Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  It wasn’t doable. She was going to have to bring them to her.

  Rivette and Breen would come running but she would be there to stop them. Pulling the pin, she lay the explosive on one of the steps, swore loudly, and vaulted over the railing to the adjoining staircase from the fourth floor. The wall to her right would be peppered with shrapnel so she balled herself low and tight against the rail.

  The grenade exploded deafeningly, metal shards gouging the concrete walls and pinging loudly off the handrail. Smoke filled the stairwell and she began moaning—while looking down, waiting for the others. They arrived in moments, saw her, understood. She held her hands up for them to wait.

  Footsteps descended on the staircase. There was muted talk. Rivette eased around Grace. He saw bare legs and colorful footwear in the haze. He fired a shot each into different pairs of shoes. The two men went down, screaming. Two more shots and they were silent. Rivette motioned to the others.

  The explosion and the shots had turned the whup-whup of the helicopter rotors into a dull drone. Grace jumped over the dead men and ran up a flight. She slowed but did not stop, peered around the corner of the final set of stairs, and saw the door that opened onto the roof. She could actually feel the beat of the rotors here.

  “Clear!” she shouted down and went to the door. She waited until the others arrived before turning the handle and pushing lightly—

  The door didn’t budge. There was no lock, no key, nothing that would seem to prevent it from opening. Breen’s flashlight caught a glint and she looked down. A knife blade was jammed under the door, point facing in, serrated edges digging into both the bottom of the door and the rubber wind guard. Rivette hurried to her side and they pushed together. There was a grating sound; their efforts only seemed to make the serrations dig in more firmly. The lance corporal studied the door. There was nothing in his arsenal that would punch through the metal.

  Grace pushed here and there in quick succession, looking for vulnerable spots—even as the beats of the rotors began to withdraw.

  Breen had been looking up at the skylight but it was too high to reach, even if he boosted Rivette.

  The lance corporal looked up. “What if we shoot out the glass, toss a grenade?”

  “Slopes to the sides,” Breen said, pointing. “That’s probably where the storm drains are. Blast won’t touch them.”

  Within moments, the sounds from outside told them that the helicopter—and their quarry—was out of reach. Grace elbowed the door hard, not a tactical move but sheer frustration. They had failed by no more than a minute or two.

  Breen called Williams with the update.

  “They could be going to the airport,” Williams said.

  “Wherever they’re going we’ll never catch them,” the major said, his voice sullen.

  “I’m outside now,” Williams said. “Airport is in the direction they’re headed.”

  “Anyone you can call to meet them there?”

  “No,” Williams replied. “But there’s someone who might have a damned effective way of stopping them.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  July 23, 8:24 a.m.

  Matt Berry was relieved to receive the call, distressed to hear Williams’s report, and uncertain about what he was suggesting.

  His small office was dark in the morning, as much from the sun being on the wrong side as from the wildfires that had to be put out from the night before. Dealing with the hunt for Salehi—which was front-burnered at every intelligence agency in the free world—also devoured a large chunk of time. So far, no one had anything concrete.

  Berry was relieved to finally hear from Chase Williams, and what the commander had just told him on their secure line seemed like their best lead … but not definitive. Berry was busy typing a message to Darla Price at the National Reconnaissance Office while they spoke.

  “No one actually had eyes on the guy?” Berry asked Williams.

  “No, but all the arrows pointed in this direction—armed guards, safe house, and some key player was definitely airlifted out of here as we moved in.”

  “What happened to the guards?”

  “Black Wasp happened,” he said.

  “I’ll have a boat for you,” he began typing a second text. “You have to vacate. Will let you know where.”

  “I’ve got a new vehicle,” Williams said. “We’ll leave as soon as the others arrive. But I’d rather stay on Salehi until there’s no chance of getting him.”

  “No. I requested eyes on the chopper and Piarco Airport asap,” Berry said. “If he’s been ferried to an airliner, hopefully we can spot it in time and ID it.”

  “And then what?” Williams asked.

  “See where it goes,” Berry said.

  “Jesus, he’ll go to a hostile nation! No one else would have him!”

  “Then we’ll pick this up there,” Berry said.

  “Why not shoot the bastard down?” Williams asked. “No one but Iran would fault us.”

  “Take down a commercial airliner?” Berry asked.

  Williams was silent.

  “That’s not gonna happen,” Berry went on. “You have—we have—zero evidence that Salehi was the guy they moved or that he’s actually onboard. For all we know this whole thing was staged to take your eye off the ball. The SOB could have gone down an elevator and out through a laundry room or something.”

  “Hold on,” Williams told Berry. “The others are back.” He switched the phone to speaker. “Major, is there any chance that Salehi wasn’t upstairs?”

  “No,” Breen told him. “They booked in a hurry, all hands on deck. The apartment door was open—we took out the hallway security cameras, got a computer and a stack of smartphones. Only reason to collect the devices would be to maintain strict silence from rank and file. And they left without them—meaning in a hurry.”

  Williams turned off the speaker. “You get that?” he asked.

  “I did,” Berry replied. “Chase, you and the team did a bang-up from the jump to now. But you’re being extracted. Head to the gulf and before you get there I’ll give you the rendezvous point. Got it?”

  “Yes,” Williams said. “But we’re not done with this.”

  “Didn’t say you were,” Berry said. “But we need to catch our breath and assess.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Port of Spain, Trinidad

  July 23, 9:07 a.m.

  Berry was not wrong. But it hurt to be this close and have to regroup.

  The others climbed into the bright orange Jeep Wrangler Williams had procured.

  “Nice ride,” Rivette said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “His.” Williams pointed to one of the dead men. “Had the keys on him.”

  With the phone in his lap, the commander drove from the parking area. Beside him, Breen was booting the laptop. As they turned onto Ajax, both Grace and Williams looked out the window for any trace of the helicopter. It was long gone.

  “Iranian websites,” Breen said, scrolling through a drop-down menu.

  “Salehi must have been reading about himself,” Williams said.

  “That—and, I suspect, whatever he could find out about JAM,” Breen said. “His survival depended on them and he is not someone who seemed deeply plugged into the terror network before today.”

  “Good points,” Williams said. Working with this man was like having a one-person Op-Center at his side; and what the others did at the apartment, getting to within a few feet of their target, was every bit as extraordinary as what Mike Volner and his JSOC team did on past missions. However much Williams might disagree with Matt Berry’s caution, the man was smart enough to have conceived of putting Williams together with Black Wasp to create a lean, mobile version of the personnel-heavy, office-bound operation that was being terminated.

  “Scary to be on the wrong side of the road,” Rivette said, his knee braced against the back of the driver’s seat.

  Consideri
ng what he had just been through, Williams found that amusing.

  Berry texted Williams, instructing him to head five miles south along the coast to the Caroni Bird Sanctuary. It was situated in the twelve-thousand-acre Caroni Swamp; moving swiftly in and out, a Naval Special Warfare Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat should not attract any actionable attention.

  The ride down the Uriah Butler Highway was quiet, both inside and outside the Jeep. There were billboards, low-lying structures, and a great many long, grassy spots along the major north-south thoroughfare. When Williams received word from Berry that the RHIB was five minutes from shore, he informed Breen. The major was already watching the gulf with his binoculars and simultaneously spotted the charcoal-gray boat racing toward them, the forward section of the motorized vessel rising a sharp twenty-five degrees or so from the water.

  “Not flying a flag,” he noted.

  “Sad when the U.S. Navy is more likely to get checked-out or shot at than smugglers,” Rivette noted.

  Williams pulled onto a patch of dirt and scrub, parked the Jeep, and while Breen, in the rear, watched the highway for police or anyone who might have followed them, the team marched toward the water. They reached the boat without incident and, within five minutes, were in international waters.

  * * *

  The U.S. 4th Fleet was established in 1943 as a means of protecting shipping against enemy submarines, blockade runners, and self-interested pirates in the South Atlantic. The fleet was disestablished in 1950, its duties transferred to the U.S. 2nd Fleet. The 4th was reestablished in 2008 to operate the Navy’s surface vessels and submarines in the U.S. Southern Command, which encompassed the waters of the Caribbean and Central and South America. The stated purpose for the move was to underscore our commitment to those partners-for-peace in the region. The actual function was to make sure Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and the terrorists they either sponsored or ignored did not gain a strategic foothold in the region.

  The Black Wasp team was taken to LCS 10, Littoral Combat Ship USS Gabrielle Giffords, where each of the Black Wasps personally thanked each of the four rescue team members. It hadn’t been a particularly risky mission but it was a very welcomed one.

  After that, the four were taken directly to the sickbay, where a pair of hospital corpsmen gave them a quick examination, handed them bottles of water for dehydration, and left them in the care of a petty officer first class. The young woman took them to the mess hall where they were joined by Lieutenant Commander Dylan Hyson. The silver-haired officer excused himself and Williams, citing security matters. Grace and Rivette were too tired to be annoyed but Breen seemed to hang on this development, this new information. Williams did not personally care what Breen knew or deduced, though the oath he took prevented him from answering questions or adding to the major’s data bank.

  “Sorry about that.” Hyson gestured to the others as they sat at another table. “You’re the only one with operational security clearance.”

  “Sure,” Williams said. “Though it does seem a little rigid after what we’ve just been through.”

  “I know that you’re a former CENTCOM commander, sir, so you now that ‘fair’ is not in the DoD lexicon.”

  “True enough,” Williams said.

  “We’re supposed to take you to the communications center for a secure debrief from D.C.,” Hyson said. “You first, the others down the line. Is there a problem with that?”

  “None. Though technically, while I’m the ranking officer of the group, I’m not the leader. Have you been briefed?”

  The lieutenant commander shook his head. “Only names and ranks. Commander Bacon—who’s on the bridge—got her orders directly from the chief of naval operations. You have powerful allies.”

  Williams said nothing. It was both fascinating and disturbing that the president and Berry were running what amounted to their own shadow government.

  “We know that you were on the trail of terror operations connected to the Intrepid,” Hyson went on, “and I want you to know you have our thanks and support.”

  “Appreciated,” Williams said. “Let me ask you: do you have any intel from Trinidad that can help us?”

  The officer sighed. “The activities in Trinidad are monitored,” Hyson told him, “but only electronically. Those communications are stored and reviewed by the Office of Naval Intelligence and turned over to Homeland Security. What happened this morning won’t be read and plugged into the terror database for days.” He shook his head. “It’s meticulous, I assure you, but not terribly efficient.”

  “Lieutenant Commander Hyson, we are still on the trail of the attacker,” Williams said. “What are your orders regarding my team?”

  “Frankly, beyond the debrief sessions, we haven’t any,” Hyson told him. “We’re continuing our patrol.”

  Williams explained to the others what would be going on. Leaving the team behind, Tyson took Williams to the Integrated Strategic Resources Suite, which adjoined the Integrated Command and Control Center. Williams was introduced to the captain and commander at the request of the latter.

  “Commander Bacon likes to know who is on his LCS,” Hyson explained.

  “Perfectly understandable,” Williams assured him.

  Hyson escorted his charge to a small room with a laptop displaying the 10’s insignia on the monitor. It was a cactus and anchor in a shield with an eagle on top and the motto Je Suis Prest below—“I Am Free,” he knew from four years of French at Tufts. The computer sat on a gunmetal desk pushed against a wall; there was a swivel chair in front.

  “Must be fun on sharp turns,” Williams said.

  “I’m informed they will be contacting you,” the lieutenant commander said. “Oh, and your phone won’t work in here. Electronic scrambling,” he added, indicating the walls.

  Just like the Geek Tank, Williams thought.

  “No one I need to text,” Williams said.

  “When you’re finished, press Command Y and I’ll come and get you,” Hyson said, shutting the door with a click.

  The fortysomething officer was efficient and polite, but nothing more. He had not seemed put out by the rescue and Black Wasp’s presence, but perhaps his superiors were. Unplanned rescues were not an officer’s favorite kind of mission.

  Except for the purr of a ventilator, the room was quite silent. There was only a slight sense of motion, as there was throughout the vessel; these new ships were beyond what he was accustomed to. He remembered, when the ships were being designed, that by using above-the-waterline waterjets instead of the combination of underwater propellers, shafts, struts, and rudders, the LCS would be ideal for missions in which a shallow draft was required—such as rivers and near-coastal waters. The jets came with an added benefit of a smoother, quieter sail.

  The clock on the computer said 9:30 and, promptly, Matt Berry’s face filled the screen.

  “We’ve got the chopper at the airfield,” Berry informed him without preamble. “And a private jet on an approach path. Point of origin, Sana’a International Airport. Owner, Sadi Shipping of Yemen. Unless Salehi’s is planning to go fly—” He checked a tablet. “—Caribbean Airlines to Haiti, JetBlue to Fort Lauderdale, Copa to Panama City, Surinam to Curaçao, the jet is there for him.”

  “Sadi,” Williams said. “He’s been tied to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

  “Reportedly,” Berry said. “Large amounts of cash have been recovered by Mossad agents working undercover in the city of Dhamar, Yemen. The Israelis say the courier was tracked back to an area where Sadi is thought to be hiding. But a direct connection wasn’t made.”

  “Saudi operatives in Jizan also mentioned him in a report—”

  “That was an interview with Amnesty International,” Berry said, once again consulting the tablet. “Women reportedly tortured—one of them talked. She went missing after that.”

  “So a man who clearly does not have Western interests at heart is likely escorting Ahmed Salehi to safety,” Williams
said. “What do you do? What do we do?”

  “You were correct to make those two separate questions, Chase,” Berry said, finally showing a little smile. “What I do, while the jet is en route, is make sure it’s going back to Sana’a. What you do is connect with Amit Ben Kimon, who is based in Dhamar, and wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Location of the jet,” Berry said, “and something else. We’re still working out the details.”

  “Photo of Amit Ben Kimon for confirmation?”

  “Mossad won’t let us have one,” he said.

  “Jesus, Matt.”

  “I know. They don’t trust us a whole lot. I had to work hard just to get the guy for this. You choose the password—I will personally text it to him before you meet.”

  “Janette,” Williams said. It was the name of his late wife who died of ovarian cancer.

  “Good,” Berry said respectfully. “It will be sent in English. If something goes wrong, very few Yemenis would be able to read it.”

  “You’re not going to tell me anything more?” Williams asked.

  “Black Wasp will be heading into very hostile territory,” Berry said. “The less you know.…”

  The DCS did not need to finish the statement. The less we know, the less we can reveal if we’re captured.

  “If you need to communicate with me when you’re there, use Amit’s phone. Uses an uplink that—well, the Israelis have one that’s pretty untraceable. And Chase,” Berry went on, “I can tell you this, though. No one in the intelligence community pursued Salehi the way you have.”

  “What do they have?”

  “State and MI5 are both in Antigua, sniffing around,” Berry said. “They got a tip from the Russians—seems they’re pissed at him about something. But all of that is unconfirmed and not entirely reliable. Dow thinks the Kremlin wants him to ask about that nuke deal in Anadyr. Anyway, that’s one reason we can’t consider taking the private jet down. No one but us thinks he may be there.”