Blood Oil

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Blood Oil Page 29

by James Phelan


  The MQ-9 Reaper was a mean machine. Practically twice as good as the Predator in every respect, but make no mistake: both unmanned aircraft, when piloted by these crews, were among the most lethal hunters in the world. Unlike, say, an F-18 or F-22, there was no actual physical crew inside the aircraft that these Air Force operators controlled. That meant that each aircraft was not confined to the physical constraints of a human pilot, so they could direct it into dangerous missions that would be unthinkable to send even the best pilots into, and there was the ability to have a razor-sharp pilot at the controls twenty-four seven.

  The Reaper that was being controlled as the HVT strike tool for Operation True Target was fitted with six stores pylons. The inner pylons carried their maximum load of two 680-kilogram external long-range fuel tanks. The midwing stores pylons each carried a pair of Longbow Hellfire missiles. The outer wing’s pylons, usable for air-to-air missiles such as the Sidewinder, were empty. In this configuration the Reaper had a total of fifty-three hours’ flight-time endurance.

  Room Bravo at Creech contained a crew of fifty Air Force officers and non-coms, all with a specific task to do in order to control their UAV unit of four aircraft. Currently, one aircraft was on the ground in Djibouti for maintenance, two were flying recon over Darfur, and one, named Swordfish, was over Nigeria. For these men and women in uniform, in their air-conditioned office full of massive LCD screens and computer-game-style controls, this was as close to being at war as it was flying sorties over Baghdad. Or, in this case, the open roads of Nigeria.

  Swordfish was currently being controlled via the Ku-band satellite data link. The Air Vehicle Operator who piloted the UAV was seated before a large flat screen, watching closely what the Reaper saw through its nose-mounted cameras. Three sensor operators were to his sides with their own control stations. The cruising speed, at around one hundred and thirty-five kilometres per hour, was on average forty clicks faster than that of the True Target convoy on the ground. He flew a track that intersected the Humvee’s course every fifteen minutes.

  To an enemy, the Reaper was like the unwanted guest who didn’t want to leave. The gnat at a barbeque. To the allied forces on the ground, it was like having a guardian angel flying in the sky.

  67

  KEY WEST, THE FLORIDA KEYS

  Duhamel fast-roped onto the suburban street from a hovering Bell 412HP of the FBI’s Tactical Helicopter Unit. The only Hostage Rescue Team member to accompany him was Brick, and he touched down on the bitumen next to the team leader and they gave the thumbs-up signal to the loadmaster above. The thick fast-ropes were released and fell to the ground and the helo pivoted and flew away from the target zone.

  Duhamel rechecked his H&K MP5 submachine gun was still flicked to safe and was met on the ground by the lead agent of the North Miami Beach Field Office’s Enhanced FBI SWAT team. Like Duhamel and Brick, these boys all wore the dark olive-coloured Nomex and Kevlar combat gear, ceramic helmets, clear anti-flash goggles, gloves and steel-capped boots. They had ‘FBI—SWAT’ stencilled in unmissable white lettering on their backs. Duhamel and Brick simply had ‘HRT’ on theirs.

  Only their weapons, the webbing and Kevlar vests bristling with tactical assault gear, set them apart. The HRT members still had their close-quarters weapons. These Enhanced SWAT members carried serious firepower.

  “Special Agent Shane Black,” the SWAT leader said.

  “SA Jake Duhamel.”

  Hands were shaken.

  “Target still in the building?”

  “Yes, sir,” Black said. “We’ve got a fire-team in across the road that has him on thermal scope, and they’ve had a couple of tech guys listening in on him all morning.”

  “What’s he been saying? Who is he—he talking on a phone?”

  “Nothin’ but prayers,” Black said. “We got a guy from the Field Office speaks Pashto. Talk’n’ to himself, it seems. No phone or radio conversations, although he has placed six calls to a cell-phone number. No answer, cell is switched off and without a message service.”

  “That phone got a location?” Duhamel asked. He knew the answer, otherwise it would have been the first thing that he would have heard from this SWAT agent.

  “Nope. It’s a clean cell number, never been used, prepaid variety purchased at a local convenience store with cash, seventeen days ago.”

  “ID on the buyer from store surveillance?”

  “One of the dead guys from the boat attack on the LOOP.”

  “Quantico got a recording of his voice?”

  “Yep, we’re transmitting it through in real-time.”

  “All right, good,” Duhamel said. The target’s voice would be run through recognition software and a search done through DHS databases and those of the NSA and CIA. If this terrorist had ever spoken on a phone that had been intercepted by the US and her UKUSA allies, they’d have it on digital storage somewhere. That would then lead to more avenues to investigate.

  “Where are the EMTs?” Duhamel asked. No ambulances were in sight.

  “Round the corner with some black and whites. We doing this or what?”

  “Yep, let’s do this,” Duhamel said. He turned to address them all.

  “Lethal force is a last option. Brick and I are first through the door,” he said. He chambered a round into his MP5, selected single-round fire, checked the sights. Brick loaded a bean-bag projectile into his shotgun. “Okay, let’s roll.”

  “You heard the man, let’s move,” Black said. He chambered a round in his M4. His nine SWAT boys all did the same, some with M4s and .45 H&K UMPs, others with Benelli M4 Super 90 Combat shotguns, a couple with CS grenade launchers. Black handed over two gas masks to Duhamel and Brick.

  Black’s team clung to the sides of two blacked-out armoured vans, ready to roll. It wasn’t that these local feds couldn’t take down the target. Hell, they would do that as soon as breathe, this terrorist being a member of a cell that had taken American lives in the Gulf of Mexico. Duhamel and Brick were there to ensure every chance was taken to take this guy in alive. Intel said there was one more known terrorist in the country, and they needed to know his whereabouts. So, for the purposes of today, for this op, this terrorist would be playing the role of hostage, and Duhamel and Brick were there to ensure that the job was done right. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team didn’t deploy from Quantico for anything but success. And success was measured by how they lived up to their motto: To Save Lives. In a sense, it was to be this bad guy’s lucky day.

  “Target’s three streets to the north?” Duhamel asked. He and Brick readied to take stations next to Special Agent Black on the side of the van. The SWAT leader paused, and gave a vacant look towards the HRT agents.

  “What—what is it?” Duhamel asked.

  Special Agent Black held a hand to his radio earpiece. Listened hard.

  “Target is animated—he may be preparing to move,” Black said.

  “Okay, let’s take him!” Duhamel said, climbing aboard the running rail of the van and banging on the metal side. “Move out, now, now, now!”

  68

  LAGOS, NIGERIA

  Fox had the M4 slung over his head and shoulder, the black nylon strap angled across the front of his chest. It rattled against his back as he ran up the embankment after Mendes. His right thigh was throbbing, just below the holstered Glock, but his full attention was on the guy ahead of him. Steve Mendes was fast. Olympic fast.

  Mendes was running flat out on the path that ran along the top of the embankment parallel to the highway. He half-stopped and looked over his shoulder—Fox was bearing down on him—then he disappeared to his right as he hauled himself up and over a chain-link fence.

  Fox didn’t stop. He wasn’t a match for Mendes in a straight line, even if he had both legs pumping at full speed. But where there were fences, cars, buildings, any obstacle, he had a chance to gain on him. he’d trained his Parkour moves enough to tackle this stuff with his eyes s
hut.

  Fox hit the chain-wire fence with his left foot connecting at waist height. He transferred the forward momentum upwards to push up the fence in a passe muraille, or pop vault. His right hand clasped the top rail and pivoted over it, landing on the other side three metres clear and exiting at the same speed he’d hit the fence. The manoeuvre didn’t lose him a second—it had cost Mendes five.

  Mendes was twenty metres ahead, and looked over his shoulder—his eyes wide at the closing gap. He surged forward again.

  A car backed out of a driveway. Mendes managed to slide over the boot and continue on, which cost him another two seconds. The driver had jerked to a halt as she realised she’d hit something, and opened her door to get out as Fox took a step off the waist-height brick fence of the driver’s house and another step off the roof of the car and over the driver’s head, and he was back on the sidewalk, powering after Mendes who had crossed the next road.

  The next main road had heavy traffic running southbound at about twenty k’s per hour after pulling away from a red light. Mendes reached out and grabbed onto the side-door railing of a bus, pulled himself up and the toes of his Nikes were on the lip of the bottom stair that protruded under the door’s rubber seal. He looked back at Fox.

  Not once did Fox stop moving, with continual forward momentum as he merged with the traffic—it was clipping along a good five k’s per hour quicker than he was sprinting. His arms and legs were like pistons as he gained just a little more speed and launched himself into the traffic, onto the bonnet of a taxi, both feet planted hard. He steadied like a surfer as the driver of the taxi, after two seconds of utter disbelief at the apparition of his new hood ornament, slammed on the brakes.

  Fox anticipated this. He jumped at the same moment as the taxi’s forward inertia was added to his speed and he was launched through the air, just far enough to make up the next five metres to land on the flatbed of a truck with a forward roll. Then he was on his feet again.

  Fox stood there, steady, breathing in through his nose to calm his heart rate. He adjusted the M4’s strap, made sure his Glock was still securely holstered, and looked ahead at Mendes. Just two cars separated them.

  Steve Mendes turned his head, never letting go of the bus as it ambled along in the late-afternoon traffic. For the first time, his expression turned pale with total mouth-agape wonder: this guy was chasing him down like a Terminator.

  Fox took a deep breath and exhaled in a gymnast’s measured posture as he bounded up onto the cab of the truck, his foot on the edge of its bonnet. Again he used the forward momentum of the vehicle under heavy braking force as he launched himself onto the boot of the next car.

  Mendes saw what was happening, knew Fox would be on him within three seconds, and turned around to check the way ahead.

  Fox didn’t stop as he sprinted over the first car, one foot on the roof, the other launching himself off the bonnet, and onto the boot of the next, then the roof—

  Mendes let go of the bus, rolled across the pavement, picked himself up and ran flat out.

  Fox jumped off the roof of the car. As his toes touched the pavement of the sidewalk he bent his knees as shock absorbers, and carried his momentum through a forward roll, favouring his turn away from the rigid M4, onto his feet and kept running. It had been one long, fluid movement from the back of that truck and he was still going for it.

  Mendes checked back over his shoulder before he ran down a side-street.

  69

  THE SITUATION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE

  “What was that?” the President asked.

  “We’re seeing what the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group are seeing in their HQ—this is the live feed from the suspect’s house in Key West.”

  “There’s no sound—why’s there no sound?”

  “It’s closed-circuit radio audio only, Mr President. The image is coming from a helmet cam.”

  “We got their tactical radio feed available, patching it through—”

  The sounds of ‘clear!’ were being yelled over the FBI team’s comms gear.

  “There, what’s that?”

  “They just called in the EMT,” O’Keeffe said. “One agent down.”

  “The terrorist?” McCorkell asked. “He alive?”

  Duhamel’s MP5 was on the floor, the barrel still smoking. He had both hands on the terrorist’s face, making sure he didn’t pass out.

  “Talk to me,” he said to the man. Slapped his face, made his eyes stay open. There was bright foamy blood on his lips from the two bullets he’d caught in the chest. An S&W auto was kicked away from the terrorist’s hand. Brick was receiving first aid from another agent for a gunshot to his neck.

  “Talk to me, you son of a bitch!”

  “We got some info here,” Agent Black said. “Washington—you getting this feed? You seeing this?”

  His camera showed a dining table of documents. Fake passports. He went through them all.

  “Okay, we got some IDs here,” he said. “Count it as six individuals. Two new faces, you seeing this?”

  He held the photos close and the faces of two other terrorists filled the massive screen of the Situation Room.

  “Oh boy,” a voice said off-camera.

  Black’s camera turned to an agent at the other end of the table. He moved down there. Papers were strewn about.

  “Be advised, we have maps of the DC area here,” Black said. “That’s maps of Washington DC, streets are highlighted in what looks like three different routes with ‘stop sites’ marked. They all lead to the White House. We got measurements too—looks like firing ranges, mortar-type ranges. Are you getting this feed?”

  70

  LAGOS, NIGERIA

  Fox rounded the corner and followed Mendes down the street. The ex-CIA man was still pumping out a fast sprint, and Fox was falling behind as he heaved harder to suck in air and keep going at full pace. His hands had started to shake from the extreme exertion, they’d been flat out for close on fifteen minutes.

  Mendes was sixty metres ahead and ran across a small bridge. Fox had his right hand down to the Glock—this was the longest straight stretch they’d travelled on for the entire chase. He fumbled with the Velcro strap holding it in but couldn’t get a purchase on it or the pistol grip as his legs were pumping flat out. He put his arm up to the M4’s telescopic butt-stock behind his shoulder, got a couple of fingers on it, started to drag the weapon around—but it was too late.

  They were both over the bridge and Mendes turned down a street to the left that followed this part of the river around to where it spilled out to the sea. This was as ritzy as a neigh-bourhood got in Nigeria, real old-school colonial mansions from a time gone by.

  Fox had the M4 pulled over his head now, had it in both hands ready to shoot, but couldn’t get a good aim unless he stopped dead still—then Mendes disappeared again, down a street that darted to the right, and Fox was on his tail but dropping back. There was maybe a hundred metres between them now, and he just managed to catch sight of Mendes as he took two fast and immediate left turns—they were heading back to the street that lined the river. Fox’s heart was beating hard in his chest, his breaths sounded loud in his head, he was really heaving for air. His right leg where the shrapnel had torn it up cramped at the quad and his pace finally failed him; his stride fell to a jog.

  Mendes stopped at a walled compound. He was at a rear entry, punched in a code and disappeared through a door in the wall that quickly shut behind him. Fox arrived at the door five seconds later, his M4 spat out three rounds, and with help from his left boot he was through the thick timber door in the concrete-block wall.

  This was the backyard of Mendes’s and Achebe’s current safe house. A big green lawn and garden, ponds and fountains and a quarter-acre swimming pool. The house was a two-storey forty-thousand-square-foot thing. Mendes was nowhere to be seen—the back door was open, still moving on its hinges.

  Gunfire hi
t the ground behind Fox as he moved forward as fast as his legs would take him. He glanced up to see two figures on the flat roof firing down at him, cheap Eastern Bloc submachine-gun fire spraying the backyard all around him. He emptied the clip of the M4: one target went down, the other ducked for cover.

  Fox moved sideways like a quarterback and headed for a door as two armed guys emerged from that very opening. Before they could fire he squeezed off the remaining grenade from the M4’s underslung M203. It spanned the twenty-metre gap in a fraction of a second and hit the lintel above them, the high explosive reducing them to pulp and the back entry to the house to rubble as Fox crashed shoulder first through a timber door to his right.

  He was in a garage. The empty M4 was tossed away, the Glock up and trained ahead as he double-tapped a security guy who had been taking a break. Coffee and cigarettes hung in the air as the man’s chest was shredded; another shot and his head was half-vaporised by the Glock’s 9 mm Hydra-Shok round.

  The two garage roller-doors were closed, as was the one door to the side that led into the house. Four cars in here. Fox was at the body of the dead security guy, and reached down with his left hand—his Glock trained up at the side door—he took a handful of the guy’s shirt, pulled it up and it ripped off him. He frisked the guy’s pockets, pulled out a gas cigarette lighter. Then he ripped the shirt into two, opened the fuel caps of the two vehicles parked closest to the roller-doors and stuffed the ripped lengths of the shirt down them.

  The door to the house opened. Fox fired three shots off and a guy rolled lifelessly through the open doorway. Pistol-fire spattered ineffectually into the garage as Fox lit the first petrol-soaked rag, then the other. The flames of each crept up towards the petrol tanks and threatened to enter into the gas tanks as Fox was on the move, firing the Glock as he ran into the house.

 

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