Page 127 of Whisper
“What’s out there?” Carter barked.
“Three villages. A handful of ranches. Not much, sir. We haven’t spent much time looking. There was nothing strategic there, we thought.”
“Well, we thought wrong.”
The white sedan pulled off the desert road at the village of Hibhib. Built around an oasis, the village was a shock of green situated in the rocky hills and dusty north of Iraq. Palms and ferns crowded the ground, jockeying for position. Houses were low, whitewashed and blocky. The car kept driving, passing through the village.
Until it turned up a narrow drive, lined with thick palms that towered overhead. The car disappeared from the feed, lost in the foliage.
“Get the visual back!” Carter barked. “We cannot lose this car!”
The images bucked and wove as the drone pilots swerved, changing altitude, axis and orbit, searching for a better angle. Images appeared through the mess of palm fronds. A two-story house with a flat roof. A long, gravel drive. The sedan, parked in front of the entrance.
Two men embracing in greeting. The imam was one of them.
And a stout and stocky man in black combat fatigues, with a short beard and a blacktaqiyahwas the other.
Carter’s gaze flicked to Kris.
“It’s him,” Kris breathed. He knew that shape. Knew that man. Knew everything there was to know about him without having spoken a word to his face. He knew Saqqaf, from the inside of the man out. “It’s him.”
Carter’s deputy spoke up, bracketing Carter. “We don’t know that for sure. We can’t get a definitive visual verification from this angle.”
“Get the strike team in the air and on target, now!” Carter barked. “We are not losing this opportunity.”
David leaned into his side. “I’m going with them.”
A thousand different half thoughts poured through Kris. There wasn’t time to think, wasn’t time to talk. “Go.”
David tore out of the command center as they kept watching the house. Kris imagined the frenzy of activity as the team prepared to launch from the airfield.
David… be safe.
“General, the chopper pilot is reporting engine trouble. They need time to fix the problem.”
“They don’t have time! They need to get in the air, now!”
Minutes turned to years.
The two men on the monitors went inside the two-story house, talking amiably, warmly.
Silence filled the command center.
Grainy images of the house filtered through the palms, disappearing and reappearing.
“How long will they spend together?” Carter leaned into Kris and asked softly.
“We have no idea. Could be minutes. Could be hours.”
“We could miss him, then. If we don’t get on the ground immediately. If he thinks we’re onto him, he could duck out into the palms and we’d never find him. He could run and disappear. We could lose this chance.”
Kris nodded. “We do have fighters overhead.” Two F-16s held position over Iraq twenty-four hours a day in case any US forces needed immediate air support.
“Do you want to capture him or do you want to kill him?” Carter asked. “What’s the CIA’s position on this?”
Kris’s eyes slipped closed. Mousa’s viciousness, his rabid brutality, replayed behind his eyelids. David’s shattered faith. A hundred bombs exploding, a thousand scenes of carnage. Beheaded bodies and destroyed mosques. The shattering of a nation, of a region. A faith ripped apart with every act of savagery. The slow march of time toward a final point, Saqqaf’s plan to bring about the end of days. Anguished families on both sides of the world, mourning the loss of their loved ones.
He’d been Saqqaf’s specter, his judge and jury, and his shadow confessor. He’d become as close to Saqqaf as another human could be, peering inside his skull, his mind, his psychology. Reading his emails, snooping through his laptop. He dreamed of Saqqaf at night, long dreams where they spoke across a river of blood as the world burned and airplanes crashed into the ground, but they were speaking different languages and nothing made sense.
