by Tom Clancy
The man was alive, just, and Ding needed at least one survivor, but as soon as he felt the man’s back and realized he was wearing a suicide vest, Ding rose up quickly and blasted the man through the skull. He then raced on toward the hill where Clark had been positioned, desperate to find his friend.
—
Jack ran headlong into the master bedroom as fast as he could, frantic to save his sister. When he got there, however, he saw a man standing in the entrance to the bathroom swiveling a pistol on an outstretched arm right in his direction. Jack dove into a forward roll, a shot rang out, and then Jack rolled back up into a combat crouch and put the red dot sight of his MPX on the shooter’s face.
Davi stood there in the doorway, Sally holding on to him from behind and looking out past his shoulder. “No!” she screamed.
Both Davi and Jack lowered their weapons quickly.
“My God!” Davi shouted. “I’m sorry, Jack!” He tossed the pistol on the ground, aware he’d almost shot his future brother-in-law.
Jack stood. “I told you to stay in the bathroom! What the hell were you shooting at back here?”
Sally lifted a shaking hand and pointed a finger to the corner of the bedroom, near the sliding glass door to the balcony that looked to the east. There, a man in a black windbreaker and black pants lay on his side, a pistol inches from his fingertips. He was clean-shaven, forty years old or so, and he blinked over distant eyes, showing Jack he was alive, but barely.
Jack moved to him, knelt down, and secured the pistol. He then felt the man’s jacket to see if he was wearing a suicide vest.
“No,” Jack said aloud. “Of course you aren’t wearing an S-vest. The leaders of your band of shitheads get others to sacrifice themselves, don’t they?”
Abu Musa al-Matari just blinked again; then he looked up at Jack. Blood dripped out of his mouth.
Jack searched him quickly, but as he did so he said, “Sally. I need this guy alive.”
Davi protested. “He came up over the balcony, he tried to kill us.”
“I know,” he said. “Congratulations. You just shot the chief lieutenant for North American affairs for ISIS’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau.” He stood back up and turned to al-Matari. “I’d love to watch him die, but he knows things we need to know.”
Olivia moved to start treating the man, and as she did so, Chavez came through Jack’s earpiece. “I found Clark. He’s alive and conscious but he looks like shit.”
“Roger that,” Jack said. “Is the area clear?”
“Seems to be.”
Jack said, “Okay, I’m sending you a doctor.” He turned to Davi, and pulled his medical kit off his chest rig. Unzipping it and dumping it on the bed, he said, “Davi, I need you to help my friend out front. Sally, this asshole is yours.”
The two doctors quickly began grabbing dressings, compresses, tourniquets, and other important items. Davi raced out of the room.
Olivia said, “Pick him up and put him on the bed. Make him comfortable.”
“He’s a terrorist, he doesn’t need to be comfortable.”
“Right now, he’s my patient,” she said. “Do what I tell you.”
Jack wanted to tell her that didn’t really change the fact the man was a terrorist, but he left it alone, scooped al-Matari up, and dumped him roughly on the bed.
“He’s shot through the lung!” Olivia protested. “Be careful!”
“We just need him alive, Sal. Not happy.” Jack pulled a pair of zip ties off his chest and secured the man’s hands on the bedposts. “This is so he doesn’t wring your neck while you’re saving his life.”
Olivia ripped away his shirt, felt around his back for an exit wound. It was there; her hand came back bloody. As she began cleaning the wounds to seal them, she looked up at her brother. “Who are you, Jack?”
“We’ll talk later, when this guy isn’t around.”
Al-Matari coughed. “Yes . . . who are you, Jack?”
Jack knelt over him. “I’m the end of your road. You don’t get to be a hero or a martyr today, Musa.”
“You’ll never get me to talk.”
“Me? I’m not the one asking you anything. Honestly, I don’t give a damn what you know. But others do, and they are going to take you somewhere and pump your twisted brain so full of drugs that you won’t be able to lie about anything.”
—
Chavez had found Clark lying in a heap thirty yards down the hill from the ledge. He’d bounced roughly down the darkened hillside, just below the rocket’s impact, so although he hadn’t taken the effect of the blast into his body, he’d tumbled down in an avalanche of soil and rock. Chavez held a light on Clark and admonished him each time he tried to sit or stand, while Davi checked him for serious injuries. Davi determined the dirt-covered senior citizen likely had a concussion, as well as a broken rib or two, and a sprained or broken wrist. But miraculously he’d suffered no more damage than that.
The two ambulatory men helped Clark back down the hill to the cabin, and by then Jack had called Mary Pat Foley directly to let her know that a wounded but alive Abu Musa al-Matari could be picked up at a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the only charge to the U.S. government for this item would be transport for five to the D.C. area.
—
A pair of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the FBI’s Tactical Aviation Unit landed behind the cabin forty minutes later. On board were medics prepared to keep al-Matari alive, and to make John Clark a little more comfortable, as the injury to his ribs was making it more painful to breathe by the minute.
The first aircraft took off as soon as it was loaded, but the second wasn’t going anywhere for a while. It had deposited a dozen members of the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team. They spent the entire evening and part of the next morning combing the area with their night-observation devices for other terrorists, but all they found were seven dead bodies and three vehicles, two of which had several rolls of carpet over some cases in the back. They found weapons and ammunition, but when the HRT men pulled out the carpets from the vehicles, they were astonished to find four Igla-7 surface-to-air missiles, each one easily capable of taking down a jumbo jet.
72
Captain Carrie Ann Davenport had been back in theater for a full month, but she still had the garden party in College Park on her mind. The dead and the wounded. The man she’d killed using the pistol that her father had given her, insisting that she carry it on her body at all times, because the President of the United States, Jack Ryan, had said that it was the right of every member of the armed services.
Her dad had been right about her carrying the gun, and she’d never hear the end of it, but she wouldn’t complain about his reminding her that he told her so.
Something else had happened the day of the attack. The good-looking guy working on his master’s in history had asked her out for coffee that night. They’d both been rattled by the events and they both felt like they needed someone who’d been there to talk to.
Since that night they’d e-mailed each other almost daily, and they’d even Skyped once, which was an ordeal for her because she was at a forward operating base in southern Turkey, on the Syrian border, and it was hard to look her best.
Matt didn’t seem to care, he joked that for some reason her loose-fitting desert aircrew battle dress uniform turned him on, and she’d laughed harder at that than she’d laughed at anything in weeks.
As she sat for the briefing for tonight’s mission she had Matt on her mind, but only at first. When the major began explaining what was going on this evening, she instantly focused fully on the job at hand.
New intelligence had come out that had pinpointed the physical location of the Islamic State’s public relations division, the Global Islamic Media Front. The GIMF was responsible for nearly one hundred percent of all the high-end propaganda coming out of the Islam
ic State into the U.S. these days, it had its own television stations, radio stations, websites, and social media arm. This meant it was responsible for the remote-radicalized fighters springing up around the world, disaffected young men and women who pledged allegiance to the head of ISIS, then went out and committed atrocities. Since the attack in College Park over a month earlier, al-Matari’s attacks in America had diminished greatly, although sporadic attacks continued in America and in Europe. Many suggested the continuing terrorism was all done by copycats, but the United States had said nothing about the capture or killing of the terrorist leader.
Still, shutting down the GIMF, destroying its equipment and infrastructure, would be key in reducing the draw of the organization worldwide. And killing its members would erase the technical know-how that had led to the success of the global outreach of the Islamic State.
Involved in the strike into the heart of ISIS-occupied Syria tonight would be four U.S. Navy F/A-18c Hornets flown off the USS Harry S. Truman in the Mediterranean, six Army A-10 Thunderbolts flown out of southern Turkey, as well as an unspecified number of special mission units on the ground near the town of Ratla, just south of Raqqa. These ground forces would be watching Highway 4, the main artery out of Raqqa, because they had intelligence on the make and model of the Islamic State GIMF leadership’s vehicles, a remarkably specific piece of intel.
Carrie Ann couldn’t help wondering if all this plum intelligence indicated America had the bastard Abu Musa al-Matari in hand, and he was singing like a bird.
Just the possibility of this made her happy.
The special operations units would be extracted by helos from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, but two Pyro AH-64E gunships from Carrie Ann’s regiment would support tonight’s attack by flying support for any medevac flights in case one of the aircraft was shot down.
Her job would be dangerous, of course, but she thought it unlikely she and Troy would see any more action than flying a wheel formation with another Apache over the Syrian desert and watching the fireworks from thirty miles away.
It was a shame, Carrie Ann thought.
She was in the mood to kill some of those sons of bitches tonight.
—
At twenty-two hundred hours, Captain Davenport made one last check to her harness, tightening herself down in the front cockpit, and she scanned the three screens and 240 separate control buttons there. She and Chief Warrant Officer Troy Oakley behind her had spent the last forty-five minutes preflighting, and now they had their aircraft ready and their clearance for takeoff.
Oakley spoke into his intercom. “You ready, Captain?” Oakley was twenty-one years older than Davenport, but she was still his superior officer.
“Let’s do it, Oak.”
They taxied out to the short runway, and Oakley eased up the collective with his left hand. As the Apache rolled forward he pressed down gently on his left pedal, countering the torque of the blades above him by increasing the power to the tail rotor.
As he pulled the collective up, adding power to the main rotor blades, his left foot pushed down farther on the pedal. When he touched the cyclic between his knees forward, the blades changed angle above, and the big attack helicopter began rolling forward faster down the runway. Now he used both pedals to keep the nose of the aircraft steady as it picked up speed.
In the cockpit’s front seat, Carrie Ann watched with her hands on her knees. She had all the controls to fly Pyro 1-1 that her backseater did; in fact she did a fair amount of flying. Similarly, Oakley had the power to launch missiles and rockets, and fire the cannon from the backseat.
She almost never let Oakley fire, however, and if they did luck into any targets on this mission, tonight would be no different. Carrie Ann loved Oakley like an older brother, she’d do anything in the world for the man, but she fired the weapons in Pyro 1-1.
With the collective at full power and the speed at forty-five knots, Oakley pulled back slightly on the cyclic, and the eight-ton Apache lifted into the air. Just behind it, Pyro 1-2 lifted off seconds later.
They stayed low, left the FOB in an eastwardly heading to fool any ISIS spies nearby with a cell phone and a mission to report helicopter flights into Syria, and then, ten minutes later, they began climbing as they turned to the south for their standoff station thirty miles northeast of Raqqa.
—
Ninety minutes after takeoff, Davenport and Oakley flew over empty desert in complete darkness, with Pyro 1-2 and Freight Train 1-1, a Chinook CH-47D, both doing the same things at different altitudes. Carrie Ann caught glimpses of the other aircraft through her FLIR monitor from time to time, but mostly her eyes were on the southwest, where a fireworks show of attacking and defending was taking place.
She couldn’t hear the Navy radio traffic, but she could listen in on the A-10s following on to the attack in Raqqa firing Hellfire missiles, and it sounded like the mission was going to plan.
All the U.S. aircraft were using Hellfires only, which caused a relatively small amount of damage as compared to JDAMs or big iron bombs, and other ordnance that the F-18s and A-10s could carry. But the target location was in downtown Raqqa, and collateral damage had to be kept to a minimum, so this necessitated several runs from each aircraft to pick the buildings apart, as opposed to a single pass from a couple of Hornets to flatten the area with two-thousand-pound bombs.
The enemy was firing a huge number of ZU-23 antiaircraft cannons, their tracers arced into the sky, but so far the Navy and Army fixed-wing attack had suffered no casualties.
Even the report from an A-10 pilot that a Stinger missile had locked on to his aircraft turned into a non-event, as the weapon apparently lost the lock because of hills or buildings.
Forty-five minutes after the attack began, all the aircraft had egressed the area. The Pyro and Freight Train flights were ordered to reposition to the south while the Black Hawks of the 160th came in to pull their special mission units out of the area, so they set course for another spot of desert, where they would fly another pattern.
Carrie Ann watched while a pair of high-tech Black Hawk helos raced far beneath her, just over the rolling sand, on their way south to pick up their Delta Force or SEAL Team operators.
Seconds after Carrie Ann lost sight of the Black Hawks, the combat controller came over her headset, telling her he was patching her through to the JTAC frequency on the ground in Ratla. This surprised her, as the Joint Terminal Attack Controller was embedded with the special operations troops, and he was in charge of directing aircraft and artillery fire on targets. He might have been used during the attack phase of tonight’s mission, although Ratla was far enough away from the target location to where she doubted it. But she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to speak with Pyro flight, especially since his extraction helos were on the way.
Seconds later a crackling voice came over her headset. “Pyro One-One, this is Lethal. How copy?”
“Pyro One-One. Solid copy. Send traffic, Lethal.”
“I am a JTAC embedded with SF.” He read off his grid coordinates to her and she typed them into her computer. “I have no more air assets in the area, but multiple targets just appeared, my sector. A convoy of eight vehicles, confirmed squirters from target location.” He read off the grid and she tapped this in, saw on her moving map display that the vehicles were on Highway 4 and heading east, between the towns of Ratla and just south of the Euphrates River. JTAC asked, “Are you available to prosecute these targets at this time? Over.”
Troy could hear the conversation, and he confirmed they had thirty-five minutes of flying time.
Freight Train was armed only with door gunners, so Pyro 1-2 would have to return with the Chinook to Turkey. This left Carrie Ann and Troy alone to fly south, into ISIS territory, to attack the convoy.
She did not hesitate. “Affirmative, Lethal. We are one Apache with eight Hellfires, seventy-two r
ockets, and nine hundred dual-use cannon rounds. We are on the way. ETA eleven minutes.”
“Roger that. I’ll talk you right to them. We are waving off our extraction until you smoke these guys.”
Carrie Ann’s heart began pounding against the steel plate on her chest. Troy came over the intercom, all business, giving her his plan for hitting the highway from the east, so that they could rake the length of the convoy and maximize their effectiveness.
—
Thirteen minutes later they banked hard to the east at an altitude of only one thousand feet, and Carrie Ann selected a Hellfire missile. When the convoy rolled out of a village, still heading east just south of the Euphrates, she said, “Firing Hellfire,” and launched at the lead technical. The plan was to destroy the first vehicle and then send wave after wave of Hydra rockets into the convoy.
The Hellfire struck the technical, blowing it apart and whiting out the FLIR screen for an instant, then pilot Troy Oakley went to maximum speed. Through the targeting system over Davenport’s right eye, Oakley could see red crosshairs over his own aiming device that told him exactly where his front-seater was aiming. Through this he could line up the rockets directly on her intended target.
“Firing,” she said again, her voice clipped and intense. A dozen Hydras launched in quick succession, and raced across the highway below toward their target two kilometers to the west.
Before the first even struck, Carrie Ann called, “Cannon!” and switched now to her cannon. This she could aim herself just by moving her head, and she fired burst after burst at the convoy.
On her FLIR she could see multiple explosions down the length of the convoy from the rockets, and then the cannon fire tore through them, eviscerating the soft-skinned vehicles. She could see individuals running off the highway into fields along the Euphrates, but they would have to turn for another pass before taking out any of the ISIS operatives on foot.