True Faith and Allegiance

In the Black Hawk on the way back into Turkey she held Oakley’s hand tightly as she knelt down over him. Medics worked frantically on his neck, as well as another wound they’d found above his left knee.

A young man in full battle rattle and a beard seated just behind her touched her on her back, and she turned around to look at him. He said, “Our docs are the best. Your dad’s gonna be fine.”

She nodded at the joke, started to look back down to Oakley, and the young man said, “I’m Lethal.” He was the JTAC who had talked her into the target.

“Davenport,” she said.

“Just have to say, Captain, you fucking kicked ass back there. Your ship pretty much single-handedly destroyed any chance that ISIS could get their propaganda machine back up and running after the Navy blew the shit out of their building.”

She thanked him, knelt back down over Oakley, and saw his eyes were open and fixed on hers now. She smiled and tears dripped onto his face. “Hey!”

He smiled back. “Hey.”

“JSOC just said you and me kicked ass. That’s not so bad, is it?”

He tried to shake his head, but the backboard wouldn’t let him. He smiled. “Not half bad at all, Captain.”

* * *

An hour later, an A-10 was launched out of Turkey to destroy Pyro 1–1 with a five-hundred-pound bomb, making certain the enemy didn’t have anything to use as a propaganda weapon.

At roughly the same time the Apache blew apart in the desert, Chief Warrant Officer Troy Oakley died on an operating table at Incirlik Air Base.

73

Alexandru Dalca had remained handcuffed on the long flight, and he was pretty sure he’d been given something that made him sleep, because when he woke on touchdown he felt especially groggy. But he shook it off as the plane taxied and finally jolted to a stop.

A man sat down in front of him; in the past few weeks, Dalca had gotten good at telling what was happening on the other side of his blindfold.

The man spoke with derision in his voice. “Okay, buddy. This is your stop. The President promised you would be released as soon as you gave us everything we asked for. You did your part, so now we are doing ours. You are free to go.”

His blindfold was removed, and he blinked several times to see the inside of the same airplane he’d first seen over a month earlier, the day he’d been shanghaied in Romania by American intelligence, and brought to the United States. Since then he’d been kept locked in safe houses, interviewed and questioned at length, often in marathon eighteen-hour sessions.

But now, to their credit, the Americans were fulfilling their side of the bargain. He checked his pockets and saw he had only some euros, his passport, and a few other things, and he wore the same clothes he wore when he’d been kidnapped, but none of this mattered. He just had to get to a computer or a bank, because he still had $11 million in offshore accounts.

Without a word he stood up from the chair on unsteady legs, walked past the bearded men in the cabin toward the open hatch, and went down the jet stairs to the hot tarmac. He looked around. He had no idea where in the world he was, but he didn’t figure it mattered much. He was out of the USA. He was free.

The stairs closed up behind him and the jet began to roll.

Dalca started walking to a terminal a hundred meters away.

* * *

Inside the aircraft Midas looked at Dom Caruso. “How long you give it till he figures out how fucked he is?”

Caruso smiled. “Not long at all, man. He’s a smart cookie. Once he finds out where we dropped him, he’ll know he’s screwed.”

Captain Helen Reid pushed the throttle forward and the Hendley Associates jet took off from Hong Kong International just fifteen minutes after landing.

* * *

At the same time a Gulfstream 550 took off from an airport a few miles to the west, a CIA employee sat in a dim sum restaurant in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Hong Kong. Across from him at the little table was a high-ranking member of China’s Ministry of State Security. It was an odd meal, but each man knew the identity of the other, so there was no real mystery between the two.

The American’s name was Spicer, and he sipped his Tsingtao beer and looked across at his tablemate. “We wanted to let you know that we are currently hunting very hard for a Romanian national by the name of Alexandru Dalca.”

The name meant nothing to the Chinese intelligence officer, and a cock of his head confirmed it.

Spicer added, “We’re pulling out all the stops. We haven’t found him yet, but believe me, Fang, we’ll get this guy.”

Fang had been delivered intelligence before by other agencies, and he realized that was going on right now. “Very well. But… why are you telling me this?”

“Because we think your organization might be looking for him, too. We want to be careful we don’t accidentally bump into each other and cause an… an incident.”

“I see,” said Fang, but he did not.