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“Doing what? Taking fire?”
“No…just standing down. Not moving. The Night Stalkers followed their orders. They took off. The last they saw, the three-member squad was returning to the mountains.”
Ernest puts his teacup down. “That Cornwall…” He pauses, shakes his head. That woman. Talking to her, working with her, planning with her, trying to make her just shut up and understand the Agency’s position on intelligence matters…some days it’s like trying to stop a spinning buzz saw with your fingers.
Still.
An opportunity has just arisen for him, and Ernest is always one for seizing such occasions when he can.
“All right,” Ernest says. “It looks like she’s run off on a rescue mission. See if we can’t get a communications drone overhead. Those mountains can play havoc with receiving and transmitting.”
“Yes, sir,” he says. “Do you want to talk to Horace Evans, then, to see what he might know on his end?”
Ernest nods. “Do it. Soonest.”
Tyler goes to the door and Ernest says, “Tyler, let’s set a deadline.”
“Sir?”
He carefully thinks through his options. “If we don’t hear anything positive in the next twenty-four hours, put out a leak to one of our friendly reporters covering national security. Just a whisper—an indication that a contract force working on their own has lost a team working inside Lebanon.”
“Plausible deniability,” Tyler says.
“Of course,” Ernest says. “If we have to cut them loose to protect the Agency, so be it. As of now, they’ve gone rogue. I won’t stand for it.”
Tyler bites his lower lip for a moment. “Don’t you think you might be acting…hastily?Sir? I mean, twenty-four hours…”
Protect the Agency,Ernest thinks. Both he and Tyler know what’s really going on here, not daring for it to be mentioned, but what’s really happening is that Ernest is protecting himself and his career, and his boss’s career.
Among other things.
The Agency can take a hit.
But Ernest refuses to let that happen to him.
“Tyler?”
“Sir?”
He picks up his teacup. “Make that twelve hours.”
Chapter10
AT THEsecond thirty-minute mark of our slog up the narrow and winding trail, I call for a break.
It’s been a long, grueling hike, and I think fondly of growing up in Maine and going with my parents for weekend tramps in our stretch of the White Mountains. Here there’s nothing but rock, fissures, boulders, and the occasional winged creature flying overhead, and the distant bare ranges covered with snow and ice.
Jordan has Ollie’s weapon and is taking lead, and Santiago is now bringing up the rear. I’m in the middle with Jeremy, and he’s been one closed-mouth son of a bitch ever since leaving the farm and his dead comrade.
His clothes are a mess, one eye is swollen, he’s limping, there’s dried blood on his face—a mixture of his and Oliver’s, I’m sure—but I’ve yet to hear, “Thanks for saving my ass back there.”
Which isn’t surprising. Special Forces soldiers and sailors operate on a different plane than us regular grunts. They are incredibly competitive and have tremendous endurance—and most have all the conversational skills of a brick.
So Jeremy is typical.
But I know something else is going on.
We’re on the edge of a small plateau, with another long climb about fifty meters ahead, and I fiddle with the radio strapped to my waist. The resulting squeal of static in my left ear nearly makes me jump.
