General Gough was in the command truck, with General Bucheery. It looked the same as the others, but the sides and top were fiberglass, not metal, so the comm gear would work without telltale antennas. He’d said a few dry words at the midnight briefing, about how essential it was to work together. Bucheery had praised the interrogation team that had developed the information on which the morning’s raid was based. Parts of his remarks were in Arabic, about how unpleasant tasks had sometimes to be performed, to save life and maintain order.
She didn’t like to think about what that meant. She was afraid the “unpleasant task” had involved the woman in Shawki’s house. The NCIS couldn’t get physical, but the host agencies they worked with were not always so concerned with the rules. The general went on to say that by “intense interrogation”—her mind flinched away again — of Shawki’s wife, and working with what Aisha had caught on the phone, the SIS had taken one Rahimullah bin Jun’ad into custody.
Bucheery said bin Jun’ad, a would-be mullah with ties to radical groups in Egypt and Afghanistan, had been “persuaded” to give up the location of the stolen explosives, and other information about a plot to attack a United States installation in Bahrain. Bin Jun’ad had confessed to providing local recruits, but the actual leader was a shadowy figure he knew only as the Doctor. The Doctor was the primary goal of today’s raid, along, of course, with the explosives and any weapons the group had managed to assemble or import.
Someone in the truck farted. The smell lay close and rank. She hated the idea of having to breathe in the actual molecules that had been in someone’s lower gut a moment before…. She tilted her wrist again.
0420.
A few minutes later the word must have come through, because the back doors opened and the crush lessened as men jumped out. Quietly. No one spoke. She dropped to the dew-damp asphalt with them. Took position in line, and began jogging down the street, deeper into the ancient reticulation of the old city. No streetlights, just stars, straight up, a narrow band of them between the tops of two- and three-story buildings that lined the street with no setback whatsoever, in fact many with the upper floors levered out over the frontages till they almost met. The muted crackle of a radio ahead, and the scuff of boots. The distant sound of a television, on very early.
Sweating under the heavy vest, with someone treading on her heels, she took deep breaths, trying to steady the accelerating hammer of her pulse. Tipping her wrist back, glancing down at the luminescent hands.
0425.
Dan woke suddenly in pitch darkness. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. Where was the little red light that marked the phone, the faintly illuminated circle of the closed porthole. Then he remembered. He was in the in-port stateroom, they were working on the toilet in his at-sea cabin, and he’d shifted down here. He succeeded at last in resolving the direction of the bathroom. Then groped his way back to the too-short bed, wadded the pillow, lay back.
And stared into the darkness.
Blair had called from the States. A one-minute call from an army base before taking off for the funerals. She didn’t sound as if she missed him. Didn’t sound as if she was thinking about him at all, as if calling him was just another thing she had to get done. He replayed the last conversation they’d had. Then the days before it. Almost all of it, yeah, nice. For a while they’d recaptured what had brought them together in the beginning.
But the navy was tough on marriages. He could count on the fingers of one hand the classmates who were still with their June Week brides. Damn few … Claudia was having trouble, too … and now he was starting to hear the same lyrics from Blair. A house, settling down, building something. What, like she was building a career in the executive branch? Compared with politics, the navy was as secure a career as the post office. At least, since he’d made O-5, he was guaranteed retirement, unless he really and truly screwed the pooch. Which he’d almost done a couple of times already…. His thoughts spun on, a perpetual motion machine whirring in the dark.
He worried again about their exposed position, but not with the same intensity as when they’d first shifted out. What had the Senior called it? “Sitting here with our thumb up our ass.” But nothing had happened. He wondered if he should knock off the boat patrols. It soaked up a lot of man-hours. At least Schaad had looked at the quick reaction team procedures again, and they’d streamlined the procedures for getting weapons and ammo on deck. The trouble was, the easier you made that sort of material to get to, the fewer safeguards you had against theft and misuse. They were both security issues, but heightening one meant lessening the other.
