The ISIS Gambit

by Brad Carlson

  “Yes, ma’am, it would, and I agree, if everything looks good, I’d recommend going tomorrow rather than waiting for a Monday morning assault.”

  “Very good, General. Let the troops know kickoff is slated for tomorrow afternoon local time, roughly nineteen hours from now. Let’s reconvene first thing tomorrow morning to review the latest intel. If everything looks good, I don’t want to wait on this.”

  XXXIII

  Sunday, September 16th

  25,000’ over Raqqa

  2:45 AM Local Time

  “Okay, boys, you ready for this?” Dani asked Stonewall and Wolf over their radios, a touch of excitement in her voice.

  “You actually enjoy these jumps?” Wolf asked her.

  “There’s nothing like it. Plus, this one’s not so bad since we’re meeting up with a team on the ground,” Dani replied. “If we were going in on our own, we’d have twice the gear and that’s a lot worse.”

  “There’s the green light. Let’s go,” Jackson ordered as the three of them jumped into the early morning darkness.

  “Chaos, where’s Wolf?” Arielle whispered over her headset. “I saw him land but haven’t seen him since.”

  “I see his chute,” Chaos replied. “I’m checking on him.”

  “Gotcha, I’ll sit tight for Falcon.”

  “Hey Wolf, you okay?” Jackson whispered as he noticed Wolf laying in the grass moaning in a lot of pain.

  “Think I broke my ankle when I landed. Thought we were landing in a field, not a friggin’ rock garden.”

  “I’ve got Wolf. Looks like he broke his ankle when he landed. Any word from Falcon?” Jackson asked Arielle as he assessed Wolf’s broken ankle.

  “Negative. On my way over to ya.”

  “Copy that,” Chaos replied. “Okay, Wolf, this is going to hurt. I need to take your boot off before I can wrap it but this is gonna hurt.”

  “Go ahead. I turned the ankle pretty bad . . . ah, geez, that hurts.”

  “Yeah, I’d say your ankle took the brunt of the fall and . . . we’ve got a compound fracture here,” Jackson added as he gently slid Wolf’s boot off.

  “Wolf, you’re going to want these,” Dani told him as she handed him a dose of ketamine tablets.

  “Dani, can you take care of Wolf? I’m going to see if I can’t raise Falcon and Archangel.”

  “You got it,” she said as she began working with a SAM splint for Wolf’s leg.

  Jackson took a quick location fix and then called out over the radio “Falcon, Cowboys, draw play, third and long, zero-three, twenty-one, seventy-seven, hike!” Two short clicks followed in quick response.

  “What was that?” Wolf asked, quite surprised by the transmission.

  “Falcon and I worked together quite a bit several years ago. I’m a huge Cowboys fan and I got him hooked on football—American football that is. Anyway, we put this code together that resembles a quarterback’s snap count. ‘Cowboys’ refers to me. The ‘draw play’ is a running play, as opposed to a pass play, which impacts the distance. ‘Third and long’ refers to the situation we’re in. ‘Zero-three’ refers to the three of us. ‘Twenty-one’ refers to a distance grid—two clicks north or south, one click east or west—plus, if it’s a pass play, you’d double the distance. A single ‘seven’ at the end indicates help is needed—doubling it, seventy-seven means it’s urgent. ‘Hike’ means please respond. A double click is an affirmative reply. A single click asks to repeat everything. Since he knows our general location, it shouldn’t take him long to find us. Based on Falcon’s response, he’ll be picking us up in that wide-spot in the road over there. Wolf, we’ll go whenever you’re ready.”

  “Did you know Falcon was going to be a part of this?” Wolf asked, looking rather amazed at this development.

  “Not until you told us back at our apartment a few hours ago. But, like I told you, I worked with the Peshmerga quite closely for a couple years. I got to know several of them so it’s not that surprising that I might know some of the one’s who’ll be helping us out with this. You ready to go?”

  “Yeah, but I’m going to need some help,” Wolf replied as he grabbed a hand from both Arielle and Stonewall.

  “Wolf, don’t be too surprised by this guy,” Dani indicated. “I’ve known him about two months now and I never cease to be amazed by him.”

  “Yeah, well it’s mutual,” Jackson countered. “We ready to go? I think I see Falcon.”

  “Chaos, my friend, good to see you once again,” Falcon said as they met at the site Jackson called in.

  “You, too, man. Say, we’ve got a problem. One of the guys we jumped with broke his ankle, compound fracture. Any ideas on evacuating him?”

  “We came in from Al Hasakah up north just the other day, but with everything going on, I don’t think I’d head back that way. There’s another bridge across the Euphrates about sixty kilometers southeast of here. We can cross there and then follow the highway straight south. It’s a vast no-man’s land as it’s nothing but dessert. We’d be about 80 kilometers straight west of Deir ez-Zawr. If you could call in one of your Pedros we’d have him at Al-Asad before noon.”

  “I’ll call it in. Wolf can’t wait for what would be at least another twelve hours, and that’s provided we go tonight.”

  “I’ll let my men know to be ready to go.”

  “Archangel, Chaos.”

  “Chaos, Archangel here.”

  “Archangel, we had a problem with the insertion. We’ve got a man down with a compound leg fracture and requesting immediate evacuation. We can meet the Pedro at thirty-five degrees, fifteen minutes north, thirty-nine degrees, fifteen minutes east in an hour and a half.”

  “Copy that, we’ll have a Pedro there for you.”

  “Roger that, Chaos out. Wolf, not sure if you heard but we’re getting you out of here.”

  “Yeah, I heard that. Sounds like I’m in for a bit of a ride. Hope they keep their highways in decent condition.”

  “I hear ya. Let’s get you loaded up and out of here,” Dani added.

  Joint Special Operations Command

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  8:00 PM Local Time

  “Admiral Fischer, Admiral Ramsey, can you both hear me?” General Logan asked the commanding officer of Central Command and the 6th Fleet commanding officer.

  “Loud and clear,” Fischer replied.

  “The same here, General,” Ramsey replied aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

  “Excellent. Okay, I’ve received word from General Kaufman that kickoff is tomorrow, 6:00 PM local time. Since everything is in place, the President does not want to delay this.”

  “Very good, General. All of our units are in place. We’ve got two teams in place in Raqqa right now and they’ve both teamed up with a local Peshmerga unit. One team is scouting out Baghdadi and his entourage and the other is targeting the nukes. We’re relying on the Israelis to keep track of the rest of the hostages,” Fischer replied. “We’ve also evacuated one of the men we inserted this morning. It seems he landed in a bit of a rock garden and suffered a compound leg fracture. Anyway, he’s already at Al-Asad.”

  “Do we know where Baghdadi is?” Logan asked.

  “We believe he left the mosque last night and spent the night at the Odessa hotel.”

  “Jack, what do you mean ‘we believe’? I thought we had bead on him now that Secretary Johnson and Colonel Marshall are with him,” Admiral Ramsey asked his colleague.

  “You know as well as I do, Jeff, that that man is as paranoid as they come—with good reason I might add. He usually has doubles stand-in for him but last night we noticed that he had two women with him when he left the mosque. We followed him to the Odessa hotel and never saw him leave.”

  “So, are we ready to hit three places?” Ramsey asked.

  “Yes, we are. It’s going to make things a bit more complicated but we can do it,” Logan admitted.

  “Where’s the Odessa in relation to the mosque?”

>   “It’s a little out of the way but not too bad,” Logan replied. “However, it does mean splitting our forces, which admittedly, I do not like. It makes it all the more critical that the Rangers draw off as many men as possible. There’s no way we’ll be able to hit the nukes, the mosque and Baghdadi all at the same time so we need as many troops pulled out of the city as possible—it’s going to be hard enough as it is.”

  “So, we’re going to raid three places at once in the middle of Raqqa?” Admiral Ramsey asked, somewhat in disbelief. His carrier air wing would be providing air support so he’d been out of most of the planning details.

  “Like I said, those Rangers need to draw as many men out of town as they can. We don’t need them charging into town blowing everything up causing these guys to hunker down. We need them to act like they’re trying to get into the city but that they are up against too strong of a force, or a force that needs to be reinforced to stamp out the Rangers. Even ISIS understands that you don’t reinforce failure so the Rangers cannot push these guys back on their heels right away—that would be disastrous. No, it’s critical that we draw them into our trap. Once the C-130s land in Raqqa we’re going to need someone with the air support to blow the two bridges across the Euphrates—we cannot have these forces double back into the city. We need to keep them south of the river.

  “You realize the one premise with this is that the Rangers can handle whatever ISIS throws at them, right?” Ramsey added.

  “Yep, and we’re only using two Ranger companies,” Logan replied. “We expect that they’ll be out numbered, but they’ll have a ton of air support. A-10s and Apaches will lead the way for them with a couple AC-130s on call, along with your entire air wing, Jeff.”

  Raqqa, Syria

  3:45 Local Time

  “They didn’t exactly pick the easiest place to scout out, did they?” Arielle noted as they looked at the overhead picture of the building on her Toughbook laptop. “Have you even been able to get a closer look?” she added.

  “Not really,” Falcon answered. “As you can see, the building’s very isolated and its set back about fifty meters from the street. The lot behind the warehouse is completely fenced with guards all over the place during the day. They slack off quite a bit at night.”

  “What about inside?”

  “They worked all last night, well, Friday night, but we haven’t seen anyone in there since early this evening. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a guard or two inside.”

  “I can’t imagine them not having someone inside. What about dogs?” Jackson asked.

  “Haven’t seen any at all, or heard any for that matter. Our best opportunity to get in’s going to be on the east side of the lot. It’s still fenced but there’re several open gates and several of these buildings here, offer a fair amount of concealment,” Falcon added, pointing to the right side of the image.

  “Okay, east side it is, plus, if they’ve got a few open gates, that’s going to rule out any dogs—that’s a good thing.”

  “Next question, have you seen this man?” Arielle asked Falcon, bringing up a picture of Kayani.

  “Yeah, he looks familiar. We saw him several times yesterday but haven’t seen him since he left with a small convoy late yesterday afternoon.”

  “Convoy?” Arielle asked, looking at Jackson. “What convoy?”

  “They had two trucks, similar to the trucks your army uses and they had two Humvees in front and back, looking like some sort of escort.”

  “These trucks haven’t returned, have they?” she followed up.

  “No, we haven’t seen them since.”

  “Okay, sure sounds like this is the right spot then. The man is Dr. Mohammad Kayani. He’s their nuclear engineer. And, if they loaded two trucks yesterday and took them out of here under escort, it would definitely seem like we have the right spot. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about where this convoy went, would you?”

  “No, we simply didn’t have the resources to follow it.”

  “Chaos, we might have a problem,” Arielle said turning to Jackson. “Those trucks are just big enough to hold probably four of the B-61s at a time. That means they might have moved eight of the bombs and with Kayani involved, he probably already has them fully functional. I need to get into that warehouse.”

  “Okay, Falcon, you’re up. How do we get her in without alerting the guards?”

  “Follow me,” Falcon replied as Arielle, Jackson and two of Falcon’s men followed from their concealed spot in a narrow alley behind a couple buildings off of the street. “We’ll have a stretch of about 25 yards of open ground but as long as it’s still dark, we shouldn’t have a problem. I haven’t seen a single yard light. We’re going in around the back loading dock. They have several doors here and locks have not appeared to be a problem. Once we get in, I’ll lead the way and one of my guys will guard the door.”

  “That’s fine. Remember, this is strictly a recon mission. We can’t afford to tip them off that we’re here.”

  “Understood,” Falcon replied. “Recon only. Everyone ready?”

  “Lead on,” Arielle replied, as she adjusted her backpack and tightened her ponytail.

  “Okay, we’re in,” Falcon advised Jackson just as he arrived at the back door. “You’d think they’d have more secure locks if they’re guarding something so important. Arielle’s already inside.”

  “Or, they’ve got guards inside, as well, which I suspect will be the case,” Jackson added. “Let’s go.”

  “Chaos, we hit the mother lode!” Arielle whispered over their headset soon after they entered the warehouse. “They’ve got everything here—weapons, ammo, grenades, you name it.”

  “What about the nukes?”

  “They look to be in an opposite corner from the guards. I’m heading over there now,” Arielle whispered over the radio.

  “Falcon, what do we have for guards?” Jackson whispered.

  “I’ve got one in what appears to be an office and there’s a couple more watching what looks like a rerun of a soccer match,” Falcon replied. “They’re pretty relaxed for what’s all here.”

  “Falcon, is there an exit over by Arielle?” Jackson whispered.

  “Looks like a couple overhead doors, but that’s it.”

  “Okay, Arielle, be careful over there.”

  “Right. Chaos, I’ve got twenty-six bombs here, most of them are still assembled and in the racks they were loaded on for shipping, though, it looks like they’re in the middle of working on several of them.”

  “Can you tell what they’re doing?” Jackson asked.

  “They’ve got six of these pretty well torn down . . . .” Arielle began as she looked over the dismantled weapons, noticing that the rear-subassembly component on each bomb had been disassembled. “Oh, my God,” she whispered to herself as an arctic chill suddenly enveloped her.

  “What’s the matter?” Stonewall asked hearing her whisper.

  “Stonewall, we’ve got a problem. They’ve figured out how to arm these things. They’re working on some of the pre-flight arming controls in the rear subassembly. They’d have to work on this if they want to deploy them with Turkey’s F-16s. Looks like we have our answer as to what their intention is.”

  “Okay, confirm twenty-six bombs, right.”

  “Right . . . two-six, twenty-six—

  “Arielle, one of the guards is headed your way,” Falcon suddenly warned.

  “I see him,” Arielle replied. “Has he seen me?”

  “I don’t think so,” Falcon advised.

  “I got him,” Arielle advised. “Chaos, watch the other guards, I’ve got this one.”

  “Falcon, what about the others?” Jackson whispered.

  “One’s still in the office, the other’s glued to the TV.”

  “Chaos, we got trouble. He’s going to find me if he keeps coming this direction. I’m too restricted in where I can go,” Arielle warned.

  “Copy that. Falcon, keep an eye on the o
ther two. Make sure no one gets word out of here.”

  “What’s this . . .” is all the guard got out as he turned into the gap between two racks of the B-61s. Arielle had pulled out her Ari B’Lilah tactical knife and thrust it into the left side of the guard’s upper left chest, severing the aorta.

  “Guard one is down,” Arielle whispered over the radio as she quietly lowered him to the ground.

  “Roger that,” came the reply from Chaos. “Falcon, keep an eye on the other two. I’m going to help Arielle with the guard—we need to hide that guy as best we can and then we need to take out the other two. Word’s going to get out but we need to delay it as long as possible. We can’t risk them discovering this guy and calling for help.”

  “Both guards still oblivious to everything. Get busy.”

  “You guys got everything situated?” Falcon asked. “Looks like there’s a lull in the match.”

  “Ahmad, what’s taking so long? The match’s almost over?” the guard hollered out.

  No answer.

  “Hey Ahmad, what’s taking so long?”

  The only reply the guard heard was the sound of a couple spare parts Arielle rolled across the floor to get his attention.

  “Ahmad?!” the guard called out, now much more cautiously.

  “Chaos, he’s headed your way, pistol in hand.”

  “I see him,” Chaos replied looking around several ammunition pallets.

  “I got him if he turns your way. You take him if turns my way,” Arielle whispered to Chaos as they crouched opposite each other across the aisle created by the ammo pallets.

  “He’s almost on you two,” Falcon advised. “The guard in the office remains oblivious.”

  Five seconds later, the guard turned the corner towards Stonewall. Before he could react, Arielle placed her left hand across the guard’s mouth and with her right hand, the Ari B’Lilah severed the guard’s trachea, and carotid and jugular blood vessels.