Warning Order

by Joshua Hood

  He knew that the signal would be picked up by the task force, and it wouldn’t take long for them to send out a helo to investigate.

  The men quickly loaded up into the Nissan Patrol that Zeus had stolen from a village a few miles away, and Blaine got behind the wheel, while Mason got in the back. He had just drifted off when the laptop dinged from his assault pack, alerting him to a message.

  The Libyan spymaster, Ahmed, had done so much more than merely save his life after Mason’s team had left him for dead. The man had taught him how to survive, and one of those lessons had been how to send messages when normal avenues of communication were unavailable. They set up a system of chat rooms, which allowed them to communicate in plain sight. This time, however, the message wasn’t from the old spy, it was from Renee. “Why is she contacting me?” he wondered.

  The little envelope at the bottom of the screen told him that he had an email. Once he opened it, a link popped up, inviting him to a garden forum that they had used in the past. For some reason, Renee loved to use the garden forums. The one time he’d asked her why, she simply smiled and said, “It reminds me of a simpler time.”

  It was an answer Mason could understand. The life they led stripped a person of the good memories and replaced them with the horrors of war. Sometimes a person needed to be reminded of why they were fighting.

  The message was simple and to the point, just like Renee:

  “I hear you are looking for a gardener,” it read. “I hear this one is all the rage—check out the link to his website.”

  Curious, Mason clicked on the link, and a separate window popped up showing a map and a blinking blue dot. He immediately recognized the program for what it was: the dot represented a captured phone. He had a very good idea whose phone it was. Using the touch pad, he double-clicked on the dot, and a ten-digit grid came up, which he quickly entered into the GPS unit.

  The new route had them heading toward Mosul.

  “Follow this,” he said, handing the GPS to Blaine.

  “Where are we going?” Zeus muttered without opening his eyes.

  “Renee found al Qatar.”

  • • •

  Kane felt like he’d just drifted off when the patrol came to a halt, and Zeus got behind the wheel. Mason gave up on going back to sleep, and after everyone had taken a piss, he moved to the front passenger seat. He lit a cigarette while Zeus pulled a CD from the visor and slid it into the player.

  The American was able to ignore the music at first, but as the song kept hammering on, the Libyan got more and more into it. He began humming along. When he began drumming wildly on the steering wheel, Mason finally had enough.

  “Dude, that shit is annoying,” he snapped.

  “What? I like this song.”

  “I’m not talking about the song, I’m talking about your terrible drum solo. It’s making my fucking head hurt.”

  “Grumpy ass,” Zeus muttered—before turning up the volume even louder.

  The girl singer’s voice blasted through the speakers, and Zeus ignored him, drumming even harder as he sang along.

  “My loneliness is killing meeeeeee, and I must confess, I do beliiiiiiiieve,” he bellowed, singing along to Britney Spears.

  “I’m going to throw that shit out the window,” Mason growled, leaning forward to pop the CD out of the player.

  Zeus swerved the SUV hard to the left, slapping Mason’s hand away. The men in the back yelled for him to get back in his lane.

  “Don’t you touch it,” the Libyan ordered, regaining control of the Nissan.

  “Then turn it down!” Mason yelled.

  “Fine, I’m turning it down,” he replied, lowering the song to a human volume.

  Mason was grateful for the gesture, but still something puzzled him. “Why does every car you steal have the same shitty music in it?”

  “Because their owners all have excellent taste,” Zeus replied, as though the answer were obvious. “Don’t you worry about the music. When the time comes, how about you just find us a place to park? Can you do that, grumpy?”

  As they drew closer to the blue dot, they began to see smoke on the horizon. Mason used satellite imagery to find a rocky outcrop just shy of their target, and the decision was made to stop there and wait for the cover of darkness to make a move.

  After hiding the truck, Grinch and Blaine set up a security position near the rocky apex, allowing Mason and Zeus to lie down in the shade. The remnants of old square-cut rocks surrounding an ancient cistern told Mason that this had once been a watering hole for passing caravans, but the water had long since dried up.

  Mason rolled his battle shirt into a lumpy pillow and, after digging out a depression for his hips, quickly passed into the land of oblivion. The two most important lessons he’d learned in the army was to sleep when you can and to always eat whenever there’s food to be had. He’d taken the lessons to heart, and they’d both served him well.

  He was woken up by a hard shove on his shoulder, and as his eyes slowly fluttered open, his head was pounding from a lack of water. Mason could feel the sand fleas biting his arms, and the heat from the sun’s rays burning his shins. Blinking rapidly, he realized that Zeus was looming over him.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  “The dot is moving.”

  “What fucking dot?” Mason asked groggily as he sat up and pulled a Nalgene bottle from his assault pack. It was the last of his water, but as he greedily downed a mouthful, he swore that nothing had ever tasted so good. He wanted to drain the entire thing but refrained because he had no idea when he would find more.

  “The dot is moving toward us,” Zeus said.

  “Real funny. You hate it when I sleep, don’t you?”

  “I’m serious: the target is coming this way,” Zeus reiterated, turning the computer so Mason could see that he was telling the truth.

  “Boss, you need to check this out,” Grinch said over the radio.

  “Shit, there is no way they could have spotted us, is there?” Mason asked, suddenly wide awake.

  “Mason, you need to get up here, now,” the sniper said urgently.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Mason grabbed his rifle and crept up a path that had been washed flat by centuries of erosion. Realizing he could be exposed, he crawled carefully to Grinch’s side.

  The sniper had stretched his shemagh between a crevice, giving him some shade from the blinding sun overhead. Based on the shadows, Mason figured that it must be about noon.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  Grinch nodded to the desert floor only twenty-five yards in front of him. An old deuce-and-a-half cargo truck and a Humvee were pulling up. The dust still hovered in the air as four men got out of the Humvee and moved to the back of the large truck.

  Mason breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that whoever was down there had no idea that they were hiding in the rocks. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, sighting through the Trijicon ACOG mounted on top. The optic had a 4x magnification and a red chevron for a reticle. As he swept the optic over the back of the truck, he frowned at the mismatched group of civilians huddled in the back. Some of the men were bleeding heavily, and all of them look terrified as the men from the Humvee ordered them out.

  Mason wasn’t sure what he was watching, but if Renee was right, one of the men in the Humvee had to be al Qatar. As he scanned across the fighters, it became clear immediately what was about to happen.

  The fighters yelled and cursed as their captives got to their feet and tried clumsily to climb down from the truck. Apparently they weren’t moving fast enough for the fighters, and one of the men, who appeared to be in his early teens, reached up and grabbed an older woman, yanking her to the ground.

  The back of the deuce-and-a-half was ten feet off the hard-packed ground, and the woman was unable to brace herself as she slammed headfirst into the ground. She lay motionless, her neck twisted awkwardly beneath her, as the man kicked her in the back. When he realized
that the fall had killed her, he laughed.

  Seeing the dead woman on the ground, one of the men began wailing and jumped awkwardly from the back of the cargo truck. He tried to move to her side, but the fighter struck him with the butt of his AK and pushed him around to the front of the truck.

  “Zeus, refresh the tracker and tell me how close they are,” Mason said into the radio.

  “If this thing is right, they are no more than twenty-five yards away.”

  “Well, get up here. We have company.”

  Counting twenty-three civilians in total, Mason guessed that they were either Shiites or Kurds. Either way, it was obvious that the fighters could care less if they lived or died.

  A tall, thin man in clean desert fatigues got out of the passenger’s seat of the cargo truck, and Mason placed the reticle on his target’s head. This man must be in charge, and he assumed that it had to be the man who killed Boland.

  The man began ordering the civilians to dig a hole near the lead vehicle. While they were handed shovels, he produced a small camcorder from his cargo pocket. After flipping open the screen, he panned the camera over the prisoners and then moved to get a better angle.

  In the distance, artillery began banging away, and Mason could hear the rounds slicing through air before the detonations reverberated across the open desert with a deep thump.

  “They are trying to take Mosul?” he asked in an undertone. “Who the fuck do these guys think they are?”

  “Yeah, there was small-arms fire earlier, but I didn’t give it much thought,” Grinch whispered. “Guess they needed to take a slaughter break.”

  Mason lowered his eye back to the optic just as two fighters seized a young woman who stood huddled next to a middle-aged woman. She fell to her knees as they grabbed her shirt, and one of the men latched onto her arm, trying to drag her back to the deuce-and-a-half.

  She screamed at them to leave her alone, but this only made them more aggressive. Amused, the thin man with the camcorder panned over slowly to catch the proceedings.

  The first man lifted the young woman off the ground by her hair. The second man struggled to hold his rifle while grabbing her legs. The woman kicked and writhed in the man’s arms, and his AK clattered to the ground, knocking up a puff of dust.

  Mason heard Zeus scrambling up behind him as the thin man laughed and pointed at the fighter. Then the man came forward and slapped the girl hard across the face. The sound of the open-handed blow carried up to their position as the woman slumped to her knees.

  “The man with the camera?” Zeus asked.

  “It has to be,” Mason answered.

  He felt his stomach turn as he watched the woman kick her feet in the dirt and scream as one of the fighters grabbed her by the hair.

  Mason could see the blood pouring from her nose as the fighter reached down to retrieve his rifle. Suddenly the older lady picked up a shovel, broke ranks, and rushed at him while he was shaking the dirt off the Kalashnikov. One of the guards yelled a warning, and the fighter turned casually and shot her in the face.

  The shot reverberated off the rocks as the old woman was bowled over and fell in a heap at his feet.

  “Boss?” Grinch said, settling his eye to his scope.

  The fighter who had just shot the woman turned back to his original victim. She was still struggling to get free, and he ripped her shirt open, exposing her breasts. He gave her a sharp kick and motioned for the other man to throw her on the ground.

  “Stand by.”

  Mason had no intention of watching the young woman get raped. As the fighter who had been dragging her by the hair pinned the woman’s hands to the ground, and the other worked feverishly at unbuttoning his pants, he placed the reticle back on al Qatar’s forehead.

  “I’ve got the target,” he said as the fighter tugged on his belt and fought to open the woman’s legs.

  “You have the target,” Zeus replied, shouldering his HK.

  “See you in hell,” he said fiercely.

  Grinch fired a second before Mason flipped the selector off safe and squeezed the trigger gently. The optic jumped as the HK bucked on his shoulder, and by the time he had reacquired his target, the man was down.

  Zeus and Blaine fired at almost the same time, working their shots across the fighters while Grinch smoothly worked the bolt, got back on target, and shot the man who held the woman by the shoulders through his eye.

  Mason finished the final fighter, and the only sound he heard was the woman’s sobs down below.

  “Blaine, you and Grinch provide overwatch. Zeus, you come with me,” he said. “I’m going to put that bastard’s head in a fucking box.”

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  What the fuck have you done now?” Simmons demanded, grabbing Cage by the shoulder and forcing him into one of the many offices outside the Situation Room. He’d just received word that the USS George Bush had been hit going through the Strait of Hormuz, and early reports weren’t looking good.

  Cage jerked his hand free with a violent tug, his fist shaking at his side as Simmons slammed the door.

  “You think I had anything to do with that? You are the one running this shit show.”

  “Are you saying that Vann had our own men killed? Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

  Simmons had put too much trust in the general, and the realization hit him like a kick in the balls. Vann had promised him that the attack would be surgical: just enough to get President Bradley’s attention but not enough to do any real harm. Vann had promised him that he had the right guy for the job, but as more bodies began washing up in the Persian Gulf, it was obvious that Vann had chosen a psychopath to do his dirty work.

  Jacob Simmons was a patriot, not a murderer, and right now all he wanted was someone to share the guilt he felt enveloping him. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that all those innocent Americans died because of him.

  “In five minutes we are going to be standing in front of the president of the United States. You better get control of yourself, or we are both fucked.”

  The two warriors stared at each other, their anger filling the small room, as they fought to control their voices.

  “How could you do that? How could you kill them?”

  “I told you, I had nothing to do with that,” Cage said. “I put you in charge of this, and somehow you let a simple operation get away from you.”

  Simmons felt used and, for the first time in his career, dirty.

  “Don’t you dare put this on me.”

  “Jacob, I told you that trusting Vann was the wrong choice, but you said you could control him. This is on you.”

  “I will kill you right fucking here,” Simmons growled, starting forward.

  “And then what? Who do you think they are going to pin this on? Me? Your fingerprints are all over this. They will bury you alive, and your daughter will have to live with the fact that her father was a traitor for the rest of her life. Is that what you want?”

  “Fuck you,” he spat, staring at the man he’d followed for his entire career.

  Cage had changed, and suddenly the scales had fallen from Simmons’s eyes. The man he knew was gone, replaced by a hard, hateful man who would sacrifice anything and anyone for his goals.

  But Jacob’s anger drained away at the mention of his daughter. He knew that Duke was right. He’d vouched for Vann and let him run with the operation instead of dictating what he wanted done. The plan was to disable the carrier, not destroy it, but no, Vann had given al Qatar too much rope, and now they were about to be hanged by it.

  “What have I done?” Simmons moaned. “I just killed more Americans than any terrorist attack ever could.”

  “I’ve known you for a long time, Jacob. Hell, I’ve bled with you in more shitholes than I can count. Let me do the talking once we get in there.”

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. You accepting this job was never about America, it’s always been about your son, about mak
ing them pay. When is it going to be enough?” Simmons demanded, bringing up the one thing he knew would cut right to Cage’s core.

  “Don’t you talk about him,” Cage hissed.

  Simmons had been there when Cage found out that his son had been killed in Iraq. Cage’s wife was sick when their son was killed, and she’d lost her will to fight after he was put in the ground. It was many years ago, but Simmons knew the pain was still there. He wondered if that’s what all of this was about, avenging the death of his family, no matter the cost.

  “You don’t know shit, Jacob. How many more women and children have to die before we wipe those savages out? You want to shed a tear for someone, how about you cry for the hundreds they are slaughtering right now in Mosul?”

  As the national security advisor, Simmons knew better than anyone what was happening in Iraq. He had the pictures from Tal Afar, showing the soldiers hanging from light poles, along with the mass graves they hadn’t even bothered to cover up.

  “How many more have to die before that pretty boy gets off his ass and wipes this evil off the map?” Cage demanded, pointing toward the hallway.

  “No one cares about Iraq, Duke. They never did.”

  “Well, I care. I even cared about that shitbag Boland. You know that they cut his head off, Jacob, and put the video on the fucking internet. Do you have any idea how many hits that video has gotten in one day?”

  “Fifty thousand,” Jacob muttered.

  “That’s right, fifty thousand people have watched that video in less than twelve hours. So you tell me who’s out of their mind.”

  “Duke, I—”

  “It’s too late for all of that. You can either eat a bullet or sack up and drive on, but the only way this is going to end is after we’ve killed every last one of them.”

  Jacob had already made his choice nine months ago, and he knew that there was no way out for either one of them. If he stayed the path, they had a chance to give America peace for the first time in a decade, but at the same time, he hated himself for what he’d become.

  “What now?” he asked meekly.