Angels of Wrath ft-2

by Larry Bond

  “She really wants to talk to you.”

  “My phone is on twenty-four/seven.”

  “What about Rankin and Guns?”

  “They can get their own girl.”

  “Ferg, listen. Alston is going to be pissed.”

  Ferguson tossed the phone on the table. The others looked at him. Ferguson folded his arms across his chest but then reached across and picked it up.

  “You OK, Ferg?” asked Corrigan. “Maybe you need a rest.”

  “Yeah, a nice long rest,” Ferguson said. “So Alston wants to chew my butt in person, huh?”

  “Well, I don’t know that she wants to chew you out.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack. But hey, who knows? Maybe some hot-looking blonde who graduated magna cum laude at daddy’s law school can run covert ops better than I can.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to like it,” said Corrigan. “You just have to do your job.”

  “You know what, Jack? I’m going to take your advice,” said Ferguson. “Tell Corrine she can look me up in Syria if she wants, because I don’t have to like it, but I have a job to do.”

  I his time when he tossed the phone, he got up and left the room.

  3

  OVER SYRIA

  THREE NIGHTS LATER…

  A cold hand grabbed Thera Majed as she fell from the aircraft, wrapping itself around her throat and squeezing tightly. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she felt her eyeballs freeze over. She was breathing oxygen from a small bottle strapped to her side — a necessity when parachuting from 35,000 feet — but even her lungs felt as if they had turned to ice.

  “Looking good,” yelled Ferguson over the short-range radio they were using to communicate.

  Guns and Rankin had gone out first. Thera’s unfamiliarity with the procedure had cost the second pair a few extra seconds, which at four hundred knots translated into nearly two miles.

  And counting.

  Between the wind howling around her and the tight helmet, Ferguson’s words sounded more like “luck of gold,” and it took a few seconds for Thera to decipher what he was talking about. By the time she figured it out, the Douglas DC-9 she’d jumped out of had disappeared.

  Thera struggled to get her body into the “frog” position she’d learned nearly two years before at the Army Airborne school. Since that time, she’d made no more than two dozen jumps, only three of which had been high-altitude, high-opening forays like this one, and none had been at night. Everybody said it would be easy — her body would remember how to do it once she stepped out of the plane — but the only thing her body remembered was how cold it had been… not half as cold as this time.

  Ferguson, arms spread and legs raised as if he were a miniature aircraft, zoomed toward her. On his left wrist he wore a large altimeter, which had a sound alert wired into his helmet’s earset. On his right he had a CIPS device that looked like a large compass. An arrow dominated the dial, showing the direction to their destination and a countdown of the mileage. A pair of lightweight night-vision glasses were strapped beneath his helmet like goggles. The aircraft had been going nearly four hundred knots when they jumped out, which meant they were, too. Their trajectory to the landing zone had been calculated before takeoff, then tweaked ever so slightly a few minutes before the jump to account for the wind.

  “Let her rip,” he told her, the altimeter buzzing in his ear as they fell through 30,000 feet.

  Thera’s first tug on the handle was too tentative, and the parachute failed to release. But her interpretation of the problem was that she wasn’t in the proper position — true enough, as it happened, though this had nothing to do with the chute deploying — and she struggled to push her head downward and get her arms out before trying again. As she did, something whipped by and tapped her on the head.

  It was Ferguson. Worried that she was having problems, he shaped his body into a delta to gain speed in her direction, then flared out to slow down. He misjudged his speed slightly in the dark as he pulled close and rather than paralleling, flew past. He recovered, sailing to the left and then back around, inching forward.

  It felt like inching. In fact he was moving at over a hundred miles an hour.

  “We have to pull now,” he yelled into the radio. “We’re getting off course. Hey! Hey! You ready? Ready?”

  Thera thought Ferguson was the one having trouble, and she started to maneuver toward him.

  “Pull!” said Ferguson, motioning at her.

  She reached to the handle and yanked, feeling the gentle tug of her harness as the chute unfolded above her. And now it really was like they said it would be: her arms moved up as she took stock of the chute and herself, making sure the cells had inflated properly and orienting herself with the aid of a GPS device wrapped around her right wrist. She was back in control or at least as much in control as anyone being held up in space by engineered nylon could be.

  * * *

  Rankin reached the bluff overlooking the Iraqi border ahead of Guns. He put down the bike and increased the amplification on his night-optical glasses, which looked like a pair of very thick sunglasses. The wrap-around glasses combined generation-four infrared and starlight enhancement technology with electronic magnification to a factor of ten. While not as powerful as the new gen-four devices being tested by Army Special Forces units, the glasses’ light weight was more than fair compensation; they were more than powerful enough to illuminate the rocky desert terrain below.

  Rankin could see a warren of “rabbit” holes and days-old tracks through the gritty soil. The holes were the entrances to tunnels used by smugglers, who used them to avoid the new Iraqi government’s surveillance aircraft and patrols.

  “What’d you do, tune the bike?” Guns asked, walking up next to Rankin.

  “Less wind resistance.” Rankin rested his right hand on his Uzi as he surveyed the desert. While the fewer than ten thousand American troops still stationed in Iraq were concentrated near Baghdad and the northern oil fields, Rankin figured the Iraqis and certainly the Syrians could stop the smugglers if they really cared to. But smuggling goods was a lucrative business, especially for the local commanders who averted their eyes.

  “We can put the main post down in the those caves. Watch the border from here,” Rankin told Guns. “Let’s go mark a landing spot for the Rangers.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Ferg?”

  “He knows where we are.”

  * * *

  Thera stepped forward as the ground finally came up to her legs. She twisted slightly and crumpled to the ground as she landed, falling on her side. It wasn’t pretty, but at least she was down. She got up, expecting Ferguson to fall on top of her any second. Gathering in her parachute, she looked around for a convenient place to hide it. Ten yards away a small collection of boulders huddled together on the ground. That would do.

  With the chute stuffed between the rocks, she took stock of her situation, checking her position with a GPS device. Their rendezvous point was about five miles away, on a ridge overlooking the nearby valley.

  She was supposed to hit no farther than a mile away. It was an inauspicious start to her first real mission with the team. She knew Ferguson only by reputation. Depending on whom you talked to, he was either easy to get along with or the biggest SOB in the world, but everybody agreed he was driven; he’d probably be mad that she had fallen so far away.

  Thera checked her radio, then decided it would he better not to call in until she was a little closer. Trudging in the direction of the rendezvous area, she’d gone about a quarter of a mile when a rich baritone echoed in her headset.

  “Oh come tell me, Sean O’Connell, tell me why you hurry so.”

  “Ferg?” she said.

  “I’ve got orders from the captain,” sang Ferguson, “for the pipes must be together, by the rising of the moon.”

  Thera dropped to one knee, scanning three hundred and sixty degrees around her. The only thing nearby were rocks.

  “Where are you
?” she said. “Ferg?”

  The sound of a motor in the distance made her freeze. She brought her submachine gun up.

  “Ferg?”

  “Yee-hah!” he shouted over the radio.

  Thera whirled in time to see the shadow of a motorbike fly over the rise behind her. The bike had two very large mufflers at its side to dampen its engine sound.

  “Ferguson,” she said.

  “You’re expecting someone else?” he asked, skidding down the hill.

  “How did you get down so fast?”

  “Hop on. The bikes landed back on the other side of the hill. I just about tripped over them when I came down. Good thing you took your time going out; we would have been all night finding them.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Ferguson watched as a large Pave Low helicopter skimmed across the desert terrain toward the chemical glow light Rankin had placed to guide it. The chopper shook the desert as it rumbled a few feet over the terrain, flying low to avoid the Syrian radars to the west. The Pave Low’s immense blades kicked a sandstorm around it as it flew. Ferguson shielded his night glasses as the bird settled in. A company’s worth of Rangers augmented by two Delta veterans and an Iraqi intelligence officer began emerging from the rear. The men and their equipment had been detailed to support the First Team, providing on-ground security and extra eyes at their base of operations in the desert wilderness. Additional troops were on call to be used for the actual “snatch,” assuming conditions allowed.

  Ferguson watched for the Iraqi intelligence officer accompanying them. He wasn’t particularly hard to spot; more than twice the age of most of the soldiers, he walked with a nervous hop away from the helicopter, ducking even though it was unnecessary.

  “Fouad Mohammed?” yelled Ferguson when the man reached him.

  “Yes,” said the Iraqi.

  “Bob Ferguson. Call me Ferg. Step into my office.” He motioned back to a run of rocks twenty yards away where he’d parked his bike. The landing area was about a quarter mile from the small caves and overhangs where they’d located their base camp.

  “You know Khazaal?” Ferguson asked the Iraqi.

  “I met him some years ago,” said Fouad, whose ears and bones still reverberated from the helicopter ride. He greatly preferred quieter modes of transportation, though he knew better than to mention this to the American; in his experience Americans never found machines quite noisy enough.

  Fifty-three years old, Fouad had dealt with a number of Americans over the years, beginning with his very early service as a glorified gofer and eavesdropper for the Iraqi foreign intelligence service. Stationed in Cairo at the age of twenty-two, he had kept tabs on various expatriate movements and Jews: easy work, though the detailed weekly reports often took two or three days simply to write. By the Iran-Iraq War he had progressed to a liaison officer working with the CIA. Out of favor for a while, he had been sent north into exile in the Kurdistan area until just before the start of the Gulf War, when he worked on a group assigned to prepare for the defense of Baghdad. After the war he found his way to the great sanctions shell game. For the first few months he helped hide evidence of banned weapons from weapons inspectors but soon turned to the more critical task of trumping up evidence of continuing programs to impress the fading dictator and keep external enemies at bay. Fouad lay low in the northern Kurdish region after the second Gulf War until friends in the government convinced him to come to work with them. A brief job with an American security contractor had renewed some of his CIA ties; eventually Fouad found himself back in service with the interior ministry’s security apparatus, serving as a liaison to “external services,” the latest euphemism for the CIA.

  “You think Khazaal would go through one of the tunnels?” asked Ferguson, sitting on a rock near his motorcycle. “I thought he liked to travel in style.”

  “We all adapt,” said Fouad. Something about the American was very familiar.

  “All right.” Ferguson wasn’t sure if Fouad was parroting the intelligence report he’d seen or if he was its author. In his experience, the Iraqi intelligence people demonstrated a wide range of abilities, from extreme competence to extreme ineptitude. As a rule, the more confident they made themselves sound the less able they were. “So we watch for a car that meets him?”

  “Possible. It may be a wild goose chase.”

  “Not what I want to hear.”

  “You want the truth or what you want to hear?” said Fouad, who knew that the latter was almost always preferred, especially by Americans. Putting the question bluntly sometimes saved problems and sometimes not.

  “Truth. Always.” Ferguson smiled at him. “But all truth is relative.”

  Fouad shrugged, though he did not agree; God’s truth was absolute, after all.

  “What we think will happen is that he’ll come across the border on foot, get picked up and driven to one of the abandoned military camps northwest of here, where a plane will meet him,” said Ferguson. “We’re going to stake out the camps so we can hit them when he’s there. On the other hand, he may just take a car all the way across the desert. If that happens, we take the car.”

  “What if you miss?”

  “Then we punt. We find out where he’s going, and we try to get him there. Problem is, we’re not sure where he’s going. Unless you are.”

  “There are so many rumors about Khazaal you can make something up, and it is just as likely to be true.”

  “We think tomorrow night,” said Ferguson. “What do you think?”

  Fouad could only shrug.

  “Can you ride a motorcycle?”

  “Not well.”

  “You’re my passenger then. Come on.” Ferguson picked up the motorcycle.

  Fouad hesitated. He did not like motorcycles and had had several bad experiences with them. “I knew a Ferguson once,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “In Cairo. And during the war with Iran.”

  Ferguson realized that Fouad was talking about his father. But he only started the bike and waited for Fouad to get on.

  “That was my dad in Cairo,” he said after they reached the base camp. “He had a bunch of jobs over here during the Cold War.”

  “Yes, I can see him in your face.” A very solid officer, thought Fouad, not a liar, like many. Good with Arabic. How much like the father was the son?

  “Anna saiiiid jiddan himuqaabalatak,” lie said in Arabic. “I am very glad in meet you. Your father was a very dependable fellow.”

  “Anaa af ham tamaaman,” replied Ferguson, using the rudimentary phrase a visitor to an Arabian country would use to show he understood what was being said. But then he continued in Arabic: “I understand perfectly: you’re trying to butter me up because you think I’m just another CIA jerk who’s easily turned by a compliment.”

  “No. Your father was a brave man. And you speak Arabic well, though with an Egyptian accent.”

  “Grammar school in Cairo. Before the nuns got a hold of me.” Ferguson laughed.

  The son was like the father in many ways, thought Fouad. A thing both good and bad.

  4

  SYRIA, ON THE BORDER WITH IRAO

  THE NEXT NIGHT…

  Rankin turned to the Iraqi and gestured at the car that had turned off from the highway. It rode across the open desert, approaching the foothill two miles away. “Is that for him?”

  “Who can tell? But the car is like the one that left from Thar in the afternoon, an old Mercedes.”

  Just like a hajji, thought Rankin: never a straight yes or no.

  Thar was a small town on the other side of the border. Iraqi intelligence officers there had prepared a list of half a dozen suspicious vehicles, all with single drivers. The theory was that the vehicle would go over alone and wait for Khazaal to slip through, a practice often employed by criminals and others trying to escape the country without documentation. The Mercedes would have been thoroughly searched before being allowed over the border.

&nb
sp; Two shadows came from the rocks. “You see a face?” asked Rankin.

  Fouad shook his head.

  Rankin looked over at Guns, who was using his satellite radio system to talk to Corrigan back in the Cube. The radio had a “local” discrete-burst mode for short-range communications with other team members on the ground and a longer-range mode that used satellites to communicate. The latter was easier to detect; though the transmissions were encrypted and virtually unbreakable, the presence of the radio waves could lead someone to the user.

  “Where are we, Guns?” asked Rankin.

  “I just uploaded the video. They’re looking at it.”

  “What’s the UAV see?” Rankin asked. A Predator robot aircraft, or “unmanned aerial vehicle,” was orbiting overhead, helping with the surveillance. It would follow the vehicle to a spot where it could be ambushed.

  “Nothing so far.”

  “Tell Ferg what’s going on.”

  “Already have,” said Guns.

  “Hold on,” said Rankin. “There’s another car coming.”

  * * *

  The trick was to let the Mercedes get far enough from the border area so that any of the local smugglers and Syrian spies nearby wouldn’t be tipped off but to not let it get so far away that they couldn’t stop it. With two cars, the task became more complicated, especially once the two vehicles got on the nearby road and headed in different directions. Ferguson and Thera staked out the first car, which was moving northwestward; Rankin and Guns followed the second, traveling two miles to the south.

  Just to make things even more interesting, a third one appeared soon after the second made its pickup. Two Rangers were detailed to follow that one, staying close enough to trail them but not take them unless ordered to do so by Ferguson.

  The first car took a turn off the highway onto a packed dirt road in the direction of an abandoned military outpost a few miles west of the border. The road wound around a series of dry streams, or wadis, and loose sand traps. Since they were on motorcycles, Ferguson, Thera, and the two Rangers traveling with them were able to sprint ahead and check out the site. Ferguson sent the Rangers down the road to watch, in case his hunch about where the Mercedes was going proved wrong. As he and Thera approached the camp, Fouad warned that a Land Rover was parked in front of one of the buildings. The Iraqi had taken over for Guns and was watching the Predator’s video feed. The vehicle had not been there in the afternoon’s satellite snapshot. Ferguson and Thera got off their bikes and went to scout the base. A low ridge sat to the south about a quarter mile from the fence. Standing at the top, Ferguson could see most of the base area.