As he pulled on cotton pants and a T-shirt-all in his customary black-a Turkish military aide arrived to inform him that Colonel Oz requested his presence in a room on the second floor.
“Me alone, or my whole team?” Crocker asked.
The aide looked confused. “Your team, I think.”
He found Mancini, Akil, Davis, and Suarez sitting on sofas on the second floor, drinking hot tea from glasses and cracking jokes about Davis’s dyed black beard and hair.
“Don’t you think he looks like an Arab pinup boy?” Akil asked.
The dark hair made Davis’s blue eyes stand out more than usual.
“Have you seen Colonel Oz?” Crocker asked.
Mancini shook his head. “Not since we arrived. Why?”
“What about Logan?”
“Logan? Don’t think I’ve met him.”
“What do you call a Turkish baby?” Akil asked in a low voice as Crocker craned his neck looking down the hall.
“What?”
“A kebaby.”
Crocker groaned. “That sucks.”
“What do you say to a crying Turkish baby?”
“What?”
“Shish kebaby.”
Crocker shook his head and groaned again. “Even worse. You guys drive here?”
“Unfortunately. We’ve been listening to his bad jokes for the last hour,” Davis complained.
“I would have tossed him out of the vehicle.”
“We considered it.”
Mancini asked, “Boss, what’s going on? You look like you got a lot on your mind.”
“We need to get ready to deploy into Syria tonight.”
“How?” the always practical Mancini asked. “What’s the plan?”
“There is no plan, as of yet. We just have an objective and a timeline, but no approval.”
“Let’s not do what we did in southern Mexico,” Mancini commented. In that case, with the minutes ticking down to a deadline, Crocker and his men had launched a raid before they’d gotten White House approval. Fortunately, they had saved a U.S. senator’s wife in the process, otherwise Crocker might have been drummed out of the service.
“Hopefully Oz will have more intel when I find him.”
“He’s getting his head polished,” Akil joked.
“Not funny.”
“Seriously, boss, some cultural advice,” Akil offered. “Don’t get impatient. Turks don’t like that. Pride and honor are important to them.”
“Thanks.”
He hurried down to the end of the long hall. All the offices and rooms were empty, except for one in which a man with his feet on his desk was reading a report.
“Excuse me, do you know where I can find Colonel Oz?”
The Turkish soldier picked up a phone and called someone. After he hung up, he led Crocker over to the window and pointed to a low adjoining building on the left.
“Kahvalti,” he said in Turkish.
“I don’t understand.”
The Turk mimed sipping a cup of coffee. “Colonel Oz…”
The Turkish orderly led them across an empty cafeteria and entered a private dining room where Colonel Oz sat at a round table with Mr. Asani and Logan watching a TV propped in the corner. Logan looked bored and uncomfortable.
Seeing Crocker and his men, Oz stood and pointed to a buffet set up on a table along the wall and said, “Buyrun, takilin” (Help yourselves). Before the SEALs had heard the translation, they were filling plastic plates with boiled eggs, cheese, green olives, sucuk (dried sausage), and börek (thin dough filled with meat, cheese, and chopped vegetables).
“These people know how to eat,” commented Akil as he bit into a piece of börek.
“Good,” Mancini said. “Check out the baklava.”
“Isn’t baklava a Greek word?” asked Davis.
“No, Turkish. Dates back to ancient Mesopotamia.”
They found places at the table and filled cups from white pitchers of Turkish coffee and green tea. Colonel Oz’s eyes never wandered from the TV, where a buxom blonde with elaborate makeup and a tight lavender outfit was interviewing a bearded man in a white suit.
“Who’s the babe?” Crocker asked as he sat next to Logan.
“Don’t know.”
Crocker couldn’t understand what the man on TV was saying, but he noted his extreme self-importance and theatricality.
“What about the guy in the white suit?”
“His name is Harun Yahya.”
Crocker had never heard of him. “Who is he?”
“Harun Yahya? The messianic leader of an apocalyptic Islamic sex cult, and a close friend of Prime Minister Erdoğan.”
“Really?” Crocker asked in disbelief. “I never thought I’d hear the words Islamic and sex cult in the same sentence.”
“Harun Yahya is an important man in Turkey and considered one of the most influential figures in Islam. Kind of a cross between L. Ron Hubbard and Hugh Hefner.”
“Who’s she?” Davis asked from the other side of Logan, pointing to the woman in lavender.
“Don’t know her name, but she must be one of Harun Yahya’s so-called kittens. He’s into kinky sex and cocaine, and has written something called the Atlas of Creation, which espouses some weird form of creationism, that he’s sent to academics and biologists all over the world. Those who have bothered to read it dismiss it as pure BS.”
“Sounds like your kind of thing,” Crocker said to Davis. “You ever hear of it?”
Davis shook his head.
As they watched, one of several lavender-spacesuit-clad kittens did a slow pirouette and broke into song, an off-key Turkish version of “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha.
Colonel Oz applauded and started to laugh. He rose halfway to his feet as though he was about to say something when a massive explosion blew the glass out of the cafeteria window, threw him back against the wall, and lifted the others out of their seats. Glass flew everywhere. Chunks of plaster from the ceiling crashed onto the table. Eggs, tea, and coffee spilled onto the floor.
Crocker found himself on the floor gasping for breath. He brushed the dust away from his eyes and mouth, and did a lightning-fast appraisal of the damage. When he saw that the ceiling wasn’t going to cave in, he hurried over to Oz, who lay near the wall holding his chest and coughing.
“What the fuck was that?” Akil shouted through the dust and debris.
“Car bomb, probably,” Mancini responded, picking a sliver of glass out of his thigh. “The explosion originated to our left.”
Men were scrambling, moaning, and coughing. Some crawled under the table.
Crocker, his eardrums ringing, shouted, “Clear everyone to the courtyard in back!”
He heard no gunfire or sounds of a follow-up attack.
With Oz leaning on him and wheezing, he turned to him and said, “We’re going outside to get fresh air and find out what’s going on.”
Oz nodded.
Mr. Asani, who was bleeding from a cut to his forehead, took Oz by the arm and led him out while Crocker accounted for his men. Except for a few minor cuts, they were all intact.
The courtyard, which occupied the space between the military headquarters building and barracks, quickly filled with half-dressed soldiers carrying AKMs (modernized Kalashnikovs) and Spanish-made G3 7.62x51mm NATO assault rifles. MiT officials in black were barking orders into handheld radios and cell phones, and medics were ministering to the wounded. Nobody appeared to be seriously hurt.
“The bomb went off in front of Turkish police headquarters down the street,” Asani reported. “From what I hear, the whole front of the building collapsed.”