American Operator

by Brian Andrews

  Dempsey turned to Munn. “We’re gonna need to breach that room. How do you want to—”

  A flash of movement in his peripheral vision cut him off. He looked right as the kneeling prisoner’s hand snapped out with lightning speed to grab Latif’s wrist. Malik twisted, spinning on his knees and jerking Latif off balance toward him. Latif went for his rifle with his free hand, but Malik was too fast and drove an elbow into the side of the young operator’s head.

  Dempsey surged into action, bringing the barrel of his weapon around for a kill shot. He squeezed the trigger, but Malik spun low, dropping under the line of fire, his body fluid and powerful like a wrestler on a mat. His left palm found the floor and his hips pivoted as if on a fulcrum, and he snapped a kick at Dempsey’s leading leg. His heel connected—driving deep and hard into the meat of Dempsey’s thigh, just barely missing his knee. The blow knocked Dempsey off balance and sent him pitching forward. As he tumbled, combat training took over. Instead of trying to catch himself, he rolled through the fall and scrambled into a combat crouch.

  At the same time, Malik popped to his feet and snatched the pistol from the front of Latif’s kit. Latif, still dazed from the blow to his head, didn’t even react. Both men, Malik and Dempsey, brought the muzzles of their weapons to bear on the other, with Dempsey juking right as he squeezed the trigger. Malik’s pistol discharged. Dempsey felt the bullet streak past his left cheek as his own round found its mark. He squeezed the trigger again and watched as his first bullet tore through Malik’s jaw and the second blew out the center of the man’s throat. The entire sequence had transpired in less than three seconds but felt a hundred times that long.

  “What the fuck was that?” Munn said, surging toward the fallen shooter. Munn put another round through the man’s forehead, then turned to help Latif.

  The former Green Beret had taken a knee and was shaking his head. “What just happened?” he said through his breath.

  “You got schooled, brother,” Munn said. “That’s what happened.”

  Munn glanced at Dempsey, jaw set and eyebrows up. Dempsey answered him with a curt nod, reading his friend’s mind: the dead man was no lowly proxy for a money guy, the way they’d assumed. Moves like that were a product of experience and advanced combat training. Malik was somebody of consequence, but figuring out who that somebody was fell onto Baldwin’s to-do list now. Dempsey had a more urgent problem to deal with—the hostages.

  “Everyone okay?” Grimes asked in his ear.

  “All good,” Dempsey said. “HVT Two is KIA.” He turned to Latif. “Take a few breaths, clear those stars, and tell me when you’re ready.”

  Latif did as instructed, pressed to his feet, and said, “Let’s do this.”

  Dempsey turned to his team leader. “How do you want to do this?”

  “Mustang, Charger One,” Munn said to Grimes. “Gimme the skinny.”

  “I hold four warm bodies in a stateroom. The two hostages are bound to chairs, and the two armed shooters look to be taking cover behind them,” Grimes reported.

  “Which side of the ship, port or starboard?”

  “I have a broadside view of the yacht and no depth perspective to work with at present,” Grimes said. “It’s hard to tell with thermals, but if I had to guess, I’d say starboard.”

  “This sucks, dude,” Munn said to Dempsey. “We have to stealth approach through the corridor, we’re not positive what side they’re on, they’re using the girls as human shields so we can’t just hose them down on the breach. The bulkheads on commercial vessels are thin. There’s nothing to stop them from cutting us to ribbons in the hall, especially if we kick in the wrong door. This is fucking dangerous, JD.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a dangerous job,” Dempsey said with a thin fatalistic smile. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been doing this every day for twenty years, and I didn’t take a ten-year hiatus to play doctor and dole out pills to kids with VD.”

  Munn flashed Dempsey a quintessential You’re such an asshole smirk. “All right, then. Here’s the plan . . .”

  After briefly conferring, Munn took the lead as he, Dempsey, and Latif approached the oval hatch at the end of the salon. On the other side of the hatch, a narrow stairwell led to the sleep quarters below. Dempsey sighted over Munn’s shoulder as they descended, careful not to make any noise. The stairway opened into the middle of a narrow corridor stretching parallel to the keel. He counted six stateroom cabin doors—three port, three starboard—and a single door at the end of the passage.

  “That room at the end of the corridor appears to be a bathroom,” Grimes said, reading his mind. “Third door on your right, I think that’s where they are.”

  Munn looked at Dempsey, eyebrows raised in query.

  Dempsey gave a single nod.

  Let’s do this.

  They advanced, slinking silently over the carpeted passage in a low crouch. As they moved toward the third stateroom on the right, Munn’s warning from minutes ago played in Dempsey’s head: The bulkheads on commercial vessels are thin. There’s nothing to stop them from cutting us to ribbons in the hall, especially if we kick in the wrong door . . .

  The passage creaked behind him, spiking his heart rate. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder. Latif, who was frozen midstride, wore a pained look on his face, and Dempsey imagined Ember’s newest member silently cursing the floor supports. The next three seconds would tell if they would be punished with an enemy strafe through the walls that cut them all down. When it didn’t happen, he signaled for Latif to take it slow and turned back to Munn. The doc had maintained his stealth, advanced past the target door, and now stood with his back pressed against the bulkhead. Dempsey moved into position on the other side of the door.

  “No changes with thermals,” Grimes said softly. “I hold the three of you in the passage and the four warm bodies in the stateroom. The yacht has drifted, and I have a better angle. Confirm starboard side.”

  In Dempsey’s mind’s eye, he could see her stretched out on the table, her body one with the sniper rifle as she watched their heat signatures through the scope.

  “It’s not a wide stateroom,” she continued. “The hostages are seated facing the door, chairs nearly pushed together, shoulder to shoulder. Both shooters are kneeling behind them, aiming around the outside shoulder of each woman—the left shooter is far left; the right shooter is far right.”

  Dempsey double tapped the corner of his jawbone next to his ear canal to send a “double click” acknowledgment via the bone-conduction, wireless earbud. Then he gave Munn the hand signal to set a breacher charge. The former SEAL surgeon silently went to work. After the charge was set, Munn looked up and grinned. It was a grin born from a thousand operations, in a thousand shitty places, where the two of them had narrowly avoided meeting their maker a thousand different times. It was a grin that said, I love this shit, and it’s definitely going to kill me someday, but I don’t think that day is today. And it was a grin that said, By God, whatever it takes, I’m going to rescue the hostages on the other side of this door.

  Dempsey grinned back.

  He held up three fingers and began counting down. On one, Munn detonated the charge. The cabin door exploded, sending shards of melamine and foam core insulation everywhere. Screams filled the air as Dempsey followed Munn through the door and into the room while Latif covered them from the passageway. The scene was just as Grimes had described. One shooter was crouched to the left, holding an assault rifle, using his hostage as a human shield while he squinted and tried to clear his vision. The right-side shooter was armed with a pistol but had taken a different tack. While clutching the woman’s torso from behind, he had his cheek pressed against her left ear and the muzzle of his pistol jammed under her chin.

  Two loud pops echoed to Dempsey’s left as Munn dispatched his target with a double tap to the head. Dempsey fixed his aim on the center of the other terrorist’s forehead but didn’t pull the trigger. Not yet, he told himself. Work the an
gle. He had zero separation between the hostage’s and the terrorist’s heads. He needed a straight line; every eighth of an inch mattered.

  “Let her go,” Dempsey said, his voice cool and collected. “If you let her go, I won’t shoot you.”

  “Get out, or I kill her,” the man threatened in heavily accented English, his eyes darting back and forth between Dempsey and Munn.

  “Everyone else is dead. Malik is dead,” Dempsey said, taking a cautious step forward and drifting slightly inboard to get a perfectly straight line. “There’s no one left to help you. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “I kill her, I kill her, I swear,” the shooter said, sweat pouring from his brow.

  Dempsey’s gaze ticked to the pistol pressed under the woman’s neck, checking whether the shooter’s index finger was on the trigger or the guard. Seeing it on the guard, he exhaled, stilled his targeting dot, and squeezed the trigger. His M4 roared, spit fire, and the bullet punched a hole in the center of the shooter’s forehead. The terrorist pitched backward; his pistol clattered to the floor.

  The hostage on the left, the older of the two women, promptly passed out, going limp in her restraints and sliding partway to the floor. The woman on the right met Dempsey’s gaze, smiled, and then began to tremble uncontrollably in her chair.

  “Clear,” Dempsey hollered.

  “Clear,” Munn replied.

  He moved quickly behind the hostages, confirmed that his bullet had ended his target, and then kicked the pistol to the corner out of reach.

  “Hostages are secure,” Munn reported over the comms channel.

  “Sarah Bonney and Diana Curtis?” Dempsey said, looking at the younger of the two women as Munn knelt to revive the other hostage.

  “Yes,” she said, a tear spilling onto her cheek. “I’m Sarah. Are you Navy SEALs?”

  A nostalgic smile spread across his face. When he’d been with Tier One, they’d had a mantra they used in situations like this, words he hadn’t had the joy and privilege of saying in what felt like an eternity: We’re Navy SEALs, and we’re here to take you home. Those days were long gone, but as he crouched to cut off her restraints, he said the next best thing: “We’re American operators, and we’re here to take you home.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Somewhere . . .

  Without explanation or provocation, they beat her.

  In the aftermath, she writhed on the floor and wept.

  Amanda had never been hit before. Not really. Sure, there was the infamous Allen “spanking incident” when she was six, when her father had lit up her backside after Amanda had defied instructions and run away to play unsupervised in the neighborhood. But this was something entirely different. A man had bludgeoned her with closed fists and kicks, and the acute pain and trauma delivered by each blow redefined in her psyche what it meant to suffer. The pain was only compounded by the trauma she’d suffered from the explosion during the attack in Ankara. In television and film, heroes got pummeled with obscene regularity only to recover moments later with a wince and a glib wisecrack. That was a fantasy. A half hour or more had passed since her bludgeoning, and she was still a wreck on the floor. The pain made it difficult to think clearly, and a primitive reflex had usurped her wits during the event so that she’d cowered like an animal and begged for mercy.

  Yes, she would be compliant.

  Yes, she would do whatever they commanded her to do . . . so long as the man with the broken front tooth and the dead eyes didn’t beat her again.

  The two places that hurt the most were her abdomen and her left eye socket. The baseball-size hematoma on the side of her face made it difficult for her to ascertain by touch if the bones of her face were broken. Probably. Her abdomen, however, concerned her more. She had no medical training, but she’d watched enough Grey’s Anatomy to know that the stuff on the inside—stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, kidneys—was all pretty important.

  Right now, her list of wants and needs was short—not being tortured and beaten again was the top entry, with not dying a close second.

  She stopped crying, and eventually she was able to lie still in a heap of misery. More time passed—she didn’t know how much—and she managed to sit up. She coughed, cleared her throat, and spit a gob of bloody phlegm onto the floor beside her. She probed the side of her face, wincing as she did. She moved her jaw around and decided that maybe her face wasn’t broken after all.

  To call the space she was in a room would be an exaggeration; it seemed more like a large plywood closet. The floor was dirty and stained. The dark reddish-brown spots were dried blood, she knew, and the rest, she presumed, had been made by other bodily fluids from previous guests. The windowless walls were bare and unpainted. The only light came from a single low-wattage bulb dangling overhead. A dingy metal bucket stood upright in the corner to her left. She was thirsty—so very, very thirsty—and she debated making the short crawl to the bucket to check it for water. But the fly buzzing near the rim told her it wasn’t worth the effort. It wasn’t a water pail.

  She swallowed, tasted blood in her mouth, and started to sob again.

  God, my brain is mush . . . I suppose getting blown up and hit in the head repeatedly will do that to a person. I probably have a TBI.

  She’d been through a mini-SERE module at the Farm, but the purpose of the training had been familiarization, not preparation. Her diplomatic post was supposed to keep her insulated from scenarios where she’d need to utilize “survive, evade, escape, and resist” methodologies. Yes, she worked for the CIA, but she was not an operator; she was just a Collection Management Officer, whose job was to serve as a bridge between the intelligence “collectors” in the field abroad and the intelligence community back home. Sometimes that meant running her own assets in the host nation, but that activity was not supposed to be dangerous. She wasn’t meant to be in situations like this. She wasn’t meant to be in places like this.

  Footsteps sounded outside. Dread instantly settled over her like a lead blanket. Next, she heard fingers fiddling with the padlock on the metal latch on the outside of the door. She scrambled into the corner.

  It’s too soon, she pleaded silently. Too soon for the man with the broken tooth and dead eyes to come back.

  She hadn’t told him anything the first time, but he hadn’t asked her any questions, either. It was her welcome beating—a little something to set expectations and establish the ground rules. But they would ask her questions. They would try to extract information from her. And they would succeed. Everyone broke eventually . . . everyone.

  She heard the lock being pulled from the latch.

  Her body began to tremble.

  The door swung open and bright light bathed the cell, making her squint. A backlit figure stood in the doorway—medium height, narrow shoulders, wearing a head scarf. This was not the man with the broken tooth and the dead eyes; her visitor was a woman. Amanda’s heart rate immediately slowed. The woman stepped into the cell and handed her a bottle of water.

  “Drink,” she said in Turkish-accented English.

  Amanda reached up and took the water bottle. With clumsy fingers, she unscrewed the plastic cap and raised the spout to her lips. She took a tentative first sip; warm water wet her tongue. The taste was odd and coppery, but it was drinkable. She drank a third of the contents while keeping her gaze on the woman. Her stern, cold expression did nothing to warm Amanda’s spirits.

  “Do you speak English?” Amanda asked between sips. She’d worked hard to become fluent in Turkish, completing the Defense Language Institute immersion course before posting to Ankara. Once in country, she’d hired a private tutor to accelerate her understanding of dialects and colloquial speech. The hard work had paid off, and she was nearly fluent in the spoken language now. She didn’t reveal this information to her captors. Their assumption that she was monolingual was one of the few exploits she had available to her.

  The woman did not answer. Instead, she kneeled and leaned in to inspect the hemat
oma on the side of Amanda’s face, grasping Amanda’s chin between thumb and forefinger and turning it to the side to get a better look.

  “My name is Amanda Allen,” she said. “I’m an American citizen.”

  The woman said nothing.

  “I work for the US State Department in Turkey.”

  The woman ignored her as she took out a penlight and shined it in Amanda’s eyes—

  Checking for pupil dilation, Amanda thought.

  “Open your mouth,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  “Open your mouth.”

  Amanda did so and the woman looked inside.

  “You have a broken teeth?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Are you a doctor?”

  “Lay down,” the woman said, avoiding eye contact.

  Amanda did as she instructed. The woman pulled up Amanda’s shirt and checked her rib cage and then palpated her abdomen. When the exam was finished, the woman got to her feet and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” Amanda said, sitting up quickly and wincing for it. “What’s your name?”

  The woman stopped at the door, turned back, and stared down at Amanda with callous judgment, as if she were a pathetic creature.

  “Will you help me?” Amanda asked. “Please.”

  “Drink” was all the woman said, and then she closed and locked the door behind her.

  Amanda’s spirits sank. Was the woman a nurse or a doctor the terrorists had conscripted to check on her? Or maybe the woman was a member of whichever terrorist organization had taken her. ISIS had found some success recruiting women into their operational ranks. Was ISIS behind the attack in Ankara? Her instincts said no. The Islamic State specialized in terrorizing civilians. Its modus operandi was to inflict maximum carnage in public places, thereby inciting fear and chaos. This operation had specifically targeted the US Ambassador and a Turkish Interior Minister. It was politically motivated.

  She suddenly felt ill.

  A beat later, she vomited. The heaving sent searing pain across her flank and rib cage. I must have broken a rib, she thought, buckled over and panting. On hands and knees, she stared at the little puddle of vomit in front of her. It was mostly water. A third of the precious water they’d given her was now wasted, and it made her mad.