Rigged

by James Rosone

  More gunfire rang out from a few other buildings as the Special Forces soldiers quickly fanned out and moved in on the insurgents.

  While the American soldiers advanced on the insurgents, one of the Apache gunships circled overhead, banking hard as it angled its nose down before letting loose a burst of gunfire from its chin gun.

  BOOM.

  A car in front of the police station exploded, killing several insurgents who had been hiding behind it as they’d peppered the police station with machine-gun fire.

  The second Apache hovered slowly over the police station, the chin gun moving wherever the gunner turned his head as he searched for more targets. Finding one, he let loose a short burst of fire, shredding another insurgent.

  At this point, the remaining insurgents broke off their attack and tried to do the best they could to slip away. The rest of Captain Nicholson’s men continued to advance along the sidewalks of the main road leading up to the police station. When they got near it, they had the police colonel call to his men and let them know they had reached the station.

  A few minutes later, half a dozen police officers exited the building as they approached the American soldiers. The police colonel spoke with them for a few minutes and then told several of them to accompany the Special Forces soldiers to check the surrounding area and make sure there were no more insurgents hiding anywhere. It was imperative that they make sure they either killed them all or got them to vacate the area.

  Twenty minutes went by as the police continued to search the surrounding area for any further insurgents. They managed to apprehend two of them as they tried to escape down an alleyway. When the police returned, they went to work on collecting the bodies of the dead insurgents and their weapons, while a local fire truck was called over to put out the fire from the car the Apache had blown up.

  Seth’s radio sprang to life. “Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell, this is General Lancaster. I’m sending the Blackhawks back to pick you guys up. It looks like the KFOR commander in Pristina is finally sending some soldiers over to Srbica. I don’t want you guys there when they arrive, so make sure to grab whatever you think is important and get on those helicopters.”

  “Copy that, sir. We’ll be on the birds before they get here,” Seth replied. He quickly waved down Nicholson and filled him on the situation. His compatriot agreed that it was time to get out of there.

  With the sound of the approaching helicopters getting louder, Seth pointed to the two prisoners. “Let’s take them with us. We can try and find out how many more insurgents are operating in the area and who else is involved.”

  The soldiers nearby nodded. They walked over to the prisoners and zip-tied their hands before placing black hoods on them. Then they marched the detainees over to the football field nearby where the helicopters would land.

  Once everyone was loaded on the helicopters, they lifted off—not a moment too soon. As they began their ascent into the air, a dozen Italian armored vehicles rolled into the city, headed right for the police station. The Italian soldiers looked up at the Americans as they flew away and shook their fists, but they were out of their grasp.

  As Seth and his men approached Camp Bondsteel, they saw a small column of military jeeps and lightly armored vehicles lined up at the main gate.

  I wonder what that’s all about, Seth thought.

  When the helicopters had landed, Seth took off at a trot to the operations center. He had a bad feeling about the activity at the main gate and he wanted to find out what was going on.

  Once Seth entered the building, he immediately spotted General Lancaster on the phone with someone. The general waved for him to join him.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll make sure to tell them.…Yes, sir, the SEALs should be landing here shortly.…I know, once they’re here, we’ll get them saddled up for the mission. I’ll call you back.” Lancaster hung up the phone and then turned to Seth.

  “Good job in Srbica,” he said. “However, I’ve got another problem right now that I need your help with.” He was clearly frustrated with how things were turning out.

  “Sure thing, boss,” Seth answered. “What’s going on?”

  Lancaster shook his head. “I have to go deal with the KFOR commander who’s down at the front gate. He’s insisting that this base is under his control, and he’s ordering us to cease our military operations right now. I need to go tell him that by order of the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States, that’s not happening.”

  “Wow, this whole place is turning into a complete goat rope. What the hell is going on?” asked Seth, venting. “One minute the Kosovars are happy that we’re here taking these terrorists out of there, the next minute it seems like the government, along with our NATO partners, is protecting them.”

  General Lancaster ignored the comment. He motioned for Seth to follow him as they walked out of the ops center. “The Delta team is nearly ready to go,” he explained. “The SEALs should be arriving momentarily. When they do, I need you to brief them on the Presevo raid. One of the ops planners has the brief ready—I just need you to bring the DEVGRU guys up to speed on what’s been going on and who the target is.”

  They heard the roar of a C-17 flying over the base and momentarily looked up. They spotted roughly four dozen parachutes descending toward the helipad area of the base. Seth looked at the general. “Is that the SEALs’ boss? You had them parachute in?” he asked with a look of disbelief on his face.

  Lancaster spat on the ground. “The damn government and KFOR wouldn’t give us permission to land them at the Pristina airport, and none of the neighboring countries would let them land either. I don’t have time for them to slip in surreptitiously. I need them on the ground now!” He stomped off in the direction of the front gate to go deal with the German KFOR commander.

  Wow, this whole mission is going to crap, Seth thought. What the heck is going on?

  *******

  Washington, D.C.

  Pentagon Operations Center

  It was 2109 hours when Secretary of Defense Charles “Chuck” McElroy dropped a couple of Alka-Seltzers in his glass of water, waiting for the tablets to dissolve before he could gulp the liquid down. His heartburn was killing him, and he needed to get it under control.

  Looking up at the video display, he saw it was 0309 hours local time in Bosnia. The Osprey had just landed in a field near the target location in Tjentiste, near the Montenegro-Serbian border, disgorging its cargo of operators. The ground forces would hike a quick mile to the target location as they sought to maintain their stealth. The Reaper drone circling overhead was providing him with excellent real-time surveillance of the surrounding area, and another screen showed a thermal image of the targeted building, courtesy of a CIA satellite some sixty miles above them.

  McElroy watched as one group of helicopters dropped off a team of twelve Delta operators. Twenty minutes later, his Alka-Seltzer had started to kick in, and he watched a smaller group of four operators rapidly approached the roof of the targeted building from the air. They had HALOed in and were quickly closing in on the location that intelligence sources had said housed Sefer Kubura, the leader of the ISB.

  The Secretary of Defense watched anxiously, barely remembering to breathe. When the soldiers who were parachuting in got close to the roof, they shot the two guards there with their silenced rifles, making sure their presence remained undetected. By the time the guards in the building could hear the rotor noise of the Ospreys, the four operators who’d landed on the roof were readying themselves to breach the building from the top down.

  The twelve-man team that had landed further away and hiked in fanned out into two separate groups. One group of six approached the targeted house, while the other ground team moved toward the two outbuildings nearby. Their Bosnian source had said the outlying buildings were acting as a barracks of sorts, housing as many as fifteen armed insurgents.

  Another computer monitor suddenly came to life. One of the technicians had added th
e views from the head-mounted cameras the operators were wearing. There was a split screen, and McElroy quickly ascertained which image was from one of the operators on the roof and which was from the team heading toward the same building from the ground level.

  The Secretary of Defense suddenly heard audio of one of the men, half a world away. “Five, four, three, two, one…!” Then he saw a bright flash on the rooftop door.

  BOOM.

  In seconds, a second flash was soon followed by a short whoomf as a flash-bang went off. Then the four operators on the roof swiftly burst into the building. McElroy watched as the other two groups of operators on the ground almost simultaneously burst through the doors of the remaining buildings on the property.

  In the span of three minutes, the Delta operators had captured Sefer Kubura alive, along with a handful of his lieutenants. Only four occupants on the property had been killed in the skirmish, while the other eleven had been captured. With their primary target in custody, the operators began a quick sweep of the buildings for any and all sensitive materials that might help shed some light on their activities. They grabbed laptops, thumb drives, cell phones, maps, journals, and notebooks—anything and everything of potential value was quickly stuffed into large bags. A few of their other comrades rounded all the prisoners up and held them fifty meters from the buildings while they waited for the Ospreys to head back for the pickup.

  Ten minutes went by as they waited for their rides to return. When the helicopters landed, the team conducting the SSE of the buildings had collected what they could and made their way out to the landing zone.

  When the Ospreys landed, the operators threw the prisoners on before piling in with all the captured materials. Secretary of Defense McElroy breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  A team of specialists would be waiting for the men at Bondsteel to begin ripping the phones, computers, thumb drives, and any other electronic devices. All the data would be uploaded to teams back at the NSA, CIA, and SOCOM for further analysis.

  McElroy knew that for now, the operators would sit back and count themselves lucky that none of them had been killed or wounded on what was arguably a hastily-thrown-together mission with zero preparation—something he knew that they both specialized in doing and absolutely hated being asked to do.

  *******

  As the first mission into Bosnia wound down, the mission into the Presevo Valley was heating up. After some arm-twisting on the part of the President and the Secretary of State, and sixty million dollars in foreign aid, the Serbian government had granted the US permission to carry out the raid in their territory.

  Surveillance showed they were indeed pulling their MUP forces out of the area, along with any other police and military units, so there would be no chance of a friendly-fire situation. All the Serbs had asked was that they be allowed to monitor the raid, which the DoD originally agreed to, but only if they performed their surveillance from the confines of the US Embassy in Belgrade, where the Americans could counter-monitor the Serbian officials.

  Because this raid was viewed as far more dangerous, an entire SEAL team platoon was being sent in, along with ODA 0311 on standby in a second set of helicopters, accompanied by two Apache gunships.

  McElroy made a comment to those in the room with him. “Well, the first raid went off without a hitch. Let’s hope the SEALs have the same luck the Army just had.”

  Bristling a bit at the comment, the Chief of Naval Operations puffed his chest out a bit. “I’m sure DEVGRU will get our man,” he said confidently.

  The SecDef nodded. “I’m sure they will, Admiral. I’m sure they will.” He stood. “Excuse me for just a moment,” he said as he headed to the restroom. They had less than thirty minutes before the next raid. It was going to be a long evening for the men and women at the Pentagon.

  *******

  As the Delta Force raid reentered Kosovo airspace, the DEVGRU raid had just left, crossing over into Serbia and the Presevo Valley. It was now 0435 hours, still another two and a half hours until sunrise, plenty of time left to operate in the darkest hours of the day. A second Reaper drone, flown in from an airbase in Romania, had finally come on station, loaded with four Hellfire missiles, ready to deliver some aerial support should it be needed.

  For this raid, the SEALs would be hitting two specific targets. The Serbian Security Service was unable to confirm which location Tahir Shicri, the head of the Islamic State of Serbia, was bedding down at, so the SEALs would have to hit two locations simultaneously, which was why the entire platoon was going in on the raid. Each team would also have a lone Apache gunship assigned for close-in support, and the Reaper could be vectored in, depending on what additional help was needed. Under normal circumstances, they would have had two Apaches for each location, but these aircraft were not commonly deployed to Kosovo, and the other two had accompanied the Delta team into Bosnia.

  While everyone was watching the monitors showing the aircraft heading toward their individual targets, President Sachs snuck into the room and walked over to an empty chair next to the SecDef. As the President approached the table, a few people suddenly noticed him and began to stand before he waved for them to stay seated.

  Now that all eyes had turned to him, he said, “Please carry on, people. I’m just here to watch like the rest of you.”

  The attention in the room quickly returned to the monitors as they waited for the assault teams to reach their targets.

  The first assault team swooped in quickly, hovering over the roof of the building they were going to raid. Ropes were thrown out the back end of the Osprey, and two strings of operators descended quickly down the ropes. While the first Osprey was landing one group of operators, a second landed less than a hundred feet from the building and offloaded the other group.

  With the Apache circling nearby, the operators moved quickly on the house. Just as it looked like they were going to breach the house before anyone could react, a lone figure appeared in one of the windows and let loose a string of bullets at the group of SEALs who had been rushing the front of the building, forcing many of them to duck for cover while a few brave operators charged forward, firing their own weapons back at the shooter.

  The Osprey hovering over the building disconnected their ropes now that they had offloaded their assault team and immediately applied power to the engines as they fought to gain as much altitude as possible to get out of the kill zone. Suddenly, four figures appeared out of a small building not more than two hundred feet away and opened fire on the Osprey with AK-74s. Then a lone figure appeared on the roof of a building several doors down and fired off an RPG at the Osprey.

  The pilot deftly banked to the left, allowing the RPG to sail right underneath their right engine, just missing them. Suddenly, a second guy appeared practically beneath them and fired off another RPG round. With almost no warning, the pilot had no way to avoid this new attack, and the second RPG slammed into the belly of the aircraft. The warhead exploded up into the cargo bay, and the Osprey slid sideways in the air for a moment before it began to lose altitude and summarily crashed into the side of a single-story house, practically on the main street of the small town.

  The Apache gunship flew in and quickly lit up the building where the man had just fired the RPG with its 30mm chain gun. The gunner then turned the chin gun on the other group of shooters who had fired off the first RPG and lit up that building as well.

  While all this was happening, the breach team that had come in from the roof met heavy resistance inside the building. The men and women in the Pentagon operations center nervously watched one of the head cameras from the breach team as they rapidly moved from room to room, looking for the high-value individual they had been sent in to capture. Suddenly, the screen whited out from an explosion.

  The second breach team, which was charging up the front of the building, made it to the front entrance when a machine gunner opened fire on them from across the street. Several of the SEALs went down from the fusillade of bu
llets before the Apache gunner was able to swing his chin gun around and rake the building with 30mm rounds, shredding the structure and any anyone inside it.

  “It’s a damn trap!” shouted a Navy captain in the Pentagon ops center. He slammed his fist down on the table, causing everyone in the room to jump.

  “What the hell’s going on, Chuck?” asked the President, who was anxiously watching as several of the operators dragged some of their wounded brothers behind a couple of vehicles parked in front of the building.

  “Hang on, Mr. President, we’re trying to figure that out,” replied the SecDef. He gave a nervous glance to a couple of his generals. This assault mission had gone from a quick snatch-and-grab to a rescue mission in the span of sixty seconds.

  One of the generals quickly picked up his telephone and ordered General Lancaster to send in the ODA team they had on standby.

  While the call for reinforcements was being made, the remaining SEALs on the ground continued to try and execute the mission. They finished clearing the house but failed to find the high-value individual they had been sent in to grab. With the mission an official bust, they now did their best to collect up their wounded and secure a perimeter until their QRF could arrive and get them out of there.

  Several of the SEALs took off toward the downed Osprey to check on the crew. Fortunately, no one had been killed in the crash or by the RPG. The two crew chiefs and one of the pilots had been injured. The SEALs quickly collected them up and made their way back to where they had the rest of their wounded comrades. Several of the medics started working on stabilizing the wounded while they waited for their rescue helicopters to come fetch them.

  Meanwhile, the Apache continued to make several low passes over the area, giving anyone else who wanted to attack the Americans pause.