Tier One Wild df-2

by Dalton Fury

  He’d learned, in his hour or so thumbing through her records, that Cindy Bird was the only girl in the family, with five brothers. Dad, an Army man, had coached her brothers in Little League sports, football, basketball, and baseball. Cindy had two soft hands and could dribble the basketball with either hand at an early age. Football was out, so she stood on the sidelines throughout high school in a short skirt atop sleek fast-running legs, pom-poms, and an often-fake smile as she tried to motivate the Friday night crowd.

  But as a kid, baseball had been her favorite sport. She played for her dad, on the field right next to her brothers at times, and could throw the ball from deep center to home plate without hitting the cutoff. The boys always stole the glory spots in the infield, so she took to the outfield, with an uncanny ability to detect how far and where the ball was going as soon as it came off the bat. She circled the grass in her spikes like a bird of prey, and rarely did she let a ball drop.

  One day her dad told her she was more of a “Hawk” than just any “Bird” after she robbed a dangerous hitter of a walk-off home run, and the nickname stuck.

  Living with five brothers, three of whom wrestled in a youth program and another who studied tae kwon do, as well as an Army father, she learned how to handle herself at a young age. She rolled around the backyard or living room with the men in the house as they tried to practice submission moves on her or each other constantly after school.

  Her dad had introduced all the kids to handguns at an early age to protect them and ensure they understood how to use the two home-defense pistols stored in the house. Cindy was a natural shooter, something her dad said likely explained how she was able to track those fly balls so easily. She outshot her brothers, which was all it took for them to elect to ride bikes or play a game of pickup football on the weekends as opposed to going to the range with their dad and sister.

  Despite her cheerleading days and a stint on the freshman homecoming court, Cindy Bird wasn’t much into dressing up. She was the type of girl who would wear an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt every day if she could. She was always topped with a ball cap over a ponytail, and most of the boys in town were more interested in the looser girls in cleavage tees and tanks and high cutoff jeans, so she garnered little attention.

  In 2003, in the middle of her senior year of high school, her father died in Iraq. The Army told her mother that he went quickly, but word around the unofficial wives’ channel was he suffered badly until he bled out during a heated firefight in Fallujah.

  Her dad’s death changed everything in the life of Cindy Bird.

  Cindy went on to college, studying to become an environmental engineer. She struggled through all four years, demotivated by the loss of her father and the nagging emptiness inside her. Her mother remarried quickly, which bothered Cindy. She tried to make the best of it for her mom’s sake and sucked it up and, despite this hardship, she managed to graduate with a respectable B average.

  Somehow the career path she had chosen no longer seemed desirable to her. She had taken her dad’s death very hard, and recalled the camaraderie and passion he had experienced in the Army. Her older brothers had told her their dad had been in some Special Forces unit, but she could not picture her gentle father as the “snake-eater” type. Still, it did strike her as odd that she rarely saw him in uniform and he always seemed to sport long hair and a thick mustache most of the year. She also realized she did not see him much after 9/11, but she was too busy with her girlfriends, high school gossip, and memory-making, and not all that bummed that Dad wasn’t around to quiz her on her whereabouts when she came in late on Saturday nights.

  Cindy had no idea that her father, Michael Leland Bird, had been the only Delta Force squadron commander ever lost in battle. His code name was “MLB” — a play on his actual initials, but more tied to his love for baseball. His men called him “Major League Ballplayer.”

  In 2008, shortly after graduating from college, Cindy enlisted in the Army. The recruiters tried to talk her into going straight to Officer Candidate School, since she had a four-year degree. But she remembered her father had been enlisted before he became an officer — a “Mustang,” they called it — and he had always said his time in the trenches as a soldier made him a better officer and leader.

  Cindy Bird became a “74D,” a chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) specialist, and she was stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, though she spent a full year deployed to Iraq.

  In early 2010, Sergeant Cindy Bird received a phone call at battalion headquarters from a man claiming to be a recruiter for a special unit. She hadn’t ever heard of such a thing. He asked her if she had received the recruiting letter in the mail earlier in the week. She had, but had only read through it quickly and discarded it as junk mail. The recruiter was very professional and took a few minutes to recite Cindy’s qualifications back to her, almost as if he were checking to see if it was the correct Cindy Bird. Born in northern Virginia, lived for nine years in Fayetteville, North Carolina, attended North Carolina State, five brothers, etc. The recruiter never mentioned her father. It seemed a little odd to Cindy that the recruiter’s last comment was, “We’d be honored if you assessed for our organization.”

  Cindy received PCS (permanent change of station) orders to Fort Bragg and reassignment to the 43rd Personnel Support Battalion. She had done well so far as a 74D, taking her job very seriously. But it was starting to bore her, so the phone call from the mysterious recruiter intrigued her. Besides, she had seen pretty much everything Fort Riley, Kansas, had to offer.

  Cindy Bird was one of a dozen women brought together to assess for a new compartmented subunit within Delta. Not to become female operators but rather to simply help out when a woman’s touch was needed. The program had been Colonel Webber’s idea. As a young captain in Delta, he had written a classified thesis on the benefits of women in the covert world. His paper argued that a woman can get away with murder compared to a man, and even though his proposal followed closely on the heels of 9/11, few in the National Security Council at the time were willing to break one of the unwritten rules of warfare — no women in combat. Ironically, one of Webber’s visionary superiors in Delta back then, Mike Leland Bird, thought the idea was brilliant.

  After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a sea change in attitude occurred at the highest levels. Colonel Webber dusted off his paper and it quickly hit the President’s nightstand. Green-lighted by POTUS, Webber sent out his recruiters to find the best females available to assess in a pilot program. After thirty days of whirlwind assessment, which took the candidates from San Diego, to Chicago, to Dallas, to Denver, and ultimately to Washington, D.C., to test their mettle, only Bird made it as far as the commander’s board. Cindy “Hawk” Bird was a test case. The odds were stacked against her in an elite all-male organization. She was put in training cell on a probationary basis.

  Webber told her the job was hers to lose.

  Cindy “Hawk” bird was officially welcomed into the Unit in 2011. She finished her six-month training as Raynor was laid up in Walter Reed healing from his secret mission in Pakistan.

  Now, with a year in Delta Force, she was the only female in the training cell.

  * * *

  During the long flight to Cairo, Raynor and his AFO cell spent time going over their cover credentials for the operation to come. They would need to know their legends like the backs of their hands, so they took turns quizzing each other throughout the flight.

  Kolt and Cindy were Frank and Carrie Tomlinson, a well-to-do Canadian couple on their honeymoon in Egypt, their sights set on seeing the Great Pyramid. They had brought clothes that looked like something a Western couple might pick out to wear to the Middle East, and they had wedding rings and guidebooks, and they’d even brought along cell phones loaded with names and numbers for contacts back in Canada.

  Digger and Slapshot held passports and documentation backing up their legends as Mike Terry and Dean Kirkland, two
freelance journalists in town looking to chronicle daily life in the city after the departure of Hosni Mubarak the year before. The new government was a complete mess and riots in the streets were commonplace, so it was no great stretch to imagine the pair as intrepid freelancers looking for a story.

  The audiovisual equipment “Mike and Dean” would be lugging through the city in support of Curtis’s operation would look like perfectly natural accessories for reporters, and they both carried business cards inscribed with real, if hastily created, Web pages that showed photography and bylined articles by both men. Their backstop was shallow, but as long as they weren’t rolled up by the wrong people and stayed in their circle under questioning, they would be fine.

  The Gulfstream landed in Cairo just before 0500 hours, and then pulled to a painted box on the tarmac. A pair of black Range Rovers rolled up alongside the plane. The CIA flight crew lowered the stairs and Kolt, Slapshot, and Cindy deplaned, each carrying two big rucksacks of gear. Digger wheeled a large black Pelican hard case behind him.

  Myron Curtis and four other men piled out of the two vehicles. Curtis marched quickly up to the AFO cell and then, with a look of surprise on his face, he just said, “Racer.”

  He did not seem overly pleased.

  “Curtis,” replied Kolt in a flat greeting.

  It was clear the thirty-five-year-old African-American had not expected the same group of operators who’d worked with him in Libya a week earlier to be the ones assigned to his operation in Egypt. He just shook his head slowly. “I’d always heard Delta was a small outfit, but I had no idea there were only three of you motherfuckers.” Curtis must have seen Cindy, but he did not put together that she was part of the team.

  Raynor smiled a fake smile. “I guess you just got lucky twice. You’ve met Digger.”

  “Not formally.” Curtis shook Digger’s hand perfunctorily, clearly annoyed that he would be working with this particular outfit on this mission.

  “And the big guy is Slapshot.”

  The two men nodded at one another, but Curtis was already reaching his hand out to Cindy now. His face lightened.

  “And this is Hawk,” said Raynor.

  “You are … you are in Delta?”

  Cindy nodded, pushing windblown hair out of her eyes with one hand while accepting Curtis’s hand with the other.

  “A pleasure, Miss Hawk.”

  In a professional tone she said, “It’s just Hawk, sir.”

  Curtis smiled. “And it’s just Myron, Hawk.”

  Raynor groaned to himself.

  Curtis introduced Denton and Buckley to the team, two bearded men Kolt took immediately as CIA paramilitary operations goons from their Special Activities Division, though they looked to Kolt like they’d just come out of Central Casting. Then he presented Murphy and Wychowski, two men Kolt took for case officers. They also looked like clichés to Kolt. They were rounder and less road-hardened than their SAD counterparts, less tan, and better dressed. Next to the paramilitary guys they looked like blow-dried network weathermen.

  With the introductions out of the way, everyone climbed into the two Range Rovers, and they left the grounds of the airport.

  FIFTEEN

  The safe house chosen by Curtis and his team for this operation was on the eastern side of Maadi on Ahmed Kamel Street, just a few kilometers from their target location. It was in a two-story office building that had an empty ground floor and a second-floor office suite rented out by the CIA and staffed to look like a small travel agency. A back door behind the counter led to additional office space, a warren of small rooms, each converted into living quarters and meeting spaces. There were five rooms in all, each with a door to a narrow hallway. A single bathroom was at one end of the hall and a well-stocked kitchen sat at the other.

  As soon as Kolt climbed out of the SUV in front of the safe house, he began evaluating the security situation his team would face here. Immediately he found problems. He stood in front of the building, looked past the small, gated lot where they had parked their Land Rovers, and he saw two high-rise buildings under construction. Dozens of open and dark cement floors looked back down on their position. To a man like Raynor, each and every nook and cranny was a perfect place to position watchers with binoculars or spotting scopes or even a sniper team.

  Kolt was also quick to notice the antenna farm on the roof of his safe house, a dead giveaway for trained enemy operators.

  Kolt went inside, took the stairs to the travel agency, and then passed through the rear door to the safe house. Here he checked the rooms and hallways. He noticed cases of Stella beer, the local brew, stacked waist-high in a corner of the kitchen. The windows of the two rooms had a view over a back alleyway, and he saw thirty-round AK magazines and binoculars in the windowsills, and Kalashnikovs propped against the walls under them.

  It was a typical CIA setup, and Kolt did not like it one bit.

  He’d learned in the intel report on the flight over that by day the small travel agency in front of this clandestine dormitory kept up appearances that they booked vacations for whoever came through the door. In actuality no one did come through the door, as the travel agency was not exactly easy to find, nor was it particularly energetic in its marketing. The staff who worked in the office were a small team of well-paid and vetted Egyptian support personnel from outside of the city who were never more than a step or two away from HK MP5 submachine guns hidden under their desks.

  At night when the travel agency was closed, a SAD officer covered the lower floor of the building and a second officer manned the top of the stairs, just outside the door of the travel agency. Both of these men carried HK MP7s under their jackets and HK pistols on their hips inside their waistbands. As far as Kolt was concerned, these two men would be able to ward off some limited threats to the building, but this really wasn’t a lot of firepower in the case of a real attack. Kolt figured their presence provided more of a chance for compromise than they were worth, as anyone looking through the ground-floor windows would see white Westerners inside, and that news was sure to spread across the neighborhood like wildfire.

  After Raynor finished his eval of the site, Curtis called everyone together. They congregated in one of the small rooms to begin their initial briefing.

  Myron Curtis took the floor, but Kolt first expressed his reservations about the safe house’s setup in his typical direct language. “Your cover for status here sucks.”

  Curtis cocked his head in surprise. “We sweep for bugs daily and there is code access on the front door. We’ve got armed security day and night. That’s all we need. Look, Mr. Operator, you aren’t in Afghanistan. If we had an A-team on the roof armed to the teeth we would get noticed by the wrong crowd.”

  “I get that, Curtis,” Kolt said. “But you’re missing my point. Because we aren’t in Afghanistan, your three antennas on the roof need to be camouflaged. Try local TV antennas; yours scream ‘American spy.’”

  Kolt continued his dressing-down. “Your Alamo kits in the two windowsills are visible from the high-rises to the north, and the two gorillas pacing the stairs and halls with the lights on all night will attract more attention than we need.”

  Curtis shrugged. “What you see is what you get, Racer. We’ve had NOC personnel, nonofficial cover operators, working out of this location since before the revolution with no issues.”

  Kolt did not like it, but this safe house was a pretty average CIA setup, considering Egypt was an ally of the U.S. If they had been somewhere where the locals were considered hostile to the United States, they might be less obvious. He understood he couldn’t just order up whatever type of coverage on the safe house that he wanted, much as he would like to. Kolt was a guest, not the MFIC.

  Raynor very much preferred to be the motherfucker in charge.

  And, by the looks of it, so did Myron Curtis.

  Kolt and his team then pulled up chairs around a small desk with a laptop on it, and Curtis sat at the desk, his stool turned around
to face the others. Murphy and Wychowski stood in back by the door, and the two SAD men wandered off to their room to crash after a full night of guard duty.

  “All right, people,” Curtis began. “I’ve brought you here to Cairo because we suspect a location here of being a transit hub for a portion of Libya’s missing SAMs. We have tracked former officers of the Haiat amn al Jamahiriya, that’s the Jamahiriya Security Organization, to one particular address, and I think it is possible they are using this location to store and repackage the munitions before sending them on to their clients.”

  Hawk took a few notes, Digger and Slapshot just sat in their chairs with their arms crossed.

  “We know the ex-Libyan security officers have caches across Libya and Egypt where they are storing as many as seven hundred SA-24 systems, all with viable missiles. With the possible exception of a missing nuke, these loose MANPADs on the world’s stage represent the worst imaginable proliferation issue the United States could possibly face.”

  Curtis pulled up a digital image on his laptop. It was a head shot, apparently taken for official Libyan credentials, of a middle-aged dark-haired man with thick jowls and a heavy brow. “This is Aref Saleh, Gaddafi’s former JSO director here in Cairo. We believe he is at the center of the smuggling operation. In fact, we are referring to the enterprise now as the Aref Saleh Organization.”

  Kolt leaned forward to get a closer look. In the briefs he’d received on the Libyan MANPAD situation, there were only mentions of involvement by ex — Gaddafi intelligence operatives. That Curtis had a name and a face meant to Kolt that either this intel was brand-new or Myron Curtis had not bothered to forward it back to Langley for distribution.

  Curtis pulled a new image up on his laptop now. Kolt and his Advance Force Operations cell all stood up from their chairs and leaned in. They found themselves looking at a satellite photo of a leafy neighborhood spotted with tall buildings. Raynor recognized from a few reference points that the neighborhood represented on the screen was their current location here in Maadi.