by Jack Carr
“Yeah, evening prayer. When does it go down this time of year?”
“Nine thirty. It will be fairly packed but will empty out quickly. I’ve already set you up with an alias and a backstory. You even have an appointment with Masood after prayer, so you have two days to get ready.”
Reece eyed Ben quizzically. “That’s not really my style.”
“Trust me. This will work. This is what I do now, remember?”
“What? Set up assassinations of Islamic clergy on U.S. soil?”
“Reece, we missed this one. We had this guy in our sights for over a year and we missed it. If we hadn’t, maybe your troop would still be alive. Your government let you down. We knew this guy was as bad as they come. Outwardly he condemns terrorism and is the face of moderate Islam in Southern California, posting videos on YouTube disparaging Islamic extremists and calling for an end to violence. In reality, his group is a conduit for funneling money to ISIS. I’m talking millions of dollars. While he preaches peace, his money helps ISIS behead Americans on camera for the world to see.”
“I thought ISIS was focused on Iraq, Syria, and the Levant? Why would Howard go through an ISIS guy to set up an attack in Afghanistan?”
“Don’t be fooled, bro. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are not as far apart ideologically as it would seem. It’s all about the caliphate, man. Twelfth-century shit. ISIS used to be AQ in Iraq, remember?”
“Oh, I remember,” Reece said, thinking of the blood and energy he and his men had invested in hunting them down over the years, “but I thought they had a very public split not long ago.”
“Well, they did. ISIS is the new kid on the block. Very popular, and far surpassing AQ in fundraising. That, along with their vicious attacks on Shia and even moderate Sunnis, have run counter to more recent AQ proclamations of Islamic unity. They appeal to the next generation of jihadi and are much more adept at recruiting, specifically using social media, than AQ ever was. AQ’s message was to join up because Islamic lands are under attack by the West. ISIS flipped it around. Their messaging is all about being on the offensive. Very powerful stuff and something we haven’t even begun to counter.”
“That doesn’t answer the question as to why Howard and Pilsner used them instead of AQ or Taliban.”
“That question is exactly why they went the ISIS route: to throw people off the track. Logically it would make sense to use an AQ- or Taliban-affiliated network, but if you want to throw up a roadblock, use ISIS.”
“Unbelievable,” Reece said, shaking his head.
“Recently, ISIS and AQ leadership have recognized the power of collaboration. They can be a much more effective force if their energies are focused on destroying us instead of each other. Pilsner and Howard have access to the same intelligence channels that I do and they would have known the same thing. ISIS and AQ can channel resources and kill us today, then work out their differences tomorrow.”
“So, the government wants Masood dead, and you figured I am a good guy to get it done?”
“Not exactly, brother, though he does need to die. This guy has funded more terrorism than the Blind Sheikh ever could have hoped to back in the day, yet he promotes himself as a moderate Muslim, denouncing all violence and terrorism. He was the connection to the Pakistani Taliban who planned and executed the ambush of your troop in Afghanistan. I know you are going to take him down. Least I can do is help. My superiors don’t know anything about this. It’s totally off the books.”
“So how does the alias and backstory work?” Reece asked, back on task.
“You are a graduate student at USD in international business and have an elective world comparative religion class. You want to interview Masood for a paper you are writing on world religions and politics. Part of the mandate for their Islamic center is outreach, so this is not an odd request. They are very open and inviting. I have Masood’s cell and center business phone numbers under surveillance. If he calls to check out your creds at USD, I divert the call and confirm your enrollment in graduate school.” Ben smiled, obviously quite proud of himself.
“And, do me a favor,” Ben continued, handing Reece a small package, “leave this with the fucker when you kill him. Wish I could go with you on this one, buddy. Hypocrites drive me crazy.”
• • •
Reece had checked and double-checked his gear for the next phase of his mission of vengeance. All there was to do now was wait, but there was somewhere that he needed to go first.
He steered his Cruiser through a quiet neighborhood and parked at a small church, continuing on foot. The streets were deserted at this late hour; anyone attempting to follow him in a vehicle would be easy to spot. Still, he took an indirect route, winding his way through a maze of residential streets, the silence broken only by the occasional barking dog. His path took him down an alley where he stopped and pretended to tie his shoe. Satisfied that no one was behind him, he cut between two homes and paused at the base of a large eucalyptus tree. Grabbing on to the lowest branch, he scrambled up the trunk and straddled a massive fork. Taking off his pack, Reece removed his bump helmet with its attached NODs, securing them to his head. The dark suburban scene was suddenly bright green through his goggles, thanks to the amplified illumination of the half-moon and stars. He scooted out on the branch until his feet dangled over a wooden privacy fence. Taking advantage of his night vision and his elevated perch, Reece carefully scanned the area for any sign of movement. Seeing nothing out of place, he swung his leg over the limb and dropped into the soft grass of his backyard. Drawing the Glock from his waistband, Reece moved to a knee and took in the scene silently for a full two minutes.
The house was dark and appeared from the outside to be undisturbed since he’d last left it. He walked across the yard and peered over the side gate toward the front of the house, where he saw Lauren’s Cherokee in the driveway and the police tape still strung around the massive eucalyptus that had been the centerpiece of his lawn. The base of the tree had been converted into a makeshift shrine by the neighbors, with cards, handwritten notes, candles, and stuffed animals covering a significant portion of the front yard.
Reece holstered his Glock and activated the IR illumination on the side of his helmet before retrieving a Strider SMF folding knife from his pants pocket. Seeing no sign of a booby trap, Reece slipped the knife’s blade between the upper and lower panes to the window of his small guest room, disengaging the lock. Here goes nothing. Reece slid the lower pane upward; the window opened easily: nothing exploded. Reece exhaled in relief. He took off his pack and lowered it through the window. Twenty years of training and more than a decade of urban combat had taught Reece that there is no graceful way for a grown man to climb through a window. He boosted himself up and rolled forward through the opening. The Glock came out and Reece slowly and painstakingly cleared his home, room by room and closet by closet.
Moving into Lucy’s room, Reece removed his helmet and sat on the tiny bed, surrounded by relics of her short time on earth. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he took in the sights and smells of his little girl’s sanctuary. Her room was perfectly intact, as if some invisible force had protected it from the hundreds of indiscriminately fired rounds that shredded the rest of their home. As he sat there among his daughter’s belongings, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened.
A tiny ceramic impression of her newborn footprint sat on a shelf next to a framed photograph of their young family taken at her christening. He stood smiling in his only suit, holding Lucy in her heirloom gown. A beaming Lauren stood by his side in a black dress that complemented her fit frame, her arm around Reece’s back. Damn, she looked beautiful.
The photo brought him back to those two weeks of leave following a past deployment when he was able to spend nearly every day with the two loves of his life. Looking back on it now, it was the happiest time of his life. Reece knew that he would never feel such happiness, pride, or contentment again.
On Lucy’s bed was a camouflage Team Seven bla
nket with her name, date of birth, and weight embroidered on it in pink—a gift from his troop. He ran his hand across the smooth fabric, feeling the threads where her name was written just like he was touching the blond curls on her head. He sat there for hours, taking in the sights and smells of his past in silent meditation. He didn’t let outside thoughts invade his tranquility; this was time with his family.
• • •
Reece made a few stops at various stores in San Diego the next day: a tuxedo shop, two electronics stores, a fabric retailer, and a hardware store. He paid cash for everything, just to slow down any investigations that could be under way. He purchased a white tuxedo vest, a yard of white nylon fabric, heavyweight thread, a box of three-inch framing nails, insulated copper wire, a small wired lightbulb, a silicone-controlled rectifier, a safe arm switch, a nine-volt battery, and three prepaid cell phones.
Reece laid out the items from his shopping trip on the kitchen table of the safe house alongside Lauren’s sewing machine, which he’d dug out of Lucy’s closet after his vigil in her room. The Bernina machine had been a gift from his mother. Lauren, God love her, was not one for sewing and he was sure that she’d never so much as plugged it in. He laid the white tuxedo vest on the table facedown next to two M112 1.25 pound blocks of C-4 plastic explosive. Using a fixed blade, Reece cut the wrapping from the two explosive blocks to expose the claylike contents. The two blocks were combined into a single mass, which Reece rolled flat using a rolling pin. C-4 is an extremely stable explosive that would need a lot more than a rolling pin to set it off. Even so, modifying military explosives was technically a violation of more than a few regulations, and having seen the mangled bodies of insurgents whose homemade concoctions went off ahead of schedule, Reece took his time. Pushing those thoughts aside, he continued to shape the mass until he was satisfied with its size and thickness.
The nails came in strips of twenty-five, designed to feed into a carpenter’s nail gun. Reece placed the nail strips on top of the explosive and pressed them into the surface until the entire face was covered with steel. He then moved the explosive sheet onto the vest and covered it with the white nylon fabric. Using scissors, he cut the material until it covered the deadly mix and pinned it in place. This was going to be the hard part; Reece hadn’t used a sewing machine since ninth-grade home economics class and he wasn’t exactly a master at it then.
Nearly every military unit had men who were gifted at sewing. Before the war created an entire industry of custom tactical nylon-focused gear companies, SEAL parachute riggers trained in sewing to repair parachutes would make side money customizing nylon gear for their teammates. Unfortunately, Reece had never spent much time in the riggers’ loft learning that particular skill. The good news was that it didn’t have to be pretty; it just had to hold everything together. After watching several YouTube videos on the basics of sewing, he fed the vest fabric into the machine.
Reece was confident that his future career would not be as a tailor but he got the job done. Leaving a small opening on the bottom right-hand corner of the nylon, he tied off the heavy thread to secure the stitches. He held the vest upright to test his work and, to his relief, everything stayed in place. Next Reece removed two of the three prepaid phones from their boxes and plugged both into their wall chargers. He used each phone to call the other to ensure that they functioned, that the numbers were correct, and that any cell phone carrier welcome texts or remote updates had all come through. He had seen even experienced terrorist bomb makers forget to do this and end up splattered across a wall when an unexpected text completed the circuit. Using a white paint marker, Reece drew a large X on one phone and wrote that phone’s number on the back of the other. He also entered the phone number as a contact on the second prepaid model.
This is where things could get tricky. Reece wished he had an EOD tech to help him, but luckily, information that would have been tightly controlled when he first entered the Teams was now freely available to the world on the Internet. He pried the back from the phone marked with an X and poked around until he could determine which wire did what. He identified those leading to the vibration mechanism and clipped them free of their attachment, twisting the wires from the lightbulb onto the vibrator wires and dialing the number that he’d placed into the other phone’s contact list. The phone on the table began to ring, illuminating the bulb. Satisfied that sufficient electrical current was flowing from the detached wires, Reece added the safe arm switch, which controlled the flow of electricity from the phone to the more deadly end of the device, and tested it in the on and off positions to ensure it would break the circuit to the cap. He then wired in the silicone-controlled rectifier designed to hold back the energy until hit with a trickle of electricity that would allow the full charge into the cap.
It was always hard for Reece to believe how these basic devices could cause such widespread terror and destruction, how a few hours of shopping could result in a mechanism for war. He disconnected the light and removed the battery from the phone, just to be safe. He then carefully removed a blasting cap from its plastic case and twisted its two wires onto those from the phone and nine-volt, wrapping the connected wires in electrical tape and slipping the device into the vest pocket. He pushed the blasting cap through the hole he’d left in the nylon fabric and buried it into the C-4 inside. He double-checked everything to ensure that he hadn’t made any errors, then hid the vest under the bed in the second bedroom. He would use the phone plugged into the wall to charge both batteries and would place a battery into the vest phone just before it was ready for use. It would only get called once.
CHAPTER 49
San Diego, California
WEDNESDAY CAME QUICKLY, though Reece did have a chance to rest, regroup, and reflect on his personal jihad. He did not question the righteousness of his cause. His only prayer was that he get to the end of his list before the authorities or the tumor took his life. Prioritize and execute.
Reece hoped he looked the part. What did a master’s business student taking an elective in comparative religion look like, anyway? Reece had spent a year at the Naval Postgraduate School studying defense analysis with an emphasis on combating terrorism and asymmetrical warfare. He remembered his professors wearing a lot of tweed coats, so he picked one up, along with some nonprescription horned-rimmed glasses. A leather cross-body satchel completed the look.
Reece tried to put on his least menacing expression before exiting his Land Cruiser and heading toward the mosque, passing an auto body shop and an abandoned warehouse as he walked. It wasn’t the best part of town but it wasn’t the worst, just a neglected neighborhood that you would move out of as soon as you had the chance. Reece felt naked leaving his pistol in the car but he didn’t know if he would be frisked before meeting Masood or if he would have to walk through a metal detector. If it had been a legitimately sanctioned mission he would have forwarded those questions to his intelligence department in the form of an RFI, or request for information, but not having his accustomed support network, he was on his own to improvise.
The satchel held the instrument of Masood’s impending death. Reece just hoped he could get in front of the imam alone. The target package had stressed that in order to maintain credibility and cover for action, the mosque was a legitimate force for good, performing religious services in accordance with moderate Islamic doctrine: officiating marriages, offering family counseling services, and helping San Diego’s downtrodden. That their masjid’s moderate outward stance was really a front for ISIS would have surprised more than a few of the faithful. Reece wondered what those Muslims who willingly gave money to Masood in accordance with the Third Pillar of Islam would do if they knew it was going to further the radical militant branch of their religion in the guise of charity.
Approaching the mosque along an avenue with more than a few burnt-out streetlights, Reece found himself walking down a different street in a different war: the streets of Baghdad’s Al-Jihad neighborhood, in the Al-Rashi
d District, 2006. After the Al-Askari Mosque bombing in February, the country had descended into anarchy. Sunni-on-Shia violence escalated to the point of civil war, with bodies stacking up in the streets by the thousands, making an already tumultuous situation even more chaotic.
Reece had been assigned to a CIA covert action program at the height of the insurgency: a small group of American advisors running a top tier Iraqi special operations force. Even though Iraq was technically a sovereign country and the unit was Iraqi, and totally off the books as far as the United States was officially concerned, they still had to get permission from both senior U.S. military leaders and CIA officials to enter mosques because of the political constraints of having U.S. personnel assigned in an “advisory” role.
In the midst of that carnage, Reece’s team had tracked a high-value individual to a mosque in the early morning hours, and had him fixed with human assets on the ground and technical surveillance in the air. Mosques were routinely used by the enemy as places of sanctuary, where they could plan and hide with impunity. Even though the Law of Armed Conflict clearly stated that a religious site would lose its immunity if it were used for a military purpose, U.S. senior military and political leaders were so scared of the fallout from hitting a religious site that they in effect allowed the enemy to plan attacks against U.S. forces from them without fear of reprisal. The insurgents knew it and took full advantage.
Reece had used the gray area in which his unit operated to skirt that technicality and had thrown the enemy off base with a highly successful campaign focused on targeting the insurgents where they felt safe and secure. The CIA side of the house, along with their attorneys, were in full support, but when the senior Army general in Iraq found out about the program he had his chief of staff read Reece the riot act. He demanded Reece call him for approval if they needed to hit someone using a mosque as refuge, which is how Reece and his team ended up waiting for more than an hour as the general took his time deciding if he should grant permission for Reece’s predominately Iraqi unit to enter the entirely Iraqi mosque. That delay provided enough time for enemy elements in the Al-Jihad neighborhood to surreptitiously surround Reece’s small force.