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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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A military vehicle crested the road that came up from the main part of the base, and headed directly toward Camp Delta, the headlights briefly sweeping across the field where al-Habib and the others crouched.
“Yalla!”
al-Habib whispered, his heart in his throat.
Let’s go!
“What the hell is that?” Talarico demanded urgently. They had just reached the top of the hill and were heading toward Camp Delta’s main gate. Gloria was behind the wheel of a Humvee from the base motor pool.
“What was what?” Gloria turned to him. He was pointing off toward the edge of the hill that plunged down to sea level.
“Four or five people, maybe more,” he said. “Black outfits, but at least three were wearing orange.” There was the hint of amazement in his voice. “You were right, it’s a prison break.”
“Goddammit to hell,” Gloria said. She hauled the all-terrain vehicle off the road in the direction Talarico had pointed, and pulled up short, in a hail of dust and loose rocks. Nothing showed up in the headlights except for the open field that dropped off about thirty meters away. “Are you sure, Bob?”
Talarico grabbed a flashlight off its bracket on the hump and jumped out of the vehicle. “I saw something out there,” he called back through the open door. He directed the narrow beam across the field, on either side of the swath cast by the Humvee’s headlights, then slowly followed it back toward the Camp Echo facility.
“There!” he shouted. He pulled out his pistol and headed in a dead run around the front of the Humvee back to the ditch beside the road directly in front of Echo, where two figures lay facedown.
Gloria jumped out of the Humvee and yanked the walkie-talkie from her belt clip with one hand, and her 0.45in. ACP MK 23 (SOCOM) pistol from the quick-draw holster at the small of her back, her attention directed across the field.
“They’re dead!” Talarico shouted.
Gloria glanced at him. He was hunched over the two bodies. “Our guys?”
“MPs,” Talarico said, straightening up. “I’m guessing Echo guards. They’ve been shot in the head.”
Gloria motioned toward the drop-off across the field and she headed out. She keyed the walkie-talkie. “TAC One, TAC One, this is a Red Release. I repeat, a Red Release, looks like from Echo. They’re already over the hill.”
Talarico had started after her, keeping a few meters to the left. He’d switched off the flashlight.
“Who’s on this channel?” the on-duty Security Ops officer came back. He sounded harried with all that was happening along the northeastern perimeter.
“Ibenez. I’m with Talarico. We’re on your special ops duty roster,” she radioed back. The Cubans probably monitored all the non-secure channels, but it would take time for someone to figure out she was on their hit list. “You have two friendlies down outside Echo right now. About two minutes ago we spotted two or more figures in black, going over the crest of the hill to the east, with three or more guys in orange pj’s. Copy?”
“Roger, copy that,” the OD radioed back. “What’s your ten-twenty?”
“We’re in pursuit about twenty-five meters out,” Gloria responded. “Standby one.” She motioned for Talarico to hold up just before the edge of the drop-off. She didn’t want either of them to get shot by a rear guard waiting for them to show themselves.
She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the edge, where she got on her belly. For a second or two she couldn’t see any movement. A guard tower about sixty or seventy meters directly below was dark, as were the towers to the north, and the one to the south just above the beach.
But then she spotted several figures, maybe half of them in black, and the other half in orange, scurrying across the no-man’s zone where they disappeared one at a time into a tunnel under the fence. She keyed the walkie-talkie.
“TAC One, I count at least four POWs and four bad guys just going through a tunnel under the east perimeter fence, a few hundred meters off the beach.”
“The guy in the tower’s got to be asleep,” Talarico said.
“Or dead,” Gloria replied. She spotted a movement on the other side of the fence, and she keyed her walkie-talkie. “TAC One, they’re out.”
“Roger that,” the OD replied. He sounded disgusted. “It’s not our problem now. If they reach the beach the Coasties will be on them. I have people coming your way. Stand by.”
“Bullshit,” Gloria radioed.
“They’re in Cuba!” the OD came back. “We can’t do diddly.”
Gloria jumped to her feet and started down the steep slope, Talarico right behind her. “We’re going after them,” she radioed. “Tell your tower guards we’re on our way. And warm up a chopper, we might need a quick extraction.”
“The beach will be crawling with Frontier Brigade—”
“Negative. I’m betting that they’re all on the northeast perimeter.”
Gloria clipped the walkie-talkie to her belt, and at the bottom she and Talarico crossed the no-man’s zone to the drainage culvert. She motioned for him to hold up, as she cautiously peered into the tunnel. It was possible that the POWs and whoever had sprung them knew they were being pursued, and had stationed someone at the other end.
“You sure we want to do this?” Talarico whispered urgently.
The tunnel was empty. Gloria could see a circle of dim light on the other side. She looked up at her partner. “Why’d they go through the trouble to stage a jail break from Echo when most of those guys are scheduled for release anyway? Unless someone didn’t want us to talk to them.”
He immediately saw her point. “What are we waiting for?”
Gloria nodded. He was a good man; smart, talented, and she had a lot of respect for him. He had a couple of kids and a successful marriage, which was something of a rarity for a field officer. She envied his wife. She ducked into the tunnel and scurried through to the other side, holding up once again at the opening to make sure she wasn’t leading them into an ambush.
The night on this side of the base was quiet. During a momentary lull in the small-arms fire to the north, Gloria was certain she heard something out ahead to the south; someone running through loose gravel.
Talarico was at her shoulder. He’d heard it too. “They’re heading for the beach.”
Gloria grabbed the walkie-talkie and called the OD. “TAC One, this is Ibenez. They’re trying for the beach. We’re going after them, but you’d better give the Coast Guard the heads-up.”
“Stand down, Ibenez, that’s an order direct from Commander Weiss. He’s en route your position.”
“Negative, negative,” Gloria radioed back. “I want a chopper standing by, ASAP.” She switched off the radio, crawled out of the tunnel, and headed south along the perimeter fence, keeping her pistol at her side, the muzzle pointed slightly away from her leg.
The timing of the breakout bothered her almost as much as the professionalism. They’d known the exact route to Camp Echo, which meant there had to be prisoners they wanted out
before
the CIA could get to them. It was driving her nuts to think that not only were the Cubans cooperating with al-Quaida, but that there might be someone inside Gitmo on the payroll as well.
Talarico fanned out to the left, slightly behind her, his pistol in hand.
They moved quickly, and as noiselessly as possible, stopping every few dozen meters to listen.
One hundred meters from the drainage tunnel, Gloria spotted the silhouettes of a small group of figures moving south, at the same moment one of them, dressed in black, turned around. She pulled up short and motioned for Talarico to stop.
For several seconds the main body of the escaping prisoners continued toward the beach, while the one figure remained where he stood, thirty or forty meters out. He dropped to one knee and raised something in front of him.
All of a sudden Gloria realized that the son of a bitch was armed and was about to shoot at them. “Down!” she shouted to her partner.
The black-clad figure opened fire with what sounded to Gloria like a small-caliber suppressed carbine of some sort.
She squatted to a shooter’s stance, brought her pistol up, thumbed the safety catch to the off position, and started firing.
The range was all but impossible under the conditions, but the noise from her unsilenced pistol was impressive. A lot of people on
both
sides of the fence had just been put on notice that the battle had shifted here from the northeastern perimeter.
Talarico opened fire, as several other black-clad figures turned and returned fire.
She dropped to the ground, and continued firing, until her weapon went dry. Talarico suddenly cried out and went down. But there was no time to help him. This was her fault, because she had been stupid; she hadn’t counted on them being so heavily armed. She ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare from her back pocket, and rammed it home. The returning fire was starting to concentrate on her now, rock chips flying all over the place from near misses.
She rolled left as she continued to fire.
A helicopter swooped down from the crest of the Camp Delta hill with a deep-throated clatter of its rotors, its spotlight cutting a broad swath down the slope, across the fence, and along the no-man’s zone. Gloria and Talarico were briefly illuminated, but then the knot of black-clad shooters and prisoners dressed in orange was lit like day.
Spotlights in the guard towers all along the perimeter fence came on and a lot of sirens started blaring up and down the line.
The Boeing MH-6J chopper peeled off to the east, firing a spray of 7.62mm rounds from both of its miniguns, bracketing the escaping prisoners.
At least one of them raised his weapon and fired at the helicopter, but the rest of them concentrated their fire on Gloria.
Something blunt hit her hard, like a baseball bat, in the left hip, and her leg went instantly numb. She squeezed off two more shots, and one of the POWs in orange went down.
The chopper was coming around for a second pass when two of the black-clad figures suddenly turned and started shooting the POWs.
Gloria propped herself up with her good leg so she could get a better look. It made no sense that they would kill one another.
The helicopter pulled up short in a hover twenty or thirty meters away, its spotlight illuminating the scene like day. All of the POWs were down. One of the black-clad figures looked up, shook his fist at the chopper, and suddenly disappeared in a bright flash-bang, the noise hammering off the side of the hill.
Gloria’s mouth dropped open. He’d killed the POWs he’d come to rescue, rather than let them be recaptured, and then had committed suicide.
She pulled out her walkie-talkie to warn the chopper pilot to stay back, when the other three black-clad figures disappeared like the first in flash-bangs, blowing themselves up.
Moments later the chopper came back and set down hard ten meters from where Gloria was up on one knee. Two armed men in Marine Corps BDUs sitting in the starboard doorway jumped out and raced back to her.
“We’re going to have company real soon, ma’am,” one of them said, hauling Gloria to her feet. His sewn name tag read JONES.
The other marine had dropped beside Talarico, who lay facedown in the sand. He looked up and shook his head.
“Okay, we’re outta here—now,” Jones said urgently.
“We’re not leaving Bob,” Gloria said, pulling away.
“We’ve got a Frontier Brigade patrol just about on top of us, and we’re
not
allowed to shoot at them—”
“We’re not leaving my partner!” Gloria shouted.
Jones slung his weapon, hustled Gloria over to where Talarico lay, and between him and his partner dragged the body back to the chopper. They stuffed it unceremoniously inside, then helped Gloria up onto the sill.
The instant the marines were aboard, the chopper pilot hauled the machine airborne and immediately peeled to the west, just clearing the razor wire atop the perimeter fence, before climbing steeply to the crest of the Delta hill.
Gloria held tightly to Talarico’s lifeless body, his half-open eyes staring up at her, his face unnaturally white. She had killed him as surely as if she had shot him herself. Her heart was sick just thinking what she would have to tell his wife. It was a part of the business they were in; some of her friends had bought it in Afghanistan and Iraq. And her own husband had been tortured to death in a Cuban Intelligence Service prison outside Havana. She knew about loss.
But this time she had been the one in charge; this time the responsibility had rested on her shoulders.
 
 
CABIMAS, VENEZUELA
No one looked twice at the Russian sea captain as he got out of his cab in front of the Cabimas Hotel Internacional, paid the fare, and headed toward the lobby. Nor did any of the smartly uniformed bellmen stationed at the front doors offer to help with his battered leather satchel and matching garment bag. He smiled inwardly. He was used to such treatment, he didn’t have the look of a successful man. And this was a busy town of important oil executives, heavy hitters, big money.
He had the typical broad shoulders and barrel chest of a Great Russian, but his face was surprisingly round, with a delicate nose and soft, almost dreamy eyes under short dark hair that made him look like a poet-soldier. He carried his five-feet-ten like a man long accustomed to being at sea; on the balls of his feet, as if he were constantly working to keep a perfect balance.
The captain entered the deluxe hotel, and crossed the busy lobby to stand in line at the registration desk. He’d never stayed here before, but the woman at GAC-Vensport had booked a suite for him. Nothing but first class for the new captain of the Panamax oil tanker
Apurto Devlán.
In the morning he would be helicoptered out to his ship, currently loading crude, but this evening he would live in the lap of luxury and enjoy it.
When it was the captain’s turn, one of the clerks, a haughty young man in a crisply tailored blue blazer, motioned him up to the desk. “Do you have reservations?”
“Yes,” the captain said. He smiled faintly. Aboard his crude carrier he would be the undisputed lord and master, but the moment he stepped ashore and interacted with civilians he became a nobody. His wife, Tania, back in St. Petersburg, bought him expensive clothes in Helsinki and Paris, but on him even designer labels looked shabby.
He handed over his Russian passport, which identified him as Grigoriy Ivanovich Slavin.
The clerk handled the passport as if he thought his hands would get dirty. He glanced at the photograph and looked up at Slavin. All of a sudden something apparently dawned on him, because his face fell. He laid the passport down and quickly typed something into his computer. He looked up again, a broad smile plastered across his stricken features. “
Captain
Slavin, we were not expecting you so early.”
“Well, I’m here,” Slavin said. “Is my room ready, or will I have to wait?”
“Of course not, sir. Your
suite
is at your immediate disposal.” The clerk laid a registration card on the counter and handed Slavin a pen. “If you will sign in, sir, I’ll have your bags taken up and personally escort you.”
“Not necessary,” Slavin said curtly. He signed the card and laid the pen on the counter. He preferred being a nobody ashore, because he didn’t like being fawned over. Aboard ship he gave orders and his officers and crew followed them. No questions, no bargaining, no diplomacy. It was the discipline he enjoyed.
The clerk handed back his passport, and motioned for a young, handsome bellman, who scurried over from the bell station near the front doors. The clerk passed him a plastic key card. “Take
Capitano
Slavin’s bags to the Bolívar Suite.”
“It’s not necessary,” Slavin growled.
The clerk was suddenly nervous. “Sir, it’s hotel policy for all VIP guests. GAC-Vensport expects no less from us.” His rigid smile broadened. The company was responsible for all of Venezuela’s oil shipping, which was the major source of the nation’s income. It was big.
Slavin remembered one of the old Russian proverbs his
babushka
used to use when the family was poor.
We’re all related, the same sun dries our rags.
He nodded.
“Da.”
The clerk gave him a relieved look and he came around from behind the counter as the bellman disappeared with Slavin’s bags. “Just this way, sir,” he said, and he escorted the captain across the soaring atrium lobby to a bank of elevators.
“A helicopter is coming for me at oh-eight-hundred.”
“Yes, sir, we’ll let you know when it’s twenty minutes out,” the clerk said. The hotel provided helicopter service with Maracaibo’s La Chinita
Airport eight minutes away, and to the ships loading at fueling platforms out in the lake.
Slavin was impressed despite himself. In the Russian navy such perks were reserved for flag officers, and during his eleven-year career in the merchant marine he’d never had the privilege of such treatment. At 275 meters on the waterline with a beam of nearly forty-four meters, his new command, the
Apurto Devlán,
was the largest crude carrier that could transit the Panama Canal, and the largest and most important vessel he’d ever been given responsibility for. He’d transited the canal ten times before aboard smaller ships, three times as skipper of container vessels, but being helicoptered out to a ship of his own would be a first. He decided that he would try to loosen up and savor the moment. It was the other thing Tania had tried to change in him; he didn’t know how to relax.
When they reached the top floor, the clerk held the elevator door for Slavin, and then led the way to the suite at the end of the plushly carpeted corridor, where he opened the door. “I believe that you will find these rooms to your liking, Captain.”
Slavin suppressed a grin. “This will do,” he said.
The suite’s sitting room was very large, furnished luxuriously with long leather couches, massive chairs, and dining-table-sized coffee tables facing an electronic media complex that featured a huge plasma television hanging on the richly paneled wall. The opposite side of the room was equipped with a wet bar, a dining area for eight, and a home office corner. Recessed lighting softly illuminated the artwork on the walls and on display tables here and there. A sweeping staircase led upstairs.
The clerk went across the room, touched a button, and heavy drapes that covered the entire rear wall opened, revealing a stunning view of Lake Maracaibo through floor-to-ceiling windows. “At night when an electrical storm crosses the lake, it’s quite spectacular from this vantage point,” he said breezily.
“What’s upstairs?”
“The master bedroom, his and hers bathrooms and dressing rooms, an exercise area, a balcony, and, of course, a Jacuzzi.”
The bellman arrived with Slavin’s bags. “Shall I unpack for you, sir?” he asked.
“No need, I’m only staying the night. Put them on the bed.”
“Very well, sir,” the bellman said, and he took the bags upstairs.
The clerk crossed the room to the wet bar, where a bottle of Dom Pérignon was cooling in a bucket of ice. He opened the champagne, poured a glass, and brought it to Slavin. “Compliments of the hotel, Captain,” he said.
The wine was sour to Slavin’s taste, but he said nothing. The clerk was watching him closely for a reaction. In the old days, to be caught reacting in the wrong way or doing something that was socially inept was to be
nekulturny.
He’d never forgotten his lessons in humility at the Frunze Military Academy, where on the first evening in the dining room he’d been taught the proper use of the linen napkin and numerous utensils.
Once a word is out of your mouth, his grandmother used to say, you can’t swallow it again. He’d learned the hard way.
The bellman came downstairs. Slavin set his wineglass aside, and reached for his wallet, but the clerk shook his head. “That will not be necessary, sir. Vensport is taking care of everything.”
“I didn’t know,” Slavin said to cover his mild embarrassment. Tomorrow would not come soon enough.
The clerk handed over the plastic card key. “I hope that you enjoy your brief stay with us, Captain. My name is Mr. Angarita. If there is anything that you need don’t hesitate to call me.”
“Thank you,” Slavin said.
“Our La Terraza restaurant by the pool is first-class. Shall I make reservations for you?”
“I’ll decide later.”
“As you wish, sir.”
When the clerk was gone, Slavin took his champagne back to the wet bar and emptied it into the small sink. He found a bottle of Stolichnaya and a glass, and poured a stiff measure of the Russian vodka. He knocked it back, poured another, and then, jamming the bottle in his coat pocket, headed upstairs while loosening his tie with one hand.
The master bedroom was just as grand as the sitting room, with a huge circular bed facing large floor-to-ceiling sliding-glass doors that opened to the balcony. It was midafternoon and the late-afternoon sun was low behind the hotel, casting a beautiful gold light across the lake. At this point the west shore was fifty kilometers away, lost in the mist, but the view was spectacular. The two-hundred-kilometer-long lake was studded with oil drilling platforms, waste gas burning in long, wind-driven jets of
fire from many of them; broad loading platforms where tankers bound for refineries all over the world loaded Venezuelan sweet light crude; and the ships themselves, outbound for the Golfo de Venezuela and the open Caribbean, or inbound under the five-mile General Rafael Urdaneta high bridge at the neck of the lake to take on their cargoes.
“Yob tvoyu mat,”
Slavin swore softly.
Fuck your mother.
He raised a toast. Tania had computed that he had been at sea for twenty-one and a half of the twenty-four years they’d been married. She never complained, in part because the money was very good. But just lately she’d started to ask him about an early retirement. Not to quit the sea, rather she wanted to travel with him to some of the places he’d told her about, as civilians, as tourists, as lovers.
God help him, he did love it. And maybe he would do what she asked, retire before he turned fifty. But not to give up the sea, just to voyage differently. It was an intriguing thought.
He poured another drink and went into the whorehouse of a bathroom, where he found the Jacuzzi controls and started the jets.
 
 
Slavin was slightly drunk. Lying in the Jacuzzi, he’d finished the first bottle of vodka, and then, dripping wet, had padded downstairs to fetch a second bottle from the bar. That had been two hours ago, and that bottle was nearly empty. He was finally beginning to relax after the long air trip from Moscow to Paris with Tania, and from there across the Atlantic to Caracas, and finally the short hop up to Maracaibo.
Air travel was fast, relatively safe, and cheap these days, but no aluminum tube with wings, into which a couple hundred passengers were crammed like sardines for endless hours, could ever replace an oceangoing vessel in which a man had more room than even in his apartment ashore.
It was starting to get dark out on the lake. The waste gas flames, combined with the oil derricks and platform lights, and the lights on the ships, made a kaleidoscope of ever-changing colors and patterns that was comforting. Like watching waves coming ashore, or burning logs in a fireplace.
Someone came into the bathroom. Slavin saw the reflection in the window glass and turned.
For a moment he thought it was the idiot clerk again. A man of moderate height, dressed in a dark jacket and open-necked shirt, stood in the doorway, longish blond hair around his ears, with a round face and dark
glasses hiding his eyes. The intruder wore latex surgical gloves, and it began to dawn on Slavin that something was very wrong.
“Who are you—?”
The man brought a small-caliber silenced pistol from where he’d concealed it behind his back, raised it, and fired one shot. Something like a hammer struck Slavin in his head, and a billion stars burst inside his brain.

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