“Anything else?” he asked.
I wanted to say, You do your job and I’ll do mine, but I’d probably pushed the envelope far enough for one conversation. Instead, I said, “No, sir. Field Twenty-seven. Day after tomorrow. Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.”
I terminated the call before he tried to fit one last word in, which I knew he sure as hell would. I quit the recording function, a fraction at ease knowing that Rutledge now had a copy of the conversation.
Next, I palmed the last of my disposable phones from my jacket and punched in Mr. Elliot’s secure number. I expected him to let it go to voice mail, but he answered three rings in, saying, “Good to hear your voice, young man.”
“Likewise,” I replied. That was the sum total of our niceties. I gave him a quick summary of my plans going forward: requisitioning the HALO gear, transportation from Amsterdam into Istanbul care of Roger Anderson, and my arrangements with Wiseman for the C-17 drop into Iran, including the misdirection about my landing point.
“Straightforward. Direct,” he allowed. “I approve. And the less you-know-who and his morons know, the better.”
“So here’s what I need,” I said and sent him the coordinates of my second landing point.
We waited for the message to go through. Here I was communicating from the bow of a launch in the middle of one of Holland’s biggest lakes and getting impatient because our communications were subjected to the laws of physics.
“Got it,” Mr. Elliot said a split second later. “Looks good. Dawn, the day after tomorrow.”
“Affirmative. And I’ll need transportation.”
“No shit. In the middle of goddamn nowhere. I would have never thought of that.” He chuckled, and I let out a slow breath. “Look for a guy on a camel.”
I grinned. “See what I had to put up with for thirty-odd years.”
“And you loved every minute of it,” he said, doing what a good case officer did to keep things on an even keel. Then he got back to business: the challenge code for my contact. “Ask him for Marlboros. He’ll say he prefers Montecristo coronas.”
“Got it.”
“How’s your finances?”
“I’m burning through money like a roadrunner on crack.”
“I’ll send a care package.” He paused. When Mr. Elliot paused, you knew something important was coming. “Hey, listen. Watch your six. There are a lot of people who want to see you fail.”
“I’ll do my best to disappoint them.”
“You do that. Take care.”
His phone beeped, and the line went dead.
I turned off my phone. There was a sense of finality to the decisions we’d just agreed to. I could feel the heat on my face and liked it. I could hear a song lyric coalescing in the back of my mind: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you might find, you get what you need.” Yeah, every once in a while the Stones came through. Nice job, Mick. Very appropriate. You go in, doesn’t mean you come back.
I broke apart the disposable and dropped the parts into the lake. I stepped back to the stern. Roger had the tiller in his hand and a satisfied look on his face.
“So?” I said.
“Your ride is on the way. Amsterdam to Istanbul, direct,” he said. “I wish I could say I got you a real good deal, but I thought quality was a tad bit more important than bargain shopping.”
“Someone you trust?”
He smiled, a perfect wave of irony filling out his face. “This guy has the same view of politics as I do. You pay, he performs.”
“My kind of guy.”
Roger veered from the middle of the lake toward the entrance near Stede Broec and the dike that signaled landfall northwest of the city.
We were one of three boats queued to cross through the dike. If anything bad was going to happen, this was the place. You couldn’t find a more perfect spot for an ambush than the narrow concrete passage connecting Markermeer with Lake Ijsselmeer. And if Roger Anderson, an apolitical man of profit, decided to sell me out, no better opportunity would present itself. I tossed him a cautionary glance and made it look as if I were studying the dike.
My paranoia was unwarranted: all I saw was a man tending to the details of our crossing. We squeezed through the watercourse without so much as a short pause and continued across Ijsselmeer to the end of the peninsula and the commercial shipping district of Den Helder. Container ships as big as apartment buildings and frigates with rust from one end of their superstructures to the other were berthed here. Loading cranes towered over the ships, and night crews worked in the shadows of yellow spotlights.
Anderson pointed us to a pier south of the main port. There were two other boats moored here, both similar to ours in their insignificance. Our launch tapped against the dock, Anderson shut off the motor, and I helped a deckhand with our ropes.
Anderson clambered onto the dock beside me. He seemed in a hurry. He said, “This way,” and moved down the pier.
Like all commercial harbors, the scale of the facilities and the vessels that used them dwarfed everyone and everything. Huge cranes serviced enormous ships. Stack after stack of pallets marked seemingly endless rows of giant warehouses. The immensity created an ambience that was at once eerie and humbling. We crossed over a set of railroad tracks, passed through a chain-link fence, and headed to a shabby, redbrick warehouse. There were two doors: a wide bay door flanked by a regular-size door made of steel. Anderson halted outside the steel door and punched a code into a cypher lock.
A lock buzzed. Anderson pushed open the door and I followed him in. He reached for a light switch, and the ceiling lamp directly above us illuminated the corridor. Metal bay doors on opposite sides receded into the gloom. A forklift sat idle, like a sleeping beast, the concrete floor around its tires marred by skid marks.
As we proceeded down the hall, the next set of overhead lights would blink on, and the ones behind us switch off. The effect was like walking in a tunnel collapsing to the beat of a metronome.
Roger halted at the fourth door and fished a set of keys from his pocket. He opened three stainless steel padlocks that secured both sides and the bottom. He grasped the bottom handle and gave the door a yank. It scrolled open with a tinny rattle. The familiar, musty odor of military equipment wafted out.
He reached to the left and flicked a switch. Overhead fluorescent lamps sputtered on. Shelves filled with boxes and crates and duffel bags in shades of military green lined a wall to the left. Roger knew exactly where he was going. He walked straight to a shelf in the middle of the wall, bent over, and dragged out a metal crate the size of a footlocker. The lid was stenciled USMC FORCE RECON, SPECIAL OPS TEAM TANGO.
“Here you go.” He snapped open the latches and swung open the lid. “This shit is so new, the jarheads don’t even know it’s missing.”
I crouched beside the crate and inspected the gear. A Mark Seven HALO rig. Harness. Instrument module fitted out with GPS, radio, altimeter, and clock. An MC-5 ram air parachute. Reserve chute. I was liking it already. Pressure suit with electrical heater. Gloves, also heated, and very cool the way they plugged into the suit. Helmet with oxygen mask and regulator, microphone, and ear speakers. Goggles with built-in display and a direct feed to the instrument module. Did I say cool?
Touching this equipment made my nerves tingle with anticipation. Yeah, I admit it: carnivores like me were adrenaline junkies even at my age and completely unapologetic about the fact.
“Got everything but the oxygen,” he added. “There will be a fresh tank when the time comes.”
I arranged the equipment back in the crate. “Weight?”