Free Mission Liberty by David DeBatto

guess I won’t
     have to study too hard for that one.” It was the name of the identity he’d used when he’d gone undercover in Kurdish Iraq,
     almost two years before Iraqi Freedom began, posing as an entrepreneurial kid who’d grown up smuggling cigarettes and alcohol
     across the Iraq/Iran border for his uncle, a tribal leader and a U.S. ally during the time after Gulf One when U.S. planes
     were enforcing the northern no-fly zone. Zoulalian had cross-trained out of Air Force para-rescue and into counterintelligence
     largely because of his language skills, but the attraction to danger was what had drawn him to both. He’d allied himself,
     in Kurdistan, with a group called Ansar Al-Islam, a small band of extremists led by a man named Abu Waid that hoped to overthrow
     Saddam, and later the Great Satan- led coalition. Working as a double agent, “Khalil” had helped DeLuca and his team track
     down Mohammed Al-Tariq, the former head of Saddam’s Mukhaberat, his primary secret intelligence agency. Al-Tariq had been
     funding an operation to ship to the United States weaponized smallpox, until DeLuca and his team tracked Al-Tariq to his headquarters
     deep underground at a place called the Ar Rutbah Salt Works, in the desert near the border with Syria. A combination of carrier-launched
     cruise missiles and “bunker-buster” smart bombs had turned the salt works into a giant smoking crater in the earth.
    “According to TF-21,” Zoulalian said, “Rahjid Waid, Abu Waid’s oldest son, is running an IPAB training camp in northern Liger.
     My story is, I survived the bombing at Ar Rutbah and I’ve been hiding out in Syria ever since, but now that things are getting
     dicey in Syria, I need a new place to go. Other than that, everything is the same as before. I know who we can ask in Iraq
     to tell Rahjid I’m coming. I’m going to need to get to Syria to catch a commercial flight so that Rahjid can send somebody
     to meet my plane.”
    “I’m sure Captain McKinley can find one of his pilots willing to give you a lift,” DeLuca said. “There’s no in-flight movies,
     but on the other hand, you’ll be flying at Mach 2. Hoolie?”
    “Luis Avila,” Hoolie said, holding up his new fake passport. “You know what they say—if you look anything like your passport
     photo, you’re probably not well enough to travel. From Arecibo, Puerto Rico. I work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
     Administration, manning a weather station at the top of El Yunque. Holy Jesus—I have to
read
all this? ‘A Multi-Study Overview on the Combined Effects of Sub-Saharan Desertification and the North Atlantic Vortex on
     Caribbean Particulate Deposits and Childhood Asthma.’”
    “You’d better read it,” DeLuca said. “After all, you wrote it.”
    “So I did,” Vasquez said, noting the authors of the paper. “‘By Dr. Luis Avila, and Dr. Helen Kossman.’ I have a Ph.D. from
     the University of Mayaguez. That’s an outrage—I did all the work and she gets half the credit? Who does she think she is?”
    “She’s with NOAA and she actually wrote the paper,” DeLuca said. “She’ll back up your credentials if anybody asks or checks,
     but nobody will. I’m Donald Brown, with the World Bank. I’m here to determine how much money we’re going to need to loan Conservation
     International to help stop the deforestation of West Africa. Paul, you’ve been working on a grant proposal for exactly that
     for the last two years, am I correct?”
    “You are,” Asabo said.
    “Can you tell us, in a nutshell, what your work has been about?”
    “A nutshell is not big enough,” Asabo said. “A thousand years ago, a band of rain forest extended from the Congo region of
     central Africa across the coastal regions all the way to Senegal and north for several hundred kilometers, and there it became
     savannah, before giving way to the desert. As populations increased, the pressure has grown to take sustenance