[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (7 page)

We were about halfway there when someone began to shout, but I didn’t start running until I heard the gunshot.

Bullets exploded in the dirt nearby, fired by one of the guards back near the garbage bins. I threw my legs into overdrive, pulling Garrett with me to the cab. Yanking open the door, I pushed him inside, then I jumped up after him and put the truck in gear.

The truck promptly stalled. Murphy obviously hadn’t done well in auto school.

As calmly as I could, I reached and turned the key.

Rrrrrrr—ping—ping-ping—rrrrrrr.

The pings were the bullets hitting the top of the cab. The
rrrrrrr
was the truck’s starter, grinding the crankshaft over and over but failing to catch. Finally the engine coughed and caught, sounding like a pig with bronchitis. I managed to give the engine just enough gas to keep from stalling, and with a series of bucks and jerks, we began moving ahead.

The bus was blocking our path. There wasn’t enough room to get around it, and I didn’t have enough momentum to ram it and push it aside. So instead I threw the truck into reverse.

The crowd behind us scattered. Loose garbage flew from the rear as we jumped up the curb, drove across the sidewalk, and slammed into the low fence separating the garbage area from the rest of the driveway. I imagine all the guards were firing now, but I couldn’t hear them. I was too busy cranking the wheel and shoving the tranny into drive, angling for the narrow space between the buildings on the left.

The truck’s engine stuttered when I tried mashing the gas. I lifted my foot from the pedal just enough to keep the engine running without flooding; right about the time my stomach started looking for a new home at the back of my throat, we began moving forward.

We stuttered and bucked, but we were moving. A low fence stood between us and a wide, open field. The main road out was on the other side of the field.

As I picked up speed, something pounded on the side of the truck. It was one of the truck drivers, trying to recapture his vehicle. Fortunately, he didn’t have a weapon. I swung my forearm at his face; he ducked, then reappeared at the window. He leaned in and bit my arm.

Either he didn’t see the fence or didn’t care. We hit it hard enough to sheer it in half; as it broke, the shattered links grabbed his clothes and pulled him away.

Clear, I turned hard right. I had a straight, unobstructed run to the main road. Except for the man with the M16 standing in my way.

“Duck,” I yelled to Garrett, who was already slumped in the seat.

He croaked a response, the first peep I’d heard from him since the yard.

“Duck!” I yelled again.

I pushed my head down beneath the steering wheel as bullets raked the windshield. At some point soon thereafter, we crashed through the main gate. I’m not sure what happened to the guy with the rifle; either we ran him over or he jumped out of the way.

Steam was pouring from the front of the vehicle when I raised my head again. I didn’t have to look at the gauges to know we weren’t going to get very far.

“Garrett, we’re going to bail,” I yelled as the cabin began fogging.

He didn’t answer. Fearing the worst, I glanced to the right and saw he was fending off a Saudi who was clinging to the window.

Garrett’s dad was tough sea salt and a better-than-average brawler, which is pretty much what you would expect as a SEAL. He calmed down considerably at Six—mandatory behavior if you want to stay on the Team. But like father like son: the way Garrett pounded the Saudi with his right fist while holding his hair with his left hand made me nostalgic for his dad and bar fights gone by.

A loud boom and the sound of eight pistons shattering brought me back to the present. The truck immediately began to slow.

I threw it into neutral.

“Out!” I yelled as we coasted toward a halt. “Come on!”

Garrett let go of the guard, then grabbed at the door handle. As he flew out of the truck, I hopped out from my side and began running.

The Saudis were about two hundred yards behind us, rallying their forces from the prison. They had a pair of Humvees, with a .50 cal mounted in a turret on the top. The up-armored Hummer started spitting bullets. I grabbed Garrett and pulled him alongside, trying to keep the garbage truck between us as cover.

We’d only taken a few steps when something threw me forward into the grit. Sand swirled over me. For a moment I thought it was a Saudi sandstorm—one of the massive storms they call a
shamal
in Iraq.

Then I realized it was manmade.

The thick cloud of dust rolled over the Hummers. The dust blinded the driver and the gunner; they not only stopped firing but turned the vehicle to the side to escape the brunt of the dirt-laden tornado.

The next thing I knew, I was being grabbed by the back of my shirt and carried through the twister of dirt. Garrett was nearby, yelling that he was going to tear whoever was carrying him into a thousand tiny pieces.

There was a roar above us, and suddenly we were thrust out of the storm and into the hold of a helicopter.

“Better grab on to something!” yelled Mongoose as the Mi-8’s motors roared overhead. “Trace is driving and she seems to be in a very bad mood.”

3

(I)

Trace took the helicopter east to Abu Dhabi, flying low over the desert to avoid Saudi border radar and the two aircraft that had been scrambled to intercept her. I was in the back of the chopper, so I have no idea how close the F-15s ever got to us; for all I know the fancy acrobatics she pulled and the wild zigzagging were simply an effort to show off.

The movements were extreme; they sent Mongoose and Garrett to a pair of large buckets at the rear.

I didn’t feel all that well myself, but fortunately there was little in my stomach to remove. Shotgun had only one comment the entire flight:

“These jalapeño potato chips need more jalapeño.”

There were some complications with the officials at the airport. While Trace and Shotgun stayed behind to straighten those out, Mongoose, Garrett, and I cabbed to a hotel in the city.

Abu Dhabi is the capital of the Arab Emirates, a very modern and surprisingly multicultural city. It has skyscrapers. It has race cars. It has alcohol—at least in hotel bars and restaurants designated for tourists. We went to one of the latter, located on the top floor of the Emirate Emerald, a la-di-da luxury high-rise hotel located right on the water.

Before making my way to the bar, I hit the head and the shower. The first splatter of water against the welts on my back stung, but gradually the pain melted away. Feeling better, I toweled off and got dressed, then went to partake of the magical healing powers of Dr. Bombay.

Mongoose and Garrett had taken a table near the windows. Garrett had been more or less comatose in the helicopter when he wasn’t throwing up, and he didn’t seem much better now. He stared at the far wall with unfocused eyes, his cheeks so bruised and puffed they looked like rotten potatoes. A beer and a shooter were sitting in front of him. Neither one had been touched.

“Damn,” he muttered as I settled in. “Damn.”

There seemed to be thoughts in his mind somewhere, but they were having trouble getting to his mouth.

I sat patiently, expecting … oh, I don’t know, maybe a thank-you for rescuing him from that hellhole. Maybe a promise to name his first kid after me.

Instead, I got this:

“You fucking asshole.”

I get that a lot, but generally not from people I’ve risked my life to rescue.

“You screwed everything up,” continued Garrett. “You screwed it all up. I can’t believe you screwed it all up.”

He unleashed a stream of curses so severe even Mongoose appeared embarrassed. He grabbed our glasses, got up, and went for some refills.

Garrett was still spewing when Mongoose returned. I may have gotten out of my chair by that point, because Goose looked concerned. “Maybe you two should take it out to the street,” he suggested.

The street was some eighty stories down. It was tempting.

“Let’s go out to the terrace,” I suggested, pointing to the doors on the side of the room. I could always toss him down to the street if I changed my mind.

Garrett hopped up with more energy than I’d thought he possessed. In the short walk across the room, he became rejuvenated, shedding the ill effects of the prison as if they were dandruff flakes on the shoulders of his jacket. Mongoose furled his brow—a frightening look that reminds me of a war pig—then trailed after him. I grabbed my gin and one of the beers.

I was barely through the door when Garrett launched into a fresh tirade. I’d heard enough and snapped back.

“I ruined your life? Is that what you’re saying?” I demanded indignantly. “Your life would have ended at the point of a sharp axe when they chopped off your head after declaring you guilty in a few months.”

“You don’t know crap.” Garrett’s eyes flashed. I had a sudden flashback to my navy days with his dad, when he and I faced off against a dozen marines.

I love the marines. Except when I’m fighting them in a bar. And especially when I’m outnumbered six to one.

But Flushing Taylor’s temper was a legendary force multiplier. He lit into those marines like an A-10A Warthog ripping through a squad of tanks. None of them were standing when he got done.

Now, the infamous family temper was about to explode on me. Mongoose took a step between us, ready to grab Garrett if he took a swing.

“Who sent you?” Garrett demanded. “Who pulled the plug?”

“What plug? No one sent me. I talked to your dad.”

“My dad?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, and I don’t want to know. If you want to associate with the scum of the earth, that’s your business. Your father was a plank owner of mine, and that brings certain obligations. That’s why I’m here. If you have a beef, take it up with your father.”

“My father.”

“You’re on your own. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t go back to Saudi Arabia.”

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” Garrett began to laugh. “You went through all this trouble because my father was worried about me?”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“How much did he pay you?”

“Not a cent.”

“This—all this—you did out of the kindness of your heart?”

“I did it because your dad is an old friend,” I told him. I was also hoping to get information about Allah’s Rule on Earth from him, but under the circumstances I decided this wasn’t a good time to talk about it. And frankly, I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be getting much of anything in the way of cooperation.

“This was none of my father’s business,” said Garrett, shaking his head. “I work for the agency, you idiot. The CIA. You just blew six months’ worth of work.”

(II)

Oh yeah, I felt foolish.

Here I was, thinking I was living a Father’s Day greeting card, and it turned out I’d actually stumbled into a Christians in Action Playtime Adventure.

*   *   *

Contrary to popular belief and my occasional roguish jibes, the CIA is not entirely clueless when it comes to tracking terrorists and their use of drug smuggling to fund operations. In this case, they were ahead of me, just not far enough to avoid tripping me up.

Concerned that Allah’s Rule was making inroads into Europe, the Christians in Action had tried for months to get information about its hierarchy and drug smuggling operations. At some point they decided that the best way to flesh out the hierarchy was to insert someone inside it.

They’d placed an Arab inside the network, but the cell-like nature of the organization prevented them from finding anything out about the European side. So they set Garrett up as a possible mule, getting him arrested in Saudi Arabia, where they hoped he would come in contact with Allah’s Rule operatives.

“How’d that work?” I asked him.

“It was working,” he insisted, folding his arms.

“So it wasn’t working at all. You’re lucky you’re not dead. What bright bulb at the agency thought of that? None of my friends, I hope.”

It was purely a rhetorical question. Garrett turned red, and stomped back inside the hotel.

“You think we screwed up an operation?” asked Mongoose.

“No. We saved him from being killed,” I told Mongoose. “He was pretty beat up the first day I found him, and he got worse. By the time he would have found anyone to make the connection for him, he’d have been cut up into little anchovy pieces. If you’re not a Believer in that prison, you’re not coming out alive. It was a stupid idea. Probably not his.”

“He’s probably not going to see it that way.”

“I don’t blame him.”

Garrett had left for his room. Mongoose and I shared a few more drinks, a couple of stories about his misadventures between deployments as a SEAL, then turned in.

Four or five hours later, I was woken from the middle of a dream by the ring of my satellite phone. I reached for it groggily, and found myself talking to Karen Fairchild.

“Honey, are you awake?” she asked. “Admiral Jones just called.”

“Damn.” I figured he’d get around to calling at some point. Admiral Jones heads the CIA. We have what you might call a beneficial but bendable relationship: it benefits him, while I get bent, spindled, and generally masticated en route to a payday. “I hope you told him you didn’t know where I was.”

“I couldn’t lie. Besides, he already knew where you were. He wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him I’ll meet him for lunch.”

“He’s on the other line. I can connect you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

The phone clicked, and the gravel-laden voice that sunk a thousand careers came on the line.

“What the hell are you doing out there, Dick? What the hell are you doing?”

“Sleeping. Isn’t it past three there? Shouldn’t you be on a golf course? Or have you taken up bowling?”

“One of my people is downstairs in the lobby of your hotel,” barked the admiral. “I expect you to talk to him, pronto. Or I’ll approve his request to send two men up to roust you.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”