Who the fuck could this be?
The man's voice at the other end sounded very far away.
"Hold for the President," he said.
This night had started out pretty much like any other for Norton and Delaney.
They'd lifted off about 2300 hours with Norton in the pilot's seat of the Hind and Delaney riding up front.
Their first order of business was to transit fifty-five miles out in the Caribbean and do a routine navigation exercise around a spit of land called Whiskey Rocks. After this, they linked up with the other choppers and practiced formation night flying and refueling exercises. This completed, they all returned to base. While the other choppers were done for the night, Norton and Delaney took on more fuel, switched positions, and then took off again. They had two more hours of flying time available, and Delaney wanted to get more time behind the wheel. Yet no sooner were they airborne when they got a call from the base telling them to return immediately.
This had never happened before. They turned around, both thinking that the satellite window was closing sooner than anticipated. But as soon as they were down again, they saw the ground crew meander out of Hangar 2 to take care of the chopper. They didn't seem to be in any hurry, indicating a satellite pass-over was not the problem. It had to be something else.
With Delaney agreeing to watch over the care and handling of the Hind, Norton hurried over to the Big Room to find out what was up.
*****
He burst in, like a kid late for class, to find most of the usual suspects were there. Smitz, Rooney, Ricco, and Gillis, of course. The SEALs. The Army pilots. The CIA security people. As Norton was walking in, they were all starting on their way out. Everyone looked grim. No one said a word to him as they passed by.
"Jeesuz, what's happened?" Norton asked Smitz, who was trying to hurry out of the room himself.
"The people running the gunship just fucked up," he said breathlessly. "They sank a Navy C-3 ship. In the Gulf. Two hundred guys went down with it. They also nailed an oil platform, killed everyone on board that too."
Norton just stared back at him, letting the news sink in.
"A Navy spy ship? Damn, that's not good," he mumbled.
"As a result, we just got our orders, right from the top," Smitz told him, each word landing like a hammer blow to Norton's stomach. "We're moving out. Now."
"Now?"
Norton asked incredulously. "You mean like today?"
"No, I mean as in 'now,' " Smitz replied. "
Right now
. The transport planes will be here in ten minutes. We take off in one hour."
Norton shook his head as if to clear it.
"Wait a minute," he began to protest. "We're not ready to go anywhere. We've been barely flying those choppers for a week. No way are we ready for combat. I thought the plan was for thirty days of practice."
"Well, the plan just changed," Smitz said, turning to leave. "Don't ask me why, but when the gunship was shooting up refugees and villages, it just wasn't this high a priority. But now it is. So we're moving out."
He started for the door again, but Norton grabbed him.
"Wait a minute! We haven't even been briefed on the fucking mission yet," he protested. "Not on the operational stuff anyway. How are we supposed to know what the hell to do?"
Smitz pushed his hand away.
"We'll get our final briefing once we're on-site," Smitz said. "Now, I want you to find Delaney, get suited up, and both of you get down to the flight line, ASAP! I've got to go wake the Marines."
With that, Smitz ran out the door.
Norton was suddenly alone in the big empty room with the garish murals. The one by the front door looked particularly eerie at this moment. Norton stared at it, then felt a shudder run through him.
The three jumbo black women with pots on their heads were really laughing at him now.
*****
Ten minutes later, he stumbled into the preflight ready room.
He'd looked all over for Delaney. In Hangar 2, back at their billet, out on the flight line. But his partner had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he was. Nor was Norton in any mood to search any further for him. Let someone else deliver the bad news. At the moment, he needed time to absorb it himself.
He always had nerves before any combat mission—any pilot who denied this was lying. But in every mission Norton had ever flown, he'd made a point of checking, double-checking, and triple-checking every last detail before his feet ever left the ground. This was the reason he'd been to war many times and had come back without so much as a scratch.
But now, he and the others were being rushed into a very dangerous situation, probably the worst thing anyone could do when it came to combat. Despite how well they had all taken to their foreign-built choppers, they were still not fully prepared for this. Far from it. No operational briefing? No idea where they were going exactly? No more than a few live-firing exercises? It was a recipe for disaster.
Yet there was nothing he could do about it. This was the price he had to pay for agreeing to join up with the Spooks. He could only buck it up, do the mission—whatever the hell it was!—and hope for the best. Or die trying.
He opened his locker to find a new combat suit waiting for him. Unlike the threads he'd been wearing since arriving on Seven Ghosts Key, this outfit was part fighter-pilot g-suit, part survival pack. It was desert-camouflaged and festooned with pockets—on the arms, the legs, the chest, Velcro pockets everywhere. The built-in utility belt carried small packets of survival stuff, including food pills, a tiny water-purification kit, morphine candy, bandages, an electronic compass, a mini-phone, a GPS transponder, and so on.
The helmet was also a combination of a pilot's regular bone dome and a standard GI-issue Fritz battle hat. It was covered with camouflage netting similar to that used in Marine Aviation. The boots were waterproof, fireproof, and lined with pyrofoam, which would heat up at the crack of an inside seal. By experience Norton knew how cold and miserable the desert could be. There was a chance these heat-lined doggies might come in the handiest of all. The suit also came with a gun, a standard-issue Colt .45 automatic, with two clips of ammo.
So this would be his wardrobe for the mission. He could only pray that the length of time he'd be wearing it would be measured in hours and not days.
Norton climbed into his suit as quickly as he could. He would search for Delaney once he was suited up, he decided. But just as he was adjusting his helmet's strap, Delaney blew in to the room.
Through the open door behind him, Norton could see the quartet of C-5 transport planes had landed and were already backed up to the flight line, their engines still turning. The unit's Russian-built helicopters were being pushed up the loading ramps and into the cavernous cargo holds. The Marines were moving single file to take their places on the C-5's as well. From all indications, they were less than thirty minutes from departure.
Delaney was already suited up in his futuristic combat suit; somehow he'd beaten Norton to the suit-up room. He was also carrying a small duffel bag with him. He came up to Norton and whacked him on his helmet.
"Ready for the big show, Jazzman?" he asked sarcastically.
"Unless they stop shooting people for desertion," Norton replied.
Delaney laughed at the grim joke.
"We ain't that lucky," he told Norton, adding, "What kind of gun you bringing?"
Norton just shrugged. "The one they just gave me," he replied, taking out the .45 and showing it to Delaney.
Delaney looked at it and just shook his head. "What are you? A girl?" he asked, exasperated.
Delaney tore the gun out of Norton's hand and casually flipped it into the wastebasket.
Then he unzipped the duffel bag, reached in, and came out with an enormous pistol.
"Here, man," he said, handing the massive handgun to Norton. "I got a
real
gun for you."
Norton's wrist almost buckled under the weight of the hand cannon. It was at least twice the size of the .45, with a long thick clip sticking out of the handle. The bullets in this clip looked like tiny artillery shells. The pistol itself was big and black and shiny. A true monster.
"What the hell kind of gun is this?"
"Beats me," Delaney said, taking out his own huge pistol and examining it. "I got them from the same guy who's been giving us the beer. He's also the armorer here. He gave one to Smitz too."
"Smitz? What's he need one for?"
Delaney checked his weapon's ammo clip. "He's going with us, I guess," he said simply.
This was news to Norton.
"Now if we get into a situation where we have to use pistols," Delaney was saying, holding the huge gun out in front of him, "what would you rather have? A GI peashooter. Or this baby?"
Norton just looked at his gun, then at Delaney, and then back at his gun. His partner was making sense.
"This one, for sure," Norton replied.
"Atta boy!" Delaney said, slapping him on the back. "Believe me, these things will come in handy. You'll see."
With that, Norton put the massive weapon in his bag, and together they walked out to the waiting C-5's.
*****
In a large, smoky, windowless room two thousand miles west of the Florida Straits, seven men were sitting around a table, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
They were all in their late sixties. Those not bald had gray or white hair—overgrown, to the shoulders in a few cases. They were all wearing Western-style shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots. And even though the room was dimly lit, they were all wearing sunglasses.
"This is a very big gamble," one man said. "There are so many things that could go wrong now."
"It has to be done," a second man said. "We knew we'd have to deal with this situation eventually. No one else was doing anything about it."
"It
was
left up to us to take some action," a third man said. "It shouldn't have come to this, but it did."
More cigarettes were lit and more coffee poured. The room became even smokier.
"But we're walking such a thin line here," the first man said. "Our people at Langley agree; what few we have left. Our lines of communications could be discovered. Just what the hell we've been doing here all these years could be revealed. That would be a disaster."
"Doing nothing about this situation would be a disaster too," a fourth voice said. "Our reason for being is not just to sit here and do nothing. Our reason for being is to act as a last resort. That's what we've done in this case. That's what we had to do."
"Personally, I think we should have acted long before they sank the
LaSallette
," a fifth man added.
This opinion was seconded by the sixth and seventh men present. The first man just shook his head and finally shrugged.
"OK, I just hope these guys can pull it off—it's such a high-wire act," he said. "They're professional military men and 1 just hate pulling their strings like they are puppets. They haven't got the faintest idea what is really happening and that's just not right."
"It's better that they don't know," the second man said. ''We agreed on that long ago. Just let them fly the mission. We'll give them what we can along the way. We'll have our friend look in on them from time to time. Who knows? They might just get lucky and things will work out our way."
There was almost a laugh around the table.
"And in thirty-five years, just how many times have we got lucky?" someone asked.
"Just about every time," the second man said. "I think."
The palace was called Qom-el-Zarz.
It was located in a very unusual part of the world. Just fifty miles northeast of Baghdad, it straddled the border of Iraq and Iran, tucked away in the very rugged foothills of the Suhr-bal. This area was so barren and desolate, at one time NASA had considered using it as a training ground for U.S. astronauts heading for the moon. In many ways, it did look otherworldly.
The palace was built into the side of a 3500-foot mountain. It looked like a cross between a modern-day fortress and something from the pages of
Arabian
Nights
. Though it had been seen by very few eyes, its architecture was among the most beautiful in the Middle East. It featured four minarets, each one housing a Rapier surface-to-air-missile platform. Its main building was a pale-blue domed affair, looking not unlike a mosque, ringed with satellite dishes and Bofors antiaircraft guns. It was surrounded on all sides by high, thick walls. Their parapets were patrolled day and night by heavily armed mercenaries.
A dozen smaller buildings were scattered around the palace compound itself, which in turn was surrounded by another heavily guarded wall. One building housed a vast collection of rare automobiles. Deusenbergs, Bugattis, Mercers, a half-dozen Lamborghinis, several special-order Jaguars—there were thirty-five of them in all, this despite the fact that only one road led in and out of the palace and it was poorly paved at best.
Another building contained an immense art collection. Rembrandts, Reubens, Titians, Monets, Renoirs. Some sculptures. Some modern pieces. All of the artwork was priceless. Most of it was stolen.
The second-largest structure in the compound was a six-story, twenty-two-room affair located near the outer southern wall. It resembled a five-star hotel, which in some respects it was. It featured great views of the snowcapped Rabat Mountains to the east or the equally pleasing Divila River to the west. Some of the most notorious figures of the last half of the 20th century had come to this place to drop out of sight. Carlos the Jackal had stayed here. So had Idi Amin, Abou Abbas, Carl Letiner of the Cali Cartel, and various members of Hamas, the IRA, and the Red Brigades. Lesser-known art forgers, jewel thieves, wealthy billionaires who'd faked their deaths, and high-up government officials who'd felt the need to disappear—many of them had also spent time as guests in the "Hotel."
It was said that exactly one half of the Qom-el-Zarz palace sat in Iraq, and the other half in Iran. There was no real proof of this; the border here was hazy at best. But if true, neither Iran or Iraq ever tried to lay claim to the place. This was out of respect for—and fear of—the person who lived here.
His name was Azu-mulla el-Zim, more simply known as "Zim." He was an odd, mysterious figure, weighing nearly four hundred pounds, with a scraggly beard and Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses. He was a modern-day sultan of sorts, rich beyond dreams. He had no friends, but no enemies either, as they said in the Middle East. And he was a true paradox. He was a sadist, ruthless in many ways, but also a connoisseur of great art. He was responsible for the deaths of countless innocents over the years, yet tears never failed to come to his eyes when listening to a Wagner opera. His stolen art collection was among the largest in the world, yet he'd made many substantial if secret contributions to the Louvre Fund over the years.
Zim began life as a smuggler at the age of ten, swallowing packets of opium for Syrian drug dealers and then walking across the border into Lebanon to sell them on the other side. As he grew older, he went into dealing arms, heroin, and much later, black-market computer chips. He'd amassed a great fortune simply by eliminating anyone he saw as a competitor. He'd murdered dozens of people himself, and had paid to have hundreds more killed. He read
The Wall Street
Journal
, the
Financial Times of London
, and at least a dozen other financial sheets cover-to-cover every day, and held huge interests in every large world market. Yet very few people in the West knew he even existed.
His wealth was estimated at several billion. But with Zim, it was not really about money. It was about control, power, and the love of playing two sides against one another. He was ruthless, a misogynist, a charming liar. He lived a fabulous life. He owned many things. He owned many people.
He also owned the AC-130 ArcLight gunship.
*****
Just how Zim had come to possess the special operations plane was a deep mystery to those who knew him.
Some believed Zim had "willed" the airplane to land near his compound the night it disappeared. Others claimed he had somehow interfered with the plane's navigational system and forced it down that way. Still others said he'd managed to get into the dreams of the pilots flying the plane and had introduced a hypnotic suggestion forcing them to land that night. Another tale said he'd secretly paid off the crew weeks before, and that they came willingly.
But however he'd come to own it, he considered it more than just another weapon or another piece of art.
In many ways, it was his most prized possession.
On this day, Zim was sitting in his main chamber, perched upon exactly one hundred large silk pillows, reading the latest edition of
Le Monde
.
He was of indeterminate age; though he looked to be in his mid-fifties, it was thought he was at least twenty years older. His usual attire was a simple silk gown, sandals, and a kufi. His beard was somewhat gray, his skin tanned on his face and hands, but nowhere else. When he spoke English, he did so with a pronounced lisp.
He was surrounded, as always, by a dozen girls, most of them from Japan, most of them barely in their teens. A pot of calming tea was steaming on a table nearby. The remains of some small biscuits littered the tea tray. The room was filled with the stench of plum incense. A bank of computer screens glowed at one end of the room. They were filled with the latest financial information from Zurich, Paris, London, New York.
Zim clapped his hands, and one of the young Japanese girls crawled up the hill of pillows and knelt before him. He raised his right eyebrow a bit—the girl knew what this meant right away. She reached up, took off his thick-rimmed glasses, wiped a speck of dust from the right lens, and returned them to Zim's nose. Then she slipped back down to the floor.
Zim was reading a piece on the fluctuating uranium market, and was thinking about organizing a coup in the Ivory Coast that would bring him closer to the uranium fields at Daloa, when the door at the far end of his chamber opened.
Two heavily armed men stepped in. Dressed all in black, they bowed and made way for a third person. This man came in on his knees, inching forward a little bit at a time. He was one of Zim's legion of flunkies, glorified servants who ran errands and carried messages for him from the various parts of his palace. They were all required to enter into his presence this way.
The man had made it about fifteen feet inside the room when Zim finally shouted at him: "OK, get up, you ass!"
The man immediately obeyed and began tiptoeing across the room toward the mountain of pillows. The Japanese girls made way for him as, with trembling hand, he proffered a note on a silver tray up to Zim.
On a signal from Zim, one girl took the note, climbed up the pillows, and presented it to him with a long deep bow.
Zim put his magazine aside, adjusted his thick glasses, and opened the note.
A hush came over the room. This was not considered pleasant news, and the man who had delivered it was in desperate fear of his life at the moment. It was not unknown for Zim to kill the messenger when the news was bad.
Zim read the note silently. He seemed confused at first—again not a good sign.
"Who sent this?" he asked.
The man at the base of the pillows quavered a bit.
"Your guest in Room Six," he replied with a shaky voice. "He's been on the phone all night."
Zim considered this, then reread the note.
"Is he being intentionally vague?" he asked the messenger.
"I have no idea, sir," the man replied, his voice equal parts terror and confusion. "Shall I go back and ask him?"
Zim shook his head. "No, I think I know what he means."
He crumpled the note and threw it down on the mountain of pillows. Then he put his hand to his chin in thought.
"Tell Major Qank to activate the Third Ring," he told the messenger. "He is to report to me anything unusual that those in the Ring might see. Understand?"
"I do," the man replied, backing up slowly. If he could just get out of the door alive, it would be a major victory.
"And one more thing," Zim called after him. "Thank my guest in Room 6."
"I will, sir," the man said, disappearing back out the door.
Once he was gone, Zim yawned, stretched his enormous body, and then put his head on a pillow and went to sleep. This was a normal ritual for him at about 9 A.M. every day.
Only when they heard him snoring did one of the Japanese girls retrieve the crumpled-up note and carry it over to the others who were waiting in the corner.
Quietly, they opened it and read it.
It contained only two words:
They're coming.
*****
Major Ali Bus Qank was not really a major. Nor was he a military officer of any kind.
He was, however, the man in charge of Zim's intelligence operation, and for this Zim had conferred the rank of "major" upon him arbitrarily. For all the work Qank wound up doing, he secretly believed he deserved to be given at least the
faux
rank of colonel—yet he would never tell Zim this.
Qank was a Syrian. He worked out of an office located beneath the west wall of Zim's inner sanctum. From there Qank and a team of four collected intelligence from a variety of sources—newspapers, TV broadcasts, the Internet—as well as from the network of informants Zim had in place around the world.
This network was broken down into sectors known as Rings. Zim had organized the network himself many years before, and it was brilliant in its simplicity. The Third Ring was made up of freelance spies who had access to all airports, both commercial and military, as well as all major shipping ports stretching across southern Europe to the Middle East. Through simple observation, intercepted radio traffic, and purloined passage logs, the Third Ring knew just about every airplane and surface vessel, military or not, that moved from America through Europe to the Middle East.
Of the entire network, the Third Ring was the most reliable at revealing the American military's objectives. Like Zim, Qank knew some things about the Americans. First, they always entered military action reluctantly. Yet when they made their minds up to act, they usually acted quickly.
Too
quickly, most times, especially when it came to secret operations.
That was what Qank knew Zim was now anticipating. The sinking of the USS
LaSallette
had been a big mistake. But mistakes happen. The destruction of the Qak-Six oil rig had been a job, paid for by a rival oil consortium, just one of dozens Zim had contracted for the gunship in the past year and a half. That the star-crossed American ship had happened upon the scene was something that could not have been prevented. And actually, there had been some luck in this. Because the
LaSallette
was a spy ship, there had been nothing heard about its sinking—not in the media, not in the back channels. Not yet anyway. Qank knew the Americans would want to keep quiet for now about the ship's sinking, rather than admit what it was up to at the time of its demise.
But Qank also knew the Americans could not let the sinking go unpunished. Refugee camps, food convoys, Bosnian innocents—their liquidation had registered little on America's moral radar. But the sinking of the
LaSallette
had changed that. Some of their own had been killed—by a weapon they had lost control of many years before. And now the Americans were coming to get that weapon back. Finally.
Qank and Zim had discussed this eventuality before, of course. In their scenario, they expected at least a thousand American troops, probably special forces of some kind, to transit to the Persian Gulf area, probably offloading in Bahrain or in the United Arab Emigrates, but definitely not in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. The prepositioning of this force would likely be accompanied by the appearance of an aircraft carrier or two moving into the upper Gulf area. Then all U.S. forces in the area would be put on alert—and then the Americans would strike.
The only question was, when?
That was where the Third Ring came in. If anyone could identify the means of transport and the timetable of the oncoming American force, the freelance spies in the Third Ring could.
So Qank worked his secure phones for the rest of this day and far into the night. Giving orders to his informants and getting back their reports, he spoke to more than 150 individuals in eighteen hours. If a thousand special troops were moving to the Persian Gulf area by air, Zim's spies would have detected a small parade of C-5 or C-17 cargo planes making their way across the Atlantic. These planes might land at Rota, Spain, or on Sardinia. (Nonstop transits were not common, if only to preserve the crews and prevent suspicion.) If such a force was moving by ship, the spies would likely see a fast-assault vessel or even a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier suddenly make an appearance in their region.