He expelled a deep breath, pulling his thoughts together. “Okay, Bob,” he said. “By a twofold goal, I assume you mean our first is to find out where Nusairi intends to launch his attack, and our second is to prevent him from getting away with it.”
Andrews nodded. “Plainly stated, that’s the position in which we’ve put ourselves. Though there are no assurances we can accomplish it.”
“And where do you propose we start trying?” asked Brenneman.
Andrews looked at his assistant director, nodded for him to pick up the ball.
“With Omar al-Bashir, distasteful as that may be,” Harper said. “And on the ground with Ryan Kealey.”
“Simon,” Mirghani said into his satellite phone. “I have some hard news to deliver.”
“It has already reached me on Talfazat, ” Nusairi said.
Mirghani had expected it would. The Arabic Internet news service carried feeds from the Sudanese Radio and Television Corporation as well as Al-Jazeera.
“I have watched the images of your home burning,” Nusairi said. “They say those who conducted the raid have not yet been identified, and that you somehow managed to elude them.”
“Only by the grace of Allah,” Mirghani said. “But ‘elude’ is not quite the word. I was fortunate enough to have been warned of the attack shortly before it occurred. A number of my loyal guards were killed. Had you heard?”
“Yes. The information being given is incomplete. There are reports of gunfire and several deaths, but the police have allowed no witnesses to speak.” A pause. “How are you?”
“Well enough,” Mirghani said. “I am in a safe place.”
“And do you have any idea who was responsible?”
“It was Mukhabarat. ”
“Bashir’s secret service?”
“Yes,” Mirghani said. “I have expected such a move for weeks. Al-Bashir blames me for the unrest in the city. The protests and civil disobedience. The strike was in retaliation… He seeks to intimidate me.”
“So it had nothing to do with our immediate plans?”
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“It was unrelated,” Mirghani replied. “As I said, I was advised it might happen by informants within the service.”
A pause. “Ishmael, I do not doubt you. But perhaps it would be best if you avoid the staging area.”
“I would greatly regret that. Our day has been long awaited.”
“I know. But under the circumstances, it is best to be cautious.”
Mirghani was silent.
“My brother, listen to me,” Nusairi said. “Let us not put in jeopardy everything toward which we have worked together.”
Mirghani did not say anything for another several seconds. Then he produced a relenting sigh. “I cannot argue against prudence,” he said at last. “The American, White, left the city well ahead of me. I expect he will be at the prearranged meeting place to taste the sweetness of our nation’s fruit.”
Nusairi laughed a little. “I am sure,” he said. “And your fighters?”
“They are in position to join your forces… There will be four hundred and more.”
“Good,” Nusairi said. “They will carry your spirit with them, Ishmael. And do not fear. We shall have adequate time to celebrate our victory.”
“Yes,” Mirghani said. “ Insha’Allah, God willing, I have faith we will.”
He thumbed the disconnect button on his phone, wiped a hand across his brow, and glanced up from his chair at Seth Holland and Ryan Kealey, who were standing to either side of him in the CIA station chief’s fourth-floor embassy office.
“There,” he said. “It is done.”
Kealey looked at him stonily. “For you, anyway,” he said.
In a traditional mud brick home near the defunct rail station at Kassala, a short distance from the city’s famed outdoor markets and some 250 miles from Khartoum, Simon Nusairi sat looking across a simple wooden table at Cullen White. There was no electrical power in the dwelling, and an oil lamp burned between them to illuminate the room.
“It is as you suspected,” Nusairi said. His features showed a kind of simmering anger. “The CIA has taken Mirghani into custody, and he has likely told them everything.”
White mulled that a second. “How soon can you roll?”
“The second convoy of tanks and helicopters will not reach the outskirts of the city until tomorrow,” Nusairi said. “I can have my men stand by for action, but it would be the next day before we are properly organized.”
“Then the next day is when it has to be,” White said.
Another silence. Nusairi watched the shadows hurled off by the lamp’s burning wick cavort across the rough brown walls of the brick house.
“Mirghani went out of his way to mention our rendezvous,” he said. “I think we should go through with it. As if we haven’t yet met.”
“A setup?”
“Yes,” Nusairi said. “Clearly a net has been cast.”
White sat for a moment, nodded.
“We’ll have to see who gets snagged,” he said.
CHAPTER 21
SUDAN
Enriched by the fertile soil of the Gash River delta, Kassala was known for the fruit groves and grape fields spread out for miles around the city proper, where its low, flat-roofed homes were laid out in a rectangle around a spacious open-air souq. There the crops were brought by donkey, truck, and camel train and sold from dawn to dusk, the citrus fruits, mangoes, pomegranates, and melons arranged around the market’s ruler-straight borders, where they overflowed their baskets among the woven goods of Beja artisans and the silver bracelets, necklaces, and charms crafted by women of Rashaida origin.
The prevailing religion in Kassala was Islam; the ethnic mix varied. Brown jute waistcoats over their long white robes, turbans wrapped around their taqiyahs, steel longswords at their waists, and wooden boomerangs across their backs, the Beja clansmen, who composed the majority of the village’s population, would often mill about the souq to trade for the superior livestock of the more colorfully dressed Rashaida nomads, whose sheep and goats were herded on seasonal migrations between the village and the Eritrean lowlands.
Kealey, Abby, and Mackenzie had driven from Khartoum in the crepuscular gloom before sunrise, Mackenzie at the wheel of the Jeep, their route following the main road out of the city southeast along the Blue Nile to Wad Medani, then turning due east across 150 miles of irrigated grain fields and parched sandy expanses to Gedaref, where the terrain gradually transitioned to rolling green hills.
Mackenzie drove mostly in dour silence. Just the day before he had helped lift the bloody remains of Jacoby Phillips from the rear section of the very Cherokee that he was now navigating toward Kassala. He and Phillips had been pretty good friends. They had often exchanged war stories-Mackenzie sharing some of his exploits in Afghanistan, Phillips speaking of his time disrupting Saddam’s communications infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. They had talked, on occasion, of getting together when they finished with their hitches in Sudan. Mackenzie, who’d inherited a family home on the Tennessee River at the Kentucky border, had told Phillips of the catfish traps they would lay in the morning from his outboard, and had explained how they would go out on the boat that same evening and bring in a haul for the community fish fry. Phillips had laughed about it. Community fry? We can catch that many fish in a single day? Mackenzie had explained you didn’t need to, not if you brought along plenty of bourbon to keep everyone happy.