True Faith and Allegiance

“He’s shot through the lung!” Olivia protested. “Be careful!”

“We just need him alive, Sal. Not happy.” Jack pulled a pair of zip ties off his chest and secured the man’s hands on the bedposts. “This is so he doesn’t wring your neck while you’re saving his life.”

Olivia ripped away his shirt, felt around his back for an exit wound. It was there; her hand came back bloody. As she began cleaning the wounds to seal them, she looked up at her brother. “Who are you, Jack?”

“We’ll talk later, when this guy isn’t around.”

Al-Matari coughed. “Yes… who are you, Jack?”

Jack knelt over him. “I’m the end of your road. You don’t get to be a hero or a martyr today, Musa.”

“You’ll never get me to talk.”

“Me? I’m not the one asking you anything. Honestly, I don’t give a damn what you know. But others do, and they are going to take you somewhere and pump your twisted brain so full of drugs that you won’t be able to lie about anything.”

* * *

Chavez had found Clark lying in a heap thirty yards down the hill from the ledge. He’d bounced roughly down the darkened hillside, just below the rocket’s impact, so although he hadn’t taken the effect of the blast into his body, he’d tumbled down in an avalanche of soil and rock. Chavez held a light on Clark and admonished him each time he tried to sit or stand, while Davi checked him for serious injuries. Davi determined the dirt-covered senior citizen likely had a concussion, as well as a broken rib or two, and a sprained or broken wrist. But miraculously he’d suffered no more damage than that.

The two ambulatory men helped Clark back down the hill to the cabin, and by then Jack had called Mary Pat Foley directly to let her know that a wounded but alive Abu Musa al-Matari could be picked up at a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the only charge to the U.S. government for this item would be transport for five to the D.C. area.

* * *

A pair of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the FBI’s Tactical Aviation Unit landed behind the cabin forty minutes later. On board were medics prepared to keep al-Matari alive, and to make John Clark a little more comfortable, as the injury to his ribs was making it more painful to breathe by the minute.

The first aircraft took off as soon as it was loaded, but the second wasn’t going anywhere for a while. It had deposited a dozen members of the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team. They spent the entire evening and part of the next morning combing the area with their night-observation devices for other terrorists, but all they found were seven dead bodies and three vehicles, two of which had several rolls of carpet over some cases in the back. They found weapons and ammunition, but when the HRT men pulled out the carpets from the vehicles, they were astonished to find four Igla-7 surface-to-air missiles, each one easily capable of taking down a jumbo jet.

72

Captain Carrie Ann Davenport had been back in theater for a full month, but she still had the garden party in College Park on her mind. The dead and the wounded. The man she’d killed using the pistol that her father had given her, insisting that she carry it on her body at all times, because the President of the United States, Jack Ryan, had said that it was the right of every member of the armed services.

Her dad had been right about her carrying the gun, and she’d never hear the end of it, but she wouldn’t complain about his reminding her that he told her so.

Something else had happened the day of the attack. The good-looking guy working on his master’s in history had asked her out for coffee that night. They’d both been rattled by the events and they both felt like they needed someone who’d been there to talk to.

Since that night they’d e-mailed each other almost daily, and they’d even Skyped once, which was an ordeal for her because she was at a forward operating base in southern Turkey, on the Syrian border, and it was hard to look her best.

Matt didn’t seem to care, he joked that for some reason her loose-fitting desert aircrew battle dress uniform turned him on, and she’d laughed harder at that than she’d laughed at anything in weeks.

As she sat for the briefing for tonight’s mission she had Matt on her mind, but only at first. When the major began explaining what was going on this evening, she instantly focused fully on the job at hand.