by Jason Kasper
Clearing her throat, Duchess said, “My team has detained the logistician who facilitated the transport and maintained direct communications with Bari Khan. They are conducting tactical questioning as we speak.”
“And in my considerable experience with targeting terror organizations,” Gossweiler coolly replied, “the logisticians are very rarely informed of the contents of their cargo. And they’re never informed of what it’s going to be used for, so I’m bracing myself for a dead end in that regard. What else?”
“During our gap in air coverage of the flatbeds, they passed through Deshar. We’ve maintained continuous surveillance for unusual activity, and I’ve got every Agency and military intelligence asset in the area monitoring for indicators of the cargo.”
Gossweiler said, “As for the rockets themselves, how bad are we talking?”
Duchess called for Sutherland, who hastily rose and approached them, trailed by Pharr.
She said, “Brian, please brief the senator on the rocket specifics.”
“Good morning, Senator. Brian Sutherland, Joint Terminal Attack Controller—”
“Cut the foreplay, son.”
Sutherland said, “OG-9VM1, with fragmentary high explosive warheads. Maximum range 2.79 miles with a lethal blast radius of ten meters.”
“Worst-case scenario?”
“Four rockets have been destroyed, leaving 646 at large. Simultaneous launch of that payload would achieve a kill box of 142 acres, and that’s only accounting for the lethal blast radius. If he expands the strike to the lethal fragmentation radius of each rocket—fifty meters plus—he could cover a little over one square mile.”
Gossweiler turned to Duchess. “So in the time it took me to have breakfast and make my way here, you lost your target, lost the rockets, and authorized a high-profile airstrike that resulted in exactly nothing.”
Duchess suppressed the instinct to raise her voice.
“While you were at breakfast, Senator, we found the rockets. If they weren’t going to be used for a major attack, they’d have been fired all over Syria by now.”
“I appreciate that speculation, Kimberly, and can’t say I disagree with you on that point. As for everything else surrounding this operation, I have to express my doubts, with the legalities being chief among them.”
Pharr intervened, “Senator, I can assure you that every action taken has been to the strictest adherence to the mandated authorities of this program.”
Gossweiler tilted his head, appraising Pharr as if he’d just noticed the presence of a particularly loathsome insect on his dinner plate.
“I don’t remember asking you a damn thing, son. My committee lawyers will eat you alive and you know it.”
Then he returned his gaze to Duchess. “As a humble and God-fearing man, I take no issue with making every possible effort to hunt down and kill every savage who would do harm to innocent civilians, whether those civilians hold American citizenship or not. But as Chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I’m afraid I have other duties to attend to. And the biggest part of my job description is to provide, and I quote, ‘vigilant legislative oversight’ to programs such as these. On a personal level, I wouldn’t have used my influence to get you this job if I didn’t think you were the right person for it. But it’s becoming apparent that I couldn’t have been more wrong. And it’s not just your abilities coming into question, it’s the efficacy of this entire program.”
“Sir, the program has merit,” Duchess argued. “All responsibility for the failures to date rests with me alone and doesn’t reflect in any way upon my OPCEN staff or the ground team I chose.”
“The ground team you chose has burned through millions in my budget, and they’ve delivered exactly zero results in three missions, one of which is now off the rails in a way that defies my ability to comprehend it.”
Jo Ann intervened, “Sir, there’s an American pilot who escaped capture in the Philippines because of those men.”
Gossweiler gave Jo Ann a bland smile, a contortion of his elderly features that fell a half-step shy of an outright sneer. “Couple problems with your logic there, Commander Brown. Yes, that pilot is alive. No, it was not what the ground team was sent in to accomplish. And I commend their actions on Jolo Island as much as the next guy, but their proximity to the shootdown was nothing more than a freak accident. The same applies for the team’s identification of this rocket shipment. And if we keep hemorrhaging defense spending in the hopes that we land on lightning-strike odds of intervening in some peripheral incident, then our nation is in bad shape.”
Before Jo Ann could reply, Gossweiler held up a hand. “I’d like to speak to Kimberly alone.”
The trio scattered. Sutherland and Pharr returned to their workstations, trailed by Jo Ann, who followed them for lack of anywhere else to go.
Then Gossweiler spoke quietly, with far more patience than anything he’d said so far.
“Kimberly, I’m tired of the previous model of endless drone strikes and collateral damage. And I have a preference bordering on obsession for surgical direct action. I’m tired of the military operators writing tell-all books, so it only makes sense to move these activities back toward intel agencies that leak less. As such, I’m willing to let the leash stretch farther than I would for the usual programs I oversee on committee. But I’m not going to put an egg on the president’s face over a team of former mercs doing wet work for the Agency, are we clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Duchess replied, knowing that any other response would merely make the situation worse—if such a thing were even possible.
“So yes,” he continued, “Project Longwing will continue—for the time being. But it’s not going to be with the team that’s struck out three times so far. And it’s not,” he added, his tone becoming grave, “going to be with you running it.”
Duchess felt her stomach turning to stone, but she was unable to react outside of a hollow nod of acknowledgement.
Gossweiler looked for Jo Ann and called out, “Commander Brown.”
As Jo Ann approached, Duchess braced herself for what was about to occur. There was a reason he’d insisted on military oversight in the first place, and that reason was about to play itself out.
Jo Ann arrived, and Gossweiler addressed them both.
“You’re authorized to continue searching for the rockets using aerial platforms and intelligence assets. But as of this second, any further ground action belongs to the military, not the Agency. The ground team will take the captured logistician to the nearest exfil point, after which I want them out of Syria and on a plane to the States with zero delay. Then they’re disbanded. You, Commander Brown, will stay on board. Kimberly, you’ve got exactly one week to prepare this program for transition to a successor that I nominate.”
And then, before Duchess could think of any words that might change his mind, Senator Gossweiler turned and left the OPCEN.
20
Cancer rested his hand on the door handle, and I gave him a nod.
He swung it open and stepped aside, and I slipped into the room with my barrel raised, cutting right to find a largely open space as Cancer entered behind me and moved to the opposite corner.
My team was in the process of performing a “soft clear,” not kicking down doors but nonetheless flowing from room to room at eighty percent speed, giving clearance to one another’s sectors of fire as we moved.
Until we’d gotten eyes-on every space in the building, our security was a matter of assumption. That was the dilemma of our situation—too much paranoia, and we’d still be cowering in the desert outside our initial target, waiting for nightfall to bring a helicopter for exfiltration.
Too much audacity, however, and we’d wander into a trap.
But the building was unoccupied aside from us and the tall Syrian man who’d quite willingly let us in—a man Elias introduced as “a friend in Zaranj.”
The man procured a chair from the corner and dragged it to the ce
nter of the room.
“Munasib?”
Elias gave a curt nod. “Nem, nem. Shukraan jazilaan.”
Reilly and Worthy entered a moment later, half-dragging the overweight ISIS logistician between them. Throwing him down into the seat, they began applying flex cuffs to bind his arms and legs to the chair.
When they’d finished, Cancer spoke without me saying a word.
“Doc, Racegun, make sure the trucks are ready for emergency exfil and go pull security. We need to make sure none of those bastards followed us back here. Make sure Nizar doesn’t run off while you’re at it, and send in Angel.”
Reilly and Worthy swept out of the room.
Turning to Elias, I said, “Go ahead. Ask him where the cargo was headed.”
“Sure,” Elias replied, switching to Arabic and rattling off a question.
To my surprise, the man replied at once, his tone almost courteous. Perhaps, I thought, the reality of his situation was finally sinking in.
But Elias barked a laugh, glancing at me with a raised eyebrow. “He says he has engaged in sexual congress with my mother, sister, and daughter.”
Ian entered the room then, walking to my side without a word.
“Try again,” I said.
Elias did so in spectacular fashion, whipping a backhand across the logistician’s face so hard I half-expected it to knock the man unconscious.
But instead, the logistician responded by summoning all the saliva he could muster and spitting it at Elias, who sidestepped the stream.
“So far, not too good.” He asked another question in Arabic, with similar results.
Cancer raised an imploring arm and let it fall to his side. “Suicide, I’m telling you. Not everything we do requires a ‘Cancer solution,’ but this fat bag of fuck sure does.”
Elias nodded. “He is correct. Someone like this man requires more...encouragement.”
I shook my head. “We’re not going to treat him like an animal.”
“No,” Elias agreed, “we will not. Because animals will not do what these people will do. You must treat them not like men, not like animals, but what they are.” He looked to the man as I waited for some conclusion to his statement.
But when Elias met my gaze, he said only, “You want this cargo? It gets further from your grasp each minute we spend waiting here.”
I walked to the corner of the room, waving for Ian and Cancer to follow.
“Shoot me straight, Ian.”
He leaned in and whispered, “What do you want me to say, David? If the Agency grabbed this guy, they’d have a pro team of thirty-year interrogators breaking him down with days of sensory deprivation supervised by a full staff of doctors. And that’s exactly what’ll happen once we hand him off. Until then...well, we found the rockets about six hours ago, and until Duchess tells us otherwise, they’re as good as gone.”
Cancer was nodding in agreement, and I replied to Ian, “Go help the guys pull security.”
“Whatever’s about to happen, I’ve seen worse.”
“I know.” I left unspoken the real reason I wanted Ian gone—not because I was worried about him reporting me for any transgressions of our operational authorities, but because I didn’t want him reliving this event in his dreams for the next few years. “Just the same, I want you to go. I’ll get you if I need anything else.”
Ian departed, slipping through the door as Cancer put a hand on my arm and whispered, “David, maybe this guy knows something, maybe he doesn’t. But you’re never gonna be able to live with yourself if we give him the VIP treatment and a bunch of civilians die as a result. So let’s get it done, boss.”
He released my arm and I looked to Elias. “Find out everything.”
The old Syrian’s eyes crinkled with satisfaction. “My way?”
“Yes. Your way.”
He spoke Arabic to his friend, who nodded and moved off to another room.
As we waited for his return, Elias began circling the man in the chair with predatory anticipation, a series of footfalls I suspected he’d done many times before.
Cancer removed his fighting knife from its sheath and showed it to Elias, who shook his head and clucked in disapproval. Looking crestfallen, Cancer sheathed the blade and turned away.
Then Elias said to us, “I may need you both to hold him. He could be quite unwilling to remain still.”
My stomach churned. Whatever was about to happen here, Cancer and I were going to be not just witnesses but active participants. And when the torture ensued, it would occur because of my order. At best I was making a ruinous moral compromise for no reason at all; at worst, we’d elicit details of a terrorist attack that we were too late to stop.
In the middle of those two scenarios was a third option, one too unlikely to allow anyone but Cancer to witness the proceedings ahead. But it represented a small chance that the logistician knew actionable intel about a terrorist attack that we still had the opportunity to stop, and until we’d ruled that out, I was unwilling to let my personal sensibilities get in the way of continuing our mission any way we could.
I heard Elias’s friend return and cringed at the thought of what his reappearance would bring. If Elias disapproved of Cancer’s knife, and our guns had proven of no use to sway a hardline member of ISIS, then what exactly would work? Whatever the answer, Elias’s friend was about to carry it into the room.
When he entered with a single item in his hand, I was momentarily confused, and then disgusted.
It was a clear plastic trash bag.
Elias accepted it with a brief exchange in Arabic, and his friend left the room. Then Elias let the bag fall open, looking to me with a single question.
“Shall we?”
Without warning, he threw the bag over the logistician’s head, pulling the plastic tightly around his neck with one hand.
The man began thrashing immediately, and Cancer and I intervened to hold him still from the shoulders. “You better not kill him,” I grunted.
Elias shook his head. “Look to the corners of his eyes. Still white. He is fine.”
The suffocating logistician, however, was most decidedly not fine. The man’s mouth was gasping like a fish, his eyes wild and panicked, as he began inhaling the plastic bag.
Then Elias said, “Only now do we start to have a problem. The corners of his eyes—you see the red dots?”
“Yeah. Blood vessels bursting?”
“Indeed. Only seconds remain to let him breathe.”
“Then let him fuckin’ breathe.”
“Not yet,” he replied, watching the man’s legs, waiting for some signal I didn’t understand, until the puddle of urine began spreading across the chair.
Elias whipped the bag off the logistician’s head as the man took shrill gasps of air, heaving breaths as the crimson flush subsided from his face.
“Good boy.” Elias patted the man’s arm amid the stench of urine. “Have some air. Stay alive for me.” Crouching next to the man, Elias waited for him to speak.
He didn’t have to wait long—as soon as he’d processed enough oxygen to make a sound, he began speaking Arabic so fast that I doubted Elias’s ability to comprehend the words.
But Elias was listening with his head cocked, nodding softly as he translated for me.
“There was to be a handoff of the cargo, which was to be routed to Sepaya. He says they told him no other details, but he overheard someone discuss some attack. It will occur five days from yesterday.”
“What’s the target?” I asked.
Elias didn’t answer, instead throwing the bag over the man’s head once more.
I grabbed Elias’s shoulder. “If he dies, so do you.”
But Elias shrugged off my hand.
“Too much air, and he will recover his wits. Then we have to start over, and it becomes impossible to tell when he is going to die. Trust me.”
Cancer said, “Just let Elias do his thing. We already lost the rockets, man. Time to find out where they
’ll be used.”
I had no way of knowing whether Elias was being truthful, or if he simply wanted to impart as much pain on a member of ISIS as he could. And in the end, I had little choice but to let him continue—if I didn’t, those rockets would be sent into flight against some strategic target, and given what I knew about Bari Khan, my guess was that it would spell the death of thousands of civilians in some Chinese population center.
Elias removed the plastic bag, and the logistician once again took seizing gasps of air as his interrogator asked, “Aistihdaf?”
This time, some of the man’s words sounded familiar.
“Fee medina Sharlatsveel, fee wilaya Farjinia.”
Elias said, “In the state of Virginia, a city named Charlottesville. You know this place?”
It took me a moment to respond—what I had just heard was impossible, and yet Elias was watching me lucidly, waiting for a response.
So too was Cancer, though his expression bore significantly more surprise. After all, he knew I lived in Charlottesville, and seemed equally as dumbstruck in that moment as I was.
But this didn’t make any sense; Bari Khan’s wrath should have been directed against his native government. The Chinese administration had killed his wife and daughter along with countless Uyghur civilians, and there was nothing of significance in Charlottesville—except, of course, my family.
“Yes.” I nodded, feeling the color drain from my cheeks. “I know this place. Find out what else he knows.”
The man was still speaking, though shaking his head as he did so.
Elias said, “He said this is all he knows about the target. That was the only comment he overheard.”
“Hit him again.”
“I believe he tells the truth.”
“I didn’t ask what you fucking believe. Hit him again.”
Elias gave a leisurely shrug, throwing the bag back over the man’s head and sealing the bottom with a fist against his neck.
“We must be careful,” Elias explained. “He will not last as long each time we do this.
See there? The red dots are getting bigger.”
Then he pulled off the bag, revealing the logistician’s horrid expression. His eyes were wide but sightless, the whites blotched with blood, his round face a blighted vision of fear as he spoke in strained Arabic.
