by Larry Bond
6
EASTERN SYRIA
Thera’s scream was followed by a steady rattle of gunfire from an AK-47, followed by an MP5’s sturdier whistle. Ferg ran around the north side of the building, aiming to flank who’d ever come out.
“Thera,” he said as he ran. “Where are you? Yo.”
She didn’t answer. When he reached the back corner of the building he threw himself down, moving forward slowly on the ground.
Something moved near the doorway. Thera.
She bent down, reaching for the doorknob.
“What are you doing?” said Ferguson.
“Duck!” she told him, flipping a grenade in through the crack and then running back toward the berm ten yards away. She made it just as the grenade went off.
Ferguson rose and walked toward the doorway. Two men lay sprawled in the dirt nearby; a third had been killed inside the building by Thera’s grenade. None of the men was Khazaal.
“Run up and cover the front of the building,” Ferguson told her.
“You’re not going in, are you?” she asked.
“Just get up there and make sure no one came out while we were playing back here.”
The interior of the building had been divided in half by a wall that ran only partway to the high ceiling. Except for the dead man and a few scattered cartons, the room at the back was empty. Ferguson moved inside as quietly as he could, then raised his grenade launcher and pumped a shell of tear gas over the wall. He pulled up his shotgun, aiming it at the open doorway, then ran forward to the wall. Though he had a pretty strong suspicion that the front half of the building was empty, he rolled on the floor and crawled his way inside.
A hundred boxes or more lined the wall on his left. The rest of the place was empty. The boxes were filled with infant formula, according to the writing on the side.
“Is this where Khazaal is going?” asked Thera when he came out.
“I don’t know yet,” he told her. “Let’s go put down markers for the airborne guys and then hide.”
“I’m sorry I had to shoot,” said Thera.
“Forget about it now. Come on. Their Mercedes should be about ninety seconds away.”
~ * ~
N
early ten miles to the south, Rankin stopped his bike in the desert and pulled out his paper map, correlating his position against the handheld GPS device. He flipped the radio into satellite mode. “Fouad, is he still coming this way?”
“Yes,” said the Iraqi.
“Where’s he going?” asked Guns. The two Rangers they’d taken with them pulled up behind them.
“Maybe for that airfield at the corner there,” said Rankin. “Let’s move up the road to the intersection with the airport.”
~ * ~
F
erguson hid behind the Land Rover, and Thera crouched at the edge of the building as the battered Mercedes rounded the turnoff and headed for the complex.
“You have the first guy out. I have the second,” said Ferguson. “Make sure the mask covers your glasses. This gas is worse than CS by a factor of ten.”
“No way.”
“Try it and see,” said Ferguson, readying the grenades.
The Mercedes stopped alongside the Land Rover. The two men inside made things easy by getting out at the same time.
Thwack!
Thera’s crossbow landed in the driver’s left shoulder, where the plunger tip injected enough anesthetic to knock him senseless within three seconds. By then, Ferguson had knocked the second man to the ground with a plastic round to the head. He soft-tossed a tear gas grenade into the car as he ran to the man, kicking away a fallen pistol. Though the man had been knocked unconscious by the blow, Ferg injected a heavy dose of the sodium pentothal to keep him out. A fog of tear gas enveloped the area; Ferguson and Thera had to pull the two men all the way to the fence before they were clear.
Ferguson cursed when he took off his mask. Neither of the men in the Mercedes was Khazaal. He took out a small digital camera to transmit the pictures back to Fouad.
“I don’t know who they are,” Fouad said. “They may be with the resistance, but most likely they are smugglers.”
“Smugglers sell baby food?” asked Ferguson.
“Maybe. It might have been stolen inside Iraq and stored there, to be sold elsewhere. The relief agencies bring in supplies, and the scum steal it away.”
“All right. We’ll get them picked up anyway. Where’s the third vehicle and what was it?”
“A Ford. I do not think it belongs to the resistance.”
“Which would be why they would use it, no?”
“I don’t think they are that clever.”
“But I do,” said Ferguson. He pulled out his map and spread it on the hood of the Land Rover to orient himself. As he did, Rankin told him over the radio that the second Mercedes had just passed the airstrip.
“We’re going to be too far behind now to catch him if he stays on the highway,” said Rankin.
Ferguson looked at the map. The highway headed southwestward for over a hundred miles before approaching civilization; there were few places on that stretch where it could turn off. The MC-130 with the special operations forces aboard could make it across the border within a few minutes and get ahead of the car, but if they missed the ambush they wouldn’t get another shot. And Ferguson and Thera would have to take the other car out by themselves.
“I’ll have Van Buren’s Rangers set up an ambush down the road,” Ferg told Rankin. “Just keep following.”
~ * ~
7
OVER SYRIA
Colonel Van Buren moved from the command area at the front of the First Team’s specially equipped MC-130 into the assault bay, where Captain Ricardo Melfi and a team of hand-picked Rangers and Special Forces soldiers were waiting to jump.
“Godspeed,” said Van Buren, holding up his thumb. Melfi, about twenty feet away, signaled back. Van Buren found a handhold and watched his people crowding toward the cargo ramp, eager to get into action. They were shadows in the unlit bay, and he tried to keep them that way, anonymous warriors; it made it more difficult to deal with problems if he thought of them as individuals with families and loved ones.
Designed to fly through hostile territory at very low altitude to avoid radar, the MC-130 used a satellite system to show its flight crew precisely where they were. The airplane banked and began to rise over the target area, a desolate curve in the highway the second Mercedes was taking. The men went out quickly, executing an extremely dangerous low-level drop as if they were stepping off an amusement park ride back in the States. By the time the airplane banked north, the troops were on the ground, squaring away their chutes.
Van Buren went back to his post. Modified from a stretched version of the Hercules (officially, the C-130J/J-30), the forward area of the First Team’s MC-130 was equipped with radio surveillance and communication gear similar to those used in the Commando Solo and ABCCC airborne battlefield controller versions of the Hercules, with a few of the links used by JSTARS thrown in for good measure. Van Buren got on the radio to the two Chinooks that had been tasked for the pickup. The aircraft were now airborne over Iraq and were about twenty minutes from the border.
“We can hear a vehicle coming north,” said Melfi when he checked in.
Van Buren checked the image from the Predator.
“That’ll be them. Get ready.”
~ * ~
M
elfi crouched a few yards from the road as the Mercedes approached the curve. The trick wasn’t stopping the car; it was stopping the car without killing the people inside. The fact that his men had been on the ground for less than ten minutes made things even more interesting.
Two Special Forces sergeants took positions on the right flank of the road, aiming SRAW weapons at the car. SRAW stood for Short Range Assault Weapon. The missile-—known as a “Predator” before the Air Force hogged the nickname for its UAV—was designed to disable tanks as well
as light-armor vehicles and built-up positions, replacing the LAW and AT-4. Essentially a modern version of the World War II-era bazooka, the stock weapon typically struck an armored target from the top rather than the side, guided by a laser range finder and a magnetic detector. The warhead normally consisted of two parts, an explosive penetrator and a fragmentation grenade: the warhead would penetrate the outer shell of whatever was being attacked, and the grenade would kill whoever was inside.
Melfi’s men were using a special version of the missile. Its titanium and steel warhead did not contain explosives. The idea was that the slug would destroy the front of the car and its engine, stopping it without killing the people inside.
“Now,” said Melfi, ducking down.
The missile made an unearthly hiss as it leapt from the shoulder of the weapons man. The car veered to the right under the blow, plowing to a halt across the road. As it skidded, a Ranger jumped up with what looked like a mortar in his hands. He sighted a red laser dot on the top of the car and squeezed the wide trigger at the base of the weapon. A large, blimp-shaped missile flew from the throat of the gun. The shell disintegrated in midair; by the time it hit the vehicle it had spread into a wide net. Two dozen miniature flash-bang grenades exploded as it hit, the effect not unlike the finale of a massive Fourth of July fireworks display. As the air ripped with the explosions, two pairs of soldiers ran to the car. One man in each pair wielded a pointed sledgehammer, the other carried CIS grenades. The back window and one of the side windows were walloped and the grenades inserted.
“Team up! Team up!” yelled Melfi as smoke began pouring from the car. Six men in heavy body armor and gas masks came forward, armed with crowbars and chain saws; they were covered at close range by four others with more conventional weapons of war. One of the occupants of the vehicle had managed to open his door before being overcome by the gas. He was pulled down, secured under the netting. The team tore off the roof of the vehicle, cutting through the nylon mesh as well as the metal.
“Go, let’s go!” said Melfi. He pulled up and snugged his gas mask as the fumes surged from the car. “Do it! Get every one of them out.”
By the time Rankin got there, all of the men had been taken out and trussed. Two were unconscious, leaning against each other. One lay on the ground moaning. The last sat a few feet away from the others, staring sullenly into the night.
None of the men looked remotely like Khazaal.
“Any papers?” Rankin asked Melfi.
“Nothing. Nothing in the car.”
“Take their pictures. Let the Iraqi look at them.”
Melfi squinted at him. It was the cross-eyed squint captains reserve for NCOs, even those on special assignments, who give them orders. Nonetheless, he told one of his men to do it.
“How far off are the choppers?” Melfi asked.
“Eighteen minutes,” said Rankin. “We’ll hear them a good way out.”
~ * ~
8
EASTERN SYRIA
Ferguson decided the motorcycles were too far away to walk to, so he hotwired the Land Rover instead. Telling the two Rangers he’d posted on the road to come in and watch the prisoners, he took off with Thera to a spot where he thought he could intercept the third vehicle.
Driving across the open terrain would have been difficult enough in the daytime, since it was pockmarked with boulders and sandpits, but at night without headlamps it was treacherous, which only made it more interesting. Ferguson had Thera pull the satellite photos from his pack as he drove, trying to dodge the worst of the obstructions. They had more than two miles of hardscrabble to get through before reaching a road to the northwest.
“Let me see that sat photo with this grid in it.”
“It’s two satellite photos,” Thera told him, reaching down to get them from the pack on the Land Rover’s floor.
“Point to where we are and where that other road is,” said Ferguson.
“Here and here,” said Thera.
He took the photos and held them on the wheel for a second, then tossed them back.
“All right. Let’s try this,” he said, pulling sharply off the road.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Friend of mine says that,” Ferg told her. “You Catholic?”
“What are you doing?”
“Shortcut. You Catholic?”
“Greek Orthodox, but I went to parochial school.”
“Good thing that didn’t come up in the job interview,” said Ferguson. “Would’ve disqualified you as a fanatic.”
“I heard you went to Catholic school yourself.”
“That’s what I mean.”
When he finally spotted the highway, Ferguson misjudged the depth of the ditch along the side of the road and nearly rolled the Land Rover trying to veer onto the pavement. Thera flew forward, barely keeping herself from slamming into the dashboard. Belatedly, she began fishing for the seat belts.
The Ford was behind them now, but with the road and terrain fairly open, Ferguson needed a strategic place to lay a trap. He’d spotted an intersection about three miles ahead on the map. He told Thera they would put the truck in the middle of it as if it had broken down, then shoot out the Ford’s tires when it stopped to see what was going on. After that they’d use the crossbow and tear gas routine again.
They were still about two miles from the intersection when a shadow loomed over the empty field to his right. Ferguson jammed on the brakes.
An airplane flying at very low altitude, no more than a few feet off the ground, passed over the roadway ahead.
Ferguson jumped out of the car. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?”
“Look.” He pointed in the distance.
“What?”
“You see that?”
“The airplane? Is it ours?”
“Nah. It’s a little Cessna thing. Or some Russian plane like a Cessna.” The plane continued on a straight line to the west, twelve or so feet above the ground.
“Back in the car,” said Ferguson, deciding they’d take the Ford anyway.
“You really think that was Khazaal?” asked Thera.
“Who else would be flying a plane at low altitude across the Syrian frontier?”
“Dozens of people,” she told him. “Smugglers, drug dealers, some other terrorist scumbags we don’t know about.”
“Nice try, but you’re not going to cheer me up,” said Ferguson. He stepped on the gas, going up over a hill and then down so fast that they went airborne for a moment. That gave him an idea. He hit the brakes and backed up, putting the car off one side of the road.
“All right. Out,” he told her. “Take off your shirt.”
“What?”
“Just to rip the sleeve,” he said, pulling open his pocketknife. “The left sleeve. Driver’s side. You can leave it on if you trust me.”
“I’ll do it myself, thanks,” said Thera, holding out her hand for the knife.
“Come on. We probably have less than two minutes,” Ferguson told her. “Open the door and lean out. When they stop and come over, drop the tear gas canister. I’ll be over there with the shotgun.”
“What if they don’t stop?”
“I’ll take out a tire with your crossbow. If they don’t hear a gun they’ll stop,” he told her. “And if they don’t we can always catch up to them in the Land Rover. But if you rip enough of that shirt off, they’ll stop.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Who’s joking?”
Ferguson trotted down the road. He had one shell with netting and flash-bangs, a large projectile with a very short range. It was tempting, very tempting, to load the grenade launcher with a high-explosive grenade and use it on the car; the Ford wouldn’t be armored. If anyone asked any questions, it would be easy to claim that the vehicle tried to run him down. No one would know any different. But he would know, and that was enough.
Ferguson barely had time to get his weapons laid out and set himself before the Ford ca
me over the hill. It moved much slower than the Land Rover had. Ferguson steadied the crossbow then put it down as the vehicle skidded to a stop. Four men, all with small weapons, got out of the car.
Ferguson aimed the grenade launcher point-blank at the tallest of the men and fired. The launcher kicked up as the grenade shot off. He missed the man and hit the side of the truck, igniting the stun grenade and the micromesh net. Ferguson dropped the launcher and thumped two slugs from his shotgun into the men who were still standing, the thick plastic bullets pounding the back of their heads. He had to hit one of the lugs a second time before he fell. By then, tear gas had begun curling out of the Land Rover.
