Sting of the Wasp

by Jeff Rovin

  “They’re probably self-appointed militia watching for Saudis or insurgents,” Breen said.

  “We should go some other way,” Rivette suggested.

  “We turn, they may fire,” Williams said.

  “We don’t turn, they will ask us questions we can’t understand or answer,” Breen pointed out.

  Williams desperately sought a third option—splitting up, turning back, opening fire. None of it ended well.

  “Lieutenant—you’re rattling,” Breen said.

  “I know,” Grace replied.

  All of them flinched as two helicopters passed over the highway, headed east from the direction of Harad. It wouldn’t be long before they split and started zigzagging over the terrain to the south and this city to the north. They had to move.

  Rivette had been looking around. “Hey,” he said. “There’s an old pickup facing the exit—right side of the second lot. See it?”

  The others looked.

  “Their troop transport,” Breen said.

  “Yeah, probably with keys already in the ignition,” Rivette said. “Our ticket through this no-man’s-land forbidden zone if we can get to it.”

  The lance corporal had a point. The port city was spotted with fires like these. The blazes, fueled by wood that used to be homes or carts or trees, could be families trying to stay warm in the cool air of the ocean—or it could be more men watching for trouble.

  The gatekeepers of Al Luḩayyah were only fifty yards away and most were now on their feet, facing the newcomers. The group was not walking toward them, but they had come from the wilderness, in the night. Williams knew there was no way to get out of this cleanly. He knew that there were two priorities: the mission and the team, in that order.

  If we fight and kill men who are simply protecting their homes and families, how are we any different from Salehi? he asked himself. But he quickly reduced that larger philosophical question to a practical one: If we do not, we are likely to die here, now or slowly.

  “Let me handle this,” Grace said, walking around Breen before anyone could object.

  That move alone caused the onlookers to stiffen with shock. They spoke one to the other, one of them shouldering his rifle and aiming at Williams, who was the tallest man. Another raised a walkie-talkie. Williams and the others stopped.

  “Grace, what’s the plan?” Rivette asked.

  “You be prepared to take on the boys to the right,” she said to the lance corporal without taking her eyes off the Yemeni force straight ahead. “There may be one or two left standing.”

  “One or two?” a disbelieving Rivette said.

  “And they may be calling for backup,” she added, “so we’ll have to book.”

  The militiamen must have heard the lance corporal, heard the English, because the men were in motion now, spreading out and raising weapons, targeting all the men. Grace was moving away from her companions, appearing to be saving herself for the inevitable shootout to follow. Williams fought the urge to raise his arms in surrender. Whatever Grace was planning, the wall of Yemenis would cut the three men down before she could reach them and before Rivette could get his hands into his robes.

  Williams saw the silhouette of her arms moving beneath her spacious robes. She couldn’t attack all of them with her knives; that couldn’t be her plan. It was only a moment before she made her move that he understood.

  “Get down,” he hissed at the others.

  Grace had already pulled the pins on two of the hand grenades she had taken from the boat on the Navet. She flung them in two simultaneous, arcing moves. Gunfire spit from one handgun but it went wide as the man was knocked over by a neighbor who recognized the threat and was diving for cover.

  Grace took a flying somersault behind a pile of stones, hunkering down as the grenades exploded. She raised her head at once, searching for a target, was just in time to see Rivette, on one knee, firing at anyone who tried to get back up.

  Williams raised his face from the cracked asphalt beneath him, peered through the smoke of the blast that was thinning and expanding in his direction. His head ringing, he could not hear the shots but he saw two men drop with new, bloody holes in their hips.

  “Move it!” Breen shouted over the team’s temporary deafness. “That’s going to draw reinforcements!”

  As one, the group was on its feet and running toward the rusted pickup, Rivette slightly behind and covering their escape. There was no one left to fire at them, though Williams saw a pair of youthful faces behind what used to be a basement window behind the truck. He refused to think about the kids. He couldn’t.

  Williams got behind the wheel, suspecting—correctly—that the old truck would be a stick. The key was there and the truck started as the others jumped in the back.

  “Hopefully,” Rivette said breathlessly as Grace pulled him in, “anyone who sees us will recognize the pickup and let it pass.”

  Grace lay flat beside a small cache of canvas-covered weapons. She pulled the fabric over her so she would not be seen. Rivette crouched by the tailgate, guns in each hand.

  “They’ve got an RPG here,” Grace said.

  “Nice,” Rivette said. “The Lord provides.”

  “Not for these people,” Breen remarked.

  The hell behind them was duplicated in front of them as Williams picked his way through a ruined city toward the sea. At the speed they were going, in the dark, the robes and head coverings the men wore raised no suspicion from other men who were protecting women who were scavenging for canned goods or fabric—banners made good patches—or collecting water from faucets that still worked. The destruction here was probably recent, or most of the food would be gone.

  The flat, dark expanse of the Red Sea grew, as did the trappings of civilization. Buildings were in better repair here, probably because the port was active and was needed by both sides in the struggle. It reminded Williams of the old NAP—the Neutron Attack Plan, first conceived in the 1960s—which involved deploying a weapon that killed troops and population with a blast of enhanced radiation but did little damage to terrain or infrastructure. Though it was designed for antitank strikes, the minds at the Pentagon imagined scenarios they called “area denial” where geographical regions could be poisoned to prevent enemy troops from moving in … or out.

  The port of Al Luḩayyah was like that. Shoot, starve, or bludgeon the resistance or invaders without damaging the ships, maintenance systems, or housing. It was an insidious tactic designed to support and prolong war, not to end it.

  They reached the port unmolested. Breen was standing, leaning on the panel in back of the cab, facing forward. He and Williams saw it first: there was just an abandoned container ship and several rowboats in the port. No fishing boats, no tugs, no patrol vessels. Nothing with a motor to get them where they needed to go.

  The major looked around.

  “What’s wrong?” Rivette asked.

  “We have to find a place to bunk down,” he said. “This plan isn’t going to work.”

  Williams heard him and had reached the same conclusion. Open channel or no, he had to contact Berry. There was a burned-out grocery store on the road that ran along the coast. The shop would have a basement. If there was no one inside, that was where they would go.

  His spirits sinking, Williams turned the wheel and headed for the bleak, unlit shell of a building.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The White House, Washington, D.C.

  July 24, 2:30 p.m.

  Berry sat in his small office, the door closed, his mind open, his hopes somewhere in the middle. He was looking through a database of the Yemeni Shia insurgency. Whoever met Salehi would also have the resources to protect him. That meant Shia fighters.

  “That means a force of Shia fighters large enough to repel an attack they have to suspect is coming,” he murmured.

  The bloody country had more factions than Washington had lobbyists. The trick to locating the right group was the same as Black Wasp had mana
ged to achieve in Trinidad: find the safe house or hideout. The key to that was identifying a spot where the enemy did not go. Possibly because there was intel, possibly because they had lost people, probably both.

  He looked up Saudi and Sudanese movements in Aden. The port city was a relative Sunni stronghold due to the fact that insurgents could infiltrate from the north and by sea, and the men did not do much to disguise their clothes or the cafes they frequented. Those hangouts had already been identified by Sunni operatives hired by the U.S. eight years earlier during the secular civil war that was part of the wider, poverty-and-politics-fueled uprising of the Arab Spring. Unfortunately, the Yemeni recruits were not professionals and suffered a high mortality rate—or else they took their profits and left the lethal gaming table.

  Berry sent his request for a wardrobe identification scan to Kathleen Hays, asking her to search using a variation of facial-recognition software. The program identified clothing and tracked it over days to create time-lapse images tracking the movements of individuals. When enough individuals in a group were charted, then group patterns became known.

  Moments after he sent his request, he got a response—but it was not about the clothing.

  Likely match for Hodeida International Airport truck. Seen 23 minutes later, Sadi Shipping sector, Aden seaport.

  That was something, and Berry asked for the exact coordinates. Satellite views showed a large complex of nondescript structures, with dockworkers moving about. That wasn’t enough to help Black Wasp.

  “They can’t go door to door,” he said.

  The desk phone rang and, unthinking, Berry picked it up without checking the ID.

  “Rumor has it that you authorized two off-the-book military flights,” said the caller.

  “I did, January,” Berry replied smoothly.

  Her voice thick, low, and unhappy, January Dow went on: “The flights were to and from Trinidad, where there was a dust-up with JAM terrorists—the group likely involved in the Montreal murders; and then from Guantánamo—which happens to be in that very same Caribbean neighborhood—to Saudi Arabia. Is there intel you are not sharing, Matt?”

  “Where would I get intel that didn’t originate with you or one of the other agencies?” he asked.

  “Don’t be a shit,” she said. “I know you have personal dealings with the Mossad, with MI5, with General Intelligence in Riyadh to name a few. What are you not telling me?”

  “You?”

  “Us,” she corrected herself.

  “Why don’t you ask your boss, the president,” he said.

  “Our boss,” she corrected him. “Why the hell would you run a secret operation on something this important?”

  “So far, you’re the only one who has said anything about secrets and missions,” he said.

  He could hear her breathing through her nose. “All right, Matt. Play your hand. But I promise you, if you are violating one word of the Homeland Security Act then you will follow your friend Chase Williams out the window.”

  “If I’m lucky, then, I’ll land on him, cushion my fall.”

  January hung up and Berry knew that time was as short as the president had suggested the night before.

  At least he has plausible deniability, Berry thought. I’m the only one with fingerprints all over this.

  He prayed that Black Wasp had received the message he sent to Amit Ben Kimon, and that everything had worked out in Harad. If it had not, he did not risk texting to the cell phone in case it had fallen into the hands of the Yemeni military.

  The only thought left was an oath, which he uttered, then went back to see if there was any intelligence on the Sadi warehouses. Nothing came up.

  He wondered, with a stabbing moment of irony, if he should call January Dow to find out what she knew.

  If I thought it would help them, I would, he said as he looked at his stubbornly silent smartphone.…

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Al Luḩayyah, Yemen

  July 24, 10:39 p.m.

  Williams parked the truck in front of a boathouse down the road from the grocery, and they made their quiet way along the deserted street. Nighttime was for smugglers and most people had no reason to come here. Given the active search for Black Wasp, smugglers might not come here tonight either.

  Hopefully, if the team needed the truck, it would still be there; if anyone found it, they would likely assume the people who stole it were gone, out to sea, and not hiding down the block.

  The grocery store was seven aisles of empty shelves, spent ammunition, shattered glass, and blood. There was dog feces on the floor; it was old, indicating how long it had been since there was anything edible here.

  At least, Williams thought, it did not smell of rotted meat. The animals had made off with that.

  The cigarettes were gone but there were matches, and Williams used them to find the basement. They weren’t as bright as the light on his SID and, though the battery had a forty-hour life, he saw no reason to waste any of that.

  The basement was located down a short flight of stairs. It was stuffy and hot; during the heat of the day it was probably stifling. The room was nearly the size of the store above and it had obviously been used as a prison, possibly as an interrogation center. There were empty beverage cans, cigarette butts, chairs with rope tied to the armrests, two pairs of handcuffs on the floor, and more blood.

  After checking to make sure it was sturdy, Rivette dropped into one of the wooden chairs. Grace stood and removed her head and face coverings. Breen sat on the stairs. It felt good to plant himself on something that wasn’t jostling.

  As soon as everyone was settled, Williams dropped the match he was holding and turned on the SID. He used the text function to minimize noise. It also occurred to him that the others had no idea who he was working for or with. Though it wasn’t high on his list of concerns, Berry might want to keep it that way.

  Amit murdered by Yemeni who took his place. Killer is dead. We are safe in Al Luḩayyah cellar with no way to get to Aden.

  It took nearly a minute for Berry to respond. Silence had never sounded so deep, and so deeply unsettling; they not only had no way to get to Aden, they had no means of getting anywhere safe.

  USN won’t go there. Can you put to sea at all?

  Williams replied, unsure if his not-so-mild sarcasm would translate:

  Rowboats.

  A longer silence followed. Williams picked up a few greasy rags and found his mind drifting to the men they had killed back at the exit ramp. It was not guilt but profound regret, and he tamped it down by telling the others that the Navy wouldn’t come here.

  “It’s too incendiary,” Breen said. “The Red Sea, I mean.”

  “Why?” Rivette asked.

  “These are major Saudi shipping lanes,” he said. “I read the intelligence reports on the plane. The corridor from Hodeida to Harad is still a Shia stronghold but the Saudi Sunnis have been probing for soft spots.”

  “That explains the all-out effort against us on the highway,” Rivette said.

  “Exactly,” Breen told him. “The Houthis have been threatening to attack crews and blow up shipping, make the waterways unpassable. The Saudis are American allies—”

  “So a Navy ship would make them go crazy,” Rivette said. “Even a dinghy.”

  “It’s happened before,” Breen explained. “The U.S. Navy transport HSV-2 Swift was hit by an antiship missile in October 2016. The destroyer USS Mason was fired at but not damaged after that. We responded with a Tomahawk missile and other armaments—”

  “Which is why there’s nothing legal going on out there,” Rivette said, cocking his head in the direction of the sea.

  “That, plus oil spills,” Breen said. “The older tankers leak. It washes ashore here. Fishermen can’t earn a living.”

  “So, economy, too,” Rivette said.

  “There’s a big cash conflict going on below the surface,” Breen said. “Saudis are building the world’s largest oil tanker flee
t. That threatens the big player here, Sadi Shipping. This isn’t just about Shia versus Sunni. It’s about the economic resources to keep Yemen afloat.”

  Williams was impressed at how much Breen had read, retained, and most importantly contextualized. He finally understood why this man was part of the Black Wasps.

  Berry answered then.

  Arranged pickup at sea, Saudi tanker Dima, +/-2:15 a.m. Going Aden. Speak English to lookout. Spot ship passing at +/-1:00 for distance.

  The clock on the phone had just scraped past eleven. That was a lot of time to avoid being spotted. But it was the best offer on the table and they had to take it—even if to just get out of Yemen.

  Williams was about to acknowledge and sign off when Berry wrote:

  Kathleen Hays at NRO has update. Wardrobe ID Puts +/- dozen supporters of Allah Houthi at dock. Top stealth fighters. Likely guards for target.

  Williams texted back:

  Acknowledged, understood.

  Berry wished them Godspeed, and Williams knew he meant it—maybe, even, for more than just his job.

  You are getting too cynical, he thought. Lose your humanity in this place and you will never find it.

  Williams lit a match and ignited the rags to give him a larger—but not too large—fire. Then he updated the others, earning universal scowls from the team. Not only would they have to reconnoiter and survive here for over three hours, they would have to row into the Red Sea, at night, in a rising wind.

  “And—hold on,” Rivette said, creeping back upstairs. He paused at the top of the steps. “Yeah,” he said and came back down. “It’s drizzling and blowing in.”

  “It has to rain here, what, twice a year?” Grace said. “Lucky us.”

  “It actually might be,” Breen said. “Should keep the patrols down. Even soldiers need to collect drinking water.”

  “Lance corporal, why don’t you—” Williams said, then checked himself.

  This was a military democracy. He had to get used to that. “We should rest, eat, maybe collect some of that water ourselves,” he suggested. “We’ll also need a sentry.”