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  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Malik said. Like all the dictator’s children, Malik spoke perfect English.

  “Where’s the colonel,” Hornbuckle snapped.

  Malik spread his hands. “As you can see he’s not here. If you plan to shoot me, don’t delay. I embrace martyrdom as my destiny.”

  A muffled explosion shook the floor. Shouts and gunfire grew louder. Hornbuckle stepped up to the desk, gun trained on Malik, and seized the laptop.

  “Watch him. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where you going?” Otto said.

  “I need to check something with O’Hern.”

  Hornbuckle left shutting the door behind him. The guard’s body was still there.

  Otto had a moment of misgiving. Why hadn’t Hornbuckle used the radios? Did he fear they would be overheard? It was against protocol to leave a high-level figure like Malik with only one guard.

  Otto walked counter-clockwise around the desk so that Malik came into full view.

  “What do they pay you?” Malik said in a conversational voice.

  “More than enough,” Otto said.

  “I will pay for my freedom. If you’ll permit me to open this desk drawer.” Malik’s hand extended to the center drawer of the massive desk.

  Otto motioned furiously with his gun for Malik to move back. “Don’t touch it! Stay in the chair. Push yourself into the corner.”

  With Otto tracking his every move, the dictator’s son had no choice but to obey. He scooted backwards on the chair’s wheeled legs. Otto backed up to the desk drawer keeping a bead on Malik. He dare not turn away. Damn Hornbuckle for leaving!

  Without looking, there was no way to tell if the drawer was booby-trapped.

  Outside the wind howled and the sun turned bright orange, top lopped flat by the low-hanging clouds. He whipped his eyes back to Malik. The dictator’s son sat in the corner grinning like a fool. His eyes glowed orange--or maybe it was a trick of the light.

  Otto took a step toward Malik.

  Streams of vapor poured from Malik’s nostrils. He stood, smoke issuing from a corner of his mouth.

  “Sit down!” Otto said.

  Malik burst into flame.

  Otto was momentarily frozen, awash in heat and the stink of burning flesh.

  A flaming man?

  Malik blossomed into a ball of white-hot phosphorus. A skillet of heat pressed down on every square centimeter of Otto’s exposed skin. Wallpaper curled from the corners and ignited. The chair on which Malik sat exploded. Otto backtracked and tried the door. Jammed shut. He put his shoulder to it and shoved with all his might. Did not budge.

  He had to get out of there. The heat was setting his clothes on fire.

  He raced to the window and that’s when he saw the Tomahawk.

  ***

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Aardvark”

  He was on an airliner headed down. There was a lot of screaming, but no sound. A sick, subdued terror seized his heart. He wrestled with his seat belt as the choppy sea rose to smash them.

  He was afloat on some piece of jetsam. How long he drifted he did not know.

  Otto woke scorched, ears ringing. For long seconds he lay still waiting for the nausea to subside, fearful of what had happened to his body. Tentatively he lifted a finger. Five fingers. An arm. The other arm. A leg. The other leg. He was bruised all over but there didn’t seem to be anything broken. A ceiling lay mere centimeters from his face. He touched it--fabric. He placed both hands against it and pushed. The barrier was too heavy for him to lift but it shifted.

  Otto turned his head and saw a strip of sand. He was lying on the desert beneath some kind of shield. Slowly, painfully, he crabbed sideways extricating himself from the sand. The steel-mounted Qalicheh lay next to him, convex surface up. He had been blown out of the palace on a flying carpet. Otto sat up, bracing himself with both hands. Twenty meters away Ghaddafi’s palace, reduced to a pile of rubble, smoldered, sending a column of dark gray smoke whipping into the desert breeze.

  The fierce winds of last night had abated, replaced by a steady 20 kph breeze that peppered Otto’s face with pins. Otto sat behind the carpet that had saved his life. He’d flown out of the palace’s fourth floor, forty meters into the sand on the eastern side, away from the village. He heard gunfire from inside the blazing ruin as vehicles vanished down the dirt road belching black smoke.

  The Ilyushin roared to life and began to taxi.

  Otto checked himself. Gun gone. Radio gone. He still had the tiny GPS transmitter but he was too close to Libyan Army to risk it. Amazingly, he still had a quart of water strapped to his belt. He had to get away. The palace was the center of too much attention.

  Had Ghaddafi even been there?

  Why had Hornbuckle left the room?

  What was on the laptop?

  Who fucked with the timing on the transmitter?

  He slithered like a lizard away from the burning palace heading east toward the truncated sun.

  In the days that followed Otto had plenty of time to review the events in his mind and try to figure out what happened.

  He lived in the desert like some feral beast, laying low during the day, hunting and moving east at night. He would require a minimum two gallons a day for survival, up to five gallons if he exerted himself. On the second day, he found a furze of green at the outside curvature of a wadi, dug down until he felt moisture and built a still out of a sheet of plastic and a straw they all carried for that purpose. At the end of the day he had accumulated maybe half a cup. He ate one of his two precious energy bars.

  He lay up during daytime in a shallow grave he’d carved from the carapace of sand. The ground surface was thirty degrees hotter than that a foot below. He considered pissing in the hole like the Kalahari bushmen, but didn’t have enough piss to make a difference.

  By night the desert looked like the set of a vast black-and-white movie. Moon and star glow reflected off the quartzite rock and pale sands. Otto nearly stepped on a fat-tailed scorpion. He saw it at the last minute, foot paused in mid-air then slowly withdrawn. It was the Mother of All Scorpions. Five inches. Its chitinous, segmented body was the essence of evil, its sight repulsive and frightening.

  Why had God made such creatures?

  Who was he to question God?

  There was no pursuit. Ghaddafi had his hands full with civil war. On the third day, Otto saw contrails to the North. He’d lost his GPS transmitter. Later that day he saw a caravan heading east several miles away on a ridge. Caravans were to be avoided at all costs.

  He ate the last of his energy bars. His stomach screamed.

  On the fourth day, he ate ants.

  On the fifth day, he came upon a Canadian archaeological dig. Four white tents, some ruins, and two vehicles. He watched for several hours from a ridgetop with his mini binocs. There appeared to be two men and two women plus a half dozen locals to help with the dig. Maple leaf patches adorned their backpacks, tent, and vehicles, a Nissan Pathfinder and an old Chevy pick-up.

  Otto didn’t have much of a choice. He had to take a chance. He hailed them from fifty meters. The men and one of the women were visible. They looked at him startled. He had appeared out of nowhere.

  “Hallloooo! Sorry to bother you!”

  As the two men and the woman turned to face him, unconsciously standing together, the other woman, middle-aged with a cap of silver hair, joined them. One of the men was tall and thin. The other was stocky, middle-aged, wearing those wrap-around shades that fit around glasses. The other woman was young and athletic, her long brown hair done up in a bun.

  “Where did you come from?” she said.

  “Otto White. I’m with Central Intelligence.”

  The tall man said, “You’re a spy? An American spy?”

  “We refer to ourselves as ops or agents. Listen, I hate to bother you, but I’m all that’s left of a seven-man team. Do you have any water?”

  As the stocky man handed Otto his canteen, the older
woman said, “You have ants on your chin.”

  ***

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Sam Flames Out”

  Saturday.

  Radio blasting Sis Boom Ba’s “Boom-Ba Style,” Sam Darling steered the Mercedes 350 SL with one hand and squeezed Sally’s right breast with the other. Rural Virginia flashed by in emerald hues, the air redolent with honeysuckle. Sally laughed and twisted away.

  “Eyes on the road, Senator.”

  Darling flashed his famous smile and shot a glance at his buxom thirty-six year old mistress, a lobbyist for Pendragon Oil. “How can I do that, darlin’, with you by my side?” His hand fell to her knee. His touch was warm.

  Sally’s knee prickled with goose bumps. At sixty-five, the Senator looked like a man twenty years younger thanks to diligent workouts in the Congressional gym and a rugged outdoor lifestyle he’d brought with him from his native Colorado. Sally also felt the illicit thrill, familiar to half the players in Washington, of a clandestine affair carried out beneath the noses of the electorate, Senate leader and whip and the President, a model of moral rectitude who was rumored to be carrying on an affair with a foreign diplomat.

  I owe this to myself, Sally thought, thinking of all the scheduling, work and deception that had gone into this weekend. With the enormous weight of Pendragon, its shareholders and board members on her shoulders Sally knew she had to produce or be gone. As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy Independence Darling was even busier. That they had managed to carry on their subterfuge for two whole years without National Enquirer or some freelance paparazzi finding out was a miracle in itself.

  Never mind that Pendragon was behind Senate Bill # 465,002, lowering environmental restrictions on shale fracking in Western Colorado. So what if she was screwing the chairman? That’s how the game was played. Besides--Darling was tall, charming and attractive and had promised to take her to Barbados for a long weekend in December. He was separated but not divorced from his wife of twenty-one years, Crystal. Although Darling had never said as much, Sally was certain he could be maneuvered into divorcing Crystal and marrying her. If she played her cards right.

  They always think that, she mused sardonically.

  She’d packed a few things to ensure a memorable weekend.

  Darling had led a life of probity, at least until colliding with Sally. Or so he claimed. Journalists had been tracking his spoor for decades in hopes of digging up dirt that would derail the powerful Republican. They couldn’t attack over his separation--half of Congress was in the same boat. So they scrutinized his every move, even going so far as to following his daughter Stella, a criminal defense attorney.

  The two-lane blacktop wound through the piney hills northeast of Lynchburg passing the occasional picture-book farm, sleek horses grazing behind white picket fences, until it came to a turn-off marked by an engraved wooden sign that would not have looked out of place outside an exclusive Georgetown boutique. Vernon’s was a high-end low profile resort catering to D.C. power players. Owner Vernon Price was a former CIA officer and field agent, and had masterfully parlayed his credentials into a thriving business.

  The smooth black macadam led between rows of blue spruce around a gentle curve to the administration building, a perfectly restored 19th Century gingerbread farmhouse with a wrap-around veranda, green shutters and trim, and an old-fashioned bench swing suspended from two tractor chains affixed to a beam. One other car, an SUV with Maryland plates, two kayaks strapped to the roof and bikes on the bumper, was parked on the gravel.

  Darling pulled up next to it and shut off the engine. He turned to Sally with a devilish grin, his eyes oddly yellow. Perhaps it was the late afternoon sun.

  “I’ll be right back, darlin’. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Sally flipped down the passenger mirror and retouched her bow-shaped lips and lustrous fake eyelashes. Not bad for an old broad. Sally ran. Every morning, six miles along Rock Creek Park with a Beretta .25 in a fanny pack. Her belly was flat as Kansas. You could bounce quarters off her ass. Dabbing Donna Karan Delicious behind her ears, she placed the little glass container back in her purse as Darling emerged from the office holding a key on a big brass tag.

  When he slid into the driver’s seat, Sally noticed the sweat popping on his brow. “Are you all right Sam? You look a little feverish.”

  “It’s called Potomac Fever, my love, and it’s why we have to get away from time to time.”

  Starting the engine he slipped the automatic into reverse and stomped on the gas causing the little Mercedes to scoot back spraying gravel like a singed Yorkie. He jammed the auto into drive and floored it, causing the car to fishtail wildly like a tire ad.

  “Sam, is this necessary?”

  “Sorry, Sal. I’m hot to trot.” His hand fell to her thigh and squeezed. His touch was hot. They zipped down the gravel road past several neat bungalows to the last in line, green on white like the main house. Darling parked the car at a carefree angle, popped the trunk, popped out, grabbed the two overnighters and went up three steps to the front door. A hand-carved sign over the door said “Day Lilly Lodge.” Setting down the bags, he unlocked the door.

  He turned to Sally. “How fast can you change into something obscene, little lady?”

  “Pretty damn fast,” Sally said. Darling smacked her butt as she passed him, went through the cozy living room/kitchen decorated with Currier & Ives prints, through the bedroom with its walnut four-poster and crinoline skirt to the bathroom where she stripped, putting on a slinky silk peignoir from Mitzi’s in Georgetown. She examined herself in the mirror, posing like a model, which she had briefly been following college. Small high tits. Thank God she didn’t have humongous bazoombas like the typical Washington mistress. No boob job for her. Mama Crandall didn’t raise no dummies.

  Judging herself resplendent, she swung open the door and struck a pose. “Ta-DA!” Her smile froze.

  “Sam?” she said.

  The Senator stood on the opposite side of the bed wearing nothing but gray Calvin Klein briefs grinning vapidly. Vapor wafted from his mouth. His eyes were yellow.

  “Sam, are you all right?” she said with quiet urgency.

  Smoke spilled from his mouth, nostrils and ears. He incandesced into a pillar of blazing light and exploded releasing an expanding ball of white-hot gas and the smell of burning flesh striking Sally like a blacksmith’s hammer and throwing her back into the bathroom.

  ***

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WTF?”

  Vernon Price smiled at the young couple from Maryland. He was a lean, gray man who radiated competence. “Okay. We’re twelve miles from Tweedy State Park where there’s a little lake. Or you can put into the James right here on the property. You can put in anywhere. We’re seeing a lot of kayakers around here lately.”

  The young man handed Price his credit card. “Do you get HBO?”

  “HBO, Showtime, every major league game, you name it, plus an extensive collection of movies on demand.”

  Sudden movement drew Price’s attention to the window. Darling’s delicious dumpling ran barefoot and half-naked toward the office. A prickle of alarm marched down Price’s spine. Something in her desperate pumping told him she wasn’t exercising. He flashed an apologetic grin at the young couple.

  “Folks, if you’ll excuse me one minute--it’s just one thing after another around here.”

  The young man shrugged quizzically. “Sure.”

  Price bolted from behind the counter and exited the front door, taking the three front steps in one leap. He had to intercept her before she reached the office. Whatever had happened was not for tourists.

  Price jogged toward her, hands up, palms out, stopping her twenty meters from the main house under a dogwood tree. “Whoa, Sally, whoa! What’s going on?”

  She collapsed into his arms wild-eyed, unable to speak, a peculiar smoky odor clinging to her skin. She gestured back down the road. Price looked up to see Day Lilly burst into flames. Poof
, like a stunt out of Fast and Furious.

  Gripping Sally by the shoulders, he marched her quickly to the nearest bungalow, Snapdragon, opened the unlocked door and led her inside. “Are you all right? Are you injured?” he said examining her carefully. She didn’t appear to be hurt, just stunned and in shock. Price sat her down on the bed.

  He pulled out his secure phone, the one the agency had given him, and hit the speed dial. Seconds later a man picked up.

  “Contingency and planning, Baumgartner speaking.”

  “This is Vernon Price at Vern’s resort, retired Service Contractor serial number 879002LP. Do you know where this is?”

  “Yessir. What seems to be the problem?”

  “I have a cottage that’s burning out of control. Senator Sam Darling is trapped in the cottage.”

  “Sir, I’m dispatching a rescue team with medical personnel and fire fighters but it will be…approximately seventy-five minutes before they arrive. Can you hold out?”

  Price looked out the window at the bungalow, now completely engulfed in flames. Fortunately it was a hundred feet from the nearest structure and the humid summer meant little chance of the fire spreading. As Price watched, the young couple with the kayaks drove quickly away.

  Nothing he could do about that.

  It was all Price could do to stay put and not run for the fire extinguisher and the garden hose but he knew from painful experience they would be of little help against such a conflagration. Priorities. First order of business: control the narrative.

  Price went into the bathroom and filled a glass with water. He came out and handed the glass to Sally who had curled up on the bed and was weeping. She sat up and drank thirstily. Price knelt before her.

  “Sally, I know this is difficult but we have to get our stories straight before the police arrive. What happened?”

  Sally looked up, mascara running from her eyes like mudslides. “He seemed a little jumpy when we drove out and in the cabin he seemed feverish--he was sweating and smoke was pouring from his mouth and ears.”