Locked On

56

Caruso had finished his sandwich, and he and Ryan were in the process of powering down the bug-bot surveillance devices in order to save battery power. They would wait until evening to fire them up again, hoping that Rehan would be back by then.

The sat phone on the table rang, and Caruso answered it.

“Yeah?”

“Dom? It’s Bell.”

“What’s up, Rick?”

“We’ve got a problem. When we got into the office, we started at the beginning of your transmission of the audio, so we’ve been about fifteen minutes behind on the translations.”

“Not a problem. Rehan took off a little while ago so we are powering down the—”

“There is a problem. We just translated what he said before he walked out the door.”

Domingo Chavez was stuck in traffic just a quarter-mile from the exit to the airport. On his way back from picking up his sniper rifle and ammo from the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, he got caught behind a bad traffic accident on the Business Bay Bridge, and now he sat in the BMW, very glad at the moment that the air conditioner was saving him from the brutal heat, because it looked like he’d be going nowhere soon.

In front of him, some three miles away, he could see the Burj Khalifa reach up into the sky. On the other side of that, all the way over at the coast, was Palm Jumeirah, his destination.

Just then his mobile rang. “Go for Ding,” he said.

It was Ryan, his voice rushed and intense. “Rehan knows Embling and al Darkur are at Burj Khalifa! He’s headed there now with a crew of goons.”

“Shit! Call Nigel.”

“I did. No answer. Tried the landline to his place, too. Nobody picked up.”

“Son of a bitch!” Chavez said. “Get over there as fast as possible. I’m stuck in gridlock.”

“We’re moving, but it will be twenty minutes, at least.”

“Just haul ass, kid! They are our only link to Sam! We can’t lose them!”

“I know!”

In the BMW just west of Business Bay Bridge, Domingo Chavez slammed his hands into the steering wheel in frustration. “Dammit!”

Both Mohammed al Darkur and Nigel Embling had been secured with plastic restraints, their hands behind their backs, their ankles zip-tied together. Rehan had ordered his men to stand the men up against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room with their backs against the glass. General Rehan sat in front of them on the long couch, his legs crossed and his arms back over the cushions. He was a man in his element, comfortable here with prisoners at his mercy.

Rehan’s men — Colonel Khan and an eight-strong security force — stood around the room. Another sentry remained outside in the hallway. They each carried a pistol of their own choosing — Steyrs and SIGs and CZs were represented in the force, and Rehan and Khan both carried Berettas in shoulder holsters.

If Nigel Embling still harbored any faint shred of doubt as to the trustworthiness of ISI Major Mohammed al Darkur, that doubt was dispelled. Rehan’s men bashed al Darkur’s face into the glass window multiple times, and the thirty-five-year-old Pakistani shrieked curses at his elder countryman.

Nigel did not need forty years of in-country experience in Pakistan to recognize that these two Pakistanis did not care for each other.

Al Darkur shouted at Rehan. He spoke in English. “What did you do with the American in Miran Shah?”

The calm general smiled and answered in English. “I met with the man personally. He did not have much to say. I ordered him tortured for information about your plans. I suppose your future plans are not as important to me now as they were when I gave that order, seeing how you now have no future.”

Al Darkur kept his chin high. “Others are on to you. We know you are working with the coup organizers, we know you have trained a foreign force at the Haqqani camp near Miran Shah. Others will come behind me and they will stop you, inshallah!”

“Ha,” Rehan laughed. “Inshallah? If Allah wills it? Let’s see if Allah wills you to succeed, or if he wills me to succeed.” Rehan looked to his two guards standing near the prisoners by the window. “It is stuffy in this pretentious apartment. Open a window.”

The two guards drew their pistols, turned as one, and fired over and over into a ten-by-ten-foot pane of the thick floor-to-ceiling window glass against which the two prisoners stood. It did not shatter immediately, but as the number of holes increased in the pane, from five to ten to twenty, white fissures spread between the bullet holes. The men reloaded their handguns while the cracking and popping of the glass continued, growing in volume until the massive glass square shattered outward, sending razor-sharp shards falling 108 stories down.

Warm wind blew into the luxury apartment, some pebble-sized flecks of glass with it, and Rehan and his men had to shield their eyes while the dust settled. The whine of the airflow up the side of the building rushing into the open panel in the window forced Rehan to stand up from the couch and come nearer to his prisoners to be heard.

He looked at Major al Darkur for a moment before turning to Nigel Embling, propped against the window glass, hands and legs bound, next to the huge opening to the bright sky. “I’ve looked into your background. You are from another century, Embling. The expatriate spy of a colonial power that has somehow missed the message that it no longer has any colonies. You are a pathetic man. You and the other infidels of the West have so long raped the children of Allah that you can no longer understand that your time has passed. But now, old fool, now the caliphate has returned! Can you not see it, Embling? Can you not see how the destruction of British colonialism has so perfectly set the stage for my ascendance to power?”

Embling shouted at the big Pakistani standing just feet from his face, and spittle flew from his mouth. “Your ascendance to power? Your lot are the ones destroying Pakistan! It is good men like the major here who will lead your country back from the abyss, not monsters like you!”

Riaz Rehan just waved a hand in the air. “Fly home, Englishman.” And with that he gave a curt nod to two ISI security men standing near Nigel Embling. They stepped forward, yanked the big man off balance by his shoulders, and pulled him backward toward the open window.

He screamed in horror as they pushed him over the edge, then let him go, and he fell backward, away from the building, tumbling out, head over feet through the hot desert wind, dropping 108 floors toward concrete and steel below.

Major Mohammed al Darkur screamed at Rehan. “Kut-tay ka bacha!” Son of a dog! Though bound hand and foot, he pushed forward off the glass, tried to lunge at the big general. Two security men grabbed him before he fell forward into the apartment, and they wrestled with him, finally pulling him backward toward the ten-by-ten-foot hole in the floor-to-ceiling glass.

Rehan’s men looked up to their general for guidance.

General Rehan just nodded with a slight smile. “Send him to join his English friend.”

Al Darkur cursed and shouted and tried to kick. He shook one of his arms away from the man dragging him to the edge, but another gunman holstered his weapon and rushed forward. Together three men now fought the major on the ground in the flecks and chips of broken window glass.

It took a moment, but they gained control of al Darkur. The others in the room stood around laughing as the ISI officer fought with only the movements of his torso.

Al Darkur screamed at Rehan. “Mather chot!” Motherfucker!

The three guards dragged Major al Darkur across the floor, pulled him closer to the edge. Mohammed stopped his fight now. The wind racing from the desert floor, up 108 stories of hot glass and metal, blew the cinnamon-skinned Pakistani’s black hair into his eyeˀhiss, and he shut them, squinted tight, and began to pray.

The three gunmen took him under his shoulders, lifted him up, and grabbed him by his belt as well. As one they heaved his body back, ready to launch him forward toward the sun.

But they did not move forward as one. The security officer holding al Darkur’s left shoulder lurched away from the window and spun around; he dropped the major and, in so doing, caused the other two to lose their grip.

Before anyone in the room could react, a second man at the window’s ledge moved away from the bound major. This man fell backward into the apartment, rocked back on his heels, and tumbled down into the sunken seating area by the sofa.

Rehan turned to look at the man, to see what the hell he was doing, but instead his eyes looked past his guard and toward the cream-colored leather sofa that was now covered in a crimson splatter of blood.

Rehan looked back out the window. In the distance he saw a black speck in the sky a few hundred feet over the Burj Al Arab hotel in the distance. A helicopter? One second later, just as the last man holding al Darkur let go of the major and grabbed his bloody leg while falling to the floor, General Riaz Rehan shouted to the room.

“Sniper!”

Colonel Khan leapt over the sofa and tackled Rehan to the tile just as a hot rifle round raced past the general’s forehead.