Target two, p.3
Target Two, page 3
And yet, Brian waited for her to make the next move. Why? Because she was technically his boss, even though he went to a different university than the one she taught at? Or was it because the field season was coming to an end, and he didn’t want a long-distance relationship?
She could ask herself those same questions. Jana had been single for a while now. Career and travel had come first, and while there had been a few short-term relationships, no one really promising had come along. No one who really fired her excitement.
Not even Brian.
Handsome, yes. Intelligent, oh yes. But tempting? Only in an abstract way, and only because it had been so long.
You should really stop flirting with him if you’re not going to follow through. It isn’t fair.
Or you could just have a fling . . .
As physically appealing as that sounded, the idea left her emotionally cold. She didn’t want a fling, not really, but Brian lived in another state. A fling was all they could expect. Besides, the dig was wrapping up soon, so a long-distance relationship built on so little time together would be bound to fail.
She thought all this through as she followed a faint goat trail up a rocky incline to the east of the dig site. It grew steeper, the small stones scattered on the slope looser, and she found her mind focusing more on getting a good footing than running through the soliloquy of “to Brian or not to Brian, that is the question” one more time.
That’s why she liked this hike. Oddly, a bit of exercise after an exhausting day actually revived her. As she ascended, the landscape stretched out below her. Already, she could see the distant glitter of the Atlantic to the west. More, and rougher, hills stretched to the east. The one she liked to climb was a mere foothill to a larger range. There was a little village to the south—its square, white houses looked like building blocks gleaming in the late sun. Camp was to the north, consisting of an orderly row of tents and a prefab structure to house the lab and store the finds. She could already see smoke rising from the chow tent as Abdel, the dig cook, created something delicious for dinner. Beyond the camp, a gravel road ran a couple of miles, then turned into a paved road, which in turn became a highway several miles later.
She felt grateful that the highway remained out of sight. She liked the feeling of isolation here.
Just as she got to the summit of the hill, a roughly level area the size of a large living room punctuated by jagged rocks, she paused.
Something wasn’t right.
She listened, and other than the soft sound of the wind and the distant clonk clonk of sheep’s bells from some unseen flock, there was nothing.
So, why had she stopped? Why was her gaze darting all around her while goosebumps rose on her sweating flesh?
She didn’t know.
Then something made her look down. Something she had seen out of the corner of her eye, something that had impinged itself onto her subconscious, and from there, the mind’s natural instinct for survival made it rise to the conscious and force a physical reaction.
She looked down, and in the grit between the rocks, she saw a footprint of a large person wearing boots.
The local shepherds wore sandals. The only people who wore boots locally in this area were military and her own crew, and she knew none of her own crew had been up here, at least not in the past few hours, as the crispness of the boot print would indicate.
When you think you might be hunted, don’t act like prey.
That’s what her father had told her when they played soldiers in the woods.
Act casual. Unconcerned. But remain alert.
Jana pretended to look out at the view as she always did, but instead of gazing far to the horizon, she lowered her eyes to look at the rocks and declivities nearby. She made a slow turn, ears perked for any noise.
Nothing. She kept turning, intending on making a slow circuit and then leaving. She didn’t know if this footprint meant nothing or something very serious, but she’d skip her evening routine today.
She didn’t get a chance. Jana had only made it halfway through her circle when, just to her left and at a spot she would have examined in the next second, she heard a slight sound of movement.
She whirled to face it, and saw a North African man, young and wide-shouldered, dressed in boots, jeans, and a loose shirt, studying her with narrowed eyes.
Jana didn’t see any more of his features. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the pistol in his hand.
“Don’t move,” he ordered in Arabic. “And don’t pretend you don’t understand me.”
He spoke with a Tunisian accent.
Slowly, Jana raised her hands halfway up, still close to her center so she could use them to block or strike. Her father had taught her these things, too, although she was long out of practice. He’d gone MIA years ago.
The man paced forward.
“What do you want?” Jana asked. The evenness of her tone surprised her.
The Tunisian didn’t reply. As he approached, he reached his free hand into his pocket and came out with a flex cuff, basically a giant plastic zip tie like many police officers use instead of the old-style metal handcuffs.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
Not going to happen.
She waited until he was in reach. He gestured with his gun and opened his mouth, probably to repeat the order, when Jana brought her left hand slamming down on his wrist and her right hand in a vicious jab for his Adam’s apple.
At least that’s what she tried to do.
The Tunisian moved his gun hand forward, so her blow landed on the rock-hard muscles of his forearm rather than the more vulnerable area of his wrist. At the same time, he brought up his free hand to block her punch, slamming her arm aside with such force that Jana staggered.
The Tunisian gave her a front kick to her stomach that left her doubled over and coughing on the ground.
“That’s more like it,” the Tunisian said. “Now, I’m going to put these cuffs on and then I have to make a little video. My clients requested it as part of the job.”
CHAPTER THREE
Jacob scrambled up the hill, hoping he wasn’t too late. He’d been stalking the Tunisian mercenary El Idrissi for the better part of two hours as the guy took a back route to get to a hill overlooking Jana’s dig camp. This move had confused him. While he had allowed the Tunisian to stay well ahead of him to reduce the chances of being spotted, Jacob could see that he didn’t have a sniper’s rifle. So, he wasn’t going to pick off Jana at long distance. Observe the camp for a while before slipping in at night? That seemed more likely, although there was another hill just to the east of camp that would make a better vantage point.
Intrigued and worried, Jacob had watched his quarry get close to the top of the hill before getting on his belly and worming his way through the rough terrain.
Jacob only caught glimpses of him after that.
Then when Jacob had gotten two-thirds of the way up the hill, he heard the sound of footsteps ahead and to his left.
Jana walked into view.
Damn it, this is probably some daily routine, and the people who hired this guy knew it.
Jacob resisted the urge to shout a warning. That might invite a shot. Perhaps El Idrissi was hired to kidnap her or question her.
He hoped so, because if he was going to just kill her at the first opportunity, there was no way Jacob was going to get up there in time.
Still, he moved up, keeping low, trying to stick to cover while trying to keep quiet.
An almost impossible task. Every few steps, a little noise from the loose ground would betray him.
Hopefully, El Idrissi was so focused on Jana, who had disappeared beyond the brow of the hill, that he wouldn’t notice his approach. Sweat slicked the grip of Jacob’s automatic pistol, but his hand remained steady.
He heard voices, a man’s and then Jana’s familiar tones. He felt a sudden surge of desire and tamped it down. Now wasn’t the time.
Never was the time with that woman, for all sorts of reasons.
He heard the sound of a struggle. Jacob increased his pace.
As he got close to the brow of the hill, he went on his belly and wormed his way between the rocks. A narrow gully to his right, about the width and depth of a bathtub, offered him a way up that would conceal him completely, but the countless little rocks in it would shift and betray him.
Surprise was key. El Idrissi hadn’t simply shot her as soon as she appeared, so he wanted to keep her alive for a while at least. That gave Jacob time to get into position. He hoped.
He stuck to more solid ground, eyes constantly roving, looking for the Tunisian.
Jacob found Jana first, lying on her side on the fairly flat top of the hill, doubled over and coughing. His heart clenched, and a cold, sick fear washed over him at the sight of such a strong woman reduced to something so helpless.
Her hands were behind her back, and while Jacob couldn’t see them, they looked under constraint.
What he didn’t see was her attacker.
Jana looked up and around, then shouted, “He hid to my rear left.”
She said this in Arabic, thinking whoever had spooked the Tunisian was a local.
Boy, is she going to be surprised.
Assuming we both live through the next ten seconds.
He didn’t see anything where Jana indicated, and he was well hidden enough, peeking through a shadowed crevice between two stones with a bush behind him to cut his profile, that Jana didn’t see him.
So, where the hell was the Tunisian? El Idrissi must have heard Jacob coming up the mountain and hid. If he had any sense of the direction Jacob had approached from, then he’d circle around the hill and come at Jacob from Jacob’s right.
The hiss of several small stones being displaced told him that the Tunisian was coming for him faster than he anticipated.
El Idrissi had come through the gully, the same gully Jacob had skipped.
Jacob hunkered down but didn’t hear the sound repeat. El Idrissi had traversed it. He wasn’t going up or down.
That meant he was close. Close enough that a gunfight might end up being fatal for the both of them.
Why aren’t grenades standard issue in the CIA?
Jacob decided to risk it all on a sudden appearance. Making his best guess as to his silent opponent’s location, he popped up from behind the rock to his right, leveling his gun.
He had misjudged by a hair. Swiveling his gun to where he saw the Tunisian’s half-concealed form, he let off a shot just as the Tunisian fired too.
The Tunisian’s bullet cracked off a rock just by Jacob’s leg and then the mercenary dropped out of sight.
Jacob shifted to a more covered position but couldn’t find anything too good because the man was downslope from him. He kept his gun trained on where El Idrissi had disappeared, waiting for him to reveal himself, straining past the ringing in his ears for any sound of movement.
The man’s arm appeared. Jacob fired, and the arm dropped out of sight. A grenade sketched a perfect parabola with himself at its end.
Jacob had no place to hide, and no time to hide there.
Jacob leapt up and swatted the grenade as if he was playing badminton and his hand was the racquet. The heavy steel globe stung his palm, but his move had the effect of sending the grenade back down the slope.
Jacob hit the dirt just as it went off in a plume of dust and a patter of falling stones.
He saw flailing through the cloud. Squinting, it took him a second to figure out what he was seeing. The grenade had dislodged a large rock and several smaller ones just above the Tunisian’s hiding place, setting off a minor avalanche that the mercenary got caught in. Jacob got a brief glimpse of him staggering out from the onslaught, battered and bleeding, before the dust obscured him again.
Jacob fired all ten remaining rounds from his magazine in a low fan pattern all around where the guy could be hiding.
The dust began to clear. Jacob got to one knee and snapped another clip in the pistol.
The dust cleared more, blowing up above the hillside like an expanding wraith. El Idrissi lay sprawled on his back, his pistol out of reach, and his mouth open, gasping. He had a widening bloodstain on his shirt, one on his shoulder, and another on his thigh.
The chest shot was the one that counted. Even from a distance and through ears ringing from the gunshots and explosion, he could hear the telltale bubbling wheeze of a punctured lung. The man was hemorrhaging blood both internally and externally.
“You OK, Jana?”
“Yeah.”
“Are there any more?” he asked, looking around. He hadn’t seen any while stalking the Tunisian, but it paid to be careful.
“No.”
“Hold on.”
“Untie me!”
“Hold on.”
Jacob moved with care down to the mercenary, keeping low and keeping a sharp eye on the dying man. He may have been plugged three times, but that didn’t meant he was down for the count.
As he approached, the Tunisian flailed his arms a bit, trying to sit or move or draw a weapon. Jacob wasn’t sure. His movements were too weak, too uncoordinated.
Unless it was a trick.
It was.
With a speed remarkable for one so injured, the mercenary reached under his leg, pulled out a knife hidden there, and threw it straight at Jacob’s throat.
It would have skewered Jacob’s Adam’s apple if he had been a little quicker and a little less injured. Instead, Jacob nailed El Idrissi right between the eyes just as he was about to release. The hand twitched, and the knife hissed past his ear.
Damn it, I wanted to question him!
Jacob shrugged it off. El Idrissi had been a pro. He doubted the guy would have told him anything.
He approached, studying the body to make sure El Idrissi hadn’t set up any death switch or movement trigger. Wouldn’t want to start searching this asshole and have him go off like the Fourth of July.
Jacob couldn’t see any wires or triggers. Probably wouldn’t have had time to set one up anyway. His last trick was concealing that knife and acting like he was dying.
The acting job had been the easy part. Jacob could have sat out of reach for ten minutes, and it would have all been over, but he had questions, questions that now wouldn’t get answered.
Like who wanted to go after Jana, and why.
“Hey, Jacob, get your ass over here and untie me!”
“Hold on.”
“Hold on? I’m trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey here.”
“I said hold on,” Jacob replied, annoyed.
He searched the body. Besides a couple of spare clips, a wallet with an ID with the right picture and the wrong name, and a thousand dollars-worth of Moroccan dirhams, all he found was a phone. Locked with a code, of course. He knew someone back in that café in Marrakech who could break into this easily enough, assuming he was going back to Marrakech. He couldn’t say why, but he smelled another long mission coming up.
He took out his own phone and took a photo of the body’s bloodied face, then of a mole on the left hand that would be a distinguishing mark. The same for a scar on the right hand.
Back in Afghanistan, there had been guys who took photos of their kills as a sort of trophy. Jacob had never done that. This was for the record, to send to the Moroccans and all other allied governments so they knew there was one less scumbag in the world.
“What the hell? Are you taking photos of a dead body?”
Jana had made it to her feet and stood, arms bound behind her back, at the top of the hill looking down at him.
“Proof of death,” Jacob said, walking up the slope toward her. “It’s not like I’m going to print it into a poster or anything.”
“Good to hear.”
Her voice wavered a little, the joking barely covering up the shock of what had just happened. She was cool in a fight, but the aftershock always hit her hard. It hit Jacob Snow hard, too, once upon a time.
“What did he say to you?” Jacob asked as he came up to her and pulled out a Bowie knife. Jana turned around so he could cut her bonds.
“Nothing, other than he was going to make a video before . . .” Jana let out a little shudder and Jacob almost sliced her hand.
He held her hands in his. “Hold still,” he said in a gentle tone.
Jana took a deep breath. Her shoulders relaxed a little. The trembling continued. Jacob squeezed her hands, and they finally became still.
He cut through the binding plastic. She rubbed her wrists and turned to him.
“Thank you. What the hell’s going on?”
“No idea. Just got some intel that someone hired this guy to take out a hit on you. The CIA sent me to intercept.”
“All the way from Greece?”
Greece was where Jacob was based and where he had his home, on the rare occasions he got to stay there.
“No. I was . . . closer.”
“Thank you.”
Their gaze held for a second. Jana looked away first, out over the distant camp. A crowd of archaeologists and students, barely bigger than dots, stood outside the chow tent. Another group was making its way toward the hill. Jacob caught the blue uniform of the police officer he’d been told was on duty.
“They’ll be here in twenty minutes.” Jana told him. She turned to him and found him lying pone, peeking over a rock.
“Go down and meet them,” he said. “Say you heard a gunfight up here and ran. You didn’t see anything. I’ll cut out in the other direction.”
He took a step away, unsure how to say goodbye. It was great to see her again, even given the circumstances, but this was no social call, and he needed to get going. He nodded to her and turned away.
“But wait, what the hell is happening?” She called out after him.
He found himself walking back to her. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know. We’ll dig into this. In the meantime, keep vigilant.”
Jacob was about to turn away a second time when his phone buzzed. Why the hell did something important always come up when he was already in the middle of something important?
