Читать книгу The Big Burn - Terry Watkins - Страница 15

The cool air took her breath away for a moment. The inside of the hut felt just like a refrigerator. She inhaled, as if trying to suffuse every cell with coolness.

There were half a dozen computer workstations, all manned by young men. On the walls, giant maps. Several large printers along the far wall were kicking out page after page of documents. The place hummed with military paperwork.

She and Brock headed to the back as chairs moved and men stepped out of their way.

Not unexpectedly, she actually heard a few very low moans as they walked by. She saw Brock shake his head.

Brock knocked on the only office door in the place. A gruff voice told him to enter. Brock asked Anna to wait.

She stood outside, leaning against the wall, thinking that she needed to call her mother at some point and explain where she was and to tell her that her father was alive. Her mom was going to be shocked. Anna didn’t know the protocol on this CIA base and didn’t want to do anything stupid. Her dad’s life was in danger and she didn’t want to be the one to end it—just by making a phone call. Her mother was probably out in the mountains with her satellite phone, so it wouldn’t be difficult to contact her. But should she? They usually talked three or four times a week, sharing adventure stories. This time, she’d have more to share than a fire adventure. This time she would raise the dead. She had a feeling her mother wouldn’t believe it, and at that precise moment, Anna could barely believe it herself. But if she didn’t call, her mom would worry. Anna didn’t want that.

About ten minutes later, while Anna had fallen into memories of her dad, Brock opened the door and motioned her inside.

The stern-looking man sitting behind the desk told her to have a seat. “I’m Curtis Verrill,” he said without looking up from a file he was leafing through. Like that was more important at this moment than making eye contact. She knew right off that she wasn’t going to like this guy.

Verrill wore tan khakis and a blue short-sleeved knit shirt with no insignia. After a few moments, he finally sat back, looked up and studied Anna for a second.

He said, “I apologize for all the secrecy and hassle. Believe me, this has been as difficult for us as it has been for you.”

“And why is that?”

He didn’t appear to like the question, or maybe the tone, so he ignored it. “We have a problem—”

“And I take it, I’m the solution.”

He didn’t respond to that either, but he did throw an accusatory look at Brock, as if to say he knew where her prejudgment had come from.

He picked up a brown folder and held it in his left hand. “Your father’s files. I’m sure you have some questions.”

She stared at the folder. After all these years CIA was suddenly going to tell her the truth about her father’s disappearance.

She reached across the desk for the folder, but he pulled it back. Apparently, he wasn’t really going to tell her anything. Now she really didn’t like the man.

Verrill related the reasons her father went under, the reasons for the cover story, his extreme value as an agent. “For an American to have any credibility in a Muslim culture, he has to be one of them. Marry into their world. Live, dress, eat and sleep like they do for a long period of time. Do business. Have a solid bona fide relationship with the people around him. Your father succeeded in all of that. He was well known and well accepted. Once he was in, he began to network.”

She listened to the story and wondered if it was any truer than what she’d believed about her father before. These people were professional deceivers. He wouldn’t have put his own daughter through all that sorrow and pain for a job, even if it was for national security. He would have found some way to contact her. To let her know he was still out there. Alive.

Brock had already told her most of what Verrill was saying about the mission. Everyone, she was sure, was well versed in this story, but no one seemed to have a good reason about her father wanting her to come in after him.

“Why me?”

“I can’t answer that,” Verrill admitted. “We have the highest qualified smoke jumpers in the world. We didn’t need to go to a…civilian.”

You left a word out, Anna thought, but what was it? Female, perhaps?

She felt a little like she’d taken a wrong step and had fallen into the rabbit hole, Alice in Jungleland. She was standing there in the middle of the Pacific with this CIA agent and this Special Ops guy telling her she was going to jump onto some tiny island—an island in the middle of the pirate and terrorist country—in less than twenty-four hours to rescue her father.

It seemed completely unbelievable to her.

There had been times when smoke jumping felt the same way. She went from putting out one small fire to the next, and the next, and after about five or six of them she no longer could think straight.

Perhaps this was one of those times.

“If this is all true, why wouldn’t he have contacted us? We thought he was dead.”

“He couldn’t contact you. Not you, his ex-wife, relatives or friends because that’s the nature of the business he’s in. He took on a different name, different identity. He had to be believed. Any suspicions might have put you and your mother in jeopardy.”

Verrill handed her a photograph. “This was taken two months ago.”

The man in the photo was getting out of a car, wearing Muslim headgear and clothing, deeply tanned, older, but it was her dad. The nose, the shape of the face. Definitely him.

Then Verrill started lecturing her on how critical the mission was, how important it was to get her father out. That the free world was depending on her. He called it Operation Fierce Snake.

She stared at Verrill, but her mind was on her father and that day he’d left and never returned. She remembered him turning as he was getting into a friend’s car. She was getting ready to go to her first year at the University of Colorado. He’d winked, smiled and said, “Be good. Be quick.”

She had laughed. “We have to live up to our name.”

He’d smiled and given her a thumbs-up.

According to Brock, her dad was already remarried by then. He’d never said a thing.

Then Verrill regained her attention. “We’re still getting some weak, random signals from his locator. He’s up on the mountain. He has some contacts on the island and one of them will meet you when you go in. Brock will fill you in on the details.”

Her father had divorced her mother twelve years ago, but he never talked about it, or berated her mother. She’d been one of those very lucky girls to have the greatest of fathers. Anna knew, and apparently so did the CIA, that she’d go anywhere, risk anything, to get him back.

Verrill continued, “Malaysia is off-limits. If you go in, I don’t know anything about it. If you don’t come out, I know nothing about that either.”

Anna glanced at Brock. He was impassive.

Verrill said, “You will go into training immediately and train continuously until you leave. That’s all.”

He stood now and reached out to shake her hand. She shook it, but somehow she knew it was simply a formality. There was nothing friendly about the gesture. “Good luck,” he said, and pulled his hand back.

The way he said it, the dark flicker in his eyes, sent a chill through Anna. She knew he really didn’t believe she could get in there and get her father out.

She’d prove him wrong.

She followed Brock out of the office, through the Quonset hut and back into the heat.

“I would like to call my mother in Colorado.”

“No problem. But you can’t tell her anything about your father or what you’re up to. You should call her soon, because once we start the training you won’t have time to talk to her until after we get back. Plus, you should know that any calls going out of here will be monitored.”

A man coming out of one of the other Quonset huts walked toward them. He had the confident swagger of someone born and bred to run things, as comfortable at the country club as on a secret military base. “Anna Quick, I’m Tom Roca.” He shook hands with her. “Welcome on board. I heard about your saving those college kids. That was very fine work.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

“Take good care of her, Brock,” Roca said, his eyes shifting for a brief second to Brock.

Brock didn’t answer.

“Great to meet Jason Quick’s daughter,” Roca said. “Enjoy your training.” He gave her a little smile, then walked into Verrill’s hut.

When he was gone, Anna turned to Brock as she climbed into the Humvee. “A friend of yours?”

“Not exactly. CIA. One of Verrill’s boys. Actually, he thinks he’s running this mission,” Brock said sardonically. “Practice before he assumes the job of running the universe.”

Anna smiled. She was starting to like Brock more and more.

They drove on to the village of Quonset huts down the road. She reflected on the tension between Roca and Brock, and Brock’s attitude toward Verrill. Not a happy group. She wondered what had happened to cause such hostility between them, and hoped it wouldn’t affect their chances of a successful operation.

Anna called her mom on a Sat phone Brock gave her—one, no doubt, that scrambled the conversation and made it impossible to be intercepted and decoded. She assured her mom that she was all right and was just going to sleep in for the next few days. Then she finally took a shower. She lingered in the downpour like a starved desert plant under the season’s first rain. She didn’t care if she used up all the water on the base, she was going to get clean. There were times, and this was one of them, when a shower or bath vaulted ahead of food, shopping or sex as life’s great relaxer. She didn’t need yoga, prayer, drugs or alcohol to get centered. She just needed water and soap.

Brock had gone somewhere to get her some clothes. When he came back she heard him on the other side of the door. “Everything you need is here.”

“Thanks.”

Fatigue breaks down the walls of reason and lets in unbidden thoughts, such as she was naked and a foot away was a handsome soldier. She smiled at her erotic nonsense. She wished she had time for a longer daydream but she was sure Brock was pacing outside, waiting for her to finish.

After the shower she found a pile of clothes just outside the stall on a chair. A green T-shirt, light nylon pants with four side pockets and jungle sneakers. High-fashion commando gear.

“Quick, you dressed?” Brock yelled from somewhere outside.

“Yes,” she called out. He walked in sooner than she’d expected, so she turned her back to him while she pulled her shirt down.

“Shower feel good?” Brock asked.

“I’m almost human.”

“You get that scar jumping?”

Shit.

She hated that he saw the scar on her back. She’d been planning on getting some skin grafts to get rid of it, but hadn’t had the time. “Yeah. Hit a snag. I didn’t have body armor on. It’s ugly, I know. I’m going to get it fixed one of these days.”

“It’s your badge of courage,” he protested.

“I like badges I can hide away in the drawer.”

He laughed and pulled up his shirt to display two nasty scars on his stomach. “Like these.”

The scars were there, but she was seeing the body that was holding them in place. The man had no fat on him. Didn’t she see a book in Barnes & Noble once with some title about the diet of the warrior among the thousand or so other diet books? Brock could be the cover.

She asked, trying to be nonchalant, “How did you get those?”

“Some moron tried to blow up a convoy I was hitching a ride on. Long story, bad ending for a lot of good people.” He tucked in his shirt. “Don’t think of a scar you earned in battle as ugly. There’s nothing ugly about it.”

She wasn’t going to argue with him, serious as he was. Especially when his scars represented something very emotional and deep. But she fully intended to get rid of hers…one of these days.

She followed him out to the Humvee and jumped into the passenger seat.

Anna rubbed her eyes. “The training for all of this had better be good.”

He gave her a wry glance, then headed down the road.

When they’d gone a few hundred yards, he said, “We’ll get in about a thousand rounds.”

“What? I need that much?”

“It’s my job to prepare you the best I can. Besides, if you’re with me I want to know I’ve made you very comfortable with Heckler and Koch.”

“Who are they?”

“They are the assault weapons you’ll be married to until we’re extracted. A thousand rounds from now you’ll think you were born with them in your hands.”

“I’m so excited,” she said sarcastically. “How long does it usually take to train somebody for your line of work?”

“Couple years. Couple million rounds.”

“I’m going to be proficient with Heckler and Koch in a day? Yeah, right.”

“Familiar is the operative word. Proficient is a marriage of talent and practice we don’t have the time for. Just give it a chance, okay?”

She nodded.

They rode in silence for a time, then Brock glanced over at her. “You may or may not hit the bad guys. I just want to make sure you don’t shoot me should a crisis arise.”

Excuse me, she thought with an inner smile, but you, my friend, are way too necessary to my survival to shoot. “I’ll try not to.”

“What’s between you and the CIA?” Brock asked.

“Years of lies.”

“Then it must feel good to finally know the truth.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t believe that your father is alive?” He glanced over at her, a look of confusion on his face.

“I don’t know yet,” she explained. “I guess I do. It’s just such a shock, it’s hard to bring this whole thing into focus. If he’s really in trouble, I want to get him out of there. Once he’s safe, then I’ll go ahead and have whatever kind of joyful nervous breakdown it requires.”

“We’ll get him out,” Brock said. “Given your record and mine, I’d say as a team we might just be the best there is at extracting somebody from a very bad situation.”

Flattery no less. She wondered what the structure of his thought patterns might be. He never appeared condescending, like Verrill, which she found to be a bit of a shock. He didn’t seem to possess any really annoying macho mannerisms toward her. Anna had run into just about every variety of male as a smoke jumper. The heroes and the assholes. She was sure the military was no different. Brock was a mystery that didn’t look to be easy to unravel. He was charming, no doubt about that, but charm could be the most venomous of snakes. It always put women in a weak position. Anna liked to know who her friends and enemies were up front and the charmer never allowed that. They were the real high-stakes poker players in the game. The ones she had to look out for.

Another group of men appeared out of the jungle and jogged in single file across the road in front of them. These men wore jungle camouflage, carried weapons and had blackened faces. Brock slowed to let them get across the road and into the high grasses of the field.

“Why haven’t any females broken through this elite barrier yet?”

He gave her a sidelong glance with that enigmatic half smile of his.

“They have now.”

Watch this guy closely, Anna thought. He’s saying all the right things.

She was in trouble.