“Stone! Enough!” Iggy shouted from the back. “No time to explain. Right now I need you to find that tango camp.”
A few minutes earlier, Iggy had opened a clear plastic case of pre-threaded needles, then pulled on a pair of latex gloves. His head turned as he watched Ashland drag a corpse from the cockpit to the back of the plane. He said to GENGHIS, “You still with me, buddy?”
“You sure you can do it?” GENGHIS mumbled.
“Better than I can fly this plane. Hang on. It’s going to hurt.” Iggy stuck his fingers in the bullet hole and pushed around until he found something that felt like an earthworm. He grabbed it and held it while he used gauze to soak up blood until he could actually see what he was working with. He held his breath as he pinched it together with his real hand while his smart hand tied a loop around it, cutting off the wound. He repeated the procedure a couple of times for good measure, then sopped up the remaining blood to make sure he had stopped all the bleeding. In less than a minute he closed the wound with stitching his mother would’ve been proud of.
The Agency had been wrong not to take him back to the frontlines. Even with only one arm and one leg, Manuel Ignatius was still an operator.
“I think we’ve got something,” Stone shouted from the flight deck as Iggy felt the plane descend. “A cluster of structures inside a quarry.”
“On my way,” Iggy said as he removed his leg and brushed the sand off the stump. A couple of blisters were already forming. Whenever he was alone at home, he usually went without the prosthetic leg because it was a relief not to have it rubbing against the stump. Not since Walter Reed Hospital had he let anyone see him without it-until now. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from a pile of gear on a seat, then hopped into the cockpit. Gripping the back of the copilot’s seat with his artificial hand, he steadied himself.
Stone changed the flap settings and pushed down on the yoke, then he banked the aircraft into a tight circle above the compound and pointed. “Look over there. This mine’s abandoned. All the others all have buildings and equipment around them.”
“Yeah, looks abandoned to me. So?” Iggy said.
“Right there. Along the north wall of the ridge between the two pits.”
“Son of a bitch. That’s a familiar footprint.” Iggy studied the area through his binoculars. “I saw several of these in Afghanistan before the invasion. There’s even camouflage netting flapping around. The high winds today must’ve ripped it.”
“SHANGRI-LA,” Ashland said.
“Yeah, SHANGRI-LA-right there in the pit of hell. Who would’ve thunk it?” Iggy pointed at the scattering of buildings nestled in the first level in the smaller of two adjoining terraced craters. Together the pits were some thirty kilometers long and between five and ten kilometers wide. Where the camp was situated on the upper level, the terraced benches were at least a football field wide. “Look at that. It’s fucking brilliant to stick it in an old open pit mine in the middle of a desert wasteland-a fortress on a shoestring. They don’t need to guard the perimeter-no one could rappelle down those walls because the sand would crumble into an avalanche. Looks like the main road is the only way in.” Iggy turned to Ashland. “Go in the back and get as many shots as you can-close ups and wide ones. Let us know when you’ve filled the camera and we’ll get out of here.”
Ashland exited the flight deck.
“You think Stella’s down there?” Stone said while he played with the digital controls, apparently familiarizing himself.
“Stella?” Iggy chuckled. “Haven’t heard her called that in a long time.” He lowered himself into the copilot’s seat. He reached into the pocket of his 5.11s and pulled out a booklet. Camille had told him that Stone was fluent in spoken Arabic and he hoped he could read it, too. “If this says what I think it does, I’d bet my good hand on it.”
“What is it?” Stone reached for it.
“Someone dropped it when they nabbed Cam. I was picking it up when the shooting started.”
Stone flipped through it. “It’s a cleric ranting about returning to the roots of the true al Qaeda.”
“Al-Zahrani?”
“How’d you know? What’s all this got to do with Rubicon?”
“His name’s come up a lot lately,” Iggy said. “Can you take us a little lower? I need a good long look. Someone bought up all the commercial satellite pictures for the next several years.”
“Rubicon?”
“You bet-one of their front companies.” Iggy studied the compound, looking for the best avenues of approach. “I’d give one of my right arms for recon on the deck, but I’m afraid a bird’s-eye view is all we’re gonna get.”
“I ran into some tangos outside of Ramadi who trained here in an al-Zahrani camp. They were the ones who kidnapped the geologist Jackie Nelson. I also know Rubicon has a lot of business here.”
“Yeah, like supporting the frickin’ terrorist camp. Obviously, they have a prison here, too. Camille said there’s a former KGB facility built out of an old gold mine. She said there are underground mineshafts in the hills around here. Our guess is that’s where they were taking you. Now I’m starting to think they’re also using it to keep tabs on the al-Zahrani camp.” Iggy lowered the binoculars and looked at the virtual gauges, but didn’t really understand what he was seeing. “How’s your fuel?”
“Twenty-nine thousand and two hundred-some pounds-enough to take us anywhere in Western Europe with leftovers.”
“I only want to get to Bagram, to Black Management’s Camp Obsidian. It’s our nearest Afghan ops center.”
“It’ll take us about an hour to get there.”
“Beautiful.”
“Not really. It takes us too far away from Stella, uh, Camille. I’d rather find what we need locally and go back. And if you’re thinking of returning with helicopters, you’re asking for some extreme flying.”
“We have to stage from where we have our assets and that’s Bagram.” Iggy scratched his face and felt a couple days’ stubble.
“I think we should go somewhere here in-country, get gear on the black market and come back tonight.”
“Would never work. I don’t know how to contact Cam’s local suppliers who outfitted us and it would be just you and me. Ashland’s not an operator, GENGHIS is down and that airstrip we used is now out of the question.”
“I don’t want to leave Uzbekistan without her. I speak some Russian. You have to have some spooks on staff with old KGB ties who can set us up, wire us some money. The Uzbeks will sell anything for the right price. We can probably even pick up a few old Spetsnaz mercs in Tashkent.”
“I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it would take too much time to orchestrate. As it is, with all the assets we have in place in Afghanistan, it’ll be all I can do to pull something together for tonight.”
“As soon as he’s done with the pictures, I’m heading to Tashkent,” Stone said.
“No, you’re not.” Iggy pointed at him. He could feel his face and neck getting warm. “This is a Black Management op. We have a command structure. Let me introduce you to it-in our world, I’m a five-star and you get to keep your old rank-what’s that, an E-6, E-7?” Iggy held his gaze. “Got that Devil Dog?”
Stone stared at him for several seconds, then said, “Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”
“Good. What’s the distance between SHANGRI-LA and Bagram?”
“You wouldn’t know the station identifier code for Bagram, would you, sir?” Stone said. His voice was stiff with an underlying tone of controlled anger, but Iggy didn’t care. Stone had accepted him as the alpha dog and that was all that mattered.
“Oscar-Alpha-India-X-ray.”
Stone punched the code into the flight computer and a color chart of the Bagram airspace appeared on one of the LCD monitors. “Electronic Jeppesens. Cool. Says here the range is five hundred forty nautical miles-that’s pushing it for helos, sir. And sir, I’m an E-8.”