Satisfied that all was as it should be, he turned off the computer and went to take a shower. When he came back from the bathroom, Lijuan was sitting propped in the pillows wearing a nightgown made of blue silk that extended to her knees.
“How did it go?” she asked, her English as perfect as her body.
“Good,” he said, shouldering into a hotel robe and pulling the towel from his waist. He sat down on the bed and gathered her into his arms. “They’re the best at what they do, so it should go well. My biggest concern is that Faisal won’t know enough to help us.”
“And if he doesn’t want to talk?”
“Oh, he’s going to talk. He won’t have any choice about that. The trouble will be in knowing when to quit extracting information. A man begins to make up lies once he runs out of truth.”
“What sort of torture will they use?” she asked softly, slipping her hand inside his robe to touch his chest.
“Whichever I tell them. They’re reliable men.”
“They must be barbarians,” she said sadly. “To be able to cause such pain without remorse.”
“Am I any less barbaric for giving the order?”
She rested her head against his chest. “Can’t you just retire? Can’t we leave and go to Singapore like we’ve talked about?” She lifted her head to gaze soulfully into his eyes. “What does it matter what happens here now? This country doesn’t care about all that you’ve done for it; all that you’ve sacrificed. The president and his men will betray you in the end — you know they must. We have enough money, Robert. Let us go away… tonight. Right now.”
He caressed her hair, wanting very much to go with her to Singapore, to live out the rest of his life and to die in her arms. Christ in heaven, what man wouldn’t? But Singapore was another world and beyond their destiny.
“You won’t allow them to betray me,” he said with a smile. “You’re my protection against them.”
She shook her head, a tear falling. “You put too much faith in me, Robert.”
He petted her and kissed her hair. “Do you trust me?”
“Of course,” she said.
“In that case, you should have nothing to worry you. I tell you that you are my talisman against them, and you can believe it.” He smiled and touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Now, no more tears for me. I’m as safe in your arms as anywhere on earth.”
She hugged him tight, allowing the cloth of his robe to soak up her tears. She was not afraid for herself, only for him, and she knew that they would crucify him after she fled.
“When will they take Faisal?” she asked.
“Tomorrow night. Once I leave here in the morning, you can take your time about getting back to Langley. Midori has everything under control there.”
“Are you sure Langley is safe?”
He opened her nightgown with a long index finger and smiled. “If we could be so lucky that they’d waste such a weapon on Langley, Virginia.”
27
Since killing the trooper, Nikolai Kashkin had been camped in the foothills above Gil Shannon’s horse ranch, and so far he’d seen neither hide nor hair of the former Navy SEAL he had come to assassinate. Each morning, he awoke in the wee hours before sunrise, slowly emerging from his tent like a lazy bear coming out of hibernation. He would stretch and yawn and leisurely set about preparing his backpacker breakfast over an MSR pocket stove. Then, after breakfast, he would sit beneath the trees, listening to the birds while enjoying his morning coffee and watching the sunrise. It was a pleasant time for him, perhaps the most pleasant he had experienced since he was a boy.
Upon finishing his coffee, Kashkin would say his morning prayers and then pick up the German Mauser Karabiner 98k rifle with Zeiss optics and make his way to the ridge overlooking the ranch, where he had carefully prepared himself a sniper’s nest among the rocks.
Throughout his boyhood, he had enjoyed hunting with his father’s father in the great forests near his home. His grandfather had been a sniper in the Red Army during the Second World War, and he had taught Kashkin the art of shooting game at long distance with an old Soviet Mosin-Nagant, but Kashkin had long since grown attached to the German Mauser, which he considered a more elegant weapon. There were more modern sniper rifles on the market with higher calibers and greater ranges, but he had never desired to bother with them. Besides, he was too old to be learning new tricks at this stage of the game. With an effective range of a thousand meters, the Mauser was more than enough rifle for the job at hand, and its 7.92x57 mm round was more than enough bullet to put a man down and keep him down. His one-shot kill ratio during the First and Second Chechen Wars was evidence enough of that.
Kashkin felt no personal rancor toward Shannon, though he was aware that the SEAL had executed a Muslim cleric with a garrote in Afghanistan. In Kashkin’s experience, most clerics were pushy, arrogant men seeking to burnish their egos while claiming to do the work of Allah. He understood that to assassinate one of them was a horrible insult against Islam, but he doubted very much whether the late Aasif Kohistani had been any different from the others he had known, so he doubted equally that there had been any great loss.
Akram al-Rashid and his people in AQAP had held up their end of the bargain by helping to purchase the RA-115s, so Kashkin would hold up his end by shooting Navy SEAL Gil Shannon dead in his very own backyard. He supposed this would send a definite message to the American Special Forces community, particularly if it served as a prelude to a devastating nuclear strike, but to Kashkin, killing Shannon would be little more than a justifiable act of vengeance—“an equal wound for a wound,” as it said in the Koran.
For the fourth morning in a row now, he lay prone in his hide eight hundred meters above the ranch, watching the woman with long, dark hair as she went about her morning routine of loosing the horses into the various paddocks outside the stable. He assumed she was Shannon’s wife, and he enjoyed watching her despite himself. He had never been one to covet another man’s woman, be he friend or foe, Muslim or not, but the woman was undeniably pretty, and her beauty, when combined with the heady experience of living so closely with nature, was enough to make him stir.
Keeping her in the crosshairs throughout most of the morning, he wondered idly if blowing off one of her arms might draw Shannon out of the house. By this point in the stalk, however, he was growing confident that his prey was not bedding down in its usual lair. So he began to think in terms of going down to the ranch and putting a knife to the woman as a means of finding out where Shannon was and when he would return. She might even get him on the phone to expedite that return.
Marie Shannon had been married to a professional sniper for almost ten years, so when she saw the glint of Kashkin’s scope high on the ridge, she knew that something was god-awful wrong because she’d seen a glint the morning before in precisely the same spot. She hadn’t thought much of it the day before, however; the Fergusons crossed the ridge from time to time between the ranches while hunting coyotes, and it was only human nature to scope things out from above.