“What’s it mean?” she asked, and sat down again.
“Beats me, Marguerite” He put his finger on the top line. “This top one is from the GPS sky file on where emergency caches of equipment and gear for agents are located. We have them all over the world.”
“And…?”
“The second set is the precise location of the two operators who just went in. Same, same.”
Del Coda thought about Swanson and Gibson, who had passed through Ramstein only about a day ago, flown down to Pakistan and were now being inserted into Afghanistan. The team communications were monitored at Ramstein, codename “Checkerboard” for this mission. The landing zone had been designated by Gibson for the CIA liaison man in Pakistan who had been tasked to scramble up the covert insertion flight.
“So they have dropped right on one of our safe houses?” Winters asked.
“Looks like it.” She gathered her purse again.
“No shit? We’re attacking our own place? How cool is that? Now let me show you the kicker.” Winters dialed up a third piece of information, an automatic alert that was triggered when the secure safe containing all of the goodies was opened. “Someone was messing around in there just a little while ago,” Ryan said.
“Before our guys got there?” She knew that ordinary procedure would have dropped them some distance away to avoid exposing the exact location of the secret hideout. Instead, Gibson chose to land almost in the back yard. That was peculiar, but not a deal breaker. However, someone else being inside the target house and in the weapons storage area could not be just a coincidence.
“Dig out the background on this cache, then send everything we have back to Langley, with the addendum that we’re are running diagnostics to rule out a systems glitch. This exact match made me uncomfortable, and I definitely don’t like the unknown factor that is showing. After sending our data back home, try to contact our boys to make sure they both know what’s going on.”
“I’ll try, but they are probably in radio silence. You have a good night.”
“I will. You start losing some weight, my friend.”
Martin Atkins was floored by the call from Janna Ecklund over at Excalibur. They had run an independent background check on Luke Gibson, a longtime CIA operative, one of the best, and found things the agency’s own exhaustive background check years ago hadn’t turned up. Lucky Sharif of the FBI had sent a summary by email.
When Atkins had come to grips with this latest development, the Office of the Director called to tell him the big man was finally back in the building and wanted urgently to meet. Atkins took the elevator up to the top floor of CIA headquarters. Everything was going sour. He was waved directly into the office of Director Richard Burns, who was standing at the window, gulping down a glass of water.
“I’ve just spent more than an hour in a room with a bunch of people who jumped all over me about things I didn’t know. Are we really running drugs again?”
Atkins sat down uninvited. “Rick, the truth is that I don’t have any answer for you on that. I can’t believe that some renegade agents have started up a narcotics business on their own, but proving a negative is impossible.”
“It’s all over the news. Talking heads on the radio are howling for some scalps, Marty — our scalps.”
“About all we can do is stall for time and run an internal investigation—”
Rick Burns’s face flushed in anger. “Can’t even do that. Who would believe us? An independent counsel would have to be in charge, and that woman from Nebraska is pushing for open congressional hearings.”
“Which is impossible. Secrecy would go out the window.”
“What’s so urgent that you have tracked me down? What else is going on?”
Atkins took in a deep breath. Exhaled. “That’s why I wanted to see you as much as you wanted to see me. I want to shut down an operation that’s just been launched. Kyle Swanson is on it, teamed up with Luke Gibson.”
“Aw, Jesus! Swanson is the drug lord? Sir Jeff was quoted as saying that it was all bullshit. I know Swanson is no traitor. Congress will want him back anyway. Can the termination of the assignment wait until it’s done? He and Gibson are after that Nicky Marks nutcase, right?”
“As of about twenty minutes ago, they reported being on the dirt in Afghanistan. And Swanson isn’t the problem — at least, not all of it. The other guy is. Luke Gibson. He’s been fooling us for years, Rick. At best he’s a crazy killer, and at worst he’s a traitor. Reading the tea leaves now, it looks like Marks works for Gibson and they have set a trap for Swanson.”
“Crazy? We both know Gibson is as smart as a fox, which is one of the reasons he works for us.”
“He’s also crazy enough to have killed both his father and his stepfather.”
The CIA chief rocked back, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Not even lunchtime, and his world was crashing. “And Swanson may be walking into an ambush? We know all this how?”
“Sorry, Rick, but first things first here. I’ll give you everything I’ve got, but right now I need your permission to stop that operation, extract Swanson, and grab Gibson.”
Burns nodded emphatically in agreement. “Of course. Do it, do it now. Get the department heads into the conference room and fill us all in at the same time. We’ve got problems on our hands, brother.”
20
The Pamir Mountains are a surging upheaval of the earth that extend from the lowlands in Afghanistan into the steep ranges stretching across western Asia and up to the roof of the world. They were carved by aeons of earthquakes, storms, and mighty moving glaciers that shoved gouging boulders along riverbeds. The mountains are forbidding fortresses, but in the lower elevations lush valleys become fertile with the melting snow and ice before descending into the high desert. Every time Kyle Swanson experienced the area, he was startled that people lived in such a climate, not only as stubborn individualists but also as organized communities that were once way stations on the old Silk Road trade route. Such was this little speck on the map called Girdiwal.
Flat on his belly in the dirt, Swanson unlimbered Excalibur from the protective casing across his chest while Gibson, angled out to his left, glassed the area with small binoculars. They seemed like two big black cats patiently watching for prey. The .50-caliber Excalibur rifle was built to do one thing, and that was to kill the enemy. Resting in its protective sheath or viced tight to a workbench, it was a compilation of parts, none of which were deadly by themselves. Assembled and loaded with thick high-powered rounds longer than a man’s trigger finger, Excalibur transformed into a piece of war waiting to happen. With Swanson snuggled against the personalized fiberglass stock, the weapon seemed to breathe along with him, slow and measured.
“I ever tell you about my father?” Gibson asked in a quiet voice.
“What?” Swanson, startled, hissed, “Shut the hell up.” Here they were on a covert operation and this guy suddenly wants to talk about dear old dad?
“First time I ever saw this place, he showed it to me. It’s an agency safe house.”
“God damn it, be quiet, Luke. Maintain noise discipline. Marks might hear you.” Swanson took a moment away from the powerful telescope on Excalibur to have a hard look at his partner. “You brought us in right on top of a safe house?”
“Don’t sweat it. Marks ain’t here, Kyle. I can feel it.” Gibson crawled forward a few feet. “Nearest neighbors are about two hundred yards off to the west, an old couple who live alone and take care of this place.”
“I don’t care. We should be looking at this from far away. Treat it like you’ve never seen it before. Your casual familiarity could get us killed. Clear?”