Keith Morgan mumbled to the others in the team room. “Son of a bitch. Hanley’s sending us back out, I can fucking feel it. I had tickets to see the Boss tomorrow night at RFK.”
“You mentioned that,” said Lynch. Then he added, “Fifty bucks says somebody ID’d another number three in al Qaeda and we’re heading back to Pakistan.”
Redus turned away from his video game and looked to Morgan now. “Hey, Five, maybe Springsteen will play a gig in Peshawar and you can catch him during our op.”
Morgan wasn’t laughing. “Paid two and a quarter for those tickets. This is bullshit!”
Ritchie Phelps said, “Whatever is brewing, it’s big enough for Hanley to come in person and bring suits along with him.”
Redus corrected him. “Hanley is a suit.”
“Yeah, now he is. He used to be SF.”
Morgan snorted. “That was twenty thousand Big Macs ago.”
The room erupted in laughter, and at the back workbench even Gentry cracked a half smile, but he didn’t look up from his gun. He worked diligently, perhaps excessively so, on his new Glock 19. He’d finished cleaning it, and now he got to work adding a large front sight loaded with a vial of radioactive tritium gas that would ensure it glowed in complete darkness, giving the user the ability to line his barrel up on a target despite poor lighting conditions.
Court’s last G19 had served him well, but he’d put seventy thousand rounds through it, and it was time to upgrade to the newest generation. He’d planned on taking his new piece upstairs to the range to test-fire it as soon as the adhesive in the screw on his sight dried, but now he figured he should wait around the team room to see what the hell Hanley had planned for the task force.
After Hightower and his visitors passed the one-hour mark in the conference with the suits, the speculation among the operators in the team room had transitioned from if they were about to get redeployed on a new op to if they would even have time to grab a burger and a beer before leaving the States again. They could imagine no other reason for the long meeting other than a mission, so amid the grumbles and bitching, the five men began packing deployment bags and double-checking weapons platforms.
A minute later the door opened and the four men reappeared. Hanley and Hightower came out first, then the other two CIA men. Gentry had already forgotten the young guy’s name, but Lynch and Phelps had been talking about Jordan Mayes for the past hour. According to what Gentry overheard, Mayes worked directly for the head of the SAD, Denny Carmichael. Court didn’t care much for office politics; hell, he’d only been to Langley once in his many years with the Agency. Most of his CIA career was spent in smelly barracks and team rooms like this, or else out in the field using a backstopped legend and pretending to be someone else.
After a wave to the six operators and Hanley’s repeated congratulations for the success of the Mog op, the visitors left.
As soon as the door shut behind them, Hightower turned around to the room to face his team. All five paramilitary operations officers stopped what they were doing and stared back at him, wondering where they were headed, and if they would even get the chance to pass by a drive-through for tacos to go on the way to the airport, since by now nobody figured they’d even have time for a sit-down burger meal.
Hightower said, “Sierra Six. Front and center.” Court Gentry stood and stepped forward. “Conference room,” Hightower ordered, then he surprised the rest of the team when he said, “You other four lucky fuckers have seventy-two hours R&R.”
Morgan pumped his fist in the air. “Hell, yes! The Boss is a go!”
Hightower opened the door to the conference room and held it for Gentry, but he continued addressing everyone. “Don’t forget, Monday at oh six hundred we’re rolling in convoy down to the shoot houses in Moyock to run some CQB force-on-force evolutions.”
Gentry looked around the team room at the other men. Confused. “Just me, Zack?”
“Yep. Don’t you feel special?”
“My lucky day,” he mumbled, and he entered the conference room.
Hightower followed him in with a whistle. “Kid, you’ve been hanging around these degenerates too long. Slowly but surely you’re getting a fuckin’ mouth on you.”
“Sorry, boss.”
Inside the conference room, Hightower and Gentry sat down at the table. Sierra One immediately got down to business. “Something different this time. A solo op. Real James Bond shit. Free tuxedo included. You up for it?”
Court nodded slowly.
Hightower glanced down to a small notebook in front of him. “Just kidding about the tuxedo. Local civilian attire will do.” He coughed as he checked his notes. “Anyway, the Agency has liaison intel saying some Israeli deep penetration agent has worked his way into a cell of al Qaeda in Iraq. The cell is on a gun run in the Balkans, getting AKs and such from Serbian gangsters. They are meeting in a safe house in Trieste, just over the Italian border from Croatia.
“Unfortunately for this Mossad deep-pen agent, he’s been compromised, and he doesn’t have a clue. A group of Pakistan al Qaeda are meeting them in Italy, and shit’s about to get nasty.”
Court said, “We know the Israeli agent is compromised, but the Mossad doesn’t know?”
“Affirmative. Like I said, another partner nation gave us the heads-up. We can’t tell the Israelis, apparently, because we don’t want to tip them off that we have a liaison relationship with this other nation.”
Court asked, “Who is the other nation?”
Hightower made a face at Gentry. “If we were supposed to know that, Hanley would have told us.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, this entire thing in Italy is a setup to get this agent away from his area of operations, so he can be liquidated without it causing a rift between the two AQ divisions. The plan is for one of the Pak AQ operatives on the trip to smoke him in Italy, then blame it on the Serbs.”
Court said, “And I need to stop that from happening.”
“You are so much smarter than you look. Anyway, you’ll be driven to Dulles within the hour. From there you’ll fly commercial to Milan. In Milan you will take a train to Trieste.”
Court wrote nothing down.
“You will ID the Iraqi guys when they arrive at the port, identify the Israeli asset among them, and follow them to their safe house. As soon as it’s prudent get him out of there. Tell him he is compromised and take him to the train station. After that, he is the Israelis’ problem. Remember, he must not know you are American. He speaks Hebrew and Arabic only, and you speak neither, so things shouldn’t get too chatty between you two.”
“Guess not.”
Court still wondered why CIA didn’t just pick up the phone and call Israel and tell them to rescue their own dumb agent. Seemed to him like the CIA could have just not revealed where they got their intel. But that was strategy, and that was above Court’s pay grade.
As usual, Court just figured the graybeards knew what they were doing.
Hightower asked, “Any questions?”
“Just the obvious. Why me? Why solo?”
“Hanley’s orders, but it looked to me it was Jordan Mayes’s order, which means it was Denny Carmichael’s idea. My guess is we’re afraid Mossad will find out we are in the area if we roll in with the whole task force. I imagine the Israelis will have support personnel monitoring their agent while he’s out of the Middle East. Hanley thinks you can get in and out low profile, stay fast and light if you don’t have the high drag of moving with the Goon Squad.”
Court just nodded. It wasn’t how they normally operated, but whatever.