Page 79 of Over the Edge

“But?” she prompted.

“I don’t expect this to go well. I have to beg you one last time to reconsider going any further with me. Let me finish this on my own.”

“You don’t seriously expect me to agree to that, do you?”

“Please, Anna.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, I have orders to do this mission, too. And nowhere in them did it say, ‘Go as far as you can, but as soon as it gets dangerous, bug out and come home.’”

Trevor huffed, but she was right and he knew it.

She continued in a hush, “How about this? How about you stop thinking of this as a suicide mission and instead, wrap your head around the fact that you’ve got help, and we can succeed at rescuing Ken and getting out alive?”

“But you don’t understand,” he blurted.

“Help me understand.”

“My plan is to get close to Kenny and die. The British military will demand my body back. When the Pakistani government can’t deliver it, the Brits will mount an operation to come get my remains. That’s how Kenny is going to get rescued.”

“What?!” she squawked.

“Keep your voice down!” Trevor bit out.

“That’s crazy!” she exclaimed under her breath.

“The Americans can’t mount a rescue operation for a presumed dead operator, but the British military can mount a rescue mission for a known body of one of its officers. I’m here to provoke the Brits into taking action that your country can’t.”

“Trevor?”

“Yes?” he responded reluctantly.

“Your plan sucks.”

“It does not—“ he started.

She was not having it. She cut him off sharply. “Yes. It does. It sucks rocks.”

He made a sound of rueful humor. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”

“Fine. Your plan is also dumber than dirt.”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“Not off the top of my head. But you and I can do awholelot better than that. We’re smart people. Between us, we can definitely come up with a better plan thandyingto attract enough attention to get a spec ops unit deployed out here.”

He rolled his eyes but didn’t disagree. Good thing. She would hate to have to smack him around in the tight confines of this tent. She pulled out the map and spread it in front of them.

“Okay. We’re here, at the ambush site.” She pointed at the map. “This is the next village up the valley and here’s the settlement at the head of the valley. If I were Abu Haddad, I would have set up shop in one of those to run the ambush and watch it from a safe distance.”

Trevor nodded. “Keep following the logic.”

“He knows a crap-ton of Marines and U.S. technology will be in the area to clean up after the ambush. He either goes underground into tunnels or caves, or he bugs out of the area immediately after the attack. Given that we did successfully put a SEAL team inside supposedly secret tunnels as part of the Swat mission, I’m betting he didn’t trust the tunnels to be safe. Which means he leaves the area immediately when the ambush strikes.”

“Go on.”

“The poisoning of the water…if that’s why all the critters are gone…he does that to drive the locals out of the area. That way there’s nobody left to tell anyone like us that he was ever here.”

“Conclusions?”

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