Not good. Logic dictated there should be crickets chirping in the sunflower field bordered by thorny scrub and mangy palm trees on whose edge he was lying. But there was no hint of them. Which told Charlie the critters were still nervous about his arrival. Which meant he had a few more minutes to go before he could think about moving.
To his right, the barest wisp of hot breeze caused the dry trees to rustle like cellophane. He brought his left arm up and focused on his watch. The muted display told him he’d left the Humvee two minutes, forty-five forty-six forty-seven seconds ago.
How time flies when you’re having fun.
I am getting too old for this crap, thought Charlie. I’m fifty-two. I have a remarried ex-wife, an Irish girlfriend, a son at West Point, a beautiful daughter newly wed to a Ranger captain, and in six months I’m going to be a grandfather. Maybe they’ll name the kid after me. Hell, it’s fricking Father’s Day. I should be home, practicing how to dandle Charlie Junior on my knee.
The fistful of sand down his sweaty back began to itch.
Probably ticks in it, Charlie thought.
Or fleas.
Or baby camel spiders.
Last deployment he’d e-mailed his girlfriend Irish Beth a picture captioned “Charlie and the Uninvited Guest.” Jose’d tossed a dead camel spider into his hide as a joke and caught Charlie’s holy shit, dude reaction on the Nikon Coolpix. Some joke. Adult camel spiders were a foot and a half end to end, and their bites burned like acid.
For an instant he saw Beth’s face. Then he thought about her breasts. About how good it felt caressing the shamrock tattoo on her fine, dancer s butt.
He blinked behind his clear, prescription Oakleys. Put Beth out of his mind. Wiped her image clean away. Charlie Becker was in his thirty-fourth year of warfare and he understood. You can think about Beth, or you can do your job. But you can’t do both.
Charlie reached into his left cargo pocket, extracted the do-rag, made a hood, pulled the Palm Treo PDA out of his vest, rolled onto his side, punched in his code, and hit the display button so he could receive streaming video from the remotely piloted Predator vehicle loitering overhead.
He squinted at the screen. There he was-a flashing triangle on the side of Highway 8. Three other triangles blinked at two-hundred-yard intervals to his south. Jose was closest. Then Fred. Then Tuzz Man. Charlie cracked a brief smile. Four triangles in the Triangle of Death. Who says Allah doesn’t have a sense of humor?
He shut the screen down, stowed the rag, closed his eyes so he’d get his night vision back faster, and lay there, listening to the night sounds and totting up the positive and negative aspects of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare. Predators were perfect examples of good news/bad news to operators like Charlie. This one was controlled from eleven time zones away-Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas to be precise. Launched from Kuwait ten hours ago, it would circle until he’d completed the mission. An eye in the sky watching his back.
That was the good news. The bad was that anybody with the right clearances could sit in Tampa or Langley and watch Charlie trying to shake the shit out of his shirt. Which meant that even as he lay here, some supergrade desk jockey holding a
Starbucks grande and munching an organic cranberry bran muffin back at CIA headquarters was right now second-guessing his every fricking move, just waiting to summon the lawyers.
Still, there were techno-advantages that Charlie, a veteran of Jurassic-era warfare, had lacked in such antediluvian venues as Desert One, Grenada, Honduras, Panama, and Somalia. The Treo, for example. The Treo was linked to a secure satellite network. It gave Charlie the capability to look at real-time video. That’s how he knew that tonight’s target, Tariq Zubaydi, a local with probable ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq, was at home and tucked into bed. He’d watched as Tariq’s guests left the house shortly after 2300 hours. Saw the lights go out just after midnight. Bingo.
0344 hours. The four men linked up in a clump of papyrus by a yardwide canal smelling of brackish water and human waste. The staff sergeant trail boss of the convoy out of which they’d bailed assumed they were Special Forces working a direct action mission. That’s because they’d shown up at Camp Liberty with their own sterile Humvee, asked for the convoy’s honcho by name, and knew the convoy number, code name, its route to Mahmudiyah, and contingency plan call sign. Not to mention the fact that they wore Army-issue uniforms with subdued infrared-readable American flags. The plate carriers holding their ceramic body armor and spare mags bore Velcro’d name tags but no other designators. The whole picture, the sergeant would testify later, read Special Forces on a black op. In neon.
But Charlie and his companions weren’t Soldiers. They were civilians. Charlie was a GS-14. Jose and Fred, retired Ranger sergeants, and Tuzzy, a former Marine gunny, were 13s. Their business cards, name tags, photo IDs, and e-mail addresses (all under aliases) identified them as employees of the Army Research Laboratory, whose on-paper headquarters was three floors of offices and the bug-proof conference rooms called SCIFs in an anonymous four-story building on Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia.
In point of fact, they were all CIA, and those three floors were where Ground Branch, the so-called action group of CIAs grotesquely named SAD-Special Activity Division-was headquartered. The National Clandestine Service’s pooh-bahs at Langley had “relocated”-their term-Ground Branch to one of CIAs satellite offices, because they claimed it would maintain better operational security. Charlie, a lanky former master sergeant who had been in Ground Branch since his retirement after twenty-five-plus years with the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2001, knew better. It’s CIA’s fricking caste system. NCS ostracized Ground Branch because they consider themselves royalty and don’t want to have to eat in the same caféteria as a bunch of gun-toting knuckle-draggers.
The prime witness supporting Charlie’s theory was as close as Nicola’s pod. Nicola Rogers was Deputy Branch Chief/ Insurgency/Baghdad and Charlie’s GS-15 boss. To Charlie, she represented everything wrong with CIA. She’d been in-country for 92 of her 120-day deployment without setting foot beyond the Green Zone, except to be driven to Camp Victory to shop, eat pizza, or do karaoke night.
A tall, lithe, thirty-six-year-old chemically blonde women’s studies graduate of Vassar, Nicola was a Southeast Asia economic analyst on loan to the clandestine service. She’d volunteered for Baghdad because she was on the cusp of promotion to Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) rank, and there was a rumor currently caroming through Langley’s corridors that CIA’s GS-15 promotables needed an Iraq tour to demonstrate they were team players.
Charlie often wondered whose team Nicola was on. It certainly wasn’t his. He guessed she was filling out her resume so once she got her SIS she could resign and become a civilian contractor, pulling in a third of a mil-plus for doing the same job she was now doing for $110,256.
Moreover, like the vast majority of the 378 officer-bureaucrats assigned to Baghdad Station or CIAs bases in Mosul, Arbll, Basra, and Kirkuk, Nicola spent almost zero time gathering intelligence. She frittered away most of the day staring at her screen reading and answering senseless memos from Langley; playing computer games; downloading music, podcasts, and TV shows from iTunes; or composing whiny e-mails to her fiancé, a Yale Law grad in CIAs Office of Legal Counsel. Two or three times a week she’d allow Charlie admittance to her hallowed “secure office pod,” look at him like he was a dirty Kleenex, and lecture about how warfare increased global warming and victimized women.