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man’s neck and head and under his arms.
“What’s making him go so
fast
?”
Satterly pointed to the X rays. “Foreign bodies in his lungs. He sucked something into his lungs.”
Murphy couldn’t believe it. “How?”
Satterly gave him a knowing, disapproving look. “Is there any doubt?” He watched Mazmin labor in his attempts to breathe. “If he dies, I’m not going to let it rest. I’m going to make sure whoever is responsible for this will pay for it.”
“How?”
Satterly didn’t respond.
“So our guy here,” Murphy said. “If he got tortured like he said, would that cause him to get an infection like this? And how would he get foreign substances if all they were doing was pouring water down his throat?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I guess we should consider he has some rare African disease we’re not familiar with. But it sure looks like regular old pneumonia to me.”
“What should we do?”
Satterly pulled the X ray off the light box, and turned it off. “We’re doing everything we can. We’ve got him on our strongest antibiotic, we’ve given him shots, we’re cooling him down, and we’re making no progress. We just have to keep monitoring him and hope he turns around soon, or he’s not going to be with us long.”
Chapter 4
Rat walked straight to the Counterterrorism Center, the CTC, that consumed acres of space on the ground floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He walked across the crowded, humming area full of cubicles where most of the people worked in a frenetic environment. He had never been to the CTC before the War on Terrorism; the Navy’s counterterrorism unit didn’t work with the CIA except in extraordinary circumstances—circumstances that Rat had never encountered.
He had heard that before September 11 there had been about five hundred analysts in the CTC. Now there were more than eleven hundred. Twenty-five hundred cables a day poured in from sources as diverse as those interrogating prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign intelligence services passing on tips on terrorist organizations. Instead of trucking pizzas in all night as had occurred regularly after 9/11, the CIA cafeteria had agreed to stay open on nights and weekends to accommodate the increased activity.
The CTC ground out five hundred terrorism intelligence reports a month, which were distributed to eighty different government agencies. A video conference was held three times a day with the National Security Council. And every day at five in the afternoon, Stewart Woods, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, summoned the forty senior officers from the CTC, the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, to the conference room just off his seventh-floor office for a grilling on the day’s terrorism intelligence. And it all swirled around Don Jacobs.
Rat looked for Jacobs, the Director of Counterterrorism, the man for whom Rat worked during his current temporary assignment from the Navy to the CIA’s SAS. Jacobs was unrelenting. He didn’t eat or sleep, or not so anyone else could tell, and thought of nothing except how to kill or capture those in the world who were sworn to destroy the United States. He wanted to find the barns they were hiding in and burn them down. Rat couldn’t agree more. He loved Jacobs’s vision and attitude. It was Jacobs who had made his new assignment exciting, who got his juices flowing. It was the promise of action, not just endless training for future missions that never happened. And Jacobs promised creative, one-off missions, not searching for lost al Qaeda in caves in Pakistan that much of the Special Forces community had been relegated to. It was a picture Rat couldn’t resist.
Jacobs had been right, too. Rat had been on numerous missions that had been creative, bold, and successful. There had been a twinge of Washington that Rat didn’t care for, like an unwanted
“What’s making him go so
fast
?”
Satterly pointed to the X rays. “Foreign bodies in his lungs. He sucked something into his lungs.”
Murphy couldn’t believe it. “How?”
Satterly gave him a knowing, disapproving look. “Is there any doubt?” He watched Mazmin labor in his attempts to breathe. “If he dies, I’m not going to let it rest. I’m going to make sure whoever is responsible for this will pay for it.”
“How?”
Satterly didn’t respond.
“So our guy here,” Murphy said. “If he got tortured like he said, would that cause him to get an infection like this? And how would he get foreign substances if all they were doing was pouring water down his throat?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. I guess we should consider he has some rare African disease we’re not familiar with. But it sure looks like regular old pneumonia to me.”
“What should we do?”
Satterly pulled the X ray off the light box, and turned it off. “We’re doing everything we can. We’ve got him on our strongest antibiotic, we’ve given him shots, we’re cooling him down, and we’re making no progress. We just have to keep monitoring him and hope he turns around soon, or he’s not going to be with us long.”
Chapter 4
Rat walked straight to the Counterterrorism Center, the CTC, that consumed acres of space on the ground floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He walked across the crowded, humming area full of cubicles where most of the people worked in a frenetic environment. He had never been to the CTC before the War on Terrorism; the Navy’s counterterrorism unit didn’t work with the CIA except in extraordinary circumstances—circumstances that Rat had never encountered.
He had heard that before September 11 there had been about five hundred analysts in the CTC. Now there were more than eleven hundred. Twenty-five hundred cables a day poured in from sources as diverse as those interrogating prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign intelligence services passing on tips on terrorist organizations. Instead of trucking pizzas in all night as had occurred regularly after 9/11, the CIA cafeteria had agreed to stay open on nights and weekends to accommodate the increased activity.
The CTC ground out five hundred terrorism intelligence reports a month, which were distributed to eighty different government agencies. A video conference was held three times a day with the National Security Council. And every day at five in the afternoon, Stewart Woods, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, summoned the forty senior officers from the CTC, the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, to the conference room just off his seventh-floor office for a grilling on the day’s terrorism intelligence. And it all swirled around Don Jacobs.
Rat looked for Jacobs, the Director of Counterterrorism, the man for whom Rat worked during his current temporary assignment from the Navy to the CIA’s SAS. Jacobs was unrelenting. He didn’t eat or sleep, or not so anyone else could tell, and thought of nothing except how to kill or capture those in the world who were sworn to destroy the United States. He wanted to find the barns they were hiding in and burn them down. Rat couldn’t agree more. He loved Jacobs’s vision and attitude. It was Jacobs who had made his new assignment exciting, who got his juices flowing. It was the promise of action, not just endless training for future missions that never happened. And Jacobs promised creative, one-off missions, not searching for lost al Qaeda in caves in Pakistan that much of the Special Forces community had been relegated to. It was a picture Rat couldn’t resist.
Jacobs had been right, too. Rat had been on numerous missions that had been creative, bold, and successful. There had been a twinge of Washington that Rat didn’t care for, like an unwanted
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