He walked to the rear of the hangar and the oversize, gray, metal tool cabinet. After a quick glance around, he opened the double doors and then reached up onto the top shelf, retrieving what looked like an old-fashioned calculator. He punched a code into the device and hit “Enter,” then returned the device to the top shelf and closed the doors. With a soft whoosh, the cabinet disappeared into the floor, exposing the very modern black-walled elevator behind. He stepped over the top of the cabinet, now flush with the floor, and entered the elevator, then pressed his palm onto the glass reader mounted on the wall—identical to the reader that had let him into the hangar from the parking lot. The cabinet rose from the floor in front of him, back into place, and then the elevator began its rapid descent.
A few seconds later and fifty feet deeper, the elevator stopped abruptly. The doors opened, giving him access into a large, well-lit Tactical Operations Center that was the hub of Task Force Ember. He was no longer wowed by the impressive row of flat-screen TVs; the polished, round mahogany table with built-in flip-up workstations; or the bank of computer terminals and servers along the back wall. He glanced, as a matter of routine, up at the two monitors that showed the taxiway leading from the hangar and the parking lot on the opposite side of the building, and saw nothing concerning. A Southwest commercial jet taxied past on its way to the runway, but nothing else was moving.
“Hey, JD,” Smith said, as he entered the room through the doors that partitioned off the team locker room and the offices beyond. “Thanks for coming in.”
“Hooyah,” Dempsey said, with just the right amount of sarcasm to remind Smith he was still annoyed at being called in. “Find anything on the Blackberry or laptop yet?”
“I haven’t heard anything from Ian and the boys yet, so I assume the answer is no.”
Dempsey nodded. Baldwin’s team and the cyber genius Richard Wang—whom Jarvis had poached from US Cyber Command—were good, but they weren’t omniscient. “Is Grimes here?” he asked.
Smith dropped into one of the cushy leather seats at the conference table. “Yeah, and so is Mendez.”
Salvador Mendez, a former MARSOC Marine with unlimited potential, rounded out Dempsey’s small combat team. The plan was to add at least two more members, but Dempsey barely had time to breathe, let alone recruit at the moment. He took the seat beside Smith. The chair was a womb; a wave of drowsiness washed over him. That was how it went for operators—burning stress hormones like human jet fuel until the mission’s complete, then when that last drop is used up, the afterburner flames out.
“You good, brother?” Smith asked.
“Yeah,” Dempsey said. “Just hitting the wall.”
“I remember the feeling. One minute you’re going Mach two, ready to take on a tiger, and the next you’re barely able to keep your head up.”
Dempsey nodded agreement. “And every year older I get, the harder I crash.”
“Lemme grab you a cup of coffee. The pot’s been warming for hours, so I’m sure it’s thick and nasty, just the way you like it.”
Dempsey shook his head. “Nah, I’m good.”
After a beat, Smith leaned in. “So, how was it?” he asked in a low, conspiratorial whisper.
“How was what?”
“Being out with a SEAL team. Was it weird? Did it get lonely or did you just have wood the whole time?”
Dempsey laughed.
Interesting that Smith had used the word lonely, because that was exactly how he’d felt. Paradoxical that he could feel alone in a group of SEALs, but therein lay the irony of human dynamics. Being “one of the guys” was not the same as “the guys plus one.” Clearly Smith had experienced the feeling before, or he wouldn’t have phrased the question like he had.
“Well?” Smith asked.
“It was good,” Dempsey said at last. “The LT from Team Four is someone we should keep an eye on—a real steely-eyed frogman.” Normally, he felt more or less ambivalent about junior and midgrade officers in the Teams, but Chunk had been solid.
“Oh, I see how it is,” Smith said with a crooked smile. “Can’t stand being outnumbered, huh?”
“Not exactly. Think of it more as accommodating a handicap. The way I see it, we need at least two SEALs to offset every Delta on the team.”
“At least you didn’t lose your sense of humor over there when you were crashing helicopters and trying to get yourself captured,” Smith fired back.
The frosted glass door to the right opened and Elizabeth Grimes and Mendez walked in, both wearing desert khaki cargo pants and black 5.11 Tactical sports shirts. Mendez was laughing about something Grimes was saying. They saw Dempsey and stopped.
“Hey, boss,” the former Marine said. “Didn’t know you were back already.”
“Just got in,” Dempsey said. He shifted his gaze to Elizabeth. “Lady Grimes,” he said with a nod.
Grimes dropped into the chair to his left, swinging her dark red ponytail over her shoulder. She stared at him with those sharp gray-blue eyes that must have melted a lot of hearts in her former life.
“Would you please stop calling me that?” she said with mock anger.
Dempsey grinned. “It’s a term of endearment.”
“Bullshit it is,” she said and punched him in the shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise.
“No, really, it’s a sign of respect,” Smith chimed in. “He told me as much when we were watching a stripper named Lady at the Mons Venus in Tampa.”
“That’s right,” Dempsey said. “I said she reminds me of Grimes, every inch the lady.”
She tried to shoot him an angry look, but started laughing instead. “The day you boys see me dancing naked is the day you’ve died and gone to heaven.”
Everyone busted up, and Mendez gave her a fist bump.
It’s good to be back with my team, Dempsey thought, and realized he was suddenly glad he’d been called into the hangar before going home. They were his home now—a tribe of NOC-using, gun-shooting, foul-mouth-talking, terrorist-chasing, hot-blooded, American thirtysomethings.
Yeah, I’m home.
The rear door opened and Kelso Jarvis, the head of Task Force Ember, entered, flanked by the Professor—tall, lanky Ian Baldwin—with the geek squad in tow.
Jarvis went straight to the center podium and Baldwin sat down in the seat beside him, plugging a laptop into the panel in front of him.
“Welcome back, John,” Jarvis said with a nod.
“Sir.” Dempsey nodded back. No matter who Dempsey had become, Jarvis would always be Captain Jarvis, former commander of the Tier One SEAL team, and a legend. Sir was about as informal as he thought he could get.
“I wanted to get us all reconnected and on the same page,” Jarvis said. “Mr. Wang will not be joining us, as he is hard at work on the decryption of the devices that Dempsey retrieved.”
“Should have been at work on the prisoner—al-Mahajer’s proxy,” Dempsey lamented.
Jarvis shook his head. “This was a tough one and you pulled it off with no injury to our cover. No reason to hang your head. From what I understand, your escape was remarkable.”
Dempsey shrugged. Like most Tier One SEALs, he had never been much of an “attaboy” kind of guy.
“Now’s probably a good time to fill the rest of the team in on what went down out there.”
“Roger that, sir,” Dempsey said, and stood. “We had intel that Rafiq al-Mahajer would be attending a meeting at an ISIS safe house not far from Al Qa’im in northwestern Iraq. Al-Mahajer is former Mujahideen with deep ties to Al Qaeda, but now he’s risen to the position of strategic leader in the Islamic State’s Iraqi front. The objective was a capture mission to grab al-Mahajer, but he sent a proxy instead and so the bastard slipped through my fingers once again.”
“Once again?” Mendez asked, looking confused. “Did we have him in our sights before?”
Dempsey felt Jarvis’s eyes on him.
“This shithead has been in the wind for a long time, since an
attempt to capture him nearly a decade ago, a mission during which a good man died.” He exhaled and let the ghost of Romeo swirl away.
“So what did we learn, John?” Jarvis asked, getting him back on track.
“The fact that al-Mahajer sent a proxy tells us something. We believe, or I do anyway, that this gathering was far more than just a morale booster for a bunch of crazy jihadists in western Iraq. This was meant to be a face-to-face liaison with someone important.”
“Who?” asked Grimes, cutting straight to the chase.
“That’s the million-dollar question. Could be a financier, a strategic partner, a petrol broker, or a faction leader planning the next strike. There are plenty of possibilities.”
“The why is equally important,” Smith added. “ISIS doesn’t typically play well with others, and not just because of differences in their religious and political ideologies. Unlike Al Qaeda, they use brutality as a recruiting tool. Unlike Al Qaeda, they are not afraid of offending non-radicalized Sunni leadership in the region. Anyone who is not devoted to their pursuit of a pure Islamic State is viewed as a nonbeliever and a threat. They’ve murdered hundreds and hundreds of Muslims, including women and children. Historically, these differences have kept them at odds with other bad actors, but as we make greater and greater progress in cutting off their revenue streams from oil and drugs, we can’t rule out the possibility of alliance building. No one would have thought that all the Al Qaeda faction leaders could have aligned to pull off the Operation Crusader massacre, but it happened.”
“Is that what you think the meeting was about? An alliance between Al Qaeda and ISIS?” Mendez asked, his expression chilling.
Dempsey shook his head. “Impossible to know with the limited intelligence we collected during the op.”
“But based on the attendees, you don’t think so.” It was a statement, not a question, from Jarvis. Whenever he asked a question, Dempsey struggled to decide whether the head of Ember was getting an expert opinion or just testing his former LCPO to see how he was evolving. In either case, all Dempsey could do was say what he thought.
“Correct,” he said. “I think this was something else. There are lots of ways for ISIS and AQ leadership to hook up without risking a meet in Qa’im. It would have been safer to meet in Raqqa, for example, where ISIS’s security is better. This feels different to me. Someone wanted this meeting to take place outside of Syria, but who and why I can’t even begin to speculate. They piggybacked onto a meeting that was already set up—the one targeted by the SEALs I embedded with.”
Jarvis nodded. “Go on.”
“Not much more to tell. As you know, we had a little issue with our air transportation en route to Baghdad, and al-Mahajer’s proxy was a casualty of that event. Without the proxy to interrogate, we have to hope Baldwin’s team can perform a miracle on the confiscated phone and laptop. Maybe we’ll find a bread crumb or get a sniff of al-Mahajer’s current location. He’ll assume he’s compromised—expect him to change tactics and locations.”
“Thanks, John,” Jarvis said from the podium.
Dempsey took his seat.
“Did you consider the possibility of an Iranian connection?” Grimes fixed her cool blues on him. She just couldn’t help herself, he thought with a grin.
If I had something like that, don’t you think I would have led with it? Uncovering VEVAK’s connection to the Yemen attack was Ember’s baptismal triumph, after all.
“Good point,” Jarvis said patiently. A few months ago, Jarvis had had zero patience for Grimes and her habit of bird-dogging the debriefs, but Ember was gelling into a family. Accepting one another’s little idiosyncrasies was part of the team coming together. “We know beyond a doubt that Amir Modiri was the mastermind behind the UN terrorist attack and the Crusader massacre. But what we know and what we can prove are not the same.”
Grimes opened her mouth as if to rebut, but then smiled and held her tongue.
“Ian?” Jarvis said, stepping aside for the lanky genius in the rumpled oxford to take the podium.
“Working diligently,” Baldwin said with a smile out of place given the context of the brief. “But we must tread carefully, as they’ve put encryption countermeasures in place. If we trip over one as we pursue decryption, the data will wipe and recovery will be much more tedious—though not impossible for us, of course.” He laughed, looked around. Finding no other smiles, he cleared his throat awkwardly.
“So nothing yet to report?” Dempsey said. He was tired. The thought of Baldwin launching into a dissertation about intersecting spaghetti lines of code and how they formed a song whose melody could be as revealing as the lyrics was more than he could take.
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Baldwin said, adjusting his glasses on his nose like a graduate-school professor, ready to launch into a discussion that would leave most of the room in the dust. “When you compare these data streams to prior streams—”
“You can go into the details with Dempsey after we’re done here, Ian,” Jarvis interjected. “In the meantime, just give us your impressions.”
“Well,” Baldwin said, and put his hands in the pockets of his baggy, wrinkled khakis, “suffice it to say, I believe there is evidence to support John’s theory about a liaison. The data patterns suggest that recent communications between the proxy involved two different people with different background languages.”
Dempsey was, as usual, amazed that they could determine that from encrypted data.
“What are they saying?” Mendez asked.
“We don’t know that, of course—yet.”
Dempsey could feel Grimes rolling her eyes beside him.
“But we do know that the pattern of the communication recently changed. We’re running an analysis of how the streams compare to all the previous encrypted transmissions we’ve collected. I’m confident we’ll find overlap somewhere.”
“So, nothing new or earth-shattering, but sounds like we’re moving the ball slowly down the field. Thanks, Ian,” Jarvis said with a pat on Ian’s back. “That’s all, people. Make sure you get a good night’s sleep tonight. I want everyone sharp and ready to act on any breakthroughs the guys can uncover.”
“We’ll be working through the night,” Baldwin added excitedly.
“And we’ll all be available on an 0300-level alert should something shake loose. In the meantime, rest, people. It’s a valuable weapon.”
Everyone stood. Dempsey wondered why he had needed to divert to the hangar for this. Then, Jarvis motioned him over. Shit.
“Yes, sir?”
Jarvis, who was still standing beside Baldwin, looked him up and down. “How are you, John? Unscathed?”
“Fully operational,” Dempsey answered, ignoring the stinger pulsing down his left leg that screamed otherwise. Old back injuries and new helicopter crashes were a really shitty combination.
“We should probably schedule a medical review for you anyway. I need to keep you five by.”
“Yes, sir,” he grumbled. He didn’t have time for that shit. As far as he was concerned, docs were just overpaid paper pushers who lobbied to keep you on the bench when work needed to be done. He wished he knew where Dan Munn had ended up. As a former SEAL himself, Doc Munn was the only physician Dempsey trusted. Of course, an appointment with Munn was impossible under the circumstances. Munn knew him only as Jack Kemper, who had died during Operation Crusader.
He looked up and saw Jarvis waiting patiently for him to finish his mental sojourn.
“John, I want you to work with Ian’s team as they decrypt the data on the al-Mahajer proxy devices.”
Dempsey laughed and then caught himself when he saw the expression on the Director’s face. “Oh, you’re serious?”
What the hell is this? Penance for Iraq? If so, being banished to the signals den seems a bit harsh.
“I’m not sure how much I would contribute, Skipper,” Dempsey said. “I think I’ll probably just be in the way.”
“That’s e
xactly the point,” Jarvis said.
“To be in the way?”
“To be in the mix. You need to understand all the elements that go into ensuring our operation is maximally effective. You are the Director of Special Activities, and also our most valuable field asset. That helo crash is a perfect example of fate fucking with resources. You never know who or what you’re going to lose, and you never know when or where it’s going to happen. I need you to be multifunctional. You have come a long way in tradecraft, but what Ian does is an integral part of the modern clandestine world. I’m not ordering you to get a PhD in statistics or computer science, but you do need to understand the ones and zeros.”
“Yes, sir,” Dempsey said, not sure what else to say. The thought of sitting beside Chip and Dale at a computer terminal for hours was nearly unbearable. Flying in a piece-of-shit Russian helo was worse, but he wasn’t sure by how much. He turned to Ian. “Okay, let’s go.”
Jarvis laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean now. You’re jet-lagged and exhausted. Go home, get some sleep, and be back bright and early. Ian will catch you up then.”
“Thank you,” Dempsey said, making no effort to hide his relief. He headed toward the door, making eye contact with Smith on the way out.
“Grab dinner before you turn in?” Smith said, a big grin on the Ops O’s face.
“Yeah,” Dempsey said, a beaten dog.
“A word, Shane?” Jarvis called across the room. “I need about twenty minutes.”
Dempsey slapped the former Delta Force operator on the back. “I’ll grab Lady Grimes and Mendez,” he said. “We’ll meet you at the Bonefish Grill in the ’burg when you’re done.”
“I heard that,” Grimes called from the other room.
With a smile on his face, Dempsey shuffled out to gather his teammates. A good meal, a couple of beers, and a good night’s sleep were calling . . . and after that, he just might accidently turn off his work phone.
CHAPTER 11
Ember Operations Center
War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2) Page 10
