An Enemy Within (33 page)

Steve forced a piece of pancake into his mouth. He wasn’t that hungry himself. A hollow gnawing sensation had kept him awake for most of the night, worrying if Alex was all right. He’d left messages on her cell phone since first thing without reply.

‘How big?’ he said, chewing laboriously.

The kid looked about him, lowered his voice. ‘Top stuff from DC an’ all. An op over the border.’ Fingers pushed his plate away and stood up ready to go. He leaned in closer to Steve’s ear. ‘AQI at thirty-one and change, forty-seven and change – that’s all I know.’

Fingers was out of the door before the shock hit Steve so hard he almost choked. The kid was talking co-ordinates. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but they sounded ominously like the numbers Alex had given him and made him write down. Al-Qaeda at large there? He suddenly went into a cold sweat, panic immediately gripping his insides, churning and nauseating.

Rushing to the exit, there was only one way he could be certain. He had the co-ordinates written down in his quarters. His dorm was half a mile away on the edge of the camp in a recently-installed prefabricated building with plywood walls. Outside the mess, he wasn’t concentrating and let a half-empty camp bus sail past. He cursed, deciding he’d have to jog the distance. He was soon lathered in sweat, his mind in a whirl. Trying her cell phone again, there was still no reply so he left a message he said was urgent.

Inside his room, he opened his bedside desk drawer. His heart sank. The co-ordinates were the same. He stood for a minute, chest heaving, trying to think of the best course of action. Alex was in danger – but from al-Qaeda? Maybe the area was home to another group of insurgents the CIA had been keeping tabs on. Maybe the agency labelled any enemy as al-Qaeda. Fingers had been quite specific: AQI he had said: al-Qaeda in Iraq.

He rooted in the drawer, found the business card he wanted and, with a trembling hand, dialled the number. It rang for ages before a sleepy voice answered.

‘Gene Kowolski.’

‘Sorry to wake you, Mr Kowolski. It’s about Alex… she could be in a life-threatening situation in Iraq.’

Steve rattled off all he knew, hardly pausing for breath. A couple of times Kowolski interjected, probing further.

‘AQI – you sure?’

‘That’s what the kid said. And that it was an operation run from Washington.’

Kowolski was silent for a while, his mind working overtime. ‘Might be the Pentagon, although drones are increasingly under
CIA control. But they don’t send up a UAV lightly so there must be some hostile activity in the same area. Whichever way, it doesn’t look good. If Alex has found McDermott, they need to be gotten out of there and fast.’

‘Well, AQI or no AQI, I’m going to get her,’ Steve said, ending the call.

For a few seconds he stood rooted to the spot, a chill fear racking his frame despite the searing midday heat. Should he explain the situation to the ground control station commander? He had no proof Alex was even in the area, or that she’d even found McDermott. He reckoned he’d only be losing precious time. If al-Qaeda had been spotted, he needed to act fast.

His mind in a crazy state of turmoil, a sudden familiar sound garnered his senses. Some of the men on camp called it the lawnmower because of the noise of its loud whining engine, particularly on take-off. He turned to see the Predator drone rushing along a distant runway, the unmistakable four-cylinder turbo urging the rear propeller on to its 72 mph take-off speed.

He watched it climbing until it became a speck against the steel-blue sky, disappearing a few seconds later. Without thinking further, Steve Lewis wheeled about and bolted for his own machine.

Only one thing galvanised his thoughts. He had to try and save Alex, the most important person in the world to him.

*  *  *

Alex opened her eyes and forced a smile, hoping the shock at his appearance didn’t show. McDermott stood before her looking slightly ridiculous in a loose-fitting white kaftan that had gold embroidery on the front.

She set about flipping sand from the blanket that had covered them, glancing at him between shakes. The lieutenant looked a shadow of the man she knew. Face gaunt and with several days’ growth of beard, it was his eyes that struck her the most.
Sunken into sockets grey and hollow, they held a dead, faraway look as though he was someplace else.

‘Why did you come here?’ he asked in a monotone.

‘Because I needed to find you, to take you back home,’ Alex said, standing up and brushing herself down. ‘No more media, no parades, jamborees, whistles. We’ll go back, somewhere quiet, forget about all the bullshit and the hype. Maybe rest up with your folks a while.’

‘No,’ he said, taking a step backwards. Alex could see he was clearly agitated, continuously ringing his hands, his body stooped.

‘But you can’t stay here.’ She cast her eyes around the wreck of the building. The storm had almost stopped, but flurries of sand eddied through the openings that once served as windows, settling in haphazard patterns on the clay floor. A gust of wind ripped through the space where the double doorway once stood, two giant columns of dense wood supporting a heavy wooden lintel twice their size.

McDermott held out his hand. ‘Come, I want to show you the Garden of Eden.’

She followed him as he stumbled towards the building’s entrance. When he turned to check she was behind him, she saw a smile on his lips. McDermott turned to face the glorious vista, the one he had viewed only a short time ago.

‘God, no, it can’t be,’ he cried, his face immediately draining.

Alex looked out at the desolate landscape; brush and scrub as far as the eye could see, a dead tree nearby, its branches twisted grotesquely as if in agony. Everything was covered in fine layers of sand and grit and dust that gave the desert a foreboding bleakness.

McDermott shook his head as if to rid himself of the vision. ‘It can’t be,’ he repeated softly in disbelief. ‘It was so beautiful before – my Garden of Eden.’

He turned towards her, tears in his eyes. She opened her arms and he fell into them, burying his head on her shoulder as he
had once before. Soon, his body shook as he fought for air between his deep, mournful sobs.

Alex could sense his utter despair. His burden was unremitting and was destroying him. She had to get both of them out of this place and to safety. McDermott stood motionless, lost in his own world. She guided him to the corner where they’d slept and made him comfortable with the blanket.

Returning to the entrance, she got out her cell phone and made to switch it on. But it was already on, the battery dangerously low. She stared at it in horror, the sickening realisation dawning that it must have switched on accidentally when she fell from the jeep and she hadn’t heard its start-up chime above the noise of the storm.

The signal was weak, but at least it was working. She saw there was a series of messages. She decided to open the latest one, a voicemail sent by Steve half an hour ago. The message was garbled but she understood he was saying something about insurgents in the vicinity and that she was in danger. He told her to stay where she was until help arrived.

Shoulders slumped, her heart suddenly pounding, Alex immediately switched the phone off to conserve its energy. The message had certainly spooked her. Gingerly, she stood back from the entrance, peering one way then the other. Nothing moved. But it did little to allay the feeling that someone might be watching them. She bit her lip, all at once feeling alarmingly vulnerable. She turned to look at McDermott. Should she tell him? Was he in a state to even care?

The lieutenant was sitting with his knees drawn up, the blanket discarded, reading his Bible and rocking to and fro.

*  *  *

The Predator UAV has a cruising speed of a little over 80 miles per hour. The helicopter Steve Lewis used was an OH-58 Kiowa that could do half as much again. As he took off heading north towards the co-ordinates near the small town of
al-Qurnah, he estimated his flight time at forty-five minutes. The drone had a twenty-minute start on him so his quick calculation told him they should arrive at roughly the same time. He was hoping they could help each other.

A multitude of visions filled his mind. His Kiowa, an army scout machine, wasn’t armed so could not be used offensively. And if he had to get in very low, which he imagined, there was considerable risk of attack from a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile, or a rocket propelled grenade, even small arms fire. All he had was his service revolver. He knew it was madness.

Would he discover the insurgents on open ground or a camouflaged lair? Would the drone be able to flush them out? What if the insurgents had already got to Alex? He just couldn’t bear the thought and banished it from his mind.

Checking his bearings, he pressed on, maintaining radio silence. He resolved to face the music when the show was finally over.

*  *  *

Kowolski could not get back to sleep. Something did not feel right. The words AQI kept spinning in his mind. He was convinced al-Qaeda in Iraq was an illusion, another bogeyman others dreamt up and which he had spread, now regretfully, into virtual reality.

He paced his hotel room and called down for a pot of coffee. Although he had no concrete confirmation, he had to assume that Alex had found McDermott and was bringing him in. So why the drone at those exact co-ordinates? And armed? And likely controlled by the CIA? A sudden chill nipped him in the pit of his stomach. Anything that pointed to Richard North-wood had to be viewed suspiciously. After all, he was the instigator of the whole McDermott fiasco. But to what lengths would he go to round off the affair?

Twenty-five minutes later, when he was on his third cup of
coffee and still ruminating, he received a call from Carl Whittingham.

‘Gene, sorry to wake you.’

‘I’m wide awake, Carl, shoot.’

‘I don’t know if you know but the boss sent me to Langley to sort of monitor how the agency was going to tackle this McDermott thing.’

Kowolski laughed. ‘You? Spy on Northwood, the master spy?’

‘Something like that,’ Whittingham said. ‘The guy’s hyped up over this. He thought I was asleep in his office but I could see he was manic. He’s had all this equipment installed – large screens, headphones and all. While he went to the John, I peeked at his desk. There was a pad with lots of scribble on it – doodling, that sort of thing.’

‘Go on,’ Kowolski urged.

‘Well, he’d written the name of McDermott and next to it the letters KIA with a question mark.’

‘Christ,’ Kowolski blurted. ‘Killed in action?’ He thought for a few moments. ‘Carl, the more I hear the more I don’t like. Maybe he’d want McDermott KIAd to put a neatly-tied ribbon round his whole fucking package. Wouldn’t that be just cupcakes and ice-cream?’

‘What should I do?’

‘You’ll have to keep him monitored and hope he won’t do anything stupid while you’re around.’

Kowolski clicked off, straight away dialling Alex’s cell phone for the fourth time since Steve’s early call. Still no reply. He paced the room deep in thought. There was only one conclusion he could reach: Richard Northwood was out to kill McDermott – and if Alex got in the way, her as well.

26

Gazing at the blank UAV picture screen so hard that his eyes hurt, Richard Northwood suddenly turned up the volume on his headset as a picture burst into view. The nervous voice of Fingers Finkelstein came through to tell him the drone’s powerful camera and sensor images were now transmitting in real time.

‘Sir, we’ve been scouring the area without success but we found this place just shy of those co-ordinates. You should be able to see the ruined building – it’s the only place around.’

‘I see it,’ Northwood said.

‘And then you get this, sir.’

Northwood’s mouth dropped as the camera closed in and the heat-seeking infra red sensor revealed two figures inside the building.

‘What you been seeing?’ Northwood said, his voice rising. His eyes flicked to the pulsing red dot on his computer screen. It told him it was Alex inside the building – the other figure had to be McDermott.

‘Sir, two people in there. One person keeps going to the building’s entrance, kind of tip-toeing slowly, then peering out.’

‘The other?’

‘Seems to be huddled in the corner, sir.’

‘The bomb-maker,’ Northwood hissed. ‘Could be,’ Finkelstein said.

‘The al-Qaeda bomb-maker busy preparing his IED, and the other’s the lookout. We’ve got to stop them.’

Finkelstein gasped. So far his duties had consisted of a couple of surveillance sorties, a remote, passive third-party, participation. Now his fingers trembled on the controls, knowing he
was one button away from unleashing a devastating onslaught on some unsuspecting target.

‘Shouldn’t we wait and check them out a while longer, sir?’

‘No,’ Northwood spat. ‘They must be dealt with – you think these murdering bastards would give us time to fanny about?’

There was a moment’s silence before Finkelstein spoke. ‘It’s your call then, sir.’

‘Right,’ Northwood said sharply, sitting down at his desk, his eyes not wavering from the screen.

‘Prepare to fire. And count me down,’ Northwood said, frantic.

Finkelstein wiped the perspiration from his hands and reached for the missile control button. Eventually, he said, ‘Target locked on, sir. Preparing to fire… and four, and three and two… Holy shit!’

The helicopter swooped as if from nowhere, its image immediately filling the screen as it hovered close to the building.

‘What the fuck…’ Northwood shouted, his mouth gaped open.

‘Firing aborted, sir,’ Finkelstein said. ‘That bird’s one of ours.’

Northwood watched, aghast, as the drone’s camera pulled back revealing the chopper only yards from the building.

If there was another talent the young operator possessed, it was that there were few flying machines currently in service that he couldn’t recognise.

‘It’s US Army – a Kiowa, definitely ours,’ Finkelstein said, his voice now shrill.