“How often do we get the ideal situation?”
“Thanks,” McCarter said. “That helps.”
“Just making a point.”
“Your point sucks.”
Hawkins shot him a lopsided grin.
“Glad I could set your mind at ease.”
“For now, we can ask our new best friend with Mossad—if he told the truth about that—for more information. In the meantime, the cyber team at Stony Man Farm is going to break into the laptop and the tablet remotely to see what they can nail down. Grimaldi was going to prepare the plane for a trip to Baghdad.”
“So, for now, we wait.”
“For now.”
* * *
KURTZMAN STARED AT his monitor and clicked through several windows, scouring through the information from Ahmadah’s computers.
The guy had kept detailed notes on everything related to the strike in Iraq. It was poor tradecraft, Kurtzman thought, but understandable. The Iranian had outfitted his computer with an encryption system that would stump more than ninety-nine percent of the cyber experts in the intelligence world and the private sector. And, to a guy who didn’t know jack about computers, like Ahmadah, it probably had seemed like putting a digital Fort Knox around his information.
But Kurtzman and his team obviously were in the other one percent in that department. Kurtzman had encountered the encryption package before and knew that, if he hit certain triggers, it would erase the computer’s hard drive. He’d managed to get past the software and now, along with Wethers, was perusing the contents.
Barbara Price glided up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“You find anything?” she asked.
“Silly question,” he said. “I found lots of stuff.”
“Okay, tell me the right question.”
“The question is do I understand what I’ve found.”
“Okay, do you?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Not sure,” he said.
She gave him a playful slap on his arm. “You could’ve just told me that.”
“You didn’t ask the right question.”
“You’re an idiot.”
Resting his palms on either side of the keyboard, Kurtzman pushed his chair back a few inches from his workstation and screwed his eyes shut. “Sorry, I’ve been staring at this thing for hours. Here’s what I’m trying to say. A lot of the stuff on his system is written in Persian. Some of it seems to be using some weird little code. There’s probably enough material here to keep the NSA’s code breakers and Persian linguists busy for years.”
She nodded.
“That said, I did find some information about the drone.”
“That’s great.”
“I found several pictures of the MQM-107 drone. Familiar?”
She shook her head.
“It was made by Beech Aircraft in the 1970s. Has a wingspan of just less than ten feet. Stands around five feet tall. Single turbojet. Beech made a couple thousand for the U.S. Army and Air Force. Some of those ended up overseas. Within the last year, it was reported that North Korea had purchased some from Syria and planned to use them as a building block for attack drones.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve only finished some cursory research,” he said, “but, according to the intelligence reports out there, they had limited success with it. I’m guessing part of it for the North Koreans was a money problem. But along the way, I also found some other interesting intel about a group of Iranian and Syrian scientists who were working on a similar project for a couple of decades.”
“What’d you find out?”
“According to the reports, they were a lot more successful with it than North Korea. They had at least a little more money to spend—economies of scale and all that crap. And they had some pretty good scientists behind the effort. It’s not clear where the whole thing ended up or if it’s ended, for that matter. The U.S. never found evidence of a finished product. Of course, we were kind of busy fighting two wars and trying to monitor Iran’s nuclear program at the time.
“But I looked at the pictures. Some were stock photos of the original drone. But there were a few pictures of a sleek-looking little number that looked similar to the Streaker.”
Price cocked an eyebrow and smiled. “Streaker?”
“Yes, Streaker. That’s what the original drone was called. Don’t go there.”
“Fine, I won’t.”
“Good. This new craft looks similar to the original. Unfortunately it had one key alteration—a missile on each wing.”
“Damn.”
“Who knows whether they were functional? I mean, this is the same country that faked pictures of its Qahar 313 fighter jet flying over some mountains, right? Apparently they’re not above it. But here’s what makes the whole thing scary. There’s a network of companies located in Iran, Qatar, Bahrain, and until a couple of years ago, Syria. U.S. and British intelligence had been tracking them for at least a decade, if not longer. The theory was they were purchasing weapons-related technology through front companies in Europe and the United Arab Emirates and shipping it back to Iran and Syria. Syria was definitely the junior partner in all of this. When things started to go south there, it looks like Iran cut them out of the loop. Who can you trust these days?”
“So who was running the companies?”
Kurtzman smiled and clapped his hands together. “You’re stealing my punch lines, Barb. There’s nothing on the official documents, of course. But all the intelligence reporting indicates that al-Jaballah was the guy pulling the strings at Sky Death Inc.”
“Sky Death Inc.?”
“A little artistic license on my part. The English translation for the company is Shamsir Industries.”
“Shamsir. As in the curved swords?”
“Bingo. Proving once again you’re not just another pretty face.”
She punched him in the shoulder, but grinned. “What else do you have for me?”
“After all that? I’m spent.”
She nodded her understanding. “Keep digging,” she said. “I need to talk to Hal.”
* * *
“WE STILL DON’T know whether these clowns have a working model of the aircraft?” McCarter asked. He was speaking to Brognola and Price through an encrypted line.
“No,” Brognola replied.
When he’d received the call from Stony Man Farm, he’d excused himself from Ben-Shahar’s room and locked himself in a neighboring room. Though they were speaking through a secure connection, he knew most of what he said could be heard easily through the door or walls, if someone wanted badly enough to listen to it.
“The general consensus,” Brognola said, “is that they do have the craft. We sent the videos and images to Langley and Fort Meade, and they saw no signs that the things were frauds. And your guy seemed pretty confident that the strike was going to come down, right?”
“Yes,” McCarter said.
“Not great evidence,” Brognola said. “But probably enough to assume it’s true. At least enough that we shouldn’t ignore it.”
“Not a chance,” McCarter said. “We need to deal with it and I think I know how.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“We’ve got a couple of hours before we reach our destination,” Manning said.
James, Grimaldi and Encizo, both of whom were assembling their M-4 rifles, looked up from their work and nodded their understanding. The three warriors were hiding in the back of an Iranian military truck that had been snatched by dissidents and turned over to the CIA for a small bounty.
The driver of the truck, Saied, was a fighter with the MEK—Mojahedin-e-Khalq. He was a low-level guy unlikely to trigger alarms with the border guards, but familiar enough with the te
rritory and the language to get them through the country. If the guards hassled Saied, the Americans had handed him several stacks of Iranian currency and ordered him to buy cooperation from the Iranian border guards.
If that didn’t work, well, it was going to be a bloody trip into the country, Manning thought grimly.
The road they were taking into Iran was pocked with potholes. The truck jerked and shuddered every time it crossed over one of the holes, setting Manning’s teeth on edge. Finally, to distract himself from the rough ride, he shut his eyes and ran through their plans in his mind.
The control center was a small facility about twenty miles over the border. It had been an army outpost when the shah had ruled the country. After the ayatollahs took over, they’d kept it as an early warning post in case the Iraqis decided to rush the border. And over the decades they’d outfitted it to sweep up bits of military and other transmissions from their hostile neighbor. It had a small airstrip, a portable air traffic control tower and a handful of other buildings, including a hangar.
U.S. intelligence had nailed down what it believed was the most likely site for the UAV control center.
Now the Phoenix Force warriors just had to blast their way through a dozen or so guards, destroy the control center, all before they got the bird in the air.
But first they had to drive twenty miles into hostile territory without getting caught.
No worries, he told himself. Just another day at the office.
* * *
MANNING CHECKED his watch.
“We should be stopping soon,” he said.
“Good thing,” Encizo said. “All this bouncing and jostling around is killing me.”
“Hard trip,” Manning said. “Especially for an old guy.”
“This old guy’s going to kick your ass,” the Cuban said.
“Sure, right after your nap,” Manning said.
“And prune juice cocktail,” Grimaldi added.
Encizo turned to James. “How about you? You want to pile on, too?”
“Hell, no,” James said. “I respect my elders.”
“Bastards,” Encizo said, grinning.
A tablet sat on Manning’s lap. He powered it up and checked their GPS coordinates. They had another mile to travel before they reached their target. Each man began gathering his weapons and other equipment.
The truck slowed to a crawl before the engine’s growl grew louder and it launched into a turn. Manning heard the pop of tires rolling over gravel as the vehicle moved for another minute before it stopped completely. After a few seconds, the driver’s door opened and closed and the warriors heard the crunch of footsteps moving alongside the truck.
Encizo and James moved to either side of the truck’s interior, crouched into kneeling positions and trained their M-4 rifles on the door. Manning slipped his fingers around the pistol grip of his weapon and laid it across his lap, while Grimaldi pointed the muzzle of his M-4 at the door.
Manning heard someone working the door release before it was rolled upward.
Saied was the only one standing in the doorway. If staring down the barrel of four guns bothered him, he gave no outward sign of it.
“We’re here,” he said.
James climbed down from the truck, followed by Encizo. Both men surveyed the area while the others disembarked from the truck. Other than the ribbon of road stretching past them a couple dozen yards away, there was nothing.
Saied gestured to the north with his chin. “The base is that way,” he said.
Manning nodded, walked around the side of the truck and spotted a smudge that he assumed was the control center.
By the time he returned, Saied had walked away from the others. He had grabbed two handfuls of a large tarp covered with digitized camouflage patterns, and was pulling it down, revealing a beat-up white compact car. He tossed aside the tarp, which rippled in the breeze and skittered over the hard-packed earth. He climbed into the car, turned over the engine and gunned it. The car lurched forward. Saied guided it to the nearby road.
James, Grimaldi and Encizo quickly pulled camouflaged tarps from inside the truck and used them to shroud the truck. Manning looked at the vehicle and decided that, while the covering wouldn’t fool anyone up close, it would be good enough to obscure it from anyone at the target site, at least for a while.
If all went to plan, they wouldn’t need much time.
If...
The big Canadian knew better than to expect things to unfold easily. In combat, plans had a way of becoming obsolete once the first shots were fired. They’d gotten this far without a problem, which Manning considered a minor miracle. But he also knew their luck wouldn’t hold forever. So they’d better move.
“All right, ladies,” he said. “It’s clobbering time.”
* * *
SEVERAL MINUTES LATER Grimaldi was lying on the ground, on his stomach. He’d set up a Barrett sniper rifle on a tripod and was staring through the scope at the front gate. James was about seventy-five yards away, also hunkered down in a depression in the ground, sizing up the opposition through a rifle scope.
A large gate protected the entrance to the UAV control center facility. A gravel road snaked through the gate. Four men, all wearing olive-drab fatigues and black combat boots, all carrying assault rifles, stood outside the gate. One of the men was scanning his surroundings, while two more were talking. The fourth had a handheld radio of some kind pressed to his ear. Grimaldi settled the scope on the guy’s face and noted his concerned expression.
The Stony Man pilot activated his throat mike. “Cal?”
“Yeah?”
“You see our friend on the radio?”
“Guy who looks like he caught the clap from a sheep?”
“That’s him.”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“If he’s not happy,” Grimaldi said, “maybe we shouldn’t be happy, either.”
“Do I sound happy?”
“Point taken.”
“Yours, too. What’s bugging him?”
“Hell if I know. Try reading his lips.”
“Good idea,” James said. “Except I don’t read lips or speak Farsi.”
Before Grimaldi could reply, he heard the rumble of an engine to his left. He whipped his head in that direction and spotted a red pickup, clouds of dust rising up around it as it rolled along the gravel road leading into the camp. Turning the rifle in that direction, he trained the scope on the approaching vehicle’s windshield. Other than the driver, he thought he saw two others inside the truck cab, though the sun’s glare reflecting from the windshield made it hard to get a clear look.
“We have two maybe three people in that truck,” Grimaldi said.
Manning’s voice buzzed in the pilot’s earpiece. “Sitrep.”
“Truck. Undetermined number of occupants. No ID on them.”
“Roger that. Let them go to the gate. The reception they get should tell us something.”
“Roger.”
Swiveling the rifle, Grimaldi tracked the truck through his scope. When the truck reached the gate, and came to a stop, one of the guards walked up to the driver’s side of the vehicle and spoke to someone inside the cab for several seconds. Two of the guards circled the truck, though each kept his rifle slung over a shoulder. Obviously neither considered the truck’s occupants a threat, Grimaldi thought. The guard who’d been speaking with the driver stepped back from the truck window and waved them through. A couple of seconds later the gate began to roll back. The driver goosed the accelerator and the vehicle rolled through the gate, which slid closed behind it.
Grimaldi followed the truck for several seconds before it stopped again, this time next to a low-slung building made of concrete brick that had been painted white.
His scowl dee
pened. Who the hell was in the truck?
The driver’s door swung open. A tall, skinny man clad in the same olive-drab fatigues as the guards at the gate slid from inside the cab. He dragged his forearm across his brow, squinted at the sun and spit on the ground before turning back toward the vehicle. Stabbing his hands inside, his legs and back muscles tensed as he tried to drag something out only to have it yank his torso inside.
Finally the driver broke free, stepped back from the vehicle, yanked something from his hip and aimed the weapon in his hand inside the truck. At the same time another guard came around the front of the truck and stood next to the first guy. The truck driver stepped forward and reached inside the truck again. This time the second man squeezed through the door, too, and they both pulled, bringing a third man into view, his body limp.
Grimaldi cursed. The guy was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and faded blue jeans. The pilot focused on the face to confirm his suspicions, even though he already knew the answer.
He keyed his throat mike.
“They’ve got our driver,” he said.
“You sure?” Encizo asked.
“He’s sure,” James said. “I’m seeing the same thing.”
“He alive?” Manning asked.
“Affirmative,” Grimaldi said. “Looked like he was trying to fight them. I think the driver zapped him with a stun gun or something. He’s looking pretty docile right now.”
“You can bet,” James said, “they already know we’re here.”
“If not, they will soon enough,” the Canadian said.
“Right,” Manning said.
“So we hit them now?” James asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got the creeps who nabbed our driver,” Grimaldi said. “Cal?”
“I’ll handle the guards at the front.”
The tall, skinny guy with the stun gun had stepped away from Saied and was hammering him in the ribs and head with a series of fast, vicious kicks with his booted foot. The other guard stood by, arms crossed over his chest, watching his comrade.
Grimaldi lined up the shot. None of the men he’d observed so far seemed to be wearing body armor. His target had his back turned to Grimaldi, giving him a wider area to hit, especially at a distance of several hundred yards.
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