Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  Williams motioned Lahem over. “I’d like to borrow your cell phone,” he said.

  The man fished out the device he had taken from the body of the dead man and handed it over. He did not ask why. He was probably supposed to know.

  Williams thanked him and waited. “Access code?” he asked.

  “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere,” the other man said. “It is 226AX,” he said.

  Williams punched in code. The screen did not come on. He tried again.

  “That’s odd,” Lahem said. He took the phone back, tried it himself, played with the battery, then tried again.

  “When was the last time you used it?” Williams asked.

  “While I was waiting for you,” he said.

  Berry’s words echoed in his head. “Very few Yemenis would be able to read it.” Williams hoped he was just being overly cautious, though he found himself wishing that Aaron Bleich and the team of the Geek Tank were here. They’d have this thing working.

  He handed the phone back to Lahem. “All right, thanks,” Williams said. “It wasn’t urgent.”

  The guide went to a seat in the front of the bus and Williams broke protocol by trying his smartphone. Because of the terrain—the mountains and lack of an uplink here—he was unable to get a signal. Maybe he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something did not sit right about this man and his plan. It all seemed a little makeshift for someone who was trained by the Mossad, had spent three years in-country, and taken this route countless time.

  Williams looked up the aisle of the dark, bouncing, diesel-permeated bus. Then he looked back. The rear door was padlocked—probably to help thwart attacks—and the motorbike blocked the front exit. It probably meant nothing—all of it. But he wished he could be sure.

  Breen was in the seat across the aisle. He leaned over. “What did you need?”

  “I wanted to reach my contact in D.C.,” he said.

  “Not just to say ‘hi.’”

  “No. Is it just me or do you feel okay about all this?”

  “We’re headed in the right direction for Aden,” he said. “That’s the main thing.”

  “On a hijacked bus.”

  “‘Commandeered,’” the major said. “You did say you wanted to stay on it.”

  “True,” Williams admitted. “But just now, our friend didn’t know the damn code.”

  “Or his reception is screwed here, too.”

  “Wouldn’t he know? He’s traveled this route.”

  Breen frowned. “On a motorbike, not in a bus with three kinds of metals used to repair the roof.” The major pointed overhead. “I also saw the driver admiring a five-hundred riyal note. Ben Kimon would deal in nothing smaller, I suspect.”

  Williams suddenly felt like a mulish hybrid between a tenderfoot and a prophet of doom. Breen certainly seemed relaxed enough, as did Rivette and—as far as he could tell—Grace as well. Maybe the SITCOM approach was more ingenious than he had realized. Maybe that was the way things should work in a world of terror cells, tribal chieftains, and black market economies powered by smugglers. Maybe Matt Berry was the harbinger of a new kind of global power, the government as multinational financier embodied in the shape of one quasi-responsible man.

  You’re no longer behind a desk, he told himself. Stop overthinking and trying to micromanage.

  He put his phone away. Major Breen was right. They were going where they needed to go. As for the rest—since this region was the birthplace of many faiths, it might not be a bad idea to do something he had not done since Janette’s death.

  Closing his eyes, Chase Williams prayed.

  * * *

  Lahem informed the driver that Highway 10 lay ahead approximately five kilometers.

  “You will take it to Aden,” he said in Arabic, making sure the passengers heard their destination.

  “We will need fuel,” the driver replied.

  “In Harad,” Lahem said and gave him another five hundred riyals. “I promise this will be worth your time. You may keep the change.”

  The man seemed less appreciative than before; from the way he listened for knocks and coughs, nursed the wheel, he was apparently calculating the cost of replacing his bus.

  Lahem did not feel too bad. Considering the injury this man’s nation had inflicted on Yemen, he was lucky the CTU agent did not simply shoot him and kick his body out the door.

  Moving to the back of the bus, stretching as he walked past his passengers, Lahem flopped into a seat and slumped low. He felt that he had not managed the exchange about the cell phone as well as he could have. He did not blame himself; he had passed the most crucial tests and brought the enemy into Yemen. But the oldest of the men seemed guarded now, if not suspicious, and they still had a journey of some 742 kilometers ahead of them. That would take at least ten hours and he was concerned that he would not be able to continue the charade.

  The CTU agent took out his own smartphone and switched the light to dim. The device was linked to the Ministry of Defense communications system in nearby Harad; that was as far as he had to reach. He addressed his text message to outpost Commander Salim al-Shaabi:

  Have infiltrated 4-person elite terror unit in blue bus. Soon to intercept Highway 10 south. Require hard mission force to intercept. Capture occupants for mission interrogation. Bader Abu Lahem

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Harad, Yemen

  July 24, 6:15 p.m.

  Commander Salim al-Shaabi did not know Bader Abu Lahem, but his CTU dossier was on file and there was no reason to doubt the authenticity of the text message or its contents. Even Saudi agents—who were plentiful in the Hajjah Governorate, secretly advancing their Sunni cause—were not well organized as a military force. It had been six years since Al-Qaeda attacked the Defense Ministry in Sana’a, using a car bomb to blow a hole in the compound wall and then mercilessly slaughtering soldiers, medical personnel, and other civilians. Since then, enemies of the state and foes of the Shia faith had chosen softer targets to hit.

  The bald, six-foot-two-inch al-Shaabi was not a soft target. His outpost was not a soft target. If terrorists were planning a paramilitary action in his command, they would be stopped.

  The commander had two armored fighting vehicles in his arsenal. He ordered those and his two armored personnel carriers to take up positions on the side of the highway. They were to allow traffic to pass until the blue bus was sighted, after which they were to block the road.

  “I do not want air coverage that might alert them,” al-Shaabi told the captains of his two, American-made, light observation Bell 206 helicopters. “Be prepared to provide air cover if required.”

  That meant a man leaning from the open hatches of each helicopter. That was the way they hunted insurgents in the field—a blue bus with nowhere to go would be a canary in a cage.

  Only a quarter of his complement of 125 troops was deployed along the roadside, west of the chokepoint. He did not send them all because there was a part of him that feared this was a Sunni ruse to attack the depot itself. He alerted the rest of his men to don full body armor and be prepared to repel such an attack.

  Within a half hour everything was in motion. Fifteen minutes later, the troops and vehicles were in place. Standing at the front of an AFV on the southern edge of the highway, Salim al-Shaabi watched the horizon with binoculars, eager for a fight that, for once, would be more muscular than a holding action against the accursed Saudis.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Highway 10, Yemen

  July 24, 7:00 p.m.

  Major Breen was sitting back in the lumpy seat, having found the bodily impression made by decades of riders. He was concerned about the mission. His issues were not whether the new man was simply careless, a double-agent, or something else they had not even considered. To Breen, this was like a parachute jump. The condition of the equipment really did not matter until impact, when you either landed successfully or did not. The progression of every legal trial was impo
rtant but nothing mattered until the jury or panel rendered its verdict. And even then, it was just a pause before the inevitable appeal process. Until there was something to concern Black Wasp, until there were actionable facts or leads, they should not be burning energy on “what ifs.” That was one of the mandates General Lovett had hit on over and over again.

  “A wasp is fast when it strikes,” he had said. “You must be, too.”

  That unorthodoxy was the very reason they were created and the reason SITCOM had been designed. That bold new vision, though dangerous as hell, could signal a major transformation for the American military. The idea of amassing overwhelming numbers had been invented millennia before to line and protect borders. With drones in the air, satellites in space, and thousands of pockets of specialists ready for sabotage, assassination, infiltration, and other highly targeted missions, the financial and human cost of the military could be greatly reduced. For Breen, that future savings in lives, treasure, destruction, and suffering was worth this risk.

  What worried Major Breen was not the concept, was not Amit Ben Kimon, was not who or what they would face in Aden. It was Chase Williams.

  The man had obviously been the leader of a group of some kind, most likely from behind a desk. He was not sure-footed in the field, was not willing to risk his team the way any field commander must. He was also unwilling to cede command.

  When Breen was named to Black Wasp, it was understood if not expressly ordered that being the oldest of the three original members by more than a decade, he was the nominal leader. SITCOM trumped that, but in survival training in Alaska and in Death Valley, the other two specialists had deferred to his broader knowledge and experience.

  Chase Williams did not know how to do that and that struggle, along with the mission, seemed to be stripping his gears. Along with something else that he had not shared with them. But he clearly had a personal stake in this. He did not seem to be a man in mourning—though uttering the name “Janette” seemed to shine a brief light on an old wound, a lost wife or daughter perhaps. It was not likely he lost someone on the Intrepid. What pushed him forward had all the colorations of a vendetta. He had been boldest in Diego Martin at the apartment, when they were closing in on Salehi. No recon, no curbside caution. The major suspected—strongly suspected—that this was personal. And, as in a trial, when emotions were factored into the mix, results tended to spill out of control.

  Breen had been debating, for the last half hour, whether to discuss this with Williams. He had not yet decided on that when the bus slowed, climbed slightly, and turned toward the west—still in the direction of Aden but now on a paved highway.

  “Yay,” Rivette said from two seats back. The lance corporal had seemed to groan and grunt with every bump; for a man whose survival depended on a steady surface for a steadier hand, the discomfiture was understandable.

  The driver finally turned on the headlights and the team rose in their seats, almost as one. They were no longer protected by wilderness. They had to be prepared for anything.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The National Reconnaissance Office, Washington, D.C.

  July 24, 11:12 a.m.

  It was her first day on the job. But in the aftermath of the Assault on a Queen, it was all hands on deck—and, if nothing else, Kathleen Hays had proven herself as a highly adept visual analyst during her tenure at Op-Center.

  The night before—a dozen hours before, in fact—after having been given security clearance to take her new, junior position, the thirty-four-year-old had been home reading a history of the NRO when there was knock at the door of her Silver Springs, Maryland, studio apartment. A laminated credential was already in the eyepiece. The caller was a man named Matt Berry and he was the deputy chief of staff for President Midkiff. Anyone could have had a fake ID printed, but if someone wished her ill there were numerous other ways to accomplish that. She palmed her small can of pepper spray and opened the door.

  Berry asked to come in. She permitted it; her visual analysis of the man was that he had the tired face of a bureaucrat, not the desperate expression of a lunatic. The two were not wildly dissimilar in the visual lexicon, but after eight months at Op-Center she had learned to quickly tell the difference.

  Matt Berry faced her in a suit as creased as his expression and said without preamble, “The president arranged for you to have this position and for you to be assigned to the Yemen Surveillance Team for a particular.” He gave her a business card that had no name, only a cell phone number. “I want you to watch the triangulated territory from the Jizan Regional Airport, Saudi Arabia, to Dhamar and then Aden in Yemen,” he told her. “In particular, I want to know two things. One: Moving south, off-road, any vehicle large enough to carry five people. Two: Any sudden military or police activity in that region. You will text me with any information, at that number, from your private phone.”

  “I was told, Mr. Berry, that my private—”

  “A forty-eight-hour window has been opened for you to place outgoing texts from the NRO,” he cut her off. “Get there as early as you can and give me any information you pick up, however trivial you think it is. Questions?”

  She shook her head and he turned to go.

  “Mr. Berry,” she said suddenly. “Do you have any idea how Director Williams is?”

  Berry shook his head and closed the door.

  Kathleen had slept four hours because she had to rest her eyes, and was at her bullpen-style station in a windowless room in Chantilly, Virginia, by five o’clock in the morning. The thirty-three-mile drive was traffic-free at that hour—reason enough to embrace an early-to-rise work ethic.

  To Kathleen’s surprise, from nine a.m. to the present her communications with Berry had been more or less constant. He had acknowledged each with a simply TY; she had not expected thanks from the brusque man she had met. That alone suggested to her the stress he was under and, thus, the reason her information was vitally important. They were on the trail of Ahmed Salehi. Since she was including no other recipients, including the NRO, she could only imagine how highly classified were the things she had not been told. That was underscored by the fact that no one, not even her superiors, had come by to oversee or ask to see her work.

  Kathleen felt like she was somewhere near the center of the known universe and found her mind, eyes, and spirit glinting with a sharp, new edge at the challenge.

  The woman reported what looked like a bus departing Jizan for the border. The dark silhouette of the bus crossing the border and heading southeast without lights.

  And then the movement of four vehicles and dozens of troops along the sides of Highway 10 in Harad.

  Mr. Matt Berry did not acknowledge that message. Kathleen hoped he had received it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Highway 10, Yemen

  July 24, 7:13 p.m.

  If Grace Lee had not used the rancid toilet in the back of the bus, she would never have heard the quaint, muffled beep outside the door. It did not seem indigenous to this old crate of a bus, it was not something she had heard before, and it did not seem like something that should be ignored.

  She opened the door, the squeak of it lost in the rattling over the rear wheels. She shut it in time to see the Israeli, sitting two seats ahead, reaching into his robe. He pushed the mute button, but that did not stop a two-chime beep from sounding seconds later.

  Chase Williams had heard it, too, and rose.

  Fussing with the phone, and accustomed to ignoring the woman, Lahem did not see or hear her as she moved stealthily behind him and saw the LED message:

  Troops massed on highway in Harad.

  The message evaporated and Lahem thrust the phone back in his robe. He looked at Williams coming toward him, but did not notice Grace easing into the empty seat behind him, leaning over, and throwing her right arm around his throat. She did not pull back but sunk back, her own weight tightening the chokehold and causing him to gasp audibly.

  Now the others were on their
feet and hurrying back behind Williams.

  “It’s a trap,” Grace said. “Military blockade in Harad.”

  Williams asked Breen to have the driver stop the bus. He did not steer the vehicle to the side of the highway but off it, resting slightly lopsided on a slope. He killed the headlights. Vehicles occasionally sped by at a high rate of speed, none of them showing any curiosity in the bus.

  When they had stopped, Williams loomed over the man in back, whose clawing, kicking struggles to free himself had proven useless. Even in the dark, Williams could see the man turning red. “Let him breathe—once,” Williams said.

  Grace obliged then retightened her grip. Her captive sucked air down his raw throat before the hold was reapplied—tightly but enough so he could gasp … and speak.

  “Who are you?” Williams demanded as the bus made an ugly stop that brought a shifting, grating protest from every part of it.

  “CTU,” he wheezed.

  “Name?” Williams asked.

  “Bader … Abu … Lahem…” he said with as much pride as he could muster from his constricted voice box.

  Williams held his pistol at the man’s forehead and asked Grace to release him. She did, pulling off her head covering and glaring at the man who was hacking to clear his compressed windpipe.

  “Where is the man we were to meet?” Williams asked.

  “Dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” Williams demanded.

  Lahem hesitated.

  Breen said over Williams’s shoulder, “You didn’t know about the phone or who he was meeting. You wanted his money route. We were a surprise.”

  Lahem hesitated again … then nodded.