Hunt the Viper Page 11

  She’d been a vivacious and sly young girl of nineteen with sparkling, dark-brown eyes when they married. The last time he’d seen her she looked like an old woman, even though she had just turned forty-three.

  Sheikh al-Sufi’s heart opened for a moment, and tears flooded his eyes as the woman who called herself Khadijah watched. As he cleared his eyes with the sleeve of his robe, she stood with her back toward him, and headed for the gate.

  “Wait,” he said. A bird called from the roof of the mosque.

  She continued silently and disappeared into the darkness, and he realized that he had never seen her face.

  Chapter Twelve

  The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

  —Spartan king, quoted by Thucydides

  Crocker had spent a week at ST-6 headquarters meeting with members of the new intel team—BC/2—and Black Cell’s CIA liaison, Jim Anders, going over new protocols. Anders would continue to define the missions Black Cell would carry out for the CIA and White House. BC/2 would provide daily intel support for the team while it was deployed overseas, and facilitate all communications to Anders when it was on a mission.

  Lt. Colonel Barbara Smithson from Naval Intelligence had been selected to head BC/2. Other members included a Major Assad Hussein from SOCOM, and Crocker’s old ST-6 teammate, comms expert, and favorite surfer, Warrant Officer Davis. Davis had decided to make the move from combat team to HQ staff in order to spend more time with his wife and kids.

  BC/2 met for the first time on a Friday afternoon in a conference room in ST-6 headquarters. Representing Black Cell were Crocker, Akil, CT, Mancini, and a new breacher and assistant comms man named Danny Chavez. Rip, who was out of town attending a friend’s funeral, was absent.

  Crocker had driven directly from the meeting to the airport, where he boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Las Vegas. Now, the next morning, he was walking with Cyndi’s four-year-old daughter, Amy, down the Strip. It was a dry, cloudless afternoon, and they’d already stopped at the Mirage Casino to see the white Bengal tigers, lions, and leopards in the special habitat created by magicians Siegfried & Roy. After that he’d taken her on a gondola ride through the Venetian across the street, and been serenaded with “O sole mio” by the gondolier.

  Now they were crossing the boulevard again, for ice cream at Serendipity 3 near Caesar’s Palace.

  Amy pointed at the greenery in the shape of a giant sundae complete with a blue straw and cherry on top in front of the twin-columned restaurant/ice cream parlor across the street.

  “Look.”

  “You think you can drink all that?” Crocker asked as the light changed and they moved hand-in-hand with a rainbow tribe of tourists.

  “That’s not real…you silly!” she squealed back.

  “It’s not?”

  Being with a young child was a strange experience for Crocker, but one he enjoyed. Instead of being hypervigilant to everything around him, he had to force himself to focus on the young girl with blond pigtails who called him Uncle Tom.

  Cyndi had given him that ridiculous name. She was currently rehearsing with Cirque du Soleil in a studio somewhere nearby. The two of them had barely had a chance to talk since he arrived late last night. Shared some laughs and kisses, and then made love. She fell asleep before he did.

  Cyndi seemed overwhelmed, which is why he’d volunteered to take Amy this morning while Cyndi’s mother was away.

  Amy was super cute with brilliant blue eyes like her mother’s and a slight craniofacial malformation that looked like an indentation between her eyebrows. She also had oddly shaped thumbs. She didn’t suffer from the more serious symptoms of the disease, including urogenital and heart defects.

  But she looked slightly odd and undersized. Like a doll, Crocker thought.

  Cyndi had told him that getting her to eat anything was a good thing. So he was excited that Amy wanted to order a large mint chocolate cone half as long as her arm.

  “Good?” he asked, as he held the giant cone and she shoveled ice cream into her mouth with a pink plastic spoon.

  “Del-i-cious,” she pronounced, her lips turning green from the artificial color.

  Her smile caught the attention of a middle-aged woman with a boy about Amy’s age. Introduced herself as the boy’s grandmother. They were visiting from Missouri for a family wedding.

  The boy asked to taste Amy’s ice cream. She let him.

  “So sweet,” the woman gushed. “You from around here?”

  “No. No, but she is,” said Crocker, whose eyes drifted toward two young men huddled together near some steps at the other end of the plaza. They looked like hawks watching the stream of tourists.

  “Oh.…Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Virginia,” Crocker answered.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the kids pounce. One with a shaved head stepped in front of an old couple shuffling along, and offered a newspaper to the man. As the elderly man and woman looked down at it, the second kid, wearing a black hoodie, swooped around behind the woman and grabbed her purse. As he ripped it off her shoulder, the woman spun, lost her balance, and fell.

  Crocker instinctively jumped to his feet.

  “Watch her for a minute, please,” he said to the grandmother, nodding toward Amy.

  “Yes, of course. But—”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He was gone before the words were out of his mouth, dashing across the plaza, past the old woman who other passersby were helping to her feet. Down the steps. He spied the two guys with the purse getting into a black VW Tiguan stopped along the curb on Flamingo Road. The car sped through the intersection, barely beating the red light.

  When Crocker saw that the SUV was momentarily stuck in traffic, he gave chase, darting through vehicles coming from both directions.

  Cars honked and skidded to a stop. A woman leaned out of a vehicle and shouted, “You crazy asshole!”

  It occurred to him that maybe she was right. But he couldn’t help himself. It was as though he needed this, or some basic sheepdog instinct had taken over. In very simple terms, people were divided between sheep and wolves. Protecting the unsuspecting sheep were sheepdogs like himself.

  He bounded through traffic to the other side, arriving just as the black Tiguan darted in front of another car and around a worksite, separated by traffic cones and yellow tape. The engine revved, and he saw that once it got around a parked dump truck, it would have a clear path to escape. No law enforcement in sight.

  So he pushed himself hard, arriving at the back of the car just as the engine revved again.

  Stupid punks!

  He saw the car had a sunroof, which was open. Lunged forward and clambered up the back to the roof and went in, head first, just as the driver hit the gas.

  He landed partially in her lap. His knees slammed the steering wheel. His feet pushed the shaved head of the kid in the passenger seat against the side window. The female driver hit the brakes and screamed, “What the fuck!”

  The car skidded left, slammed into the back of a van, and stopped. Crocker felt someone punch him in the back as he twisted his body up, blood oozing from a cut to his forehead. He turned and shoved the butt of his palm under the shaved guy’s chin, so that his head flew back and shattered the side window.

  The female driver screamed, “You fucking madman! What are you doing?” He turned and reached for the kid in the black hoodie. A sharp pain erupted from his forearm and stunned him for a moment. The kid had stabbed him with a pencil, the tip of which had broken away and was still embedded in his forearm.

  Slippery pissant used that moment to try to escape out the side door. But Crocker squeezed through the middle console, gave chase, and grabbed him hard by the back of the hoodie, taking the kid’s feet out from under. Scrambled on top of him. Readied his fist.

  “The purse or your f
ace, motherfucker!”

  “Take it, man. Fucking take it! Who the fuck do you think you are? Rambo?”

  A decade earlier, Séverine’s then-husband, Alain, was at the wheel of his silver Citroën DS—a creepy-looking car in her opinion, and one she described as a “slithering amoeba”—talking about his great-uncle Maurice Delage, a famous pianist, who had studied with Ravel and became one of the top French composers of his time.

  “He was an amazing man, you know. A world traveler…In 1900 he helped form a group of very esteemed artists known as Les Apaches that included Ravel, Manuel de Falla, and Igor Stravinsky. I believe I get my appreciation of music from him.…”

  It was a beautiful afternoon in late March and they were on a twisting mountain road outside Aix-en-Provence headed for an inn Alain had discovered on a previous trip. “So you believe that traits like musical appreciation are passed through the DNA?”

  “Oh, yes,” Alain responded. “It’s been proven there’s such a thing as the biological transmission of memory.”

  She always thought that he drove too fast, but usually kept her mouth shut. Alain was a skilled driver. But the speed at which he was taking the blind curves of this road made her chew her bottom lip.

  “I’ve read research that claims traumatic experiences like phobias and severe anxiety can somehow be passed from the brain into a parent’s genome, allowing them to be passed on to later generations, but never anything as complex as artistic appreciation,” she said, bracing herself for the next sharp turn.

  “Yes, but if that’s so, doesn’t it follow—”

  “Watch out!”

  A few feet ahead the road was blocked by a truck.

  “Salaud!” Alain exclaimed as he applied the brakes and turned into the oncoming lane to try to pass. Bastard! When he saw that lane was blocked as well, he braked to a stop. “Merde!”

  Several vehicles had stopped and a small group of onlookers had gathered along the right side of the two-lane road. Alain slammed his hand on the wheel and got out to take a look. “Wait here. I’ll go.”

  But Séverine didn’t wait, and followed. The driver of the truck, a heavyset man with a thick black mustache, was waving his thick arms and explaining that he hadn’t seen the bicycle.

  “I was going slow. In second gear, you know, to make the incline. The boy was in the lane. Right in the middle of the lane! I honked and tried to turn, but he didn’t move!”

  Séverine leaned forward and saw the boy on the ground past the crumpled green bike. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he appeared to be choking. The skin around his mouth had turned bluish green. Two men knelt beside the boy but looked as though they didn’t know what to do.

  One, wearing a pink shirt, shouted, “Call a doctor!”

  A woman in the crowd of maybe ten people answered, “I already called for an ambulance. It’s coming.”

  The bluish-green color spread to his cheeks. Séverine had no medical training at that point, but intuited that the boy was choking on his tongue. She stepped forward, only to be stopped by a hand that grabbed from behind.

  It was Alain. “No,” he whispered.

  “But…I think I can help.”

  “No!” he said more emphatically, holding a finger up to her face, his other hand tightening around her arm.

  He pulled her back to the car. “You’re not a doctor or a nurse. Nor am I.…Then we get into areas of liability and such…”

  She felt angry, humiliated. By the time the EMT workers arrived in an ambulance, the boy was dead.

  Cyndi stood behind Crocker in the bathroom as he washed his face, checked the superficial cut over his brow, and swallowed two Motrin. Parts of him were sore, but otherwise he was fine.

  “What the hell, Tom? I don’t understand!” Cyndi shouted, her face red and strained with anger in the bathroom mirror.

  There appeared to be no need for stitches to his forehead, or to close up the puncture to his arm, which had been cleaned and bandaged by the EMT workers who had arrived to tend to the muggers and the girl. They were later arrested and carted off.

  “You just leave a four-year-old and run off?” Cyndi continued. “Why? Because you saw a woman being robbed? Of what? A purse that probably contained less than a hundred dollars and some credit cards that could have easily been canceled?”

  He toweled his face and hands. “I’m sorry, Cyndi. Everything happened so fast.”

  “Do you realize what you did? Do you know how freaked out Amy is now? Tom, do you understand what could have happened?” She was getting louder and more worked up.

  “Amy is fine. Calm down.”

  “Calm down?…Goddammit, Tom! Look at me!”

  He turned and took her by the shoulders. “I saw the woman get thrown to the ground. I reacted. It’s over.”

  “Get your fucking hands off me!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  Their eyes met. He saw fury in hers, like that of a mother bear protecting her cub. He didn’t feel like arguing or being attacked, so he let go of her shoulders and took a step around her.

  “I’ll go apologize to Amy now.”

  She spun and struck him with her fist at the base of his neck. “No, you won’t! Don’t you dare!”

  It was approximately the same place he had been grazed by a bullet ten years ago in eastern Afghanistan. That time he’d been lucky. This time his entire head went numb for a second and he thought he was going to collapse.

  Through the mental fog he saw Cyndi coming at him again with clenched fists, shouting, “I trusted my daughter to you. You animal. You…asshole.”

  “Cyndi.…Stop.”

  “You have no control of yourself, do you?”

  He brushed her away with his left arm, and steadied himself on the side of a dresser. “You must be talking about yourself, Cyndi. Go see a shrink.”

  He sat with a beer in his hand, gazing out the window of the room he’d booked at the Mirage. Artificial blue, green, red, and yellow lights sparkled in the distance. The windows of the tower across from him sparkled gold. He rubbed his tired eyes and the lights seemed to meld into a nebula-like glow.

  He wanted to be in the field, assigned a mission, away from the emotional confusion of civilian life.

  Hell…I try to help an old woman and this shit happens…

  Caesar’s Palace had offered him a complimentary room because the woman whose purse he retrieved was one of their guests. But he’d turned it down. A year ago, he and Mancini had gotten involved in a confrontation with some North Koreans who were staying there posing as Chinese diplomats. A friend of his, who was the casino’s head of security at the time, had been fired as a result.

  So this wasn’t the first time his impulse to do the right thing had gotten him in trouble, or caused complications.

  I wonder where Jeri is now?

  A sassy African American lady with a great sense of humor and formerly a member of the U.S. Secret Service. Even though she’d been let go by Caesar’s, she didn’t blame it on him. She understood. Appreciated the fact that he was wired to act. Not sit around licking ice cream while some North Korean assholes got away with ripping off the casino, or some old lady was mugged.

  The adrenaline had subsided, but thoughts hadn’t stopped cycling in his head. His phone vibrated on the glass-topped table beside him. Cyndi. He pushed “Reject.”

  He downed the beer and a soft numbness came over his neck and shoulders. I don’t belong here.

  He got up to get a pillow, and when he returned to the armchair, his phone was dancing on the table. Cyndi again. This time he accepted the call and put the phone on speaker.

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah…” He stretched his legs out. His left knee barked.

  “Tom, I’m sorry.” She sounded like the sweet person he’d known before.

  “Yeah…”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “You and me are different.…”

  He’d already decided to leave in the morni
ng, and would figure out something to do over the last two weeks of R&R. Maybe go scuba diving in the Caribbean, or climb a mountain, or run with the bulls in Pamplona. Figured he needed to get away and clear his head.

  “Tom, I said I’m sorry. I’ve been under a lot of pressure. I know that’s no excuse. I get super protective when it comes to Amy, and I think you know why.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s so precious to me. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”

  “I get it.” Crocker twisted open another St. Pauli Girl and took a long swig. “She was never in any kind of jeopardy. I would never let that happen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Listen, Cyndi—”

  She cut him off. “As her mother, I feel that you shouldn’t have left her. That’s my opinion.”

  “Fine. How is Amy?” Crocker asked.

  “She’s okay. Before she went to bed, you know what she said to me?”

  “No.”

  “She told me you’re a hero.”

  “Sweet kid.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.

  —Isaac Asimov

  Sheikh al-Sufi sat with his top lieutenants in a room on the bottom floor of Raqqa Museum watching the ISIS propaganda videos that had been sent by a representative of the Islamic State Institution for Public Information. They did this at least once a month to boost the morale of frontline fighters, especially the new recruits from places like Libya, Qatar, Kuwait, Pakistan, Yemen, Nigeria, the UK, the Netherlands, and France.

  A young jihadist faced a camera and said, “My message to my brothers who are stationed on the front lines: Remain steadfast and resolute. Allah is with you. Present your severed limbs, bodies, and blood, and sacrifice them to Allah. Do not be weakened. Do not grieve, as you are superior.”

  The camera followed him as he climbed into a specially modified Nissan, whose rear seat and trunk were packed with explosives. An ISIS surveillance drone followed the car as it wound through the streets of Mosul, slammed into an Iraqi Army checkpoint, and exploded.