by Isaac Hooke
The militant abruptly rounded the bend; he seemed to be gazing in the general direction of the Hornet.
Ethan couldn't be sure whether the fighter had seen it, but he released the sticks and ceased all motion, letting the mini-quad hover in place: when not moving, the drone would more easily blend into the background. He could only hope the man was far enough away.
The militant stared for several seconds, and then finally turned around, walking back behind the building.
"Close one," Sam said over the comm. "Now get me a visual on those vehicles. We need to know which one Al Taaraz gets into, if any."
Ethan accelerated toward the bend, then laid off on the throttle to slowly edge the Hornet past: the lone militant was still visible below, hurrying back toward the line of vehicles.
Beyond the man, the fighters Ethan had seen before were piling into the bus. There was no sign of either Al Taaraz or Kareef.
"Find the high value," Sam said.
Ethan accelerated the Hornet toward the vehicles. The last remaining militant hopped onto the bus.
The tail lamps of two nearby Land Cruisers activated.
Ethan magnified the display. The windows of the SUVs were tinted black, and it was impossible to see beyond them. He zoomed out just as both vehicles turned onto the service road.
"Ethan, I need a bead on the target..." Sam sent.
"The windows are tinted," Ethan complained.
"I can see that. What about the bus?"
"Give me a second." He brought the drone toward the school bus.
"If we can't get a positive ID we have to call the mission off, you know that, right?" Sam sent.
No pressure or anything.
As the SUVs performed a U-turn and sped past, Ethan closed on the bus. He started to increase the magnification when the view changed: the bus was moving.
The vehicle pulled onto the service road, following the same route as the SUVs toward the compound entrance.
"Ethan..." Sam said.
He brought the Hornet parallel with the bus, flying sideways to keep the moving windows in view. He zoomed in.
The video was tilted, thanks to the degree of roll Ethan applied to the drone. Even so, he was able to discern individual militants past the windows. There was no sign of Al Taaraz, however. Ethan increased the roll, panning the camera over the windows as the Hornet slowly overtook the vehicle. He was constantly worried about being spotted.
There.
Seated close to the center of the bus was a man with a mustache.
"Found our high value," Ethan said.
"It could be an ordinary militant," Sam returned.
"No," Ethan said. "Look at his face. It's bloated as hell. All the other muj with him are military types, lean and hard. Has to be him."
"Recall the drone," Sam said, apparently agreeing.
Ethan pulled the drone way back. He was relieved to be exiting the field of view of the bus passengers.
"People," Sam continued. "Operation Street Hustle is a go. Prepare your rockets. Wait for my order."
Traveling at top speed, the Hornet reached the cinder block wall. Ethan scooted it past the camouflage and across the street, landing the quad rather hard on the rooftop beside him.
Ignoring the Hornet, he unrolled the first carpet and scooped up the RPG-7 launcher that had been hidden inside. He unrolled the second rug, revealing two PG-7VL warheads with the boosters attached.
He loaded one of the thick, arrow-like warheads. He already knew the wind speed was negligible because of the drone, but he glanced at the Islamic State flags mounted to the top of the compound anyway. They hung limp.
He retreated from the edge slightly and, after confirming that the backblast area behind him was clear, he rose to a kneeling crouch. He hefted the launcher over one shoulder and trained the 2.7x optic over the entrance of the compound a half block to the north.
The barbed-wire fence had been rolled aside, and the two SUVs were already retreating down the main street.
"Ethan, what's your status?" Sam sent over the comm.
"Got a bead on the entrance," Ethan transmitted. "I'm waiting for the bus."
"Good," Sam replied. "Doug, William is probably going to need a hand taking out those Cruisers."
"I'm moving now," Doug returned. "Though I doubt I'll make it in time."
Doug must have been positioned on the southern section of the street. William had obviously taken the north, giving him the best spot to disable the SUVs.
Ethan heard a click on the Hytera, his secondary radio; an instant later Sam's voice erupted over the unencrypted line: "Othunan, I'll need you to lend us one of your rocketeers."
"Already on it," Othunan returned.
"Coordinate with Wafeeq." She used William's alias.
When the bus emerged from the gate Ethan followed the front right tire with the optical sight; he estimated the speed of the vehicle at thirty kilometers per hour and he led the target accordingly.
The two SUVs remained half a block ahead, purposely keeping their distance, probably afraid that a passing Predator would classify the vehicles as belonging to a motorcade.
Scared of airstrikes, are you? Well, you've got something worse to fear today, my friends.
Ethan waited for the order to fire, but it did not come. The bus was traveling closer to fifty kilometers per hour by then, he guessed; Ethan increased his lead on the target accordingly.
The window of opportunity was quickly closing.
"Sam?" Ethan asked. "Waiting for your order."
No answer. He wondered if he'd lost the comm signal.
"Sam—"
"Are you certain that was the high value target?" Sam sounded distracted—she was probably reviewing the grainy video footage he'd captured of the bus occupants.
"Yes." He said it as confidently as he could, wanting there to be no doubt in Sam's mind, yet of course he wasn't one hundred percent certain.
Sam must have detected a hint of doubt in his voice, because still she didn't give the order.
"Sam..." Ethan said into the mouthpiece.
"Engage," she finally replied. "Operation is hot, people. Ignite all vehicles."
24
Ethan fired.
A loud bang filled his hearing, similar to a bomb going off. There was no recoil whatsoever—all exhaust was directed out the rear breach of the tube. It felt like someone gave his lower body a good slap from behind along the entire length.
A small cloud of gray-blue exhaust enveloped him, drifting upward, potentially giving away his position. Another puff of smoke appeared ten meters in front of him, indicating where the rocket motor had ignited.
The warhead struck the front tire. The one point four-three kilograms of OKFOL stuffed inside the bomb detonated with an explosive velocity of 8,670 meters per second, and the resultant fireball violently lifted the entire right side of the bus into the air.
The vehicle continued forward for a few seconds, tilting precariously to the left, until it finally toppled on its side. Wheels spinning helplessly, the large motor vehicle slid for several meters, carried by its momentum, cutting a thick gash into the asphalt. A grating noise worse than fingernails scraping down a chalkboard echoed from the surrounding buildings.
As it ground to a halt, other rockets, courtesy of William and the resistance fighter he was coordinating with, struck the two SUVs farther north.
The first SUV flipped right over as a rocket struck its undercarriage. The second RPG, probably fired by the resistance fighter, impacted a little too high, hitting the second SUV in the engine. The vehicle exploded, rising two meters straight into the air before slamming back onto the asphalt.
Ethan stuffed the Hornet, controller, base station and antennas into the backpack along with the remaining warhead—the tip of the long rocket protruded, but he didn't care right then.
He slid the pack over his left shoulder, the launcher over his right one, and then snatched up the tripod. He retracted the telescopin
g legs of the latter as he ran across the roof and he dove into the stairwell without slowing.
He descended to the first floor and burst through the front door. The two Rios were gone, of course, racing instead toward the disabled bus. Ethan hurried after them.
Resistance fighters were engaged in a firefight at the entrance to the compound. Several of the men had taken up positions on either side of the gate, and they pummeled the unseen mujahadeen within.
Ethan crouched low as he passed by on the opposite side of the street; he used the parked cars as a screen.
A technical stolen by the resistance abruptly pulled in front of the compound. The man in the truck bed began to unleash unholy hell into the compound via the ZU-2 anti-aircraft gun. The 23mm shells fired five times per second, splitting apart any mujahadeen who dared approach.
Ahead, the Rios halted by the upturned bus. Sam leaped onto the undercarriage and climbed the rusty rear axle assembly, using the drive shaft and other exposed parts of the suspension as footholds. She looked almost like a ninja, clad in that black abaya and hijab, though the headset she wore on her exposed face betrayed her spec-op status.
She nimbly hauled herself onto the side of the bus and, keeping low, shattered one of the rear right windows with the stock of her rifle. She pulled the pin on an aerosol canister and tossed it inside. She threw two more canisters into the bus and stepped back. In seconds a white fog snaked from the broken glass.
Sam crouched on the frame, near the rear of the vehicle, as Doug vanished past the front of the bus. Like Sam, Doug would be waiting for any escape attempts—the incapacitating agent took anywhere between twenty to sixty seconds to take effect, depending on the victim's physiology. It was a derivative of the opioid compounds the Russians had used in the Moscow theater hostage crisis of 2002, with a slightly lower lethality rate of fifteen percent. That rate could be reduced to three percent if the proper antagonist was administered in under two minutes.
Near the middle of the vehicle a window abruptly shattered and a bearded militant attempted to drag himself through. Sam mowed him down. The long rear window abruptly shattered and another frantic mujahid tried to escape. Sam leaned over the edge of the bus frame and eliminated that man, too. No more escape attempts were made.
At the sixty second mark, Sam leaped down and scanned the shattered rear window with her rifle. Apparently satisfied with what she saw, she raced past the undercarriage to join Doug at the front.
Ethan had been watching all that from behind the parked vehicles as he made his way forward. He emerged from cover and ran to the Rio that was beside the bus, shouting, "Maaz, pop the rear hatch!"
He threw the gear into the open cargo hold and grabbed a spare M16A4 that had been left out for him, then he hurried past the undercarriage of the bus. The front right tire was completely gone—the surrounding section had crumpled. Heat from the explosion had fused shrapnel to the metal.
Ethan reached the fore and nearly ran into Sam; she spun her A4 toward him, but dropped the weapon when she recognized him.
Ethan peered into the shattered windshield. The dead driver leaned against the side window, and blood pooled onto the glass from his head. Beyond him, through the dispersing fog, Ethan could discern the unconscious forms of the militants piled against the left side of the bus.
Doug emerged, carrying a body. He hoisted it through the broken windshield with Sam's help and together they lowered the lifeless form to the asphalt. Ethan couldn't see the man's features from where he stood.
Doug removed his gas mask and retrieved a needle—the antagonist necessary to treat the opioid-induced apnea.
"It's not him," Sam announced. She glanced at Doug questioningly.
Doug had been about to inject the man, but paused. "He's the only one in there without a full beard."
Sam shot Ethan an accusing look.
"How do you know—" Ethan began.
She kicked the unconscious body so that it faced him.
Ethan realized the man wasn't the emir immediately. Though he wore a mustache, the plump militant was far too young to be Al Taaraz. Maybe eighteen or nineteen years old.
Damn it.
"You were certain, were you?" Sam said bitterly.
"What do we do now?" Doug asked, putting away the needle without bothering to inject the man.
Sam peered past the edge of the bus, toward the compound that was still under attack. "Nothing. The mission is a scrub."
"Found the high value," William abruptly sent over the comm.
Sam exchanged a look with Ethan, then the two of them glanced down the street.
William was crouched near the flipped SUV. A man lay bound and gagged with duct tape at his feet.
Ethan, Sam and Doug loaded into the Rio and Maaz raced toward William. Gunfire continued all around them as resistance fighters rushed to join the battle.
Behind them, the technical parked in front of the compound exploded as an RPG struck it.
"That's him," Sam said when Maaz halted in front of William and the bound man. The operatives unloaded from the Rio and hurried to his side.
"The scholar?" Sam asked William.
The operative shook his head. "He wasn't in this Land Cruiser."
Sam turned to Ethan: "Find him."
Ethan hurried to the burning wreckage of the second SUV. It had been utterly destroyed thanks to the inaccurate aim of the resistance fighter. A quick scan of the inside revealed the blackened bodies of teen fighters. Moving toward the fore of the vehicle, he found Kareef's charred corpse on the hood. From his posture, with one hand extended in front of the other, it looked like he had been trying to crawl out of the wreckage but had finally succumbed to the flames. The fire had burned the flesh of his hands through to the bone, and all that remained were blackened claws gripping the front grille.
Another innocent of war.
A Rio screeched to a halt beside him.
"Get in!" Sam said from the backseat. Al Taaraz was sprawled in the seat beside her, still bound and gagged.
"The scholar is dead," Ethan told her.
She nodded, a moment of sadness washing over her features. Her face hardened and she repeated: "Get in."
Ethan loaded into the front passenger side of the vehicle.
The other Rio pulled up next to them; Ethan saw Doug and William inside.
"Let's move!" Sam told Maaz.
The driver raced down the street. Traffic picked up about a block north, as oncoming cars performed U-turns to avoid the carnage. A few vehicles had simply parked in the middle of the road to watch.
Ethan glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the other Rio close behind.
"We're clear, Othunan," Sam said into her Hytera. "Get your men out of there."
"We will vanish like silk in the wind," Othunan returned. Because of the range, his voice cut in and out with static. "Your driver already has the destination."
"And what's our destination?" Sam asked Maaz.
"Al Wattar Street," he answered. "The house of a sympathizer. A cobbler."
"There's nowhere closer?" Sam said.
"There is," Maaz answered. "But this cobbler has set aside a special room for our guest. Trust me, we want to go there."
Ethan glanced at Al Taaraz in the backseat. The man appeared dazed: his head rocked back and forth listlessly.
Sam noticed his gaze. "He was fairly shaken up after the RPG attack. William probably roughed him up a little, too."
"Look at me," Ethan told the man. "I said look at me!"
Those eyes managed to focus on him.
"All this effort and loss of life to grab you," Ethan said. "You better be worth it."
Al Taaraz couldn't answer, of course, not with his mouth taped.
"Going black." Sam produced an abaya from the backpack beside her and proceeded to pull the robe over the man's body. She completed his look with a niqab. For all intents and purposes it looked like a woman sat there.
Sam lowered her own veil, and Et
han did likewise.
Maaz drove with the flow of the traffic; for Ethan, it wasn't fast enough.
"How far to our destination?" Ethan asked him.
"Not far," Maaz answered.
Three Islamic State technicals roared past in the opposite lane, weaving between traffic. One truck bed contained a ZU-2, the others several militants. Likely men from a nearby checkpoint who had heard the call for backup and, eager for martyrdom, hurried to the site. Many more fighters would come, Ethan knew; they would probably cordon off the entire neighborhood to search for the emir.
Ethan retrieved the smartphone stowed in his abaya and activated the GPS app. He wanted to know exactly where the driver was taking them. Sam was probably doing the same on her laptop behind him.
Maaz turned onto a side street and slowed the Rio. He leaned toward Ethan to count the hand-painted house numbers on their right and stopped in front of a squat-looking building labelled thirty-three in Arabic. A cobbler's shop, judging from the poster of a sandal on the window. The shoe was displayed at an angle that hid the sole, of course.
Ethan glanced in the rearview mirror; the other Rio had halted just behind them.
"Stay here." Maaz left the vehicle and entered the house. He peered from the doorway a moment later and beckoned the others inside.
Keeping their niqabs lowered in case any of the neighbors were watching, Ethan and Sam left the vehicle. They lifted the fully-veiled Al Taaraz from the backseat and, sharing his weight between them, carried him to the front door. He didn't struggle.
Doug, William and the other driver joined them, and they shut the door behind them.
The grizzled proprietor turned over the sign on the window so that the outer portion read "closed." He then rolled one of the many area rugs aside, revealing a wooden trapdoor set into the stone floor. He pried it open.
Within, stairs led down into darkness.
"Welcome to our temporary black site, people," Sam said.
25
The Islamic State leadership had a tendency to casually sweep the kidnapping or death of a high ranking official under the rug, since it happened more often than anyone dared admit. There would be no announcement regarding Al Taaraz; a new emir would quietly assume command in Mosul and the Caliphate would act as if the man had been in charge the entire time. But it would be a few days before any of that transpired. The Shura council would have to be notified, first, likely via courier. Then an Internet meeting would be arranged. Finally, the new official would take office.