by Brad Taylor
“Trust me, Hezbollah has nothing as deadly as what they can provide.”
21
“It wasn’t your fault,” Doku said. “The circuitry had a short in it.”
Elina said, “I told you that. Did you not believe me?”
Doku smiled. “I never questioned your commitment, but others would have. It’s good you came back with the vest.”
Elina simply nodded, but inside she relaxed. After the strike against her father’s murderers she had fled the square, returning to live like a wolf in the forest, debating what she should do. She’d stayed for two days, considering her options. She knew the insurgency leadership would be questioning her commitment. Wondering if she was now the enemy — and she’d seen what punishment they meted out to traitors. It would be much, much worse than what she had attempted on the Kadyrovtsy. A slow, painful demise. The only way to prove she was still a Black Widow was to return, but the visit would be fraught with risk. Doku’s statement gave her hope that she’d made the right choice.
He continued. “The attack was spectacular, right in the heart of the beast. Early counts are upwards of fifty people killed, many more injured. Very few civilians.”
“I saw my father’s murderer. That’s all I cared about.”
He said nothing for a moment, considering her words. “So you are done?”
“No,” she said, “Kariina did my duty for me. I still owe for others of my family.”
Doku turned to the window. Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “I’m very glad to hear that. You are different than the other female shuhada I have trained. As dangerous as they were, you’re smarter. More cunning. More driven.”
He turned back and said, “Tell me, could you be a shahid against someone other than the Kadyrovtsy? Someone that is unrelated to the tragedy that befell your family?”
“Why?”
“Because I have a mission for you. A very special mission.”
22
“Pike, you’d better get up here.”
I stared at the handheld radio for a split second like it was a snake, then snatched it up and scrambled to the ladder, Jennifer and Decoy hot on my heels. I knew that little sentence would be nothing but trouble.
We’d rented the upper floor of an apartment complex just off Sukhumvit Road, getting both apartments along with roof access. It was the closest place we could find to the anchor we’d been given that would still allow us to maintain anonymity.
Reaching the ladder, I said, “What’s up? The general finally show?”
I knew that wasn’t it, because that wouldn’t have required my presence. Only a jot in the logbook.
The anchor from Kurt had turned out to be a house, recently rented, with the general’s name on the lease. That’s all we had as a starting point, and so far, it had been a bust. We’d maintained eyes on it for close to two days with little to show for it, which would be embarrassing when we were relieved by the inbound team. There had been a couple of men who came and went, and they did look Arabic, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, given the house’s location.
It was situated about a block off of what was known as “Little Arabia,” just off Soi 3 in downtown Bangkok, which, considering the general’s nationality, had seemed to make sense.
Little Arabia was just that: a slice of the Middle East right smack in downtown Bangkok, complete with women wearing full-length abayas and niqab face veils, men in traditional Gulf attire — which we charitably called a man-dress — and signs in Arabic. It had made any close-in reconnaissance hard, because we would have stuck out as bad as if it had been Fallujah.
I exited the roof access and found Knuckles staring at our Wasp screen, while Retro fiddled with a computer. We’d decided to use the UAV first, before getting more aggressive, which is why access to the roof had been key.
Knuckles said, “Take a look. The two tenants are emptying the place, taking out all the Persian rugs.”
I studied the screen, seeing an open trunk of a car in the walled courtyard, the two men coming and going from the house, loading what looked to me like cinder blocks.
“What do you make of it? Are they leaving?”
Which would suck, because we had no other anchor.
Retro said, “That’s not what’s interesting. Look at this, I’ve been running a feed. I’ve got it on tape. The first carpet they brought out was big. And it was moving.”
“Moving?”
He hit play, and I saw both men come out of the house, one on each end of a large rug. When the first man hit the bottom step to the courtyard, the rug began to writhe up and down, left and right, until it popped out of his hands. He immediately jumped on it, while the second man began beating the top part of the carpet with something I couldn’t identify. After three or four blows, the rug became still, and the men loaded it into the backseat of the car.
What the hell? Who do they have?
Retro said, “We kept eyes on afterward, and the rug doesn’t move again. Whoever is in it is either dead or out cold.”
Shit. This really causes a dilemma.
My mission was simply to get a handle on the general, then pass off everything I knew to the inbound team — the clean team — for them to exploit in accordance with whatever the Oversight Council deemed necessary. In no way was I to do anything that might invite compromise of my team or the mission. Interdict this escapade, and the Iranians would know they were being watched. Don’t interdict, and whoever was bound up in the rug was more than likely dead.
Which really made life difficult when you were supposed to be the white knight. A choice that had no good ending. I had seen this exact same thing play out in Iraq. Watching a nobody who was going to lead us to a somebody, only to have the nobody begin to do something evil right in front of us, like shoving some poor Iraqi into the trunk of a car.
The choice then had been horrific, stretching my sense of right and wrong to the breaking point and leading to a moral equivocation. If I saved the Iraqi, the terrorist would know his contact was blown, forcing us to start at ground zero as he moved operations and remade his cellular infrastructure, burning anyone who might lead to him. But if I didn’t, I was culpable for a death, because I had the power to stop it.
It was much more than a simple equation of immediate right versus wrong, because saving the one guy in the trunk most definitely would ensure that others would die later on. The terrorist would remain operational while we climbed up the tree again, and every day lost in the hunt was another day for him to kill.
It had been a hard decision, but I made it with the overarching mission in mind.
Knuckles said, “They’re locking up the house. They’re finished. What do you want to do?”
I felt the time disappearing like water down a drain, knowing there was only so much before it no longer mattered and the sink was empty. I considered the same choices as before, along with the repercussions. The general, according to Kurt, was up to some very destructive actions. Much worse than the killing of a single guy. Hell, I didn’t even know if the man in the rug wasn’t bad as well, somebody who had been facilitating Iranian operations and was now no longer of any use.
On the other hand, I didn’t know if he was either.
“They’re in the car, lights just came on.”
Screw it. Anyone bitches, I’ll say we did the same thing in Iraq.
“You got a pinecone on the Wasp?”
Knuckles grinned. “Yeah.”
“Deploy it and vector me in. Jennifer, stay here and help with the airborne surveillance. Get Kurt on the VPN and let him know what we’ve got. Everyone else, kit up.”
Back in Iraq, on my call, we’d saved the man in the trunk in a vehicle interdiction, and he’d ended up being nothing but a farmer with some bad luck. I’d gotten a ration of shit about it until we’d killed the terrorist two nights later in blind luck. Or maybe it had been karma. The farmer became a staunch supporter of all Coalition operations, along with his entire extended family —
which, although it wasn’t why I had executed, had helped the overarching mission.
I figured Spock could kiss my ass again. Sometimes the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.
While the rest of the team raced back down the ladder, Knuckles’s grin faded to a sour look. I said, “Hey, you’re still too beat-up. Somebody’s got to man the beacon, and we might need your insider knowledge of the prison in about six hours.”
Jennifer smiled at that, saying, “I’ll make sure he stays on the roof.”
As I turned to go, the weight of the decision sinking in, she grabbed my sleeve. “This is the right thing, no matter how it turns out. Don’t second-guess once you’re on the road.”
The comment brought a measure of calm, reminding me of why I had joined the Taskforce in the first place, an organization designed to prevent death and destruction by preemptive actions. She was always a good sounding board, which was the very reason I had asked her to join as well. Her moral compass had no equivocation. It was black and white, right and wrong. Nobody else could puncture my sense of superiority like Jennifer. And nobody else could poke her back in the eye like I could.
I said, “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry. I’m doing it for the guy in the carpet. I wouldn’t execute just because I want to go kick some ass. I’m not like Knuckles.”
She gave me her disapproving-teacher look, and I said, “Just get that beacon emplaced, or it’s a dead issue. That thing isn’t the best we’ve ever used.”
Which was an understatement. I, personally, thought the pinecone was the dumbest idea ever conceived. Something that sounds great on paper but ends up being a waste of tax dollars. It had been thrown in as a benny when we’d modified the Wasp UAV, but as far as I knew, it had never been used operationally because of its shortcomings in emplacement.
Basically, it was a normal beacon that operated off of the cell network, about the size of a fifty-cent piece and twice as thick. The unique thing was how it was emplaced. It was secured onto the bottom of the Wasp with electronic magnets and had a single wing sticking out of its side that also served as its antenna. When the power was cut to the magnet, it fell free and floated down, spinning like a seed from a pinecone on its single wing, auto-rotating until it made contact with the target, where another magnet held it in place. As a beacon it worked pretty well, with a battery life of over twelve hours. The problem was getting it on the target.
The big idea had come because of the Wasp’s limited range. It couldn’t track a car like the Predator or Reaper. Its range was just too shallow, and it flew too slowly to be able to match the speed of a car. The great idea had been to equip the Wasp with the pinecone, the theory being that when you saw you were going to lose the car, you’d beacon it for further tracking. Unfortunately, the very things that made the Wasp unsuitable for tracking on its own made it unsuitable for emplacing the beacon. It had proven impossible to drop the pinecone with any hope of it hitting a moving car. Great idea in theory, sorry in execution.
Until now. The Bangkok traffic would limit the speed these guys could move, and with its stop-and-go nature, we actually might succeed. Especially since there was no way the target was going to be breaking any traffic laws with a body in the back.
For once, I hoped I’d eat my words about how stupid the idea had been.
23
Retro tossed me a small duffel when I reached the bottom of the stairs, saying, “Usual kit. I didn’t put in anything unique, so speak up if you think we want something.”
I unzipped it while we moved through the apartment, seeing a Glock 30 and an H&K UMP, both suppressed and both chambered for the .45, along with night-observation goggles and other pieces of kit.
I said, “Grab the spare Wasp,” then pulled out an innocuous Bluetooth earpiece and put it in, saying, “Commo check. Knuckles, you got me?”
“Yeah. Loud and clear.”
We hit the parking lot, and I slapped the spare Wasp’s pinecone onto our own car, asking, “Got the track?”
Jennifer came on this time. “Yeah. Got your track. Vehicle’s on Sukhumvit, about out of range. Knuckles is lining up for a dive-bomb now.”
I tossed the keys to Blood, getting into the passenger seat. “Tell him if he screws this up, he’ll spend the next ten years staring at a screen instead of going on hits.”
We maneuvered down the alleys until we reached the intersection with Sukhumvit, waiting to be told which way to go. After a full minute, I began to fear the dive-bomb mission had failed. It shouldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds.
“Koko, what’s the story?”
Jennifer, hating her call sign as much as Brett despised his, came back a little short. “Stand by. I’ll alert when we’re in motion.”
I grinned and muted the connection, saying, “She sounds a little pissed.”
Decoy said, “I sort of like that call sign. I could have called her Curious George.”
Decoy had knighted Jennifer with the call sign “Koko” on our last mission together, after the gorilla that used sign language, and she’d tried mightily ever since to get us to forget it. It worked a little bit. We only used it on the radio. I’d learned early that she wouldn’t respond to it in person, but in the middle of the mission she had no choice.
Brett said, “I’ll trade with her. Blood is ridiculous.”
We all started to chuckle, and I was glad to see everyone relaxed and calm. It meant we were clicking, something we would need in the coming moments. Decisions would be made in the blink of an eye, and undue stress tends to short-circuit logical thought, causing catastrophic mistakes.
Retro, in the back working a tablet, said, “Got the beacon, but it isn’t moving.”
Which could have meant one of two things: The dive-bomb had missed and the beacon was sitting in the middle of Sukhumvit Road, or the car was stopped in traffic. At least it would tell me left or right.
“Which way?”
“North. They went north on Sukhumvit.”
Blood pulled into the traffic, and we slowly marched forward.
Jennifer came on. “Pinecone is in place. Knuckles is still overhead with the Wasp, and it looks like a clean hit, dead center of the roof.”
All right.
“Good work. Keep the Wasp up as long as possible. Any word on Kurt?”
“They’re tracking him down. I’ll let you know as soon as I make contact.”
I wondered if that was true. Would she call me if Kurt told us to stand down or let it go to rescue whoever was in the rug?
Retro said, “About a half mile in front of us, moving now.”
Which might as well have been on the other side of the world given the traffic. Eventually, we left Sukhumvit and entered the expressway, still heading north. We lost the Wasp and were on our own. The traffic opened up, and we closed the distance.
“What’s ahead of us, Retro? Where’s he going?”
“The only thing big is Don Muang, right off of 31.”
“How far?”
“About ten klicks.”
If they were headed to Don Muang Airport, we’d need to stop them before they got there. Once they were inside, there’d be way too much security to attempt any sort of a takedown. But a vehicle interdiction on the freeway was a nonstarter. No way could we do that clean.
Why would they be going to the airport? They certainly can’t put the rug through an X-ray machine. Unless they’ve already made arrangements.
“They’re off 31,” Retro said. “Now headed west on 304.”
“Distance?”
“Exit two klicks up.”
Soon enough we were behind them again, now running into traffic, but not as much as on Sukhumvit.
“What’s ahead of us here?”
“The only thing out west is the Chao Phraya River, about eight klicks away.”
We kept going, keeping about one kilometer back, me wondering if we were going to follow them to Burma. The beacon had just crossed the river, with us just behind, whe
n Retro said, “Exit, exit, exit. One klick ahead.”
Endgame.
“Okay, listen up. I think they’re going to another safe house. Someplace out of the city. We’ll let them settle, then pick up surveillance again. We see any indication that they’re going to smoke the guy in the rug, we intervene. Otherwise, we jump-TOC to here.”
I got the okay from my group of shooters and said, “Koko, Knuckles, you copy? Go ahead and break down the TOC. You know the beacon track. Do some research on the area, see where we can stage out here. Hotels, apartments, the usual.”
I got a roger and settled back to wait. Eventually, we were off the 304 and onto surface streets. After traveling a few more kilometers, we entered dirt roads, with little traffic, and still the target continued, now headed back east. The buildings faded away until there were only sporadic houses, then expanses of woodland.
Where the hell is he going? Farther east and he’s going to run into the river.
Which is exactly what he did.
Retro said, “Vehicle stopped. Right on the Chao Phraya.”
“Next to a house?”
“Not that I can tell from this map. Looks like the road just dead-ends into the river. He’s about five hundred meters up.”
“Blood, find a side road and pull over. Decoy, break out the Wasp.”
Within five minutes we had the UAV constructed and launched. It homed in on the target beacon and began circling, all of us crowded around the screen as Decoy maneuvered its flight.
Retro was right. There wasn’t a house around, but there was a dock, with three long-tailed Thai boats tied to it. Really nothing more than large canoes. We could see the two men struggling with the rug between them, loading it into the farthest boat, precariously wavering as they crossed from one boat to the other.
They then began going back and forth, loading the same square shapes I had seen earlier. Blocks of some type. Maybe radios or boxes of equipment.
Blood said, “What the hell are those things? Looks like cinder blocks for a building.”