Soul of the Assassin (53 page)

Parnelles had been guilty of it himself, urging Ferguson to concentrate on T-Rex rather than the Iranian, and he’d been wrong. Very wrong.

He should not have gotten involved. He should have stayed aloof, as he normally did. Even if it was an important mission, even if he did know Robert, even if Robert was so close to him he felt like a son—he should not have gotten involved.

And he shouldn’t now.

“I see no reason to get MI6 involved in this. There’s no room for them,” Parnelles told Slott.

“It
was
their operation.”

“Was
being the operative word. Didn’t Hamilton screw them up in the first place? Wouldn’t they have been able to grab Atha?”

“That may be a matter of opinion,” said Slott. “MI6’s perspective is that they didn’t know there was a possibility that material was missing. We didn’t know, either—Ferg only found out after Atha got away.”

While Parnelles thought Slott was playing devil’s advocate a little too strenuously, it was also true that grabbing Atha could have caused problems as well. Had they done so, this phone call could easily have been about the diplomatic repercussions. Given the circumstances as they now seemed, he’d have preferred that—but would he have said that earlier?

“Can’t you just tell Ferguson to take Hamilton along for the ride?” said Slott.

“Why should I tell him that? He works for you.”

“Let’s face it, Tom, he only listens to you.”

“I’m not sure he listens to anyone,” said Parnelles.

“If MI6 doesn’t cooperate, then the Indonesia operation falls apart. We’re back to square one. The rebels will overthrow the government within six months, and A1 Qaeda moves in the next day,” said Slott. “All Ferguson has to do is let Hamilton sit in a hotel room in Tripoli so the British can take some credit, for cryin’ out loud. That’s not much.”

“We’re assuming his plan is going to work.”

“And if it doesn’t, what’s the harm with having this Brit there? Hell, MI6 can even share the blame.”

Indonesia was important; the Agency was trying to thwart a coup there.

Parnelles looked at the photo again.

This was
exactly
the sort of thing he hated when he was in the field—being told what to do because of politics.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Parnelles told Slott, hanging up.

~ * ~

17

NEAR THE LIBYA-SUDAN BORDER

Guns spotted the truck coming down off the ridge when it was only a mile away. The rocks he and Rankin were hiding in were a half mile southwest of the aircraft; there were just enough to keep them from being seen.

Their first plan was to wait and watch. They’d left George Burns near the plane, facedown, then dragged the dirt so that it looked as if he’d crawled out on his own before dying. It was possible whoever was checking them out would think he was the only one in the plane and leave. If not, Guns and Rankin could wait in the rocks and ambush them up close. Both men had their pistols and several replacement magazines of ammo.

The plan itself was a good one—but too passive for either Guns or Rankin to stick with for very long

“There’s only four of them,” said Guns, peering from the side of the rocks as the truck circled around the plane. “I only see two rifles.”

“Gotta figure the others have weapons of some kind,” said Rankin.

“Yeah. They go in the plane, we got ‘em. Come up from behind.”

“Maybe,” said Rankin. “Depends where they park the truck. If they leave it on the side, it’ll be shorter.”

“You OK with your arm?”

“It’s my left arm. I’m fine.”

He’d rigged a simple sling to help keep his arm against his body If he didn’t think about it too much—or look at it—the pain was bearable. Rankin checked his Beretta. Even with one hand, he’d have preferred his Uzi, but it was back in Bologna.

The truck stopped near George Burns’s body. Rankin waited until two of the men began poking around the nose of the plane.

“Crawl until we’re ten yards from the plane, or until they see us,” he said. “I’ll yell.”

Neither man actually crawled; it was more like a three- and four-point scamper across the hot sand. When they were about forty yards from the plane, one of the men walked toward the tail section, looking in their direction. Rankin raised his gun to fire, but Guns beat him; the man fell as the shot cracked the air. Guns dropped to his knee, training his pistol on the left side of the plane. Rankin kept running, trying to cut down the distance between him and the men with the truck.

A man jumped from the cab and fired a pistol at him; Rankin fired back, but missed badly. Rankin started to sprawl in the sand to avoid the return fire; as he threw himself down he remembered his broken arm and tried to land on his shoulder to deflect some of the impact. But it was too late. The shock ran through his entire body, as if his bones had been pierced by hot steel nails.

Guns didn’t have an angle on the man behind the truck. He moved to his right, starting to flank the aircraft, when he spotted one of the other men coming out from behind the left engine and wing. The man saw him at almost the exact same moment, but Guns was faster with the pistol than he was with the rifle, and a pair of bullets in his stomach laid him down.

Rankin’s pain was so intense that he couldn’t see or hear the bullets flying around him. He felt as if someone were squeezing his entire upper body; the pain radiated so fiercely that he couldn’t even have said where he was injured.

When it finally lifted, it was as if he’d caught his breath. He saw the man huddled behind the truck, shooting at Guns. Rankin fired a shot just close enough to get him to duck back.

“Guns, you OK?” Rankin yelled.

“Yeah.”

“Can you sweep around and get behind this guy?”

“I’ll try,” shouted Guns. “There’s another one somewhere. Watch out for him.”

“Yeah,” said Rankin. He saw the shooter moving behind the truck and fired, this time hitting the vehicle close to the man’s head. The man threw himself to the ground.

Guns, meanwhile, ran to the man who’d fallen near the tail of the airplane and grabbed the AK-47 he’d dropped. He was starting to move around the wing when he heard a loud cracking noise; he dove into the sand as the fourth man began shooting from inside the burned-out plane through a passenger window.

By the time Guns got himself turned back around and in a position to fire, the man had pulled back from the window. The Marine tucked the Beretta into his belt, and with the AK-47 ready he crawled toward the nose of the plane, expecting that the man would try to get out. Then Guns got a better idea—he jumped up and dashed to the side of the aircraft, flattening his body hard against it. He felt the fuselage shake and heard someone moving around, pulling himself through the windshield as Guns and Rankin had earlier.

A barrel appeared near the edge of the aircraft; Guns waited until he saw flesh and then fired, almost point-blank, into the cheek of the gunman. The bullets shattered the man’s cheekbone with enough force to throw his turban headgear into the air; he fell to the side and Guns jumped forward, firing into the pulp that had been the man’s face.

Rankin was having a harder time with his gunman. They were less than thirty yards from each other, and together had fired a dozen shots, but so far neither had hit the other. The pain of Rankin’s broken arm kept him off-balance, his world tilting hard left. His right arm couldn’t seem to keep the pistol’s recoil from raising the barrel. Finally he stretched down on the ground, trying to regain his breath and clear his head.

His opponent, meanwhile, had his own problems. One of Rankin’s first shots had broken the back windshield on the truck and sent bits of glass into his opponent’s face. None had gotten into his eyes, but the blood streaming down his forehead made it hard to see. Unlike the others, the man was an ethnic African with no particular wish to die in jihad. Nearly out of bullets, he decided his best bet was to try to run away. He backed away from the truck, then saw something moving near the nose of the airplane.

Rankin, holding his gun out in front of him, saw the man raise his arm to fire.

“Guns!” Rankin yelled, squeezing off three, four, five shots.

The African fell. Rankin collapsed.

“Where’d he get you?” Guns asked a few minutes later.

“Didn’t,” said Rankin. “I don’t think. But man, this arm is killing me.”

Guns found a first-aid kit in the plane. They fashioned a splint to keep the arm and bone inside straight, lessening the chance of the break worsening. The strongest thing for pain in the kit was a bottle of aspirin.

“Not even worth it,” said Rankin. But he took four anyway.

“Try this,” said Guns, emerging from the aircraft with a full bottle of Jack Daniel’s. George Burns had stashed it beneath his seat in the cockpit.

Rankin refused at first, then decided he might as well. He took a strong pull, then winced.

“This stuff’ll kill me if the fracture doesn’t,” he said, before taking another swig.

~ * ~

18

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Corrine Alston was working on a new draft of the finding authorizing action against Iran when her encrypted phone buzzed with a call from Parnelles. She picked it up, hoping to hear that she didn’t have to bother finishing the finding.

“Corrine, this is Thomas Parnelles. I need a favor.”

“What kind?”

“MI6 is giving us hell, and I’d like Ferguson to make nice to their agent, Hamilton. He doesn’t have to kiss him, just answer one or two of his phone calls.”

“Why aren’t you going to tell him yourself?”

“Ordinarily, I don’t talk to Robert in the middle of an operation,” said Parnelles coldly. “That would be your job.”

Corrine knew that Parnelles could easily talk to Ferguson himself if he wanted to; she was fairly certain that he had on other missions. Of course, a call from her had a different weight than a call from him.

It also meant he would not be connected to an order that Ferguson was bound not to like.

“If I talk to him,” she told Parnelles, “I’ll tell him this was your idea.”

“You can tell him what you want. If you do mention me, say that I told you I owe him an apology.”

~ * ~

19

APPROACHING TRIPOLI, LIBYA

Thera handed Rostislawitch the folded surgical pants and shirt when the navy C-2A Greyhound transport aircraft was fifteen minutes from the airport.

“You can put them on over your clothes if they fit,” she told him. “We have to be ready when we land.”

The scientist nodded.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she told him. “We’ll fly you to the States. You’ll be safe.”

Ferguson had told Rostislawitch the same thing. But he knew that Atha was more likely to fall for the plan if he was there. He was the bait in the trap—the peanut butter his mother used to put on the spring so they could catch the mouse eating their larder.

Thera helped him pull the green pants over his shoes. An ambulance would meet them at the airport and they would pretend to transport a sick patient into the city. Just in case the Iranian had spies at the airport, they planned to actually go to the hospital, where a car would meet them to take them to the hotel—not the Alfonse, where the message had directed Atha to meet him, but the Americano, two blocks away. The Marines would go straight there, and be waiting when they arrived.