Secret of the Oil: Prequel to the Donavan Chronicles Read Online Free Page B

and resumed looking out of the grimy window. Waiting, waiting, and more waiting.
    She rethought the circumstances that had led to her sitting here. She could not believe it all. Her deployment to Baghdad had caused a major hiccup in a budding romance with a handsome Navy lieutenant commander in the Pentagon. She hoped they could get their relationship back together on her return to Washington. All she wanted was for him to understand that this was important to her. She knew he didn’t comprehend why she had to take on this mission, and she had left Washington before they could work it out.
    Tara knew this would be her one and perhaps only chance to conduct a covert operation, and she wasn’t going to let it pass, even if she was an intelligence analyst, not a field operative. After it was over, she could initiate her plan to get out of the military, enroll for her doctorate in History at Georgetown, and possibly marry Glenwood.
    She recalled the reason she was sitting on this stool freezing her ass off in Iraq had started with an idea. She had attended an award ceremony at the Pentagon for one of the returning veterans from Iraq, who had lost one arm and had his face badly burned from a roadside bomb. This soldier, Sergeant Watts, had been assigned to her division, and she would see him everyday. A germ of an idea began festering in her mind and she thought it through, decided she could do it, and that she had the knowledge to carry it to its conclusion. She had recently returned from a mission with one of the counterterrorist teams as an observer, not an actual mission but a training exercise. She’d learned how they operated and the equipment they used. Even as an observer it was not difficult to glean the technical skills they employed. She knew she could do it if she found herself in a similar situation. Tonight, sitting here in this dump, culminated in two years of effort from the day she had the original idea. It started to materialize when Tara had an appointment with the department head of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s data base directorate, Dr. Lucy Nolan.
    “Doctor, I have an idea that I want to try. It’s simple, and it’s low budget.”
    “Okay, Tara, what is it?” Dr. Nolan asked.
    “I want to attempt to recruit a terrorist by using the Internet. I’ll post a message asking for assistance in learning how to construct improvised explosive devices here in the U.S. These things are causing us too many casualties in the war against the terrorists. I’ll ask for a man to help a woman learn how to build them so I can use them in America. I’ll use Islamic message boards. My objective will be to get to know one of them and maybe turn them.”
    Tara’s presentation persuaded Dr. Nolan to authorize the attempt. Nolan knew that Tara was professionally proficient in the language.  The next day, Tara placed messages on the Islamic Army of Iraq’s web site, www.iaisite.net, and on Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade web site, www.kataebaqsal.com. As an afterthought, she put her message on a little known Saudi message board. It was a shot in the dark, but she had a hunch it might spark a response. The effort really was at no cost to the government, since she was the only one monitoring any hits to her query. Few of the colleagues with whom she had shared her idea believed that any Arab man would take a woman seriously, and she did suffer a good many crank responses. Nevertheless, one interesting answer arrived. That one man was turning out to be a winner. She wanted to solidify the contact and bring him under the DIA's control. It would be the greatest accomplishment in her military career.
    Tara and her contact, who said his name was Mohammed, had e-mailed one another over the next year and a half—small exchanges of pictures and of insignificant details: innocuous things, like where they were born and where they had worked. Mohammed had also unwittingly provided snippets of intelligence that proved to be useful and