Deep Black

by Sean McFate

  Farhan handed him half the money. He could hear the drone of the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, starting in the distance. It was joined by a second call from farther away, and finally a mellifluous chanting from the Blue Mosque. Reflexively, Farhan faced Mecca and almost got down on his hands and knees to pray. He had an urge to do it, but now was not the time. He had broken his father’s trust; he had forsaken his birthright. If he left now, he would be dead to his family. He could never return, not even for his mother’s funeral. But he had a more important calling.

  “Drive for ten minutes,” Farhan said, as he climbed into the passenger’s seat. “Get as far away from here as you can. Then I will tell you where to go.”

  The man nodded. “I am not a criminal,” he said, echoing Farhan’s earlier words.

  “I know.”

  “I am a Muslim. We are duty-bound to help those in need.”

  “I know,” Farhan said, as the man shoved the money into his robe. “So am I.”

  In the port city of Gwadar, Pakistan, a rusty scupper sat unmoored and waiting. The captain, a Methuselah of a man, tossed his cigarette into the water as his satellite phone rang. He looked at his watch. Exactly on time. He answered, but said nothing. The deal was on. He hung up and nodded to the first mate, a man he’d known since they were both children on the docks of their small hometown in the Azores Islands, a thousand miles in the sea. The mate nodded back. The stack billowed smoke and, quietly and efficiently, they headed out to sea.

  Chapter 1

  August 18, 2014

  We’d been operating deep in ISIS territory north of Mosul, Iraq, for two weeks, living off the kindness of the locals we saved and the fanatics we pillaged, when the call came in from Nassib, our friend in Mosul. Search and rescue, a young girl in peril, thirty minutes to plan an operation. My kind of job.

  I was a former U.S. Army paratrooper in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, recruited to the “dark side” by Apollo Outcomes, a high-end private military company. Their recruiting pool was the world’s most elite military units: U.S. Navy SEALs, Army Delta and Rangers, British SAS, German GSG 9, French GIGN, Australian SASR, Israeli Shayetet 13, Central American anti-Communist hunter-killer patrols, and Southeast Asian commandos. Apollo did the jobs that were too dangerous for the CIA and too politically sensitive for the Pentagon. When you wanted plausible deniability, you called Apollo Outcomes. To be honest, I liked Apollo because rules didn’t apply; the only thing that mattered was mission success. And I was always successful.

  That was before Ukraine. Three months earlier my boss and mentor, Brad Winters, sent me there to defeat Russia’s shadow war in that country, a CIA black-ops contract. It turned out I wasn’t working for the CIA; Winters had gone into business for himself and sold out my team to the Russians. Only three of us survived—Boon, Wildman, and me. I had to mercy-kill my best friend, Miles, with my bare hands in a shitty Eastern Ukrainian forest to save him from the pain of bleeding out. I’ve killed a hundred men in my time, and a few women, too. All for a good cause, of course. I still feel the silence in my bones, the moment when Miles stopped breathing.

  Now we were on the run, working as slum mercs in Kurdistan fighting ISIS. It was a big fall from being in the world’s most elite and secretive military unit. I figured Winters thought I was dead, or dead enough to not come after me, as long as we kept off the grid. That is, until I was ready to go after Winters.

  Until then, I was biding my time, playing Robin Hood to reclaim my soul. There was no money in it, but I didn’t care. I was past that. We infiltrated ISIS’s Caliphate to rescue the innocent from the terrorist group’s ghoulish version of Islam. Even al Qaeda found ISIS’s brutality extreme.

  “This is the spot,” I said, signaling to stop.

  We were on the ridgeline above the main highway in two up-armored Humvees, each with a fifty-caliber machine gun on the turret. This was twenty kilometers, or “klicks,” outside Mosul, ISIS’s capital in Iraq, and the country was mountainous, full of steep rock gullies and evergreen trees. A few weeks earlier, ISIS had blitzkrieged through here in pickup trucks, sending the much superior Iraqi army fleeing for the hills, throwing down their weapons and ripping off their uniforms in the process. That’s what you get for a few billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money.

  I stepped out of the Humvee. Perfect vantage point above a perfect ambush point. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to feel alive.

  “Anything?” I asked Boonchu “Boon” Tripnet, who was already on his knee with the binoculars to his eyes. Boon was Thai, and we joked he was our Buddhist mercenary. Short with ropy muscles, he was born poor among the poppy fields and heroin smugglers, who terrorized villagers and kidnapped their girls, selling them to Bangkok brothels. After his brother, a Buddhist monk, was gunned down, he walked out of the mountains and joined Thai Special Forces. It was a three-week walk. He was fourteen.

  “Nothing,” Boon replied calmly. He was always calm.

  I turned to Wildman, our ex-SAS commando, who was sitting in the gun turret. Wildman was huge, with a shaved head, a thick neck, and two teeth short of a smile. He was whittling a block of C-4 with a bowie knife. It looked like a hunchback squirrel. He held it up for me to see with a grin.

  “Not bad, eh?” he said in a Welsh-infused British accent. “Not Ogun,” he said, giving me shit, like he always did, “but not bad.”

  Ogun was an African god of iron and war. He was sort of my spirit guide, the orisha who had looked out for me when I was a newbie in the jungle. He once came to me in a dream, after I built a small army in Liberia, a huge black man with scars on his face, wearing blue coveralls. He thanked me as we sat on an I-beam at a construction site, having a beer. I honored Ogun with a carving of him on my bar back in Washington, DC. Whenever I was home, I gave him a traditional gift: a shot of gin, a bottle of palm wine, chalk dust, and African money. I would never see Ogun or that apartment again. Not after what happened in Ukraine.

  “It sucks,” I said, eyeing the hideous creature. “The sooner you blow it up the better.”

  “You should talk,” Wildman said, glancing at my black robes. It looked like I’d gone native. Looks can be deceiving.

  “Johnny Jihad,” Boon said. “One klick out.”

  I felt the excitement jumping under my skin. Combat is like heroin. Even after it’s worn you out and thrown you away, you need more.

  “Single vehicle,” Boon said. “A bus.”

  Good, they were alone. Just like Nassib promised.

  “Lock and load,” I told what was left of my team. I didn’t even need to say that much. We’d done this countless times. The men knew what to do. Wildman grabbed his SA-80 assault rifle and smiled wide enough for me to see his missing teeth. Boon scrambled up a rocky overhang with his Dragunov sniper rifle. The Kurds we’d hired manned the turrets, as I scrambled down the steep hillside onto the road.

  The white bus appeared at the bend, grinding up the hill. The windows were curtained. My SCAR assault rifle was concealed beneath my black Bedouin robe, as were my twin Berettas on thigh holsters. My face was totally concealed behind a black turban and sunglasses, the standard ISIS uniform. It wouldn’t fool them for long, but it didn’t have to. It only had to fool them long enough for the driver to slow when he saw us. He did.

  Wait for it, Locke, I thought, as the bus coasted to a stop. Wait for it.

  A man appeared in the windshield. He was armed and bearded. The driver pointed at me. They were twenty meters away.

  I walked toward the bus, my hands raised in supplication. The brakes began to squeal. At ten meters, Boon fired—I saw the crack of the windshield before I heard the shot—killing the driver. The militant beside him froze in horror as Wildman took him out, three-round bursts through the windshield.

  Within seconds, I had smashed through the bus door and was up the steps, a Beretta pistol in each hand, ready for close-quarter combat. There was a militant a few rows back, fumbling to aim his Kalashnikov in the tight space. Som
eone hit his arm. Bullets sprayed the ceiling, hitting Allah in the ass. A woman screamed, and I put a bullet in the militant’s forehead.

  A man lunged from my peripheral vision. I pivoted to aim but he plowed me off my feet, sending both pistols flying as I hit the floor. I hit hard, my assailant falling on top of me. He bit my face. I head-butted him. My right hand pulled my double-edged Gerber blade and sunk it into his side, twice in rapid succession. He rolled backward; I leapt to my feet. Berserking, he charged with his Kalashnikov. I wrenched it from his hands, flipped it, and pounded him in the face with the stock.

  I looked around, as warm blood trickled into my mouth—mine or his, I wasn’t sure. The bus was twenty rows long, and every row was filled with girls and women in veils. At the back was one last ISIS militant. He was holding a girl as a human shield, a knife at her throat. She was eleven or twelve. He couldn’t have been much older.

  He watched. I watched. His hands were steady, but his eyes flashed from one person to another, a sign of weakness. What did his god want him to do? Slowly he lowered the knife, his hand shaking.

  A woman jumped him. First one, tearing at his face. Then two, three, and the kid went down shrieking, crying for mercy until his screams were muffled.

  I collected my weapons. “Du’a,” I yelled, holstering my Berettas. “Du’a Aswad.”

  A woman stood up. She was middle-aged. Blood covered the left side of her face, where she had fought the militant. She spoke English.

  “What do you want with her?” she asked.

  “Her uncle has paid for her rescue.”

  “Take us all,” the bloody woman said.

  “We only have two vehicles. We don’t have room. You can take this bus.”

  “None of us know how to drive.”

  Women in this part of the world were denied the opportunity to drive, seek an education, have a profession. . . .

  A preteen girl spoke, barely audible. The older woman translated. “She says she won’t leave us to be sabaya.”

  “What’s sabaya?”

  “Sex slaves,” the woman said without flinching. “We are Christian and Yazidi prisoners. We are to be sold to ISIS fighters. They say it is ibadah, religious worship, to rape unbelievers.”

  I could feel anger, uncontrollable anger. There was a time when I would have felt nothing. It was good to feel again.

  “New plan,” I said over my headset. “Wildman, you and Boon take the Humvees. I’ll drive the bus and meet you in Kalak.” The bus would draw less attention without a Humvee escort.

  “Rock and roll,” Wildman replied. Nothing fazed him. If I’d said we were loading the bus with explosives and driving it into Tehran, he’d have reacted the same way.

  I pulled the driver’s body out and slid behind the steering wheel, adjusting my head scarf to conceal my face. I had a month’s worth of growth, but my thin beard was nothing compared with the facial output of these religious professionals.

  “Curtains closed,” I yelled, knowing the woman would translate. “When the shooting starts, get down.”

  It was twelve kilometers to the bridge over the Great Zab River, the border between the ISIS Caliphate and the free “country” of Kurdistan.

  “They know this bus,” the bloody woman said, as we were waved through an ISIS checkpoint. “We are the sabaya bus on its weekly delivery of sex slaves.”

  We crested the last hill. Below us lay the dusty border town of Kalak, straddling the Great Zab River. It was smoldering, as if a battle were just fought. The road ahead led to a blown river bridge. Trucks and a 155-millimeter cannon sat mangled in its steel carcass.

  “There’s another bridge, to the north,” the woman said. “I will guide you. I know this town.”

  Women shouted “left” and “right” in Arabic as we navigated the street maze. We emerged on a road that led to another bridge over the Zab River, its entrance heavily guarded. I floored the accelerator.

  “Everyone down!” I shouted. Ahead, I counted two ISIS Humvees and half a dozen militants. Two men grabbed their guns and walked into the road, holding up their hands for me to stop.

  I pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The bus was sluggish, but once it was at top speed it would be hard to stop—unless they were smart enough to aim for the driver.

  Protect me, Ogun, I thought, as the men leveled their AK-47s.

  The moment slowed, as it always does right before the shit hits the fan, and then it exploded. The road opened up in a tower of dirt, and two bodies blew toward me as an RPG hit behind them, blowing the turret off the left Humvee. Wildman. Just in time. Fifty-caliber machine-gun fire tore through the militants, keeping their heads down as we crashed through their checkpoint and onto the two-lane bridge.

  Bullets ripped into the bus. I could hear the plink-plink of bullets on metal, the crash of windows cracking, screaming. Tracers streamed across the bridge, going both directions. I rammed a small car, sending it over the bridge.

  Ahead of me at the far end of the bridge our two up-armored Humvees sat idling, their turrets working the ISIS outpost. The Hummers were covered with metal armor salvaged from scrap and welded on one piece at a time over the last two months. They looked more like science fiction than tanks. Wildman called them “hajified.” His was the one with the homemade Jolly Roger flying from its whip antenna: a crude white skull on a tattered, bloodstained black cloth. He’d ripped the head scarf from the head of a still-breathing ISIS militant and drawn the skull himself.

  “Fuck yeah!” he yelled into the wind, as we passed.

  And then Boon fired the second RPG, and the last ISIS militants disappeared in a cloud of red mist.

  Chapter 2

  It was dark by the time we entered Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, a country in name only. Erbil was like El Paso, Texas, circa 1880: a dusty and lawless frontier town, and the last stop before pandemonium. In the mid-2000s, the newly liberated Kurds of north Iraq had poured money into building projects, thinking that thanks to the U.S. occupation, their capital city would float on oil revenue forever. But most of the money flowed out with the oil, the world economy collapsed, then ISIS invaded Iraq. Now Erbil was a half-built ghost town.

  Our Kurdish partners took their Humvee and went home, while we drove to the Christian district where we’d been flopping for the last two months. We approached the World Trade Center Apartments, the inappropriately named megacomplex. It was a hulking monolith, half completed and a tenth occupied, the owner having abandoned construction long before the ISIS advance.

  We slowed half a block away and Wildman jumped out, as always falling instinctively into a security mind-set. I nodded to Boon, who put his hand on his sidearm as we approached the arched doorway to the parking area. We backed into our garage and chained the barnlike steel doors. It would take a block of C-4 to break it.

  Good thing, too, since the back half of our garage was full of rugs, silk floor cushions, jewelry, wedding garb, silverware, brass candlesticks, and all the other worthless shit we’d been “paid” over the last three months to rescue innocent refugees trapped behind ISIS lines.

  We were lousy mercenaries. But we were damn fine humanitarians, for whatever that was worth.

  “Eyes front,” Boon said, as we entered the courtyard.

  It was dark, but at the far end I could see a man sitting casually on a folding chair with his legs crossed in the dim light falling from an upper-story window. He was wearing a white linen suit, neatly pressed, and smoking a cigarette. He looked like a banana plantation owner from the 1920s, except for the red-and-white-checkered keffiyah on his head. He wasn’t trying to hide. In fact, he was sitting in the most conspicuous spot. He wanted to be seen.

  “Good evening, Dr. Locke,” he said, as we approached. Years ago I finished my doctorate at the London School of Economics, a fact few knew. I approached with caution.

  “Who are you?”

  “I have a proposition.” His English was ridiculously precise.

  “From the Saud
is?” The Saudi upper class always wore the keffiyah.

  “No.” He dropped his cigarette and smothered it with an Italian loafer. “Not quite.”

  I could see a bulge on the left side of his suit, easily accessible to a right-handed man. He was no fool, but also no assassin.

  “Inside,” I said.

  Boon prepared the chai, a sweet concoction of mint and black tea. I would have preferred the bottle of Woodford Reserve I kept stashed in my go bag, but I needed to stay frosty for this conversation. I offered him a seat by the window and sat cross-legged on a Bedouin pillow we’d been given for saving a six-year-old boy.

  “I hear you’re good at finding people in ISIS territory,” the man said. “And you’re even better at getting them out.”

  We sipped our tea. Silence was the best policy in these situations. It never gave anything away.

  “I work for a Saudi prince, a man whose name is unimportant, but you can assume the man himself is not.” Obviously. “Yesterday, his son disappeared in Istanbul. We have reason to believe he may now be in Iraq.”

  “Why?”

  “He has contacts here.”

  I sipped my tea. “What kind of contacts?”

  The Saudi sipped his tea. “That is something his father would like to know.”

  Fanatics, in other words. It wasn’t unheard of for wealthy Saudis to support or even join ISIS. In fact, it was common. Religious Saudis, including members of the royal family, were the primary financiers of Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS. But even the most Wahhabi of princes preferred their sons to stay clear of the battlefield. Osama bin Laden’s flamboyant fanaticism had almost brought down his billionaire wing of the royal family, after all, and martyrdom was for the poor.