Now Mohammed al Darkur"s eyebrows rose. "My information is that he arrived in Dubai this morning. I a.s.sumed I would help you translate any conversations he has at his safe house."
Chavez looked to Caruso and Ryan. Their pa.s.sive monitoring devices were dormant in the air ducts of the Rehan compound. If their target was here in Dubai, then they needed to return to the Kempinski and begin the surveillance.
Ding nodded slowly. "We have translators. My team will know it as soon as Rehan gets to his place."
Al Darkur seemed satisfied by this, and soon Chavez left the apartment with Caruso and Ryan.
In front of the elevators, Jack said, "If Rehan is here, we could already have missed something important."
Chavez said, "Yeah. You guys hustle back to the bungalow and get on it. I need to head over to the airport and meet the plane to pick up the equipment, but first I"m going to get Embling away from the major and debrief him thoroughly. I"ll see you guys back at the place in a few hours."
Chavez spent three hours in discussions in the 108th-floor flat. The first hour was exclusively in a room with Nigel Embling. The British expat spent the vast majority of that time going over everything he had learned about Mohammed al Darkur in the past month and a half. Embling"s other contacts within the PDF had convinced him that neither the 7th Battalion of the Special Services Group, called the Zarrar commandos, with whom al Darkur was aligned, nor the Joint Intelligence Bureau, to which al Darkur had been a.s.signed in the ISI, was overrun or heavily influenced by Islamist radicals, as were many sectors of the PDF. Further, al Darkur"s own actions leading an SSG unit against terrorist groups in the Swat Valley and Chitral had won him commendations that would have made him a target of the "beards" in the PDF.
Last, Embling a.s.sured Ding Chavez that he himself had been in the room when Sam Driscoll insisted on going along on the Miran Shah operation. Major al Darkur had been against the American"s partic.i.p.ation, and had only reluctantly allowed him to go.
It took the full hour, but finally Chavez was convinced. He spent two more hours talking to al Darkur about the operation on which Sam disappeared, and he quizzed him on his staff and the contacts he claimed to be shaking down to get information on the missing American"s whereabouts. Finally, sometime around noon, Chavez left the men in their apartment and headed to the airport to pick up the sniper rifle and other gear sent in on the Gulfstream.
Ryan and Caruso returned to their bungalow at the Kempinski Hotel & Residences and activated their pa.s.sive surveillance equipment across the water, and all three cameras came to life. There was definite activity in the house, though at first none of their cameras revealed Rehan to be present. While they waited and watched the feeds from the cameras and listened to various men speaking Urdu stroll through the entry hall and great room, they called Rick Bell. It was just past two a.m. in Maryland, but Rick promised that he, a technical a.n.a.lyst, and an Urdu-speaking translator would be on station at Hendley a.s.sociates within forty-five minutes. Ryan and Caruso recorded all received image and audio captures until then, and they fed them on for a.n.a.lysis.
It was after eleven a.m. Dubai time, some two hours after Dom and Jack arrived back at the bungalow, when a flurry of excitement appeared to take over the guard force in the house. Men tightened their ties and took up positions in the corners of the rooms, more men appeared through the front door carrying luggage, and finally a big man with a trim beard came through the front door. One by one he greeted all the guards standing there with a kiss on the cheek and a handshake, and then he and another man, who seemed to be a high-level officer, entered the great room. The men were deep in conversation.
Caruso said, "The big guy is Rehan. Looks about the same as he did in Cairo back in September."
"I"ll e-mail Bell and let him know you have confirmed Rehan."
"I should have shot that f.u.c.ker back then."
Ryan thought that over. His concerns about Sam in Waziristan and Clark in Europe were eating him up, and he knew it was even worse for his cousin. A year earlier, Dominic"s twin brother had been killed in a Campus operation in Libya. The thought of losing two more operators must have weighed extra-heavy on Caruso.
"We"re going to get Sam back, Dom."
Dominic nodded distractedly as he watched the feed.
"And Clark will either fix his own situation, or he"ll hang out until my dad takes office, and Dad will look after him."
"There"s going to be a lot of pressure on your dad not to get involved."
Jack sniffed. "Dad would take a bullet in the chest for John Clark. A few bleeding-heart congressmen aren"t going to stop him."
Dom chuckled, and they discussed it no further.
Soon Dominic called Ryan over from where he had been sitting in the bedroom, peering through the spotting scope at Rehan"s safe house. "Hey. Looks like everyone is heading back out."
"Busy f.u.c.ker, isn"t he?" Ryan said as he hustled back in to watch on the monitor.
Rehan had taken off the suit coat he was wearing, and now he was clad in a simple white shirt and black suit pants. He and the man who was beginning to look like his second-in-command were standing back in the hall with a group of about eight men, most of the guard force that had come with them from Pakistan, as well as a couple of faces Ryan recognized as being regulars at the house.
The audio was good, Dominic and Ryan could hear every word, but neither man spoke Urdu, so they would have to wait for the translator in West Odenton, Maryland, to translate the conversation in order to put some context to the scene.
Seconds later, Rehan and an entourage left through the front door.
"Show"s over for now, I guess," said Dom. "I"m going to make a sandwich."
Twenty minutes after Domingo Chavez left Embling and al Darkur"s flat, there was a knock at the door. The Pakistani major was on the phone with his staff in Peshawar, so Embling went to answer it. He knew there was security in the building that would not allow anyone off on this floor of private residences who did not have permission from one of the occupants, so he was not concerned about his security. As he looked through the peephole he saw a waiter in a white tuxedo jacket holding a wine bucket full of ice and a bottle of Champagne.
"May I help you?" he asked through the door. Then he mumbled to himself, "By taking that lovely bottle of Dom Perignon off your hands?"
"Compliments of property management, sir. Welcome to Dubai."
Embling smiled, opened the door, and then he saw the other men rushing up the hallway. He made to slam the door shut, but the waiter had flung his wine bucket aside, drawn a Steyr automatic pistol, and leveled it at Nigel Embling"s forehead.
Embling did not move.
From around the side of the doorway, hidden from sight from the peephole, General Riaz Rehan of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous appeared. He carried a small automatic pistol himself.
"Indeed, Englishman," he said. "Welcome to Dubai."
Nine other men burst into the apartment, past Nigel, with handguns held high.
Caruso had finished his sandwich, and he and Ryan were in the process of powering down the bug-bot surveillance devices in order to save battery power. They would wait until evening to fire them up again, hoping that Rehan would be back by then.
The sat phone on the table rang, and Caruso answered it.
"Yeah?"
"Dom? It"s Bell."
"What"s up, Rick?"
"We"ve got a problem. When we got into the office, we started at the beginning of your transmission of the audio, so we"ve been about fifteen minutes behind on the translations."
"Not a problem. Rehan took off a little while ago so we are powering down the-"
"There is a problem. We just translated what he said before he walked out the door."
Domingo Chavez was stuck in traffic just a quarter-mile from the exit to the airport. On his way back from picking up his sniper rifle and ammo from the Hendley a.s.sociates Gulfstream, he got caught behind a bad traffic accident on the Business Bay Bridge, and now he sat in the BMW, very glad at the moment that the air conditioner was saving him from the brutal heat, because it looked like he"d be going nowhere soon.
In front of him, some three miles away, he could see the Burj Khalifa reach up into the sky. On the other side of that, all the way over at the coast, was Palm Jumeirah, his destination.
Just then his mobile rang. "Go for Ding," he said.
It was Ryan, his voice rushed and intense. "Rehan knows Embling and al Darkur are at Burj Khalifa! He"s headed there now with a crew of goons."
"s.h.i.t! Call Nigel."
"I did. No answer. Tried the landline to his place, too. n.o.body picked up."
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h!" Chavez said. "Get over there as fast as possible. I"m stuck in gridlock."
"We"re moving, but it will be twenty minutes, at least."
"Just haul a.s.s, kid! They are our only link to Sam! We can"t lose them!"
"I know!"
In the BMW just west of Business Bay Bridge, Domingo Chavez slammed his hands into the steering wheel in frustration. "Dammit!"
Both Mohammed al Darkur and Nigel Embling had been secured with plastic restraints, their hands behind their backs, their ankles zip-tied together. Rehan had ordered his men to stand the men up against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room with their backs against the gla.s.s. General Rehan sat in front of them on the long couch, his legs crossed and his arms back over the cushions. He was a man in his element, comfortable here with prisoners at his mercy.
Rehan"s men-Colonel Khan and an eight-strong security force-stood around the room. Another sentry remained outside in the hallway. They each carried a pistol of their own choosing-Steyrs and SIGs and CZs were represented in the force, and Rehan and Khan both carried Berettas in shoulder holsters.
If Nigel Embling still harbored any faint shred of doubt as to the trustworthiness of ISI Major Mohammed al Darkur, that doubt was dispelled. Rehan"s men bashed al Darkur"s face into the gla.s.s window multiple times, and the thirty-five-year-old Pakistani shrieked curses at his elder countryman.
Nigel did not need forty years of in-country experience in Pakistan to recognize that these two Pakistanis did not care for each other.
Al Darkur shouted at Rehan. He spoke in English. "What did you do with the American in Miran Shah?"
The calm general smiled and answered in English. "I met with the man personally. He did not have much to say. I ordered him tortured for information about your plans. I suppose your future plans are not as important to me now as they were when I gave that order, seeing how you now have no future."
Al Darkur kept his chin high. "Others are on to you. We know you are working with the coup organizers, we know you have trained a foreign force at the Haqqani camp near Miran Shah. Others will come behind me and they will stop you, inshallah!"
"Ha," Rehan laughed. "Inshallah? If Allah wills it? Let"s see if Allah wills you to succeed, or if he wills me to succeed." Rehan looked to his two guards standing near the prisoners by the window. "It is stuffy in this pretentious apartment. Open a window."
The two guards drew their pistols, turned as one, and fired over and over into a ten-by-ten-foot pane of the thick floor-to-ceiling window gla.s.s against which the two prisoners stood. It did not shatter immediately, but as the number of holes increased in the pane, from five to ten to twenty, white fissures spread between the bullet holes. The men reloaded their handguns while the cracking and popping of the gla.s.s continued, growing in volume until the ma.s.sive gla.s.s square shattered outward, sending razor-sharp shards falling 108 stories down.
Warm wind blew into the luxury apartment, some pebble-sized flecks of gla.s.s with it, and Rehan and his men had to shield their eyes while the dust settled. The whine of the airflow up the side of the building rushing into the open panel in the window forced Rehan to stand up from the couch and come nearer to his prisoners to be heard.
He looked at Major al Darkur for a moment before turning to Nigel Embling, propped against the window gla.s.s, hands and legs bound, next to the huge opening to the bright sky. "I"ve looked into your background. You are from another century, Embling. The expatriate spy of a colonial power that has somehow missed the message that it no longer has any colonies. You are a pathetic man. You and the other infidels of the West have so long raped the children of Allah that you can no longer understand that your time has pa.s.sed. But now, old fool, now the caliphate has returned! Can you not see it, Embling? Can you not see how the destruction of British colonialism has so perfectly set the stage for my ascendance to power?"
Embling shouted at the big Pakistani standing just feet from his face, and spittle flew from his mouth. "Your ascendance to power? Your lot are the ones destroying Pakistan! It is good men like the major here who will lead your country back from the abyss, not monsters like you!"
Riaz Rehan just waved a hand in the air. "Fly home, Englishman." And with that he gave a curt nod to two ISI security men standing near Nigel Embling. They stepped forward, yanked the big man off balance by his shoulders, and pulled him backward toward the open window.
He screamed in horror as they pushed him over the edge, then let him go, and he fell backward, away from the building, tumbling out, head over feet through the hot desert wind, dropping 108 floors toward concrete and steel below.
Major Mohammed al Darkur screamed at Rehan. "Kut-tay ka bacha!" Son of a dog! Though bound hand and foot, he pushed forward off the gla.s.s, tried to lunge at the big general. Two security men grabbed him before he fell forward into the apartment, and they wrestled with him, finally pulling him backward toward the ten-by-ten-foot hole in the floor-to-ceiling gla.s.s.
Rehan"s men looked up to their general for guidance.
General Rehan just nodded with a slight smile. "Send him to join his English friend."
Al Darkur cursed and shouted and tried to kick. He shook one of his arms away from the man dragging him to the edge, but another gunman holstered his weapon and rushed forward. Together three men now fought the major on the ground in the flecks and chips of broken window gla.s.s.
It took a moment, but they gained control of al Darkur. The others in the room stood around laughing as the ISI officer fought with only the movements of his torso.
Al Darkur screamed at Rehan. "Mather chot!" Motherf.u.c.ker!
The three guards dragged Major al Darkur across the floor, pulled him closer to the edge. Mohammed stopped his fight now. The wind racing from the desert floor, up 108 stories of hot gla.s.s and metal, blew the cinnamon-skinned Pakistani"s black hair into his eyes, and he shut them, squinted tight, and began to pray.
The three gunmen took him under his shoulders, lifted him up, and grabbed him by his belt as well. As one they heaved his body back, ready to launch him forward toward the sun.
But they did not move forward as one. The security officer holding al Darkur"s left shoulder lurched away from the window and spun around; he dropped the major and, in so doing, caused the other two to lose their grip.
Before anyone in the room could react, a second man at the window"s ledge moved away from the bound major. This man fell backward into the apartment, rocked back on his heels, and tumbled down into the sunken seating area by the sofa.
Rehan turned to look at the man, to see what the h.e.l.l he was doing, but instead his eyes looked past his guard and toward the cream-colored leather sofa that was now covered in a crimson splatter of blood.
Rehan looked back out the window. In the distance he saw a black speck in the sky a few hundred feet over the Burj Al Arab hotel in the distance. A helicopter? One second later, just as the last man holding al Darkur let go of the major and grabbed his b.l.o.o.d.y leg while falling to the floor, General Riaz Rehan shouted to the room.
"Sniper!"
Colonel Khan leapt over the sofa and tackled Rehan to the tile just as a hot rifle round raced past the general"s forehead.
Get me closer, Hicks!" Domingo Chavez shouted into the boom mike of the headset as he slammed a second five-round magazine into the magazine well of his HK PSG-1 sniper rifle. He"d missed with his last two shots, he was certain, and only by getting closer could he nail Rehan and his men, as they were now running and crawling and scrambling for cover.
"Roger that," Hicks said in a calm Kentucky drawl, and the Bell JetRanger raced nearer to the ma.s.sive spire-like structure.
Even with the broken windowpane in al Darkur and Embling"s place, Chavez would never have been able to identify the location of their apartment had he not also been able to catch a glimpse through his twelve-power scope of something tumbling out of the side of the building, spiraling down toward the ground.
It was a man, Ding knew this instinctively, though he could not take the time to try to identify who was plunging before him to their death. Instead Chavez had to range his weapon for five hundred meters and do his best to line a target up in his mil-dot crosshairs.
Even though Chavez had not spent much range time working on sniper craft in the past year, he still felt comfortable making a five-hundred-meter shot under the right conditions. But the helicopter"s vibrations, the downwash of the rotors, the upward movements of the air currents along the skysc.r.a.per, all had to be solved for in order to make a precision hit.
So Chavez did not go for precision. He did his best to calculate everything he could to the best of his ability, and then he lined up for a gut shot. Center ma.s.s on his targets. A man"s stomach was not the perfect location for a sniper shot. No, perfect would have been the brainpan. But targeting the upper stomach gave him the greatest margin of error, and he knew there would be some errors in his targeting, considering everything he had to deal with.
He fired from the backseat of the chopper, propping his weapon in the open window. This would absolutely destroy the carefully tuned barrel harmonics of his rifle, but again, getting closer would fix everything.
"Closer, brother!"
"You worry about your gadget. Let me worry about mine," replied Hicks.
To say the call from Chavez to the aircraft twenty minutes earlier had come as a surprise to Chester Hicks was putting it mildly. He had been going through some paperwork with Adara Sherman when his mobile rang.
"h.e.l.lo?"
"Country, I"m on my way back! I need you to scare me up a helicopter in ten minutes! Can you do that?"