“So how did you get over her, Pat? What’s the secret?” He was growing angry. He did not like to talk about Shari, even with Jeff and Pat and Double-Oh.
She had a hand on each hip and glared at him. “You think that Jeff and I got over her? How wrong you are. You never get over that kind of loss. You just…eventually…come to accept it as something you cannot change. The sun comes up in the morning, the clock ticks, and Shari will still be dead. You cannot climb into the coffin with her.” Pat pulled her wrap tight around her shoulders. “Wake up, Kyle. Shari’s been gone for more than a year, and you are condemned to live with the rest of us now. I want you back, the real Kyle Swanson, not some war junkie who is on his way to becoming an otherwise useless alcoholic.” She turned, shook her head, and walked away to the main cabin.
Swanson fell back in his chair. Jesus Christ. She just beat the crap out of me. Kyle had been disturbed for months when he could no longer mentally recall every detail of Shari’s beautiful face, nor smell her fragrance, although he could still imagine her touch and her laugh. He was losing her. She was fading over time. “What’s your opinion, Jeff?” he asked.
“What she said.” He drank some coffee and unblinkingly returned Kyle’s stare.
“And you?”
Master Gunny Dawkins picked up his briefcase and pulled out a folded map. “I’m your friend, not your confessor. Whatever it takes, as long as it takes. But if you get fucked up on booze or dope and get me killed, I shall be very unhappy. Now can we please move past this Oprah moment and talk about the fucking mission?”
Double-Oh laid out the map, pointing at a grid location close to the southwestern tip of Iran. “This is where the defector said the so-called Palace of Death was located, almost within rock-throwing distance of the border. We know from the satellites that there’s nothing important down there except the port town of Khorramshahr. Beyond that is just a lot of dirt, which is why the boss wants to put some boots down and take a look.”
“Could the walk-in just have been looking for a quick cash payment with his allegedly secret information?” Kyle asked. “Peddling bogus information to Americans is not exactly new in Iraq.”
“Not bloody likely if someone went to the trouble to assassinate him in the Green Zone. There was a reason.” Jeff sat back and folded his hands over a growing belly, the price of success. He was no longer young and jumping out of airplanes.
“That was a perfect stalk and shoot,” Double-Oh looked over at Kyle. “We’re sure it was Juba. The description from the hotel people matches what we know about him, and he did everything but leave his autograph. So somehow he’s involved, too.”
“Lots of loose ends,” said Kyle. “But why Iran? It would be a lot more credible if an Iraqi scientist emerged from Syria, since that’s where Saddam stashed his big weapons, up around al-Baida, and in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Iran and Iraq hated each other after eight years of war and a million casualties. I cannot see this level of cooperation, even so many years later.”
Sir Jeff picked up the map and studied it. “Unless…” They could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s brain. “At the end of that war, there were months of negotiations before the two sides agreed to the solution brokered by the United Nations. Very little was changed in the long run, but some deals were made concerning captured territory and the shared use of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.”
“History lesson number 42,” said Kyle. “What is your point?”
“What if this Palace of Death thing was one of the backchannel agreements, something even the UN people did not know about? Hussein and the ayatollahs overlooked their differences long enough to make a deal for the future.”
Double-Oh was interested. “Meaning us?”
“I’ll get to that. What was the major thing people remember about the Iran-Iraq War? The use of chemical weapons by Iraq to blunt Iranian frontal assaults. Later came the biochem attacks in the Kurdistan region. You certainly remember the Arab saying that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ Both sides consider America to be the Great Satan, and both sides anticipated that sooner or later, one or both of them would be facing us in combat.”
Kyle finished his coffee. “So these crazies, the mullahs and Saddam’s thugs, start planning something way back in the 1980s? A jointly owned and operated bioweapons factory? Then they never used the product?”
“If they were trying to come up with something really new and effective and deadly, perhaps it just wasn’t ready in time for the Gulf War, and things tightened up quickly during the current war. The United States sold weapons to both sides during the Iran-Iraq fighting, and so much matériel and cash has been lost or stolen during the current war that it cannot even be counted. Throw in the massive support the United States supplied to the Afghan rebels that fought the Soviet Union and it is reasonable to believe they had access to plenty of raw materials and plenty of time for development.”
“So you think there really may be something to this Palace of Death idea?”
“The name is just a name, like Saddam’s ‘Mother of All Battles,’ but they have to call it something. Whatever is out there needs to be uncovered.”
“That’s the job. Kyle and I are heading down to Doha to pick up a MARSOC team, then go in early tomorrow morning.” Double-Oh stood and put away his map. “Give my apologies to Pat for my not being able to stay longer. I still have some money she hasn’t stolen from me at poker.”
Kyle shook hands with Jeff. “Tell m’lady I’ll be thinking about what she said…and for her to have a good time in London. I’ll be back in a few days.”
Sir Jeff slapped him on the shoulder. “Right. Only wish I was going with you.” He walked them to the helipad and waved as the helicopter lifted away.
THE MARINE ASSAULT TEAM arrived at Camp Doha in Kuwait as fast as it could be assembled and flown out of North Carolina. They boarded a plane on a sunny afternoon, flew most of the night, and got off to find themselves in the desert sun of Kuwait. A waiting helicopter ferried them to a secure barracks in the special operations sector of the sprawling American base at Camp Doha, north of Kuwait City.
Every member of the team had been to Doha before, during previous tours in Iraq. It was Little America. Uncle Frosty’s Oasis, the Marble Palace, the beach, and great Mexican food downtown at the La Palma. Pizza, camel races, ice cream. Doha was not a hardship post.
They knew, however, that this was not going to be vacation time, for the first thing they saw in their barracks was a stack of hazmat suits on a table by the door. They pawed through the stack and picked out correct sizes, tossed the suits onto the bunks, and followed Captain Newman over to a private room in a mess hall for chow. Afterward, he disappeared for a briefing, and the rest of them ambled back to their small barracks. Special operators do not linger in the daylight when starting a mission, and they were glad the sun was going down.
The lights were off, and Travis Hughes was the first one through the door, feeling for the switch. He was snatched from his feet by a big, meaty arm and thrown to the floor, where someone jammed a knee into his chest and pressed a knife to his neck.
Darren Rawls, the next through the door, thought Hughes had tripped and fallen. Then he felt a pistol barrel being jammed under his chin so hard that his head was forced back.
The lights snapped on. Master Gunny Dawkins removed the pistol he held on Rawls and looked furious. A guy with a black mask had Travis Hughes pinned to the floor.