She glances behind her, sees the traffic light quickly go from green to red.
It will remain red for as long as she needs.
The Impala continues along Watts Road. So does a dark-blue Honda CR-V containing Wendy Liu and Phil Cannon, just in front of Noa and Aldo. Juan Rodriguez is approaching them from the other end of Watts Passage, driving a black extended Ford F-150 pickup truck. She checks her watch, and then the SIG Sauer pistol in the bag on her lap.
It’s a few minutes from getting very interesting.
“Noa, this is Juan,” comes the radio call.
“Go.”
“We’ve got company near the rendezvous site.”
“Say again?” Noa asks, looking to Aldo, her driver, who suddenly hunches his shoulders forward, like he’s getting ready to be tossed into a football game in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter.
“I’ve got a Lincoln Town Car, Virginia plates, windows tinted, near the dirt access road. I can’t tell if anybody’s around.”
Noa sees the idle countryside pass by, beautiful and rural Virginia farmland and isolated houses, except for one large government facility, over there to the west and expertly hidden by the trees and brush.
It’s the National Ground Intelligence Center, part of the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command. Although there is still no hard evidence, Noa is convinced those three foreign students—in these roundabout trips to their technical school—have been scoping out the place for a future terrorist attack.
Noa says, “All stations, we’re still a go. Juan, you’re up, get ready. Wendy, you’re next.”
Aldo says, “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” she says. “But that car could be a breakdown, stolen and abandoned, or out of gas. We’re not aborting for that.”
The narrow road is curving and looping, but now there’s a straightaway. Ahead of her is the Honda CR-V, and in front of that is the Impala. In the distance she sees Juan approaching in the other lane, driving up fast in the Ford pickup truck.
Aldo says, “Sure hope the boy remembered his seat belt.”
“Me, too,” Noa says, as the black Ford F-150 suddenly swerves into the oncoming lane, blocking the Impala, which slams on brakes and instantly collides into the side of the truck.
CHAPTER 39
FOR THE FIRST time in hours, the main cabin of the scrubbed Air Force Gulfstream G550 passenger jet is quiet. Up forward are the pilot, copilot, and two other crew members, all Air Force, but “sheep-dipped” so they’re not officially on duty but are flying as contracted civilians. They have a sense of who they’re carrying on this trip, and also have the sense to leave them alone.
In the main cabin, in luxurious leather seats designed for diplomats and officers, Liam Grey sits still with the surviving members of his team. Ferris Walton sits slumped across from him, butterfly bandages on the right side of his face from where he was cut breaking through the second-floor apartment’s window, a bottle of Heineken in his hand.
Tommy Pulaski is dozing in his padded seat. Mike Cooper is staring over at Liam, also with a bottle of Heineken in a beefy hand.
It’s been a long trip from France, heading out from an abandoned airstrip outside of Montmorency, north of Paris. There had been a debrief, a review of what went wrong and what went right, recriminations and loud curses, and two brawls.
Somewhere in the rear, in a zippered body bag, are the remains of Boyd Morris. Liam knows from cold experience that his family will soon get the bad news, that Boyd is dead, and the bad lie, that he died in a training accident.
Mike Cooper says, “We’re pretty thinned out, Liam. What next?”
“We get replacements, and after some training to ensure we click as a group, we head out again once we get our target packages.”
Ferris Walton scratches at his bandages. “Liam, besides more guys, we’re going to need a change in our ROE. We shouldn’t have nailed those guards at the apartment building with CS gas. We should have killed them all.”
Liam says, “The target was the three ISIS fighters. Our orders were to go in small, quick, hard, and lethal, and get out. Those were our Rules of Engagement.”
Mike says, “Leaving three gunmen pretty much alone.”
“They were teenage boys with AK-47s. That’s it,” Liam says. “Our job was to eliminate the ISIS hardcases before they went somewhere else or hired themselves out. They get zapped, most people cheer. If we kill three local boys being paid a hundred Euros a day for sentry duty, that gets a lot of attention we don’t need.”
With bitterness, Mike says, “One of those boys killed Boyd.”