Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  “And God’s peace be upon you,” Salehi replied.

  Sadi terminated the conversation and Salehi reflected on the commitment he had made. There was one aspect of the talk that stayed with the captain as he closed the laptop and looked back at the sea. Sadi had not been wrong. Whatever Salehi’s profound differences and disagreements with this man and his methods, just those few words of farewell had pushed all of that aside. They had been an almost magical homecoming—not the one Salehi had been anticipating, to Iran, with its politics and double-dealing, but to something more profound, something deeper.

  An invitation to a brotherhood of pure and incorruptible faith.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  F27 Friendship, 2,400 Feet Above the Lesser Antilles

  July 23, 4:43 a.m.

  The Friendship turboprop was anything but; cold, rattling, and Major Breen could swear that air was whistling in around the windows. That didn’t stop him from catching a short nap, after which he thought about the mission. Not the details; that was the province of Chase Williams. He was thinking about the team itself.

  “A new breed,” their Department of Defense liaison, U.S. Army General Buddy Lovett had called them. The army being the army, of course the team was named after a feared, fleet creature: the black wasp.

  That’s what happens when you’re born in a think tank, Breen thought. In this case, the hatchery was the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. The command, Breen mused, is that whatever is “new” is invariably saddled with the conservative “old,” like anything designed by committee.

  Still, the heart of the idea had emerged relatively unscathed. That was the reason Breen had volunteered to serve. The core idea was not just to have a quick-deploy unit with diverse skills, but one that was actually undertrained. Breen could just imagine how that had gone over when Lovett had first proposed it.

  The view was that each skill set would complement another, making the team adaptable, fluid, and run by what Lovett described as a “situational command.” That meant the ranking officer was in charge until something happened that required the skill of a sniper or hand-to-hand combat expert or forensics analyst.

  “I think you could have come up with a better acronym than SITCOM,” Breen had told Lovett. But the general replied it was something that no one had even considered.

  Breen believed that someone at TRADOC had to have realized it but chose not to say anything.

  No one could be sure how the covert attack team would actually function in the field or under fire. Breen had suggested that maybe “progressive infiltration group” would be a more fitting nom de guerre—as in Guinea Pig. Lovett had chuckled at that during their first training session. Or maybe it was just the general’s anxiety talking. There were downtimes when the team members and their trainers openly wondered if the idea was brilliant … or insane.

  Breen still wasn’t sure, but they were about to find out. He wished he could tell Lovett that they were undertaking their first mission, but part of the Black Wasp charter was that once Lovett sent them the “call” message, he would have no further communication. The general took very seriously the idea that this was a covert team, on its own. Any breach of protocol would corrupt the experiment.

  Then there was Chase Williams, whose career over the last four or five years was a complete mystery. The thirty-five years of military service showed up in the searches Breen had done, in archived articles, photographs, and interviews from the Pacific Command and Central Command websites. Then … nothing. It could be that he had retired, but even former officers go on social media. There was none for Williams.

  There was also nothing in his prior record to suggest what the hell could have transitioned him from a command desk to Black Wasp. But there was a conclusion to be drawn. Williams’s command of intelligence and fluency with the language of security suggested that he had been involved in the field for those missing years. Being involved with Central Intelligence or the National Security Agency would not have been something to conceal.

  He had been hidden somewhere, Breen decided. Something off the radar but important enough for someone to trust him, now, with our untested hides.

  Breen could throw a dart at the U.S. government and hit more dark or black ops intelligence operations than public ones, so going any further with his investigation was problematic. Though a few things did stand out.

  No one who was as important as Chase Williams appeared to be was not typically, suddenly, free to leave his day job and join a field operation. No one who had not trained with the team, and who had apparently not been out from behind a desk for nearly two score years, would be attached to them without good reason.

  What kind of reason? Breen wondered.

  It likely had something to do with the Intrepid. Otherwise, none of them would be going anywhere. Since Williams was not active Navy, the Intrepid connection was probably with whoever had been behind the attack, most likely someone Williams knew or knew of. And if he knew or knew of them, one would have expected him to know where the bastard was.

  And there was something else about Williams that had jumped out. Breen had been in enough depositions and military courts to recognize the body language of guilt when he saw it. Chase Williams looked like he was carrying something on his soul the size of a house. That suggested something Breen had also seen, show trials in which men and women were prosecuted not for wrongdoing but for ineptitude.

  Williams may have been point man on a major, major intelligence failure. If so, it would be interesting, exciting, and possibly dangerous to see how that all played out.

  * * *

  The vivid images from the morning, and the events that followed, had prevented Chase Williams from sleeping. There was already an iconic image on the news, one that was seared into his eyeballs: the blackened tail fin of the space shuttle Enterprise, which had been housed on the Intrepid, poking from the charred remains of the roof of its specially constructed pavilion.

  In the past, Williams’s work was fluid. People and events, meetings and conference calls, information and questions flowed one into the other. Hours passed without boundary. Most times, a day seemed to end not long after it had begun. It was new for Williams not to be thinking beyond benchmarks. The Black Hawk ride. Boarding the Friendship. Checking the parachutes. Rest—no, review maps. Equipment. Intelligence updates. Life by checklist.

  An astronaut buddy once told him that his life depended on just such minutiae and structure. Williams did not think he would like it, and he was right. Yet it was the only way to slog through the emotional and psychological morass. The proverbial left foot, right foot, onward of his boot camp days. Because, in a very real sense, that was where Williams was. Starting over, learning over. He had experience but it was mostly managerial fabric with threads of tactics. A lot of that had to be ripped away for what was ahead.

  He had been looking at a map on his smartphone. It had struck him, in the dark of the cabin, that one of the things that he had to shuck was protocol. Black Wasp was an antitraditional unit. It was liberated from rules of engagement … and, at least in this case, the burdens of morality. Salehi must be found and either taken or killed. That was the only “rule.”

  The others were awake and Williams squatted in the aisle between them. As ranking officer—albeit retired—he felt he could press a mission outline on the group.

  “I’m setting out a very simple profile,” he said, “and your input is welcome.”

  Lieutenant Lee was sitting on the aisle, Rivette at the window. Williams noticed the whites of her eyes shift as she snatched a look across his shoulders, across the aisle, at Major Breen. The glow of the phone revealed an expression that was stoic and unchanged.

  “Our drop zone was selected because Jamaat al-Muslimeen—JAM—uses the Navet River to move personnel and matériel,” Williams said, scrolling and tracing the route with his finger. “They are active around the clock to tax law enforcement and use a variety of vessels to move inland from
the Atlantic. I suggest we take one of the vessels and rip it, and its people. Either they or whoever they send as backup will be plugged into the local terror ecosystem.” He turned the phone to illuminate the team and looked from face to face. “Thoughts?”

  “You just described my dream mission.” Lance Corporal Rivette smiled.

  Williams looked at the lieutenant.

  “I like it,” Grace said without expression.

  “Major Breen?” Williams asked.

  “If Black Wasp had a charter, that would be it, short and direct,” he admitted. The straight mouth twisted into a smile. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  3,500 Feet Above Nariva, Trinidad

  July 23, 5:56 a.m.

  Before the Friendship copilot, Captain Leanne Howard, emerged from the cockpit, she shut the lights in the cabin. This was to allow the jumpers’ eyes to adjust to the dark. Then she came back to help with the black jumpsuits that had been provided for the passengers, and then with the gear and the jump itself. She paid particular attention to the access of each jumper to the operational handles. It was dark, and she wanted them to make sure they could find them by feel.

  When they had first met on boarding, Grace Lee put the woman in her late thirties, a little older than the pilot. Grace was immediately outraged. From age four, growing up on Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown, Lee had been forced to claw her way upward in the male-dominated world of martial arts. It made her strong … and it also made her a reactionary. She had to remind herself that not every dynamic was discrimination—male above female, European above Asian, youth above age.

  But, being Grace Lee, the only daughter of a father who published the Mulberry Community newspaper and a mother who was his fact-checker, she had to know the true story.

  “May I ask a personal question?” Lee asked as the copilot-turned-mother-hen checked her harness.

  “Why am I number two?” she asked.

  Lee, caught off-guard, said nothing.

  “I saw it in the look you gave us when you boarded,” Captain Howard told her. “I’ve seen it before among young recruits when men got picked first. The answer is, I came to piloting late, after I stopped jumping, and the Commander has flown this route before, in this aircraft, on surveillance runs. I would have picked him over me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said, slightly embarrassed but defiantly intact.

  “Don’t be,” the captain replied, giving the chute an “all set” pat and Grace a wink. “I wondered the same thing about you.”

  The remark physically and spiritually inflated the younger woman swifter than anything she had ever heard. As she made her way to the lineup behind Rivette, she felt as though she could walk on air.

  * * *

  Lance Corporal Jaz Rivette shook out his hands the way Lieutenant Lee had once showed him. Chigong, she called the quick turns at the wrist, his fingers flopping. Moving internal energy. The young man had even started chigonging before going out to the range. It made his fingertips more sensitive, made the fingers seem directly connected to his will, bypassing the brain, in a way they hadn’t before.

  “That is exactly what you’ve done,” she had told him the next time they met. “Thought is the enemy of action.”

  That was not what Rivette had heard growing up. His single mother always used to tell him, “Think before you do something stupid!” Those were the first words he heard after she learned that he’d stepped up to stop the bodega robbery, and they were the last words she told him when he enlisted.

  The advice made sense where they lived in San Pedro, a community in the southern part of Los Angeles. The low-income housing near the port was rife with temptation from drifters, grifters, and local gangs who sought a fast buck stealing from ships or sailors. Rivette was lucky: his only interest in the sea was as a means out of San Pedro, a means of relieving his mother’s burden of having to support him and his two younger sisters. He would skip rocks or shoot at seabirds with a slingshot he made from driftwood, a waterlogged shoe, and rubber bands he took from school.

  Then came the bodega. He did not think then and hadn’t since. That was one of the reasons he suspected General Lovett tapped him to be a Black Wasp. Everything Jaz Rivette did was by instinct—instincts honed in the street, ingenuity and survival skills he developed helping his mother by catching fish, by taking out-of-date buns from a fast-food trash bin, by watching EMTs to learn first aid in case anyone in the family was injured. Rivette wasn’t chest-thumping proud of those things; they came naturally, all of them. Though he never admitted it to others, he actually felt that those around him were dull … not that he was particularly sharp. That belief was reinforced by the sharp, sharp people he had met in the Marines and then in the Black Wasp SAEs—skill assessment exercises that were held at Fort Bragg. In addition to the candidates, seasoned special forces personnel participated to provide a performance baseline. In whatever algorithm they had used, Rivette topped all the recruits and most of the veterans. He did not understand how that had happened since many of the warriors he saw radiated power and confidence.

  Me? Rivette thought as Captain Howard checked and then okayed his parachute. I was just a quiet kid who could shoot.

  * * *

  Major Breen had stopped wondering about Chase Williams after the shortest mission overview in military history. The JAG officer had no particular liking for enhanced interrogation, either as a human being or as an attorney. But he also believed that nothing must stop them from apprehending the monster who had attacked his nation. If that meant causing some discomfort among terrorists who shared that vision, he could live with that. Certainly the enemies of America and American law, from the Taliban to the drug cartels, had never hesitated to do worse.

  Whoever Williams was, wherever he had come from, he understood Black Wasp and he knew what he wanted to achieve. Breen had no problem stepping back from rank command and letting this man lead the mission until SITCOM procedures took over.

  A pat on the back from the copilot and he was ready to jump. He did not know about the others, but he was eager to put this operation into motion. He had always wondered what he would have done during the Revolution, when the acts of the Founding Fathers and anyone who supported them were treason punishable by hanging. He felt he would have risked everything for a cause.

  It was good to know he had not been wrong.

  * * *

  Captain Howard stood by the closed starboard door of the plane waiting for the “blast” signal from the cockpit—the okay to jump. They were going out the rear of the aircraft so that any backwash would carry them away from the plane. She knew nothing about the four passengers who were arrayed in the aisle—according to age, it seemed, with the youngest going out first. But she did know, by the casual and dissimilar way they stood, by the uncertainty about which door they’d be using, at the way they actually paid attention to her prejump review of procedures, that they had not had much training. She doubted, in fact, that any of them had a signed clearance to jump. Even before they had queued up, just moving to the aisle from the equipment check in the bulkhead, there had been no sense of the person in front or behind, or of the seat backs; they were like consumers with backpacks at a Starbucks, oblivious to their turn radius.

  Not that it mattered much, the captain had to admit. At this low altitude, with those advanced chutes, landing with too much kinetic energy wasn’t the danger. It would take hitting a tree or lake for any of them to be seriously hurt. Even experienced jumpers had trouble with those kinds of off-ground touchdowns.

  There were no signal lights over the door, no line for the parachutists. The Friendship was not typically used for jumps and there hadn’t been time to rig anything. Communication from the cockpit was simple: the pilot signaled once with his flashlight when they were one minute from the drop zone. Captain Howard donned her goggles—a signal for the others to do the same and also to don their black helmets. Then she latched her leather waist harness to
a hook forward the door. It was rigging of her own design, adapted from the bellyband of her own jump gear before a broken leg ended that aspect of her military life. When the door was secure, she motioned them forward.

  She had been mentally counting down and was dead-on when the flashlight shined again. Since the team was looking at the open door, they did not know it was time to go until the captain pushed Rivette into the darkness.

  * * *

  Chase Williams was the last man out the door. Just before going out, he had been thinking how strange it was to be, effectively, a guest on his own mission; a dependent, rather than a leader. He had been the one determining the nominal policy of Black Wasp to this point, and the team had been respectful about that. He hadn’t expected otherwise; for all they knew he was active duty and outranked them. But once they touched down the SITCOM conventions kicked in. When he had first read about it in the Officer’s Club, the concept seemed to owe more to tag-team wrestling than to military polity.

  But maybe that was the point, he had thought. To fight savages, you needed to lose the regulations and a lot of tradition.

  Williams’s penultimate thought, before he was shoved from the plane, was wondering how much the president and Matt Berry knew about Black Wasp’s operational mandate. His last thought was whether they had given him this assignment because he was command-qualified and suddenly toxic—though the military had a more polite black ops phrase for it: very highly expendable.

  The wind did not whistle; it drummed like a typhoon against his high-impact, lightweight carbon helmet. He could not see the others as he dropped; all he knew was where, on the map, they were supposed to land. Williams had transferred his gear to a canvas grip that Captain Howard had rustled up for him; it was the same compact size as those carried by the other team members and attached to either thigh during the jump. Williams transferred his phone, printed maps, and his personal Sig Sauer 9mm XM17. It had been gifted to him by Op-Center’s JSOC team in 2015, after the unit was attached to Williams’s operation. The polymer striker-fired handgun could be customized by the user, with interchangeable grip modules and adjustable frame size and caliber. Rivette was the only Black Wasp who carried multiple weapons; Grace Lee carried none, only a selection of knives, which were sheathed on her legs and hips—four in all.