Don Pendleton - Assassin's Code

“And he wants redemption. Let him fall going forward,” Bolan said.

“Damn it! You know my orders were to extend you every courtesy! Every courtesy! This? This is pushing it!”

“Give him to me.”

“No!” Keller replied.

“What? You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t know! And stop smiling at me!”

“Give him to me,” Bolan pressed.

“God have mercy on us all…”

“Good.” Bolan nodded. “I’m glad we have that settled.”

“What!”

Bolan switched gears. “What did the sketch artist in D.C. come up with?”

Farkas opened a laptop and clicked an icon. Bolan could almost sympathize with the corporal. “Reema” was something right out of an old Arabian Nights movie: huge dark eyes, sensuous lips, perfect cheekbones and chin. All she was missing was a see-through pink veil and a ruby in her belly button. Bolan flicked through the multiple sketches he had ordered. Reema in Western-style clothes, Reema in the traditional long pants and tunic, Reema naked, Reema with just her eyes and the bridge of her nose peering out of a veil. Bolan downloaded the sketches into his highly modified tablet computer.

“Assuming I agree to go along with this,” Keller said, “which I haven’t, how do you want to play it?”

“Close to the vest. Convertino is on suicide watch. He makes an attempt, and busts out on the way to the infirmary. He steals a Humvee, crashes the gate and tries to contact his woman or whoever has her.”

“Or whoever has her, if anyone has her, takes him out.”

“That’s about it,” Bolan said.

“That’s just about a death sentence, not to mention that during the manhunt, not many of our guys are going to try to bring him back alive.”

“He’s looking at life in prison or the death penalty anyway. He wants redemption, he wants his woman safe, and if his woman was in on it, he wants payback. And he’s volunteered. He’s already sworn he won’t resist if captured.”

“You know how many things can go wrong on this?” Keller asked.

“He’s being implanted with a tracking device as we speak. I had to slap him around a bit to get him intimidated, so he has enough bruises on him no one should notice. The damage should help make his case.”

“You know, even if they bite, the only reason will be to kill him,” Keller said.

“I know.”

“How big a team do you want?”

“Just me, and I’ll take Ous along in case I need to talk to any locals,” Bolan replied.

“No backup? No surveillance?”

“I’ll have my own surveillance, but I’d take it as a favor if you were to pick me a crack team and keep a chopper hot on the pad in case I call. If things get hot, they’re going to get hot fast.”

Keller gave Bolan a very frank look. “I hope to God you’ve got some kind of pull with the Attorney General, or we are looking to get seriously rat-screwed on this one.”

“Never met the man,” Bolan admitted.

Keller just stared.

“But I know his boss,” Bolan stated.

Keller opened her mouth and closed it. The Attorney General of the United States served at the pleasure of the President. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You can ask.”

“Who are you?”

Bolan shrugged. “I’m Batman.”

“I’m not surprised at all.”

He gazed at Keller speculatively. “You speak Arabic?”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here.” The NCIS agent’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“How’d you like to be a caped crusader, too?”

Sangin

“Yeah, nice cape, buddy!” Agent Keller sat in the battered Toyota pickup, mildly outraged, swathed in a full burka and sandwiched between Ous and Bolan. “It suits you,” the soldier said.

“Indeed, you look most fetching,” Ous agreed.

“No woman looks fetching in a pup tent,” Keller muttered.

Ous sighed. “You have no idea how much time and energy we men spend, our eyes attempting to burn through the burka. We gasp at the accidental flash of an ankle, but much more can be told by a moment’s fall or fold of cloth, the change in drape as a woman sits or stands, the sway of it as she moves, and we yearn, burning, to catch a heartbeat’s glance of approval from a pair of shining eyes. I assure you, Agent Keller, our eyes are well practiced, and were you to walk across the bazaar, garbed as you are, all eyes would be upon you.”

Keller turned to Bolan. “You know you could take some charm lessons from him.”

“Actually, I may be the first man in Afghanistan to have charmed a woman into a burka rather than out of one,” Bolan replied.

The radio link crackled with Farkas’s voice. “Batman, this is Control, do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, over.”

“Mission is go.”

Bolan mentally counted down the seconds. Ous sat behind the wheel looking at his watch.

“Batman!” Farkas’s voice rose slightly with excitement across the link, “The rabbit has run!”

“Right on the mark,” Ous observed.

Bolan could hear gunfire on the other side of the link. “Understood. Control, maintain radio silence from now on unless we initiate.”

“Copy that, Batman. Over and out.”

Bolan took up his phone-size tablet and switched frequencies. Aaron Kurtzman’s voice came across the link from Stony Man Farm, the nation’s top counterterrorist organization, half a world away in Virginia. “Batman?”

“Inside joke. You have Convertino?”

“Affirmative. I have him on satellite tracking and satellite visual. My current visual window is two hours. After that I’ll have to switch to a different orbiter. I predict a ten-minute visual lag, but you’ll have constant from the transmitter.”

“Copy that. Give me visual.” Bolan watched as his screen lit up with a gray-green scene observed from overhead by a thermal-imaging satellite. Sangin Base was a constellation of lights, and a vehicle was tearing away from it with reckless speed. There was little to do but wait. Convertino would abandon his vehicle once he had covered some distance and then use his skills as a Marine scout sniper to make his way into the city unseen.

“I might just have something for you, Batman.”

“What’s that?”

“The woman, Reema.” Bolan’s screen split. Ous and Keller leaned over to peer at it. The NCIS sketch took up one-half of the screen and the other was a photo of a woman sitting in a café. She was blonde, wearing oversize sunglasses, and someone who wasn’t a professional surveillance artist had taken the shot from across the street, but there was a similarity.

“Who is she?”

“I called in a few favors and got this from Israeli Intelligence. Last year an Israeli military industrialist was suspected of leaking information. This woman was suspected of being his mistress. The day after that photo was taken the man was found in his office with his brains blown out in an apparent suicide.”

“And the woman?” Bolan queried.

“Disappeared without a trace.”

Bolan had guessed that. “What else?”

“Working backward, the Israelis believe a woman matching her description may be linked to the death of several prominent Israeli and Lebanese citizens, but they can’t prove anything,” Kurtzman stated.

“They have a name?”

“All they have is a first name.”

“Lay it on me,” Bolan said.

“Zurisaday.”

It was a beautiful name for a beautiful woman.

“A few clues lead them to believe she might be Jordanian,” Kurtzman continued. “But they’re not sure.”

Keller echoed Bolan’s thoughts. “A beautiful name.”

“It means ‘over the earth’ in Arabic,” Kurtzman said.

Ous scowled. “It should mean ‘viper.’”