Act of Revenge

by Dale Brown

  “You’re Christian?”

  The translation was slow, and the device offered no possible responses.

  Chelsea shook her head.

  “Does he beat you?” asked Shadaa.

  Chelsea froze.

  Shadaa interpreted that as a yes. “Come with me and I will get you some food.”

  Johnny came up the block just in time to see Chelsea going into the hotel.

  “She’s going in,” said Christian over the radio. “Hot damn.”

  Johnny continued up the street. He was about ten yards from the entrance when one of the two guards stepped out and, with his submachine gun, motioned him away.

  Johnny crossed the street. The guards were well equipped: rather than the ubiquitous AKs, they wielded MP5 submachine guns. The weapons suggested a higher degree of competence, or at least investment.

  Johnny walked about twenty yards past the restaurant entrance before crossing back. They were still watching.

  Turk was waiting around the corner.

  “Get a look at those goons?” he asked Johnny.

  “I saw them.” Johnny frowned. “You have a fix on where Chelsea is in the building?” he asked Christian.

  “She said something about tables—must be a dining room. Stand by; I gotta talk to Yuri.”

  Johnny folded his arms. Before the war, this had been a fashionable block. It was still something of an oasis—if you ignored the shrapnel marks on the low walls and the crater at the side of the street.

  “Johansen says the Syrians are gearing up for an attack,” said Christian. “Russian planes are on the way.”

  “Tell Chelsea to plant the damn bug and get out of there,” said Johnny.

  “Relax,” said Christian. “She’s doing fine. I moved our pickups into the city,” he added, referring to the trucks with backup team members in case anything went wrong. “Destiny is above; we can get out anytime we want. Let her do her thing. I’m listening and she’s doing fine.” He paused, then added, “Russian planes are about zero-five away.”

  Chelsea tried to think of how to get to Ghadab’s room. She needed strategy, words.

  Go to the restroom, use the translator.

  “You don’t speak very good Arabic,” said Shadaa. They were alone at the edge of the dining area’s patio—distant from help.

  “I don’t,” admitted Chelsea.

  “What do you speak?”

  “Somali,” said Chelsea.

  Shadaa reached to Chelsea’s face. She brushed her cheek gently, then lifted her scarf back. Chelsea reached to stop her, but it was too late; the cloth fell back, taking its earpiece with it. The piece would automatically shut off when the veil was back, so there was no chance of it being detected, but now Chelsea didn’t even have the rudimentary translator to help.

  “I don’t know Somali,” said Shadaa. “Français?”

  Chelsea shook her head.

  “English?” asked Shadaa.

  “A some,” said Chelsea haltingly. “A some I can talk.”

  “You mean, ‘I can speak a little.’”

  “This.”

  A shriek from the street interrupted them. It was an odd, unexpected sound that morphed and changed, beginning like the whistle from an old tin toy. It lengthened, becoming a woman’s scream.

  In the next moment, there was a loud crack and the ground rumbled from an explosion.

  “Bombs!” said Shadaa, speaking once more in Arabic. “Come with me. Quickly.”

  The ground rumbled again, this time violently enough to fell several chairs. Chelsea had a hard time staying on her feet as she followed Shadaa into the hotel’s dining room.

  The room went dark before they were midway across. Another explosion, this one so close that it shook the ground sideways, sent Chelsea to the ground face-first. She struggled to her knees, then her feet, wincing and then coughing with the plaster dust shaken from the ceiling.

  Shadaa lay a few feet away.

  “‘Ayn?” asked Chelsea, helping her up. “Where?”

  Shadaa blinked, dazed.

  “Room?” said Chelsea in Arabic, then English. “Your room? To go? Safe?”

  The ground shook again. Shadaa took Chelsea’s hand and led her from the dining room to the basement stairwell. There were sirens in the distance, and the heavy ra-thump of antiaircraft fire.

  With the electricity off, the stairs were dark, the basement impossibly so. Shadaa walked with her hands out, feeling her way until she came to a wall. She collapsed against it, sinking to the dirt floor. Chelsea did the same.

  The bombing continued for another minute and a half, the explosions moving away. As they waited, Chelsea reached into her pocket and took out the bug, slipping it onto the hem of Shadaa’s dress.

  It was time to leave; she’d pressed her luck too far already.

  “Yjb ‘an ‘adhhab,” she said, rising. She slurred her words to hide the flaws in her pronunciation. “Must go.”

  Shadaa surprised her by jumping to her feet. “With me,” she told Chelsea, grabbing Chelsea’s hand and starting for the stairs.

  They stopped at the top of the stairs. Chelsea glanced toward the door.

  Run?

  Run!

  “This way,” said Shadaa, pointing down the hall.

  Is that where Ghadab is?

  She should leave; she knew she should leave. But this was too good an opportunity.

  “Yes,” she told Shadaa. “With you I am.”

  60

  Boston—about the same time

  GigaMan was not, Massina learned to his surprise, a single person. Instead, the identity belonged to three different users, the most prominent of whom had a home base—if you could call it that—in southern Turkey. The other users were based in Germany and Albania. They all shared the same botnet and servers based in Morocco and Ankara, and occasionally were online at the same time.

  Their credentials proved remarkably easy to steal, thanks to a photo Massina had surreptitiously included in the root directory of one of his computers: inspected by their botnet’s virus, it back-infected its attacker; within an hour Massina made the botnet his own.

  “Prime GigaMan” had contacts throughout the Middle East. The one that interested Massina was in Fallujah, an Iraqi city under Daesh control. The contact used a web provider in Croatia to post comments on a website devoted to a youth football league—soccer to an American—in England. The posts appeared to be innocuous, mostly scores and credits to players for goals and assists.

  But why would someone from Croatia with a difficult-to-track pedigree do that?

  It took a little bit of experimenting, but Massina eventually realized that the numbers, when strung together, yielded web addresses. These pages were filled with seemingly meaningless gibberish—encryptions, he was sure. But to decipher them required more firepower than he had in a laptop.

  He decided, in the end, to tell the CIA what he had. That meant talking to Demi Ascoldi, who was filling in for Johansen.

  He asked if she could meet him in the Box; she countered with a restaurant.

  A sure sign that she wasn’t taking him seriously. But he acquiesced. She was on time, at least.

  “You’ll find this useful,” he told her, pushing a flash drive across the table as she sat down. “It lists contacts of your subject and some of the people who work with him. They use state-level encryption stolen from Turkey. We’ve left it intact.”

  Ascoldi frowned. “Is this why you called?”

  “I get conflicting signals from your agency,” said Massina. He hadn’t expected her to do jumping jacks in gratitude, but neither had he expected an antagonistic response. “You want my help, you use my people, but when I do help—”

  “Some things are better left to the professionals, Mr. Massina.” She rose. “Thank you for lunch.”

  He didn’t bother pointing out that they hadn’t eaten.

  Bozzone met Massina outside on the sidewalk.

  “Go well?” asked Bozzone.
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  “Better than I expected,” replied Massina sarcastically.

  61

  Palmyra—around the same time

  Johnny and Turk ran toward the hotel entrance, hoping that the guards would be inside. But they remained at their posts, crouched under the awning.

  “Can we take shelter?” asked Turk.

  The answer was a burst from one of the guard’s weapons—fortunately, into the air.

  Turk and Johnny retreated back down the block.

  “Let’s go in through the park,” yelled Turk.

  The bombs and missiles were aimed at the southern end of town a mile away, close enough to break windows and unsettle the ground. Johnny barely kept his balance as he ran behind Turk.

  Someone with a machine gun began firing from a nearby roof.

  “That’s a waste of bullets,” said Turk, stopping at the gate to the park.

  The gate was chained, but there was plenty of slack. Johnny slipped through easily; Turk had to squeeze.

  “Gotta lay off the beer.”

  They walked a few yards along the perimeter wall, stopping when they saw the low wall at the rear of the patio.

  “Christian, any guards back here?” asked Turk.

  “Not in view.”

  “Where’s Chelsea?” asked Johnny.

  There was no answer.

  “Christian, you there?” asked Turk. He waited a moment, then asked again.

  When there was still no answer, Turk switched frequencies to call the command bunker directly. There was no acknowledgment.

  “Probably our relay unit got hit,” suggested Johnny.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s get Chelsea out,” said Johnny.

  He started toward the rear of the hotel.

  “Whoa, go slow,” said Turk.

  “We gotta get her out.”

  “She’s not in trouble right now. We don’t want to blow it.”

  “Who says she’s not in trouble?”

  “Relax. Let’s take this one step at a time.”

  “I’m not a relaxing kind of person,” said Johnny. But he knelt back down, waiting to see what plan Turk came up with.

  62

  Northern Syria—around the same time

  Krista pounded the console.

  “That’s not going to get the coms back,” said Johansen.

  “Why do the Russians always screw everything up?”

  “That’s what they do,” said Johansen. “Keep the drones out of the way if they come back.”

  “Yup.”

  Outside, Kevin Banks had almost finished prepping the UAV that would take the place of the ground dish knocked out by the Russian bombing. Using the UAV had two major disadvantages: it had a smaller bandwidth, which meant less information in real time, and it was easy to detect, as it had to fly over the city.

  Johansen stared at the control handset.

  “Problem?” asked Banks.

  “Forgot the password,” Johansen confessed.

  Banks took a step, but Johansen’s fingers took over, remembering the sequence by rote. The plane beeped with an acknowledgment. From there it was easy—a voice command told it to preflight according to its standard checklist; another got it in the air.

  They watched the aircraft flutter away, unsteady in the wind.

  “The way things are going, I thought it would crash,” said Banks as it finally straightened out.

  “Bite your tongue,” Johansen told him.

  63

  Palmyra—around the same time

  The muscles in Chelsea’s neck tightened as she walked up the stairs behind Shadaa.

  Now I’m scared. I can admit it.

  Worse than Ukraine.

  I should have been more scared in Ukraine. That’s the advantage of being naive.

  She gave herself a silent pep talk, not with words but with feints of emotion, a push to be brave without spelling it out:

  Johnny and Turk . . . out there . . . ready . . .

  The knife beneath my pocket if I need it . . .

  If he is here . . .

  Hope he is here . . .

  She wanted Ghadab to be there. She wanted to be the one to shoot him.

  Which she could do, would do, even though they hadn’t even discussed the possibility.

  Take the chance!

  Shadaa slowed her pace at the landing, then turned to walk down the hall.

  Almost there.

  Walk. Push everything out of your mind.

  Shadaa stopped in front of a door.

  His room?

  Chelsea involuntarily blinked as Shadaa opened the door.

  I should have my gun in my hand.

  “My master is very important,” said Shadaa, using English as she stepped into the room.

  Empty.

  Not here!

  Damn!

  Chelsea fought against the disappointment.

  Time to leave.

  “I go,” she said.

  “I don’t think so.” Shadaa turned around to face her, a pistol in her hand.

  The Russian bombardment had ended; a thick cloud of black smoke rose from the southern side of the city. There were sirens in the distance; here, everything was quiet.

  “We go in and have a peek,” said Turk. “Someone comes, we say we’re looking for volunteers to fight the fires.”

  It was thin cover, but Johnny didn’t argue.

  Before they could start for the wall, a man appeared on the rear patio from the building. He had an MP5. Another came out behind him.

  “Wait?” asked Turk.

  “No. We need to get her out.”

  Turk rose. “Guy on the right’s mine.”

  “I know you are a spy,” Shadaa told Chelsea in English. “Get inside.”

  “No spy.”

  “Who do you work for? The council? I doubt it. The Americans? Turkey?”

  “No spy. Somalia.”

  “Stand against the wall.”

  Chelsea moved slowly, trying to relax her muscles, trying to remember the exercises—they had done this in training, this exact scenario, an attacker coming behind you with a gun. The Krav Maga instructor was bigger, stronger, ready to fire.

  Toooch . . . toocch.

  Gunshots, below, not here.

  Chelsea saw Shadaa jerking around, looking toward the door at the sound of the bullets.

  What happened next was reflex, hammered into her by weeks of training with the team.

  Pivoting on her left foot, she swung her elbow with all her might into her captor’s side, then punched up with her right fist, aiming for Shadaa’s chin. Shadaa, taken off guard, fell back; Chelsea’s fist hit her neck instead.

  Then it was about anger and fear, but mostly anger.

  Chelsea threw herself at the other woman, crashing her against the wall. She wanted to knock the gun from Shadaa’s hand but couldn’t see it. Instead she pushed her against the wall, grinding her shoulder and wedging her legs, springing into her.

  A sharp elbow to her rib caught Chelsea by surprise. As she started to fall, she grabbed the other woman by the throat with her left hand and together they tumbled over, spinning onto the floor. Chelsea went down on her back, pinned by the larger woman’s weight.

  Shadaa had lost the pistol, but instead of trying to retrieve it, she squirmed around, punching Chelsea in the face. Chelsea twisted and the next blow missed.

  Knife! Knife!

  Chelsea struggled to get up but her feet tangled in the long dress. Shadaa grabbed her right shoulder and pulled her down, trying to twist her over so she could strike her face. Chelsea’s fingers groped in her pocket, searching for the hilt of her weapon. Shadaa, knee on the floor for leverage, jerked Chelsea backwards, lifting her slightly, angling into a body slam the way a wrestler would.

  The blow nearly knocked Chelsea out. She flailed with the knife, jabbing through her dress. Shadaa lifted her again, aiming to smash her hard against the floor, but instead she collapsed, stung by the slashing pain
that tore up her side.

  Chelsea looked into her face. Shadaa’s eyes crossed.

  Chelsea plunged the knife into her enemy’s stomach.

  Harder! Harder!

  Johnny beat Turk to the patio, pivoting over the short wall with a quick jump. He grabbed the MP5 from the man he’d slain, pulling the strap off the dead body with a sharp yank. Blood burbled from the man’s forehead, spreading across the stones like spilled ink, more purple than red.

  “Inside,” said Turk, coming up behind him.

  They left the bodies there, rushing through the large, empty dining room.

  Johnny halted, swiveling his head right and left to make sure she wasn’t there. He fought the urge to call her name—it would only put her in more danger.

  “Stairs are back this way,” prompted Turk. “Come on.”

  It was only with the last blow that Chelsea remembered she was plunging her knife into a human being. By then, Shadaa was long dead, her blood everywhere, spurting and oozing and leaking, soaking into the carpet and floorboards.

  Fifty blows with the knife. So much anger.

  Was it gone now?

  Chelsea got up. Blood covered the knife and her hand, already sticky. The smell was pungent, similar to the smell of a field-gutted deer in the hot sun, if you’d smeared yourself with the blood and gizzards.

  The door sprung open. Chelsea whirled, knife out.

  “You OK?” Johnny Givens filled the doorway, one of the guard’s MP5 in his hands. “You OK?”

  64

  Northern Syria—a few minutes later

  “Coms coming back online,” Krista told Johansen. “But it looks like we’ve lost a few of the video bugs.”

  “Government center?” asked Johansen.

  “Still working. No damage to the buildings. Leave it to the Russians to miss anything important.”

  Johansen looked at the screen showing a live feed from an Air Force Global Hawk coming south to get a better view of the attack. A Russian fighter to the west challenged the UAV by turning on its target radar. The American pilot ignored it: what was a little petty harassment between hostile almost-allies?