by Bob Mayer
Except there was a problem, one which Neeley had raised to the dismissive CIA liaison in Isolation. This was an ambush. It was a proven tactic of terrorists to draw in rescue forces and hit them hard. Except forces in this case was “force,” singular, in the person of Neeley, primary operative of the Cellar and the closest thing Hannah back at Fort Meade had to a friend.
Which meant not much of a friend at all, except they’d saved each other’s lives years ago and they’d die for each other. Hannah also sent Neeley on missions like this, where she could get killed.
It was all part of being in the Cellar.
Neeley was buried inside one of the six-foot-high mounds of refuse. She’d squirmed her way in twenty-four hours ago, stayed in it without moving all day as more trash was heaped on top, including various liquids that seeped down on her. She actually appreciated the fouler-smelling and disgusting items because it made it that much less likely someone would come rooting through.
Living was worth a little, and a lot, of discomfort.
Neeley leaned her head to the right, pressing her right eye socket up against the rubber socket on the end of the thermal scope mounted on the sniper rifle. A tiny switch inside automatically turned the scope on.
With little twitches, making sure she didn’t disturb the trash surrounding her hide site, she peered out the tunnel she’d poked clear with a stick just after dark to get a field of fire.
She had three positions identified from the previous night. She’d picked them up as she maneuvered into the alley. They were careless, but they could afford to be. They were in friendly territory and Neeley had picked up the distinct impression that they hadn’t expected any action the previous evening.
Which was interesting.
Actually, disturbing was a more accurate word.
If they knew which night to expect extract, it meant the mission was compromised. Which meant she should back out and call for exfiltration and forget about extraction of the package.
Neeley wasn’t a big rule follower for those other than the ones Gant had given her.
The Cellar did not have Protocols like the Nightstalkers.
It had Sanctions, which this wasn’t, so that didn’t factor into it.
Neeley didn’t ruminate on why or how the mission was compromised. The very fact the Cellar had been called in to do this had been an indicator. Hannah would deal with it.
There were four men in a second-story apartment across the street from the package. They had two light machine guns, AK-47s, and one RPG rocket launcher. Of more danger were the half-dozen “insurgents” in a minaret towering over the mosque at the end of the street. They had a cluster of RPGs and, ominously, at least two SA-24 Grinch shoulder-to-air missiles. The Grinch was the latest variant of Russian surface-to-air missiles, technically not available for export, but what were rules to bad guys? You could buy anything in Russia these days.
Who named a missile a Grinch? Neeley wondered as she scanned the minaret. Really, not long till Christmas and she was literally going up against the Grinch? She rarely considered irony, since it was often the baseline of any operation she was on, but this time it seemed a bit over the top.
She counted six heat signatures in the minaret. All awake and alert, unlike last night.
They were waiting.
As were the last two. They’d come just after dark, like last night, and crawled into one of the Dumpsters next door to where the package was. They’d wedged the top open six inches and were peering out with night-vision goggles, the latest American version, most likely stolen by an Afghan soldier from his American counterparts and sold on the black market.
An old woman came walking down the street, the weariness in her step indicating a long day at work. She had little clue about the firepower amassed all around her and disappeared into one of the buildings on the left side of the street.
A voice crackled in Neeley’s ear. “Status?”
She whispered her reply, picked up by her throat mike and encrypted and transmitted back to Hannah while being frequency hopped and relayed through several Milstar satellites. “Go. Status of Pakistani air defenses?”
That was the key question. How far up did the betrayal go and who was involved?
“Inactive. You’ve got a local problem.”
“Roger,” Neeley said. “But we kept this tight, so the only way word was leaked was via the Agency.”
“Naturally. I foresee a Sanction in the future, but for now it is your call whether to proceed or not.”
“I’m on mission,” Neeley said.
“The missile countdown has begun and exfil is inbound,” Hannah said and nothing more, because after so many years and so many missions, there was nothing they could say. It was all down to the execution now.
Neeley pulled her eye back from the rubber gasket, the ease of pressure automatically turning the scope off. She slithered one hand into a pocket and extracted a pill. She carefully put it in her mouth and, twisting her head to the left, took a sip of Gatorade from the CamelBak built into her MOLLE combat vest.
The pill would give her four hours on the edge. Since she hadn’t slept since infiltration, going on fifty hours now, she would need that edge. But if she weren’t out in four hours, the crash would be bad. She didn’t worry about that because if she weren’t out in four hours, she’d be dead.
Her pulse quickened as the speed hit her bloodstream.
She didn’t need to check her hide site. She’d taken nothing out, so there was nothing to indicate she’d been here. Gant’s rule number four: Always pack out what you pack in. They were Neeley’s rules now, as much of her as they had been of Gant.
In fact, there was nothing on her to indicate who she was or where she was from. Well, there was DNA, but it wasn’t like the Taliban or Al Qaeda or whoever was waiting to kill her was going to run that, and even if they did, she wasn’t in any database. She didn’t exist and hadn’t for a long time.
She pressed her eye back against the rubber, the alley coming alive in heat once more. The rifle was an old one. She knew there were better models now on the market, but Gant had also impressed on her that familiar was sometimes better than newest. It was an Accuracy International L96A1. British made, it chambered the NATO standard 7.62 by 51mm round.
The rounds loaded in this rifle, though, were anything but standard.
Neeley had prepared the rounds herself, building them to be subsonic so they wouldn’t produce the distinctive crack of breaking the sound barrier. A bulky suppressor on the end of the barrel would reduce the sound of the gasses propelling the bullet as they escaped the barrel. There is no such thing as a true silencer, but her rifle was pretty damn quiet.
A new voice crackled in her ear. “On station. Target Alpha locked in. Fifty seconds.”
Of course the suppressor combined with the low-power bullets meant a greatly reduced range, but that was why Neeley was in the pile of rubbish, needing to be close to the package.
“Forty seconds.”
Neeley placed the crosshairs right between the goggled eyes of one of the men peering out of the Dumpster.
“Thirty seconds. Missile away.”
Her finger caressed the trigger. While she remained focused on target, part of her mind began to monitor her breathing and heartbeat.
“Twenty seconds. Tracking positive.”
She knew that the Global Hawk that had fired the Hellfire missile was already roaring back toward Afghanistan. The “pilot” flying it was safely ensconced in a bunker on the other side of the world at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas.
“Ten seconds. Tracking positive. Eight. Seven. Six.”
Neeley slowly exhaled two-thirds of the air in her lungs to her natural respiratory pause and paused her breathing.
“Three. Two.”
Neeley fired in between heartbeats, the round ripping through the target’s NVGs and his skull, splattering the lid of the Dumpster with brain, blood, and bone matter.
The minaret blossomed in an explosive ball, and as Neeley worked the bolt, she wondered if Allah would curse her. Then she figured she’d pissed off pretty much every god on the planet if there was a higher power, so it was a little late to worry now. She fired, killing the other man in the Dumpster while he was staring to the side, trying to see what the cause of the explosion was.
She stood, garbage falling aside, and slung the sniper rifle over her shoulder. She pulled a short, stubby grenade launcher out of a sheath on the side of her pack. She’d bought it on the black market in Kabul, then spent time modifying 40mm rounds for it. She had six rounds in loops on the front of her vest and one in the chamber. The first thing she’d done to the rounds was remove the safety that only armed the round after a hundred feet. These were live as soon as they left the barrel.
As she dashed down the alley, she pressed herself against the right wall and fired the first round. Right into the window where the four men were. It exploded while she broke open the M79 and loaded another round, still moving rapidly down the alley. She put a second round into the room for good measure and a body came flying out of a window, landing on the concrete with a solid thump.
Neeley dropped the thumper on its lanyard and drew her MK23 .45-caliber pistol. As she passed the body, she put two rounds into its head, then pivoted right and kicked open the door where the package lived, weapon at the ready, the muzzle following her gaze.
The package had one arm around his wife and the other around his daughter. His eyes widened as he met Neeley’s and she had no time to deal with his surprise that it was a woman coming for him. She was focused on the two men standing behind the family, scimitars in hand, raised for head-chopping strikes at the neck of the two adults.
One of them started to shout something, but the second syllable never left his mouth because the first .45-caliber round Neeley fired hit right between his eyes. She spared him the double-tap in the name of expediency and to help the wife keep her head. As blood and brain and bone still flew out of the back of the first man’s head, Neeley had shifted right and fired, this time double-tapping, the bullets blowing apart the second man’s head and flinging his body back, the scimitar flying away with the body.
Neeley shifted back left and fired a fourth time, hitting the first man as the body crumpled back, the bullet passing the package’s side by less than an inch.
One of Gant’s rules was always make sure with an extra round.
She was making sure because she’d passed up the first double-tap. She was sure Gant would have approved. Neeley strode into the shack, taking charge with action and presence, not words. She was tall, just under six feet. Her short hair was still dark; she dyed the gray because it made her stand out and she was distinctive enough as it was. Her face was all angles, no soft roundness. The lines deeply etched around her eyes told of years of stress living on the edge.
She gestured and the family ran toward her. She exited the building, glanced over her shoulder to make sure they were following, and then began to jog at a steady rate, pistol at the ready, weaving through the alleys and streets of the slum as if she’d been born there. It wasn’t far, three blocks, and she counted on the explosion to keep everyone indoors for a little while. She had a good idea of response time and felt she had a sufficient window.
She reached the soccer field, sirens wailing in the near distance. Neeley shrugged off her pack as the three Pakistanis caught up, breathing hard. They were staring about fearfully, looking for the helicopter they and the ambush team had expected, Neeley supposed.
They were out of luck in that regard.
Neeley signaled for them to put their hands over their heads. They hesitated and she gestured with the .45 and they complied. She pulled harnesses out of the pack and quickly snapped them on the man, woman, and terrified child. The harnesses were already linked with twelve-foot lengths of high-strength rope. One end was still in the pack and the other end had twelve feet and an empty loop.
“Thirty seconds,” a different voice whispered in her ear.
She reached in her ruck and pulled a cord. A large balloon blossomed forth from the tank that had taken up half the space in the pack, rising rapidly into the air and lifting the rope still in the ruck. Neeley went to the free end and buckled in.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded in Pashto.
Neeley didn’t answer. Coming in from the south low and fast, its dark form barely visible, was an MC-130J Commando II. It was the Special Operations–modified version of the venerable Lockheed C-130 Hercules cargo plane, first deployed in 1956 and still the workhorse transportation vehicle of the air force. This version was capable of all-weather flight and loaded with enough navigation, communication, and countermeasure electronics to make Apple headquarters in Cupertino weep with envy. A pair of metal whiskers protruded from below the nose of the aircraft. The pilot centered on the blimp and dove down an extra fifty feet, barely missing rooftops.
The whiskers caught the rope and it immediately slid to the center where a sky anchor locked onto the rope.
The Pakistani was opening his mouth to say something else when the rope tightened and he abruptly left the ground, followed by his wife, child, and then Neeley.
The MC-130 gained altitude and speed, turning for the Afghan border as its forward momentum swung the rope along the belly of the plane. On the open ramp in the rear, several air force crew manned a crane. They expertly snagged the rope, then began hauling it in along with its passengers.
At the very end of the rope, buffeted about, Neeley spread her arms to reduce the spinning and stared down at the lights of Abbottabad as they began to recede.
Despite the air whistling around and the roar of the engines, she heard Hannah’s voice in her earpiece.
“Good job.”
As she was reeled into the MC-130, Neeley finally allowed her thoughts to drift, to naturally think of Gant as the freezing wind ripped into her. Of his strong arms around her, holding her tight against the Vermont winter that penetrated the stout walls of the cabin he’d built. And then how it had been her holding him, keeping him warm, as his body wasted away.
Those thoughts always led to one place, one she was visiting in her mind more and more often: the grave they’d dug together that last year, in the early fall before the ground froze. Gant always thought ahead and he’d known he would not be around for the spring thaw and this was something that had to be done now. She’d done most of the digging, as he tired easily at that point. Resting, he’d sit on the growing pile of dirt, which he’d soon be part of, drinking a beer, telling morbid jokes and mixing in his Rules, knowing she was soon going to need them more than ever before. They’d had ten years together, long enough for Neeley to learn all his Rules and be taught all his tricks and tactics of covert operations.
But not long enough for her to grow tired of his arms.
As gloved hands reached out and pulled her into the cargo bay of the Commando, she pictured his lined, aged face, peering out the window at that dark hole as winter set in. She’d kept the fireplace blazing, the red glow flickering on his skin. She’d used so much wood, she knew the pile wouldn’t last the winter, but neither would he, and once he was gone, she would be too.
There had been more than the cancer and the specter of the hole eating at him though. He’d been unable, even in love and even dying, to break his oath and tell her of the organization he worked for, the Cellar, and why her life would now be in jeopardy.
As the back ramp rose up into the tail and shut, Neeley shrugged off the harness. Had he known where the journey he’d sent her on would end? Had he known she’d end up taking his place in the Cellar? Had she even had a choice? It was a question she asked herself more and more as she grew older and knew her life options were closing off with each year.
Neeley sat on the red web seating lining the side of the plane as the three Pakistanis were met by an interpreter, the parents’ arms gesturing on all sides, mouths open in argument. She tuned out th
e voices already muted by the roar of the turboprop engines and inadequate insulation of the Special Operations plane. The front half of the Commando’s cargo bay was hidden behind a curtain, covering the screen watchers and countersurveillance experts who kept the plane cloaked from electronic detection and helped the pilots navigate a spiderweb route back to safety. The pilots were flying 250 by 250: 250 feet above the ground at 250 knots, which made for interesting maneuvering as they reached the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Neeley leaned her head back, still feeling the speed surging in her veins.
Had she ever had a choice? Maybe, but it was so many years ago, well before the Cellar. Everyone has a key point, a golden moment in their life, where there is a fork in the road and sometimes we make that choice and sometimes we’re shoved onto a path.
Ten years before Gant’s death, she’d been a teenager, living in Berlin. She liked to think she’d been innocent and naive, but as the years passed, her retrospect shifted also. She’d been walking through Tempelhof Airport, a large, brightly wrapped package in her hands. She could understand the lilting Berliner accent of the natives, and even then, so many years after the blockade and the airlift, there were still those who remembered and gave Americans, like Neeley, an extra smile.
The men had also noticed her because of her cut-off Levi’s and tight T-shirt. Inappropriate attire for the first week of October in Berlin, but she knew now it was a diversion, set up by her boyfriend who’d given her the package to take to England. It was before 9/11 and security at airports was almost nonexistent.
Except for Gant, for whom there was no such thing as a lack of security. He’d later told her he spotted her right away. Not because of the long, lean legs or taut breasts straining against the thin shirt, but because she clutched the package to her, just below those breasts. It was a tell those who worked in counterterrorism easily recognized.
His row had been called, but he had not boarded. He always joked the plane would leave when the last person boarded, so there was no point rushing, but the reality was, he watched every single person as they entered the gangway.