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“Include me and G
ENGHIS
among the fake prisoners,” Camille said. “The mission's all yours, sir. Make it happen.”

“You got it,” Iggy walked toward the door to the main ops center. He had no sign of a limp and if he wore long pants, no one would suspect that he was missing his right leg below the knee.

“Ma'am. Any idea what that information is, ma'am?” G
ENGHIS
said. “Is it related to Rubicon beating us to sites with large weapons stockpiles?”

“I'm guessing it is. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out they're selling seized arms back to the insurgents, but I'm only speculating.”

Iggy stood in the doorway. “That would be enough to bring down the bastards. You ever think about how much business that would free up for us? Why the hell would they ever take a risk like that? They've got billions in contracts and that's not even counting Afghanistan and the drug work they're doing in South America.”

“I know.” Camille set down the pen. “Rubicon has raked in over fifteen billion in Iraq contracts. That's a hell of a lot at stake, but you know, if peace breaks out and things settle down here, all that goes away. Maybe they're doing us all a big favor and making sure it doesn't.” Camille had seen the CIA flounder about for most of the 1990s, searching for a real purpose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. She sure as hell didn't want to be in the same listless position if the War on Terror abruptly ended. Everything she had worked so hard to build up would be over and Black Management would be out of business. She didn't particularly like it, but she needed the War on Terror—a lot of people did.

“I wouldn't put it past them to bankroll the tangos to stay in business. They screw their own guys every chance they get.” G
ENGHIS
snorted.

“Can I see you in your office for a minute?” Camille said.

“Sure thing.” Iggy motioned with his prosthetic arm for her to walk ahead of him. They entered his office and he shut the door.

 

Blinds covered a window looking out into the operations center. They were lowered, but the slats were turned so that he could keep an eye on things. The office was just big enough for a desk, a few chairs and a vinyl couch. Stuck in the corner beside bookshelves were what Iggy called his dumb arms and legs. His running leg and swimming limbs were the latest of their kind, each costing fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, but they had no brains. The smart ones cost three to four times that.

Most of the time he wore his smart limbs, which had microprocessors that constantly compensated and adjusted to whatever activity he was doing—walking slowly, climbing stairs, driving, eating, typing. Servo-motors opened and closed hydraulic valves in his ankle and wrist, increasing or decreasing movement in response to the microprocessors that measured his movement fifty times a second. The limbs were Bluetooth-enabled so they could be adjusted remotely with a laptop. Out of concern that an enemy hacker could gain access to his body, he had refused to be outfitted with them until their programming was upgraded with 256-bit encryption. Only he, Camille and a handful of his doctors knew the alphanumeric password.

“What's the story with you and G
ENGHIS
?” Camille said. She stood beside his desk and put her hand on a stack of papers.

“One I don't tell,” Iggy said as he sat down.

“You're going to have to. I need to know whatever it is.”

“You know I'm professional.”

“But G
ENGHIS
isn't. I want to know what you know about him and don't like.”

“Did you know he's Carmen's godfather?” He pointed to a picture of one of his seven kids hanging on the wall next to a shot of him in jungle camouflage holding a sniper rifle.

Camille sat down. She had never considered that G
ENGHIS
might have been his friend, let alone the godfather of his oldest daughter. Tonight was the first time she'd ever seen them together and they didn't exactly seem to get along.

“This stays between us.”

“Of course.”

“G
ENGHIS
and I were both in Delta. He came up through Marine recon, then switched over to the Army. He's the kind of guy who didn't care about losing rank and that's pretty much all I cared about. They were looking at swapping my bird for a star and I got a chance for some field action that would help make the case for my promotion. I handpicked my team. G
ENGHIS
, a guy named Pilkenton and I gave the Libyans a little technical assist in complying with international agreements on chemical weapon production.”

“Meaning, you were on a black op to knock out a factory?”

“Flattened the goddamn complex. Woke up Qadaffi in his tent sixty miles away.” Iggy grinned, pleased with himself. “Anyway we were on the egress to the rally point, outside of Rabta and ran into resistance. We neutralized it, but Pilkenton took a round in the face. We were running behind and racing to get the hell out of there. You take out a chem plant like that and you've got all kinds of fallout you don't want to be exposed to. The winds were light, but they were shifting and about to blow toward us. Pilkenton was slowing us down, bleeding all over the place and groaning. He couldn't help it, the poor bastard. Anyway, we heard another Libyan patrol coming, looking for their buddies. Pilkenton would've given away our position. There was hardly any mouth there to put your hand over to shut him up. G
ENGHIS
snapped his neck, then carried the body to the LZ. Pilkenton never would've survived anyway.” Iggy's gaze was distant, still somewhere in the Libyan desert. He took a deep breath. “It's hard to explain how someone with a gunshot wound to the face dies from a broken neck.”

“That's a challenge.”

“But I did it—under oath. Everyone knew I was covering for G
ENGHIS
. And they all understood, too. They'd all been there. But I couldn't live with it, Camille. My word is everything. They made me a general and sent me to the Pentagon. That's when I left Delta for the Christians In Action. Lying is a lifestyle with those loveable bastards, so I thought that's where I belonged.” Iggy picked up a pen and twirled it around his artificial fingers. “Haven't spoken to G
ENGHIS
since.”

“I understand,” Camille said, even more convinced that she could trust Iggy. Especially considering what it had cost him, his loyalty to G
ENGHIS
would've made a Marine proud. “But you're going to have to work with him and that's going to involve more than talking.”

“I'm a soldier. You can count on me doing what it takes to accomplish the mission. And we have a mission to finalize right now. You'll meet your team at twenty-three thirty hours in the bunker to do some run-throughs first. Come as an Iraqi civilian—male, traditional dress.” He looked her in the eyes. “I'm also going to have to ask you a question about a scenario involving our guy on the inside. If I don't like your answer, I'm pulling you, even if you are the boss.”

“I'd expect no less.” Camille left the room.

Camp Tsunami, Abu Ghraib Prison

Hunter's stomach growled as he sat naked on the prayer rug, heavy metal music now blaring over the loudspeakers. The one hundred ninety-three cinder blocks had been inventoried so many times that he was ready to name each one like he'd already done with the seven rats that regularly prowled his cell. He did another hundred pushups, but didn't want to work out too hard since he hadn't eaten in days and he was starting to feel it. All the water he could drink was a bitter reminder that he had let Zorro extract more information from him than he had ever given the North Koreans or Saddam's Mukaburat. Handing over his real name was harmless enough, he tried to convince himself, but he knew that was the way it always started. Each scrap was innocuous, you told yourself as you handed over more and more. He understood how denial worked—he had once dated a Catholic girl who called herself a virgin the next morning—time and time again.

He was man enough to admit to himself he had been screwed by Zorro and it wasn't going to happen anymore. Even though Zorro knew he worked for Force Zulu, he had refused to acknowledge it during today's interrogation session. It wouldn't take long for them to realize their only leverage over him was water. Then they'd start withholding it again. Soon enough a point would come when he would have to begin handing them the little details they already knew or die from cascading organ failure. Intense physical pain was less insidious, easier to resist. Old-fashioned electrodes-on-the-balls torture made things very black and white.

Zorro had kept coming back to something called S
HANGRI-LA
and he seemed to believe that Hunter knew something about it. Hunter assumed it was the code name for whatever Rubicon had going on with the tangos and it was probably related to the arms caches Ashland had accused him of stealing, something that Zorro didn't seem to care about. He wondered how the strange Uzbekistan connection fit in. Jackie's husband had worked for Rubicon Petroleum and she claimed he was up to something secretive in Uzbekistan—the same place the al-Zahrani terrorists had trained. It could be a weird coincidence, but he doubted it. No matter how much he thought about it, a clear picture wouldn't come together.

He opened the Koran and started reading it to kill time, but his mind kept wandering to Stella. She would be trying to find him, but he doubted she stood much of a chance.

The guards on this shift were still playing heavy metal at a deafening level. He wasn't sure if they had switched to heavy metal to annoy Arab inmates or for the guards themselves to relieve their own ears. Either way, he welcomed the change except that the sound level was about the same as a jet taking off. Constant exposure to the deafening sound left him with a splitting headache that wouldn't go away for days and he feared he was going to have a hearing loss. He flipped through the Koran, then unexpectedly heard some familiar notes on an electric guitar, but he told himself no way were the guards playing that song to get to the prisoners. It wasn't right. Not even they would stoop so low as to play the national anthem to torture inmates.

After another chord, Hunter got up. Jimmy Hendrix' electric guitar was screeching while machine guns, bombs and screams—the sounds of Vietnam, the sounds of Iraq—were going off in the background. He stood at attention in his Abu Ghraib cell, naked, singing “The Star Spangled Banner” while he chocked back tears.

 

Without warning, the door cracked open and a guard threw Day-Glo orange prison coveralls, an olive-drab hood and a pair of flip-flops at him. He carried an AK-102, the poor Russian cousin of an M4, but he didn't point it directly at him. Hunter could've taken him out, but he saw something in the guy's eyes; he wanted something from Hunter and he was afraid.

The guard yelled above the music. “Put these on. We're getting you out of here. Hurry!”

Hunter jumped into the overalls and zipped them as fast as he could.

The guard glanced at the door as he handed Hunter the heavy hood. “Pull this on, too. I'll stick the strap through, but I won't buckle it.”

“Did Camille Black send you?”

“And get your hands behind your back so I can cuff them.” The guard's body was shaking with tension.

“No cuffs.”

“It's got to look like a prisoner transfer. Get your hands behind your back. We're running out of time. Do it!”

“I want my hands free. You don't know what you're doing, do you?”

“I'm making five million in five minutes. Hands behind your back.” He pointed the Russian assault rifle at Hunter.

He hoped the guy's half-assed plan gave him an opening to escape before it got him killed. But he didn't hesitate to go along with him. He'd rather die from a bullet than organ failure. “Give me the tie and I'll hold it in place.”

“Whatever.” He handed Hunter the zip-tie.

 

The flip-flops were several sizes too big and Hunter struggled not to trip over them as the guard shoved him along. The hood obscured everything, but he heard the clank of heavy metal locks and guessed he was almost outside the cell block or had entered another one.

A woman's voice said, “What took so long? Nathan can't stay parked at the door much longer. They're starting to get suspicious.” Her footsteps paced alongside them.

“Stop!” A man shouted. Hunter estimated he was ten meters from them at their six o'clock. He wanted so badly to rip off the mask so he could see, but he knew better.

One of his liberators grabbed him, spun him around, took his arm and started to run. He planted his feet firmly and refused to move, figuring it was his best and only chance. Hunter heard an automatic weapon pop and the guy holding onto him screamed, then let go. He wanted to yank off the hood, but knew any movement on his part would be interpreted as a threat, a threat to be neutralized. So he stood there as he listened to another burst of gunshots and he heard the female jailor scream. He forced his eyes closed and pictured Stella telling him she loved him—that was the last image he wanted to take with him to eternity. In a split second, he was being shoved to the floor. He didn't resist.

“Face down! Now!”

His heart was pounding so hard, it felt like it was shaking his body. Then he realized he was actually trembling. He really thought it was over. As he lay on the cold concrete floor, smelling blood and sensing death all around him, he understood his life was soon coming to a close.

And he also understood he had made a terrible mistake in staging his death, telling himself that it was to protect Stella. Now he realized it was more to protect him, to protect him from losing her. He had lost over two years with her and now he'd never see her again.

A Rubicon operator kicked him in the kidneys. The sharp pain was almost a welcome distraction.