Countdown to Mecca (28 page)

But Anastasia wanted to talk about it, and so, maybe for the first time in his life, certainly for the first time since the accident, he wanted to listen.

“My father was in the closet when they got married,” she whispered. “They were young. Well, I don't know. Maybe he didn't know. He claims he didn't know. My mother certainly didn't. I think maybe he wanted just to conform, but it's impossible to read someone else's mind, you know? Especially on something like that. But one day my mom came home and there he was … with someone else. It was a bad way to find out—a big shock. I was in the other room, a year and a half old. It was chaos. I didn't remember a thing, except … except my father was not there. I grew up without a papa, yet I still had one. In all the dirty whispers and all the pointed fingers, I still had one.”

Sammy held her tighter.
What was worse?
he wondered. Growing up with an abusive father, or with an absent father and abusive neighbors?

“It wasn't like today,” Anastasia continued as if it were a fairy tale. “There was still a stigma, and—and gays weren't considered good parents. That's nonsense, but that's what people said. But I didn't blame the whisperers and pointers. I blamed him. I blamed my dad.” She stopped and took a long breath. “We didn't talk about him. I tried a few times. But my mother … her heart was closed. Years go by and I moved out to L.A. I was going to be a model and an actress. But too short here, too round there, blah-blah-blah. And your eyes … my God, what is it with your eyes?”

Anastasia gave a small, throaty laugh, which made Sammy feel better than he had since Jack and Doc had left.

“Then one day I get a phone call. It's him. In San Francisco. Of course, San Francisco. We met for coffee. We tried to patch things up, but I was too hurt. In his absence I let him hurt me. It was all my fault, you see? In my mind, he left because of me. And I cursed him for that fantasy.”

Sammy felt a single tear reach his forehead. He was going to wipe it off for her, but then she continued.

“I couldn't get over the hurt I had built up. I couldn't move on. I was embracing my imagined hurt so I couldn't hold him. I had nursed the hurt so long I thought it was a better friend than he could ever be. He was a bartender in a gay club here. Clich
é
, right? But that wasn't the only one. I never visited … too busy, right? But then, two years later, a hospital calls. They say, ‘Your dad's dying.' AIDS. AIDS! Of course.”

He felt more tears, but her soft voice continued, telling him it was more important that he listen than console. “That is why I came to San Francisco. It wasn't that the modeling dried up. It was because I wanted to look after him. I could have stayed in L.A., but no. I couldn't leave him the way he left me. Not anymore.” She was silent for a few moments, and he felt the tears stop. “I nursed him the way I had foolishly nursed my pain. It wasn't enough. He died within a month. It was only afterward that I found out he didn't get the drugs. He didn't want them. After all he had done to me, he didn't want to linger.…” She let go of Sammy. He sat up and looked into her wet eyes that were now shining like beacons. “You see?” she asked, her voice cracking. “You see what blaming your father does?” Sammy drew her to him, holding her more firmly, yet more tenderly than he ever had before. He wanted to protect this woman for eternity. He wanted to make her happy and safe more than he would ever want to best his brother. She had heard the word “Firebird.” It had tried to destroy her. He would stand up to it and bring it down if he had to tear off every one of its fiery feathers with his teeth!

Samuel Michaels's eyes snapped open. He found himself staring at the computer screen, but dancing in his mind's eye was a pattern from an exercise he'd done for a class way back in the Marines … a byte dump … a website sign-in … a you-build-it template at an Internet provider creating a simple webpage. He stared at it now. All it consisted of was a template for a plumbing business.…

“Oh, my Lord,” Sammy breathed. He took Ana's shoulders and kissed her more passionately than he ever had anyone in his life. Then he stabbed at the computer keyboard to access the plumbing site's activity log. Ana looked up at his face, saw his energized expression, and turned her own head to see what he was doing.

The webpage had first been set up over a year before. There were multiple log-ins, but mostly from five separate providers. Sammy checked the sign-in data to see where they were located. Two were definitely local, and Sammy guessed they were providers whom Morton used to connect to the web. The others were from overseas. From the timing of some of the sign-ons, he guessed that they were being done by at least three different people, not simply one person traveling across the globe.

Now that he had found one website provider, he went back to the various hexadecimal dumps and looked for others. There, he found another website builder, this one from a place in Spain called Ariba!Go.com. Once more he found a bare-bones website, but this one's home page had something on it: a link to Google Maps. At first glance, there appeared to be nothing there—the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia.

Sammy switched to the satellite view and zoomed in. A long strip of concrete sat in the desert, next to a building and a road. The place looked abandoned. There was a date under the link. It was from a month before. It didn't relate to the satellite image, which was marked as having been taken nearly a full year prior to that.

Once again, Sammy found a log of activity. The log-ins were from the same ISPs he'd found earlier. This site also kept backups of pages that had been worked on. Sammy went through the list. The oldest was the docking time for an Indonesia-registered ship in Saudi Arabia three months before. Sammy made a note of it to research later and scrolled on. There was another shipment, and a passenger plane schedule. Then a page with only three words buried in the description of available services: “Firebird alt feint.”

“Jesus!” Sammy exclaimed, rousing Ric and Miwa. “It's a double blind!”

 

38

Outside Yanbu' al Bahr, Saudi Arabia

Jack's phone buzzed as Doc found the eleventh body in the pit. He looked at Doc, who glanced up from a dirt-covered corpse with slit eyes and a clenched jaw. The smell was not pleasant. Jimmy had already tied part of his headscarf over his nose.

Jack glanced at the smartphone screen. It was from Brooks's event coordinator. “Yes?” he said quietly.

“Mr. Hatfield.”

“Yes.”

“The general wishes to meet you for dinner at his hotel this evening,” said Peter Andrews. “I will text you the exact time and address. Will that be satisfactory?”

“Yes,” Jack said for the third time. “Thank you. Tell the general I look forward to talking with him.”

“I will—” Andrews started, but Jack had already ended the call. He slipped the device back in his pocket as he looked at Doc.

“Rigor not completely set in,” the old soldier intoned. “But they didn't die from natural causes.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Jack said tightly. He looked at the sun. “So they were recently killed. And now we have a deadline. First the prince, then the general.”

Doc nodded. “Which means we better find who killed them fast.”

Jack nodded in return, waved Jimmy over, and the three began shoveling the dirt back over the dead men. Though the temperature was still in the low eighties, Jack's hands were cold. The back of his neck froze and knotted. Rising when he was done, he felt every muscle stiffen. His legs trembled as he walked to the car.

“We go now?” Jimmy asked as he opened the driver's side door. “We get help?” The look on Jack and Doc's faces gave him his answer. His own expression changed to one of understanding. If any justice was to be found in this godforsaken place, it would be found by them.

Incongruously, Jimmy smiled like a panther spotting his prey. “We go on, then,” he said, starting the car. “To the Air Force base.”

Jimmy piloted the car beyond the village of the dead. On the way, they grimly went over what they knew and what they feared.

“Those men helped Brooks's people make a bomb,” Jack said. “Then, when the last pieces came in—the switches—they were killed.”

Doc nodded once, gravely.

“You think the cops will find the bodies at the village?” Jimmy pressed.

“Probably not,” Doc said. “Who will tell them? And the bodies will be gone in a few days. Scavengers'll pick them apart.”

“Under the sand?”

“It was a shallow grave. Wind will blow it off. That's why we use rocks in the field, not—not like this. I'm sure they did it on purpose.”

Jack considered making an anonymous call to the Saudi authorities, but quickly realized there was no sense in taking that risk. Even if the local police recorded what they found, it was likely to be suppressed.

“You're thinking,” Doc noted.

“Yeah. So their killers can't be far,” Jack decided. “No way they'd set the workers' village miles from the base.”

Sure enough, within minutes, the car reached a large platform, covered with sand but perfectly flat, spread out by the side of the road. Jimmy quickly turned, and they found themselves at the top of a hill. Jimmy stopped the car behind the nearest dune, then the three scurried out to lay at the crest of an overlooking bluff.

Doc used the digicam. Jack used his smartphone's camera zoom. Jimmy just used his dark eyes to seemingly see for miles. All of them saw a trio of small buildings set in a little cleft between two hills, about five hundred yards below them. The largest of the three structures looked like a stretched one-car garage—maybe four or five car lengths long and barely much wider than one. It had had an overhead door at its face, and another door near the corner at the side, but was otherwise without openings.

One of the smaller buildings looked like a cottage, albeit one that might have only two rooms; the other was bunker-like, short and squat. They seemed to be made from concrete, though from this distance, even with the camera at full zoom, it was difficult to tell.

The small complex was surrounded by razor wire and two very large fences. Two heavily armed men patrolled the perimeter. The guns were HK G36s, easily recognized because of the launcher below the barrel. They were good guns, but definitely not Saudi-issue. The Saudi regular forces were mostly armed with Steyr AUGs; some elite forces used M16 and AR15 variants.

“Why would they need the grenade launchers?” Jack asked softly.

“Slow down an attack,” muttered Doc, eye still glued to the soft rubber eyepiece of the digicam. “Blow stuff up. The usual reasons.”

“Maybe projectile blow up vehicle,” offered Jimmy.

There were two minivans in the parking lot, along with a pair of white pickup trucks. And a cargo container.

“There are no guards at the back,” Jack realized. But the gate there was wide open, leading to a driveway that connected to a long runway etched out of the sand. Pointed toward the horizon was a small plane.

“Man moving,” said Jimmy, pointing at a person leaving the building.

Doc zoomed in on the man. “Not Saudi.”

“Westerner?” Jack asked.

Doc shook his head. “From the facial structure and light hair, I'd say Eastern European.”

“Russian?”

“Maybe. The two guards as well.”

Jimmy tapped Jack quickly on the arm. “He going to truck.”

They watched intently as the man started the truck's engine and the vehicle started lurching toward the exit driveway, and the plane. The hair on all three men's necks stood up. It was as if all had been hit by the same thought at the same time.

“Can you see what the truck is carrying?” Jack asked. As he was speaking he used every pixel his smartphone's zoom had. He thanked the Lord that the truck was an older one, with just a canvas cover that was rolled up at the back.

They could all see a crate there, but there was no way Jack could discern the number from this distance.

“Anything?” he asked Doc intently.

By all rights, the old soldier's vision should have weakened by now, but somehow it had only gotten stronger. Even so, even he couldn't make out anything specific on the crate.

“No,” Doc said, thumbing the digicam's zoom repeatedly, hoping against hope that somehow he had missed its optimum level.

Both men broke from staring at the back of the truck when they heard the trunk of their own car open. They looked over to see Jimmy taking an old-fashioned, nautical, telescoping spyglass out of the compartment. He ran back, and plopped down between them.

“Gift from SEALs,” Jimmy grunted. As he pulled the object out to its longest setting, Jack saw the inscription on the side.
To ol' Eagle Eye, from a Grateful Crew
. Jimmy used it to target the back of the truck as it bounced toward the plane.

Jack held his breath, but he was already certain that it was the container they had been looking for. What else could it be? What else was worth killing all those buried men for?

“No numbers,” Jimmy said. “Too bouncy. But crate from same ship.
Flower of Asia,
yes?”

“Christ Almighty!” Jack hissed. “They have the bomb, they covered their tracks, now they'll destroy the base and fly it out. What are we going to do?”

“Two Glocks against G36's?” Doc grunted. “Close to suicide.”

“Close?” Jack snapped back. “But if we don't try, maybe millions will be…!”

Jimmy decided the matter for them. Both men's heads snapped right as they heard the throaty roar of the car. They ran toward it, seeing Jimmy's smiling face in the driver's window.

“Enough talk!” he cried as they leaped in and the car vaulted over the hill.

 

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