The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  I screamed, trying to close the distance between us, but this time physics wasn’t on my side. The pistol fired, and the report was loud enough that I thought my eardrums had burst, which was strange, because dead men don’t usually care about burst eardrums. Then I realized that the report had sounded so incredibly loud because it had actually been two gunshots instead of one—a shotgun blast from behind me followed by Oliver’s Glock.

  And that made sense because Oliver was now lying on his back, unmoving, with a beanbag-sized indent in his skull.

  “Did you mean what you said, lad?” Nolan said from behind me. “About a second chance.”

  “I did,” I said, turning to face the Irishman.

  He still had his shotgun at low ready, but it wasn’t exactly pointed at me. Of course, it wasn’t exactly pointed away either, but I’d take what I could get.

  “I can’t guarantee what will happen,” I said, “but I’ll try to bring you in. I give you my word.”

  “I suppose that’s all I can ask,” Nolan said, lowering the shotgun. “Either way, I’d rather have you as a friend than an enemy. All right, then. Let’s go find your wife.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  They say that politics makes for strange bedfellows, and the battlefield is no exception. Even so, this was a first for me. In the almost decade I’d been making my living at the pointy end of the spear, I’d worked with everyone from Kurdish freedom fighters to Afghan warlords. I considered myself pretty open when it came to operational allies. Still, I’d never partnered with a former member of the IRA.

  “This way,” Nolan said, leading me past the sprawled bodies at a sprint. “We must move quickly.”

  In this, my new Irish friend and I were in violent agreement. I might have escaped the Devil’s clutches unnoticed once, but he would make sure to keep better track of me this time. Sooner or later, he’d be expecting a check-in from his commando henchmen. When that didn’t come, Laila would pay the price.

  We must move quickly might just have been the understatement of the century.

  “Where are we going?” I said as Nolan swung to the left, following a hallway that by my reckoning led to the opposite side of the palace from where we’d entered.

  “With the ongoing Iranian offensive, the roads are too dangerous. The bodachs who have your wife will be using the helicopter.”

  “Helicopter?” I said.

  “Yes. There are two outside.”

  Of course there were. We’d seen two helicopter pads on our Google Earth recon. It only made sense that two helicopters would occupy them. It also explained the Devil’s sudden appearance after the Israelis had locked down his phone in Syria. I assumed that the Iranians weren’t the only ones traveling by helicopter.

  “Faster,” I said to Nolan. “If Laila gets in a helicopter, we’ve lost her.”

  As if to give voice to my fears, the unmistakable whine of turbine engines spooling up filled the air. The helicopters. We weren’t going to make it.

  And then I had a thought.

  Like all modern aircraft, helicopters relied on GPS to navigate. I was betting that the frequency bands that the satellite-based navigation signals utilized would probably also be affected by the Devil’s military-grade jammer. This meant that for the helicopters to align their internal navigation systems prior to departure, the Devil would first need to switch off his jammer.

  Digging my cell phone from my pocket, I looked at the display and nearly laughed with relief. The Wi-Fi band was still jammed, but I had cell service. I dialed Zain’s number and held the device to my ear.

  “Matthew?” Zain said. “Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me. I need—”

  “It’s a trap, Matthew. The Devil owns Oliver. He’s waiting for you to—”

  “I know, my friend. I know. The Devil found us.”

  “And you’re still alive?”

  “I am. Virginia is not.”

  “No! I—”

  “Listen, my friend,” I said. “I need your help. The Devil has my wife.”

  “Your wife?” Zain said.

  “I don’t have time to explain. Where are you?”

  “Outside the building with my men. We’re waiting in overwatch as planned.”

  “Can you see the helicopters?” I said. “They’re on the red side.”

  “Helicopters? Why?”

  “I think my wife is on one of them,” I said.

  “Stand by,” Zain said. “I can’t see the red side from here. We’re moving.”

  Seventeen years of hitting target buildings in search of HVTs had taught the special operations community a thing or two about deconflicting fires and segmenting objectives. Rather than being designated by cardinal directions or left and right, the faces of a target building were now designated by color.

  In this case, Zain and his men were set up to monitor the side of the building closest to the road, or the green side. In order to get a bead on the helipad, they’d need to maneuver to get line of sight on the red side, closest to the river.

  Which would take time.

  Time that Laila didn’t have.

  “We have the helipads in sight,” Zain said, sounding out of breath. “Each is occupied by a single helicopter. The rotors of both helicopters are turning. What should we do?”

  What indeed.

  “Stand by,” I said, sprinting to catch up with the Irishman, who was waiting for me next to the far door. “Does this go outside?” I said to Nolan. “To the helicopter pads?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far to the helicopters?”

  Nolan shrugged. “Maybe fifty meters?”

  I paused, considering my options. As of this moment, I had to believe that the Devil was unaware of my escape. But if I popped out of the doorway like a jack-in-the-box, he might see me.

  And then the jig would be up.

  “Matthew,” Zain said. “Both aircraft are preparing to take off. We have just seconds.”

  At that moment, a boom reverberated through the building, setting the overhead light swinging on its narrow cable.

  I looked at the Irishman, and he had a dumbfounded expression that mirrored mine. Whatever was happening now hadn’t been on his agenda either.

  “Zain,” I said, mashing the transmit button on my cell, “what the fuck was that?”

  “The Iraqi army has arrived. They’re breaching the building.”

  “With what? Another one of your cruise missiles?”

  “No, Matthew. A tank. A big one.”

  Holy hell. General Mattis famously said that when you know you’re headed to a gunfight, you should bring all your friends with guns. While I agreed in principle, I also thought it best to make sure your friends didn’t accidentally get shot in the back.

  “Zain,” I said, “is your diversion ready?”

  “Of course. Do we fire on the gate now?”

  “Change of plans,” I said. “Does the gunner have line of sight to the helicopters?”

  A pause that was much too long, and then: “Yes.”

  “Have him shift his aimpoint to the ground between them and stand by.”

  Nolan heard only my half of the conversation, but I could still tell by his incredulous look that he thought I’d lost my mind. Which was fair, because I wasn’t really in a position to argue.

  Still, two helicopters spinning up meant that two groups of people were leaving. Given what I knew about the Devil, I was betting that those two groups of people were probably traveling to two different destinations. After all, if the Devil intended to head to Iran, he could take Laila there himself.

  Also, the Iraqi army was breaching his palace with a main battle tank. While I hadn’t been an armor officer, it didn’t take a genius to realize that an almost-fifty-ton tank didn’t just sneak up on you.

 
If I had to guess, someone had tipped the Devil off and he’d decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He was abandoning his sex-trafficked girls and roomful of potential customers in order to ensure that he could live to fight another day. That meant that one of the helicopters held Laila and her Iranian captors, and the other the Devil, which in turn meant that one of those birds needed to be transformed into a ball of flames.

  I just needed to figure out which was which.

  “Matthew, the helicopters are lifting off.”

  I waited an agonizing second and then burst through the door, Nolan on my heels. As expected, I could hear the roar of turbine engines, but couldn’t see the helicopters through the cloud of grit and sand generated by their rotor wash. This was good, because if I couldn’t see the helicopters, their occupants shouldn’t be able to see me.

  In theory.

  “Zain,” I said, shouting over the shrieking engines, “do you know who’s in what helicopter?”

  “No, Matthew,” Zain said. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Are you with the man with the diversion device?”

  “Yes.”

  “Put your hand on his shoulder. Make sure he doesn’t fire until you give him the word. Understand?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. But which one? Which helicopter?”

  Which indeed. Two helicopters with two very different passenger manifests. If I was right, one of them held Laila and one held the Devil.

  That was a very big if.

  The aircraft lifted together, clawing skyward as another boom rocked the palace. I’d attended several breaching courses during my time in the Ranger Regiment, and while I’d learned my share of field-expedient breaches, I’d never seen one that utilized the gun of a main battle tank.

  First time for everything.

  The dust cloud billowed, expanding outward like the aftershock from an IED. Then the helicopters popped out of the cloud. For a heart-stopping moment, they both flew eastward in formation. Then the trail aircraft broke to the left, heading west toward Syria, while the lead aircraft continued east.

  East toward Iran and the advancing army.

  I had my answer.

  “Zain, target the aircraft heading west. I say again, target the aircraft breaking over the river. Confirm my last.”

  “Which helicopter, Matthew? Which one?”

  Son of a bitch. I looked at Nolan and saw the shotgun he was holding.

  “Do you have anything besides beanbag rounds for that?” I said.

  “Slugs,” Nolan said.

  “Give them here.”

  Racking the shotgun’s slide, I ejected the remaining beanbag rounds and then loaded six slugs.

  “Zain,” I said as I was loading, “you need to target the helicopter flying west. I say again, west. I will try to designate the direction with my shotgun. Look for the sparks.”

  I might as well have told Zain to look for Tinker Bell and follow her fairy dust toward the helicopter. With an M4 and tracer rounds, what I was suggesting might have been possible. A shotgun firing slugs had a range of about seventy-five meters. I had no chance of even reaching the helicopter, assuming Zain was even in a position to see me.

  But I put the shotgun to my shoulder anyway and sighted down the barrel. I was still a Ranger, and Rangers didn’t quit.

  “The fuel cans,” Nolan said, hitting me in the shoulder. “Shoot the fuel cans.”

  I looked from the Irishman to his outstretched finger and saw the pile of fuel cans next to the stack of generators providing power to the palace. Goddamn, but I was an idiot. Adjusting my aimpoint, I fired round after round into the fuel cans. The first two did nothing, but the third spun a can up in the air, trailing fuel behind it. Fuel that sprayed across the hot generators.

  A second later, the vapor ignited in a satisfying whoosh that enveloped the generators.

  “Zain, do you see the burning fuel cans?” I said.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “Look above and find your target.”

  “Target acquired.”

  “Fire the device!”

  The word device was a bit of a misnomer. During the planning phase of this goat rope of an operation, I’d told Zain we needed to have a diversion on standby. Not a Tomahawk-missile-level diversion, but something big enough to get the Devil’s attention. With this in mind, I’d asked to see his weapons inventory, and after a little misdirection, Zain had grudgingly obliged.

  One look into the warehouse he called an armory and I saw why. The gear he had “acquired” rivaled my company armory back in the Ranger Regiment. Most was Russian stock, which eased my conscience somewhat since that meant Zain hadn’t been stealing all of the supplies I’d paid him to deliver to the Syrian freedom fighters.

  However, he did have a healthy selection of American weapons, including several antitank missiles. The tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided—or TOW—missiles were nice if you could mount the launcher to a technical or a Humvee, but I was looking for something man-portable. Like the two boxes Zain had tried to steer me past. But one look at the nomenclature and I knew what was in them.

  I’d asked him where he’d acquired this particular merchandise, but I might as well have been asking a fish why water was wet. Some things just were because they were.

  A flash split the night sky to my right. A millisecond later, an ember of flame streaked overhead, trailing a cloud of noxious smoke and the particular whooshing sound a solid-propellant rocket engine makes in boost phase. I tracked the projectile’s trajectory for the two seconds it took to intercept the helicopter.

  Then there was a second, brighter flash of light, and the Devil was no more.

  The explosion’s rolling boom reached us a second later, like thunder after lightning, but by then done was done. Thanks to a Javelin antitank missile and a Syrian smuggler’s gunnery skills, the Devil was now in hell with his namesake. Ordinarily, this would have been a time for high fives and fist bumps, but the second helicopter, the one containing my wife and her Iranian captors, was still heading eastward as fast as its jet engines could carry it.

  The Devil might have been out of play, but Laila was still in danger.

  “What now?” Nolan said, reading my mind.

  “Now it’s time to finish this.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  To his credit, the Irishman didn’t question the logic of my statement. He simply looked in the direction that the helicopter carrying Laila had disappeared, and then turned back to me.

  “Then you’re going to need wings,” Nolan said. “Have ye got any?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I’m working on it.”

  Which was true, after a fashion. What was also true was that I didn’t have a clue how I was going to get to Laila before she and the Quds Force men kidnapping her disappeared into the welcoming arms of the advancing Iranian army. Fortunately, my cell phone chose that moment to erupt, saving me from explaining to the Irishman how I was going to magically produce wings.

  “Matthew?” Zain said. “Matthew? Did we hit the right one?”

  “Good shooting, Zain,” I said. “But now we need to get my wife. Do you have a helicopter?”

  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have bothered to ask such a ridiculous question, but since the smuggler had managed to somehow appropriate a Javelin missile, I didn’t think a helicopter was really too large a leap. Besides, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  “Sorry, Matthew. Not close by. I can get one in perhaps a day—does this help?”

  No, it most certainly did not. But that wasn’t Zain’s problem; it was mine. So I pivoted.

  “Don’t worry about it. But can you meet me at the helipad with one of the assault packs? I’m a little light on weapons and equipment.”

  “Yes, Matthew. I’m coming.”

  The Irishman looke
d at me like I had horns growing from my forehead. “Ye’ve found wings now, then?” Nolan said.

  “Not yet,” I said, thumbing a new number into my cell phone. “But I’ve got a guardian angel.”

  At least I hoped I still had one. To be fair, he’d never let me down before. Then again, I’d never asked him to pull a fucking helicopter out of his magic hat. But what good were guardian angels if they couldn’t do a little magic every now and then?

  I tried to do the time-zone conversion while the phone rang, but gave up. He would answer. He always answered.

  On the fifth ring, a familiar baritone came across the line. “Hello?”

  “Frodo, it’s me.”

  “Matty? Holy shit, brother. I knew you were going in dark, but what happened to the scheduled check-ins? It’s been days.”

  “I’m in trouble,” I said. “I don’t have time to explain, but all comms are compromised. This line included. I need your help.”

  “Roger that,” Frodo said, immediately transitioning to business. “Give me a SITREP and tell me what you need.”

  “Roger,” I said. “SITREP as follows. Three Iranian Quds Force operatives have kidnapped Laila. They just departed my location in a Russian-made helicopter heading east. I believe they intend to link up with an IRGC mechanized division currently moving into Iraq. I need to interdict the helicopter before it reaches the division’s frontline trace.”

  “Copy all,” Frodo said. “I take it you need transportation?”

  “That’s affirm. Something fast. The helicopter’s got a five-minute head start and counting. Stand by for my grid.”

  “Send it.”

  I read Frodo the GPS coordinates from my phone and then confirmed the alphanumeric sequence after Frodo repeated it back to me.

  “Okay,” Frodo said. “Be ready to roll. I’ll call you with details on this line. Do you have a range and bearing to the helicopter?”