by Rawlin Cash
Hunter waited. He prayed someone valuable would come out of the building. He wanted it to be the Crown Prince but it was Jamal. The man came to the door and stopped. He was carrying a bag and Hunter knew it contained the sniper system. Just thinking about it made him angry. It had been developed by American scientists using congressional dollars and then, instead of being given to the army to equip American soldiers, it was sold overseas.
He had Al-Wahad in his sights. He could have pulled the trigger. The man came out slowly onto the porch and scanned the surrounding buildings. Hunter had been right about him. If he’d been trained as a sniper, he’d know he wasn’t safe. A sniper knew he was never safe. If he spotted an enemy sniper, there was literally no amount of time that could pass that would remove the risk. You stayed put. You waited. Only when the other man moved, only when he was dead, were you safe.
Jamal took a cigarette from one of the guards and lit it. Hunter could have shot it from his mouth. He could have lit it for him. He knew Hale would have liked to take a man like Al-Wahad alive, but Hunter had no intention of letting that happen. This guy was about to lose the frontal lobe of his brain. It was going to be lights out. You don’t kill the American president and live.
Not today. Not on this watch.
The only thing that stopped Hunter from pulling the trigger was the chance of an even better target. Al-Wahad was stalling. He was on the porch smoking and it was possible he was waiting for the Crown Prince. There was only so much time a man like that would sit tight in an embassy. He had yachts in the South of France and prostitutes and bottles of champagne to get back to. He’d come to DC to speak to the president. That was unlikely to happen now. He’d have to leave eventually.
More guards came out of the building and Hunter recognized them as the royal guard.
That meant the Crown Prince was going to move too.
Hunter waited. He could get them both. The drones would spot him as soon as he took the first shot, they’d direct a response. The time taken for the second shot would cost him his life. But it was tempting.
He waited another ten minutes. Al-Wahad went back into the embassy and then re-emerged.
What was the delay?
It had to be the Crown Prince.
Hunter was cautious by instinct. He was aware that all of this could be a ruse. Jamal could be exposing himself as bait. He could be trying to lure Hunter out. He must have known Hunter would still be there. There was no way he’d give up an opportunity like this. There was no way he wouldn’t be still watching. A single night was nothing. Hunter could have remained motionless on that roof without food, without water, without sleep, for days. If he had a bottle of water, he could last over a week. A target like this was worth it.
Hunter zeroed in on Jamal’s face, searching for any sign something was amiss. Through the scope he was so close to him. He could almost imagine Jamal’s breath on his face.
He was smoking.
He was talking to the other men.
Hunter was certain it was him. As certain as he could be. He’d seen people create decoys using plastic surgery but no one would do that for a man like Jamal. He was just a hired gun.
Jamal was a brutal man. He was an effective killer, he was cruel, but if he was really planning to walk the Crown Prince across the lawn in full view of over a dozen buildings, he was a complete fool.
Jamal stubbed out his cigarette and walked toward the chopper. He walked at a normal pace. He looked calm.
Hunter scanned the building.
No Crown Prince in sight anywhere.
Fuck, he thought.
Was Jamal a fool or was this some sort of trap? Was he gambling that he wasn’t the target?
As he strode toward the chopper, Hunter had seconds to make up his mind. Shoot him or wait for the Crown Prince?
He wanted the Crown Prince.
But he couldn’t let Jamal just saunter out.
He made the decision.
He put his finger on the trigger and took the shot.
The instant he pulled the trigger, the heavy, two-twenty grain bullet left the barrel at 2,850 feet per second. That was two and a half times the speed of sound. It took less than half a second to hit the back of Al-Wahad’s head, which blew right open like a test shot fired into a watermelon.
Before the bullet hit Al-Wahad, hunter was moving. He rolled sideways, slower than he’d have liked because his muscles were so numb, and at the same moment, the targeting systems on the two nearest drones zeroed in on him.
The drones were equipped with infrared cameras. The high-fidelity imagery was transmitted in an encrypted video buffer to a control unit inside the Saudi Embassy.
If the sniper system had been active rather than in Jamal’s dying grip, Hunter would already be dead.
He pulled his Glock from his waist and put two bullets in the lithium ion battery pack visible on the side of the closer of the two drones. Then he turned and put two more bullets in the second drone. He got to his feet and ran for the side of the building.
At the same time, a Saudi drone operator inside the embassy transferred the targeting data acquired by the drones to an automated system at Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center in Charles County, Maryland, where it was accepted under the coordination protocol signed by Meredith Brooks and automatically retransmitted, now with a valid US targeting signature, to the USS George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group off the coast of Naval Station Norfolk, 192 miles away. Microseconds later, the USS Philippine Sea initiated the trigger for a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile. Weighing three and a half thousand pounds, it suddenly became the largest projectile ever fired at Washington DC. There was a time when the Tomahawk missiles carried W80 nuclear warheads. Those days were over. This missile carried over one ton of conventional high explosive. The missile measured over twenty feet in length with its booster and as it took off from the deck of the Philippine Sea, it lit up radar defense systems along the length of the Eastern Seaboard.
The missile was a Block III, supplied to the DoD by McDonnell Douglas in the nineties before they lost the contract to Hughes Aircraft Corporation. It was powered by a Williams International F107 turbofan engine and flew at a subsonic five-hundred-fifty miles per hour. It had a low-altitude flight trajectory, coasting at one hundred to one-hundred-fifty feet above ground.
The missile was woefully inadequate for the task.
The Saudi controller inside the embassy would have known that, but he had no power over the response the US weapons systems made to his target request.
If it struck the Kennedy Center successfully, it would have devastated most of the building, almost certainly killing Hunter. But the speed it travelled at and its lack of any kind of stealth capability meant it would never strike. The entire order demonstrated the weaknesses of a coordination protocol, especially one hacked together as hastily as the one Meredith had implemented with the Saudis.
There was zero chance of a successful hit.
Central Washington DC was the most difficult place on the planet to successfully penetrate by air attack.
The city had been caught off-guard in 2001 when the 9/11 hijackers were able to fly a Boeing 757 into the western facade of the Pentagon.
That type of attack was no longer possible. The city’s air defenses were upgraded in the aftermath and now comprised three overlapping layers. A missile with the capabilities of a Block III Tomahawk, in the absence of countervailing factors, had no chance of penetrating.
The missile defense system was completely independent of attack protocols, meaning it did not know or care that the Tomahawk had been fired by an American vessel. To hit its target, the Tomahawk would have had to overcome all three layers of the defense system.
The first layer was the Flight Restricted Zone, an area covering a fifteen mile radius around the White House. Any aircraft within that zone had to be specifically cleared in advance or would be taken down by a squadron of high-alert, cocked and locked, F-16s, based out of Andrews Air F
orce Base. In addition to the jets, Homeland Security operated choppers armed with a range of scanners and fifty caliber rifles to enforce the zone against unauthorized aircraft.
The second layer of protection was the National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System, produced by the Norwegian defense contractor Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace. The system used AIM-120 air-to-air missiles that would usually be fired by fighter jets, but had been adapted for use by surface launchers. The trade off for being surface launched was that they used more fuel to get to full altitude and speed. This shortened their range to less than twenty miles, but given the small size of the exclusion zone and the fact the silos were strategically located around the city, they were capable of intercepting a wide range of attacks at high velocity, even when made in large number. In spots around the city the distinctive six-pack launchers could be seen on top of important government buildings. The system did not rely on target acquisition from the larger integrated air defense system, but had its own system based on radar and electro-optical sensors installed near the launchers. The system was in the process of entering its third generation, with an upgrade based on the Navy’s very deadly Evolved Sea Sparrow, but that system was not yet in operation.
The final line of defense was based on the Army’s Avenger system and used FIM-92 Stinger missile launchers to take out a target at the very last second. These were initially mounted to Humvees which could be seen parked around the White House, Pentagon and Capitol. The Humvees were later replaced with hard-mounted launchers on the roofs of key strategic buildings.
The Tomahawk missile fired at Hunter was picked up by NORAD within seconds of launch. The fact of its launch as well as its target information were simultaneously passed to NORAD’s attack tracking system and the data created a specialized alert for the situation in which a US attack, and an attack on the US, were coming from the same event.
Alarms went off at the NORAD monitoring facility at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, and the Sector Operations Control Center at Rome, New York, but because of the conflict in the missile’s source and target, with presidential authorization for the attack superseding air defense protocols, F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons were not mustered.
Canadian Forces Base Winnipeg, designed to provide NORAD alert services for attacks over the North Pole, also picked up the launch and, because it lacked the presidential authorization conflict, tagged it as a hostile attack that triggered the mustering of Canadian 425 Tactical Fighter Squadron out of Bagotville, Quebec. This unit was armed with McDonnell Douglas built CF-18 Hornets which were capable of Mach 1.8 and were authorized for air intercept over US airspace.
Because of the proximity of the missile launch to its target, none of the NORAD defense mechanisms, designed to protect North America from launches emanating from Russia, would have been able to intercept it in time, even if they’d been deployed correctly.
The next line of defense, Washington’s own Flight Restricted Zone, patrolled by F-16s out of Andrews, was similarly delayed by the presidential order conflict. Even though the missile flew almost directly over Andrews Air Force Base, and could have been intercepted by F-16s as soon as they were airborne, no F-16s were deployed.
The task then fell to the Norwegian built National Advanced Surface to Air Missile System, which launched six AIM-120 missiles from a site inside Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, a 905 acre installation in the Southwest of Washington DC. This system, being purely defensive and therefore incapable of processing US attack information, received no conflict from the presidential order and treated the missile purely as an attack.
The AIM-120s were 7 inch diameter missiles with transmit and receive guidance capability. They were twelve feet long, weighed three-hundred-thirty-five pounds, and were armed with fifty pound high-explosive blast-fragmentation warheads. They reached a speed of mach 4, over three-thousand miles per hour, and took out the Tomahawk when it was just five hundred yards from the Kennedy Center.
By that time, Hunter was halfway across the roof, making his way for the edge of the building. The sky over the Lincoln Memorial was lit up with fire from the intercept as he leapt off the edge.
The entire building would have been destroyed if the missile struck, and the explosion over the Lincoln Memorial created a fireball five hundred feet in diameter that had tourists on the national mall running in panic.
Hunter fell one floor to the gallery level, where he was able to shoot his way through a wall of glass and get inside the building.
Fifty-Four
Fawn was on her laptop in the East Wing when the explosion happened. She saw it through the window. Immediately, her phone rang. It was Langley confirming that the missile had been launched under the Cooperation Protocol ordered by the president. It was flagged as a level three national security breach authorizing the CIA to intervene in domestic politics.
Fawn was only half listening.
A file had just arrived in her CIA inbox from an anonymous, internal source. It was a document that had been sent by the Director of the CIA to Hale a few years earlier, right after Hunter first went off the grid.
The document contained an order stating that Preying Mantis had gone off the rails and that the sole remaining operative, Hunter, needed to be eliminated.
There was a response from Hale who was director of Paramilitary Black Ops at the time, stating that Hunter had terminated all outstanding Mantis agents, and had then been terminated himself by Hale personally.
There were photos of Hunter, showing him lying on a concrete floor, face up, with a bullet to the temple. There was a medical report confirming his death. There were additional photos showing the other Mantis agents, all dead on the same floor.
The report stated that everyone had been executed and the program officially terminated.
Fawn could see that Hale had gone out on a limb for Hunter. He’d told the CIA that Hunter was dead, and had even taken the step of having the medical report and photos fabricated.
What she didn’t know, given the strained relationship between the two men now, was why he’d done it.
Why risk his career for one operative?
Why save Hunter and not the rest of the agents?
And why was Hale so afraid Hunter would someday come for him?
What had happened between them?
And who had sent her the files?
She looked out the window over the south lawn. Police cars were rushing down E Street, their sirens wailing. Crowds were being moved east along the mall away from the explosion. There were ambulances but from the way the crowd was behaving, Fawn could tell that injuries had been minimal. The missile had been taken out at a high enough altitude to avoid much damage.
Her phone beeped. It was a message from Langley confirming that the target of the missile was the north east corner of the Kennedy Center. It was followed by a second message stating that a shot had been fired from the roof of the Kennedy Center into the Saudi embassy compound. A man inside the embassy grounds had been killed but there was no confirmation on his identity.
She saw that there was another anonymous file transfer downloading to her inbox. It was a video file. She didn’t want to open it until she was alone.
Hale was with the president and the conversation had moved on to topics above her pay grade. That usually meant they were making some sort of political pact that was either embarrassing, immoral, or illegal.
She’d have gone right to the Saudi embassy to see the target personally and find out who he was but she wanted to get to the bottom of the data that was being transferred to her.
She closed her eyes. She was exhausted. She felt the momentary release of sleep wash over her, the feeling that she was falling, that she was vulnerable, and then she snapped back to attention. She needed sleep but now was not the time.
Her phone buzzed. It was confirmation of the shooting target. Jamal Al-Wahad. He’d been shot while attempting to board a helicopter on the embassy lawn.
He�
�d been careless.
Sloppy.
He should have known Hunter was watching.
The Saudis were arrogant. That’s what got them to take such a risk. That was what got them to use a US ship to fire at Hunter.
They had a tie in to American heavy ordnance targeting capabilities, but they had no men on the ground. They had no local support. They had no alternative but to rely on drones and missiles.
The file transfer was complete. She looked over her shoulder to make sure she was alone before opening it.
The file’s metadata didn’t give much away. It was from Kabul around the time Mantis was wrapped up. She knew that was what it would be related to.
She looked for sender identifying information but it had all been stripped. That wasn’t usually possible on the internal system but had been the case with a lot of the data she’d been getting lately.
She opened the file.
It was standard CIA security camera footage. The watermark meant she would be able to verify the location of the camera and the time of the recording.
Two men were in a black site interrogation room.
One of them was Hunter. He was sitting at a desk facing the camera. He was in the position of someone being interrogated but he wasn’t restrained, he had a cup of coffee in front of him, and from his demeanor he was there voluntarily.
She knew the other man, his back to the camera, was Hale. She could tell by the posture, the back of his head.
When he spoke, it confirmed it.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Hale said.
Hunter shrugged. “It’s a bit late for that.”
“I know,” Hale said. He was apologizing. It wasn’t a tone Fawn was used to hearing in his voice. “This is my fault.”
“Yes it is,” Hunter said.
“We did our best.”
“You dicked around too much. You fucked us in every hole.”
“It worked with you.”