“I have extended my apologies to you both. Now we must move on.”
“Not until Kyle is alerted to the situation.” Jeff was showing his stubborn streak. “Just in the past night, he has caused extraordinary damage to the Iranians. If they think he is a CIA agent, they are definitely coming after him.”
“That is probably happening even as we speak, which is why we must depend on his ability to react quickly and correctly to totally unexpected situations. I told our agent, Dr. Bialy, to give him a full brief, but she said it may be too late. They are not in regular contact. She hasn’t heard from him in hours.” The MI6 chief put both palms flat on his desk and rubbed the old wood as if giving it a good polish. To those who knew him, it was a habit that expressed great alarm. “After last night’s exploits, he must be holed up somewhere alone, thinking he is safe. He is most assuredly not.”
Middleton joined in. “An operator like Swanson is only as good as his last fight, sir. If I was talking directly to him as his commanding officer, I would ask, ‘Gunny, what have you done for me lately?’ Swanson may be holed up for a few hours, out of ammo, with no fresh intelligence about what we are thinking, and tired beyond normal endurance, but he will be ready for whatever comes his way.”
“Let us hope so, General. The plan was thrown together rapidly, it is complex, and the time is short. At this point, our governments are protesting to the United Nations and threatening military options if the Iranians do not withdraw from Egypt. Only his continued success in this one-man war is holding back the decision to send in special ops teams. We’re willing to give it another twenty-four hours.”
26
Swanson made it back to the safe house, locked the door, went to the bedroom and fell backward onto the mattress, fully clothed. He fell asleep with his hand on the Colt .45 that rested on his stomach, and the nightmare snatched him so hard that his body shuddered in physical response. An endless ghostly line of dead men shuffled toward the small pier at the jet ski marina and were being packed into a narrow black boat that could only seat perhaps a maximum of ten, but somehow there was always room for one more. Leaning on the steering oar at the stern was the Boatman, who grinned with stumps of rotten teeth in oozing black gums.
“You are doing well. I knew you would. I told you this would be your largest harvest ever. I can always count on you, Gunny Swanson,” said the spectral image, spreading an arm to help another zombielike passenger lurch aboard.
“Go away,” Kyle replied in his dream.
“I cannot. You are killing too many to ignore. Hundreds.”
“They are not men. They are my enemies. If I don’t kill them, they could kill my fellow Marines.”
The Boatman hissed a cackle of amused laughter. “A dissembling response. They posed no threat to your fellow Marines, who were not even here, and you killed them anyway. Fellow humans are dead or dying by your hand. Men who happen to wear a different uniform, that’s all.”
“Each is my enemy, you evil bastard. You know that. Quit busting my balls.”
Behind the fluttering sheer silhouette of the Boatman was an entire sea of licking, low fire. “I think this is enough for me to transport for one load now. You keep up your good work, and we will visit again later.” There was the cackle of a bodiless laugh, and the long, low craft nosed away into the flames.
Swanson cried out at the departing figure. “I didn’t want to kill any of them! They were my country’s enemies. And I don’t want to kill any more…”
The final answer echoed back from a hole in the fire. “But you will. You have to, for more are coming.”
Swanson jerked awake to a full sitting position, the .45 locked in a two-handed firing grip, as he heard the scratch of a key in the lock of the safe house’s front door. He swung his feet to the floor and slipped prone at the bedroom doorway, with a clear firing lane to the front.
A light triple-rap knock, and the door opened about two inches and stopped. “Swanson? It’s me. Omar. I’m alone.”
“Step in backward and slow, keep your hands where I can see them, and close the door.” Swanson’s pistol did not waver from its line, and his eyes were intense and on the target.
Omar did as instructed, keeping his hands high, which pulled up his shirt high enough in back for Kyle to see the butt of a pistol in the back of his belt. “Pull out the weapon with two fingers, left hand, drop it, and kick it beneath the sofa.” Omar did as he was told.
“Keep moving back toward my voice.” Kyle got up and took a few silent steps. “Turn around, slow.”
Omar did so and found the big hole at the end of the .45’s barrel pointing right between his eyes. “Hurry up with your search or inspection or whatever this is, Kyle. We don’t have much time. They’re coming.”
Tianha Bialy was at a big mirror in the bedroom of her suite, carefully applying the final touches to her makeup, deciding to pass on the lip gloss. A girl had to be careful around Muslim men, she thought. They would appreciate beauty in a woman and then just as easily treat her like a dog. Love, she had found over the years, had little to do with such a relationship. Anyway, she was not here to please anyone, for she already had a fiancé back in London as well as a lover, Omar, in Egypt. Satisfied with her understated look, she gave her clothes a final adjustment, then took a chair in the living room and calmed herself to await the knock on the door. It was almost ten o’clock.
Major Shakuri had been extremely busy all morning, imposing his version of logic and order on the situation that seemed to change every few minutes. He studied the updated damage reports from the overnight attacks and had a brief, unpleasant telephone conversation with General Khasrodad out at the airport. The man had no fighting spirit and very reluctantly gave Shakuri the soldiers needed for the evening’s executions.
The major had approved the final list of the latest examples, but the overnight casualties to the Iranians had been high, and Shakuri had to keep his retaliation formula in some sort of perspective. Even at one-for-one, it would mean several hundred executions, which was an impossible number. The lesson, not the executions, was the important thing. So he would do twenty today, then declare the lesson learned before it turned into a general massacre. With the extra soldiers, he would then use martial law to restore calm in the beachfront city. The bodies this time would be left to rot in the park for a few days before being taken away by grieving relatives. Examples.
With those arrangements in place, he sifted through the news reports. The Muslim Brotherhood had promised to spark a spontaneous uprising of the people across the land, but that had not yet happened. Since winning political power through elections, the Brotherhood had to deal with all of the problems of any government, both in its own country and abroad. They had wanted power, and found it an uncomfortable fit. There were problems in Gaza, where militants wanted to secede from Egypt and form an Islamic emirate on the Israeli border. The Bedouins would not cooperate because they never cooperated with anybody. The old players in Hamas would not bow to the wishes of the new government, and al Qaeda despised the elected officials for not being radical enough. There were dozens of serious fracture lines within the Brotherhood, and powerful rival political parties. So when it came to stitching together a unified front with a separate rebel army, everyone wanted a slice of the pie. The idea that the Brotherhood would launch demonstrations against itself defied logic. That left the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still intact, and the last thing the generals would allow was a competing army on Egyptian soil. The major wondered why the colonel could possibly have believed any differently.