Tier One Wild df-2

by Dalton Fury

  So Digger and Slapshot sailed by in a felucca for a second time at midmorning and a third time in late afternoon. Raynor and Hawk did their honeymoon routine again. They hired an English-speaking tour guide to take them around the neighborhoods of Cairo so they could take pictures with their high-end camera equipment. At their direction he drove them over the Ring Road Bridge spanning the Nile, and then south on the Cairo-Aswan road. Here, in a wide spot of greenery along the river, they stopped and ate a picnic lunch while their guide ate his lunch back at the car. Kolt took his camera, attached a 400mm lens, and took more than one hundred pictures of the target location across a hundred yards of blue water.

  As they added to their target folder, the target was beginning to look more and more difficult to take down. Armed men, motion lights, fences, open ground to cover.

  The AFO cell recognized that the hit, if it came, was going to be a real bitch.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the late afternoon two flights arrived at Cairo International Airport within minutes of one another: an Egypt Air flight from Beirut and an Olympic Air flight from Athens. From among the hundreds of passengers disembarking from the two aircraft, seven men converged just past customs control. They ranged in age from thirty-three to forty-four, they all wore fine tailored suits, and their luggage was minimal. They all climbed into a single minibus at curbside pickup. From there they were driven through traffic-clogged streets to the Hotel Sofitel Cairo Maadi Towers and Casino.

  The seven men took keys to four suites, all on the ninth floor. From their balconies they had views of the pyramids in the distance, but they instead pulled the draperies closed in their rooms and slipped NE PAS DÉRANGER cards in their key locks.

  They took no calls and held no meetings that evening.

  They were not businessmen; they were Quds Force, Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.

  They were spies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

  One of the seven was the deputy director of the organization, and the other six men were his security force. Each and every one of them had military special operations experience. They had worked missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon and Syria, and they had come to Egypt, for want of a better explanation, so their boss could do some shopping.

  The leader of their group was here to meet with Aref Saleh, formerly of the employ of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, to purchase weapons, but for now they would wait here in their hotel until given further instructions by the shadowy arms merchant.

  The Russian-made Igla-S missiles that he had for sale were worth the inconvenience.

  Iran had shoulder-fire SAMs galore. Igla-S’s as well as others. But the Iranians weren’t looking to increase their own armaments stores. Instead, they were gift-shopping. The SAMs they would acquire here in Egypt could be traced back to Libya, not Iran, so they created real plausible deniability.

  The mandate of Quds Force was, in part, to build underground Islamic organizations throughout the world.

  They were here to secure the purchase of twenty Igla-S systems to deliver them to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Lebanese themselves could have arranged this, but the Iranians were working as cutouts as well as benefactors to Hezbollah, so they were here instead of the Lebanese.

  * * *

  In the al Qaeda base disguised as a village near Wadi Bana in southern Yemen, a soft knock at a wooden door echoed in a baked brick room. David Doyle, clean-shaven and with his brown hair cut short and spiked, stood looking out a tiny bare window, his back to the door. A simple aluminum table sat in the middle of the room, and around it were three chairs.

  Miguel sat at one of the chairs with a notepad and a pen in front of him. At the sound of the knock he called out in excellent English, “Come in.”

  David Doyle joined his second-in-command at the table now.

  The door opened and a dark-complexioned man with short hair and trim sideburns entered slowly. He wore baggy cargo shorts with sandals, and a sweatshirt that made him perspire in the still air.

  “Good morning,” he said to the men on the other side of the table. His voice was tentative.

  “Good morning,” said David Doyle. “Please, have a seat. This won’t take long.”

  The man sat in an aluminum chair that scraped the brick flooring as he scooted forward. Thin beads of sweat streamed from his temples; he wiped his face with the forearm of his white sweatshirt. The garment bore the orange silhouette of the head of a longhorn steer and the word TEXAS above it.

  “How’s it going?” asked Miguel.

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” the man asked, his accent thick but his English easily understood.

  Miguel did not answer. Instead, Doyle took over the questioning. “What is your name?”

  “Jaza Hussein, but everybody calls me Jerry.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m originally from Pakistan, but now — ”

  “What do you do, Jerry?”

  Jerry smiled, pinched the front of his UT sweatshirt. “I’m working on my master’s in public policy at UT in Austin.”

  “Are you, now?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, then said, “Yep.” His second try sounded more natural, less stilted and formal.

  “That’s cool, Jerry. I hear that’s a nice town.”

  Jerry nodded quickly, spoke quickly. His nerves showed. “Great town. Got a little flat right off of Guadelupe Street.”

  “A what off of Guadelupe?”

  “An … an apartment?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “An apartment. Yes. In my country we call them flats, but here in the States we — ”

  “I understand,” said Doyle.

  Miguel looked down at the papers in his hand. “I had a friend who went to UT. I visited him once.”

  Jerry’s eyes widened slightly, but he nodded and smiled. “Cool.”

  Miguel then looked up from his papers. “I forgot, what does everyone at UT Austin call that stretch of Guadelupe there by the campus?”

  Jerry’s eyes narrowed in thought. They looked off to the side slightly. Then back to his interviewers. “Yes. That is referred to as … ‘the drag.’”

  Doyle said, “You don’t sound too sure about that, Jimmy.”

  The interviewee smiled nervously. “Jerry. It’s Jerry. And, yes, I am certain. It is called the drag.”

  “What was the name of the guy who shot all those people from the clock tower?”

  Now there was no hesitation. Jerry was emboldened. “Whitman. A total motherfucking asshole.” He said it as if it were all part of the man’s name.

  Doyle and Miguel looked the man over for a moment more. Finally Doyle said, “Well done, my friend.”

  The operative across from them smiled, his chest filled with pride. But Doyle then said, “But it needs to be a lot better.”

  Jerry said, “It will be, David. I promise.”

  “Good.”

  “Very well. Leave us, and send in the next student.”

  Jerry stood with a nod and a slight bow and left the room. As he shut the door Miguel said, “Not bad for one day of study. That guy is Pakistani. Never been to the U.S. Never been to the UK.”

  Doyle was a tougher instructor. He said, “He’s got the language, and he’s coming along on the facts quickly enough, but he has to get rid of the nerves. The objective isn’t to make these men into Americans, it is to make them into foreign students in America. I don’t give a damn if a cheeseburger makes him puke, I just want him to act comfortable when questioned.”

  “It has only been one day, David. He will be fine. They will all be fine.”

  Doyle just grunted. His entire operation depended on his operators’ ability to blend into the fabric of the United States.

  There was a fresh knock at the door.

  “Come in,” said Miguel.

  It went on like this for the entire morning. These were just the initial interviews, the easy ones. Over the next few days Doyle and Migu
el planned to put each of the men through several more, each different from and more difficult than the last. The two leaders would play the role of busybodies sitting next to the men on a bus, then they would be curious and suspicious citizens, racially profiling the men and challenging them on what they were doing near an airport.

  Finally, Doyle would pose as a police officer, and he would pull the men over in their car, one at a time, and question them against their documents.

  Each of the twelve operatives had memorized stacks of material relating to their legends, and Doyle would make certain they knew every last line of it. He would also make sure they could recite it back while relaxed, while exhausted, while scared, and while angry.

  This, and their ability to press a trigger that launched a missile that would kill hundreds of infidels, and to repeat this action over and over and over, would determine their ability to carry out the mission.

  NINETEEN

  Slapshot and Digger had spent the hours since dawn swapping thirty-minute shifts watching location Chalice from their hide — ten feet back from the ground-floor bedroom window of the flat across the street and fifty yards west of the Saleh property.

  Slapshot was on duty now, seated in the chair in the darkened room, his head covered in a dark brown sheet and his arms resting on the table in front of him on either side of the Schmidt of Bender variable power spotter’s scope resting there. He made no sudden movements that could be seen by anyone either on the street or in any windows in the neighborhood.

  To the right of the scope on the table was the laser microphone. To use the device, he would have to open the bedroom window ten feet in front of him a crack by sliding out of his position, and then low-crawling across the floor to the window, and then opening the window slowly and carefully before retracing his movements back to his chair.

  Neither he nor Digger had detected any countersurveillance in the area, but they weren’t taking any chances. Their SOP for this type of surveillance determined their actions.

  The CIA men, however, were not as careful.

  Twice the day before, Murphy and Wychowski dropped in on the hide; both times they entered from the back of the building, not on Ibrahim Khedr, and they kept the lights off throughout the one-bedroom apartment. Still, Digger and Slapshot admonished the men for making too much noise, noise that could not have been heard from the street, but possibly could have been detected from adjoining flats in the building.

  Both times the CIA men rolled their eyes at the over-the-top OPSEC protocols of the high-strung Hardy Boys, and both times Digger and Slapshot stuck to their guns and told the Agency men to either get the hell out or shut the fuck up.

  At ten o’clock on the nose, two black SUVs that Slapshot recognized as belonging to the Aref Saleh Organization pulled up to the curb in front of objective Chalice. In total eight men climbed out of the trucks, and the drivers pulled back out into the light traffic and disappeared up the road, back in the direction of Maadi Land and Sea.

  The eight men walked straight up the steps to the entrance of the home and went inside.

  “Heads up.” Slapshot penciled the time into the log after calling out softly to Digger, who was lounging on the bed in the dark behind him. “Looks like something’s about to go down.”

  “Fuckin’ finally,” Digger said, then he rolled slowly off the bed and headed over to the table. He sat behind the laser microphone, woke the laptop attached to it back up with a swipe of his finger across the track pad, and slipped the attached headphones over his ears.

  While he was doing all this, Slapshot low-crawled to the window and cracked it open. It took him a minute to make it back to the desk, and by the time he returned, Digger was receiving broken transmissions from inside the house across the street.

  “Anything?” asked Slapshot.

  “Yeah. Garbled Arabic. I’m recording.”

  “I’ll push it to Racer. Maybe Curtis or one of his guys can translate the audio feed.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes after the Aref Saleh Organization men arrived at the home on Ibrahim Khedr, all was silent in the house. Whatever was going on with the eight men inside, it did not involve talking in any one of the front rooms where Digger could beat his laser’s focal point off the window and back to his receiver. So far, the laser mike was worthless.

  Just before ten-thirty, however, Slaphshot moved his eye out of the spotter’s scope so that he could take a sip of lukewarm tea from a mug. The entire act was slow and deliberate and covered by the brown sheet over him. Before he nestled his eye back in the rubber eye cup of the scope he looked out the window and saw a beige Range Rover pulling up a block east of Chalice in front of a luxury apartment building. This in itself was not unusual, cars came and went on this residential street with mind-numbing regularity, but when no one climbed out of the Range Rover after half a minute Slapshot directed his spotter scope on the vehicle and took a closer look.

  Inside, two men sat in the front seats, their eyes directed up the street to the west.

  Seconds after this a second vehicle, this one a two-door Honda Civic, pulled to the curb to the west of Chalice, within fifty feet of Slapshot’s position. He did not need his Schmidt of Bender scope to look into this vehicle. He could clearly see two men sitting there, looking down the street to the east.

  “Who are these guys?” he asked softly. “Check this plate number.”

  Digger pulled off his headphones — he wasn’t receiving anything in them anyway — and followed Slapshot’s eyes to the car just below them outside. Slapshot then directed him to the other car, across the street and on their right. Slowly and purposefully Digger lifted a set of binoculars off the table and looked through them.

  After a few seconds he remarked. “They are new.”

  “You’re right. They don’t look like Saleh’s men.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  Digger ran his finger down the list of license plate numbers Curtis’s team had tied to the Aref Saleh Organization. No hit. “New kids on the block, bro.”

  Just then the doors opened on both of the new vehicles on the street. All four men climbed out, and then shut the doors behind them quietly. They fanned out, one man on each sidewalk, both on the north side and the south side of the street. Two men to the east of Chalice, two men to the west of Chalice. They began walking around the area, looking from the sidewalk into the windows of the buildings around them, taking their time.

  Slapshot spoke even more softly than before. “These guys are thorough. Better than Saleh’s men.”

  “Damn right,” Digger said, using his binoculars to get an extremely close look at one of the men directly in front of his overwatch. “And these are gorillas. Not intelligence desk jockeys, like Saleh’s guys.”

  Slapshot agreed. “All of them are printing concealed weapons. Security goons. Doubt any of them have ever sat behind a desk in their lives.”

  “I’ll call Racer and let him know it’s getting hot out here. These guys obviously are working an advance. Something is going down.”

  The men in the street all had black curly hair and short, trim, beards. All four of them were in their twenties or thirties, and their loose-fitting suits had bulges at the hips and under the arms, where pistols and submachine guns were, no doubt, stored for quick retrieval.

  Slapshot asked, “Wonder who the client is?”

  “Unless these guys are lost, or just window-shopping, we’ll know soon.”

  After three minutes of scanning by the four men in the street, another Land Rover SUV pulled up in front of objective Chalice. Slapshot looked through his glass and saw a big driver and a big passenger in the front. A single passenger sat in the backseat. There was a conversation that lasted several seconds among them all. The Americans in overwatch wondered if one of the security men already on the street was communicating with the three in the SUV via radio earpieces, but Slapshot did not move his scope to check.

  Finally the front passenger got out of
the SUV and opened the back door. As the man climbed out, two of the four security men who had been watching the street collapsed on their protectee and followed him up the stairs, their hands inside their jackets, their heads on a swivel.

  The man at the center of this scrum looked a couple years older than the others, and he was clearly in charge. But he was not a personality Slapshot recognized.

  Digger had already lifted the camera with the 400mm zoom lens. He snapped dozens of rapid digital shots of the men, focusing on the man in charge, still careful to not make any sudden movements that could be detected from the street.

  In seconds the men disappeared inside the two-story home and Digger went back to the laser mic.

  Slapshot went off glass and focused his naked eye closely on the man right in front of their position.

  The man had been leaning against the thin trunk of a tree that grew alongside the road, and his eyes had been scanning the street to the west. But while Slapshot monitored him, the security man pushed off the tree and stood erect, his eyes alert and his body language on guard.

  Slaphsot said, “Shit. Something has got the sentry on this side spooked.”

  Digger said, “I’m getting faint chatter. They must be in the foyer of the house. I don’t have line of sight on the window there. Need them to move into another room.”

  The black BMW tied to the Aref Saleh Organization pulled up the street from that direction and turned into the garage of Chalice.

  “You getting pictures?” asked Slapshot.

  “Gonna try,” replied Digger. “All depends on whether or not they leave that garage door open for a few seconds.”

  But Slapshot was not listening. Instead, he watched the sentry in front of him lift a radio from his pocket and put it to his mouth.

  The man’s eyes were still fixed on something to the west. Slapshot slowly leaned forward, looking out the window to the left.