The Black Monk was expressionless. DeLuca was glad he wouldn’t want to play poker with this guy.
“Al-Tariq is dead,” the imam said. “Your own people have said so.”
“I believe my own people could be wrong,” he said. “We are currently reexamining the proof that led us to believe he was dead. Meanwhile, I’ve received indications that he is not. If you could use your contacts and connections to confirm his status, one way or the other, it will help me know what to do next.”
The imam whispered something to Goliath, who helped the older man to his feet and escorted him from the room.
“Was it something I said?” DeLuca muttered beneath his breath.
Goliath returned.
“My English is not so good. I say this in Arabic,” he announced, then spoke for several minutes before leaving them alone. DeLuca looked at Sami.
“That was interesting,” Sami said.
“What did he say?” DeLuca asked.
“He said the imam once had a mentor whom he revered and respected,” Omar Hadid said. “A very scholarly, learned man who’d talked a bit too openly about how they needed to replace Saddam with someone more religiously inclined. I knew him. Al-Tariq tried to have the man put in prison, but his followers surrounded him and protected him, so instead, Al-Tariq sent an emissary, another imam from a mosque in Baghdad, as his delegate, and then behind closed doors, the man Saddam sent assassinated Sadreddin’s mentor by slitting his throat. This is why Saddredin has agreed to help you.”
“Goliath said he’d be in touch, possibly later today,” Sami added.
“What was the name of the assassin?” DeLuca asked.
“Jaburi,” Sami said. “Imam Razul al-Jaburi. Mean anything to you?”
“Not personally,” DeLuca said. “Could be worth looking up when we get back. Does the name mean anything to you?” DeLuca asked Omar.
“I know the name,” Omar said. “It’s a common one.”
When he got back to the OMT and searched the SIPERNET database, he learned that Imam Razul al-Jaburi had died of cancer years ago, but that his two oldest sons (he’d had twelve) had been named in the Deck of Cards. His other sons included lawyers, bankers, the youngest a respected academic. All in all, the Jaburi tribe seemed like a lot of bad apples, in a very large orchard.
He checked his e-mail one last time before going to bed. There was no response from his wife. There was, however, a response from Gillian O’Doherty, who wrote:
Dear D,
Sorry for the delay. Had a mad cow on my table the other day, not as mad as they thought, it turned out, but no doubt good and pissed off after I was through with her.
Had a chance to run the syringes and compare to the Al-Tariq file. Interesting results. The DNA is a positive match. There is no doubt. The FBI could ballpark the samples only within the month, but I can confirm that the DNA on the needles is probably less than a month old. This would indicate that the user was your man. However, the fingerprints on the syringes do not match the fingerprints in the file. This is also definite, or as definite as one could ever be.
What do you want me to do next?
Gillian
DeLuca hopped a Blackhawk the next morning and flew to BIAF. All physical evidence involving tissue samples or biological materials was kept at CJTF-7’s CASH facility, in a freezer room that had been part of the airport’s cold storage. The guard at the door scrutinized his B&C before letting him pass. Mohammed Al-Tariq’s file contained reports and photographs, all of which had been scanned and placed in the digital files DeLuca had already read. The pictures of the dead Al-Tariq matched pictures taken of him when he was alive. The pictures from the recovery scene were, to say the least, grisly. DeLuca was more interested in the tissue samples, and specifically, an item that had been labeled Exhibit 4a/
1054, one that had caught his eye when he saw it on the evidence list. The heavy glass jar, about the size of a large container of pasta sauce, was filled to the top with formaldehyde, and in the formaldehyde floated a human hand, yellow and bloated, the tissue ripped at the wrist, the hand otherwise surprisingly undamaged.
He ordered the hand to be prepared for shipping and gave the sergeant in charge of the evidence room Gillian O’Doherty’s address, advising him to mark the package URGENT.
He wrote Gillian a note out in longhand to go along with the package. His note read:
Gillian,
You’re going to think this is crazy, but tell me if the prints you get off this match the prints on the syringes. No, I haven’t lost my mind. Yet. But I’m getting there. Rapidly.
David
Chapter Thirteen
DELUCA WAS ON HIS BUNK, READING REPORTS, when a runner said a man named Goliath was at the gate, refusing to speak to anybody but Mr. David.
“Who’s Goliath?” Hoolie asked from where he sat cross-legged on the plank floor, brushing Smoky for fleas.
“Sadreddin’s bodyguard,” DeLuca said. “Used to be an Olympic wrestler. Heavyweight.”
“Goliath Bakub?” Hoolie said. “The Goliath?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Only since high school,” Vasquez said. “You ever heard of the Persian Pretzel Hold? He invented it.”
“This is going to be bullshit,” Sykes said.
“Hey, cabrone—why are you so down on me, man?” Vasquez said. “I’m not shitting you. He had this hold, man, only one guy ever got out of it and beat him. Guy named Kelsey, in the World Games, down in Brazil. You can call him and ask him if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh yeah?” Dan said. “So how did he beat him?”
“I asked him that once,” Vasquez said. “Ol’ Goliath, man, he got Kelsey in his Pretzel Hold, and I said to Kelsey, ‘How’d you escape that hold, man?’ And Kelsey said, ‘There I was, in the Persian Pretzel Hold, and I thought I was doomed, but then I opened my eyes and I saw that right in front of me, two inches from my face, was a pair of testicles, so I figured, what did I have to lose? So I bit ’em. Man, you’d be surprised at what you can do when you bite yourself in the balls, man.’”
Hoolie had a belly laugh at Dan’s expense for about three seconds, and then Dan launched himself through the air, landing on Vasquez in midchuckle. The dog cowered behind the water cooler barking while Vasquez and Sykes wrestled. Mack rolled her eyes and went back to reading a six-month-old edition of Vogue.
DeLuca was happy to see his team members getting along so well.
Goliath was waiting outside the gate, leaning against the side of a black Cadillac. When DeLuca reached him, he took a map from his briefcase and spread it out on the trunk of his car. The map gave a topographical view of a mountain rising sharply out of the western desert, and at the foot of it, the town of Sinjar, about 160 kilometers west of Mosul, near the border with Syria.
“Sinjar Jebel,” Goliath said, pointing to the forty-five-hundred-foot mountain peak in the upper left corner of the map. He moved his massive finger to the town. “Sinjar. Is Yezidi place. He is here.” He pointed to an area on the map, making a small circle. “This valley. Ibrahim, yes. His father, sometimes mostly. His men, yes.”
DeLuca studied the map for a moment. The road was narrow, with high country to either side. An armored column would be sitting ducks, assuming they could even navigate the switchbacks. The road led to a high valley, following contours that grew closer and closer together, and then the road disappeared into what the map symbol indicated was a tunnel, the sort of choke point that was easily defended and nearly impossible to pass. DeLuca knew there were bunker buster bombs that could be used to open tunnels and clear out caves, even tactical nukes suitable for the task, but if the tunnel went in deep enough, not even tacticals could solve the problem. The area Goliath had indicated was beyond the tunnel, surrounded by mountains on all sides.
“Can I keep this?” he asked. Goliath nodded. DeLuca told Goliath he’d be in touch.
“I will go with you,” Goliath said.
“Thanks
for the offer, but that may not be necessary . . .”
“I will go with you,” Goliath repeated, leaning over DeLuca until he blotted out the sun. “Imam Sadreddin insists. I will go.”
“That will be fine, then,” DeLuca said. “Happy to have you along.”
Goliath got in his car and drove off.
“Maybe we can find you a Humvee to snack on along the way,” DeLuca added.
DeLuca called for a meeting with General LeDoux the next day, after forwarding the general a one-page synopsis of the situation and the Air Force’s most current aerials of the region. Phillip was accompanied by Captain Martin, as well as by a senior master sergeant named Johnson who told DeLuca his friends called him Preacher. LeDoux had said only that Johnson would probably be able to help them, and DeLuca took his old friend at his word, without knowing exactly what or who Johnson was attached to. They met in a room in the building adjacent to the TOC, where Scott, who’d joined them for the briefing, was able to plug in his laptop and connect it to a digital projector to make a PowerPoint presentation.
“We’ve been looking at the Sinjar Jebel range for a long time,” Scottie said. “Basically for as long as the no-fly zone was being enforced, and Sinjar is well within the zone. In 1997, we had an antiaircraft battery light up their radars here and here, and in 1999 we had one here,” he indicated, using his finger to tap the wall where the image was being projected, “but that’s it, and nothing in the valley the imam has indicated for us. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything—this part of Iraq has been a hideout for political and religious dissidents since the Medes, basically. Sinjar itself was originally a Roman fortress.”
“Three thousand feet?” Johnson asked. He spoke with a heavy southern accent; perhaps that was why he was called Preacher, for his evangelical intonations.
“About that,” Scott said. “The area indicated, the Zinab valley, is as inaccessible as any you’re going to find in Iraq. The roads are basically goat trails, and there are caves everywhere. The tunnel the road into Zinab uses probably started as a natural cave that got excavated. It’s a half-mile long and goes straight through the mountain. Any tank or Bradley that got disabled inside would jam up the works, but as best we can tell, they’re not going to get that far anyway because it just doesn’t look wide enough. Foot access is pretty much the road, too. Tenth Mountain could probably rope in over the ridges, but not easily or quickly, and they probably couldn’t take much with them.”
“Choppers?” Johnson asked.
“Not good,” LeDoux said. “Lieutenant?”
“The general’s right,” Scott said. “We don’t think we’ve failed to get triple-A flashes because they’re not there. This picture here,” he said, moving the PowerPoint ahead a slide, “is of an energy signature typical of the newest SAMs, which we know Saddam was buying after he kicked the inspectors out, when he pretty much knew we were coming. We took out a couple dozen in Baghdad, so we can confirm the signatures. In Zinab, we’ve got energy signatures here, here, here, and here. And they’re pretty tucked away, probably in caves, which is going to make it really difficult to knock them down. And the topography forms a kind of natural bowl, so any helicopters trying to fly in will come in below the SAMs. It would be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Iraqi triple-A is about as incompetent as it gets, but even they could cause us problems with these conditions. Plus the winds. It’s not somewhere where I’d want to fly a helicopter.”
“There are others kinds of air support we could throw in,” LeDoux said, “but we’re trying to contain rather than disperse, right, David?”
“If there’s biologicals there, yeah, containment—good idea,” DeLuca said. “My main problem is, I need Ibrahim, or Al-Tariq if he’s there, alive. There’s something going on, and they know what it is.”
“We’ve been having a really close look in the last twenty-four hours,” Scott continued, moving to the next slide, “and here’s what we’ve found. This building here, the white square there, was originally a monastery built during the Crusades and dedicated to Saint George, but it was more of a fortress than a monastery. A French knight named Robert de Boissy held out for sixty days there against Saladin, who eventually starved him out and chopped his head off. Anyway, the walls are six feet thick, which makes it impossible for us to jam any electronics inside. And we have reason to believe they’ve got significant electronics, because they’re running generators 24/7. UAV intel suggests somewhere between eight and twelve people. And these,” he said, zooming in, “are munitions casings. Whoever’s in there is armed to the fucking teeth. Pardon my French, General.”
“I speak French, too,” LeDoux said, turning to Preacher Johnson. “I’m thinking HAHO or HALO. What’s your opinion?”
“I’d have to check with meteorology, but off the top of my head I think HAHO is out. My boys are the best but nobody can fly square chutes into mountain terrain at night where there’s wind like what I imagine we’re going to find here. Especially if it’s too windy for choppers. HAHO could scatter people half the way to Turkey. I think we’re looking at a HALO jump.” He turned to DeLuca. “You okay with that?”
DeLuca had to pause a moment. HALO stood for High Altitude Low Opening, a method of insertion for parachute troops that involved jumping out of an airplane from six miles up, dropping at speeds approaching two hundred miles an hour and waiting until the last moment to open your chute, as low as two thousand feet. It was a way to quickly insert men into an area undetected, as opposed to the alternative, a High Altitude High Opening jump, where jumpers opened their chutes as high as thirty thousand feet and then steered them like kites, riding the winds and following a navigator while traveling as far as a hundred miles across the landscape below. Veteran paratroopers called HALO jumps the ultimate thrill ride.
“Sounds good,” he said. “When?”
“Dad . . .” Scott said, but DeLuca silenced him with a glance. Not even Phillip knew about his fear of flying. It was a nonstarter. You did what you had to. This was too important, and since he was the only one who’d seen Ibrahim Al-Tariq in person, he had to go.
“It’ll take us twenty-four to pick the LZ and get our shit together and check the weather reports,” Johnson said, “but we’ve got no moon for the next two days. I like my missions like I like my humor—the darker the better. You’ve jumped HALO before?”
“A hundred times,” DeLuca lied. “You?”
“Sergeant Johnson is a TL with Task Force 21,” LeDoux said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of them. They have a lot of skill sets, but they also play old time hockey. This is too strong for MPs or Fourth Cav. You’ll be in good hands. Co-NCOICs, of course. You want somebody from your team?”
“One guy, I think,” DeLuca said. His son looked concerned. “Don’t worry about it,” DeLuca said. “Any idiot can fall out of an airplane.”
“Preacher Johnson is the best,” LeDoux confided to DeLuca when the master sergeant had departed. “He was jumping round chutes into typhoons over North Vietnam when you and I were hanging out at the mall. He could still carry you over a mountain on his shoulders if you break your leg.”
“Vietnam?” DeLuca said. “How old is he?”
“We think he’s in his late fifties,” LeDoux said. “Somebody deleted his birthday from all of his records. Probably him. And nobody has the balls to ask him. He doesn’t want to be forced to retire.”
“You’re a general,” DeLuca said. “Why don’t you ask him how old he is?”
“I may be a general, but I’m not crazy.”
DeLuca had indeed heard of TF-21, a task force so named because it supposedly comprised the top twenty-one Special Forces operatives chosen from Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALS, Green Berets, Air Force PJs—they were the best at what they did, everybody said, though no one knew exactly what they did. They’d been on the ground in Iraq for weeks before the war, dressed as Iraqis, marking GPS positions, collecting DNA, and gathering evidence before it was destroyed, and they
’d been on the ground tagging targets with lasers to help guide the JDAMS, cruise missiles, and smart bombs as they fell. It had been TF-21 intelligence that had led to the decision to bomb the palace where Saddam and his sons were thought to have been hiding, two days before the planned opening of the air campaign. They had no base, never stayed in one place for very long, and generally kept to the sidelines, staying clear of publicity and embedded reporters. DeLuca was looking forward to meeting them.
He tried to convince himself that he was also looking forward to jumping out of an airplane from six miles up, but he wasn’t having much luck.
Reicken was angry when he found out he’d been excluded from planning the mission. It was the second time in as many weeks—he’d been angry the first time when he learned DeLuca had gone to Iran without telling him. He hit the ceiling a third time when DeLuca told him he’d chosen Dan Sykes to go with him on the jump. He explained, as patiently as he could, that it wasn’t a mission for Mack, and that between Dan and Hoolie, Vasquez had two weeks of jump school, whereas Dan had been a member of a jump club in California since he was sixteen.
Dan had arranged for a training jump with a helicopter pilot he knew. Practicing a HALO jump wasn’t possible after Reicken decided commissioning a C-130 for the job would have been a bit extravagant. Instead, they were to take a Blackhawk up to twelve thousand feet and jump from there. Sami walked him to the chopper, where Dan and the jumpmaster he’d booked were waiting for the pilot and the flight engineer to finish their preflight protocols.
“So how you doing with this jump stuff?” Sami said.
“I’m doing,” DeLuca said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” Sami said. “Me, I gave this shit up a long time ago. Why jump out of a perfectly good airplane, right? I mean, I did my training but that was enough, you know?”
Team Red Page 21
