by Jason Kasper
David’s tone was clinical. “Suicide Actual copies all, executing time now.”
Things happened quickly after that. The UAV feed shifted, flashing into adjusted focus settings as it captured the final glimpses of black specks—David’s team—splitting into two elements as they swept toward the target building.
The J2 was focused on the translator beside him, wearing headphones as he transcribed the content of BK’s phone call to English.
Then the J2 turned to Duchess and shouted, “The team isn’t compromised—BK says he’s leaving in five minutes, requesting some pre-planned armed escort that’s inbound. Call is connected to a mobile phone somewhere in Zaranj. They’re discussing a scheduled transport coming to recover—”
Duchess snatched the hand mic from her desk and keyed the transmit button.
Her decision, of course, was no decision at all.
Gossweiler had threatened to shut down the program along with her career, yes—but the ground team had a perilous link to their exfiltration point in the form of one local driver preparing to speed to the target building upon David’s order. If that link was severed by the arrival of an armed convoy, the five contractors would be trapped in Syria, desperately trying to evade capture until Duchess and Jo Ann could redirect military assets—and by the time that occurred, it would be too late to save them.
She spoke into the hand mic. “Abort. Abort. Abort. How copy?”
No response.
She transmitted again, “Abort. Abort. Abort. We have verifiable intel on enemy assets inbound to your location time now. Pull back until we can reassess the threat level, how copy?”
Silence. Total, abject, uncompromisable silence.
Then the UAV representative turned to face her.
“Ma’am, it’s too late—the ground team is already making entry.”
10
From his kneeling position, Worthy braced the buttstock of his suppressed HK416 against his shoulder as he heard the flat plastic clack of David triple-firing the initiation device behind him.
A deafening explosion to his front blew a hole clean through the outer wall—with BK remaining in place, they had to assume the doors would be boobytrapped—and Worthy rose to charge through a cloud of smoke into the now-gaping entryway.
He’d already flipped his night vision upward, prepared to utilize his rifle-mounted tac light once inside the building. There were many advantages to using “white light” in close quarters battle, the least of which was blinding your opponents before you shot them.
But as Worthy cleared the hole on his way into the target building, he saw at first glance that he wasn’t going to need his tac light after all.
The interior was fully lit already, the windows taped over by sheets of black plastic. They’d been expecting a terrorist bed-down site, with their target asleep and defended by a personal security detail of two or three bodyguards.
Instead, they’d stumbled upon a massive logistical operation in progress.
Two covered trucks were parked facing the closed bay doors, and Worthy saw in an instant that they were in the final stages of being loaded by what appeared to be a half-dozen Syrian men with assault rifles slung across their backs.
He charged for the nearest cover—a waist-high metal crate ten feet to his front—pivoting at the waist to open fire as he ran.
Worthy wasn’t concerned at that moment with precision fire, instead ripping rounds from his barrel as fast as he could pull the trigger. They were fully committed, and if he didn’t get some suppressing fire down ASAP, David and Ian were screwed as they entered behind him.
But Worthy had been first in the door for good reason—as a competitive shooter, his reflexes were without peer.
His first six rounds were directed at a cluster of men behind the nearest truck, and he registered two of them falling forward as he transitioned his aim right. Unleashing another half-dozen bullets at the men behind the second truck, he didn’t have time to evaluate the results—by then he was slowing his forward sprint, crouching to take cover behind the metal crate as the first return fire began cracking around him.
Cancer flowed through the demolished rear wall to encounter absolute chaos unfolding inside the building.
The lights were on—problem number one—and a startled Syrian man was in the process of wielding an assault rifle in his direction—problem number two.
Cancer dealt with the second problem first, bringing his suppressed HK416 to bear on the man’s chest and firing three times to drop him. Only then did he trip over something beneath him, regaining his footing to see a wounded fighter who’d been incapacitated by the explosive wall breach, or the rubble knocking him down, or both. Cancer ignored him, moving forward to bypass his first kill of the night to the sound of Reilly double-tapping the downed fighter in his wake.
But then the real shooting broke out—not the quiet, chuffing shots of his team’s suppressed weapons, but wild automatic gunfire that exploded beyond the hall door to his front.
Racing down the short corridor, he heard a frantic transmission from David.
“Cancer, can you isolate the trucks?”
“Stand by,” Cancer replied, kneeling at the open doorway and angling his rifle around the corner, feeling Reilly doing the same from a standing position behind him.
His first glance at the central warehouse bay revealed stacks of metal crates, scattered and open on a dusty concrete floor, partially blocking his view of two covered flatbed trucks facing away.
Men were piling into the backs of the vehicles, continuing to fire toward one side of the warehouse—the same wall through which Worthy, David, and Ian had entered.
At the moment, isolating the trucks was out of the question. He’d be dead in three seconds if he broke cover, and Cancer gladly obliged the ISIS fighters seeking martyrdom by responding in the only way he could at present: as a shooter.
Cancer took aim at one of the remaining fighters shooting his weapon overtop of the crate—what was it about terrorists, he wondered, that made them want to raise their guns over their head and fire without looking—and dropped him with a trio of rounds before directing his aim to the next standing figure.
As the low man, Cancer restricted himself to targets on the warehouse floor while Reilly engaged enemy fighters on the backs of the trucks.
Now the two team elements had the bad guys caught from perpendicular angles. Sure, they were grossly outnumbered by ISIS fighters, but establishing a crossfire was a good start. Cancer gunned down a man crouching behind one of the metal crates, then shifted to a fighter scrambling for the tailgate, lacing a burst into his spine and shoulder blades to drop him in place.
Cancer was scanning for his next target when he heard the bark of the truck ignitions turning over in the confined space, and before he could consider the implications, the rightmost truck throttled forward.
A shrieking scream of twisted metal erupted as the truck punched into the closed rolling door, ripping it from its tracks. The other truck followed suit, blasting through the second rolling door and out into the street.
Ian reloaded his rifle as the sound of the trucks receded, leaning out from behind the crate to take aim.
It was no use—the warehouse was empty or very nearly so, save the open crates and scattered bodies lying amid smears of blood.
David shouted, “Anyone hit?”
A chorus of negative responses.
The gunfight had lasted maybe thirty seconds, though to Ian it had seemed like half that. He’d certainly shot at enemy figures amid the din of battle, though whether he’d hit anyone was up for debate.
The gunfight itself was his team’s area of expertise.
What happened in the minutes following that gunfight—or minute, singular, in this case—was Ian’s.
David shouted, “One minute for SE!”
Ian scrambled to his feet, slinging his rifle and trading his grip for the small camera in his pocket. His task now was site exploitation, gat
hering as much intelligence as possible to feed back to the Agency. Ordinarily this meant prioritizing the collection of anything digital—cell phones, computers, hard drives—followed in short order by paper files and photographs.
But tonight, Ian’s focus was almost solely directed at the metal crates scattered across the warehouse.
The air was rank with gunpowder and dust, vehicle exhaust and blood, as Ian took photos to document the number of crates. Each was olive drab in color, a sure indicator that they’d harbored military hardware. Ian flung one of the open crate tops shut, snapping a photograph of the yellow text atop it.
As the rest of his teammates checked bodies for phones, radios, and documents, Ian heard David transmitting to their exfil driver, a local Agency asset.
“Cobalt, this is Suicide Actual. Be advised two enemy trucks fleeing northbound. Do not approach the objective. We’re bumping to exfil point Bravo-Four, arrival in ten mikes.”
Cancer emptied a dead man’s pockets as he called out, “Somebody tell me one of these bodies is BK.”
Ian knew without checking that wasn’t the case—the masterminds didn’t stick around to fight. Everyone his team had gunned down were foot soldiers whose final moments were dedicated to covering the leader’s withdrawal, and even if Bari Khan had miraculously caught a fatal bullet in the opening salvo, they would have done everything in their power to take his body with them.
Ian darted from open crate to open crate, stepping over the foam scraps of abandoned packing materials, until he found what he’d been hoping to spot.
One of the crates had some of its contents intact. It must have been the last one left to load before the team had made entry, and the enemy hadn’t hesitated in abandoning it. Why should they? They already had the vast majority of their cargo aboard the trucks, which were now racing away from the warehouse to parts unknown.
But Ian recognized the contents at once, correlating the number of crates to his memory of an intelligence report with a growing sense of disbelief that his team had just stumbled upon something that the military community considered a statistical impossibility.
David yelled, “Thirty seconds!”
“I’ve got UXO,” Ian shouted back, using the acronym for unexploded ordnance. “We need to blow it in place.”
David said, “Leave it. We’re in Syria, they’ve got more UXO than they know what to do with.”
“Not like this,” Ian said, snapping pictures of the crate’s contents.
David appeared at his side, momentarily speechless. Then ran a palm across his forehead and said, “Well, shit.”
Embedded in the remaining foam packaging were four identical rockets—three and a half feet in length, with body tubes ending in sinister-looking nose cones.
“PG-9?” David asked.
“Worse,” Ian replied. “I’ll explain later.”
“You have what you need?”
“Yeah, serial numbers and batch codes. We can go.”
“Exfil!” David yelled, readying a grenade to drop in the crate. “Get back to our gear—we’re diverting to Bravo-Four.”
11
Duchess focused on the central flatscreen projecting a grainy, low-angle shot of the target building from the unarmed UAV flying its orbit.
It was impossible to tell what was going on inside the building—they were reliant on David’s communications for that—but the situation outside the structure complicated itself with the sudden appearance of two covered flatbed trucks turning onto the street.
The UAV controller said, “Two trucks leaving the objective, headed northbound. Do you want me to follow them, or keep eyes-on the target area for the ground team?”
Duchess answered without hesitation, “Stay with the trucks. J2, I want a geo-fix on the phone that Bari Khan called in Zaranj.”
“Working it now,” the J2 called back.
Duchess had promised herself she’d never be the person in an air-conditioned OPCEN pestering the ground force commander for updates. After all, a significant portion of the GFC’s job was keeping the higher command appraised with timely updates on the tactical situation.
But it took David over a minute to check in, and when his voice came over the satellite communications relay, it was garbled amid intermittent static.
“...Bravo-Four...no joy, eight EKIA, two flatbed trucks fled...heading north...airstrike...”
Then the words faded to static altogether before ultimately cutting to silence.
But she’d heard enough.
Bravo-Four meant they were diverting to an alternate exfil point, no joy meant BK was alive, and his team had claimed eight enemy killed in action, which was notable for the same reason the two flatbed trucks were: namely, what in the hell were those transport vehicles and that many people doing at a supposed bed-down site?
Duchess’s worst fears were coming true, her suspicion that the only plausible answer was a repeat of what she’d encountered long ago in Yemen.
Which would explain his use of the one word that should never have come over the radio frequency during a covert assassination.
Airstrike.
She keyed her hand mic. “Suicide, you’re coming in broken. Say again.”
“Stand by...to high ground...when able...get an airstrike inbound...flatbeds headed north...”
The only explanation was that David wasn’t concerned with BK himself, but rather the cargo aboard the trucks. Without further information forthcoming until David reached the high ground to send a clear transmission, she needed more of the one thing she was losing by the second: time.
“What’s our UAV station time?”
The operator called back, “Thirty-seven minutes before bingo fuel, but if those trucks keep going at max speed, we’ll lose visual before that.”
“Nearest airstrike capability?”
This time her joint terminal air controller answered. “Two F-15Es are on ready status one at Incirlik. If we scramble them now, they could be putting down munitions in just over two hours.”
“JTAC, what’s the fastest we can reacquire visual?”
A man responded, “Next wave of UAVs will be overhead in approximately one hour, forty-two minutes.”
So no matter what happened, she was going to lose eyes-on the two flatbeds for just over an hour. And she had the creeping suspicion they’d just stumbled onto something much bigger.
Duchess checked her watch—Gossweiler would be stepping out of his Senate Prayer Breakfast in less than ten minutes, after which he’d be en route to the OPCEN at best, and able to shut her down completely at worst.
Now she faced the quandary of whether to trust her ground force commander and marshal additional assets that would likely expose a targeted killing operation that was supposed to be known only to a handful of Washington elites.
After a second of thought, she made her announcement.
“I’m calling in Agency authorization. Get those F-15s inbound now.”
12
Ian struggled up the rocky slope, keeping Worthy in sight through his night vision as they moved in single file. They were racing against time, moving quickly toward the crest’s high ground, where David could make effective radio contact with Duchess. From there, the team would swing south for three hundred meters to their alternate exfil point.
David fell in alongside Ian, whispering as they moved, “There must have been a dozen crates in there.”
“Thirteen. And that’s not the worst—”
David cut him off. “This is big. Those rockets were military grade. We’ve just stumbled upon hard evidence of state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be Iran.”
“David, it’s—”
“Or maybe,” David continued, “Russia. Using the serial numbers, Duchess should be able to trace the shipment.”
“David! Shut up. This is the result of state sponsorship—by us.”
“What do you mean, ‘by us?’”
Panting for breath as he moved, Ian replied, “Those wer
e Bulgarian-made OG-9VM1 rockets. The CIA supplied them to the Syrian resistance. One of the shipments was lost in an ambush six months ago—thirteen crates totaling 650 rockets—and has been missing ever since. The Agency assumed that load had since been fired all over Syria, but we just found it intact. And since we only destroyed four, that means—”
“645 are still at large.”
“646,” Ian corrected him, “but that’s not the point. This means BK was sent here to take possession of the rockets, and that wouldn’t be the case unless he’d been handpicked to lead a major terrorist operation. With that payload, he could wipe a few city blocks off the map.”
David continued huffing uphill for a moment before asking, “What do you think he’s after?”
“One of our bases in Syria, maybe. Or a US Embassy somewhere. Could be anything. Duchess needs to hit those trucks ASAP.”
As Worthy crested the high ground, Ian heard David transmitting beside him.
“Raptor Nine One, this is Suicide Actual, how copy?”
Duchess’s response was faint over Ian’s earpiece. “You’re coming in clear,” she said. “Send it.”
“Those two flatbeds have the missing shipment of rockets intended for the Syrian resistance.”
“OG-9VM1,” Ian prompted him.
David said, “OG-9VM1. 645 are at large.”
Ian cringed. “646, David.”
“Correction,” he continued, “646 rockets at large and presumed to be on the trucks, along with BK. Assess they will be used in a major attack. Need airstrike on those two flatbeds ASAP, how copy?”
“It’s in the works,” she replied. “You’re sure you found the entire load?”
Ian whispered, “We’re sure. They ship fifty to a crate and we found thirteen crates. You can double-check my math later.”