Greg Rucka - A gentleman_s game

"Give me a pistol and a suppressor, I can do it just as well and a damn sight quicker."

Crocker took another draw from his cigarette, let the smoke go slowly, so that it climbed along the window and curled back toward them from the ceiling. The silence spread like the smoke, but it didn't bother Chace. She could wait. She was well versed in the nuances of Crocker's moods. When D-Ops acted like this, you didn't rush him, because he was still working his angles. There was a validity to what he was saying about Poole, but she knew it wasn't the real reason. She may have lacked the upper-body strength of Nicky Poole or Chris Lankford, but she was faster than both men and, with a knife or a gun or even her bare hands, just as lethal.

"How's Lankford coming along?" Crocker asked.

"He's been hitting the books. Having a hard time learning patience, but I had that problem, so did Ed."

"Not Poole."

"That's only because he came to us wrong way 'round."

Crocker nodded, accepting the assessment. Almost every Minder had been seconded from within SIS to the Special Section, normally after serving some field time, but just as often was taken straight from the School at Fort Monkton. While some Minders came with prior military experience-Wallace had been a Royal Marine, Butler a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards-neither Chace nor Lankford had come to the job with armed services experience. It wasn't a prerequisite.

Poole was an exception, because he was homosexual. Unlike the American military, there was no Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the British armed forces, as a European high court decision in early 2000 had declared such policies, and indeed Britain's general ban on gays in the military, to be an unwarranted discrimination. The fact that Poole fancied men shouldn't have mattered in the least under the ruling.

But it was still the S.A.S., arguably Britain's most prestigious regiment, and when one of Poole's fellow troopers, a man by the name of Hart, had fired a bullet into Poole's body armor during a training exercise in the Killing House, events had threatened to explode into the public eye. Faced with the choice of letting the matter stand or pursuing Hart with charges-an act that would have brought yet more scrutiny upon the S.A.S., still reeling from the bad press of the last decade-Poole had instead decided to leave the Army altogether.

It would have been an extraordinary waste of the thousands of hours and millions of pounds that had been spent on his training, and fortunately, that was exactly what Poole's CO had thought as well. After some pointed inquiries through the MOD, Poole's CO had contacted the Colonel who headed the SPT, the military-trained Special Projects Team tasked directly to SIS under control of D-Ops, asking about an opening. Poole's personnel jacket was forwarded as a matter of course, with a copy to D-Ops as protocol dictated. Normally, it wouldn't have earned a second look, but Kittering's replacement, Butler, had just died in T'bilisi, and for the second time in less than a month Crocker had found himself scrambling for a warm body to fill the post of Minder Three.

Poole had caught his eye. Minders were hard to come by at the best of times; few who could do the job actually wanted to, and those who wanted to were, almost universally, the most likely to completely arse it up. The last thing Crocker wanted in the Section was an agent who imagined himself the next Jack Ryan or, worse, the next James Bond. In the face of that, an agent who was homosexual was laughably mundane, and a liability only if the agent let it be one. Crocker didn't give a damn if Poole fancied women, men, or livestock, as long as it didn't get in the way of the job.

Crocker put out his cigarette, set the ashtray back on the desk.

"It took eight months to find Lankford," he told Chace. "Took three months of additional training after we'd found Poole to get him ready for action."

He'd lost her for a second, then Chace realized what he was saying and she nodded slightly, trying to conceal her surprise. Crocker wasn't sentimental, she knew that, but all the same, it touched her. He could afford to lose Lankford, he could even afford to lose Poole, but what she was reading between his words now was that he couldn't afford to lose her. The needs of the Firm came first.

"You think it'll be a one-way trip?" she asked.

The scowl came back. "An hour ago the Deputy Chief was trying to convince me to put a Minder into Saudi. I held him off, but I don't know if I can do the same if it's C who's behind him on the next go-round."

"It'd be madness."

"I did point that out to the DC."

"If Faud moves, goes abroad-"

"No guarantees, Tara."

"I'll make it back, you know I will."

The look he gave her was uncharacteristically sincere, and abruptly sad.

"No," Crocker said. "I don't."

Saudi Arabia-Tabuk Province, the Wadi-as-Sirhan 18 August 0032 Local (GMT+3.00) After prayers and sunset Sinan was called to Abdul Aziz's tent, arriving to find four others already waiting outside with the commanding officer. Since coming to the camp, Aziz had forgone his thobe for the more military desert fatigues the rest of them wore, so it surprised Sinan to see that Aziz was once again in his cotton robe.

"You men are coming with me tonight," Aziz told them, and gestured toward the old Russian truck, draped with camouflage netting and parked in the shadow of the wadi wall. "Get in the back."

They moved to the truck, climbing into the bed as directed. There were wooden benches bolted at either side in the back, and the canvas top had trapped the heat of the day within. Sinan heard grumbles from some of the men as they took their seats, stowing their Kalashnikovs either beneath them or between their legs.

The drive was long and uncomfortable, the truck bouncing and hopping along the almost-roads out of the camp and into the desert. With the canvas flaps thrown back, Sinan could see the desert stretching forever into the night, and the stars were brilliant, thick in the sky. There was no illumination except for what the heavens provided; the truck drove without headlights, the driver wearing NVG.

Of the four others with Sinan, three were Saudi. The fourth was an Afghani named Matteen, and he had good stories of fighting Americans and British near Tora-Bora, and to relieve the boredom of the trip, he shared them. Sinan listened to the veteran's tales with absolute attention, eager to learn from Matteen's experience.

"They tried to bomb us, you know?" Matteen told them. "For days and days they dropped bombs on us, and the whole earth shook and shuddered, as if Satan was trying to climb free. But Allah protected us in the caves, and their bombs did nothing. They tried to murder us for days, and in the end, their bombs did nothing. We were protected because we were righteous."

All of them nodded.

"Back in the camp," Matteen continued, "it's the same thing. The wadi is a good place, very safe from the air. No satellites to spy on us, and if the mushrikun try to bomb us, there are many places to wait and stay safe. A very good place."

"If they come on foot?" Sinan asked.

The Saudis laughed. "It will never happen," one of them said.

Matteen shook his head, barely visible in the cowled darkness of the back of the truck. "You don't know, you don't know. Your rulers allowed Americans to build bases on our holy soil. There are mushrikun in Riyadh, and they are cowards. Spineless, gutless… Don't believe for a moment that we won't be sacrificed on the altar of their greed if it comes to that."

"The Crown has always supported us in the past."

"In the past, yes. But even with the West in its death throes, there are still those who want to pacify the Americans. Look what happened to our brothers in Riyadh and Sakakah after the bombings last year. It was your leaders who rounded up those muwahhidun and had them executed, all to appease the apes and pigs of the West."