Prime (4 page)

TWO

The arrival of a helicopter at Camp Blue Diamond—formerly the An-Ramadi
Northern Palace, where Saddam Hussein’s half-brother had once lived, and
presently headquarters of US Marine Corps 1
^st
Division—was a common
enough occurrence that Jack Sigler rarely took note. Something about this one
was different, though. The deep bass thump of the rotors beating the air above
the Euphrates River, as the bird made its final approach, resonated through his
body like an alarm and fanned an ember of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He
poked at the food heaped on his tray—two hamburgers, a mini-pizza and an
unopened bag of Cool Ranch Doritos—but his appetite had disappeared.

Daniel Parker, seated across the table from
him, instantly picked up on Sigler’s discomfort. The team’s only
African-American operator, Parker had a round, youthful face that was incapable
of concealing his emotional state. “Someone just walk across your grave, Jack?”

“I just remembered something I need to take
care of.” He stood, and in a single deft motion, scooped up the tray, dumped
its contents into a nearby trash can and flung it like a Frisbee onto the tray
rack. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

Parker stood as well. “Well that’s a
coincidence. I just remembered that I need to take care of something, too.”

“Yeah?
What’s that?”

“You tell me.”

Sigler regarded his teammate and friend with
a wan smile, an expression that seemed completely alien on his rough, unshaven
face. With his shaggy hair and hard expression, Sigler had been often told he
resembled Hugh Jackman, or more precisely, that actor’s film portrayal of the
comic book superhero Wolverine; Wolverine didn’t smile.

Before Sigler could answer, the Motorola
Talkabout radio clipped to his belt crackled to life. “Jack,
it’s
Kevin. I need you at the TOC.”

Parker’s eyebrows went up. “Damn, Jack.
Spidey-sense, much?”

“I’m wondering that myself,” Sigler muttered.
The ominous feeling that had started with the approach of the helicopter was
blossoming into something like paranoia. He keyed the transmit button on the
radio. “Be there in five.”

It took him only three minutes to walk
briskly from the dining facility in the main palace building, to FOB McCoy, the
smaller, walled-off compound where Cipher element had set up shop. Above the
always-locked metal door was a crudely painted sign that read ‘Animal House,’
presumably a reference to the college fraternity in the classic John Belushi
movie of the same name: Delta Tau Chi—Delta House. The sign had appeared one
night, a few weeks after they’d arrived in country—most likely some jarhead
acting on a dare—but Kevin Rainer, Cipher element’s commander, had left it
there. Although their unit designation was supposed to be classified, why
bother denying what everyone at Camp Blue Diamond already knew; Cipher element
was part of the 1
^st
Special Forces Operational Detachment-D, the US
Army’s elite counter-terrorism interdiction unit, better known simply as
Delta
.

Sigler went directly to the tactical
operations center (TOC)—known informally as
The
Lair
—which served a dual purpose as both communications hub and conference
room. Rainer was seated at the end of the long rectangular table, along with
Doug Pettit and two other people—an athletically built, brown-haired man, and a
woman—in civilian clothes. The man was Scott Klein, a CIA officer who had been
working closely with Cipher element to disrupt communications between the
different local insurgent groups, but it took Sigler a moment to recognize him;
he was having trouble tearing his gaze away from the woman.

She was, in a word, stunning.

She was seated, but Sigler guessed that she
was about the same height as Klein; the Company man was about 5’ 10”. Her
blousy top mostly concealed her figure, but her arms, where they emerged from
her rolled up sleeves,
were
slender and toned. It was
her face however, framed in a cascade of long and straight black hair that
arrested Sigler’s attention. Her almond-shaped eyes, the irises brown with
flecks of gold, hinted at some recent Asian ancestry, as did her high
cheekbones, but her face was longer, with a prominent forehead and a strong
jaw.

“Hel-lo,” murmured Parker, slipping into the
Lair behind Sigler.

Command Sergeant Major Pettit, Cipher
element’s senior non-commissioned officer, directed a scathing look at the
young operator, but no one else at the table seemed to notice, least of all the
woman, whose attention was fixed on the screen of her laptop computer.

Klein rose and extended a hand to Sigler.
“Jack, good to see you.”

Sigler accepted the firm handclasp, but his
reply was guarded. “Scott. Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to ruin
my day?”

Klein’s grin confirmed Sigler’s suspicions,
but the CIA officer withheld further explanation until Sigler and Parker were
settled in at the table. “First, congratulations are in order. The guys you
nabbed last night turned out to be a lot more important that we expected.”

Sigler felt his apprehension growing; he
could tell where this was headed. The couriers had given up something
actionable—maybe a location for a high value target
—and now Cipher element was going to have to postpone their rotation back
to the States to take on one more
mission
.

Ordinarily, that
wouldn’t have bothered Sigler. It wasn’t as if he had anyone waiting for him
back home.

He wasn’t really
sure what ‘home’ was anymore. For the last eleven years of his life, home had
been wherever the Army sent him, and somehow that seemed more real to him than
his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. His mother still lived there, but he
didn’t visit often. There were too many bad memories at the house on Oak Lane:
memories of his sister Julie who had always been there for him, and of his
father who never had.

He’d been adrift
back then, a punk, more interested in skating and hanging out with the other
losers in the neighborhood, than in trying to be a good son. He didn’t care
what his mother or his mostly-absent father thought of him, which seemed to
suit them just fine. Julie, however, had refused to give up on him. In her own
gentle but insistent way, she had equipped him to make his own path in life,
encouraging him to find a dream and follow it, just as she had ultimately done.

When he was
fourteen, Julie had joined the Air Force, intent on becoming one of the
nation’s first female fighter pilots. Two years later, against all odds, she
had succeeded. Then, just a few weeks before she was to wed her high school
sweetheart, while on a cross-training flight in a Navy F-14, she crashed.
Julie’s death had been the final straw for an already strained domestic
situation. Three months later, Sigler’s father left abruptly and didn’t come
back. Shortly thereafter, Jack Sigler left as well, to join the Army.

Unlike his father,
Sigler wasn’t running away. At first, he’d thought that it was Julie’s death
that had motivated him to enlist, but later he realized that it was really his
memory of her life that was driving him. Military service had given her focus,
a challenge she knew she was capable of meeting and beating, and that was what
he felt he needed. His mother, though heartbroken, had agreed to sign the
waiver that would allow him to enlist at seventeen.

The rigors of basic
training had shown him what he was capable of accomplishing. His natural
athleticism and agility made him a perfect candidate for specialized
training—Airborne school, the Rangers—but he wasn’t content to simply test his
physical prowess. While serving in the 101
^st
Airborne, he managed to
earn a college degree, and then he attended Officer Candidate School. Not long
after receiving his commission, he set his sights on a new goal: Special Forces
selection.

The challenges…the
successes…had transformed him.

He’d joined the
Army because he wanted to make a difference, to do something that would have
made Julie proud, and now here he was, leading a team of the most elite
counterterrorist shooters in the world, saving lives by taking out the bad guys
before they could kill innocents.

Making
a difference.

The uniform was
home. He preferred being on alert status, whether forward positioned as they
had been for the last four months, or standing by in the on-deck circle at Fort
Bragg, waiting for the shit to hit the fan somewhere.

Yet somehow, this
time he’d actually been looking forward to going back to the States, and he
wasn’t the only one.

Casey Bellows had
seen his newborn son only via webcam. Mark Adams, the old man of the team at
thirty-eight, was just two years shy of his twenty, and he had already received
approval for transfer to a non-deployable headquarters unit. Even the Boss,
Rainer, had made no secret of his plan to leave active duty and start up his
own private security firm.

They’d had a good run,
but maybe it was time to cash out and enjoy their success, not risk it all on
one more throw of the dice.

Stow it, Sigler
, he admonished himself.
This is what you signed up for
.

Sigler focused on
Klein.

“Sasha can explain
it better,” Klein continued, with a gesture to the woman. Then he hastily
added, “Sorry, I skipped the intros. Jack, Danno, this is Sasha Therion
. We brought her in to consult on this…”

He paused, as if expecting the woman to
engage with the conversation, but she continued to gaze at her computer screen,
seemingly hypnotized.

Sigler felt compelled to speak, if only to
end the awkward silence. “Brought her in? I thought your new boss put the
kibosh on outsourcing.”

It was no secret that Domenick Boucher, the
new director of the CIA, under orders from the President, had put an end to the
former administration’s practice of outsourcing the detainment, rendition and
interrogation of suspected terrorists. It was partly as a way to restore
accountability to the relevant agencies and partly to stop the hemorrhage of
taxpayer dollars into what some journalists had taken to calling the
‘terror-industrialist complex.’ The President had made other changes too, some
public and some under the radar, to streamline the nation’s intelligence-gathering
apparatus and repair the lingering damage to America’s public image following
too many incidents of abuse, brutality and torture—oft times with official
sanction.

The President, a former Army Ranger, was by
no means soft on national security issues, but he did have what one primary
opponent had disparagingly called ‘an obsolete sense of integrity.’
Old-fashioned maybe, but not obsolete.
Evidently the
American people had liked the idea of a leader with integrity.

Klein shook his head. “This is different.
But, I should let Sasha explain.”

When she failed to pick up the cue a second
time, the CIA man laid a hand gently on her forearm, and as if speaking to a
young child, he said: “Sasha, why don’t you tell the men about your work?”

The woman looked up suddenly, the spell
broken. She glanced around the table as if just realizing that she wasn’t
alone. “Uh, I do the math.”

Sigler stifled a laugh, but he noticed that
Parker was now sitting up a little straighter. Daniel Parker, a self-confessed
science geek, was the antithesis of most African-American stereotypes: a man
who would count it a greater honor debating astrophysics with Neil deGrasse
Tyson than playing one-on-one with Allen Iverson…though if push came to shove,
he would probably acquit himself equally well in either situation.

“Sasha is, among other things, a
cryptanalyst,” explained Klein. “We might have stopped outsourcing the dirty
work, but we can’t afford to keep people with her talents on the payroll.”

Sigler connected the dots. “So we found some
kind of coded message.”

Klein pursed his lips.
“Not
exactly.”

“This is what you found,” Sasha declared, as
if abruptly deciding to take an interest in the conversation. She turned the
laptop around and showed them the screen, and the image on it that had so captivated
her.

The display showed what Sigler could only
assume was a digital copy of one of the documents they had recovered during the
previous night’s raid. It didn’t look familiar, but then he hadn’t really been
looking when they’d done the collecting. He recognized the delicate curves of
Arabic script, but there was a block of writing in the middle that looked like
nothing he’d ever seen before. The letters might have been Greek or perhaps
Cyrillic, but interspersed among the not-quite-familiar letters were other
shapes that looked almost like Chinese characters: