by Jack Mars
Elizabeth had done a very silly thing. And the Secret Service had probably been lax in their protection of her. They had relied too much on the school’s security, and they had underestimated what a bored teenage girl might do to experience a little excitement and a little romance.
Keller hoped that they were able to retrieve Elizabeth safe and sound. But her antics had caused something of a disaster—which by the way, was likely to set off a chain of catastrophic violence that would impact thousands of innocent people, people whom irresponsible young Elizabeth would never meet or even imagine.
And her antics had opened an opportunity to remove from the highest office in the land a man who was unfit to occupy that office. In the end, this was a good thing, no matter what happened to Elizabeth. It was not an opportunity that should be allowed to go to waste.
Okay. That settled it.
Keller climbed out of the car and set out walking at a brisk pace. Within a few moments, he was at the bottom of the hill and crossing the Francis Scott Key Bridge along the pedestrian sidewalk, heading across the Potomac River toward the Arlington neighborhood of Rosslyn.
On the bridge, the six lanes were quiet. Now and then, a car passed. Up ahead, to his south, the tall office towers of Rosslyn loomed. Even this time of night, there were many, many lights on.
Halfway across the bridge, Keller stopped. He pulled out a small cellular telephone and flipped it open. It was a burner phone—he had purchased it anonymously for cash with prepaid minutes loaded on it.
It was breezy out here on the bridge. Someone with a camera and a high-powered telephoto lens could watch him, but it would be very hard for anyone to overhear him speaking. It would also be hard to intercept a phone call that no one was expecting, from a phone that had never been used before. And naturally, it would be impossible to trace from where the call had come.
He dialed a number, one that very few people had.
After a couple of rings, a voice picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” Keller said. “Do you know who this is?”
“Of course,” the voice said. “I was staying up, watching the TV news, and waiting for your call. I was beginning to think it wasn’t going to come.”
Keller shook his head and smiled. “Here it is.”
“Good. What do you have?”
“I’ve got everything we need. It’s all on tape. He’s cracked. This has broken him.”
“Okay,” the voice said. “You know what to do with it.”
Keller nodded. “Right. But none of this comes back to me. Agreed?”
“Agreed. We’ll have someone play the salient parts for him, but he’ll think he was bugged. You’ll have nothing to do with it.”
“Good,” Keller said. “I suggest you have someone play it for him after he’s gotten some sleep, when he’s a little more lucid. When I left him, he was barely making sense anymore.”
“Very nice,” the voice said.
Keller smiled. “Yes. It is.”
After they hung up, Keller dropped the telephone on the ground. He stomped on it, three, four, five times, until it broke apart. He picked up the shattered plastic casing and tossed it over the protective fence and into the river. Then he did the same with the metallic interior, where the sensitive data might be.
He watched the silver metal hit the dark water and then disappear beneath it. Then he kicked apart the last bits and pieces of black plastic still on the sidewalk.
The phone was gone. The conversation had never happened.
And pretty soon, maybe as soon as later this morning, David Barrett would relinquish his duties as President.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
9:25 a.m. Arabian Standard Time (1:25 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Al Alam
Near Tikrit, Iraq
“There’s the river,” one of the young British soldiers said.
To Luke’s ears, it sounded like “Thay-uhs the rivah.”
Four Black Hawk helicopters moved across the pale desert landscape toward an undulating line of green. The green marked a fertile area on either side of the Tigris River. In some places it was a narrow band. In others, it seemed a mile wide. It snaked on into the far distance.
Luke, Ed, and four guys from the British Special Air Service, or SAS, rode in the lead chopper. In the second chopper, there were another six of the Brits. A dozen men in all were on this mission. The Brits all wore black balaclavas across their faces and goggles on their eyes. It was hard to see who they were. The two last choppers were empty—they were meant to carry the arrestees. It seemed like it might be a little bit of overkill to take one man and his family into custody.
In the near distance, oily black smoke rose into the air. A narrow strip of road seemed to lead directly to where the smoke was coming from.
“Something’s going on,” Ed Newsam said.
He was right. As the chopper moved closer, Luke could see that red and orange flames were still burning, apparently out of control. The flames reached into the sky in several places.
“Attention,” the chopper pilot said. “Estimated time of arrival to the target is one minute. Prepare for disembark.”
“Oh, great,” Luke said. “The compound is on fire.”
“Looks like somebody got here first,” Ed said.
The first two choppers touched down on the far edge of the compound, away from the river. The rotor blades kicked up minor dust storms. Luke, Ed, and the SAS clambered out.
They walked toward the center of the compound, rifles drawn.
Behind them, the helicopters pulled away.
The scene was apocalyptic. The main house, a sprawling twenty-room monstrosity, and two smaller outbuildings were burning. A cluster of large trees planted near the river were on fire, their flaming arms reaching toward heaven.
A tall, corrugated building which must have been a garage—there were several cars parked outside of it—was also on fire. That’s where the dark black smoke was coming from. To the far right, the fields were on fire. The buildings and the trees could have been hit with mortars, but the fields must have been deliberately set, possibly with flamethrowers.
Near the gate to the road, a couple of large horses, brown and white Arabian chargers, stood together. They stamped their feet and their tails swung anxiously. At least the horses had been spared.
About a hundred chickens ran back and forth on the grounds. The sky above the compound was turning dark with circling vultures and birds of prey. Every few moments, a hawk would drop to earth, snatch a frantic chicken, and fly off with it.
Straight ahead, the corpse of a woman lay on the ground in a pool of blood, her white robes stained red.
Several more human bodies were scattered around, apparently shot while they ran.
A water tower had crashed over sideways, its tank ruptured.
A grain storehouse had been left intact. Also, a long chicken house was still standing, along with a barn. Luke glanced inside the barn. A few cattle lay on their sides, shot dead. Whoever liked horses didn’t feel the same way about cows.
“Someone is a step ahead of us,” Ed Newsam said.
Luke caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his left eye. He turned that way, MP5 already raised. He wasn’t the only one. Two of the SAS guys had done the same. At high speed, Luke replayed the moment in his mind: someone in dark clothes and with dark hair had just dashed inside the chicken coop.
He and the men were moving quickly toward the long building, guns out.
They burst inside. It was dim inside the building, and motes of thick dust and feathers hung in the air. Weak light streamed down from high, narrow windows at the top of the building. Someone or something slid through a hole in the ground just as they came in. Small hands came up and slid a wooden board over the hole. The board was a cut-out of the wooden floor in an area where chickens would normally be fed their grain. Scattered piles of grain still lay on the floor.
When the board was back
in place, it was hard to see where the hole had just been.
Luke, Ed, and two SAS men moved to the spot.
Ed reached down, pulled up the board, and darted backward with it.
The SAS guys stepped up, rifles trained down the hole, laser sights on, headlamps shining brightly.
Luke stepped up with them, hand raised.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Steady! Steady!”
In the darkness down at the bottom of the hole, two small children, a boy and a girl, were crouched, huddled together.
“Don’t shoot.”
* * *
“What is he saying?” Luke said.
A young SAS guy was translating the boy’s Arabic. The SAS guy had removed his balaclava, helmet, and goggles, revealing a fresh-faced, blond-haired kid with pale blue eyes and fat cheeks. Hardly the fearsome storm trooper that the helmet and mask made him appear.
The boy, perhaps twelve years old, was being strong. The girl, maybe half that age, had given up entirely. She was being held by another SAS guy with his helmet off, hugging him tightly, pressing her face into his chest.
“He says a group of men came just before sunrise. They immediately set about killing everyone. They launched rockets at the houses, and shot down anyone who came out. There are more bodies down by the river of people who tried to escape out the back way. The elder imam, Muhammad al-Barak, was taken from the main house, forced to his knees, and shot in the head. The boy and his little sister had been trained to hide beneath the chicken coop if anything like this ever happened, and that’s what they did. They made it there without being seen. When he heard the helicopters, he climbed out to see what was happening, and that’s when we found him.”
Luke was relaying the news to Trudy and Swann over a satellite phone. He winced at the news of al-Barak. The old man who had come to thank him and Ed personally had met a bad end. It was the kind of thing that happened all too often around here.
“Does he have any idea who the men were?”
The SAS guy said something to the kid in Arabic.
The kid nodded, his dark eyes hollow and empty. He said something and pointed to the north. He continued speaking for several seconds.
“Yes. He knows exactly who they were. They belong to a religious school and jihad training camp about twenty miles north of here, straight along the river. His grandfather the imam knew the school, and the teachers there, well. The boy himself has visited there with family members. His grandfather and father told him it would never be, but he imagined going there to train one day when he was older. Now he says he would never join them. Their betrayal is too terrible.”
“Trudy?” Luke said into the telephone.
Her voice was there. “Yes.”
“We need another quick meeting with Don, Big Daddy, and Monty. I want permission to go in there. We’ve got a dozen guys, although we’re going to send two back with the kids. The boy believes the camp the killers came from is just up the river here. If we’re going to hit them and get a prisoner who can give us some intel, we should do it before the trail goes cold. I think we can probably do okay with ten guys.”
“When do you want to do it?” Trudy said.
Luke almost couldn’t believe what he was about to say. Don had already given him the green light home. He wanted to go home, more than anything. He wanted to see Becca. He wanted to be there when their boy was born.
But he also wanted to finish what they had started here. He didn’t like that these militia guys had come down and killed al-Barak and his entire clan. It wasn’t right, no matter what al-Barak had done. If you had a problem with the man, then kill the man. Not the family.
“Now,” Luke said.
* * *
Green light.
Three Black Hawk helicopters raced across the pale blue morning sky.
Big Daddy and Don Morris had been in agreement—move forward with an assault on the camp. Montgomery had been called away on some other business and had not been available for the meeting. But Luke had kept his SAS guys anyway.
Luke had Mark Swann patched through on his helmet radio. Swann had pored over the available satellite imagery, and seemed to have pinpointed a militia camp whose location agreed with what the child had described.
“What does it look like?” Luke said.
“It looks like a big piece of nothing,” Swann said.
“Give me more than that, Swann.”
“There is a road,” Swann said. “It is marked as Unnamed Road. It hugs the Tigris River for several miles, on the west side. Just past a little piece of nothing called Salman Village, there’s a bridge across the Tigris. There’s a wide open dusty plain, and as near as I can tell maybe thirty tents. There may be a more permanent structure there, but if there is, I don’t see it. It looks like there’s an artillery range to the east of there, with some cannons lined up. On the imagery I have, which admittedly is old, there are about a dozen vehicles parked on the property. A few of them appear to be pickup trucks with rear-mounted heavy weapons. If I were you guys, I’d take those things out first, then hit the cannons.”
“Can you get some more recent imagery?” Luke said.
“Not likely. I can’t get control of a satellite in the next ten minutes, and I doubt there’s anything better than what I have. No one has ever taken a high priority look at that place. It really is a slice of nothing in the middle of nowhere. This looks like a very local gang. What I described to you is from me pulling generic imagery in that region and then zooming in.”
“Any place to land?”
“The whole place is flat as a pancake. I’d say land anywhere you like.”
Luke shook his head and smiled. “Anything resembling a helipad?”
“No. Nothing like that. These people appear to be earthbound. When they go somewhere, they drive there.”
“How recent is the imagery you have?”
“Uh… three months old.”
“Swann!”
“It’s all that exists. It’s the best you’re going to get.”
Luke gazed out the bay door for a moment. The choppers were moving fast above the parched, flat landscape. They were about to assault a militia compound, but had no idea what it was going to look like.
“Ed? Are you hearing this?”
Ed was flying in the second helicopter. He and Luke had split up to each take command of a small squad of SAS operators. This was an Americans show, after all.
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
“We got three choppers, man. These birds are loaded with Hellfire missiles and M60 machine guns. I say we come in and wreck the place. I doubt it’s changed all that much. Go with Swann’s priorities. Knock out the vehicles, then the stationary cannons. After that, if anybody still has fight left in them, we drop in and take them out, too. Shoot first, ask questions later.”
Luke nodded. It made sense.
“Okay, sounds good. But let’s spare a couple so we can ask questions later.”
A few moments passed.
Luke looked at the young SAS men on his chopper.
“Guys!’ he shouted. “America thanks you for your service on our behalf. We know you men are the best of the best. The mission today is smash and grab. We want to bag one or two of the leaders of this militia. If the foot soldiers lay down, that’s fine. We let ’em live. If they want to fight, we give them a fight. No one stops us, no one challenges us. But we want the leaders alive and intact.”
“What you gonna do with them, Yank?”
Luke shrugged. “We’re gonna talk to them. Firmly.”
The young guys laughed at that.
“Incoming,” the pilot said. “Prepare for evasive action.”
Incoming? That was quick.
“Uh-oh,” Luke said. “The game’s starting.”
The men took seats and strapped themselves in as the chopper banked hard right and gained altitude. A few seconds later, a rocket whooshed by.
Then the heavy guns op
ened up.
Luke could hear it, though he couldn’t yet see it—the metallic clank of automatic cannon fire coming from the ground up ahead.
Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.
“Stone!” Ed said in his ear. “How do they know we’re coming?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell them.”
Luke went up and poked his head into the cockpit.
“What are you guys seeing up here?”
“Ahead and to the right,” one of the pilots said. “Vehicles moving across open desert, mostly fast-moving pickups, maybe modified SUVs. Heavy weaponry in truck beds. Ahead and to the left, the same. I count at least a dozen vehicles. I see at least one lorry or heavy truck, maybe a mobile rocket launcher. They’ve dispersed to make it harder on us. But they’re coming out to fight.”
“Kill them,” Luke said. “Fire when ready. Take the rocket launcher first. Tell the other choppers.”
The helicopters raced across desert, four stories up. Luke poked his head out the bay door to the right. Ahead, to their right, trucks moved across open terrain. Luke could hear the rattle of their guns.
He looked at the folded-up door gun, an M134 Minigun. It had six rotating barrels powered by an electric motor. And it had a high rate of fire, usually thousands of rounds per minute without cooking off. He had barely glanced at it before. He wasn’t expecting to need it. A long belt of 7.62 millimeter rounds hung from it.
He looked at the nearest SAS guy. The tag sewn into the man’s jumpsuit said GILMOUR.
“You, Gilmour. You know how to work that gun?”
The guy looked at it. He looked back at Luke. “Naturally.”
“Get to it. You’re my door gunner. We’re in a fight. Let’s go. Rip it up.”
The guy unclipped and went to the gun. Luke went to the other side. A pickup truck was running straight at them, broadside to the chopper, the cargo door wide open. A man was in the truck bed, working the heavy gun.