One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [141]
Jennifer’s face was pale. “We can’t do this alone. Can’t Kurt go get that guy now? Isn’t this enough proof?”
“No. You heard his dilemma in D.C. That hasn’t changed. It’s sad to say, but a simple suicide attack won’t cut it. He’s not going to risk political upheaval on an event that occurs every day all over the Middle East. He’s also not going to launch based on our hunch, especially when his own analysts can’t agree that it’s a WMD. We have to prove it.”
“How on earth are we going to do that?”
“Same way we were here. He’s obviously got the device, if there is one. We didn’t find one here, so we need to go there, find him, then check out what he has.”
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“Tuzla, Bosnia. Pack your stuff. We need to leave right now. We have a little over forty-eight hours before he goes nuts. Once he’s convinced they’re compromised, there’s no telling where he’s going to go.”
Jennifer remained seated. “Are you serious? Where are we going to go? How are we going to find this guy? At least here we had the message about the coffee shop. How are we going to find him in an entire city?”
“Pull up that e-mail trace again. It should have come with a map. It’s not that accurate, but I’ve been to Tuzla. It’s not that big of a place and probably doesn’t have that many Internet cafés. It’s a long shot, but we go to Tuzla, find the closest café to the map location given, and see if we can find him.”
“What happens if we don’t find him?”
“He blows up a bunch of people. Not much we can do about it. All we can do is try.”
“Shit, Pike, we can’t do this. We’re going to fail. Fail. Can’t you see that? Why isn’t anyone else helping....”
She put her head in her hands. I sat down next to her and rubbed her back.
“Look, this will all be over, whether we like it or not, within the next forty-eight hours. All we can do is try our best. Hang in there for a couple more days and it will end one way or another.”
She sat up. I was relieved to see a spark back in her eyes. “Okay. Forty-eight hours. But when we get home I am kicking somebody’s ass in the United States government.”
84
Five thousand miles away, Kurt Hale sat at his desk with the latest intel reports from Pike. He rubbed his eyes, not liking the choices he faced, or the repercussions if he chose incorrectly. He wasn’t surprised by the fact that there was no black-and-white description of the terrorists’ intentions or capabilities. It was just the way of intelligence. From past experience, he knew there was never a smoking gun. You always had to make a judgment call, read the tea leaves, and hope you came close.
He knew that Pike would take the commander’s intent he had given seriously, and wouldn’t send an alert unless he proved there was WMD involved. Unfortunately, according to this last batch of e-mails, waiting until Pike’s call might be too late. The team wouldn’t have time to launch from the U.S. to wherever Pike ended up before the terrorist fled on his suicide mission, killing thousands and possibly starting World War III.
On the other hand, if Kurt did launch a team, he would quite possibly bring down the president of the United States of America and irreparably harm the future defense of the nation, whether the threat was real or not. Once he pulled that trigger, there would be no going back.
Kurt knew that hunting a human being was hard enough, especially one who knows he’s the prey. Accomplishing the mission in another sovereign country, without leaving any fingerprints—the way the Taskforce operated—was exponentially harder.
Before starting up the Taskforce, Kurt had studied any and all operations that had a hint of being the same as what he would be called upon to conduct. He had learned—through others’ mistakes—that just getting the guy wouldn’t qualify as a success. The most glaring example post 9/11 that Kurt had seen was a rendition operation of a radical Egyptian cleric called Osama Moustafa Hassan—or Abu Omar—from Milan, Italy,