Operator Down

by Brad Taylor

  We’d landed in Joburg, and the first order of business had been sleep. I’d left Armstrong in the capable hands of Blaine and his crew, given the team their marching orders, and gone comatose for close to sixteen hours. When I’d awoken and padded down to our hotel TOC, Blaine was talking to Kurt, and Kurt was in a fine mood.

  Turned out there wasn’t any danger to the hospital, and he’d burned a lot of chips to get the ball moving—all because he’d agreed to let the coup go forward and felt responsible for the threat. Now he was learning there had been no threat to the hospital, and he’d managed to convince the secretary of defense to execute a full-blown NEO, based on my recommendation. He started right in as soon as I sat down.

  “You told me the hospital was under fire.”

  “Now, wait a minute. I told you it was uncorroborated.”

  “And conveniently, some guy named Thomas Naboni is now in charge of the country. The king’s come forward supporting him, which was enough to shut down any bitching by MPs in parliament. Not to mention there’s some rumor that a US Special Forces team had something to do with keeping him alive, like some kind of Karzai mission in Afghanistan after 9/11. Because of it, the US embassy is scrambling for a story supporting his rightful position in the government.”

  “Why are you shouting at me about this? You said yourself, if Thomas was left standing it wasn’t any of our business.”

  “An SF team? Really?” His eyes started to bug out of his head, and he shouted, “It’s the same damn team we talked about! They were gone before I even made my first call!”

  “Well, you might want to ask the embassy RSO about that.”

  He’d clenched his fists and sputtered, “I did. Two women showed up at the embassy and convinced the team to leave.”

  “Yeah? That so? Strange.”

  “Pike—”

  Before he could get too worked up, I changed the subject. “Did we get anything out of Armstrong?”

  He let out a breath and sagged back, saying, “Yeah, he’s setting up a meeting between Malloy and that ‘Colonel Smith’ guy. We’re transferring control over to DSS and FBI, and they’re coordinating on a sting with the South Africans. It’s a law enforcement matter now.”

  “So, you got what you wanted. Those triggers will be off the street, and Malloy will be in the bag.”

  “And you got Thomas Naboni.”

  “No, sir. I got Aaron. The Israelis thank you. Thomas was just a bennie that worked out.”

  He said, “The mission was the nuclear triggers.”

  I said, “The mission was bigger than just the triggers.”

  He shook his head and asked, “What would you have done if I’d have said no on recovering Aaron?”

  I thought about it, then simply said, “The right thing.”

  He didn’t probe what that was, and a day and a half after that, Jennifer and I were having lunch with Aaron and Shoshana, four tables over from Tyler Malloy.

  I said, “You guys should really try one of these hurricanes. They’re delicious.”

  Shoshana said, “I don’t drink anything that comes with an umbrella.”

  “Well, you get to keep the glass.”

  Jennifer said, “So you guys fly tonight?”

  Aaron said, “Yes. We have an appointment in the diamond exchange tomorrow with one Eli Cohen.”

  “Does he know about the coup results?”

  Shoshana said, “I honestly don’t care.” She put a chip in her mouth and said, “Say, you guys should come visit before you go home.”

  I laughed and said, “What, you need help with Eli?”

  She grew cold, saying, “No. We won’t be needing any help there.”

  Jennifer said, “What are you going to do with him?”

  Aaron took a sip of his beer and said, “Nothing. Well, I’m going to give him a handgun and then an array of unpalatable options. I’m pretty sure whatever happens to him will be at his own hand. Especially if it keeps his family seat on the exchange.”

  I said, “Well, good of you to give him a choice.”

  Jennifer slapped my arm, saying, “Pike.”

  Shoshana said, “No, he’s right. It’s a choice he never gave us.”

  I changed the subject, saying, “Israel’s a little out of the way for us.”

  Aaron took the shift, wanting to get away from the earlier conversation. “Not really. You stretch it a little bit, but you have to fly to Europe first anyway. It’s just bending the leg of the triangle.”

  Before I could say anything else, Tyler Malloy stood up, shaking Smith’s hand. I called out to Knuckles, saying, “He’s on the move. Get it on tape.”

  The Hard Rock was located in a patch of concrete called Nelson Mandela Square. Just off the rail line in the Joburg suburb of Sandton, it was a chic place surrounded with art galleries, museums, and restaurants. It was pedestrian-only, which made it easy to box with my team for a follow. Veep, Brett, and Knuckles were positioned outside, lounging wherever they could find spots that covered the avenues of egress.

  I heard Knuckles say, “I’ve got him. He’s coming my way. Veep, Blood, on me.”

  We huddled around the tablet in front of Jennifer while she manipulated the camera view until she had Knuckles’s feed. We saw nothing for a moment; then Shoshana pointed to the upper right of the screen. Tyler Malloy came into view, walking rapidly by Knuckles. Knuckles stood, and we got a perfect view of Tyler’s back as he walked toward Maude Street and the Sandton Convention Centre.

  Jennifer glanced up, then hissed, “Colonel Smith.”

  We all looked at his table and saw it surrounded by men in suits. Whether they were DSS, South African Special Branch, or FBI I didn’t know, but it was a little sweet justice seeing him frog-marched out the back.

  We returned to the screen, seeing Tyler had entered an alley. He approached a van, pulled out a key, and opened the back. We couldn’t tell what he was looking at, because Knuckles held back at a distance, not wanting to interfere with the inevitable.

  Tyler crawled inside the van and began manipulating a trunk. He got it open, and then all sorts of hell descended on him, the van assaulted by a full squad of guys wearing black balaclavas and carrying MP5s. The camera went crazy as Knuckles retreated, calling, “Jackpot. Jackpot. Did you get it?”

  I said, “Yeah, we got it. Sort of anticlimactic, though. I was hoping you’d join in and kick him once for Aaron.”

  Knuckles laughed and said, “See you back at the hotel.”

  I looked around the table and said, “Well, that’s that.”

  Shoshana stood and said, “We’d better head to the airport.”

  Jennifer said, “Your flight doesn’t leave for a few hours.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t trust being this far away. The rail has an express straight to the airport, and I feel safer once I’m there. That place is a nuthouse.”

  Aaron pulled out his wallet and said, “Let me get this. It’s the least I can do.”

  Jennifer said, “No, no. It’s our gift to you.”

  Shoshana said, “Big spender.”

  I laughed and she said, “Come to Israel. I’ll give you two a gift.”

  “What?”

  She looked at Jennifer and said, “A date. Jennifer’s been wanting one for a while. I can feel it.”

  I said, “Oh, so now you’re giving us relationship advice?”

  Deadly serious, she said, “Yes, I am. Take it.”

  Jennifer looked at me with a tinge of longing. I said, “So you’re now reading us like the enemy?”

  Shoshana smiled and said, “No, Nephilim. You will never be the enemy. I’m just telling you what I’ve learned.” Aaron rose, and she took his hand, saying, “What you two have taught me.”

  I rose as well and kissed her on the cheek, saying, “Can we go to Caesarea and lo
ok at pottery shards? I promised that a few days ago, and it seems to get Jennifer hot.”

  Jennifer smacked me on the shoulder, then gave Aaron and Shoshana a hug.

  Shoshana said, “We’ll do what Jennifer wants. But I don’t think it’ll be about pottery shards. You don’t have to be me to read that.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Operator Down is the first book I’ve written where I began with a blank slate and a plan instead of relying on a news story to spark an idea. I have gone from furiously typing two books a year to having some time to actually ponder, and I used it. I wanted something different. I wanted to move away from trying to chase the latest headlines and just type a story that resonated. That required doing something I’ve never done before: finding a story that would never make the US news cycle but was still real. Which was liberating. At the outset, I had three goals: one, make it personal vice some world-ending terrorist attack; two, bring back Aaron and Shoshana (just because I love them); and three, set the story somewhere I hadn’t before.

  From there, I started kicking around ideas that could satisfy those three parameters. I hit upon the diamond trade in Israel and the connection to the plethora of diamond mines in Africa. The idea of a coup began to form, but research into the usual places where blood diamonds are found, such as Sierra Leone, revealed that these were definitely not locations I was looking forward to visiting. I then found the unique land of Lesotho, a country completely surrounded by South Africa, source of some of the largest gem-quality diamonds on earth, and—while relatively stable—also a place with a history of coups.

  So, I had an idea, and I took off on my book-research adventure, only this time I got a little more than I bargained for. After spending a few days in Joburg and Cape Town nailing down those areas (yes, the manager of the Hard Rock was from Texas), I met my guide, Khabiso, in Lesotho the first night of arrival, and we planned out the next day’s events. What we didn’t plan for was getting detained by a counterintelligence unit for “spying” on the Lesotho Special Forces base. After driving around seeing all the specific places I’d requested, we were rolled up outside of the Makoanyane Military Base. Doing things the average tourist would not.

  We spent the next six and half hours in solitary interrogation in separate rooms, which I probably deserved since I seriously looked like a spy. The book was about a coup, so all the pictures on my camera were decidedly not touristy—the parliament building, the prime minister’s residence (a blurry frame taken as we drove by it—with a sign saying “no pictures” in the picture), the lone television and radio station, the primary police headquarters, etc.—nothing on my camera was helping my “tourist” story. I had no plausible reason for having taken those photos, I had a retired-military ID card, and there was absolutely no way I was going to tell them I was a writer and have them Google my bio. They’d already told me I’d been trained to “resist interrogation” (Yeah? True, but how do I answer that?) and had called my passport fake because it said I was born in Japan (no idea why that makes my passport “fake”—but you don’t argue with the interrogator). I was sure that if they saw my books and bio it would have cemented their paranoid fears. Oh, and there was a US Special Forces team on the ground conducting a security assessment of the USEMB, but they were truly there for a secret reason that I alone knew. At least that’s what my interrogators told me, because they thought I was spying for them. . . .

  In the end, the Johan interrogation scene wrote itself (with a little literary license—nobody ever laid a hand on me—but the Frog is real, and I enjoyed giving him some just desserts on the page), and the plot developed with some real-world intrigue that my interrogators managed to let slip during my questioning. I had no idea at the time about the machinations occurring in Lesotho, but everything I learned during that session played out in the book. I’m deeply indebted to Khabiso, who could have left me high and dry but instead became a little spitfire demanding we be released—and who also turned out to have some highly placed friends in the government. After the interrogation was over, Khabiso’s sole worry was that I’d give her a bad TripAdvisor review. I laughed and said, “They were stupid enough to take us on the base. Can’t get any better research than that.” Yes, the building that Brett and Johan assault is real, as is the sheet-draped room I was interrogated in, but the only reason I saw it was because I was careless.

  The next day’s activities were decidedly more routine—driving to Morija and seeing the museum, with a side trip to a certain concrete bridge that Johan crosses—and I thought about going to the US embassy to let them know that any SF team on the ground needed to watch what they did, but in the end, I just drank a beer at the hotel bar. They were on their own.

  In Israel, I’m indebted to my guide, Avraham, who showed me around Tel Aviv. Not only did he give a first-rate historical perspective on the establishment of the city, and the country of Israel, but by the end of the tour, he’d finally decided I was trustworthy. Probably because when he told me about the prison that held Eichmann, I’d relayed I knew all about his capture. A little Jennifer coming through. Sometimes reading history pays off.

  I’d initially explained what I was doing there, and that I really would like to talk to someone about the diamond exchange. We finished the tour, and he said, “I have a cousin who works inside the exchange. Would you like to meet her?” Two hours later, I had a call from her saying to bring my passport and no weapons. I assumed that was some Israeli comment made because she believed every American travels with a pistol in his belt, and I thought I was just going to pick her brain at a coffee shop near the exchange, but when I arrived, she’d gotten me clearance to get inside. Yes, I now have a badge for the fabled diamond exchange of Israel, and the education was incredible. So much so, I named a character after her. Alexandra is the name of the cousin who walked me through. I still have the badge, and my wife says we’re going to use it—for something she has yet to outline. . . .

  As in the Taskforce and life, time marches on in the publishing industry. Retro retired in this manuscript, and my editor, Ben Sevier, moved on as well. He’s been with me since One Rough Man, and we brainstormed the plot for Operator Down, argued about the title, and generally did everything we usually do, and then, while I was deep into it, he was offered a job he couldn’t refuse as the publisher of a major house. For the uninitiated, that’s like being offered the position of CEO. He’ll be greatly missed, but my Dutton Taskforce marches on, with Jess seamlessly continuing to berate me on editing, Liza churning out publicity leads and then forcing this reluctant author to step up, and the rest of the Dutton crew running like a well-oiled machine, making sure my books are the best they can possibly be. As Pike would say to Shoshana, I’m glad you’re sweet on me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRAD TAYLOR is the author of the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series. He served for more than twenty years in the US Army, including eight years in 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, commonly known as Delta Force. He retired as a Special Forces lieutenant colonel and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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