and a thousand kisses.
Mumtaz
The old woman’s eyes misted as she clutched the note to her broken heart. Then, she looked up at the soldier-woman and nodded. “Tell us what we are to do.”
CHAPTER
7
Al Zawra: Compound of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin
The man known as George Kenner had gone by many names in his lifetime, taking on and casting off identities as easily as most people switched hats. At the moment, as far as the sheikh and his followers knew, Kenner was a Canadian-born ex-paratrooper-turned-private-military-contractor who had converted to Islam twenty years earlier while helping Afghan freedom fighters expel Russian invaders from their country.
It did no good for Kenner to try to pass as an Arab, not with his startling, pale blue eyes, fair skin and white-blond hair. Brown contact lenses and a dye job might have camouflaged his eye and hair color temporarily, but those solutions were unsuited to the kind of open-ended operation on which he was currently engaged.
In any case, the language would have given him away as soon as he opened his mouth. There were myriad accents and dialects throughout the Arabic-speaking world, but none of these came naturally to Kenner. As gifted a linguist as he was, having been trained from youth to blend like a native into certain foreign milieus, he would never speak better than kitchen Arabic. He’d come too recently to the language. Better to adopt the identity of a sympathetic former infidel from a country deemed relatively benign and then get on with the job of infiltrating Salahuddin’s inner circle.
Kenner had come to Salahuddin on the recommendation of a mujaheddin chief in Kabul, who’d praised his foreign-born brother for his piety, his ruthless devotion to the cause and his superior tactical skills. Inside the jihadist movement, the Kabul contact reported to Salahuddin, Kenner was called “Juma Kamal,” but his brethren accepted that his Muslim identity should remain secret to all but a select few. Kenner was of more use to them traveling incognito under his infidel name and that useful Canadian passport, which rarely received more than a cursory glance from border guards.
That Kenner’s Canadian background was fiction, his religious conversion a farce and his Kabul sponsor long since turned by U.S. intelligence remained a secret to all but a tiny handful of individuals back in the American capital. Washington had a miserable track record for running humint—human intelligence—sources, inside the nearly impenetrable fundamentalist Islamic warrior movement. The only reason Kenner’s cover had remained intact thus far was that the existence of the double agent was known to so few.
Here in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the self-styled Sheikh Salahuddin had seized on the opportunity offered by the current confusion to return to his hometown, wrest control of it and then extend that control over the region. If his campaign went as planned, he would be a major force to be reckoned with, playing a key role in the formation of the new national government.
Salahuddin claimed to hate the traitor Saddam Hussein, a fellow Sunni who paid lip service to Islam when it suited his aims but who, together with his corrupt sons, lived like the worst of infidels. If Salahuddin had once enjoyed a decadent life himself, his time in prison had allegedly convinced him there was more glory to be found in being a holy war leader. Now that Saddam had been overthrown, he had no wish to see the Americans’ tame Shia lapdogs take over the country, divvying it up between themselves and Kurdish riffraff. While a power vacuum existed, Salahuddin told his followers, the time was ripe to exert the moral authority of the Prophet’s true way—and there was no shortage of potential followers among the country’s Sunni minority, which was terrified at the prospect of rule by Shias and Kurds, gunning for bear after Saddam’s long, dark reign.
Kenner had been infiltrated into Salahuddin’s camp ostensibly to help organize and train the sheikh’s warriors, but really to keep track of his plans and try to turn them in a direction favorable to Washington’s interests in the oil-rich region. Either that, or, if Salahuddin couldn’t be co-opted, eliminate the threat. If the sheikh had known where the mercenary’s true loyalties lay, he would have been far more careful about welcoming him into his proverbial tent.
Sitting on the edge of his cot, Kenner frowned at the sound of dead air in his cell phone. His caller had hung up on him. Typical.
He’d known Dick Stern over a decade now, since long before the ex-CIA deputy had arrived at his current exalted status in the White House inner sanctum as assistant national security advisor. He’d met Stern back in the days when he was running covert operations into Soviet-controlled Afghanistan. Since then, Kenner had carried out several deniable assignments at the CIA operative’s behest, including at least one assassination of a foreign opposition leader—a totally illegal operation that remained to this day unknown to anyone else in the American capital, least of all the dreaded Congressional intelligence oversight committees.
As far as Kenner was concerned, Stern had always been prone to pomposity—seldom in doubt, never wrong. He demanded absolute, unquestioning obedience from his agents and he got it, because to cross him was suicide, professionally and sometimes literally. On the other hand, the man did have a talent for landing on the winning side of domestic bureaucratic skirmishes, which made him a reliable source of lucrative contract dollars to a free agent like Kenner.
Kenner had been asleep when Stern called from Washington. His room in the sheikh’s compound was a private one, closet-sized but infinitely preferable to the overcrowded barracks that the bulk of Salahuddin’s fighters occupied. When his razor-thin cell phone had vibrated in an inner pocket of his shirt, he’d come instantly awake. Salahuddin was paranoid about cell phones, forbidding their use in the compound for fear of overhead satellites that fished through the ether, listening for suspect conversations and using the signal to zero in on enemy targets. Kenner was careful to keep his link to his handlers well hidden from view at all times, and was trusted enough at this point never to be subjected to a body search.
After the short conversation with Stern, Kenner tucked the phone away once more, then sat on the edge of the cot, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem of the American doctor. On the one hand, her capture had inflated Salahuddin’s reputation in this campaign where image was everything. The foreign press was already coming to name him as a power to be reckoned with, which helped attract followers to the sheikh’s camp.
From an American perspective, this kidnapping could be played a number of ways. In a worst-case scenario, if anything were to happen to the doctor, it would cement Salahuddin’s reputation as a power to be feared. If nothing else, it provided a convenient high-profile villain to shore up the American public’s support for the invasion of the country, now that it was becoming clear that the weapons of mass destruction play had been a bluff. On the other hand, if the public outcry over the doctor’s kidnapping became too clamorous, the American military might be tempted to launch a strike against Salahuddin. Kenner couldn’t let that happen. Salahuddin was too useful to him. He’d spent too long working this plan to stand back and see his protégé eliminated.
The rich tapestry of the prayer mat lying in one corner of the room, prearranged so that it was facing toward Mecca, caught his eye, and he scowled. Five times daily, when the muezzin called the pious to prayer, those who could get to the mosque did so in order to pray shoulder-to-shoulder as tradition demanded with their fellow believers. The sheikh accepted that Kenner’s responsibilities often prevented him from praying at the mosque, but he believed the convert made use of the prayer mat. Kenner, however, barely gave the rug a glance.
Reaching over the side of the cot, he grabbed his boots, pulled them on and laced them up, then got to his feet. Approaching his midforties, his short-cropped hair rapidly
