“Damn,” Clutch said.
“Through and through. You’re going to be okay, brother. I’ve got to drag your ass and your shit onto that Star Wars thing,” Harwood said.
“Not leaving you, man. I can hang,” Clutch said.
“Real doctor needs to work on that, like ASAP,” Harwood said. “I’ll go with you. We’re in this together.”
He stood, lifted Clutch into a fireman’s carry, and placed him on the ramp of the Sabrewing. As he bolted back to grab Clutch’s rifle, scope, and rucksack, the ramp began to rise. It was obvious that the timing of the flight mission was precise and automated. He scratched against the shale and rocks in the small depression behind their sniper hide where the Sabrewing had landed.
He stepped onto the slowly rising ramp, dragged Clutch inside, and was able to find the ramp control toggle in the rear of the aircraft. He pushed Stop as the ramp was at a 45-degree angle to the ground. The momentary pause allowed him to situate Clutch comfortably in the aircraft and secure him using the two cargo straps, cinching one directly on the wound to stanch the blood flow. The cargo bay would be big enough to hold both of them. There was a small box with flashing lights near the front of the aircraft. To his surprise, there was no cockpit where someone might be able to take over and fly the aircraft—not that he was qualified to do so—though he supposed that might be possible from the rectangular box, which had a small screen display.
The ingress and egress routes were on the screen. A flashing red dot was where they were presently located. He presumed it was red because they were behind schedule or there was a threat, or both. The egress route was indicated by a dashed line to the west, whereas the ingress route was a yellow line, most likely indicating that portion of the route was completed. Other numbers flashed next to the map. Hours, minutes, latitudes, longitudes.
“This thing’s like a flying coffin, Vick,” Clutch said. His face was dimly lit by the blue and red lights inside the cargo bay.
“Zodiac base, Reaper, over,” Harwood said.
Stoddard’s reply was quick. “Send it.”
“One wounded. Casevac coming your way.”
“Roger. Station time critical. Send patient, stay on location, sanitize area, relocate, and send grid once in position.”
“No. I’m coming back with him.”
“Negative. Orders are to continue mission,” Stoddard said.
An explosion rocked the earth, and shrapnel whizzed like ninja stars in every direction, pinging off the aircraft. The display showed EMERGENCY OVERRIDE, and Harwood realized their equipment was on the ground next to the aircraft. He bolted out of the ramp door, saying, “Got to grab our shit.”
He grabbed Clutch’s gear and his rifle, some ammo and water, and flipped it all into the diminishing gap between the ramp and the cargo bay. He turned and retrieved his rifle and rucksack before climbing up the ramp and attempting to slide between the narrow gap. The enemy gunfire intensified, causing him to let go of the ramp twice before braving a third attempt to climb in. Bullets pinged off the rocks around him, spraying dust in his face.
As Harwood was wedged between the ramp door and the frame of the aircraft, the drone began lifting vertically. Stoddard was most likely monitoring the situation and needed to get the aircraft out of there before they were overcome by the enemy. Harwood’s foot was caught between two rocks, twisting his ankle while the upward force of the drone wrenched his shoulder. It didn’t help that he had his rucksack and rifle in one hand and his other arm in the ramp, trying to open it.
“Stop this thing!” Harwood shouted.
“Vick!” Clutch replied.
Harwood fell to the ground, ankle twisted, as the door sealed shut with a snap and the four rotor blades spat sand and rocks everywhere, powering the vessel into the sky. The blades then tilted forward slightly, and the vertical lift became horizontal, as well. The Sabrewing quickly sped around the backside of the crest and began flying an automated map of the earth route, maybe twenty meters above ground level, to the west.
Harwood lay on the ground for a moment, cursing. The heavy machine gun fire reminded him he was in enemy territory. He quickly grabbed his equipment and pried open the ammunition box that had come with the resupply. He loaded two belts of 7.62 ammunition into his rucksack and scurried out of the compromised impact area. He jogged up and down goat trails, staying on or below the military crest of every ridgeline, never silhouetting himself to the enemy tanks stacking up to the east. Artillery fell a couple of hundred meters behind him, shaking the ground beneath his boots. Random rifle fire pinged near him occasionally, and he was convinced that the aircraft had been the target.
After fifteen minutes, he found a rock outcropping at the end of a trail that afforded him a view to the east. He settled into a hasty sniper hide, which was perhaps a half mile from his previous position. He had been moving due north, away from the artillery and burned hide site, but deeper into Syria or Lebanon. He wasn’t sure and needed to check.
A sniper’s first task is always to put his weapon into operation. He popped the bipod on his SR-25 and aimed toward the column of tanks now a farther half mile away. He noticed that there was a road below him to the north. The bright lights of what he assumed was Damascus shone off the nighttime cloud layer, providing him some light for his night-vision goggles and Leupold scope. He used both to assess his surroundings.
The location wasn’t ideal, but he could continue with the mission and feel relatively secure. He was far enough removed from the compromised location that he could survive until sunrise. There was no way to scale the cliff to his front that he could see. The minor trail he had taken to the location was the main enemy axis of approach. The ridgeline running north and south was jagged and severe.
He dug through his rucksack and found some fishing line and a flash-bang grenade. He low crawled down the trail and set in an early-warning indicator by securing the fishing line to the pin of the grenade and creating a trip wire across the path at its narrowest point. It was far enough away so that the grenade shrapnel would not injure him while also giving him sufficient time to spin and fire his sidearm at whoever might make it past the grenade.
He plucked at the trip wire. It was taut.
He returned to his new hide site and settled in, promising himself to improve his camouflage when he could see better. As it was, it was decent. Of course, the ammunition and water he’d left behind would be damaging clues that might lead Hezbollah or the Syrian Army in his direction. Countersniper operations were relatively simple. Intelligence analysts studied the target and then used simple mathematics to calculate the distance the average sniper—not that there was anything average about the Reaper—would use for a hide site. A quick map analysis would lead any experienced analyst to the ridgeline that Harwood and Clutch had been using. There was a finite number of locations that would be within the range of the sniper weapons and provide the cover and elevation a sniper required to do his business.
Harwood had maybe twenty-four hours in this location before he would have to move. Good countersniper teams would work the ridgeline methodically from north to south with one element and from south to north with another, squeezing him. As he moved north tomorrow night, there was a very real chance that he would bump into enemy infantry searching for him. Once they discovered the left-behind equipment, the Syrians would escalate the search.
As Harwood slowed his breathing and thought through his problem set, his thoughts returned to Clutch.
Another spotter wounded. As Clutch had pointed out, he was Harwood’s third spotter in as many years. Harwood had dismissed survivor’s guilt primarily because the sniper business was dangerous and to be behind enemy lines shooting at them carried a certain amount of risk that other professions might not. Either the sniper or spotter surviving a mission was always, to him, a fifty-fifty proposition. There was no point in feeling guilty about something that both men had agreed was an insane but necessary mission. Like every soldier, Harwood
knew that death was also a leering Peeping Tom just waiting for the right moment to crawl inside your window and harvest. The key was to tightly lock down all the windows and doors, keeping death at the doorstep. And when the time came, Harwood would answer the door, open it, and confront the killer man.
An old army physical training cadence popped into his mind:
I am a man of death / killing commies right and left / I’m not the killer man / I’m the killer man’s son / But I’ll do the killing / until the killer man comes …
Eventually, the killer man would come for him, Harwood knew. It was only a matter of time. His narrow escapes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Syria, and even in the United States were all lucky breaks as far as he was concerned. There was skill involved, but he believed a person made their own breaks.
But still, three spotters. Clutch’s fate gnawed at him.
Harwood looked at his TacSleeve, which was monitoring Clutch’s trek around Mount Hermon. The soldier-monitoring chip painted a blue line that was his route through valleys and over ridges toward the Mediterranean Sea, where Harwood presumed Stoddard would recover the drone and Clutch.
An explosion thundered in the distance behind him. He pulled away from his sniper scope and saw a fire on a far ridge, miles to the west.
His TacSleeve buzzed. A red X appeared on the blue line, indicating that the route had stopped.
Clutch’s chip was no longer broadcasting.
CHAPTER 5
Sassi Cavezza
Sassi held the phone to her ear as she looked at Fatima.
It was almost midnight. They were standing in the UNHCR forward operating base near the Turkish border. The UN had built a small encampment around the refugee area, locating the tent in the middle and painting UNHCR letters in blue on the top. Fatima’s parents had called the resettlement center via their satellite phone and asked why their daughter had not returned.
“We were being chased by some terrorists, Mr. Abel. I’ll return Fatima tomorrow,” she said.
Normally, she didn’t disclose operational details about when and where she would be going. In this case, however, she sympathized with the Abels’ concerns. Their daughter had left her home for water and never returned.
“Why didn’t you just bring her back to our home?” Fatima’s father, Ahmed Abel, asked.
“Because your house was several blocks away, and we were in danger. My priority is to protect all of you. It is your first night back in the house, and between the Russian tanks and the ISIS terrorists, we had to flee. I’m sorry.” And she was. She was sorry about the entire situation. She didn’t know whether any of them would survive the resettlement, and questioned the higher command’s decision to begin this early. With ISIS “defeated,” the UN leadership made a decision to unburden its refugee camps and begin returning the refugees to the neighborhoods and homes. Some areas were still off-limits because of sarin gas residue.
“How do I know you have not kidnapped her?” Abel pressed.
Sassi tugged at her curly light brown hair and shook her head. No matter all the positive things she did, there was always suspicion and gamesmanship. She understood that the father was worried about his daughter, but this was the same man who was a constant rabble-rouser in this very same refugee camp before Sassi had resettled the family. Either the conditions weren’t good enough, the water and food weren’t plentiful enough, or the high command wasn’t sending them back soon enough. Fatima’s mother was submissive, allowing the father to dominate the conversation not only for the family but for the entire neighborhood, too.
“I’m here to protect you and your family, Mr. Abel. I haven’t kidnapped her. She’s in my protective custody.”
Fatima was sitting on a low stack of water bottle cases, playing with her doll. The one success of the day had been recovering Aamina. Sassi’s experience had been that the children impacted by this war survived best when they had a tangible reminder of home. A picture, a shirt, a soccer ball, and, yes, a doll. Anything to transport their young minds from the horrors they confronted to whatever imaginary world they crafted with the memorabilia.
“I want her back tomorrow. It’s too dangerous to travel at night, but first thing in the morning. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Would you like to speak with her?”
“No,” Abel said, and then hung up. The phone clicked in her ear.
“Another satisfied customer?”
Sassi looked up to see Hans Schmidt, the UNHCR regional director. In other words, her boss. He was in his midfifties, a native German, built like a weight lifter, and had a mop of gray hair he kept disheveled to add to a somewhat natural rough-hewn look. He wore khaki cargo pants, dark brown hiking boots, and three layers of outerwear—a black stretch T-shirt, an untucked button-down dress shirt made of heavy cotton, and an UNHCR zip-up windbreaker. All of it was stylishly put together. While it wasn’t rare that Schmidt made the rounds of the refugee camps, he did so only with armed security. For the last several months, the German had been hitting on Sassi in an obvious way.
The advances had been most frequent in the last month, but the undertone had been there since they first met. He had shipped in from UN headquarters in New York City for a rare field assignment in his career. Like many Europeans, he spoke multiple languages, including some broken Italian. At first, Sassi found his attempts to communicate with her in Italian mildly humorous, if not obviously contrived.
“I speak fluent English. Let’s stick with that,” she had told him. And so they had.
Today she didn’t have the patience for his nonsense. Sassi was still concerned about what she had seen on the walls of the basement. Was it something that had been forgotten? Or was the plan she had briefly studied an actual viable operation that someone intended to implement?
“Heard you departed your sector rather quickly today,” Schmidt said. As usual, he invaded her space and put his hand on her shoulder. She flinched and stepped back toward Fatima. Hakim looked up from the wooden crate he was sitting on as he peeled an apple with a small pocketknife.
“Sometimes that’s required when the situation doesn’t look so well,” she replied.
“Really? What happened? The UN intelligence report is quite clear that your sector is free for return of refugees. By the way, you look lovely this evening.”
That, she knew, was not true unless he liked the disheveled, stinky, grimy look on a woman. No makeup, which she hardly ever wore anyway; no bath in two days; stale breath; totally sexy. With that thought, she inched closer to him and spoke directly into his face.
“That’s inappropriate, don’t you think, Mr. Schmidt?”
This time, Schmidt was the one who stepped back.
“Of course, no offense taken, I hope.” Schmidt spoke with a thick German accent that Sassi understood well. She had traveled throughout Germany, skiing the Bavarian Alps near Garmisch and vacationing at Lake Chiemsee. Nothing could compare to her Tuscan home overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, but she so enjoyed the cultures of other countries that she made it a point to travel on her limited budget to neighboring countries in Europe and Africa.
“First I was approached by two Russian tanks, and then we were chased out of town by what appeared to be ISIS thugs. Remnants, most likely.”
“Might they have been local hooligans?”
“Hooligans? I don’t think hooligans carry rocket launchers and AK-47s, but you’re welcome to come inspect the area with me tomorrow.”
“The last thing I want to do is be a miniature manager,” Schmidt said.
Sassi suppressed a laugh. Perhaps he’d made a self-effacing faux pas intentionally, to be charming, or more likely it was a language issue. Fatima stared up at them with wide eyes. She clutched her tattered doll as if it were a life raft, which perhaps it was.
“You mean micromanager, and you’re the furthest thing from that,” Sassi said. Schmidt puffed his chest, taking Sassi’s subtle shade as a compliment. “But it might be help
ful to you to actually see the areas we are returning families and children to.”
“My schedule is packed this week, but maybe next,” Schmidt said. “An American military commander would like to meet with you.”
The change of topic caught her off guard.
“American military commander?”
“Yes. He flew into İzmir today. He wants to know about your progress.”
“I don’t have time for commanders, American or otherwise,” Sassi said. “My responsibility is in the field. You talk to him.”
“I already have. He requested you by name,” Schmidt said.
Sassi deflated, shrugged. “And what do you want me to do with her? Them?” She swept her hand across Fatima and the tent behind them filled with hundreds of children and parents with weary eyes and threadbare clothes. Ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts for the men and filthy hijabs for some of the women, while others dressed more progressively, wearing only scarves around their heads. It was an eclectic group Sassi was charged with managing. Early in her career, she had made the mistake of becoming too familiar with the refugees. After watching Sunni warlords slaughter a family she had befriended, Sassi had taken a year off from the United Nations and escaped to the Seychelles to reflect on her life.
Her purpose. Did it really matter how many people she helped? Was her compassion just fuel spent into the ether, or did it make a difference? There on the beach at Anse Source d’Argent, she had decided to return, but only after building a protective wall inside her mind that allowed her to compartmentalize her work.
Several of her friends from school had gone on to be bankers, lawyers, or entrepreneurs making loads of money and living on the Tuscan bluffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Here, she was unbathed, surrounded by swarms of people with no home, no hope, as the German playboy made his moves. She had allowed Fatima inside her protective wall, though, and taken unnecessary risks.
She thought about the pictures and diagrams she had seen on the wall of the basement, mulled them over in her mind, and said to Schmidt, “Okay, where is he?”
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