Anderson Harp
Retribution
Dedication
To the first Marine I ever knew
and my memory of the night he returned from war
to come home to us.
And to every other member of our military
who has made the same journey.
Epigraph
The sword is ever suspended.
Map
PROLOGUE
The pilot gripped the yoke of the aircraft until her tiny, dark hands turned nearly white, choking off all circulation. The Cessna single-engine seaplane fought the wind as she kept it on its heading, south by southwest, just above the whitecaps churning below on Lake Michigan.
“Allah Akbar,” she kept repeating to herself in a whisper. “Allah Akbar.”
The floatplane was old, its white paint chipped particularly on the leading edges of the wings. She continued to fight the drag of the old Cessna Skylane and the wind, which flowed just off the nose of the aircraft.
The pilot was small; so small, in fact, that she sat in the pilot’s seat on a cushion to raise her up. The seat belt hung on the floor, unused, as she had pulled the seat up as far as it would go so that her tiny feet could reach the aircraft’s pedals.
“Allah, please be kind.”
The other seats had been removed. White bricks of explosives were stacked behind and around her. The Semtex had affected the weight of the aircraft, causing it to be even more sluggish in its movements. Her instrument panels featured empty holes where the transponder and other dials were once housed before being removed. All she had that remained was a compass.
The pilot pulled on the yoke as the airplane dipped in the wind. The two pontoons added even more drag, like a hand held out the window of a car by a child, flying no more than twenty feet above the white-foamed water. It was important for her to fly low, despite the driving snowstorm. The transponder’s spot on the panel was empty for a reason. It was the transponder that marked the aircraft on radar.
The pilot looked at the map on her lap. A red circle noted the last marker she had just passed.
“South Haven Lighthouse.” She spoke the words to herself. The words couldn’t be heard. The engine spewed oil, its cylinders old, but it was bought cheaply, and meant for only one flight.
She did the calculations in her head. “Seventy-eight miles.”
She was flying slowly. Very slowly. The weight and drag of the old pontoon plane heading nearly directly into the wind caused it to go no faster than a truck on a highway.
“A hundred and ten knots. At best, a hundred and ten,” she told herself.
The aircraft would be at the pier in less than half an hour.
“Then I turn.”
The pilot turned to the back, looked at the stacked bricks just behind her seat. Red wires led from a button on the yoke to the center of the block. It wasn’t the plastic explosive that mattered. At best, that would leave a small crater. It was what was in the center of the blocks that mattered.
Death, she had long ago decided, would not be nearly so bad as her life. She tasted the salt of the tears as they rolled down her face and smiled.
She had been the child with the limp who still insisted on playing football with the boys. Americans called it soccer. In truth, it had been neither. They’d used a ball of tightly bound rags and socks held together by strips of plastic bags looped and knotted together like a web. The boys of Danish Abad had laughed at her, trying to keep up with her limp. After this, they would laugh no longer….
“I will be remembered.”
The Chechen had said it would be so. She smiled again. It was important to be remembered.
She lifted her head from the panel to the windshield, which had become coated with a light blue covering of ice and snow.
“Oh, shit!” she cried over the drone of the engine.
The shape of a ship suddenly emerged out of the white.
She dipped her right wing, pulling on the yoke, clinging to control of the aircraft as it slipped by the mass of black steel that had risen out of the white. It looked like a large, ore-carrying vessel, well over a thousand feet long. The rust of the ship and its dark ore cargo had been camouflaged by snow and ice, making the vessel nearly invisible.
In the flash of her eye, she saw a crew member running out of the bridge, waving at her. The deep sound of the horn seemed amplified by the cloud cover as it frantically repeated its warning. She felt the vibration from its sound through the aircraft’s frame.
“Oh, Allah, I don’t have much time.”
The odd sight of her low-flying aircraft would surely be called in on the ship’s radio.
The pilot pushed the throttle forward, increasing the pitch of the engine.
In ten minutes, it would be too late. As soon as she turned due west, just beyond the pier, it would only be a matter of seconds.
“Death over humiliation!” Her loud shout of what had become her personal motto belied her true state: the brink of utter exhaustion.
So much she had done. And in such a short time since it all began.
CHAPTER 1
“O’Donald.”
Maggie O’Donald looked up from the e-mail that had just arrived from Riyadh. She’d long ago grown weary of how Pat barked her last name when he wanted to get her attention. It seemed childish.
“You see this?” Pat Stuart peered through the attic office window, a square of bulletproof glass no wider than a framed diploma. The light from outside had dimmed from the typical bright blazing Qatari sunshine to an ominous gray, giving Pat’s face a cold pallor.
“You know what simoon means?” he asked.
She thought a moment.
“Devil’s wind?” Maggie had been in Qatar as a CIA case officer for only a few months, her Arabic still lacking depth.
Pat shook his head. “A poison wind.”
Translation notwithstanding, Maggie knew perfectly well what a simoon was: a violent windstorm from the west that could mean several days of choking, blowing dust. Winds could reach up to fifty miles an hour as sand and dust crept into every exposed corner, leaving a film of yellow, claylike particles in one’s ears and hair and clothes. Even if you wore a surgical mask, you’d find grit in your mouth for days.
The last simoon had stripped the color from Maggie’s new car, a titanium-green Taurus SEL that she had so proudly picked up at the import desk at the Doha docks only a month earlier. An industrial sandblaster couldn’t have done a better job of reducing the vehicle to its primer coat. She’d felt literally sick when she saw it. But, right now, sandstorms posed the least of Maggie’s worries.
She returned her focus to the hot e-mail. If it leaked, several would die, including, in all probability, the source. Even if it didn’t leak, the survival rate would be low for anyone connected to it. She remembered that term from her training at Langley.
A low survival rate.
“This one’s gonna be bad,” Pat said, still focused on the coming storm.
Maggie shook her head, trying to focus on the emergency at hand. W. Patrick Stuart III loved to talk.
“You may have to cancel your little weekend in Kuwait,” he added.