Kingdom Come

by David Rollins

  “Yes, sir.” What did you expect?

  “No need to be overly formal. Call me Bradley.”

  “Yes, sir.” She leaned back against the wall opposite the desk.

  “Still all business are we? Fine. This is not a social call anyway. A couple of hours ago one of our teams recovered a laptop. Thought you might like to know.” Why is every conversation with this guy like extracting a splinter? He continued, “It’s the laptop the latest video was uploaded from, the one starring President Petrovich.”

  It was as if two electrodes had suddenly zapped Schelly’s heart. “You’re sure?”

  “Digital fingerprints don’t lie, Jill. Seems the Scorpion or his minions, whoever used the computer, also took the opportunity to do a little internet surfing – Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Google – looking for news on jihadist activity across the world, in particular any news on the forces building up that the Scorpion will be calling on, and whether our own president is going to come out swinging at Dabiq. All of which tells us that the Scorpion is getting sloppy.”

  “Sloppy?”

  “Careless. The previous videos were uploaded in Raqqa. As we all believe, the Scorpion chose Raqqa to make us think he was in that general area, while he was nowhere near there at all. But this latest video was uploaded from a different location - from a farmhouse.”

  A farmhouse …

  “Out in the middle of nowhere. You can interpret this a number of ways, but our two favorites are that the Scorpion is on the move and is now too far from Raqqa to access the city. But top of the list is that just maybe he was in a hurry and …”

  Schelly felt a tingle run up and down her spine. “… and the farmhouse is close to where he’s hiding out.”

  “There ya go.”

  “Can you send me the coordinates?”

  “Check your sipper.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank me over dinner.”

  “I thought you said this wasn’t a social call.”

  “I’m multi-tasking.”

  “And I’m gay.”

  “And I’m CIA. You don't think I know your dirty laundry? Chalmers stood and took a couple of steps toward her. “I guess we could invite Professor Başak. You never know, right? Things might get interesting.”

  What the hell? “Are you passing this information – these coordinates - to your Phoenix teams?”

  Chalmers hesitated. “This is not a game of Marco Polo, Major. Just because you’ve called me out over a program I have nothing to do with -. that doesn't sideline me.”

  “A Phoenix team hits Quickstep 3, we’ll both know how that happened.”

  “I don't know what you’re talking about.” He took another step toward her, leaned forward and placed a hand against the wall beside her head, patently inside her personal space.”

  “We done here, Mr Associate Deputy Director?” said Schelly, refusing to be intimidated. Asshole.

  “I’ll call you.” He pushed back off the wall, opened the door and left.

  Schelly exhaled and considered calling Kiraz. But at this hour the professor would be asleep, or maybe not given that sleep seemed to be a dirty word in Washington. And anyway, there are more important things to think about than personal outrage. You’ve got men in the field who are under-resourced and under-briefed, there’s a president hanging on a cross, millions are on the brink of war, and now this CIA Phoenix bullshit.

  Nevertheless, the news about the laptop was potentially a major break. Schelly returned to her office. She opened the operations folder on sipper and clicked on a new file just added. Overhead images showed a small, mean farmhouse, its coordinates around thirty miles due west of Position Alpha. If the hypothesis held that the Scorpion would be moving closer to Dabiq, to where his army was mustering, his hideout would have to be somewhere further west of the farmhouse. In that case, the search area was instantly reduced by at least two thirds.

  She pulled the WHO records again, looking for reported clusters of leishmaniasis, and cross-referenced those against battle reports. Ghasaniyeh fitted the profile. Medicins sans Frontiers had reported a sand fly infestation in the town. Ghasaniyeh lay to the south of Ayn El-Arab, a town on the border where fighting had broken out. Satellite weather reports had the prevailing winds coming from the north, which would bring the flies. Checking maps, Mamit, a border town mentioned by Chalmers, was in the same area. Crosschecking intelligence surveys confirmed that both Ayn El-Arab and Mamit were Sunni towns and assessed as being strongholds of ISIS sympathizers.

  Schelly felt a familiar tingle way down deep. This is where you are, isn't it? You’re somewhere here. Topographical maps revealed an area of ridges and valleys around seven miles south of Ghasaniyeh gored by the erosion of ancient wadis. There were several tiny hamlets in the vicinity located around fourteen miles east of the Euphrates River. The area was roughly equidistant from Raqqa and Dabiq and formed the northern-most point of a triangle up near the Turkish border. A perfect place to get off the grid, and yet still close enough to the strings if you need to pull them. The search area was around fifteen square miles. A large area for a single team to cover, but doable.

  The satisfaction Schelly felt was short-lived. Chalmers and his Special Activities Phoenix hit squads - they had access to the same information. And indeed Chalmers had already pinpointed Mamit. Perhaps he’d already come to the same conclusions. And then there were the Russians. They weren’t stupid, as well as being highly motivated. Every scintilla of their enormous military and intelligence resources would be employed in the hunt for their president. All of which potentially put Cooper and his men in quite a few lethal crosshairs. And those crosshairs were much more likely to find their target if Schelly directed Quickstep 3 to the much reduced search area. But what choice did she have? Schelly folded her arms tight against her body and looked down at the map, now with a small circle on it drawn in red. It was a hell of an hour to be phoning the United States Secretary of Defense, but as Schelly saw it, what choice did she have?

  Forty-three

  Ronald V. Small @realSmall

  America wins because we are born winners. It’s in the water. If you are an American stand up and say, “I am an American. I win. That’s what I do!”

  Bo was hunched over a screen, his default position pretty much ever since the supply drop. Looking over his shoulder, I asked him, “What are those multi-colored blobs?”

  “This shit’s insane, boss. They’re rodents,” he replied. “Heat signatures.”

  The RQ-11 Raven drone was buzzing around above our heads at around 1000 feet, orbiting in a one-mile radius centered on our vehicles. At that height, it could see five miles out across the desert floor. And what it could see at the moment was rats, none of which carry AKs, wear suicide vests, or are looking for a place in Paradise. Reassuring on one level, but not at all helpful in our search for the Scorpion. I was starting to hope for some jihadist action because the desert was feeling vaster and emptier every time we stopped and found absolutely nothing. Not even refugees.

  I walked over to Dawar, who was sitting cuff-locked with his hands behind his back in the bed of the Toyota utility, his head hanging low. So far, he had decided to act like the desert and reveal zip. So I had decided no more Mr Nice Guy. “Natasha!” I called. The Russian reluctantly got out of the ambulance and joined me at the utility. My fellow American lifted his eyes, but only when I cocked my Sig and handed it to the Russian. “There’s no safety,” I told her. “Just squeeze the trigger. The action is tight. Takes a few pounds of pressure. You might need to use two hands.”

  “You want me to shoot?” she asked, confused.

  “Yeah.” I gestured at Dawar. “In the head. Make it a clean shot. No need to make him suffer unduly. Through an eye or maybe the temple, or through the ear.”

  “You do not need to tell me where,” Natasha said. “Finally, you grow pair,”

  I felt like shaking her and saying a pair, but there’s a time and a place.

 
“What?” said Dawar, suddenly animated. “No, wait!”

  Natasha aimed the pistol at Dawar, pulled the trigger and the gun went off with that seriously loud bang at close quarters that always makes me jump these days.

  Dawar was surprised to find himself still alive. And Natasha was surprised as well, having just shot a hole in the side of the Toyota instead of blowing Dawar’s lights out.

  “Why did you do this?” she asked me angrily, my hand having pushed the gun to the side at the last instant.

  The answer seemed obvious to me, and it had nothing to do with her refusal to use articles in her speech. I said to Dawar, “Next bullet is yours, asshole. Killed by a woman. Fuckin’ embarrassing, right? No Paradise for you – not unless you tell us where the Scorpion is.”

  “That’s torture,” Dawar pointed out. “Congress has outlawed that shit.”

  True, though the press said the commander-in-chief was ambivalent about torture. Be that as it may, as it currently stood, I was breaking every rule in the book, at least the one that said threatening to kill a prisoner in cold blood unless they talked was a no-no. This could get me court martialed. But here’s the thing. You have to break some eggs if you want to make an omelet, right? And the omelet in question here was finding a criminal holding the world to ransom so that I could kill him in cold blood. So, the circumstances were extenuating, if you get my drift.

  “So sue me,” I told Dawar, and motioned at Natasha to line up his head for round two. “As I told you when we met, Natasha here killed our last prisoner and the thing that concerned her most about it was breaking a fingernail, so I know she has it in her to do you. And now, as she has just demonstrated, you also know she has every intention of pulling the trigger when I tell her to.” This last bit I said as much for Natasha’s benefit. “If you don't give us something useful, bub, she will shoot you dead and there’ll be no dewy-eyed virgins for you, if that’s what you’re looking forward to.”

  “I don't know anything,” he blubbered, his eyes shifting from Natasha to me, and back again.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I got separated when Al-Aleaqarab picked up Petrovich and the others at the crash site. I don't know where he is.”

  “He must have set out contingency plans, in case his fighters got separated.”

  “Yeah, coz you pick up a Russian president every other day.”

  “Leave the sarcasm to me,” I told him. The nerve, right?

  “Our base was a warehouse back at Latakia, but that got overrun by Russians. I wasn’t there at the time, but I heard about it.”

  “And what have you heard about where your boss might have gone since? What’s the word on the jihad-barricade-checkpoint-street?”

  “They say he has brought the Crusader to his knees.”

  “Who?”

  “The Crusader – that’s what we call the West.”

  Right. Like I said, who writes this stuff? That aside, Dawar may have been correct about the effect the pictures of a crucified Valeriy Petrovich were causing around the globe. No doubt assholes everywhere were seeing this as some kind of rallying cry. Meanwhile, I was getting nowhere. “Shoot him,” I told Natasha.

  She smiled and raised the gun.

  “Wait, wait … Up north, up north, somewhere close to Dabiq. That’s the rumor.”

  Maybe he really was concerned about being shot by a woman. Yet another example of inequality between the sexes right there, if one were looking for it. I put my hand on the weapon again. “Keep going,” I told him.

  “They say he hasn’t crossed the Euphrates yet. He’s waiting for his forces to build up.”

  “Whereabouts is he, exactly?”

  “No one knows. But he’s not hiding in plain sight, not like bin Laden did. He’s not in any town or city. No time to organize a safe house. Our retreat from Latakia was a rout. Our intention was to die fighting. Al-Aleaqarab will be somewhere in the desert.”

  “He’ll be worried about being spotted from the air,” I said, thinking aloud. “Any caves you know of in the general area of ‘up north’?” I gave him some rabbit ears.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Haven’t been in that part of the country.”

  I’ve questioned enough criminals in my time to know when someone’s telling the truth. And also when they’ve said everything they’ve got to say. Press too hard beyond that point and you get embellishment.

  I put my hand out to Natasha. “Thank you,” I said, meaning, hand over the piece. She shook her head at me and pushed it into my hand with as much displeasure as she could muster. I checked the weapon, made sure a round was up the spout and –

  An explosion made me jump about a foot sideways. Again. But this time Dawar was sprawled across the Toyota’s bed, his brains all over the paintwork, the rest of him twitching. Natasha checked her own weapon and replaced it in her boot, happy in her work.

  “What? What the fuck?” I yelled at her.

  “Everything he was going to say, he said. But this wasn’t enough. So, now he cannot go to heaven. And he cannot claim to authorities he was tortured by you. I do you favor. I know your system. It needs to grow pair also.”

  “But why the fuck did you kill him?”

  “I tell you why just now. Also, you do not know these people like I know them. They are all like Chechens. You cannot trust them. You cannot trust anyone who loves death more than life. These pigs murdered my twin sister in Beslan. You remember that? Beslan? The school? These Chechens, they take the school, they make explosives in the classroom and the gymnasium. All the children are going to be killed, so what choice does government have? Spetsnaz, tanks, they move in. Much gunfire. Some children live. My sister, Irina, is not one of them. This is why I join army. This is why I do this.” She gestured off hand at what was left of Dawar.

  Everyone has a story. But this was another of hers I wasn’t buying. Either it wasn't entirely genuine, or there was more to it. “I thought Beslan was part of the Chechen fight for independence.”

  “What would you know?”

  “Didn’t the Russian army do most of the killing?”

  “You believe everything CNN tell you?”

  No, not since around the year 2003. Fair enough. I gave a mental shrug and let it go. I didn't want to get sucked further into her backstory. And what could I do about the very dead Dawar? He was a terrorist, so who cares, right? But something Arlen told me niggled: Don’t take this the wrong way, but your normal is kinda fucked up from pretty much every perspective except your own. I pictured him saying it, like it was somehow not a positive aspect of my personality. I looked at Dawar, at least what was left of him shaking against the bodywork, and I felt … nothing. Truthfully, I wasn’t even angry with Natasha, although I was annoyed that she had disobeyed my order. That’s what I was pissed about – not that she had killed someone’s son, possibly someone’s father, in cold blood. Nothing I could do about it though, not now. And maybe she was right about having done me a favor. I could see Arlen, arms folded, shaking his head at me. Do me a favor, Arlen, and go back to your Power Point preso. “I have a question for you, Natasha,” I said, feeling calmer.

  “Da?”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “I just give reason.”

  “Maybe that’s what motivated you to join the military, but not–”

  “How do you know? Did terrorist kill your sister?”

  “I’m an only child. Can't you tell? Look, I’m not asking you about your personal history. You told me what happened in the helicopter, but there’s something else. I’ve got this feeling and it’s telling me to keep pushing you. You’d rather stay with us and look for Petrovich than go back to your own people and join their hunt for him. I don't think it’s because you like us. So, what are you not telling me?”

  “Everything. I tell you everything.”

  “Natasha, c’mon. What really happened in the helicopter? Actually, I believe you about the what. Let me rephrase. Why did it happen?”<
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  She looked at me, squinting a little like she was trying to understand the point but not quite getting it. “Why do you care? What does it matter? The bodyguard, he blew up helicopter and it crash.” She opened her hands out as if to say, “I have told you this already. There you go - you got it all.”

  But I didn't have it all, and that was the point. “Natasha, it’s not enough to know that a thing has happened. People want to know why a thing happened. We’re not down with uncertainty, randomness. When we know why something happened, it gives some control over the universe, makes us believe that we can maybe stop a thing happening the next time.”

  “You want to know, because you want someone to blame. You can't blame the universe. This is your stupid American culture. Shit happens. You know this expression?”

  “Yeah, but more often than not the shit gets a helping hand. You told me one of Petrovich’s security detail blew himself up. I’m not down with the whole Islamic terror sleeper thing. Before your suicide bomber is tasked to close protection duty for the President of Russia, the FSB is going to know more about him than he knew about himself.”

  My pocket began to vibrate. The satellite phone. “Don't go away,” I told her, and walked several paces out of earshot before I thumbed the green button.

  “Major Cooper,” said the voice on the line. “Major Schelly.”

  “Major. We still on a first name basis?”

  “Vin. How’s that?”

  “There you go. What’s up?”

  “Good news and bad news,” she said.

  “Love it. Gimme the bad. I eat bad for breakfast.”

  “Right, well, the Reapers had to bug out.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve got a Predator coming online soon, so we can keep eyes on you, but it’s winchester.”

  “So, there’s no one watching us at the moment?” I asked.

  “No, unfortunately, right now you’re on your own.”

  I was relieved. Video footage of Natasha whacking a prisoner while I stood right beside her wouldn’t look so great in any kind of enquiry, should one ever be called. I covered my relief on this score by saying, “Hey, you saw what we came through a little while back, right? Those Reapers saved our bacon.” Everyone knows how important it is to save bacon.