by Larry Bond
“There,” Ferguson told Thera, pointing to the second building in the row. “You can just barely make out the shadow inside.”
“How many people?”
“At least two.” He pointed to the road beyond the complex. “Maybe they’re forming a caravan here. Or maybe waiting for a plane. You could land our MC-130 on that road at the back there.”
Ferguson dropped down, sliding to the bottom of the hill. They were no more than fifteen minutes ahead of the Mercedes; if they were going to take it here, they had to get a move on.
“What we have to do is take out the guard by the gate, then the person or persons in the building,” Ferguson told Thera. He took the M203 grenade launcher from his pack and stuffed a dozen plastic shells in his pants pockets, which were already bulging with magazines for the MP5N submachine gun. His vest had concussion and smoke grenades, along with ammo for his pistol and slugs for his shotgun, which he had over his right shoulder.
“Are we taking these guys prisoner or what?” asked Thera.
“Khazaal’s the only one we have to apprehend alive,” said Ferguson. “But, yeah, we dunk these guys if we can. Have your gas mask ready. Crossbow?”
Thera held up the weapon, which was very similar to the type used by deer and other game hunters in the States. A marriage between a miniature rifle and high-tech bow, the weapon fired a titanium arrow over fifty yards, was as accurate as a rifle at that range, and would send its missilelike arrow through the side of a skull. It could also fire two different types of nonlethal ammunition: a syringelike dart with a fast-working anesthetic and a lollypop-shaped hard plastic arrow that was supposed to stun someone struck with it. The anesthetic was related chemically to sodium thiopental, the barbiturate commonly known as truth serum. It worked even quicker though it left the subject feeling as if he or she had a full-body hangover. Thera didn’t trust the lollypops and had left them back at the base camp.
“Wait until I’m outside of the buildings if at all possible,” Ferg told her. “But if you have to shoot, shoot. He doesn’t have a vest. Shoot at the chest.”
Ferguson jogged to the west side of the base, taking advantage of the wadi near the fence, which obscured the view. He found a hole under the fence and crawled into the compound between the two warehouse buildings at the southern end of the compound.
Thera used a drainage ditch to cover her as she closed in on the guard. She found a brace of weeds thirty yards from the entrance and got into firing position. The guard, clearly bored, stood with his gun down against his leg. She took a grenade out just in case — no sense fooling around if she missed — and put her MP5N within easy reach.
“Thera, where are you?” hissed Ferguson in her ear.
“Here,” she whispered. “Just tell me when.”
Ferguson hunkered on his haunches. There was no sign that there were more people than the guard and the one whose shadow he’d seen in the large building to his right. The building had a window at the back; he was tempted to try and get in that way but decided it was too risky. Nor did he have anything to use to booby-trap the exit.
“Thera?”
“Yeah?”
“After you take out the guard, I want you to get to the west side of the southern-most building, all right? There’s a window there. You think you can cover it?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No but. Wait until I’m ready if you can.”
Thera steadied the crossbow, zeroed in on the guard. She’d first used a bow when she was twelve years old, hunting with her father at his cabin in the Catskills. He was a New York City detective back then, two years divorced from her mother, a much heavier drinker than now. She could feel his hand on her shoulder, gripping gently, his thumb pressing as the buck walked toward them in the field.
The guard turned toward her. Suddenly he started to bring up his rifle. Thera pulled the trigger on her crossbow. The weapon made a whispery thwang as it shot. She watched through the scope as the arrow struck the guard flat in the chest. He shook, stunned, not quite comprehending what had happened. Then he started to grab at the arrow, stopped, raised his gun again, then fell off to the side, knocked unconscious by the massive dose of synthetic narcotic in the warhead.
Ferguson heard Thera’s heavy breathing over the radio and realized she’d shot the guard. He moved up the side of the building, reached the corner, and glanced toward the front. He saw no one. He checked the grenade launcher — he figured he would hit anyone coming out in the chest with the tear-gas round, which would knock them down at very close range — then knelt on one knee to wait for Thera.
Thera ran to the stricken guard, made sure he was down, then grabbed the dart and his rifle and went to the back of the building. Ferguson caught a glimpse of her as she ran.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Let me catch my breath.”
“Not enough time. Use the gun if you have to. Get your mask on.”
Without knowing exactly how the building was configured, Ferguson decided on a simple, two-step plan: tear-gas grenade in window, then duck. Standard grenades needed about fourteen meters to arm; this was a precaution against the grenade going off too close to friendly troops. The arming mechanism in these rounds allowed them to explode as soon as they struck something.
Ferguson rammed the metal butt end of the grenade launcher through the window, breaking the glass. Then he pumped the round inside and grabbed his shotgun. A man emerged from the building; Ferguson fired point-blank at the man, striking him in the chest, neck, and face with the plastic pellets in the shell.
“Ferg?” asked Thera.
“Watch the back, watch the back,” he yelled, reloading the M203 and pumping another round inside the building before running over to the man he’d shot, who was writhing on the ground. Though the shotgun pellets were plastic, he’d been so close to Ferguson that the round cut as well as bruised his face, and he wailed in pain, temporarily blinded. Ferguson put him temporarily out of his misery with a shot of Demerol.
As he rose, he heard Thera scream.
5
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Judy Coldwell waited for the bank clerk to leave the safety-deposit area before opening the box. Her fingers trembled as she picked up the passport and the envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills.
As she had hoped but also feared, she had been called on to fulfill her brother’s mission. It would not be easy. The church was under attack. The Reverend Tallis had been arrested. So had other elders, perhaps all of them. The bank accounts in the United States and Cayman Islands had been frozen, according to the FBI press release she read on the Internet.
Tallis had managed to send her a one-word message: Latakia.
Coldwell knew that meant Latakia, Syria, and that she should go there. Beyond that, however, she was unsure exactly how to proceed. She knew that her brother’s mission would have been to contact groups interested in attacking holy sites. She knew where to get the necessary authorizations (and find willing bank officers) to enable her to access the group’s hidden overseas funds. But she did not know what groups Benjamin had been dealing with.
Latakia had been a favorite spot of arms dealers and other smugglers when she last visited roughly three years before, and she guessed that whomever Benjamin had been dealing with had arranged to meet him there. Whether they would accept her as a replacement or not remained to be seen. Traveling to Syria was not easy for an American, but that at least would not be a problem; the passport in her hand indicated she was a Moroccan of French and Italian descent.
Whatever must be done would be done. Generations were counting on her to bring forward the next age.
Coldwell glanced at the passport. She would have to get her hair cut so that it matched the photo, but by tomorrow afternoon, Judy Coldwell would no longer exist. Agnes Perpetua would have taken her place. The tickets for the first leg of her journey were already waiting at the airport to be claimed.
Coldwell put the passport and money in
to her purse, then closed the box.
“I’m done here,” she told the clerk outside. “Done.”
6
EASTERN SYRIA
Thera’s scream was followed by a steady rattle of gunfire from an AK-47, followed by an MP5’s sturdier whistle. Ferg ran around the north side of the building, aiming to flank who’d ever come out.
“Thera,” he said as he ran. “Where are you? Yo.”
She didn’t answer. When he reached the back corner of the building he threw himself down, moving forward slowly on the ground.
Something moved near the doorway. Thera.
She bent down, reaching for the doorknob.
“What are you doing?” said Ferguson.
“Duck!” she told him, flipping a grenade in through the crack and then running back toward the berm ten yards away. She made it just as the grenade went off.
Ferguson rose and walked toward the doorway. Two men lay sprawled in the dirt nearby; a third had been killed inside the building by Thera’s grenade. None of the men was Khazaal.
“Run up and cover the front of the building,” Ferguson told her.
“You’re not going in, are you?” she asked.
“Just get up there and make sure no one came out while we were playing back here.”
The interior of the building had been divided in half by a wall that ran only partway to the high ceiling. Except for the dead man and a few scattered cartons, the room at the back was empty. Ferguson moved inside as quietly as he could, then raised his grenade launcher and pumped a shell of tear gas over the wall. He pulled up his shotgun, aiming it at the open doorway, then ran forward to the wall. Though he had a pretty strong suspicion that the front half of the building was empty, he rolled on the floor and crawled his way inside.
A hundred boxes or more lined the wall on his left. The rest of the place was empty. The boxes were filled with infant formula, according to the writing on the side.
“Is this where Khazaal is going?” asked Thera when he came out.
“I don’t know yet,” he told her. “Let’s go put down markers for the airborne guys and then hide.”
“I’m sorry I had to shoot,” said Thera.
“Forget about it now. Come on. Their Mercedes should be about ninety seconds away.”
* * *
Nearly ten miles to the south, Rankin stopped his bike in the desert and pulled out his paper map, correlating his position against the handheld GPS device. He flipped the radio into satellite mode. “Fouad, is he still coming this way?”
“Yes,” said the Iraqi.
“Where’s he going?” asked Guns. The two Rangers they’d taken with them pulled up behind them.
“Maybe for that airfield at the corner there,” said Rankin. “Let’s move up the road to the intersection with the airport.”
* * *
Ferguson hid behind the Land Rover, and Thera crouched at the edge of the building as the battered Mercedes rounded the turnoff and headed for the complex.
“You have the first guy out. I have the second,” said Ferguson. “Make sure the mask covers your glasses. This gas is worse than CS by a factor of ten.”
“No way.”
“Try it and see,” said Ferguson, readying the grenades.
The Mercedes stopped alongside the Land Rover. The two men inside made things easy by getting out at the same time.
Thwack!
Thera’s crossbow landed in the driver’s left shoulder, where the plunger tip injected enough anesthetic to knock him senseless within three seconds. By then, Ferguson had knocked the second man to the ground with a plastic round to the head. He soft-tossed a tear gas grenade into the car as he ran to the man, kicking away a fallen pistol. Though the man had been knocked unconscious by the blow, Ferg injected a heavy dose of the sodium pentothal to keep him out. A fog of tear gas enveloped the area; Ferguson and Thera had to pull the two men all the way to the fence before they were clear.
Ferguson cursed when he took off his mask. Neither of the men in the Mercedes was Khazaal. He took out a small digital camera to transmit the pictures back to Fouad.
“I don’t know who they are,” Fouad said. “They may be with the resistance, but most likely they are smugglers.”
“Smugglers sell baby food?” asked Ferguson.
“Maybe. It might have been stolen inside Iraq and stored there, to be sold elsewhere. The relief agencies bring in supplies, and the scum steal it away.”
“All right. We’ll get them picked up anyway. Where’s the third vehicle and what was it?”
“A Ford. I do not think it belongs to the resistance.”
“Which would be why they would use it, no?”
“I don’t think they are that clever.”
“But I do,” said Ferguson. He pulled out his map and spread it on the hood of the Land Rover to orient himself. As he did, Rankin told him over the radio that the second Mercedes had just passed the airstrip.
“We’re going to be too far behind now to catch him if he stays on the highway,” said Rankin.
Ferguson looked at the map. The highway headed southwestward for over a hundred miles before approaching civilization; there were few places on that stretch where it could turn off. The MC-130 with the special operations forces aboard could make it across the border within a few minutes and get ahead of the car, but if they missed the ambush they wouldn’t get another shot. And Ferguson and Thera would have to take the other car out by themselves.
“I’ll have Van Buren’s Rangers set up an ambush down the road,” Ferg told Rankin. “Just keep following.”
7
OVER SYRIA
Colonel Van Buren moved from the command area at the front of the First Team’s specially equipped MC-130 into the assault bay, where Captain Ricardo Melfi and a team of hand-picked Rangers and Special Forces soldiers were waiting to jump.
“Godspeed,” said Van Buren, holding up his thumb. Melfi, about twenty feet away, signaled back. Van Buren found a handhold and watched his people crowding toward the cargo ramp, eager to get into action. They were shadows in the unlit bay, and he tried to keep them that way, anonymous warriors; it made it more difficult to deal with problems if he thought of them as individuals with families and loved ones.
Designed to fly through hostile territory at very low altitude to avoid radar, the MC-130 used a satellite system to show its flight crew precisely where they were. The airplane banked and began to rise over the target area, a desolate curve in the highway the second Mercedes was taking. The men went out quickly, executing an extremely dangerous low-level drop as if they were stepping off an amusement park ride back in the States. By the time the airplane banked north, the troops were on the ground, squaring away their chutes.
Van Buren went back to his post. Modified from a stretched version of the Hercules (officially, the C-130J/J-30), the forward area of the First Team’s MC-130 was equipped with radio surveillance and communication gear similar to those used in the Commando Solo and ABCCC airborne battlefield controller versions of the Hercules, with a few of the links used by JSTARS thrown in for good measure. Van Buren got on the radio to the two Chinooks that had been tasked for the pickup. The aircraft were now airborne over Iraq and were about twenty minutes from the border.
“We can hear a vehicle coming north,” said Melfi when he checked in.
Van Buren checked the image from the Predator.
“That’ll be them. Get ready.”
* * *
Melfi crouched a few yards from the road as the Mercedes approached the curve. The trick wasn’t stopping the car; it was stopping the car without killing the people inside. The fact that his men had been on the ground for less than ten minutes made things even more interesting.
Two Special Forces sergeants took positions on the right flank of the road, aiming SRAW weapons at the car. SRAW stood for Short Range Assault Weapon. The missile- known as a “Predator” before the Air Force hogged the nickname for its UAV — was des
igned to disable tanks as well as light-armor vehicles and built-up positions, replacing the LAW and AT-4. Essentially a modern version of the World War II-era bazooka, the stock weapon typically struck an armored target from the top rather than the side, guided by a laser range finder and a magnetic detector. The warhead normally consisted of two parts, an explosive penetrator and a fragmentation grenade: the warhead would penetrate the outer shell of whatever was being attacked, and the grenade would kill whoever was inside.
Melfi’s men were using a special version of the missile. Its titanium and steel warhead did not contain explosives. The idea was that the slug would destroy the front of the car and its engine, stopping it without killing the people inside.
“Now,” said Melfi, ducking down.
The missile made an unearthly hiss as it leapt from the shoulder of the weapons man. The car veered to the right under the blow, plowing to a halt across the road. As it skidded, a Ranger jumped up with what looked like a mortar in his hands. He sighted a red laser dot on the top of the car and squeezed the wide trigger at the base of the weapon. A large, blimp-shaped missile flew from the throat of the gun. The shell disintegrated in midair; by the time it hit the vehicle it had spread into a wide net. Two dozen miniature flash-bang grenades exploded as it hit, the effect not unlike the finale of a massive Fourth of July fireworks display. As the air ripped with the explosions, two pairs of soldiers ran to the car. One man in each pair wielded a pointed sledgehammer, the other carried CIS grenades. The back window and one of the side windows were walloped and the grenades inserted.