“It’s the system, Mr. Babcock. Nothing is exempt in counterespionage. I didn’t say that any of us was a suspect, but no one should be off-limits.”
“Including you, Commander Morse.”
“Yes, sir, including me. I have more access to classified data than anyone aboard the ship.”
At this, Babcock became silent. He sat at the end of the table, seemingly deep in thought.
Fletcher put on his reading glasses. After he perused the list, he said, “This is hard to believe. Why would any of these people be working for Al-Fasr?”
Morse shrugged. “If we figured out what turned people into agents and double agents, we could identify spies before they did us any damage. Some do it for money, obviously, but usually it’s more than that. They see it as a romantic cause, or some sort of idealistic crusade. Sometimes they just get blackmailed into it.”
Fletcher was still staring at the list. “What do we do about them?”
“Well, as a stopgap, we can reassign them while we keep monitoring their activities. Five work in sensitive intel and comm areas. Three officers, two senior enlisted, one warrant.”
“What about the media people? Aren’t they possible suspects?”
“We can’t rule them out. None have access to discrete communications facilities that we know of, but one could have his own dedicated transmitter.”
Babcock came out of his reverie and said, “They shouldn’t be allowed this close to the operation. Even if they’re not giving away secrets, they’ll put their own spin on things, and we’ll get smeared in the press just like they did to us in Somalia.”
Vitale said, “We’ll get smeared if we throw them off.”
“It’s the lesser of the evils.”
“What do we tell them?” asked Fletcher.
“The truth. This is war and we’re offloading all noncombatants.”
Fletcher nodded and turned to Vitale. “You heard him. Do it.”
Claire stepped onto the flight deck. Even through the padded cranial protector and the float coat, she could hear the thunder of the jet engines, feel the thirty-knot gale that swept over the bow. The C-2A Greyhound turboprop was parked beside the island, its back clamshell door open and waiting for her. The other reporters had already boarded.
“I’ve never been kicked off a carrier before,” she said. “Was it Babcock?”
“Probably,” said Maxwell. “The actual order came from Admiral Fletcher. He says no more media coverage of the Yemen operation.”
“Until something happens that makes him look good.”
“You said it, not me.”
“There’ll be another strike, won’t there?”
Maxwell put on his blank face. “I don’t know.”
She studied him for a moment. There was that hard look, his eyes glowing like coals. He was burning inside.
“You still want revenge,” she said. “An eye for an eye.”
His expression didn’t change. “I do what I’m ordered to do.”
She saw the crew chief waving to her from the back of the C-2A. “Sam, please get over it. You can’t bring Josh back. Come back to me alive, promise?”
He looked at her, and for a moment the hard lines in his face seemed to soften. He smiled and said, “Okay. I promise.”
She gave him a quick kiss, then trotted to the C-2A and climbed aboard.
It was nearly dark when she spotted him. Or when he spotted her. Each was taken by surprise.
B.J. was trotting along a path that traversed a cultivated hillside. Halfway down the hill she noticed rows of some sort of scrawny crop — sorghum, millet, something like that. She tried to remember from her homework what kind of subsistence farming they did up here in the highlands.
When she glanced up from the terraced hillside, back to the path ahead, there he was. Twenty yards away, he wore the ubiquitous kaffiyeh and a baggy shirt and trousers made of coarse sackcloth. Dangling from his belt was a scabbard, which she knew contained his jambiyya, the curved dagger Yemeni men carried in this part of the country.
He stood transfixed, staring as if he were seeing an extraterrestrial. She returned his gaze. For nearly a minute they stood like that, neither moving, regarding each other warily. He was a farmer, she guessed. Maybe a shepherd. One of those dudes she had warned the other pilots about in her briefing. Don’t expect the peasants to be friendly. Their only loyalty was to themselves and their families and to whatever small-caliber sheik ran their local village.
She wondered if he had another weapon, a revolver or an automatic pistol inside his baggy clothes. Guns were a way of life here. That was in the briefing too. Peasants who couldn’t afford shoes here owned AK-47s.
She thought about the Beretta in her shoulder holster. He could see the pistol. And he could figure by her costume where she had come from. Everyone who lived in these hills had seen and heard the air battle that raged over their heads this afternoon.
Okay, let’s break the stalemate.
She smiled at him.
He stared back, his face expressionless.
She took a step toward him, holding her hands in front of her so he could see she meant no harm. She tried to recall one of her Arabic expressions. Maybe she could persuade him to —
He turned and ran.
Wait, she wanted to call out. Maybe she should run after him. She would make the dumb sonofabitch understand that she was friendly.
Forget it. What would she do if she caught him? Wherever this guy was running to, there would be others like him, armed to the teeth. In any case, the word would spread like wildfire about the woman snake eater running loose in the hills. There might even be a reward for her.
She turned and trotted back down the path up which she had come. She kept up a brisk pace, staying in the shadows, pausing every few minutes to listen for pursuers. When she came to a dry streambed, she turned and followed the twisting, sand-filled bottom. After a mile, she left the streambed and began climbing the steep, brush-covered slope of a towering promontory. From such a high perch, she could survey the best routes out of this place.
Most of the hillside was in shadow now. The setting sun bathed the landscape in an orange-brown hue. The temperature had dropped by a good ten degrees. When darkness came, it would get cold.
When she was still a hundred yards from the summit of the promontory, she heard something. She stopped, crouching in the shadow of a rock formation. For half a minute she sat motionless, listening. At first she heard only the wind, the low buzz of insects in the brush. Then, something else.
The distant whop-whop of rotor blades. A helicopter.
Ours or theirs?
She pulled one of the colored smoke flares from her rucksack, checking it to make sure she could yank the ring when the time came. She would throw the flare, then run into an open area where the helo could land or hover while she got into the sling.
The whop-whopping grew more distinct, coming from the north.
B.J. was getting a bad feeling. North was not a good direction. The good guys would not come from the north.
Without warning the helicopter burst over the ridge, flying directly toward her. As she rolled into a fetal position, trying to meld herself into the rocks, she glimpsed the streamlined profile. It wasn’t one of the big Sikorsky SAR helos. This was a French-built Dauphin.
She saw the gunner in the open hatch. He was wearing the same desert-colored fatigues as the troops who had killed the Tomcat crew. She prayed that her own camo flight suit, the glop she had daubed on her face, and the nylon scarf over her head would make her invisible.
The noise of the rotor blades became a throbbing pulse. The concussion hammered on her ears like giant drums.