Arabian Collusion

by James Lawrence

  To fit into the airplane, the rotor wings had to be folded on top of each other. We spent a few minutes moving them into flying position and then locking them down. Sachse did the final pre-flight check on the Little Bird and then gave control of the aircraft to McDonald over the radio comms. We were in an isolated corner of the airport, but there was no guarantee security wouldn’t come around. McDonald started the aircraft while the four of us—Burnia, Jankowski, Migos and I— kitted up and secured ourselves on the bench seats of the aircraft, two of us on each side.

  We were all wearing GPNVG-19 night vision with the four lenses that made all of us look like aliens sitting aboard the aircraft. We were wearing black tactical uniforms, and body armor vests, helmets, and black balaclavas that covered most of our faces. The rotor blades increased speed and we lifted off. The Little Bird cleared the airport boundary fence by only twenty feet.

  To avoid radar we flew at treetop level. Central Turkey is hilly and heavily wooded. We avoided the towns on the way to our destination. The flight was thirty-five minutes long at a speed of sixty knots. Halfway to the objective, Cheryl’s voice came over the radio. She was looking at our objective from space.

  “Two guards inside the guard shack covering the front gate. No movement outside of the main residence. Three horses are corralled outside the stable. No activity coming from the house.”

  The Little Bird touched down in an open field surrounded by a forest a little over a mile from the estate. The aircraft began shut-down procedure while the four of us moved into the wood line and began our infiltration of the estate. The terrain was difficult. Although there was not a lot of underbrush, there were plenty of rocks, and hills were steep. It took almost forty-five minutes to reach the eight-foot-high stone wall surrounding the estate. Migos and I moved to the wall and pulled security. I took a knee and oriented right, he did the same, only orienting to the left.

  “The far side is clear,” Cheryl’s voice said into our headsets.

  Burnia came forward to the wall and placed a lightweight titanium assault ladder against it. He climbed to the top and dropped a second ladder against the opposite side. Jankowski followed Burnia, and then Migos and I followed. The distance from the wall to the house was two hundred yards. To the right of the house were the horse corral and barn. To the left was the guest house our satellite recon identified as the barracks for the security detail. Burnia and Jankowski followed the wall toward the front gate. Migos headed to the west wing of the house. I went to the guest house and emplaced two claymore mines connected by a strand of detonating-cord fifty yards in front of the house. I aimed the anti-personnel mines at the front door. I pulled out the remote sensor from my pack; it was little more than a motion detector with a five-second delay. I set it up facing the door and moved to the estate house to link up with Migos.

  When I reached the grey stone exterior of the western side of the house, Migos was still emplacing the GSM frequency jammer. The jammer would shut off all cell phone service in a three-hundred-yard radius. I used the bolt cutters from my backpack and cut the phone lines, then I opened the electric box and switched off the power to the house. Burnia and Jankowski linked up with us at the front door. Burnia worked the lock with his pick tools. Jankowski held a halogen tool in his hand, just in case there was a dead bolt. I tested the PEQ-18 laser on the DDM4 300 blackout ISR and got ready. The door swung open and we filed in quietly.

  Cheryl and Dave weren’t able to find plans to the house. Based on the shape and the view outside, our best guess was that Omer would locate the master bedroom on the second floor facing the picturesque lake in the back. The bedrooms on the second floor were our objective, and our goal was to get to them and capture Omer before things got loud. The estate was huge and home to Omer’s entire family that included his wife, seven kids, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren. We definitely wanted to avoid a gunfight in the house.

  Our two teams started in the center of the second floor and worked outward. It was 3:00 a.m. and everyone was fast asleep. Migos and I went left and stopped at the first door on the lake side. I turned the handle on the door and quietly entered the room. It was an open room with large bookcases and shelves along the walls. Through my white phosphorous night vision goggles, everything looked like it was on a black and white television. There was a desk and lots of art and military objects on the shelves. I made a note to come back later to gather intel, but first we needed to find Omer.

  “Office, no joy,” I said to Migos.

  Migos led us to the next door in the corridor. He entered first; I covered the hallway. A minute later I heard Jankowski’s voice.

  “Jackpot.”

  “Bring him to the office. It’s the first room Migos and I went into,” I said.

  Migos and I went to the office.

  “Site exploitation,” I said over the radio.

  This time I turned on the IR light attached to the side of my helmet and began a proper search. Migos did the same. A few minutes later, Jankowski and Burnia showed up with a bound and gagged Omer. He looked like he still hadn’t recovered from the Taser.

  “Was he alone?” I asked.

  “No, his wife was with him. We zapped her and tied her up. She’s gagged and still in her bed.”

  I went over and kneeled next to Omer who was lying on his back, eyes wide open.

  “Omer, buddy. Do you remember what you did to the people in those two villas in Homs to get the book? Well, I’ve bad news for you. If you don’t help us find a copy of that book, the same thing is going to happen here. It’s called payback.”

  Omer nodded. Burnia cut the flex cuffs holding his feet and pulled him to a standing position. He held on to Omer as he walked to a wall. At the wall was a painting; Burnia removed the painting, and behind it was a safe. Burnia cut the flex cuffs on Omer’s hands while I shined a regular pen light onto the safe.

  “Open it,” I said.

  Omer worked the combination, pulled the lever, and the safe opened. Before he could reach inside, Burnia smothered him and tied him back up. I aimed the flashlight into the vault and found a portable hard drive, several USBs and a stack of papers, including one envelope thick enough to hold a book. I removed them and stashed them in my backpack. Then I shut the white-light flashlight off and returned my night vision in front of my eyes.

  “We’re still undetected. We’ll extract outside the wall and let whoever is inside this place continue to sleep. Burnia threw Omer over his shoulder and we filed down the wide staircase that led to the estate’s grand entryway. We exited the same door we came in, making sure to lock it on our way out. The guardhouse had doors that opened on both sides of the exterior wall. We walked out through the guardhouse door, and had to step over the two dead bodies dropped by Burnia and Jankowski on the way in as we exited.

  “McDonald, what’s the status on our ride?”

  “Two minutes.”

  Seconds later, I heard the whump whump of the tiny helicopter approach.

  “Activity coming from the guest house!” I heard Migos say.

  I looked through the steel bars of the front gate and saw five figures leaving from the front door of the house. The lead man was already off the front stairs of the porch, and the rest were close behind him. They had already triggered the mine sensor. Seconds later the explosion flashed white through my night vision goggles. Hundreds of lethal metal balls from the twin claymore blast instantly killed all five men and blew out every window in the front of the house.

  The Little Bird touched down on the access road fifty yards from our position. We hopped on the aircraft and secured ourselves on the bench seats with retention cords. I couldn’t see them, but I knew Burnia and Jankowski were holding Omer between them.

  The flight back to the airport gave me a lot of idle time to worry about getting out of Turkey. The GSM Jammer only had enough battery power to last an hour. If the people alive in the house were able to use a cell phone and call the authorities before our take of
f, we might have a problem. They were sure to look for the helicopter at the airport. We needed to get out of Turkish airspace as fast as possible. I was sure Sachse had already loaded up the pallets and cleared us through customs. Hopefully, we could land, load the Little Bird, taxi and take off before any alerts were made.

  We landed next to the tail ramp of the C130. We raced into action as soon as we touched down. Burnia dragged Omer into the C130, while the rest of us got to work breaking down rotor blades. Sachse helped, and the four of us pushed the Little Bird up the ramp and into the airplane cargo hold. The tail ramp came up before we even had the MH-6 tied down. We began to taxi as McDonald and Sachse were strapping down the helicopter.

  I grabbed a headset and walked over to the last window on the side of the plane in the far back. The pilots were chatting about our location and place in the queue. We were third in line to take off. They had planes landing on the same runway and it was going to take ten minutes. The communication system was connected to Paphos via an onboard satellite link. I called Cheryl.

  “Are you hearing anything from the Turks?” I asked.

  “Nothing yet. We can see you in the line-up, and there’s no police or military activity directed at you.”

  Our flight plan was to Budapest, Hungary. The distance due north to the Black Sea and to the international boundary is just under two hundred miles, which at maximum speed in our C130J was going to take us twenty-five minutes. The max speed of our Hercules is 410 knots, which is painfully slow when compared to Mach 2 for the Turkish F-16s. The air defenses along the Turkish coast were another concern. We had excellent intel on the Turkish ADA positions and our route was plotted to avoid them. We had worked out a plan with several contingencies based on when the alert went out to the Turkish Air Force to stop us. The best case was that the alert wouldn’t come out.

  I sat in a nylon mesh seat along the fuselage and buckled in. Jankowski handed me a can of Diet Coke and I did my best to appear calm as I waited to hear the good word from the pilots.

  It didn’t take long. The pitch of the four turbo-props steadily climbed as they went to full power. I checked my watch as we raced down the runway. It had been seventeen minutes waiting in the queue to take off; now we needed another twenty-five to get out of Turkish airspace. The plane climbed steadily until it leveled off at ten thousand feet.

  I was on the end closest to the tail gate. Migos was sitting next to me. Sachse was next to him. Burnia, Jankowski, and Omer were seated across from us. McDonald was forward in the cockpit. Now that he had all those flight hours ferrying us around remotely in the Little Bird, he liked to think of himself as a pilot. We were all buckled in. We had the white lights on in the airplane. None of the guys were talking; everyone was straight-faced and sober.

  “Turkish Air Force has issued intercept orders,” Cheryl said over the intercom. I looked at my watch; we needed fourteen more minutes to reach freedom.”

  The plane dropped so fast it felt like my stomach was in my mouth.

  Before long, we were flying one hundred feet above the ground. We were bouncing and jiggling around the terrain as we raced through the dark night. It’s times like this that I appreciated the quality of the former Air Force Special Operations pilots we had on the Trident team. I knew we had the best pilots, best plane, with the best countermeasures on the market. We were going against a force equipped with NATO Air Defenses and F-16s. If the Turks catch us, we’re dead, I thought. The two US Air Force bases are located south of Ankara, and neither would be notified by the Turks to scramble aircraft for this emergency, so the number of on-call ready interceptors available to the Turks was very limited. Our intel had it pegged to only two aircraft.

  The chatter from the two pilots was steady and calm. I heard the radar alarm over my headset.

  “That’s a ground-based radar system, you’ll outrun it in a minute,” I heard Cheryl say. “Change heading to twelve degrees on my order; stand by for my go,” she said.

  I knew Cheryl was going to divert our course once we got out of range of the radar. She didn’t want the air defenders to plot our flight path so the fighter jets could track us down.

  As we were waiting to make the turn, a different alarm went off. The vibration of the countermeasures firing from the wings shook the aircraft. These weren’t flares and chaff like in the old days; the aircraft had fourth generation countermeasures that can defeat both heat- seekers and radar guided missiles. Everybody on the team was wearing headsets and listening the same as I was. I don’t think any of us were breathing.

  A full minute went by.

  “Go!” I heard Cheryl say. The plane banked steeply to the right. Everybody was frozen still for another two minutes.

  “Feet wet,” I heard over my headset. We were finally over the Black Sea. I looked at my watch and stared at the second hand. It swept the face once; halfway through the second rotation, I heard over the headset, “Touchdown.” We had crossed over the line into international waters. We stayed low skimming the waves, but returned to our original course. We went back up to ten thousand feet before entering Romanian airspace. It was another three hours before we landed in Macedonia. We were all very happy to hand Omer and the intel we grabbed over to the CIA agent who met us at the tarmac of the airport. We refueled and then headed back to Paphos. This time when we took off, nobody buckled up; instead. we erected hammocks inside the airplane and went to sleep.

  “I don’t think we should be taking this airplane anywhere near Turkey in the future,” Migos said from his hammock.

  “We’ll change the corporate ownership, the tail number; before long we’ll be landing in Istanbul,” I said.

  “Not me. I draw the line at surface-to-air missiles. This is not the first time that has happened.”

  “I’ll bet you won’t be joking about how easy the Air Force has it for a while,” Sachse said in his Kentucky twang. We all laughed at that.

  Chapter 20

  London, UK

  The Prince paced in front of his office desk. He was still at his London estate where he had been ensconced since fleeing Riyadh so many months before. He nervously stroked his mustache as he paced. His approach to life had always been as if it were a game of chess. He was winning, but he had to sacrifice a few pieces along the way to get to his position. Omer and Abbas had both dropped off the map, which was worrisome. But, on the positive side, his children were again by his side, and his archenemy was about to lose his Kingdom. Saudi was on the brink of a full-scale civil war, and Turki had every intention of pushing it over the edge with his next move.

  The thought of the torment he was causing his cousin made him smile. He couldn’t help but think, if given the chance, MBS would gladly return his billions several times over if it would erase the last weeks of unrest that threatened his Kingdom. He had no intention of making it that easy; he wasn’t going to let up until the Crown Prince fled Saudi and exiled himself at his French palace. Even that wouldn’t be the end of it, because Prince Turki had yet another surprise waiting for him in France.

  The disappearance of Omer wasn’t his main worry. Omer had been essential early on, as he was the person who brought the lost Quran to his attention. In the beginning of the plan, Omer was very active operationally, particularly with the attack on the Shirin compound and seizure of the artifacts. It made sense that his activities would eventually be discovered. The Israelis, Americans, Saudis, or even one of the European countries whose citizens he had massacred in Homs had probably snatched him. It didn’t matter. Omer had never been afforded the privilege of learning the Prince’s grand design.

  Abbas was a different matter altogether. His familiarity with the Prince was much greater, and there was no good reason he should have come to the attention of an intelligence agency. Which could only mean he was not aware of something important that was going on. This not knowing concerned him greatly. As a precaution, he decided to relocate to someplace where he could have heavily armed security and the support of a
friendly government. Morocco was the place. He had an excellent relationship with King Mohammed and the cash-strapped former playboy was always willing to turn a blind eye in exchange for a generous donation.

  He owned a beautiful estate in Tangier. He had not visited in almost a year, and he missed it. This would be the perfect time to make use of it. The home was isolated, easily defended, and would offer him the privacy he needed to stay off the grid until it was safe again to show himself.

  Chapter 21

  Paphos, Cyprus

  I was in my perch on the fly deck of the Sam Houston, still docked at the Paphos Marina. A portable fan was gyrating on the table next to me to combat the heat. I watched Mike as he passed Coco the flamingo on his way down the narrow walkway to the marina gate. The guard let Mike pass, and he continued toward the Sam Houston with his distinctive limp. I waved him aboard, and he climbed up the stairs and took a seat on the couch directly opposite me. I got up and got a bottle of Sam Adams for each of us from the mini-fridge.

  “I’ll bet after spending most of the day with Dr. Forrest you can use a beer,” I said while handing him a frosty bottle.

  “He’s an impressive guy. With this latest line of inquiry, Cheryl and Dave seem to have knocked over a bee’s nest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re under a cyber-attack. They’ve been defending against a deluge of hacking attempts from an unknown source.”

  “Do they know where it’s coming from, or by whom?”

  “They don’t know. They have a super powerful AI driven supercomputer that reacts at the speed of light to threats. Over the past six hours, they’ve had their hands full protecting the system from a very sophisticated attacker that doesn’t know enough to quit.”