“Looks like you don’t think I’ve been earning my pay keeping your rogues patched up, eh?” she said. “You had to bring a train car full of patients for me.”
Deep below his feet, Juan could feel the magnetohydrodynamics ramping up. “What else do you give a doctor as a gift after a little relaxing shore leave?”
Juan pulled back on the sliding door and a fresh cascade of water poured onto the deck. Then from the gloomy interior emerged the first skeletal prisoner, owl-eyed and soaking wet.
“You’re safe now,” Juan said in Arabic. “You are all safe. But you must hurry, understand?”
Fodl joined him and Dr. Huxley an instant later, and together they cajoled the shell-shocked men and women out of the car. There were a few injuries, sprains mostly, but a couple of broken limbs as well. And one man who’d caught a bullet in the wrist from one of the terrorists Cabrillo had fought on the car’s roof. As was his custom, Juan would more regret hurting these people further than take satisfaction in saving their lives.
He spotted Mark Murphy. The lanky weapons expert had his kit bag slung over one shoulder and a waterproof laptop case in his hand. He was heading for a hatchway that would lead him to his cabin. “Forget it, Mr. Murphy. As of this second, you and Mr. Stone are on a priority research job.”
“Can’t it wait until after I shower?”
“No. Now. I want to know everything there is to know about something called the Jewel of Jerusalem. Alana Shepard mentioned it may be buried with Suleiman Al-Jama but isn’t really sure what it is.”
“Sounds like a legend out of a trashy novel.”
“It might just be. Find out. I want a report in an hour.”
“Yes, boss,” Mark said dejectedly, and shuffled away.
“Who are all these people?” Julia Huxley asked, passing a woman down to the waiting arms of an orderly.
“They were all in the upper levels of Libya’s Foreign Ministry,” Juan told her. “One of these poor souls should be the Minister himself.”
“I don’t understand. Why are they all prisoners?”
“Because unless I messed up my reasoning, the new Foreign Minister, the esteemed Ali Ghami, is Suleiman Al-Jama.”
TWENTY-SIX
THE HELICOPTERS PAINTED WITH LIBYAN MILITARY COLORS swarmed out of the empty wastes of the southern desert like enraged wasps. Four of the five Russian-made choppers were done in mottled earth-toned camouflage, while the other wore the drab gray of the Libyan Navy.
In his fifteen years with the CIA, Jim Kublicki never thought he would be an observer on a Libyan helo assault of a terrorist base camp. Ambassador Moon had arranged his presence on the attack with Minister Ghami personally. On the surface, the new level of cooperation out of Tripoli was amazing, but both Moon and Kublicki harbored their doubts. The chief among them was the result of the eyes-only report that had been delivered from Langley. Kublicki had no idea how operatives had penetrated Libyan airspace during the height of the search for the Secretary of State’s plane, but somehow they had. The evidence they found led to the only conclusion possible: Her plane had been forced down before the crash—presumably, to remove the Secretary herself. Then the Boeing was intentionally slammed into a mountaintop.
The report also documented how a team of men in a chopper had landed at the crash site and deliberately tampered with the scene. The exact words from the document were “they tore through the wreckage like a twister through a trailer park.”
The team from the National Transportation Safety Board had issued a secret and still-preliminary report backing up what Langley had said. Despite the best efforts of the terrorists, there were inconsistencies in the wreckage that could not be easily explained. When Moon had met with David Jewison of the NTSB and outlined the CIA report, he’d nodded, and said it was quite possible the plane had landed briefly before the crash.
When Kublicki had arrived at a remote air base outside of Tripoli where they were staging the assault, he’d met with the operation’s leader, a Special Forces colonel named Hassad. He’d explained that the Libyan desert was dotted with hundreds of old training bases left over from the days when his government had allowed them sanctuary. In the few years since the government renounced terrorism, he and his men had destroyed most of the ones they knew of, but he admitted there were dozens more they did not.
Hassad sat in the right-hand seat next to their pilot, while Kublicki crammed his six-foot six-inch frame into a folding jump seat immediately behind the cockpit. There was only a handful of men in the rear section of the utility chopper. The bulk of the assault force was in the other helicopters.
The Libyan colonel clamped a hand over his helmet’s boom mic and leaned back. He had to raise his voice over the whopping thrum of the rotor blades. “We’re landing in about a minute.”
Kublicki was a little taken aback. “What? I thought we were going in after the assault.”
“I don’t know about you, Mr. Kublicki, but I want a piece of these people for myself.” Hassad shot him a wolfish grin.
“I’m with you there, Colonel, but the uniform you lent me didn’t come with a weapon.”
The Libyan officer unsnapped the pistol at his waist and handed it over butt first. “Just make sure that me giving you a sidearm doesn’t make it into your report.”
Kublicki smiled conspiratorially and popped the pistol’s magazine to assure himself it was loaded. The narrow slit along the mag’s length showed thirteen shiny brass cartridges. He rammed the clip home but wouldn’t cock the pistol until they were on the ground.
From his low vantage strapped in behind the cockpit, Kublicki couldn’t see through the windshield but knew they were about to land when his view of the sky was blocked by dust kicked up by the helicopter’s powerful rotor wash. He hadn’t been in a combat situation since the first Gulf War, but the combination of fear and exhilaration was a sensation he would never forget.
The craft settled on the ground, and Kublicki whipped off his safety belts. When he stood to peer over Hassad’s shoulder, he saw the terrorist camp a good hundred yards away. Men in checkered kaffiyehs, brandishing AK-47s, were running toward them with abandon. He saw no sign of the soldiers from the other choppers in pursuit.