Allah's Scorpion

PROLOGUE

Under an overcast moonless sky, a rubber raft came ashore three hundred meters east of the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay’s outer security fence. Four men dressed in U.S. Navy SEAL night fighter camos, their faces blackened, Heckler & Koch suppressed baseline carbines strapped to their backs, jumped out of the boat and quickly carried it ten meters up the beach to some tall grass. They moved swiftly, efficiently, as a well-practiced team.

Their leader, who’d entered Cuba with his operators ten days earlier under a French passport identifying him as Pierre Halille, raised a pair of Steiner Mil Spec binoculars to his eyes and scanned the beach in the direction of the U.S. Navy Base and the sprawling Camp Delta detention facility situated on a bluff that rose nearly fifty meters above sea level. He was sweating lightly even though the night was relatively cool. He was not used to the humidity, and a great deal was at stake this morning, not the least of which was his life and the lives of his men.

The fence was six meters tall and was topped with coils of razor wire. Strong searchlights atop guard towers at one-hundred-meter intervals lit the no-man’s zones like day. Nothing could get close without being spotted, either by the American military guards on the inside or the Cuban Frontier Brigade patrolling the outside.

Other lights were on throughout the sprawling camp, but very little activity went on at this hour. The main part of the base, with its hospital, schools, barracks, dining halls, and recreation centers, was to the west, along the bay, housed mostly in prefab buildings, large air-conditioned tents, and a collection of white-walled concrete-block buildings with red roofs. Base headquarters, the hospital, the school, and several other facilities were housed in more substantial buildings, yet even from here the installation looked temporary.

Farther to the west, on the other side of the bay, Leeward Point Field served as Gitmo’s airfield, while on this side were eight separate detention areas, each within its own fenced and heavily guarded compound. Three were for high-security-risk prisoners, another three for medium risk, one for minimum risk, and the eighth, Camp Echo, outside the main detention area, was used for low-risk inmates selected for hearings before a military tribunal. These were the prisoners who would be the first to be released and returned to their home countries.

He lowered his binoculars and raised his watch. It was 2:18 A.M. He held his breath and cocked his head to listen for a noise, any noise that might indicate their presence was known. U.S. Navy and Coast Guard fast-attack boats patrolled these waters to prevent escapes from the base by sea. But the only sounds were the small waves sighing ashore.

In twenty-two minutes a diversion would begin five kilometers away at the northeast perimeter. They had to be in place before it began. It was the only way in which they had even the slightest chance of reaching Echo. A Cuban Frontier Brigade combat unit would make one of its routine probes on base defenses. This evening the attack would be more intense than usual, and would last much longer than normal, drawing the Americans to the opposite side of the base from Camp Delta, where the hills rose steeply behind the outer fence.

Returning the binoculars to a zippered pocket in his camos, he unslung his carbine, and without a word, headed north through the scrub brush, keeping the no-man’s zone fifty meters to the left. His three men fell in silently behind him.

As they approached the first guard tower, he motioned for his people to drop to the ground. They would have to continue on their bellies. Although it was the middle of the night, the U.S. Army troops here had a fearsome reputation. This place wasn’t another Abu Ghraib, but not one freedom fighter or mujahideen had ever escaped. Nor did he want to run into a Cuban patrol. He took great care to make no noise, and to keep his head down until they were twenty meters past the tower, and even then he motioned for his brothers to keep low and move slow.

They had come to rescue five prisoners, not become prisoners themselves.

Several minutes later they came to a spot directly opposite the second guard tower. They were on a slight rise here, the terrain dipping down to the no-man’s zone and a tall fence, before angling sharply upward to the Camp Delta bluff and inner security fences. But there was considerably more scrub brush and sea oats, providing them decent cover.

Halille, whose real name was Sharif al-Habib, raised a hand for his men to halt and drop to the ground. He checked his watch again. It was 2:37 A.M. He looked back at the others and nodded. They had reached their first objective with three minutes to spare. So far there had been no signs that their presence had been detected. The Cuban fishing boat, Nueva Cruz, that had dropped them off five kilometers southeast of the bay had not been challenged by the U.S. Coast Guard that patrolled these waters, for the simple reason that the boat was only one of a fleet of a dozen similar commercial fishermen that worked close inshore every night. In reality, the Coast Guard, like the soldiers manning the towers, and the military policemen who kept watch over the eight individual detention camps within Delta, looked inward. They were guarding against prisoners breaking out, not mujahideen breaking in.

Al-Habib took a small tripod out of a pocket, opened its legs, and attached his M8 to the base shoe. He took a prone position, and adjusted his sightline until he picked up the silhouette of the lone guard on the tower sixty meters away in his scope. His heart hammered in his chest, and all the spit had dried up in his mouth. They had gotten to this point because of good intelligence: They knew the Coast Guard patrol routes and times, they knew when the Frontier Brigade guards on the beach would be at the northern leg of their patrol, and six months ago they had been given a detailed topographic map of the U.S. facility, as well as the surrounding area on either side of the winding bay. From the maps they had spotted a weakness in Camp Delta’s perimeter. A way in, and a way back out.

Now the mission depended on how accurate al-Habib’s aim was.

“There is a possibility of failure at every step of your journey, Sharif,” Osama bin Laden had warned him six months ago on the Pakistani side of the mountains outside Drosh. “I do not want you or the others to die for the cause yet. This is very important.”

“Insh’allah,” al-Habib had replied. He had been fighting Jews for more than twenty years, since he was a boy on the West Bank. He’d only been six the first time he went with his brothers to throw stones at Israeli APCs in Nablus. Now his brothers were dead, his father was gone, and he knew of no Palestinian who hadn’t lost family members. He was not afraid of dying.

“Yes, God willing, but it is the hearts and minds of men who do His work,” bin Laden said gently. He nodded and smiled with such incredible warmth and sadness that all the air seemed to go out of the cave. “Your heart, Sharif. Your mind.”

Al-Habib had felt love washing through his body. It was, he remembered now, as if God’s own hand had caressed his heart. “I won’t let you down.”

“It’s not for me, Sharif,” bin Laden said. He took al-Habib by the arm and they went outside into the cool mountain evening. They had the ephemeris of every Western spy satellite. None were in position overhead at this moment. “Your struggle is for the jihad. For our people. For Allah.”

Bin Laden was a legend among Islamic militants everywhere because of his service in Afghanistan. He had brought only his construction equipment, his money, and his brilliance up against the might of the entire Russian army. And he had won. By doing so he’d inspired an entire generation of mujahideen to take up the fight; to be bold, to have initiative, and best of all, to have heart. If you will believe in God, He will believe in you. And al-Habib truly believed in God, in the struggle, and most of all, in bin Laden.

Sixty meters away, the tower guard disappeared. Al-Habib’s heart lurched, and he looked up from the scope. Everything hinged on taking the guard down without raising an alarm, so that they could approach the fence where a drainage tunnel was located, cut through the screen, climb the bluff up to the camp, take out the two guards outside Echo, retrieve the five prisoners waiting for them, and then make their way back to the Nueva Cruz.

“Men fadlak,” he whispered under his breath. Please. The diversion would begin at any moment. He could feel the tension of his men behind him.

A zephyr of a breeze caressed his cheek, bringing with it the hint of soft music playing from a great distance. A radio perhaps. He leaned forward into the sniper scope, steadying his aim so that the backlit reticle was centered on the tower’s west observation port.

“This mission is important, Sharif,” bin Laden had said. “The brothers you will rescue have an inestimable value. Do you understand?”

“We will not fail.”

A mock-up of a portion of Camp Delta had been built in the desert outside Damascus where al-Habib and his people had trained. It had been cleverly constructed in disconnected sections so that the satellites would see this installation as nothing more than another base for Islamic militants. Such places were common in Syria. Bin Laden had come to the camp at great personal risk to speak to al-Habib before he left for Cuba. It had been such a huge honor that al-Habib’s stature among the Syrians had immediately risen to astronomical heights.

“I do not want you to needlessly sacrifice your life for this mission, but the brothers you will rescue are even more important than you. You must free them and bring them back here unharmed.”

It was night and they stood beneath an awning to conceal them from an American Keyhole satellite. Bin Laden was a full head taller than al-Habib, but he had to use the battered Kalashnikov rifle he’d carried since Afghanistan as a cane. Their eyes met and al-Habib was struck by three things: the man’s patience, his great intellect, and a sadness that lay heavy around him, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“What if we run into resistance, Imam?” al-Habib asked respectfully. During the last three months of their training they’d all been struck by how fragile a mission this was. So many things could go wrong.

Bin Laden laid a gentle hand on al-Habib’s shoulder. “If it becomes clear that you will not succeed, you must kill them. Under no circumstances must they fall back into American hands.”

If the prisoners were so important, al-Habib wanted to know, why would they be held in the minimum-security Camp Echo? But he didn’t ask the question. There were some things better left unsaid. Now, he wondered if he’d been wise, or if he’d simply been dazzled by bin Laden’s presence.

The guard came into sight. Al-Habib’s gut instantly tightened. He thumbed the safety selector lever to the off, single-fire position, and with his free hand, motioned for his people to make ready. It was time now. Any second—

A bright flash blossomed in the hills several kilometers to the north, directly behind the base. Before the sharp boom of the explosion arrived, the tower guard started to turn toward the light, his head in profile at the exact moment al-Habib squeezed off one shot.

With a muzzle velocity in excess of 2,850 feet per second, the 5.56-by-45mm NATO round covered the sixty meters in less than one second, the noise from the supersonic round all but lost in the confusion. The guard’s head was shoved violently forward, al-Habib could see the impact of the bullet before the American was down.

The sound of the initial flash-bang mortar shell rolled across the base, followed immediately by a lot of small-arms fire, all concentrated to the northeast.

A siren sounded somewhere inland to the west, probably at base headquarters, and lights started coming on all over the place.

Al-Habib looked up from the scope and held his breath. The next part was crucial if their mission had any hope of succeeding. The diversion had to temporarily lead the American defenses away from this end of the base. The window did not have to be a big one, because Camp Echo was less than two hundred meters from this spot. But they needed at least seven minutes to get in, free the five prisoners, and get back out.

Another flash-bang mortar round went off in the distance, and the small-arms fire intensified, mostly Kalashnikovs, but al-Habib could hear machine-gun fire, possibly the U.S.-made M60s that the Cuban military used.

Nothing moved in the tower, nor had the local alarm sounded, which meant that the guard had gone down without hitting the Panic button. No one was coming to the rescue. Yet.

Al-Habib detached his weapon from its tripod and, keeping low, scrambled down the shallow slope to the two-meter-wide drainage ditch that paralleled the fence. An oval, corrugated metal drainage pipe, just wide enough for one man at a time to enter, crossed beneath the fence to a similar drainage ditch on the inside of the camp. The opening was covered by a thick metal grate.

He dropped to one knee and trained his scope on the nearest tower one hundred meters to the north as Abu Bukhari slung his weapon and started on the grate with bolt cutters.

The distant tower guard was gone, and when he raised his scope, he could see no activity on the bluff.

In less than thirty seconds Bukhari had the grate off, and without a word climbed into the twenty-meter-long tunnel and disappeared in the darkness. Ibin Kamal and Omar Sufyan, good West Bank boys, followed, leaving al-Habib alone for just a moment in the middle of a mission for which all of his self-confidence had disappeared. Once they were inside the perimeter, the Americans would shoot to kill.

Al-Habib touched the fingers of his left hand to his chest to feel for the one-kilo block of Semtex plastic explosive taped to his body. It had been his idea. Bin Laden didn’t want any of the prisoners they’d come to rescue to be recaptured. Neither would he or his men be taken alive. For just an instant he had a vision of his father’s tear-stained face, and he shook his head.

What is writ by the hand of God cannot be put asunder by the mere will of man.

The jihad was right and just. “Writ by the hand of God,” al-Habib mumbled. “No question.”

He ducked into the tunnel and crawled on his hands and knees to the other side, reaching the opening just as Sufyan was pulling himself out. He didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, nevertheless he was glad to be back out in the open air, even though he was getting the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that he had come to the end of his life.

The action to the north was heating up as American forces began returning fire. There would be nothing in Cuban or U.S. newspapers about the routine probe, but a U.S. military report would mention the incident, the greater-than-usual quantity of ordinance expended, and the fact that no casualties were sustained. Nothing would be mentioned about the prison break, or the casualties here.

The four of them crossed the no-man’s zone and started up the steep slope, clawing at the loose sand and crumbling rock, trying to hurry as fast as they could while making the minimum of noise.

At the crest of the bluff, they held up. Camp Delta, behind its own razor-wire-topped fence, consisted of several dozen concrete block detention units, each with its own inner fence and security station manned by MPs.

Kamal pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then pointed them in the direction of a low, concrete block building just outside the main detention area, which housed Camp Echo.

Al-Habib rose up over the edge for just a moment and immediately spotted two American Military Police guards outside the tall, razor-wire-topped fence that surrounded the building. They’d stepped around from the guard shack, their weapons slung over their shoulders, and were facing north toward the noise and flashes of the Cuban probe.

No other activity was in sight. No movement, no other soldiers. The Camp Delta inner perimeter fence was across a dirt road and a barren field of low brown grass and gravel.

Al-Habib motioned that he would take out the MP to the left, and for Sufyan to take the other.

“Let it begin now,” al-Habib told himself. “Let my hand be steady and my heart be strong.” He nodded. “Insh’allah,” he whispered.

“Insh’allah,” Sufyan replied.

They both rose at the same moment. Al-Habib centered his reticle on the back of the guard’s head and squeezed off his shot at almost the exact moment as Sufyan’s. Both American MPs collapsed to the ground.

A tall, nicely proportioned, young black woman stepped out of her room in Gitmo’s BOQ near base headquarters and padded on bare feet down the short corridor and outside to an awning-covered patio used as a smoking area. She was dressed only in an brief bra and panties, the white material almost fluorescing against her dark skin. The sounds of the attack had awakened her, and although she wasn’t particularly concerned for the moment, she was curious. The big siren in front of Gitmo’s HQ was blaring, and spotlights along the northeastern perimeter were trained on the hills behind the base. She walked to the edge of the patio to get a better look, but all she could make out from here was an occasional flash in the distance, and the sharp sounds of assault rifles and perhaps a machine gun.

She’d been down here on special assignment for the CIA for ten days now, and this was the third Cuban probe on their defenses. But this morning the firing seemed more intense than it had the other times.

She flinched when another mortar round landed with a big flash of light somewhere in the hills behind the base, and she got the notion that the Cubans weren’t shooting at us, they were just making a lot of noise for some reason.

To draw our defenses away. From what?

“What the hell are you doing out there?” someone called to her from the door of the BOQ.

Gloria Ibenez glanced back and smiled. “Can’t sleep with all this racket.” Her eyes were wide and dark, and her black hair fell in cascades around her high cheeks, full lips, and narrow, finely sculpted nose. She was a beautiful thirty-two-year-old Cuban-born woman, and she turned heads whenever she walked into a room.

“Come on, Ibenez, put some clothes on before you start a riot,” her partner, CIA field officer Robert Talarico, said. He was bare-chested, but he’d pulled on a pair of jeans. He came out to the patio where she stood, and offered her a cigarette.

She shook her head as another flash-bang rolled across the base, followed by a fresh crackle of small-arms fire.

“It’s a big one tonight,” Talarico said. His father had been a tunnel rat in ’Nam, and like his father he was short, slightly built, and moved in tiny swift steps like a bird. He was two years older than Ibenez, but she was the senior partner, a fact he did not resent. He had a lot of respect for her tradecraft and her intelligence.

Gloria turned and stared toward the distant firefight as a pair of APCs roared up Main Street and headed northeast in a big hurry. “Too big, maybe.”

“They’ve hit us before. Nobody gets hurt, they’re just letting us know that we’re pissing them off by being here. No big deal.”

“This time’s different,” Gloria said. “It’s already lasted longer than before. And it’s more intense. Could be a diversion.”

Talarico straightened up. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. This maybe has something to do with us?” He gave her a sidelong glance. “With you specifically?”

“Probably not.”

Gloria’s father, Air Force General Ernesto Marti, who’d been Castro’s chief of air operations, had defected to the United States when Gloria was thirteen. Pretending that he was experiencing engine trouble, he’d landed his Cessna 182 in downtown Havana on the Avenida San Antonio Chiquito in front of the Necrópolis de Colón, where his wife was waiting with their only child. Before anyone could do a thing, he’d taken off and headed northeast toward Key West. Who was going to question the chief of air operations?

But the airplane had developed an actual engine problem, and they’d crashed five miles short of the island. Gloria’s father pulled her out of the wreckage, but she could never forget the look of helpless surprise on her mother’s face as the airplane sank just outside the reef in five hundred feet of water.

General Marti went to work as a special adviser on Cuban affairs to the CIA, and after law school and a brief stint in the Navy’s JAG, Gloria had followed in his footsteps. They were both very high on the Cuban Intelligence Services most wanted list.

“What time is it?” Gloria asked.

Talarico checked his watch. “Quarter to three.”

Gloria and Talarico worked in the Special Projects Division for the deputy director of operations. For the most part their recent assignments had not involved the use of legends — cover stories. Most recently they’d been in Afghanistan, interrogating every peasant and mujahideen they could get their hands on, to come up with some hint of where bin Laden might be holed up. Last week they’d been assigned to Gitmo to see what information they could get from the Afghani and Iraqi prisoners. But it had turned into a dicey operation. The guys working for naval intelligence, which handled most of the interrogations, resented the CIA sticking its nose into their territory, and Amnesty International had been sniffing around lately, looking for another Abu Ghraib scandal.

And now these Cuban probes on Gitmo’s defenses. The last two times they’d hit the perimeter just off the beach below Delta. But this morning the attack was to the north.

Well away from the detention camp. At three o’clock in the morning. When nearly everyone was supposed to be sleeping.

Another flash of light lit up the night sky to the north, followed several seconds later by an impressive boom.

“Get dressed,” Gloria said. “We’re going to take a ride.” She turned and headed back to the BOQ, Talarico right on her heels.

“Where?”

“Delta.”

“You think it’s a prison break?”

Gloria looked at him, and shrugged. “I don’t like coincidences,” she told him. “The Cubans are up to something.”

“That’d mean they were cooperating with al-Quaida,” Talarico said.

“Now there’s a thought,” Gloria replied at the door to her room. “But we are the common enemy.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

“Bring your pistol.”

Kamal and Sufyan dragged the bodies of the two MPs out of sight in a shallow depression in the sand and gravel next to the road, while Bukhari figured out the control that released the gate lock. Al-Habib stood in the shadow cast by the guard shack, his attention toward the Delta outer fence about thirty meters away, every sense alert for any sign that their incursion had been detected.

But there was no movement, no sirens, no guards coming across on the run. All the noise and activity was directed to the perimeter fence five klicks to the north.

“No keys,” Bukhari whispered urgently.

“What about the gate?”

“It’s electric, I found the switch.”

“Do it,” al-Habib whispered. So far as they knew, opening the gate at this hour of the morning would not trigger an automatic alarm. But no intelligence report was ever one hundred percent certain.

A moment later the gate lock buzzed, and the three bolts snapped with an audible pop.

Al-Habib’s hand tensed on his weapon, and he held his breath, once again listening for any indication that someone was coming for them. His nerves were jumping all over the place. But there was nothing. Their luck was holding, and for the first time since they’d come ashore he was beginning to feel that they might pull this off.

He motioned for Bukhari to come with him. Kamal and Sufyan would remain outside to cover their backs.

Al-Habib reached the steel door to the low concrete block building and stepped away for Bukhari to mold a one-hundred-gram block of Semtex around the door lock. A heavy wire mesh covered the narrow window beside the door. Someone in an orange shirt was there. Al-Habib urgently motioned for him to get back.

An air-conditioning unit at the rear of the building noisily kicked on at the same moment Bukhari inserted a slender pencil fuse into the gray putty material and cracked the acid chamber.

He and al-Habib moved to either side and turned their backs to the door. Two seconds later, the Semtex blew with a muffled crack, the sound all but lost to the noise of the air conditioner. The smoldering lock mechanism and handle landed in the dirt three meters away.

Bukhari pulled the door open, and al-Habib, his rifle up, safety off, his finger alongside the trigger guard, rolled inside, sweeping his M8 left to right.

There were five prisoners dressed for bed in orange suits in the corner farthest from the door, but no American guards.

“Musafa Bakr,” al-Habib called softly.

A slightly built man with a pencil-thin mustache came forward with a heavy limp. “Aywa,” he said. Yes. The other four were right behind him.

“Are you hurt?” al-Habib asked, concerned that they would have to carry him down the bluff to the fence and then to the beach. It would seriously slow them down.

“Not badly enough to cause a hindrance,” ex-Iranian Navy Commander Bakr said.

“What happened—”

“We can talk later. Do you have a weapon for me?” He held out a hand.

It wasn’t what al-Habib expected, though he could hardly deny the request. He took his 9mm Steyr GB pistol from a zippered pocket and gave it to the man. “Our luck is holding so far, but it won’t last,” he said.

Outside, al-Habib, Bukhari, and the five prisoners hurried across to the open gate. Kamal and Sufyan waited in the shadows, their attention directed toward the main entrance to Camp Delta.

“Anything?” al-Habib asked.

“Nothing,” Sufyan replied.

They shut and relocked the gate, and, al-Habib in the lead, started across the field toward the edge of the bluff. The night sky to the north was lit by the occasional flash of a mortar round. The small-arms fire had not slackened, but it would not last much longer. And once the attack was over, someone might start to wonder what was going on. If a check was made of the guard posts, the game would be up.

They had to be down on the beach before that happened if they were going to have any chance of getting away.

Al-Habib glanced back at Bakr right behind him. If something did go wrong, and the prisoners had to be killed, doing so would be more difficult because one of them was armed.

A military vehicle crested the road that came up from the main part of the base, and headed directly toward Camp Delta, the headlights briefly sweeping across the field where al-Habib and the others crouched.

“Yalla!” al-Habib whispered, his heart in his throat. Let’s go!

“What the hell is that?” Talarico demanded urgently. They had just reached the top of the hill and were heading toward Camp Delta’s main gate. Gloria was behind the wheel of a Humvee from the base motor pool.

“What was what?” Gloria turned to him. He was pointing off toward the edge of the hill that plunged down to sea level.

“Four or five people, maybe more,” he said. “Black outfits, but at least three were wearing orange.” There was the hint of amazement in his voice. “You were right, it’s a prison break.”

“Goddammit to hell,” Gloria said. She hauled the all-terrain vehicle off the road in the direction Talarico had pointed, and pulled up short, in a hail of dust and loose rocks. Nothing showed up in the headlights except for the open field that dropped off about thirty meters away. “Are you sure, Bob?”

Talarico grabbed a flashlight off its bracket on the hump and jumped out of the vehicle. “I saw something out there,” he called back through the open door. He directed the narrow beam across the field, on either side of the swath cast by the Humvee’s headlights, then slowly followed it back toward the Camp Echo facility.

“There!” he shouted. He pulled out his pistol and headed in a dead run around the front of the Humvee back to the ditch beside the road directly in front of Echo, where two figures lay facedown.

Gloria jumped out of the Humvee and yanked the walkie-talkie from her belt clip with one hand, and her 0.45in. ACP MK 23 (SOCOM) pistol from the quick-draw holster at the small of her back, her attention directed across the field.

“They’re dead!” Talarico shouted.

Gloria glanced at him. He was hunched over the two bodies. “Our guys?”

“MPs,” Talarico said, straightening up. “I’m guessing Echo guards. They’ve been shot in the head.”

Gloria motioned toward the drop-off across the field and she headed out. She keyed the walkie-talkie. “TAC One, TAC One, this is a Red Release. I repeat, a Red Release, looks like from Echo. They’re already over the hill.”

Talarico had started after her, keeping a few meters to the left. He’d switched off the flashlight.

“Who’s on this channel?” the on-duty Security Ops officer came back. He sounded harried with all that was happening along the northeastern perimeter.

“Ibenez. I’m with Talarico. We’re on your special ops duty roster,” she radioed back. The Cubans probably monitored all the non-secure channels, but it would take time for someone to figure out she was on their hit list. “You have two friendlies down outside Echo right now. About two minutes ago we spotted two or more figures in black, going over the crest of the hill to the east, with three or more guys in orange pj’s. Copy?”

“Roger, copy that,” the OD radioed back. “What’s your ten-twenty?”

“We’re in pursuit about twenty-five meters out,” Gloria responded. “Standby one.” She motioned for Talarico to hold up just before the edge of the drop-off. She didn’t want either of them to get shot by a rear guard waiting for them to show themselves.

She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the edge, where she got on her belly. For a second or two she couldn’t see any movement. A guard tower about sixty or seventy meters directly below was dark, as were the towers to the north, and the one to the south just above the beach.

But then she spotted several figures, maybe half of them in black, and the other half in orange, scurrying across the no-man’s zone where they disappeared one at a time into a tunnel under the fence. She keyed the walkie-talkie.

“TAC One, I count at least four POWs and four bad guys just going through a tunnel under the east perimeter fence, a few hundred meters off the beach.”

“The guy in the tower’s got to be asleep,” Talarico said.

“Or dead,” Gloria replied. She spotted a movement on the other side of the fence, and she keyed her walkie-talkie. “TAC One, they’re out.”

“Roger that,” the OD replied. He sounded disgusted. “It’s not our problem now. If they reach the beach the Coasties will be on them. I have people coming your way. Stand by.”

“Bullshit,” Gloria radioed.

“They’re in Cuba!” the OD came back. “We can’t do diddly.”

Gloria jumped to her feet and started down the steep slope, Talarico right behind her. “We’re going after them,” she radioed. “Tell your tower guards we’re on our way. And warm up a chopper, we might need a quick extraction.”

“The beach will be crawling with Frontier Brigade—”

“Negative. I’m betting that they’re all on the northeast perimeter.”

Gloria clipped the walkie-talkie to her belt, and at the bottom she and Talarico crossed the no-man’s zone to the drainage culvert. She motioned for him to hold up, as she cautiously peered into the tunnel. It was possible that the POWs and whoever had sprung them knew they were being pursued, and had stationed someone at the other end.

“You sure we want to do this?” Talarico whispered urgently.

The tunnel was empty. Gloria could see a circle of dim light on the other side. She looked up at her partner. “Why’d they go through the trouble to stage a jail break from Echo when most of those guys are scheduled for release anyway? Unless someone didn’t want us to talk to them.”

He immediately saw her point. “What are we waiting for?”

Gloria nodded. He was a good man; smart, talented, and she had a lot of respect for him. He had a couple of kids and a successful marriage, which was something of a rarity for a field officer. She envied his wife. She ducked into the tunnel and scurried through to the other side, holding up once again at the opening to make sure she wasn’t leading them into an ambush.

The night on this side of the base was quiet. During a momentary lull in the small-arms fire to the north, Gloria was certain she heard something out ahead to the south; someone running through loose gravel.

Talarico was at her shoulder. He’d heard it too. “They’re heading for the beach.”

Gloria grabbed the walkie-talkie and called the OD. “TAC One, this is Ibenez. They’re trying for the beach. We’re going after them, but you’d better give the Coast Guard the heads-up.”

“Stand down, Ibenez, that’s an order direct from Commander Weiss. He’s en route your position.”

“Negative, negative,” Gloria radioed back. “I want a chopper standing by, ASAP.” She switched off the radio, crawled out of the tunnel, and headed south along the perimeter fence, keeping her pistol at her side, the muzzle pointed slightly away from her leg.

The timing of the breakout bothered her almost as much as the professionalism. They’d known the exact route to Camp Echo, which meant there had to be prisoners they wanted out before the CIA could get to them. It was driving her nuts to think that not only were the Cubans cooperating with al-Quaida, but that there might be someone inside Gitmo on the payroll as well.

Talarico fanned out to the left, slightly behind her, his pistol in hand.

They moved quickly, and as noiselessly as possible, stopping every few dozen meters to listen.

One hundred meters from the drainage tunnel, Gloria spotted the silhouettes of a small group of figures moving south, at the same moment one of them, dressed in black, turned around. She pulled up short and motioned for Talarico to stop.

For several seconds the main body of the escaping prisoners continued toward the beach, while the one figure remained where he stood, thirty or forty meters out. He dropped to one knee and raised something in front of him.

All of a sudden Gloria realized that the son of a bitch was armed and was about to shoot at them. “Down!” she shouted to her partner.

The black-clad figure opened fire with what sounded to Gloria like a small-caliber suppressed carbine of some sort.

She squatted to a shooter’s stance, brought her pistol up, thumbed the safety catch to the off position, and started firing.

The range was all but impossible under the conditions, but the noise from her unsilenced pistol was impressive. A lot of people on both sides of the fence had just been put on notice that the battle had shifted here from the northeastern perimeter.

Talarico opened fire, as several other black-clad figures turned and returned fire.

She dropped to the ground, and continued firing, until her weapon went dry. Talarico suddenly cried out and went down. But there was no time to help him. This was her fault, because she had been stupid; she hadn’t counted on them being so heavily armed. She ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare from her back pocket, and rammed it home. The returning fire was starting to concentrate on her now, rock chips flying all over the place from near misses.

She rolled left as she continued to fire.

A helicopter swooped down from the crest of the Camp Delta hill with a deep-throated clatter of its rotors, its spotlight cutting a broad swath down the slope, across the fence, and along the no-man’s zone. Gloria and Talarico were briefly illuminated, but then the knot of black-clad shooters and prisoners dressed in orange was lit like day.

Spotlights in the guard towers all along the perimeter fence came on and a lot of sirens started blaring up and down the line.

The Boeing MH-6J chopper peeled off to the east, firing a spray of 7.62mm rounds from both of its miniguns, bracketing the escaping prisoners.

At least one of them raised his weapon and fired at the helicopter, but the rest of them concentrated their fire on Gloria.

Something blunt hit her hard, like a baseball bat, in the left hip, and her leg went instantly numb. She squeezed off two more shots, and one of the POWs in orange went down.

The chopper was coming around for a second pass when two of the black-clad figures suddenly turned and started shooting the POWs.

Gloria propped herself up with her good leg so she could get a better look. It made no sense that they would kill one another.

The helicopter pulled up short in a hover twenty or thirty meters away, its spotlight illuminating the scene like day. All of the POWs were down. One of the black-clad figures looked up, shook his fist at the chopper, and suddenly disappeared in a bright flash-bang, the noise hammering off the side of the hill.

Gloria’s mouth dropped open. He’d killed the POWs he’d come to rescue, rather than let them be recaptured, and then had committed suicide.

She pulled out her walkie-talkie to warn the chopper pilot to stay back, when the other three black-clad figures disappeared like the first in flash-bangs, blowing themselves up.

Moments later the chopper came back and set down hard ten meters from where Gloria was up on one knee. Two armed men in Marine Corps BDUs sitting in the starboard doorway jumped out and raced back to her.

“We’re going to have company real soon, ma’am,” one of them said, hauling Gloria to her feet. His sewn name tag read JONES.

The other marine had dropped beside Talarico, who lay facedown in the sand. He looked up and shook his head.

“Okay, we’re outta here — now,” Jones said urgently.

“We’re not leaving Bob,” Gloria said, pulling away.

“We’ve got a Frontier Brigade patrol just about on top of us, and we’re not allowed to shoot at them—”

“We’re not leaving my partner!” Gloria shouted.

Jones slung his weapon, hustled Gloria over to where Talarico lay, and between him and his partner dragged the body back to the chopper. They stuffed it unceremoniously inside, then helped Gloria up onto the sill.

The instant the marines were aboard, the chopper pilot hauled the machine airborne and immediately peeled to the west, just clearing the razor wire atop the perimeter fence, before climbing steeply to the crest of the Delta hill.

Gloria held tightly to Talarico’s lifeless body, his half-open eyes staring up at her, his face unnaturally white. She had killed him as surely as if she had shot him herself. Her heart was sick just thinking what she would have to tell his wife. It was a part of the business they were in; some of her friends had bought it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And her own husband had been tortured to death in a Cuban Intelligence Service prison outside Havana. She knew about loss.

But this time she had been the one in charge; this time the responsibility had rested on her shoulders.