He tossed the Pig’s keys to Linc and had started to slide back from their concealed position when Linda grabbed his arm. “What do we do with the guy?”
“Leave him. I have a feeling the Libyan government is going to announce they’ve located the crash site within the next twenty-four hours. Pretty soon, this place will be crawling with people. Let him explain what the hell he’s doing here.”
With that, Cabrillo slipped away. Crawling on his elbows, he covered the distance to the unsuspecting man in under a minute. It helped that the distant helicopter’s turbines were beginning to turn over with a whine keen enough to set his teeth on edge.
Screened from the others behind a hillock, Juan waited for the man to finish his business before rushing the last few yards. The man’s back was turned, and just as he started to stand upright and reach to pull up his trousers Cabrillo struck him in the back of the head with a fist-sized stone. He’d recalled the Somali he’d struck in a similar fashion less than a week earlier and put enough behind the blow to collapse the Libyan in the dust.
Juan nodded to himself when he felt a pulse at the man’s throat and started stripping off his clothes. Fortunately, the man was one of the few wearing boots. They would hide the shining titanium struts of his artificial leg. Removing the kaffiyeh revealed an average-looking guy in his late twenties or early thirties. There was nothing about his features to make Juan think he wasn’t Libyan, though he couldn’t be positive. There was no wallet in his uniform pockets or any other means of identification. The clothes didn’t even have labels.
Cabrillo dragged the unconscious man farther from the crash site, and made certain his own satellite phone was secure behind his back. Without it, he never would have considered what he was doing. Then he waited, though not for long. Someone began shouting, bellowing over the roar of the chopper’s engines.
“Mohammad! Mohammad! Come on!”
Now Juan knew the name of the man he was to impersonate. He tucked his scarf a little tighter around his face and emerged from behind the hill. The soldier they earlier identified as the leader of the twenty-man team stood fifty feet from the chopper. He waved Juan in. Cabrillo acknowledged him and started jogging.
“Another minute and we would have left you out here with the scorpions,” Juan was told when they came abreast.
“Sorry, sir,” Cabrillo said. “Something I ate earlier.”
“Not to worry.” The team leader slapped him on the shoulder, and together they climbed up into the chopper. Inside its rear cargo compartment, fold-down seats lined both walls. Juan slouched into one a little ways off from the others, making sure his pant cuff covered his metal ankle. He was pleased to note that not everyone had lowered their kaffiyehs, so he laid his head against the warm aluminum hull and closed his eyes.
He had no idea if he was in the middle of a regular Army platoon or surrounded by fanatical terrorists. In the end, if they discovered him, he decided it probably wouldn’t matter. Dead was dead.
A moment later, they were airborne.
THIRTEEN
THE MUSIC CAME IN EVER-RISING WAVES AS IT NEARED ITS crescendo. The orchestra had never played better, never had more passion. The conductor’s face glistened with sweat, and his baton whirled and flared. The audience beyond the bright spotlights was held rapt by the performance, knowing they were experiencing something magical. The rhythmic pounding from the percussion section sounded like an artillery barrage, but even that couldn’t drown out the swelling notes from the violins and woodwinds.
Then came an off-key sound.
The musicians staggered in their play but somehow managed to find their place again.
The dull thud came again followed by a sharp click, and the music stopped entirely.
Fiona Katamora returned from the performance she had been playing in her head, her right hand poised with an imaginary bow, her left curled for her fingers to rest on the strings.
Practicing music in her mind had been the only way to keep herself sane since her capture.
Her cell was a featureless metal box with a single door and a chamber pot that was infrequently emptied. A low-wattage bulb protected by a wire cage gave the only illumination. They had taken her watch, so there was no way for her to know how long she’d been their prisoner. She guessed four days.
Moments before their aircraft made its emergency landing in the open desert, their pilot had come over the intercom to explain that they had spotted an old airfield. He managed to eke a few more miles out of their descent and set the aircraft down. The landing on the dirt strip was rough, but he had gotten them down in one piece. The cheer that went up when the wheels finally stopped rolling had been deafening. Everyone was up at once, hugging, laughing, and wiping at their joyous tears.
When the pilot and copilot stepped from the cockpit, their backs were slapped black-and-blue, and their hands shaken until they were probably ready to fall off. Frank Maguire had opened the main door, and a warm desert breeze had blown the stink of fear from the cabin.
And then his head had exploded, spraying blood and tissue onto the stewardess standing behind him.
A swarm of men emerged from along the length of the runway, where they had been hiding in foxholes covered with tarps and sand. They wore khaki uniforms, their heads swaddled in scarves. Several had ladders, and before anyone could think to reseal the cabin one of the ladders was set against the bottom sill. The pilot rushed to push it back, like a knight defending a castle wall. He was hit in the shoulder by the same sniper that killed Maguire. He went down clutching at the wound. An instant later, three men brandishing AK-47s had reached the cabin.
Fiona’s assistant, Grace Walsh, screamed so shrilly that Fiona later recalled being annoyed with her at the same time she feared for her life.
It all happened so fast. They were herded back away from the open door to allow more men to enter the plane. The terrorists kept repeating in Arabic, “Down. Everybody get down.”
Fiona somehow had managed to find her voice. “We will do whatever you say. There is no need for violence.” And she had gotten down on her knees.
Seeing her take the lead, the crew and staff sank to the cabin floor.
One of the men yanked Fiona to her feet and pushed her toward the exit at the same time that another man was climbing the ladder. Unlike the others, he wore dark slacks and a white short-sleeved oxford shirt.
Fiona knew the moment she saw him she would never forget his face. It was angelic, with smooth coffee-colored skin and long curling lashes behind wire-framed glasses. He was no more than twenty years old, slender, and almost bookish. She had no idea how he related to the gun-wielding savages shouting at her people. Then she noted he had something in his hands. A set of Arab worry beads and a copy of the Koran.
He smiled shyly as he passed her and was led into the cockpit.
She looked back to see her people being handcuffed to their seats, understanding telescoping in on her so the horror hit like a physical blow.
“Please don’t do this,” she begged the man grasping her arm.
He shoved her even harder toward the ladder. Fiona went wild, clawing at his face with her fingernails and trying to ram her knee into his groin. She managed to rip off his kaffiyeh and saw he didn’t have the classic Semitic features of a typical Libyan. She guessed he was Pakistani or Afghani. He balled up his fist and punched her hard enough that she momentarily lost consciousness. One second, she was scratching and kicking, and the next she was lying on the carpet, the left side of her face pulsing with pain. Men standing outside on the ladder started dragging her off the plane.