Act of Revenge

by Dale Brown

  “We cut these power lines first,” said Idi the Sudanese. “We take over the police station and secure their weapons.”

  “Strike the pumping station at the same moment,” said Ahmed. He was new to the team, a student from Egypt, but very promising: he had recruited two suicide bombers in Cairo before being called. “But we don’t have enough explosives.”

  “This is a farming area, and there are not enough explosives?” prompted Ghadab.

  The question sparked the group. They had been thinking in simple terms—cut power, blow up the obvious symbols of corruption. But now they began to think creatively, to see the possibilities, to appreciate the destruction they could inflict. He sat back quietly as they spoke back and forth, until at last they had an outline of a mission.

  “I think it is an excellent plan,” he said. “But the proof is in the doing. So let it be done.”

  39

  Southern Kurdistan (Syria)—a few hours later

  Ten years before, T’aq Ur had been a small but prosperous village on the Euphrates, dominated by Kurds but very much a part of Syria. The people who lived there, Sunni Muslims mostly, grew a variety of vegetables in the river-irrigated fields. There were pomegranate trees, olive groves, apricots. The most prosperous had goats, primarily for their own or their neighbors’ tables. The meat was slaughtered by the local butcher in accordance with practices well over a thousand years old; the farming itself was only slightly more advanced. The tiny town was a place time had forgotten.

  But the dictator had not. And in the early days of the revolution, he remembered that a politician who had been born there had once opposed him. The Syrian army shelled the town for a week before coming to pick through the remains.

  Then came waves of rebels, some backed by Turkey, some part of ISIS. They took the village after two weeks of sieges. A counterattack by the Syrian government failed. The Russians came and bombed, ineffectively, since most of what was left by that time was rubble. A Syrian platoon backed by Iranian regulars managed to gain a foothold, only to be driven out by a Turkish-backed rebel group that numbered no more than two dozen men. The stones changed hands once or twice again, but by that time, the only inhabitants of T’aq Ur were mosquitoes. Even they soon quit the place—there wasn’t enough fresh blood to live on.

  The Kurds arrived in January, setting up an outpost with American help. The troops moved on within days, pushing their front farther south. T’aq Ur was finally completely free—and completely empty.

  The lack of people was exactly why Johansen had chosen it as his base of operations. They were a good distance from Palmyra—roughly a seventy-minute drive across the desert—but within range of the devices that would help find Ghadab. His teams could stage from here without fear of interference or being attacked by surprise. If they needed help, the Kurds were nearby.

  His headquarters was in a bunker complex the Israelis claimed had been part of Syria’s clandestine nuclear program. There had been six buildings at one time; one was about the size of a small U.S. elementary school. This was now a pile of rubble; besides the bricks, it contained a number of unexploded artillery shells. The next largest building was a barracks designed to hold about a hundred soldiers. It, too, was wrecked, but it had a usable basement, and it was in the basement that Johansen set up shop.

  They moved in at night. The basement was cleared easily enough, with the help of Peter and the two mechs programmed for lifting. While it was dusty and filled with spiders and even a few snakes, the walls and ceiling were sturdy, and there was plenty of room for sleeping bags. Partitions were stretched between the piers that held up the building.

  They slept in the space closest to the stairs: if the roof collapsed, they’d have the best chance of getting out from there. The next night they cleared more of the building, reinforced the ceiling, then divided the area into living and working quarters.

  Prep work nearly done, Johansen sent out patrols in pickups to get a feel for the area. Everyone wore nondescript fatigues; if anyone checked the labels, they’d find they came from China. As much gear as possible had been sourced from outside the U.S.; even the vehicles that had taken them there were Japanese.

  Not that the charade would fool anyone.

  The agency would use Massina’s newly minted public profile as an antiterror firebrand to imply he was behind it all: a self-made billionaire unleashing a private army to revenge his city.

  There were precedents, most notably the mission launched by Ross Perot to rescue his people kidnapped by Iran in the late ’70s. The media would have a field day drawing parallels between the two men.

  Johansen had lied about the Agency wanting Massina to take a lower profile. As far as they were concerned, the louder the better. He, on the other hand, worried the inventor was making himself too much of a target.

  Johansen couldn’t worry about that now. There were too many other things to fret about.

  Chelsea spent the day organizing her work area, setting up the control units. When the sun set, she went outside and put the bomb mechs to work clearing the artillery shells from the wreckage around them. Each shell had to be carried into the desert a mile away and quietly rendered inert. Which was a bit of a bummer—all those explosives would have made a good-sized boom.

  It took longer than she expected. She had to call it quits at sunrise with about half the job still undone.

  “Half day, huh?” joked Johnny as she closed down the units.

  “Yeah, I’m a slacker,” she told him. “Calling it quits at twenty hours. What are you doing?”

  “Patrol.”

  “Good luck.”

  He looked pretty good in his long Arab shirt and baggy pants, Chelsea thought as she went downstairs. Very movie-star-like. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, he was on respirators and in a drug-induced coma, legs gone, chest full of blood.

  A half hour later, Johnny joined Turk and Christian and set out south in a pickup, aiming to launch a UAV over their target area. Turk—a former SEAL who looked like an Arab, though he was born in Indiana—was at the wheel; Christian, who despite his name was a first-generation Muslim immigrant from Kurdistan, rode shotgun in the back. Johnny handled coms, in contact with the base via supplied video feeds and old-fashioned radio. While they had brought helmets that could do the same, to a man the team considered the helmets too cumbersome to use except in an actual assault. Wearing them now would make it obvious that they weren’t a patrol of Daesh soldiers—which was what they hoped to pass for, at least from a distance.

  After they had driven for about a half hour, they stopped to launch a Hum. With the two battery-powered engines running full-out, Johnny ran with the aircraft across a flat stretch of sand until he felt it trying to lift from his grip. Putting his head down, he increased his speed, then threw it like a javelin. The UAV tucked right, then swooped back level and began soaring, climbing slowing into the night. The sound from its electric motors faded quickly; by the time it reached 1,200 feet, it was both impossible to see or hear in the night sky.

  Johnny hopped back into the pickup. He had preprogrammed the little bird to fly a figure-eight pattern above the truck, acting as a scout.

  “There’s a checkpoint near the road to our east,” Johnny told Turk, showing him the screen. “Five miles.”

  They tucked east, then south, skirting a small settlement to reach a ridge two miles due northeast of Palmyra where they could survey the city and surrounding area easily.

  A pair of highways intersected near the tip of the city, making it an important crossroads. The highways themselves were barely that: they accommodated a single lane of traffic in each direction, and though paved, it was hard to tell in places because of the sand that typically covered the pavement. An airport once used by the Syrian air force sat like a dog’s tail at the southeast corner of the city. The runways were too cratered for use by planes, but the Daesh forces had about two platoons’ worth of men stationed in barracks there. A brackish, s
easonal marsh folded against the edge of an ancient lake bed at the opposite end of the city; a smaller, similarly dead lake sat nearby.

  Daesh troops were scattered at intervals around Palmyra’s boundaries. Turk mapped out a path between them and set off on foot, leaving Johnny and Christian with the truck. He walked around the back of the hill to a dried creek bed, using that to get within fifty yards of a building on the city boundary. He was just about to climb over a wall into the backyard when Johnny spotted movement on a nearby rooftop.

  “Seventy meters to your left, two guys on that house,” he told Turk.

  Turk dropped behind the wall. Johnny watched the two figures kneel near the bricks that marked the edge of the roof. They were looking in Turk’s direction, but didn’t seem to be able to pick him out of the shadows.

  “They see me?” asked Turk.

  “Hard to tell.” A moment later, one of the men began spraying his AK-47 in Turk’s general direction. He ran through the entire magazine before stopping. The firing was erratic, but near enough to Turk to make it clear he’d heard or seen something.

  “Shit,” muttered Turk.

  “Yeah. We got lights.”

  “Patrol?”

  “Maybe—pickup coming from the center of town. One of our guys is on the phone.”

  “I’m gonna back out.”

  “Stay low.” Johnny turned to Christian, who was watching the feed over his shoulder. “Maybe we should do a diversion.”

  “Nah. He gets out without being seen, Daesh writes this off as two guys with overactive imaginations.”

  Turk crawled three hundred yards to a dirt road, changed direction slightly, and then half crawled, half ran, back in their direction. By that time a patrol had arrived. They did a perfunctory search, barely looking over the wall before heading back and returning to their post in a building near the city center.

  A half hour later, sure that they hadn’t been detected, Johnny recovered the UAV and the three Americans headed back to their base.

  40

  Southeast of Dar al’Abid as Sud, Syria—around the same time

  It began with a car bomb in the market area an hour and a half after sunrise. The brothers used too many explosives, but that was hardly a drawback: Ghadab grinned as he watched a woman a block away pitched into the air by the explosion.

  She wasn’t wearing a head covering when the bomb exploded. Clearly, God had seen her and directed her demise.

  The explosion set off an alarm at police headquarters. Three of the four officers on duty were cut down as they rushed from the building. The fourth came out with his hands up.

  He was taken to Ghadab, who was supervising the raid from a roof across the street. Without bothering to question him, Ghadab slit the man’s throat. Blood fanned the air purple-red before he even pulled the knife away.

  The ravages of war had reduced the population to barely over two hundred, the majority women and children. Shouting and firing their Kalashnikovs as they went door to door, Ghadab’s men rousted thirty-three males, all but two or three over the age of fifty or under the age of fifteen, to an empty lot in the shadow of the old storage tanks near the center of town.

  “What a pathetic collection,” Ghadab told Yuge the Iraqi. “Not one of them could fight for the Caliphate.”

  “That one there, the fat one,” said Yuge, who’d begun interrogating the captives as they were brought over. “He claims to have fought for us.”

  “What is he doing in the city, then?”

  “He says he is a spy, with information for the Commander.”

  “Bring him to me.”

  Yuge grabbed the man by the shirt and dragged him to Ghadab. His white shirt and pants had been soaked with sweat; dirt caked on them like mud. A coil of fat above his sagging shoulders supported his head.

  “Who are you?” demanded Ghadab.

  “Ari, son of Rhaddad,” said the man, as if he expected Ghadab to have heard of him.

  “What are you doing in this village?”

  “I am preparing for the brothers,” claimed the man. “The infidels are all around. They are planning to strike Palmyra.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. Very soon.”

  Ghadab took hold of the man’s arm and dragged him toward the others, who were watching to see what would happen.

  “Tell me,” Ghadab shouted. “Is this man a true believer?”

  No one answered. Ghadab took his knife from his belt.

  “Tell me,” Ghadab shouted, pointing his knife at a gray-haired prisoner. “Is this man a true believer?”

  The man began to shake, but didn’t speak.

  “I’ve seen him drink,” said another man.

  Ghadab let go of Ari and walked to the man who’d spoken. He pointed his khanjar at his face.

  “When?” demanded Ghadab.

  “After the Daesh were driven out.”

  “You swear this?”

  “May God strike me down.”

  Ghadab walked back to the fat man.

  “The man there says you are a liar,” Ghadab told him.

  “With God as my witness, I swear on my children and all that is right—”

  His sentence ended in a sputter and cough, his windpipe and throat slit by the fat part of Ghadab’s knife.

  “To lie before God is a sin punishable by death,” bellowed Ghadab, turning back to the others. “Who will join the Caliphate?”

  It was foolish to resist, and yet the crowd was not unanimous. Only half volunteered, all but two arguably too young to be accepted.

  “Put them in the truck,” Ghadab told Yuge.

  Yuge and two other men herded them to a pickup they had commandeered. It wasn’t hard; the men went eagerly, thankful to be spared.

  Ghadab looked over the others.

  “None of you will fight?” he asked.

  “Please,” said one of the men. “We have been in our share of battles. We are worn from the fighting. All of us.” He gathered up his long shirt and held it up to reveal a scar on his belly. “The dictator’s troops gave me this scar.”

  Ghadab leaned over and with his knife touched the top of the jagged purple gouge on the man’s pelvis.

  “You fought on the government’s side?” asked Ghadab.

  “I fought against the corrupt dictator,” answered the man.

  “I have worse scars,” said Ghadab.

  He pushed the knife tip against the wound. To his surprise, the old man remained stoic even as the tip liberated a trickle of blood the pure color of a poppy whose leaves had just burst open.

  “Enough,” said Ghadab. And with that he slashed the knife horizontally against the man’s midsection, so hard that the old man folded to the ground. Ghadab knelt and slit the man’s throat, bringing him a quick death—a mercy. The smell of blood intoxicated him and he lingered for a moment, absorbing it.

  By the time he rose, the rest of the captives lay on the ground, shot by his men. In the distance, he heard gunfire—the “volunteers” in the truck had all been killed.

  “Burn the buildings,” he said. “You can take what women are suitable as slaves. Kill the rest.”

  41

  Boston—a few hours later

  With Chelsea gone, Borya had little to do. No one would tell her where her boss and mentor had gone—very likely no one knew—but gossip pointed toward a project that would avenge the Boston attacks. Naturally, Borya wanted in. But no one was going to let a teenage intern get involved in such a thing.

  Barely a barrier for her.

  Smart Metal’s work computers were tied to a “sterile system”—there was no access to the outside world, one of the more basic precautions that the company used to protect against viruses and espionage. They did, however, have computers that could access the internet without access to the company’s internal system. One day, soon after Chelsea left, Borya decided to use one to find out all she could about the terrorists who had attacked her city. Her first sessions were Google search
es primarily, and a lot of reading. From there, she began trolling chat rooms where ISIS supporters hung out, then explored so-called “dark sites” hidden from normal web searches and used for transferring propaganda and untraceable communications.

  She found some pretty disgusting stuff. It was fascinating to see how the perverts thought.

  This wasn’t what the external links were supposed to be used for, and when she reported to work after school one day and found Bozzone waiting for her in the lab, she knew she was in trouble.

  Not that she let on.

  “Hey, Beef,” she said, greeting the security chief like an old friend. “How’s it hangin’?”

  “Mr. Massina wants to see you.”

  “Awesome.”

  Borya was an old hand at getting in trouble; she visited the principal’s office at her Catholic school so often the receptionist had nicknamed a chair “Borya’s throne.” But this was different. She loved working at Smart Metal, and the tone in Bozzone’s voice made it clear that she wasn’t being summoned to see Mr. Massina because he had a birthday present for her. But she feigned indifference, slinging her backpack over a shoulder and following Bozzone to the elevator.

  “Think the rain will stop in time for the Red Sox game?” Borya asked.

  Bozzone turned his head, raised his eyebrow slightly, but said nothing. Deposited in Massina’s outer office, Borya had no time to settle on a strategy as the secretary waved her right in. Massina was at his desk, staring at his computer, chin in one hand, pen in the other.

  Was it the right or the left that was fake? She couldn’t remember.

  “Ahhhh, Ms. Tolevi.” Massina frowned. “Have a seat.”

  “Hey, boss.” Her voice squeaked. She tried clearing her throat, but suddenly her mouth and everything in it felt drier than sandpaper.