The tangos were a trusting bunch.
Working as fast as he could, he set up the 240-Golf’s tripod and bore-sighted the AN/PVS-17 night vision scope so that the crosshairs were aligned with the barrel. He fed the first rounds of the ammo belt into the machine gun.
“CHALK ONE this is TIN MAN. In position and standing by,” he said over the encrypted radio.
“Copy that,” Stone said.
With everything ready, he took out his thermal binoculars to confirm that they were targeting the right tents with the Claymores. The desert landscape held onto the summer heat as if it remembered the chill of the Uzbek winter and it made most things look shades of yellow and orange, but the dark red of body heat couldn’t be mistaken. He guessed he was looking at three to four hundred tangos, snoozing away in three tents.
Now Iggy could start searching for Camille. Prisoners tended to be kept separated from others and he hoped to find a structure with only a few heat signatures inside. A terrorist training facility was not the type of place that usually held prisoners, so that made it even more likely they’d lock her up somewhere alone-if they hadn’t already killed her. He shoved that thought from his mind as fast as he could.
He started with the structures closest to the entrance of the mine and worked his way toward the raiding party. In each structure he picked up several bodies and assumed they were tangos sleeping wherever they could find a good spot. The body density was far greater than he was looking for, so he kept scanning.
In the middle of the camp, he found something. The pattern appeared to be a single individual with two others positioned less than three meters away. He swapped the thermal imaging binoculars for standard night vision ones. The structure appeared to be a small tent, but it was difficult to see much more because of the camouflage netting blowing in the wind. The pattern was consistent with a prisoner being held by two guards, but he couldn’t imagine anyone stupid enough to hold a prisoner in a tent. It was more likely the camp’s head honcho. He radioed Stone instructions for one of them to check it out after they had infiltrated the camp. Switching back to the thermal binoculars, he kept searching.
Please be alive.
Chapter Eighty-Three
The CIA program’s original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.
– The Washington Post, November 2, 2005, as reported by Dana Priest
Shangri-la
“Hunter?” Camille said in an intentionally weak voice, just in case it wasn’t him. Then fell to the ground, pretending to whimper as she moved toward her cache of buried nails. No one answered, but she heard breathing and kept herself turned toward it while she ran her fingers along the exposed wooden frame, searching until she found the knot that marked where she had buried the nails.
“Cut the bullshit, Camille.”
Joe Chronister.
“Joe? Thank god you’re here.” She lied. She had no illusion that he was there to rescue her. If he was in the heart of the terrorist camp, it could only mean that he was somehow working with the tangos. The only question was, was he working on his own or with the CIA? At that moment, it didn’t matter much. All she really cared about was surviving to wreak revenge on al-Zahrani. Her fingers sifted through the sand until she found the nail. “He raped me.”
“Stay where you are. I’ve got a Glock trained on you in case you can’t see it.”
He shined a flashlight on her. She squatted, so he couldn’t easily see that her legs weren’t tied and she contorted her face before she looked up. He had a false beard and was dressed like a muj in a dishdashah. As a smart operative, it was a safe assumption that he was wearing a bulletproof vest. She would have to plan her attack accordingly. She shielded her eyes with her forearm, holding up her bound hands to help paint the picture of a distraught female prisoner. It wouldn’t take much acting.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Camille. You fucked things really good. I set you up for a nice little excursion to Ukraine. You would’ve kept your pretty ass safe.”
“He violated me, Joe.” Her voice cracked and she whimpered. She forced herself to flashback to al-Zahrani rooting around on top of her and let herself feel the pain until she started crying.
“Pretty impressive operation, we’ve got here, isn’t it? You’re one of the few people who can really appreciate the brilliance of what I’ve got going on here. Everything you see here-Rubicon is pulling the strings.”
Camille cried harder, then started sobbing. She fell into the part far too easily. She knew she was in danger of believing herself a victim and losing her edge. She pulled herself back and began moaning, breathing through her mouth as if she couldn’t stop crying.
“Enough of the fucking theatrics. You listening to me?” Joe stepped closer.
Camille rocked herself as she whimpered. Joe Chronister was not someone she had ever thought of as needy, but she realized then that he had a strong need for her to appreciate his work. The more she ignored him, the more he talked.
“I told al-Zahrani he could keep you a couple of nights so it didn’t look bad in front of the boys, then you’re coming over to us at BALI HAI. It’s our duck blind that we use to keep an eye on this goddamn place. It’s also a prison-and a well built one I might add, thank you KGB. It’s a hundred feet down inside an old gold mine that dates back to tsarist times. BALI HAI is the jewel in our newly privatized little gulag chain. With Congress and that Post reporter Dana Priest breathing down our neck about Agency-run black sites, we’re putting them under new management-privately-run prisons, just like stateside. You don’t even need presidential approval when the other motherfucker is the one who’s doing it. That’s the beauty of outsourcing-plausible deniability. Gotta love it.”
She looked up, counting on her puffy eyes. “He raped me. They had AKs. They pinned me down and held me,” Camille said in a near-whisper. “They held me while he…” She gasped for air and then continued “raped me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Is this for real? You’re sniveling like my goddamn wife, for christssake. Pull it together, Camille. What the hell happened to fuck you up like this so fast?”
“Al-Zahrani,” she whispered as quietly as she could. “He, he…raped me.”
“I can’t hear you. What’d you say?”
Chronister bent down toward her and Camille sprang.
She shoved the nail deep into his left eye as she twisted her body at a forty-five-degree angle so she would be clear in case he managed to discharge the weapon. He screamed and the flashlight fell to the ground as he raised his hands up to his eye. Camille put her hands over the hand that was holding the gun. She guided his right hand across his chest underneath his left armpit to avoid any bulletproof vest, then she twisted his wrist into a downward angle. She pulled the trigger, sending a round through his heart and lung.