In the year she had been posted with the Agency, she had never taken out the Glock. She didn’t need the practice. Maggie’s grandfather had taught her to shoot pistols from a very early age on his ranch.
“It must have been a smaller bomb to blow the fence,” he said loudly over the blare of the alarm.
“If that’s true, the next one will come at us right out of that storm,” Maggie shouted back.
Pat turned and stepped toward his desk. Maggie saw him reach for the small photo of his family.
A movement out of the corner of her eye brought her back to the window. Two figures ran across the courtyard, each with a weapon of some kind. The sound of random firing from a machine gun carried from the soccer field on the north side of the embassy compound.
Maggie watched a cement truck emerge out of the darkness and head directly for the embassy’s main building. It seemed impossible, but the boy driving the truck seemed barely able to peek over the steering wheel.
“Oh, God.”
The flash blinded her like a direct glimpse of the sun. And then everything went pitch-black.
CHAPTER 2
William Parker awoke to a lightless, frigid bedroom, the green glow of his digital clock the only thing visible.
Damn.
As always, his internal clock had awakened him at three in the morning. He clenched his fist, once, twice, and then a third time. The flexing was a habit, often unconscious, that he had developed during therapy to restore function to his scarred right shoulder.
Parker sighed and pulled back the covers, standing up in the chill air. It was that time of year, the changing of the seasons, between air-conditioning and heat. Not that the heat would come on any time soon. He preferred a cold house. The clock, though… the clock was hers. Parker didn’t need one. Combat had taught him sleep was a luxury, not a necessity. His experiences in North Korea and Iraq had trained him to sleep for only a couple of hours at a time. Even the bed was a comfort he had never gotten accustomed to.
Parker made his way through the dim light, down the stairs, across the wide space of the lodge’s main room to the kitchen. He could smell the faint, oaky scent of burned wood from the fireplace. He closed his eyes as he swung the refrigerator door open. Intentionally blinded by his shut eyes, he felt for a bottle of water on the second shelf. She insisted on Dasani.
As the fridge door closed, he opened his eyes while looking away, but the last flash of light from the refrigerator passed through the kitchen, across the main room and through the large windows and doors that framed the stone fireplace. In the instant that it occurred, Parker sensed a stranger outside.
He moved along the wall, again in the darkness, keeping something solid to his back. Another habit of combat.
Always keep the unknown in front of you.
He reached the corner of the room near the glass door on the far right of the fireplace. Others might have reached for the Glock in the drawer by the kitchen’s back door, but the pistol would be the least of any intruder’s worries.
The grassy knoll behind the lodge was draped in the darkness of a quarter moon. Most, looking out through the door, would be barely able to make out the shapes of the rocks or the tree line beyond the edge of the small field. Here, though, darkness wasn’t Parker’s enemy.
Something moved.
A hidden motion detector triggered a light. And like a flashbulb, it froze a deer standing in the center of the field. Her large eyes stared directly into the light. The green reflection from her retinas glowed with an almost chemical color. The condensation from her breath left a wisp of a cloud around her nostrils. Except for the faint sign of breath, the doe was motionless, as if a wax model of a living creature.
Parker smiled.
The doe stood her ground for what seemed to be an eternity, not moving a muscle, frozen, and then, as if comprehending a danger, she darted off into the darkness. Her white tail flashed in the light.
Parker’s smile vanished.
He, too, sensed something.
CHAPTER 3
The concussion wave from the blast shattered windows for several city blocks. The crater on the edge of the building quickly filled with water as the main to the embassy was sheared in the blast. It was an odd sight of smoke, blowing dust, and water spraying up from the pipe.
As the winds began to die down with the passing of the storm, the smell of burned rubber, wood, and human remains overwhelmed the rescue crew searching through the pile of debris for survivors.
The soccer field now served as the landing zone it was intended to be. Marine CH-46 and CH-53 helicopters landed in wave after wave, and soon the smoldering ruins were an armed camp with men in black jackets stenciled with FBI combing the wreckage. The teams were on the grounds before the last of the wounded had been pulled out from under the timbers and shattered blocks and bricks.
Later, the regional security analysts concluded that the attack was a failed attempt on the ambassador’s life. They were wrong.
The actual target had been caught under the torn wreckage of the building, her legs pinned under a fallen steel roof beam. The rescuers raced to jack up the beam and pull the limp body out from under the weight of the debris.
Locked within Maggie O’Donald’s unconscious mind was the password.
“Air Force Six-Niner hold.”
The bulky C-17 Globemaster’s brakes squealed as the medevac aircraft stopped on the taxiway of the Al Udeid Air Base just outside of Doha.
“Six-Niner holding.” Colonel Danny Prevatt looked over to his copilot with impatience.
“What now? Don’t they realize we need to get these folks out of here?”
Danny Prevatt knew that several of the wounded were on the verge of their mortality. It was an unusual record for his trade, but Prevatt had never lost a life on a mission. He attributed it to speed, skill, and mostly luck. As always, he planned to climb fast and catch the best winds.
The only good news for the bombing victims was that the aircraft had been at Al Udeid refueling when it had gotten the word. Every asset had been only minutes away. And Air Force 69 knew what it was doing. Danny and this crew had flown well over a hundred medevacs out of Iraq without a loss. But time remained the critical factor.
God, what a base. From his vantage point in the pilot’s seat atop the C-17, Danny could see out over the fifteen-thousand-foot runway and, across from the runway, the new hangars and aircraft bunkers of Al Udeid. It was one of the newest military airfields in the Gulf.
During his last stopover at Al Udeid, Prevatt had asked another pilot, “Why Qatar?”
“Well, beyond its central location in the Gulf…”
Qatar had not been known to most of the world until after September 11. The small country jutted out into the central Gulf. Surrounded by Saudi Arabia to the south and west, UAE to the southeast, and, across the Gulf, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, for centuries it was a crossroads for merchants. Its markets were full of Persian rugs, some more than a century old, smuggled out of northern Iran, and brass handcrafted urns and pots. Each rug reflected the mystical story of its respective village in maps of bright colors, designs, and shapes. The pots were shaped by hand with thousands of blows from a hammer that turned the metal.
“In 1939,” the pilot had explained to Prevatt, “Sheikh Thani bin Mohamed let engineers dig for oil. They didn’t find one oil field but three. Stacked on top of each other. Any one of ’em would’ve made this Bedouin tribe a bunch of billionaires. But then, below those three, they found the mother lode.”