Tier One Wild df-2

by Dalton Fury

  One of the Quds men settled down in the construction with a pair of binoculars and a mobile phone, while the other returned to the Sofitel.

  By midafternoon the Iranians had established that a team of American operatives, likely not local CIA spies from their embassy, were operating a safe house in Cairo and working an operation that required Farsi translation.

  They’d have to contact Iran for further instructions, and they would warn the Aref Saleh Organization that there had, almost certainly, been a serious compromise of the operation.

  * * *

  Aref Saleh slipped his satellite phone back onto its charging cradle and leaned back in his chair. It was perfectly quiet in his simple but functional office on the third floor of Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd., on Kornish al Nile.

  He strummed his fingers slowly on the blotter in front of him, thinking about the distressing call he had just received. Saleh was a good businessman, and he knew better than to argue with a customer, but he had just spent twenty minutes arguing with the leader of the Iranian contingent here in town to meet with him.

  The man had admonished Saleh and his organization, claiming that the Quds Force operatives had been compromised here in the city due to the poor security measures put in place by the JSO. When Aref questioned him on this further, the Iranian explained that they had tracked a Farsi speaker to a CIA safe house in Saleh’s neighborhood.

  The fifty-eight-year-old Libyan had snapped back that these were tenuous grounds on which to place blame. If American intelligence was here in the city monitoring the Iranians, then, as far as Saleh was concerned, that was the Iranians’ fault, and that was the Iranians’ problem.

  Saleh did not think there was a chance his operation had been discovered. He had paid agents in the Egyptian police, military, and government, just as he had in Libya, who would warn him if an operation against him were in place. Even if American intelligence were somehow onto his scent, Saleh did not think they would be operating without some level of participation by their allies in the Egyptian government. And his Egyptian government allies, Saleh had no doubt in his mind, would pass word on to him.

  No, the Iranian fools had made a mistake, they had brought American agents along with them to the city, they were the ones under surveillance.

  Not him.

  An initial sale of Igla-S shoulder-fired missiles had been made to the Quds Force operatives weeks earlier; the man who had come from Tehran with six security officers for his protection was here to negotiate a second purchase of the goods. The meeting had been timed to coincide with the delivery of the first shipment so that these men would be here in town to assure that nothing went wrong.

  Well, something had gone wrong. Saleh snorted as he thought of this. Shiite thugs. They were here to make a second purchase, yes, but also to intimidate him with their presence.

  And they brought American spies.

  Saleh did not know what they would do about this threat from America, but he told the Iranians, in no uncertain terms, that they needed to stay away from him. He did not need the Americans learning about him or his operation.

  Late this afternoon the Igla-S weapons would arrive from the Libyan desert, and then late tonight they would ship out, following the orders of the Iranians.

  Once this was done, Saleh decided, he would leave Cairo for a while. Maybe permanently. He would leave his shipping concern here to handle the goods physically, but he would relocate his offices for his own personal security. Not back to Tripoli, no. Perhaps to Beirut. Yes. He could pay off members of Hezbollah, and he would work from there.

  Beirut was lovely in the fall and, unlike Cairo, it was free of American spies.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kolt Raynor and his team had spent the majority of the day conducting mobile surveillance around the Sofitel in preparation for the arrival of the technical surveillance team from Langley the following morning. They returned to the safe house at 1630, eager for an hour’s rest before heading back to the hotel for an evening sitting in their vehicles watching to see if the Quds Force operatives ventured out.

  Kolt first popped his head in the comms room to let Curtis know they were back, then he headed into the kitchen for a bottle of water. As he did so he almost bumped into a thin man in his sixties who was opening the refrigerator door to peek inside.

  “Good afternoon,” the man said in accented English.

  Kolt just looked at the man, then turned away and headed back into the hallway without returning the greeting. He stuck his head back into the comms room. “Curtis. A word, please.”

  The two men stepped out of the travel agency and headed down the stairs into the empty lobby of the building. Once there, Kolt turned on the CIA man quickly. “Who the fuck is that?”

  “Jesus. Calm down, dude. He’s the terp.”

  “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “He’s fully vetted by Cairo Station.”

  “He’s local?”

  “That’s right. He’s the best guy in town with clearance.”

  “I told you to stay away from Cairo Station on this.”

  Curtis stood his ground. “But I don’t work for you, Major! Look, I know better than to farm this off to some untested Persian egghead who translates pamphlets for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or some shit. This guy is a vetted agent. He’s worked with us since the late eighties.”

  “That’s great,” said Kolt. “But you pull a guy into an NOC safe house who is getting paid by the local station, and it can create a paper trail or raise questions around the embassy. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Curtis started pacing the empty lobby. “You’ve seen it all, haven’t you, Rambo? Well, let me remind you, it’s my op. I know what I’m doing.”

  “I don’t give a shit whose op it is, Curtis. I am responsible for my people and I sure as shit will not put them in danger because of some bureaucratic fuckup.”

  “What do you want me to do? He knows where the safe house is. It won’t do any good to send him home now.” Curtis clapped his hands together. “I’ve got it! Let’s shoot him. Will that work for you? You’ve been here, what, five days, and you haven’t killed anybody? Let’s go fix that right now. We just pop a cap in that motherfucker and call it a day.”

  At that moment Kolt wanted to shoot Myron Curtis. But instead he said, “The terp can stay. PERSEC at this place is your problem. This place is getting too crowded. Me and my team are outta here.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Racer.”

  “I’m serious. We’ll find another locale and head out.”

  * * *

  Kolt moved his team to a second safe house in under an hour. It was close to the Nile but five klicks south of Curtis’s location. It was also near Cairo’s metro’s north-south line, which could be convenient, as well.

  These digs weren’t nearly as nice as the travel agency location, but they seemed a hell of a lot more secure. A simple house in a neighborhood with other white people walking around amid the local Arab population, a wall, a gate, a two-car garage, and several large, empty, dusty rooms.

  Sleeping bags had been tossed in one of the bedrooms, but Kolt and Cindy opted for a ten-by-ten room with local-style twin beds. There was also a big living room with rugs on the floor, a kitchen stocked with canned food and dried food and a frightening array of molded, rotten, and otherwise nasty items in the refrigerator.

  These safe houses were set up and maintained by the local CIA station. Cairo had been a hotbed of CIA activity since the revolution over a year earlier and Raynor decided it was no great surprise that personnel at CIA Station Cairo had been stretched pretty thin of late.

  It didn’t look like anyone had been in to check on this safe house in half a year.

  But Kolt had his team in place, and he was satisfied that their position was secure. He and Slapshot had just established satellite comms with JSOC back at Fort Bragg when Kolt’s mobile phone vibrated in his pocket.

  He looked down and saw that it was Myro
n Curtis.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Curtis.”

  “What?” Kolt was not going to engage the man in small talk.

  “Thirty-five minutes ago a tractor-trailer rolled through the gates of Maadi Land and Sea.”

  “Bringing something or about to take something away?”

  “The trailer was riding low. Definitely full, or close to it. It turned right at the gate, heading for the loading dock. We saw it on the live feed, so Murphy headed over there in time to hear the sounds of work at the loading bays of location Rhine. The trailer left three minutes ago, and it appeared to be empty. Murphy says the location is quiet at the moment.”

  Kolt thought it over.

  Curtis said, “We are thinking maybe the Iranians worked out a deal for immediate delivery. The weapons are here in Rhine. I bet the Quds guys are going to drive the goods out themselves. They’ll go up to Port Said, deliver them to a covered ship, and then take them through the Suez to Iran or up to Beirut. They can load up and go at any time.”

  Kolt knew that Curtis was still making assumptions, but the likelihood his assumptions were correct seemed to be increasing. Even though the Iranians were supposed to check out of the hotel in two days they could not assume they would not leave early, or the goods would not leave on their own sometime in the next forty-eight hours.

  “Okay,” he said. “I will contact my command and request authorization to hit Maadi Land and Sea tonight.”

  “Sooner the better.”

  “We’re not going to do it in daylight.”

  Curtis just said, “Hey, I don’t know ninja shit. You do. Just get the hit.”

  Kolt made the call to Webber, explained the situation carefully, and warned that if the SAMs were, in fact, in that warehouse, they might leave at any time. He suggested they either go after the Quds Force operatives at the Sofitel or hit Maadi Land and Sea.

  Raynor further stressed that he and his team would have a difficult, if not impossible, time finding the munitions once those munitions left Maadi, so, whatever they were ordered to do, they needed to do it tonight.

  Then Raynor called Slapshot and Digger together, and he briefed them that they might, just might, be heading into target areas Rhine and Stone very soon.

  * * *

  Kolt willed his sat phone to chirp. Finally, at just after 1900, it did. As expected, it was Webber. “Raynor, listen carefully. You are a ‘no go’ on the Iranians at their location at the Sofitel.”

  “Understood,” he said. He had no illusions that he and his team would be sent in to the Sofitel Hotel to roll up a cell of Iranian spies.

  Shit like that only happened in training or in the movies.

  Then Webber said, “But you do have execute authority at objective Rhine. You may enter the warehouse for the purpose of identifying the SA-24s or any other Libyan munitions you may find there. That’s it. This is a low-vis assault. No gunfights. If you engage, it better be a life-or-death call.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is not authorization to enter the office building, objective Stone. We are talking about the warehouse only.” Webber was going out of his way to stress this, Raynor noted. Apparently someone, somewhere, maybe the President himself, was worried about offending Egypt with a big shoot-’em-up in Cairo.

  “And if we hit the jackpot?” Kolt asked, knowing he might be pushing it.

  “If you get inside and ID the weapons, then yes, Racer, if possible, destroy them in place.”

  The Secretary of Defense wanted these missiles out of action, if and only if it could be done in a surgical fashion with no political snafus like Libyans in Egypt dead by the hands of American commandos.

  But still, Raynor felt like he was being sent on half a mission. “Sir, we cannot know for sure there are weapons at Rhine at this time. We do know, however, that the offices of Maadi Land and Sea contain the leadership of the Aref Saleh Organization. If we can make entry there, we can capture or kill — ”

  Webber interrupted over the crackling connection. “Negative! You do not have authorization to hit the building on the southern portion of the property. You are to steer clear of all combatants. Maintain your cover. I can’t have you risking four good operators to this. You don’t have the numbers to actively handle that many bad guys. Are we clear on that?”

  Kolt nodded to himself. Even this limited hit was a hell of a lot better than doing nothing. He repeated his mission for Webber’s benefit. “Roger, sir. Soft and quiet. If we find the weapons at Rhine, then we can go loud in order to render safe.”

  “That is correct. That is the extent of your command authority. If you come in contact with combatants you may, obviously, use lethal force. You may not, and I am going to repeat this for you Raynor, you may not enter the office complex in order to engage Libyan nationals housed there. They have not been designated as a hostile force.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Racer. Make your own luck. Bring everyone home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  The AFO cell spent the evening building their assault plan. Slapshot took the lead on this, as he had served the longest in the Unit, and Raynor knew to defer to him. Kolt and Digger asked questions, made suggestions, and Hawk took notes. She would not be involved in the assault, but she would be involved.

  Slapshot said, “Hitting from the riverside is the way to go, boss. Looks like two patrolling sentries plus the same number on the roof of the office. Four total who could have eyes on the rear of the property at any one time. That’s not nothing, but there is fair cover at several points between the pier and the loading dock of the warehouse. Best we take advantage of them.”

  Kolt nodded. “I like it.”

  They determined Racer, Slaphsot, and Digger would use a small locally procured dinghy with a 110-horsepower engine to land at the pier at 0330, when the guard force would be the least alert and the sliver of moon would be nearing its lowest point to the horizon before dawn. The three men would use night-observation devices to make their way from the pier, where they would use bolt cutters to cut through the fence at the waterline. They would then make their way up through the fifteen meters of low vegetation on the northwest corner of the property, cross twenty meters of asphalt parking lot where they would have to concern themselves with a couple of patrolling sentries and exposure to the roof of the office building and the pair of static guards stationed there.

  Once they made their way to the warehouse, they would make entry either at the loading dock on the north side or, if that was not feasible, they would come around to the east side and go through the main entrance.

  Slapshot and Raynor would go inside to find, photograph, and then rig the weapons with small blocks of C-4 explosive. Meanwhile, Digger would remain concealed outside to watch the exfiltration route.

  They talked for some time about the size of the secondary explosions, but ultimately decided that, as long as there were a manageable number of SAMs present, the blast of the detonation would be confined to the warehouse of Maadi Land and Sea.

  The men would make their way back to the boat and drift downriver before detonating the C-4 in a chain reaction, destroying the tubes, power sources, and warheads.

  While this was all happening Hawk would be parked several blocks up on the Kornish al Nile. If the team ran into trouble and found themselves unable to make it back to the dinghy, they could exfiltrate on the northeast side of objectives Rhine-Stone and attempt to make it over the wall and out into the neighborhood. Hawk would swoop in and pick them up at their war RV, and they would hightail it out of the area.

  The plan sounded clean and efficient, which meant to Kolt it sounded like it was too good to be true. He fully expected snags in their operation: a sentry who wasn’t where he was supposed to be, or a member of the JSO leadership on the balcony with an early morning nicotine fit, or a sweeping flashlight that did not follow the rules and keep sweeping in the same direction.

  “What
’s up, boss?” Slapshot asked. “Your mouth says it’s a go, but your expression is telling me something else.”

  “Two things. One, I’m not entirely confident that the Agency fellas haven’t been burned already. Second, this could get ugly quick. It’s definitely high-risk here, guys.”

  “Not like you to worry about the risk, Racer. We’ve got this,” Slapshot quickly said.

  “It’s not you guys. I don’t know,” Kolt said, looking around at the others.

  “Do I need to leave?” Cindy asked, sensing she was the problem.

  “No, Hawk. You’re good. Actually, it’s your guys’ kids,” Kolt said, looking at Slapshot and Digger.

  Digger said, “We all know the risks. I’m here because of my kids, not despite them. I fight so they might not have to.” This was said with a tinge of irritation.

  “Ditto!” Slapshot added.

  “Got it. Feel better just getting it off my chest. We’ll either come back with our shield or on it,” Kolt said.

  “Damn right,” said Digger.

  Still, Kolt knew they had to make their plan as organized as possible in advance of the execution of it, otherwise the snags and snafus would increase tenfold.

  Raynor stood from the table. “I like it,” he told the team. “Let’s make it happen.”

  * * *

  At thirty minutes short of midnight Kolt traveled alone north on Cairo’s main north-south metro line. He wore Western clothing that fit in perfectly with what virtually all the male locals were wearing on the train, and his tinted glasses covered most portions of his face not obscured by his short beard. He moved with the crowd, and drew no attention whatsoever.

  He climbed off the train at the Hadayeq El-Maadi, and stepped out onto the street. Within seconds a beat-up-looking half-yellow, half-primer two-door Toyota pulled up and he climbed in.

  “So you guys are a go, huh?” Myron Curtis said from behind the wheel as he headed off into traffic.

  No one else was in the car.