“Custer’s? That doesn’t sound like a good omen.”
“I think you’re right. He had four helicopters shot out from under him in the closing months of Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams personally awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross and pulled him out of the field, over his strong objections, I might add, and packed him off to OCS.”
“You have that medal too, don’t you?” she asked. “I guess that’s something else you two share.”
“Probably, but Stansky is amazing — irascible and irreverent. He has a particular disdain for West Pointers, staff officers, and senior NCOs who forgot where they came from. Pat O’Connor knows not to make a mistake like that.”
“Those two sound like you and Ace Randall. And when you took me to that last dinner, I remember the four of you were standing in a little circle in your dress blues. Even Dorothy wondered which of you had the most medals.”
“The real contest was which one of us hates wearing them the most.”
“Yeah, I could see that. All right, what do you think he wants?” Linda asked.
“Stansky? Probably nothing. He and I have been getting together for lunch every month or so just to ‘chat.’ ”
“To ‘chat’?” Linda laughed. “Like you said, you and a two-star general? Really?”
“Hey, they all call me now — the Secretary of the Army, the Chief of Staff, sometimes even the President.” He looked at her and she stared back, both deadpan.
“Speaking of bored children with nothing to do, it sounds like you need to find something for Stansky to do, too,” she suggested.
“Him? Something tells me, it’s going to be the other way around,” Bob said.
“Yeah, probably, but I was thinking, since you’re back in town, why don’t we invite everyone out for a barbecue Sunday afternoon?”
“We can, but Ace mentioned that Koz, The Batman, The Bulldog, and Lonzo have deployed somewhere.”
“Do you have any idea when they will be back?”
“No, they’ve ‘gone dark,’ so there’s no telling.”
“Well, we can ask the rest of them anyway. I need to get off this couch, and it’ll give me something to do.”
He looked down at her and stepped closer for a better look. “Are you okay?” he finally dared to ask. “I hate to say it, but you look like a truck ran over you.”
“A truck? You sure you want to go there again? But, since you finally bothered to ask, do you remember how Ellie told you she wanted a little brother, and you told her you’d look online and see if you could order one for her from Amazon? Well, you don’t have to… I’m pregnant.”
“You’re what?” he asked, wide-eyed, surprised, with a big grin.
“Don’t give me that. You heard me, and it’s all your fault.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ain al-Assad Air Base, Iraq
Al-Assad air base is one of the most important military installations in Iraq. Located a hundred miles west of Baghdad, it served Saddam Hussein’s military for decades. Since his fall, it has been a joint US-Iraqi Air Force Base, more or less important depending on what was going on in An-Bar Province and next door in Syria. With the new hot war against ISIS, many American assets had been shifted in, including fixed wing transport and fighter jets, helicopters, and the full gamut of Special Operations forces.
Near the rear of the base, behind three sets of razor-wire fences, sat a dozen flat-roofed, “modular” office buildings and a small forest of antennae and satellite dishes. The sign outside showed an innocuous DoD insignia and the name “Joint Imaging and Research Delivery Center,” which no one understood, much less believed. There was only one entrance to the complex and the checkpoint as well as each of the prefab buildings inside were sandbagged and barricaded up to their windowsills as if they were expecting an Indian attack at any moment. Anyone with even passing familiarity with Iraq or Afghanistan knew that hi-tech buildings like that might be the local offices of Facebook, Netflix, or HBO, but since there weren’t any Amazon delivery drones parked outside, they had to be some type of special warfare operations command center.
One of the main assets of these new buildings was that they had some of the best modular air conditioning units in-country. They could “freeze an Eskimo’s ass,” as one general delicately put it. That was a good thing, because what happened inside was often more heated and intense than the desert air outside.
“Would you mind telling me what the hell happened out there last night, Sergeant First Class Kozlowski?” Colonel Jefferson Adkins glared down at him and demanded to know. There wasn’t a single sheet of paper on his desk, or a photograph, book, or pad of paper in the office, which meant Adkins wasn’t based here. He was a deputy something or other from JSOC in Baghdad and had flown in around noon. He sat perched on one cheek on the front edge of the desk, so he could lean forward and try to intimidate the four scruffy enlisted men sitting in the chairs in front of him. Koz was at the right. The Batman sat next to him, then Prez Washington, and Illegal Rodriguez sat at the left end. At six foot three, black as coal, and well over 230 pounds, Adkins could dominate any room or conversation he wanted to, especially when he was sitting like that, hovering over them, trying to make them nervous. Unfortunately for him, the four men sitting in front of him were Deltas and they weren’t easily intimidated.
Koz shifted in his chair and looked up at the colonel, whose face seemed to hang up there like the side of a cliff ready to fall on him at any minute; but Koz had seen this act before and wasn’t particularly worried. He shrugged and finally answered, “Well, Colonel, I really don’t know. You have my report. Everything went by the book until they opened up on us. It was a trap, no doubt about it. They knew we were coming, so there wasn’t…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. What happened to those three Iraqis who got on the helicopter with you?”
Koz looked up at him and frowned. “I’m sorry, Sir, but you’re gonna have to fill me in, ’cause I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Adkins slammed his fist on the desk. “I’m talking about the three Iraqis that you four morons chucked out the door of that helicopter,” he said as he glared down the line at them, one by one.
“Us? I’m at a complete loss, Sir. Somebody told you we did that? Do you mind showing us the report?” Koz asked, using the word “report” intentionally. If Adkins had it in writing, they were toast. If not, he had nothing, and they all knew it.
Adkins didn’t move. “I’m told that three Iraqis — a captain, a lieutenant, and a platoon sergeant — got on that helicopter with you when you took off out of Raqqah last night, but they weren’t on it when you landed here. This morning, their bodies were found out in the desert about ten klicks east of where you took off.”
“Wow!” Koz looked up with a straight face and shook his head. “What were they doing out there?” Adkins’s eyes narrowed angrily, as if he was ready to explode, so Koz continued, “Look, Colonel, what do you want me to tell you?”
“I want you to tell me what really happened out there, dammit!”
“Well, it was an ambush, a trap, plain and simple. Somebody sold them out, and us too. When the Iraqis reached the house, a big IED went off. The ones who were still walking tried to get back to their Chinook, with ISIS guys shooting at them from the roof, but the Iraqi pilot didn’t wait for them. He took off and left them behind, until an RPG took his Chinook out. That was when Lieutenant Winkler ordered us out, and as we withdrew, some of the Iraqis that were left ran by us and kept going. How far they went, I have no idea, Sir.”
“I was told they got in the helicopter with you.”
“In the helicopter? You heard wrong, Sir. I was busy returning fire when the Lieutenant’s bird took a hit from another RPG. It blew up and went down with no survivors, so we had no choice but to get out of there too. I was the last one to jump inside. It was plenty dark in there, but all I saw was our guys — Batman, Prez, Illegal, and the flight crew.”<
br />
Adkins studied him for a moment, then leaned closer. “You’re going to stick with that ridiculous story?”
“Now, I’ll admit that things were a little frosty out there, Sir. Maybe those three Iraqis of yours grabbed onto the struts as we took off and hung on for a while,” Koz shrugged. “We were in the middle of a firefight, and…”
Adkins rolled his eyes. “All of you?” he said, and then turned toward the others. “That’s your story?” he asked.
“Yes, Sir,” all three Deltas repeated.
“You know this isn’t going to end here,” Adkins warned.
Koz shrugged. “If someone has accused us of doing something, give us a name and let us see the report. I’d sure like to talk to him and straighten this out.”
Adkins looked down at him. “The Iraqi’s are in a real snit over this, Kozlowski, and you’re smart enough to know if I had any actionable intel, you’d already be in the stockade.”
“Innocent until proven,” Illegal finally had enough and spoke up.
“Roger that, Sir,” The Prez growled. “Until proven!”
“All right, have it your way, all of you. There’s a C-130 waiting on the tarmac. It’s cleared all the way to Pope Field at Bragg. I may not be able to do anything to you, but I want you the hell out of my AO, Sergeant.”
“Roger that, Sir,” Kozlowski looked around the small room. “Too bad. You got great air conditioning in this place, and we were just getting to like it.”
Adkins glared angrily at him. “You know, men like you and ‘Ace’ Randall, ‘Chester’ Blackledge, even ‘Lonzo’ Hardisty and ‘The Bulldog’ Peterson, God rest their souls, were exceptionally good soldiers until you fell under the spell of that clown, Bob Burke.”
This time it was Koz’s turn to bristle. He looked up at the colonel with hard eyes. “Well, since you seem to put a lot of stock in stories, Sir, I read that in the Middle Ages, when a man was a traitor, someone who took up arms against his own people, or a coward who cut and ran, he would be tortured and drawn and quartered while he was still alive. Then, they’d cut his head off and stick it on a pike in the middle of town, just for spite.”
“What the hell’s that got to do with anything, Kozlowski?” Adkins roared.
“Everything. Those two Iraqi officers and the sergeant were in charge of that operation. If they were the ones who ran past us, then they were the only ones who got away. Now, maybe they were the fastest runners in the unit, or maybe they got a good head start, or maybe they were way behind their men the whole time; I don’t know. But if they did fall off that helicopter, like you claim, there’s a whole lot worse things that could have happened to them,” Koz said as he stood up and looked down at Adkins for a change.
“I’m not done with you, Sergeant!” the colonel fumed.
“Oh, I’m sure you’re not, Sir, but we lost four good Deltas and the flight crew from the 160th that night,” Koz said, knowing that Adkins might be assigned to JSOC and Delta, but he was just another DoD bureaucrat, not a warrior. “I’ve never had the pleasure of serving in the field with you; but I’ve been on dozens of Ops with Major Burke, and he always cared much more about his own men than the enemy.”
Adkins stared up at him, angry and flustered.
“So, if you don’t have anything else for us, Sir, if we have a plane to catch, then we have some things we need to get squared away.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Raqqah, Northern Syria
It was almost noon, “Showtime,” Henry Shaw thought as they walked down the crowded, dusty city street. For security reasons, they told him that the location of the Caliph’s speech and prayer service would remain a closely guarded secret until an hour before it began. Today, it was to be in an old grain warehouse on the river near the center of town, which had been converted into a makeshift mosque. As he drew closer, with one of the burly Khan brothers on each elbow, the crowd mysteriously parted to let them through. Shaw was going to ask the Khans which one of them was Moses, but one look at the surly brothers told him neither man had a sense of humor. When they reached the front door, he looked up and saw the sun riding high in an electric-blue sky. Even down here in the narrow city streets, the temperature was rising. By the time the noon service was over, it would be an oven inside the crowded old building.
To the truly faithful, the Salat al-Jumu’ah midday congregational prayer service on Friday was the most important hour of the week, especially since Caliph al-Zaeim would deliver the sermon. Shaw couldn’t believe his fortune to arrive in time to hear him speak. Despite the destruction and the ongoing battles around the city, ritual prayer was a solemn obligation for a Muslim. It was one of the five pillars of the faith and defined who they were, establishing the dividing line between the believers and the heretics.
That was when he heard the Muezzin’s call to prayer, the Adhan, blare from the old, tinny loudspeakers that had been hastily placed on the warehouse roof. The message may have been garbled, tinny, and hard to understand, but as he looked around the street, he saw everything had ground to a halt. “Allahu Akbar, God is Great…” and “La, ilaha al-lah, There is no God but God,” he heard, as the message rang out across the city.
The faithful left their shoes outside along the wall in neat rows. He barely got his off before the Khan brothers pushed him through the front door and into the crowded warehouse. There was barely a square inch left over; but the crowd parted again and they led him to the center of the room, where space suddenly opened for them on the old carpets that had been rolled out on the bare concrete floor. The dilapidated condition of the building with its broken windows and holes in its roof did not matter. When the Caliph spoke, the warehouse would become the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, al-Azhar in Cairo, al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, al-Haram in Mecca, or one of Islam’s other great mosques.
Even with the doors and windows open, it did not take long for the crowded room to heat up. Nonetheless, the suspense and anticipation became palpable as everyone waited for their Caliph to appear. Assuming he would enter from the street as everyone else had, Henry Shaw continued glancing back over his shoulder. He immediately noticed that most of the eyes in the room were on him, no doubt suspicious of his blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. On the other hand, from their faces and their dress, he saw many different tribes and nationalities, as different from each other as they were from him — different ages, complexions, beards, and head coverings — but none of that mattered in here. Interesting, he thought. By rough count, he estimated there must be over five or six hundred men crammed inside the building, no doubt feeling as outnumbered as the Spartans at Thermopylae against the Persians, the precursors of the modern-day Iran, proving that numbers mean nothing.
Down the right-side wall of the warehouse there was a small, closed man-door, not the kind of thing anyone noticed, but when it suddenly opened, the murmuring and mumbling in the room immediately stopped. It was the Caliph! And behind him, carrying the Black Standard, the large ISIS battle flag, walked the imposing figure of Aslan Khan and another large soldier. The flag was rolled around two long poles. Khan held one and the other man held the other as they followed al-Zaeim to the end wall, unrolled the flag, and placed each pole in a tall brass stand behind the Caliph. Based on the legendary battle flag of the ninth century Caliph Muhammad, it was all-black with the Seal of Muhammad in white at the center and the words “Muhammad is the Caliph of God” and “There is no God but Allah” written above it. There was no more definitive symbol of Islam at war than the Black Flag.
Shaw had been placed in the middle row in the very center of the crowd, sandwiched between the muscular Khans like a thin slice of cheese between two thick pieces of bread. Still, he couldn’t help but listen in rapt attention as the Caliph began to speak. Shaw’s Arabic was as good that of most of the men in the room, and he understood every word. Watching him speak in person for the first time, Shaw’s first impression was that Al-Zaeim was a small, frail man, but a masterful speaker who knew how to wo
rk a crowd. He began slowly, quietly, almost whispering, demanding absolute silence to be heard. There were no whispers, coughs, rustling of clothes, or scratching, as every man in the room strained to hear his words. Ever so slowly, he increased his pace and volume, looking heavenward and then back down at the crowd, his eyes moving from man to man, drawing each of them along with him.
Shaw had heard many of al-Zaeim’s Kutbah sermons, but only in bad recordings on tape. This was different. The recordings couldn’t capture his facial expressions, his gestures, or the raw emotion he projected as he railed against the Americans, the Russians, the Syrian Baathists in Baghdad, the rich Gulf oil states, the Jews, and worst of all, the Iranian heretics, making it clear what each man was fighting for and what Islam expected of him.
Abu Bakr Al-Zaeim was confident in his abilities as an orator, but the heat and continuing lack of sleep were sapping his energy. Nonetheless, he knew the speech: every word of it, his cues, when to interject the appropriate pauses, when to gesture, when to make eye contact, and how to wring the last ounce of emotion out of the crowd. Mergen and Batir Khan had drilled him on it all morning until he felt he might collapse, but he had no choice. If he didn’t perform well, all three of them would answer to that bastard older brother of theirs. And if Aslan Khan wasn’t completely satisfied when he heard the final speech, it would mean the basement again, or someplace even worse. Oh, Aslan would have one excuse or another, but there would be nothing al-Zaeim could do about it except continue to suffer.
In front of the eastern wall, signifying the direction toward Mecca, they had placed a small portable staircase with a platform on top for him to use to deliver his speech. It was like a minbar in a real mosque, and they dragged it around town from location to location, partly because it was tradition and partly because he was so short. When the Caliph finally reached the top and turned, he paused to slowly scan the crowd. With eye contact, hand motions, and the imploring tone of his voice, he would soon make every man in the room believe he was talking to him and him alone, holding the crowd spellbound with the power of his oratory. There was a small microphone on the pulpit, but it was there to record his words, not to amplify them. Down the street in another abandoned building was a makeshift recording studio, where the Caliph’s message would be copied onto hundreds of audio cassettes and CDs before the night was over, to be disseminated to scattered ISIS cells from Morocco to Pakistan, the Philippines, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London, and even America, uploaded to a dozen websites, and broadcast to his followers around the world.
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