by Dalton Fury
“Guess not. It’s just that we may need to cook up a story in case I am asked about it. I am your wife, after all.”
Racer said, “You hit me with a frying pan.”
“Screw you,” she said with a laugh. “Do I look like the type who would hit someone with a frying pan?”
“More like a double-tap to the forehead.”
“Thanks … I think.”
* * *
Slapshot and Digger perspired under the hot midday sun as they sailed up the Nile on a small wooden sailboat called a felucca. They both wore white gallabiyas, traditional dress for Egyptian males consisting of a long, loose-fitting shirt.
They needed to get a good look at the complex from the riverside. Digger knew how to sail from childhood vacations in Lake Michigan, and Slapshot was school-trained on everything from a paddleboat up to a thirty-seven-foot 370 Justice, the largest Boston Whaler on the market, having spent several weeks in Key West with the rest of his team years ago in preparation for a secret hostage rescue in South America that was ultimately shelved when one of the American hostages was killed and the administration lost its nerve.
The two men, both in traditional clothing and skillfully sailing by in an old wooden boat, would attract much less scrutiny than a couple of obvious Westerners in a motorboat skulking just offshore.
As they headed past the three-story office building on the southern portion of the walled complex, Digger manned the sails while Slapshot used a mini HD camera hidden in a basket to get images of the rooftop, the grounds between the water and the walls, and the parking lot in between. They counted three guards, men in jeans and short-sleeved shirts carrying MISRs, the local brand of the Russian AK-47. One man at the fence on the riverbank held binoculars in his hand. He brought the optics up to his eyes and quickly focused on the sailboat passing by.
Digger and Slapshot just looked away, and the camera kept recording.
They noticed four trailers parked next to one another in the rear parking lot on the north side of the warehouse. They suspected this meant the loading bay was right there but out of view. They also noticed the fence came down into the waterline of the river, and a fifteen-meter pier jutted out into the river.
But there was no indication of what was inside the facility itself, either in the warehouse or the office building.
They opted against a second pass, instead continuing upriver to a landing point a few hundred yards away. Here they called Murphy, one of the CIA case officers, who came and picked them up.
SEVENTEEN
By early evening, all four members of the JSOC team had returned to the safe house. Curtis and his two men had spent a mostly fruitless day attempting mobile surveillance of some men who had spent a few hours outside of the walls of Maadi Land and Sea.
Kolt brought his team into the conference room and Curtis came in a moment later. Kolt said, “We took a look at Rhine and Stone from both sides, and there is definitely something up. Whatever is going on inside those buildings is a hell of a lot more important than some shipping concern. With all these security goons on the outside of the buildings, it’s guaranteed they’ve got guns on the inside, too. They are most definitely protecting something or someone.”
“Something like Libyan arms,” Curtis said confidently.
“Maybe,” allowed Kolt. “But it’s too early to know that for sure.” He could see Curtis’s mind was already made up about what was going on inside the walls of the shipping company. He would not let himself fall into groupthink without further analysis of the target. It was a dangerous mistake that he was determined to avoid.
Raynor said, “I scrolled through our recce photos of both the black side and the white side. We have fair-quality shots of two older cats, could be the MFICs, at objective Stone. You need to take a look.”
If Curtis was impressed, he hid it well. “Any chance you guys were burned by getting too close?”
“No chance.”
Curtis looked to Digger and Slapshot now. The two men shook their heads. Neither of them was particularly thrilled about getting second-guessed by CIA.
Myron Curtis next turned the lights down in the room and sat in front of the laptop attached to the large monitor on the desk. He took the SD cards handed to him by Racer, containing the snaps they’d taken while casing Rhine/Stone. He slipped one of them into a port on the side of the laptop. In seconds he was scrolling through photos from Racer’s camera, shots taken in the tiny park across the street from Maadi Land and Sea, and then from a higher angle. These were the pictures taken from the balcony of the condominium tower.
The camera’s magnification was impressive, as was Racer’s ability to keep the instrument steady. One after another, photos scrolled across the screen showing the warehouse, the office building, the parking lot, and several vehicles parked there. By using the zoom feature on the software, Curtis was able to zero in on individual license plates on a row of luxury cars by Stone — the office building — and get good close looks at men on the roof and partial shots of men on the balcony on the south side of the property.
He then put in the SD card from Digger’s camera. He clicked through the images taken at water level from the bow of the felucca.
He moved quickly through the images, he said he would scan them intently later, but he stopped suddenly on a pair of men standing together on the balcony, the same two Raynor had captured from the other side.
Curtis zoomed in tight on the men. One of them was turned away slightly from the Nile River, as he had been in the dozen other shots that included him. But the other man, fortyish and nice-looking, with slick black hair and narrow eyeglasses, seemed to be looking straight into the camera’s lens. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Myron Curtis said.
“You know him?” asked Slapshot.
“Not socially, no. But I know who he is. This is Ashraf Afifi. He was, until the fall of the Gaddafi regime, deputy director of JSO operations in North Africa. He had a reputation as something of a playboy in Tripoli. They say he actually nailed Gaddafi’s wife.”
Hawk remarked, “The colonel’s wife? Sounds like he has brass balls, too.”
“Holy shit,” agreed Digger. “So the bravery of our targets is not in question.”
Raynor smiled at the comments.
Curtis kept talking. “Everybody thought he was dead, killed in the last year’s uprising. In the three days we’ve had the remote cam up at Rhine, he has, most definitely, not come out of that property, unless he was in one of the vehicles with tinted windows. They have a Mercedes and a BMW with smoked glass.”
Curtis thought for a moment, happy that they had finally ID’d a former JSO employee here in Cairo, but confused by this revelation. “We assumed only lower-level men, foot soldiers and logisticians, would be working here in Maadi, as our link analysis indicates that this is just a storage and shipping facility for all their shit. We’ll have to double back on the intel to see what this means.”
Slapshot leaned forward with his arms crossed and said, “Curtis, I’m probably the dumbest guy in this room, but to me it means maybe your intel about this just being a shipping warehouse is wrong.”
Kolt spit some tobacco juice into an empty water bottle. It was a good point. Despite his aw-shucks manner, Slapshot was nobody’s fool.
Curtis bristled. “Anything is possible, but like I said, we have yet to ID Saleh, and we know he is a hands-on son of a bitch. He is a wanted man in Libya, and we know he has been in Libya, but the prospect of him moving into and out of the country at will seems pretty implausible to us.”
Kolt said, “The other guy in the picture. No chance that’s Saleh, is there?”
Curtis looked again, briefly, and said, “Can’t see his face. We don’t have any reference shots of the back of his head.”
Raynor stared down Curtis while he thought, Just asking, smartass.
They spent the next few minutes going over the rest of the photos. Finally Curtis said, “Next on the agenda. While you guys…”
— he looked at Hawk with a wink — “and girls … were outside Maadi Land and Sea, we spent the day tailing a couple of the other personalities. Just after noon three possible Saleh Organization men went by objective Chalice, a second JSO property a kilometer from Rhine/Stone, on Ibrahim Khedr Street. Two men went inside while a third stayed behind the wheel of the C–Class Mercedes that delivered everyone, and he parked out front. They were only there about twenty minutes, the driver outside was attentive enough, and our resources were thin, so we could not get any closer.”
Raynor cocked his head. “No need to get closer in that situation. Any idea what they were doing there?”
Curtis all but waved away Raynor’s comment. “Nothing important. It’s just an unoccupied two-story brick home, not far at all from Maadi Land and Sea. It’s also owned by the same front group, so we checked it out, but it’s a dry hole.”
“How do you know that? Did you go inside?”
“No, but it’s empty.”
“But you just said some dudes went there today.”
“They just dropped by. Did not stay long.”
“What, for cookies and milk? Guys like that don’t just drop by for no reason.”
“Relax Racer, it’s nothing.”
Kolt pressed him. “Why don’t you have audio out there? Bugging Maadi Land and Sea is a bitch, but if the Ibrahim Khedr house is just a house with no security, can’t your guys get in there and tech it up with remote surveillance?”
“Trust me, Raynor. It’s not that easy. In Libya, these guys swept for bugs each and every day at all their properties. There is no reason to assume the same would not hold true here.”
“Aren’t your mics better than their sweepers?”
Curtis shrugged. “We had a pretty good understanding of the technology Libyan intelligence used in electronic surveillance countermeasures, so I’d like to think we have the ability to put in something they couldn’t detect. But we can’t say for sure these ex — Libyan intel guys aren’t getting their tech equipment from better manufacturers than they had access to in the old days. For all we know they might have detection means we can’t fool. We cannot allow this op to be compromised by Saleh’s goons turning up a bug.”
Kolt shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense, Curtis. If they had that high-speed shit in there, then they wouldn’t need all the overt goons with guns.”
Curtis snapped, “We aren’t taking that chance. They find a single bug and the entire operation will be compromised. We are too close to risk that.”
“Look, what about something stand-off, like laser mics? We brought a couple. We can use the apartment across from Chalice and try it out.”
Curtis shook his head. “We don’t use those. They suck.”
Kolt shrugged. “They are better than nothing, which is what you are getting right now. The laser microphones pick up sounds inside a location by detecting vibrations on window glass that could then be converted to synthesized speech. Or some techno shit like that.”
“We have a remote cam on Chalice in the apartment, just like at Rhine/Stone. If somebody shows up there for any length of time we’ll head over there and check it out. But in three days there has been exactly twenty minutes of action at that location. We are going to focus on Maadi Land and Sea. That’s where the action is.”
Kolt was not going to let this go. “What if those men went by today to inventory the munitions they have stored there? Look, we’ve got the kit and the personnel,” Kolt said. “Stupid not to give it a shot.”
“Racer,” the CIA man insisted, “you and your team are going to focus on Maadi Land and Sea.”
Curtis was clearly getting annoyed at all the second-guessing from the team he assumed was there just to do his bidding. But Kolt had done the circle jerk with agency folks before and was not one to back down from a confrontation, especially when it involved a mission as important as this. “Why?”
Curtis looked at Raynor for a long time. Then he shrugged. “When we learned about this house, our first assumption was that perhaps Saleh, or maybe one of his top lieutenants, was using it as a residence. That’s why we set up surveillance. But I don’t think Saleh is here in Cairo, and if he is, he’s probably in Stone. We’ll continue to do spot checks on objective Chalice, but we’re not nugging that place with twenty-four-hour surveillance, because no one is living there, and we know they aren’t storing missiles there.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
Now Curtis shouted back at Raynor. “They have an eight-thousand-square-foot warehouse two klicks away that is protected with walls, cams, and guns! Why the fuck would they stick the SA-24s in an unoccupied building in a residential neighborhood?”
It was obvious to Raynor that Curtis did not like having his assumptions questioned. It was SOP in Delta that, if an assaulter or sniper thought the officer’s assumptions were shit, he sure better speak up about it. Myron Curtis obviously didn’t have thick skin. He was in charge. It was everyone else’s job to shut the hell up and take orders.
Kolt said, “Okay, Curtis. I understand. You pushed a deployment order through because you thought ordering up some JSOC operators would give you your own little squad of dumb asses who would come over and follow your orders without question. Am I right?”
Curtis glared at Raynor, and softly he said, “And then, in a cruel twist of fate, I get you.”
* * *
The meeting broke up a moment later, and Kolt’s team began filing back to the two rooms in the back of the safe house reserved for them. But Kolt lagged behind in the meeting room to talk to Curtis. He wanted to toss the guy out the second-floor window, but he fought the urge, and decided to try and right this ship before it completely capsized.
“Curtis, there is too much at stake here for you and me to get into a pissing match. It’s not about your authority or my authority. It’s about getting those damn missiles off the market.”
“Don’t patronize me, Racer. There is nobody who wants that more than me.”
“I believe you. But you aren’t going to get it done like this. Look, I’ve got no problem with cutting out a level or two of the bullshit layers of bureaucracy in order to complete my mission, and it looks to me you roll the same way.”
The younger man just nodded.
“But you are walking on a razor’s edge with this op. Your security is shit, you aren’t sharing crucial intel with Langley, and it looks to me like you had us come over here to hang around until we somehow get the go-ahead to hit the warehouse. It doesn’t work like that, Curtis. We have to get some real indicators, some actionable intel that says there are munitions at objective Rhine, before the JSOC commanding general will even consider us going in there.”
Curtis said, “I know that. I know we can’t get into Rhine without proof that the Libyans have munitions. But I’ll get the proof, and when I do, I need you and your team ready to hit it. You need to concentrate on knowing that property like the back of your hand.”
Kolt sighed. “If we get the hit, we’ll execute the hit. But we aren’t hitting shit without authority from my boss at Bragg. In the meantime, let us help you. We’re not just shooters. We probably have more experience tailing targets than your guys.”
“These Libyans are good. I saw what happened in Tripoli with Saleh’s men there, I can’t let an overzealous operator — ”
“‘Overzealous’? That’s a big word, Curtis. You learn that in case officer school?”
Curtis paused a long time. Finally he said, “I know all about you, Major Kolt Raynor. I know what happened in Pakistan in ’09.”
Raynor’s jaw tightened. He leaned closer to Curtis and spoke slowly now. “You don’t know shit, and you need to think very carefully about the next fucking word that comes out of your mouth.”
Curtis nodded with a cruel smile. “I had friends at Langley look into you. You are a piece of work, Raynor. You have a track record of leaving body bags wherever you go. I just might need a gunslinger or two on thi
s mission, if it comes down to it, so I’m not going to send you home. But for now you are a loose cannon and a danger to this op. You want to conduct surveillance on Chalice? Fine, go ahead. That will keep you out of my hair. Me and my team will find intel linking Saleh or the munitions to Maadi Land and Sea, and then I’ll send you — correction — JSOC will send you in to blow some shit up and to kill some sons of bitches. You might want to focus on getting ready for that.”
Raynor turned and left the room without another word.
* * *
When Kolt returned to the room he was sharing with Cindy, he sat down on his bunk to pull off his boots.
She faced him, sitting on her own little bunk and firing up her secure laptop. “What’s the deal with you two guys?”
“No deal. We met a couple weeks ago.”
“And something bad happened?”
“Only to the bad guys. I guess Curtis doesn’t see it that way.”
“Am I going to have to be the referee between you two?” she asked jokingly.
Kolt did not like the inference. He was pissed about Curtis, pissed about the potential for this operation to fail, and he did not like being teased by the pilot program girl from training. He was in charge here, and she was getting a bit too relaxed with their banter. “No, Hawk. You will not.”
To her credit, Cindy immediately realized she’d gone too far teasing about a serious situation. “Sorry, boss. I was out of line.”
“Not a problem. Stay focused on the mission, Carrie.”
“Yes, sir. I mean … right, Frank.”
* * *
The Delta personnel spent the next day doing more recce of Rhine and Stone and setting up the laser mics in the apartment across the street from Chalice. Much of their surveillance work was tedious and much of it was repetitive, but Kolt knew that they would need much more intel on the locations. One had a tendency to make dangerous assumptions with a single look at a target. It would take multiple recons to understand the daily patterns inside the walls of Maadi Land and Sea.