Tom Clancy - Locked On

Last, Embling assured 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 participation, and had only reluctantly allowed him to go.

It took the full hour, but finally ChaÀ Amvez 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 passive 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 analyst, and an Urdu-speaking translator would be on station at Hendley Associates within forty-five minutes. Ryan and Caruso recorded all received image and audio captures until then, and they fed them on for analysis.

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 fucker 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 fucker, 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 fromÀnin 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 Pérignon 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 Associates 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.”

“Shit! Call Nigel.”

“I did. No answer. Tried the landline to his place, too. Nobody picked up.”

“Son of a bitch!” 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 ass, 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 glass. 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.