Angels of Wrath (10 page)

“Yes,” said the Iraqi.

“Bob Ferguson. Call me Ferg. Step into my office.” He motioned back to a run of rocks twenty yards away where he’d parked his bike. The landing area was about a quarter mile from the small caves and overhangs where they’d located their base camp.

“You know Khazaal?” Ferguson asked the Iraqi.

“I met him some years ago,” said Fouad, whose ears and bones still reverberated from the helicopter ride. He greatly preferred quieter modes of transportation, though he knew better than to mention this to the American; in his experience Americans never found machines quite noisy enough.

Fifty-three years old, Fouad had dealt with a number of Americans over the years, beginning with his very early service as a glorified gofer and eavesdropper for the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. Stationed in Cairo at the age of twenty-two, he had kept tabs on various expatriate movements and Jews: easy work, though the detailed weekly reports often took two or three days simply to write. By the Iran-Iraq War he had progressed to a liaison officer working with the CIA. Out of favor for a while, he had been sent north into exile in the Kurdistan area until just before the start of the Gulf War, when he worked on a group assigned to prepare for the defense of Baghdad. After the war he found his way to the great sanctions shell game. For the first few months he helped hide evidence of banned weapons from weapons inspectors but soon turned to the more critical task of trumping up evidence of continuing programs to impress the fading dictator and keep external enemies at bay. Fouad lay low in the northern Kurdish region after the second Gulf War until friends in the government convinced him to come to work with them. A brief job with an American security contractor had renewed some of his CIA ties; eventually Fouad found himself back in service with the interior ministry’s security apparatus, serving as a liaison to “external services,” the latest euphemism for the CIA.

“You think Khazaal would go through one of the tunnels?” asked Ferguson, sitting on a rock near his motorcycle. “I thought he liked to travel in style.”

“We all adapt,” said Fouad. Something about the American was very familiar.

“All right.” Ferguson wasn’t sure if Fouad was parroting the intelligence report he’d seen or if he was its author. In his experience, the Iraqi intelligence people demonstrated a wide range of abilities, from extreme competence to extreme ineptitude. As a rule, the more confident they made themselves sound the less able they were. “So we watch for a car that meets him?”

“Possible. It may be a wild goose chase.”

“Not what I want to hear.”

“You want the truth or what you want to hear?” said Fouad, who knew that the latter was almost always preferred, especially by Americans. Putting the question bluntly sometimes saved problems and sometimes not.

“Truth. Always.” Ferguson smiled at him. “But all truth is relative.”

Fouad shrugged, though he did not agree; God’s truth was absolute, after all.

“What we think will happen is that he’ll come across the border on foot, get picked up and driven to one of the abandoned military camps northwest of here, where a plane will meet him,” said Ferguson. “We’re going to stake out the camps so we can hit them when he’s there. On the other hand, he may just take a car all the way across the desert. If that happens, we take the car.”

“What if you miss?”

“Then we punt. We find out where he’s going, and we try to get him there. Problem is, we’re not sure where he’s going. Unless you are.”

“There are so many rumors about Khazaal you can make something up, and it is just as likely to be true.”

“We think tomorrow night,” said Ferguson. “What do you think?”

Fouad could only shrug.

“Can you ride a motorcycle?”

“Not well.”

“You’re my passenger then. Come on.” Ferguson picked up the motorcycle.

Fouad hesitated. He did not like motorcycles and had had several bad experiences with them. “I knew a Ferguson once,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“In Cairo. And during the war with Iran.”

Ferguson realized that Fouad was talking about his father. But he only started the bike and waited for Fouad to get on.

“That was my dad in Cairo,” he said after they reached the base camp. “He had a bunch of jobs over here during the Cold War.”

“Yes, I can see him in your face.” A very solid officer, thought Fouad, not a liar, like many. Good with Arabic. How much like the father was the son?

“Anna saiiiid jiddan himuqaabalatak
,” lie said in Arabic. “I am very glad in meet you. Your father was a very dependable fellow.”

“Anaa af ham tamaaman
,” replied Ferguson, using the rudimentary phrase a visitor to an Arabian country would use to show he understood what was being said. But then he continued in Arabic: “I understand perfectly: you’re trying to butter me up because you think I’m just another CIA jerk who’s easily turned by a compliment.”

“No. Your father was a brave man. And you speak Arabic well, though with an Egyptian accent.”

“Grammar school in Cairo. Before the nuns got a hold of me.” Ferguson laughed.

The son was like the father in many ways, thought Fouad. A thing both good and bad.

~ * ~

4

SYRIA, ON THE BORDER WITH IRAO

THE NEXT NIGHT . . .

Rankin turned to the Iraqi and gestured at the car that had turned off from the highway. It rode across the open desert, approaching the foothill two miles away. “Is that for him?”

“Who can tell? But the car is like the one that left from Thar in the afternoon, an old Mercedes.”

Just like a
hajji,
thought Rankin: never a straight yes or no.

Thar was a small town on the other side of the border. Iraqi intelligence officers there had prepared a list of half a dozen suspicious vehicles, all with single drivers. The theory was that the vehicle would go over alone and wait for Khazaal to slip through, a practice often employed by criminals and others trying to escape the country without documentation. The Mercedes would have been thoroughly searched before being allowed over the border.

Two shadows came from the rocks. “You see a face?” asked Rankin.

Fouad shook his head.

Rankin looked over at Guns, who was using his satellite radio system to talk to Corrigan back in the Cube. The radio had a “local” discrete-burst mode for short-range communications with other team members on the ground and a longer-range mode that used satellites to communicate. The latter was easier to detect; though the transmissions were encrypted and virtually unbreakable, the presence of the radio waves could lead someone to the user.

“Where are we, Guns?” asked Rankin.

“I just uploaded the video. They’re looking at it.”

“What’s the UAV see?” Rankin asked. A Predator robot aircraft, or “unmanned aerial vehicle,” was orbiting overhead, helping with the surveillance. It would follow the vehicle to a spot where it could be ambushed.

“Nothing so far.”

“Tell Ferg what’s going on.”

“Already have,” said Guns.

“Hold on,” said Rankin. “There’s another car coming.”

~ * ~

he trick was to let the Mercedes get far enough from the border area so that any of the local smugglers and Syrian spies nearby wouldn’t be tipped off but to not let it get so far away that they couldn’t stop it. With two cars, the task became more complicated, especially once the two vehicles got on the nearby road and headed in different directions. Ferguson and Thera staked out the first car, which was moving northwestward; Rankin and Guns followed the second, traveling two miles to the south.

Just to make things even more interesting, a third one appeared soon after the second made its pickup. Two Rangers were detailed to follow that one, staying close enough to trail them but not take them unless ordered to do so by Ferguson.

The first car took a turn off the highway onto a packed dirt road in the direction of an abandoned military outpost a few miles west of the border. The road wound around a series of dry streams, or
wadis,
and loose sand traps. Since they were on motorcycles, Ferguson, Thera, and the two Rangers traveling with them were able to sprint ahead and check out the site. Ferguson sent the Rangers down the road to watch, in case his hunch about where the Mercedes was going proved wrong. As he and Thera approached the camp, Fouad warned that a Land Rover was parked in front of one of the buildings. The Iraqi had taken over for Guns and was watching the Predator’s video feed. The vehicle had not been there in the afternoon’s satellite snapshot. Ferguson and Thera got off their bikes and went to scout the base. A low ridge sat to the south about a quarter mile from the fence. Standing at the top, Ferguson could see most of the base area.

“There,” Ferguson told Thera, pointing to the second building in the row. “You can just barely make out the shadow inside.”

“How many people?”

“At least two.” He pointed to the road beyond the complex. “Maybe they’re forming a caravan here. Or maybe waiting for a plane. You could land our MC-130 on that road at the back there.”

Ferguson dropped down, sliding to the bottom of the hill. They were no more than fifteen minutes ahead of the Mercedes; if they were going to take it here, they had to get a move on.

“What we have to do is take out the guard by the gate, then the person or persons in the building,” Ferguson told Thera. He took the M203 grenade launcher from his pack and stuffed a dozen plastic shells in his pants pockets, which were already bulging with magazines for the MP5N submachine gun. His vest had concussion and smoke grenades, along with ammo for his pistol and slugs for his shotgun, which he had over his right shoulder.

“Are we taking these guys prisoner or what?” asked Thera.

“Khazaal’s the only one we have to apprehend alive,” said Ferguson. “But, yeah, we dunk these guys if we can. Have your gas mask ready. Crossbow?”

Thera held up the weapon, which was very similar to the type used by deer and other game hunters in the States. A marriage between a miniature rifle and high-tech bow, the weapon fired a titanium arrow over fifty yards, was as accurate as a rifle at that range, and would send its missilelike arrow through the side of a skull. It could also fire two different types of nonlethal ammunition: a syringelike dart with a fast-working anesthetic and a lollypop-shaped hard plastic arrow that was supposed to stun someone struck with it. The anesthetic was related chemically to sodium thiopental, the barbiturate commonly known as truth serum. It worked even quicker though it left the subject feeling as if he or she had a full-body hangover. Thera didn’t trust the lollypops and had left them back at the base camp.

“Wait until I’m outside of the buildings if at all possible,” Ferg told her. “But if you have to shoot, shoot. He doesn’t have a vest. Shoot at the chest.”

Ferguson jogged to the west side of the base, taking advantage of the
wadi
near the fence, which obscured the view. He found a hole under the fence and crawled into the compound between the two warehouse buildings at the southern end of the compound.

Thera
used a drainage ditch to cover her as she closed in on the guard. She found a brace of weeds thirty yards from the entrance and got into firing position. The guard, clearly bored, stood with his gun down against his leg. She took a grenade out just in case—no sense fooling around if she missed—and put her MP5N within easy reach.

“Thera, where are you?” hissed Ferguson in her ear.

“Here,
” she whispered.
“Just tell me when.”