A gust of sand-heavy Saharan wind scraped Tyler Grant’s cheeks and caused a twitch in her bad leg. Still, she waited patiently, part of a short chain of bodies linked by extended arms. Listening devices and sensors had pin-pointed three armed terrorists, locating one in the cockpit of the Tunis Air Boeing 737. The other two were in the rear of the plane with sixty-two hostages.
Tyler’s free hand rested on a shortened Tavor assault rifle. The belt on her black fatigues weighed at her waist, heavy with gear. They had deployed in four groups of six each, two teams to take the rear doors and two for the mid-fuselage ones. No one would enter through the key front doors, just behind the cockpit. Those had been jammed by the terrorists. The teams in the back had the job of safely securing the hostages, five of whom were members of an American congressional delegation on a fact-finding trip through the region. Also of note were intelligence officers belonging to the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the Libyan Jamahiriya Security Organization.
Underfoot, paving created by crushing the rubbled remains of old civilizations--Phoenicians, Assyrians, Romans, Greeks, Vandals, Turks, and Arabs--served as a reminder of other wars, other fights. Overhead, Orion the Hunter moved in a sky of barely visible constellations, recommending infinite patience to the commandos of the Tunisian Gendarmerie and their one guest member.
“Dix, maintenant. Faire dix.”
Tyler pressed forward behind Hamid’s bulk, releasing his shoulder as he started up the ladder, reaching past his legs for her first holds. Three other teams would be performing identical maneuvers, black-clad figures swarming toward the aircraft’s doors, climbing silently.
Then, pressure on her shoulder said they were in position, a chain of ink blobs again, this time a Rorschach pattern etched on the 737’s wing. The six of them would be joined for as long as it took to get through the door, sandwiched together, impersonal elements in a functional unit, like the leaves on a tree or the wheels of a car.
Not long now. Should be only seconds while the entry men finished priming the locks.
“Equipe Alpha, prêt.”
As the port side rear team reported its status, Tyler heard something else, a soft but high-pitched wail, barely audible, but it broke her concentration, and she wasn’t alone. Through the bodies touching hers, she felt Rafik and Hamid’s heads turning, caught body odor—Rafik’s cigarette-impregnated skin, Hamid’s sweet chewing gun smell. Every sense strained for information, eyes on the stars. They had all studied the meteorological data.
The sound said they were out of time. “Merde.” Rafik whispered, the word an accompaniment to his hard grip and the bunching muscles in Hamid’s shoulder. Across the horizon, above the orange halo marking the city of Tunis, the stars disappeared, cascading into nothingness.
“Equipe Beta, prêt.” Beta team was ready.
A warm breeze lapped the aircraft’s wing, tried to slip rasping fingers under Tyler’s balaclava, lifted the back of her shirt. She steadied her breathing.
Then, beyond the wing and the runway, Tunis disappeared. Where its glow had dominated the skyline, now, there was nothing. Not the nothing of an electrical failure, shutting down district after district, transforming the city, erasing the black frieze of stepped images. Instead, beyond the airport terminal and its lights, lay the dark of a wilderness.
A large dust devil whirled by, catching the tip of a wing, rocking the aircraft.
“Equipe C, prêt.” C team was ready.
A skirmish line of wind-driven rubbish came next, plastic bags, fragments of newspaper and candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs and crumpled tins. Most of it, sensed rather than seen, passed under them, a single can flying high and clanging off an aileron. A face appeared in an unshaded aircraft window, back-lit by the glow of cabin lights. Tyler imagined it might be Stephanie Wilson, visualizing the wide eyes and determined chin of her friend and Wyoming’s congresswoman who was traveling with a delegation from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. Then, the window shade came down; sliced off the image.
Tyler shivered.
“Attendez,” Rafik’s voice whispered through the radio. “On my signal. One. Two. Three. Go.”
They weren’t fast enough. Their final warning? A sharp drop in atmospheric pressure and a loss of oxygen. They had time to gulp air and to tighten their holds before a wall of wind-driven sand smashed into them, hitting the 737 with a solid thump. The storm front had arrived. Eyes squinting defensively even behind protective night vision goggles, Tyler saw a vague area of blurred light appear in the side of the aircraft. “Go, go, go,” she wanted to scream, mouth open inside the balaclava. Even with Hamid as shield and Rafik at her back, the wind threatened to toss her away as carelessly as a breeze might whip the tail of a kite. How long could she hang on? This was how a bird felt in a hurricane, how a tree bent under a tidal wave.
The Boeing 737 heaved against its restraints. Her fingers remained locked into Hamid’s shirt. And, he tumbled inside, pulling her along. Training took over, then. She threw herself sideways, feeling Rafik almost on her back. For a fraction of a moment, the immediate relief from the direct assault on her senses left her gasping and blinking away dirt as training and instinct guided the rest of her body.
Her Tavor came up and around, its laser scope projecting a searching red dot. Hours of exercises running through the streets and rooms of training facilities, firing at pop-up targets gave her confidence. Practice differentiating instantly between an outline of a dwarf with a gun and a child with a camera or between a woman reaching out for help and one tossing a grenade gave her confidence and focused her random thoughts and extraneous impressions.
Like. The congressional delegation and the intelligence officers had been herded out of their first class seats and put with the rest of the passengers in the rear.
Like. Saharan sand swirled through the open doors. Wind rocked the aircraft and roared an accompaniment, trying to lift them into flight.
Hamid had her back now. Tyler launched herself up the aisle behind Rafik. They ran, guns swinging, checking rows of chairs. Laser beams met and crossed in a bizarre dance. Heart pounding, breath shallow, Tyler did her job, blinking rapidly, swinging her shoulders from point to point, ready for anything. The floor shuddered under their feet, sand lashed the windows, drummed against the 737’s hide.
The door to the cockpit remained closed as she took the right and Rafik rolled to the left. Lungs reacting to the interior air that had already become sand-clogged, her breathing shallow, Tyler crouched, half inside the galley, Tavor ready. It was quieter here.
Lifting a thumb, she squinted through her night vision device and gave the ready sign.
Rafik, looking like a space creature in his body armor, helmet, and goggles, stood back and tested the door. Unlocked. With a nod to her, he threw it open. Tyler rolled into the opening and slammed into a pair of legthe terrorist who had stayed in the cockpit? She felt more than saw him stagger as she found space to lift a knee under her body, then checked an instinct to jam her elbow up and into his groin. Instead, she braced her back against a panel, the Tavor in a firing position.
The man had found his balance, arms reaching up toward the instrument-studded ceiling, weaponless, his kefiyah-wrapped face invisible except for his eyes. They were wide with sudden fear as red spots from the Tavors bloomed on his chest. The tableau froze for a heartbeat. Tyler stayed low, finger on the trigger, Rafik standing back, the terrorist breath rasping an audible rhythm to the wind. Sand battered the windows.
Then, the tension evaporated. The pilots stood and began applauding. One of them, the Minister of Interior, Suleiman Esshira, flipped on the cockpit lights. A large grin creased his fine features, and he took off the Tunis Air hat he had donned earlier as a symbol of the role he was to play.
Tyler flipped up her night vision device and yawned to clear her ears. Thank God! It was over. She edged out of the cockpit. Her breathing evened out, her pulse settled.
Behind her, the terrorist, a volunteer from the Direction Général de Securité et Espionage, unwound his kefiyah, muttering his own relief.
“There you are, darling,” Tyler heard a shouted greeting over the storm noise. Congresswoman Wilson had elbowed her way out of the line of hostage-players. The five intelligence officers followed her.
Blocking their way, Wilson hugged Tyler, then reached beyond to shake Esshira’s hand and bellow. “Did you know that Tyler is one of my constituents … from the great state of Wyoming and my home town of Cody, named after Buffalo Bill Cody.” She raised her voice even higher. “She’s an incredible woman, and we’re very proud of her. Very. Now, Excellency” Using her long arms and force of personality, Wilson managed to steer Tyler out of her way, usher the Interior Minister into the more spacious area of the galley, and pin him almost literally to the side of a counter.
Tyler watched this with no surprise. Stephanie Wilson was generally considered an act of nature—a Democrat elected to national office by Wyoming voters. That said it all.
The intelligence officers behind her were led by the CIA’s Inspector General, Chuck Montrose. He nodded at Tyler, also moving around her to join Wilson and Esshira. He did say, “That was quite a show, sweetheart. Congratulations.”
“Quite a show,” she repeated, rubbing the back of her neck but, also, taking the initiative and getting herself out of the way of the MI-6 officer who followed him. For just a moment, she stared at Montrose’s tall, distinguished figure, at his thick blonde hair, scarcely noticing the equally blonde and tall MI-6 officer. The rest of VIP guests were lined up along the aisle, all of them seeming to want to congratulate each other. Not that they’d done anything but watch and avoid getting shot.
Leaving the men to it, Tyler strode down the aisle, stripping off her helmet and balaclava, and shaking the dust from her hair. Then, remembering the Tavor’s sling, she dropped into a seat to tighten it. As she did, she smelled bad breath and heard. “Tomorrow. Fourteen hundred.” She didn’t look up at the Libyan intelligence officer, didn’t respond, and she felt him move away. When she raised her head, the Libyan was at the door, his suit jacket whipped by the wind. His head was bent, his right ear canted to better hear something the man next to him was saying.
Who was that? She knew the outline, the ungainly figure, arms and legs looking like bony appendages thrust into a pot belly. It was … . Yes. The guy belonging to the interesting email, a computer engineer named George Tendale, a man she’d known casually in Paris years back.
“… want to pick your brain,” the note had said.
George? Pick her brain?
George Tendale. What was George doing with his head close to her agent’s? What was George doing among this group of VIPs? She’d ask him when he showed up to “pick her brain.”
Ten minutes later she struggled through the subsiding wind and boarded a waiting bus. Hamid had saved her a seat.
“For two minutes, we are alive,” the big man muttered in his native Mahgrebi Arabic. “Then, we wait. And, wait.”
“That’s life in the fast track,” Tyler said, resting her head on the seat back.
“They liked us? These foreigners? They decide to train Libyans to be like us?”
She didn’t answer.
“We … the Unité Speciale should do this training in Tripoli, you know. We are the best.”
Tyler raised her head long enough to look at him. “You would actually train them? Not kill them?”
“Maybe a little of this, a little of that.” He rumbled a laugh. “We would take you with us to be sure some survive. The weakest, of course. It is good to remember that Qadhafi, he attack us one time. He could do the same again.” His voice changed, and he imitated her heavily accented Arabic, “’Now, Hamid,’ you would say every day. ‘You must not work these poor specimens of Libyan dogs so hard. Be kind, Hamid. Be a good boy, Hamid.’”
The man across the aisle from them heard. He was one of the unit’s two lieutenants, a blonde Tunisian, a throwback to the Vikings who once called North Africa home. On his less morose days, he would claim Tyler as a relative. “We are of the same genesred hair, yellow hair, it is the same. My ancestors come south. Your ancestors go west. What is difference? This makes you my sister.” The one thing they actually did have in common was their age. Thirty-two. Now, he said, “Shut up, Hamid. We are not interested in what passes for … .”
His voice trailed away as Rafik climbed into the bus and closed the door. Without orders, the driver put the bus in gear and headed across the remote tarmac of Habib Bourguiba Airport toward the gendarme base.
Like some of the men, Tyler closed her eyes and dozed. She had an adrenaline headache, an invariable hangover springing from action and danger. But it would go away. Excited male voices told of another type of reaction, especially among the younger and less experienced commandos. Well, at least they felt comfortable in being themselves with her along. She was no longer a source of discomfort.
Ten months ago, the blonde lieutenant’s expression had been wary, his attitude nervous. The rest of the men had been the same. The idea of a woman exercising in their ranks had been both funny and disturbing, even though they had heard of her. But she represented a flow of money that funded their high-tech toys. If she wanted to jump off the tops of buildings and crash through windows or put on scuba gear and climb the hulls of ships, none of them would tell her no or complain. They had expected to carry her along, had thought she would cause a weakening in their overall performance, had expected to tip toe around her.
“She can be difficult.” That was the word from Egypt, from the men who had worked with her there. The Egyptians hadn’t elaborated, had seen no reason to explain anything to Tunisians, but it was an open secret that she had been responsible for the cross-border capture of the terrorist, Mohammed Hamdan, doing it by leading a team of CIA mercenaries into Libya from Egypt.
Difficult or not, the Tunisians had taken one look at that red hair, the green eyes and flaring eyebrows and hadn’t cared. Egyptian opinion, in any event, counted for nothing. Egyptians were known to be fault-finders and were, and this was an understatement, difficult, themselves.
Guards stopped the bus at the gate, and Tyler opened her eyes. Beyond Hamid’s big body, eucalyptus trees bent under the wind, illumined by security lights. They drove on into the gendarmerie base with its clusters of white buildings and neat landscaping. Not long, now. She would find an aspirin, attend the debrief, and take care of her equipment. By ten-thirty, she wanted to be on her way to town. The VIP dinner should be over by eleven at the latest, and she’d be able to catch Chuck Montrose, her former husband, at his hotel.
She rubbed the back of her neck. Just thinking of him made the hair on the back of her neck prickle. No point in detouring to her own place. No. They only had tonight. He and Robert Knowland, another Headquarters’ dignitary, were scheduled to leave on the ten a.m. Air Tunis flight to Orly.
“We’re here,” Rafik announced as the bus crunched onto gravel and stopped in front of the group’s Tunis headquarters. It was a small structure set among a handful of other buildings behind barbed wire. Nothing here was for show or comfort. No air-conditioning units poked from the lower half of windows. Not a single flower relieved the white of the crushed rock-covered ground or concrete-block walls. But it was home for the Unité Speciale.
She followed the men out the front of the bus and jumped to the ground as her cellphone vibrated on her belt. Stepping to one side, she reached for the device, feeling something brushing her leg. Rafik’s dog. He was a tall, skinny animal with brown hair and a curling tail. His dark eyes gleamed up at her, asking to be petted.
“Debriefing in five minutes,” Rafik said, passing her. The dog stayed at her side.
“Tyler,” she answered her cell, her free hand dropping to massage the dog’s ruff.
“There’s news from Washington.” Chuck’s voice was harsh and rasping. “Bad news. Meet me. ASAP.”
