by David Poyer
This conclusion, in conjunction with the release of Al-Nashiri (suspect D546576), causes this agent to conclude that either:
1) the information D546576 and/or others gave PSO was a false lead, due perhaps to application of torture, resulting in misleading information given simply to feign compliance; or
2) the PSO is still shielding the real (read: foreign Arab) bad guys in hopes of their carrying out a planned strike against the Saudi royal family or government figures.
She sat back, stretching her neck. It was all so speculative. Of course most investigative work was, but counterterrorism was even murkier than pursuing qat smuggling or stateside rings that stole ammunition or weapons.
The NCIS had little training for the intelligence function. Now she was being drawn into another world, chasing deadly, elusive criminals with close ties with host governments; so cunningly woven into the fabric of their societies that just trying to identify them was like wandering through a wilderness of mirrors.
She’d worked a Mafia case out of the naval air station in Sigonella that reminded her of this in some ways. But Yemen was Sicily squared. Was it feasible that senior officers in the PSO, or maybe even above that—the slippery Minister Abdulilah—were still facilitating the people they were now pretending to pursue? Had supplied the weapons that had nearly killed her?
Benefiel came in, looked as if he were about to say something; then just sat and logged in. They both had terminals now, one good thing the augmented investigative element had brought along with Caraño: a container of computers, chairs, file cabinets, stationery supplies. They no longer had to beg ink-jet cartridges from the attachés.
Okay, she thought, tapping her nose. Let’s look at it from their angle. The Honorable Abdulilah and General Gamish and Colonel Al-Safani. They want to push back against Saudi activity on their borders. So the PSO facilitates a plot against the Saudis. Or maybe it’s not the whole organization that’s helping Al Qaeda, but some key member of the regime. Let’s call him X. So, X hears the president’s public denunciations of ALQ, or AQ, as the FBI called it; but he’s a clandestine supporter. Or maybe not, but still wants to use it as a cover, a smoke screen, his actual intent being to foment an attack on the Saudis and blame it on AQ, with the always slippery Yemeni president holding tight to plausible deniability.
Okay, why attack the Saudis? To send some sort of message, to warn them off? Or, an alternate explanation, to trigger more friction; generate enough internal fear and coercion that the president reverted to a fundamentalist foreign policy, as opposed to the semicollaborative relationship with the United States he seemed to be developing at the moment?
Benefiel cleared his throat. “Want to, uh, get a sandwich?”
She ignored him. So who was X? And if indeed there was an X, and she was anywhere close to his rationale, then, investigatively speaking, how would she get any traction on him? They needed access to the day-to-day relations of Yemeni officials with the local Salafis. Which they’d never get if they depended on the PSO itself, and if X was within the PSO. Or above it—if X was someone like Abdulilah, at the ministerial or even presidential level.
Okay, how else? Usually, when you had an idea who your perp was, you started with those close to the suspect. In Sicily, she’d turned the driver who took Signore Salvatore Lo Tocco to work every day. Worked from him to the dry cleaner who got the drugs onto the base, and passed the package to the Italian “Catturando” organized crime unit that had picked up Lo Tocco and his consigliere in Palermo. The big guys seldom thought twice about the little people around them. The secretary, the clerk, the guy who gave him his haircut. But the help saw the comings and goings, overheard conversations. They understood what they witnessed and sometimes were willing, given a promise of protection, to testify.
But whom could she recruit? She massaged her eyes. Round and round, but the bottom line always was, she was stuck in here, unable to operate, unable to interview or act. They had to operate through the local agency; and odds were the PSO was at the root of the problem.
After a little more reflection, she filed the report. Then went downstairs to the cafeteria. And there he was, sitting morosely in front of a tray of beef Stroganoff. Caraño himself, with Doanelson. One of the NYPD detectives stood a few yards away, watching television and jingling change in his pockets. The two FBI agents winced as she plunked her tray down. “Agent Ar-Rahim,” Caraño noted, glancing up.
“Rod. Scott. A word?”
“Scotty was telling me how the raid went. Sounded pretty effective, eh?”
“Sorry to be negative, but I’m afraid I don’t agree.” She gave him what she felt were the results, contrasted with what the PSO was claiming had happened. Doanelson frowned; pushed salad around, but didn’t interrupt. “Those are my conclusions,” she finished. “Either they got bad info, or they’re dirty. To put it in words of one syllable. And we’ve got a dead bystander.”
The SSA shook his head. “Sorry about the girl. If it was a reaction to the tear gas. But now you’re telling me we can’t trust the general That’s tough to believe. Gamish has assured me they’re in full cooperation mode.”
“I don’t trust anyone in this country, Rod. I tried, when I first got here. But the more I learn and the more I overhear, the less I trust.” He looked doubtful, the way she’d figured he would; not being able to depend on the host government would make their job much tougher. But she pushed ahead. “I have to be able to do fieldwork. Very limited, and I’ll be very careful, but I need to be able to get out of the embassy. At least for atmospherics. I need you to clear me to do that.”
The senior agent was already shaking his head. “No, Aisha. It’s too risky.”
“But then we’re totally isolated. How can we accomplish the mission from in here? Inside this glass jar?”
“We depend on our allies,” Doanelson said around a mouthful. “Like we’re supposed to. Not go charging off running some kind of secret superspy operation on our own.”
“Atmospherics are nice,” Caraño said, “And I agree, you’d be just the person to put out there. But I can’t risk an agent to gather them. Not after you’ve already been threatened. I can’t, Ar-Rahim; you’re too valuable.”
“Too valuable to put to work?”
“No, to lose, in what may be a very long war. We have thought about this. But over and above that, we can’t risk our relationship with the PSO and President Saleh. That would send very bad messages to some very highly placed people. Far above our pay grades.”
“They’re not being straight with us, Rod. They’re playing both sides.”
“But isn’t that better than playing just one? They’re saying the right things. Maybe as time goes on, they’ll realign actions to rhetoric. Their position’s fragile, too. They have to balance helping us with appearing not to. A lot of their political support comes from the fundamentalists.”
“Who are—”
“Just let me finish, okay? They’re walking a knife edge. The whole society could go either way. And last—no, don’t interrupt me—I have direct orders from the DCM not to let you out the door again.” Caraño took her wrist; she had to keep herself from jerking away. “They tried to kill you twice. You’re not to leave the compound again unaccompanied. Understand? No English lessons. No visits to the mosque. You will not leave here except with the rest of us, in convoy. They’ve targeted you and it’s our responsibility to protect you.”
“I’m restricted?” she said, not believing what she was hearing. “How in the hell am I supposed to—look, Rod, I speak the language. The only one on this team who does. You’re saying, we’re going to depend on the very people who funded these killers in the first place to tell us about them? And this furthers our mission how?”
“You heard the man,” Doanelson began, but she rounded on him so furiously he dropped his fork onto the tray with a clatter.
“Scott, I swear, keep out of this, or I’m going to shove that FBI badge where there’s no Kevlar, d
o you understand me? I’m protesting this, Rod. We have troops going into combat. They still don’t know how many thousand dead in New York and DC. Our orders are to do what’s necessary. You’re saying that includes torture, but not fieldwork?”
She waited, but neither responded. Just looked at their trays. Finally Caraño sighed. “Protest it if you want, Aisha. You’re a good agent. Just a little too involved with the local situation, if you know what I mean.”
She didn’t have a response to that, or, at least, any that didn’t seem childish or unprofessional. After that, she couldn’t stay and eat with them. Pretend they were all still on the same team. So she slapped the table, hard, rattling the metalware, got up, and walked out.
The least she could do, though, was to leave her tray for them to clear.
12
Night Raid
A hundred feet off the waves, the helicopter was completely blacked out. Teddy sat with boots planted wide and forty pounds of C4 explosive strapped to his chest, letting the vibration lull him. Almost not believing it was actually coming off. Across from him Oz, Scooper, and Smeg stared sleepily back or avoided his eyes. They’d had to leave Foss behind; the scorpion-fish sting was infected; he might lose the foot. Catron was still in pain, but had fought off the doctors, insisting he could see well enough to fight.
But what lay at the end of this flight … the thought crawled like a rash itch up inside Teddy’s backbone, ran like startled ants out along his upper arms.
No one knew what they were flying into. They were supposed to be in and out before the Taliban command, whatever was left of it, knew they were there. But that was how a lot of operations had started, and not how all of them had worked out.
The helicopter throbbing around him was Air Force, a nonreflective, dead-black Pave Low bird that seemed like the biggest aircraft Teddy had ever been aboard. Certainly it was bigger than any other rotor-winged aircraft he’d ever seen. In the muted lighting the thing had loomed over Kitty Hawk’s flight deck, wide as a tractor trailer, the turbines way up there screaming in a hushed thunder that quivered in his belly, the strange-looking half-tail strobing red light so that the rotor looked motionless. A refueling probe jutted like a cannon. Pylons like flying buttresses grasped pontoons and sponsons, flare dispensers, electronic-warfare pods, antennas. The blades stretched nearly across the flight deck, and three other birds were spinning up at the same time spaced along it.
Intimidating. He was used to the stripped down SH-60s the Navy used for insertion, a cramped box of a fuselage, stripped metal, bare hydraulics, open doors. Yelling at the pilots to communicate. Climbing up into these things had been like climbing into some future century. The 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment had led raids into Iraq during Desert Storm and Panama, done the Liberian evacuation, the Iraqi no-fly zone, and other operations that hadn’t made the media. They did infiltration and extract of special forces and CSAR, combat search and rescue; they could navigate where no other aircraft could and spoof or distract most radars. This was what war looked like with unlimited funding, time, and technology. The Air Force way. This single bird could have lifted the entire platoon, plus a Zodiac rigged to drop. He almost felt lonely in here with only thirteen guys.
Thirteen of his own guys, that is. In black, padded flight suits, the six air crewmen moved agilely as chimps from handhold to handhold, writhing among the motionless SEALs. One was strapping himself into a minigun mount on the back ramp. That was encouraging, if they had to dismount into hostile fire.
Teddy knew the plan. But he wasn’t sure he had faith in it. Maybe it had started out like a SEAL mission, at least a little.
But then, it had started to grow.
* * *
HARDLY any country in the world was farther from the sea than Afghanistan. None of their combat swimming or SDV training was going to do any good there. It was desert and mountain, and the only ways in led over countries that were either totally hostile, such as Iran, or at best dubiously neutral, such as Pakistan. But the planners had laminated together Air Force and Navy capabilities and come out with a plan that for sheer audacity rivaled the Honey Badger mission to rescue the hostages from Teheran.
Their tasking was to launch from the sea, overfly Pakistan, and achieve tactical surprise against an enemy who had to know they were coming. Their target was the main Taliban radio station north of Kandahar, which intel suspected also housed an operations center. Also, not far off, was a compound said to be used by Mullah Omar. They’d roll in, take down his personal security detail, and either kill him on the spot or scarf him back for trial. This sounded challenging, and they’d planned and rehearsed it in the ninety-six-hour mission request, planning, and execution cycle customary for the Teams. Now, they were lifting off. Into a dark, windy, rainy night—ideal for undetected transit. He’d spent most of the hours in between shuttling between intel and flight ops, but still no one seemed sure what would happen if a bird went down.
Their goal was five hundred miles inland, but map miles weren’t helicopter miles. Their twisting course—threading international boundaries, fretted by mountain ranges and deserts—snaked around population centers, antiaircraft radars, and commercial air routes. The round-trip was over thirteen hundred miles. It would take seven hours to fly in, and the helo crews would have to endure another seven out.
Then suddenly the whole thing had ballooned. The old saying—“Peace before war, but if there’s a war, we want a piece.” Rangers were hitting the airstrip in a separate Army mission, and the supersecret Deltas were to assault a compound inside the city also used by the same high-value target the SBS and the SEALS were after. Rangers would be providing security for that part of the operation too.
Meanwhile, Charlie Platoon was doing a recon on an abandoned Russian airstrip to the southwest. The Fifteenth MEU was tasked with establishing a forward operating base there, but the Marines weren’t ready to launch. Until then, someone had to make sure no one occupied the strip. So Charlie, aboard another Pave Low, would split off shortly after they crossed the Pak border. They’d infiltrate via a desert LZ and lay up in an overwatch position until the Marine helicopter-borne assault.
His own team’s objective, “Tantalum,” was the original core of the mission. But all these inserts were taking place nearly simultaneously. In other words, not only was deconflicting the freqs a motherfucker, the possibility loomed of a massive clusterfuck. So in the end SOCOM had split the Navy’s piece of the operational headquarters raid, Objective Cottonmouth, into two elements, one landing north of the objective, the other southwest. Echo and Bravo got the north end, all the US operators together, which made sense—even if the SBS was good, you didn’t want them operating too close; that was how you got blue-on-blue casualties.
The whole plan made him feel hinky. Generally when you took a unit behind enemy lines, success and even survival depended on two things: how well you planned a totally “clandestine” operation; then, on how well your platoon actually executed your plan. For a small unit to do almost any other type of behind the lines operation was called “going Hollywood” and tended to get everyone killed. SEALs preferred to slip in and out without anyone knowing they’d been there. “Leave no footprints in the sand.” The success of future ops depended on your ability to remain an unknown to your enemy.
Not that the Teams hadn’t participated in classic compound assaults. They had, but whether they succeeded depended on initial surprise, speed, close coordination between all units from beginning to end, and bringing overwhelming force quickly to bear on the objective.
In those frenzied hours there’d been a lot of discussion about how large a force to commit. The thing had started out as a multiplatoon operation. But bigger wasn’t always better. SEALs had almost always operated in small groups, six or eight men. Others were better trained for large-scale sweep-and-destroy ops, which this seemed to be turning into—Marines, Army Rangers, “conventional” rather than “special” forces. Teddy had made the po
int they could get too numerous to achieve surprise, yet at the same time not be heavy enough to prevail if they sucked in a sizable opposing force. But intel had said in the Enemy Sit brief there shouldn’t be much opposition. Few Afghanis were committed enough to the Taliban to die for them.
The team had done a walk-through and talk-through at half speed, then a briefback, then done it again at full speed with full gear. Teddy had spent most of the previous night poring over photos, memorizing possible bunker locations and fields of fire. Remembering what Stroud had said. Attitude. Leadership. Management. Yeah, and at the end of it, killing the enemy.
But this time he had to try to tone it down a little. Concentrate on his guys. Not be so much the killer who came out covered in blood, flourishing his knife.
The droning of the rotors was his own pulse. The droning of the turbines was the om in his head. He breathed deep, let the stress out. Breathe deep, let it out.
Craning past the gunner he caught something dim outside, glowing in the dark. The gunner was leaning into the slipstream, looking ahead. The aircraft rocked, nudged him in his seat. Went nose-down, then nose-up. The airframe jolted. He flicked the night-vision goggles on just for a moment, conscious he had to conserve batteries, and picked up the other 53 making its approach to a jellyfish shape floating in the night.
Refueling. No clue how they’d picked up the tanker in these black skies. The helicopter floated weightless, motionless except for the drone and pulse that was now part of his bones. He remembered suddenly, with a quirk of the lips, how he’d put a mission not much different from this in his screenplay. If he’d brought a camera, he could have gotten some stock footage.
* * *
ONE of the gunners shook him awake. A helmet clunked against his cranial. “Fifteen out,” the airman yelled. Teddy blinked and straightened his spine. He clicked the little switch on the goggles and pulled them down.
