by Jeff Rovin
Williams shot the man through the heart. Saheli fell in a lazy half-turn and landed on his back.
“God!” Breen shouted as he made his way through the crates. “Good, good God!”
Williams just stood where he was and lowered his arm. He heard Grace behind him, saw Rivette shake a fist in triumph. Now openly angry, Breen came forward.
“You had no call or right,” the major said.
“Screw this son-of-a-bitch,” Rivette said.
Breen ignored him, kneeling and feeling for a pulse. He dropped the man’s wrist. “We had him!” he yelled. “He’d surrendered. He should have been tried!”
Williams looked at the JAG attorney. “He was.”
Removing his SID from his robe, Williams stood in a position that roughly matched the security camera image. Then he took a photo of the dead terrorist, his face intact, and forwarded it, and a short recap of the takedown, to Matt Berry.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The White House, Washington, D.C.
July 25, 12:00 a.m.
January Dow had been napping on the sofa in her office when the call came from the president’s executive secretary, Natalie Cannon. Midkiff had called an emergency meeting of his top intelligence personnel regarding “new information” about the fugitive Ahmed Salehi. Instantly alert, January texted her driver and used the mirrors in the elevator to quickly brush her hair and straighten her black pantsuit.
It was a short trip from C Street NW to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Dow’s driver encountered very little traffic at this hour. The INR head used the seven minutes to swipe through the latest intelligence reports; she did not want to show up at the meeting “stupid,” as her mother used to call it back in Austin, Texas. Angel Dow was a young widow who worked as a temp. Before she went to a new office, she made a point of calling other temps to find out about the company.
“You can ingratiate yourself with wiles or with knowledge,” Angel had told her young daughter. “Knowledge doesn’t run out or get old.”
“Nothing,” January said hotly under her breath as she saw a lot of speculation, a lot of cities and locations that were ruled out—but nothing concrete. A CIA team that had been dispatched to Trinidad reported:
11: 20 p.m.
JAM code name for attackers “Pack of Lions.” Disorganized strike. Doctor at the clinic they hit saw an Asian woman and a Caucasian man in jumpsuits. Fits profile of river attack. JAM organizer made to sever finger with teeth. Surgeon reattached. Analysis: mob hit.
The NRO had added:
11:29 p.m.
JAM Canada team traveled Port of Spain to Munich, Germany to Sana’a, Yemen to Port of Spain to Montreal. In-country 17 months. Investigating Yemen activities through ELINT database.
The FBI had just noted:
11:59 p.m.
Surveillance of Pakistan Embassy showing only known diplomatic personnel. Shift change.
So the update was the same as always in these lone-wolf or quasi-lone-wolf attacks: methodical backtracking to plot potential forward movement. Even with computer analysis, it was a slow process. Algorithms, metrics, and all the tools used by intelligence services still required the input of raw data.
“You goddamned idiot,” she said to a mental image of Chase Williams. He was the screw-up who should have had that data.
January was not surprised to see the cars of Trevor Harward and Matt Berry still in the parking lot. Part of “knowledge” was knowing who she might be facing before she went in. She was surprised that there were no FBI, CIA, or Department of Homeland Security personnel present. That was either a very good or a very bad sign. Either she was going to be asked to take point on what was clearly a stalled investigation or she was going to be fired for failing to move the ball—the sacrificial lamb.
“They wouldn’t dare,” she thought as she went through West Wing security. The Oval Office was notified of her arrival and, tablet tucked under her arm, she walked briskly down the corridor toward the Oval Office. There was a fair amount of activity here—some of it data crunching, she suspected, but more of it probably damage control. Blame for the Intrepid attack was being spread across DHS and the White House equally. Tucked in the data she had just read was a poll that said the handpicked frontrunner for Midkiff’s job, Roger Levi, had seen his lead plunge from 55 to 44 percent.
January strode past the Marine sentry, was told “Go right in” by Natalie Cannon, and opened the door to find Midkiff, Harward, and Berry seated around the coffee table between the two couches. Berry sat alone, on the left.
The INR director shut the door, her eyes on the laptop facing Berry but angled away from the empty seat. She sat beside him. No one was smiling but there was a palpable air of—serenity was the word that came to mind.
Berry turned the laptop toward January; slowly, as if he were roasting corn over an open flame. There was an image on the screen. It showed the face of a man who was unquestionably Ahmed Salehi, his eyes staring. He was lying on his back, on a concrete floor, his head resting just atop of symmetrical puddle of blood. There was a single bullet hole in his chest.
The photograph had been posted to the intelligence feed and marked SL-1, highest security level visibility only. The time stamp read WH 12:07 a.m., which was about the time she had passed through security.
January frowned. The image had just been posted, and from this office.
“We also got a team of Supporters of Allah terrorists,” Berry added. “Including their leader, I’m told.”
The president picked up the phone on the coffee table.
“Nat? Have the press secretary come in in five minutes,” he said.
“Who and where?” January asked no one in particular.
Berry replied, “Chase Williams in Aden, Yemen,” he looked at his SID, “twenty-three minutes ago. Firefight with the aforementioned Supporters of Allah.”
January’s skilled, restless brain assembled a timeline that did not fit. Op-Center disbanded, Williams put in charge of a commando unit—possibly his old JSOC team—the group sent to Trinidad off the Montreal murders, a shootout there that collected essential data, extraction by the Navy, and then either night-dropped or sea-borne into Yemen.
“Is he all right?” January asked.
“He is,” Berry said. “I’ll tell him you asked.”
“We are not going to reveal who or how to the press,” the president said. “Just ‘commandos,’ and that will be it. But I would like you to be the source of this information.”
January’s frozen look of puzzlement surprised even her. “I see. Why?”
“Because this has to have been run by one of our intelligence agencies, relentlessly following leads and fielding a team before the enemy had a chance to go underground,” he said.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Because someone is going to take a storm of justifiable outrage from the other agencies—in private, of course, but they will not appreciate how you kept this information to yourself.”
“To protect the highly covert nature of the mission,” Berry contributed. “Not for personal advancement.”
“No,” January said, looking him squarely in eyes that seemed to sparkle with caffeine-fueled life. “Who would do a thing like that?”
“You’ve got credibility and you’ve got steel in your spine,” Midkiff said. “And frankly, what you don’t have is mud on your reputation the way Op-Center and the high-visibility agencies have. DHS, CIA, FBI—their social media negatives are in the red.”
“Whereas INS doesn’t even register,” she said. “We really have to up our Twitter game.”
“ASAP,” Harward pointed out. “Press conference has been called for one a.m.”
“Yes,” the president said. “I’d like you to be at the podium. Decline all questions—just look like the cat that devoured the mouse.”
“I can do that, Mr. President,” January said with a small Cheshire look.
“I’ve seen her make that happen,” Harward said
innocently.
January’s eyes had moved from the president to the national security advisor to Berry. Harward did not seem to be in on whatever joke the DCS quietly seemed to be nursing. She was willing to bet that before the men had gotten together here, Harward had no idea what had been in motion. Realizing that she had been as clueless as the president’s old football team college buddy was no consolation.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “Truly. You worked two fronts and won both.”
“Just doing the people’s work,” Berry said.
“January, Matt’s right—this is a triumph for America,” Midkiff said.
“And for Chase,” Berry added pointedly.
She had to give Berry that, too. Whatever the details—and she would have them, somehow—this operation reeked of the DCS, right down to the kill-you-with-civility rollout of this meeting. As for Midkiff, she did not know if the president was just exhausted, blind to Berry’s motives, or—as she had always suspected—more than a trifle naïve. Angel Dow would not have been impressed by him. The deep knowledge that should have been his was stored in the heads of others.
The president turned bodily to the INR head. “You will brief the press secretary and then we will have all the intelligence heads in the situation room,” he glanced at his watch, “at eight a.m. to plan for possible retaliation from whoever managed his escape.”
“Your press conference will probably ignite a bunch of fires,” Berry said helpfully.
“We do not believe this was run by JAM,” Harward said. “They haven’t the muscle or reach. There is obviously a powerful player in Yemen we have to find, starting with whoever rented that warehouse from Sadi Shipping.”
“Why not Mohammad Obeid ibn Sadi?” January thought out loud. “He has not been seen in public for decades.”
“The Howard Hughes of the Middle East,” Berry added.
“Well, that can be part of the agenda tomorrow,” the president said. His eyes shifted to Berry as he rose. “This win is yours, Matt.”
“And Chase’s,” he added.
“He owed us one,” Harward said.
Even January would not have said that, even though she thought it.
“I’m going to get some rest,” the president said, seeming to deflate a little, leaking whatever energy he had left. “See you all at eight.”
That was all the president said to the group as he left the office and Press Secretary Suze Bender walked in.
Passing her in the doorway, and within earshot of his tired secretary and the alert Marine, the president made a point of using the same words Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, had used at his press conference in December 2003:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Little Bird, Gulf of Aden
July 25, 1:25 p.m.
“If Chase hadn’t shot him, I would’ve,” Rivette said. “Hell, that’s what we were trained for!”
Leaving the warehouse, the four had made their way silently, but swiftly, back to the waiting helicopter. Sitting in the four facing seats in the helicopter, the lance corporal had to shout to be heard by Lee and Breen over the rotors as the chopper fought a headwind to get above the clouds. The refueled MH-6 had lifted off without incident and was nosing through the rain that was driving at them from the south. The mood of the passengers was grim, though none of that was directed at Chase Williams.
Williams sat quietly beside the pilot, ignoring the debate as he contemplated his own actions at the dock.
“The man wasn’t shot, he was executed,” Breen said.
“He’s a man, now, this guy who slaughtered innocents?” Rivette said. “He is—was—a murderer who does not get to kill any more Americans, ever. I am very happy that he has joined his Pakistani brethren in whatever afterlife is the hottest.”
“The Pakistani girl, lance corporal?” Breen asked with rare anger in his voice. “The granddaughter? Are you glad she’s dead.”
“Price of terrorists doing business,” he said. “Her incendiary-device-creating grandfather should’ve thought of that before he took her on his killing spree.”
Grace was sitting beside Rivette, the tailboom behind them. Breen was across from her, his back to the cockpit.
“Ahmed Salehi broke the harmony of the universe,” she said. “He alone is responsible.”
“It is my understanding, from having read his file, that he was responding to an American attack that sank his cargo ship.”
“That was on a mission to collect Russian nukes,” Rivette said. “Yeah, I read that, too. Some SEAL team or something stopped him. If they’d stopped him better, those people would not have died on the Intrepid.” The marksman looked ahead in disbelief. “Counselor, are you actually defending that prick?”
“Not him,” Breen said calmly but firmly. “Due process.”
“We didn’t ‘due process’ those guys in Trinidad,” Rivette pointed out.
“Or the Supporters of Allah,” Grace added with more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice.
“That was a question of survival,” Breen said. “We are soldiers first and we were on a mission. But we had Salehi. He was ours.” He pointed beside him. “There is an empty seat where he should have been sitting. Without due process, our country is no better than the one we left.”
“I believe, Major, we just proved that isn’t so,” Grace said. “Our country targeted a man, not a museum or a school or a workplace, as they have done. Back there, Salehi had an equal chance. If that had been a school instead of a warehouse, we would have waited at our own peril. On the Intrepid, no one had a chance.”
“That reasoning is based on a principle of retribution, not justice,” Breen said. “And you are wrong. Salehi did hurt us, Lieutenant, possibly worse than we realize.”
“How?” she asked.
“We crossed a red line,” he said. “It’ll be easier, now, to cross more.”
The plastic panel behind Williams muted the conversation and he was glad for it. From the tone of the Black Wasps, however, he knew what the topic was. And he was not entirely convinced he had done the right thing. The dead man had attacked the Intrepid, but he had also cost Williams Op-Center. At least, the Op-Center he knew.
I pray to God that was not why I did what I did, he thought. I pray that I did it for the dead.
The remainder of the ride was quiet, save for communications between Oudah and the Dima. The Little Bird rendezvoused with the tanker in just under ninety minutes, not far north of the choke point where the Red Sea passes between Yemen and Eritrea on its way to the Gulf of Aden. The return flight took longer than the initial trip because the pilot took them near their ceiling to avoid rocket fire from Shia radicals.
The tension remained thick as the team exited the helicopter and hurried to the elevator. Williams knew, from debriefs, that a good deal of that was a holdover from the mission, the birth pangs of post-traumatic stress. But the shooting of Ahmed Salehi also weighed heavily on the team—all except Oudah. The gunfire had been heard and the battle witnessed and his expression and handshake before reporting to the captain told Williams that he had been proud to have played a part in the mission.
After they were shown to guest quarters in the cabin deck above the main deck, Williams paused in the corridor and faced the others.
“I’m very sorry for the dissention I’ve caused,” he said. “You don’t know much about me, and that’s how some higher-ups want it. But I’ll tell you this much. I was in the Navy for thirty-five years and nothing prepared me for a moment like that. I will probably never know if what I did was right.” His eyes moved to Breen. “Legally, it was not. Ethically—the Supporters of Allah and whoever spirited him out of Trinidad on a private jet did not want Salehi for show. I think I’ll sleep a little better knowing there’s one less terrorist we have to watch out for.”
“They were probably giving him a boat,” Breen offered. “Otherwise, why fly
him to Yemen only to sneak him somewhere else on a ship?”
“So he could pick up more warheads,” Rivette suggested. “A-bomb fever.”
For a flashing moment, Williams felt as if he were back in his office at Op-Center, listening to a debate between Roger McCord and Paul Bankole.
“This is a postmortem for the party planners,” Williams said. “I’m going to find out how we’re getting home from India and then I’m going to sleep. I just wanted to tell you that you’re all exceptional people and it has been an honor serving with you—and to learn from you. ‘SITCOM,’” he uttered, shaking his head and laughing. “You cannot know how important it has been being a part of a new team.”
Williams supposed that the others took “new” to mean the christening of Black Wasp; from his knowing look, maybe Breen had picked up his real meaning.
“Will we be seeing you again?” Grace asked.
“That’s up to the people who put me here,” Williams replied, “and who I have to go contact. Let them know we’re safe, headed for Trivandrum, India, and would like a ticket home.”
“I—all of us, I think—hope we all get to do this again,” the lieutenant said. “There is not a history text or military game plan that we did not impact.”
“For the best,” Rivette insisted, not looking at Breen.