True Faith and Allegiance

by Tom Clancy

  Midas nodded. “Understood. I’ve had a few days like that myself.”

  Adara knew about what had happened, and she was used to Dom getting a little melancholy when things went wrong. Added to that was the fact Adara was now being trained as an operator, and she knew she had to give Dom some extra space and understanding.

  She imagined that wasn’t going to be too much of a problem, considering the fact she had a full plate for the next several weeks.

  Clark spent forty-five minutes going over his plan for six weeks of instruction with his two new trainees, and at eight o’clock sharp, Gerry Hendley came into the conference room to meet Midas. The four of them talked about the history of Hendley Associates and its special relationship with the government for a while, until Gerry excused himself and Clark officially began his training.

  In order to work at The Campus, one had to understand how The Campus worked, as well as the operation of Hendley Associates, the cover company that Midas was now an employee of.

  Clark spent the morning moving Midas and Adara from meeting to meeting throughout the building, first introducing them to the investing and analytical team on the Hendley “white side” as well as the analysts, computer hackers, equipment purchasers, logistics experts, et cetera, who worked on the Campus “black side.” Adara had worked here for years, but she was not on a first-name basis with everyone in the building. Some of this had to do with the fact that fully fifty percent of her work life took place on board the Gulfstream or else at a tiny office they kept at the airport fixed-base operator, formerly at Baltimore BWI Airport, but recently relocated to Reagan National, just ten minutes’ drive north of Hendley Associates in Arlington.

  There were just over eighty employees working here in the building today, and Clark took Midas and Adara around to meet most all of them.

  The next part of the process was as educational to Adara as it was to Midas. Clark went down the somewhat complicated list of just exactly who around the intelligence community was aware of the sub rosa intelligence work done at The Campus. From the director of national intelligence to the attorney general and, of course, the President of the United States, it was a list with some lofty names, although it remained a relatively short list. The off-the-books organization had been employed on more than a dozen special assignments in the past several years, so many people had come in contact with operators of The Campus, but Gerry Hendley and his executive staff had gone to great pains to keep the exposure small and the affiliations murky.

  Midas knew this from his own experience a couple of years earlier. He had been an officer in a highly secretive military unit operating in a battle zone who was then introduced to a group of men and told he couldn’t be read in on just who, exactly, they worked for. He’d found it odd at the time, but now that he was on the other side of the coin, it was comforting to know there were just enough people around the government who ran interference for The Campus that he knew he could expect some semiofficial cover during his operations.

  In the late afternoon Clark took his team down to the two-lane firing range on level B3, just below the parking garage. Over the next few hours they trained on the MP5 submachine gun, the M4 rifle, and the SIG Sauer MPX, the new sub gun the team had been testing to see if it was worthy of replacing the H&K UMP kept hidden as a close-quarters defensive weapon in the Gulfstream.

  Adara actually had more time behind the SIG MPX than Midas. Delta used the H&K MP7 PDW (personal defense weapon), as their short-barreled weapon of choice, while The Campus had been testing the new SIG for the past few months.

  Still, Midas and Adara shot identical groups.

  Adara was never going to be the shooter Midas was, but a small, mobile unit like The Campus was in need of overlapping expertise. She had more medical training, more logistics training, and a wider understanding of worldwide aviation. She was a pilot, where Midas was not, although they both had significant boating experience.

  There would be places Adara could go where Midas would stick out, and the inverse was just as true.

  Clark was happy to see that Midas didn’t have any qualms about training alongside a female. He could think back to a time in his own military career where he would have found it incredibly odd, to the point of distraction, to run and gun with a woman, but that was a long time ago. Adara had become something of a daughter figure to him in the past five years, and he realized he had to keep aware of his own professionalism so he wouldn’t take it easy on her during the training program.

  After working into evening at the range, they took an hour off for dinner at a local barbecue shop, then they drove to an outdoor range in Springfield for night fire training. They donned night-vision equipment and used rifles equipment with night-vision-capable holographic weapons sights, and they cleared rooms in the four-room shoot house there.

  Again, Adara acquitted herself well, and Midas shot, moved, and communicated like he’d been, just months earlier, a high-ranking Delta Force officer.

  That is to say, this stuff was ingrained in Midas’s DNA by now.

  Adara was bone-tired when John Clark called his last cease-fire of the day, shortly after eleven p.m.

  Clark said, “You both did good today. But today was the easy day. Tomorrow things get harder, and harder still the day after.”

  Adara imagined this was true, and she imagined John would say the same thing every day for the next six weeks.

  23

  The opening play of the Islamic State’s worldwide operation to draw American soldiers en masse back into the Middle East did not begin with Sami bin Rashid and Musa al-Matari’s fighters in the United States. It began in Sicily, and it was carried out by three young Islamic State plants in the flow of war refugees from Syria.

  The men had been trained in an underground ISIS camp in Raqqa, then traveled in the mass immigration out of the war zone from Syria into Turkey, then through Bulgaria and Romania, before leaving the refugee flow and slipping illegally over the border into Hungary. When they made their way into Slovenia these three men were met by other ISIS operatives, already living and working in Europe, and here they were outfitted for their operation.

  A total of six operatives, including the three newcomers to Europe, crossed into Italy, then spent a full day on the highways heading south. Down at the tip of Italy’s boot in Reggio Calabria, they stole an eight-meter fishing boat with a small Zodiac launch tethered to it, and they sailed across the Strait of Messina over to Sicily.

  They anchored in a quiet cove through the daylight hours, then sailed back out into the black Mediterranean in the late evening, using their mobile phones to give them precise geo-coordinates and directions to a point off the coast of Fontanarossa, a sleepy Sicilian beach community. Here the three young men from Syria climbed into the rigid-hulled inflatable Zodiac launch and began heading west toward the beach in the pitch-black night.

  —

  Naval Air Station Sigonella was a fifteen-minute drive to the west of Fontanarossa. Considered the hub of America’s U.S. Naval Air operations in the Mediterranean, Sigonella served as a main support station for America’s ongoing attacks against ISIS targets in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and other U.S. operations against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates all over North Africa. Flying time from Sigonella to Syria was roughly two and a half hours, and it was barely a quarter of that to northern ISIS positions in Libya.

  Sigonella base was well protected with guns, gates, and guards, and local police were on the lookout for any disturbances in the area that might indicate a threat to U.S. personnel. But on this early morning, the waters of the Med to the east of the base were perfectly quiet other than the approaching Zodiac. The rubber boat came into the shallows without use of the motor. The three men climbed out into waist-deep water and tossed their paddles back in.

  They didn’t bother with pulling the little RIB to shore, anchoring it to the ocean floor, or fixing it to a dock
with a line.

  No, they would not need the small watercraft again.

  Each man carried an H&K submachine gun with several extra magazines, and all three carried a suicide vest, double-sealed in plastic garbage bags. The gear had been provided to them by the three ISIS operatives already living in Europe, and they’d guarded it with their lives since picking it up in Slovenia.

  Together the three Syrians scanned the shore in front of them, saw no one around, and then waded out of the water, ran up the sand, and dropped down in the deep grasses by the side of the road. On the other side they saw just what they were expecting to see: a quiet community of one- and two-story homes with tiled roofs.

  The nominal leader of the three men, so appointed because he carried the mobile phone with Google Maps on it, pulled the device out of a waterproof bag and looked it over. It took him a moment to orient himself, and when he did he realized they’d drifted too far south on their approach in the RIB. Softly he pointed to the right, and to the others he said, “Two blocks that way.”

  They donned their vests and checked one another to make sure everything was set up correctly. And then they stood and set off up the beach road.

  On a street called Via Pesce Falco the small kill team turned left, began running along fenced and gated front yards, making an effort to stay out of the streetlights but sacrificing pure stealth for speed. The last in the group was the man with the mobile phone to his face; he searched the map on the device for just the right house.

  Halfway up the street he stopped abruptly, and the men ahead of him ran on a dozen meters before realizing their mistake and returning to take a knee next to him on the darkened sidewalk.

  There was nothing special-looking about this house on his right; it was one of dozens on Via Pesce Falco. The property next to it was just a sandlot with tall sea grasses, so they used this to make their way around back. Here they jumped the rear fence, and the first gunman arriving at the sliding glass door at the rear of the property waited till his two colleagues caught up to him. He tried the door, found it to be locked, and then he wiped sweat from his brow.

  With a nod to his partners, he turned his MP5 around in his hands and used the butt of the weapon to shatter the glass by the door latch.

  He unlocked the door, and the three terrorists moved into the darkness of the home.

  —

  This house was a four-bedroom rental property. At present it was rented as off-base living quarters for four United States Naval officers, all lieutenants in their twenties. They were all bachelors, and all pilots of the F/A-18 Hornet.

  It was against Italian law and Navy regulations for personnel to carry a firearm off base, but twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Mitch Fountain always snuck his nine-millimeter Beretta M9 home with him. He knew he’d get a serious reprimand if he was ever caught, but he did it anyway. He was from South Dakota, he’d grown up around guns the way many grow up with footballs, and the thought of fighting a war against terrorists without so much as a pistol next to where he laid his head at night rubbed him the wrong way.

  Mitch was the only one of the four in the house who did this, and consequently, when he woke at four-thirty a.m. to the sound of breaking glass downstairs, he knew it was up to him to investigate. He grabbed the Beretta from his nightstand, flipped off the safety, and ran out of his little room and toward the stairs.

  As he arrived he saw three men coming up the steps, illuminated by a night light plugged into a wall socket there.

  When he realized they were carrying shoulder-fired weapons, he did not hesitate.

  Fountain fired three rounds at the sight of the ascending attackers, hitting one man squarely in the throat, the chin, and the top of the head.

  And then Navy Lieutenant Mitch Fountain was killed by a fully automatic burst of the second gunman’s MP5.

  The second gunman then stopped on the stairs, turned, and chased after his dead colleague, who was now sliding down the stairs back to the ground floor. He began taking the man’s suicide vest off him, while the third terrorist ran into the second-floor hallway.

  The three other Americans were still in the process of waking up; the initial crash of broken glass had happened less than twenty seconds earlier, after all, but they grabbed a ball bat, a tennis racket, and a folding combat knife, and they all came running out of their rooms.

  The ISIS gunman in the hall saw the three men pour out of their rooms at once, he let go of his sub gun, and he reached for the pressure switch swinging freely from the cuff of his left arm.

  A quick toggle of the safety and a press of the plunger, just as the first American swung a baseball bat at the side of his head, and his job was done.

  The second floor of the little villa erupted in fire, killing all four men instantly.

  Downstairs, the one remaining ISIS operative fell onto his dead comrade, knocked there by the blast above, then he finished retrieving the vest. He held it in his left hand as he darted out the front door of the home, out into the street, where he turned to his right and took off to the west.

  Many of the homes on the street were employed as off-base housing for the air station, this he had been told, although he’d been given no specific secondary target. He ran alone through the dark as lights came on in houses all around, car alarms blared from the explosion, and he looked for more U.S. Navy to kill.

  Forty-five seconds after leaving the target home he settled on the largest villa on the street, ran up the drive, and arrived at the front door just as it opened. A man in a bathrobe stood there, searching for the origin of the explosion, but he was knocked down by the young terrorist.

  Both men fell to the floor, more people came down the stairs next to them, and the terrorist put a thumb on the detonators of both suicide vests, and jammed down on the plungers simultaneously.

  —

  The President of the United States sat in the conference room on Air Force One and looked at the four computer monitors on the wall. As Nebraska crept by, 38,000 feet below him, he conferenced with the secretary of defense on one monitor, the secretary of state on another, the attorney general on the third, and the director of national intelligence on the fourth.

  And here in the conference room on the 747, Chief of Staff Arnie Van Damm sat off to the side.

  SecDef Bob Burgess continued his rundown of events. “Nine innocents dead in all, including seven Americans. Five junior Navy officers, four of whom were Hornet pilots in a squadron currently flying ground support operations in Libya and Syria. And a lieutenant commander who was killed along with his wife. He was the new chief of air traffic control at the base. He’d just arrived at Sigonella three days earlier and didn’t yet have housing set up, so he was staying in a bed-and-breakfast near the beach, a few doors down from the pilots’ off-base rental.”

  After a pause, Burgess said, “Two more dead were Austrians on holiday, a husband and wife. Two Italians dead as well. Five wounded, two of these seriously.”

  Mary Pat Foley added, “An Islamic State website we’ve deemed credible announced the attack five minutes after the first reports, put up testimonial videos of the attackers, even mentioned the name of one of the dead American F-18 pilots. There is no doubt that this was an ISIS operation, and no doubt they had specific targeting information.”

  The President asked, “How the hell did they know the exact address this guy was staying at? And how did they know the lieutenant commander was staying in the B-and-B up the street?”

  Foley replied with obvious frustration. “We still do not know. The DoD and the entire IC are running tests on all networks, looking for any hints of new penetration that might have exposed these men. So far, nothing.”

  Ryan said, “This is like the Commander Hagen incident, another attack on the Navy.”

  Burgess said, “Except this time the attackers are ISIS, not a Russian college dropout. But, yes, their int
el is every bit as good and difficult to account for as the Hagen attack in New Jersey.”

  Ryan said, “Okay. That’s our immediate threat abroad. Any chance this attack indicates that Abu Musa al-Matari is in Europe, and not, as we’ve been fearing, on his way here?”

  Mary Pat Foley spoke up now. “Doubtful. The Islamic State’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau has its own European operational leadership. They all live there, work there. Hell, most of them were born there. Al-Matari wouldn’t be on home turf in Europe the way a dozen other men of his rank would be.”

  “Makes sense,” Ryan said.

  “Plus,” Mary Pat added, “we do have some news on Musa al-Matari.”

  Ryan said, “Good news, or bad news?”

  Dan Murray said, “It’s not good. We’ve been trying to identify this ‘Language School’ the Yazidi girl told us al-Matari spoke of. We think we found it in the jungles of El Salvador, close to where the Guatemalan ex–Special Forces men had gone to teach a training class.”

  Ryan said, “A group of jihadists in El Salvador didn’t get noticed by the local Feds?”

  “No, but this place was way out in the sticks.” Murray frowned. “FBI agents toured through it yesterday. It had already been abandoned, totally cleared out, but there were enough shell casings around to indicate some serious training had gone on.”

  “Small-arms training?”

  “We found evidence of pistols, rifles, and small explosives. But just because we didn’t see anything else, that doesn’t mean they didn’t train on other weapons.”

  “Size of the encampment?”

  “Hard to say, because these were existing structures. They’d been around since the eighties and weren’t built for the use of the ISIS group. But from the burn pit, and from the locals who say they heard shooting for something like three to four weeks, we think we could be looking at a force between twenty-five and fifty pax.”