Whiplash

37

Objectively speaking, the goal of the operation against the Sudan prison camp had been a success: Tarid was free, and heading toward Khartoum. Not only was he being tracked via satellite, thanks to the biomarker Danny Freah had planted, but the CIA was scouring intercepts and digging through databases and other sources to get as much information about him as possible.

But the operation had cost considerably more lives than Danny had hoped. The Sudanese and the rebel dead weighed on him more than most people would have thought. But the real blow was McGowan.

In war, sacrifice was inevitable, and even the best leader has to make decisions that led to deaths. But Danny felt that he should have planned the attack differently, found some way to protect McGowan. He brooded about the attack, reviewing it over and over in his mind.

There were many small changes he might have made, and yet they might not have led to a different result. The ferocity of the Sudanese defenders had been surprising. In general, they were not considered either effective or fierce. They had proven to be both. With a more aggressive leader, they might have cost the Whiplash team even more casualties.

On the whole, the Americans had performed well. The small group was starting to bond; Danny found that he was coming to like Nuri as well as respect him.

There was one glaring exception: Hera. She was the sand in the Vaseline. Or as Boston put it, “The only word to describe her rhymes with witch. And it ain’t rich.”

Danny had worked with difficult personalities before. Special operations attracted them, and it wasn’t always easy to weed them out. But peer selection and an extended training and test period helped. One fierce op generally rounded them into shape — or showed that they were never going to fit.

“I can bust on her ass,” said Boston, reviewing the situation after they got back to Base Camp Alpha. “Pound a little respect into her pointy head.”

“I’ll handle it,” said Danny.

“You going to bag her?” Boston asked.

“I can’t while the mission is continuing. We’re short as it is. And she speaks Farsi better than Nuri. If this guy’s Iranian, that’s a big plus.”

“Your earphone thing doesn’t translate for you?”

“It does. But it’s not the same. Anyway, I can’t bag her now.”

“You can do anything you want, Chief. You de boss.”

Boston had been struggling to find a title other than colonel that fit. Boss, chief, skipper — nothing felt good on the tongue. He was just so used to calling Danny “Captain,” nothing else felt right.

Nuri, meanwhile, was trying to figure out a next step.

“The good news is, Tarid’s in Khartoum,” he told Danny when they settled down to take stock together.

“What’s the bad?” said Danny.

“Besides the coffee?”

“From now on we operate only in places with Dunkin’ Donuts,” said Danny. “What’s the bad news?”

“The tag didn’t take properly. The signal is deteriorating. The rain must have diluted the marker before you got it on him.”

He’d also lost some marking Tilia. Nuri wasn’t sure whether that had been an accident or not, and didn’t mention it.

“Can we track him?” asked Danny.

“For a while.” Nuri got up and poured himself some more coffee. “Starbucks would be acceptable, if we could get it into the budget.”

“Yeah, but you can’t beat the doughnuts at Dunky.”

“True.” Nuri took a sip. As bad as the coffee might be, he was addicted. “The signal will be gone inside a week. I want to tag him again. I’ll go over to Khartoum. We’re going to have pull the plug here. Our cover is toast, we have to get rid of the mercs, and I have to believe the army’s going to be out for blood after this. So we’re best off recycling.”

“How?”

“Well, I think we have enough sensors at the milk barn down there to hold us for a bit. So we concentrate on our Mr. Tarid. Follow him. Find out where he’s going. We play civilian for a while. We can base ourselves in Khartoum. There are plenty of westerners there. We go to the backup covers. Restock.”

“Agreed,” said Danny. “But one priority you didn’t mention — we have to get McGowan’s body home.”

“Yeah, I know. That sucks.”

Nuri had never lost a fellow officer on a mission before. He really didn’t feel as if he’d lost one now, either — he still divided the team up mentally, separating himself from Danny and the Whiplash people. He felt bad about McGowan, but didn’t ache the way Danny did.

“We can’t take everybody into the capital anyway,” said Nuri. “You oughta stay away anyway.”

“Why me?”

“Because he’s seen you. You and Hera. And Boston.”

“And Flash.”

“Right.”

“I’m going with you,” said Danny. “We’ll take Sugar. Boston and the others can take care of getting everything out of here.”

“All right.” Nuri pulled over the chair and sat down. “We’re going to need more people eventually.”

“True. You think we would have done better last night with more people?”

“I think we did OK last night,” said Nuri.

“It was a hell of a bloodbath.”

“That’s Sudan these days. Sucks. I’m sorry we lost McGowan,” Nuri added.

“So am I.”

“But we did all right. We’re not — we don’t have all the firepower you guys used to have at Dreamland,” Nuri said, thinking Danny was comparing the two operations. “So we’re never going to have overwhelming odds.”

“We had some troubles in ops there, too,” said Danny, thinking back. “It just gets harder.”

He meant accepting the losses, but didn’t explain.

“The next batch of people we get should be heavier on the Agency side,” said Nuri, getting back to his point. “Your spec ops guys are OK shooters, but they’re not really spies. We’re going to need more spies, I think. Be useful following Tarid.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, we can train anybody. Not anybody — you know what I mean. I started on the paramilitary side myself, then moved over. It’s not that hard.”

“Yeah?” asked Danny. He got up and got himself coffee.

“I don’t know,” continued Nuri. “Maybe it isn’t for me. It’s my blood. My grandfather worked for the Agency. And my great-grandfather was with the OSS. I grew up listening to stories about it.”

“Your parents were CIA, too?”

“Skipped a generation.”

Nuri’s father had been about as far from a CIA type as possible, at least partly in reaction to his own father, with whom his relationship had always been poor. His mom was even more opposed to the CIA and military. But in a way, both had done quite a bit to prepare him for his career. His father was an executive with an oil company, and they had lived almost exclusively in the Middle East and Northern Africa when Nuri was growing up. His mother had insisted he learn the local languages and customs wherever they lived — critical background for his job.

“I think we just take the best people we can,” said Danny. “Train them the way we want. Cross-train them.”

“Agreed. But for now—”

“We play it by ear,” said Danny. “Just like we’ve been doing. Besides, just because they’re from the CIA doesn’t mean they’re perfect.”

Nuri took that, correctly, as a reference to Hera.

“What are we going to do about her?” he asked.

“Hera gave you problems too, huh?”

“I think she’s jealous. She originally trained for the MY-PID program and didn’t get the first selection. She can’t be top dog, and her nose is out of joint.”

“I’d say whoever rejected her spent some quality time with her,” said Danny. “Did you know her?”

“We met a few times. We never worked together.” Nuri shrugged. “She speaks Farsi. That’ll be pretty useful.”

“I know. We have to keep her for this mission. I’ll talk to her.”

“Good luck.”

Just before she woke, Hera dreamed about McGowan.

He was in the tent with her, standing across from her bed.

“What?” she asked him, sitting up.

He shook his head slowly.

“What?” she asked again. “Are you warning me about something? Did I do something wrong?”

The dream faded into daylight.

Shuddering, she got out of bed quickly. Pulling on her clothes, she went for something to eat.

Danny happened to be in the house. He was surprised when she came in — she wasn’t due back on watch for another six hours — but was glad she was there. No one else was around and he could get their talk over with.

“Hera, good morning,” he said. “There’s coffee.”

“Good.”

“Bagels are good.”

“They’re kinda slimy. I’ll stick to the powdered eggs. Thanks.”

He waited until she’d had a few sips before he started talking to her.

“I want you to be more careful when you’re talking to people,” he told her, deciding to start out diplomatically. She had, after all, been through hell the night before.

“What do you mean?” she snapped.

“You get nasty when things get tight. With me. Yeah. With everyone else.”

Hera thought of the dream. Last night, in the minefield, she’d yelled at McGowan.

“I–I yelled at McGowan. In the minefield. I called him a jerk.”

“You pretty much yell at everybody,” said Danny.

Hera saw McGowan’s face. Her eyes began welling up. The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of Danny Freah. She started to turn away.

Danny grabbed her arm. “Hey, I’m still talking to you,” he told her. “Don’t walk away.”

“What? Am I your kid?” she said, struggling to hold back her tears.

Danny let go of her arm. “Look—” He stopped, wanting to soften his tone, understanding that McGowan’s death hit everyone hard.

“Leave me alone,” Hera said, quickly turning and walking out. She barely made it to her tent before exploding in sobs.

The talk hadn’t exactly gone as he planned, and Danny decided he’d give her a little time before trying to have a better discussion. But a few minutes later the Voice reported that Tarid left the house in Khartoum where he’d been staying. Within minutes it was obvious he was going to the city airport.

There was only one flight out for several hours, MY-PID reported: a UAE flight to Morocco.

“The question is where he’s going from there,” said Nuri. “The possibilities are endless.”

They might have been, but MY-PID didn’t have to waste its time counting them. Instead, it interfaced with a CIA database that tracked passenger manifests. Tarid had not used his real identity, but only forty people showed up for the flight. Cross-checking against earlier flights, the computer quickly identified his alias and found that he was en route to Athens.

There the trail ended.

“We just need to get to Athens before that flight,” said Danny. “And we can follow him from there.”

“I follow him. You can’t. He’s seen you already.”

“We may be able to use that.”

“Maybe. But not to follow him.”

Tarid had a very long layover in Morocco, which gave them an opportunity, but getting to Athens wouldn’t be easy; Tarid had picked the quickest route.

“He must be going to Iran,” said Nuri. “Changing flights and IDs along the way. If that slows him down, maybe we can beat him there.”

MY-PID had already searched flights for matches against Tarid’s other aliases and possible aliases. There were only two direct flights from Athens to Tehran after Tarid arrived. The computer ruled out all but three names on those flights as possible aliases.

“How about Bahrain?” said Danny. “They fly to Tehran.”

“Yeah,” said Nuri.

MY-PID considered the possibilities and made a new suggestion: Arash Tarid was flying as Arash Arash, due in at Imam Khomeini Airport late that night from the Arab Emirates.

“We still can’t beat him,” said Nuri. “The best we can do is miss by a half hour.”

“What if we flew to Kuwait,” said Danny. “Or better yet, Azerbaijan?”

“From Khartoum?”

“From anywhere. If we get up to Egypt, we can get a U.S. flight. They can bring us right into Baku.”

“Then what?”

“We take a boat.”