Scorched Earth

by George Galdorisi

  “When is the first of those six flights landing in Mosul?” Williams asked.

  “In about three hours,” Bleich added. “We’ve spoken with Mr. Dawson and our team will be there, suited up and ready.”

  “Good work. Keep the press on. I’ll be in my office. Ms. Sullivan and Mr. Sutherland back from Memphis yet?”

  “Yes sir, they got in a few hours ago. Ms. Sullivan’s standing by for your morning meeting.”

  * * *

  Twenty-five miles north-northeast of Op-Center’s headquarters, in Hyattsville, Maryland, the last of the FBI CIRG command vehicles was pulling out of the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church. The HRT teams all left in a somber mood, disappointed they weren’t able to catch the kidnappers and rescue the hostage even after they had them nearly in their grasp.

  Before they departed, the FBI director went to their site and had told them they had done everything they could to rescue Admiral Bruner. They had not failed, he emphasized, and now they just had to leave it to others to rescue the admiral. He told them if anyone could intercept Bruner before he fell into ISIL hands, it was Op-Center. Sincere and on-point as his pep talk was, it did little to brighten their mood. They were professionals—this is what they did—but they had failed.

  * * *

  The two hundred fifty-mile journey over some of the roughest terrain in Iraq had been bone jarring, but Dawson, Rodriquez, and their JSOC team had arrived at the Mosul airport in good time. Once there, the senior FedEx man on the ground briefed them on the agreement his CEO had made with Op-Center. Within an hour, four members of Volner’s team, led by Master Guns Moore, were attired as FedEx workers and were lounging in the warehouse at Mosul airport waiting for the first of six FedEx flights to arrive. Volner and the rest of his team, along with Dawson and Rodriquez, had taken up concealed overwatch positions on a small bluff on the airport perimeter.

  Situated in a small tent with the uniformed members of the JSOC team, JSOC civilian Laurie Phillips set up her gear. She would provide the direct conduit back to Op-Center headquarters and to the Geek Tank. One of the first things Volner had done when Laurie had arrived at Fort Bragg was to take her to Op-Center to meet all the players—and especially Aaron Bleich and his Geek Tank team. She had hit it off with Bleich, and it was clear that his team would always pull out all the stops to provide Laurie and “her” JSOC squad with all the real-time info they could.

  “You good to go, Laurie?” Volner asked as he ducked into her tent. The tent was attended by a small generator and a heavily filtered air-conditioning system to try to protect Laurie’s gear from the constantly blowing sand.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve got the UHF satellite feed up and running and had a good comms check with the Op-Center watch floor, as well as the Geek Tank. Just so you know, they pulled an all-nighter there to get us what we need—”

  “They’re good people.”

  “That’s for sure. And thanks for going with my suggestion to use the CENTCOM Global Hawk to provide eyes in the sky for this operation. With ISIL being this close to where we are, we’ll need any edge we can get.”

  “Glad we could make it happen,” Volner began. Then smiling, he continued. “It’s kind of come full circle for you with these birds since your time as a CNA analyst aboard Normandy, hasn’t it?”

  Laurie Phillips smiled too. It had been Volner and his team that had snatched her out of Saudi Arabia after a rogue Saudi prince had shot down the U.S. Navy helicopter Sandee Barron and Laurie had been flying. They had tried to get to the bottom of what Laurie had been convinced were false Global Hawk video feeds showing a purported terrorist camp in Syria that was actually a faux camp. The camp had been constructed in Saudi Arabia as part of the prince’s plot to have the United States attack Syria. But their decision to take that flight had begun with Laurie’s close analysis of Global Hawk video. She’d likely prevented a war—but was cashiered out of the CNA anyway.

  “Well, it sure as hell has, Major. But don’t worry, I’m not looking to go rogue on you on this op.”

  Volner considered this for a moment, then hunched down into a squat so he could be eye level with Laurie. “Look, Laurie, we never have really talked about this, so now maybe it’s time. I know Mr. Williams was intent on finding a way to get you a soft landing after those idiots at CNA showed you the door. That was ‘push’ on his part, but there was a lot of ‘pull’ on our part I suspect no one ever told you about—”

  “Pull, sir?”

  “Look, Laurie, you were a Marine back in the day so I know you understand how the military works. Given the kinds of ops JSOC gets involved in, we don’t have to recruit—we have a constant stream of uniformed and civilian people knocking on our door wanting to join this organization. We have our pick of literally scores of analysts who can do what you do. But none of them have been there and done that like you have, and none of them—and I’ll say this carefully—none of them have brass ones like you have. I don’t need people standing around waiting for permission—I need people like you who’re willing to do what they need to do to get the job done and take their lumps if they need to. I think I’ve got the right person.”

  “I won’t let you or the team down, sir.”

  “I know you won’t. Okay, I’ve got to talk with Master Guns. He’s down in the warehouse. He’s got to get ready to receive the next FedEx flight.”

  “Nada on the first two flights so far, Major?”

  “Zero for two.”

  Two FedEx flights had arrived in the past five hours, unloaded all their cargo destined for Mosul, picked up some small amounts of freight, and departed. Neither flight had contained a 10 x 10 x 6 refrigerated box with tamper-proof locks. Moore and his FedEx-clad team had inspected every box big enough to hold a human, and the canines they’d brought along proved their worth, sniffing and then turning away from about a dozen boxes each time. Now they waited for the next FedEx flight, due to arrive in about an hour and a half.

  * * *

  Trevor Harward entered the Oval knowing President Midkiff had just finished reading another one of Chase Williams’s POTUS/OC Eyes Only memos updating him on the search for Jay Bruner. He knew the president was frustrated, and he had worked with him long enough to be prepared for this meeting.

  “Mr. President,” Harward began as he and Wyatt Midkiff sat down in the conversational area in front of the president’s desk. “Anything new from Chase?”

  “No, only that his JSOC team is on station at the Mosul airport. Two FedEx flights have come and gone and Admiral Bruner wasn’t aboard either one. There are four more flights due over the next six hours or so; we’re confident they’ll get him.”

  “Chase has good people working for him. If anyone can get the admiral, they can.”

  “I’m still disappointed our FBI CIRG people lost him after having him in sight.”

  “We all are, Mr. President. I’ve spoken with the attorney general already. He knows the FBI director started this op with too light a footprint. It won’t happen again.”

  “It damn well better not.”

  “It won’t, sir.”

  The president and his national security advisor sat in companionable silence before Harward addressed the 800-pound gorilla looming over them. “Mr. President, what’s happening here is unprecedented. A terrorist group on our soil snatching a senior military officer off the streets and getting him out of the country so those they’re in league with can assassinate him. It’s dreadful, Mr. President.”

  Harward and the president embarked on an earnest conversation about the implications of what had already happened and how the impact would be even worse if Jay Bruner weren’t rescued. The effect on the U.S. military could be profound. Would the U.S. military commander about to strike an enemy stop and think about terrorists on U.S. soil taking retribution on him or her—or their family? Would that cause military commanders to stop and think before they attacked enemies of the United States, or would this concern cause them to start bei
ng selective about whom they attacked? The more they talked, the more worried they became.

  “I’m counting on Chase’s people to get Admiral Bruner back, but I feel we have to do something, anything, to help.”

  “I know it’s not what you want to hear, Mr. President, but for now, all we can do is wait.”

  * * *

  Dale Bruner wasn’t one to wait. He had spent the morning being with and consoling his mother and sisters and sharing their grief and their dread. Now he felt trapped. He wanted to do something, but before he could do anything, he needed to know more. In the small, tight-knit SEAL community, it wasn’t hard to find where people were assigned. He had made the call and the man had agreed to meet with him in his Pentagon office that afternoon.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  FedEx Warehouse, Mosul Airport: Iraq

  July 19, 1915 Arabia Standard Time

  The next FedEx flight was due in less than fifteen minutes, so Moore and the three other JSOC men dressed as FedEx workers lounged casually in and around the FedEx hangar at Mosul airport—or as casually as they could in the 110-degree early evening Mosul heat. Real FedEx workers who had been read into the operation manned two forklifts and would unload the inbound FedEx flight, this one a twin-engine Boeing 767-300 long-range, wide-body jet.

  Once all the cargo was moved into the warehouse, Moore and his team would send away the FedEx forklift drivers, close the building’s doors, and bring the canines and their handlers out of the room where they were hidden. They’d look for the 10 x 10 x 6 refrigerated box first, but the dogs would sniff out every bit of cargo.

  * * *

  At Op-Center, Chase Williams met with his deputy, Anne Sullivan. It was their normal morning meeting—but one delayed a bit while Williams parked in the Geek Tank, gathering all the intel he could. Williams and Sullivan had been together at Op-Center from the beginning—she was his first hire.

  While Williams had had many tours in Washington during his thirty-five years in uniform, he never considered himself a Washington insider. Each tour in Washington had been brief—usually two years or less—a blessing from his perspective. But the downside was he never had the time, or the inclination, to get into the political minutia that actually made this city run. That’s why he had recruited Sullivan—and hard.

  Anne Sullivan was from money—old money—and had retired as a GSA supergrade at age fifty-five. She had been content to live out the remaining decades of her life enjoying the art and culture Washington had to offer before Chase Williams—in her words—charmed her into taking the number two spot at Op-Center. They were simpatico but were also yin and yang, as each brought completely different strengths to the job.

  Williams and Sullivan sat sipping the dark roast Sumatra blend coffee that seemed to drip endlessly from the coffee maker Williams had installed in his office. His office—by design much smaller than Sullivan’s—looked more like a small shipboard office Williams had occupied multiple times during his Navy career as a surface warfare officer. His Krups XP604050 drip coffee machine was the only thing in his office that passed for an indulgence.

  Sullivan had just finished debriefing him on her mostly unsuccessful trip to Memphis to try to persuade the FedEx CEO to divert his Mideast-bound flights. Williams could tell his number two was down.

  “It’s okay. I know if there were a way to persuade their CEO to turn those flights around, you and Duncan would have done it,” Williams began. “But you did the next best thing. From what Brian is telling me downrange, he’s given us everything we could have wanted—and more—especially using their warehouse as the place we’ll grab Admiral Bruner. That’s a win in my book.”

  “Thanks, boss. It’ll be a win when we get him back to the States and reunited with his family.”

  “That’s for sure. You said you had something else for me, something you’ve sniffed out?”

  “I do. I’ve still got friends on the National Security Council, and what they’ve told me should come as no surprise. But it should reinforce the decision you helped the president make a while ago to allow Op-Center to get involved in domestic counter-terrorism.”

  “I think we proved that when we thwarted that attack on the U.N. Headquarters a while ago.”

  “You’re right, we did. And based on what my friends on the NSC tell me, maybe after this op is over and Admiral Bruner is brought home, we should lean forward on the domestic side just a little bit more.”

  “Does this have something to do with the FBI not being able to intercept the admiral before he was taken out of the country?”

  “No, it has everything to do with it,” Sullivan replied. “My contacts at NSC tell me that the president gave the attorney general an old-fashioned ass-chewing over this and told him to get rid of the FBI director immediately. The best the AG could do was to convince the president to let the director resign on his own for whatever reason he wanted to come up with. But at that, the president said he needed to be out of his office before the end of the week. I heard a search committee has already been formed to find his replacement.”

  “That’s great intel, Anne. I’ll talk with Jim Wright and have him broach this with Allen Kim down at Quantico. I’m sure they’re talking with the FBI CIRG folks down there anyway, but knowing the president might be willing to let us use Allen and his team more often is valuable. Anything else?”

  “Only that there’s nothing any of us can do to get Aaron and his team to leave the building until we get Admiral Bruner back. I’ve had Duncan bring in futons so they can get some sleep, and NGA has been helpful in keeping their gym open twenty-four hours so the team can freshen up and shower,” Sullivan said, referring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that occupied the building above Op-Center’s subterranean offices. “If this goes beyond another day, I’ll talk with them about keeping a skeleton crew on duty to man their cafeteria at night.”

  “Hmm … from the looks of it, our team does pretty well with take-out.”

  “Yeah, boss, but we want these kids to grow old gracefully like you and me. They keep eating that junk and their arteries will clog up before they’re forty.”

  Williams just smiled. Anne Sullivan had never married, and given the senior positions she had had during her GSA career, she had rarely spent much time with twenty- or even thirty-somethings. The Op-Center director figured it was the unfulfilled mother hen in her that caused her to take a protective role with the Geek Tank.

  “Well, I’m all for that. Let’s keep my coffee away from them too.”

  * * *

  At the other end of Op-Center’s subterranean warren, Aaron Bleich and his team were in overdrive—pumping intel to Laurie Phillips and her JSOC squad downrange. While the FedEx CEO had promised full cooperation and was doing his best to deliver it, the further this instruction had to trickle down the FedEx chain of command, the more it lost in translation.

  “Someone” was supposed to provide Op-Center with cargo manifests for each of the six flights that might have Jay Bruner aboard. That hadn’t happened quickly enough for Bleich, so he had Maggie Scott hack into their servers—they were more secure than most others, so it took her a while—but she’d done it.

  A weary Aaron Bleich looked up from his computer monitor to see the Goth-clad Scott standing in his doorway, right below the sign above his door that read Senior Hall Monitor.

  “Aaron, this is the one!”

  “The one what, Maggie?”

  “The FedEx flight that’s landing at Mosul in a few minutes is the one with a 10 x 10 x 6 refrigerated box. That’s where they’ve packed up Admiral Bruner.”

  Bleich leapt up. “Great work, Maggie. You tell our JSOC team yet?”

  “Yes, I sent it to Laurie. She said it was timely, as the flight was already talking to the Mosul airport tower.”

  “Perfect!” Bleich exclaimed. Let’s grab Roger and go tell the boss!”

  * * *

  Room 5A524 was one of hundreds of nondescript Pentagon offices
far from the building’s prestigious “E-Ring.” The E-Ring had the only Pentagon offices with windows facing outward toward the green lawns that surrounded the building. That was why the E-Ring contained the impressive, well-appointed workplaces of senior military and civilian officials who oversaw the day-to-day activities of the tens of thousands who came to work in the world’s biggest office building every day.

  In this tiny office—no more than four jammed-together cubicles with cheap faux-wood desks, far-from-state-of-the-art computers, and phone and computer wires running everywhere in a hopeless tangle—Lieutenant Dale Bruner and Commander Patrick Kissel were having an earnest conversation in Kissel’s small cubicle. What passed for a “view” were the perpetually grimy windows and bird-shit-stained walls of an office on the Pentagon’s “B-ring.” The wall and windows were less than twenty feet away.

  Bruner had told his former commanding officer little over the phone, but once seated in his cubicle in the borrowed chair of an absent coworker, he poured out the entire story. Kissel had been more than a commanding officer—he had been a mentor to Bruner during his time with the teams. Now Kissel was doing his “purgatory tour”—as he called it—in the Pentagon as one of the few SEALS on the Navy staff. He was assigned to the innocuous-sounding “Naval Expeditionary Warfare Directorate,” N-95 for short. The directorate was an odd duck on the Navy staff in that it was headed by a Marine Corps general. And since SEALs—in spite of their heroics in the field—remained odd ducks in a Navy still dominated by surface, submarine, and aviation “tribes,” N-95 seemed the logical place to stash Navy SEALs on the CNO staff.

  “Dale, I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear about your dad,” Kissel began. “But from what you’ve told me about the VCNO visiting your home, it sounds like getting him back has everyone’s full attention—”