Kilo Option, page 24
“Is this correct?” Hussein asked Yernin.
“Unfortunately yes,” Yernin said, still thinking it out. “But there may be another way for you to achieve your objectives.”
Hussein clapped his hands. “There is always a path if we put our best minds to it.”
“If the blame falls on us, the Western allies will not hesitate to annihilate Iraq,” Sidqi argued. “Men, women, children. Everyone.”
“In sha’Allah,” the Iraqi leader whispered.
“Even you, Dear One,” the minister of propaganda suggested.
Saddam Hussein was insane. Yernin had suspected it, but now he was convinced. All of them lived in a fantasy world. Their time had come and gone, never to return. They were men willing to make desperate gambles no matter the outcome. They wanted to win at all costs. If they were to be defeated, they were willing to take the entire region with them.
So be it, Yernin thought. “We may not have to strike Israel,” he said. “Now you are making sense,” Sidqi said, relieved.
“But we will supply you with a crew, and we will supply you with nuclear missiles.”
“Why?” the minister of foreign affairs sputtered.
“To make a nuclear attack.”
“On whom?” Hussein asked, his eyes glinting like polished obsidian.
“On your most hated enemy, Your Excellency,” Yernin replied. “In the meantime I will go to Kuwait to make sure that Lane and the woman are killed.”
33
KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL HOTEL KUWAIT CITY
“We’re not going to crowd him,” Lane instructed the dozen NSA special agents and Kuwait Special Palace Guard security people gathered in his fourteenth-floor suite. “That means no one in the lobby. He’d spot your people right off the bat.”
“You’re the boss,” NSA agent in charge, Cal Trilby, said. “But if he’s as good as you say he is, you’ll be placing yourself in an unnecessarily risky position.”
The hotel was across from the US Embassy on Arabian Gulf Street in the section of the city known as Beneud Al-Gar. It was a favorite haunt of Western VIPs and journalists. Lane had registered this morning under his own name without trying to conceal his presence. The other rooms on the fourteenth floor were either empty or occupied by security people. A helicopter and pilot were stationed on the roof.
“It’s Yernin who’ll be putting himself in risk. Because if he gets this far, this floor becomes a killing ground.”
“Don’t we want him alive, sir?” one of the Kuwaitis asked.
Lane turned his steel blue eyes to the man. “That would be nice. But if you give this guy half a chance, if you hesitate for just a fraction of a second, if you don’t kill him the instant you see him, he’ll kill you.”
He looked at the others, including Zahedi, who stood by the window uneasily listening to Lane’s instructions.
“I’ve seen what he can do. If he thought that taking out this entire hotel was the only way to get to me, he’d do it.”
“What’s his beef with you, Mr. Lane?” Trilby asked.
“Let’s just say that I got in his way before, and I’m in his way now and he doesn’t like it.”
“If he’s got some agenda, wouldn’t it be better if we did take him alive?” Trilby persisted. “I heard that Norfolk wasn’t very pretty. I for one would like to talk to him.”
Lane nodded. “Okay. I wanted to see only one body bag going out of here. But I’d like to have a chat with this guy myself. Alone, in an empty room. So if your people want to do it your way, I won’t interfere.”
Trilby and the others looked uncomfortable.
“We’re going to give him seventy-two hours. If he hasn’t shown up by then, we’ll have to think of something else. He might not take the bait, or his people here might already know what precautions we’ve taken.”
“How?” Trilby asked.
“We might have a leak.”
The NSA agent gave Lane a very hard look. “Just great. Means we’ve lost our advantage.”
“Fourteen to one are pretty good odds,” Lane said quietly.
“From what you say and from what I read, he’s faced worse.”
Lane hated maneuvering people, but in this case it had been necessary for their survival. “You have a point. So we’re going to change plans in midstream, and nobody outside of this room will know about it.”
It occurred to Trilby that they’d been had. He grinned sheepishly. “They said you were good, Mr. Lane, but they were wrong. You’re better than that.”
“I went up against this guy once and lost, so hold your praise until afterward.”
“What’s the plan?”
“We’ll go with the assumption that he already knows that we’ve laid a trap up here for him. So we’re not going to hide a thing. We’ll lock out the elevators from this floor, and station people at the stairwell doors, as well as the elevator doors in case he stops one of the cars on the fifteenth floor and climbs down.”
“The man’s not a fool. What makes you think he’ll try for you if he knows it’s a trap?” Zahedi questioned.
The Kuwaitis were especially nervous having the Iranian officer here. But they all regarded him with respect. They’d seen his impressive file.
“Because he’s arrogant, and because he knows he can even the odds,” Lane explained.
“How?” Trilby shot back.
“I don’t know yet,” Lane admitted. “But if he shows up, it’ll mean he has a plan.”
“If it was me I’d cut the power and phones to this floor,” Zahedi said.
“That’s a start,” Lane agreed. “We’ll station a man in the basement where the power and telephone distribution equipment is probably located.”
“How about the roof?” Trilby suggested. “If he could get that far and take out our chopper pilot he might be able to rappel down to us. It’s only five floors.”
“Put an extra man up there too.”
“Air-conditioning ducts, service elevator, pipe and cable runs?”
“You have the manpower.”
“We’ll have to call in some extras—”
“No,” Lane interrupted. “No calls out of here. No one can know what we’re doing.”
“But it’ll leave this floor practically unguarded,” the NSA special agent protested.
“You’re right, and he’ll know it,” Lane said. “When he has all of your people spotted, he’ll make his move. Colonel Zahedi and I will be waiting for him.”
“You’re setting yourself up as bait,” Trilby said. “But we’ll have every possibility covered. He’ll never get to you.”
“Yes he will,” Lane said. “Because he’s already figured out a way in here that we haven’t come up with.”
“He won’t get in here unless he’s invisible,” Trilby said, exasperated.
“Then maybe that’s what he’ll do.”
ABOARD THE FAILAKA FERRY
The ferry was ten minutes late leaving the island dock for the mainland, and the handful of passengers who’d come over to see the sights were getting restless.
NSA field operative George Straite and his Kuwaiti partner, Ibn Salem, due to escort the last load back to the mainland, waited at the rail. Straite smoked a cigarette as he peered at the pilothouse on the upper level.
There was no one up there that he could see. He hadn’t paid much attention to the crew, but he didn’t think the pilot had gotten off.
“Is there something wrong?” Salem asked respectfully. The NSA field officers were better than any of the CIA bunch he’d worked with in the past. Sharper, more professional. Although he did not like foreigners in his homeland, he was learning a great deal about security procedures that would one day stand him in good stead with his superiors. He wanted eventually to head the Special Palace Guards, a position of great importance and respect.
“We’re late, and no one seems to be minding the store.”
Salem’s eyes followed Straite’s gaze to the pilothouse. “A mechanical problem?”
“Maybe.” Straite flipped his cigarette into the water and leaned his beefy frame out over the rail so that he could see the stern of the boat. The car ramp was up, but the line tenders stood idly by waiting for orders.
They’d wanted to close the island to any public traffic, but the Kuwaiti government wouldn’t bend that far. Instead they’d offered security help all over the island, as well as aboard the ferry, which made the one-hour trip four times a day. The hovercraft that had also serviced the island had been discontinued after the war. Private watercraft or aircraft were forbidden to approach within the one-mile exclusion zone.
Straite looked at his partner. “Cover my back while I go up and take a look.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Yeah,” Straite said. He went upstairs to the empty open deck, then took out his pistol and climbed the ladder to the pilothouse deck, his movements surprisingly light and graceful for a man of his size.
The pilot lay facedown in front of the control panel in a pool of blood, the back of his head wet, his hair matted around a small black hole.
“Shit,” Straite swore. He scrambled down the ladder and took the stairs to the main deck two at a time.
“What is it?” Salem asked, alarmed.
“The pilot is dead,” Straite explained, keeping his voice low so no one else could hear him. He didn’t want a panic among the passengers. “Radio the house and tell them we’re on the way back.”
Salem keyed the walkie-talkie as he fell in behind Straite, who headed toward the stern where they could get off the boat.
“Abel unit, this is Baker Three, incoming with a red star express.” It was the code phrase for imminent trouble.
“Roger, Baker Three, understood. Do you need any help?”
“Negatory,” Salem radioed, using the American vernacular even though he recognized the voice at the house as a fellow Kuwaiti security officer. “We’re coming in. Watch yourself.”
34
KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL HOTEL
Valeri Yernin, dressed in a shirt and tie and a dark windbreaker, listened on a telephone in a room at the end of the corridor from Lane’s suite. The handset was connected to the line through a sophisticated processor that allowed him to hear what was going on in any room on this floor.
A toolbox marked AT&T KUWAIT sat on the floor at his feet. He’d snuck into the hotel through a basement service entrance and hidden himself on the fourteenth floor early this afternoon, as soon as he learned that Lane was laying a trap instead of remaining on the island with Frances Shipley. It had taken him nearly four hours to set everything up for his countertrap, and he’d almost been caught. He had to take a lot of chances, but the prize was worth it.
Yernin had heard everything said in Lane’s suite, and he knew with a sickening feeling that he would be hard-pressed to get out of here in one piece, let alone make an attempt on Lane’s life.
To this point Maslennikov’s source had been infallible. But Lane’s last-minute change in plans had come as a complete, disturbing surprise. Perhaps he had underestimated the man after all.
Maslennikov had given him fair warning. Twice. But the American was nothing more than an analyst. A desk jockey. An observer, not a field man.
Still, Lane had come close to ruining everything on the train from Richmond. And he’d gotten surprisingly far in Iran for someone who was supposedly nothing more than an academic.
The stairwells were being watched now, as were the elevator shafts and pipe and cable runs that connected the hotel’s services to each floor.
But Lane’s security people were watching for someone to get onto this floor, from either above or below, not get off.
Killing Lane here and now would be desirable. But if he could get to the woman and kill her, or even hold her hostage, Lane would drop everything and come after him. Men driven by such passions usually were prone to big mistakes. Fatal mistakes.
However, if a shot were to present itself to him, he would not hesitate to take it. His primary goal before anything else was to kill Bill Lane.
Making his decision, he entered a code on his laptop processor that automatically routed a telephone call from his room through the switching network downstairs to a repeater somewhere in the city that in turn relayed his call to a transmitter on a specially scrambled radio frequency. The call bypassed the hotel’s switchboard, its point of origin masked.
The connection was made in under five seconds. He pushed a talk button.
“Units one through four, are you in place? Overseer requests.”
“Aywa Whad.” Yes one.
“Aywa Itnn.” Yes two.
“ywa Thaltha.” Yes three.
“Aywa rb’a.” Yes four.
“Remain in position. I’m coming over in a chopper. Do you understand?”
“Aywa,” the one he recognized as the group leader, Captain Ahmad Barzani, replied tersely. The Mukabarat field leader was a capable man with a lot of imagination. His troops loved him. He would do as he was told so long as it was practicable, though he would not risk his command. There were too few of his people left.
“If I’m not there within twenty minutes, proceed with your primary mission.”
“As you wish, In sha’Allah.”
Yes, pray to your God, Yernin thought. In the end it may be all that is left for you and the madman you choose to follow.
He broke the connection, then hit a series of keys on the processor, which would block all calls to or from this floor.
Next he screwed the silencer on his gun, checked the load, and made sure he had two extra eighteen-round magazines of 9mm ammunition in his jacket pocket, and the nine-inch stiletto under his left arm.
Finally, he hit another series of keys on the processor unit, punched in a thirty-second delay, and touched the Enter key.
A signal was sent to the electrical distribution system in the basement where the main circuit breaker relays were put on hold for thirty seconds before they would shut down.
He turned off the room lights, listened a few moments at the door, then unlocked it and eased it open a crack. One man stood at the stairwell door at the end of the corridor. No one else was in sight.
Yernin turned back and glanced at the processor’s luminous screen. The unit counted down past ten.
At zero the lights throughout the hotel went out, plunging the entire complex into darkness for a few seconds before emergency lighting would take over everywhere except this floor.
Yernin stepped out into the pitch-black corridor and, trailing his left hand along the wall silently, made his way to the stairwell door.
He stopped, sensing that someone was very close ahead. It was aftershave lotion, and some other smell. Gun oil, Yernin thought. His sense of smell was sharp.
“Charlie, watch yourself back there,” a voice came from a radio less than one meter from where Yernin stood.
A tiny red light winked on at about eye level. It was the walkie-talkie’s transmit light. The stairwell guard was holding it up to his mouth.
“I can’t see a thing,” the guard whispered.
“The emergency lights will be on any second.”
Yernin crouched down and aimed up and to the left of the red light. He cupped his left hand over the gun’s receiver to catch the spent shell, and fired. The sound of the silenced shot was soft, certainly not audible from much more than a few meters away. But the guard grunted loudly, and fell backwards into the stairwell.
Yernin jumped over the guard’s body, tossed the hot shell casing down to the next landing, picked up the walkie-talkie, and silently took the stairs up, two at a time.
“We’re coming out,” Lane shouted, racing down the still dark corridor from his suite. Something was wrong with the emergency lights.
He and Zahedi had been studying the hotel’s engineering diagrams, which one of the Kuwaiti security people had supplied. When the lights went out he rushed to the door and tore it open but hesitated on the threshold. Anyone moving around out there would be a target.
Zahedi was behind him, his gun drawn, when they heard the noise at the end of the corridor and recognized it for what it was.
“Trilby,” Lane shouted.
“At the elevators,” the NSA special agent answered.
“Everybody else stay in position,” Lane shouted. “Someone call for backup.”
“Phones are out,” one of Trilby’s men shouted from the right.
Keeping low, Lane zigzagged from one side of the corridor to the other as he ran, trailing first his left and then his right hand against the walls to guide him.
Coming around a corner, he skidded to a halt and fell back, Zahedi right on top of him. The west emergency door was open and lights were back on in the stairwell.
From where Lane crouched he could make out the figure of the downed security agent, his legs holding the door open.
Trilby came up behind them a second later. “The Ukrainian’s on this floor!”
Something didn’t set right with Lane. “Maybe,” he said, studying the open door. “He didn’t come past you?”
“Not unless he was a ghost,” Trilby replied.
“Maybe not a ghost, but he was invisible,” Lane said. Something still nagged at the back of his head. “Start your people checking the rooms one by one, and tell them to be careful for booby traps.”
“Right,” the NSA special agent said, falling back.
“He might still be in the stairwell,” Zahedi suggested.
“Cover me,” Lane instructed, and before the Iranian could object, he dashed to the end of the corridor, keeping low and zigzagging.
At the door he flattened himself against the wall, took a quick look inside the stairwell, then ducked back.
The downed agent had been shot just below his jaw, the bullet probably crashing directly into his brain, killing him instantly. He’d been shot by someone standing below him. On the landing.
