LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

       Deir ez-Zor Governorate, Syria

      Yaser Jenyat was sick of waiting. It was miserably hot and the dry earth underneath his buttocks was scorching. When he checked his Rolex replica, it seemed the hands were frozen. Had they moved at all since he had checked them last?

      “They’ve changed plans, or itineraries,” he suggested. “Maybe someone warned them.”

      “Who?” Ziad Dalila asked him.

      “How should I know?” Jenyat answered. “Someone.”

      “We have orders,” said Malek Hakim.

      “We have obeyed them,” Jenyat shot back. “We came, we waited. No one said we have to take up residence.”

      “You want to leave,” Hakim replied, “start walking.”

      Jenyat tried to spit but found his mouth had suddenly gone dry. “I didn’t say that.” His voice cracked like the sunbaked soil. “We all should go, before a damned patrol turns up.”

      “You know these Westerners,” Tawfiq Jandali said. “They’re slow with everything.”

      Until they want to kill you, Jenyat thought. Shifting where he sat, his back against the left rear tire of their UAZ-469 off-road vehicle, his elbow grazed the AKM assault rifle standing beside him, almost toppling it before he lunged and caught it, just in time. He glanced around to see if any of the others had observed his clumsiness, but they were busy squinting at the eastern skyline, toward Iraq.

      “We’ll wait another thirty minutes,” Hakim said. “If they’re not here by then, I’ll call in for advice.”

      No one replied to that. It had not been a question.

      Jenyat sipped warm water out of his canteen. He wished they had some shade, that someone else had drawn the so-called “plum assignment,” that he might be anyplace but here. The thoughts of glory he’d envisioned when his name was drawn had long since disappeared, evaporating like the sweat that drenched his shirt.

      At least he would not be the one to fire the crucial shot. He understood the basics of the 9K338 Igla-S shoulder-mounted launcher and its 9M342 missile, but he was not competent to aim and fire it, thank Allah. If they had waited all this time only to fail at their assignment, Jenyat was relieved the shame would not be his.

      “I see something,” Dalila said, passing Hakim his field glasses. “East-northeast.”

      That covered half the godforsaken desert, but Hakim had barely raised the glasses to his eyes when he said, “I see it.” Several seconds later he added, “Yes. It’s them.”

      Jenyat rose to his feet, surprised to feel a fleeting tremor in his legs, and reached for his rifle. He would have no use for it, if all went well, but he felt better holding it, sharing the AKM’s potential for explosive violence.

      “Get ready,” Hakim ordered.

      Tawfiq was even now hauling the Igla out of the UAZ-469’s cargo bay. The tube was painted olive drab, like everything else in the army. It was a little over five feet long, nose-heavy with its pistol grip and its bulbous infrared sighting gear. Already loaded, it weighed thirty-seven pounds, including the warheads. Its maximum operational range was almost four miles, with a flight ceiling of eleven and a half thousand feet.

      They had been promised that the target, although capable of cruising at much higher altitudes, would be within the missile’s range. The flight would be a border hop, evading radar on both sides to keep the visit under wraps. Deniability was crucial to diplomacy among the states that labeled themselves civilized.

      “Late as they are, how do we know it’s them?” he asked Hakim.

      “I see the plane,” Hakim replied. “It has ‘UN’ painted behind the cockpit and on the tail.”

      “Praise Allah,” Ziad Dalila said.

      “Allahu akbar,” Jandali chimed in, as he hoisted the launcher to his right shoulder.

      Jenyat could see the target now, and he heard the whisper of its twin engines drawing closer. He considered praying briefly, silently, but then decided it would be a waste of time.

      Squinting, he watched the small white speck, distorted by the heat haze, moving into range.

      * * *

      “I WILL REMIND you that we must not set our hopes too high,” Sani Bankole said.

      Seated across the aisle from Bankole, Roger Segrest almost asked, “what hopes?” but stopped himself. He was a pessimist by nature but had learned to hide it well during his long climb up the State Department ladder to his present post. Most of the people he dealt with daily lived for smiles and reassurances, not straight talk that would drive them all to drink.

      Besides, he didn’t have to spell it out. Segrest was confident that everyone aboard the Let L 410 was wise enough to know the truth—namely, that Syria was in the toilet, circling the drain. The country had been bad enough, a nest of terrorists, before its latest civil war erupted, pitting a despotic government against hundreds of rival “liberation” forces. Toss in Hezbollah, the Kurds and ISIS, among other players, and what did you have?

      A goddamned recipe for disaster.

      Still, there was an outside chance he and the other passengers on this plane might accomplish something, he supposed. Stranger things had happened in the strange world of diplomacy, but they were few and far between.

      One of the pilots spoke up on the intercom. “We’ve crossed the border, gentlemen.”

      Segrest couldn’t have told the difference, peering out his window at the trackless wasteland below. All deserts looked the same to him: bleak, unforgiving, dangerous.

      He idly wondered what their lodgings would be like in Deir ez-Zor. They’d be stuck in the Syrian city for three or four days, unless the talks broke down immediately—as they might, considering the endless grievances both sides advanced.

      Make that all sides, Segrest thought. It might have been a relatively simple matter if the only people at the table had been government officials and the rebels who opposed them. Oil, politics and religion changed that, of course, dragging in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel and Jordan, not to mention Russia and his own employer, the United States. They hadn’t heard from China yet, or Egypt, but he wouldn’t be surprised if both of them weighed in before the year was out.

      Diplomacy, my ass, he thought, only half listening to their putative spokesman from the United Nations. It was a damned chess game, with better than a dozen players making moves.

      “But if we have patience—” Bankole was on a roll, but now the cockpit intercom cut through his platitudes.

      “We have a target lock! Fasten your seat belts, gentlemen. Evasive action, starting now!”

      Segrest looked out the window, didn’t see a damned thing but the pale blue sky they occupied and the broiling desert. “Target lock” meant someone had “painted” them with infrared to guide a rocket or a burst of antiaircraft fire, but who in the hell—

      The Let L 410 shuddered, riding a blast of thunder from the clear sky. The explosion didn’t breach the cabin, but oxygen masks automatically dropped from the ceiling, dangling like weird wilted flowers in front of their faces. Segrest fumbled with his seat belt, fastening it on the third try, as the turboprop nosed over and began to fall.

      Even the pilot sounded panicked. “Crash positions, gentlemen! We’re going down.”

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