“Natalie, he was dead the moment he took three hits of venom. Get out of there and follow your extraction plan,” Shannon said. “Good work.”
Natalie dug the earpiece out and slammed it against the floor, breaking it with a snap of plastic. She pushed herself away from the dead man with her feet until she hit the foot of the bed. Suleiman’s head was turned toward her, half-open eyes staring at her.
His was the first life she’d ever ended, her first kill. She stared at his body in the silent room, just a pile of meat in a puddle of its own filth now. No longer a person.
“Get up. Get up and get out of here,” she said to herself. But she couldn’t move.
What had Shannon said about him before Natalie arrived here? That Suleiman had funded suicide attacks in Israel. He’d supplied weapons to jihadis from Morocco to Afghanistan. He’d sent circuit boards to Iraq that were used in IED attacks on Soldiers and Marines. This wasn’t a good man, not one who deserved her sympathy.
Natalie grabbed the edge of the bed and pulled herself up. She gathered up the spent syringes and put her veil over her face. She used the mirror to look herself in the eye and didn’t see a person without pain for ending a life.
She snatched up the roll of bills from the dresser and left a part of her soul in the room.
Chapter 7
The pebble arced through the air and struck the side of a Styrofoam cup.
“One point,” Shlomo said. The Israeli tossed a stone at the cup a few feet from where he and Ritter stood against the battered hangar. It hit the lip of the cup and bounced in with a tink.
“Five points. I’m at thirty-seven to your four,” Shlomo said.
“This game is rigged,” Ritter said.
“You bet a hundred shillings against a sniper, who makes his living putting a tiny bullet onto a target the size of a coin a kilometer away from him, and this is rigged?”
“Yes, you put some sort of… rock magnet… in the cup,” Ritter said as he tossed another pebble, which missed completely.
Shlomo scored another five points with his next toss.
“Forty-two to four. Why don’t you just pay up now?” Shlomo said.
“Maybe I’m just slow playing you. How much is a hundred shillings anyway?”
“About a whole American dollar,” said Misha, another Israeli lounging in the shade of the hangar, a paperback book depicting a brightly colored armored figure battling some sort of tentacled and toothy space beast in his hands. The title was encrypted in Hebrew script.
“Double or nothing next game,” Ritter said.
A series of beeps came from a pack lying against the hangar. Ritter dropped a handful of rocks to the ground and pulled a beeping satellite phone from the pack. The code on the phone promised a message from Shannon. Ritter took the phone around the corner where the Israelis couldn’t watch him.
He entered his password and was rejected. Odd. He looked around for Mike, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Ritter chewed at his bottom lip. There’s a nuke loose. To hell with protocol, he thought. He entered Mike’s personal code, which he’d learned by watching Mike’s thumb position as he entered the code over the years.
A text message appeared on the screen:
TGT LOC 39P ZP 0713 7533
DELIVERY LOC MTF
IL CAIUS POST DELIVERY
RITTER NOT/NOT CAIUS
Ritter relocked the message with Mike’s password and tapped the phone against his thigh. They had the location of the nuke but hadn’t been told where to take it. He didn’t know what Caius was, what it had to do with the Israelis, or why he was exempt from it. The Caliban Program used code words and terms when dealing with outsiders or when communications weren’t secure. If Ritter didn’t know the word, then it had to be something he wasn’t trusted to know about.
For as long as he’d been with Caliban and for all the laws he’d broken for the sake of its mission, why did Shannon think this “Caius” had to be hidden from him?
Mike jogged around the corner, a roll of toilet paper in hand.
Ritter handed the phone over to Mike.
“For you,” he said.
“Yankees! Where are you?” Moshe yelled.
They found Moshe in the hangar, rummaging through a wall locker. Israelis climbed into Botha’s Cessna Caravan armed with wrenches and crowbars.
“Your people came through with another location for the package. I don’t know why my government wants to take you on another wild-goose chase, as you say, but I don’t give the orders.” Moshe pulled a dark-tan backpack from the locker, covered in straps and pillow-like pouches.
“Good thing my team has a mandate to be prepared. You’re both airborne qualified, correct?” He patted a hand on top of the parachute.
Mike nodded.
“Sure,” Ritter said. He’d gone to Airborne School back in 2000 for his ROTC summer training. He’d earned his jump wings after a handful of jumps from a static line unto the unforgiving soil of Fort Benning and remained a “five-jump chump” ever since.
“Getting in will be easy. Getting out is a bit more complicated,” Moshe said.
A seat flew from the open door of the Caravan and tumbled in the dirt. Another followed a few seconds later.
A screen door clattered shut, and Botha ran into the hangar. His hands grabbed his head through his unkempt hair.
“What the hell are you doing? I just had those refurbished!” Botha yelled as his arms whirled from Moshe to the plane.
“Making room. You’re going to fly back to Saudi Arabia and drop us off along the way,” Moshe said.
“What? Where? I can’t stop in Yemen. There was a disagreement about some paperwork a while back, and the official in charge was very hardheaded about it,” Botha said.
“You mean the shipment of pre-Islamic artifacts you had on your plane that ended up for auction in England?” Moshe asked.
Botha shrugged and turned his palms up. “I offered him a very legitimate bribe.”
Moshe took a pen from his uniform top and pointed to a kidney-shaped island off the “horn” of Somalia.
“Socotra. You’ll fly us over. No need to stop.”
“This plane can’t make it to Socotra,” Botha said.
“We’ll stop and refuel at the airport in Bosaso. You don’t have any warrants there, do you?” Moshe asked.
Botha had to think for a second before shaking his head.
Another seat flew from the plane and ripped open the leather upholstery of the seat it landed on.
“Aww, come on!” Botha continued his protests with the men who were clearing out the interior of his plane.
“You said getting out was a problem,” Ritter said to Moshe.
Moshe turned a laptop around and zoomed in on the island to a cluster of homes in a desert mountain valley. He moved the image so the homes and the coastline were on the screen.
“The structures are the target, and there’s a fishing village on the coast twelve kilometers away. This package of yours — it’s heavy, right?”
“Four man carry.” Ritter said.
“Long way to go on foot. Maybe we can procure some transport. Maybe we can’t. We get to the fishing village, and one of our sayanim, our helpers, will meet us there. He’s paid up with the pirates and can get his boat there from Bosaso quickly enough.”
“Once we’re on the boat, you’ll give us the drop location, correct?”
“That’s the plan,” Ritter said.
Moshe tossed his pen onto the desk and zoomed in on the cluster of buildings.
“Get packed. We’re wheels up as soon as there’s room for us in that rust bucket. If all goes well, we’ll be there before dawn.” Moshe said.