“Yes,” Smith said, after a beat.
“You hesitated.”
Smith laughed. “Look at you, reading between the lines. Now, if only you can learn how to be a better liar, we might just make a decent spook out of you yet.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dempsey said. “Just answer the question.”
“My contacts at CIA are all kinds of irritated with me for telling them what to do. Right now, I don’t think they’d piss on me if I were on fire.”
“That bad?”
“After what happened in New York, what do you expect?”
Dempsey sighed. “I expect them to either put up or shut up. Counterterror ain’t a beauty contest; we’re all on the same team.”
“True, but try to remember who we’re talking about. At the end of the day, we still need them. So, try to play nice.”
“I’m just looking for a ride, Shane. Nothing more.”
“That’s exactly the problem. They’re not excited to play chauffeur for an asset they’re not cleared to know about for an operation they’re not running. They’re used to being the biggest dog in the yard, and that’s the way they want to keep it. But don’t worry, Jarvis made some sort of deal behind the scenes, and we’re all sorted out now. If you need them, they’ll be there.”
“Good. Anything else I should know?” Dempsey asked, checking his watch. “I need to get moving.”
The SEALs in the Joint Special Operations Task Force would not wait around forever on some damn spook to show up. They’d gladly launch without him if he gave them an excuse to do so.
“Not right now,” Smith said. “Stay hot and be sure to check for messages before you launch.”
“Will do. I’ll call you in a few hours.”
“Roger that. And Dempsey?”
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.”
Dempsey clicked off the small but powerful satellite phone and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his BDU-style pants. The fact that he was here alone—with no parental supervision—showed that Shane Smith, Ember’s Head of Operations, and Kelso Jarvis, the Managing Director, were confident with him leading their Special Activities Unit. Dempsey had proved his worth in New York and on several scouting missions during the last several months. His hard work, and Ember’s success rate, were causing the fledgling unit’s workload to pile up. According to Jarvis, the Director of National Intelligence was already beginning to think of Ember as his own private mini-CIA. The tasking they were receiving lately could easily have been rubber-stamped for CIA, but instead of giving it to Langley, it was being shuttled to Ember.
The reason was simple—speed, stealth, and efficiency.
The CIA had some good folks doing good work, but nimble it was not. They could never have stopped the short-fuse terrorist attack on the United Nations that Ember had foiled six months ago. In fact, Kelso Jarvis’s off-the-books unit was created to address the very type of exigencies that the CIA could no longer reliably defuse. Ember was not stymied by bureaucratic oversight and dithering DC politics, nor would it ever be.
Langley was like a battleship—big and powerful, but an outdated relic of another era.
Ember was like a fast boat—small, nimble, and under the radar.
After completing his much-needed trip to the pisser, Dempsey retrieved his duffel bag and unzipped the main compartment. He fished out a drop holster and strapped it onto his right thigh. He checked the magazine in his Sig Sauer 229 and slid it into the holster with a click, then retrieved his Sig 516 assault rifle. He tested the batteries on the EOTECH holosite and the PEQ-4 IR laser designator, twice, then kicked the duffel back under the cot. All of his SCI-level documents—including multiple identities, cash, and mission directives—were in the money belt he wore under his cargo pants. If he didn’t make it back for the duffel bag, all he’d leave behind were some clothes.
Dempsey shielded his eyes and squinted as he stepped out of the small hooch that served as guest quarters for the base. Like most operators, he had developed a strong aversion to the blinding desert sun. Down range, SEALs were creatures of the night. Vampires with assault rifles instead of fangs. But he was no longer one of them. He was a guest.
This particular compound was nestled behind the diplomatic mission buildings at the edge of a small airfield. It was, more or less, like every other remote compound he had visited over the past few months as John Dempsey, and over the previous two decades as Jack Kemper. As he wove through a row of white Toyota pickup trucks, an image of Romeo flashed in his head, the kid wearing that dopey-ass grin on his face just before—
“Help you, sir?” a voice said, snapping him back to the present.
The sir hadn’t been spoken in the manner customary between a soldier and a superior officer. This sir was tinged with an almost imperceptible sarcasm . . . Almost being the operative distinction. Dempsey knew this because he had used the same exact tone when he’d been working on the other side of the fence in his former life.
In the Spec Ops community, a Jones did not rate a “sir.”
Dempsey reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a Department of Defense ID card, which he showed to the camo-clad operator. “John Dempsey,” he said casually. “I’m here for the brief.”
The operator glanced apathetically at the ID. “Oh yeah,” the SEAL said, scratching his beard. “They said you were coming.”
“And here I am.”
The SEAL swiped his own ID across a card scanner beside the wooden door, and Dempsey heard a click as the magnetic lock disengaged. “Welcome to Camp Little Bighorn, John Dempsey. Try not to get too comfortable.”
Dempsey smiled and shook his head. The historical significance of the unofficial name the SEALs had chosen for their Forward Operating Base was not lost on him. Isolated, outnumbered, and tasked with what seemed like an impossible mission, no doubt these SEALs felt like the infamous Seventh Cavalry in 1876. Now that ISIS owned the Wild West, they were embedded in the most hostile of hostile lands.
Once he was inside the perimeter fence separating the Special Warfare compound from the rest of the facility, Dempsey headed straight for the TOC. The building was easy to recognize with its cinder-block walls, spaghetti-mess of data cables, and exterior-mounted air-conditioning units buzzing away. He yanked the door open and stepped inside, like he’d done a hundred times before. To his left was the command center, where a handful of operators sat at workstations, undoubtedly communicating with other assets in preparation for the upcoming mission. To his right was the conference room where the rest of the SEALs were talking and waiting.
“You Dempsey?” a voice said to his right.
Dempsey turned and locked eyes with his welcome party—a tight-jawed operator who was overtly sizing him up. Dempsey did the same, getting a measure of the man. The SEAL was wearing slicks—unmarked BDUs without an insignia or a nametag. Since there were no official military combat operations authorized in Iraq, slicks were the Special Forces equivalent of his own 5.11 Tactical brand clothes.
Dempsey smiled at the SEAL. “Yeah, I’m John Dempsey, but you can call me JD.”
To his credit, the operator extended a hand.
Dempsey gladly shook it. He didn’t remember shaking Smith’s hand the first time they’d met. He’d probably rolled his eyes instead.
“Keith Redman. You can call me Chunk.” The operator smiled and tipped his ball cap as if daring Dempsey to ask for the story behind the handle.
Dempsey nodded. No doubt that nickname had a helluva story behind it, but now wasn’t the time to ask. In his peripheral vision, he saw another operator approaching from the left. This SEAL was older and wore desert cammies with a Trident on the left breast and gold oak-leaf patches sewn to his collar tabs.
“You must be Mr. Dempsey?”
“Yes, sir,” Dempsey said. “Thanks for putting up with me being here. I remember what a pain in the ass it is having a fifth wheel around.”
The Lieutenant Commander nodded and looked him in t
he eyes, no doubt trying to recall if they’d met before. Dempsey had intentionally dropped the hint that he was former Special Ops, hoping it might make things easier. But the decision was not without risk, because revealing potentially compromising information about his past jeopardized his non-official cover. If Smith were here, he would not be happy with him. But Smith wasn’t here, which emboldened Dempsey to test the boundaries. There was no rule book for this sort of thing. As far as he was concerned, this was a blind date, and the only way to combat the awkwardness and suspicion was to try to find commonality as quickly as possible. As far as this SEAL team was concerned, anyone who wasn’t part of their team was just baggage.
“Your being here is not my call,” the Lieutenant Commander said with a shrug, confirming where he stood on the matter. “I see you’ve met Lieutenant Redman. Chunk is the officer in charge of the platoon for this hit.”
“Good to know,” Dempsey replied, glancing at Chunk. He liked the fact Chunk had not introduced himself as an officer, but he wasn’t entirely surprised. He was a SEAL. After that, who cared?
“You got anything to share that will make our job easier tonight?”
“I doubt it, sir,” Dempsey said. “But perhaps the three of us could talk for a moment in private before the mission brief?”
The senior officer snorted and shook his head before conceding. “Sure. Why not? We love this cloak-and-dagger spook shit, right, Chunk?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Chunk said, and snapped a can of Skoal in his left hand before taking out a generous pinch and shoving it behind his lower lip. “Things always get interesting when the Smiths show up.”
Dempsey gave a tight smile and laughed. “I get it, guys,” he said. “I do. I’m gonna tell you everything I can, whether it gets me in trouble or not, so that the team has the best information possible. I’m not CIA, by the way. The folks I work with would not send me here if there wasn’t some serious shit about to go down; I can promise you that. I also promise I’ll do everything in my power to keep my presence from putting your team at any additional risk. Hell, with any luck, I might prove to be an asset out there.”
The two officers eyed him skeptically, but he could tell he’d made an impression. He hoped his easygoing demeanor, straight talk, and humility put him in a different category from the other guys who’d dropped by in civilian clothes over the past few months.
The Lieutenant Commander nodded. “Well, you’re kitted up like you wanna go out and play with us—which I fucking hate, by the way—so I guess we should chat. Head Shed says you have a full pass, so we better set some ground rules.”
Dempsey nodded. “Of course. Let me tell you what I know first and then you tell me how to best complete my mission without getting in your way.”
“I like that,” Chunk said, and slipped a plastic water bottle from his cargo pocket and spit some brown tobacco into it. “Step into my office.” He gestured toward the back of the room.
Dempsey followed the two officers through the maze of tables and SEALs. Some operators were hunched over laptops, finalizing their individual portions of the op brief, and some were clustered in small groups, bullshitting in whispered voices. A few of the older SEALs looked vaguely familiar, but he didn’t recognize anyone he’d logged time with stateside or down range—no one from BUD/S or the time he’d spent with the white-side teams. He felt an invisible weight lift from his shoulders. After he had been blown up in Djibouti, Jarvis had ordered the plastic surgeon sewing him back together to change his face just enough to be unrecognizable to facial-recognition algorithms. Whether the doctor’s handiwork would be sufficient to fool a human acquaintance had yet to be put to the test. He still wondered if someone he really knew, a SEAL from his early years with the Teams, would recognize him. He had a few brothers still left out there—men he had fought and bled with, men who knew the parts of him that no plastic surgeon could alter. A true friend would be able to look past his new nose, the cleft chin, and the newest batch of scars and recognize the man underneath . . . right?
Part of him hoped that when the time came, someone who mattered to Jack Kemper would know him.
Chunk held open a door to a small room with an even smaller table and a few folding chairs. It was the down-range version of a conference room. Chunk tossed his ball cap on the table beside his clear plastic spitter and took a seat. The unit commander remained standing, his arms folded across his chest.
“Whadaya got?” Chunk asked.
Dempsey retrieved a small tablet computer in a thick Pelican case from his cargo pant pocket. He pressed his thumb against the biometric reader in the bottom right corner, and the screen lit up. He tapped a folder marked IRB6, and a grainy picture of a man appeared on the screen.
“This fuck stick is Mahmood Bin Jabbar,” he said. “He was a midlevel Al Qaeda manager back in the day, before he disappeared for a long while.”
“He was Mujahideen,” the Lieutenant Commander said, uncrossing his arms and leaning in. Apparently Dempsey had gotten his attention. “I remember this asshole. When I was a JO with Team Four, this guy was on the capture/kill list every fucking day. He was part of a hit where a Tier One guy got killed. Supposedly, they never found the fucker.”
Dempsey nodded. The Teams were such a small world—never more than a degree of separation. “Bin Jabbar went off radar after that event.”
Dempsey clicked open an even grainier picture taken from a great distance and enhanced. The man was hunched down beside a semicircle of heavily armed men, drawing a picture in the dirt.
“Recognize this guy?”
Chunk squinted at the image. “Bin Jabbar again?”
“Yes, except now he calls himself Rafiq al-Mahajer. Five years ago, we got a hit while he was working as an Al Qaeda mentor with Boko Haram in Cameroon.”
He tapped the forward button again.
“This is him with Abubakar Shekau—”
“The fucking leader of Boko Haram?” the senior SEAL interrupted.
“Yeah,” Dempsey confirmed.
“Well, shit,” Chunk said. “He ain’t no midlevel fuck stick now, is he?”
“And he ain’t Muj anymore,” the SEAL commander pointed out. “He’s out there in the suck now.”
“Yeah, except he’s not Al Qaeda anymore, either,” Dempsey said. “After that he disappeared again. Until now.”
He clicked to a new picture of al-Mahajer kitted up with an AK-47 and two bandoliers of ammunition. He was standing next to a sign on which Arabic had been spray painted in red over English type. The Arabic translated to God’s Sword. The English beneath was still readable:
CAMP AL QA’IM.
“That’s fuckin’ Al Qa’im,” Chunk said.
“Yep, five days ago,” Dempsey confirmed.
The senior officer pushed back from the table and stroked his chin with one hand. “I see where this is headed, but give me the download anyway.”
“This photograph indicates that Rafiq al-Mahajer has risen to a leadership position in the Islamic State’s Iraqi front. We believe he will be attending the meeting tonight that you guys are tasked to hit.”
“He ain’t on my daily list,” Chunk said. “He’s not one of the three targets we have for the meet, either, unless he’s using another alias.”
“The spooks kept him off the list on purpose,” the Lieutenant Commander suggested. “Right, Mr. Dempsey?”
Dempsey nodded. “But it’s not as nefarious as it sounds. My group believes we’re the only ones who know al-Mahajer is going to be at this meet. This fucker is slippery and paranoid, so we didn’t want to broadcast it to the entire IC and risk getting his antennae up. We’re keeping this one close to the vest. Understand, fellas?”
The senior officer snorted again. “And how the hell is that possible? Everything is linked and synced. I take a piss out here and five minutes later I get a text message that the Pentagon, NSA, and FBI are talking about my dick because the CIA snapped a picture of it. It’s a joint bullshit world.
How do you guys, whoever the hell you are, keep something like this to yourselves?”
“We’re outside of those circles,” Dempsey said, choosing his words carefully.
“Then where do you get the information?” Chunk blurted out. “The NSA and OGA control everything.”
“And who the hell analyzes it?” the commander asked in rapid-fire succession.
A mental picture of Ember’s Signals Director, Ian Baldwin, and his two protégés—who Jarvis had dubbed Chip and Dale—popped into Dempsey’s mind. He imagined the three men arguing about data sets and intersecting colored lines on a computer screen and somehow deducing where al-Mahajer was going to turn up next. “It’s complicated,” he said at last. “And anyway, I don’t really understand it myself. But I assure you if my guys say al-Mahajer will be there, then there’s a ninety-five percent chance he’ll be there.”
“How bad do you want this fucker?” Chunk asked.
“Really bad,” Dempsey said.
“Any special reason beyond the obvious?” the unit commander asked.
“Yes,” Dempsey said, and held the SEAL’s gaze.
“Got it,” Chunk said with a tobacco-stained grin. “Supersecret squirrel shit. I get it. How does this change my operation?”
“For starters, we can expect him to bring a security detail with him—possibly a big one. I imagine for a snatch-and-grab like what was planned for tonight, you were running two teams of six, with offset air . . . right?”
Chunk shrugged.
“Okay, well, I recommend two nine-man teams on site and a reserve squad to secure the perimeter for squirters,” said Dempsey, remembering the last time this asshole had squirted and the aftermath that had led to Romeo being vaporized.
Chunk nodded and looked at his boss.
The SEAL commander nodded back and glanced at Dempsey with a look that said, Go on.
“You might also want air in orbit and CASEVAC standing by,” Dempsey added. “There ain’t no cavalry waiting in the bushes in Iraq these days, and Al Qa’im is a long way from Irbil and Baghdad. I don’t want any of your guys getting hurt, but in the event someone does, I’ve arranged for a JSOC surgical team at the diplomatic mission complex here.”
War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2) Page 3