Direct Action - 03

by Jack Murphy

  Outside in the courtyard, a crowd had begun to gather. The soldiers had long since disappeared, many of them dropping their rifles and beating feet as the already agitated public converged on the Army building. Now that people saw the Muslim Brotherhood members breaking free they openly cheered and chanted slogans. When the four gunmen emerged from the prison with their three American prisoners the crowd went wild with fervor, their extremist devotion overwhelming a few members who dropped to their knees.

  A gray mini-van edged through the crowd.

  Just then, a civilian ran up out of the gathering crowd with a black Al Qaeda flag attached to a thin metal pole. One of the gunmen grabbed the flag while the other three escorted their prisoners to the van.

  With his head still wrapped in the black kafiyah, the gunmen held the black flag proudly as he began to wave it back and forth.

  “Allllaahh Akbaaarr!” he screamed at the top of his lungs.

  “Allah Akbar!!!” the crowd screamed in return.

  With the prisoners loaded into the back of the van, the gunmen handed the black flag back to a Muslim Brotherhood member. Jumping into the van, it lurched off as the crowd parted ways. Escaped prisoners and protestors alike praised these gunmen and their gift from god.

  Ramon began downloading his Barrett magazines, sliding each cartridge out on by one and setting them down. The bullets were about the size of his finger and had enough kinetic energy even after traveling 1,000 meters to cut a man in half.

  Their target building in the engineering section of the University of Cairo was only about 700 meters away, an easy shot with the .50 caliber rifle. There would be little compensating for gravity or wind at that range when firing a round with so much energy behind it. The former Special Forces sniper had no doubt that he could hit targets at that range with this rifle, even if he was a little rusty. They also had a very detailed range card that he and Deckard made copies of. Deckard could call in pre-designated target reference points to help Ramon get on target faster as well.

  Flipping open the latches on the black box that Deckard had retrieved from under the bridge, Ramon began sliding the bullets under the feed lips of the magazine, which depressed the follower as the magazine filled with ten rounds. They looked like normal .50 caliber rounds except that the bullets themselves had clear plastic wrapped around them.

  “Whoever set that cache was sloppy about it,” Deckard complained as he watched Ramon. “What is so special about these bullets anyway?”

  “Sloppy or just rushed,” Ramon elaborated. “It was worth the risk of going in to retrieve the cache. These are EMP rounds.”

  “You've gotta be shitting me.”

  “Nope,” Ramon said. “During the terminal phase, when the round makes contact with something, it will emit an electro-magnetic pulse which will short out and destroy any electronics within five meters. This way I will be able to clear a path for you by disabling the security systems as you make your infiltration into the engineering building. It should be sealed up pretty tight, all things considered. We'll see what we can do about that. There are also a couple EMP grenades in that case for you.”

  “If you fire it too close to me, it will destroy my comms uplink,” Deckard said as he picked up one of the box shaped EMP grenades and inspected it in his hand.

  “Well, don't get too close.”

  Just then, Ramon's cell phone began to buzz.

  Checking the text message he received, he then turned to Deckard.

  “Showtime, brother.”

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Aaron Helms turned into a human chatter box as he sat in the back of the mini-van with the Al Qaeda gunmen, their eyes menacing him through the slits in their black head wraps. Aaron was just a liberal arts major who wanted to fight for human rights and got in over his head. Now he was on an express one-way trip to a made-for-youtube snuff flick starring him and his college bros in orange jump suits.

  “We're so fucked,” he croaked.

  The van hit a bump in the road and Adam started to cry.

  One of the gunmen finished texting someone on his cell phone. He had to be the biggest Arab any of them had ever seen. Probably he was texting AQ HQ back in Pakistan, Aaron figured. Meanwhile, Luke was hugging himself as he gently rocked back and forth on the floor of the van.

  As the driver took them across the Nile River on one of Cairo's many bridges, the three college students were left to ponder their fate. Then, one of the gunmen turned to the other and began to talk.

  “I think you were getting a little too into it, Zach,” the gunmen said in English. “Waving the black flag around like that..what was that about?”

  “I was just staying in character,” the other gunmen responded. “I take my job seriously, unlike some of you.”

  Aaron and Adam looked at each other, both their faces streaked with tears.

  “Both of you fucking jokers need to pull your heads out of your asses,” a third gunmen said.

  “Whatever Rick. You're just jealous of my method acting.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The van rocked as they crossed the bridge, then the wheels squealed as they took a tight turn.

  “Women drivers: no survivors,” the one they had called Rick announced.

  “Eat my ass, Rick,” a woman's voice said from up front, the driver not even turning to look at them.

  “Don't threaten me with a good time. I'd eat the peanuts out of your shit, girl.”

  The others laughed until the big guy who had been texting screamed at them.

  “Knock it the fuck off,” he snarled. “We're still in the middle of an operation.”

  Then he peeled off his head wrap. The others followed suit. The college kids looked on with slack jaws.

  The guy with the beard looked over and saw their expressions.

  “Did you guys really think Al Qaeda would break into a prison and free you just to execute you?” the American said.

  “Uh,” Aaron began. “Maybe.”

  Luke pursed his lips like he had just bitten into a lemon.

  “Damn, you kids look like you are about to piss your pants,” the blonde haired American said.

  Luke took a deep breath.

  “Too late.”

  “How you doing down there, high speed?”

  Deckard heard Ramon's voice through the ear bud placed in his ear, the device connected to the cell phone in his pocket. He was walking onto the university grounds through the Giza Zoo, which ran right behind the engineering department.

  “Three minutes out,” he answered.

  “I'm all gassed-up and ready to go.”

  Crouching in the bushes, Deckard watched the facility grounds for a moment. From observing most of the morning and into the afternoon, they already knew that there was not a roving guard on patrol. In fact, the campus was pretty dead because so many students were out protesting in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

  “I'm ready to go in,” Deckard said into the microphone attached to the ear bud. “Hit it.”

  A second later, sparks flew from the transformer mounted on the telephone pole just outside the electrical engineering building. Three booms echoed out in rapid succession as the sound caught up with shots. From his sniper hide up in the empty building, Ramon's shots would be muffled, but still audible to those who knew what they were listening for.

  “That's it. Put a shot into the transformer and two more into the generator up on the roof,” Ramon told him.

  Sure enough, Deckard didn't see any indications from his view through the windows that there was any power inside.

  “Moving in.”

  Deckard walked up to the oblong, khaki-colored building. He squinted as he got closer to the door.

  “Looks like there is a key card lock on the door, I am going to-”

  His words were cut short as a hole suddenly punched through the door above the locking mechanism.

  “Come down six inches,” he advised Ramon.

  “Roger.”


  This time he blasted the lock and pieces of metal scrap bounced off the door stoop. With the lock shattered, Deckard was able to shoulder open the door and step inside. Sliding his backpack off, he rapidly attached the upper and lower receiver of his AR-15 rifle, then locked and loaded a magazine.

  “Inside, moving up.”

  “Got it, fifth floor looks clear from where I'm sitting.”

  Deckard carefully walked down the empty corridor to the stairwell and began walking up. It made sense that the device they were after was being kept by the Army inside the electrical engineering department of the University of Cairo. That would be the best place for them to study it since that is where the tools and expertise were already located. The Egyptian Army would not be so foolish as not to have it under guard however.

  Then the interior lights came back on. Back up power. Somewhere in the basement probably.

  “Hold up a minute,” Ramon said over their cell connection. “Let me load my other mag so I'm shooting regular ball ammo if you come under fire.”

  “I've got a couple more flights of stairs to go.”

  “Cool,” Ramon said. Then a second later, “Okay, I'm up.”

  Deckard walked out onto the fifth-floor hallway with sweat dripping off his forehead. He held his rifle at the low ready as he moved towards his objective. Their intel was that the device was being held in Lab C. Finding the correct door, he looked through the window pane to glance inside. Pulling back behind the wall, he spoke into the mic.

  “Looks like at least two guards. Couple civilians in there, too.”

  “You're clear outside. You know what to do.”

  Rendering the device inoperable was the first priority, recovery at a close second. Deckard palmed one of the EMP grenades as he backed away from the door. The pulse would propagate outwards and right through the walls. There was no need for him to get it into the room to render the device inoperable. With the lab's door locked, he would normally have had to breach the door before lobbing it in. No need for that this time.

  Pulling the pin, Deckard rolled the EMP grenade down the hall where it stopped at the foot of the lab's door. He scrambled away to make sure he was out of the blast radius. While it wouldn't physically harm him, it would kill his cell phone, and with it, his comms link to Ramon.

  Five seconds from the time he pulled the pin, the grenade popped off. There was no brilliant plume of miniature bolts of lightning or anything cool like that, more like a weak firecracker. The EMP itself was of course invisible to the human eye. Hearing the pop, one of the soldiers inside opened the door to see what was going on.

  Deckard was there to buttstroke him across the jaw.

  Stepping inside the lab, there were rows and rows of desks with soldering irons for students to practice building microchips. On a black table towards the back, two engineers looked up from their work, both of them wearing those goofy magnifying glass goggles that made them look like they had giant Anime character eyes.

  Another soldier standing by on guard duty went for the pistol on his hip.

  “La!” Deckard ordered, thrusting his gun barrel in the guard's direction.

  The soldier put his hands in the air, realizing that the newcomer had the drop on him. Stepping towards the table, he waved the engineers back. He was looking at the device. About the size of a shoe box but only about two inches thick, the black box had a USB cable and a power cable leading out of it. The top of the device had been pried open and the electrical engineers had been poking and prodding around inside. The computers and lights inside the room had gone dark, which meant that the EMP had done its job.

  Keeping his rifle leveled on the Egyptian soldier, while the other writhed on the floor behind him, Deckard unzipped his backpack.

  Now he just needed to haul ass out of there.

  Shen Banggen walked alongside the Egyptian Lieutenant Colonel as he was led to view the device. The Chinese operative was on assignment for the People's Third Department. It was his job to shape outcomes, and part of that position included securing foreign technology which had military or economic applications the Chinese government could reverse engineer to use for espionage, combat, or simply to turn a profit by mass producing and dumping into foreign markets.

  They had just completed a meeting with an Egyptian General which had to be cut short. The military was desperate to quell the riots around the city, and the General had other obligations. Banggen assured the Egyptians that they would be properly compensated for the technology transfer.

  “The device is just upstairs,” the Colonel informed him as they walked.

  “I understand,” Banggen replied in Arabic.

  His track record with technology procurements was nearly impeccable, and his superiors knew it. He had recovered a sensitive computer system from the Taliban they had captured from a Navy SEAL team that they had killed. A few years later, he secured large pieces of a stealth helicopter which the Americans had crash landed in Pakistan. Other pieces of tech showed up here and there. In one major coup, he simply paid off a U.S. Special Forces soldier running a training mission in Thailand. He helped the soldier make it look like a hooker had drugged him and ransacked his hotel room. Banggen got the black tough box filled with sensitive radio equipment and delivered it to his superiors in China.

  Suddenly, something popped on the floor above them. To Banggen it sounded like a single firecracker lit on Chinese New Year. But this was no Chinese holiday. The lights flickered and blinked off. The Chinese intelligence operative then noticed that the second hand on his watch had stopped ticking. The Egyptian Colonel looked up, as if he would see something on the ceiling.

  Banggen then pulled out his cell phone. It was completely dead and would not turn on. First they had a power outage causing the back-up generators in the basement to kick on. Now this.

  “Something is happening,” he informed the Colonel. “We need to get to the device.”

  Taking off at a jog, they headed for the stairs.

  In one smooth motion, Deckard swept the device and the opened cover into his bag with all the wires still attached. Cramming the cables inside, he zipped it up and threw the backpack over his shoulder on one strap, the other having been used to improvise a sling for his AR-15.

  Before leaving, he relieved the soldier still on his feet of his Browning Hi-Power pistol and stuck it in his pocket. The last thing he needed was to get shot in the back on his way out the door.

  “See ya later, Fletch,” he told the guard.

  High stepping it over the second guard who was curled in the fetal position in the doorway, Deckard headed down the hall.

  “Got the package,” he said into the mic. “On my way out.”

  “Roger that,” Ramon answered. Good, the EMP hadn't taken out his comms.

  Turning into the stairwell, Deckard suddenly found himself face to face with an Egyptian Army officer. The officer's eyes went wide with surprise, startled by Deckard swinging onto the landing. He held a BHP in his fist, but forgot it was there for a second too long. Deckard identified his threat faster and raised the AR-15 into the pocket of his shoulder, his knees already bent in a shooter's stance. The barrel barked twice, then several more times as Deckard fired 5.56 shots into the officer as he crumpled to the ground and rolled down the stairs.

  Without hesitating, Deckard brought the rifle to bear on a second potential target. The approaching man backed up against the wall with his hands in the air.

  “I'm unarmed,” he said in near perfect English.

  He was in his fifties, chubby around the waist and the neck, and obviously Chinese. Deckard's eyes narrowed. In an instant, Banggen realized that he had been made. The American mercenary recognized him from the picture they had been shown in the briefing for their mission to the Philippines. A Chinese influence agent heading up to a floor where a sensitive, captured American technology was being kept? Yeah, sure.

  “That is a matter of opinion. Your weapon isn't guns or bombs is it?”
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br />   “I am here on official business with the People's Republic of-”

  Deckard's rifle recoiled in his hands.

  Banggen pitched forward and did a face plant.

  Flicking the rifle's selector back to safe, Deckard bounded down the stairs.

  Target of opportunity.

  Ramon tossed his suitcase with the disassembled Barrett inside in the trunk while Deckard popped out the cylinder on the steering column using a screwdriver. Bypassing the lock, Deckard hit the ignition and they had their ride out of Cairo.

  He took the wheel while Ramon got in the passenger seat and called up a map on his cell phone to help guide him out of the city. Bill had simply texted them a cardinal direction, basically the worst exfil plan in history. They would secure transportation out of Egypt once they got to the coast of the Red Sea.

  Ramon directed him over a bridge heading east through the city. Cairo was volatile to say the least. Young people were out in the streets marching and chanting slogans. Pro-democracy protestors clashed with the Muslim Brotherhood, and they both clashed with the Egyptian military. Deckard did his best to skirt around clusters of protestors who could break into a riot at any moment.

  His navigator instructed him when to make turns, and they weaved through the now-busy city streets.

  “Take this left, then straight ahead.”

  Deckard followed Ramon's instructions and suddenly found himself coasting across a wide boulevard littered with trash, discarded pickets, and empty tear gas canisters. To their right stood the military bearing riot shields, shotguns, and grenade launchers loaded with tear gas. To their left was a gaggle of twenty something year old kids throwing rocks at the soldiers.

  A sniper's shot cracked, the bullet leaving a dimpled hole in the hood of their stolen car.

  Deckard slammed down on the gas pedal and shot across the street.

  Both men breathed a sigh of relief when they finally cleared the city and took the Cairo-Suez road to the coast. It was now getting late in the day and exhaustion began to set in. Liquid Sky had been running a no-notice hostage rescue and asset recovery in a hostile region with bare-bones intelligence, no equipment when they arrived in country, and no backup to speak of. Whether they wanted to admit it or not, their nerves were shot.