Threatcon Delta (17 page)

T
here was a saying in the Task Force: Armed prey is dangerous, but only if you are reckless.

Adjo was not reckless as he watched the compound empty, the gate shut, and activity on the mountainside cease. Except for the observer and the occasional hum of a distant aircraft, it could have been an earlier millennium. A few bedouin boys came along, tugging camels, having given up on finding a brave tourist to rent one for the ascent. That only enhanced the sense of time out of sequence.

Then there was the holy man on the mountain. As much as Adjo tried to hold to rational thought, the site lent its weight to the claim that he was the
Gharib Qawee.
If Adjo felt that way, he could only imagine what more susceptible men might feel.

Then, what he had been expecting occurred. He heard the familiar growl and would have to decide now what to do.

Four jeeps came chugging through the village. The United Nations Multinational Force and Observers had arrived. The MFO had been established by Egypt, Israel, and the United States in 1981 to keep this holy region from becoming remilitarized. The MFO was comprised primarily of Egyptian peacekeepers under the supervision of Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, American, and British officers. Their mandate was to provide defense and deterrence, not to engage in combat operations. Pulling up to the front of the gardens, the white-helmeted soldiers set up blockades and multilingual signs advising traffic not to enter the area. Their only protectorate was the defined roadway, paved and labeled on a map. Pilgrims were free to find another way up, and locals were still permitted to use the peaks for sheep grazing and olive groves. The United Nations presence was strictly to control what was defined as “commercial visitation and passage.” Truckers or buses seeking to use the route would be stopped and questioned. If the interviewer suspected they might be delivering arms or reinforcements, or in this case, helping the gunman flee—improbable though that was, since no one would be searching for him and he could stay on the mountain till the MFO left—they had the right to detain him or turn him back. Many of the soldiers could be bribed. It was a big, ineffective gesture that satisfied an international mandate for peacekeeping but accomplished, in fact, very little.

According to protocol, absent a second attack, the MFO would treat the shooting as an aberration. If another shooting did not occur within twenty-four hours, they would withdraw. If there were another attack, Task Force 777 and other special operations units would be permitted to undertake “cleansing activities” under MFO supervision. Lieutenant General Samra had once said that the mandate prevented genocide but not murder. He was absolutely correct.

Because Adjo had anticipated their arrival, the lieutenant had marked possible trails up the mountain in his memory. He did not want to use the tourist routes, which were relatively level and clear of rock. If this were a plot of some kind, then the men who felt they now commanded the mountain would be using those paths. He wanted a route that would overlook those arteries. The moon would be nearly full tonight, and there would be ample light for observation—and, he hoped, for the climb. His only considerations were that the slope of the area be gradual so that he could walk or crawl rather than climb, which would tire him quickly, and that there be no steep falls from either side, something he might stumble from in the dark.

Adjo had half a bottle of water and now only a well-melted candy bar. The tourist paths were dotted with small shacks that sold tea, snacks, and Coke. Even if they were open, he didn’t dare approach any of them. He rationed the water but ate the chocolate before it had to be licked from the wrapper. For the last hour of daylight, he stayed in the dark shadow of the tree where he was less likely to be seen and where it was at least ten degrees less—
cooler
was not really a word that applied here—than the 120 degrees in the sun.

The sun was finally swallowed by the peaks behind him, vanishing in a murky pool of red and violet. The moon was climbing above the mountain’s southern peaks; a pie-shaped wedge cut by a promontory diminished as it rose. Before the blue-white light could illuminate the ruddy, darkening peaks, Adjo set out. He walked along the monastery wall, which concealed him from the ghostly glow that swiftly swept the mountainside. The path he had selected was littered with irregular, fist-sized chunks of granite left by ancient excavations. The rubble had slid into a stable, triangular sheet that barely shifted under his tread. It rose for some fifty feet, the top half of which he took in a spidery walk, his hands spread before him. He felt like a boy again, playing in the ancient quarries near his home in Wadi Kom Ombo. His father was a carpenter who worked for a small boat maker on the Nile. Adjo was the youngest of three children and he hid among the rocks to keep from going on the water. It frightened him because no one ever knew when it would leave the riverbed and consume land, homes, cars, and people. He did not want to work on boats. Even at the age of five he liked wrapping his fingers around stone, knowing that it could be used to build or fight or stand on. In school, when they read the stories of the ancient gods, he always wanted to hear more about Geb, the earth god, who was not part animal like the others but was a man the color of mud and flowers. Adjo drew pictures of him, at one point painting his own body with mud from the riverbank. He liked the notion that the night god, Nut, came to bring him darkness and rest, that the snake-headed water god, Naunet, feared him.

Bassam Adjo joined the army to protect the land he had loved—first as a physical thing, then as an ancient political concept. He was drawn to 777 where he could soar above the waters and occasionally see the place on the river below where his father and brothers toiled. He liked the freedom and also the control. But being here, like this, was also good. It was like visiting his boyhood home, the place where he was born.

The rocks felt familiar, the night air invigorating. The evening was cooling quickly, and by the time he reached the top of the mound there was a distinct chill in the air. At the top of the rock apron he moved to the right, where waters—perhaps from the time of Moses himself—had carved a waist-deep gully in the mountainside. Adjo’s Nikes provided a strong cushion where the V-shaped cut was insufficiently deep for him to touch bottom. Sure-footed, he made his way in a zigzag course to a small ledge some fifty meters above the monastery. The gunman would have been at a nine o’clock position laterally from where he was standing.

The rock cut ended and Adjo continued along knobby outcroppings of varied size and uneven surface. This was more of a climb, and the shadows the rocks threw made it difficult to see anything on the left side. He didn’t want to stop in the open and there was no point going back, so he had to feel his way before committing to a handhold. Here, his thick soles were a hindrance. His feet themselves weren’t very happy, swelling from the heat and exertion. But he was not in a rush and it still felt good and right to be among the rocks.

When the sniper’s post was below him, Adjo paused and turned his back to the rock. He took a swallow of water—he kept the plastic bottle in his backpack, whose metal clasps he’d covered with dirt lest they reflect moonlight—and looked back at the gunman’s perch. The tourists’ path went right by it, about ten meters away, meaning the gunman could have come from above or below, day or night. There were no security cameras looking up from the monastery, so he wasn’t concerned about being spotted. Still, he wasn’t sure it was worth going to investigate at night—especially if the shooter was still in the vicinity.

Adjo looked up the slope and decided to make for the next outcropping, one which would give him a good view of the tourist road at sunup. He wasn’t tired but he was cold and shivering, the long afternoon’s perspiration cooling everywhere on his body. The desert wind had come up, carrying not just a chill but sand. The puffs of grit got in his eyes, in his mouth, and clung to the sweat on his exposed hands and face.

I wonder if Moses had to brush his beard and hair and shake out his robes when he reached the summit.
That may have been why it took the prophet so damn long to carve the Ten Commandments.

The next forty or so meters took three times as long to negotiate as did the first fifty. In addition to the wind, the rocks were larger, rounder, and had steeper faces than those farther down. Gripping them was a problem. Also, the wind had a deep, whistling quality that made it difficult to listen. If anyone were waiting up there, Adjo would have to see them, not hear them. But he made the ascent without incident, and was surprised to see that fully three hours had passed since he set out. It seemed much shorter. Nestling between two rugged projections that jutted like thick, flat arms from the side of a boulder and provided some protection from the wind, Adjo had a good view of the tourist path and below, the sprawling, open plain beyond the foothills. At one point during the long night he thought he heard voices. But they sounded distant and muffled, as though someone had left a radio on in one of the tea shacks. He hadn’t seen any pilgrims, which didn’t surprise him. This was not a journey a novice would take at night. The noises he did recognize on the peaks were not human, whether it was underbrush stirred by the wind or the scratching of a large lizard crawling among the rocks. He was also alert for wolves and mountain lions, though there was enough game and trash so that they almost never attacked humans.

Not unless their natural hunting grounds are disturbed by an influx of pilgrims,
he thought, casting a cautious look around.

Adjo wondered what his family, and his father in particular, would think if they knew he was working on the Mountain of God. They were not religious, but they would fear to tempt God by showing disrespect to one of his temples. Nor would they understand how a man could be paid to sit outside, on his bottom, and watch for people who might or might not show up. That would seem like stealing to them. And the fact that Adjo enjoyed it would have been doubly mystifying to his father in particular. To Youssef Adjo, playing checkers or watching action movies with friends was something for a man to enjoy.

The stars were clear and Adjo could clearly see the Milky Way. If God had not actually summoned Moses to this spot, Adjo could see how a man would come here to be inspired, how it would help him to search his soul for a means of organizing a rabble into a law-abiding people.

The young man closed his tired eyes. The shrieking wind and the cold prevented him from sleeping for very long, but he was comfortable enough otherwise. Only occasionally did he hear one of those muted, far-off murmurs, never close enough to concern him.

When the inside of his eyelids went from black to brown, he opened them and watched the new dawn break. Feeling neither tired nor rested, he shifted to a crouch so he could see over the northern arm of his resting place. He moved slowly and purposefully on limbs that were stiff from sitting and sore from the climb. He had a headache from trying to see in the darkness; he was accustomed to having night-vision glasses. But he stretched his mouth and eye muscles to a semblance of alertness and poked his head above the rocks.

The discomfort and fogginess were shoved aside when he saw an encampment at the base of the mountain. It must have been set up just after sunset, for he had not seen it when he began his climb.

There were more than a thousand people below. They weren’t tourists, for there were no cars or buses. They were lying under blankets, their heads on bundles. Some were already going about their morning devotions. Others were still assembling at the far western section of the camp, at the fringes of the desert.

They were pilgrims, and Adjo knew that his mission here had suddenly become irrelevant. The sniper had wanted to shut the mountain down for a day, make sure that no one got in the way of these people. He didn’t want tourists or shopkeepers to see them and report them. And with the MFO in the field here, 777 would have stood down for the evening.

Brilliant.

Adjo took out his phone and called Task Force headquarters. As much as these pilgrims worried him, he was far more concerned with something else: the likelihood that they were only the first wave.

And something more dangerous that he couldn’t even begin to consider: what would happen when the prophet came down to engage his flock?

Or, perhaps worse,
Adjo thought
. What if he does not?

K
ealey drove Phair to a small restaurant in Arlington where Kealey was known—at least to the hostess who seated them and to the waitress who took their order. Phair didn’t note the name of the place and didn’t remember what he ordered after he’d ordered it. His mind was scurrying about the puzzle of what was happening in the Middle East, interspersed with flashes of the dramatic events that had brought him from a firefight in Iraq to a restaurant in Virginia poised for a mission to Venezuela that might or might not involve a mobster. It was the antithesis of the first half of his life, which had been a testament to order.

The future cleric had grown up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where his father had been a railroad conductor. His mother, with whom he spent the most time, was a volunteer at the local church, organizing everything from bake sales to prayer groups to disaster-relief drives. An only child, young James sought fellowship among other children at the church and found himself repeating to them the lessons he had learned in Sunday School and from his mother. He rarely got them to listen, but it made him feel good to take the side of the Lord. And when he was inside the church on Lincoln Drive, he felt as though he were
at
the side of the Lord.

He was sixteen when his mother died from a heart attack. He had to be there for his father, who was lost and lonely. James never resented it, and there was no question then what he would do with his life.

Talking to his priest, young Phair decided that he wanted to minister to people under stress, like his father had been. He enlisted in the military and found his calling.

Be careful what you wish for,
he told himself as a salad and a plate of fish and chips were placed before him.
The fate of the Middle East could end up resting on your shoulders. That’s a lot of people who need help right away.

“We won’t find a lot of affection in Venezuela,” Kealey said as he peppered his fish. “Regardless of Ramirez. The Venezuelans think Americans are bullies. Did you find that in Iraq?”

“Not so much,” Phair said, rising from his disjointed reverie.

“Really?”

“Many of them, especially among the young, want what Americans have.”

“You mean possessions or freedom?”

“Possessions,” Phair replied. “A lot of them don’t seem to know what to do with freedom—at least, our notion of it. They don’t require gay marriage or the right to publish pictures of Mohammad. They don’t want cruel dictators, but they’ve belonged to groups, to tribes, for thousands of years. They like that sense of community and interdependency.”

“What about free speech? Freedom of religion?”

“They have always grumbled among themselves,” Phair said. “They don’t need others to hear it. A few firebrands do, but mostly those who are looking to subvert the system we’ve been trying to install. As for religion, they are free—within their own communities. Outside of that,” he shrugged helplessly. “That is something we will probably never change.”

Kealey chewed thoughtfully on a fry.

“There is something about the Venezuela trip that is worrying me,” Phair said.

“Only one thing?”

“I trust you will take the necessary precautions with the obvious obstacles.”

“Thank you.”

“But my worry occurred to me when we first discussed this course of action. The excitement of the chase pushed it aside—but not far enough, I guess.” Phair hesitated. He knew going in how it would be coming out. But he had to say it just the same. “Are you familiar with the debate over Josef Mengele’s research?”

Kealey nodded gravely. “Submerging healthy men in tubs of ice water to study hypothermia or injecting them with malaria to find effective treatments.”

“Among many other experiments,” Phair said. “And much worse. We had an ethics class in the seminary where the question was asked whether doctors should use findings obtained in such a fashion. I was against it. I listened to all the arguments about how the victims would have died in vain or how good can come of evil. But the odor of evil was still present for me in the process. I would have felt a part of it.”

“I understand. That didn’t stop us from going to the moon using rocket science perfected when the Germans bombed England,” Kealey pointed out. “The facilities used to study and construct the missiles were built by slave labor. The Soviets readily embraced the research and the captured hardware. Had we not used what we obtained, Mr. Khrushchev may have nuked us from space.”

“It feels like there’s a difference,” Phair said, searching to find it as he picked at a dish of coleslaw. “Perhaps it’s the fact that one was done while looking into a man’s eyes.”

“It’s an old debate,” Kealey said as he crunched on a piece of fish. “The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—I’m sure you heard about that.”

“Sadly.”

“Over here, the uproar was less about the acts—which were mild compared to what Saddam had done—but the fact that America was doing them.”

“The Iraqis were used to torture,” Phair said. “It was the American angle that soured everyone over there.”

“It’s unfortunate but I would argue that, faced with the insurgency, we were pretty temperate. One can certainly understand why Saddam ruled the country the way he did. It was the only way to hold all those mad, suicidal factions together.”

“He was a sadistic despot, not a nationalist,” Phair said, a little surprised.

“No argument, and Abu Ghraib is nothing I’m proud of. It’s also a result of war. People—kids—are gonna pop from that kind of pressure, lose perspective.”

“Well, there’s a price to pay for that,” Phair said. “You asked if the Iraqis saw Americans as bullies and the answer is—not at first. They do now, most of them.”

“It’s an imperfect, sick world,” Kealey said. “The good—or bad—thing is, at both Abu Ghraib and in the prison at Guantanamo Bay, we’ve obtained operational data about the insurgency that has saved American and Iraqi lives.”

“From
every
man tortured?” Phair asked. He’d needed a second to digest the fact that Kealey seemed to be endorsing it.

“Of course not,” Kealey acknowledged. “But you can’t know that going in. My point is, should we have discarded the information we did obtain? Right now, somewhere in the world, attacks are being planned in secret little meetings against good, innocent people. Not just in the Middle East but in Africa, Indonesia, Latin America. Is it wrong to pressure individuals who attend such meetings for information?”

“I believe it is,” Phair said. “You can’t pre-punish.”

“I can,” Kealey admitted. “I haven’t got whatever charity muscle it is that drives you. If we obtain information from this Nazi prick, I have no problem using it.”

Phair let the subject drop. The other Kealey was back, the Mr. Hyde who wanted to stay on mission and would defend whatever that required. Perhaps he had misread Kealey earlier; perhaps he was only a teenager who would throw a tantrum when the world wouldn’t behave the way he wanted it to. The cleric took a sip of water; his mouth made it taste like metal. He picked at his salad. He was hungry, but felt guilty eating.

“Maybe he won’t know anything,” Kealey said. “Or maybe he’ll be dead. Then we won’t have to worry about it.”

There was sarcasm in his voice. Obviously, that wouldn’t help them or the situation. Maybe that was why Phair had been drawn to religion as a kid. The rules were very, very clear.

“Life was simpler once,” he said, not having meant to say it aloud.

“When?” Kealey asked. He warm and calm once more.

“Among people whose only goal was to raise a family in safety and some comfort, to pray in accordance with their traditions,” Phair said. “There were no larger matters to consider. I was color-blind when I left my unit to minister to the wounded Iraqis.”

“Humanism and patriotism are not always compatible,” Kealey replied. “I accept that, and it only underscores the point I was trying to make that few things are ever clear-cut. Certainly not in our present situation.”

Phair still didn’t agree, and he felt nauseous. Maybe it was the oil in the salad dressing or maybe he was trying too hard to swallow a reality that didn’t want to go down.

Kealey’s phone buzzed. He checked the caller’s name, then answered it. Phair watched the man’s hand holding his fork become perfectly still. He was listening so hard to his phone, he looked as if he were going to drill it through his ear. All he said was, “I’ll be there in twenty.” He tapped his phone off and shoved it into his pocket, dropped his fork with a bite still speared on it. Standing, he pulled out his wallet and dropped forty dollars on the table.

“Was it something I said?” the chaplain tried joking.

“You have no idea,” Kealey said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. I’ll send a car to pick you up and bring you back to my office.” With that, he was gone.

Mr. Hyde has left the building,
the major thought. Nervous though he was about being tied to this agent for a mission of such urgency, in his absence Phair felt his appetite returning. He was able to finish the salad and made a decent showing on the fish. It helped to recall all the times in Iraq when he was hungry, having given whatever food he had to children. Since returning, not a bite had passed his lips when he didn’t feel guilty for having eaten it. Instead of thanking the Lord for His bounty, he found himself asking why He didn’t provide to those who truly needed it. They were not Christians, most of them, but that was beside the point. They were His children. They were Phair’s brothers. Patriotism was only a part of it. Those poor Iraqi families, orphans, the elderly, the wounded; they had caused a crisis in faith that he was still struggling to reconcile.

And soon you’ll be consorting with a Nazi,
he thought.

It was strange and disconcerting to think that repatriated, asked to help prevent a possible war, he felt as far from his core as he’d ever been.