Page 16 of Murder Island

A botched mission. Unforgivable.

“He should have sent me,” Lial muttered to herself.

The door to the hut opened abruptly. A tall man appeared in the entrance. He wore a brown vest over a dark blue tunic. His head was covered in a turban. A bandolier of ammo draped diagonally from shoulder to hip. He held an automatic rifle in his hands.

Taliban.

“As-salamu alaikum,”he said.

“Wa alaikum assalam,”Lial replied.

In this part of the country, a woman without a proper head covering might be beaten or even shot. But Lial felt perfectly safe. She knew Ansar. They were colleagues. In fact, they’d attended the same school—on another continent, years ago. They’d been working together at this remote location for months, and they’d barely made a dent in the job.

Lial closed the laptop and replaced her head covering. She walked outside with her partner.

“The Chicago mission,” she said. “It failed.”

Both spoke flawless Pashto, but English was easier. And good practice. It was the language used by most of their customers.

“They escaped?” said Ansar. “Both of them?”

Lial nodded. “The charges were set correctly, but the monitoring was off. They lost track of the targets.”

She walked with Ansar down a long stretch of pavement lined with thick concrete barriers. “Somebody will answer for it,” said Ansar. “Anyway, it’s not our problem.” As they emerged from the end of the walkway, he looked out and spread his arms wide. “Thisis.”

They had reached the edge of a pitted runway stained with thousands of black landing marks. Extending into the distance were rows of bulky mine-resistant trucks called MRAPs, along with SUVs, jeeps, and pickup trucks, some in white, others in desert camo. It looked like the world’s most bizarre car dealership.

One side of the runway was filled with stacked cases of MREs. The other side was lined with the real moneymakers—metal cases of M4 carbines, antipersonnel mines, and Javelin missiles, gathered from abandoned FOBs all over Afghanistan.

Ansar was right. Lial knew that she needed to focus on the work in front of her. The logistics were daunting. The assignment was to feed the black market with the base’s vast supply of equipment and weaponry—everything the Americans had carelessly left behind.

CHAPTER 17

“LAND HO!”I felt a little silly shouting it.

But there it was.

We’d been sailing for days since leaving the Bahamas behind. And still no hint from Kira about where we were going. I’m not sure she even knew where we were headed herself. But now there was a dot of land on the horizon.

I hustled back to the cockpit. “Island! Dead ahead.”

Kira peered over the wheel and smiled.

“So wherearewe?” I asked.

“Exactly where we want to be,” said Kira. “In the absolute middle of nowhere.”

The sea was calm and the wind was favorable, blowing us straight toward the dot in the distance. As we got closer, I could see that a dot was pretty much all it was—a tiny speck of land, too small to be on any map. Maybe the tip of some extinct volcano or the last remains of a sinking atoll.

We anchored about thirty yards off the beach and took the dinghy ashore. When I first sighted land, I was worried we’d stumbled onto some pirate hideout. But as soon as we slogged onto the beach, I could tell that there was nobody else there. The island was just two thick arms of sand curled around a tiny lagoon. End to end, the whole thing was about twenty yards long. It looked like an island in aNew Yorkercartoon.

“I think we’ve officially reached the end of the world,” I said.

“Perfect,” said Kira. She stabbed the handle of her paddle into the sand. “Civilization is overrated.”

I walked to the high point of the island and turned in a full 360. Other than theAlbatross, there was nothing in sight but blue water. At some point in the past, a breeze or a bird must have carried some seeds over from somewhere, because the island had a small stand of palms and a few scraggly bushes. There were clusters of green-jacketed coconuts high in the trees and piles of greenish-brown fronds on the ground.

Kira leaned up against one of the trunks and tipped her face up toward the sky. She looked relaxed and at peace. A few seconds later, she snapped into action.