The cabbie looked in the mirror. “Everything okay?” he asked in Spanish.
“We’re just arguing,” Crosswhite said, lowering his voice. “Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”
The cabbie seemed to accept that and kept driving.
Mariana put her glasses back on and looked out the window. “You should know this is a command performance for me. I don’t want to be here.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Pope ordered me. I guess there are only so many people in the agency he feels he can trust right now.”
Crosswhite grunted. “It’s not like him to make such a gross error in judgment.”
“You’re a bastard.”
“You know what?” he said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re done here. I don’t care if you get back on a plane or hang out at the pool, but you and I are done. You’re useless to me.”
She looked at him, realizing she’d pushed him too far. He had enough influence with Pope to hurt her career. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do to Hagen?”
“Is that was this shit is about? You’re still pissed about Hagen?”
“You made me a party to murder,” she hissed. “That’s not why I’m in the CIA!”
Crosswhite didn’t have the patience to get into it with her. “Take it up with Pope when you get back to Langley.”
“I already did that.”
“And?”
“And he said tough shit.”
“Then you’d better get used to it. This is the world we work in. If you had any brains, you’d realize you’re a member of a club now — a very exclusive club. There aren’t too many women who can say that.”
She looked out the window. “I can’t sleep. I’m having nightmares.”
“They’ll go away,” he said quietly. “The important thing to focus on is purpose. What we do is not random; it’s not arbitrary. There are very definite reasons for it.”
She looked at him. “These men should be put on trial. Pope is having them killed out of vengeance.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“What’s the other way?”
“Pope sees the future. And in it, there are bad guys with nukes. So he’s adopted a zero-tolerance policy.”
“I heard what you said to Paolina. You don’t even believe that yourself anymore.”
He took a deep drag from the cigarette. “I’ve got a lotta blood on my hands, Mariana. A little doubt here and there is what keeps me human.”
They arrived at the hotel and went up to their rooms, pausing in the hall outside their doors.
“Just hang here at the hotel until mission complete,” he said. “We’ll keep the argument between us. Pope doesn’t need to know.” He winked at her. “What happens in Havana and all that shit.”
Mariana keyed into her room and closed the door. She stepped into the bathroom, reaching for the light switch, and was slugged in the stomach harder than she had ever been hit in her life. She grabbed her middle and collapsed to her knees, trying to scream, but there wasn’t so much as a breath of air left in her lungs.
Someone grabbed her from behind, pressing a strip of duct tape over her mouth and shoving her forward onto the floor. Her hands were quickly bound with a nylon tie-down, and two Cuban men carried her into the other room, tossing her onto the bed. One of them jerked her pants and panties down inside out past her ankles, tying the pant legs in a knot and effectively binding her feet.
Mariana’s pain was matched only by her terror. She tried to sob, but the wind was still knocked out of her, and she was having a great deal of trouble breathing through her nose.
“One fucking sound,” the man said in English, “and I’ll break your fucking neck!”
“I’ll call Peterson,” said the smaller of the two, taking a cellular from his back pocket.
71
When Gil came across the ruptured bodies of Anzor Basayev and the other two security men, he recognized Basayev’s face from the mission dossier he’d been shown in Moscow, making a mental note to tell someone back in the world that at least one high-priority target had been taken out. A short time later, he picked up what he hoped was Kovalenko’s trail, and it didn’t take long to determine that he was tracking two men. He stopped to study the separate boot prints, seeing that one of the men had cut a notch into the heel of his left boot, and this was all Gil needed to confirm that the Wolf was still alive. Many soldiers who spent a lot of time operating alone — such as snipers — chose to notch the soles of their boots to help guard against walking in circles or tracking themselves. Gil had never employed the technique himself, thinking he could always notch his boot if and when the circumstances called for it. Otherwise the notch might end up being used to track him, the way he was using it to track Kovalenko now.
With the sun nearing its apex, he moved out.
The bolt-action TAC-338 was slung across his back. Chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum, it was a far superior weapon to the semiauto Dragunov SVD, and the scope was far superior as welclass="underline" a Nightforce 8-32 x 56 mm. For the first time since mission start, he felt like he was adequately equipped, which was ironic, considering his physical condition. His belly wounds were festering but not particularly painful. The shrapnel wounds from the grenade, however, were hurting like hell and suppurated constantly, making it so that his left sleeve and trouser legs clung annoyingly to his skin.
He estimated that, if need be, he could function in this condition for perhaps another thirty-six hours with the help of the dextroamphetamines. By that time, he would be robbing Peter to pay Paul for each additional hour in the field, growing steadily less effective. Once infection set in and fever took hold, he would have to change his priorities.
Sucking down the last of Dragunov’s water on the move, he discarded the water bladder and dug into Mason’s rucksack for a pair of high-energy bars, wanting to get some food in his belly before reestablishing contact with the enemy. He wondered idly who had arranged for the Obsidian helos, but the answer was obvious. Pope was watching from above. Always Pope — like the omniscient eye of God.
He imagined everyone back in DC throwing a fit the second they realized he was jumping off the helo to go “rogue” again. How he’d come to hate that word. The simple truth was that he loved to fight, and he no longer made any apology for it. His love for combat had already cost him his marriage, so what was left to lose — other than his life? And that was why he’d gotten off the helo — that and because fuck Sasha Kovalenko. Kovalenko liked to fight, too, and he was damn good at it. Gil realized that he liked being well met, and in the last forty-eight hours, he’d come to understand that combat was a lot like the game of chess: the only real way to improve was to compete against someone better than you.
He set a brisk pace down the mountain, wanting to catch Kovalenko before dark. There was a forest camp to the south near the Georgian border. The camp was controlled by an Umarov ally named Ali Abu Mukhammad. Gil had seen it on a map in the mission dossier, and he remembered it was only a few clicks west of the bridge where he and Dragunov had originally planned on hitting Kovalenko. If the man Kovalenko was traveling with was Dokka Umarov, it was almost a sure bet they were headed to Mukhammad’s camp.
The titanium implant in his foot began to give him trouble after the few hundred yards of the downhill grind, so Gil slowed his pace. If the foot gave out on him, he was finished.
He was down on one knee beside a brook, cupping the ice-cold water to his mouth, when an enemy patrol of perhaps a half dozen happened by on the far side, partially obscured by the dense undergrowth that grew at the lower elevation — two different species of rhododendron that kept their leaves year-round. He waited for the patrol to pass, but then a Chechen emerged from a gap in the thicket to his right, no more than fifteen feet away on the opposite bank. Gil dropped flat to the ground and froze like a lizard.