One Rough Man

by Brad Taylor

  Four of them replied with their call sign and a simple “Roger.” Knuckles was last, and I knew I wasn’t getting a one-word response.

  “ENDEX? What the hell? We won’t get an ENDEX in a real-world situation.”

  I smiled, knowing he had spent the better part of the day dressed like a homeless man, stinking of whatever disgusting filth he could find to smear on his body. “I hear you. I just got paged. I don’t know what it’s about. I’ll swing by and pick you up. I don’t think anyone else wants to ride with you.”

  Before Knuckles could answer there was a chorus of calls claiming their cars were full or they were already moving. He finally broke in. “Okay. Fine. What about the Rabbit? What do you want to do with him, turn him loose?”

  “No. Bring him along. I don’t know what the page is about, but we might be able to pick up where we left off. No sense burning the team by letting him go.”

  Knuckles acknowledged the call, then gave directions where to find him. He was only a couple of blocks away. I cranked up the car and pulled into traffic. I rounded the corner and spotted him a block away. He was standing two streets up holding a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless Veteran. Will work for someone who understands what’s important.” I pulled over, allowing him to climb in.

  “Funny sign. Unfunny stench. Maybe you should take the Metro.”

  “Ha ha.” Knuckles was silent for a minute, which told me he was pissed. I was unsure whether it was the exercise or the page, but he didn’t waste any time leaving me wondering.

  “What the fuck was that call back there about tagging the target? Dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard. There was no reason to do that. It’s not like we were in a Jack Bauer scenario.”

  “I know, but these exercises never have a guy carrying a nuke. We never get pressure to get it done at all costs. I decided to make it a Jack Bauer scenario—see how the team reacts. We don’t want that to happen on a real-world without doing it once in practice.”

  “Yeah, sure. There’s a reason Jack Bauer’s on TV. It doesn’t happen real-world. You pull that shit on a live mission and we’re spending the rest of our lives in a shithole foreign jail.”

  “Ease up. It’s better to be prepared.”

  Knuckles switched the subject, telling me he was good. “What’s the story? We’ve never had a culmination exercise called off. We’re due to deploy in five days and we haven’t even worked the kinks out of the new kit.”

  “I don’t have a clue. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Knuckles began rubbing off his filth with a packet of wet wipes from his pocket. “This had better be good, because we aren’t ready to deploy.”

  It was good.

  WE CROSSED THE KEY BRIDGE, leaving Washington, D.C., and entering Virginia. Minutes later, we pulled into a parking garage under a nondescript office building near Clarendon. The small plaque on the single door leading into the building read “Blaisdell Consulting,” making it sound like we were some sort of think tank or government contractors. It was a great cover, because consulting firms are all over D.C., and no one can figure out what the hell they do.

  The entire thing was a façade. Outside of the initial foyer, manned by little old ladies who would take your number and ask you to return at a later date, the building was dedicated to one thing—finding and killing terrorists. It was a block long and four stories tall, incorporating everything from an indoor twenty-five-meter firing range to an isolation facility that could house twenty-four men. The unit inside had no official designation and no official affiliation with the U.S. government—only a top-secret crypt that would never see the light of day. Because we had to call it something, it was known simply as the Taskforce.

  We badged in from the underground garage and moved straight to the primary conference facility on the second floor. Paneled in dark wood, it was dominated by a large oval table with small speakers in front of every chair and a large plasma screen on the far wall. The lighting was muted. It would have looked like the conference room in any law firm except for one difference: Instead of being surrounded by bookcases full of law texts, the walls held souvenirs from past operations. Kaffiyehs, flags, framed letters in Arabic, and various weapons hung around the conference table. I had had the pleasure of hanging about a third of them.

  I never really understood why so much money had been spent on the room, since we were so classified we wouldn’t be giving briefings to congressmen or anyone else. If it had been done for our sakes, they could have left it bare concrete. We wouldn’t have cared. In fact, speaking for myself, I would have liked it better. I was told it was to encourage us to start thinking like corporate types. Get us into the cover and away from the knuckle-dragging killer-commando past we all had.

  The rest of the team had beaten us back. When we entered, they all looked at Knuckles and me as if we had gleaned some secret knowledge on the drive over. Before anyone could ask, I threw it right back at them. “Well, someone know what’s going on? Anyone say anything about Johnny’s team? Something happen in Jordan?”

  Bull spoke up. “Nobody’s talking. Duty officer said to wait here. The boss will be down in about five minutes.”

  Our lead intel analyst entered the room, moving straight to the computer system in the rear without saying a word. Ethan and I were pretty good friends, so I figured I wouldn’t have to wait for the commander.

  “Ethan, what’s up?”

  “Change of mission. You’re headed to Tbilisi.” He turned his back and began loading stuff onto the computer, which annoyed me.

  “Tbilisi? What the fuck for?”

  Speaking over his shoulder, Ethan said, “Pike, I don’t have time right now. The boss is on the way down. All I can say is that you won’t be coming to my house for dinner tonight.”

  6

  Before I could ask anything else, the element leader for Omega Operations, Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, entered the room. His appearance really caused the team to perk up.

  He walked over to Knuckles and me. “Glad you guys could get back in so quick.”

  “Well, we’re here. What’s the story? Something happen to the team in Jordan?”

  “Nothing bad’s happened to the team,” Blaine said, “but something bad is about to happen with the mission. Your target is headed to Tbilisi, Georgia.”

  Knuckles frowned. “Why’s that a big deal? This will be, what, his third trip? Didn’t we already analyze that and decide to focus on Jordan, where he lives?”

  Mustafa Abu Azzam was a confirmed leader of a terrorist cell affiliated with Al Qaeda. Living in Jordan, but born and raised in Oman, he was hell-bent on doing irreparable harm to the United States. Had he been focused on other targets, such as the country of Jordan itself, the Taskforce would have quietly passed its intelligence into the system, letting the Jordanians handle it. As it was, he lived and worked in Jordan as a reputable citizen, leading a double life that allowed him to plan attacks in relative safety. We had worked for close to a year to put a face to the name the Taskforce had been tracking. A year of hard, slow, boring—but necessary—work. Nobody wanted to kill an innocent man. My team had flip-flopped with Johnny’s over and over again, trying to get a handle on this guy, and we were very close. Our next deployment had a good shot at finishing him. Starting with just a name, then with cell phone numbers, building into e-mail addresses and Internet traffic, finally into addresses outside the virtual world, we had pinpointed the man called Azzam. Johnny’s team had taken the first confirmed photographs, and was simultaneously building a pattern of life for an operation while we prepared to deploy for the final takedown.

  Before I could ask anything else, Colonel Kurt Hale entered the room, followed by a scrum of analysts. A large man with jet-black hair, my wife says he would be handsome if his nose weren’t bent at an angle, like it had been flattened and sprung back out of whack. I always laugh at that, because I’m the one who flattened it. Don’t get the wrong idea. It was during routine combatives training. I
could show you a scar on my elbow where I had to have surgery because of something he did. I would never say a cross word to the man otherwise, because he’s the finest commander this country currently has. Of course, I’m biased.

  Kurt shook my hand and apologized for interrupting the team’s training. I shrugged it off. “Thanks for throwing in the trailer. It caused a little high adventure.”

  Kurt grinned and said, “You guys need a wrinkle every once in a while. A few more days and you’d have figured out what he was doing.”

  “We didn’t wait. We took him down. Would have had both targets if you hadn’t paged.”

  “You took him down? He just entered the exercise today. Where is he?”

  “In the parking garage.”

  Kurt was flabbergasted. “Jesus, Pike! You brought him here?”

  I held up my hands. “Sir, don’t worry. He’s blindfolded in the back of a van inside a dog kennel. He has no idea where he is.”

  Kurt turned to one of the men with him and barked out instructions. I watched him get the van keys from Bull, then scurry out of the room. The way I was looking at it, Return ASAP meant get my ass here as soon as possible, so I wasn’t too upset at the breach in security. Kurt knew me pretty well, so he shouldn’t have been too surprised. More like business as usual.

  Years ago, Kurt had been my first troop commander at a Special Mission Unit on Fort Bragg, and pretty much kept me from letting my arrogant attitude get me fired. He looked past the arrogance to the raw talent, and while everyone else wanted to get rid of me as trouble, he managed to channel my energy until I had sloughed off the bad and kept the good. Well, mostly.

  Kurt shook his head and said, “We’ll talk about this later. Have a seat.”

  After getting the team’s attention, Kurt said, “Sorry for cutting your culmination exercise short, but there’s been a significant change to the mission profile. Your target, Mustafa Abu Azzam, is currently traveling to Tbilisi, Georgia. This is his third trip, and, yes, he has always returned to Jordan, but we think we’ve finally figured out what he’s been doing in Tbilisi. Intelligence indicates that he’s been attempting to purchase a quantity of radioactive waste from some contacts in Chechnya. Apparently, he’s been successful, and is planning on conducting the transaction within the next few weeks.”

  He paused to let that sink in, then continued. “Now, obviously, Azzam getting material for a dirty bomb isn’t something we can allow, so things have sped up a bit. We can’t be sure he’ll return to Jordan with the material, so we have to stop him before he gets it, which is where you come in.”

  I didn’t have to be told why we were the ones who were going to Tbilisi instead of the team in Jordan. The cover plan used by Johnny’s team, the same cover plan that we were going to fall in on, was specifically built for that region of the world, down to a particular commercial sector in a specific city. The cover wouldn’t transfer to Tbilisi without a significant chance of compromise.

  “What’s our status in Tbilisi? We’ve all been prepped for Jordan.”

  Blaine answered, “Alias shop is working that now. Luckily, we had built a plan for Tbilisi, so we just need to dust it off. Your new documents will be ready by the time you fly.”

  Knuckles spoke up. “What sort of support package can we expect? We haven’t done any infrastructure development in Tbilisi. Seems we’re going to be running the ragged edge on this.”

  “Believe it or not, we’re sitting pretty good. We began some preliminary infrastructure development on Azzam’s first trip to Tbilisi as a precaution, so we aren’t starting from ground zero. The support team that was flying to Jordan tonight will divert to Tbilisi. You’ll have a complete package.”

  I cut to the chase, asking the question on everyone’s mind. “Are we at Omega now?”

  Kurt said, “No, not officially. Since the target’s changed location, I have to brief the Oversight Council tomorrow, but I can’t wait on their approval to get your team moving. Worst case, I should have an answer before you land. Given the ramifications of what he’s trying to do, I see no issue.”

  The Taskforce called each stage of an operation a different Greek letter, starting with Alpha for the initial introduction of forces. Being at Omega—the last letter in the Greek alphabet, symbolizing the end—meant we were ready to execute the mission. The missions themselves could take anywhere from three months to a year. Getting to Omega was hard work, with an enormous infrastructure behind it. There were generally three or four different missions canceled for every one that made it to Omega. It was the crown jewel of our profession, the gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “Good enough,” I said. “When do we leave?”

  Kurt said, “Well, your team’ll be flying with the support package tonight, along with Blaine. The flight plan’s already been filed, so a few extra people won’t cause a spike. You, however, will deploy on Monday, as scheduled.” He grinned. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the leave I promised.”

  I heard what he said, my face betraying the struggle going on inside. Kurt noticed my discomfort but didn’t ask for my opinion. “Okay, before I turn it over to Blaine, remember, we don’t have execute authority on this. I expect it but don’t have it yet. Don’t go Rambo on me.”

  7

  It would have made things a hell of a lot easier if Kurt had simply ordered me to go. Now I would have to make a choice about whether to leave the team on the night they deployed, or abandon my family after I had promised I would be home for my daughter’s birthday. Nothing was more important to me than Heather and Angie, but as the team leader the mission took priority. It was an impossible choice.

  My deployment was nothing new for my family. I had married Heather after I was accepted into the Special Mission Unit on Fort Bragg, so she was used to frequent absences. Even so, leaving is like twisting a knife each time I do it, especially now that Angie is old enough to know I’m gone. Our last night together before the culmination exercise hadn’t been a very good one.

  I had been out grilling steaks when I heard a thump inside the house, like something had crashed. I went inside to find Heather staring at the thermostat on the wall, clearly upset. I asked her what had fallen.

  “That was me kicking the damn wall. The air conditioner’s broken again. That’s just great. Right before you leave. Perfect. Something else I’ll have to deal with.”

  This wasn’t a good way to start our last night together for at least six months. I tried to mollify her. “I’ll have Paul handle it. I’ll call him right now.”

  Paul was our next-door neighbor. He was a good guy, but I really didn’t care for him. He was always upbeat, always helpful, to the point where it was sickening. I’m probably jealous because he spends more time with my family than I do. He’s the one that Heather turns to for any immediate help, and that hurts. But that’s not his fault, it’s mine.

  Heather waved her hand. “Paul couldn’t fix a leaky faucet. Don’t bother. I’ll get Tim to help. He’s a lot better with his hands, and he’s home now.”

  She started to say something else but held her tongue.

  I could tell she wanted to get something out but wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it tonight. I needed to avoid a fight at all costs. While I, personally, didn’t really fear what the future held, I couldn’t predict what would happen on a deployment, and couldn’t allow Heather’s last memory of me to be a fight. We both knew the job was dangerous. We never talked about it out loud, but the potential consequences were there all the time. Tonight it was worse, because I was leaving. It was like a heavy presence that surrounded everything in the room. I took a gamble, hoping whatever she wanted to tell me would be a simple thing that I could smooth over before I left.

  “What? What were you going to say?”

  “I’ve said it before.” She sighed, brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then let it out. “Why do you have to go? Why is it always you? You’ve been gone since 9/11. Isn’t it someone else’s turn?”

 
Shit. That gamble hadn’t paid off. “We’ve been over this. I can’t just up and leave. I’m the team leader. It takes time to train a replacement. This is my last tour. I promise.”

  Task Force tours were a little different than anything I had done before. They were six months long, followed by three months of downtime, followed by a three-month ramp-up prior to deploying again. During the last month of the ramp-up, we deployed permanently to D.C. and dropped all contact with our past, so for the family it was more like a seven-month rotation. The final month was lockdown. It was when we were completely cleaned from our past and prepped to become whatever was called upon by the mission. Tonight was the last night before the lockdown in D.C., the last night before my final seven-month absence. I was stepping down after this tour, something I had promised Heather I would do.

  She gave me a bitter look. “Yeah, just like your last rotation at the Unit. And then you go and volunteer for this new thing. What’ll it be next, Pike? At least when you were with the Unit I had other wives to talk to, people I could call who knew what I was going through. Now I don’t even have that. I have to run around telling everyone you’re some sort of communication technician in the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. Do you know how stupid that makes me sound? You’re never here, and when you are, you never put on a uniform. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Honey—”

  She continued, speaking so fast her sentences began to run together. “Angie’s learned how to swim and you’ve never been in a pool with her. The damn next-door neighbor’s teaching her to ride a bike. She’s going to be six in a month and you haven’t been to a single birthday she can remember.”

  She stopped, clearly wishing she hadn’t said these things on the night before I deployed. She began to cry. “It’s not fair. Why is it always you? Tim left the Unit. Why can’t you do the same?”