I’ll never forget what you’ve done.’

Had daybreak finally dawned, she would have seen Abu Khamsin blush. She turned and waved, selected a gear and roared off.

They watched her until she was out of sight. Abu Khamsin
turned to George, shaking his head. ‘That, my good friend, is one crazy American woman.’

*  *  *

After thirty minutes’ travel, Alex reckoned she had less than a half-mile further to be slap bang at the centre of her GPS coordinates. She squinted, scouring the immediate landscape. Nothing but scrubland, parched and bare, the taste of salt on the wind. A deep water-filled gulley ran parallel to the road, beyond which she could just make out the ruins of a house, dotting the horizon.

She had turned off the main road, her GPS guiding her on to a rough sand track pitted with the occasional large stone boulder which had made progress painstakingly slow. Suddenly, the vehicle’s engine began to splutter. Her heart sank. ‘Not now,
please,’
she urged. But the jeep soon rolled to a stop, an obstinate camel digging in its heels.

She leant forward, fumbling under the dashboard for the hood release catch, found a lever and pulled while praying it was the correct one. Jumping out, she only then realised how strong the wind had become as she fought her way to the front of the vehicle and lifted the hood. She was greeted by a strong smell of fuel. The engine compartment was as foreign as a page of Arabic. A feeling of dread descended as she stared helplessly at the cables, wires and parts that meant absolutely nothing.

It was only then that she heard the noise; faint at first somewhere in the distance. She glanced south, surveying the sky. Emerging daylight had brought with it a cluster of white billowing clouds, scurrying against the palest blue as if in flight. Turning backwards and shielding her eyes from the dust, her mouth dropped. A great menacing shroud of darkness moving at speed towards her. Angry coils of wind, whipping up loops of sand, shrieked like banshees, howling and wailing across the landscape like mini tornadoes. A sandstorm. Closing fast. Alex felt panic setting in. To be caught here in such a ferocious
storm would be perilous. Her open vehicle would provide little protection and the onslaught could last for hours.

Frantically, she began running her fingers along the wires and rubber pipes of the engine bay, checking connections but hardly knowing what she was doing. Before long, she found a narrow piece of thick tubing that had obviously come loose, its end dangling. She sniffed it – petrol. Looking to where the tube might go, she traced it to the nozzle end of a dull metal casting. A mechanic would have told her it was the carburettor and what she held was the fuel pipe whose clip had come undone. She grunted, hopefully pushing the end into place, jamming and twisting the tube until her fingers and arms ached and it would go no further.

*  *  *

Alex drove forward at a snail’s pace, half expecting the engine to splutter and die at any second. What little daylight remained was rapidly draining in the frightening gloom. She found a headlight switch but all the beam did was to reflect the particles of whirling sand, each one a shiny blinding mirror. Her GPS indicated she should turn northwest. Was there a way over the gulley? Even with the wind behind her, it was difficult to see any distance. Then, she brightened. Up ahead, only a matter of metres, she could make out a crossing, a short stretch of stout wooden transoms strung both sides of the clay-baked banks of the gulley. She gunned the motor and made it to the other side, turning into the wind to follow a track running alongside the waterway.

Visibility was soon down to a matter of yards, the storm now battering down hard. Squinting, one hand shielding her eyes, and with only one hand on the wheel, she eased down on the accelerator. The little vehicle picked up speed but it only increased her anxiety as it rattled over the bumps and hollows in the track. She knew that time was running out. The fog of the
storm was slowly swallowing her, like a gigantic beast toying with its prey.

A short distance further on, the track evened out to run parallel with the low embankment of the waterway. Using the barrier as a guide gave her the confidence to increase her speed. But she realised the vehicle was still in too low a gear and the engine squealed as if in protest, its small wheels spinning over debris and sending Alex bouncing and jiggling as she grasped the wheel, knuckles draining. Changing up a gear, she pressed on. She hit a small rock that skewed the jeep into a slide and she fought to regain control, just managing to get the vehicle straight.

Desperate now, her head bent low against the ferocious stinging assault, Alex cried out into the wind. She’d always been sure that God did not exist, ever since she’d been old enough to think for herself, to reason. But, for a split second, the ludicrous thought entered her head that it was Him throwing down this challenge, almost as an invite to test the limits of her intrepidity; flagrant and teasing and daring her to resist.

Her whole body ached and she could feel the strength draining from her. But she fathomed there was no alternative but to grind her teeth and continue. She pressed the accelerator to the floor but had travelled no more than another 50 yards when the jeep smashed into a large boulder half-buried in the mud. The collision ripped off the front section of the exhaust with an almighty crash sending the vehicle skywards. The impact was so sudden, so severe, that Alex was flung sideways out of her seat. Time seemed suspended as she reached the point of no return, her hands clawing at the air in a futile attempt to stay aboard.

She landed in a scrub of sand, rolling over several times to take the brunt of the impact. Looking up through the haze, she was just in time to see the jeep careering up the embankment and disappearing over its crest into the waterway.

*  *  *

Stunned, Alex checked herself over, first flexing her arms. She could feel grazes on her elbows, which stung. Slowly pushing up into a sitting position, she yelped. Her right ankle suddenly screamed at her, a sharp painful stab that made her grimace. Gingerly, she eased it one way, then the other. Movement was slow and deliberate but, although she gasped in recoil, she was satisfied it wasn’t broken. Desperate to escape the sniping torrent around her, a chill of fear struck at her like a snake. For the first time, she doubted whether she could summon the strength from her rapidly-draining reserves to battle on.

Her body, tired and weak, wanted her to lay back and give in, to collapse into the cool grit beneath her and simply succumb. Turning her head away from the incessant driving wind, she made an effort to stand but managed only a few steps before collapsing to the ground.

The sand was everywhere; in her eyes, her ears, her mouth. She pulled the niqab tighter across her face, a tingling burning sensation tormenting her cheeks.

Lying prostrate, she could feel the cell phone in her pocket digging into her thigh. Shifting position seemed to require an enormous amount of effort and she flopped down, now hardly able to catch her breath. As she lay there an unfathomable feeling swept over her. She started laughing, a small chuckle at first, then loud chortling belly laughs that racked her frame and competed with the howling storm. How would Kowolski spin her death? ‘Another journo wasted. Paid the price of her independence. Should have been embedded.’

Moments later the laughing turned to coughing which shook her violently and made her wretch. Her fingers pulled frantically to rip the niqab from her mouth and she raised herself on all fours hawking mouthfuls of spit and sand from her throat until her eyes watered and she slunk back groaning with the effort.

*  *  *

She didn’t know how long she’d been lying there and she was halfway to delirium when it happened – almost as if in a dream. Alex felt herself being lifted, pulled effortlessly from the ground. Allowing herself to be carried like a baby, she looked up to try and see her rescuer’s face but it was covered with a keffiyeh. The man’s head was slanted away from her, tilted against the gale as he took large steady strides, never stumbling, over the rough uphill terrain.

They reached the wall of an abandoned building, which momentarily gave them shelter. It was only then that he turned and looked at her. Instantly she recognised those eyes.

Lieutenant Matt McDermott’s were the darkest of dark brown.

*  *  *

Neither of them spoke as he gently laid her down in a corner of the ruined house. He fetched a blanket and joined her, covering both of them with it and pulling it over their heads. Alex nestled against the warmth of his body. So tired, she knew the talking could wait. Within minutes she was fast asleep.

25

Richard Northwood stretched his arms high above his head and did his best to stifle an involuntary yawn. His office clock signalled a little after 4.00 a.m. and while his mind was racing, his body needed sleep. The present flux was making him more unsettled by the minute. He’d had one false alarm when he thought Alex had made her rendezvous. But, just as he was about to call everyone to action, the red dot on his screen had started moving again.

Now he stared at the monitor watching the dot that hadn’t budged in over an hour. This had to be it, he told himself. He picked up the phone and called the airbase at Ali al-Salem.

‘I’m sure we’ve got a definite this time,’ he said to the colonel at the ground control station. ‘You set to go?’

The colonel hated to sound uncooperative. But what could he do about the weather north of the border? The Predator drone had been on standby for several hours. He could see it standing in the baking heat on the tarmac, the sun throwing shards of piercing brilliance off its silver fuselage. He had his two best combat systems officers itching to send their baby airborne.

‘Negative, I’m afraid, sir,’ the colonel almost sighed. ‘We’ve got one helluva sandstorm blowing north of Basra. We wouldn’t see a thing up there even with infra red. These babies tend to be a little fragile.’

‘Shit.’ Northwood clenched his fist. ‘Colonel, you’d better monitor the situation every fifteen minutes and let me know the moment we get a green light.’

He glanced across the room at Carl Whittingham from the Pentagon. The guy was practically asleep in his chair. North-wood eyed him contemptuously. He knew Whittingham had
been sent to keep tabs on him. But he was out of his depth. This was a CIA operation – his operation – and he was resolute to the point of obsession that nothing would stand in his way. He’d long since put aside any self-recriminations over the McDermott exercise that had gone so horribly wrong. It was now up to him to solve the problem and he didn’t want some pen-pushing poodle getting in his way, someone who might prove squeamish in the end game.

The President needed to be protected at all costs.

‘Say, Carl,’ Northwood cooed, tapping him gently on the shoulder. ‘You can bed down in my secretary’s office down the corridor. I’ll let you know if we get any action.’

Whittingham leant forward rubbing his eyes. He nodded and stumbled out of the room. Northwood closed the door after him, breathing a sigh of relief. Then he locked it. There was no margin for complications in what he’d planned. Whittingham wasn’t the type who would like it when they started playing hardball and Northwood hadn’t told him the drone was armed.

Glancing round his office, Northwood surveyed the dual screens that would beam pictures in real time when the drone was airborne. UAVs might be military hardware, but their surreptitious capabilities meant they were eminently suited to CIA control. With an eye to the future, he had already written a paper pressing for the agency to train its own drone pilots, thereby adding another dimension to its undercover work. Northwood’s section had relied on army or air force personnel to fly them in the past. Much better, though, if all aspects of an operation could be kept in-house.

Still, this was the first time he planned on using one that had a Hellfire tucked under each wing and with him giving the orders.

*  *  *

The kid sat at the mess hall table staring blankly at his plate of food, clicking both thumbs against the two nearest fingers of each hand in a non-stop nervous rhythm. Kit Finkelstein was
known on the airbase as Fingers, but not because he was always clicking them. At the age of twenty-two, his lonely obsessive childhood as a computer games nut had paid dividends by landing him the position of a combat systems officer with the US Air Force.

Forgotten were the nightly admonishments from his mother to ‘quit the Devil’s own game and come down for your supper’. Now, she was so proud of her ‘pilot’ son that she glowed whenever she talked about him to anybody willing to listen at the local thrift store where she worked, even though she didn’t understand what a drone did.

Many a meal went cold while he sat mesmerised by the screen, his fingers flitting manically over the controls of some latest craze, ignoring his mother’s pleas. And here he was, about to bestow the same fate on another dish. Only, this time a heady mixture of excitement and fear was to blame.

‘Hey Fingers, you lost your appetite?’ Steve Lewis sat down beside the kid, noting the untouched food with a frown. They’d often sat together chatting, Steve considering himself almost a fatherly figure. ‘You’ve gotta put oil in the engine or you’ll seize, man.’

Fingers looked up, giving his dining companion a hapless grin. ‘I’m on standby with the bird and she’s armed. Just a bit nervous that something big’s going down.’