Dead Reckoning

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_d773747e-54ee-5393-a318-628d65c73eeb)

Zarqa, Jordan

The mob was heating up outside. Its rhythmic chanting of the past two hours had given way to random shouts and jeers from individuals amid the larger, heaving mass of human fury. Rocks were flying, and if experience was any guide, Molotov cocktails wouldn’t be too far behind.

Mark Hamilton stood watching on a closed-circuit television, since the US consulate had no external windows. It was basically a bunker, the design dictated by security concerns, with eight-foot concrete walls around it, topped by razor wire.

That wouldn’t stop the mob, if its excited members were determined to get in.

“Still no police?”

Hamilton turned to face his aide, Arnie Connelly. “Not yet.”

“Jesus, how long does it take?”

Hamilton shrugged. They both knew members of Jordan’s national Public Security Force should have shown up by then, if they were coming. Their headquarters, another bunker, stood roughly half a mile from the consulate, a five-minute drive at rush hour, even without lights and sirens.

“They’re hanging us out to dry,” Connelly said.

“We’re not hung yet,” Hamilton answered, trying to sound confident.

The trouble, this time, had blown up out of nowhere. Back in the States, in some southern backwater, a crackpot preacher short on congregants and craving national publicity had hatched a plan to gain recruits and pocket their donations with a protest against Islam. Picking up a couple dozen copies of the Koran—likely the only ones for sale in his reactionary cotton-picking state, Hamilton suspected—he had invited all and sundry to a grand book-burning ceremony, featuring a barbecue, a bluegrass band and his incessant pleas for money to support his “great, important work.”

Predictably, the Muslim world had gone insane.

Now, here he was with Connelly, one other staff member, and two US Marines, manning a bunker in the middle of the night, a lynch mob at their gate.

Great time to be a diplomat.

Most people in the States couldn’t explain the difference between an embassy and a consulate. Embassies were the larger, more important facilities, defined as permanent diplomatic missions, generally located in a foreign nation’s capital city. Consulates, by contrast, were smaller outposts, normally sited in tourist cities, where they handled minor problems involving visas, travelers’ problems, and wheedling complaints from expatriates. They had smaller staffs, fewer guards, less prestige.

Zarqa was not a tourist town, per se. There were no tourist towns in Jordan, at least so far as jet-setting Americans were concerned. Zarqa was Jordan’s second-largest city, with a population of 481,000, and housed more than fifty percent of all Jordan’s factories, fouling the air till it hardly lived up to its own name’s translation: “the Blue One.” Zarqa also moved about ten percent of Jordan’s exports—leather goods and clothing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

That meant that while sun-baked foreign tourists were in short supply, the city saw its share of Western businessmen, wheeling and dealing in suits that cost more than Hamilton earned in a month. Few of them visited the consulate, preferring to discuss their needs with the ambassador in Amman, but Hamilton was there, in case one of their trophy secretaries lost her purse and didn’t think the native cops were suitably outraged.

“What’s Rigby doing?” Hamilton inquired.

“Burning a lot of papers.”

“Shit!”

Hamilton left his aide staring at the monitors and went to find Cale Rigby in his office. Rigby was supposed to be a cultural attaché, which was not-so-secret code for CIA. Their spook in residence, he was involved in God knew what, lording it over Hamilton and Connelly as if he were the consul, and the pair of them were just his flunkies.

Then again, given the climate of the times and the leanings of the State Department back in Washington, he might be right.

Hamilton didn’t knock before he entered Rigby’s office—still the only one he’d ever seen that had its own incinerator in one corner, with a stovepipe routed through the outer wall. Rigby was sitting in his roller chair, with the incinerator door open in front of him, feeding the flames with documents one handful at a time.

“You think we’re that bad off?” Hamilton asked.

The CIA man didn’t bother facing him. “We could be screwed,” he answered, “but it doesn’t matter. This is protocol.”

“All of your hard work, up in smoke.”

“No sweat. It’s all on file at Langley, anyway.”

The first shot sounded like a firecracker outside, but Hamilton could tell the difference. His bunker had been strafed and stoned before, though never by a mob this size, so furious.

“Better go check that out,” Rigby advised, dropping another wad of top-secret reports into the fire.

* * *

THE FIRST SHOT was a signal, nothing more. Saleh Kabeer checked his Rolex watch and saw that it came right on time. He trusted other members of his team to hear and carry out the orders he had drilled into their heads over the past two weeks, in preparation for this moment.

He was grateful to the backwoods bigot in America who had devised a plan to outrage all of Islam at a single stroke. Without him, Kabeer would have had to plan a local incident himself, whip up the necessary anger to collect a mob and go from there. This stroke of luck, headlined and amplified by Muslim news outlets from Nigeria to Indonesia, was surely a gift from God to aid his endeavor.

Given the time and opportunity, Kabeer thought he might send the scrawny Crusader a fruit basket, as thanks. Of course, the fruit would all be poisoned.

Kabeer was supervising the attack, which he had also planned from its beginning as a spark of rage against the West. His group was not yet large enough to tackle major targets, but this would be a decent start. His young men were the best, most dedicated he could find, all disillusioned by the endless talk and feeble action from al-Qaeda and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, craving battle and glory.

Starting this night, their wish would be fulfilled.

* * *

“JESUS! YOU SEE THAT?” Connelly blurted out.

It was impossible to miss. Someone had thrown a grappling hook over the razor wire topping the consulate’s south wall and was hauling in its line, ripping the coiled wire from its moorings. “And there’s another one!”

He turned and followed Connelly’s finger, pointing toward the west wall’s monitor. Same thing and same result. Within another minute, maybe less, the north and east walls both had broad gaps in their curly razor wire. A moment after that, he saw the ladders going up. Dark, nimble figures scrambled over, dropping down inside the walls.

Welcome to US soil, Hamilton thought. For whatever that’s worth.

Not much, this night, with no police in evidence and only two Marines to guard the consulate. He’d issued orders not to fire on anyone unless the building was invaded, then use common sense in self-defense. Hamilton knew Marines were tough, but two of them could no more stop a mob of hundreds—was it thousands, now?—than they could stop a tidal wave with sandbags and harsh language.

Five men altogether, in the consulate, and what would happen if he broke out extra guns for Connelly and himself? Would it make any difference to the inevitable outcome?

Hamilton had already phoned the embassy, not once, but half a dozen times. Their answer was the same each time he called: Hang on. Help’s coming.

So was Christmas, but the way things looked right now, Hamilton doubted he’d be celebrating it. More likely, he would be the ghost of Christmas past.

“Look! That guy’s got a rifle!”

By the time Hamilton turned, the man Connelly had seen was on the ground and out of sight. Another one came close behind him, though, and this one definitely had some kind of military rifle slung across his back, together with a heavy-looking satchel.

Ammunition? High explosives? Hamilton was betting that the gunman hadn’t scaled their wall to drop off a petition or his dirty laundry.

“We need to get out of here!” Connelly said.