Quest for Honor (35 page)

“Yes, sir,” Schaal said without a trace of hesitation. “We’ve been training recently for just this type of mission. The word is that if things in a certain South Asian country start going the way of Egypt or Libya, we might have to go in and secure certain places. I’m sure you can guess which country that might be.”

Carpenter would know there was a very short list of such nations. He nodded. “Very well. In the event that ship gets to a certain point, and it’s getting pretty damn close, my orders are to do everything I can to secure the target and seize the weapon. Preferably without it going off.”

“Don’t worry about that, sir,” Schaal said with a tight grin.

The captain glanced at his watch. “If he stays on present course and speed, you launch in one hour. If you run into any trouble on board that you can’t handle, I’m afraid I can’t provide you any backup. I’ll have to put a torpedo into him. You’ll have very little time to clear the target.”

Schaal knew the captain was being honest. His men were very good at what they did, but they weren’t trained to board and seize a hostile vessel under fire, and if the skipper was foolish enough to surface close by, the Iranians could cause serious damage to the submarine. The SEALs held no illusions about what they would encounter once they got on board. There were hard men over there and they would fight to the death. But he and his team were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and knew all about how to deal with hard men. “Understood, sir. If we get in a bind, don’t hesitate to fire, even if some of us are still aboard.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, the code word is ‘Buster’. You’ve got five minutes from that signal and then I give the order to fire.” The captain hesitated. “My orders are also very clear on another point: if your mission fails and any of you are taken prisoner, I will not negotiate with the enemy. I will send him to the bottom.”

“I’m sure you won’t have to worry about that, either, sir.” Schaal had been fighting these people for a long time and had never heard of a SEAL being captured by them. He and his men would not be the first. Schaal knew that the skipper was under a lot of pressure. If the SEAL assault failed, and the sub somehow could not sink the enemy vessel, Washington would have no choice but to take it out with an air strike, quite possibly with a missile, and he wouldn’t put it past them to use a nuke themselves. That ship would not be allowed to launch on the homeland.

The phone on the bulkhead buzzed. Carpenter glanced at the SEAL, then picked up the handset. “Captain.” His eyes betrayed nothing as he listened. “Very well, I’m on my way.”

The talk turned to other things, gently prodded in that direction by Nariman. They came around to history, a favorite subject of their evening visits. Once again, they debated the strategy of Xerxes the Great and his invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. Nafisi returned to his thesis that even after the delay at Thermopylae, the Persian Navy had failed Xerxes at Salamis. Nariman countered that the Army should have easily smashed the Greeks at Thermopylae, making the battle at Salamis unnecessary. “A paltry three hundred Spartans held off the mighty Persian Army,” Nariman scoffed, warming to the subject.

“And your mighty Persian Navy was tricked by Themistocles, sailing right into the Straits where their superior numbers were negated,” Nafisi countered. “Why did the admiral—“

“Excuse me, Captain.” It was the radio operator, in the doorway to the bridge, saluting. He had a paper in his hand. “Message from headquarters, sir. Your eyes only.”

“Thank you, seaman,” Nariman said. He pulled apart the single-page message, which had been folded and stapled shut. He first looked for a mark in the upper left corner. Yes, it was there, very unobtrusive, looking like a smudge from a finger, but distinctive enough that Nariman recognized it. He breathed a little more easily. His executive officer had read the message and was making his preparations. The captain read the brief text.

“What does it say?” Nafisi asked.

“The mission has been aborted,” Nariman said. He handed the paper over to the major, who ripped it from him.

“There must be a mistake. Have your man authenticate it!”

“He has done so,” Nariman said. “That is standard procedure with any Code Red communication, Major, as you well know.” He turned to the hatch leading back into the enclosed bridge.

“What are you doing?”

“I am going to order the helm to change course.”

In the gathering dusk, Nariman saw a movement at the major’s hip, then the click of a pistol being cocked. “You will maintain course, Captain.”

“On whose authority?”

“On mine, and the authority of the Supreme Leader. I am taking command of this vessel as of now. We will continue the mission.”

Nariman faced the major. “I have seen no such orders. I am in command. You will hand me your weapon and stand down, Major.”

“Or what?”

“Or I will have my officer shoot you dead.” He nodded to his right. An ensign was at the corner of the bridge wing, pointing a Kalashnikov rifle at the major.

Nafisi looked at the armed sailor. “You are making a mistake, Captain. When we return to Iran you will be shot as a traitor.”

“I think not,” Nariman said. “I have received a lawful order to abort the mission and return home. Now, hand me your weapon. You are under arrest.”

“My men will take this ship!”

“They will not. They are all under arrest, even as we speak. Is that not so, Ensign?”

“Yes, sir,” the ensign said. “Lieutenant Commander Souroush has things well in hand below.”

“Very good,” Nariman said, allowing himself to breathe easier. “Now, Major, your pistol, please.”

Within minutes,
Lion of Aladagh
began a leisurely turn to the south, and then to the west. Five hundred yards to the north, a mast rose slightly above the three-foot chop of the sea, invisible in the dark. Through the powerful night-vision optics, Carpenter watched the Iranian vessel closely. After a few minutes, satisfied that the target had changed course, the captain gave an order. Moments later a coded message burst from the radio mast up to a satellite and down to COMSUBRON One at Pearl Harbor. From there it would go quickly up the chain of command for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific and then to Washington. Carpenter flipped up the handles of the periscope and nodded to a sailor, who pressed a button that started the ‘scope and mast sliding downward.

“XO, pass the word to the SEALs. My compliments to Lieutenant Schaal, and inform him that it appears they’ll be able to stand down. I’ll be back there shortly.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Carpenter took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He could almost feel the level of tension in the control room go down a few degrees. They would stay on station for another twenty-four hours, just to make sure, and his sonar men would stay alert, as would the men in the torpedo room. But, hopefully, it would just wind up being a very realistic drill.

He started aft, to where the SEALs waited. There would be another mission for them someday. He wished it were not so, but that was the world they all lived in. Perhaps his grandchildren, yet to be born, would live in a better one. Until then, Carpenter and men like him would sail on, doing their best to create that world.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Djibouti

T
he base hospital
at Camp Lemonnier was not that large, but it was like every other military hospital Mark had seen, a place of organized chaos. His left shoulder throbbed, but he had already taken one pain pill on the flight here and didn’t want to pop another till late afternoon, if then. He would tough this one out, as he had so many others, but damn, it was getting harder to do that.

Why hadn’t they known about the Iranian quick reaction force? Someone back at the spook farm in Kabul had screwed up on that one. They’d been loading the prisoners onto the Black Hawks when Raven One spotted the company of motorized infantry moving up through the valley to their west, right along the planned exfiltration route. The Apaches went in hard after them, providing cover for the Black Hawks to run the gauntlet, but Mark’s bird took fire from the ground and the pilot’s desperate evasive maneuvers had saved the bird but roughed up the passengers. Mark had yielded his seat and the safety harness that went with it for one of the prisoners, and found himself tossed violently against the bulkhead, banging his left shoulder hard. The doc back at the FOB put him in a sling and said it was possibly a torn rotator cuff.

They made it back with only light casualties among the raiders and the helo crews. That was the important thing. The prisoners all made it to Afghanistan as well, but they would be repatriated quickly to avoid unnecessary political problems once they had undergone interrogation. The high value target, who’d admitted to being al-Qa’im after some rather energetic questioning by Krieger, would be staying for a bit longer.

Mark had been able to get breakfast at the FOB after the mission debrief, then got a lift to Bagram and caught a special CIA jet to Djibouti, arranged by the General. He hadn’t even had time to shower and change into a clean uniform, so he didn’t smell real good right now and didn’t look real pretty, but he didn’t care. They were used to that here anyway. There was someone he had to see and it wasn’t going to wait.

Jim eased himself out of the hospital bed and tried flexing his leg. The nurse, a tough-looking Frenchwoman, had warned him that he wasn’t ready yet to put any weight on it. The surgery that morning had gone well but Jim was facing some rehab time when he got home. Right now, though, he had to use the bathroom and, by God, he was going to do that on his own, so he slipped on the robe and reached for his crutches.

Getting up was an exercise in agony. Every part of him hurt, not just the repaired knee. There were bruises all over the place. Two ribs were cracked but there’d been no damage to internal organs. He’d never had cracked ribs before and he’d always been told they were a real bitch. Whoever told him that was certainly right on the money.

He cripped slowly to the bathroom, took care of business, and emerged to find a tall, rough-looking soldier standing in the doorway to the room. For a moment Jim didn’t recognize him, until the man took off the scruffy patrol cap and his eyes hit on Jim and lit up, he knew.

The brothers hugged each other as best they could without inflicting further injuries. “Damn, Jim, it’s good to see you,” Mark said. He wiped his eyes with the back of a hand. “Good thing the men back at my base can’t see their C.O. right now.”

“They’d think it’s just fine,” Jim said, wiping his own eyes. “Where the hell have you been? You’re carrying about half of Afghanistan around with you.”

“Not just Afghanistan,” Mark said. He pointed to Jim’s bandaged leg. “Did the knee go?”

“Yeah. Meniscus tear. They fixed that up this morning, but the doc here says I’m a serious candidate for a knee replacement when I get home.”

“Well, you’ve known for a long time that was coming, haven’t you?”

“I suppose, but I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I gotta get back into the bed. You wouldn’t believe how sore I am.”

“Oh, I think I would.” He took Jim’s arm and helped him around to the bed, got him settled in, and took a chair.

Jim pointed at Mark’s sling. “What’s with the arm?”

“Shoulder,” Mark said. “Probably a rotator cuff.”

“Hope the other guy looks worse.”

“It was a helicopter, and it has a few holes in it but not from me,” Mark said.

Mark stared at his brother for a few seconds, the memories racing from memories childhood to manhood and all they’d been through in their lives. There hadn’t been much time to get together in recent years but right now he felt that everything Jim had endured, Mark had been right there with him.

“I watched the fight,” he said at last. “Damn, Jim, I’ve never seen anything like that. How the hell did you ever get in that jam in the first place?”

“It’s a long story. How much time do you have?”

Mark grinned. “My boss tells me he wants me to take a week’s leave, but I’m heading back to the base day after tomorrow. While I’m here I’ll have them look at the shoulder. Maybe we can get a room together.”

“I have to warn you, the nurses here are mostly French but they’re not exactly Brigitte Bardot lookalikes.”

“That’s okay,” Mark said. “There’s a woman back in Kabul that would put all of them to shame if they were.”

“Your eyes lit up, little brother. You want to tell me about her?”

“She’s British and she’s great and I’m gonna ask her to marry me.” There, he’d finally said what he’d been thinking about for a while now. It felt good.

Jim grinned broadly. “That’s terrific. If you need a best man, let me know.”

“You’ll be at the top of the list. Now, tell me that story.”

They talked for the next two hours. Jim got emotional when he described the death of his old African friend, and had to take a moment to compose himself. “He wanted to come out,” Jim said huskily. “Put all that shit behind him, the killing and the torture, all of it. He never made it.”

All Mark could do was nod. How many men had he known, Iraqi and Afghan, who’d wanted to turn their lives around? A lot of them, and some had made it. Others hadn’t. Shot, blown to bits, or just disappeared. It was a damn shame. But a lot of Americans had died over the past ten years or so to give those people a chance. That was a damn shame, too, but maybe, just maybe, it would all be worth it.

The nurse came back, said something about the room needing some air, and opened the window. Jim just laughed, but Mark said he really should be checking in with the base commander and maybe rustle up a shower and a clean uniform someplace.

When the nurse left, Mark stared at his big brother. “I always knew you had it in you, Jim,” he said, his voice cracking.

Jim blinked and looked away for a second. “Mark, I—“

There was a knock at the door. Mark turned and saw a gorgeous woman flashing a hundred-watt smile at Jim. He’d never seen her before, but he’d seen many like her:
Agency.
“Hope we’re not interrupting anything,” she said.

Denise Allenson came into the room, with Tom Simons behind her. The CIA agents looked none the worse for wear except for the bandage on Simons’ forearm. When they’d parted the day before, after the helicopter ride from
Kearsarge,
Denise told Jim she’d come to the hospital later to check on him, but the combination of the fatigue and the pain medications had knocked him out for several hours. When he finally awoke again, it was late at night. They’d wheeled him into surgery first thing this morning. Now, he was surprised by how much glad he was to see her.

Simons gave him a firm handshake, Denise a hug that lasted a little longer than he expected. Her eyes were shining when they met his.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Jim glanced over at Simons, who was talking with Mark. “I’ll live,” he said. “Right now I’m pretty sore and my leg hurts, but at least we’re alive.”

“I’m heading back to Washington,” she said, “but I hope we can get together sometime.”

He grinned at that. “This was my first and last covert mission. I doubt we’ll ever be working together again, Denise.”

She cocked her head slightly. “I wasn’t talking about work,” she said, raising an eyebrow just so.

Simons looked over at them. “Jim, we can’t stay, have to get back to the embassy and finish Denise’s debrief. But first I want to fill you in on what’s been happening since you got back here.”

Jim sat down on the bed, grateful to rest his throbbing leg. “Okay.”

Simons went over and closed the door, then turned back to them. “First things first. The Marines rolled up Shalita’s camp and we have the surviving fighters in custody on board the
Kearsarge
. A lot of them will be in Gitmo pretty soon. I expect the intel we get from them and the files we found in the camp will be very valuable. More importantly, Jim, the flash drive Shalita gave you was beyond valuable.” He looked at Mark. “Colonel, the mission you went on after that HVT was based partly on intel from that drive, although I’m authorized to tell you it was put in motion thanks to information we gleaned from an Iranian defector in Oman. Adding it all up, from what you two men achieved, along with Agent Allenson here and your strike team, Colonel, we were able to spike a planned attack upon the homeland that would have had extremely serious consequences. You three had an important role in saving a great many American lives.”

That took a moment to sink in with Jim. He could see Mark had accepted it almost as a matter of course. Well, that was pretty much the nature of his work, wasn’t it? For Jim, though, it was a helluva lot more important than a telecom marketing campaign. Then he remembered a question he’d wanted to ask ever since the night before. “Denise said they made a mistake, back at the camp,” he said. “It was the lights, wasn’t it?”

Denise had a crafty look in her eyes. “They moved the fight out into the open. Heydar wanted to show off for the whole camp. When Jim challenged him, his reputation was on the line.”

“He should’ve just kept it inside the main building,” Simons said. “Outside, they needed extra lights for the TV camera. That was enough for one of our surveillance satellites to spot them. We vectored in a drone and there you were.”

“If you’d just picked a fight with him first thing, indoors, it would’ve been all over for us,” Denise said. “A smart move, Jim. I assume that was your plan all along?” Her raised eyebrow showed she was a little skeptical.

“Believe me, I’d love to take the credit, but we got lucky on that score.”

“Did they see Jim’s fight back home?” Mark asked.

Simons grinned widely. “They certainly did. Jim, I think when you get back to the States you might have to hire a public relations guy.” From a thigh pocket on his cargo pants, Simons pulled a folded piece of paper and handed it to Jim. “This is from the online version of
USA Today
.”

Jim unfolded the paper and the headline leaped at him: ONE MAN AGAINST TERROR!
Unarmed Civilian Beats Al-Qaida’s Best.
Below that, a surprisingly clear photo, apparently lifted from the video, showing him using the tonfa to block the overhead bo strike from the second fighter.

“It’s been all over CNN and BBC,” Denise said. “Haven’t you been watching?”

“Well, to be honest, no,” Jim said. “I wasn’t really awake until a couple hours ago.” In fact, he was starting to feel a bit woozy. “I’d better lie down,” he said. He lay back on the bed and Denise carefully lifted his bandaged leg, placing it carefully next to the other.

“Jim, you take it easy for a while, I’ll head over to the base headquarters,” Mark said. “What time is dinner around here?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Five, maybe.” He was getting more disoriented by the second. Christ, the leg hurt. “Can you find the nurse, please? I think I need a pain pill.”

Simons promised to come by during the evening, and Mark put a hand on Jim’s shoulder and squeezed. “See you later, big brother.”

Denise turned back to him when they’d gone. “I’d better let you get some rest,” she said. “I’ll get the nurse on my way out.”

He took her hand. The emotions that had buffeted him the past couple weeks were rocking him pretty good right now. He really liked this woman, and he knew the feeling was mutual. But he also knew it wasn’t going to go any further. She had her life at Langley and he had his back in Wisconsin, whatever that might turn out to be now.

“You’re pretty special, Denise. I’m glad I got to work with you.”

Her eyes changed ever so slightly, the affection tinged with regret. “So am I.” She touched his cheek. “I fly out tonight, Jim, so I guess this is goodbye. Call me when you get back home, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” The room was starting to twirl a little bit. He had to focus on her eyes, her face, and those lips as they came closer and closer.

It was amazing what a hot shower and clean underwear could do for a guy. Top it off with a new uniform and it was just about the closest thing to heaven since his last evening with Sophie. Mark felt good as he walked down the hospital hallway to Jim’s room, despite the pain in his shoulder. He’d been doing a little more thinking, and things were starting to fall into place. But he needed to talk them over with his brother first. Needed to talk about a lot of things, in fact.

Jim was sitting up in a chair beside the bed, watching television. Mark knocked at the doorway. “Looks like you’re feeling better.”

“I am, and you look like a new man,” Jim said, grinning. “Everything except for the hat, that is.”

Mark laughed, pulling off the battered old patrol cap. “We’ve been through a lot together. It’ll have an honored place on my mantle when I get home.”

“When will that be?”

Mark sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, my tour here has another six months to go. I’ll be rotated back stateside, and then I’ll have to decide whether to pull the pin or go for my star. If I do that, it’ll mean another couple years at least. Then, if I get the star, I’ll have to put in another two or three. I’d probably find myself back over here somewhere eventually.”

“My little brother, the general.”

“Yeah, it has a ring to it. But I’ve been thinking about a different type of ring. Sophie—that’s the girl I mentioned before—she works for the BBC. She told me she could probably get transferred to their bureau in the States. New York, or maybe Washington.”