Tier One Wild (22 page)

This, and their ability to press a trigger that launched a missile that would kill hundreds of infidels, and to repeat this action over and over and over, would determine their ability to carry out the mission.

NINETEEN

Slapshot and Digger had spent the hours since dawn swapping thirty-minute shifts watching location Chalice from their hide—ten feet back from the ground-floor bedroom window of the flat across the street and fifty yards west of the Saleh property.

Slapshot was on duty now, seated in the chair in the darkened room, his head covered in a dark brown sheet and his arms resting on the table in front of him on either side of the Schmidt of Bender variable power spotter’s scope resting there. He made no sudden movements that could be seen by anyone either on the street or in any windows in the neighborhood.

To the right of the scope on the table was the laser microphone. To use the device, he would have to open the bedroom window ten feet in front of him a crack by sliding out of his position, and then low-crawling across the floor to the window, and then opening the window slowly and carefully before retracing his movements back to his chair.

Neither he nor Digger had detected any countersurveillance in the area, but they weren’t taking any chances. Their SOP for this type of surveillance determined their actions.

The CIA men, however, were not as careful.

Twice the day before, Murphy and Wychowski dropped in on the hide; both times they entered from the back of the building, not on Ibrahim Khedr, and they kept the lights off throughout the one-bedroom apartment. Still, Digger and Slapshot admonished the men for making too much noise, noise that could not have been heard from the street, but possibly could have been detected from adjoining flats in the building.

Both times the CIA men rolled their eyes at the over-the-top OPSEC protocols of the high-strung Hardy Boys, and both times Digger and Slapshot stuck to their guns and told the Agency men to either get the hell out or shut the fuck up.

At ten o’clock on the nose, two black SUVs that Slapshot recognized as belonging to the Aref Saleh Organization pulled up to the curb in front of objective Chalice. In total eight men climbed out of the trucks, and the drivers pulled back out into the light traffic and disappeared up the road, back in the direction of Maadi Land and Sea.

The eight men walked straight up the steps to the entrance of the home and went inside.

“Heads up.” Slapshot penciled the time into the log after calling out softly to Digger, who was lounging on the bed in the dark behind him. “Looks like something’s about to go down.”

“Fuckin’ finally,” Digger said, then he rolled slowly off the bed and headed over to the table. He sat behind the laser microphone, woke the laptop attached to it back up with a swipe of his finger across the track pad, and slipped the attached headphones over his ears.

While he was doing all this, Slapshot low-crawled to the window and cracked it open. It took him a minute to make it back to the desk, and by the time he returned, Digger was receiving broken transmissions from inside the house across the street.

“Anything?” asked Slapshot.

“Yeah. Garbled Arabic. I’m recording.”

“I’ll push it to Racer. Maybe Curtis or one of his guys can translate the audio feed.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes after the Aref Saleh Organization men arrived at the home on Ibrahim Khedr, all was silent in the house. Whatever was going on with the eight men inside, it did not involve talking in any one of the front rooms where Digger could beat his laser’s focal point off the window and back to his receiver. So far, the laser mike was worthless.

Just before ten-thirty, however, Slaphshot moved his eye out of the spotter’s scope so that he could take a sip of lukewarm tea from a mug. The entire act was slow and deliberate and covered by the brown sheet over him. Before he nestled his eye back in the rubber eye cup of the scope he looked out the window and saw a beige Range Rover pulling up a block east of Chalice in front of a luxury apartment building. This in itself was not unusual, cars came and went on this residential street with mind-numbing regularity, but when no one climbed out of the Range Rover after half a minute Slapshot directed his spotter scope on the vehicle and took a closer look.

Inside, two men sat in the front seats, their eyes directed up the street to the west.

Seconds after this a second vehicle, this one a two-door Honda Civic, pulled to the curb to the west of Chalice, within fifty feet of Slapshot’s position. He did not need his Schmidt of Bender scope to look into this vehicle. He could clearly see two men sitting there, looking down the street to the east.

“Who are these guys?” he asked softly. “Check this plate number.”

Digger pulled off his headphones—he wasn’t receiving anything in them anyway—and followed Slapshot’s eyes to the car just below them outside. Slapshot then directed him to the other car, across the street and on their right. Slowly and purposefully Digger lifted a set of binoculars off the table and looked through them.

After a few seconds he remarked. “They are new.”

“You’re right. They don’t look like Saleh’s men.”

“No, they don’t.”

Digger ran his finger down the list of license plate numbers Curtis’s team had tied to the Aref Saleh Organization. No hit. “New kids on the block, bro.”

Just then the doors opened on both of the new vehicles on the street. All four men climbed out, and then shut the doors behind them quietly. They fanned out, one man on each sidewalk, both on the north side and the south side of the street. Two men to the east of Chalice, two men to the west of Chalice. They began walking around the area, looking from the sidewalk into the windows of the buildings around them, taking their time.

Slapshot spoke even more softly than before. “These guys are thorough. Better than Saleh’s men.”

“Damn right,” Digger said, using his binoculars to get an extremely close look at one of the men directly in front of his overwatch. “And these are gorillas. Not intelligence desk jockeys, like Saleh’s guys.”

Slapshot agreed. “All of them are printing concealed weapons. Security goons. Doubt any of them have ever sat behind a desk in their lives.”

“I’ll call Racer and let him know it’s getting hot out here. These guys obviously are working an advance. Something is going down.”

The men in the street all had black curly hair and short, trim, beards. All four of them were in their twenties or thirties, and their loose-fitting suits had bulges at the hips and under the arms, where pistols and submachine guns were, no doubt, stored for quick retrieval.

Slapshot asked, “Wonder who the client is?”

“Unless these guys are lost, or just window-shopping, we’ll know soon.”

After three minutes of scanning by the four men in the street, another Land Rover SUV pulled up in front of objective Chalice. Slapshot looked through his glass and saw a big driver and a big passenger in the front. A single passenger sat in the backseat. There was a conversation that lasted several seconds among them all. The Americans in overwatch wondered if one of the security men already on the street was communicating with the three in the SUV via radio earpieces, but Slapshot did not move his scope to check.

Finally the front passenger got out of the SUV and opened the back door. As the man climbed out, two of the four security men who had been watching the street collapsed on their protectee and followed him up the stairs, their hands inside their jackets, their heads on a swivel.

The man at the center of this scrum looked a couple years older than the others, and he was clearly in charge. But he was not a personality Slapshot recognized.

Digger had already lifted the camera with the 400mm zoom lens. He snapped dozens of rapid digital shots of the men, focusing on the man in charge, still careful to not make any sudden movements that could be detected from the street.

In seconds the men disappeared inside the two-story home and Digger went back to the laser mic.

Slapshot went off glass and focused his naked eye closely on the man right in front of their position.

The man had been leaning against the thin trunk of a tree that grew alongside the road, and his eyes had been scanning the street to the west. But while Slapshot monitored him, the security man pushed off the tree and stood erect, his eyes alert and his body language on guard.

Slaphsot said, “Shit. Something has got the sentry on this side spooked.”

Digger said, “I’m getting faint chatter. They must be in the foyer of the house. I don’t have line of sight on the window there. Need them to move into another room.”

The black BMW tied to the Aref Saleh Organization pulled up the street from that direction and turned into the garage of Chalice.

“You getting pictures?” asked Slapshot.

“Gonna try,” replied Digger. “All depends on whether or not they leave that garage door open for a few seconds.”

But Slapshot was not listening. Instead, he watched the sentry in front of him lift a radio from his pocket and put it to his mouth.

The man’s eyes were still fixed on something to the west. Slapshot slowly leaned forward, looking out the window to the left.

He couldn’t see anything without getting up, and he was
not
going to run the risk of compromise by doing that.

Suddenly he had an idea about what was going on. He sat back down quickly. “No. Please no.” He grabbed the phone and pushed the button to connect him with Curtis.

Curtis answered on the first ring. “Yeah.”

“Are you or one of your guys bumpered on Ibrahim Khedr Street right now?”

“Negative. I’m at the safe house, and they are both here with me.”

“What about the Cairo Station guys that are helping out?”

“They are tailing a black BMW that left Maadi Land and Sea ten minutes ago.”

Slapshot sighed. “You got comms with them?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“We’ve got a black Beemer at Chalice, and one of the detail guys for another force just spiked on something suspicious down the street. What’s the plate number of the one they are on?”

“Shit. I don’t know.
What
detail guys at Chalice?
What
other force?”

“There is a full protective detail here in the street. More dialed in than the Saleh Organization yo-yos. Can you do us a huge favor and get your boys to scram? And while you are at it, please tell them if they crash the party of our target again while we are in an active OP that we will shoot them ourselves.” He followed this with, “Sir.”

“They aren’t
my
boys, soldier. They belong to Cairo Station.”

“They belong to Langley. Like you. Sir.”

Curtis hesitated before saying, “I’ll call them off.” He hung up the phone.

Slapshot looked back to the security man in the street. He was on his radio now, no doubt collapsing the rest of his team.

The American in the dark ten feet back from the window whispered hopeful instructions to the man: “No, dude, it’s cool. Just some dumb-ass white guys out for a Sunday drive. Your boss is fine, no need to be security guy of the month, just let him go on with the meeting.”

Digger was now monitoring the security man to the east. “Looks like they are bugging out.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Slapshot as he watched the scene. The front door of Chalice opened, and the two men there shouldered up with the VIP exiting the door. Together they all walked purposefully but calmly to their SUV parked on the curb. The security men weren’t hauling ass, they clearly were not convinced they had been compromised, but apparently the leader of this VIP’s protection detail thought the anomaly with the fair-skinned men showing up behind their host at just this moment was worthy of calling off the meeting.

Within seconds the SUV and the two cars that had arrived with it had all driven off to the west.

A minute later the BMW from the Saleh Organization’s motor pool rolled back out of the garage and drove off to the east.

“Did you get anything at all?” Slapshot asked.

“Background noise. They must have been hugging each other in an entry hall the whole time or something.”

“That thing is a piece of shit,” Slapshot said. He then picked up the phone and called Curtis back. He said, “They are gone.”

“Dammit. Any idea who this other entity was?”

“We have pictures,” he answered. “But no joy on the audio capture. Would have been nice to hear that meeting.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later Raynor was on the phone to Curtis. He and Cindy had spent the morning on a Nile day cruise that took them, along with a big group of gawking Westerners, twice past Maadi Land and Sea. Frank and Carrie Tomlinson were completely invisible as they took photographs of the security lighting in the back of Rhine, as well as pictures of the gate to the pier that jutted out from the back of the property.

They were now back in their car, with Hawk doing the driving. Raynor said to Curtis, “I hear your boys were burned at Chalice.”

Curtis replied angrily, “You don’t know that for sure.”

“My guys say so. So … yeah, I
do
know it for sure.”

“They aren’t my boys. I told you, I took what I could get from Cairo Station. They tailed a car with tinted windows. They tried a bit too hard to get a look at the driver of the car when he pulled into the garage, and that spooked this other entity at the scene. Shit happens, Racer.”

“That’s sloppy as hell, Curtis, and you know it. Spy School 101.”

Curtis countered quickly, “Look, we aren’t even sure there was any meeting happening.”

Kolt said, “C’mon, man, a full PSD, advance on the location, SUVs, radios, printed concealed weapons, even tinted windows. What about that doesn’t scream ‘bad guys getting together for a powwow’ to you?”

“All I’m saying is we can’t be certain. They didn’t get any audio.”

Kolt took that as a slight on him but he ate it. He had been the one who recommended the laser microphone. “Let’s just assume this was a meeting. If they didn’t finish, they’ll either try for another meeting or skip town. Did the BMW go back to Rhine/Stone after leaving Chalice?”