Free The Colonel's Mistake by Dan Mayland

claimed her as our own, but realistically her cover’s as good as blown. So even if we were to get her out tomorrow, she wouldn’t be able to operate in-country. In the meantime, Gobustan might not be the worst place in the world for her to hole up in. At least she’ll be safe there.”
    “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
    “You know something I don’t, Colonel?”
    “Let’s say I just don’t share your optimism about her safety given your recent track record.”
    “No one’s denying that we got hit pretty bad—”
    “
Pretty
bad—”
    “But now we’re gearing up to play offense and—”
    “Find a way to get her out.”
    “Talk to me in a couple days.”
    “All I can say is that if anything happens to Buckingham, there’ll be hell to pay. I hope you understand that. I hope the DCI understands that. We—and by we I mean the president,” lied Amato, “don’t abandon our own.”
    Since Amato’s boss was James Ellis, the president’s personally appointed national security advisor, and since the president did indeed direct national security largely through Ellis, and Ellis in turn directed much of the president’s policy through Amato, itcould genuinely be said that on matters related to Iran, Amato usually did speak for the president.
    But Kaufman wasn’t easily bullied.
    “No one’s abandoning her, Colonel. She’s alive and safe and we’ve let the Azeris know we’d like her to stay that way. If the president feels we should be doing otherwise, have him contact the DCI. Meanwhile, I’ve got other priorities.”

In a vast desert south of Baku, Mark lay hidden amid an elevated cluster of mud volcanoes—bizarre little cratered hills that popped out of the desert like acne and burped up gray mud and methane gas. He held a pair of Zeiss binoculars to his eyes, focusing on an isolated collection of low-slung buildings visible in the far distance. Decker lay a few feet to his right.
    The summer sun remained a brilliant, blinding white. No shade existed for miles around and the heat rising up from the baked earth was brutal. Beyond the mud flow in front of him, Mark could see patches of white salt crystals, the desert equivalent of a dusting of snow. The rest of the expansive landscape was dotted with dry scrub brush, wild lavender, and black puddles where oil had oozed naturally out of the ground. Gobustan Prison looked like a lifeless island surrounded by a sea of desert.
    The road leading up to it was lined with steel pylons, remnants of the jail’s former incarnation as a stone factory. Just beyond the prison lurked the bottom half of a mountain—its top half had been blasted apart and carted off to Baku in the form of limestone blocks. Mark wiped the sweat off his forehead and thought about all the poor schmucks who must have slaved away at that factory for their Soviet overlords. A couple decades of hell and then dead byforty. His life hadn’t always gone as planned but at least he hadn’t been born into that.
    He refocused on a point just past the pylons where there was a gated break in the high chain-link fence surrounding the prison compound.
    At ten past five, an olive-green van with military markings on it passed through the gate. It was similar to the one Mark had been stuffed into the night before.
    “That’s us,” he said.
    They hopped in Mark’s Niva and took off across the desert, bouncing over rocks and smacking down scrub brush until they intersected the road ahead of the van at a secluded railroad crossing. Mark pulled over in a cloud of dust and parked the Niva in the middle of the road where it narrowed just before the train tracks. He popped open the hood as though he were having engine trouble. When the van came into view, he told Decker to get out.
    “Flag him down. He should know what to do.”
    It was all supposed to be a big charade, so that Orkhan could cover his ass. A fake ambush.
    Decker got out and raised his arms, but the van just sped up.
    “Uh, he ain’t