Cold Shot (11 page)

“You still feel that way?” Elham said. The answer was obvious.

“I’ve come to see they can be cunning people,” the civilian admitted. “They can be complicated people—at times capable of great feats and true bravery, at other times, so self-indulgent, so weak-minded. They have no single religion so they have no moral center, which makes them unpredictable. But always cunning when they need to be. That is the only reason to fear them.”

“True enough, I suppose, though I think we’re not that different,” Elham said, surprised by his own candor. Ahmadi had enough connections at home to put an end to higher ambitions with a single remark.

“And how do you see them?”

“I’ve found the Americans to be . . .” He paused for a moment, picked the word carefully. “. . . determined,” he finished.

The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

The satellite image showed a dirt trail running through the woods from the south side of the storage field below the paved road to the southern end of the dockyard warehouses. Kyra found it without trouble and marched across packed dirt in the dark for almost an hour, staying close to the tree line so she could disappear into the shadows if anyone approached. It was almost midnight now and the waxing moon was her only light. It was enough for most of the walk. Her night vision was undisturbed until she approached the dockyard, where some of the large lamps finally grew bright enough to interfere.

Kyra reached the edge of the paved yard. Another fuel storage depot was off to her right, large white towers that reflected the moonlight and brightened the open space. A large warehouse sat directly in front of her five hundred feet to the west. The
Markarid
’s berth and warehouse were northwest of her position with a fence running between the two mammoth storage buildings.

She pulled a night-vision monocle from her satchel and scanned the yard. She saw nothing, then touched her earpiece. “I’m here. You sure I’m alone?”

“Still three guards by the gangplank, but that’s a hundred yards from the warehouse. Anyone else there is inside a building with a heavy roof,” Jon replied.

Kyra nodded, then calmed her breathing. There was no cover story she could offer that would explain her presence away once she entered the dockyard. The Glock and a hard run would be the only things between her and prison.

That’s more than I had last time,
she reminded herself.

She ran north along the trees for almost a hundred feet, then west, skirting the edge of the fuel storage depot. She had to skirt a smaller building, some kind of office, she guessed, but the lights were off. She reached the fence. It wasn’t topped with barbed or razor wire. The longshoremen had erected it for organization, not security. Kyra ran parallel to the barrier until she reached another darkened shed. She mounted the building quietly, then went over the fence and landed in a crouch.

“I’m over.”

“I see you,” Jon said in her ear.

“I’m going to try the warehouse. I’ll see if I can get a look at the dock from inside. If there’s nothing there worth our trouble, I’ll pull back.”

“Roger that.”

Kyra crept along the building’s metal wall, occasionally stepping around stacked wooden pallets and forklift tires. The warehouse itself was at least five hundred feet long, two hundred feet wide, easily bigger than a soccer field. The main doors on the east side were chained shut, which didn’t surprise her. She hadn’t expected her luck to be that good. She moved around the perimeter, stopping to listen and testing every door until she found an unsecured window. She slid it open a foot, then squeezed herself inside.

Autopista Valencia/Route 1

“You respect the Americans?” Ahmadi asked.

“I have no particular feelings toward them, hate or admiration,” Elham confessed. “I’m just a soldier and I want my country to prosper. If the Americans stand in the way of that, I will do my part to remove them from the road. That is the definition of duty. An American general once said that a man can do no more but should aspire to do no less. But where does the road lead that our leaders have chosen for us to travel?”

“You surprise me again. I was not aware that soldiers were ever philosophers,” Ahmadi mused.

“Soldiers spend a lot of time thinking about the causes for which they’re asked to die.”

“You question our leaders?” Ahmadi asked.

Elham considered his answer, but only for a few seconds, lest Ahmadi get the wrong idea. “Leaders are just men and even the best are fallible. Even when Allah speaks, we are sometimes slow to hear or we misunderstand the divine message. So I obey my orders, but not out of any particular loyalty to any particular leader or even all of them together. I simply trust that our country has Allah’s favor and He will make everything right. If our leaders do their jobs well, they push forward His work. If they do their jobs poorly, Allah’s will rolls forth anyway, perhaps just a bit more slowly. My calling is just to do my part.”

“Sargord, you are a diplomat after all.”

The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

The warehouse was completely dark inside. Kyra had to scan the space with the night-vision monocle to get her bearings. She listened for voices or movement, heard nothing, and then started to move. The building was also mostly empty of cargo, which surprised her. There were open shelves in the back, storage bins for hand tools, compressors, gas cans, and other equipment. More stacks of pallets were scattered randomly around, the occasional chair and card table set together where some longshoremen took their lunch or played cards. It was her father’s garage on a massive scale. The dust kicked up by her boots was visible in the green light of the night-vision camera.

“Still with me?” she whispered.

“Yes, but your signal isn’t great,” Jon advised.

“I’m in the warehouse . . . metal roof.”

She padded forward as quietly as her boots would allow. The massive space had pieces of equipment here and there, scattered around in no organized way she could identify. One green cargo container, covered in streaks of rust red, sat near the main doors to the west. A forklift was parked a dozen feet away, its metal tines lowered to the ground. Kyra looked around again, the monocle turning the warehouse interior a sickly olive color. She closed her eyes and listened hard again for almost a minute, but heard nothing.

She made her way to the front and approached the metal box. “Only one container in here,” she reported. “Don’t know if they unloaded this one from the ship.”

“That’s strange. Port warehouses are usually full. They might be reserving that one for special cargo,” Jon said. “Can you get the box open?”

Kyra pulled out a Maglite from her bag and clicked it on, the red light helping to preserve what little night vision she had. She played over the container. She approached the door . . .

Then it hit her, a horrendous odor, stronger than the smell of diesel fuel and oil, rolling out of the box into the warehouse. It was possibly the worst thing she had ever smelled. It staggered her and she wondered why the owners had bothered locking the enormous metal crate. No one in their right mind would open it out of pure curiosity. She couldn’t remember ever having inhaled anything so evil and her stomach heaved, almost out of control. Kyra clenched her jaw shut, forcing the bile back down.

“The smell—” She was breathing through her mouth. Even so, Kyra could
feel
the odor in her throat.
This is the mission,
she told herself, but her stomach took no comfort in the thought.

“Can you open it?” Jon asked.

A padlock sealed the container door. “I think so . . . give me minute.” She knelt on the floor, opened her bag, and rifled through it. She pulled out a steel sheet, the size of a credit card, with lockpick tools laser cut into it. She popped out the two pieces she needed, tucked the card into her thigh pocket and set to work, inserting the torsion wrench into the padlock, then the half-diamond pick. Opening locks wasn’t her specialty and it took her two minutes and far more silent profanities to get the lock open. Done, she put the tools back in her shirt pocket, pulled the handle, and swung the door open.

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

“What is it?” Marisa said. She leaned over Jon’s shoulder to see the monitor. He didn’t flinch.

The station chief stared at the screen until Kyra’s flashlight played over the contents.

The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

The metal box trapped the light, magnified it. The container only held two cargoes.

In the back, shapeless black bags, stacked in no orderly way, each one roughly the size of a man—
No,
Kyra realized.
Exactly the size of a man.

In the front, men, a dozen, still alive. They were curled up on the metal floor, covered in their own bile and excretions. The sight caused Kyra’s stomach to heave again, harder this time, and she barely held it down.

She forced herself not to stumble backward. “Jon?” she asked, using his name and breaking communications protocol. “You seeing this?”

One of the men reached up at her with a shaking hand.
“Ayúdame,”
he begged weakly in Spanish.

Help me.

U.S. Embassy,

Caracas, Venezuela

“Yes,” Jon said simply.

Marisa looked at him, surprised. There was a gentleness in his voice she’d hadn’t heard for years. She’d never known him to show sympathy often.

“How many?” he asked.

The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

Kyra didn’t want to open her mouth to answer. “Eleven body bags, I think,” she spit out as quickly as she could. “Twelve men in the front. They’re still alive and they’re not Africans. I’m pretty sure they’re Venezuelans . . . the accent is right.” More of the men had raised their arms to her, some pleading, others too weak to even say a word.

“Eleven . . . counting the one the Navy pulled out of the Gulf, that’s a good ballpark number for a pirate team,” Jon said.

“We have to help these men,” Kyra said. She knew the answer.

“Arrowhead, this is Quiver,” Marisa announced, touching her own headset microphone. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”

“I can’t just leave them like this—”

“Arrowhead, you have no way to move them out. Even if you could help them back to your vehicle, somebody is going to come back for that container,” Marisa said, trying to be patient. “If they open it and find any of those men missing, they’ll know somebody was there. I know this feels wrong, but if you want to help anyone, all you can do is get the intel. You have to get what you came for and get out. That’s the only way you can help anyone.”

I know.
Kyra refused to say it.

“I hate to ask this, but you need to open one up in the back and get some footage,” Marisa said.

“Are you serious?” Kyra asked. It was as close to begging as she’d ever come.

“We need confirmation,” she said.

Kyra muttered a curse too low for the smartphone to record. She entered the container, her sense of smell objecting, almost violently, and she stepped over the grasping Venezuelan men. She knelt down before the closest bag.

“Arrowhead?” Marisa called out.

“Yes?” she gasped, trying not to breath.

“When you open it, don’t puke. Whatever you’ve got to do, you hold it down.”

“I can’t promise that,” she said, gasping for air. The smell alone convinced her that she wouldn’t be able to hold down her dinner when she pulled the zipper. Whatever she found inside—

“If you puke, they’ll know you were there,” Jon advised.

“I doubt that.” She’d felt the men’s bile pulling on her boots. But Jon was being logical again.
And here I thought you were actually worried about me. So much for sympathy.
“Do my best.” She put her flashlight in her teeth and tried not to inhale. She aimed the smartphone with one hand and reached for the cadaver bag with the other.

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

Jon and Marisa watched Kyra’s hand grasp the zipper as the Venezuelan men groaned and pleaded in the background. She tugged, the zipper caught for a moment, and Kyra had to wrestle it for leverage with one hand. It finally came, sliding open fast, and the corpse inside was exposed to the light.

For a half second, they saw it—an African male, his head massively bloated from the gases of decomposition trapped under his skin and open blisters covering his face and lips. His hair was patchy, bald in spots, with sores on the scalp where the follicles were absent. They couldn’t tell his age for the swelling—

The smartphone and flashlight swung away from the corpse in opposite directions, the picture went dark and they heard Kyra heaving, trying desperately to keep her jaws clenched shut. The young woman needed almost a full minute to control herself, and they heard her trying to suck in air.

The smartphone and flashlight swung back onto the corpse and Kyra held the picture for a full five seconds. “That enough?” she pleaded.

“Jon, hostiles inbound,” Marisa said. She pointed at the IMINT feed on the wall monitor. A pair of vehicles had passed through the gates to the dockyard and were approaching the warehouse.

“Yeah, that’s enough,” Jon said. “You’ll have company in one minute. We can get stills from the video. Close everything up.”

The Puerto Cabello Dockyard

Kyra nodded and did as she was ordered. She stepped over the men until she stood outside the container door and tried to breathe fresh air in through her nose. It didn’t help. The odor was trapped in her sinuses now and she wondered if she would ever get it out. She turned back and looked down at the men, still reaching up to her but too weak to move otherwise, even to drag themselves out of the box. Tears began to flood out of her eyes.
“¡Lo siento!”
she said, her voice breaking.
I’m sorry.

She finally got fresh air into her lungs and her mind finally focused in that moment. She began scanning the warehouse, desperately searching for any way to help the men still crying out, but there was nothing. Whoever was approaching was coming for them and she wondered if God Himself would forgive her for what she had to do next.