Chapter 17
DOHA, QATAR
STAN Hurley inhaled a lungful of designer tobacco smoke and tried not to choke on the outlandish flavor.
He’d earned his spurs back in the day cigarettes were not designed to taste good.
You smoked unfiltered on the job and Marlboro Reds to unwind.
The spies he’d looked up to as a youngster wouldn’t have been caught dead puffing on a hippie cigarette.
But kids these days were different.
“Sunrise is in less than thirty minutes. Decision time.”
Hurley took a final drag from his hippie stick before flicking the burning ember overboard. He thought he heard the cigarette hiss as it hit the salt water, but that was probably his imagination. The ringing in his ears was more pronounced this morning.
A night spent listening to a man scream had that effect.
“Mr. Hurley?”
With a final look at the blackness stretching across the water, Hurley turned from his contemplation of the horizon to the sorry excuse for a clandestine officer sharing the deck with him.
Like the clove cigarettes he preferred, the maritime branch operative looked the part of a spy.
Hell, the man had even fooled him at first. He’d been quick to help Hurley load the would-be assassin onto his trawler and was good until he realized what Stan intended.
Then his true colors had shone.
The agency officer might look the part, but he lacked the intestinal fortitude required for dirty work.
To be fair, the CIA’s private navy didn’t recruit from the same pool of candidates as Ground Branch, the agency’s private army.
While still paramilitary officers, maritime branch members weren’t door kickers per se.
Instead, their mission set focused more on tasks like scooping up signals intelligence, or SIGINT, from foreign vessels or clandestinely transporting men or material over the earth’s oceans and waterways.
The long-haired, bearded operative sharing the deck with him might have been Farm trained, but Hurley was willing to bet it had been a long time since the man had participated in a field expedient interrogation.
If ever.
“Keep your pants on,” Hurley growled. “This ain’t my first rodeo, kid.”
While this was true, the hippie did have a point.
Spies, like special operators, did their most critical work in the dark.
The retrofitted trawler had quite a few tricks up its sleeve, but its most important one was the way it looked.
With its contingent of nets, winches, and steel cables, the vessel had been engineered to avoid notice, but for this to work, it had to live its legend just like the operatives it protected.
Which meant it was time to get fishing.
But before the craft could start towing its trawls, there was the matter of the still-alive assassin in the hold below.
Hurley’s interrogation methods were nonstandard, to use a clinical term, but effective.
While he lacked the finesse of the cadre of CIA doctors normally utilized for enhanced interrogations, he knew a thing or two about getting answers from people who were reluctant to provide them.
Breaking the would-be shooter hadn’t been difficult.
The man hadn’t been schooled in the art of resisting interrogators, probably because the people he reported to never envisioned a scenario in which he might be captured.
Which added yet another wrinkle to this situation.
But first things first.
Hurley had a decision to make—keep the man alive for another cycle of daylight or get rid of him now.
Keeping him alive meant the possibility of getting additional information from him, but it also increased the risk to the crew in the event that any of the numerous maritime powers who patrolled this stretch of ocean decided to board the trawler and conduct an inspection.
For that matter, even being boarded by the US Navy or Coast Guard wasn’t without risk.
A team of Navy SEALs might be persuaded to look the other way, but conventional military units wouldn’t overlook a half-dead prisoner.
Best-case scenario, they’d detain the trawler and crew until someone further up the chain of command set them straight.
Worst case, they’d arrest Stan and the maritime branch officers and tow the boat to the nearest port. Not only would this take the vessel and her crew out of play, but it would leave Hurley on ice and unable to relay the vital information he’d extracted over the last several hours.
No, he needed to dump the prisoner and get on with business.
“You got secure SATCOM on this tub?” Hurley said.
The man nodded, looking relieved. “Absolutely. You gonna ask for handling instructions?”
Hurley frowned. “What?”
“Handling instructions. For the prisoner.”
“Oh, him? No. I’m gonna slit his throat and throw him over the side. Sharks will take care of the rest.”
The hippie paled. “Is that a joke?”
“Am I laughing? Get the radio warmed up. I’ll handle the shitbag.”
The paramilitary officer sighed and then climbed below as if he were running from Hurley and all he represented.
Stan shook his head.
This new generation had missed Vietnam and the decades when the Cold War had come dangerously close to turning hot.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have the stomach for what needed to be done as much as they hadn’t been bloodied yet.
Until you held an asset in your arms as he gurgled his last breath or picked up pieces of your best friend after a car bomb rendered him unrecognizable, you didn’t truly understand the seriousness of your chosen profession.
And to add insult to injury, the newcomers didn’t even smoke decent cigarettes.
Kids these days.
After a final look at the horizon, Hurley headed below to take care of his prisoner and then radio a secure SITREP to Irene.
By the time she heard what he had to say, she might just wish she could switch places with the shithead he was about to toss over the side.
For better or worse, the shooter’s suffering was about to end.
Irene’s was just beginning.