Backblast Candace Irving (classic novels to read .txt) 📖

beneath that polo, not to mention his voice, the man's mood had yet to improve.

"Yes, Lieutenant. All of it. Every goddamned carton of bait you've got. Tell Chief Yrle I want it waiting in the master-at-arms shack before my return. No exceptions." He jammed the receiver home and spun around. Glared. "Well? You still got a problem with my investigative procedure?"

"Nope." Not on this. "It'll save time."

He blinked. The scowl faded—slightly. "You don't think the bait's mislabeled either, do you?"

She shook her head.

"Then why the hell—"

"It needs to be excluded." Might as well start there while she worked out the rest.

"Then how do you really think strychnine got onboard?"

This time, she offered a shrug—and the truth. "I have no idea. Yet." But she would. As mysteries went, they were dealing with a doozy of a locked-room scenario. Only in this case, the poison appeared to have been located on the outside of the door. Damned if she could figure out how it had been nudged across the proverbial threshold, let alone who was responsible for the nudging. "None of this makes sense."

On the one hand, they had Nabil Durrani.

As a physician, Durrani could've easily uncovered and chosen to abuse knowledge of his cohort's preexisting heart condition. Not only had Durrani been the brains behind that Afghan terror cell, the doc also had one hell of a motive to kill his bastard-in-arms. Namely, to shut Hachemi up before the translator could identify their unknown American traitor. But Durrani also had less access to strychnine than some unnamed, affronted shipboard sailor.

Hell, Durrani had had even less opportunity to actually poison Hachemi than the Marine guards.

In short, the Afghan doc would have to have found a like-minded marionette aboard a US naval warship willing and able to do his bidding.

A situation that appeared extremely unlikely.

As for Corporal Vetter and Staff Sergeant Brandt, either Marine could've tainted Hachemi's food as easily as one of the mess cooks, possibly more so, given that the Marines were bound to have been entrusted with said food without others present.

But Vetter and Brandt weren't just Marines. The corporal and staff sergeant currently served as US embassy security guards. As such, the men were considered the best of the best—for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which included loyalty, personal and professional restraint, and the proven ability to keep their mouths shut.

Both men would've known who they'd be guarding from the moment the assignment came down, but would either have shared that knowledge out of turn?

She suspected not.

Nor did the math add up. Both Vetter and Brandt had been on board the Griffith for four weeks, since the fifteenth of December.

But the Marines weren't the only guests the Griffith had hosted lately. And a politician was a whole other animal. One more akin to a loose-lipped hyena than a silent, steadfast bulldog culled from the cream of the Corps.

"When did the diplomats board the ship? Where?" She'd assumed the Griffith had been at sea at the time, as it had been when she'd arrived.

Was she wrong?

Riyad must have anticipated the direction of her thoughts, because he shook his head. "The Griffith has been at sea since mid-November. She was taking part in a multi-national training exercise in the Indian Ocean when she was rerouted to the Arabian Sea to house the diplomats. All of them. The US ambassador and her staff, as well as the Pakistani and the Afghan contingents. Everyone arrived via the same Super Stallion that's waiting for us up on the Reagan's flight deck. The ship has been underway for nearly sixty days."

Damn.

While that underway timeline stunk for those sailors, it was even worse for this case.

But speaking of that CH-53E, "What about the pilot and the crew of the helicopter? Where did they drop off the diplomats once the geopolitical bitch-fest wrapped up?"

Odds were, the American ambassador and her staff, as well as the Pakistani and Afghan contingents, would have all been told that the translator and the doc were headed for deep interrogation aboard the same ship that the diplomats had just departed.

Given the current drawdown in the region, surely that gaggle of Afghan diplomats would've included at least one member of the Taliban, possibly more?

If so, would that Taliban have been as tight-lipped as the Marines?

Riyad removed his latex gloves and dumped them in the biowaste container beside him. "They left via the same UAE airstrip where they retrieved you. They all picked up the final legs of their respective US military hops from there."

"And Durrani and Hachemi? Were they picked up at the same place, at the same time? Or was there a delay between the diplomatic departures and the prisoner boardings?"

A delay during which someone on that chopper crew would also have known who they were now waiting on…and why.

The spook nodded. "Same strip. Same day. The crew was forced to wait at Al Dhafra for roughly three hours before the prisoners arrived."

"You're certain?"

This nod was firmer. "I was there. My orders put me on the same helo hop to the Griffith as the prisoners. I arrived at Al Dhafra before the helicopter touched down with the diplomats and the embassy guards. I watched them all disembark."

"What about the guards? Did either Vetter or Brandt—or any of the Super Stallion's crew—leave the apron during the wait?"

A third nod. "All of them. But no one left the terminal."

But who was to say one of them hadn't been met in, say, the latrine?

Still, three hours? A tight window to say the least. So tight, a potential perpetrator would have to have phoned a trusted contact ahead somehow, so that the poison would be waiting for him. On an airstrip in the middle of the desert in the UAE.

Damned difficult. But not impossible.

She'd noted tighter timing—and harsher, seemingly insurmountable odds—before. And when she added in that fact that the Marine guards and chopper crew had to have known who they were supposed to be picking up…

But it was still a damned dicey