The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  David transmitted, “Positive. All crates accounted for. Will send serial numbers when able—”

  An explosion in the village cut his transmission short.

  The team fell into the prone, Ian the last to hit the ground. Orienting his weapon toward the noise, he caught a brief glimpse of a fireball ascending over the rooftops before fading to black, leaving only an ashy green smear of smoke visible in his night vision. There was a brief chatter of gunfire before he heard the revving of vehicle engines.

  Ian asked, “What the hell was that?”

  It was Cancer who replied, having assessed the situation at the first blast.

  “Hey, Suicide,” he transmitted in an excited tone, as if he were pleasantly surprised if not enthusiastic about what had just occurred, “I think that was our exfil vehicle.”

  13

  Jo Ann watched the scene in the OPCEN unfold with a rapidity she’d witnessed all too many times.

  Duchess thought her to be a dumb country bumpkin, she supposed, and Jo Ann didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was that the job got done—the problem, up until this point, was that it hadn’t.

  And she knew as well as Duchess did that things were about to get a lot worse for everyone in the OPCEN, for the ground team, and for the future of Project Longwing.

  The UAV rep called out, “Trucks are headed northbound toward Deshar, where the road diverges northwest and northeast. UAV will lose them before they get there—it’s going offline in fifteen minutes.”

  Without prompting, the joint terminal air controller announced, “Our three-bird ISR stack will arrive twenty-four minutes ahead of the fighters, and I have recommended priorities for all three.”

  Duchess replied, “First platform on station goes to the center point of Deshar and flies concentric rings outward to search for the trucks first, and evidence of rocket transfer second. The next two proceed up the northeast and northwest routes to locate the trucks, and once they’re found I want a full speed and distance analysis to determine if they had time to hand off cargo. Am I missing anything?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m on it.”

  Jo Ann felt herself nodding at Duchess’s order, grateful that she didn’t have to intervene. It wasn’t her role to bark orders, and interrupting Duchess was the last thing she wanted to do.

  Instead, Jo Ann monitored the exchanges in the OPCEN with a clinical focus, trying to divine any vital information that had slipped through the cracks. Because while Duchess was ultimately in charge, Jo Ann was able to maintain an objectivity and perspective denied to anyone who had to answer the radio calls the instant they were received.

  And her first opportunity to contribute came with the J2’s next update.

  “We’ve identified the location of BK’s outgoing call,” he said. “Geo-fix is on a structure on the east side of Zaranj, probable residence of a suspected ISIS logistician. It’s a twelve-kilometer straight-line distance from the target building where BK scrapped his phone.”

  Jo Ann was already typing into the encrypted chat on her computer, linked directly to a counterpart at the JSOC OPCEN.

  Duchess said, “I need to know what strike assets—”

  “On it,” Jo Ann replied, focusing on the response appearing on her screen. Looking up, she said, “There’s a strike force at Forward Operating Base Presley: a platoon of Rangers and two CAG troops.”

  No one called them CAG anymore outside of the old breed who predated the myriad code name changes in the interim. But Duchess knew exactly who Jo Ann was referring to—an organization so elite that the military simply referred to them as “The Unit,” and well-informed civilians called Delta Force: the Army’s equivalent of SEAL Team Six, established three years prior to their Navy counterparts.

  Aside from a few areas of specialization, there was virtually no difference between the two. Both were the apex predators of special operations, and either could accomplish their missions with a precision unknown to virtually any other military organization worldwide.

  As Jo Ann saw the next line of text appear in her encrypted chat, she said, “They could be wheels-down in Zaranj in just over six hours.”

  Duchess winced at the ETA, and for good reason—far too much could happen in that period of time. “Put the Rangers on standby for a bomb damage assessment once we hit the trucks. I’ll need a helicopter to recover our ground team, and I want the CAG troops on standby for no-notice launch in support of emerging intelligence as it is obtained. Questions?”

  Jo Ann typed a swift response and said, “In the works.”

  Then the J2 said, “Intercepted radio chatter indicates an ISIS convoy was on its way to escort the flatbeds when they encountered a civilian truck on the road, and…”

  “And what?”

  “They destroyed it.”

  “What are the odds that it wasn’t our team’s exfil vehicle?”

  “At zero one thirty Syrian time? Close to zero.”

  David transmitted, “Raptor Nine One, be advised, we just saw a fireball in the village, and our exfil driver is no longer responding.”

  Duchess snatched up the mic.

  “We’re tracking. You’ll have to initiate your escape and evasion plan until we can redirect recovery assets your way.”

  “What’s the status on that airstrike?”

  “It’s inbound.”

  “Are you going to have continuous eyes-on the trucks?”

  “There’s going to be a gap in coverage.”

  “Copy...stand by for Angel.”

  Duchess frowned. Angel was the callsign for the team’s intelligence operative, Ian.

  Jo Ann hadn’t met him, but knew him by family reputation—his father was a special operations legend whose exploits for the military and the Agency had become canon among the community. Even the SEAL Team Six operators Jo Ann had worked with spoke “Mad Dog” Greenberg’s name with awe.

  Ian transmitted, “By all means, hit the trucks—but don’t be surprised when your bomb damage assessment doesn’t find any rocket remains. BK’s too smart to leave his cargo on those trucks for long, and we can’t afford to lose them. They can fly nearly three miles, have a blast radius of ten meters, and there’s over six hundred of them. You do the math. And if they’ve sat on those rockets for months, it means there’s something big in the works. A catastrophic attack they’ve been setting up.”

  “No shit,” Jo Ann muttered to herself.

  Duchess was only slightly more diplomatic in her response. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

  The next transmission came not from Ian, but David.

  “So tell us how to help. We don’t need to evade; we need to stay on the trail.”

  Duchess looked over to Jo Ann then, her eyes conveying what she likely had too much pride to speak—a search for confirmation, a second opinion on how she was about to respond.

  Jo Ann, for her part, had been waiting for the chance.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d seen a mission’s single purpose fragment into a constellation of unanticipated contingencies—though she had to admit, the wheels were coming off this particular operation with an intensity that rivaled anything she’d seen. They had two trucks on the move with Bari Khan presumably aboard, a dearth of air support, and a suspected logistician with potentially critical intelligence twelve kilometers from the objective, where the ground team was now stranded.

  So when Duchess looked to her, Jo Ann was waiting with a thumbs-up gesture, nodding as she said, “We have nothing to lose by telling them.”

  Jo Ann’s thinking in that moment wasn’t that the ground team would have some miraculous ability to intervene. But in her years of working first with SEALs and then with the greater special operations community, she’d learned that a fully informed ground team could generate solutions that not even a full OPCEN staff would have the firsthand perspective to see.

  Whether or not Duchess had been seeking confirmation for her decision, Jo Ann couldn’t tell—but a momen
t later, she transmitted her reply.

  “BK placed a call requesting an armed escort for the cargo. We think the call was made to a logistician who brokered the transport, and we’ve located the call’s point of origin in Zaranj. But that’s over twelve kilometers from your team, and you’re not going to make it there before sunrise. We can have a special operations team there to snatch him in six hours.”

  “In six hours, this logistician is going to be gone. Keep tracking his phone and send us the grid.”

  “You’re isolated without support,” Duchess replied. “What can you possibly accomplish?”

  A long silence followed, and the next transmission carried with it a tone of smug confidence that made Jo Ann crack a grin.

  “Duchess,” David said, “you’re lucky you have us.”

  14

  I activated my rifle-mounted laser, the infrared floodlight illuminating the house interior in blazing emerald hues as I moved toward the stairs. This was no explosive breach, but a surreptitious entry: Reilly had pried open a door to let us in, and we spread throughout the small building as stealthily as we could manage.

  The house was dead silent, and I wondered how anyone could sleep at the moment—we’d been in a gunfight not far from here about an hour earlier, and that was before our exfil truck turned into a fireball.

  Yet I supposed if you lived in a war zone, there wasn’t much choice. And when I thought about it, I’d had deployments where nighttime rocket attacks—even those that didn’t miss my sleeping quarters by much—had been followed by going back to sleep in short order.

  I ascended the stairs and paused at a doorway, feeling Ian squeeze my shoulder from behind. Pushing open the door, I slipped inside and saw two figures in the bed, a man and a woman.

  I paused for a moment. There were ten different ways this could turn out, and nine of them were bad.

  The woman’s hair was a dark tangle over her pillow as she slept on her stomach. The man was on his side, facing away from me—and this was going to be really embarrassing, I thought, if he wasn’t who I thought he was.

  Circling to the opposite side of the bed, I found an AK-47 leaning barrel-up against the wall. I took the weapon in one hand and noiselessly passed it to Ian.

  Then, kneeling beside the man, I examined his face.

  His features were lean and angular, ending in a neatly trimmed beard that left no doubt—this was the father whose daughter I’d saved during our previous incursion to Syria.

  I’d been in this home once before, glimpsing BK through the ground floor window shortly before handing the little girl back to the man I knelt before.

  And here’s where it got tricky, I thought. A surreptitious entry was no problem for my team; nor, in fact, was a gunfight. But there was no easy way to do what I was about to do.

  Using a red penlight, I illuminated my face from below and shook the man awake.

  “Shhh,” I whispered, then summoned the most appropriate of my limited Arabic phrases. “Hathahee lysat b’mushkula.”

  This is not a problem.

  The man’s face was calm as his eyelids fluttered open, and he seemed to register my presence with a serene acceptance. That was easier than I thought.

  Then, as he awoke more fully, his eyes went wide and he screamed.

  “Shhh!” I repeated, more urgently.

  But he screamed even louder.

  His cries were soon drowned out by his wife, who bolted upright and began shrieking loud enough to crack a windowpane.

  Shit, I thought. This was going poorly.

  I stood and turned on my tac light, pointing the beam downward to cast a soft glow and let them see us in full.

  “It’s okay,” I said as reassuringly as I could manage, tapping my chest. “Sadiq, sadiq.” Friend. I held my hand toward him and said, “Sadiqee,” for my friend.

  The woman was clutching a sheet to her chest, her figure partially covered by the man as he tried to shield her from harm.

  They both looked terrified, the man in particular as he recognized me. He seemed to think this was some form of retribution, maybe us coming back to eliminate eyewitnesses to our previous operation.

  I heard a girl scream from down the hall, followed by Reilly whispering in a failed bid to calm her. Looking to the woman, I extended an arm toward the door and said, “Please. Raja.”

  She hesitated, and I told Ian to look away.

  Only then did she rise from the bed, sweeping out of the room as I transmitted, “Mom is inbound.”

  The man, sitting up to find that his AK-47 was gone from the bedside, gave me a smoldering glare.

  “Ana asif,” I said. I’m sorry. “Wa laqin, intaj—” But I need—Wait, I corrected myself, “Noontaj musaeada.” We need your help. Had I said that right? I thought so, and waited for his reaction.

  He shook his head slightly. “Your Arabic is...terrible.”

  “Look,” I said, transitioning to English, “your family is safe. You remember me, right? I saved your daughter.”

  He shot back, “You started a battle. You almost got her killed.”

  “Well, yeah. But then I saved her.”

  “I assume you also started the battle earlier tonight.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What. Do you. Want.”

  I glanced at Ian, who looked even more uncomfortable than I felt.

  Then I replied, “I need you to take us to Zaranj. You know this place?”

  “Of course I know it. What do you want there?”

  “There’s a man I need to question. I’m not sure if he speaks English, and, well, you’ve heard my Arabic.”

  “I have heard your attempt at Arabic.”

  “So it’s settled,” Ian said cheerfully, “you drive us there, help us get some information, and we part ways. Oh, and maybe we could borrow some of your clothes because, you know, we’re all pretty white.”

  I added, “We can pay you.”

  The man was unconvinced. “You cannot pay me enough. Zaranj is not for tourists. If they identify my vehicle, they will kill me.” He rubbed his forehead, then stopped abruptly as he looked to me with renewed interest. “But if you can get my family to America...perhaps I can help.”

  I hesitated. I’d never discussed this prospect with Duchess, and while I was certain the CIA had the resources to relocate a family, I’d never explicitly received permission to offer them. Clemency to sympathetic locals hadn’t exactly been a planning consideration prior to our freefall into Syria.

  “Three people,” I said. “You, your wife, and your daughter.”

  “Four. My mother as well.”

  Shit. Duchess was going to be pissed.

  “I will request permission for four people.” Seeing his gaze harden, I added, “And no matter the response, I will personally ensure you make it to America. I’ll set it up myself if I have to.”

  I pulled the tactical glove off my right hand, extending a sweaty palm toward him.

  He rose from the bed and shook my hand.

  “Nizar.”

  “David.”

  Releasing the handshake, I said, “I’m sorry to be in a hurry, Nizar. But the sun will rise soon, and we need to leave immediately.”

  “Not yet.” He shook his head. “First you need to meet my mechanic.”

  15

  Duchess checked the wall clock, weighing the local time in Syria against US Eastern Standard Time as it applied to her at CIA headquarters and, more importantly, her Senate counterpart in DC.

  The UAV rep turned in his seat, speaking the words that Duchess had been dreading.

  “UAV is offline.”

  Duchess looked to the central flatscreen, catching her last glimpse of the two flatbed trucks and their armed escort of four technical vehicles traveling north as fast as they could manage on the potholed desert road. They vanished as the UAV banked right, the horizon on screen tilting out of sight until only the night sky was visible.

  Now her OPCEN was timing t
he duration from losing visual with the UAV to re-establishing it with the inbound drones and fighter jets. Every second added to that count strained her ability to engage the trucks with an airstrike, added room for doubt as to whether the rockets would still be aboard by then.

  Only a detailed bomb damage assessment would be able to say for sure, and even then, the number of rockets destroyed could well remain forever unknown.

  Duchess announced, “Sutherland and Pharr, approach the bench. I’m ready for your brief.”

  The pair of men rose from their adjacent workstations and quickly ascended the platforms to her desk. They looked like a study in opposites.

  Brian Sutherland was a youthful-looking, clean-shaven man in his forties. He laid a map before her, using a pen to point at a road junction at the village just north of the flatbeds’ current location.

  “This is where the road splits in Deshar. That gives us two likely routes, and we won’t know which one the trucks will take—or if they’ll split up—until our incoming birds arrive and establish positive identification.”

  Duchess nodded, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sutherland was her JTAC, an acronym for Joint Terminal Attack Controller—an expert in the art and science of calling in close air support. He’d earned his bones at the ground level of special operations, first as an Air Force Combat Controller and later as an instructor evaluator at the schoolhouse. His active duty service consisted of calling in bombs and strafing runs while fighting alongside Green Berets and Navy SEALs, making him an ideal candidate for the Agency’s JTAC requirements.

  Now that he no longer served on the front lines but from an OPCEN at CIA Headquarters, he was tasked with the neurosurgery of close air support: directing fighters and bombers from thousands of miles away, relying on aerial surveillance and ground observer reporting to deliver precision ordnance at the ragged fringe of Agency authorities.

  For this reason, his desk was located alongside that of the second man now standing at his side.