Andrew Kaplan - Carrie's run

“Just like that?” he said, snapping his fingers.

“Just like that,” she said.

“How do you know they’re there?” he asked.

“We have a double agent, an officer in AQI, inside. They brought him in to be questioned by Abu Nazir himself. We tracked him by a cell phone we gave him.”

“Abu Nazir? The Abu Nazir?”

“Yes.”

“And Abu Ubaida too? How do you know he’s there?”

“I saw him myself in the souk yesterday. We also bugged our double agent’s house. Abu Ubaida is the one who came to take him in.”

“You saw him? In the market? An American woman wandering around like a tourist-and you’re still alive?”

“I was wearing this.” She pulled her abaya out of her backpack to show him. “A woman in an abaya is invisible to a lot of men in this part of the world, Colonel. You’d be surprised.”

“Possibly.” Tussey grimaced. “Seven hours is a long time. They could be all the hell the way to Syria by now.”

“Except if they want to interrogate him, it takes time. They’re still there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the cell phone hasn’t moved,” she said, leaning forward. “Come on, Colonel. Give me some Marines. Abu Nazir and Abu Ubaida are smart as hell. Without their leadership, these mujahideen shooting at you and your men are clueless. They’ll fade away.”

“Maybe the cell phone hasn’t moved because they left it behind. Maybe your man inside is dead. Maybe it’s a trap.”

She didn’t answer right away but looked at a jagged opening in the wall behind him that had once been a window. It was bright with sunlight, the day getting hotter. The stench from below because of the lack of toilets was indescribable. How the hell do they stay here? she wondered.

“Maybe. Very possible,” she admitted. “But Abu Nazir and his right-hand killer, Abu Ubaida, are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. This is the best shot at them we’ve ever had.”

“Who did you say you were working with as liaison?” he asked.

“Captain Dempsey. Ryan Dempsey, USMC,” she said, unable to suppress a quaver in her voice. “Task Force One Forty-Five.”

“I know him. Where is he? Why isn’t he with you?”

“He was killed this morning. Highway 11 outside Fallujah. I just found out myself an hour ago,” she said, her hands trembling. “I have urgent intel to get to Langley and USF-I headquarters and we had no cell or Internet communications. It’s my fault. I killed him.” She clenched her jaw and had to try to force herself to stay under control. “It’s not going to be for nothing.”

He stood up.

“Like a Marine,” he said, and touched her shoulder with his fist as he walked past her to the map to study the location of the porcelain factory on Highway 10 in al-Ta’mim District. He looked back at her. “How many men does Abu Nazir have with him at the factory?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Could be ten; could be a hundred.”

“I can’t give you a couple of platoons. Truth is, I can’t even spare a fire team. But I’ll give you a squad. That’s two fire teams. Probably lose half of them within two blocks of here,” he muttered.

“What about a Predator?” she asked. A Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles would help even the fight, even if all they had was a Marine squad of eight men.

“That’s you clandestine types or the Air Force. If you’re such a hotshot with USF-I HQ as you claim, you ought to be able to order one up. But if I were you, I’d hurry. The hajis have been stepping up their attacks exponentially. There’s something big coming, and soon. Real soon,” he said.

The porcelain factory, what was left of it, was a sandstone shell of a building on a big empty lot about a kilometer south of the Ramadi Barrage, the steel and concrete dam on the Euphrates Canal. There was a chicken-wire fence atop a concrete berm with gaps in it that ran all around the factory grounds. The day was hot, a touch of breeze blowing dust in from the desert.

Carrie was with Sergeant Billings, a big Montana ex-ranch hand with shoulders the size of Yosemite’s Half Dome, on the ground-floor ruins of a destroyed house across the road from the factory. The sergeant had deployed himself and one fire team of infantrymen with them, facing the factory, and the second fire team behind the concrete and chicken-wire fence on the opposite side of the factory. He had positioned his light machine gunner in an armored Humvee with another Marine as the driver, defiladed in the rubble behind their position. When the shooting started, they were to use the Humvee to block the road to prevent any attempts by the terrorists to escape.

Except where were the mujahideen ? she wondered. If Abu Nazir and/or Abu Ubaida were in there, there should have been armed al-Qaeda insurgents swarming all over the place. But there was no one. What had gone wrong? Had it taken them too long to get here?

And yet, they were in there. They knew this because Virgil had activated software on Romeo’s cell phone that enabled them to eavesdrop on anything being said near it. The range was limited to within a meter or two of the cell phone. And what they were getting was an interrogation.

Virgil had handed Carrie an earbud connected to his laptop so she could listen in. Someone-it could have been Abu Ubaida or even Abu Nazir himself-was asking Romeo questions. Romeo’s answers were interspersed with screams.

“This woman was a CIA sharmuta whore?” she heard the questioner say. To Carrie, it sounded like Abu Ubaida’s voice from the video in Walid’s house.

“She never said so, but yes. She implied it,” she heard Walid say. It was his voice. She was certain of it.

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know. Aieeeee!” Walid screamed.

“What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! If I knew I would tell you. I swear,” Walid babbled.

“Don’t blaspheme! What was her name?”

“Aieeeee! Please! Aieeeee! I only knew her code name. Zahaba. Please, no more. Please, brother.”

“Why gold?”

“The color of her hair. She was a blond. I only knew her code name.”

“Describe her.”

“American. Long blond hair. Eyes blue. Height about one point six five meters. Slim. Weight, perhaps fifty kilos, not more.”

“What did she want?”

“Information about you and Abu Nazir. Anything I could give her, but I told her nothing. Nothing!”

“You lie,” the questioner growled, and there was the sound of screaming. It went on for a long time. She took the earbud out. So the interrogator was Abu Ubaida. No question. “Information about you and Abu Nazir,” Romeo had said. He could only have been talking to Abu Ubaida.

“What do you think?” she asked Virgil and Warzer, both of whom were lying prone on the ground, scanning the factory across the road with binoculars.

“You’re hearing what I’m hearing. They should be there.” Virgil grimaced. “But I don’t see a damn thing. It’s wrong. There’s something wrong.”

“We took too long to get here. There should be al-Qaeda all over the place. At the least, they should have someone watching the road. There isn’t anyone,” Warzer said.

“So you both think it’s a trap?” she asked.

Virgil nodded. So did Warzer.

“Sergeant?” she asked, turning to Billings, who squirted a brown stream of chewing-tobacco spittle on the bricks in front of him.

“This is Indian country, ma’am. When you don’t see the Indians, that’s when you gotta worry,” Billings said.

“It’s unanimous,” she said, looking at them. “That’s what I think too. We call in the Predator?”