by Jason Kasper
Then he lowered his barrel as quickly as he’d taken aim.
The trio of young teenage women were holding up their hands in submission, making no attempt to defend the man of the house. But these girls were too similar in age to be daughters, and Reilly realized that they were the man’s wives—if you could call them that. More likely ISIS war brides provided in exchange for services rendered.
Oh, Reilly thought with a darkening sense of anger, he was going to manhandle this prisoner far more than necessary in the course of his duties.
From the far side of a doorway, he heard David shouting, “Doc, in here.”
Reilly rushed forward, clearing the next doorway and entering an empty kitchen. The next door he encountered was open, and he jogged through it toward the sounds of men grunting in exertion.
But when he rounded the corner to see Elias standing triumphantly over David, who had his knee in the prostrate prisoner’s back as Ian applied flex cuffs, Reilly stopped short.
David said, “Doc, come get this guy.”
Elias waved a hand between Reilly and the prisoner, looking inconvenienced. “What is the problem? Pick him up.”
But the prisoner that David was in the process of flex-cuffing was a bloated mess of a man, probably two hundred thirty pounds and very little of it muscle mass.
Gritting his teeth, Reilly stomped over and prepared to deadlift his prisoner.
That effort took more strain than he anticipated, even with David and Ian trying to help him. As Reilly hoisted the prisoner upright, the man spat into David’s eyes.
David responded in kind, driving a fist across the prisoner’s face and causing the fat man to go limp in Reilly’s grasp.
He struggled to catch the logistician. “Suicide, you’re not helping!”
“Sorry,” David said, wiping his eyes clear. “Let’s go.”
The detainee was shouting in Arabic—presumably insults, judging by the tone—and did his best to resist the transport, locking his knees and trying to halt forward progress more than his considerable weight already was.
Reilly assisted his captive’s motivation to comply by swinging him sideways, then flinging him into the wall.
The man’s forehead cracked off the surface, driving his body backward into Reilly’s grasp, and he exploited the gap in resistance by half-pushing, half-dragging the prisoner into the front room.
And that, he soon found, was where things got complicated.
The three teenage women who’d formerly cowed before Reilly’s barrel had undergone some critical metamorphosis upon seeing their husband-slash-rapist being dragged out of the building.
They descended upon the prisoner with shouts and cries, assaulting him with their words and their fists as David and Ian struggled to keep them at bay.
But one particularly emboldened young woman broke free of David’s arms, advanced before she could be grabbed again, and drove a kick to the prisoner’s groin with a force that defied comprehension.
The big man went limp once again.
Reilly had to squat down to support the weight, wheeling the man away from his former captives and toward the door to the street.
And whatever Elias’s intuition about suspicious men approaching the target building, Reilly saw in a glance that he’d been correct.
David and Worthy had their barrels raised, firing their first suppressed rounds at targets to their left. A collective scream erupted from the civilians around them as men and women darted for cover.
Then Reilly caught his first sight of an enemy combatant—a man running across the street toward him, drawing a pistol from beneath his shirt.
Reilly’s only possible reaction was to throw his detainee to the ground, draw his rifle, and shoot the man that David and Worthy were too preoccupied to see. But by the time he did, Reilly knew, it would be too late.
Just as he prepared to drop his prisoner, he saw that he didn’t have to.
Cancer’s silver Land Cruiser roared down the street, mowing down the pistol-wielding man beneath the bumper before screeching to a halt. Then Cancer shifted to reverse, flooring the gas to back over the fallen enemy for good measure.
All of this occurred in Reilly’s first six seconds outside the building, a surreal melee of violence that could have just as easily been dismissed as a bizarre dream. David and Worthy fired as fast as they could at the men closing in on the target house from all directions, and Reilly heard a single shouted order from his team leader.
“Get him off the street!”
Reilly turned to see a storefront door beside him and manhandled his prisoner sideways for three staggering steps.
Then, mustering all of his strength, Reilly swung the man to his right and hurled him into the door, which burst open as he landed on his stomach with a cry of pain. Reilly turned to provide suppressing fire, finding and then engaging a man crouched behind a parked car, his rifle angled over the hood. Firing two shots, Reilly saw the man drop out of sight before he swung his barrel to the right, blasting a half-dozen rounds at a building corner where he’d seen a flash of gunfire.
He continued shooting at another enemy sprinting into view, his peripheral vision registering three figures racing behind him to enter the store through the now-open doorway—first Worthy, then Elias, and finally David.
As David opened fire from the shop window, Reilly turned to plunge inside and saw the chaos within.
It was a small electronics store, the walls filled with cheap cell phones and wire attachments, and the owner behind the counter was red-faced, wild-eyed, and screaming at them in incomprehensible, rapid-fire Arabic.
“This way!” Elias shouted, waving Reilly into a back room.
Flinging his rifle behind him on its sling, Reilly squatted above his prisoner, still in the prone amid shattered glass, and deadlifted him upright. The prisoner was disoriented, but still able to resist—he dug in his heels, writhing his shoulders against Reilly’s grasp.
“You dumb sonofabitch,” Reilly grunted, swinging the man’s massive body to his left. The prisoner’s head smashed into the corner of a display case, buying Reilly a few moments to hoist his cargo through the doorway after Elias.
Beyond was a small storage room, with a single exit into an alley.
Devoid of options, Reilly hauled the logistician’s mass through the next door, emerging into the alley and following Worthy and Elias toward a side street.
David was behind him, transmitting over the team frequency, though Reilly couldn’t make out the voice in his earpiece over the shouts of civilians and enemy alike.
Instead he followed the men to his front, fully aware that he was the only team member capable of hauling the ISIS logistician’s obese figure toward some unknown exfil, and trusting Worthy and David to manage the tactical situation with Elias’s help. And while his trust in his teammates was absolute, it was Elias who represented the single point of failure for this operation.
Any lingering doubts faded when the combined element reached the side street ahead.
Cancer’s Land Cruiser fishtailed to a stop before them, and Elias ripped open the back door as Reilly charged forward with his unrepentant cargo.
Reilly’s next movement was performed with all the unceremonious grace with which he struggled through repetitions in the gym under enormous resistance: he took a final pair of staggering steps, squatted beneath the weight of his load, and, with as much force as he could muster, hurled the prisoner into the backseat.
The logistician’s body sailed forward, achieving not any great distance but sufficient to cause his head to impact the far door so hard that Reilly feared he’d just broken the man’s neck.
There was no time to confirm; Reilly leapt atop the backseat, feeling Cancer accelerate before he could close the door.
Glancing through the rear windshield, Reilly saw David, Worthy, and Elias leaping inside Ian’s waiting truck, and together the two vehicles sped toward the workshop.
19
By t
he time Duchess received David’s next transmission, his team’s role in the mission was almost an afterthought.
“Raptor Nine One, Suicide element has recovered logistician. We weren’t the only ones trying to snatch him. En route to an offsite location for tactical questioning, will advise when able.”
“Copy all,” Duchess transmitted back, acknowledging receipt of the message but offering no further guidance. At this point her only concern was the bomb damage assessment of the two destroyed flatbeds.
“ETA on the Rangers?” she asked.
Sutherland responded, “Wheels down in four mikes.”
Duchess considered the phrasing on her next inquiry.
“ETA on the firing squad?”
This elicited a chuckle from the assembly.
“Senator Gossweiler’s vehicle has passed the front gate,” Pharr replied. “We’ve got fifteen to twenty minutes before he reaches the OPCEN floor.”
Duchess nodded. “Sutherland, please advise the Ranger ground force commander that our PIR is time-sensitive. We request initial assessment as soon as they have eyes-on, followed by a detailed report once they’ve had time to sift through the wreckage.”
Her priority information requirements were twofold: first and foremost, any evidence of rockets aboard the trucks at the time of their destruction. The Rangers making their way to the site to perform a bomb damage assessment didn’t know that the rockets in question were provided by the Agency to the Syrian resistance, and they didn’t have to—an untold number of indirect fire rounds were fired every day against warring factions in Syria, though none quite so accurate and deadly as the OG-9VM1.
For all of Duchess’s continuous aerial oversight of the mangled wreckage of the two flatbed trucks, they’d been unable to positively identify any evidence at all. No visible rocket cylinders had been thrown clear of the blast, and Duchess desperately hoped that the Rangers would be able to find some scrap of a rocket body, some partial serial number that had survived the bombs and could thus provide an assurance that at least some of the cargo had been destroyed. If they could determine Bari Khan had been killed in the blast, even better.
That uncertainty was the reason for her second and final priority intelligence requirement: any identifying marks on the flatbeds themselves. Because in the event no rockets were found, Duchess would need concrete assurance that she’d bombed the right trucks in the first place.
At this point, however, there was nothing she could do about it either way.
Located almost seven thousand miles from the battleground in Syria, Duchess had made the best decision she could using the information she had available at the time. But the gap in aerial coverage of the trucks between the time they’d left the warehouse with the rockets aboard and the moment they’d been destroyed left a lingering doubt in her odds of success.
And now not just her career but the entire targeted killing program depended on this bomb damage assessment for survival.
The thought was fractured by Sutherland’s next announcement.
“BDA element is one minute from wheels-down.”
She turned her attention to the central screen, an orbiting high-angle view of the truck wreckage and the surrounding desert.
An MH-47 Chinook helicopter thundered into view, touching down at a two-hundred-meter offset from the blast site with its twin rotors forming shadowy discs over the ground.
Streams of darting figures raced off the helicopter ramp, spreading into a semicircle formation and kneeling until the bird had deposited the last man.
Then the Rangers were concealed within whitewashed clouds of sand as the aircraft lifted off again, gaining altitude and banking out of view at the edge of the screen.
By the time the sand cleared, the Rangers were already advancing on the vehicle wreckage, moving in tactical wedge formations as they divided into blocking positions on the road, perimeter security, and clearance elements.
Duchess watched the choreographed movements as she’d done countless times, supervising ground teams over a video screen as they executed their missions in more nations than she cared to count. Her focus was on the first men to reach the trucks, and she watched them raising their rifles in anticipation of possible survivors.
It was always easy to identify whether shots had been fired—the moment of enemy contact, before any radio call was sent, the tiny figures of men on the screen would immediately flex to fire and maneuver, overtaking the threat by any means possible.
But the Rangers continued their sweep unhindered, and she felt her pulse in her ears as she waited for Sutherland to relay the initial assessment.
He did so without turning in his seat, announcing, “The truck exterior components thrown free of the blast have bullet holes estimated to be from 5.56mm weapons.”
That much was a boon to Duchess’s spirits—in contrast to a majority of third-world Kalashnikovs chambered in 7.62mm, David’s team carried 5.56mm rifles, so these were almost certainly the right trucks.
Then he said, “No rocket components whatsoever.”
Duchess replied with composure, more for the benefit of her OPCEN staff than out of any sense of assurance. That particular resource existed in a very finite quantity, and it was dwindling away by the second.
She asked, “If you were a betting man, Sutherland, what would you put our odds at?”
He turned to face her.
“I am a betting man, and I wish I had better news for us. But given our use of the smallest possible bombs to achieve desired effects, the presence of truck exterior components with identifiable bullet holes, and the partially intact truck engine assemblies, the odds of 646 rockets vanishing without a trace are slim to none. At a minimum, they should have seen multiple rocket fins, warheads, or rocket motors by now. If there were rockets aboard, it wasn’t all of them.”
“Understood,” she replied in a crisp voice. “Let’s have them continue to comb the wreckage. I don’t want them to exfil until they’re absolutely certain.”
Sutherland nodded and resumed communicating with the ground force, and the mood in the OPCEN was one of total control over the tactical situation.
Duchess, of course, knew better.
Sutherland was far too experienced to be mistaken about this. Duchess knew in that instant that she’d bombed the right trucks; but she also sensed, and painfully so, that they’d lost the cargo and Bari Khan along with it.
As for everything else—the operation at hand, the future of the program, her own career—all was uncertain. With her hopes of a positive BDA dashed, Duchess’s every decision up to this point could—and would—be interpreted as questionable if not outright negligent by the one man who held the strings, and that man was on his way to the OPCEN at that second.
Gossweiler, of course, possessed the legal authority to insert himself on the OPCEN floor at will. If this mission occurred between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, when most of Congress was traveling home to meet their constituencies, she knew that Gossweiler would have been present from the moment of infiltration until his chief of staff ushered him away for his next scheduled commitment.
At present she was faced with the worst-case scenario: a failed mission resulting in Gossweiler clearing his schedule to personally supervise her efforts, thus making him even more irritable than usual.
She appraised her surroundings, considering the scene through Gossweiler’s eyes.
The dress code in the OPCEN was business casual at best, unless the individual had some personal fashion sense. Pharr, for instance, wore a suit whether he had to or not—possibly just to offset his biker-gang appearance.
But for the most part, these people were selected on the basis of their brains, not their ability to dress well. Jo Ann’s pantsuit looked like it was made of couch upholstery, more suited for substitute teaching in her Podunk hometown than a face-to-face with a senator in DC. With a short-sleeve collared shirt and tie, Sutherland could have fit in as middle management at a paper mill. And h
er UAV rep was in an honest-to-God polo shirt.
None of that changed the fact that Gossweiler would be striding onto the OPCEN floor as judge, jury, and executioner for the staff’s combined actions over the past eight hours, and the hard facts were debatably just as questionable as their wardrobes. As with many key missions in Duchess’s career, the outcome was usually more important than the means—if you bent every rule in the book and things turned out well, the administration was often more than enthusiastic to claim the victory.
But even if you stayed well within the lines of your designated authorities and things didn’t go as hoped, the powers-that-be tended to find fault with everything you’d done, up to and including vague condemnations on seemingly obvious judgment calls. Politics was a dangerous game, and she was about to deal with a man who’d survived it longer than most.
And at the moment this thought crossed her mind, Gossweiler arrived.
She heard the door swing open behind her, held by a CIA staffer who announced, “Senator on the floor.”
Duchess turned to see Senator Thomas Gossweiler enter alone, attired in a suit and tie, a seventy-two-year-old white man whose face was less creased than many of his peers who were ten years his junior. A shock of silver hair was combed back neatly over his ghostly blue eyes, and everything from his piercing glare to his erect posture projected an image of total authority that matched his tone as he spoke.
“Kimberly, what have you got?”
Duchess replied quickly, calmly, nodding to the screen at the front of the OPCEN.
“Our bomb damage assessment is ongoing. So far they’ve confirmed the presence of bullet holes consistent with weapons used by my ground team, which in addition to the analyst assessment indicates we hit the right vehicles beyond a shadow of a doubt. As for evidence of the rockets, they’re still searching.”
Gossweiler was unconvinced, watching the central screen with a skeptical expression. “Those trucks don’t exactly look like they were vaporized, so if the Rangers haven’t found any rockets yet, I don’t believe they will. What else?”