by Tim Curran
“We’d need some human intelligence for that,” Mason said, expressing exactly what they were all thinking. “Without HUMINT, without someone on the ground...”
Costello shook his head. “Shit, Syria’s a hard target. Especially these days. Do we have anyone solid?”
All eyes went to DCI Pershing, the resident spymaster. He shook his head. “No… we don’t have any assets I’d trust with something of this magnitude. Everything’s in disarray since the withdrawal of our forces.”
Mason lit another cigarette. “Screw it. This is too big. Get some drones in there.”
VanderMissen shook his head. “We’ve already lost two in the attempt. One had mechanical failure, the other was shot down.”
Mason said, “All right, put Delta Force or some SEALs on the ground, recon the situation.”
SecDef Thorogood shook his dead. “No. I wouldn’t want any conventional SpecOps in on this.”
“Those boys are hardly conventional,” Mason pointed out.
“No, this is too…touchy.”
“Well, get some spooks in there then.”
VanderMissen smiled, sitting down, liking as always Mason’s direct line of thinking. “Bob?”
DCI Pershing got up before the display. He went back to the map. He looked at those gathered, slowly, thoughtfully. “As of tonight, we’re going to do just that. We will have someone on the ground.”
Everyone looked at him.
“As we speak, a SAC/SOG team is on its way to Cypress,” he explained referring to the CIA’s clandestine Special Activities Center and the elite Special Operations Group, its paramilitary wing. “Tonight the SOG team will be in Kuwait. And tomorrow night—tomorrow afternoon for us—they’ll parachute into the desert. We’re going to get some actionable intel on this one way or another, gentlemen.”
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:
CBT CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS
6:10 P.M.
Ah, Elizabeth Toma thought with some amusement, the world spins, revolves, rotates, and the only constant is survival and death. And though this might have been a chilling, helpless realization for someone else, to Elizabeth it was validation of her personal belief system. No more, no less.
Through the windows of her executive suite, she looked out over the VA Bio+Tech Park, a sprawling vertical city of glass towers and boxes, prismatic atriums, and glazed façades like greenhouses stacked one atop another. They dazzled the eye and stretched the mind with their abstract architecture. Pretty, pretty, pretty. Modern and multi-functional, the campus of Virginia Commonwealth in the distance, it was the seething lair of researchers, entrepreneurs, financiers and executives. The shining jewel of the Mid-Atlantic Biotech Corridor.
“And nothing but anthills,” she said under her breath.
And that was going to become all-too apparent in the coming weeks as all that the masses had come to believe in and trust came crashing down around them. Maybe they didn’t see their modern world as a house of cards waiting for a good wind to blow it all down, but that’s exactly what it was.
Although on paper CBT conducted cutting-edge research into pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, nanobiotechnology and molecular biology, stem cell bio and global health and synthetics, it was also a major black biology contractor for the Defense Department. In its Level Four biosafety facilities deep underground, CBT routinely amplified hot strains of lethal bioagents, perfected delivery systems for biological weapons, and genetically engineered life forms that could not—and should not—exist under natural conditions.
Though the former activities were perfectly legitimate, the black biology was illegal as hell, yet it went on ceaselessly beneath the noses of the CDC and other regulatory agencies. With billions at stake, there was always a way.
As she waited for Bob Pershing to call, she sipped from a glass of fine Madeira that was over a hundred years old (and went for something like $5000 a bottle if you could find it), a gift from a Russian colleague, and contemplated the end of the world.
She thought of money.
She thought of power.
She contemplated the enormous amount of both that she wielded, the people she had bought and sold, coerced and collected through extortion, controlled with systematic blackmailing by gathering incriminating, embarrassing, or socially damaging information about them and their families. To an outsider, she would have been seen as a corporate weasel, her activities disgusting and reprehensible, but the world of D.C. politics was social Darwinism in action. It was business as usual inside the Beltway and everybody played the game in one way or another.
She controlled an impressive network of politicians, lobbyists, and power players, many of whom opposed the policies she and her confederates pushed, but in the end they drank the Kool-Aid because it was better than being publicly humiliated and tossed out of office. This was the machine she owned and did her bidding.
It made her think of her mom and dad, humble immigrants from Yokohama that simply wanted to fit in and become part of the American dream. They never had any idea what a nightmare it indeed was once you flipped it over and studied its soft, white underbelly in any detail.
She supposed it was as an undergraduate studying biophysics at Rutgers that she first began to question the dream, noticing with rising cynicism that those with power believed they had the God-given right to impose their will upon those who had none. It was how the political structure of the university worked, from the administrative branches to the departments and committees.
Yes, on paper there was such a thing as democracy, but not in practice. Not in the real world.
It was also at Rutgers where she first read Huxley’s Brave New World, wherein the future population was pharmaceutically drugged into loving its own servitude. It made her think of her parents and their friends, in fact, all the adults she knew. All of whom were drones that perpetually fooled themselves into believing they were free.
The very idea was ridiculous, of course. By the time your average American had graduated high school, his or her mind was already rigidly controlled and compartmentalized. Conditioned by eighteen years of schooling so they could fit seamlessly into the adult world where their fears and needs would be expertly exploited by those in power. Through spin and psychological manipulation and careful, methodical brainwashing, they would work and pay taxes and vote and even sacrifice their sons and daughters in wars, believing it was an honor to die for something that was realistically no threat to them.
It was known collectively as conformity, of course. But in reality it was a system in which the working class were bound by rules and regulations which the ruling elite were exempt from.
This was how the machine operated.
The only real threat to the machine had been the counter-culture back in the 1960s. It became too powerful, too influential, and for a time it seemed the old, well-entrenched power structure might collapse under this global awakening. Such a thing was unacceptable. Which was why it could never be allowed to happen again. Wars were necessary for political maneuvering and corporate profit. Without them, the machine would stop. And it was with this in mind that the military-industrial complex had forever seized control of not only the government and corporate entities, but the media systems, thereby controlling the masses without them ever realizing they were being controlled at all.
The Internet had been a blessing for the spin doctors and social engineers. Here was a way to Big Brother your way into everyone’s life at a frenetic pace, overwhelming and confusing them with data overload until they accepted things which would have been abhorrent just a few generations before. It was the perfect tool to continue the dumbing down of the populace who were now a body of non-thinkers and intellectual weaklings conditioned to accept and never question.
That was how the machine ran—fueled by taxpayer dollars, its gears well-greased by the blood of their sons and daughters which they sacrificed willingly.
Elizabeth stared at her phone. “C’mon, Bob,” she said under her br
eath.
She controlled a lot of people, but even she had to answer to someone, and it was these individuals that she dared not disappoint.
The phone rang.
“Well?” she said, dispensing with any form of greeting.
“They reacted exactly as we planned,” DCI Pershing said. “It couldn’t have gone any smoother. They’re afraid. They’re willing to do just about anything to control it.”
“Good, Bob, good. Keep me posted.”
“Count on it.”
There. It was beginning. It was finally beginning. Elizabeth sighed. She stared out through the windows, seeing beyond the Bio+Tech Park and into the country itself. Terror was beginning. It already had a foothold that would soon escalate out of control as an extremely unpleasant organism began its burn through the population. She thought of all the people that were going to suffer, to die as a nightmare beyond imagining took their world.
Another swallow of Madeira and she had the strength to make the call to those who stood in the shadows. Because as Bob Dylan had said, we all had to serve somebody.
Dabbing sweat from her temple, she did just that.
MAY 13
SYRIA’S EASTERN DESERT: EL BADJI
12:41 A.M. (SYRIAN TIME)
"All right, girls,” Colonel Loomis hissed in the darkness, “drop your socks and grab your cocks, stow that gear or we’ll be having breakfast in a Damascus prison.”
He watched his team cut into the hard, dry earth with their shovels, digging deeper and deeper until they had a nice trench going. Quietly, carefully, the parachutes, packs, and jump helmets were placed in it. Not thrown, but placed gently like newborns into cribs.
That’s it, Loomis thought, bury it up real nice. Pack it down tight, spread a light layer of soil and rocks over it. The wind will do the rest. By morning, nobody will ever spot it.
When they were done, the five of them gathered around Loomis in the murk.
“Before we go, remember this is strictly recon. I want noise discipline,” he told them, even thought they were all pros and knew better. “We’ll take a look, grab a few snapshots and some video, then back to the LZ for extraction. Any questions? Good. Pitts take the point. You know the way.”
The Syrian desert at the Iraqi border was like the dark side of the moon.
Hundreds of desolate miles of bleak, rocky nothingness. The wind howled and carried the ugly cold bite of the winter that was to come. It was like Antarctica: endless, alien, lonely. Hot as a frying pan in the summer, colder than a meat locker in winter. May was a transitional time in the desert: cold nights and warm days. It was home to Bedouin nomads and their scraggly herds of sheep and goats. Lizards, poisonous snakes, wiry grasses, thorny bushes. Not much else but sand, rocks, and time itself. It was a place where a stranger could get lost at night mere feet from his door. Where the night and sand and blowing wind created a nightmare landscape of confusion.
On maps, trails and landmarks were easily sighted, easily followed; on the ground—particularly in the desert—they merged, moved, and vanished entirely. But Loomis wasn’t worried about getting lost.
He’d been here numerous times.
Maybe not this particular stretch of real estate, but in others very similar in Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan and Yemen. He was a twenty-odd year veteran of special operations. There were few hotspots or hellholes he hadn’t waded through in that time. Jungles, deserts, swamps, and frozen mountain tops were home to him. He could navigate his way through the worse terrain and often just by instinct. You got that way after a while.
If you lived long enough.
Loomis had handpicked this team on a moment’s notice.
He was traveling in good company.
Dunn was second in command. An eighteen year veteran of the Navy SEALs, he was a Navy Cross winner and was literally unstoppable: nothing got between him and his target. If they did, they usually ended up with a bullet in their head or with their throats slit or necks snapped. Creech was an ex-SAS sergeant major. He’d honed his deadly skills in Northern Ireland, Oman, and Malaya. Like Dunn, absolutely lethal. Then there was Childress. A veteran of the Army Rangers and Green Berets, he lived entirely for operations like this. It was the only time he came to life. It was in his blood. Pitts, a fifteen-year veteran of Marine Corps special operations and Horse, a Delta Force vet, rounded out the team. Horse was a full-blooded Cree Indian and the best scout/sniper Loomis had ever seen. His tracking skills were almost supernatural.
They were all good.
Dressed in black fatigues with black watch caps pulled down over their ears, their faces were smeared with black camo grease. They wore fingerless black neoprene gloves and Night Vision goggles. Although they carried a lot of equipment—radios, machine pistols, knives, cameras—nothing made a sound as they stalked the desert. Everything was strapped or taped down. And anything with a shine to it was painted flat black.
They were shadows and nothing more.
They carried neutral equipment from a dozen countries, sported no vanity tattoos or piercings. If they died out there, no one would be able to tell what country they’d come from. And none of them would be taken alive. If they had to die, they’d kill as many of the enemy as possible before taking their own lives.
Each man had a cyanide tablet taped to his wrist.
Once it was bitten, death came quickly.
Loomis studied the terrain as they went—hills, rocky outcroppings, scrubby brush, and hard-packed plateau. Although it was monotonous country to the extreme, Loomis committed it to memory. He was always on the lookout for defensible perimeters, good ambush and kill zones. The NV goggles gave everything a surreal, greenish cast. He was sure they were going the right way, yet from time to time he stopped and checked GPS. 10,000 miles above, TACSAT was guiding them in the right direction, watching their every move and sending a real-time transmission of the same back to the Pentagon.
Up ahead, Pitts halted, crouching down. The others followed suit.
“What do you got?” Loomis whispered into his throat mike.
“Three camels... no, four... with riders coming over the ridge,” Pitts voice said in his earphone.
“Into the rocks,” Loomis said.
The six of them melted into the jagged fissures of volcanic rock. The camels, as promised, made their appearance. They and their riders halted at the top of the ridge. Bedouins, Loomis saw. Dressed in dusty robes and checkered khafias, they were armed with old WWII bolt-action rifles. They seemed to be looking for something. Their leader, an old man who sported a beard nearly to his belly, pointed off to the west and they rode away. Bedouins were not unfriendly to strangers, but neither did they trust them nor like them. They did not choose sides. They had no use for armies or governments, for terror groups or the men who hunted them; theirs was a society that predated such things.
The rocky dips and rises gave way to endless rolling sand dunes. In the emerald glow of the NVGs, they were like the crashing waves of some awesome primordial ocean frozen in time. Pitts went up the ridge, went down on his knees, looked around. He motioned to the team and they followed him into the sea of sand.
It seemed to go for days.
In reality, it was less than two hours walking time. Had it been nice, flat earth, they would’ve made their target in forty-five minutes or less. But with the dunes and rocks and the constant stopping to check the GPS and Pitts pausing to scan the horizon... it took time.
But that was okay.
They were all professionals and if special or irregular warfare taught you nothing else, it taught you patience. Loomis knew that well enough. Hours and hours spent lying in the jungle grass on ambush. Week-long treks behind enemy lines on long-range reconnaissance patrols. Entire days spent hiding in trees waiting for the perfect killshot on an enemy officer. Day after grueling day spent trailing enemy units to their base camps. The entire time you never spoke, you rarely ate or slept. Sometimes you’d creep up so close, the enemy would urinate on you as you h
id in the brush but even then you wouldn’t move.
You learned patience. Or you died.
Take Horse for example
When they were in Kuwait back in the ‘90s, Loomis remembered how Horse would go out at night alone. How he’d stalk an As Saiqa unit, Republican Guard Special Forces, taking them one by one with a silenced rifle. He’d spend hours and hours lining up a kill. And if it was somebody special, say a political officer or extremist operations chief, he’d lay in wait in the same position for days. He’d piss himself, shit himself, go crazy with the bugs biting his face, but he would not move. Not until after he’d pulled the trigger and his quarry’s skull had gone to hamburger.
Patience, always patience.
Things had gone good so far, Loomis knew. They’d flown over the border in a Combat Talon cargo plane piloted by men of the Air Force’s 20th Special Operations Squadron. The Talon was a souped-up C-130 Hercules loaded with sophisticated navigation and radar-evasion equipment. It could drop a team in and get out and nobody would be the wiser. The Drop Zone was a barren plain four miles south of El Badji. They’d made a quick-delivery para-insertion from 600 feet. And the great thing was that everyone had made it down okay. No broken bones, no sprains. And that was outstanding when you considered that the DZ consisted of the hard-packed, sun-dried clay of a dry riverbed.
“We got activity ahead,” Pitts said in Loomis’ ear.
Everyone was already down on their bellies, lizard-crawling up the dune to join him.
They couldn’t see too much out there.
Just the night pressing in from all sides, the dull gray Syrian terrain. But in the distance... lights. Flickering, flashing. A small pocket of life.
Loomis knew they’d arrived, but he checked the GPS.
Yeah, no doubt about it: this was El Badji.
“Pitts, Horse... take us in. Rest of you... spread out. Let’s do this real slow.”
