Al-Habib rose up over the edge for just a moment and immediately spotted two American Military Police guards outside the tall, razor-wire-topped fence that surrounded the building. They’d stepped around from the guard shack, their weapons slung over their shoulders, and were facing north toward the noise and flashes of the Cuban probe.
No other activity was in sight. No movement, no other soldiers. The Camp Delta inner perimeter fence was across a dirt road and a barren field of low brown grass and gravel.
Al-Habib motioned that he would take out the MP to the left, and for Sufyan to take the other.
“Let it begin now,” al-Habib told himself. “Let my hand be steady and my heart be strong.” He nodded. “Insh’allah,” he whispered.
“Insh’allah,” Sufyan replied.
They both rose at the same moment. Al-Habib centered his reticle on the back of the guard’s head and squeezed off his shot at almost the exact moment as Sufyan’s. Both American MPs collapsed to the ground.
A tall, nicely proportioned, young black woman stepped out of her room in Gitmo’s BOQ near base headquarters and padded on bare feet down the short corridor and outside to an awning-covered patio used as a smoking area. She was dressed only in an brief bra and panties, the white material almost fluorescing against her dark skin. The sounds of the attack had awakened her, and although she wasn’t particularly concerned for the moment, she was curious. The big siren in front of Gitmo’s HQ was blaring, and spotlights along the northeastern perimeter were trained on the hills behind the base. She walked to the edge of the patio to get a better look, but all she could make out from here was an occasional flash in the distance, and the sharp sounds of assault rifles and perhaps a machine gun.
She’d been down here on special assignment for the CIA for ten days now, and this was the third Cuban probe on their defenses. But this morning the firing seemed more intense than it had the other times.
She flinched when another mortar round landed with a big flash of light somewhere in the hills behind the base, and she got the notion that the Cubans weren’t shooting at us, they were just making a lot of noise for some reason.
To draw our defenses away. From what?
“What the hell are you doing out there?” someone called to her from the door of the BOQ.
Gloria Ibenez glanced back and smiled. “Can’t sleep with all this racket.” Her eyes were wide and dark, and her black hair fell in cascades around her high cheeks, full lips, and narrow, finely sculpted nose. She was a beautiful thirty-two-year-old Cuban-born woman, and she turned heads whenever she walked into a room.
“Come on, Ibenez, put some clothes on before you start a riot,” her partner, CIA field officer Robert Talarico, said. He was bare-chested, but he’d pulled on a pair of jeans. He came out to the patio where she stood, and offered her a cigarette.
She shook her head as another flash-bang rolled across the base, followed by a fresh crackle of small-arms fire.
“It’s a big one tonight,” Talarico said. His father had been a tunnel rat in ’Nam, and like his father he was short, slightly built, and moved in tiny swift steps like a bird. He was two years older than Ibenez, but she was the senior partner, a fact he did not resent. He had a lot of respect for her tradecraft and her intelligence.
Gloria turned and stared toward the distant firefight as a pair of APCs roared up Main Street and headed northeast in a big hurry. “Too big, maybe.”
“They’ve hit us before. Nobody gets hurt, they’re just letting us know that we’re pissing them off by being here. No big deal.”
“This time’s different,” Gloria said. “It’s already lasted longer than before. And it’s more intense. Could be a diversion.”
Talarico straightened up. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. This maybe has something to do with us?” He gave her a sidelong glance. “With you specifically?”
“Probably not.”
Gloria’s father, Air Force General Ernesto Marti, who’d been Castro’s chief of air operations, had defected to the United States when Gloria was thirteen. Pretending that he was experiencing engine trouble, he’d landed his Cessna 182 in downtown Havana on the Avenida San Antonio Chiquito in front of the Necrópolis de Colón, where his wife was waiting with their only child. Before anyone could do a thing, he’d taken off and headed northeast toward Key West. Who was going to question the chief of air operations?
But the airplane had developed an actual engine problem, and they’d crashed five miles short of the island. Gloria’s father pulled her out of the wreckage, but she could never forget the look of helpless surprise on her mother’s face as the airplane sank just outside the reef in five hundred feet of water.
General Marti went to work as a special adviser on Cuban affairs to the CIA, and after law school and a brief stint in the Navy’s JAG, Gloria had followed in his footsteps. They were both very high on the Cuban Intelligence Services most wanted list.
“What time is it?” Gloria asked.
Talarico checked his watch. “Quarter to three.”
Gloria and Talarico worked in the Special Projects Division for the deputy director of operations. For the most part their recent assignments had not involved the use of legends — cover stories. Most recently they’d been in Afghanistan, interrogating every peasant and mujahideen they could get their hands on, to come up with some hint of where bin Laden might be holed up. Last week they’d been assigned to Gitmo to see what information they could get from the Afghani and Iraqi prisoners. But it had turned into a dicey operation. The guys working for naval intelligence, which handled most of the interrogations, resented the CIA sticking its nose into their territory, and Amnesty International had been sniffing around lately, looking for another Abu Ghraib scandal.
And now these Cuban probes on Gitmo’s defenses. The last two times they’d hit the perimeter just off the beach below Delta. But this morning the attack was to the north.
Well away from the detention camp. At three o’clock in the morning. When nearly everyone was supposed to be sleeping.
Another flash of light lit up the night sky to the north, followed several seconds later by an impressive boom.
“Get dressed,” Gloria said. “We’re going to take a ride.” She turned and headed back to the BOQ, Talarico right on her heels.
“Where?”
“Delta.”
“You think it’s a prison break?”
Gloria looked at him, and shrugged. “I don’t like coincidences,” she told him. “The Cubans are up to something.”
“That’d mean they were cooperating with al-Quaida,” Talarico said.
“Now there’s a thought,” Gloria replied at the door to her room. “But we are the common enemy.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
“Bring your pistol.”
Kamal and Sufyan dragged the bodies of the two MPs out of sight in a shallow depression in the sand and gravel next to the road, while Bukhari figured out the control that released the gate lock. Al-Habib stood in the shadow cast by the guard shack, his attention toward the Delta outer fence about thirty meters away, every sense alert for any sign that their incursion had been detected.
But there was no movement, no sirens, no guards coming across on the run. All the noise and activity was directed to the perimeter fence five klicks to the north.
“No keys,” Bukhari whispered urgently.
“What about the gate?”
“It’s electric, I found the switch.”