Then another shriek went up, and pandemonium erupted.
My God! What have we unleashed?
Stafford abruptly fell to his knees and pitched forward, face down and unmoving, but Katherine made no effort to loosen his mask.
She felt a rattle in her lungs with her next breath, like the beginnings of a chest cold.
Whatever it is, it’s fast.
Something about that realization soothed her. Her fear receded, replaced by a calm that was clinical but at the same time, almost reverential.
She had discovered something new, something unique, and that was what she had lived for. So what if it killed her?
She unclipped the satellite telephone from her belt and hit the redial button.
The call connected almost right away, but there was a momentary delay as the signal traveled into space and then back down to its destination. “Katherine? I wasn’t expecting you to call so early.”
She tried to answer, but there was no breath in her lungs to form the words. Her only reply was a mewling sound that turned into a coughing fit. Black phlegm sprayed across the backlit display of the phone handset.
There was another maddening pause, and then the tiny speaker erupted with a strident: “Katherine!”
Dark clouds gathered at the edge of her vision, but the coughing spasm had cleared some of the fluid from her lungs. She managed to draw a shallow breath and willed herself to speak one last time.
“Richard. I’ve found something.”
CIPHER
ONE
Iraq, 2006
They seemed to materialize out of thin air, like ghosts, or perhaps more in keeping with the superstitions of the region, like jinn—spirits of smokeless fire that inhabit the space between earth and heaven.
Not that there was anyone around to notice.
Even if the inhabitants of Ramadi had been inclined to venture out after dark, a curfew was in effect and the streets were patrolled by a combined force of United States military personnel and soldiers of the newly reinvented Iraqi Army. At two a.m., anyone wandering the streets was likely to be shot on sight.
The eight men who moved swiftly and soundlessly through the night weren’t worried about being discovered. They had timed their advance perfectly to avoid detection by the patrols, and it was unlikely that anyone glancing out a window into the darkness would have been able to distinguish them in their camouflaged uniforms with matching body armor and helmets. Peering through the monochrome display of their PVS-14 night-vision devices, they advanced to the front of the target house and assembled in groups of four on either side of the door, bunched together like coiled serpents preparing to strike, which was more or less exactly what they were.
The second man in formation to the right of the door whispered into the lip microphone of his radio headset. “This is Cipher Six. By the numbers. Last chance. Go or no-go? Over.”
The replies crackled in the earpieces of the headsets worn by all six men.
“Eagle-Eye One. Go. Over.”
“Eagle-Eye Two. Go. Over.”
“Eagle-Eye Three. Do it. Over.”
“Cipher Seven, good to go. Over.”
Cipher Six, a man named Kevin Rainer—formally Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Rainer, though no one had called him that since he earned his green beanie—nodded, a gesture that went unnoticed by the other seven men arrayed around the door. The gesture was seen by the three sniper teams—Eagle-Eye One, Two and Three—who watched over them all from a distance.
The Eagle-Eye snipers were literally able to see through the walls of the house with their thermal scopes, verifying that only two occupants were within, but heat signatures could reveal only so much. Were the men wide awake but lying still on their beds? Would they be instantly alerted to the presence of intruders and snatch up a handy AK-47 or activate the detonator on an IED? Were they even the right men?
“Danno, go.”
The third operator in the stacked group on the left side darted forward and knelt in front of the door. One gloved hand came up to test the knob. It didn’t move, but Daniel Parker had been expecting that; he would have been surprised if the door had opened on the first try. On any other night, he might have blasted the door off its hinges with a shotgun, used a shaped charge to blow out the latch plate or simply kicked the damn thing down, but not tonight. This mission demanded a more subtle approach.
Parker took a lock-picking gun from a pouch on his tactical vest and slid the metal pick into the keyhole. There was a faint clicking noise as he worked the trigger lever, but a moment later the cylinder rotated, allowing him to ease the door open a crack. He slid a hand inside the gap, probing for trip wires or some other booby trap. Finding nothing, he gave the door a push and then spun out of the way, as Rainer’s team moved fluidly inside.
There was the briefest pause and then Rainer’s voice whispered across the radio net. “Room clear. Move in, Jack.”
Parker fell into line behind his team leader, Jack Sigler, as the second group filed into the house. All but one of the members of the first group were spread out throughout the front room in tactical positions. The remaining operator stood guard over a figure that lay face down and motionless on a mattress in the corner, his hands secured behind his back with flexi-cuffs.
Just as they had rehearsed dozens of times…hundreds of times…Sigler’s team lined up on the corner of the hallway, and at a gesture from their leader, each advanced into the unknown space beyond. Sigler was the second man into the room, as was their protocol, and he broke to the right. Parker, in the number three position, peeled left behind the point man, Mark Adams. Another mattress was positioned along the far wall right in front of Parker, and a bearded man lay sprawled out atop it, snoring loudly.
Sigler and the fourth man in their stack, Casey Bellows, visually scanned the rest of the room, while Adams moved directly toward the sleeping man, with Parker close behind him. A narrow beam of green-tinged light—invisible to the unaided eye—lanced from the AN/PAQ4 targeting laser mounted on the upper receiver of Adams’s suppressed Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle. As seen through the night-vision devices each member of the team wore, it appeared as a bright, wavering point on the supine man’s forehead.
The sleeper stirred and opened his eyes.
Adams froze in mid-step. Below the brilliant spot of the laser, a pair of white dots appeared—the man’s pupils, fully dilated and reflecting only the infrared spectrum of light—staring right back at Parker.
Then the man rolled over onto his side, facing the wall.
Parker didn’t exhale the breath he was holding. Maybe the man was still asleep, maybe he was just playing possum; either way, in another three seconds he would either be bound and gagged, or bagged and tagged. Parker activated his own PAQ4, aiming at the back of the man’s head, as Adams moved in for the capture. Before the man could even begin to wake up, he was flipped onto his stomach. The flexi-cuffs were pulled tight around his wrists and a strip of olive drab ‘100 mile an hour’ tape was slapped over his mouth, to preemptively silence his uncomprehending protests and cries of alarm.
Adams gave a thumbs-up signal, indicating that the captive was under control, after which Sigler’s voice whispered across the net: “Room secure.”
“Roger,” Rainer answered. “Cipher Seven, we are ready for pick-up. Over.”
Cipher Seven, Doug Pettit, who presently sat behind the wheel of an up-armored M1151 HMMWV—a Humvee to the rest of the world—idling quietly with no lights showing, half a mile away, replied immediately. “Roger, Six. We’re on our way.”
“All right, boys,” Rainer said. “Clean up time.”
A falsetto voice cooed in Parker’s earpiece: “Knock, knock. Housekeeping.”
It was probably Jesse Strickland, who styled himself the team’s court jester. Someone groaned in response, but that was the end of it. The team went to work. Parker lowered his assault rifle, leaving Adams to look after the prisoner. He took a large green nylon pouch—a st
andard military-use body bag—from a pocket. He held it open so that Sigler could begin dropping stuff in. Everything but the furniture went into the bag: loose papers, books, articles of clothing and even a collection of empty soda bottles. There was no telling what might be worthwhile, and this was not the time or place to make such judgments. There would be plenty of time to sort through it all later, when they were back safely behind the wire.
Thirty seconds later, the eight men, along with two captives and three bags full of what might or might not be important evidence, hustled from the door of the house to a row of waiting Humvees. Parker heaved his burden through the rear door of the fourth vehicle in line and then climbed inside, slamming the heavy door shut and engaging the combat locks. Sigler settled into the front passenger seat and secured his door.
There was another round of radio check-ins, with each driver reporting their readiness, and then the convoy pulled away. Despite being in armored vehicles, the team remained vigilant. The mission had gone flawlessly to this point, but the last thing any of them wanted to do was jinx things with a premature round of self-congratulation. It took only a single roadside IED to ruin an otherwise perfect outing. They avoided the known patrol routes, where insurgents most often targeted occupation forces, and instead risked a course that led them through neighborhoods that were known to be sympathetic to the opposition, reasoning—or rather hoping—that Hajji would be less likely to blow things up on his own doorstep. Nevertheless, every man in the team knew that no amount of preparation and planning could guarantee success; luck always played a part.
This time, their luck held. Twenty minutes later, they rolled under the arch that guarded the entrance to Camp Blue Diamond. The mission had gone flawlessly. They had captured both of the al-Awda couriers and gathered a ton of evidence, without firing a single shot…or being fired at.
It was a great way to end their four-month deployment to Iraq.
TWO
The arrival of a helicopter at Camp Blue Diamond—formerly the An-Ramadi Northern Palace, where Saddam Hussein’s half-brother had once lived, and presently headquarters of US Marine Corps 1st Division—was a common enough occurrence that Jack Sigler rarely took note. Something about this one was different, though. The deep bass thump of the rotors beating the air above the Euphrates River, as the bird made its final approach, resonated through his body like an alarm and fanned an ember of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. He poked at the food heaped on his tray—two hamburgers, a mini-pizza and an unopened bag of Cool Ranch Doritos—but his appetite had disappeared.
Daniel Parker, seated across the table from him, instantly picked up on Sigler’s discomfort. The team’s only African-American operator, Parker had a round, youthful face that was incapable of concealing his emotional state. “Someone just walk across your grave, Jack?”
“I just remembered something I need to take care of.” He stood, and in a single deft motion, scooped up the tray, dumped its contents into a nearby trash can and flung it like a Frisbee onto the tray rack. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Parker stood as well. “Well that’s a coincidence. I just remembered that I need to take care of something, too.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“You tell me.”
Sigler regarded his teammate and friend with a wan smile, an expression that seemed completely alien on his rough, unshaven face. With his shaggy hair and hard expression, Sigler had been often told he resembled Hugh Jackman, or more precisely, that actor’s film portrayal of the comic book superhero Wolverine; Wolverine didn’t smile.
Before Sigler could answer, the Motorola Talkabout radio clipped to his belt crackled to life. “Jack, it’s Kevin. I need you at the TOC.”
Parker’s eyebrows went up. “Damn, Jack. Spidey-sense, much?”
“I’m wondering that myself,” Sigler muttered. The ominous feeling that had started with the approach of the helicopter was blossoming into something like paranoia. He keyed the transmit button on the radio. “Be there in five.”
It took him only three minutes to walk briskly from the dining facility in the main palace building, to FOB McCoy, the smaller, walled-off compound where Cipher element had set up shop. Above the always-locked metal door was a crudely painted sign that read ‘Animal House,’ presumably a reference to the college fraternity in the classic John Belushi movie of the same name: Delta Tau Chi—Delta House. The sign had appeared one night, a few weeks after they’d arrived in country—most likely some jarhead acting on a dare—but Kevin Rainer, Cipher element’s commander, had left it there. Although their unit designation was supposed to be classified, why bother denying what everyone at Camp Blue Diamond already knew; Cipher element was part of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-D, the US Army’s elite counter-terrorism interdiction unit, better known simply as Delta.
Sigler went directly to the tactical operations center (TOC)—known informally as The Lair—which served a dual purpose as both communications hub and conference room. Rainer was seated at the end of the long rectangular table, along with Doug Pettit and two other people—an athletically built, brown-haired man, and a woman—in civilian clothes. The man was Scott Klein, a CIA officer who had been working closely with Cipher element to disrupt communications between the different local insurgent groups, but it took Sigler a moment to recognize him; he was having trouble tearing his gaze away from the woman.
She was, in a word, stunning.
She was seated, but Sigler guessed that she was about the same height as Klein; the Company man was about 5’ 10”. Her blousy top mostly concealed her figure, but her arms, where they emerged from her rolled up sleeves, were slender and toned. It was her face however, framed in a cascade of long and straight black hair that arrested Sigler’s attention. Her almond-shaped eyes, the irises brown with flecks of gold, hinted at some recent Asian ancestry, as did her high cheekbones, but her face was longer, with a prominent forehead and a strong jaw.
“Hel-lo,” murmured Parker, slipping into the Lair behind Sigler.
Command Sergeant Major Pettit, Cipher element’s senior non-commissioned officer, directed a scathing look at the young operator, but no one else at the table seemed to notice, least of all the woman, whose attention was fixed on the screen of her laptop computer.
Klein rose and extended a hand to Sigler. “Jack, good to see you.”
Sigler accepted the firm handclasp, but his reply was guarded. “Scott. Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to ruin my day?”
Klein’s grin confirmed Sigler’s suspicions, but the CIA officer withheld further explanation until Sigler and Parker were settled in at the table. “First, congratulations are in order. The guys you nabbed last night turned out to be a lot more important that we expected.”
Sigler felt his apprehension growing; he could tell where this was headed. The couriers had given up something actionable—maybe a location for a high value target—and now Cipher element was going to have to postpone their rotation back to the States to take on one more mission.
Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have bothered Sigler. It wasn’t as if he had anyone waiting for him back home.
He wasn’t really sure what ‘home’ was anymore. For the last eleven years of his life, home had been wherever the Army sent him, and somehow that seemed more real to him than his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. His mother still lived there, but he didn’t visit often. There were too many bad memories at the house on Oak Lane: memories of his sister Julie who had always been there for him, and of his father who never had.
He’d been adrift back then, a punk, more interested in skating and hanging out with the other losers in the neighborhood, than in trying to be a good son. He didn’t care what his mother or his mostly-absent father thought of him, which seemed to suit them just fine. Julie, however, had refused to give up on him. In her own gentle but insistent way, she had equipped him to make his own path in life, encouraging him to find a dream and follow it, just as sh
e had ultimately done.
When he was fourteen, Julie had joined the Air Force, intent on becoming one of the nation’s first female fighter pilots. Two years later, against all odds, she had succeeded. Then, just a few weeks before she was to wed her high school sweetheart, while on a cross-training flight in a Navy F-14, she crashed. Julie’s death had been the final straw for an already strained domestic situation. Three months later, Sigler’s father left abruptly and didn’t come back. Shortly thereafter, Jack Sigler left as well, to join the Army.
Unlike his father, Sigler wasn’t running away. At first, he’d thought that it was Julie’s death that had motivated him to enlist, but later he realized that it was really his memory of her life that was driving him. Military service had given her focus, a challenge she knew she was capable of meeting and beating, and that was what he felt he needed. His mother, though heartbroken, had agreed to sign the waiver that would allow him to enlist at seventeen.
The rigors of basic training had shown him what he was capable of accomplishing. His natural athleticism and agility made him a perfect candidate for specialized training—Airborne school, the Rangers—but he wasn’t content to simply test his physical prowess. While serving in the 101st Airborne, he managed to earn a college degree, and then he attended Officer Candidate School. Not long after receiving his commission, he set his sights on a new goal: Special Forces selection.
The challenges…the successes…had transformed him.
He’d joined the Army because he wanted to make a difference, to do something that would have made Julie proud, and now here he was, leading a team of the most elite counterterrorist shooters in the world, saving lives by taking out the bad guys before they could kill innocents.
Making a difference.
The uniform was home. He preferred being on alert status, whether forward positioned as they had been for the last four months, or standing by in the on-deck circle at Fort Bragg, waiting for the shit to hit the fan somewhere.
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