Deep Black

by Sean McFate

“He will go along,” she whispered firmly, biting off the words, and I believed her.

  “Will his friends?”

  “They will do it for me,” she said, and I realized who had been keeping them alive in this hellhole the last six months, while Farhan was in his father’s prison.

  “If they go north and are captured, will Farhan’s father have them killed?”

  She thought for a moment. “They can’t be captured,” she said.

  I nodded and slipped away. Moments later, I found Wildman and Boon.

  “Here’s the plan,” I said, unfolding the map. It took a few minutes to explain.

  “Fook no,” Wildman said immediately.

  “That’s insane,” Boon said.

  “Which is why it might work, right?”

  Boon shrugged. He was looking at Marhaz, probably thinking about the baby. My plan was the only way. He hated it, but I knew he was going along.

  I looked at Wildman. “You can walk away if you don’t like it,” I said. “They need your type here.”

  “I’m not bloody walking,” he snapped back. “Not if that means staying in this desert. And besides, what would you knobs do without me?”

  “What about the Kurds?” Boon asked me.

  “What about them?”

  “We can’t expect them to follow us, not on this.” He was right. I’d fallen into the typical American trap of thinking our allies, in this case the Kurds we’d been partnered with for the last few months, should just do what we said, even if it wasn’t in their best interest.

  “I’ll talk to them,” I told Boon. “Wildman, you set the demolitions.”

  Wildman smiled, his missing teeth cracking his black bear beard in the dim light of the warehouse. I looked down and saw his little friend staring at us, the one who had led us to the first meeting place yesterday morning.

  “Take the kid,” I said. “He knows this town.”

  Wildman didn’t argue, just cuffed the kid and pointed toward the canteens. Apparently, my gruff explosives expert had made a friend. First time for everything.

  One last task. The moment of no return.

  I woke Farhan roughly, laughing as he sprang into a defensive position, his AK-47 in firing position. He must have been exhausted to fall asleep that deeply. He’d been on the road from Istanbul for three days.

  “I need your phone,” I said.

  “What phone?”

  I had frisked everyone for phones so that nobody could track us. It was a rookie move to carry a mobile phone on the run. If it was turned on, even for a second, it could give us away. But I suspected Farhan hadn’t complied with my orders. So-called leaders never did.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me, as he pulled a phone from his robes. “It’s not mine. And it’s untraceable. Yes, I’m sure. I’m no fool.”

  It was a satellite phone, but unlike any I’d seen before. Custom-made. I extended the small boom antenna and dialed a number. “Hey. It’s me . . . I need a favor. I’m gonna be coming in hot.” I looked at my watch. “ISIS. Maybe others . . . After midnight . . . Yes . . . Of course . . . Roger . . . wilco, out.”

  Farhan reached for his phone. “I’m keeping it. And I need something else from you, too.”

  “The key?”

  I nodded. He understood my price. “The key.”

  He hesitated but Marhaz appeared behind him. She must have been listening. She guided her hand slowly over his. “We have to trust him, habibi.”

  He looked at her. Was that what love looked like?

  He handed over the nuclear key.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here, or you’ll die trying.”

  He grunted. I don’t think he heard the joke.

  “What would he have done, had he not met you?” I asked Marhaz, after we’d both watched the prince walk away.

  She was silent, but only for a moment. “Gone home and rule his little kingdom in Saudi Arabia,” she said.

  Chapter 35

  The Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter settled in to cruise five hundred feet above the waves.

  “Knight Rider Six Five, this is Icepack. Say ‘Status,’ over?” Icepack was the call sign for the air surveillance controllers in the Combat Information Center aboard the USS Lexington, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser and the helo’s mothership.

  “Long run complete, Icepack,” the pilot replied into his headset. “Ten miles due south of Masirah, point five, inbound mother, overhead plus forty-five, two-plus zero-zero. Five souls.”

  The Knight Rider had just picked up the ship’s new chaplain in Fujairah, a major airhead and refueling port in the United Arab Emirates. Its strategic location outside the Straits of Hormuz allowed U.S. ships in the area a chance to top off before heading into or out of the Arabian Gulf. But Fujairah was no shore station; coming that close to land was too dangerous, as the USS Cole learned in Yemen in 2000, when terrorists blew a hole in the destroyer’s hull while it was at pier. Now the U.S. Navy refueled at sea. Underway replenishment, or UNREP, is a ballet of tankers and supply ships refilling warships on the high seas. Fujairah was a primary stage.

  “Is that Masirah Island?” the chaplain asked through the headset, the rising sun lighting up its beaches. They had just flown over Oman, and this island was the last dry land between them and their ship. The chaplain had the enthusiasm of a tourist.

  “Affirmative,” the crew chief said. “Our last bailout point.”

  “Say again, fuel state?” Icepack said.

  “Two-plus zero-zero. Full bag.” Standard aviator lingo for “two hours.”

  Radio silence. The pilot sensed a change of mission coming.

  “Thank you, Mr. . . . ah, Mr. . . .” said the chaplain, as he fumbled with his headset. He was fresh from the States, fresh from seminary, fresh to the navy.

  “Dice,” the pilot said.

  “Dice?”

  “Call me Dice. Call sign ‘Dice.’”

  “Okay, Mr. Dice.”

  “Just Dice.”

  “Okay . . . Dice. I wanted to thank you for . . .”

  “Not now, zip lip. Standing by for tasking from Icepack.”

  “Oh, right. I understand.” He clearly didn’t.

  “Chief,” Dice said to the crew chief. “Please explain things to the Chaps.”

  “Father,” the crew chief said. “Shut up.”

  “Knight Rider, this is Icepack. FRAGO to VID. Small group-three freighter with an aft pilothouse. Sending coordinates.”

  “Copy, Icepack,” Dice replied, and changed course.

  “What is it?” the chaplain asked, unable to stop himself.

  “FRAGO.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fragmentary order. A new mission.”

  “So we’re not going to the Lexington?”

  “Not yet. They want us to check out a freighter first.”

  “Is that safe?”

  Dice turned off the chaplain’s headset. Fuckin’ newbies, he thought. He had a freighter to find before he could go home, and the chaplain’s prattle was giving him a headache.

  Open ocean and gray haze. For forty minutes, that was all they saw, which pretty much sums up every day when flying Navy Air.

  “Dice, I think we got something,” the copilot said. A blip showed on the fringe of their radar screen.

  “That must be it. Let’s go.”

  Fifteen minutes later they could see the freighter. Dice switched to maritime channel 19, the universal channel for bridge-to-bridge communication.

  “Cargo ship in vicinity Socotra Island,” he called down to the ship, “this is U.S. Navy helicopter Six Five, half a mile off your port beam. Request description of your cargo manifest and destination port.”

  Silence.

  The helo closed to about four hundred yards from the freighter’s bridge so they would know they were the one being hailed. Dice repeated the call.

  “Captain, captain!” the radio op
erator called, stumbling to the bridge. “A U.S. Navy helicopter is hailing us. They’re off our port bow.”

  Captain Goncalves grabbed binoculars and peered out the left windows. In the distance he could see the chopper, gray on gray.

  Not good, he thought.

  “Cargo ship in vicinity Socotra Island,” the chopper pilot repeated.

  “Captain, what do you want to do?”

  Goncalves just stared through the binoculars.

  “Captain.” It was the first mate this time, just arriving at the bridge. “If we don’t answer, they’ll come back with two choppers of marines.”

  Goncalves turned suddenly, seized the helmsman by the collar and dragged him to the bridge radio. “You’re Filipino, yes?”

  “Y-y-yes, captain,” the man answered nervously.

  “Then answer in Filipino.”

  “In Tagalog?”

  Goncalves grabbed a three-ring binder from the navigator’s desk and beat the man.

  “Stop! Please, stop!” the man pleaded.

  “Did I not just give you an order?!”

  The man whimpered to the radio.

  “Speak, damn it,” the captain said.

  “What should I say?”

  The captain hit him across the face with the binder. The man started speaking ragged Tagalog.

  “I am bihag sa barko ito. Tulungan mo ako!”

  “What the hell is that?” the copilot asked.

  “I am bihag sa barko ito. Tulungan mo ako!”

  “It’s a foreign language,” Dice said. “Sounds like Spanish.”

  “Amateurs.”

  “Or smugglers. Let’s take a closer look,” Dice said, as he nosed the Seahawk toward the ship.

  “They’re coming toward us!” the helmsman shouted.

  “What the fuck did you tell them?” Goncalves demanded.

  “N-n-nothing! I swear it!” said the Filipino, but it didn’t save him from the binder.

  “Get some hands on deck! Look busy,” the captain said. “Do . . . routine things.”

  Dice maneuvered carefully around the freighter, hovering fifty feet above sea level.

  “Icepack, this is Knight Rider. I’ve located the cargo ship. Name is the Eleutheria, Malaysian flag. They are not answering in English.”

  “Roger, Knight Rider. What do you see?”

  “Wait one.”

  This was Dice’s third tour in the Gulf, and he’d seen more than his share of smugglers. Once, he’d seen a tugboat dragging a submersed shipping container of cigarettes. He circled the freighter, looking at the machinery, tackle, other things that a normal cargo ship would use. They looked like they had been recently operated. Of course, the ship was in such disrepair that it was hard to tell. Men on the bridge were waving.

  “Knight Rider, we ran it. It’s already been bagged and tagged. Not our target. Return to Mother.”

  “Roger, Icepack. Returning to ship.”

  “They’re flying away,” the first mate said, waving at the helicopter.

  Assholes, Goncalves thought, also waving.

  “That’s the last we’ll see of them,” the mate said.

  “No. There will be more.”

  Chapter 36

  Brad Winters stared at himself in a garish gilt mirror that took up half the wall as he waited in the antechamber for Abdulaziz to allow him admittance. His hair was cut short but impeccably groomed, with a sharp part and an old-fashioned rise in the front, like a small wave curling toward a beach. A Princeton, they used to call this haircut, on the old illustrated 1950s haircut charts.

  White boy cut, his barber had called it with a laugh, back in the inner-city Baltimore neighborhood where Winters grew up. The man was used to African-American hair; he could never get the Princeton right.

  Winters had it just right now, though, even if it had been five days since his last trim. He had gone gray over the last few years, but he was lucky: the hair was stone white and distinguished, with just a bit of color at the temples. He made his face as blank as possible and stared into his own eyes, but he couldn’t find anything hidden there. Good. If he couldn’t find his true self in his face, then neither could anyone else.

  Clooney-esque, he thought, tipping his chin a quarter inch to the right and allowing himself a mirthless smile.

  “Mr. Winters,” the prince’s male secretary said, opening the door.

  He went inside, the computer tucked under his arm. He had brought the largest flat-screen he could find, for effect.

  “What do you have for me now, Mr. Winters?” Abdulaziz sighed. Winters could see the strain under his eyes. The man hadn’t been sleeping. Just wait, my prince. It gets worse.

  “I’ll let the video do the talking,” he said, even though the video had been recorded, possibly accidentally, without sound.

  He set up the computer and found the bookmarked site, while the prince sighed impatiently. He was in his late sixties and pampered; he had no use for computers. But his eyes widened when he saw the majordomo in the alley with his phone in his hand, and the gaunt figure stepping into the frame behind him. He didn’t flinch when the man cut his majordomo’s fingers off with a ludicrous sword, nor did he flinch when his head came off with one blow. He had seen these kinds of things before. He lived by them. But Winters knew the death had unnerved him.

  “Where did you get this?” Abdulaziz demanded.

  “We monitor the fanatic websites. It’s a valuable part of our job. The video appeared this afternoon, shortly after the noon prayers.”

  “Is it real?”

  Winters nodded. “Yes. And there are seven others with earlier time stamps, all the same assailant, all beheadings.”

  The prince stared at the screen, although the image had gone black. He wasn’t thinking about the majordomo. He was thinking about his son, out there somewhere, with this fanatic nearby.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know his true name, but he has a nickname by which he is known.”

  The prince looked up as Winters paused for effect. “Yes?” he said.

  “The Wahhabi,” Winters said solemnly, knowing the name would hit Abdulaziz hard. The man was a Saudi. The man was a Sunni religious fanatic. The man would lead the prince’s mind exactly where Winters wanted it to go: to a palace conspiracy, to the rival faction, to Prince Khalid.

  “Anything else?” the prince asked, pointedly looking away. Winters could almost feel his mind churning. Abdulaziz was paranoid, unstable, and surrounded by enemies. He was not a man to be pushed too far.

  “Not right now, my prince.”

  “Then please go. And take this blasted machine.”

  One less loose end, Winters thought with a small smile, as he tucked the blasted machine under this arm. One more push.

  That push was happening forty kilometers away, in al Ha’ir prison. Even as Brad Winters was slipping into the backseat of his chauffeured car, contemplating how to find Prince Farhan, or at least how to keep him from escaping Sinjar, Mishaal was on his knees, begging his faceless attendant for his cure.

  “I am nothing,” the prince was saying. “I am unclean. I am”—anything you want me to be, if it means one more shot—“yours.”

  “Now you see the truth,” the attendant said, as he pulled the hypodermic needle from his robes, and plunged it into the base of Mishaal’s skull.

  The prince felt the relief sweeping over him, like desert rain, like the Nile flooding its banks in the spring and covering the dry fields with the basic nutrients of life, the dead plants, the rotten timbers, the broken-down shit. He felt his cells open to receive, crying out, and then collapse on themselves. He found himself crying, his face to his prayer rug, his lips intoning silently the glory of the father.

  Six minutes later, he was dead.

  Chapter 37

  We sat quietly in the Humvees, waiting for 0445. Boon was in the lead vehicle with Wildman manning the turret. I was in the commander’s seat of the trail vehicle, with our Kurdish driver a
nd turret gunner. Marhaz sat behind me and Farhan across from her. He looked like the ISIS killer he was trained to be, yet his eyes doted on Marhaz. It was a Romeo and Juliet action story.

  The younger Kurd fighters had voted to come with us, a sign of respect. Warriors don’t let brothers down, even if it started as a brotherhood of convenience. The older Kurd stayed with the refugees, hoping to guide them to freedom. It was my decision to mix the team between the two vehicles. It was going to get violent out there, and this was our best operational arrangement.

  “One minute,” I said over the headset.

  It was almost five, just before morning prayers and at the beginning of dawn twilight. This sliver of time afforded us sufficient darkness for stealth, yet enough light should a firefight erupt.

  Farhan was whispering to Marhaz in Arabic, stroking her belly with one hand and holding a Kalashnikov in the other. But Marhaz didn’t need reassurance. She knew she might die in the next fifteen minutes, but she’d lived that way for months. It would have been hell for an unmarried pregnant woman in ISIS territory. A true living hell. If she’d been stopped and questioned, she would have been shot, defenestrated, or stoned to death. I don’t know where she’d been hiding, but she was tough.She and her prince made a good match.

  “Thirty seconds,” I said.

  We donned our night-vision goggles, switched on the infrared headlights, and powered up the engines. Two Yazidi children swung open the garage doors. We would go first, sprinting south toward the desert, attracting ISIS’s attention. A few minutes later, the refugees would sneak out heading north, past the mountain and, eventually, hopefully, to Turkey.

  The last thirty seconds seemed the longest. My mind wandered to the middle movement of Bruckner’s ninth symphony. The orchestra creeps along, ready to pounce. Waiting. Waiting. We would have to be Bruckner’s symphony, quietly holding back then exploding in a fortissimo of firepower. No wrong notes. Not this time.

  “Go!” I said.

  “Allahu akbar!” Wildman screamed. “Yahweh, Jesus, and Mary!”

  We rocketed out of the garage like the Bruckner symphony, the Hummers’ turbo diesels screaming. It was six blocks to the main road, another three blocks to the Mosul road, and then into the Jazira.