With Hostile Intent

Chapter Sixteen The Trailblazer

Jabbar awoke bathed in sweat. He sat upright in his bed. His pulse was still racing from the vividness of the dream.

He could still see the rippled surface of the sea skimming beneath his jet, the high cloudless sky over the Gulf. And in the distance, that great, gray death slab on the horizon.

It looked so benign.

The MiG was flying at only a hundred feet above the sea at nearly twice the speed of sound. Somehow he had come this far without being killed by American jets. He didn’t know why. Surely their airborne sentry ship — the AWACS — would have detected him. At any second he expected to hear the shrill chirp of his Sirena radar-warning receiver announcing the threat of an air-to-air missile.

Jabbar had no illusions about his own survival. He knew his death had been pre-ordained when he locked gazes with the riflemen of the firing squad. But he would die like a warrior. Also mounted to his MiG was a cluster of air-to-air missiles. His final act as a fighter pilot would be to engage as many of his enemies as possible before he was blown out of the sky.

As the angular silhouette of the great ship swelled on the horizon, Jabbar’s finger went to the launch button on the control stick. Mounted beneath the right wing of the MiG was the Krait. Jabbar knew that even today the American navy had nothing that could intercept a low-flying, supersonic missile.

He knew what would happen when he pressed the button. The Krait would leap from beneath the MiG’s wing and streak toward the demon ship out there on the horizon. The missile would pierce the double-layered steel hull, not detonating until it had penetrated the vital organs of the warship. When the warhead exploded, the USS Reagan would erupt in a hellish mushroom of fire and molten steel. America’s most powerful warship — and its 5,000-person crew — would be vaporized.

Jabbar knew he should feel a hatred for the Reagan. From its deck had come the Hornet fighters that killed Captain Al-Fariz — the incident that ignited this new war. But Jabbar could also admit the truth: The goat-brained Al-Fariz had been ripe for killing anyway, blundering as he did into the forbidden territory.

Jabbar had often wondered why he too had not been shot down in the same engagement. Still burned into his memory like an indelible scar was that moment of terror, hearing the shriek of his Sirena, waiting for the Hornet pilot to kill him with another missile.

But the missile hadn’t come, and Jabbar didn’t know why. Did the American lose his nerve? Did he decide that shooting Al-Fariz was a mistake? Did he feel merciful?

Jabbar was sure that he would never know the facts, only that an American fighter pilot had spared his life. And now Jabbar had been ordered by Saddam Hussein to launch a nuclear-tipped missile against the American aircraft carrier.

It was insane, thought Jabbar. Saddam was a maniac. But like many maniacs, this one possessed a demented genius for retribution. Jabbar knew that other missiles — launched simultaneously from surface vehicles — would be en route to targets in Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. The cities were even more defenseless against the Krait than the American fleet. The much vaunted Patriot missile had been a great joke during the Gulf War, doing more damage to the territory it was defending that to the incoming Scud. Even its successor, the Revere, was ineffective against the lethal Krait.

It would be a slaughter. A very ugly slaughter, because for most of the intended targets the Krait warheads transported Anthrax toxin and Sarin gas. Saddam did not wish his enemies a merciful death.

The Middle East would become a biological and nuclear wasteland.

Jabbar sat upright in his darkened room, wet with perspiration. Outside, the dawn had not yet come to Baghdad. Saddam’s war was still only a bad dream.

He still had time. He had to do something.

“Listen carefully,” the man said.

Tyrwhitt listened. They sat at adjoining tables in the sprawling al-Amarz coffee house. Swarms of passersby jostled each other, shuffling past the tables and the harried waiters.

The man’s features were now familiar to him — the hawk-like nose, the intense brown eyes that drilled into him like lasers. No question, he was the colonel from the reception at the Ministry of Information. Tyrwhitt wondered again about him. What motivated the man? What did he do in the Iraqi military? Why was he taking such a terrible risk?

“Latifyah,” said the informant in a low voice. “It is the assembly plant as well as the Krait missile propellant factory. Each building is fortified with a minimum of a meter of concrete. The complex has not only anti-aircraft and SAM defenses, it is within the protective umbrella of the Al-Taqqadum fighter interceptor base. Now pay very close attention. I will give you the current air defense order of battle.”

He stopped and peered at Tyrwhitt with his piercing brown eyes. “Are you sure you can remember this?”

Tyrwhitt sighed and gave him a withering look. “As I told you before, I remember everything.”

He caught the Iraqi’s humorless smile. Obviously he didn’t believe it. But it happened to be true. Even after half a dozen scotches, Tyrwhitt still possessed his computer-like ability to retain reams of arcane data. It was the single attribute that made him an effective journalist. And spy.

The Iraqi went on in his rapid, guttural English. He related details about the state of Iraq’s air defense radar, the disposition of its surface-to-air missile batteries, the timetable for the launch of the Kraits.

Tyrwhitt nodded, absorbing the information. He noticed that as the Iraqi spoke, his eyes were in constant motion, scanning the crowded shop.

Abruptly he stopped. He drew the folds of his kaffiyeh around his face. Tyrwhitt could see only the intense dark eyes. “We are in danger here. You must leave immediately.”

He nodded toward the far end of the coffee house. Two brown-suited men were walking through the open-walled entrance. They had the unmistakable look of the Bazrum.

Tyrwhitt rose, turning his back to the entrance. “Will we meet again?”

“I don’t know. It is very dangerous for us now. Go quickly.”

Tyrwhitt inserted himself into the throng of passing people. Assuming the standard hunch-shouldered posture of the Iraqi male, he shuffled toward the far end of the coffee house. He didn’t look back.

Tyrwhitt pulled the old Halliburton suitcase down from the shelf in the closet. He tossed in three clean shirts and enough underwear and socks for three days.

He stopped and peered out the window. It was still only three-thirty in the afternoon. He was in good shape to catch the six o’clock Middle East Airlines flight to Bahrain. It was one of only three daily commercial flights leaving the country. Even though the UN sanctions had been eased in the past year, air travel from Iraq was still a bitch.

It had been a close thing back in the coffee house, he reflected. The Bazrum agents had spotted him, which he now realized was what the informant intended. In their eagerness to trail Tyrwhitt they had failed to notice the Iraqi colonel, still huddled at his table with his face cloaked in his kaffiyeh.

Tyrwhitt led them on a hide and seek chase through the B’aath district. Walking briskly through the crowded plaza, he took a sharp turn into a vendors’ lane, then darted between a row of crumbling low buildings. When he doubled back to the opposite end of the plaza, he spotted a rusting Trabant taxi idling in the outer lane. He jumped into the taxi and told him to drive swiftly to the Rasheed.

The two puffing Bazrum agents came trotting out a side street in time to see the Trabant pulling away. Tyrwhitt gave them a cheery wave.

By the time he arrived back at the Rasheed, he had reached a decision. This new information was too explosive, too detailed to send by encryption. He would have to fly to Bahrain.

It had taken a couple of calls on the Cyfonika. As it turned out, he had no problem getting a seat on the MEA flight, which was a 727 with over a hundred seats open. Iraq was so poor, few of its citizens could travel by air.

His editor in Sydney was agreeable to Tyrwhitt taking some rehab time. Everyone knew that Baghdad was a hardship assignment and, anyway, Tyrwhitt could justify getting out for a few days by cranking out a feature article. In Bahrain he could write something about the skirmishes between the emirate government and the Shiites who were raising hell in the streets. Old stuff, but it would cloak his real reason for being in Bahrain.

Latifiyah. If the Iraqi informant was to be believed — and Tyrwhitt was convinced of the man’s veracity — time was against them. It was urgent that he have one of his rare one-on-one debriefings with his CIA handler. The secrets of Latifiyah were ticking in his head like a time bomb.

Tyrwhitt threw his toilet kit into the suitcase. After a moment’s hesitation he removed the ankle holster and the Beretta nine-millimeter and stuffed it in the dresser drawer. For the past five years, since he’d been through the CIA school in Langley, Virginia, he had regarded the concealed pistol as life insurance. Without it he felt defenseless. He had no choice; no way could he get through Baghdad’s airport security with a firearm.

He glanced at his watch. Almost an hour remained before he had to leave for the airport. Tyrwhitt settled into the deep desk chair and tried to put everything into perspective. His meeting with Ormsby, his CIA handler, would take no longer than half a day. Bahrain would be a holiday. Short, but still a holiday from the grimness of Baghdad. It would feel peculiar not to be startled by each unusual sound, every soft footstep in a hallway. Not to lie awake wondering when the Bazrum would smash through his door and haul him away.

Bahrain was an enlightened Muslim country with a plenitude of good restaurants. Bars. Night clubs…

Wait. In the frenzy to gather the information about Latifiyah, he had nearly forgotten. When he last spoke with Claire, wasn’t she on assignment? Yes, of course she was. She had been infuriated that he woke her up, suggesting she join him in Baghdad.

Claire was in Bahrain.

He picked up the Cyfonika satchel and walked to the window. He extended the antenna of the satellite device and began punching in the numbers.

Chuff. Chuff. Chuff.

Maxwell rounded the corner at the fantail, then started back up the starboard side. Jogging on the hangar deck involved a certain risk. You had to be wary of aircraft tie-down chains that could snag an ankle and make you a cripple. You had to dodge the tow vehicles that shuttled back and forth, darting in front of you, dragging jets around the deck.

He was on his second lap when he heard someone coming up from behind.

“Mind if I tag along, XO?” B.J. Johnson appeared beside him, matching his easy stride. She was wearing nylon warm-ups and a white head band. Maxwell noted her level, relaxed pace. B.J. was not a jogger. The kid was a serious runner.

“I’d probably just hold you up.”

“You’re doing a good eight minute mile pace,” she said. “Suits me.”

“Looks like you’ve done this before.”

“Once or twice,” she said, breathing easily. “A whole slew of ten-kay runs, and the Marine Corps marathon last fall. Three hours, twenty-five minutes. Not bad for a girl, huh?”

“Not bad at all. You beat me by five minutes.”

She smiled at that. “So?”

They made a half dozen circuits of the hangar deck, maintaining the eight-minute pace. “How many laps to a mile?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Twenty laps takes me forty-five minutes. What’s that? Six miles?”

“Close. How far you gonna go?”

“Six. Then I’m wiped out.” He looked at her again and said, “What’s on your mind, B.J.? You didn’t come up here to run laps with an old guy.”

She kept her eyes straight ahead. “I need somebody to talk to. Spam is no use. She’s on another frequency. To the other guys in the squadron, I’m still an alien. I thought maybe I could run something by you.”

“Sounds heavy. What’s the subject?”

“Me. I’m going to quit.”

Maxwell slowed to a halt. “If we’re gonna talk about this, I have to be able to breath. C’mon with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. A special place.”

A twenty-knot wind swept over the catwalk, tousling B.J. Johnson’s hair and ruffling the collar of her flight suit. Eighty feet below they could see the bow of the Reagan slicing like a cleaver through the Gulf.

B.J. stared down at the water and said, “Back when I got my orders to flight training, I thought it was such a bright, shining opportunity. Then to get Hornets — absolutely my wildest dreams come true. It was supposed to be a great adventure.”

Maxwell knew what she meant. He could remember his own flight training days — the exhilaration of going off to Pensacola, beginning a career in naval aviation. It never left you.

“So you changed your mind?”

“About the adventure part, no. I still love flying. But the opportunity part, that stuff about the wings of gold and the camaraderie of naval aviators — it didn’t happen, Brick. It’s not happening. Not for me, not for any women aviators. It’s a lie.”

He had never heard B.J. speak so bitterly before. It gushed out in an angry burst. “Nobody said it was going to be easy,” he said.

Her eyes were filling with tears. “Damn it, don’t say that! I never wanted it to be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing. It’s just that …” Her voice trailed off.

“You don’t think it’s worth doing any more?”

“I don’t think I can do it anymore.” She began to lose her composure. “I don’t want be a trailblazer. I don’t want to set a damned example. I just want to go someplace where I’m accepted for what I can do.”

She dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt. “Sorry. Fighter pilots aren’t supposed to cry, are they? They’re supposed to be like John Wayne.”

“John Wayne wasn’t a fighter pilot. He was an actor. You, on the other hand, are a real-life fighter pilot. Feel free to cry.”

Maxwell knew what she meant. B.J.’s troubles were the same every minority faced when they broke into a fraternity like naval aviation. Just because you made it through the door didn’t mean they invited you to the table.

“It’s no secret,” she said. “They really want us to fail.”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

“Those who feel threatened by us. The Undra Cheevers and Hozer Millers who cheer whenever one of us bites the dust. It’s like… we have no friends. No support group.”

For a while Maxwell said nothing. He knew what she said was true. Women in military aviation were isolated, without the traditional bonds that male warriors took for granted. He thought about his own nugget years. Yes, he’d had a built-in support group. Not only did he have fellow male aviators with whom he lived and trained, he had mentors. He had his father, salty and opinionated. He had Josh Dunn, his father’s best friend. He had a sequence of mentors — flight instructors, department heads, commanding officers.

For men, mentors were natural and necessary. For women fighter pilots like B.J. Johnson, they were nonexistent.

“Okay, let’s start one,” said Maxwell.

“Start what?”

“A support group. Consider me the founder and president of the official B.J. Johnson support group.”

B.J. looked skeptical. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Not at all. The group has just been founded. There’s only one thing you’re not allowed to do.”

“Uh-oh. What’s that?”

“Quit.”

B.J. turned and gazed out to sea. Off on the eastern horizon lay the low, mottled coastline of Iran. To the north was Iraq. Enemies everywhere.

“What would it prove? They’re still gonna hate me.”

“That’s their problem. It’s your life, not theirs.”

B.J. didn’t respond. She peered around, taking in the panoramic view. “I see why you like it up here.”

“Out here at night, especially in a storm, you feel infinitesimally small. It puts your problems in perspective.”

“Is that how you felt in outer space? Infinitesimally small?”

“Yeah, if you can call a two-hundred-fifty-mile-high orbit ‘outer space.’”

She looked dreamily off into the distance. “I once thought I wanted to do that.”

“You still can. You could be an astronaut, B.J.”

She shook her head. “This is hard enough, just proving that I can fly the Hornet. Then I would have to somehow get into test pilot school, go through the same bullshit again. Proving myself. Then NASA. I can’t be a trailblazer anymore.”

Maxwell felt a shock run through him. He stared at her. “What did you say?”

She looked at him peculiarly. “Trailblazer?”

Maxwell turned his face out to the open sea. His mind was racing back in time. “That’s what she called herself,” he mumbled into the wind.

“She? You mean…”

“Deb.” Maxwell gripped the rail with both hands. “She always called herself a trailblazer.”

“Deb was your wife, wasn’t she?” B.J. said gently. “I heard what happened. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m over that.”

“She was an astronaut too, wasn’t she?”

“Almost. She was training for her first shuttle flight.”

B.J. waited a moment. “Is that why you quit?”

Maxwell didn’t answer right away. He had locked those memories in a dark compartment of his psyche, not to be shared. “It was more complicated than that.”

“. You resigned from the astronaut program.”

“Yeah, I resigned.”

She folded her arms over her chest and faced him. “No disrespect, sir, but doesn’t it seem a little… condradictory, you giving me a pep talk about not quitting?”

The ship was heeling to port. As the Reagan’s course altered to the south, the glare of the afternoon sun spilled over them. Maxwell pulled his sunglasses from the sleeve pocket of his flight suit and put them on. “You’re not me, and this isn’t the space shuttle we’re talking about. You’re already a fighter pilot, and you have to have a better reason for throwing away your career than because the guys don’t like you.”

She sighed and looked out over the rail again. The sun was low over the Saudi coastline. “What was she like? Your wife, I mean.”

“Smart. Good looking. Gutsy.”

“What would she say about what I’m doing now?

He looked at her questioningly. “What are you doing?”

“Being a trailblazer. Like her.”

He nodded. “She’d say don’t quit.”

Outside her room, the late afternoon sun had settled below the rim of the high rise buildings across from the hotel. As she listened to the man’s voice on the other end of the line, she felt a rush of emotion. She was surprised that Chris Tyrwhitt still had the power to rouse her.

“How did you know I was in Bahrain?” said Claire.

“Lucky guess.”

“Are you still trying to get me to Baghdad? Forget it. I’m not coming.”

“You don’t have to. I’m coming to you.”

A silence followed while Claire digested the news. She could hear him breathing on the phone. It sounded eery, as if his voice was being channeled through outer space.

“I’m very busy,” she said finally. “The divorce is still in process and we shouldn’t —”

“We have to talk, Claire. Really. I need to see you.”

“It won’t change anything. Too much has happened.”

“I don’t care what’s happened. I’ll make it up to you. You don’t have to believe me, just give me a chance. Can’t we at least have a drink, maybe dinner together?”

She hesitated. She wished he didn’t have this effect on her. Damn him, he was a masterful charmer, which was why she had fallen for him the first time around. She had learned her lesson. Once with Chris Tyrwhitt was enough, thank you.

But what the hell, he could be good company. He made her laugh, made her feel wanted, made her feel sexy. Which, of course, was the dangerous thing about Chris Tyrwhitt.

Don’t see him, she told herself. You’re finished with Chris Tyrwhitt.

“Okay,” she heard herself saying. “We can meet for a drink.”