“Who? Chi Long?” Walker asked, hoping that Laws had been right.
As soon as he said the name, Ed-Eddie’s face blanched. “You know?”
“Of course we know. We’re U.S. Navy SEALs. We fucking know everything,” Yaya said.
Walker couldn’t help but grin at his friend’s aplomb. “Almost everything. Where are the others? Where are the other SEALs?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit!” Yaya twisted his face into something monstrous. “Total fucking bullshit!”
Ed-Eddie’s eyes rolled toward Walker, who knew instinctively that he’d have to be the foil for Yaya’s bad cop. They didn’t have Laws’s interrogation experience, but it would have to do. In conversations on the safety of American soil, he’d always proclaimed that he’d never resort to torture. Now he’d have to put that assertion to the test.
“No, Yaya. Maybe our friend here just wants to help. I mean look at him. He’s not like those others.” As he said it, Ed-Eddie shook his head. “He wears American clothes and American shoes. Hell, look at his shirt. For all intents and purposes, he might just be American.”
Yaya stared at Walker for a moment, then smiled slyly. “He’s the farthest thing from American. A shirt and shoes don’t make you who you are. You know what we say, clothes don’t make the man.”
Walker shrugged. “You’re right about that. You can dress the part, but you can’t act the part. An American wouldn’t let another American get hurt. In fact, an American would make sure he’d do anything in his power to help his fellow American.”
“Why not let me take him out in the woods,” Yaya said, digging the pistol into the man’s ear. “He’s not American. He’s just a pretender. He’s just a slave of Chi Long.”
Ed-Eddie began to cry. “I want to be an American,” he sobbed. “I want to help. I do, but he’ll kill me.”
“Who’ll kill you, Ed-Eddie?” Walker asked.
The man sniffed. “It’s just Eddie.”
“Okay, Eddie. So who’s going to kill you?”
He squirmed on the floor, trying to see both Yaya and Walker. “You know,” he whispered. “Him.”
“Him?” Walker pointed at Yaya.
“Or him?” Yaya pointed back at Walker.
“No,” Eddie said, his voice going low. “Chi Long.”
“Ahh,” both Walker and Yaya said at the same time. “Him. Is that where you took our friends? To Chi Long?”
Eddie nodded.
“Are they alive?”
Eddie nodded again.
Walker felt an immense surge of relief. But he couldn’t dwell on it. They needed to know more.
“I wouldn’t worry about ‘him,’” Walker said, using finger quotes. “Yaya has a magical device that makes us invisible. He can’t see us.”
Eddie’s eyes narrowed.
“No, really. That’s how the other soldiers couldn’t find us. Just as ‘he’ has magic,” he said, using finger quotes again, “we have magic, too.”
Eddie craned his neck to look at Yaya, who until that moment had been looking imploringly at Walker. Walker shrugged and grinned at his friend.
“Go ahead and show him the concealment device,” Walker urged.
Yaya looked around, then reached into his side pocket. He pulled out the old cable he said was from World War II and held it up. “You mean this old thing?”
“That’s it.”
Eddie looked at it and narrowed his eyes. “How does it work?”
This time it was Yaya’s turn to smile. “You put it in your mouth. Here, Walker will show you.”
Yaya handed the cable over to Walker, who reminded himself that Yaya needed a good asskicking. Walker took it, grinned at Eddie, then placed an end in his mouth. It tasted like tar, cigar ash, and an old wig, but he kept it in his mouth.
Eddie looked from one to the other. “But there are two of you.”
Yaya nodded in agreement, and looked at Walker. When Walker’s grin grew even larger, Yaya’s nod turned into a shake.
Walker pulled his out of his mouth momentarily and said, “We both have to have it in our mouths.”
He put his back in and offered Yaya the other end. Yaya put it in his mouth and frowned only a little at the taste. The cable was almost at its limit as it stretched between the pair. Yeah, revenge is a dish best served with old cable.
“But I can see you,” Eddie said matter-of-factly.
Walker removed it from his mouth. “Of course you can. You aren’t a demon. This only works on demons. You know, like him.”
Eddie stared at Yaya, who still had his end in. After a moment, he narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Not as good as a suit.”
Walker and Yaya exchanged a look.
“What kind of suit?” Walker asked.
“You know,” Eddie said, touching the skin of his arm. “One made from people.”
“You’ve seen this?”
Eddie glanced toward the dead soldiers. “I’ve seen one.”
56
The barbarians were at the gates. If it hadn’t been a variation on the usual, Billings would have been outraged. They finally had eyes on and CENTCOM wanted to retake control of their satellite, citing their priority. Their priority my ass, she thought. If it weren’t for the fact that SEAL Team 666 wasn’t as highly classified as it was, they wouldn’t even be having this conversation. After all, which was more important, hunting down someone’s cousin they believed to be a member of the Taliban, or supporting an elite unit that was ascertaining whether America was being threatened with destruction?
That the four-star general at CENTCOM knew about SEAL Team 666 and requested the shift in priority anyway was an indictment on his status as Head Asshole in theater. He knew she couldn’t drop the bullshit flag and point out which was more important. He knew that she’d keep the team’s existence a secret no matter what. In fact, she would bet that he was counting on it.
But there was nothing to be done at this point except to try and make something from nothing.
She stared at a map of the world. Her eyes found Myanmar, then drew down the coast until she reached the spot where she believed Kadwan to be. It was so far away from anything. They had assets in Thailand, but they’d have to invade sovereign airspace to get there. Because Kadwan was on the coast, it would be so much easier to bring help across the sea. They could go virtually undetected until the last moment.
She grabbed her phone and put in a call to the SOCOM J3. He owed her a favor for fighting on his behalf for funding, during last year’s congressional free-for-all after the budget cuts.
She explained her situation.
“I’d love to help, Alexis, but it looks like there’s a big operation building along the Pakistan border. CENTCOM intends to conduct a series of airstrikes to root out some of Haqqani militant leaders in Northern Waziristan. C-130s have begun dropping psyop leaflets as part of an information campaign warning the militants that they’re going to be bombed.”
“If we warn them, won’t they flee?”
“Doesn’t work that way. Muslims are used to being threatened. It’s part of their culture to ignore it. Psychological Operations was hugely successful in Desert Storm One, responsible for upwards of three hundred thousand defections.”
“I’ve seen some of the leaflets they used portraying Saddam as a devil.”
“Those weren’t the successful ones. SOCOM had C-130s dropping leaflets on targets, calling them out by name and warning them that they’d be bombed the next day. Then they did exactly that. After the third or fourth time the C-130s dropped their leaflets, the Iraqis got the message. They’d take off running. It got to the point where they didn’t have to drop conventional bombs, just paper.”
“Nice. And they intend on using that in Waziristan?”