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  He moved to his wall safe, placed his right palm against the biométrie reader, and dialed a combination. When the heavy door swung open, he pulled out a file that had been secretly ordered from the CIA on a dozen Special Forces operatives who were occasionally used for unique missions. “The wet stuff,” CIA had explained.

  Taking it to his desk, sitting in the black high-backed chair and studying the papers under the bright light, he flipped to a section that identified three Marines who were employed for such work, and saw that two of them were already on other assignments.

  The remaining candidate was an expert scout sniper and gunnery sergeant. The statistics and the photograph showed that he was five-nine, 160 pounds, with gray eyes and short brown hair; a combat veteran; age thirty-four; single; and numerous decorations including awards from foreign governments and letters of commendation that were marked TOP SECRET. Buchanan read the biography with some interest, for it seemed that the man had been in almost every hot spot around the world for the past ten years, including special missions with the Israelis, the British, and the Russians. He was officially credited with eighty-one confirmed kills, but the real figure was much higher, for the number included only his victims who had been confirmed, and not any killed in special secret operations. Interestingly, the file also had a couple of letters of reprimand that indicated problems with authority. His last mission had involved a questionable kill on the wrong side of the Pakistani border, which had caused a serious diplomatic incident. The shooter was reprimanded and temporarily banished from the active list of covert agents. This would be a good time to bring him back. Not only was he finishing a contract job with some weapons company and was free for new orders, but he also might be wanting to prove that he was still up to doing clandestine work. Buchanan underlined the name: last name Swanson; first name Kyle.

  The National Security Advisor possessed one of the most secure computers in the entire U.S. government, but Buchanan refused to believe it could not be hacked. All of those whirring and clicking sounds only meant that the hard drive was storing and shuffling information. There was no such thing as a really secure computer. He did not want anyone to someday unveil his secret correspondence to a Senate investigating committee or have it become a headline in The Washington Post. He would not even trust his secretary on this one.

  From his middle desk drawer, Buchanan slid out a single sheet of expensive stationery that bore THE WHITE HOUSE across the top in simple blue letters, and began to write in a neat, precise longhand. There would be only this one original, and it would rest in a briefcase locked to the wrist of a special courier. Once the instruction was read by the Marine sniper, the courier would destroy the document. No copies, no paper trail.

  Buchanan finished the note, sealed it in an official envelope, and put it into a light blue file folder with a red stripe diagonally across the front and WHITE HOUSE TOP SECRET stenciled in big black letters. He sealed that, too.

  Then he told his aide Sam Shafer to locate this Gunnery Sergeant Swanson and get him to that fleet Marine unit in the Mediterranean as soon as possible. Shafer would also fly out to the task force, carrying the letter in a burnished aluminum briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, to personally deliver it. By using his private staff and a CIA cover, Buchanan would bypass General Turner and the others in their fancy uniforms.

  As he worked, Buchanan once again had to grudgingly approve of Gordon Gates’s enterprising and farsighted ideas. Sending in a bloodthirsty robot like Swanson was indeed a good insurance policy.

  CHAPTER 14

  ALI SHALAL RASSAD KNEW THAT sometimes just a little shove was all that was needed to force friends and enemies alike to do something they would later regret. He was a master of that quiet tactic, and was about to employ it against the United States of America. Rassad was known as the Rebel Sheikh not so much for being a great fighter, although he was, but because he refused to be consumed by any higher political power. His streak of stubborn independence made him an ally of convenience from Baghdad to Tehran to Washington. He worked with all, trusted none, and worked only for himself.

  He had agreed to perform a very precise role in the drama involving the American general, the sort of multilayered deception that he most enjoyed. He was being paid well to lend some of his militiamen to the mission, then to hold a single brief meeting with the Pentagon correspondent from a major American television network. The reporter had been in Iraq many times and had great credibility within the United States. His story would be accepted as fact.

  Rassad sipped a cup of strong tea as he scanned the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers and magazines that were brought daily to his office in Basra. A staff that monitored the Internet furnished its hourly report: the blogs were busy, but had nothing significant. Just braying opinions of people who didn’t really know anything. Three television sets ran CNN, al Jazeera, and Sky News, and stories about the disappearance of General Middleton and the peculiar demands made by the Holy Scimitar of Allah dominated the news.

  There was nothing in the papers or on television to match the fresh information on a decoded message that was also on his desk. Task Force 32-A of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet was moving into position in the western Mediterranean. Israel had granted flyover permission for the Americans. The Marines were coming. Rassad intended to spur everyone along with a renewed sense of urgency to prevent them from having second thoughts that might breed caution.

  Rassad loved the game. He pushed aside the papers, finished the tea, and snapped his fingers for an assistant to clear the desk and incinerate all of the papers. Some posturing politician someday might send a raiding party to his palace in attempt to find and seize incrimination information. That would fail, of course, and the politician would soon be assassinated, but Rassad kept his most important information in his head. Everything else was consigned to ashes.

  He returned to his living suite, where a barber waited to trim his beard, eyebrows, nose, and ears. The valet had laid out clothing chosen for the interview, a dark gray suit from London, an off-white dress shirt with a muted silk tie, and highly polished Italian shoes. The trousers were tailored to help offset the fact that his left leg was an inch shorter than his right, a reminder of the year and a half he had spent in Abu Ghraib prison for the crime of defending his beautiful girlfriend when Uday Hussein’s thugs had come for her. Uday himself, laughing, had wielded the long steel crowbar that smashed Rassad’s bones while telling in great detail how the girl, a virgin, had been fucked and how she screamed and how when Uday tired of her, he tossed her to the guards in a rape room, where she died. Rassad would be allowed to heal for a while after one of the torture sessions, only to undergo a repeat performance with the crowbar when he had recovered enough. He was not beaten to get a confession, for he had nothing to confess. Uday just enjoyed beating him. In the end, when the Americans had released him, Rassad could not walk on the mutilated leg.

  The limp became a badge of honor for his new life as it healed, an unspoken reminder that he had paid dearly for opposing the dictator Saddam Hussein. When he was taken to prison, he had been just another bureaucrat in the Ministry of the Interior, but he emerged as a new political force, for he had channeled his powerful mind away from the pain and into how he could capitalize on his experiences. There were days now when he could almost thank Uday for the cruelty, because no one ever questioned Rassad’s loyalty to his country. It was a wonderful political bargaining chip. In the end, Rassad had the final laugh on Uday by directing the Americans to the location of the Hussein brothers, where they were killed. He kept a picture of Uday’s misshapen dead body in a folder in a desk drawer, and he looked at it often.

  Today, Rassad would wear the fine suit instead of the comfortable robes in order to appear as a reasonable, moderate, westernized Iraqi leader. He did not want the American television audience to equate him with some ordinary Koran-thumping radical mullah. He had graduated from MIT, for Christ’s sake.

  A slee
k Bell helicopter, ornate in its coat of glistening midnight blue with gold trim, skimmed in to land at the palace after a smooth trip from the big American base in Doha, Kuwait. Jack Shepherd unfolded his lanky frame from the comfortable seat and stepped out, shielding his eyes against the rotor blast. He was disoriented. Something was missing. Something was wrong, a sense of incompleteness. It wasn’t until an escort shook his hand and helped his television crew load their gear into an air-conditioned limo that Shepherd could put his finger on what was different. It was quiet! He had heard others speak about the eerie feeling in the broad neighborhoods around the Rebel Sheikh’s palace, but he had not been here for at least a year. In Iraq, he usually came in tense and expecting danger, with bomb blasts echoing throughout the countryside, something somewhere always blowing up with the erratic constancy of a popcorn machine, but this area of Basra was an oasis of calm.

  The escort gave them a quick tour before going to the palace. Shops were open, private cars jammed the clean streets, children played soccer on neat green fields, and women walked freely in the street markets, some with heads uncovered, with bags of goods on their arms. Police without sidearms directed traffic, and men in robes or open-necked shirts and trousers sat around the tables of sidewalk cafés. There was laughter.

  Shepherd saw a sign giving directions to the new Toyota plant, and passed other signs of German, French, British, Japanese, and Russian companies. Foreign investment was flowing in. The new buildings being erected were not slapdash brick-and-mortar jobs, but well-engineered concrete and steel. Shepherd flipped through his mental index cards until he found the comparison-Beirut, and how the older correspondents described it back when it was a pearl of a city and not a terrorist hellhole. Military units stayed outside Basra, and some of the Rebel Sheikh’s feared private militia had been transformed into civilian police. This area of the city had been good last year when he visited, and was better today. Whatever the sheikh was doing was working.

  “Jack Shepherd! It is good to see you again.” Ali Shalal Rassad stepped from the shade of an arbor of trees beside a fountain in the courtyard of the palace and extended his hand. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

  “Thank you for the invitation,” Shepherd replied. “This is a big story and I appreciate getting your comment.”

  Rassad nodded and led the correspondent into the coolness of the palace. “Indeed. Please have your crew set up right away. I fear that time is not on our side. After the interview, you can use my press office to feed your story back to your editors. My technicians will help in any way they can.”

  As they took their places and were miked up, and lights were arranged and tested and the camera was prepared, Rassad steered the off-camera conversation toward what Shepherd had observed on the way in.

  “I must say I was quite impressed,” the reporter answered. “Everywhere else this country is torn by violence, but your zone shows none of those signs. Why is that?”

  “Many reasons, my friend, and I will be happy to discuss them when we have lunch after the interview. The easy answer is that we just want to live in peace, and the Prophet, may his name be praised, is leading us in that direction. Foreign armies have invaded our country over the centuries, and we know how to rebuild,” he said as a technician adjusted his suit and tie and a makeup artist applied a little powder to a bright spot on his forehead. “The problem this time was that the Americans wanted to do everything their way, and not our way. Luckily, we drew the British as occupiers, and they were more understanding. Once we endured the violent time and proved we could provide our own security and were no danger to others, London was glad to allow us room to grow and so withdraw some of their troops.”

  Rassad suddenly looked grim. “No American contractors are allowed to come in and pay fantastic sums to their U.S. employees while giving our people slave wages, and making decisions in Dallas that should have been made in Iraq. We wanted equal pay for equal work. If they didn’t want to oblige, they would learn that they were not the only outside nation on this earth that had contractors wanting to help us. The hubris of the American administrators was their downfall. We were building an entire nation, not some shopping mall. The result was that we were able to establish security, clean water, adequate food, electricity, and a civil government that is quite secular and that emphasizes fairness and tolerance. There is no reason that the rest of our nation cannot be the same way, if the foreigners-all of them, including our fellow Muslims from other countries-will simply go home.”

  He did not mention his personal militia, the feared Holy Scimitar of Allah. They were kept out of sight at distant bases and trained daily with the deadly specialists from Gates Global, one of the world’s best private security companies. One reason things were so quiet in Basra was that everyone in town knew that stepping out of line would result in a quick trip into the desert, never to be seen again.

  Shepherd made notes. “That sounds rather like a threat,” he observed.

  “Not at all. They will leave sometime anyway, for they have done so throughout our history. The sooner the better. Let us get on with our lives.”

  Shepherd got a nod from his cameraman. “Okay, we’re ready to roll if you are.”

  Rassad’s manner changed dramatically, the facial expression eased, and he became a quiet diplomat. “I will make a brief statement, then you can ask questions.”

  The cameraman pointed and Rassad began. “The people of Iraq have been greatly shocked by the news that Brigadier General Bradley Middleton of the United States Marine Corps has been kidnapped. We also have been shamed by the outrageous claim that this crime was committed by the Holy Scimitar of Allah. As a humble representative of the Holy Scimitar, I want to denounce that falsehood in the strongest way possible. As everyone knows, the Holy Scimitar is a benevolent society, much like the American Red Cross, and is dedicated to the health and welfare of the Iraqi people. It has no connection whatsoever with any terrorists. We were not involved with the kidnapping of General Middleton and we reject those who have tarnished our good name. They are thugs and beyond the protection of the Koran’s teachings.” The sheikh paused and stared into the camera. “We had no hand in this.”

  Shepherd had a hard time keeping his face straight and professional. Great stuff, and the sheikh had adroitly danced around the Holy Scimitar’s violent history. “Do you know who did it?”

  “Unfortunately, no, we do not. But our security people have uncovered something which we feel we must convey publicly to your government. We did not contact them directly because while we wish the general no harm, we do not work for the Americans. I contacted you, Mr. Shepherd, because I consider you to be an honest broker of this information.”

  “What is the message?” Shepherd was glowing inside. That unsolicited compliment, plus this invitation to interview the sheikh, would play well in the upcoming negotiations to renew his contract. He damned sure was not going to screw this up now by challenging the sheikh about the real reputation of the vicious militia.

  “Evil men are planning to execute General Middleton before a television camera at noon on Tuesday. He is to be stoned to death in symbolic retribution for the destruction American forces have wrought. The true villain in this horrible episode is al Qaeda.”

  Shepherd was shocked. “Can you prove that, Sheikh Rassad?”

  “Yes.” He removed a white envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. “After we finish speaking, the Holy Scimitar will turn over to a Swiss diplomat this written message that was delivered from an al Qaeda messenger only a few hours ago. It claims to contain details known only to someone who participated in the kidnapping. Beyond that, it gives only the time of the execution and says there will be no negotiations.”

  Rassad eased back into his chair as Shepherd said something inane to close the interview. As the lights went off, both men unclipped their mikes and Rassad took him by the elbow, steering him away. “Now you must go to our press center and file your report, John.
Please hurry, for I consider this to be extremely important, and perhaps you can save the life of General Middleton. When Washington calls, as I am sure they will, you can tell them from me personally that we are digging hard for any information that could be helpful and will pass along anything we find immediately. Now go, go! When you are done, we will have lunch. I want to talk about the coming football season.”

  Sheikh Ali Shalal Rassad was satisfied. This was Arab politics at its best, built on shifting sands, bargaining in which something could be nothing, or anything. Gordon Gates had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for assisting in the capture of General Middleton and meeting with the reporter. Buying Rassad’s help was not the same as getting his allegiance. Gates was a comrade of convenience. Rassad was now moving to convince Washington that the danger to the general was great, but that he wasn’t involved at all. They were always ready to believe that al Qaeda was at fault, which meant that those radical fools who were trying to weaken his hold on Basra would be hit hard again by the Americans. As a further goodwill gesture, he would have the Holy Scimitar sweep up a couple of al Qaeda operatives tonight and turn them over to the CIA and further rid him of that nuisance.

  Ali Shalal Rassad walked down a cool, tiled hallway toward his living quarters, pulling at the confining necktie. He had time for a nap before the reporter finished filing and joined him for a late lunch.

  CHAPTER 15

  PREPARE FOR LANDING.” THE anonymous voice on the public address system woke him up, and Swanson tightened the belts holding him in the uncomfortable seat. He was aboard a twin-engine Grumman C-1A, technically called a Carrier On-board Delivery System, but familiarly known to all as a COD. Many of the twenty-eight passenger seats were occupied by young sailors and Marines returning to the huge CVN-71 after spending a shore leave as drunk as skunks. The seats faced the rear of the plane, which created a disoriented feeling of flying backward and severe cases of motion sickness and a need for extra barf bags. A hangover combined with a COD ride is just too much for most human stomachs to handle at dawn on Sunday morning.