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  “It’s a suicide mission,” Admiral Halverson said. “If you’re wrong, and bin Laden did order Trumble’s assassination, you’d be walking into a hornet’s nest.” He shook his head. “Hell, even if you’re right, and it was one of bin Laden’s followers, what would stop him from ordering your death the moment you set foot in Afghanistan?”

  “Considering what we’re faced with, it’s a risk I’m willing to take, Admiral,” McGarvey said. “The same risk your people signed on for when they put on a uniform.”

  The comment stung, and the admiral sat back, chastised.

  “I don’t think we have any other choice now,” Secretary of State Carpenter said in his studied way. “But what would you say to the monster that would make any sort of difference?”

  “I’ll tell him that we got his message about the bomb, and ask him to turn it over to us,” McGarvey said. “I can’t think of any other reason he gave the serial number to

  Trumble. He wants to make a deal with us. We’ll give him back his assets, lift the bounty and try to get the Saudi government to let his family come home. At least that’d be a start.”

  “We’ve been over that,” Berndt said.

  “There’s something else he wants. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something he wants badly enough to agree to talk to us.”

  “Kill him,” Berndt said flatly.

  “Another failed missile attack could drive him into using the bomb,” McGarvey said. “None of us want that.”

  “I mean if you actually get close to him, kill the man.”

  McGarvey went eye-to-eye with the President’s national security adviser. “Are you giving me that order, Mr. Berndt?” The room was quiet. “Because if you are, I would like it in writing.”

  “Dennis, we’re a long ways from ordering a suicide mission assassination,” the President said. “If we strike his camps with cruise missiles the mission will be to deny him the capability to wage a war of terrorism. We will not specifically target the man.”

  It was a very fine point, barely within American law, and no one missed it, nor did anyone offer comment. Assassination as a political weapon was not an option, although if bin Laden were to be killed in a missile raid, then so be it.

  “How sure are you that he’s not simply setting a trap?” the President asked. “It comes down to that.”

  “If he is, he wouldn’t have killed Alien. He would have waited for someone like me to show up. He wants something, and I have to meet with him.”

  “How soon could you set it up?”

  “We’ll put the word out, and if he responds it’ll be within the week, maybe two,” McGarvey said.

  “Safeguards?” the President asked.

  “We have some limited resources in Kabul.”

  “Assuming he’s still in Afghanistan, how would you get there? Government transport is out.”

  “Ariana Airlines, through Dubai,” McGarvey said. “For

  the moment it’s the only reliable carrier to Kabul. From there I would expect he’d send someone for me.”

  The President shook his head. “I don’t like this, but I don’t see any other alternative under the circumstances.”

  “No, sir,” McGarvey said.

  “General?” The President turned to Murphy.

  Murphy gave McGarvey an odd, almost pensive look. “He’ll have to go in clean. If we try to set something up for him, some kind of a backup, and bin Laden finds out about it, Mac will be a dead man.”

  The President looked around the table. “Have there been any leaks yet?” To this point the media was accepting the FBI’s story that the shooting in Orlando was a case of mistaken identity in a drug cartel war. The eye witnesses said that the shooters were slightly built and dark-skinned, which was a close enough fit to generalize that they were Colombians. Bari Yousef’s identity and Alien Trumble’s real employer were being kept secret.

  “No, sir,” Berndt assured him.

  “Then we’ll keep it that way,” the President said. He looked again at McGarvey. “Do it,” he said softly.

  “Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. A whisp of something from Voltaire came to him: I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom. Before he put himself into the lion’s den he would try to even the odds as much as possible. He wanted to stop bin Laden, but he also wanted to make it up to Trumble’s family.

  The Oval Office

  Berndt and Admiral Halverson remained behind as the others filed out of the room. When everyone was gone they followed the President upstairs. On the way in he told his chief of staff to push everything back for another ten minutes, then he went to his desk.

  “We can monitor McGarvey’s movements into the Afghan mountains, am I correct in this?”

  “To within a few meters,” Berndt confirmed.

  “Okay, if he actually comes face-to-face with the bastard, and if bin Laden so much as farts, I will order the immediate missile attack on his camp once McGarvey is clear.”

  “Or dead,” Berndt said darkly.

  The President nodded. “But I’ll need an ironclad confirmation of that before we go. Clear?” Berndt nodded. “Admiral, I want the Carl Vinson and her battle group moved into position as soon as possible. And we’re keeping the lid on this.”

  “I’ll see to it immediately,” the admiral said, happy to go into action.

  “It’s a trap,” Berndt predicted. “All he’s going to accomplish is get himself killed.”

  “McGarvey is a capable man. We will give him the chance before we do anything.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Berndt said. “Now, what about the funeral for Alien Trumble and his family? We’re going to have to stay out of it, officially, if we want the cover story to hold.”

  The President’s eyes went to the photograph on the desk of his wife and daughter. He was doing this for them, he thought. For all Americans, but especially for them. “The CIA will handle it. Whatever they want.”

  “But, Mr. President—”

  The President looked up, an angry set to his jaw. “Alien Trumble was an American hero, Dennis. He will be treated as such.” His eyes narrowed. “Let’s keep focused. We’re facing a madman in possession of a nuclear bomb who has shown a willingness in the past to kill innocent men, women and children. Don’t forget it.” The President shook his head. “God knows, I won’t.”

  SARAH BIN LADEN

  The trumpets blew, and the walls came tumbling down at the battle of Jericho. But in reality Joshua probably used a hammer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  In the ten days since the President had given his approval to the operation being called Meteor, the mood on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters had gone from one of anger and disbelief to one of quiet acceptance. If bin Laden had the nuclear device, and that was still a big if in a lot of people’s minds, then they had no choice except to send an emissary.

  McGarvey sat in a window seat near the back of a half filled shabby Ariana Afghan Airlines 727 inbound for Kabul’s International Airport. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the flight out of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates was already an hour late. But no one aboard, most of them businessmen, a few of them diplomats from India and Germany, was in any rush to arrive. Afghanistan was not a tourist destination. He’d been thinking about Katy and their last night together. She’d clung very close to him, but she refused to press him for details. He was going out of the country, he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about his assignment, and he’d already begun to withdraw to that special place of his where he went to distance himself from his friends and family. She was not a stupid woman, she had an idea where he was going and why. At Trumble’s funeral in Minneapolis last week, she’d been impressed to see a tear roll down her husband’s cheek, but she’d said nothing about that either, though just now McGarvey realized how hard it must have been for her not to reach out for him, to hold him and console him; tell him that everything would be okay. He probably would have snapped
at her, he thought, and she probably had known that too.

  He was torn in two directions, as he had been for most of his life. On the one hand he loved his ex-wife with everything in his soul; he wanted them to have a life together. A real life, because he had some alternatives. He didn’t have to go out into the field, almost no DDO before him had. In fact he didn’t even have to stay with the CIA. He could always go back to teaching Voltaire, maybe back at the small college in Delaware where he’d taught before. Or, he had enough money so that he could retire; they could travel, just be together.

  Who the hell am I kidding, he asked himself. He could see Alien Trumble’s face in his mind’s eye. The man had no names, no conditions.

  Elizabeth had come back from Paris for the funeral, and dealing with her had been even more difficult than her mother, because she was more direct. Word had spread around the DO that bin Laden was on the move and that her father was probably going after him. But no one outside of a handful of people knew the details.

  “Otto won’t tell me what’s going on, and I suppose you’re not going to make it any easier for me to find out, are you, Daddy?”

  “Just watch yourself, will you, sweetheart,” McGarvey said distantly. They were at the airport in Minneapolis to catch her flight back. She’d already said goodbye to her mother who stood a few feet away talking with some of Trumble’s family.

  “Is there anything you want me to take back to Tom?” Liz asked. She was a pretty young woman of twenty-three with a round face, short blond hair and electric-green, inquisitive, sometimes mischievous eyes. McGarvey pulled himself back to the present.

  “Things might get a little dicey in the next few weeks, so keep your head down, okay? Don’t take any chances.”

  She smiled wryly and glanced over at her mother. “What’s Mother say?”

  McGarvey shrugged. It was none of her business; she was trying to draw him out further. “She’s okay.”

  She nodded. Her mother and father were her world, but they had decided not to tell her they were getting remarried. Not until this was over. “Give ‘em hell, Dad,” she said seriously, then she gave him a peck on the cheek, waved goodbye to her mother, and headed for the jetway.

  He could see her reflection in the glass of the window. I am what I am, he thought A leopard cannot change its spots. And yet for a brief moment he felt a genuine stab of pain thinking what he was jeopardizing. What he had been jeopardizing all of his professional life.

  Below, the mountains spread to a broad plateau and he could see the sprawling city of nearly two million people, and beyond it the international airport five miles to the northeast. Kabul, which was at an elevation slightly higher than Denver’s, was obscured by a pale brown haze and looked just as drab and colorless as the gray and brown countryside. After the Russians had pulled out in ‘89 and the Taliban had taken over, life in Afghanistan had become dreary and brutish. Women had to be covered head to toe, and they could not hold any jobs, not even as medical doctors. It was one of many cat eh-22s. Women could not be examined by male doctors, and since there were no female doctors, women were never Heated for any sickness or injury. The death rate among the female population was becoming horrendous, yet the Taliban ruling party did nothing about it, nor would it allow much of anything to be done by outside agencies. The entire nation of sixteen million fiercely proud people was spiraling downward into a dark age, its borders all but sealed off to the outside world, which for the most part seemed content to allow Afghanistan to self-destruct in civil war.

  It was a dark country, McGarvey thought. A brooding place, filled with secrets and repressions and death; a perfect place for a man such as bin Laden and his fanatical followers to wage their jihad against the West.

  Coming in, the American-built airport looked like any other around the world; long paved runways, a large fairly modern terminal and control tower, maintenance hangars, warehouses. But there were very few jetliners on the ground, and only a handful of cars and a few trucks in the parking lot. Definitely not right for a city this size; it was as if the place were holding its breath, waiting.

  He closed his eyes as they touched down with a jolt and a sharp bark of tires, putting his family and that life completely behind him. Divorcing himself completely from one life of normal routines, for the other more dangerous existence in which the slightest misjudgement, the tiniest error, the briefest hesitation at the wrong time, the most innocuous miscalculation could cost him his life. It was a self defense mechanism, an instinct for survival in which he fell back on a set of skills that he’d honed over twenty five years in the business; automatic reflexes, an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings and the dangers they held. When he opened his eyes again, the transformation was nothing less than startling. Had the French businessman seated next to him been watching he would have sworn that his seatmate on landing was not the same who’d flown from Dubai. But then the only differences were in McGarvey’s cold, gray-green eyes, and in the way he held himself; loosely erect, yet like a coiled spring ready to strike. He was back in the field.

  McGarvey’s only luggage was a small overnight bag and a laptop computer in a leather case, both of which he had carried aboard. Bags in hand, he followed the line of passengers across the tarmac into the customs hall of the terminal. Armed military guards seemed to be everywhere, and unlike the security people in many airports he’d flown to or from, these men looked as if they meant business. They were alert, their attention constantly shifting from passenger to passenger as if they expected an attack to come at any second. Nothing sloppy here, McGarvey thought.

  When his turn came he laid his bags on the low table in front of a uniformed customs inspector and handed over his passport The man looked up comparing the photograph to McGarvey’s face.

  “Wait here,” he said, and he walked off In a military officer who was talking on a phone at a standup desk. When the officer was finished the customs inspector handed him McGarvey’s passport

  The customs hall was a long, narrow room with windows facing the parked airplane, several doors leading to offices, a set of large swinging doors through which incoming baggage was brought in and a pair of turnstiles leading to a corridor marked: TO terminal in Arabic and French. A top line of print that had probably been in Russian was painted out. A pair of armed guards, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, flanked the exit They were checking everybody’s entry cards.

  The military officer examined McGarvey’s passport and CIA-forged visa stamp, looked over at him and then made another brief phone call. When he was finished he came over with the customs inspector. Neither of them smiled, though the military officer didn’t seem as nervous or as belligerent as the inspector, and his British-accented English was much better.

  “What is the purpose of your visit to Afghanistan?”

  “Business,” McGarvey said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that one of the soldiers at the turnstiles was watching them.

  “This is a diplomatic passport. What sort of business?”

  “Actually I’ve been sent over by my government to inspect our old embassy building.”

  The officer’s thin lips compressed beneath his luxuriant dark mustache. “Open your bags.”

  McGarvey did as he was told, and the officer rifled through the clothes, which included a pair of soft boots and bush jacket. He pulled out a toiletries kit and looked through it, then picked up a small leather pouch.

  “What is this?”

  “A camera,” McGarvey said.

  The officer handed it to the customs inspector. “There are no cameras permitted in Afghanistan.” He turned his attention to the computer. “Switch it on.”

  McGarvey did it, and Windows 98 came up on the LCD screen. A few seconds later the icons appeared. He brought up the file manager and clicked on one named: emb-k. A picture of the U.S. embassy in Kabul was displayed.

  The officer was impressed despite himself. He gave McGarvey an appraising look. “You will ne
ed permission from the Ministry of Security before you can inspect this building.”

  McGarvey held his gaze for a beat, then nodded. “I understand.”

  “You will also be required to have an escort.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take everything out of your pockets.”

  McGarvey complied, laying his ballpoint, wallet, handkerchief, comb, several hundred dollars and change, penknife and satellite phone on the counter.

  The officer eyed the money, but picked up the phone which was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “What is this?”

  “A telephone.”

  “Portable phones are not permitted in Afghanistan,” he said, and he handed it to the customs inspector.

  “In that case I’ll stay right here until the next flight leaves, and I’ll be on it”

  “It is the law.” The officer straightened up.

  “You have my camera, but I’ll keep my phone.” McGarvey took a hundred dollar bill from the pile and slid it across the counter.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the officer said, recoiling.

  “It’s for my telephone permit,” McGarvey said with a straight face. “It’s the same in most other countries. The money goes to your Ministry of Communications. It’s a licensing fee, do you understand?”

  The military officer motioned sharply for one of the guards to come over. “Search hint.”

  McGarvey spread his arms and legs, and the young bearded soldier quickly frisked him. When he was finished he stepped back and shook his head. McGarvey noticed that the hundred dollar bill was gone.

  The tension in the hall was very high. Some of the other armed guards, seeing that something was going on, had unslung their rifles. Most of the other passengers had already cleared customs and were gone, but the few who were left behind looked over, then quickly averted then eyes. No one wanted to get involved.