by Randy Singer
2
The land was rocky and arid, with windblown sand, sparse desert grasses, and jagged rocks. The wind had a bite, the elevated air thin and brittle. A nocturnal lizard scurried across his path. It reminded Patrick of some training runs he had done in New Mexico—a blend of mountains and desert and ramshackle huts.
The prison was on a dirt road on the outskirts of the city, rising like a fortress from the surrounding slums and rocky hills. Patrick had endured nearly a week of briefings, using a 3-D computer mock-up of the facility. Thick stone walls about ten meters high were topped with coiled barbed wire. An enormous arched steel door served as the front entrance. The outer walls of the compound ran at least four hundred meters on each side, with a number of rounded towers built into each wall like a medieval castle. The towers had small sniper slits on each floor and a guard perch on top.
That was just the first line of defense. Inside the perimeter, the compound was a labyrinth of concrete buildings enclosed by a chain-link fence. In the center, a sniper’s platform towered above the entire facility, complete with spotlights and sirens.
Over a thousand prisoners were housed here, separated into sections of forty to fifty each, with only two guards per section. The Houthi guards were mostly new recruits, poorly trained and young, many of them still in their teens. They would be armed with AK-47s but no night goggles and no rocket launchers. Maybe a few hand grenades. Most had never experienced combat.
Patrick and his men arrived at the outskirts of the facility right on schedule, and the snipers settled in. Two rocky ranges provided good cover and clean shots at the guard towers. A third sniper climbed up a fire escape to mount the roof of a nearby abandoned apartment building. A fourth climbed to the top of a warehouse and hunkered down behind a heating vent.
The other men scrambled into position—four per team, each team covering a side of the compound. Despite the brisk air, Patrick could feel the sweat on the back of his neck and the jagged breath of the man behind him. They stopped, checked around, then crouched and sprinted from one rock to the next, down alleys between cramped adobe houses, and across a road, positioning themselves behind some mud-brick utility buildings less than a hundred meters from the prison’s outer walls.
The snipers and team leaders checked in on the troop net, the channel used by the SEALs on the ground, monitored by Patrick through his right earbud.
“We’re at checkpoint Neptune.”
“Roger that, checkpoint Neptune.”
“Tex here. Checkpoint Neptune.”
“Roger.”
And so it went, one after the other. The air acrid and tense, Patrick’s breath short. He kept his voice calm on the radio, but his heart was racing. In a few moments they would unleash hell. In less than thirty minutes, it would all be over.
He turned to the man right behind him, his best friend in the SEALs and the undisputed workout champion of the team, a guy named Troy Anderson, known to all his teammates as “Beef.” Beef was stockier than Patrick and a few inches shorter, with broad shoulders and a square face. His body fat was a ridiculous 5 percent. Beef was the team prankster, but he was also intensely competitive, and tonight he was in his element. Patrick looked at him and nodded. It was time.
“Clear the towers,” Patrick said softly into the radio.
Seconds later, the snipers confirmed their hits on the tower guards. They had code-named them for American patriots.
“Jefferson down.”
“Madison down.”
“John Adams down.”
“Franklin.”
“Thomas Paine.”
Patrick tensed. The intel said there would be six Houthi guards in the towers. Five had fallen in rapid succession. A sniper cursed into the troop net, and a return shot rang out from one of the guard towers, a brief spark illuminating the night. The responding round from the SEAL sniper was suppressed.
“He’s down,” the sniper said a second later. “John Hancock.”
With a fist to his helmet, Patrick signaled for Beef to move forward. “Set explosives,” he said into his mic.
Beef’s job, along with the breachers from the other teams, was to scramble to the base of the prison wall and place the explosives. Four simultaneous blasts would open holes in the outer walls, and the assaulters would pour through from every direction. From there they would blast their way through the fence surrounding the compound, blow open the outer doors to the prison, and create chaos inside—grenades, flashbangs, and shots coming at the Houthis from every angle. The SEALs wanted to be in and out in a matter of minutes.
But before Beef could cross the road, the dry night air was split by the sound of sirens. A high-pitched wail filled the skies, accompanied by sweeping spotlights. A hail of gunfire peppered the ground around Beef as he sprinted back behind the utility buildings.
“Thanks for the cover, Q,” he gasped, hunkering down with Patrick and the others. “Next time, just tell me if you want to break up.”
Patrick kept his head low but could see flashes from the AK-47s inside the slits in the towers. The intel was flawed. There was supposed to be a total of six guards manning the towers, but it looked like there were dozens more, raining fire on the SEALs who had tried to set the explosives.
The other teams radioed in. They were engaged as well, pinned down outside the walls. There was no small amount of cursing.
“Resistance is heavy,” Patrick said into his command mic, sounding calm. “Permission to abort Surgery and commence Slingshot.”
There was a pause, a disappointed hesitation on the other end of the comm. “Slingshot” meant using a technological advantage, a reference to David’s slaying of Goliath. Patrick’s orders had been clear. The SEALs were to minimize bloodshed. Take out the snipers, breach the wall, keep the kills to a minimum, clear the cells, and get out. Politically, a targeted Special Ops insertion was preferable to a broader-scale attack. Surgery was preferable to Slingshot.
But not if it meant SEAL casualties.
“Permission granted.”
Patrick looked at his watch. It would take the drones at least two minutes. Two long minutes with bullets flying. He stuck his head out for the briefest of seconds and fired back at the towers.
This was going to get messy.
3
NAJRAN, SAUDI ARABIA
The room looked like a NASA control center. Dozens of drone pilots sat in rows before high-def digital monitors, eyes glued to the screens in front of them. At the front of the room was a large IMAX screen projecting feeds from multiple drones at once, all flying more than 15,000 feet over the action at Sana’a Central Prison. A CIA operative paced nervously behind the pilots at the joysticks.
Twenty-one-year-old Brandon Lawrence was one of the best pilots in the room. Skinny and pasty-skinned, Brandon had always been a bit of a computer geek. After high school, he’d taken a year off perfecting his favorite video games, then enlisted in the Air Force. He’d completed basic training and had been selected to fly the MQ-9 Reaper, the Air Force’s most sophisticated drone, a beefed-up version of the Predator. Working under the command of the CIA in countries outside formal war zones, Brandon had logged thousands of hours and more than thirty-two combat missions in the last two years. He was steady at the controls, clinical in his annihilation of enemy targets, and nonchalant afterward. He never showed how much it tore him up.
In daylight, at 15,000 feet, his drone’s light and radar sensors were so advanced that he could zoom in on an object only inches long. He could see what kind of weapon an enemy combatant carried, if not the brand of cigarettes he smoked. With the latest facial recognition software and his drone’s 1.8 gigapixel cameras, he could pick enemy leaders out of a crowded city street. But at night, with the infrared technology, the imagery from the ground was more muted, a blur of green hues, fuzzy outlines of buildings, and hazy images of targets.
His job was to take out the guard tower at the center of the prison facility and the half-dozen men who would o
therwise open fire on the SEALs once the outer wall was breached. It had to be a precise strike. A few meters off-center, and he would take out part of the prison, killing dozens of inmates.
Brandon zoomed in tight on the tower and pushed a button on his controls that pulled up a computer-generated grid displaying precise coordinates—distance, direction, range. The CIA operative moved in behind Brandon and grunted his approval. Brandon locked on to the target.
The screen provided an overlay showing the anticipated blast radius for the Hellfire missile. Brandon and the other pilots confirmed that they were locked and loaded.
“Commence fire.”
On the screen at the front of the command center, the explosions were nearly simultaneous—ten flashes, silent and surreal against the eerie green backdrop of the infrared video. The six towers in the prison’s massive outer walls all took direct hits as the missiles incinerated the guards, demolished the towers, and created gaping holes in the walls. Other strikes knocked out the power lines and generators, blanketing the prison in darkness and silencing the siren. Brandon’s missile left a smoking crater where the interior guard tower had been, the bodies of six Houthi soldiers cremated in the blast.
“Nice work,” the man behind Brandon said.
“Thank you, sir.” Brandon stared at the screen in front of him, his hand trembling slightly on the joystick. Here he was, out of harm’s way, single-handedly executing men who had no idea what was coming. He was acutely aware that this was no video game. And he felt a little ashamed that he could take another human’s life without ever being in danger himself.
He had joined the Air Force because he wanted to serve his country. It seemed the perfect fit, blending his love of technology with his desire to serve.
But he never thought it would play out like this. Working at the direction of the CIA. Sitting at a computer terminal in Saudi Arabia. Killing six soldiers in Yemen, hundreds of miles away. Judge, jury, and executioner. Watching by video as the real warriors stormed the compound.
The wonders of modern warfare.
4
SANA’A, YEMEN
Patrick Quillen felt the shock waves from the explosions. He waited for the “clear” signal, then motioned his men forward. Staying low, they ran across the road and stepped around the smoking piles of charred rubble at the gaping hole created by the missile. He shouldered his HK 5.56 rifle and swept the area, his men fanning out to clear the prison yard.
The place looked more like a refugee camp than a high-security prison. Rows of dusty garments hung drying on clotheslines, and rugs apparently used as canopies for shade stretched from the clotheslines to the chain-link fence ringing the inner compound. There were no trees, just barren ground with a slab of concrete and a basketball hoop at one end.
Basketball. Who knew?
Patrick and his men crossed the prison yard with no resistance. The Houthis had apparently retreated inside the inner walls.
The four teams came together, leaving a handful of members at strategic points in the yard to provide overwatch. A breacher set a small charge at the gate in the fence and blew it open, and the men hustled inside. They divided into two teams of six, with Patrick’s team staying at the front entrance to the main prison building.
The thick steel door in front of them required a larger charge. Beef knelt, peeled the backing off the adhesive strip on the two-inch-thick breaching charge, and attached it to the door. He checked the blast area, and the other men backed out of the way.
“Explosives set, south entrance, building 1,” Beef said.
Beef rolled out of the way himself, then triggered the charge and the door blew open. Another man threw a flashbang inside, and Patrick was the first to step through, moving quickly away from the death funnel of the doorway, sweeping his rifle in an arc.
There! On a catwalk, trying to regain equilibrium, were two Houthi guards.
He heard the pop of their guns, a few wild shots in the split second before Patrick and another assaulter put several rounds into them. One guard was blown back against the wall. The other slumped over the railing, hung there for a second, then plummeted to the floor below, landing with a thud.
The SEALs fanned out in the entry room. It looked to be an administrative space used for processing inmates.
“Lobby secure,” Patrick said.
The other team leader responded. “Alpha Two is in.”
The plan was for the two infiltrating teams to converge at the third-floor pod where the targets were being held. But first they had to navigate the steps and breach another steel door on the third floor.
Patrick prepared to open the door to the stairwell but hesitated. He had learned to trust his instincts. The extra guards in the towers had been unexpected and had cost his team the element of surprise. He was sure the Houthis were now waiting at the top of the metal-grate steps and would try to stack his team up on the staircase.
His radio squawked. The team leader was breathless. “Alpha Two engaged in the stairwell. Eagle down.”
Patrick heard Beef curse behind him.
“Get that guard over here,” Patrick said, motioning to the Houthi they had killed in the admin area.
Two assaulters grabbed the man under his arms and dragged him to the stairwell door. “Toss him in after I kick open the door,” Patrick said. “Take cover. Then go.”
His men nodded. Patrick kicked open the door, and they tossed the dead guard through. He took a round of fire but no grenades. Two assaulters slid in right behind him, hugging the walls and returning fire at the guards above. Two more SEALs followed quickly behind.
The guards retreated, and Patrick and his men sprinted up the steps, training their rifles on the doors at the second and third levels, leaving two men behind to seal the entrances.
The four remaining SEALs gathered at the landing just outside the third-floor door. Beef attached explosives, and the men retreated down half a flight of stairs. The door blew open, and Patrick launched another flashbang inside. The team followed through the opening and immediately took fire.
“Allahu Akbar!” the guards yelled.
Patrick rolled as bullets cracked over his head. It was pitch black, and he knew the Houthis didn’t have night vision goggles. They were at the other end of a pod of cells, retreating and firing, spraying bullets everywhere. The prisoners huddled in the corners of their cells, shouting in Arabic. Patrick and his men stayed low and returned fire. In a matter of seconds, the Houthi guards were lying facedown in their own blood.
Patrick and Beef hustled to the far end of the pod, poked the guards with muzzles to make sure they were dead, and kicked the AK-47s away from their bodies. The prisoners in the cells were wide-eyed, most cowering next to the exterior walls. A few moved gingerly toward the front of their cells, reaching through the bars and calling out to the SEALs.
The team moved quickly along the row of cells. They were less than twenty meters from where Holloman and Abdulaziz were being held when the bad news started pouring in.
“We have seven hot spots moving toward the target,” Patrick heard over the command net. “Transport vehicles. Alpha One and Two, do you copy?”
“Roger that,” Patrick said.
“Copy,” yelled the leader of Alpha Two. He sounded breathless, still under fire. Patrick and his men would have to help in the north staircase as soon as they secured the prisoners.
There was no telling how many Houthis were in the armored vehicles moving toward the compound. They might have RPGs that would make it hard for the extraction helos to land. How had the rebels mobilized so quickly?
The radio traffic picked up.
“Alpha Two still engaged. Resistance is heavy.”
“Neptune One engaged,” one of the snipers said.
“Neptune Three engaged.”
Two snipers under fire. The other breaching team pinned down in the stairway. Extra guards in the towers. Houthi reinforcements on the way. The prison guards had drawn Patrick and his men dee
p inside the prison. It all added up to a trap.
A few seconds later, when Patrick and Beef reached the cell where Holloman was supposed to be, his worst fears were confirmed.
“Alpha One to Hawk,” Patrick said, calling Admiral Paul Towers, the commanding officer of the Joint Special Operations Command. He was the man ultimately in charge of the mission, communicating directly with the director of the CIA and the president. Patrick, like all SEAL team leaders, revered the man.
“Hawk here.”
“You need to see this,” Patrick said.
He switched on the light attached to the rail system on his helmet, illuminating the cell where Holloman should have been. His camera beamed the visual back to headquarters.
There, in the corner of the cell, smiling, was a full-size cardboard cutout of President Amanda Hamilton.
5
TWO MONTHS EARLIER
CHESAPEAKE, VIRGINIA
Paige Chambers heard the outer door to the restroom open, but it was too late. She let the vomit fly. She was bent over in a stall, the door closed. She would just have to wait this person out. She had read once that the great Roman orator Cicero did the same thing. She hated that she got so nervous before a big hearing like this, putting so much pressure on herself that she literally made herself sick.
This is not me. I’ll be fine.
She kept her hair out of her face with one hand and used the other to wipe her mouth with toilet paper. When she was done, she flushed the toilet, and some of her frayed nerves, disguised as this morning’s breakfast, circled the bowl and went down the drain.
She waited until she heard the bathroom intruder wash her hands and leave. Paige grabbed her coat from the hook on the back of the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom. She checked herself in the mirror, adjusted her pin-striped suit with the skirt that reached just above the knees, and bent over to get a drink from the faucet.
