American Operator

by Brian Andrews

  Valerian walked out of the villa, stepping over the dead bodies of Kartevelian’s security detail. Once outside, he powered on his mobile phone and sent a message to a cleaner to dispose of the bodies and untie Sergi and his soon-to-be Russian bride. With that chore complete, he saw that he had a secure message waiting:

  MALIK IS DEAD. BACKFILL REQUIRED. CONFIRM RECEIPT OF NEW TASKING. STANDARD DROP. SHORT TIMELINE.

  Valerian sighed and climbed into his rental car.

  Damn it, I don’t want to be Malik.

  He had come to hate Middle East operations. Yes, he was good at it, and yes, his “appetites” were easily sated in that world. But he’d grown weary of playing the Islamic terrorist legends. And it wasn’t because he had been raised Roman Catholic or because he harbored religious prejudices. No, it was because these Middle Eastern terrorists were such savages; they were murderers of civilians—women and children no less—barbarians lacking any real culture or class.

  But it didn’t matter what he wanted. There was no point in asking Arkady to find someone else, because the answer would be no. The answer was always no. That was his penance for being the best.

  That was his penance for being Zeta Prime.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ember’s Executive Boeing 787-9, N103XL

  Incirlik Joint NATO Airbase

  Adana, Turkey

  2145 Local Time

  Grimes paced the Ember mobile TOC.

  Alone.

  Munn, Martin, and Latif, along with the two PJs they’d requested, were kitted up and waiting inside the Air Force Special Operations CV-22 Osprey, parked beside the Boeing on the skirt. Munn had encouraged her to wait with them. She’d declined. Dempsey was moving on the compound north of al-Bab where they believed Amanda Allen was being held—no way in hell was she going to hang out in the belly of the Osprey shooting the shit with those guys while their quarterback had the offense inside the red zone. She needed to know what was going on.

  She needed to watch.

  The plane was warm. They had temp power from the base, but the Boeing’s AC units weren’t running, just the fans. She hooked her left thumb into the shoulder strap of her body armor and just let her arm hang there. Ever since she’d taken that round to the chest, it just felt better to have her arm like this when she was standing kitted up. She stared at the imagery streaming in a four-way split screen on the monitor mounted on the bulkhead. In the upper-right quadrant, a live satellite feed streamed in green-gray night vision. On the other side of the world, in an underground bunker in Virginia, Simon Adamo was watching the same feed. She could see him sitting at a workstation in the Ember HQ TOC via a wide-angle feed displayed on the monitor’s bottom-left quadrant.

  “What are those vehicles doing?” she said aloud, talking on her open mike. A three-vehicle convoy appeared to be heading north from al-Bab on the route to Turkey . . . the same route that passed by the target compound.

  “Not sure,” he said, the timbre of his voice hinting at his own displeasure with the development.

  “There’s not much north of al-Bab after the target compound,” Grimes said, aware she was stating the obvious. “It’s only fifteen miles to the border, and there are no authorized crossings after dark.”

  “That’s not entirely accurate,” Adamo said. “Our UN convoy, for example, would be permitted to cross at this hour. And there are several small clusters of houses north of the compound that these vehicles could be traveling to.”

  She resisted the urge to point out that these three beat-up cars were not UN vehicles with special crossing permission, nor were they likely to be a group of friends returning home after a dinner party in town. This was al-Bab, Syria, not some suburb of Chicago. She watched the vehicles slow as they approached the access road leading to the compound.

  Damn it. I knew I should have pushed Adamo harder to have the Osprey airborne when Dempsey arrived on the X at the compound.

  “I’m concerned about these vehicles, Simon,” Ian Baldwin said, stepping into frame on the Ember HQ feed.

  “For good reason,” Simon said, turning to look at another feed off frame. A beat later, his attention was back on the night-vision sat feed. She watched him enter several keystrokes on his workstation keyboard, switching to the operational frequency that included Dempsey. “Atlas One, this is Olympus . . .”

  “What’s up, Olympus?” Dempsey answered after a beat, his voice a soft whisper automatically augmented by the gain-management software Baldwin’s team had programmed into their comms suite.

  “Atlas, we have a group of three vehicles headed toward your position. They just turned off the highway and are running dark,” Grimes said, beating both Adamo and Baldwin to the punch. She glanced at Adamo, and despite the thousands of miles separating them, he appeared unfazed by her leapfrog.

  “Check . . . Stand by,” Dempsey came back, his voice calm and cool. Strange how a man who was so passionate in the TOC, an absolute mush of a teddy bear on his back porch drinking a beer and manning the grill, could be absolute ice in the field. All SEALs, she supposed, were like that, but Dempsey operated on a different plane. Outside the wire, Dempsey was unflappable . . . He was a machine of war.

  Her gaze ticked to the upper-left quadrant, the feed displaying satellite thermal imagery, and she watched Dempsey’s yellow-orange silhouette creep west along a shallow culvert. His movements were smooth and fluid—a jaguar stalking prey. Moments later, another image began to move east—the DIA agent operating as Robert Theobold. The man moved like an operator, but there was only one John Dempsey. A third image stayed put, seeming to cower lower in the culvert. That could only be the interpreter asset whom the DIA man was managing, Kadir.

  She felt an overwhelming need to dash from the Boeing, board the waiting Osprey, and swoop in to assist. The arrival of the new vehicles had changed the tactical picture. They needed to act. They needed to take control of the situation before it deteriorated. She glared at Adamo on the monitor, willing the order to flow from his lips, but he just kept watching the feed. Why is the default state always to be reactive? We need to be proactive. We need to take control of the situation right fucking now!

  This compulsion to take control, to be in control, had become more acute after her near-death experience in Jerusalem. When that bullet tore through her chest and she felt her life slipping away—it changed her. She realized that life was not something she would let happen “to her” ever again. That was why she’d rebuilt her body to be harder, stronger, and more flexible than before. That was also why she’d insisted on sniper training. On the WinMag, behind that scope, she was a god—a god with the power to mete justice with the tip of her index finger. But she wasn’t on the long gun now. She was watching this whole damn mess unfold on TV.

  The three vehicles approached the five-foot wall of the two-building compound just as Dempsey reached the corner, perhaps only twenty yards away. In her mind, Grimes found herself calculating angles on the compound from the south, where one of the buildings had enough rise to give her a reasonable shot. If she’d insisted on being inserted covertly to cover the op—to give overwatch—she could have been resolving those shots in real time.

  “Got ’em,” Dempsey whispered. “Three vehicles. How many signatures?”

  “Only three,” Adamo said, this time answering first. “One driver per vehicle.”

  “Shit,” Dempsey said through his breath. “They’re gonna move her.”

  Grimes cinched the waist panels tight on her body armor and validated the loadout on her kit.

  “What are you doing, Elizabeth?” Adamo asked. “I can see you kitting up.”

  “We need to go get him.” She looked at the Ember Ops O through the screen with wide eyes that said there was no other possibility. “Obviously.”

  On-screen, Dempsey crept up the shallow rise and settled in behind scattered rocks only a few yards from where the vehicles had parked in a loose cluster. Three figures disembarked in unison and walked toward the
larger of the two buildings.

  “We still need to confirm the package, Boeing One,” Adamo said, assigning her a local call sign. The subtext of this was not lost on her. She wasn’t going anywhere . . . not yet, anyway.

  “Atlas One attempting to confirm the package now,” Dempsey said softly in the familiar computer-augmented whisper. “Worried I might be out of time, though.”

  “Can we at least get our bird up and in slow orbit on our side of the border?” she said.

  “Give it a few minutes. We need to confirm the package,” Adamo said, his voice an anchor.

  A few minutes could be the difference between life and death for Dempsey and the hostage, especially if things went bad now. She slung her compact Sig Sauer MCX Rattler assault rifle across her chest and the case with the .300 WinMag sniper rifle over her shoulder. This was a no-brainer. They needed to be in the air so when JD needed them, they’d be mere minutes from heeding the call.

  “I’m gonna wait in the bird,” she said, her hands flying across her kit, confirming her extra magazines for the assault rifle and the pistol on her right thigh, as well as smoke and fragmentation grenades at her left side.

  Adamo turned to the camera, looked straight at her for the first time. “Confirmation was always the plan, not extraction. We let Atlas One make the call from the X. You and your team are the short-fuse QRF on hot standby at the—”

  Before he could finish, and before she could protest, a tremendous whump rocked the Boeing. She gripped the conference table as the aircraft shuddered and the screens in the TOC flickered.

  “What in the holy hell was that?” she barked, looking around. “That felt like an explosion.”

  As if in answer, a second explosion, this one closer, shook the big jet. A beat later, gunfire erupted outside. What the hell was going on? This wasn’t Al Assad Air Base in Iraq or Bagram in Afghanistan. Incirlik was a sprawling NATO base in the middle of Turkey. They couldn’t possibly be under attack. This had to be something else—an accident.

  “Get me eyes on Incirlik,” Adamo said to Baldwin on the monitor, his voice tense but controlled.

  “One moment . . .”

  “Atlas One, hold,” she said.

  “What’s up?” Dempsey said, his orange-yellow thermal silhouette going still on-screen.

  “The base appears to be under attack,” Baldwin reported.

  She’d rarely heard the Signals Chief sound anything but relaxed, a tone she had once mistaken for indifference. But right now, his voice was tight and even had a tenor of concern.

  “That’s impossible,” Adamo said, echoing her thoughts.

  “As improbable as it is, empirical video evidence suggests otherwise.” A new satellite feed appeared on her monitor, bumping the Ember HQ TOC from the split. Hastily scrawled white lines overlaid the aerial imagery of the base as Baldwin annotated the scene like an NFL announcer marking up an instant replay on TV. “We have multiple perimeter breaches—here, here, and here—and three groups of assaulters. The largest force is—”

  An explosion rocked the jet, throwing Grimes against the table and then to the ground. The TOC went black as she groaned on the floor. Her right elbow had hit the table so hard, her fingers were tingling, and her left hip had taken the brunt of her fall and was complaining loudly as well. She swallowed the pain and got to her hands and knees just as acrid gray smoke began to fill the cabin. A strip of LED lights illuminated along the floor, marking the emergency exit route.

  Time to go.

  In the dim light, she collected her Rattler and the WinMag from the floor and scrambled to her feet. Hunching low below the cloud of noxious smoke, she followed the lights toward the front of the aircraft. As she moved forward, the smoke became thicker.

  “The Boeing appears to be Tango Uniform,” she said, coughing. “Shifting command and control to the Osprey.”

  No one answered.

  Shit.

  The Boeing had been serving as the comms hub for this op. It was possible that she might still be broadcasting even if she was not receiving, but she doubted it. If the Boeing truly was fucked, then that meant she was blind, deaf, and mute as well.

  And so was Dempsey.

  Ducking lower, she moved along the passageway until she reached the wide-open cockpit door. Through the cockpit windows, she could see angry fires blazing behind a nearby hangar. A hand on her shoulder made her spin around, her assault rifle coming muzzle to chest with a middle-aged man. He wore a gray T-shirt with “NAVY” emblazoned in blue, running shorts, and flip-flops.

  “Whoa, whoa, it’s me—flight crew,” he said, his hands going up.

  She recognized the pilot immediately and lowered her weapon.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

  “The base is under attack,” she said. “I think this plane’s on fire. Which means we need to evac to the Osprey and get up in the air ASAFP. We’ve got a mission on the ground in Syria that needs our support.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to help rebuff the attack on the base?” a new voice asked as the copilot materialized.

  “This is a major NATO base. Base security personnel will handle it. If we intervene, we risk getting shot. We need to stay on mission.”

  “Well,” said the copilot with a Georgia drawl, “this plane is definitely on fire, so I agree with swapping assets.”

  With sudden urgency, the pilot pressed past her and entered the cockpit.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “If the fire’s in the fuel system or engines, I can extinguish it from up here,” he said, slipping into the left seat. “If I can contain the fire, I can save the plane. You guys go; I’ll be right behind you.” He spun around and looked at her over his shoulder. “But if you get clearance to bug out in the Osprey, don’t fucking leave me behind.”

  “Understood,” she said, and then a new thought occurred to her. “Is there a way to destroy the plane and our gear and crypto if things go south?”

  The pilot turned and raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Are you saying you think we might lose the base?”

  Grimes shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell is going on out there. Is there a self-destruct hardwired in?”

  “Yeah,” the copilot behind her said, his voice tight. “But we can detonate remotely.”

  “Even without comms or power?”

  “Yes,” the pilot answered. “It has its own power source and satellite uplink.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Meet us at the Osprey. You’ve got five mikes and we’re going.”

  The pilot nodded and turned back to the cockpit controls.

  “Let’s go,” Grimes said to the copilot.

  He swung the handle, unlocking the main cabin door, and then moved onto the rolling stairwell, but she stopped him at the threshold with a hand on his shoulder. “Are you armed?”

  “No,” he replied.

  She pulled the pistol from her right thigh holster and handed it to him. “Fifteen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber,” she said. “I’ll lead.”

  She slipped past him, crouched, and descended the stairwell, sighting over her Rattler. As she neared the bottom, a gunshot rang out, accompanied by a loud ting as a bullet slammed into the metal frame of the air-stair. She took a tactical knee and scanned for a target. She saw figures running across the tarmac in front of the burning hangar, which was now fully engulfed in flames. Her index finger tensed on the trigger, but she held her fire, uncertain if the figures were assaulters or base security.

  “On my mark, we make a run for the Osprey,” she shouted.

  “That’s a nonstarter,” the copilot barked over his shoulder. “The Osprey’s fucked.”

  She angled her head right and looked under the nose of the Boeing and beyond to where the Osprey sat at an unnatural angle. The aircraft’s left main gear was gone, and the left wing was pressed into the tarmac, two of the proprotor blades bent at unserviceable angles. Smoke rose from the shattered cockpit windscreen.<
br />
  Oh God, my team’s in there . . .

  She pounded down the last few steps, ducked around the corner, and broke into a run toward the Osprey. She hadn’t gone ten yards when she spied Munn sprinting toward her, left hand up, right hand clutching an assault rifle. As he met her halfway, he scanned the tarmac for threats, droplets of blood flicking from his chin as he looked right and left.

  “You okay, Lizzie?” he asked.

  “Yeah . . . You?” she replied, eyeing the blood slick down his right cheek running from what looked like a scalp wound.

  He nodded and took a tactical knee beside her, checking her six. She did the same as they shared info.

  “One of the Osprey pilots is dead and the other is fucked-up—I don’t know if he’ll make it.”

  “And Ember?”

  “We’re okay,” Munn said. “Luca has a chunk of shrapnel in his left shoulder, but he’s in the fight. I got just this little nick, and June smacked his head pretty good but seems okay. Sounds crazy, but I think we took direct fire, Lizzie . . . We’re off the flight line, so it couldn’t have been random mortar fire. I mean, Christ, our QRF bird took two hits, and then we saw a rocket hit the Boeing. I think the comms package is fucked.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder at the Boeing and was relieved to see that the plane was not visibly on fire—at least on the outside—but the hump on the top of the fuselage housing the plane’s command and control antennae arrays was damaged. “Are you saying that we were the target?”

  “I don’t see any other planes on this side with smoke pouring out of them.”

  “How is that possible?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But they hamstringed us pretty bad.”

  Grimes gritted her teeth. “What do we do? We can’t talk to Olympus and we can’t talk to Dempsey.”

  “I know there’s a Harris 117G Multiband Manpack somewhere in the Boeing. I saw Dempsey pack it. If I can find it and get it up and running, and if Baldwin can line up SATCOM UHF, then we’re back in business. Until then, we’re stuck with line of sight only.”

  A burst of gunfire erupted to the east, closer than before. They both whirled, weapons trained in the direction of the sound.