Kilo Option, page 25
He looked back at Zahedi, his eyes straying to the emergency lights near the ceiling. Why weren’t they working?
Holding his Beretta in both hands, he spun around the corner into the stairwell, jumping over the special agent’s body. He swung the gun in a tight arc down the stairs, then spun on his heel and covered the flight up.
Nothing moved. Nor was there any indication that anyone had come this way except for the dead man.
“Lane?” Zahedi called softly.
Lane gestured for him to hold back. Something wasn’t right here, damnit. He felt like an absolute fool for not seeing what it was.
He moved down to the next landing, swinging his gun in a tight arc. As before, there was no movement.
Turning to start back up, his eye strayed to a shell casing lying on the floor. He picked it up. Standard 9mm. Same caliber Yernin used in Norfolk, which meant nothing. Except that the casing was on the lower landing. Meant Yernin stood down here and fired up at the guard. Meant he could have used night vision goggles.
Meant he knew the lights were going out and how long they’d stay out, because he’d engineered it that way.
It struck Lane all at once. If Yernin had engineered the lights to go out, it meant he’d had a head start. It meant that, once again, someone had fed him information.
Lane raced up the stairs to the fourteenth floor. The emergency lights still hadn’t come on.
Yernin had been here on this floor sometime this morning, or maybe early this afternoon, before Trilby and his people showed up. The dead guard and the shell casing on the landing were a ruse.
Yernin had waited for them. But something happened to make him change his mind. So he’d shot the guard and gotten out.
It meant that somehow he’d overheard the briefing Lane had given the others in the suite.
“Are the phones still out?” Lane demanded as he raced down the corridor.
“So far as I know,” Zahedi said.
“In here,” one of Trilby’s men shouted from one of the rooms.
The curtains had been thrown back. The light from outside was enough that they could see the laptop computer.
“It’s hooked to the phone line,” the agent said. “But the program running now is apparently holding back electrical power from this floor.”
Trilby came pounding up the corridor. “He’s not here,” he shouted, pulling up short at the open door.
“He was here all along,” Lane said. “And he heard that we were changing plans, so he got out.”
“I’ve got a man in the basement. Maybe he can intercept the son of a bitch before he gets out of the hotel.” Trilby pulled the small walkie-talkie out of his pocket. “Stewart, do you copy?”
“Roger.”
“Yernin’s on his way down. Get up to the west stairwell door in the lobby as fast as you can. If you see him, shoot to kill. We’ll be right behind him so look sharp.”
“Roger that. I’m on my way.”
Lane was staring at Trilby. “Do all your people carry walkie-talkies?”
Trilby nodded. “Us and the Kuwaitis.”
Lane pushed past the startled special agent and went back to the stairwell where he quickly searched the dead agent’s body.
The others followed him.
“He knows everything,” Lane said.
“Sir?” Trilby asked.
“He took this man’s walkie-talkie.”
Trilby looked at his own radio. They’d been outmaneuvered.
Lane grabbed the walkie-talkie from the agent and keyed the transmit button. “Yernin, you bastard, I’m coming after you. Just you and me. You name the spot.”
There was nothing but the soft hiss of a dead channel.
“Yernin, I’m coming,” Lane said in Russian. “We know what you took from the navy’s Honolulu computer.”
“Fuck you,” Yernin’s voice came from the tiny speaker, his transmission distorted.
It sounded to Lane like the Ukrainian was inside a waterfall.
Yernin keyed his radio again. This time he merely laughed. But again they heard the waterfall distortion.
“Where is he?” Trilby asked.
The special agent who’d discovered the processor on the phone shrugged. “Wherever he is, it’s windy.”
“The roof,” Lane said. He bolted up the stairs in a dead run, the others directly behind him.
NSA Special Agent Dan Restormal took a couple of steps toward the rooftop door and started to raise his walkie-talkie when a thunderclap burst inside his head.
Yernin slipped out of the shadows behind the helicopter, yanked open the passenger-side door, and climbed inside.
The pilot reached for his gun, but Yernin placed the muzzle of his pistol against the side of the man’s head.
“You have less than thirty seconds to start this machine and get away from here before I kill you. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three …” Yernin started the countdown.
The pilot was convinced. He flipped on the master switch, auxiliary fuel pump, turbocharger boost pump, and then turned the key. The Jet Ranger’s engines spooled up slowly, the power indicators finally rising to the green.
Still holding the gun to the pilot’s head, Yernin watched the west stairwell door.
“You’re running out of time.”
The door started to come open.
Yernin slid the window back and got off two shots, then turned back to the pilot.
“Lift off or die. Now!”
The helicopter lurched off the roof, then dove over the edge toward the east as it picked up speed. The last Yernin saw of the rooftop, the stairwell door was coming open again and several men were piling out.
35
FAILAKA ISLAND SAFE HOUSE
Night had already fallen by the time George Straite and Ibn Salem reached the safe house from the ferry.
On the way up they were stopped twice for identification; once on the road leading up to the house, then at the hundred-meter perimeter.
Hughes and Dick Scott, who was the number-two man in the NSA special detail, waited at the front door.
“The ferryboat pilot was shot to death, but apparently none of the passengers saw or heard a thing,” Straite told them. “I figured we’d better get back as soon as possible. Is everything okay here?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “We spotted a big powerboat in the bay this afternoon. Supposedly rented by a CNN crew. But Mr. Hughes called a friend of his at CNN. It’s not theirs.”
“It was the Natalee, a forty-five-footer, Kuwaiti registry,” Hughes said. “White hull, blue canvas on her superstructure. Did you see anything like that in the harbor?”
“No, sir,” Straite said.
“Well, she’s gone now.”
“I might have believed it was nothing, until the incident on the ferry,” Scott admitted. “I’ve doubled up the outside positions, but we’re getting stretched pretty thin.”
“How about Mr. Lane and our people at the hotel?” Straite asked. He was getting a creepy feeling between his shoulder blades. They all were.
“We can’t get through to them,” Hughes said. “Problem with the phones. The CIA is sending someone across the street to the hotel to find out what the hell is going on. So for the moment we’re on our own.”
“What about the navy?”
“They’re standing by,” Scott said.
“For how long?” Straite asked.
“Until we don’t need them any longer,” Hughes shot back.
“Sorry, sir. I just wanted to know how to pace my people. They can’t all work twenty-four hours a day.”
“I just don’t know,” Hughes admitted. He went to the window and looked outside. “But my gut tells me whatever it is will happen sometime tonight.”
“Good enough for me, sir,” Straite said. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”
“Better send for a new ferryboat pilot. I’d rather not have those passengers wandering around the island.”
The last of a series of four clicks sounded in Captain Ahmad Barzani’s ear where he lay with the three other men in his squad a few meters from the inner perimeter checkpoint. It meant that the other three Mukabarat commando units were in place around the island.
They were dressed head to toe in black ninja night-fighter bodysuits, their faces blackened. They were equipped with night vision goggles which made the night seem like ghostly day, giving them the advantage over the American and Kuwaiti guards. The only weapons they carried were suppressed .22-caliber automatic pistols with folding shoulder stocks, scopes, and sixty-round magazines. Since most security people wore Kevlar body vests, Hussein’s special commando units were trained to make only head shots. Their Ukrainian instructors were the best, and tonight’s assault team was the crème de la crème.
They had come over from the mainland a few at a time aboard the ferry, while out in the bay a cruiser provided a diversion for them. The only mistake so far had been killing the ferryboat pilot. But the man had apparently once lived and worked in Baghdad, and had recognized one of Barzani’s team members.
Unfortunately it had drawn the American and Kuwaiti officers aboard the ferry back to the house, and now the island’s defenders were alerted that something was about to happen.
“In sha’Allah,” Barzani whispered to himself. If it was Allah’s will that they all die here on this godforsaken rock, then so be it. Each of them had a price on his head with the puppet government in Baghdad. They would die here sooner, or home later; it did not matter. Martyrdom would be theirs.
Barzani motioned for his number two, Mubarak al-Hadr, to look at the checkpoint where two men leaned against a humvee parked across the narrow road.
Hadr studied the situation for a second, then turned back and nodded.
Barzani motioned for Hadr to take out the guard on the right, on three.
Again Hadr nodded. He brought his weapon up, centered the scope on the head of the man to the right, a Kuwaiti, and made his count. “One … two … three.”
He fired at the same moment as Barzani, the shots barely audible as soft pops. Both guards crumpled where they stood, neat round holes in the exact centers of their foreheads.
Barzani keyed his walkie-talkie once, indicating to the other teams that he had taken out his objective. Within the next five seconds the other teams responded in kind. The inner perimeter around the house had been secured.
“Get one of their walkie-talkies,” he told Hadr.
Hughes went to the upstairs sitting room where Frances Shipley, dressed in a robe, stood at the window watching the lights out at sea. A fire burned in the fireplace, and the Gallic singer Enya’s voice came from the stereo. The scene was domestic and Western, anything but Arabic. Which was at the heart of our troubles out here, Hughes thought.
“Close the curtains and step away from the window like a dear, would you please?” Hughes said.
She turned, startled, and let the heavy curtains fall back. “Do you think Hussein has sent his assassins here?”
“It is a distinct possibility.”
“Tonight? This moment?”
“Unfortunately, yes. There was an incident aboard the last ferry. The pilot was killed.”
Her gray-blue eyes narrowed. “Has Bill been informed?”
“There’s a problem with the telephones at the hotel. Nothing uncommon. But we’ve asked the CIA to send somebody over to check it out.”
“Have you called for the navy to backstop us?” Frances asked.
“We don’t think it’s necessary yet. No reason to get anybody riled up. But they’re standing by, so if we should need help it’s not far off.”
“Coming after Bill and me is not simple revenge,” she said. “We’re interfering with their plans somehow, and they want us stopped.”
“I agree. But I think that if we can sting them by eliminating their mentor, Comrade Yernin, it might give them pause.”
Again her eyes narrowed. “But we are in this for revenge, Thomas? Is that what you’re saying?”
Hughes gave her a sad look. “William is a man with an extraordinary sense of honor. Right versus wrong. Good versus evil.”
“He’s no Boy Scout,” Frances flared.
Hughes smiled. “Heaven forbid. But Valeri Yernin has to be stopped. William has set himself to do it.”
“It’ll get him killed.”
“Perhaps it will,” Hughes replied coolly. “In the meantime I thought it best that you be forewarned. I suggest that you get dressed. I assume you can handle a gun?”
“Yes.”
“When you’re ready join us downstairs, I’ll have one for you.”
She stopped him at the door. “Tom?”
He turned back. “Yes.”
“It’s just that I love him,” she said.
Hughes smiled gently. “I know, dear. So do I.”
36
KUWAIT INTERNATIONAL HOTEL
On the roof, Lane and the others watched the helicopter turn north, directly across Kuwait Bay, and hit the deck so that it skimmed the surface of the water. Then its lights went out and they lost it in the confusion of the lights on the ships and oil platforms out there.
“The border with Iraq is less than fifty miles away,” Trilby said. “They can make it in twenty minutes unless we ask the air force to shoot it down.”
“The pilot would be killed,” one of the special agents said.
“Yernin will kill him anyway,” Trilby replied bitterly.
The inside information Yernin was getting was good, almost too good, Lane thought. Very few people had known the setup at the hotel. Yet the assassin had found out soon enough to beat Trilby’s people. Yernin knew that Lane would be here just as he knew that Frances was at the island safe house.
“Is this operation over with now?” Zahedi asked with a smirk. “Are you going to let him go?”
“He’s not going to Iraq,” Lane said, turning toward the stairs. Someone was on the way up.
“He’d be a fool to try anything else,” Trilby said, but then a funny look came over his face. “Failaka? Do you think that the son of a bitch is going to the island? He’ll be dead meat once he sets down.”
“He has help,” Lane said.
Two men in suits came through the door, paused to take in the situation, then approached Lane and the others.
“One of you guys named Lane?” the taller, darker of the two men asked.
“Me,” Lane said.
“Tom Hughes asked us to check out what’s going on. The hotel’s phone lines are down, all the power was out, and there’s a dead guy with National Security Agency ID down on the fourteenth-floor landing.”
“Did Hughes say that he needed help?”
The man shook his head. “No. But when we tried to confirm who the hell he was, we couldn’t. He’s on Failaka, we got that much, but the phones out there are dead too. What the hell is going on? Nobody said anything to us about any operation.”
“I’ll explain later,” Lane said. “I assume you’re CIA. Do you have access to a helicopter, and I mean right now? Something with radio gear we can raise the navy on?”
“Hold on, cowboy. We’re just embassy security from across the street. How about some ID?”
“I’m Bill Lane and I’m with the National Security Agency, as are some of these gentlemen. Some of the others are Kuwaiti Special Palace Guard officers. And this gentleman”—Lane pointed to Zahedi—“is a colonel in the Iranian secret service. What’s more, I’m not a cowboy, and unless you move your ass, some friends of mine might get hurt. And I would take that personally.”
The man’s eyes went wide. “You’re that Bill Lane,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He stuck out his hand. “Chad Thomas.”
He motioned to the other man. “My partner, Art Hager.”
Lane ignored the outstretched hand. “Can you get us a chopper?”
“Five minutes,” Hager said. “Right here be okay?”
“That’ll do,” Lane said.
Hager stepped to one side and said something into a lapel mike.
“Mr. Lane, are you expecting an attack on our sovereign lands?” one of the Kuwaiti officers asked suddenly. He did not look happy.
“It’s possibly already in progress. Someone may have come ashore on Failaka.”
The Kuwaiti’s jaw tightened. He glanced at Zahedi with hate. Not many people in Kuwait liked the Iranians.
“Would they be Iraqis? Saddam Hussein’s terrorists?”
“It’s likely.”
“Why wasn’t my government informed of this?”
“You’re here. You must have been told something.”
The Kuwaiti glanced at Zahedi again, then at the others. “Our part in this operation is over. Take your helicopter to Failaka and evacuate your people—all of your people—immediately out of Kuwait. I don’t care where.”
“You don’t have the authority,” Trilby sputtered.
The Kuwaiti puffed up. “I am an Al-Sabah. My uncle is the emir. You will all leave my country before this night is over.”
He and the other Kuwaiti security people stalked off.
“That one will cause you trouble,” Thomas cautioned.
Lane stared at him. “It won’t matter if everyone on the island is already dead.”
FAILAKA ISLAND
The helicopter pilot was very good. He managed to hold the machine barely two meters off the surface of the water at full throttle all the way across from the mainland.
They approached the island from the southeast, which put them on the opposite side from the house and ferry dock. There was a surveillance post on the coast, but Yernin was certain that Barzani had taken it out by now.
He switched the helicopter’s radio to Captain Barzani’s frequency.
“Unit One, what is your situation? Overseer requests.”
“We’re inside the inner perimeter.”
“Is it safe to land?”
“Yes. But you will alert the house.”
