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He just hoped they didn’t test it because Kevin Nixon had applied the stencil only a few hours earlier from a catalog of gang and prison tattoos he kept aboard the Oregon.
“What are you doing here?” the first thug asked.
“There’s a man who works at the harbor. He owes people I represent a great deal of money. I want to hire some of your guys to help me keep an eye on him until it’s time to collect.”
“You have money?”
Eddie didn’t bother to answer. No one in their right mind would make such a request without being able to pay for it. “Four or five days. Eight or ten guys. Ten thousand dollars.”
“Too tough to exchange. Make it euros. Ten thousand.”
With the currency rates the way they were, that was almost fifty percent more. Eddie nodded.
And, just like that, he had enough men to keep Tariq Assad under twenty-four-hour watch, while he and Hali waited in a flea-bag hotel that the Tong controlled. The gang supplied updates on Assad’s movements every six hours via disposable cell phones, so over the course of a few days they had a pretty good pattern of his movements.
Generally, Assad worked eight hours on the night shift at the dock, though he would usually take off for a couple if no ships were expected. On those nights, he went to an apartment not too far from the harbor where he kept a mistress. She wasn’t the prettiest of the ones he frequented, but she was the most convenient.
After work he went home to be with his family, slept maybe six hours, and then went out to have coffee with coworkers before visiting other apartments dotted around Tripoli. Eddie asked his new employees to put together a list of the women’s names, and when he asked Eric Stone to cross-reference them using the Oregon’s computer it came back that Assad was bedding the wives of midlevel government employees. Even the plain girl near the harbor was the sister of the deputy director of the Energy Ministry.
Given that Assad wasn’t particularly attractive by anyone’s standards, his conquests were all the more impressive.
Eddie and Hali both concluded that Assad was nothing more than a mildly corrupt harbor pilot with an overactive libido and one hell of a pickup line. That was until Max Hanley called with his bombshell announcement. Assad’s ingratiation into the bedrooms of Libya’s government took on a whole new and darker aspect.
JUAN LISTENED OVER THE phone as Eric Stone described the route the old rail spur took through the mountains toward the coast, twenty-odd miles away. The satellite pictures didn’t give the gradient of the line, but Juan’s tracking chip had put him at nearly a thousand feet above sea level when he’d gotten off the helicopter at the terrorists’ training camp.
From the outline of a plan that was forming in his mind even as Eric spoke, Cabrillo decided it was going to be one hell of a wild ride.
Worse, though, the timing was going to be incredibly tight, and he could think of no excuse he could have Overholt pass on to the Libyans to delay their assault without tipping his hand.
Adding to his problems, he hadn’t slept more than six hours out of the past forty-eight, and, judging by the appearance of his three shipmates, they weren’t faring much better.
“What is it?” Linc asked, his surgical gloves covered with blood as he finished the last of the tight stitches. He had sewn the cut in Juan’s leg by layering three rows of catgut, moving from the deepest part of the wound out to the skin, so there was no way it would reopen. With a local anesthetic keeping the pain to a dull ache, Juan felt confidence in his body’s abilities.
“What?”
“You just chuckled,” Linc replied, snapping off the gloves and stuffing them into a red biohazard-containment box.
“Did I? I was just thinking that we are so deep over our heads right now I don’t know if what I have in mind is going to work.”
“Not another of your infamous plan C’s?” Linda groaned. She stood just outside of the Pig
, looking over Linc’s massive shoulder.
“That’s why I laughed. Gallows humor. We’re well past C and into D, E, or F.”
There were two options facing Cabrillo but no real choices. He was about to put them all into a shooting gallery, with the Pig playing the role of sitting duck.
Linc duct-taped a gauze pad over Juan’s wound, and said, “If Doc Huxley has a problem with my work, tell her to take it up with your HMO.”
Juan struggled back into his pants. They were ripped in a dozen places, and so crusted with sand that they crackled when he drew them over his hips, but the Pig didn’t carry any spare uniforms. He did a couple of deep knee bends when he leapt to the ground. The cut was tight, but both the stitches and the anesthesia held.
The sun had yet to show itself over the distant mountains, so the stars blazed cold and implacable overhead. Cabrillo studied them for a second, wondering—and not for the first time—if he would live to see them again.
“Mount up,” he called. “The show’s gonna be mostly over by the time the Oregon arrives, and we’ve got a lot of grim work ahead of us.”
“Just curious, Juan,” Linc said casually. “Who are these people we’re going to rescue? Political prisoners, common criminals, what?”
“I think maybe they’re the key to this whole thing.”
