Primary Target

by Jack Mars

  He glanced around the room. The afternoon was really fading now. Night was coming on. The last yellow light of day played against the concrete walls. It was beautiful. For an instant, he had a thought, a wish…

  But it was elusive, and gone before it even formed.

  “Ahmet,” a harsh voice said.

  A mujahid stood in the doorway. He was a large man, and strong. He had a thick black beard and piercing eyes. He was carrying an AK-47 rifle. He had three or four grenades hanging from his vest.

  He had been introduced to Ahmet as Siddiq Jara’a, a nom de guerre if ever there was one. Siddiq meant truthful. Jara’a meant daring. But Siddiq wasn’t really supposed to be used as an actual name. It was an honorific, first conveyed on men of high integrity by Muhammad himself.

  This man, calling himself Siddiq, was an idiot.

  “Yes?” Ahmet said.

  “Do you have a satellite phone?” the man said in Arabic.

  Ahmet stared at him. Siddiq was mostly a silhouette looming in the doorway, as day slowly turned to night. Ahmet was not certain how to answer that question. He hesitated to say anything. No one had asked him this before, and he had not volunteered any information.

  “Do you?” Siddiq said.

  “Yes. Do you want to borrow it?”

  Siddiq shook his head. “You fool.”

  Without warning, he marched into the room. He took the rifle from his back, turned the butt of it to Ahmet, and struck him hard in the ribs.

  The girl screamed.

  Ahmet raised a hand. “Wait!”

  Siddiq pulled the rifle back and struck him again. Then again.

  Ahmet curled into a ball, and Siddiq hit him in the back. The hit was harder than the others, and Ahmet felt a searing pain. The man had broken something, maybe a rib. Ahmet rolled onto his side, breathing heavily.

  Siddiq hit him again.

  “Uhnh.”

  “Stop!” the girl said. “Stop! You’re going to kill him.”

  Again Siddiq hit him, in the side this time. Something else broke. The pain was unreal. Siddiq hit him yet again.

  He leaned in close.

  “I should smash your skull, you idiot. Do you not hear the helicopter buzzing the hillsides? Of course you don’t. You are not a warrior. You don’t hear anything. You don’t see anything. You know nothing.”

  He grabbed Ahmet’s jaw in one viselike hand.

  “Look at me.”

  Ahmet turned his face to Siddiq’s. The man’s hard, bloodshot eyes glared at him. They almost seemed to give off their own light. They were like lasers.

  “A runner came up the mountain with news from our spies in Baghdad. He risked his life to come here. The Americans are dropping commandos on the lower slopes. Why? Because they know we are here. They traced a satellite call from your parents’ house to this very spot. Your parents are dead. Are you happy? They were killed by the Americans. You have destroyed your family and jeopardized everything with your own stupidity.”

  Ahmet didn’t respond. He simply stared at the man. Was it true? Of course it was. He saw now how this mission, this adventure he had gone on, could never have turned out any other way.

  His beloved parents…

  “Give me the phone.”

  Ahmet reached into his pocket. It hurt to move. His hand came out with the satellite telephone in its black plastic casing.

  Siddiq snatched it, dropped it on the ground, and smashed it to pieces with the butt of the AK-47. He looked down at Ahmet.

  “You never should have had that.”

  He turned away from Ahmet and faced the girl. He turned the rifle around and placed the barrel against her temple. She closed her eyes. She was trembling.

  “You’re a pretty girl,” Siddiq said to her in Arabic.

  Ahmet shook his head. Of course she wouldn’t understand a word the man was saying. Siddiq probably didn’t even care.

  “We should have kept you, used you for ourselves, and then sold you into slavery.”

  Tragedy upon tragedy. Ahmet’s entire family was dead. Now Siddiq was going to kill the girl. Once the Americans knew the girl was dead, they would kill all the mujahideen on this mountain. Some of the Americans would die. Oaths of revenge would be taken on both sides. The cycle would begin again.

  The girl.

  The girl. Her death would lead to the deaths of thousands. It would rain fire on innocents everywhere.

  More oaths. More revenge. More dead girls.

  Where Ahmet had fallen, there was a large chunk of broken rock. He reached his hand to it. He could barely get his fingers to grip it. It was solid, with sharp edges. Yes. He picked it up.

  Silently, he worked his way to his feet. He was scorched by pain. Siddiq had broken his bones. There must be internal bleeding.

  Siddiq still held the gun to the girl Elizabeth’s head. He was still taunting her in a language she couldn’t understand. His back was to Ahmet.

  “Goodbye, American dog,” Siddiq said.

  Ahmet raised the chunk of stone and slammed it across the back of Siddiq’s head. One hit cracked the man’s head open. Siddiq turned slowly around. His eyes were large and already vacant. His mouth hung open.

  Ahmet smashed him across the face. Teeth flew.

  Siddiq fell to the floor, making no attempt to slow his fall. His head bounced off the hard ground.

  Ahmet went to where the girl’s chain was driven into the wall. He gathered himself for a great effort. It was going to hurt, he knew that. Still, he would do it. He would force himself.

  He yanked on the heavy chain, a test pull.

  The spike slid easily out from the wall and clattered to the floor. Just like that. A child could have pulled it free.

  He looked at the girl and shook his head. Then he laughed.

  * * *

  Elizabeth could hardly make sense of what was happening.

  “Run,” Ahmet said. “Go west, toward the last of the sunlight.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “West, okay.”

  Her head was swimming. She was hungry, she was thirsty, and she was tired. She had been terrified of dying, but now she was much less so. They had made her say terrible things about her father, things she didn’t mean, things she didn’t even remember. She knew they were horrible, and that was all. She hated them for doing that.

  She tried to focus on what Ahmet was saying, on what it meant, but it was hard.

  A fighter had suddenly walked in, spoken to Ahmet in their language, and then started killing him. Then the fighter had turned his back on Ahmet, and Ahmet had killed the fighter instead. Ahmet was a slippery guy. Who could trust him?

  But Ahmet had also saved her life.

  “If I go west, is there a way down?”

  Ahmet shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. But west will take you away from the mujahideen, who are mostly deployed to the east. They will try to hold the line against the enemy coming uphill. The terrain here is harsh. There is nowhere for the Americans to land.”

  “So what’s to the west, then?”

  “The cliffs.”

  She stared at him.

  “You are wearing bright orange,” Ahmet said. “If you are lucky, your friends will see you from the sky. If you are unlucky, you can still choose your own death, and not the one the militants would choose for you.”

  It took a few seconds for that idea to sink in with her.

  “Jump?” Elizabeth said. “From the cliffs?”

  Ahmet nodded. “Yes.”

  Elizabeth didn’t love the sound of that. Maybe there was another choice here, one that Ahmet wasn’t thinking of. She had learned that in a business class once. Look for the third option, the one that was being overlooked.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  He had picked up the other man’s gun and was checking the ammunition. Now he was taking what looked like hand grenades from the man’s vest.

  “I’m going to die protecting you,” he said.

  She gestu
red at the gun. “Do you even know how to use that thing?”

  He patted the barrel. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “Of course. I was trained in the jihad camps.”

  He put the gun down and began to go through the dead man’s pockets. There was blood soaked into the dirt near the man’s head. It was shocking to her, a little bit, the businesslike way Ahmet killed someone, then went about looting the corpse. Ahmet was cold-blooded. All of these people… they just…

  She didn’t have words for it.

  Ahmet came out of the man’s pocket with a fold-out knife. He opened the blade and slid it under the leather strap that held her left hand. He sawed at it, and within a few seconds, the knife cut through, popping out away from her body. Then he did the same with the right wrist.

  She put her hands on her wrists, getting the feeling of freedom into them. The ghost sensation of the tight leather straps was still there somehow.

  Ahmet looked at her. He took her face in his hands.

  “Run,” he said. “Run west.”

  * * *

  “The shooting has started.”

  Ed Newsam had spoken. He was crouched near the open bay door of the Little Bird, peering out into the gloom with a pair of high-powered binoculars. The chopper banked hard right, flying eastward high above the ridgeline of the Sinjar Mountains. Behind him, the body of Greg Welch lay where he had zipped it into a bag and fastened it to sturdy metal eye hooks in the flooring.

  Luke was on the radio.

  “Swann? Swann, come on!”

  The radio crackled.

  “The signal went dead, Luke. That’s it. I don’t think it’s coming back. They must have figured out the satellite phone attracted us, and they destroyed it.”

  Luke looked up and shook his head. They had gotten here five minutes ago. They had gone straight to the area where the phone seemed to be, and right away they had spotted militia activity. The militia had spotted them, too. They were based in the highest reaches of the mountains. Their location was along a sharp ridgeline, a dragon spine of jumbled rocks. There was nowhere to even consider landing. And if they dropped altitude, they were going to catch hell from militia guns.

  This was a Little Bird. It was fast and as maneuverable as choppers came. It could land in the tightest spots. But it couldn’t land on a razor’s edge while taking enemy fire.

  “Where was the signal again when it went dead?” Luke said.

  “I told you. I plotted the location on a satellite map of the area. I also plotted it on a topographical map. It was near the highest altitude on the ridge, thirty miles from where the mountains cross into Syria. There’s some kind of old settlement up there. There’s a small building of some kind, which is the same color as everything else, and was probably built from local stone. It fades into the background very easily. It looks like somebody tried to do some terraced farming there once upon a time, but the terraces are too narrow to land. It looks like there might be an old well and a small freshwater spring. All of this is about half a mile east from some sheer cliffs. Find that building. The signal was coming from inside, or near, that building when it went dead.”

  Luke glanced at Ed. “Are you hearing this?”

  Ed shrugged. “I don’t know, man. We went out and around. Looks to me like we’re coming back in, approaching some cliffs from the east. Talk to the pilots. They have Swann’s coordinates. Somebody just started a shooting war up ahead, and it looks like it’s starting to get hot.”

  “Guys,” Rachel said over the intercom. She and Jacob must have overheard them up front. “We can’t play this game anymore. There’s nowhere to set this thing down. We are almost out of fuel. That firefight he mentioned is directly in front of us—practically on top of the coordinates Swann gave me. We need to get this bird to Kurdish territory or we are going to crash. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the mood for a chopper crash in the middle of an Al Qaeda hideout.”

  Luke raised a hand to no one. “Okay, Rachel. Okay. Swann, who is shooting at whom?”

  “Two platoons of Marines dropped in from Hueys near some friendly Kurdish positions on the lower slopes about ten or fifteen minutes ago. I’d assume they got their bearings, geared up, and they’re starting to fight their way uphill.”

  “Big Daddy sent those Marines?”

  “Yes. He’s trying to wrangle some Navy SEALs, but he doesn’t have them yet.”

  Luke shook his head.

  This didn’t sound right. It was going to take those Marines all night to push uphill against positions held by even a handful of religious fanatics.

  Luke had an idea. He ducked his head into the cockpit.

  “I’ll strike you a deal.”

  “Name it,” Jacob said. Both he and Rachel were staring through the windshield and monitoring controls at the same time.

  “Put me right over Swann’s coordinates, even if there’s shooting. Hold that position for ten seconds, and let me get a peek down there. Then we’ll go anywhere you want. Sound okay?”

  Jacob glanced at Rachel. She shrugged.

  “Sounds good,” Jacob said. “Just don’t blame us if we get our skin shredded.”

  Luke looked out the cockpit windshield. There were flashes of light up ahead.

  “I won’t blame you,” Luke said. An image of the disastrous Afghanistan mission flashed through his mind. “I’ll blame me.”

  “Fair enough,” Jacob said. “We’ll be over those coordinates in thirty seconds. Let’s make this quick.”

  Luke ducked back into the cabin. “Eyes sharp, Ed. We’ll be there in half a minute.”

  “We’re already there, white man. Passing over those cliff faces… now.”

  Luke pulled a long metal box out from under the bench. He shoved the body of Greg Welch out of the way. He turned a silver knob on the left, then on the right, and opened the box. More weapons in here. An MP5 with a three loaded box magazines. An M-79 grenade launcher. Half a dozen grenades.

  Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  “What’s the armament configuration on this bird?” he shouted at the cockpit.

  “One M230 chain gun, two Hydra rockets,” came the reply.

  “What about Hellfire missiles?” Luke said.

  “They weren’t loaded,” Rachel said. “You were just going to interview someone, remember? We weren’t going to need all that muscle.”

  Luke grunted. Lesson learned. Always load up the weapons. Overload them if necessary. Too much was better than not enough.

  “Oh, man,” Ed said. “Stone, you better see this.”

  Luke went to the bay door. Ed pointed at the ground toward their right. In the last of the fading daylight, Luke saw a tiny figure in bright orange go running by, headed toward the cliffs. Just behind that figure was where the shooting began.

  Another figure was firing back the way the orange figure had come. From that direction, at least two dozen others were approaching. Some were running fast, some were stopping and shooting. The bright muzzle signatures of automatic weapons lit up the night like fireflies. The faraway blat of machine gun fire came to Luke on the wind.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  “The girl,” Ed said. “Elizabeth.”

  It was. It was a girl in an orange jumpsuit. Just like Elizabeth had been shown in an orange jumpsuit in the video.

  It took Luke a long second to process the information. A wave of unreality washed over him. All this time, he had been focused on the telephone, finding it, capturing the person holding it, and then asking more questions. The right questions, put to the right person, could bring them closer to Elizabeth. He never thought, not for one second, that Elizabeth would be in the same place as the phone.

  Luke jumped up and poked his head back into the cockpit.

  “You gotta put us down there. Did you see that? The President’s daughter is down there, running for the cliffs. They’re right behind her. You gotta drop us. Somehow, you gotta put us on the ground.”

  The two pilo
ts turned and looked at him.

  “What?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  11:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (7:05 p.m. Arabic Standard Time)

  The Situation Room

  The White House, Washington, DC

  The insanity rolled on. Lawrence Keller watched it unfold with increasing alarm.

  “The Russians are overreacting,” General Stark said. “And they’re overplaying their hand.”

  Stark was a madman, and Mark Baylor was just a step behind him. How did this happen? How had Keller himself gotten this so wrong?

  They were better off with a do-nothing like David Barrett.

  NSA and CIA listening stations had started picking up chatter from inside the Russian strategic command. Instead of simply allowing the United States to attack its allies in Syria and Iran with impunity, Russia was ready to go the mat. They had emerged from the disastrous 1990s in a weakened state geopolitically, militarily, and economically, but they did have one last card up their sleeves.

  They had nuclear weapons left over from the Soviet Union.

  Keller pointed at a military aide sitting to Stark’s left. “Can we hear that assessment again, please?”

  Stark shook his head and sneered. “Mr. Keller, you have no authority here, and you have no military experience. I’m not sure we need to—”

  “Incorrect, General,” Keller said. “Do your homework. I am the authorized representative in this room of the duly-elected President of the United States, David Barrett. I served in the United States Marine Corps, Second Battalion, Fifth Marines, from 1967 to 1971, with two tours of Vietnam. I spent the month of February 1968 in Hue City, taking it back from the NVA. I probably have as much combat experience as you do, General, if not more.”

  Lawrence Keller was all the way out on a limb now. The situation was nuts, and as a result, he had lost his mind. Mark Baylor was watching him closely. Everyone was watching him. It was impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. It was impossible to fade back into the woodwork.

  “Now let’s hear that assessment again,” he said.

  The aide looked down at the paper in his hand. The paper had been passed to him from a runner who had come downstairs with the latest printouts.