Gloria’s jaw tightened. “I have a few ideas.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but Adkins is getting pressure to pull you out of there ASAP,” Rencke said. “Might be for the best if you came home to file your field report. If you’re right, it could give the bad guys a false sense of security after you’ve left. They might screw up, ya know.”
“You have a point.”
“But, how’re you doing?” Rencke asked. “You were wounded.”
“I took one in my hip, but it didn’t break the bone,” Gloria told him. “The doc says I’m going to be sore as hell for a couple of weeks and I’ll probably have a limp for a few months, but I’ll live.” She closed her eyes, and she could see Bob’s slack death mask when she held him in her arms in the chopper. “I was lucky.”
“Yeah,” Rencke said quietly. “When do you get out?”
“Sometime this morning, I think.”
“Okay, sit tight, I’ll get back to you.”
Gloria broke the connection, laid the phone on the bedside table, and looked out the window toward the bay and the ferry landing. One of her senior instructors at the Farm had told the small graduating class that sooner or later every field officer comes to the point in their career when they question their validity. The good ones keep asking, “Am I making a difference?” but the bad ones stop caring. In reality, the really bad ones sold out — like Aldrich Ames had to the Russians for nearly five million dollars. Or they ate the bullet. Suicide was more of an occupational hazard in the intelligence community than death at the hands of your enemy. Bob had been one of the exceptions.
The CIA had been on a quiet but intense worldwide hunt for Osama bin Laden for sixteen months, ever since Don Hamel had been appointed the new director of National Intelligence. Bin Laden’s capture or assassination would serve as a showpiece for the supposedly overhauled U.S. intelligence system. All fifteen intel agencies, including Homeland Security, the FBI, and the military units, were in on the hunt. But the CIA had taken the lead.
There were more than one thousand al-Quaida fighters in U.S. custody, some of them in Afghanistan and Iraq, but many of them here in Camp Delta. Gloria and Talarico had been sent down to chase a few leads they’d unearthed last month in Afghanistan. Three al-Quaida messengers, who might have clues to bin Laden’s whereabouts, had supposedly been arrested last year, and were being held here. But the three had come in as Unidentified Alien Combatants along with several hundred other UACs.
Gloria had a hunch that they’d somehow been tipped off that the CIA was closing in on them, their transfer to Echo along with two others had been arranged, and an al-Quaida incursion squad had been sent to get them out or kill them.
It was a pretty morning outside. Just across the bay, past the airfield, the western fence separated this base from her homeland. There were times when she missed her childhood with her mother and father. She’d been an only child, and doted upon. But that was dead and buried forever. There was no peace here now. The tropical sun was shining, the trade wind breezes were blowing just as they had yesterday, only this morning her partner was dead, and his blood was on her hands.
She closed her eyes and began to cry silently, something she hadn’t done since her mother’s death.
In addition to the five hundred prisoners, nearly three thousand military personnel, dependents, and civilian contractors were housed on the base. The navy hospital, which served them, was very much like a small county general medical center, taking care of everything from sprained ankles to birthing babies. It was noisy around the clock; nurses checking on their patients, televisions and radios playing, and announcements coming over the PA system.
A few minutes after eleven, Lieutenant Commander Weiss, looking sharp in his summer undress whites, showed up at Gloria’s door, his hat in hand. He was angry. “Nice night of work, Ms. Ibenez. The body count was sure as hell impressive.”
“I think you guys call operations like that a cluster fuck,” Gloria said. She was done crying for now. But there’d be more when she spoke to Bob’s widow, Toni, and saw the kids.
“That’s about what General Maddox said to me this morning,” Weiss said. He came the rest of the way in the room and closed the door, but didn’t come closer than the end of the bed. He didn’t want to get contaminated. “What were you thinking?”
“We stumbled into the middle of a prison break, I called it in, and we went after them,” Gloria said. “Anyway, who were those guys?”
“Suspected al-Quaida,” Weiss replied tightly. It was obvious he was holding his temper in check.
“Was that why they were being held in Echo?” Gloria shot back. She knew why Weiss had come to see her, and it wasn’t to find out how she was faring.
“That’s none of your business.”
“That’s exactly my business, Commander.”
“Cuban television is all over this deal of yours like stink on shit,” Weiss said. “They’re reporting that our people opened fire on nine unarmed prisoners. They’re calling it a massacre, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and just about every other fucking news organization in the world has shown up in San Juan wanting permission to come here.”
“They must have had help,” Gloria said.
Weiss’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“They knew that the Frontier Brigade would be on the opposite side of the base making a racket, which gave them a clear shot at coming ashore, which means at the very least they had the Cubans on their side. But how’d they get past the tower guard?”
“They took him out. One shot to the head.”
“No one heard anything?”
“There was a lot of noise,” Weiss replied, his lips compressed.
Gloria felt a bit of compassion for him. Although the Army MPs ran Delta and the other detention centers, the overall security and intelligence mission belonged to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Weiss was the officer in charge. Last night’s fiasco had definitely landed on his lap, and he’d already felt a lot of heat, with a whole bunch more to come. “I’m sorry, Commander, but I didn’t make last night happen. Bob and I just stumbled into it.”
“And you got him killed, Ibenez,” Weiss said. “What the hell were you doing up there at that hour of the night? There weren’t any interrogations on the schedule.”
Gloria refused to look away, even though her innards were roiling, and she kept seeing Bob’s face in death. “I had a hunch.”
“About what?”
“The Cuban probe on the perimeter went on longer than normal, it was way up north, well away from Delta, and it was happening in the middle of the night.”
Weiss was looking at her as if he was watching a lunatic who was babbling nonsense and didn’t know any better.
“I think that Bob and I might have been made, our mission compromised.”
Weiss nodded as if he’d come to a conclusion. “One of the prisoners realized that you were CIA, made a quick phone call to bin Laden himself, and in just ten days arranged an attack on the base so that you and your partner could get in the middle of it and be taken out.” He smiled. “Have I covered everything?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Gloria flared. “You know goddamned well that there’ve been unauthorized sat phone emissions out of here.”
“Not for the last ninety days.”
She reached for her satellite phone on the nightstand. “Maybe you missed one.”
“No,” Weiss said flatly. “We picked up your encrypted transmission a couple hours ago. I just came over to tell you that you’ll be leaving on the first available transport.”