Blowback

Reynolds would have laughed if it wasn’t so despicably sad. Radical Islam blamed America and the West for everything that was wrong with their fucked-up countries. He had had his fill of all of it. He couldn’t wait to get out. He hadn’t been back to his cabin in Montana since his wife had died and didn’t think he’d ever return, but he knew at some point he was going to have to try to put his life back together. One more year and he’d have enough to retire very comfortably, and no matter what his situation, he’d made a promise to himself that he would try. And once he left, he never wanted to set foot in the Mideast or deal with security or intelligence work ever again.

For the time being, though, he had a job to do. He’d been tailing the three young radicals for the past two days, but in that time there’d been no sign of their buddy, Khalid Alomari. This despite the fact that someone in Saudi intelligence was still filing nostalgic remembrances of surveillance days past, claiming that the four youths had been together almost every day over the last three. Something was definitely up, and the sooner Chip Reynolds got to the bottom of it, the better he’d be able to sleep at night.

After finishing their coffees, the young men were preparing to leave when one of them received a phone call. It was times like these when Reynolds wished he still had access to the CIA’s incredible trove of listening devices. Sitting in his Toyota Land Cruiser across the street from the Starbucks with a parabolic microphone balanced on the windowsill, he wasn’t getting anything. What’s more, even with the air conditioning going full blast, the summer heat pouring through the open window was roasting him alive. It was all putting him in a very bad mood.

Whatever the phone call had been, it must have been important, because Mo(hammad), Larry, and Curly had an intense, albeit brief conversation, and then immediately hurried outside to their car.

The late afternoon Riyadh traffic made it difficult to keep up with the three men. In fact, on two separate occasions, Reynolds thought he had lost them, only to recover their car a couple of blocks later. They certainly were being cautious, but none of them had the experience to outmaneuver a seasoned espionage veteran like Reynolds.

An hour later, the men turned onto a dusty access road leading to a seldom-used military airfield south of the city. What the hell were they up to? he wondered.

As the road twisted and turned, Reynolds often lost sight of his quarry for thirty or forty seconds at a time. He had to be very careful not only not to lose them for good but also to make sure that he wasn’t following so closely that they knew someone was behind them. Blending in was one thing in downtown Riyadh or along one of the country’s busy motorways. It was another thing entirely out here in the middle of nowhere.

Coming around yet another curve, Reynolds had just enough time to slam on the brakes and skid to a stop. He managed to back his car up out of sight while he watched the young fundamentalists pick up speed as they hit the final straightaway. Five hundred yards away was the airfield’s not so deserted and very much armed checkpoint. Was that what this was all about? A suicide bombing? It didn’t make any sense. Why waste three men on a job one could have done alone? And why hit such a low-value target? Something like this wouldn’t even make the news, much less the watered-down intelligence briefing Reynolds skimmed each morning.

Reynolds prepared himself for the worst. As the car closed on the checkpoint, he thought he saw their brake lights, but quickly realized it wasn’t brake lights he saw flashing, it was something else. These guys were signaling the soldiers with their headlights! Even odder, the soldiers seemed to be responding.

He watched as two men in uniform rushed down from the guard tower and hurriedly opened the gates. Five seconds later, the car with his three suspects sped through and the gates were closed behind them. They never even slowed down. There was no ID check, nothing. Obviously, they had been expected. Reynolds couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The phrase “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” came to mind, but this was like the Southern Black Baptist Conference inviting the KKK in for punch and cookies.

As much as he didn’t want to, Reynolds knew he was going to have to get a closer look. He watched as the car headed toward a pair of dilapidated hangars on the far side of the airfield. He pulled off the access road and headed his SUV into the desert. He would have to cut a pretty wide arc to come up on the rear of the airfield without being seen, but it was his only choice.