The Skorpion Directive (39 page)

He checked Mandy’s BlackBerry, still not using his own, and saw that they were approaching the sector very fast: they’d be over it in thirty seconds. In the cabin behind them, Fyke and Levka were pressed up against the porthole doing pretty much the same thing: looking for any sign of the
Blue Nile
.

Nikki Turrin was sitting on the opposite side, looking down at Casablanca. A flat, meandering city, streets and lanes laid out in no particular order, it looked to her like an aerial shot of Gary, Indiana. So much for Bogart and Bergman.

She felt the jet banking, and her coffee tilted. She heard the crackling voice of the copilot up front.

“We have been denied permission to land at Anfa. We are to leave Moroccan airspace at once. If you care to look out the port-side windows, you’ll see how serious they are about this.”

Everyone went to the port side. Everyone except Dalton, who was suddenly riveted by something that was passing below them right now. He could hear Fyke’s low growl from across the aisle. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mikey, they’ve scrambled a fucking Mirage. He’s sitting right off our wing.”

“Give him a wave,” said Dalton as the Legacy did a slow bank to starboard. Dalton’s attention was fixed on something large and rectangular, set out on what looked like landfill, right on the rim of the coast. It was some sort of palace or public building, with a blue roof, a square tower. The grounds around it were a complex pattern of inlaid stone. He picked up Mandy’s BlackBerry.

“Mandy, does this thing have a camera?” he asked.

“Yes. A good one.”

“Thanks.”

He held the BlackBerry up, found the trigger, and snapped a picture just as the coast fell away and they were passing over the muddled maze of downtown Casablanca.

He held the screen up for Mandy.

“Look at this.”

She studied the image in the little screen.

“Bloody hell,” she said, her gray eyes widening. “That’s the Hassan II Mosque. It’s the largest mosque in the world, I think. They’ve been working on it for years. Where’s that card?”

She started ruffling through the pockets of her leather jacket, emerging with one of the ID cards Dalton had taken from the bodies of the men he had killed on the road to Staryi Krim.

She held the card up, tapped the symbol they had assumed was a Serbian unit badge . . .

“This is what they’re going at. The mosque. It has to be. They put it right out there on the Web too. Like a piece of a puzzle. So they could brag about it later. The sods. What bloody cheek.”

Dalton, his face paling as the enormity of the thing went home, stood up, slipped by Mandy, who was still staring down at the ID card, shocked, stunned, silent.

“Danny. Joko,” he said, standing at the door to the cockpit.

Roth and Levon turned around.

“Come back into the cabin. Both of you. There’s something you need to see.”

 

 

 

ROTH
slammed the microphone back on the cradle, stared out at the desert below. The harsh, arid terrain was slowly rising into a chain of ancient mountains, ground down to rocky slopes by a hundred million years of wind and sand.

“Fucking Moroccans,” said Roth. “They don’t believe us.”

“Then screw ’em,” said Levon. “We did what we could.”

“What about Vukov and the rest? What about Galan?”

Roth looked at Joko and then around the cabin at the rest of them, everyone looking either angry or depressed or both.

“They’ve pulled the Mirage off. But you can bet they’re watching us on the radar. If we do anything but leave Moroccan airspace, they’ll force us down. Everyone in this cabin will end up in a Moroccan prison. Joko, you and I know what will happen to us. We’re not only Jews, we’re Mossad. Look, everybody, it was one chance in Hell that these dumb-ass carpet jockeys could see past their hatreds even to save their own fucking mosque. They can’t. So I’m going back to Tel Aviv. I’m sorry about Galan, but you all know what these people do to captured Israeli soldiers. I’m not up for being tortured to death in Meknes Prison.”

“Or being handed over to Hezbollah or Hamas,” said Dalton. “No. You two have to get out of this now. But I’m staying.”

Roth and Joko looked across at Dalton.

“Lovely,” said Joko. “What are you going to do? Open the door and step out, hope you land on a camel?”

Dalton pointed to the four-lane blacktop running north along the coast. “Put me down on the A3. Touch and go, I’ll manage from there.”

Roth and Joko stared down at the tiny ribbon snaking along the coast, a perfect picture of bloody nowhere.

“You, my friend—and I say this with the greatest respect—are totally fucking nuts,” said Levon with nonetheless a touch of reverent awe in his voice. “Totally, utterly, completely bat shit. And the pilots would never agree to it. It’s a rat fuck from the get-go.”

“Yes it is. Ask them anyway.”

Roth looked at Dalton for a while, shaking his head.

“Fine. You’re nuts. But I will. And I know what they’ll say.”

Roth was wrong.

 

 

 

THE
pilot turned out to be an ex-fighter pilot from the IDF. Grinning like a loon, he pulled a hard left bank, dropping down through the heat haze like a falcon diving on a wren, lining up on the A3, choosing a straightaway and heading right at it.

“I crash this thing,” said the pilot over the intercom, “I’m sending the bill to Langley.”

He didn’t. He touched down, bounced twice, taxied to a stop. Dalton, grabbing a leather bag full of borrowed guns and ammo, along with his own Anaconda and his gold, popped the latch. The door swung upward, a hot blast of desert air and grit flowing into the cool of the cabin. He turned around in the doorway and saw Mandy, Levka, Fyke, and Nikki all up and getting ready to go.

“No,” he said, hardening up. “This is no—”

“Dear God,” said Mandy, brushing past him and jumping to the pavement. “This is no time to stand in the door and pose for the
Oath of the Horatii
. Hand me my bag, Dobri.”

Fyke was on the ground a second later, and then Levka. Nikki was about to step off when Dalton put a hand on her shoulder. “No, Nikki. I’m sorry. One of us has to stay.”

She shot him a ferocious look, but he pressed his point.

“Nikki, listen. It
has
to be one of
us
. You know everything we know, Nikki. If we don’t pull this off, you’re the only one who can do anything for us back in D.C. I know you want to go—”

“No! I’m not going to end up as a . . . goddamned REMF!”

Dalton, in spite of himself, had to grin at that.

“Where’d you get that phrase?”

“Hank. He used it all the time.”

“Where is he? Where is Hank right now?”

Her face changed, softened a bit.

“He’s on his way down to Fort Meade.”

“Good. What about Briony?”

“She’s . . . staying . . . in Garrison.”

“Then go see him, Nikki. Tell him everything that went on. If anyone can find the other end of this crazy tangle, it’s him.”

She was still in the door, struggling with it.

“Truck coming,” said Fyke from the ground.

Nikki looked at Dalton for a moment longer, her eyes hot and her breathing short and sharp. Then she reached out, put her hand behind his neck, pulled him in, and kissed him hard on the mouth. She broke off, shoved him out the door, slammed it down, and the engines began to spool up immediately.

They all stepped back out of the Legacy’s wash and watched as it gained speed and rose into the air only a hundred feet in front of a large tractor trailer, which plowed into the shoulder and shuddered to a stop in a cloud of dust. As the jet climbed, it became a glint of steel in the sunlight, a booming roar that shook the sky. And then it was gone, and they were left on the ground in the grit and heat of the desert, the pavement smelling of tar and kerosene.

“How sweetly romantic, a farewell kiss from a devoted fan,” said Mandy, shouldering her bag. “Remind me, if we ever meet again, to put something truly horrid in her tea.”

They watched as the truck jerked and stalled and then started up again, a column of smoke belching from its stacks.

“Here he comes,” said Fyke. “What do you think? Should I show some leg?”

“No,” said Dalton, pulling out a couple of gold bars. They glowed in the sunlight, little slabs of heat and fire. “This is prettier.”

 

 

 

THE
night had come down on Casablanca by the time they reached the center of town. The trucker, a Sephardic Jew who had noted the Israeli flag on the Legacy’s tail, grinned and swore that God was smiling on their enterprises, whatever they were, since not only had they survived a landing on a crumbling highway, but the first person to come along was a Jew, not some Moroccan thug with a cell phone. In exchange for three “formalities”—Dalton’s Crown Royal bag was getting lighter—he happily drove them all the way into the center of Casablanca and then out along the Boulevard Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, circling the roundabout and pulling to a halt about a quarter mile from the Hassan II Mosque. It was, he explained, adopting a solemn, professorial tone, “the largest mosque in the world, capable of accommodating twenty-five thousand worshippers inside and another eighty thousand on the grounds. It was seven epic years in the making, the most awesome wonder of the Islamic world. Whatever you are doing here, I trust that it will meet with the favor of whatever gods you follow. In your case, Mr. Blondie, I suspect he is Thor or perhaps Odin. Good-bye to you all. And know that you have made an old man happy today.”

He gazed down upon them, a wizened, leathery old scoundrel with a silver tooth, grinning hugely, jiggling his little bag with three solid-gold wafers in it—he had just collected thirty thousand dollars. He slammed his door, shoved the gearshift forward. There was a clash of gears, a burst of compressed air from his brakes, and the truck jerked forward, lumbering away into the rush and clamor of the streaming traffic, the smoke from its stacks rising up and spreading out and losing itself in the generalized yellow haze of smog and coal dust and sea-salt mist that hung in the humid air.

Dalton turned and considered the mosque itself, set on its landfill delta projecting like a broad square shelf out into the Atlantic Ocean. The old driver was right, even if as a Sephardic Jew who was in no way a valued fragment of the Casablanca mosaic he was being grimly sardonic.

The building, still open to worshippers at this hour,
was
a timeless Moorish classic, with a slender square minaret three hundred feet tall that to Dalton looked like the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco. Down here at street level, bathed in the glow of floodlights, standing out massively against the twilight sky behind it, a laser beam at the top of the minaret lancing out toward Mecca, the ocean booming in the dark, the immense structure breathed of the divine, of the infinite. It looked eternal, untouchable, serene, impregnable. Dalton knew it wasn’t.

“Okay, boss,” said Levka. “What is plan?”

Fire and blood,
he was thinking.
Fire and blood
.

Dalton gave Fyke and Levka a considered appraisal. Levka, still battered and sporting a very black eye, had gone without shaving since bruises and cuts presented obstacles. Fyke, although he had shaved his beard between Tel Aviv and Prague, now had a three-day growth.

“We need two people inside the mosque. I don’t look Muslim, and Mandy isn’t going to put on a burqa anytime soon . . . Or are you, Mandy?”

“Soon as you do, dear boy,” she said with a sweet smile.

“So you two are it. Don’t try praying, you’ll just blow it. Wander. Look dazzled. Look for any bad guys. And, while you’re at it, see if you can get an idea of how fireproof this place is. They have the boat here for a reason. My guess is, they’re planning to use it to put a couple of incendiary rounds into the mosque—”