Crocker shook his head. “The U.S.? I don’t think so.”
“No?”
He finished the water and set the cup on the floor. When he looked up, he saw her rising to her feet and reaching for her left hip. Instinctively, he lunged at her and went for the pistol. As he grabbed her right wrist and pulled it down, he realized that she wasn’t reaching for the pistol but merely adjusting it. But it was too late.
Holding her right hand with his left, he reached under her uniform tunic and removed the weapon-a hot-pink Beretta Nano 9mm-from its nylon holster.
“What’s this for?” It looked silly in his hand.
She pulled her wrist free and contorted her mouth. She also tried to twist away, which only added to the friction between their bodies. “What are you doing? You hurt my wrist.”
He could feel her heart beating in her chest. “Why are you carrying a loaded pistol?”
“Do you like to hurt women?”
“No. I don’t like it when someone I don’t know walks into my room carrying a concealed weapon.”
Their eyes met, a mere six inches apart. In close proximity he could smell the tahini on her breath and feel her full breasts against his chest.
“Maybe I carry it because I’m in a war zone where we have many enemies.”
Good answer.
“What do you really want?” A moment after he said it, he realized that his question was loaded with all kinds of innuendo, which she seemed to be considering now in a private corner of her mind.
“I want lots of things. Things you can’t give me, Mr. Wallace.”
Said like a woman.
“But there is something…”
Of course there is. “What?”
She bit her bottom lip and said softly, “Look after Hassan.”
“Hassan? The student?”
“Yes. He’s my half brother,” she said gently. “Very intelligent, but naive about people and politics. Someone who studies diagrams and numbers. I don’t think he understands the risks out there. The darkness in the human soul.”
It was a mouthful, said with a seductive sincerity. He let it sink in and settle.
“You want me to protect him?”
“Please.”
Someone tapped on the door. Seconds later he heard Davis’s voice.
“Boss?”
“Just a minute.”
His eyes never left hers. Hers were filled with yearning, and fire.
“You think we can trust him?” Crocker asked.
“Yes. He’s a good person.”
He nodded. “Then I’ll make sure he gets back safely.”
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “Thank you.”
It wasn’t a quick thank-you, more a long, full kiss that offered promise. Promise perhaps of more, if he brought Hassan back safely.
Wow.
She pulled back a little and waited to see if he understood, which he did, and to measure the effect she had on him, which was considerable.
“You’d better go now,” he said in a deep voice.
“Yes.” She stepped back, adjusted her tunic, and smiled warmly. “I hope we meet again.”
“Me, too. And don’t forget this.”
He handed back the pink Beretta.
“You can take it if you want,” she said.
“A pink Beretta? No thanks.”
They assembled near the Ford F-250 and the Mercedes Sprinter van-both beige with blue crosses painted on the hoods, front doors, and sides. The pickup bed wore an aluminum cover, and the Sprinter featured a twenty-three-foot-long cargo bay.
Hassan, Crocker, and Akil stood alongside the F-250; Mancini, Davis, and Suarez waited beside the Mercedes. Captain Zeid and Babas leaned on a green Mitsubishi jeep fifteen feet in front of them, smoking cigarettes and trading jokes with Colonel Oz.
Crocker pulled himself away from the story Akil was telling about his childhood in Cairo to check with the colonel.
“Any word from the truck with the medical supplies?”
Oz waved toward him. “It’s coming. Five minutes. No worries. You worry too much.”
He held his tongue and looked at his watch: 2319. They’d be lucky to leave before midnight. Janice sat inside, in an office near the sat-phone, waiting for the approvals from Washington.
Zeid muttered something in Turkish, and Oz threw back his head and laughed. Crocker thought it might have been a sarcastic comment about him and his men but didn’t really care. He was more concerned about the okay from D.C., and wondered if it would ever come. There was nothing he hated more than getting geared up for an op and waiting while the suits at Langley and the White House made up their minds.
“You spoke to the driver?” he asked Oz, unleashing some of his annoyance on him.
“What driver?”
“The driver of the truck with the medical supplies.”
Oz pointed the radio clutched in his hand toward the gate and the town in the distance. “See, here. It’s coming, my friend. Relax.”
Easy for you to say.
All Crocker saw were low clouds and the murky lights of houses. He was about to say something about trust and accuracy when an old Mercedes 2.5-ton roared through the gate, made a half circle in front of them, and stopped.
Two men hopped out, waving their arms and shouting in Turkish. Oz met them halfway and yelled back.
“What’s the problem?” asked Crocker.
“There is no problem, except that this fucking goat herder is late because he ran out of fuel.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Crocker said, checking his watch again. “Did he bring the supplies?”
Oz shrugged and shouted at the driver, who was climbing into the cab. The driver shouted back and pointed his stubby arm toward the back of the truck.
Crocker unlatched the doors and pulled them open. The tall cargo area was half-full of boxes of medical equipment-gauze, tape, Israeli bandages, IV bags, and syringes mostly, and some medicine. It would do.
He heard Janice shouting from the top of the back stairway. “Wallace! Hey, Wallace!”
“What?”
She flashed a thumbs-up.
“Green light?”
“Yes.”
He turned back to his men and said, “Looks like we’re going into Syria.”
Akil shouted back, “Sweet!”
Chapter Eight
Change calls the tune we dance.
– Al Swearengen, Deadwood
A light rain started to fall as they rolled through the elaborate white-and-red structure that housed Turkish customs, Zeid and Babas in the open jeep in front of them flashing their headlights and shouting at the guards. On the Syrian side stood two grim-looking old men shouldering M1 rifles.
Babas shouted, “Subhan Allah!” (Glory be to God!)
The guard waved back. “Mawt al-Assad!” (Death to Assad!)
They entered gentle verdant hills that reminded Crocker of western Virginia, one of his favorite locales. Except here the shoulders of the rough two-lane highway were littered with broken suitcases, empty boxes, strollers missing wheels, an ice chest, a smashed TV, pieces of clothing, plastic bottles and containers, and other junk that had been discarded by refugees and subsequently picked through by scavengers. Evidence of the thousands of civilian lives that had been upended. Families pulled apart; kids ripped out of communities and schools.
The barbarity of the Assad government against its own people hit home. Crocker had read somewhere that the Syrian president and his wife had met in London, where they were both studying. She was a stylish woman who advocated for women’s rights and education, and they were parents of three children.
How could educated, civilized people justify horrors like this?
Low-lying clouds and precipitation limited visibility. The houses that dotted the hillsides appeared dark and uninhabited. Some were destroyed; others showed the ravages of war-collapsed roofs, walls decimated by artillery shells or rockets. Anti-Assad and jihadist slogans had been spray-painted in black on the remaining standing walls, forewarnings of an uncertain post-Assad future.