of CONUS layovers. Short of distributing Hadi’s photo to Las Vegas law enforcement, there was little they could do but continue to work the problem with what they had in hand.
Whoa!” Jack Ryan Jr. said from his cubicle.
“What?” Dominic called from the conference room, where the daily skull session had just started.
“Hang on, I’m coming in.” He tapped a few keys, sending the file to the conference room’s AV node, then walked in and picked up the remote from the table.
“You look like a teenager who’s seen his first boob,” Brian said. “What’s up?”
“I was trolling one of the URC websites when I came across this.” He aimed the remote at the forty-two-inch monitor on the wall. After a few seconds, three side-by-side images appeared on the flat screen, the first showing a man hanging from the neck in a featureless room; the second showing the same man lying on the floor, his severed head sitting beside him; in the third, the man’s severed head was bracketed by his severed feet.
“Jesus Christ, that’s some serious shit,” Brian said.
“Which website, Jack?” Rounds asked.
He recited the URL, then said, “It’s a URC hub, but up until now it’s been all propaganda—‘rah-rah, stick it to the infidel, we’ve got them on the run’ kind of stuff.”
“Well, this sure as hell ain’t a pep talk,” Ding Chavez said.
“It’s punishment,” Clark said, staring at the screen.
“What’re you thinking?”
“Hanging is a pretty standard execution technique for them, and the beheading is a little extra humiliation—something out of the Koran, as I recall—but the feet . . . That’s the real message?”
“What, he tried to run?” Dominic asked. “Leave the URC?”
“No, he made a move and the higher-ups weren’t happy about it. Saw this in Lebanon in ’82. Some offshoot of Hamas, I can’t remember the name, blew up a bus in Haifa. A week later the leaders were found the same way: hanged, beheaded, their feet chopped off.”
“Hell of a way to make your point,” Chavez said.
Rounds asked, “Jack, where’s the site run out of ?”
“That’s the kicker,” he responded. “It’s Benghazi.”
“Bingo,” said Dominic. “This thing coming so close on top of the Tripoli embassy . . . How much you wanna bet we’re looking at the fallout from an unsanctioned mission?”
There were no takers at the table.
“What if it’s more than punishment?” Jack offered.
“Explain,” Rounds said.
Clark answered, “It’s a warning. That Lebanon thing . . . Two weeks later, Hamas tried to ram a car bomb into the British embassy about a block from the bus explosion. It fell through because their intel people were still cranking away on the bus bombing.”
“Same principle could be at work here,” Jack said. “They’re telling the other cells to mind their manners.”
“Yeah, but in favor of what?” Chavez asked.
53
THE GRAVEL ROADWAY leading away from the beach looked almost pristine, probably because there was little, if any, traffic on it, and not even much in the way of animals to trample on it, and the harsh weather either killed or stunted anything that tried to grow.
Musa gave their captain, Vitaliy, a final wave, then nodded solemnly at Idris, whom he’d ordered to stay behind. However unlikely, if the captain tried to leave before they returned, Idris would kill the two Russians. Piloting the boat back to port without them would be a challenge, but Allah would show them the way.
Musa climbed into the cab’s passenger seat. Fawwaz, already behind the wheel, started the engine while Numair and Thabit climbed into the bed.
“Go,” Musa ordered. “The sooner we finish what we came to do, the sooner we can leave this cursed place.”
Fawwaz shoved the gearshift into drive and started up the hill.
The lighthouse and its neighboring hut were only a kilometer away, maybe five hundred meters uphill. Vitaliy and Vanya sat in the wheelhouse swivel chairs and watched their progress through binoculars, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, and wishing for more food, while the music on the radio got worse. Fred’s watchdog stood at the rail, watching them both. To the east was kelly-green tundra, and the view was as featureless as what a mouse might see when contemplating a green carpet.
Vitaliy watched as two of the charter party stepped out of the truck, then used hand signals to direct the driver to back up to the steel shed.
Vitaliy had never seen one of the generators that ran the lighthouses. He’d heard they contained radioactive material, though how they worked was beyond his knowledge. He’d heard also that some had