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I HITthe ground and muscle memory from my Ranger training takes over, and I duck and roll like I’m landing after a parachute drop. The helicopter dips and increases its speed, and as I get up, Jeremy is standing right next to me, his face red and twisted with anger.
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” he screams.
I check myself and my gear, which isn’t much: just my MOLLE harness, radio, pistol, small water bottle, two spare magazines, and my MP5 over my shoulder. I take that off and say, “Pretty obvious, don’t you think?”
“You…you get on that radio and you call for someone to pick you up! Now!”
By now the helicopter is gone. “You don’t get to order me to do shit, Jeremy. According to both of our respective agencies and paperwork you signed and swore to, I’m still in charge of this operation.”
“This operation…” To see a rugged, determined, and armed SAS trooper search for words on other days would be amusing. But my sense of humor isn’t up and playing right now.
He grimaces. “Our operation isover.Completed. You have no right or purpose to be here. Call your CIA, your military, your goddamn JetBlue or someone to retrieve you, Amy. You don’t belong here!”
“Our operation is over when I say it’s over. And whatever you’ve got going on, you’re going to tell me, and if I think it’s appropriate, I’ll assist.”
“You…”
“You’re limping, you’ve been beaten up, you can barely see out of one eye,” I say. “Now, Jeremy Windsor, you have one minute to tell me what the hell is going on, and then we’re going to start moving, with me in the lead.”
He stares with fury and anger at me, his dirty, torn, and bloodied clothes flapping a bit in the mountain breeze that has come up.
“Pretty soon bad guys with guns in those hills are going to start talking to each other about a BP helicopter that flew in and then flew out,” I say. “Those were civilian pilots. You think they know how to do evasive maneuvers or flying? No. Nice job retrieving Santiago and Jordan, but they drew a very long arrow to where we’re standing.”
Jeremy’s still not talking. I say, “Meaning, someone might be hauling ass up here. And when they get here, it’s going to be just you and me.”
Now he speaks. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But I know something else.”
“What’s that?”
“You and Oliver, you wanted to get captured. Why?”
It’s a pleasant morning and Tom Cornwall decides he’ll take the long walk to work, even though he knows there’s a spotter or two out there, keeping him in view. He has a new job now, working for a start-up news organization here in Manhattan. About a year ago he was at loose ends, with Amy starting her new position with the CIA—part of him wants to laugh at the absurdity of that, his wife, his Amy, a field agent with the CIA—and after a book deal had fallen through, he was hunting hard for a new job.
And this one had practically fallen into his lap. Dylan Roper, who had once worked with Tom at theNew York Times,had pitched him on it over lunch one afternoon at the Union Square Cafe. “There’s too many amateur voices, too much fake news, too much biased crap out there,” Dylan had said. “I’ve got some financing and I’m getting a crew together to get back to our journalism roots. Hard news, exclusives, fully sourced and backed up, with no agenda except reporting. Criterion News Service. You in?”
He waits at a crosswalk, crowded with other commuters on this beautiful Manhattan morning. After that offer and some long, grueling talks with Amy—“Oh, all right, then,” she had said—here he was, working for Criterion, and enjoying nearly every minute of it. It was good to get back to his old reporting days, and despite a harsh temper and a demanding editorial style, Dylan kept his word, providing the technical and monetary support to make the agency a player in the international news-media field.
The light changes.
Tom moves along with the crowd, wondering, as he does most mornings, what his wife is doing right at this moment.
Jeremy says, “You’re full of shite.”
“No, no I’m not,” I say. “The last briefing before we arrived here, we were told the place was clear of any terrorist groups or militia. But no, one group manages to pop up and go after you right after we complete our primary mission.”
“It happens.”
“Sure,” I say, getting cold up here on this exposed plateau, knowing I’ll freeze in place if we don’t get moving soon. “But why only you? If there had been an intelligence failure, why wasn’t another group chasing us Americans?”
“Amy…”
“When you got ambushed, you refused help. You didn’t want us coming back, you didn’t want us to respond, you didn’t even ask me if I could call in a drone or an airstrike. Nothing. And don’t take offense, Jeremy, but you surrendered. SAS men fight until they run out of bullets, then they use their knives, and if they don’t have knives, they use rocks or their bare hands. Why did you want to give up?”
His eyes are showing me something else—an internal struggle, some kind of debate going on—and finally he says, “Ollie and me…we had another mission. We were to be captured, then brought to a terrorist leader…one we were going to make every effort to kill.”
“Who is this guy?”
