The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  After all, the man who’d engineered my prison break with a stolen American cruise missile surely wouldn’t have had a problem acquiring a roomful of weapons and equipment. But not just any weapons and equipment. The kit nestled in the foam-lined Pelican cases would have been at home in a 5th Special Forces Group team room. Normally, I’d have been a bit disconcerted to find such high-tech gear in the hands of a Syrian smuggler.

  Today, I was just happy to have the kit at my disposal.

  “Anything else you need, Matthew?”

  “Not right now,” I said, turning my attention from the weapons and equipment to the smuggler who’d procured them. “I’m probably going to wish I hadn’t asked this question, but where did these come from?” I pointed to the Pelican cases.

  “Ahh,” Zain said, following my finger, “they were provided by the Syrian Chief of Base. Your friend.”

  If I’d had any doubts before, it was becoming clearer by the moment that Charles Sinclair Robinson IV was not in any way, shape, or form my friend. Still, being an asshole was one thing, but providing CIA-specific equipment to a Syrian smuggler was out of character, even for Charles.

  “He gave those to you?” I said, mentally inventorying the contents of the cases. Seeing next-generation body armor, top-of-the-line optics, and night-vision devices along with the tricked-out HKs with integrated suppressors in the hands of a Syrian was unusual. But the tech in the innocuous-looking plastic boxes took my apprehension to the next level. They held low-profile MBITR software-controlled radios—exactly like the ones that Frodo and I had been using while trying to rescue our asset and his family.

  And they’d mysteriously failed just when we needed them the most.

  “Not quite,” Zain said. “These came from the stock the American provided to his asset.”

  “Sayid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how did you get them?”

  Zain shrugged. “One of Sayid’s men liked to play dice. He wasn’t very good at gambling and was even worse at managing his money. He ran up a substantial debt with some of my men, and when it came time to settle, he offered these in lieu of currency. I thought it was a fair trade.”

  “Why do I find it hard to believe that he just happened to be playing dice with one of your men?”

  Another shrug, this time accompanied by a narrow smile. “Let’s just say that I try to make the most of the opportunities Allah provides. My men have readied Virginia’s profile. Would you care to see?”

  I took one last look at the radios before turning back to Zain. Before this was all over, Charles and I would have a reckoning, no two ways about it. But first I had to rescue a girl and lure the Devil out of his lair without getting anyone else killed in the process. With that in view, my beef with Charles could wait.

  “Okay,” I said, turning to face the flat-screen, “show me what you’ve got.”

  Zain waved his hand, and a dozen shots of Virginia appeared on the TV. Invisible bands compressed my chest as I looked from image to image.

  As instructed, the photography team had gone out of their way to ensure that Virginia couldn’t be identified in the shots. None of the pictures featured a full view of her face, but it was her all the same. Here a tumbling of auburn hair. There a profile shot of a startling blue eye or an expanse of creamy white skin. Taken in total, the images were a mosaic of Virginia. Their incomplete nature somehow made her seem even more alluring.

  We were actually doing this. I was putting Virginia on a sex trafficker’s auction block.

  What the hell am I thinking?

  “Good, no?” Zain said, mistaking my disgusted silence for appreciation of his team’s work.

  I looked from the screen showing the auction site and the ticking clock to the images of Virginia. The faces of the other women about to be auctioned made my skin crawl, but they were similar to one another. Dark complexions, brown or black hair, and brown eyes. By contrast, the pictures featuring Virginia were the equivalent of a spotlight shining into a darkened room. She was going to stand out—that was for sure.

  But would it be enough to land the Devil?

  “Your photographer did good work,” I said, not knowing what exactly to say.

  “What do you think?” Virginia said, coming up behind me.

  “I think this whole thing makes me want to vomit,” I said.

  “Join the club,” Virginia said. “I’m not too keen on the plan either, but it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

  I knew that she was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I was struggling to find something to say when Zain beat me to the punch.

  “We can upload only one picture to the Facebook page,” the Syrian said, chewing on his ever-present cigar. He stepped closer to the flat-screen, staring at each image. “Which?”

  “That one,” I said, pointing to the centermost image. The picture showed a quarter of Virginia’s face, revealing a single shining blue eye framed by auburn curls. A dusting of freckles covered her cheek, like cinnamon sprinkled across a parchment of white. “No one sees that picture and walks away.”

  “I agree,” Zain said. “Virginia?”

  Virginia stared at me, her face flushing scarlet.

  “What?” I said. “It’s true. Okay, Zain. Put it up on the site. Start the bidding at double the asking price of the next-highest girl.”

  Zain gestured to one of his men. A moment later, Virginia’s face popped onto the auction site. A collective silence fell as we waited for the first bid. After a full minute of waiting, the silence felt ominous. Finally, the first offer came in. And then another. And another. The dam broke as bids flowed in almost too fast to count. By the tenth, the highest bid was double the asking price. By the fifteenth, it was triple.

  “We chummed the water,” Virginia said, watching the dollars beside her icon click upward. “Now we just need the Devil to bite.”

  I nodded but didn’t reply. I kept hearing one of my mom’s favorite admonishments: If you catch a tiger by the tail, you’d better hang on. I had a feeling that the hard part wouldn’t be getting the Devil to bite.

  It would be surviving whatever came next.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Matthew. Matthew!”

  I woke with a start, transitioning from sleep to wakefulness in an instant. Laila termed this ability my instantaneous awakening. She chalked it up to my being raised on a ranch, and she was half right. Much of the day-to-day work with animals had to be done before the sun came up, and my parents certainly weren’t ones to tolerate a boy’s request to sleep in when cows needed to be milked. But life on the desolate stretch of land my parents had optimistically called a ranch hadn’t produced my instantaneous awakening.

  I had combat to thank for that.

  “I’m up, Zain. I’m up.”

  “I can see that, Matthew. But are you okay?”

  I paused in the act of pulling on my boots, trying to understand what he meant. Though the room was dimly lit I could see Zain’s face, but his expression offered no clues.

  “Why do you ask?” I said.

  Now his look of concern turned to one of embarrassment. “You were making noises in your sleep. Crying out.”

  His words prompted a flash of what I’d been dreaming. Like Zain’s features, the details were elusive, but I remembered enough—women, girls really. Lined up in rows, waiting. Their bodies covered by burkalike robes, their faces visible in abstract. Here an eye, there a pair of curved lips. I’d been running from girl to girl, trying to get them to follow me to safety. But my mouth couldn’t form words, and my spectral hands passed right through them.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pushing the dream and the sense of hopelessness that had accompanied it away. “Just fine. Is it time?”

  Zain shook his head. “Not yet. The others are still resting.”

  After watching Vir
ginia’s bids shoot through the roof, I’d started fleshing out a plan for the night’s operation. It wasn’t the stuff of which books were written.

  Doctrinally, an operation like this should have had at least two separate teams. One to provide an outer cordon tasked with surveillance of the target and to act as a QRF if, or when, things went south. The smaller, inner team would be responsible for actions on the objective. In this case, those included identifying and rescuing Ferah and capturing or killing the Devil.

  But even under these optimal conditions, the operation I was planning would still have been classified high-risk. And I didn’t have optimal conditions. I had Syria’s most well-connected smuggler and a chemistry professor. No one was going to be briefing this operation to West Point cadets once we were finished.

  Still, I did have a card or two stacked in my favor. Zain’s men had displayed impressive discipline while rescuing us from the Iranian outpost. One team had created a diversion with well-aimed mortar fire and the warhead from a retrofitted cruise missile, while the second had penetrated the compound and whisked us away. Rangers and Delta Force shooters they were not, but Zain’s gang of smugglers was intelligent and could follow orders.

  Wars had been won with less.

  “How long till the auction goes live?” I said, pulling on my shirt.

  “Three hours.”

  “Any movement on the possible sites?”

  Zain shook his head, and I swore.

  Everyone knew that Mosul had become a hotbed for sex traffickers. But once ISIS had been pushed out of the city, the flesh traders were no longer state sanctioned. When the Caliphate had still been in power, girls were actually brought to distribution sites and inventoried. Then their would-be rapists arrived and signed for the girls like they were checking out books from a library.

  But that was then.

  Now that Mosul was once again notionally under the control of the Iraqi government, the Devil had to be more discreet. Instead of using fixed locations, he kept his show on the road. He chose a different site for the flesh auction each time, and the location was announced via the same Facebook page potential buyers used to submit their bids.

  To keep ahead of the Iraqi police, the Devil never revealed the location of the auction more than thirty minutes before it started. Assaulting an unreconnoitered objective with less than half an hour’s prep would have been difficult for a Tier 1 unit, let alone Zain’s band of merry men.

  With this in mind, Zain and his lieutenants had identified a number of potential locations where the auction might be held and put them under surveillance. At last count we had eyes on half a dozen buildings in the hopes that our surveillance teams would pick up the preparatory activity that was bound to precede the auction. If the Facebook site was accurate, almost one hundred women were on the auction block. About half that many buyers had already submitted bids. Prepping a space for that kind of traffic wasn’t going to happen in thirty minutes, but so far, our surveillance efforts had come up dry.

  Time for plan B.

  As if reading my mind, Zain said, “Thought you might want this.” He handed me a cell phone along with a folded slip of paper.

  “You sure he’s got it?”

  Zain adopted his best wounded-puppy-dog look, if a hardened Syrian smuggler could look like a wounded puppy.

  “Matthew,” Zain said, his dark eyes conveying the depths of his injured pride, “I run a network that moves thousands of tons of goods across the borders of three countries every day. I engineered and executed your rescue from an Iranian prison, a rescue worthy of your Charlie Force.”

  “I think you mean Delta,” I said.

  “Yes, yes. My point is that nothing moves in Iraq without my knowledge. Nothing. My men discovered the information you need. The question is, did you fulfill your end of the bargain?”

  “We’re about to find out,” I said, accepting the phone.

  I clicked into the device’s contacts and tapped the single stored number. A moment later, the sound of a telephone ringing came through my earbuds. The phone rang twice, three times, then four as Zain stared at me with a look of studied indifference. This would not be a great start to our operation if my target failed to discover the phone I’d slipped into his pocket. No, that wasn’t exactly true. I guess it would be more accurate to say that if the person on the other end of the line didn’t answer, there would be no operation.

  Zain still managed to look unconcerned, but I could tell the tension was getting to him too. He was chomping on his cigar like a dog worrying a steak bone. I was about to hang up and try again when the ringing ceased.

  “Hello?”

  “Benny,” I said. “How was the helicopter ride?”

  “Drake?”

  “Yep.”

  “You planted this phone on me?”

  “Sure did. Since you forgot to give me your business card before you left, it seemed like a good idea.”

  “I thought I was done with you,” Benny said. “But you keep coming back. Like herpes.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first to make that comparison,” I said. “Now, as much as I’d like to chitchat, this is a business call.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “The business of you showing me some gratitude for pulling your ass out of a jail cell. My momma says that it’s impolite to remind someone that they owe you a favor, but here I am.”

  “Here you are. What do you need?”

  “Unit 8200. I need them to lock down the Devil’s phone.”

  “I think we’ve had this conversation. I am in your debt, but I can’t do this for you. All of our ISR assets are focused on the Iranians.”

  “Then I need you to unfocus them,” I said.

  “Drake, I—”

  “No, no. Hear me out. Since saving your life doesn’t seem to carry a lot of weight, I’m prepared to sweeten the pot.”

  “How?”

  “By giving you what you’re looking for.”

  “And that would be . . . ?” Benny said.

  “The location of the Iranian Quds Force cell that kidnapped you,” I said, unfolding the paper Zain had slipped me to reveal his spidery handwriting. “My sources say that they killed your two bodyguards in the process. Maybe your life isn’t important enough to retask Unit 8200, but how about getting a little payback for the two boys who died trying to protect you?”

  I could almost feel Benny’s anger radiating across the airwaves. The ominous silence was worse than his muttering Hebrew expletives. Was mentioning the deaths of his men a low blow? Yeah, probably. But a girl’s life hung in the balance. The time for niceties had long since come and gone.

  “You know where the terrorist cell is bedded down?” Benny said. “Right now?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who’s the cell leader?”

  “Come on, Benny. You’re insulting my intelligence.”

  “Who?”

  I looked at the scrap of paper. “He goes by Bijan. Bijan Nuri. And he’s a captain in the Quds Force. Does that ring a bell?”

  Another beat of silence, then: “You have his location?”

  “Eyes on him as we speak.”

  More silence, this time broken with a long sigh.

  “Give me an hour.”

  “Benny, Benny, Benny. This is Unit 8200 we’re talking about. They invented SIGINT while the rest of us knuckle draggers were still making chalk marks in alleys. Thirty minutes or I shop my tip to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “You think yours is the only intelligence service who’d like a word with old Bijan? Thirty minutes, Benny. Don’t be late.”

  I ended the call and handed the phone back to Zain.

  “Will he do it?” Zain said.

  “Yep.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s M
ossad. They don’t fuck around when it comes to dealing out payback. Kill a Jew, and they will track you to the ends of the earth. And the Iranians didn’t kill just one. They were stupid enough to kill two. Israelis don’t forgive, and they sure as hell don’t forget.”

  “Sounds like someone else I know,” Zain said before walking out of the room.

  I thought about pushing back, but maybe being compared to a Mossad assassin wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  Besides, as the Devil was about to discover, Zain was right.

  FORTY-SIX

  The call came thirty minutes later, almost to the second. I thought about ribbing Benny for coming so close to the deadline, but didn’t. Maybe the signal-intercept guys at Unit 8200 were having an off day. Or more likely, maybe Benny had had to step on a couple of toes in order to bump my tasking to the front of the line. Either way, I was already sufficiently amped about finding the location of the auction site. I didn’t need to tweak Benny.

  Not too much anyway.

  “I have the information,” Benny said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Save the jokes. I’ve localized the phone, but you’re not going to like what I’ve found.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  “He’s in Syria.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How can you be sure it’s him?”

  “We’re sure,” Benny said.

  “You’ll have to do better than that if you want the Iranians’ location,” I said.

  Several moments of uncomfortable silence passed before Benny spoke. When he did, his voice was noticeably softer.

  “We have certain capabilities that extend beyond just locating the phone,” Benny said. “We have a positive ID on the man you seek. I swear it.”

  Now I was the one responsible for several moments of uncomfortable silence. Gaining positive ID on a high-value target, or HVT, was one of the most complicated aspects of a kill-or-capture mission. Localizing a phone was only part of the operational problem. Oftentimes a more daunting part was proving that the person holding the phone was actually the HVT. Voice intercepts were the most obvious way of confirming a person’s identity, but using them required penetrating the phone and possessing a copy of the target’s voice file to compare against.