IT WAS SET TO BLOW, LOUD AND HOT
âWell, Agent Lemmon, I guess thereâs not much left to say except I canât recall the last time I saw a G-man walking around in rubber-soled combat boots. I didnât know government issues, the official kind, trooped around with compact submachine guns in special swivel rigging beneath oversize windbreakers. To answer your questions, yes, I have a major deal in the works that could change the entire destiny of the world. My employees were just chess pieces, pawns to take the fall while I rode off into the sunset. You know what my problem isââ
âIâm not your shrink, Colonel,â Lyons interjected.
The Able Team leader was already searching for cover, aware that he and Blancanales were in a cross fire. It was something in Lakeâs eyes, a look, that warned Lyons to make a scramble to save his skin.
He was in the air, flying over a couch as the Uzi appeared, like some sorcererâs trick, in Lakeâs hands.
They knew.
He couldnât nail down, of course, the when and where he suspected heâd been found out, but Reza Nahru sensed the angry heat of a killing mood in the barracks as soon as he was roused from sleep.
âGet up! On your feet! The general wishes to speak with us!â
There was real menace, he thought, in the way his brother Iranians glanced at him, then turned away, a few of them wrinkling noses as if they were in a hurry to clear a bad stench. He was on his feet, reaching for his assault rifle when Bahruz Fhalid growled, âLeave it.â
And then he knew he was a dead man, beyond any scintilla of a doubt.
Time seemed suspended, and he found it strange to the point of some peaceful, easy feeling how he could so calmly accept the inevitable, go and face down his own death. At least, he told himself, he wouldnât die alone, since he heard both men were likewise told to leave their AK-47s where they were leaned up against respective edges of their cots.
Small comfort. Dead was dead.
A moment stolen to look at Tabriz and al-Hammud, rising now from their cots under the dark scowls and black eyes of AK-47s, and he still couldnât help but wonder how his treachery had been uncovered.
It had to have been his CIA contact in Port Sudan or perhaps Khartoum. The secret meetings, accepting the envelopes of cash from the CIAâs contract agent in Sudan, had been spied out somehow, by someone. Sudan, he knew, was crawling with Iranian agents, all manner of former SAVAK thugs, and he could have cursed himself for not being more careful in watching his back. Too late to kick himself nowâclearly word of his deceit and betrayal had trailed him all the way down to Madagascar.
The sweeping courtyard was just beyond the door. The massive stone walls of the garrison, once home to French soldiers, would be smeared with his blood when he was marched out there to be shot.
Death at the hands of his own. Shot down like a mad dog in the street. A sorry testament, he decided, to a bad life.
A fitting end.
âA moment to pray?â he asked Fhalid.
âBe quick about it.â
He slumped to his knees, shut his eyes, clasped his hands. As a Muslim, once devoted to God and his will, committed to prayer and to his faith, he had somehow, somewhere lost that faith, his belief in right and wrong, stripping himself of any sense of humanity. No, he wasnât one hundred percent certain on exactly where and when he had stopped believing in God, but supposed it had begun when he had leftâabandonedâhis wife and three children in Tehran, right after the way with the Iraqis. From there, a pit stop in Beirut, beefing up on weapons and intel. There, rallying an elite corps of freedom fighters, mapping out strategy against the infidels. Then on the Gaza Strip, where heâd recruited the poor, the angry and the desperate out of Palestinian refugee camps to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv, martyrs for God. There was also an American diplomatic entourage wiped out in Pakistan not long ago that he had played no small role in arranging. At least twenty of the men gathered in the barracks had also been part of creating slaughterhouses in six different countries.