Enemy of My Enemy (8 page)

Once he was outside of the building, Jack dialed Avi on his cell phone. It was late Friday afternoon. He expected to find Avi at home if he was in the country. Jack wasn't disappointed.

"This is Jack Cole," he said. "We've never met, but—"

"Osirak," Avi immediately said. "You were the guy in the wine business in Paris."

Jack was pleased he remembered. "There's something I want to talk to you about. I need your help."

"Where are you?"

"Jerusalem."

"Good. Come up to the Moshav tomorrow at one o'clock. You can have lunch and meet the family. Avahail. Just outside of Netanya."

Jack was pleased. He had made a start on rescuing Robert.

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

To pass the time, Robert, sitting on the dirt floor, doodled on the ground with one finger, tracing and retracing the letters
USA.
He listened for sounds, but there were none. The other cells in the building must be vacant, he decided.

Following that session in Abdullah's office, when the phone call came, the guards, who had repeatedly slapped Robert, didn't lay a hand on him. Prior to that time, the food he had been given was a thin, watery fluid with a couple of suspended solid objects that he was afraid to eat. After that, food became ample and tasty. There were no more rounds of interrogation with Abdullah.

Robert could guess what had happened. They had found out who he was—or more precisely, who his father was.

That thought didn't comfort him. As he closed his eyes, a cold fury surged through his body. He knew why he had been pulled out of his air force unit at a base in California and shipped to the Middle East: Terry McCallister had made a call to Chip Morton, the secretary of defense, urging Chip to give Robert some flying time where .it mattered, to build his resume for the political career Terry had planned for his son. Robert knew all of this from his unit commander on the base in Saudi Arabia, who grumbled about having been ordered to use an inexperienced pilot on reconnaissance flights that sometimes turned lethal.

Robert still wasn't sure what had happened. Had his F-16 strayed off course? Where did the missile come from? He had been in contact with air control at the base. How had he missed it?

All of those issues were fuzzy. But one thing was clear: It was all his father's fault that Robert was here. No, that was wrong. It was Robert's own fault. He was the one who was constantly striving so hard for his father's approval. He was the one who had rejected the offer from Brown University for their combined premed-medical school program, giving up his lifelong dream to be a doctor. He was the one who agreed to attend the Air Force Academy because it was part of the blueprint for his future that his father had drawn. He could have simply followed Ann's lead and gotten as far away from the man as possible, but Robert wasn't Ann.

When this ends,
Robert thought,
I'll go back to school and take the science courses I missed for medical school. Then I'll start over. I'll live the life I want to lead. To hell with him.

For a few minutes that thought buoyed Robert's spirits. Then he opened his eyes and looked around the dingy cell. Despair snuffed out hope. What was the point of thinking about the future? He didn't have one. He would never leave this hellhole alive. Robert heard the sound of several men approaching the cell. Sliding backward, he moved himself into a corner. He tensed, waiting to see what they wanted.

The door creaked when it opened. Abdullah was standing there, accompanied by four soldiers.

Abdullah pointed to two of them. Without saying a word they pulled Robert to his feet, then hoisted him onto their shoulders. That was the way they carried him out of the cell.

"Where are you taking me?" Robert cried out.

His question evoked a grunt from one of the soldiers. They hauled him up two flights of cracked and splitting stone stairs, through a door that led outside into bright sunlight that momentarily blinded Robert after so long in the dark cell. He squinted, trying to see where he was, where he was being taken.

They loaded him into the back of a truck, open on top, which was empty except for bits of fruits and vegetables. Two of the soldiers climbed up and sat down on the floor with him. A heavy dark green vinyl tarp was pulled over the top. Then the truck began to move. "Where are we going?" Robert asked.

No one responded.

The air was stifling under the tarp. Robert strained his eyes to see through a rip in the plastic, but he was too far to the side. One of the soldiers pointed a gun at Robert. The other took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. In a matter of seconds the pungent aroma of Turkish tobacco filled the air. To Robert, the odor was disgusting.

He wanted to remain awake and alert, to observe everything he could about where they were taking him, maybe even to escape if he had the chance. But his body betrayed his mind. Ever since he could remember, he fell asleep in a vehicle when he was tired and he wasn't driving. He felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness.

The truck slammed to a stop. Robert opened his eyes and saw a worried look on the face of the soldier who was smoking. He crushed out the cigarette with his boot and peeked out of a corner where the tarp was loose. His look of concern turned to amusement. He said something to his comrade, which Robert couldn't understand. They both laughed. From his pocket he removed a grease-stained cloth, covered Robert's eyes, and tied it behind the prisoner's head. Robert smelled another cigarette being lit.

The wheels of the truck started rolling again. Robert, sitting and leaning back against one of the wooden planks on the side, found a haze descending over his mind. He could no longer think clearly. He closed his eyes. He wanted to believe that it was good he was being moved, that his father had found a way to win his release. More likely, he thought with grim bitterness, his father had somehow managed to make Robert's fate worse, as he usually did.

* * *

Sarah McCallister stared into the bathroom mirror in the suite at the Four Seasons and was horrified. "My God, I look like a mess," she announced to the haggard, wrinkled face with bloodshot eyes that stared back at her. It had been another long night of anguish—the third since her Bobby's plane had been shot down—tossing and turning in bed, her chest and stomach muscles tightening to the point of agony when she tried to imagine the horror confronting poor Bobby. Twice she felt she was on the verge of a heart attack. And all the while Terry was in the same bed sleeping soundly, secure in the belief that the president, who owed him big-time, would secure Bobby's release. Finally, at four-thirty, she had moved to the other bedroom in the suite.

She couldn't stand to be with him in bed any longer. How could he sleep? He was the one who was responsible for what had happened to Bobby. He was the one who robbed Bobby of his childhood, who constantly raised the bar so high that no accomplishment was ever enough, who latched on to the absurd idea that his son would have a career in politics and one day become president, a blueprint that Terry would dearly have wanted for himself but was unable to achieve because of what he had done in his youth.

"Leave him alone, Terry. Let him live his own life," she had pleaded.

"Stay out of it," he had snapped back.

He had brushed her concerns aside and increased the pressure on Bobby, who didn't have Ann's courage to disobey him.

The idea of Terry's living vicariously through Bobby's accomplishments infuriated her, but she was helpless to do anything.

Terry had been stupid to drag them both from Chicago to Washington once he learned that Bobby's plane went down. He could have pressured Jimmy Grange and the president by telephone. They were no closer to Bobby in Washington than in Chicago.

Finally, around six o'clock in the morning, alone in her own bed, she had begun dozing off, sleeping fretfully, until the sound of Terry's voice woke her. He was on the phone barking orders to assistants in the private equity firm he had founded in Chicago. "Sell that interest... Buy that... Straighten out that company.... What am I paying you for...? We're not running a charity, for Christ's sake."

Even now, he was on the phone as she was splashing cold water on her wrinkled face. When the second line rang, Sarah raced across the room. It might be somebody with news about her Bobby.

"It's Jimmy Grange, Sarah."

She held her breath.

"There's been a development," Grange said. "I want to come over and brief you and Terry."

Her heart was pounding. "Good or bad?"

Grange hesitated. "We'd better talk in person."

"Don't do this to me, you bastard," she screamed. "Tell me whether it's good or bad."

Terry broke into the conversation from the phone in the living room. "Who is this?"

"It's Jimmy Grange. I want to come by and update you."

"Good or bad?" Sarah wailed hysterically.

"Come now," Terry told Grange.

The line went dead.

"Pull yourself together," Terry shouted from the living room. "Don't make an ass out of yourself."

She dressed in a black skirt and black blouse, prepared for mourning, and tried to comb her long brown hair. When that failed, she grabbed a rubber band from the living room desk that held Terry's business papers and tied it up in a ponytail, the way she had worn it when she was a student at Michigan. Thinking about Michigan depressed her even more. Terry had worn
his
hair in a ponytail then, too.

She was certain that her appearance—and especially her hair—startled Terry, but he didn't say a word to her about that or anything else. They sat on separate sides of the living room in plush chairs covered with burnt-orange velour. In silence he read the
New York Times
while she stared out of the window at M Street in Georgetown below, watching carefree tourists go in and out of little shops while she agonized over how much pain her Bobby was in now.

When the bell to the suite rang, she remained in her chair, grabbing the sides tightly with white knuckles, letting Terry answer it. She was bursting with anxiety to hear what this man she detested had to say. During the long presidential campaign two years ago, she had referred to Grange as the bagman. Terry raised money from wealthy people and corporate executives. Then he gave it to Grange, who periodically came to Chicago to collect the checks, hear about the contributors, and return to campaign headquarters in Washington.

"Okay. What do you have for me?" Terry said gruffly when the three of them were seated around a glass-topped coffee table with a vase of red roses in the center. Grange was on the sofa, Terry and Sarah at each side.

In the White House limousine on the way to the hotel, Grange had decided that he'd better mask the optimism he felt about Major Davis's rescue effort. The last thing he wanted was to build Terry up, only to have to deliver bad news if something happened to make the operation go south.

Grange began in a slow, hesitant voice. "We believe that a renegade unit of the Turkish military shot down Robert's plane. The Turkish government has failed to meet our deadline for dealing with the matter themselves. So we put a special-operations unit on the ground in the area where we
think
Robert went down. We
believe
that the rogue Turks are holding him in a small prison in the locale."

"How did you learn that?" Terry demanded.

"From an informer."

Sarah felt a sudden burst of excitement. This was the first confirmation they had that Bobby was alive.

Terry bored in on Grange. "How good's the informer?"

Grange shrugged. "Major Davis, who's in charge of the unit, is prepared to rely on him. That's good enough for the president."

"But Kendall's son's not the one down there, is he?"

"True."

"How many men in Davis's unit?" Terry was cross-examining Grange as if he were a trial lawyer confronting a hostile witness.

"Six. All highly trained."

Terry shot to his feet. "Six?" he said, raising his voice in incredulity. "Six fuckin' men? That's it?" He shook his head in exasperation. "There could be a whole division of Turkish soldiers guarding that prison."

"Listen, Terry," Grange said, now losing patience himself. Sure, he was sorry that it was Terry's kid, but he didn't need a tongue-lashing, no matter how much Terry contributed to the campaign. "It's a military action. We've got General Childress personally involved. He's air force too. He was a pilot himself. He knows what it's like. They're the experts. We have to trust their judgment. You wouldn't tell a surgeon how to operate, would you?"

Terry sneered. "I would if he wanted to cut me open with a pocketknife!"

Grange started to fire his own nasty retort, then choked back the words. Terry was pacing around the room like a caged predator. Grange glanced at Sarah, who was leaning back in her chair, her eyes closed. One of the buttons of her blouse was undone. She wasn't wearing a bra.

She opened her eyes and caught Grange leering at her, as he frequently did.
The pig.
She looked down and rebuttoned her blouse, then glared at Grange, who turned away.