Keasling nodded. “Or the rogue agent might have sabotaged the support aircraft. Either way, we need to keep the Night Stalkers on the bench for now.”
“So what else can we do to help those men?”
“I’m trying to divert immediate close air support, sir. And I’ve put the word out to all our operators in the region. 1st Ranger is attached to 7th Group at COB Speicher — al Sahra airfield, near Tikrit. They can be there in a couple hours.”
“A couple hours? Our boys could be dead by then.”
A strange gleam lit in Keasling’s eyes. “Sir, with all due respect, I wouldn’t bet on it.”
NINE
A man in a white waiter’s uniform pushed a food service cart out of the elevator and down the hallway. It was an hour after midnight, and the corridor was still and silent. Upon reaching his destination, one of more than a dozen nearly identical doors on either side of the hall, the waiter stopped and consulted a slip of paper on the cart, as if to verify that he was in the correct place. He stood motionless for a moment and could just make out a murmur of voices — probably from a television set inside — then he rapped his knuckles loudly on the door.
Several seconds passed. He was about to knock again when a voice issued from behind the panel. The terse inquiry was in Arabic, a language the waiter did not speak fluently, but the meaning was clear enough.
“I have food,” he called out. He spoke in English, but with an accent that might reasonably have been mistaken for German. “You order room service, ja?”
The door opened a crack, and through that narrow space, the waiter saw an unsmiling bearded Arab man, not quite as tall as his own six feet. The Arab appraised the waiter with a laser-like stare, taking in his dirty blond hair and long goatee — features that looked decidedly out of place in the region. Then he opened the door wider and took a half-step into the hall. Despite the late hour, the man was fully dressed, though he had chosen western attire — a brown sport coat over a white cotton dress shirt and khaki chinos — instead of the garb preferred by his kinsman. He glanced left and right, then returned his attention to the waiter.
“No room service.”
The waiter picked up the slip of paper and held it out for inspection. “You order food, ja? See right here?”
The Arab ignored the paper. “No.”
The waiter took another look at the slip. “Did someone else in the room order? You have others in the room with you?”
A perturbed look crossed the man’s face, then he stepped back inside and rattled off an inquiry in Arabic. The waiter seized the opportunity to advance his cart into the room, but the Arab blocked his entry, stopping the cart with such suddenness that the waiter had to steady himself by grasping the door frame. There was an angry look in the Arab’s eyes as he pushed the cart back into the hall.
“No order,” he said forcefully. To make his point even more explicit, he drew back the lapel of his jacket, revealing something metallic — the brushed chrome slide action of an enormous pistol in a shoulder holster. “You go now.”
This time, the waiter offered no protest, but almost scurried back, with one hand raised in a gesture of surrender. The Arab watched the blond man retreat all the way to the elevator, before turning back inside and slamming the door.
Instantly, the waiter reversed course and hurried back to the same room’s door. As he moved, he tucked his chin against his right shoulder, and when he spoke into the radio microphone clipped inside his white uniform jacket, all trace of the quasi-German accent was gone. “This is Juggernaut. Package delivered.”
A man’s voice — a laconic Texas drawl — sounded in the flesh colored ear bud connected to the radio. “Roger, Jugs. Receiving, Lima Charlie.”
Lima Charlie, the NATO phonetic alphabet equivalent of the letters L and C, meant the signal from the tiny transmitter that had been surreptitiously placed in the hotel room was being received “loud and clear.”
A murderous gleam appeared in the waiter’s bright blue eyes. “Damn it, Houston. I fucking hate it when you call me ‘Jugs.’”
The man at the other end of the transmission — Sonny Vaughn, the team leader who went by the callsign ‘Houston’—didn’t take the bait. “You’ve got ‘em riled up. They aren’t buying your bogus waiter schtick.”
“It was your stupid idea,” groused the ersatz waiter — Stanley Tremblay, callsign ‘Juggernaut.’ “A German waiter in a fucking Arab country? Really?”
“I explained all this, Jugs. A lot of European tourists come here. And half the workers in Arab countries are foreigners. Besides, the whole point was to stir things up…whoa, standby.” There was a long silence. “Bingo. These are our guys all right. Two men… They know they’ve been made.”
“Is the kid here?”
“Negative.” Pause. “Someone’s making a call.”
“Shit.”
Tremblay swept the stack of neatly folded dinner napkins off the cart. He reached down and plucked up the Beretta 9 mm semi-automatic pistol equipped with a suppressor that nearly doubled its barrel length, concealed beneath. He gave the hotel room door a gentle push — the strip of tape he’d surreptitiously slapped over the strike plate during his first attempt to enter, had prevented the latch from engaging — and moved inside like the Grim Reaper in stealth mode.
In the space of two seconds, he fired four shots — two pairs of bullets for each of the two men standing in the front room. The big Arab that had met him at the door had only enough time to whirl around in surprise before the Beretta gave him the kiss of death. The other man, also of Arab ancestry, but smaller in stature, didn’t even have time to look up from the cell phone he was dialing.
With the gun still held at the ready, Tremblay quickly moved to the second body and scooped up the phone in his left hand. He could hear a tinny voice issuing from the speaker, but he ignored it and thumbed the ‘end’ button.
“Got a number, Houston. Find a name to go with it.” He started to read the digits from the phone’s display, but before he could finish, it started vibrating in his hands. “Shit. He’s calling back. How do you say ‘butt-dial’ in Arabic?”
“Never mind that, Jugs. Hold the phone next to the radio. I’ll try to bluff ‘em.”
The phone squirmed like a living thing in his hands. Tremblay hastily unplugged the mic and earbud wires from the radio unit clipped to his belt, then held the cellular phone next to it and hit the button to accept the call.
The conversation that followed was brief and incomprehensible. Despite his southern roots, Vaughn did a passable job of mimicking the voice of the phone’s former owner — an imitation based on the snippets of conversation he’d overheard from the listening device — but when the call ended, there was a note of urgency in his next transmission.
“They’re spooked, pardner. I got an exact GPS location from the calclass="underline" Mualla, the port district.”
“The kid is there?”
“Hope so. But we can’t wait for you.”
Tremblay scowled. “Story of my life. I do all the work, but you guys get to have all the fun. Come pick me up when you’re done.”
“Roger, out.”
Tremblay tossed the phone aside and turned for the door. His disappointment at being left behind by his teammates was sincere, but the clock was ticking, and the two minutes it might take him to exit the hotel could mean the difference between rescuing the kid or recovering his headless body.
The ‘kid’ was the adult son of the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He’d been abducted while vacationing in the area — sailing or some other damn fool diversion of the idle rich. Tremblay and his three teammates from Delta’s elite Alpha team had managed to identify the kidnappers. They were al-Something-or-other…there were so many damn terrorist groups in the Arab world that he’d given up trying to keep them straight. Alpha had tracked them here to Aden’s Gold Mohur Resort, but evidently the bad guys had split up. Two of them had been living it up here at the hotel, while an unknown number were babysitting the hostage on the other side of the city.