Free The Colonel's Mistake by Dan Mayland Page B

handle, hoping the force of what had to have been a crash had somehow popped open the lock. It hadn’t.
    Then came the water—first lapping at her ankles and seconds later rising to her shins. As it reached her knees, she swiveled and waded toward the front of the van, finding in the dark the locked metal door that led to the driver’s compartment.
    She was about to cry out for help when someone ripped it open.
    Blinding sunlight spilled in. A face slowly came into view. Through the windshield of the van all she could see was open sea. She wondered whether she was losing her mind.
    They’d been driving. On a dirt road, she’d thought, bumping over what had felt like potholes.
    A huge hand encircled her arm and yanked her into the open water. The van was sinking, its driver swimming away at top speed. A strange wood road loomed above her.
    “Can you swim?”
    The man who’d pulled her out had an enormous rectangular head and blue eyes. He smiled at her in a goofy way that put her at ease.
    “I think. Who are—”
    “John Decker! Mark sent me!”
    “He’s here?”
    “Up on the road.”
    Daria saw him now. He was staring down at her, looking worried.
    “Get your ass up here!” Mark yelled. “We’re going to have company!”
    Daria crawl-stroked to the road and began to shimmy up one of the thick wood stilts just as Mark appeared from above and extended a hand down. With a wiry strength that surprised her, he hauled her up onto the road.
    Decker joined them a second later.
    “I can’t outrun them in reverse,” said Mark.
    Daria saw the boat—a distant black Zodiac filled with armed men. And that was when she understood how disastrously she’d miscalculated. Dragging Mark into this had been wrong, so wrong. She’d been deluding herself—thinking that it had been some kind of bad-luck coincidence that she’d been with Campbell when he’d been shot.
    It hadn’t been a coincidence. It had been blowback for what she’d done. She’d been a target then, just like she was now.
    “Turn the car!” said Decker. He groaned as he leaned his barrel chest into the front fender. When Mark joined him, the Niva moved a bit.
    “Push!” said Decker through clenched teeth.
    Daria threw her weight into it too and together the three pivoted the car so that it was facing the shore. They all jumped in. Mark threw the car into gear, slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and didn’t look back.

A half hour later, Mark pulled onto a narrow dirt road that intersected the highway to Baku and cut between two shallow salt lakes. He stopped at a pumping station near the south lake and parked between the empty building and an enormous wastewater pipe that had once drained toxins from a nearby Soviet factory into the lake.
    “We need a little privacy,” he said to Decker. Then he remembered how the guy had vaulted over the side of the stilt road, and added, “Please.”
    He hadn’t told Decker anything about Daria’s relationship to the CIA, or why she’d been imprisoned at Gobustan.
    “Where do you want me?”
    “Take cover somewhere, watch the road. And let us know if anyone’s coming.”
    Once they were alone, Mark told Daria about the carnage at the Trudeau House, and about what had happened at Peters’s apartment. He finished by saying, “Aside from the support staff at the embassy, the two of us are the only CIA personnel in Azerbaijan. For now at least.”
    Daria put her hand to her mouth as she listened. She was in the passenger seat, still soaking wet. With her black silk blouse plastered to her body, she looked thin and fragile. Eventually she whispered, “I can’t tell you how…” She put her hand to her mouthagain, as though trying to stuff the emotion back inside her. He could hear her breathing through her nose. “…how grateful I am.”
    The sun was beginning to go down; it hung low in the sky, a red ball suspended just above the bleak desert.
    Her fingers lightly touched his shoulder.
    Mark was