He threw his transponder on the flat roof of the shed that housed the elevator’s hoist mechanism, told Zoulalian to leave the car running, and explained that he was going back for the laptop. Zoulalian handed him the machine pistol.
“Not by yourself, you’re not.”
“I’ll explain on the way down,” DeLuca said as he raced for the staircase. “This place is going to light up pretty good in a few minutes.”
They’d only gotten as far as the office when the doors to the supply room kicked out and they heard a woman’s voice shout, “Freeze, motherfuckers—throw down your weapons!”
DeLuca stopped in his tracks, raising his arms above his head.
“I didn’t know you had such a potty mouth, Colleen,” he said. Mack lowered her weapon, as did Sykes and Vasquez, who stood to either side of her.
“We’d just taken out the guard when we heard voices,” she said. She looked at “Khalil.”
“It’s all right—he’s with us,” DeLuca said.
“We were looking for a way down,” Dan said, gesturing toward Vasquez. “We found this guy in the middle of nowhere after the storm cleared.”
“I appreciate the help,” DeLuca said. “Follow me. Eyes on.”
They took the steps two at a time. DeLuca led the way, followed by Sykes, Vasquez, MacKenzie, and Khalil.
He kicked through the doors and led his team out onto the catwalk, pausing by the elevator rails and gazing into the shaft below where the cables ran down into a hole in the floor of the salt pit. He’d heard pilots brag that the telemetry on their smart bombs was good enough to hit a medium-sized pizza from twenty thousand feet. He hoped they were right, because anything but a direct hit wasn’t going to cut it. The elevator wasn’t moving. That was good.
He’d taken three steps onto the catwalk when he heard shouts down below, then gunfire.
That was bad.
DeLuca made it across just as three men burst through the doors below and onto the landing, the first looking up and firing on them. There was nowhere to take cover, the treads of the catwalk open iron grates. Mack, Dan, and Hoolie returned fire as Khalil retreated toward the elevator shaft, a position from which he’d have a better angle. A second guard took up a position beside the first, firing toward DeLuca, who was closest, his location protected by the metal stairs, the guard’s rounds ricocheting wildly off the iron and throwing sparks into the chasm below. DeLuca fired a burst from his M-11, grabbing a guywire with his left hand and leaning out to get a better angle, the machine pistol kicking violently in his right arm, one of his rounds knocking a guard from the landing. A second man fell as the third burst through the door with a shout, leveling a shoulder-fired RPG at Khalil and firing. The detonation of the grenade briefly lit the abyss, affording DeLuca a glimpse of the debris below, like a massive flashbulb going off, but the grenade missed its target, allowing Khalil to return fire with one of the AK-47s taken from the dead guards, joined by fire from Dan and Hoolie. MacKenzie raced ahead to catch up with DeLuca at the stairs. The man with the RPG fell over the railing, dead, and then the room was quiet, the air filled with smoke and smelling of cordite.
“Khalil—are you all right?”
“I’m good, Mr. David,” Zoulalian called back.
“Let’s go!”
“You go ahead,” Zoulalian shouted. “The walkway is gone. There’s a gap. In the catwalk. Maybe fifteen feet. From the grenade. You go—I’ll find another way.”
DeLuca raced ahead, stepped over the bodies clogging the lower landing, and bolted the first set of stairs, then the second, his team close behind him. At the third, he heard footsteps below, but he didn’t have time to be cautious, so he pressed ahead, spraying the hall in front of him with bullets as he emptied the M-11 to clear the way. He heard gunfire coming up from below at the last turn of the stairs. He dove low onto the landing, firing with his Smith and Wesson .357 as a man beneath him tried to duck for cover, but the man was too late, falling face down as DeLuca fired two more rounds into him to make sure. He stopped to pick up the man’s weapon, a Tec-9, to replace the M-11 now that it was empty. Mack, Sykes, and Vasquez paused next to him.
“Down these stairs, turn right and right again, then a long, straight hallway,” DeLuca said, trying to catch his breath. “I guess we fight our way down it.”
“Me first,” Hoolie said, showing him that he had a grenade in each hand.
“Go go,” DeLuca said. “We’ll make noise.”
Where the corridor turned a corner toward the main room, they stopped, DeLuca knocking out the light bulb overhead with the barrel of the AK-47 he carried. Someone fired a burst of machine-gun fire at them from the door of the room where he’d been held. He gestured to Hoolie to show him where the room could be located.
“You’re low, I’m high—don’t stand up until I stop firing. Mack, you cross, Dan, stay here until we go but hold your fire. On three. One, two, three.”
He stood up, firing his Tec-9 toward the door, making sure, as best he could, that his rounds carried high along the ceiling. Hoolie scrambled to the door, dove to the floor sliding headfirst, and threw a grenade into the room. It exploded a moment later, the blast throwing debris out the opened door. He got to his feet and entered the room, where DeLuca and the others joined him a second later. The explosion had ripped the camcorder from its power supply and knocked over the tripod upon which it was mounted, but the light was still working on battery power, throwing enough illumination across the floor to reveal the body of the man who’d shot at them and, beyond them, the body of the German shepherd.
“Aw Jesus,” Vasquez said, panting, exhausted, his gaze fixed on Smoky’s lifeless corpse. “What was he doing in here?”
“You didn’t do it,” DeLuca said softly. “He was already gone. Come on. Moving out. How many grenades you got?”
“Just two,” Vasquez said.
“One on the door and one inside,” he told Vasquez. “Let’s go.”
They worked their way quickly down the hall, room by room, until they heard a sudden burst of fire coming from inside the main room that sent them scrambling for cover. A second exchange of gunfire told them a struggle of some kind was going on inside the room but not directed at them. DeLuca led the others to the door, where he peered through the crack. He saw Adnan rise to his feet and fire in the direction of the elevator, then duck again behind an overturned table.
“Now!” DeLuca said, shouldering the door open and rolling once, then firing at a man he recognized as Abu Waid, who took cover behind a pair of large metal filing cabinets. Waid fired back, forcing Mack, Sykes, and Vasquez into the hall. When DeLuca stood to take him out, he thought at first that his gun had jammed, only to realize his clip was empty.
He reached for his .357, as Waid raised his rifle, pointing it straight at DeLuca’s heart and smiling.
The elevator doors behind him opened.
Abu Waid turned, squeezing off several rounds before Khalil cut the man in half with a burst from his M-12.
A door at the opposite end of the room opened.
DeLuca recognized Ibrahim Al-Tariq as he bolted through it.
DeLuca squeezed off three shots from his .357 but missed.
Sykes ran to give chase.
“Don’t shoot!” Adnan said, rising to his feet, his rifle leveled at Mohammed Al-Tariq, who lay wounded on the floor, next to a table where DeLuca saw a laptop computer. Al-Tariq was bleeding from where he’d been shot in the leg. Adnan had shot him.
“What’s through here?” Dan Sykes asked, standing at the door where Ibrahim Al-Tariq had fled.
“The salt mines,” Khalil said.
“Let him go,” DeLuca commanded. He turned to Adnan.
“Lower your rifle,” DeLuca commanded.
“No,” Adnan said.
“Lower it!”
“No!” Adnan said, in a voice filled with an anguish that came from deep inside him. “He killed my family. He killed my wife. He killed my son, and my daughter. H
e tortured them. He made my wife watch while he tortured her children. It should have been me, but he killed them, and it was my fault. So now I will kill him.”
“Adnan . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Adnan said. “The only way I could get to him was to give them you. I’m sorry, but it was the only way. I didn’t do it for the money.”
“We know,” DeLuca said. “That’s why we picked you. We knew what you would do.”
Developing human intelligence was a murky business. You had to move into communities where a hundred people had a hundred different reasons to do a hundred different things. The trick was finding someone with the strongest motivation to do the same thing you wanted to do. He’d searched his files, before ever leaving Kuwait, looking for someone he could use to take apart the Mukhaberat. He’d rejected a huge number of candidates before coming across the file for Adnan bin Saddem, a man whose family had been slaughtered by the head of the Mukhaberat. DeLuca had been improvising at first, feeling his way, trying to work his informant the way he’d worked the gang bangers back home, subtly reminding him of what he hated and who he loved and what he could do to help. When he’d learned that Al-Tariq himself might still be alive, what he wanted came more into focus. They knew Adnan was bright, and filled with a thirst for revenge, and that he could go places they couldn’t go, so they’d used him, the way a hunter uses a bird dog to run ahead and flush the game. When Adnan started making his own play, saying he’d heard someone mention the possibility that Al-Tariq had a brother, DeLuca and the others had gone along with him, to see where he might lead them, and as they’d hoped, he’d led them to Al-Tariq himself.
“Do you mind if I have a look?” he asked Adnan, who continued to point his weapon at Al-Tariq. Adnan shook his head.
DeLuca crossed to Al-Tariq’s laptop, where he saw a screen filled with Arabic script. He called Zoulalian over and asked him to translate. Zoulalian read the words on the screen.
“You have mail waiting to be sent . . .” he read. “It says ‘send now,’ ‘review mail,’ or ‘send later . . .’”
“Click on ‘review mail.’” Zoulalian did so. “What does it say?”
“Praise Allah,” Zoulalian read. “Proceed to your assigned targets immediately. God is with us. Have faith, for you are the chosen one thousand.”
“Delete that,” DeLuca said, “and write, ‘Stand down and await further instructions,’ and then hit send. But copy the block of addresses first. And put it on a floppy.”
“David,” Sykes said from the opposite doorway. “You gotta see this.”
DeLuca crossed the room, stepping over the bodies of two guards whom Adnan had apparently killed when he’d first begun his assault on the men who’d killed his family, and joined Sykes. Beyond the door, where the maze of tunnels composing the salt mines began, he saw rack after rack of shelves, and on the shelves, large glass jars filled with human body parts preserved in formaldehyde. The rumors about Al-Tariq were true.
DeLuca pulled the door shut.
“Ibrahim . . .” Sykes said.
“He’s not going anywhere,” DeLuca said. He looked at the screen on his sat phone. It was eleven-fifty-one.
“We gotta go, people!” he called out, just as an explosion up on the surface shook the earth and made the lights flicker. Somebody had arrived early. “Adnan—leave him. Khalil . . .”
“Laptop’s in my bag,” Zoulalian said, frisbeeing DeLuca the diskette. DeLuca caught it and tucked it in his shirt pocket.
“Adnan,” DeLuca repeated, as another explosion shook the room, plaster dust trickling down from the ceiling. The lights flickered again. He really didn’t want the power to go out.
“Go,” Adnan said. “I will stay. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.”
“La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah,” DeLuca replied.
The elevator was inoperable, but given that any number of JDAMs, JSOWs, and “Daisy Cutters” were about to rain down on them in general and the elevator shaft in particular any minute now, the elevator wasn’t DeLuca’s first choice of transportation anyway.
They took the hall and the stairs in leaps and bounds, with Sykes in the front and DeLuca bringing up the rear. The catwalk over the salt pit swayed with each detonation up above, the air thick with dust that made the dim lights even dimmer. They were forced to stop at the end of the catwalk where the RPG fired earlier had left a fifteen-foot gap. Disconnected, the end of the catwalk rolled from side to side beneath their weight, unstable now. A single bomb dropped through the roof covering the pit would kill them all.
“Back up—back up,” Dan Sykes shouted, stripping off his battle gear and dropping his weapons to the floor below. “There’s an aluminum ladder on the far wall . . .”
“What are you doing?” Vasquez asked him.
“I used to do the long jump in high school.”
“So did I. What was your best jump?”
“Seventeen-five.”
“Go for it—mine was sixteen-eight.”
Sykes backed up thirty feet as the others cleared the way for him, then raced the length of the catwalk as it wavered from side to side, throwing his body out across the void. He landed hard against the tangled metal of the opposing span, pulled himself up, and ran for the aluminum ladder. He returned, extended the ladder to twenty feet and lowered it across the gap, where Vasquez caught the other end.
“Go go go!” DeLuca shouted, holding the end in place as Khalil shimmied his way across on all fours. Once on the other side, he helped Sykes secure the far end.
“Mack, you’re next,” DeLuca said.
An explosion topside rocked the roof. The lights blinked off for a few seconds, then came back on.
“Now, MacKenzie!” She dropped her weapons, then crawled hesitantly out onto the ladder, which twisted and bowed beneath her weight. She was halfway across when the lights went out, and this time, they didn’t come back on, pitching the room into total darkness, to where DeLuca couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. “It doesn’t matter, Colleen—just feel your way. Stay low and centered. Tell me when you’re across.”
It seemed like an eternity, but then he heard Sykes call out, “We got her.”
“You’re next,” DeLuca told Vasquez.
“Why don’t . . .”
“Now!” he growled.
He waited, holding his end of the ladder as steady as he could, the catwalk still swaying in the darkness, creating an odd sensation, because he couldn’t see anything, but he could still feel it moving.
“I’m good,” Vasquez shouted back.
“Hang on,” DeLuca said, taking the belt from his pants and tying his end of the ladder to the catwalk as tightly as was possible, which wasn’t very tight at all. He reached blindly out into the darkness in front of him, feeling for the first rung, then the second, then the third, keeping the side rails of the ladder between his legs and pulling himself forward with his arms.
Six rungs.
Seven.
How much farther?
Then the ladder twisted beneath him, skewing sideways toward vertical. He fell off to the left, hanging on to the side rail of the ladder with both hands.
“DeLuca!”
“I’m still on,” he called back, kicking his leg up, trying to find something to throw it over, but there was nothing there. He tried again.
An explosion rocked the room, causing him to lose his grip with his right hand. He felt his left hand slipping.
He kicked again.
Nothing.
He reached up with his right hand.
Nothing. Where the fuck was it? Where was the goddamn ladder?
He felt the fingers on his left hand peeling away as another explosion shook him.
He couldn’t hold on any longer.
He let go.
Someone grabbed him by the left wrist, pulling him up. He reached for whoever it was with his right hand. His rescuer grabbed him by the right wrist.
“I got you,
” Sykes said.
DeLuca felt himself being pulled bodily onto the far end of the catwalk.
“I don’t know how you saw me . . .” he began.
“NVGs,” Dan said. “Everybody hold hands and follow me.”
He led them to the end of the catwalk, then right and through the far doors, where they scrambled up the stairs as Sykes called out directions.
“I don’t understand why they haven’t blown this place up yet,” MacKenzie said.
“They soften the target first,” Vasquez said as they raced up the stairs. DeLuca vaguely understood the procedure, attacking a hard target first with GPS-guided JSOW five-hundred-pound penetrating warheads, then a couple of two-thousand-pound Mark 84s JDAMs, and then a GBU 28 “Bunker Buster” or two, five-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs that were twenty-five feet long. That was what they’d used on Mohammed Al-Tariq’s home the first time they’d attacked him from the air. It felt like they were being a bit more thorough this time.
They reached the office. One of the walls had been blown out, the roof hanging low enough that they had to duck to pass beneath it.
“This way,” Zoulalian said, racing toward the car. The others followed, the way lit now by the stars above and by a number of fires burning in the various outbuildings. DeLuca thought at first that it was a miracle that the car was untouched, until he remembered how accurate the precision-guided munitions being used were. Perhaps they’d spared the vehicle intentionally.
On the other hand, it was possible that they intended to blow it to pieces if they saw it move.
He hit redial on his sat phone and threw it onto the back dashboard of the car, all five of them piling in as fast as they could, the car spraying gravel behind it as they sped away, Zoulalian at the wheel.
They’d reached the front gate of the salt works when a tremendous explosion launched the old Mercedes four feet straight up in the air. DeLuca felt the air rush from his lungs at the concussion. They landed with a crash, the car bottoming out, but they kept going, managing to put another forty or fifty yards behind them before a second massive explosion rocked the vehicle a second time, sending it fishtailing in the sand as Zoulalian struggled to regain control.
Team Red Page 35
