The Lost Codex (OPSIG Team Black Series Book 3)

by Alan Jacobson

Vail curled some hair behind her right ear. “What do you make of the fact that he’s come to Sahmoud rather than the other way around?”

  “Sahmoud’s ability to move in and out of the territory is restricted,” Uzi said. “And he’s at the top, or near the top, of just about every intelligence agency’s most wanted list. Much safer for Rudenko to come to him. Into Egypt, through the Sinai, then the tunnels into Gaza.”

  Fahad pointed at the road ahead. “Slow down, we’re getting close. Turn left.”

  Uzi followed the instructions and decelerated. Ahead, about seventy-five yards away, was a guard booth and two metal pillars that rose from the roadway. “Gated community.” He pulled the car to the curb.

  DeSantos leaned forward to study the uniformed security officer, who appeared to be alone in the small brick structure. “We should hang out here till we hear back from Hot Rod.”

  Rodman’s assessment came in a moment later:

  he’s in gaza blocks from you

  will send address

  “That goes with what my CI told me,” Fahad said. “We’ve got the right place.”

  A second later, it came through on DeSantos’s phone. “This doesn’t match the one your CI gave you.”

  Fahad consulted the screen, then leaned back, his face twisted in confusion. “That’s easily two blocks away.”

  “We go with Hot Rod’s intel,” DeSantos said. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Uzi said. “We can always double back to Mo’s house if we don’t find anything.”

  “The numbers are transposed,” Fahad said. “Two digits are reversed. Maybe that’s it.”

  And maybe not.

  Vail looked out at the street. Large houses with adobe tile roofs and solar panels were set back from the road. None of them had perimeter walls or metal gates. “If we know Rudenko’s there now, we shouldn’t wait. We’ve got no idea how long he’s going to stick around.”

  DeSantos tapped away at his phone. “Operationally, it’d be better to wait till it’s completely dark. I just asked Hot Rod to let us know if Rudenko moves.”

  “How are we tracking him?” Uzi asked.

  “NSA and NGA,” he said, referring to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. “Combination of cell phone intercepts, GPS data, and infrared heat signatures from a drone equipped with FLIR sensors.”

  “Those sensors can be defeated.”

  “So far we’ve got a fix.” DeSantos’s phone vibrated. He took a few seconds to read the text, then paraphrased it: “Apparently there’s a bunker-like room that’s hardened and shielded to some extent. They can see four men along the building’s perimeter and outside that room, but the others are less distinct. They think there are a total of eleven in and around the house. Rudenko’s one of them and, presumably, Sahmoud.”

  “Wife and kids?” Vail asked.

  DeSantos looked long and hard at her, then texted Rodman back. The response was near-immediate, despite the ten thousand miles separating them. “He wants to know if we’re serious. And he wanted to know who asked.”

  Vail shook her head. “Yes, I’m serious. And I want an answer.”

  Six minutes later they had a response. “Best they can tell, his wife and two boys are out of town in Italy at their villa.”

  “Any backup?” Fahad asked. “Or just us?”

  DeSantos glanced down at his phone. “Just got blueprints. And real-time images with infrared signatures. Check your satphones. Let’s make sure we all have the same feed.”

  Uzi and Vail pivoted in their seats, pulled out their devices, and called it up on their small screens.

  “Can’t really see inside that room,” Vail said.

  “That’s the shielding,” DeSantos said. “Probably layers of concrete, maybe metal. We know men are in there but they look like blobs rather than well defined human outlines.”

  Great. We’re not quite blind, but close to it. Kind of like being severely nearsighted and having your glasses smashed.

  Fifteen minutes later, they had devised an operational approach to infiltrate the house, and although they had the layout and location of the tangos, they were guessing about who and what was inside the hardened room. They also did not know al Humat’s security protocols and what obstacles they were going to face.

  They had one advantage: the element of surprise—at least for the moment—so the idea was to maintain it for as long as possible.

  They assumed there would be motion sensors that would set off perimeter lighting and video cameras linked to a hard drive recording mechanism. That was a reasonable supposition, though by no means guaranteed.

  “If it’s cloud-based,” Uzi said, “it could be a huge problem.”

  “Odds?” DeSantos asked.

  Uzi considered the question. “Al Humat isn’t known to be tech savvy—and a lot of the extremist groups take al Qaeda’s lead and avoid tech whenever possible because they know it can be tracked by the good guys. So I’d gamble that their video is, at best, recorded on a local hard drive. More likely it’s just live feeds with no archival storage. They’re not worried about catching or prosecuting intruders by identifying their mugs from a recording. They just want to prevent someone from doing what we’re going to do. But since camera feeds can be hacked, they may avoid them altogether and rely only on security personnel.”

  “I’m more concerned with how we’re going to coordinate with each other once we leave the car,” Vail said. “We don’t have comms devices.”

  DeSantos nodded. “As we work our way toward Sahmoud, if something goes south, text will be our quietest and quickest way of communicating.”

  After walking through the plan a final time, they initiated their first line of attack: removing the security booth guard from the equation.

  Fahad was the logical candidate to approach the man given his native appearance and language skills. Uzi would follow a moment later as backup and support in case there was someone else nearby.

  A minute after Fahad left the SUV, DeSantos’s satphone rang.

  “It’s Knox. Text Fahad, tell him to wait.”

  Uzi yanked his phone out and started typing as DeSantos answered and placed the call on speaker. “Yes sir.”

  “Are we secure?”

  DeSantos looked around and made sure no one was in earshot. “You’ve got me, Uzi, and Karen. We’re in a car.”

  “I’ll be landing in a matter of minutes. Status?”

  DeSantos gave him a quick update. “We’re getting ready to go in.”

  “Getting those docs is job one. Sahmoud is a secondary priority, but a priority nonetheless.”

  DeSantos glanced at Vail and Uzi. “We’ll take care of both.”

  “Just make sure you secure those documents,” Knox said. “Keep your emotions in check, temper your desire for justice. I want that fucker to pay for the American lives he’s taken too. But the codex and the scroll … while their strategic and historic value is obvious, there are other considerations. And because of that, after taking possession of them, you’re to turn them over to Mossad.”

  Vail kinked her neck. “If we’re going to give them to the Israelis, why not just have them infiltrate Sahmoud’s compound. They’re much better equipped—”

  “Because you’ve got your mission and you’ll carry it out. And because if I thought that pulling out now would work, I’d call the director general and tell him what we’ve got and let him deal with it. But there’s no time for that. You’re down the street from two prime targets. You bug out now, we may never find those docs again.”

  Uzi ran the back of a hand across his beard stubble. “Why are we giving the codex and scroll a higher priority than capturing the number three most wanted terrorist?”

  There was a prolonged pause. Just when Vail thought they had lost him, Knox began speaking.

  “President Nunn
wants to control the documents for his own strategic reasons. My sources tell me he plans to use them to force concessions from Israel to win the peace.”

  “I thought that’s what the Palestinians are doing,” DeSantos said.

  “It carries a great deal more weight with the president as the driving force behind it. And to Nunn, being the only president who successfully brokered a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians would cement his legacy. But you know what? I don’t give a shit about a president’s legacy. If there’s peace it should be a negotiated agreement, not some leveraged form of blackmail. Despite best intentions, negotiated agreements sometimes fail. But extortion never works.”

  “Take the documents out of the equation for a minute,” Uzi said. “The administration could just withhold military aid loans to Israel and leverage them that way. Wouldn’t that have the same effect?”

  “Not that simple,” Knox said. “Those military loans are required to be spent in the US, so taking that money out of the US economy, and the jobs it would cost, would not be very popular at home. Congress would never go for it, anyway. No, this is Nunn’s only shot. They’re secret negotiations, which means no one’s supposed to know what he’s planning to do with these documents. So if you repeat what I’ve just told you, it’ll be clear who leaked the information. I’m the only one who knows what’s really going on outside a very small, well controlled circle.”

  Apparently not as well controlled as you think. And now not as small a circle as it was before.

  “Secretary McNamara and I don’t buy into this strategy. It’s the wrong approach and won’t lead to a healthy peace.”

  Vail squirmed in her seat. Defying—and undermining—the president? This feels dangerously close to treason.

  “That’s why you’re not going to bring the codex and scroll home,” Knox said. “Give them to the Israelis. Bring them to the Shrine of the Book building at the National Museum. We have to ensure that this leverage—this undue influence that these documents provide—is taken out of the equation.”

  DeSantos signed off and Vail texted Fahad to tell him to resume the operation.

  “Showtime,” Uzi said.

  DeSantos gave him a fist bump. “Good luck.”

  UZI LEFT THE SUV and followed the path that Fahad took to the guard booth along the sidewalk, using the cover of bushes and hedges where possible. From fifteen feet away, he watched through the window in the front of the small brick structure as Fahad greeted the officer.

  From what Uzi could tell in the descending darkness, there was some discussion between the two men. A moment later, Fahad was the only one visible.

  Uzi advanced and found the militant seated in a chair, dressed in an al Humat uniform, his head resting on his forearms. He looked like he was asleep. But Uzi knew better.

  Conspicuously absent was an array of video screens for surveillance monitoring—a good sign and hopefully an indicator of whether or not the residents of the neighborhood felt the added level of paranoia was necessary.

  Fahad began searching the small desk drawers while Uzi examined a spiral bound log book that contained Arabic writing. Visitors were required to sign in. Their license plate numbers were recorded along with their names and addresses. “Looks like they have regularly scheduled check-ins with someone—someone on Sahmoud’s personal detail. Probably one of the guys in that house.”

  “Makes sense. What’s the interval?”

  “Every thirty minutes. Last one was … eighteen minutes ago.” Uzi checked his watch. “So we’ve got twelve minutes. That’s cutting it close.” He texted DeSantos and Vail and gave one last look around. “Let’s go. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  70

  Rudenko is our third priority,” DeSantos said, “and only because he may have the scroll. If it’s clear he doesn’t, we let him go unless taking him down won’t jeopardize our primary objectives: the two documents first and Sahmoud second. You okay with that?”

  Vail frowned. “You mean because I’d like to put a bullet behind Rudenko’s ear?”

  “Because of that, yeah.”

  “I understand the mission priorities, Hector. But forget about Rudenko. What if it comes down to the two docs or Sahmoud?”

  “You heard our orders,” DeSantos said. “Codex and scroll are number one. That said, I’m betting Sahmoud is in the bunker—the most secure room in the house. Which means he’ll have the docs there too. Assuming I’m right, we should be able to grab both the docs and Sahmoud.”

  I hope you’re right.

  DeSantos looked out at the guard booth. From what he could see in the failing light, he told her, Fahad and Uzi had been successful. “Let’s take a minute for a dose of reality.”

  “I kind of assumed I was living a nightmare.”

  “Most of the time,” he said, ignoring her, “a Special Forces operator aims to get in and out. He avoids contact with the enemy. We don’t have that luxury. We’ve got vests but no head gear. We have guns but no suppressors. No comms and limited intel. So to keep the advantage of surprise, the Glocks stay in our waistbands until we don’t have any choice. This is close quarters combat. Use your knife. And your hands.”

  “We’ve already gone over this.”

  He twisted his body to face her. “I need to know if you can handle yourself. This isn’t going to be yelling at some perp a block away to stop while sighting him with a .40-caliber. This is in your face, kill or be killed.”

  She looked into DeSantos’s eyes and absorbed what he was saying. There could be no doubt. No hesitation.

  “I’ve been involved in close quarters combat. You know that.”

  “Al Humat chooses its guards from its best fighters, Karen, those who’ve proven themselves by killing innocents—which shows their commitment to the cause. These aren’t rent-a-cops.”

  Sahmoud and Rudenko are two of the worst offenders I’ve come up against. I want them. Badly. But can I do it?

  She had the training. She had the weapon. She had gone hand to hand with serial killers and deadly assassins. But would she have the killer instinct in a situation where she was the intruder?

  She had crossed the line in the past, sometimes purposely and sometimes inadvertently. This felt different. There wasn’t a question of if she would encounter tangos. They were going in to purposely engage them.

  Vail realized DeSantos was waiting for an answer. She held his gaze and said, “We’re taking down one of the world’s worst. Two of them if we’re lucky. I’m in.”

  DeSantos nodded slowly. “Let’s do it, then.”

  71

  Ten minutes passed and the light was fading rapidly. Over the Mediterranean, the sky still had some life to it. But to DeSantos's right, the death of cloud-covered darkness had settled in.

  Most importantly, he had difficulty seeing the landscape around him: just how he wanted it.

  He moved slowly to keep from tripping motion sensors, a painstaking process but one he had perfected during years of similar missions.

  Waves crashed in the distance but his auditory sense was focused on those noises that would mean the difference between life and death. His field of vision had narrowed, his concentration was deep.

  He had one objective at the moment: the man on the other side of the door. According to his screen, the guard was two and a half feet away, only a one inch slab of wood separating them.

  He had little choice but to permit Fahad’s participation: although he had strong suspicions, he had no proof. With a force of four against eleven, they had a chance of success. With three the odds dropped significantly. DeSantos had to trust him.

  But not completely. He had texted Rodman and asked him to make sure Fahad’s regular cell phone and satphone were monitored. If he made a call to anyone other than the three members of his team, they were to be notified immediately.

  It
was enough fighting eleven men; he did not need one of his own working against them.

  DeSantos knew from the infrared imagery that the guards were armed with what looked to be AK-47s. They probably also had small arms and even bladed weapons. The objective was for him, and his team, to strike unexpectedly. And fast. It took time and effort to move a heavy submachine gun toward an enemy. Too much time in close quarters combat—which is what this would be. Plus, they were likely not expecting an incursion and, despite what he told Vail, even if they were their best fighters, he did not know their specific level of training. They might shoot well at fifty yards, but did they practice weekly? Did they practice home invasion scenarios? Using his SOG SEAL seven-inch knife, he scraped the exterior surface of the door. Lightly, at first.

  No response.

  Again, a little more deeply.

  Footstep. Hand on the knob. Creak of the hinge as it opened.

  DeSantos tossed a small rock to his right. It rustled the leaves of a bush and the guard stepped out onto the cement stoop. The AK-47 was slung across the man’s shoulder, gripped sloppily in his right hand, pointed at the ground.

  DeSantos swung the double-serrated blade backhanded through the moist, cool air and struck the man in the left kidney. He stiffened and opened his mouth to scream but DeSantos slapped his fingers over his lips.

  He yanked the knife out and stabbed again, this time a vicious, fast jab to the right side of the man’s spine. He struck bone and went through it. The man’s legs went limp and DeSantos put him down with a final strike to the throat so he would not make a noise that would give away his position.

  DeSantos yanked him into the foliage, stepped over the bloodied concrete, and into the house.

  VAIL MADE HER WAY to the southeast side of the house. She had approached as DeSantos advised her, along the plant line and staying clear of gravel, keeping on grass wherever possible to avoid making unwanted noise. She moved slowly but deliberately and was successful in not setting off the motion sensors.

  She stood at the front door for a moment and heard only the crashing rumble of ocean waves. It was unnerving. The satellite imagery showed her mark—a soldier standing rock-still, a foot away, guarding the entrance to the home. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream and her hands felt unsteady. She wiped her palms on the back of her pants and took a long, cleansing breath.