The Colonel's Mistake Read Online Free Page A

looking, he couldn’t stop himself from staring, struck by the fact that he’d been alive for as long as he had, that he hadn’t just accidentally cut himself and bled to death. Because the people in front of him reminded him that bleeding to death was a terribly easy thing to do.
    He approached the bodies so that he could see who they were. One was the security guard. He’d died with his gun drawn in front of a tiled fireplace. The body Mark had first noticed he now identified as a twenty-five-year-old operations officer, a man who’d been posing as a Canadian financial wizard. He’d been a top recruit from MIT and Mark had been his mentor. The third was a matronly Canadian woman who’d served as the administrator of the Trudeau House without ever knowing it was a CIA front company. She was slumped against the wall behind her desk, beneath an elongated brass sconce. Her chair had fallen over, likely pushed away, Markthought, as she’d scrambled to try to save herself. All the bodies were riddled with bullet holes; Mark counted twenty, even thirty in each of them.
    He breathed slowly, gaping at the scene sprawled out before him, searing the visual image into his memory. He wondered what could have led to such a brazen, unprecedented attack. The CIA had been operating in Baku ever since the Soviet Union had fallen apart, and no one had ever been killed. It was considered a friendly posting. The fact that the CIA had let him stay in Baku after resigning stood as a testament to that.
    But it was a friendly posting in a bad neighborhood, with Iran to the south, Russia and Chechnya to the north, and a simmering civil war with the Armenians to the west. Somehow, Mark thought, his mind racing, some of that violence must have spilled over. A levee had broken.
    He searched the first-floor offices. They were empty and undisturbed. On the second floor, near the top of the carpeted steps, he found another dead operations officer and chief of station George Logan. Logan’s chest had a big hole where his heart should have been. The way the blood had seeped out made it look as though he had little wings growing out of his back.
    Logan had been a Washington desk jockey with little experience abroad, Mark recalled. He bent down to pick up one of the spent bullet cartridges, his hand shaking a bit despite his admonitions to himself to stay centered. The kind of guy that, when Mark was feeling cynical, made him think that maybe the CIA’s overreliance on technology wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
    Mark hadn’t thought Logan deserved his own station. But the man sure as hell hadn’t deserved this.

 

PART II

 
    Port of Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates
    The soldier lay hidden beneath a canvas tarp, on top of a battered red shipping container that rested on three others and was surrounded by thousands more. Beyond this vast field of containers stood a row of yellow rust-stained cranes. Beyond the cranes, across an expanse of calm water, loomed the
USS Ronald Reagan.
    The soldier’s digital camera made steady clicking sounds as he zoomed in on each section of the massive aircraft carrier.
    Over a thousand feet long, the
Reagan
was one of eleven nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carriers in existence. As the weak light of dawn grew stronger, the soldier grew bored and started imagining all the riveters and welders and electricians and nuclear technicians who must have been needed to put the thing together. But the more he thought about it, the harder it was for him to conceive that something so colossal could have been created by human hands.

Mark called Ted Kaufman, his former division chief, from a secure line in the Trudeau House.
    “
How many bodies
?” demanded Kaufman.
    “Five.” Mark listed their names.
    “Christ.”
    The line went silent except for Kaufman’s breathing. Mark imagined the panic that was setting in. He’d heard that Kaufman had been a decent operations officer decades ago, but as a division