SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Fox

by Don Mann

  “I can see that.”

  “Heard you guys kicked ass without me,” Suarez said.

  “We missed you,” Crocker said. “Everything happened so fast. It’s still a blur.”

  “He didn’t do shit, like usual,” Mancini joked.

  “Yeah, right. While this guy was jerking off in the engine room, I was killing terrorists.”

  “Man, I wish I was there,” said Suarez.

  “Hey,” Crocker said, “I meant to ask you, you remember anything from the night you were shot?”

  Suarez’s expression turned serious. “Not much. I was standing near the cab of the van, talking to Hassan.”

  “Hassan?”

  “Yeah, Hassan.”

  “What was he saying?”

  “Some stuff about his girlfriend. I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “He disappeared with the sarin,” Crocker said. “Nobody’s seen him since.”

  “I heard. Yeah. Strange dude.”

  “Real odd.”

  They were resting in their room in the hospital’s visitor center, getting ready to go into town for dinner, when the phone rang. It was Jim Anders.

  “Crocker, you alone?” Anders asked.

  “No. Mancini’s with me. Why?”

  “How do you guys feel about detouring to Paris?” Anders asked.

  “For what purpose?” If this was for a confab of some sort, he’d pass.

  “I’ll explain when you get here. It’s pretty basic. Won’t take more than a day or two.”

  “It’s ops-related, right?” asked Crocker.

  “Yes. You’ll understand why I called you specifically when you get here.”

  “Okay.” It would give him more time to prepare to face Holly.

  “I’ll have a Gulfstream waiting for you at the airport in an hour,” said Anders. “Once you land in Paris, take a cab directly to the InterContinental, on the Right Bank near the Opera House.”

  “We have time to grab dinner before we leave?”

  “As long as you get here before midnight. You’ll be traveling undercover, so use your alias passports.”

  “Got it.”

  Four hours later he and Mancini were zipping down the Beaux Arts–era boulevards of Paris with the taxi’s windows open, both lost in thought. They registered at the InterContinental under their aliases and met Anders in his suite on the ninth floor.

  “Glad you’re here,” he said, ushering them in. Janice was there, too, looking sharp in a dark-blue blouse, along with two officers whom Anders introduced as FBI Special Agents Leslie Farrell and John Wilkens from Overseas Operations.

  Anders was all business, showing them to seats around a coffee table in the living room. “We’re here to wrap this up,” he said, sleeves rolled up.

  “What, exactly?” Crocker asked, helping himself to one of the bottles of Perrier on a table in the corner.

  “The operation that began in Istanbul,” Anders answered.

  “I thought that was over.”

  “Remember Mr. Talab?”

  “Sure. I thought he was still in Syria.”

  “Farrell and Wilkens have been searching for him. And guess where they found him.”

  “Here?” Mancini asked.

  “Good guess,” Wilkens said, handing Crocker a black-and-white surveillance photo taken through the back window of a passing Mercedes. “We took these as he was coming out of the Syrian embassy.” It showed someone who looked like Talab seated in back, with a short beard and wearing sunglasses.

  “You sure this is Talab?” Crocker asked.

  Wilkens handed him a stack of eight more surveillance photos of the same man standing and talking to several men and getting into the car. It was Talab.

  The gears in Crocker’s head started grinding, trying to figure out what was going on. “Why are we going after Talab?” he asked. “I thought he was our friend.”

  “We thought so, too,” Janice said. “But it turns out he’s the guy who set the whole thing in motion.”

  Crocker had been suspicious of the Syrian from the start. “Wait. He’s been acting as a kind of double agent?”

  “More than that,” Janice muttered.

  Anders leaned forward and said, “We now believe Talab has been working for President Assad of Syria all along, first as a double agent, fingering people like Jared, and then as the mastermind of the entire sarin-slash-hijacking operation.”

  Crocker remembered the light resistance they had encountered while stealing the sarin from the Syrian base, and how it had surprised him.

  “It’s extremely devious, really,” Anders continued. “They led us to the sarin, then made it appear that it had been stolen by ISIS terrorists who then went on to hijack the cruise ship. Their larger objective was to alert the United States and the rest of the world to the worldwide threat posed by ISIS—which was easy to do, given recent events in Iraq and Syria—and to shift U.S. and Western sympathies back to President Assad as a more reasonable alternative.”

  Made sense, in a diabolical way.

  “I never liked Talab,” Mancini offered.

  “You think the Syrians are that clever?” Crocker asked.

  “The Assads aren’t dummies, which is why they’ve survived so long.”

  “So Hassan was involved, too, working for Talab and the Assad regime the whole time?” Crocker asked.

  “We believe so, yes.”

  It felt like a punch to the gut. He’d rescued that little bastard off the street in front of the schoolhouse in Idlib and helped deliver his son. Never for a second had he suspected that Hassan was an agent for Assad.

  “You find Hassan?” Crocker asked.

  “No. But we will.”

  “Make sure you do.”

  They’d been double-crossed to such an extent and had expended so much effort that Anders’s cool-headedness bothered him. Hadn’t Anders been so sure that Talab was a friend? Wasn’t the Agency’s trust in him the basis of everything we had to endure inside Syria, and on the Disney Magic?

  He wanted to kick the table in front of him, but he held back. Everyone made mistakes. They misread people and situations, and as a result put others in danger. There was no point pointing fingers or complaining now. It was time to put this hydra-headed monster to bed and move on.

  Leaning forward, he asked, “Tell me, what do you want us to do?”

  At 0812 the next morning Crocker was sitting behind the wheel of a red-white-and-blue American Airlines van parked in front of the Hotel de Suede on Paris’s Left Bank, not far from the Les Invalides and beyond that, the Eiffel Tower. Under the blue American Airlines overalls he wore an armored vest, the straps of which were cutting into the skin under his arms.

  He and the CIA Ground Branch and former British SAS operative named Sully were acting as though they were there to ferry a flight crew to de Gaulle Airport. They were really waiting for a signal from FBI agents Farrell and Wilkens, who were standing in the alcove of a photographer’s studio across the street from the Syrian Embassy at 20 rue Vaneau. A delivery truck with Mancini at the wheel idled in an alley off the cité Vaneau, and a third vehicle waited beyond the embassy on the one-way rue Vaneau.

  It was a simple snatch-and-grab. Crocker had executed dozens of them in much more dangerous locales than Paris. Farrell, Wilkens, and their team had been watching Talab for days, tracking his movements, monitoring his security, and establishing the patterns and routes he followed.

  As Crocker scanned the street through the windshield, Sully leaned in the passenger window and said, “The doorman with the stick up his arse is complaining. He wants the room numbers of the crew we’re picking up.”

  “Tell him you don’t know room numbers. Give him some names instead. Stonewall the bastard. Buy us another ten minutes.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Crocker and Black Cell had worked with Ground Branch often, but never with Sully, who was new to the unit. He glanced at his watch: 0815. The target was late. Loo
king right, he heard Sully joking in French with the uniformed head doorman.

  The voice of Special Agent Wilkens blasted through his earbuds. “All units, stand by to move. The side gate is opening.”

  He turned the knob on the Motorola in his pocket that controlled the volume. Two seconds later Wilkens continued: “Observe a black Mercedes 450 limo emerging. Stand by thirty seconds.”

  Crocker honked twice. Hearing the go signal, Sully slid in.

  “Stand by ten seconds while we ID the target,” said Wilkens through the earbuds.

  “What’s going on?” asked Sully.

  “Close the door,” Crocker ordered.

  “All units, target IDed. Go!” Wilkens shouted.

  Crocker pulled the black one-hole face mask over his head and hit the gas. A small Fiat sedan was up ahead, between him and the Mercedes limo, but he managed to weave around it. A white sedan beyond the limo did a sharp U-turn, stopped, and blocked the street. A second later a truck sped out of an alley and T-boned the Mercedes.

  Bam! Metal into metal, glass flying, sparks. Game on.

  In his ear he heard Wilkens screaming, “Teams two and three engage! Go! Go! Go!” The guy sounded like he was losing it.

  Crocker screeched to a stop right behind the Mercedes, grabbed the suppressed M7A1 off the floor, and jumped out. A second delivery truck spun out of the alley and blocked the gate to the Syrian embassy so no follow-up vehicle could exit.

  Mancini was already out on the street, using a metal bar to smash the window beside the driver. The terrified man came out with his hands on his head. Simultaneously another man exited the passenger door with a Glock in his hand and started shooting wildly. Sully cut him down with a suppressed blast to the chest.

  Mancini leaned over the front seat and faced a terrified-looking Talab in back just as Crocker opened the back door and saw the Syrian reaching for something in his briefcase. He held the M7A1 to Talab’s temple and shouted, “Stop!”

  The Syrian froze. Crocker pulled him out and saw another man crouched on the floor, trying to be invisible. He was a big man with a tattoo of a spider on his neck. When Crocker straightened him up against the side of the Mercedes, he recognized him as the man he had grappled with in the van back in Istanbul.

  “Hey, fuckface, remember me?” he asked. Unable to contain his anger, Crocker reared his head back and butted him hard in the face. The big man wobbled and caught himself on the car, blood streaming from his nose down his chin.

  Sully pulled Crocker back.

  “What was that about?” Sully asked.

  “He killed a buddy of mine.”

  “In that case, you want another go at him?”

  “No, that’s good. Let’s split.”

  They dragged both men to the back of the van. Once inside they Tuff-Tied their wrists and ankles together and slapped gaffer’s tape over their mouths. Ninety-five seconds after the op had started, Crocker gunned the van around the Mercedes and headed for the Orly military air base on the outskirts of Paris.

  Later that night, after a celebratory dinner at the famous La Coupole in Montparnasse, Crocker, Anders, Janice, and Mancini returned to the InterContinental to pack their bags and check out before their midnight flight to Dulles. As they entered the lobby Anders informed Crocker that Talab and the three men with him had been ferried by military helo to the USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed in the South Atlantic, where they would be interrogated outside the legal jurisdiction of any country.

  “I’d love to hear what you get out of him.”

  “I’ll make sure you do,” said Anders.

  Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. It didn’t really matter. Crocker decided that as soon as he got upstairs he was going to call Holly and tell her that he was sure they could get through this rough patch together if they both tried a little harder, which he was one hundred percent willing to do.

  As they passed the newsstand in the lobby, Mancini pointed out headlines in French, Spanish, English, and Italian that announced the daring rescue of the Disney Magic by “NATO commandos.” The attackers, according to the headlines, were “Islamic terrorists.”

  Curious, thought Crocker. I wonder if their real affiliation will ever be revealed?

  This wasn’t the first example of government misinformation he’d witnessed. Most of the ops he and Black Cell participated in were kept secret and never reached the public.

  “You want one as a souvenir?” Mancini asked.

  “Not really. Thanks.”

  He stopped and glanced at his watch, wondering if there was still time to shop for a graduation present for Jenny. Typically, he experienced physical and emotional letdowns after a difficult mission, and he was starting to feel his brain and body relax.

  Civilian life was more challenging. He’d keep that in mind and try to be more attentive to Holly when he got home.

  He saw Anders, Janice, and Mancini wave from an open elevator. They all looked happy. Charlie Parker’s mournful, beautifully shaded version of “Everything Happens to Me” played over the hotel PA system. He waved back as if to say Don’t wait for me. As the elevator doors closed two women wearing black headscarves ducked in at the last second. There was something vaguely familiar about the way one of them moved. It alarmed him enough that he headed for the stairs to hurry up to the fourth floor, where he and Mancini were rooming.

  On his way up, he remembered that his three colleagues were unarmed. So was he, except for the five-inch koppo martial stick Mohammad al-Kazaz had given him. He’d taken it to dinner to show to his friends, and it was now in his right rear pocket.

  Crocker pushed through the stairwell door at four, dashed to the elevator, and reached it just as the doors were closing.

  “Manny, wait!”

  Maybe he was overreacting. Still, he stuck his leg out and squeezed in, bumping into something on the floor. Someone had disabled the lights so it was almost completely dark inside, and he couldn’t distinguish anything at first.

  He made out the outline of a body at his feet, then heard people grappling in the far right corner. Reaching for the koppo stick in his pocket, he looped his middle and ring fingers through the paracord and stepped forward, slipping on a metal object on the floor and falling against someone’s back. It was a big man. Mancini, he thought as he crashed into one of the covered women. Except it wasn’t a woman, which Crocker discovered shortly after the person elbowed him in the gut. The pain he felt woke him up completely and unleashed an almost primordial rage that caused him to drive the point of the koppo into his attacker’s throat.

  When the attacker gasped and raised his hands to his neck, Crocker saw Hassan’s beardless face.

  “You again,” he grunted. Using the high-low principle from hand-to-hand combat, Crocker slammed a knee hard into Hassan’s groin, then grabbed his face with his left hand and smashed it, one, two, three times, hard, into the back of the elevator until Hassan lost consciousness. He would have kicked him a couple of times, too, if he wasn’t still in danger.

  Before he could even take a breath he heard a metal clicking sound to his left. Turning, he saw that a second attacker—who really did appear to be a woman—had just loaded a mag into her pistol. He immediately recognized the eyes and mouth as she pointed it at his chest.

  “Fatima.”

  “Yes, Wallace.”

  “This my reward?”

  She hissed a kind of sneer and squeezed the trigger as Crocker turned sharply right, ducked, and, holding the koppo in a forward saber grip, drove it into her solar plexus. The shots went off so close to his face that they burned the skin on his cheek and numbed his eardrums. He kept charging into her knees until they gave way and she screamed. Grabbing the wrist with the pistol, he slammed it against the side of the elevator twice until it clanked to the floor.

  Screaming and flailing like an injured animal, Fatima reached up and raked her long nails across his cheek. She was trying to find his eyes, breathing furiously and struggling with all her mi
ght. But he had trapped her in the corner from behind.

  For a second he thought of detaining her. Then, remembering the extent of her betrayal and his colleagues on the elevator floor, he took her head in both hands, pulled up, and twisted hard to the right so that her spinal column snapped and she went limp.

  “Peace be with you.”

  Somehow the three Americans in the elevator managed to survive. Crocker didn’t know how, because they had all suffered gunshot wounds. The French EMS team had acted quickly and expertly, for which he was enormously grateful, and his colleagues were out of danger.

  He left Paris clinging to that knowledge, like a kid holding on to a favorite toy, and proud of the fact that they had completed the mission without losing anyone. He’d learn the details later. Now all he wanted was to get home to Holly and Jenny, decompress, and rest.

  Since he’d flown civilian, he landed at Norfolk International Airport at around 1850 local time. He was so tired he couldn’t remember which airport the team had left from or where he had parked his truck, so he hired a cab to drive him to the Navy Gateway Inns and Suites, where he and his family were staying temporarily.

  Jenny answered the door in shorts and a Virginia Tech T-shirt and immediately threw her arms around him. “Dad, you’re home! Yay!”

  “Sorry I missed your graduation. I’m so proud of you, sweetheart. How did it go?”

  “It was fun. Grandpa came. We missed you.”

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I bought you something.”

  He entered the little red-tiled foyer and set down his bag as familiar smells surrounded him. Jenny followed, looking happy to see him yet somewhat wary, as if she knew to treat him carefully. “What happened to your face?” she asked.

  He quickly manufactured a lie. “Oh, I fell off the hotel Stairmaster and scratched myself. Burned it a little, too.”

  “Gee, Dad.”

  He’d had the presence of mind to buy her something at the duty-free shop at Charles de Gaulle. He found it now in the side pocket of his bag and handed it to her—a stunning silver Michele Deco Day chronograph dial watch that had been recommended by the young woman at the shop and had set him back almost seven hundred dollars. The look of surprise and joy on her face made it worth the price.