The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  Slowing to a halt beside David, Ian looked sideways to see Cancer dragging Worthy’s motionless body by the casualty handle on the back of his kit, then dropping him in the corner between buildings before returning to a firing position. Was Worthy dead? It was impossible to tell, though Cancer had notably failed to call for the team medic.

  As David rose to a crouch to continue moving to the next piece of cover, Ian heard bursts of unsuppressed gunfire to his rear; he instinctively turned in place, knowing full well that he’d be too late.

  But when he turned he saw not ISIS fighters but his team’s two Syrian guides. Nizar was behind cover, carefully shooting his captured AK-47 at the enemy. But Elias was in a frenzy, standing in the open and spraying gunfire while shouting in Arabic. He halted abruptly as a bullet found his chest, then fell forward to the ground.

  Ian shouted, “Elias is hit!”

  “Leave him,” David replied.

  Then he was off again, shooting on the move as Ian followed. To David, Elias getting shot was a mere data point, and not a particularly important one at present. The two men plunged forward, Ian trying to discern exactly what David was moving toward, and why.

  But by the time he could, he lapsed into utter shock at the sight.

  Bari Khan should have been long gone, screaming away from the compound on the first moving car. After all, he was the highest value target on the objective, and his security detail’s primary mission in life would have been to evacuate him at the first sign of trouble.

  That knowledge made what he was now seeing impossible: a fleeting glimpse of Bari Khan himself, a Chinese man surrounded by Arab fighters, running not toward a car but into a doorway of the adjacent building. He wasn’t even armed—though Ian saw he carried a satchel over his shoulder.

  David shouted, “He’s mine,” and took off at a sprint faster than Ian could follow.

  I closed with the building that Bari Khan and his security detail had just vanished into, slowing my final footfalls to give Ian a momentary chance to catch up.

  Without waiting to see if he had or not—remaining in the open wasn’t a viable survival strategy—I flowed inside, sweeping my AK-47 barrel across a short corridor with a single open door.

  I ran toward the doorway, armed with the knowledge that if the procession at any point turned to set a hasty ambush, I was done for.

  But what choice did I have? Bari Khan had slipped through our fingers once, the Delta soldiers were still twenty minutes away, and if I didn’t kill him in the next thirty seconds, no one would. At that moment I didn’t particularly care whether every rocket made it out of the compound. Illogical as the thought was, Bari Khan was my team’s original target, and I was going to gun him down here even if the effort resulted in me getting wounded or killed.

  There was one more important consideration, and it represented the only possible explanation for why he would still be in the compound instead of speeding away in a vehicle: he had evidence of his plan here, the ultimate target his rockets were intended for, and he valued the preservation of that plan far above his own life.

  I cleared the doorway and saw at a glance that I was right.

  The room had all the indicators of an impromptu command post—files of stacked paper, two computers, a satellite phone on a table—but my concern at present was with the men who’d disappeared inside and were now gone.

  They’d exited through a window and onto the street, the last ISIS fighter vanishing through the window frame as I raised my AK-47 to engage.

  But my vision registered movement on the floor to my front, an object of some kind coming to rest not two meters ahead of my boots.

  Bari Khan’s satchel.

  I pivoted in place, turning to the doorway as Ian entered. Driving my legs hard, I tackled him at the waist, launching us both against the far wall of the corridor. Ian impacted with a grunt, and I spun him sideways to fling his body to the floor with savage ferocity.

  Then I leapt atop him, freefalling with my arms outstretched. I was a split second from landing atop his prostrate form, my view entirely consumed by the sight of his tactical kit, when Bari Khan’s satchel exploded.

  The concussion of the blast sounded as a sonic boom of high explosives, a searing wave of heat flooding into the hallway as a tremendous shockwave sucked the air out of my lungs. I held tight over Ian’s body, waiting for the heat on my back to recede before rolling off him.

  “You okay?” I asked, faintly making out a groan from Ian amid the echo of the blast. Then I transmitted, “Doc, Elias is down in the courtyard.”

  “Doc copies,” Reilly replied, indicating he’d search for and treat Elias as soon as the tactical situation allowed.

  Pushing off Ian, I found my AK-47 hanging from its sling across my back and readied the weapon to re-enter the room that served as the focal point of our operation.

  The former command post was a scorched wasteland of debris, the walls charred from the blast. Whatever the contents of those files, they were largely reduced to ash and paper fragments that covered the floor.

  In the open compound behind me, I heard a few erratic pops of unsuppressed gunfire, but for the most part the battle seemed to be ending as quickly as it had begun.

  I transmitted, “I’ve got eyes-on the enemy CP. Anyone need support?”

  For the few seconds it took Cancer to respond, I desperately hoped the answer was no. Having found a treasure trove of enemy intelligence—mostly destroyed, but still—I didn’t want to let it out of my sight.

  Cancer replied over my earpiece, “We’re fine out here, gunfight’s over. Worthy’s fine, being a big ol’ puss is all. What do you need from me?”

  I replied, “Ian will orient you to the CP; we need to strongpoint around it until the cavalry arrives.”

  “Standing by, boss.”

  Then I turned to see Ian, his eyes wide and unblinking.

  “Thanks for the save,” he said.

  “Don’t think we’re going to start taking warm showers together just yet. But if we find some viable intel in this mess, I'll consider it. Go find Cancer and bring him here so he can adjust our defenses—anything that matters to us will be in this room.”

  The final gunshots were still echoing as Reilly sprinted across the courtyard, scanning bodies until he located Elias. Unslinging his aid bag, Reilly dropped to his knees before the prostrate man.

  Elias was lying on his stomach, shuddering faintly like a car running out of gas. Reilly said, “Hey, brother, you with me?” as he drew his knife, using it to slice the man’s shirt down the middle and expose a backside free of obvious injury. Still, Reilly swept both palms down Elias’s back, feeling for any deviation—some wounds closed almost completely, and other internal injuries were only detectable from abnormalities in the skin surface.

  The second his initial sweep revealed nothing unusual, Reilly rolled Elias onto his back, seeing the bloody smear of a gunshot wound, his face an eerie purple hue.

  Reilly tore Elias’s shirt open, exposing a torrent of blood issuing forth from a bullet hole on the right side of his chest. But that part didn’t matter—Elias’s problem wasn’t blood loss. Instead, the bullet’s path had carved a one-way valve in his chest, allowing air into the pleural space and causing the lung to collapse. The resulting condition was known as a tension pneumothorax, and judging by the state of Elias’s face, Reilly had a minute or less to stop it if he wasn’t too late already.

  He quickly unzipped his aid bag, telling Elias, “You’re all good, pal, just a little flesh wound.” Retrieving his supplies, he wiped the wound free of blood with a gauze pad and then applied a clear adhesive chest seal directly over the bullet hole. Then Reilly plucked a 14-gauge needle shrouded in a catheter from his aid bag and tossed aside the plastic cap.

  Running his fingers across Elias’s chest between his right nipple and the center of his collarbone, he stopped halfway and probed for a gap between bone—the space between the second and third rib along the mid-clavi
cular line.

  “Bit of pressure,” Reilly said, forcing the needle into Elias’s chest.

  It disappeared into his torso, and Reilly withdrew the needle to leave the catheter inside, the only sign of it a small circular valve emerging from the entry point. Sticking the needle into the dirt beside him, Reilly leaned down and listened for the hiss of air from the valve—there was none.

  He grabbed a second needle and felt along Elias’s right side, finding the midaxillary intercostal space that was lateral to the nipple. Forcing the needle inside, he performed his second thoracostomy in the span of fifteen seconds, pulling the needle back out and listening for air hissing out of the catheter valve.

  But it too was silent, indicating that internal bleeding had flooded the space previously occupied by air. With no exit wound, there was a much greater danger of the bullet having struck a major blood vessel—and while two needle thoracostomies were enough for most stateside doctors to declare the patient dead, Reilly had one last-ditch effort to drain the internal bleeding that he now knew was preventing Elias’s heart from beating.

  He found the same spot on his casualty’s opposite rib, holding an index finger in place as he aimed the tip of his knife.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said, making a hasty incision, “going to be a badass scar.”

  Reilly dropped the knife and plunged his index finger through the cut to deepen the penetration, feeling Elias’s hot flesh give way to a pop as his fingertip passed through all resistance.

  Withdrawing his finger, Reilly watched the blood pour out of the wound, hoping it was enough to alleviate the pressure on Elias’s heart. Looking to his torso, Reilly watched for the bilateral rise and fall of the chest.

  There was no bilateral rise and fall, or unliteral, for that matter—Elias was dead, his vacant eyes staring up at the sky.

  Reilly sat back on his heels, panting from the effort as he felt a hand alight atop his shoulder.

  Looking up, he saw Worthy standing over him.

  “Internal bleeding,” Reilly said. “He’s gone.”

  “He was gone two minutes ago.” Worthy patted Reilly’s shoulder. “You’re a good medic, Reilly.”

  I leaned down to pick up the next object at my feet—the blackened remains of a satellite phone, half its receiver missing from the blast. It was beyond repair, but hopefully Duchess’s digital forensics people could pull some data off of it nonetheless.

  Slipping the phone remains into a cargo pocket, I knelt to continue sifting through the paper fragments that had partially survived the explosion. Most were covered in Arabic script, and I began assembling them in a loose stack beside a pair of incinerated laptops. The faster I could consolidate the remaining intelligence for a handoff with the special operators now inbound to link up with us, the faster they could speed it to the rear for analysis.

  And at this point, every minute counted.

  I had no idea what Bari Khan planned to obliterate with those rockets, but his plan was meticulous. The ashes around me contained paper shards of all sizes, most of them singed at the edges until only a few words remained. I collected them meticulously, watching where I set my feet, knowing that a single misstep could smudge some key detail about an imminent terror attack out of existence. Judging by what remained, a key detail or two might well be all that the intelligence analysts could decipher for our efforts to stop the attack.

  And even while I sifted through the detritus of the enemy command post in the wake of a failed raid, I had to admit that Bari Khan had earned my full begrudging respect.

  To remain on site after the first sign of US presence was impressive enough. But to expose himself to incredible risk in safeguarding his plan by destroying the evidence told me he was not just committed but courageous. Sure, his motives were misaligned with what most of society would consider acceptable, myself included. But as a terrorist operative, the man was a force to contend with.

  Scanning for the next viable scrap, I found an oblong shred of blank paper a few inches in length. Carefully lifting it, I turned it over to see that the reverse side bore text that was not only neatly typed, but also in English.

  My first glance at the words had a surreal, dreamlike quality. I blinked to clear my vision, certain that I’d been concussed by the blast and was currently looking at words that at any moment would morph into illegible Arabic.

  But they remained clear and vivid, and any delusions faded to a tightening of my chest, a viselike grip on my heart as I struggled to breathe. Then the rage began to take hold, my pulse hammering with anger and a terrifying wave of fear.

  Blinking again, I re-read the words printed on the partial scrap.

  Laila and Langley Rivers, 427 Spring River Drive, Charlottesville.

  28

  Duchess mentally processed the current radio transmissions with a mounting sense of concern that everything was most definitely not going to be okay.

  David’s initial reports about the assault were virtually incoherent, and she seriously questioned whether he’d sustained some kind of head injury.

  Now he was on a tirade, providing a stream-of-consciousness rant that Duchess visualized Gossweiler reading on the mission transcript even as she heard it.

  “They know my family,” David continued. “I want a protective detail on my wife and daughter yesterday, along with my entire team’s next of kin.”

  At his first pause, she asked, “What’s the status of the cargo?”

  “Fuck the cargo. Do you hear what I’m telling you? They have the info on my family, I just found the names in the CP.”

  Sighing, Duchess made her announcement to the OPCEN.

  “Notify the FBI, we’ll need low-vis protective details deployed at once. I’ll wave them off if this turns out to be nothing.”

  Which, she thought, it almost certainly would.

  Whether David had sustained a concussion or otherwise gone delirious in the course of the fight, she wasn’t sure. But she knew one thing for certain: whatever David thought he knew, he was wrong. The only explanation for a link to his family was a personal vendetta, and there was zero chance one of those was playing out in Syria with the help of an ISIS-supported Chinese dissident pulling the strings. Duchess had initiated FBI support for one reason alone: so that she wouldn’t have to lie on her next transmission.

  “It’s in the works. Now focus.”

  “I am focused. You need to listen to what I’m saying. I’m looking at the scrap with my wife’s and daughter’s names on it.”

  “What scrap? What’s the status of the cargo?”

  “Jesus, woman. All right, your precious ‘cargo’ is flooding out of the city in an estimated two dozen civilian cars and trucks. We stopped some of it still getting inventory, but I’d be surprised if more than ten percent is still here. You need to stop all traffic on the highway and start checking vehicles, especially any with bullet holes or body damage.”

  Duchess shook her head. He’d just described a significant portion of vehicles anywhere in Syria, and probably half of them originating from Ibrahimkhel. And with the logistical issues in deploying the strike force to that far-flung city in the first place, no magic wand would help them now.

  No, she thought, any hope of stopping the rockets would have to occur at the border.

  “I understand,” she transmitted back. “The first element of the strike force is moving on foot to your position, will be on-site within ten minutes.”

  “We’re prepared for link-up.”

  “Now tell me about this intel you found.”

  “The enemy command post was vaporized by an explosive charge, and we’re sifting through scraps of paper at this point. I’ve got a sat phone and two laptops that are partially intact and need immediate analysis. Most of the writing we’ve found is in Arabic, but the information on my fucking family—that’s in English.”

  Duchess lowered her mic, glancing sidelong at the woman beside her.

  Jo Ann’s face conveyed the unspoken accu
sation that Duchess had hand-picked this team leader—which was true—and that she’d chosen poorly.

  That latter part may have been true as well, Duchess thought. She didn’t have all the facts, but David’s words cast a shadow on the inerasable transcript of a mission that had been called into question long before that point. Gossweiler was soon going to learn that Duchess had contradicted his direct order by authorizing an additional ground raid by her Agency team, and whether or not he would view the threat against the president as a worthy justification for that split-second judgment call remained to be seen.

  Unable to bear Jo Ann’s glare any longer, Duchess said, “Spit it out.”

  Jo Ann shrugged. “Your man is losing it.”

  “Yeah,” Duchess agreed. “No shit.”

  Then she looked to the communications support rep and said, “S6, set up a direct line to my desk. I need to speak with the strike force commander.”

  29

  Worthy approached Cancer as he spoke quietly to David, both men standing in the open compound amid the aftermath of the team’s raid.

  The fight was over, any surviving enemy having long since decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

  Worthy would have liked to think that was due to the ferocity of his team alone, but their early warning network alerting them to helicopters approaching the outskirts of Ibrahimkhel was probably the determining factor. The strike force had already touched down and was proceeding on foot to the compound, and so far any remaining enemy in town hadn’t taken so much as a pot shot at them.

  Besides, Worthy thought, why would they bother? They’d already been successful, or mostly so. The vast majority of their cargo was already en route to whatever destination Bari Khan had dictated, and a handful of those rockets was sufficient to cause tremendous damage.

  A few hundred of them spelled a catastrophe in the making, and that’s exactly what was occurring now.