CHAPTER TEN

August 18, 2001

Armin Training Camp

Rennie heard them before she saw them. She was thirty feet from the crest of the ridge. She couldn’t tell if they were close or if the slight breeze had carried their voices from farther away and she couldn’t see anything over the slope, the angle was too steep.

She drew herself into a low crouch so she could move quickly if need be, bracing her foot against a tree to keep her balance.

Every sense seemed to open and expand to its fullest capacity.

She thought she could even smell them. Then, just as quickly, the voices retreated. It was completely dark now, but she could see a halo of muted light at the crest of the ridge coming from the lights of the camp.

She lay perfectly still, well camouflaged by the dense vegetation, but in an uncomfortable position, a kind of half-crouch, half-sprawl. Her muscles were bunching up and she forced herself

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to ease her body flatter to the ground. She looked at her watch.

Almost 2100 hours. If all was on schedule, the festivities were due to begin in half an hour.

The men so close to the edge of the woods had surprised her. She thought of the plan of the camp she had studied until she knew it like she knew the layout of her own apartment.

The Bureau’s intelligence had obviously erred in estimating the distance between the forest and the nearest buildings. She would have to top the slope to get her bearings anyway.

She hated to leave her spot. She felt safe there, hidden in the brush. She moved out slowly, still on her belly, and inched her way up the steep incline. The ground was more viney here and she used the tangles to stay her footing and still allow her to keep the sub-gun in her hand, with the safety on to avoid any chance of an accidental firing. Nearing the top, she heard more noises—wheels on an unpaved road, and faint music. She had no idea what sort of security they would have at this time of night. It was believed that they were more concerned with the road. They would never suspect an attack from the woods.

Still, Rennie paused before lifting her head. She feared the split second it would take to raise her head over the edge of the slope.

She might rise up only to hear the retort of a weapon and know that she was dead. This night, though, was tied to a schedule and the thought of time slipping away from her pushed away whatever fear remained and she looked over the bank’s edge.

The two-dimensional picture imprinted in her mind suddenly sprang to life. Buildings rose from black lines on a white page, taking on form and texture. There were the barracks, a series of huts sharing a common roof. And there was the old stable. What was it used for now? Perhaps more barracks. Or storage. North and to her left was the activity she had heard. There was light and smoke and the forms of soldiers walking from the barracks toward the maneuvers field. Intelligence had posited accurately that this was where Armin’s speech would take place.

It was almost a quarter after nine and Rennie needed to be in position by the time Armin stepped up to the podium.

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Fortunately, he was known to be verbose. The plan of the camp the FBI had was very close to what she was actually seeing and she knew she needed to move farther north in order to get a view of the maneuvers field. She shifted her position carefully, ducking her head out of view and crawling awkwardly along the steep, vined edge, occasionally peeking over to check her line of sight.

It was completely dark, the only light coming from the field where a bonfire raged and spotlights were trained on the makeshift stage that came into view. Rennie’s adrenaline shifted up a notch. As long as Armin took the stage, and everything pointed to that notion, she would have what appeared to be a clear shot. She settled into the brush, pulling some of it around her, camouflaging herself as much as she could. She swung Brad’s already assembled sniper gun off her back and snapped the bipod into position.

Hunkering down, she peered through the scope. The scene suddenly leapt to life before her eyes. The clarity the scope brought, in addition to the strong light source, was astounding.

Rennie could see the splintering planks of the stage smeared with mud. The grass around it looked bitten up by too many heavy boots. She raised the barrel of the gun slightly and flinched as the head of one of the men moved through her crosshairs. Soldiers were bustling around everywhere. They didn’t look like a band of ruthless terrorists, at least not most of them. A lot of them were young boys who looked like they were playing dress-up.

Rennie wasn’t surprised at this—she had read the profiles. What surprised her was how much they looked like any group of boys, joking and making rude gestures to one another, filled with the excitement brought about by the break in their routine.

The conditions for the shoot were almost perfect. The light wind had died down and the night was still very hot which was ideal, since colder, denser air would create more drag on the bullet. Rennie estimated she was about a half-mile from the stage.

It was far, but she had shot accurately at that range before.

It was hard to tear her eyes away from the stage. She didn’t

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want to miss the moment Armin stepped into her line of fire, but she needed to scan the area and get her bearings. About two hundred yards directly in front of her was the stable. She was in line with the wide center aisle that cut through the middle of the ancient structure. She flicked on the night vision on the scope and the world again changed to radioactive green. She swung the barrel of the gun past the stable across a few hundred yards of dirt and gravel to the barracks. There was a road that ran behind these buildings, parallel to the line of the woods. She could see a few men walking toward the maneuvers field. She scanned past the barracks until her line of vision was even with the crest of the bank where she hid and then moved the scope left. Again she swept slowly past the barracks, the stable and then to the mess hall and what they thought was Armin’s house. She lingered there, moving along every inch of the building. Dim light shone weakly through the small covered windows. Then she heard commotion from the stage area. She moved her sight left and switched off the night vision.

Men were packed around the stage, pressing up against it.

She could feel their excitement and it affected her, elevating her adrenaline and setting her even more on edge. Everyone seemed to have their weapons in hand and Rennie longed for the familiar feel of her sub-gun. With her face against the cheek pad, she could smell Brad’s musky scent caught in the fibers of the leather and took a small comfort in it. Armin was nearby. She knew it.

The crowd was beginning to take on the aspect of a large group of people caught up in the same all-consuming emotion. It was an arena where that emotion would rule the day. She hoped Armin didn’t fire them up any more than they already were. A loud roar rose from the field and the crowd began to press forward, focusing their attention.

And then he was on the stage, stepping up to a tall crate that the soldiers must have moved there to act as a podium while Rennie was doing her scan. Rennie held his face in the scope and watched him smiling, his gun raised in triumph. Ahmad Armin.

She needed to let the crowd settle in a little before she took her

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shot. She concentrated on controlling her breathing, keeping her breaths slow and shallow. She could feel her adrenaline jumping wildly, pulling at its leash, begging her to just squeeze off a few rounds and watch his head explode, but she kept a tight hold on it. No mistakes now. She needed to wait for the right moment, keeping him in her sights. Then make the shot and run like hell.

Through her scope, she watched him as he calmed the crowd so he could begin speaking. He looked smaller than he had seemed in the many photos she had seen. Dumpier. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, but if Rennie had learned anything during her time at the Bureau, it was that murderous instinct can come in any form.

Armin began to speak, raising a bullhorn to his mouth. She trained the crosshairs at the spot on his head just behind his right ear. Her index finger was on the trigger guard where it was supposed to be until she decided to make her shot. She scanned over the crowd at the edge of the stage. Everyone was listening intently and occasionally roaring their agreement. She moved the barrel of the gun back to Armin. He was becoming emphatic, gesticulating with his gun and punching the air with the hand holding the bullhorn. The crowd grew louder. To Rennie, they sounded almost panic-stricken, fueled by his rhetoric. Then Armin began to fire his gun in the air. The crowd joined in. Now is the time. Rennie flipped off the safety and put her finger on the trigger. Armin was moving back and forth, rocking against the crate as he leaned into it. She just needed him to pause. Just for an instant. Then a light flickered out of the corner of her eye.

She jerked her head to the right, waiting for the sensation of hot metal passing through her brain. She saw a red glowing point at the entrance of the stable passageway. Someone had just lit a cigarette.

Rennie swung the barrel of the gun toward the point of light and flicked on the scope’s night vision. A soldier stood with a hand in his pocket, leisurely smoking a cigarette. Why wasn’t he pressing up against the stage with everyone else? Then he turned and looked down the passageway to his left. Rennie followed his

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line of vision with her scope. Leaning over the top of one of the stable’s Dutch doors was a woman. She was very thin and had short dark hair. She was motioning to the soldier for something.

A small woman, something feline about her, with distinctive features.

Hannah Marcus.

The American woman kidnapped by Armin almost two years before and believed to be dead stood very much alive in the crosshairs of Rennie’s scope.

Fareed Reza unbuttoned the high collar of his uniform. It was too bloody hot to be wearing the god-awful thing and he had never felt more like a man playing a part. But perhaps it had always been this way. He hardly knew who he was anymore. He lit a cigarette and drew in deeply on the bitter smoke. He had stepped away from Hannah Marcus’s stall to give her a moment of privacy as she ravenously ate the food he brought her from Armin’s celebration. She wasn’t starving but it was the first thing approximating decent food she’d had since beginning her captivity. None of them ate well in the camp, but her diet was particularly paltry.

Standing at the opening of the stable, Fareed turned his face to the sky. It was a clear night, a beautiful night. If only he were anywhere but here.

He heard Hannah set her plate down.

“How about a smoke, Fareed?”

He stepped back from the opening of the stable and knocked a cigarette out of his pack. “They aren’t very good. Just cheap Indian cigarettes. I haven’t been able to get anything better.”

“I guess I’ll have to take what I can get then. You have a beer in any of those pockets?”

He smiled at her jab at his uniform. He always admired her ability to maintain her sense of humor in the face of everything she had endured. He found he was attracted to her and felt like a fool for it.

Fareed stepped back to the opening of the stable; he wasn’t in

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the mood to talk tonight. He had grown tired of Armin’s festivities for his brother before they had even begun. Disgusted by the impending pomp and Armin’s inevitably bombastic speech, he had slipped away to relieve Hannah’s guard and to give himself a moment of peace. The absurdity of the evening, Armin firing his weapon into the air like a maniac, only confirmed that he had to leave this place, resume a life of some kind of normalcy, a life without guns and bombs and the death of innocents. But then there was Hannah. Armin had long accepted that she was just a casualty in this mess she had stumbled into, but lately he had taken to calling Hannah The Jewess . It was unlike Armin, and Fareed feared for her.

That morning when he had awakened, knowing he had to get out before his collusion with Armin caused him to step even further into the abyss, he thought of Hannah alone in her stall.

He wanted to go to her, to tell her he would make her safe. Still in the flush of sleep, still in that place of dreams where anything seems possible, he imagined himself slipping away in the night and spiriting Hannah away with him. Now he saw how preposterous it all was, a foolish romantic notion born out of desperation. He would leave—Armin couldn’t stop him—but he would have to leave Hannah behind. If he left like a thief in the night, taking their hostage, he would spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. But if he left without her, he thought—he had to believe—that Armin would let him be.

He could make an argument to Armin for setting Hannah free, but he knew it wouldn’t be heeded. No one even suspected she was still alive. In many ways she wasn’t, living like an animal, eating scraps and sleeping in a stall. And she knew too much.

Fareed had told her too much, in moments of weakness, when she seemed to be the only thing in his life that was civilized. She was unlike any woman he had ever met, hard and soft, full of an aggressive cynicism tempered by an expansive heart she almost never showed. And she was beautiful in a way that made him ache.When she was taken she had only been in Tajikistan a week,

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covering a story for one of the wire services on the country’s transition to a market-based economy. A group of colleagues had planned a day hike in the mountains and asked her to join them.

She was the only American. Hikers who did their homework knew better now, but then the area was still considered safe. He thought of the photograph taken of her soon after her abduction, the one they issued to the press. Hannah had been a difficult prisoner, never showing the fear they wanted to capture on film.

She only gave them anger, never the weakness they needed to broadcast to the world to show their power and make every American traveling abroad feel vulnerable. So they drugged her and the picture was snapped, Hannah looking like she was in shock, wide-eyed and confused. Long after she was taken, she’d begun to trust him—at least a little. He suspected she wasn’t one to ever trust completely no matter what her circumstances.

Fareed dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot. He could hear Armin bellowing to the crowd as he walked back to Hannah’s door.

“You okay? You seem a million miles away tonight,” Hannah said.Fareed thought of London. “Not quite that many,” he said as he took a key and unlocked the stall door.

“What are you doing?” she asked, suspicion suddenly in her eyes.“It’s okay. I want to talk to you about something.”

He stepped inside, leaving the door partly open.

“Let’s sit,” he said.

The guard tossed down his cigarette, opened the door where Hannah stood and went into the stall. Rennie didn’t think, she just acted. Climbing over the edge of the bank, submachine gun in hand, she ran for the stable. The moment she leapt from the cover of the woods, she knew how vulnerable she was but also knew that she had to reach the doorway to the stable before the soldier came back out. She didn’t allow herself to think what he might be doing there. She knew better than anyone that these

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people, those who transformed their religion into something murderous, were capable of every form of brutality.

Rennie covered the two hundred yards in about thirty seconds, her feet pounding a rhythm into the hard ground. She crouched low, just out of sight, beside the opening of the wide center aisle of the stable. She had thumbed off the safety of her sub-gun the moment she left her sniping position. She’d rather not shoot the soldier, for though the sub-gun was silenced, it still made an audible retort. She reached down and unsnapped the hold on the knife at her thigh.

She could hear the crowd growing louder under Armin’s influence. Nocturnal insects chittered all around. Crouching lower, she peeked into the stable. The passageway was clear and low voices came from inside the woman’s stall. Her boots silent on the dirt floor, she crept slowly to the door. The stall, like many, was equipped with Dutch doors. The top half was fully open and hooked to the wall. The lower half was open a few inches. A light flickered, probably from a candle. Their voices were louder now but she couldn’t discern the words. She peeked through the opening in the lower door, ready to fire if necessary.

The next few moments blurred together as she acted even as her brain assimilated the information her eyes offered her. Seeing the guard standing over the woman, obscuring her from seeing Rennie, she bolted from her cover and silently crossed the few steps between them. She let go of her sub-gun, its strap keeping it handy, and slipped the knife from its sheath. In an instant, one arm encircled the guard’s chest while the other passed the blade under his jaw. She could see Hannah Marcus over his shoulder scrambling backward on her cot, her face in shock. The guard’s body kicked, struggling for what seemed like an eternity, not so much against her, but against the life rushing out of him. She held him tight, feeling his terror until he finally sank, slipping motionless from her grasp. Later, much later, Rennie would remember the pressure of the knife and the way the skin gave under it, unresisting, making the man seem so pliant, so weak.

But then, she dropped him to the floor of the stall, bare and

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clean, feeling nothing.

Hannah Marcus was pressed as tightly into the corner of the stall as she could be, her arms wide, her palms flat against the wall. Her mouth was set and she looked at Rennie with wide dark eyes. Her gaze was impenetrable and for a moment Rennie was transfixed by it.

“My name is Rennie Vogel. I’m with the FBI. We’ve got to get out of here.” Rennie put out her hand to the woman.

Ignoring Rennie’s proffered hand, Hannah moved to the edge of the cot and put her feet gingerly on the floor. She moved as slowly as if she were wading through mud. She stood unsteadily and reached down to the guard, placing a hand on his shoulder, her expression unchanged.

Rennie knew at once that getting the woman out of the stall and into the woods was not going to be a simple task.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Rennie said.

Hannah still said nothing. Rennie could see that she couldn’t get her body to move.

“I’m going to help you.” Rennie slipped her arm around Hannah’s waist and moved her to the door. She was very petite, with a small frame. And thin, very thin. Rennie edged them into the passageway, sub-gun in hand. She closed the door behind her and fastened the padlock with one hand. She hurried them both toward the exit of the stable. At the doorway, she carefully looked around the corner.

All was clear. Hannah still seemed weak and unable to walk on her own. Rennie threw one of Hannah’s arms around her shoulder and put the arm with her weapon around the woman’s waist. And then she was off, half-carrying, half-dragging her as they ran the two hundred yards to the woods. Out in the open she could hear Armin more clearly. The crowd was clapping and yelling.

This was madness, almost suicidal. Armin and his soldiers were only a half-mile away. If they were seen at this point, they would be caught. Rennie stumbled as Hannah’s legs buckled.

They both went down, hitting the ground hard. Only Hannah

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had a free arm to break their fall and their knees took the worst of it.

“Up, up!” Rennie pulled Hannah to her feet roughly. They had to get to the woods.

Rennie was nearly frantic as they struggled across the last twenty yards. Hannah was moving more easily now. The shock of the fall seemed to restore some of her strength. Crashing through the thick foliage, Rennie eased her down onto the vine-covered slope. She looked exhausted just from their short run.

How would they ever make it through the forest?

Crouched low, Rennie scanned the woods and then turned back to the encampment. Everything seemed quiet except where Armin was still giving his speech. She checked her watch: 9:45.

She wondered how much longer he would speak, if she had time to take a shot. The sniper gun was still in position where she had left it. From the way he fell, the soldiers would know the direction of the shot and quickly figure out it had come from the line of the woods. She knew it would be risky. The whole area would be swarming in seconds with the armed soldiers, pumped-up and bloodthirsty from Armin’s speech.

It was too uncertain. She would be risking more than her own life. She looked down at Hannah lying next to her. She was gazing up at Rennie with a slack, unreadable expression. Rennie knew when she left her team dead where they camped that it was unlikely she could make it through the woods, take the shot and get out on her own. But now this. They had never imagined that Armin still had Hannah Marcus. It had been a year and a half since he had released her photograph and made his demands.

The FBI assumed she was dead. But she wasn’t. Rennie had to decide. What was this woman capable of?

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