by Jack Mars
“Oh my! Hashan left that thing behind. Is that what it is, a telephone? I thought it must be a computer game. I have never even looked at it. I have no idea if it works. I imagine its batteries died long ago.”
Antar smiled. It was a smile that looked brittle, like it might crack in half.
“Do you mind if I take a look? The batteries might still work. I really do need to make a call.”
Luke glanced up at Greg Welch. Welch translated what Luke had just said. He stood there, watching Luke. It was almost as if the temperature in the room had just dropped twenty degrees.
Welch looked at the phone on the shelf.
A long pause drew out. Antar’s demeanor had changed. His brow was furrowed, like he was thinking. Then he seemed angry. He waved a hand. He spit something in Arabic. It sounded vicious, like a curse.
“Do what you like,” Greg said.
Luke looked at him.
Behind Welch, Eva Antar lingered in the doorway. Suddenly, there was a small black pistol in her hand. She pointed it at the back of Welch’s head.
“No!” Luke shouted. “Greg!”
BANG.
The noise was loud, but not deafening. It was a small gun, after all.
There was a moment, an instant, when Welch grimaced, his eyes squinting shut, probably not in pain, but in anticipation of what was about to happen. Then his face seemed to bulge for a split second, before spraying outward in a shower of blood and bone and flesh and gore.
Luke looked back at the old man. He had ripped open his jacket. What had appeared to be bandages earlier was a suicide vest. His shaking hands worked to pull the cord that would ignite the explosives. Luke noted a string of them working their way around the man’s torso—enough to blow the house apart.
Luke felt oddly frozen. It seemed impossible that this man, who had been quietly airing his grievances and his heartbreak and his tragedy a moment before, was going to…
Then Luke had his gun out. It happened automatically, animal instinct, with no conscious input from him. He fired, without taking aim.
BOOOM!
Antar’s head blew apart, much if it spraying out to his right. The noise was loud. The man’s face went blank, his hands slack, and he oozed bonelessly to the floor.
Then Ed Newsam was on his feet. Now he had a gun in hand.
He turned and faced off with the wife.
She pointed her small gun up at Ed.
BOOOM!
Ed fired, the shot hitting the woman’s chest. Her arms flew upward, her gun dropping from her hand. She fell to the floor, her back coming to rest against the wall. Her mouth hung open. For a moment, she sat there, her face blank. Then her upper body slid sideways onto the floor, leaving a trail of red on the wall, like a snail leaves behind a trail of slime.
Luke stood, surveying the carnage in the tiny living room. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. Three people dead, and it could have easily been five.
“Oh my God,” he said.
Ed looked at him. “We better go.”
Luke walked across to the shelf and grabbed the telephone. He glanced down at it. Of course it was a satellite phone. It was on. The battery power was full. The satellite connection was good.
He breathed deeply. His racing heart skipped, then slowed down the tiniest amount. “We better call the chopper to land right here,” he said. “That made a lot of noise. I doubt we could walk to the rendezvous site and make it there alive.”
“Shouldn’t we search the house?” Ed said.
Luke looked around. The rooms were spare. There wasn’t much to search. More concerning was that the house was small. A rocket attack would probably blast through and bring the whole thing down on top of them.
“I’m worried about the neighbors. In a minute, we’re going to be in a shooting war just holding onto this place.”
Ed had pressed himself against a cinderblock wall, away from the windows.
“Have you noticed?” he said. “Everybody seems to know when we’re coming.”
Luke looked out a window. There were already a dozen people gathered outside. Children were running in the alleys between houses, calling out. Luke wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have seen an AK-47 in someone’s hands, which disappeared quickly. Luke also pressed himself against a wall. It was getting ugly out there.
He got on the radio to the chopper pilots.
He had met the pilots for the first time today, but he had heard of them before. They were an odd couple, a woman and a man, Rachel and Jacob. They were US Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and they’d apparently flown together for years. Luke liked that about them. The 160th SOAR were the Delta Force of helicopter pilots.
Rachel was thick and muscular and as tough as they came. She looked like a Rosie the Riveter poster. You don’t join an elite group of Army special operations pilots as a woman. You brawl your way in. Meanwhile, Jacob was thin and reedy, but as steady as a rock. His calm under fire was legendary, almost surreal.
“Guys, we’re gonna need an extract down here,” Luke said.
Rachel’s voice: “How did the interview go?”
“Uh, not quite as planned. The translator is dead. The subjects are dead. The natives are growing restless.”
“Okay, we’ve got a visual on your location. Seems like a crowd is gathering.”
“Yes.”
“Not good.”
Luke nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”
Jacob’s voice came on, calm as always.
“Luke, we’ll be there in thirty seconds. I’d suggest we make this a just-in-time thing. Touch and go. We’ll drop into the front yard, guns facing the bulk of the crowd, you guys come out, jump on board, and we’re gone in five seconds. Sound okay?”
“We’re bringing a body out,” Luke said.
“Okay,” Jacob said. “Then make it six seconds.”
They could hear the chopper already.
“Sounds good.”
Ed Newsam kneeled and slung Greg Welch’s body over his shoulder. Welch’s head was dripping blood and gore. It didn’t matter. The rule was you didn’t leave a man behind. It was a rule that you couldn’t always follow, but in this case…
“Got him?” Luke said.
Ed nodded. “Let’s go.”
Just before the helicopter landed, Luke came out of the house first, his own gun in his right hand, Ed’s gun in his left. He pointed them directly into the crowd. No one moved or even flinched. Hard eyes stared at him.
Behind him, Ed Newsam came out, carrying his tragic cargo.
The chopper barely touched down before it was back in the air. Luke looked back at the crowd. Upturned faces watched the helicopter flying away.
Luke was already on the radio again.
“Swann? Swann, can you hear me?”
The Little Bird chopper banked hard left and headed south and east, away from the village and back toward Iraqi territory. If they were lucky, they would make it across the border before anyone in the Syrian government knew they were here.
“Three minutes to the border,” Jacob said. “Three minutes. Hold tight and send a little prayer to whoever or whatever you believe in.”
The remains of Greg Welch lay sprawled across the tiny passenger cabin. Ed Newsam was working to zip Welch’s corpse into a body bag. Welch’s head was ruined. His face seemed as though a giant fist had punched a bloody hole in it.
Swann’s deep voice: “Luke? I’m here.”
Luke felt breathless, like he had just run ten miles. “Swann.”
“Yeah. How did it go? Did you get any information from the parents?”
“There was a problem with the parents,” Luke said.
The radio crackled. “A problem? How so?”
“Don’t worry about that right now. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it seems like these really might have been the kidnapper’s parents. If so, that’s a big break, buddy. And there’s a way we might confirm it. I have with me a satellite phone
that I confiscated. Is there any way you can access it without my having to come all the way back to Baghdad? It has a number that it called repeatedly over several months in its log, and I need to know where that number was located, and where it is now.”
There was a pause over the line. Luke looked at Ed. Ed pulled the zipper, closing the black bag over Greg Welch’s head.
“Yeah. I can do that. No problem. I’ll need you to use the phone to call a number I give you. You’ll be calling my laptop. Once we’re connected, I can look at the call record and trace where those calls went. It shouldn’t take me very long.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “Give me the number.”
Luke punched the digits in as Swann read them off to him. The phone was quiet for a long moment, then made a buzzing, humming sound as it connected to the computer.
“Luke, I’m going to cut you off for a moment.”
“Don’t make me call you back,” Luke said.
“I won’t. Just be patient for five minutes, okay?”
Luke checked his watch. It was 5:35. Maybe two hours of daylight left. “Five minutes, man.”
Ed Newsam was at an open bay door, scanning the skies for enemy activity.
“Anything?” Luke said.
Ed nodded. “Yeah. Black spots on the horizon, coming low and hard. Three of them, by my count.”
“Gentlemen,” Rachel said over the intercom, as if to confirm their worst fears. “I suggest you strap yourselves in. Syrian fighter planes approaching from the west. They should overtake us in less than a minute.”
Luke poked his head into the cockpit.
“How soon until we cross the border into Iraq?”
“About the same,” Rachel said. “One minute or less.”
“If we make the border…”
Jacob shrugged. “Doesn’t guarantee a thing. We encroached on their airspace. And anyway, they have missiles that could take us out right now, if they want. They could fire on us and take us out when we’re twenty miles into Iraq. We’re moving like a bumblebee compared to them.”
“Dammit,” Luke said. He gazed through the cockpit windshield. It was wide open desert in front of them.
“I’d strap yourself in, Stone. This could get interesting.”
Luke went back, sat down next to Ed, and strapped in. Ed was craning his neck behind them, watching out the bay door.
“Anything?”
“I can see one. He has us right on his nose. Coming hard like a missile.”
Luke took a deep breath. This was going to happen faster than the speed of sound.
Ed turned around and faced front. “Here he comes.”
Luke looked to his right. Through the bay door, behind him, he saw the Syrian plane. It was a dark shadow, a blur, coming almost too fast to see. An image of a pterodactyl appeared in his mind.
His heart skipped in his chest.
“Oh man.”
The fighter zipped past, just over their heads, way too close. The shriek of its jet engines was LOUD. For a moment, they were everything. Both Luke and Ed plugged their ears with their fingers.
An instant later, the turbulence hit them and the tiny chopper shuddered. The Little Bird rode the unsettled air, then simmered down. A second passed, then another jet went screaming by. Another second, another jet.
“Ahhhnnnnh!” Luke shouted. He hated those fighter pilots.
The chopper bounced across the turbulent airfield. It was like being caught in the churn after a monster ocean wave breaks.
Out the bay door, Luke saw all three of the planes banking hard in single file, heading back the way they had come.
Luke let out a long breath. He felt his heart now, thumping steadily, thumping hard, but already almost like normal. His ears were ringing.
“Congratulations, gentlemen,” Jacob said. “We just crossed the border into the loving arms of Iraq.”
A long moment passed. Ed and Luke sat still, straps still holding them.
“This has been a day,” Ed said. He stared down at the body bag holding the former CIA translator.
“Amen,” Luke said. “Yesterday was bad, but this…”
“Brutal,” Ed said.
A burst of static came from Luke’s radio. He picked it up. Swann was back.
“Luke?”
“Yeah, Swann. What’s up?”
Swann’s voice was shaking. Just a guy doing some data mining, and yet he was nervous. He was lucky he wasn’t out there. Syrian fighter jets hadn’t just buzzed over his head.
“I ran the locations of that phone number. It’s also a satellite phone, and for most of the past year it barely moved, stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, the entire time. It seems that the parents were probably calling their son. This could be the real thing.”
Luke realized what was making Swann’s voice shake. He looked at Ed.
Ed’s eyes lit up. “Pay dirt,” he said.
“Where is the phone now?” Luke said into the radio.
“For the past twelve hours, it’s been located in the Sinjar Mountains, on the Iraq side of the border. The phone you took from the parents called that location twice.”
A feeling began to swell in Luke’s chest. Suddenly there was a chance. That was all he ever wanted, was a fighting chance.
“Sinjar Mountains?” Luke said. “Can you be a little more specific? The Sinjar Mountains doesn’t tell me a whole—”
“About a hundred and twenty miles due north of your current position,” Swann said. “Give or take a few miles.”
Luke did the math in his head. The Little Bird topped out at about 175 miles per hour, but would burn fuel like crazy at that speed.
“What’s it like up there?”
There was chatter behind Swann. Trudy Wellington was saying something. Suddenly she was on the radio.
“Luke, it’s Trudy.”
Luke smiled and shook his head. “Yes. I know that.”
“The Sinjar Mountains are steep and rugged, difficult to access. There’s a patchwork of interests there. Kurdish militias control much of the region, but some areas of the mountains are wild, and up for grabs. The most inaccessible parts are thought to be hiding spots for Sunni terrorists and militias. There are also minority groups living up that way, like the Yazidis, who try to stay out of all this.”
A new shriek of static interrupted her voice.
“In a nutshell, I’d say those mountains are cold, hard, and heavily armed.”
Luke looked at Ed Newsam. Ed shrugged.
“You know what to do,” Ed said.
Luke undid his straps and jumped up. He poked his head into the cockpit again.
“We need to go north,” he said. “Sinjar Mountains.”
“North?” Rachel said. She looked at the indicators in front of her. “Sorry, Stone. We don’t have that kind of flying time left. We have to go back to base to refuel. We can’t go to the Sinjar Mountains and expect to make it back. We’ll be just about out of fuel by the time we get there.”
Luke shook his head. “Guys, I’m sorry. We’ve got new orders. We have to go north. We’ll find fuel along the way. Or we won’t. If we have to, we’ll set this bird down and walk.”
Jacob was uncharacteristically concerned. “This is untamed country,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of friends out here.”
“I guess we’ll have to make new friends.”
Luke went back to his radio.
“Trudy, I need you to talk to Big Daddy and have him pull as many people as he can into this. This could be a breakthrough, but it’s going to take us about forty-five minutes to get up there. We’re going to have to ditch this chopper at some point. I’m sure Big Daddy could have a drone over those mountains twenty minutes from now. We could have a drop team jump in from a plane, if need be. If they start scrambling now, they can get there before us.”
“There’s a little bit of a problem here, Luke.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “There’s always a problem. Which problem is this?”
“Trudy, don’t anticipate it being a problem, okay? Tell Big Daddy we have a satellite phone that’s been calling another satellite phone, which was located in Geneva for months. The person at the other end might be Ahmet, the man who kidnapped the President’s daughter. If we can get to him before someone else does, he might know something about where she is now.”
“Luke, do you have any idea how tenuous that lead sounds? The terrorists probably stationed a dozen satellite phones in Geneva as blind alleys. How hard would that be? Even if it is the right man, he could well be dead. If he isn’t, he should be. Someone else probably took his phone. Satellite phone locations are notoriously bad intel. We’re always making drone strikes on satellite phones and killing the wrong people. If through some quirk of fate, Ahmet’s somehow still alive and holding that telephone, he probably handed Elizabeth over to others and immediately went another direction. The odds of him knowing where she is are slim, to put it mildly.”
“Are you playing devil’s advocate?” Luke said.
“No. I’m telling you what the official response is likely to be. Especially after what happened this morning, and the rift it caused between Big—”
“Trudy, this is a lead. A man died to get it. Do you have a better one?”
“No.”
“Then tell Big Daddy I need some troops in the Sinjar Mountains. A strike force, preferably special operators, fast and light and silent. Don’t send a battalion. I also need a spy drone, at least one. Get me these things, please. If it’s a problem to get them, then try harder.”
“Got it,” Trudy said.
“Good. Thank you. Is Swann still there?”
“I’m right here,” came the skinny man’s deep voice.
“Swann, I need you to pinpoint that location as exactly as—”
“I’m already working on it,” Swann said.