“No,” he said. “No problem.”
He turned away and strode back to the transport helicopter. The deadly demonstration had only reaffirmed what he already knew, that his cousin had underestimated the ruthlessness of these men. They would stop at nothing.
Tomorrow the three Cobra helicopters would swoop in and unleash their power on the warlord’s compound. The transport helicopter carrying Marzak and his newfound friend would land the dive team and their guards at the treasure site. They would be joined by the other helicopters after they had reduced Amir’s compound to smoking rubble.
Professor Saleem was neither a coward nor a hero. Like most men, if sufficiently pressed, he had the potential to earn either title, but extremes of behavior were not part of his character. He preferred to occupy a safe middle ground that placed no demands on his ego or his well-being. Now, to his dismay, for the first time in his life he was having moral qualms that could not be rationalized away with clever intellectual argument.
He knew that Amir Kahn’s village would have women and children. The thought of these innocents facing the same awful force as the inhabitants of the so-called abandoned village had knocked him from his precarious perch of neutrality, leaving him in a position where he was seriously entertaining the thought of doing something that would place him in danger.
There was only one problem. He hadn’t quite decided what to do.
Or even if there were anything he could do.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The man leaning against the wooden building next to the site of the OK Corral gunfight could have been one of Tombstone’s desperado re-enactors, except for a major difference. Tyler Lee Clayton was a real killer.
Clayton was from Alabama where he’d knifed a man in a gambling brawl. The trial judge was a friend of the Clayton family, and said he would suspend the jail sentence if Tyler joined the army. Clayton signed up. At the time, the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to send to Iraq and Clayton’s anti-social behavior was seen as a boon rather than a barrier.
A thin cigar drooped from his lips as he surveyed the streets of Tombstone. He was around five feet nine, rangy in build, with stringy muscles packed on his slender frame. He had a lean face with high tight cheekbones and flat gray eyes that suggested the coiled violence of a rattlesnake.
He wore a black T-shirt and his bare arms were covered with death-themed tattoos. Without the pull-down cap, gloves and belt-knife, he bore little resemblance to the Ninja-leader who had destroyed the house in the Tubac hills a few hours earlier.
The expression of simmering anger contorting his hard features was stoked by the burning pain in his rib-cage. The handle-bar of the motorcycle had slammed into his mid-section like a steer’s horn and inflicted a long, dark bruise on his pale skin. Back in the day, he never would have allowed himself to be ambushed so easily. He had been under the impression that he and his men were disposing of a defenseless young woman, not the crazed road warrior who had roared out of the outbuilding and tried to run him over. He had taken a lot of crap from his comrades before he’d silenced them with a dangerous stare.
A man was strolling toward him along the boardwalk. He was dressed in black pants and T-shirt, too. Although he was shorter and broader-shouldered than Clayton, and his complexion was olive rather than fish-belly white, he had a similar dead-eye expression on his face. His name was Vinnie Tartaglia, and he had gotten into trouble of his own in Staten Island before becoming another bottom-of-the barrel army recruit. He was not as smart as Clayton, but he was equally as violent. Vinnie said. “Talked to a guy in that restaurant. A woman came in on a Harley a few hours ago and had breakfast. She was pretty quiet, he said.”
“She’s going to be quiet for a long time after I catch up with her.”
Vinnie snickered. “You hear from Tech?”
“Yeah. They say she left town headed southwest from here. They tracked her phone before it went dead a few miles from Fort Huachuca.”
“She could have gone toward Bisbee, maybe, or doubled back to Nogales and crossed the border. Maybe even slipped by us on the way to Tucson. She’s probably hundreds of miles from here by now.”
“Maybe not. I talked to our psych department. They’ve got the whole file on her. Crazier than a bedbug, but watch out when she’s cornered!” He patted his sore ribs for emphasis. “Some people will run for as long as they can when they get scared, but she’s a hunker-downer, they said. Looks for someplace she’s been before where she can hide instead of run.”
“This is big country. Lots of hiding spaces.”
“Tech’s running a check of her finances. Credit cards. Stuff like that. They’ll know where she’s been before. Maybe a motel or hotel. Or even a campground.”
“What do you want me and the rest of the guys to do?”
“Hang out for now. Grab some lunch while we call in back up to establish a perimeter.”
“Sounds good,” Vinnie said. He noticed the sign on the wall. “Hey, they’re doing a reenactment of the OK shoot-out in twenty minutes. Want to go see the good guys kill the bad guys?”
Clayton glanced at the sign.
“Naw,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “Too violent.”
After about an hour on the highway, Sutherland had pulled over and ditched her phone. She wasn’t taking any chances that someone would triangulate her position using her cell phone signal, and she still had her back up phone registered under a different name and number. Then she had headed south, where she had a place in mind that might be a good hiding spot.
Sometime later, she arrived on the outskirts of Fort Huachuca, where the U.S. cavalry had set up shop in 1877 to intercept Geronimo’s escape routes into Mexico. She turned off the highway south of Sierra Vista, away from the strip development along Route 92, and followed a winding narrow road into the quiet precincts of Ramsey Canyon.
At the end of the road, she parked near a low-slung building. The sign out front identified it as an inn. She had stayed at the B and B on one of her painting trips. It was a few hundred yards from a nature preserve where she had found many avian subjects for her canvas.
The middle-aged innkeeper was on her way into town, but she said no one was staying at the inn and there was plenty of room available. The hummingbirds that attracted the usual bird-watchers hadn’t arrived in the canyon yet. She told Sutherland to make herself at home and to enjoy a slice of fresh-baked apple pie.
Sutherland took her up on the offer then went for a quick hike in the preserve. She was famished when she returned and polished off, not without some guilt, around half of the newly-baked pie. Then she settled into a Western print sofa opposite the stone fire place, opened her laptop and wrote a message to Hawkins, asking him again to contact her. She waited a few minutes, but there was no answer. After chewing over a few more what ifs, she consoled herself with the fact that he and Calvin were very good at what they did.
Besides, she had to watch out for her own butt.
It was clear what had happened. Lulled by the peaceful setting of her desert home, she had forgotten that the cyber network she used to detect threats was a two-way street to her front door. She had blundered in trying to get at the Arrowhead Foundation’s tax status. She had set off alarms when she made the amateurish call to the Foundation, then compounded her error when she got too nosy about Trask.
She had placed filters on her phone number and email address, but anyone with a brain could have followed the trail back to her. Especially an outfit like Arrowhead which specialized in security.