Rules of Betrayal (17 page)

“God, no,” said Connor. “We don’t have the resources. Besides, everyone isn’t the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees my activities. Ways and Means has nothing to worry about. Neither does the Banking Committee.”

Grant paced the perimeter of his room, every so often looking at Connor and shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you put your finger in it this time.”

“I’m just collecting information, Joe. I think this one is in your court.”

“It was twenty-five years ago.”

“Last I heard, uranium had a half-life a wee bit longer than that.”

“Frank, I just can’t …”

“I’m waiting.”

Grant sat down, as if he had an unbearable weight on his shoulders. “You know what a mirror mission is?” he said finally.

“That’s not my bailiwick.”

“Back in the day when Russia was still the big bad bear, we used to send out our aircraft on long-range runs mirroring the flight profiles we would follow in the event of a nuclear exchange. That’s when it happened. One of our B-52s suffered a catastrophic engine failure and went down, carrying two nuclear-tipped ALCMs. Since the plane’s flight was top-secret, we couldn’t mount a full-fledged retrieval operation. There was also the embarrassment factor. We weren’t going to admit to losing anything until we got them back. It stacked up as a disaster on ten different levels.”

“So you just left them there?”

“Our tracking data showed that one of the devices broke apart on impact and was rendered useless. We figured we only had to worry about the one. We had a decent idea where the plane went down, but remember, this was back in 1984, before we had the kind of GPS system we do now. We were able to narrow down the crash’s location to
a one-hundred-square-mile perimeter. The problem was the terrain. Up there, a hundred square miles might as well be a million. For three years we put teams up that mountain. It was a monumental undertaking, more so because it’s impossible to travel around without being noticed. When a place is absolutely deserted, even a single person stands out. It’s not like you can zip in there at night, grab the thing, and zip back out. We’re talking the tallest mountains on earth.”

“What about satellites?”

“To reposition one of our birds in space required an order of Congress. You can’t just flip some switch and move your footprint. At least, you couldn’t back then. No one wanted to spill the beans. We were effectively blind.”

“No one ever found it?”

Grant shook his head. “It was a miracle we were even able to locate the plane. We blew up all the pieces we found. There was sensitive equipment on board, and we wanted to cover our tracks. But we never did find hide nor hair of that last bomb. After a while we just forgot about it. It was no different from losing a bomb at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Hell, if we couldn’t get to it, who could?”

Connor absorbed the information without emotion. He had seen a lot of incompetence during his years. He knew about prevarication and self-deception and all the other white lies bureaucrats tell themselves to paper over their failures. “How big, Joe?”

“I swear we tried,” said Grant. “We did everything we could. You of all people should know that some things have to remain secret.”

“How big a bomb are we talking about?”

“It was Russia we were up against. How big do you think?”

“I’m waiting, Congressman.”

“One-fifty.”

“One-fifty what?”

“One hundred fifty kilotons. The biggest that we could fit on an ALCM.”

“And Hiroshima was how big?”

“Ten.”

Connor kept his liverish gaze on Grant.

“It can’t be found,” Grant pleaded. “It’s above twenty-two thousand feet, two hundred miles from the nearest city. The goddamn thing weighs three thousand pounds. It’s gone, Frank. Do you hear me? It’s at the bottom of some prehistoric crevasse. No one can get to it. It’s impossible.”

The team numbered eight in
all. There was the helicopter pilot, a rangy Pakistani who had flown rescue missions in the Hindu Kush for forty years. The guide, the farmer from the region who had found the missile and knew the approach like the back of his hand. Two nuclear physicists, both veterans of the A. Q. Khan network. Three porters to carry the equipment. And Emma.

Emma was the team leader, or, as Lord Balfour had informed her, “his personal ambassador to keep the others in line and focused on their task.” She knew better than to rely on his imprimatur of authority. In her pack she carried an Uzi submachine gun, just in case.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Emma had put down at an airfield in Chitral, elevation twenty-six hundred meters, four hundred kilometers northeast of Islamabad and a stone’s throw from the Afghan border. If, that is, one could throw a stone over the towering peaks that held the impoverished mountain village in their palm. She stood huddled with the pilot and guide on the tarmac, backs turned against a bitterly cold norther as they studied a topographic map of the region.

“Missile here.” The guide pointed to a red dot inked near the peak of Tirich Mir.

“It’s very high,” said Emma, noting the altitude. “Seven thousand meters.”

“No worries, madam,” he continued in his crisply enunciated but broken English. “Missile not at seven thousand meter. Avalanche in spring. Maybe missile come down mountain. Maybe six thousand meter. No higher.”

Emma considered this. Six thousand meters was over nineteen
thousand feet. With little time to acclimatize, the entire team would require oxygen. “You’re sure you can find it again?”

“My brother there now. Lord Balfour pay.”

Emma turned to the pilot. “How high can you take your chopper?”

“Five thousand meters.”

“That’s all? Surely you can take us higher.”

“Not in my aircraft. The air’s thin at that altitude. It’s very difficult to get proper lift. To go higher, you need a military helicopter. I’m sorry.”

“Any place to put down nearby?”

“There are no airfields, if that’s what you mean. No one lives in the area. It’s beyond hell and gone. I suggest we make a recce and hope to find a decent place to set down.” The pilot caught Emma’s eye. “Might I have a word?”

Emma said, “Of course,” and asked the guide to give them a moment. Grudgingly, the guide moved a few steps away. The pilot glanced at the sky, taking in the thin cumulus clouds that raked it. “There’s a front moving in. If you think it’s windy here, wait until we get up high. The gusts will be blowing at gale force. It might be better to postpone the expedition.”

A front meant snow. This late in the year, a significant snowfall would keep the missile buried until the spring thaw next May or June. Emma couldn’t allow that to happen. “We’ll manage,” she said. “Let’s finish fueling and get moving.”

“So we go?” asked the guide, who’d overheard every word. The trip meant payment, and in his case an early retirement.

“We go,” said Emma.

The guide smiled broadly and began barking orders at the porters and engineers to get to the chopper. Emma did not smile, though she had equally compelling reasons to get up the mountain. Her future survival would depend on it. She phoned Balfour and informed him that they were completing fueling and would be taking off again in minutes. All further communication would be conducted via radio.

Emma climbed into the copilot’s seat and pulled the door closed. The helicopter lifted into the air, buffeted by the gusting wind. The
town of Chitral passed below, a maze of mud walls and battered buildings laced with thousands of colorful prayer flags. The pilot pushed the stick to the left and the aircraft banked hard, leaving behind the high plateau and advancing into the towering, shark-toothed mountains.

Behind her, the guide and the engineers sat bunched together, looking miserable. The porters were crammed along with the equipment into the aft cargo bay. Emma shifted in the seat and stared out of the Perspex canopy. An infinite landscape of peaks and valleys beckoned. The wind calmed, and she felt as if she were floating into the jaws of a great white beast. The altimeter read four thousand meters, but already the mountains soared high above them. The broad, snowy faces threatened to graze the helicopter’s skids, passing so close that she was certain she could reach out and scrape her palms against the exposed rock.

Emma roused herself from her daydream, reminding herself of the importance of the mission. It was a rare rebuke. Normally her single-minded focus was her strongest suit. And so she readily admitted to having been drifting for a while now. Days, if not weeks. Her destination never varied: it was the past that drew her. And now, looking at the mountains, feeling as if she were being swallowed whole by them, she heard its siren song more strongly than ever.

She knew only one person who loved the mountains more than she did.

“His name is Ransom. He’s a surgeon. We think he’s exactly the ticket to provide you the cover you require.”

The photograph showed a tall, lanky man in jeans and a parka carrying a rucksack. Dark hair with a hint of gray, strong nose, sturdy lips, and black eyes that made her look twice
.

“Rather on the intense side, isn’t he?” said Emma as she slid the picture across the table. “He looks more like a student than a surgeon.”

“He’s finishing up a fellowship at Oxford in plastic surgery. Apparently he’s the real deal. Has offers from hospitals all over England and the States.”

“Is he one of us?”

“Good Lord, no,” said General John Austen, the air force two-star who had stood up Division several years before. “And we don’t want him to be. He just turned in his application to work for Doctors Without Borders.”

Emma took back the picture. “A do-gooder?” she said, not entirely trusting
.

“Aren’t we all?” Austen opened a file on his desk. “We want you in Nigeria. The deputy minister isn’t playing ball. He’s making noise about terminating some contracts with our friends in Houston. Thinks his country is more than capable of drilling their own oil and seeing it to market.”

“And I’m going to convince him otherwise?”

“Either that or kill him,” said Austen
.

“Come now, General, you don’t mean that.” It was the other man in the room who spoke. The fat one who insisted on wearing short-sleeved shirts and was constantly perspiring. Emma remembered his name: Frank Connor. “The deputy minister has been dipping his finger in the till for quite some time now. We’d like you to collect evidence of his greed and remind him where his true interests lie.”

“Or else I’ll provide the information to the prime minister,” said Emma, “who’ll string him up with piano wire and cut off his balls with a rusty knife.”

Connor frowned. “Accurate and persuasive.”

“I still say we kill him,” said John Austen. “But I will defer to Frank, seeing as how this is his operation.”

Connor went on: “We’re putting you into Doctors Without Borders a month ahead of Ransom. We’ve wrangled you a job as a mission administrator. Basically, you’ll run the whole show. Don’t worry, we’ve got a few weeks to bring you up to speed. Get close to Ransom and we’ll fix a transfer for him to Lagos. The Lagos mission is staffed by locals, so it’s imperative that Ransom request that you accompany him. No one’s going to be looking at a doctor and his trusted colleague.”

Emma didn’t like Africa. It was too hot, too humid, and had far too many creepy-crawlies. “How long?”

“Start to finish? Two months in Liberia. It’s up to you to see how quickly you can get the job done in Nigeria. Best case, six months.”

“And after?”

“The usual. You break it off with the doc. We pull you out. Take sixty days and go lie on a beach somewhere.”

Emma looked at the photograph again, and she felt a current pass through her. Ransom was handsome, to be sure. But there was something about him that disturbed her. It was his eyes. Like her, he was a believer. And so he was dangerous. At once she warned herself to be wary of him. Six months was a long time. “Where did you find him?”

Austen took back the picture and slid it into his file. “None of your business.”

The helicopter landed on a rock-strewn plateau at 4,500 meters. Emma shouldered open the door and jumped to the ground. The cold hit her like a hammer. To the east, a track of cumulus clouds streamed past the summit of Tirich Mir. During the hour’s flight, the sky had turned a curdled gray. Heavy weather was approaching.

Emma dug the Magellan GPS out of her pack. The device put the distance to the bomb at twenty-two kilometers. But that did not take into consideration the 1,500-meter gain in elevation, the lack of a well-marked trail, or, most trying of all, the thin air. Alone, she might cover that stretch in six hours. She looked over her shoulder at the porters unloading the equipment. Each would carry a load weighing forty kilos. They would be fine. Near them stood the two engineers, batting their arms for warmth. One took a few steps, then bent double and put his hands on his knees. They would not be fine.

Emma walked to the guide. “Get those men some oxygen,” she said. “And tell the porters to hurry. We move out in twenty minutes.”

She watched the guide run off, then turned her attention back to the darkening sky.

Trouble.

“You have thirty seconds to
walk into a room and commit everything you notice to memory,” said Danni.

“Like what? The color of the curtains? Kind of bedspread? I don’t get it.”

“Both of those. But also the location and type of desk. Do the drawers have locks? What’s on the counters? How do the windows open? Is there an alarm system? Anything that your instincts tell you is important.”

Jonathan stood next to Danni on the front steps of a run-down villa in the hills above Herzliya. It was past two in the afternoon. The morning’s robin’s-egg blue sky had given way to sodden gray clouds. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and raindrops had begun pelting his cheek. Mentally he prepared himself for the task at hand. Closing his eyes, he willed his mind to become a blank slate able to capture everything it saw. He drew a breath and ordered himself to be calm. But all the while a voice shouted in his head: “You have to do better!”