Task Force Desperate

by Peter Nealen

  Our two choppers landed together, the rotor wash flapping the sides of the tents and hammering the FOB with grit. Caleb and his team minus were waiting for us, and started forward to retrieve Hank and Tim’s bodies. I waved them off, as I bent down to pick Hank back up, and Bob maneuvered Tim back onto his shoulders. We’d carry them off ourselves.

  As we got up, and I adjusted Hank’s dead weight in my arms, I caught Alek’s eye, and jerked my chin to one side fractionally, while glancing at Baird and shaking my head. He nodded without a word, and we walked down the ramp, off the helo.

  Caleb and Dave had a couple of litters waiting, so we carried our dead to them, and laid them down gently. Dave took Nick in hand and helped him toward the smaller GP tent, where I guessed he had the aid station set up. Bob crossed Tim’s hands over his chest. Hank didn’t have enough left of his right to do that, so I just adjusted him as well as I could. Then I stood up and faced Baird.

  Consciously or unconsciously, the remainder of our team had drifted into a group with Baird and Jason opposite. There was a growing tension in the air, and Caleb picked up on it first.

  “Guys,” he said, “What’s going on?”

  I brought my rifle off my back, and kept it slung in front of me, my hand on the pistol grip, the muzzle pointed at the dirt. “That’s a good question, Caleb,” I replied, not taking my eyes off of Baird. “Seems we got set up.”

  “What do you mean?” Alek asked. Baird was frowning in puzzlement and a little anger, his hands pointedly held out at his sides, empty.

  “Ask him,” I said, nodding toward Baird. “Care to explain why your boy Spider was commanding the fighters trying to get at us from the target building, Baird?” I asked.

  He looked taken aback and a little insulted. “You must have been mistaken. I’ve worked with Spider for five years.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t mistaken,” I said. “I shot him from less than fifty yards, through an eight-power scope. It was him.”

  Baird was watching me with as much intensity as I was watching him, his eyes searching mine for any trace of a lie, or uncertainty. I knew he wouldn’t find any. “Why were those Shabaab fighters waiting for Imad at the hostel that night?” I asked. “Why did he leave Spider’s side, and was almost immediately burned?”

  He was as pale as I’ve ever seen a black man turn. He wasn’t looking at me anymore; his gaze was questing around, his thoughts churning, trying to find an explanation for what I’d seen, for what had happened. I could tell he wasn’t having any luck.

  “He sold out Imad, and was waiting for us,” I ground out. “He was Shabaab, or Al Qaeda, or Brotherhood, or some fucking thing the whole fucking time, Baird. So here’s the question: did you know, in which case you’ve been playing us from the get-go, and we should just shoot you dead right here and now, or does your security just suck?” I was beyond pissed. I wanted to kill him so bad I could taste it. I wanted to do it with my bare hands.

  Only many years of discipline and restraint were keeping me rooted to where I was standing, and my rifle pointed at the ground.

  Jason was looking at me with narrowed eyes, as if trying to gauge whether or not I was telling the truth just by staring. Then, he turned his attention to Baird, a cold, expectant look in his eyes.

  Baird continued to look at us in disbelief. He couldn’t accept it yet.

  “I knew he’d spent time with the militias. That was what made him so valuable,” he explained. “I’d recruited him while I was still working for the Agency. He helped me bird-dog two warlords who were doing business with Baseej gunrunners who were bringing in weapons from Sudan, about five years ago. He saved my life at least twice. His contacts with the militias were what got me into Baidoa on my little fishing expedition. He got me the initial introductions.” He looked at me, then at Alek. ”I can’t imagine he’d turn.”

  “I’ve known Jeff a lot of years,” Alek said. “I’ve never known him to be wrong when he’s this certain before. So what’s the deal? Is your team compromised? Danny warned us that you were considered less than reliable by Langley. Were they right?”

  “I don’t know who’s been saying that bullshit, but it’s a lie,” he protested angrily. “If Langley had had a problem with the way I worked, they’d have recalled me. I retired, I wasn’t forced out.”

  “I knew Danny for a lot longer than I’ve known you,” Alek pointed out remorselessly. “Why should I trust you over him?”

  “I have a feeling that there isn’t a right answer to this, is there?” Baird said. “If I deny that Spider could have done what you’re saying he did, I’m a Shabaab double agent. If I admit that he was Shabaab, that he sold out your man and staged an ambush for us in Kismayo, then my security is unreliable. And if that’s the case, then by extension, so am I.” He looked steadily at us. “For what it’s worth, if it’s true, and Spider was dirty, which I am not admitting he was, then I had no knowledge of it.”

  “That’s small comfort to the guys we lost, now isn’t it?” Jim said harshly.

  Baird spread his hands helplessly. “I can’t change that. I can’t go back in time and undo last night.”

  “No, you can’t,” Alek said. “Neither can we. Unfortunately, all we can do is try to make sure there isn’t a repeat performance.” He pointed with his off hand, his meaty right still wrapped around the grip of his rifle. “So get on your birds and get out of here. We don’t need your help anymore.”

  “Just like that?” Baird said. “I pull your asses out of the fire, and this is the thanks I get?”

  “Just like that,” Alek affirmed. “I just lost four good friends last night. I can’t afford to take chances with the rest, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ve got enough evidence to call working further with you taking chances.”

  Baird stared at both of us in frustration, then, his fists clenched, spun on his heel and strode back to the Cougar. Jason looked at us coolly for a moment, then nodded fractionally, touching one hand to his hat brim in a mock salute. He turned and followed his boss without a word.

  The lot of us stood there stonily watching as both helos spun up and lifted. The wind of the rotor wash blew grit and gravel over us and the bodies. Bob bent down to brush the worst of it off the fallen. It wasn’t going to do them any good, but it was the gesture that counted.

  Bob was taking it hard. He hadn’t known either man as long as most of us had, but he’d been in the “peacetime” military. He’d never lost a buddy in combat before Colton, and now three more teammates and one who was close to being a teammate were gone in a night. He was trying to stay stoic like everybody else, but I could tell he was hurting.

  All of us were. But we weren’t out of the woods yet, so we pushed it into the dark places in the back of our minds and tried not to think about it. We’d all pay for it later, and I fully expected most of us would spend a couple of days blind drunk when we got out of Africa, but for now we couldn’t afford to hurt. So we clammed up, went stone-faced, and drove on.

  Once the birds were out of sight, Caleb came back over to us. “What the fuck was that all about?” he asked.

  “Some son of a bitch we were supposed to trust turned out to be a bad guy,” Jim said. “And as a result, we lost four guys.”

  Caleb looked down at the bodies. “Fuck.” It wasn’t eloquent, but it got the point across. He jerked a thumb at the big tent behind us. “The Colonel’s on VTC inside, wants to talk to you guys.” We all involuntarily glanced at the bodies. “Go on. We’ll take care of Hank and Tim.” He paused. “Was there any way to recover Rod?”

  Alek just shook his head. “Wasn’t enough left.”

  Caleb closed his eyes. “Fuck.”

  “Amen, brother,” Larry said, as we filed past and into the tent. Mike and Eddie followed along, leaving the bulk of their team to help Caleb.

  There wasn’t any air conditioning, so it was, if anything, hotter inside than it had been outside, under the sun. An industrial fan was blowing in the corner, trying to stir enough
of the air to keep the occupants breathing, but it didn’t help all that much. A couple of folding tables were covered in satcom gear, and Tom Heinrich’s face was already looking out of the screen of a laptop set on one of them.

  “Gents,” he said solemnly as we gathered around the table. “Caleb’s filled me in on some of it. What the hell happened?”

  Alek gave him the short version, up to our little confrontation with Baird outside. By the end, Tom had reached off screen, and come back with a cigarette, which he promptly lit up. “I don’t have the words, gentlemen. I know how you’re feeling right now.” He took a long drag. “I thought you should know that Al Masri has put out a new message, proclaiming that the infidels tried to rescue several of the ‘infidel criminals’ that their ‘brothers in Islam’ were holding righteously in Kismayo, blah, blah, and failed. He’s holding it up as a sign that Allah is with them, the time of the infidels’ superiority is at an end, and calling for all Muslims to strike down infidels wherever they can. The usual jihadi boilerplate, there really isn’t anything new.”

  “Did they kill any more of the hostages?” Mike asked.

  The brief flash of anger across the Colonel’s face answered that question even before he spoke. “Only fifteen this time, but yes. They hanged them in front of Kismayo University at sunup this morning. It hit the web just a few minutes ago. I’ll spare you the video.”

  I almost told him to play it anyway, but we really didn’t need to see it. We had enough of a reservoir of hate and discontent built up from last night to take us a long way.

  “I’ve got some other bad news,” Tom said carefully. “The CIA’s been told to pull the contract. This shit-show in Kismayo got enough of the wrong people concerned that the whole mess is now supposedly getting handed over to ‘negotiators’” He practically spat the word. “There were apparently some NGO handwringers in Kismayo, trying to do relief work. They’re decrying the ‘indiscriminate use of air support’ on your extraction. The local UN toady is screaming about illegal mercenaries being the greatest threat to stability in the country, again. The usual suspects are bleating about unauthorized special operations, and some of the biggest leakers on Capitol Hill are screaming that they weren’t informed in detail about what was going down. I don’t think they know it was a PMC on the ground, but that doesn’t matter. This operation is now officially high-visibility, and that makes it politically unacceptable. Some poor sod in the Clandestine Service is probably going to be hung out to dry for running a rogue operation. They might even put the blame on Danny’s head. Lord knows he’s not going to be able to defend himself now.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bob protested. “They’re up in arms about what we did, but not about the hundred fifty or so hostages that the bad guys are still holding?”

  “Most of them probably don’t even know about the hostages,” Tom admitted. “Most of the media’s been downplaying this ever since it happened. They couldn’t hide that there was an attack, but the official word is that with the GWOT being over, Lemonier was all but closed down. The only people who seem to actually know how many were there are the military and to some extent the families of the people stationed there. And the military leadership isn’t talking, because they’ve been ordered not to. It would reflect poorly on the present administration, and since it didn’t happen on US soil, it can be generally swept under the rug.” He stubbed out the cigarette and lit a fresh one. “Oh, there are some voices who are raising hell about it, but they’re considered, ‘unhelpful,’ I think is the new wordage. Those men and women are in the wind, now, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.”

  “Has the Agency been told about Danny?” Alek asked quietly.

  “They have,” Tom replied. “So has his wife. I added my condolences, and told her that you’d be by as soon as you could get back.” Alek nodded his thanks. There was an awkward silence for a minute after that. None of the rest of us knew Danny very well, but he and Alek had been close at one time.

  “So now what?” I asked into the quiet. “We just go home, bury our dead, and hand another success to these assholes? Fuck that.”

  “What else can we do, man?” Larry asked. “We’re a little outgunned here, and now we don’t even have what little support we had before. We’re as much in the wind as the hostages.”

  “Actually…” the Colonel put in carefully, “There is something. It might not save the hostages, and might make us all even more a bunch of pariahs back home, but we can still put the hurt on these fucking savages.”

  We all looked at him for a moment. “You have our attention,” I said.

  He gathered his thoughts for a moment, those icy eyes looking somewhere above the screen. “I was struck early on with just how little information we were getting from the CIA about the situation. Obviously, they let their assets slip, and then they pointed you to one that turned out to be unreliable in the worst way. I didn’t know about Baird at the time, but I figured it was time that we started developing our own intel base.

  “It’s still a project in its infancy,” he went on. “But I have already managed a couple of rather significant recruitments, which have already started to bear fruit. Given the nature of the present contract, I of course concentrated on subject matter experts in the Middle East and East Africa. What I’ve managed to dig up in the short time we’ve had to work on this is…interesting. One of my new recruits has been able to access certain realms of SIGINT that were previously out of our reach, as well as putting a few pieces together that we didn’t have before.

  “The new Egyptian Mukhabarat is becoming the Muslim Brotherhood’s equivalent of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. They’re very well-funded, they’re hardline Islamists, and they’re quite interested in exporting the Islamic revolution as far as it can go. Apparently, strategic control of the approaches to the Suez Canal was on their ‘to do’ list.

  “Their problem seems to be that they’re upset Hezbollah and the Qods Force has been upstaging them lately. While they got a good amount of traction in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and have been making progress in East Africa, the Iranian proxies have them on their heels in Lebanon and Anbar. They mostly seem to consider AQ to be unreliable these days, so they wanted to strike a major blow against the US to advance their own credibility with the Muslim street. Even as neutered as our foreign policy is these days, to Muslims, the US is still the Great Satan, and it’s still the primary symbolic target, even if the US government won’t lift a finger against them for fear of being called Islamophobic.

  “The Lemonier hit was their first big push. Apparently they’re comparing it to Osama’s gambit in Somalia in the ‘90s in some of their strategy calls. I don’t know if you remember, but it was the Black Sea shootdowns and the subsequent withdrawal that convinced Bin Laden that the US was a paper tiger, and emboldened his operations leading up to 9/11. Al Masri, or Mahmoud Al-Khalidi, now that we’ve had that particular kunyah exposed, sold the operation as a litmus test. In effect, they took our people to see if the response would be as overwhelming as the attack on the Taliban in ‘01 or the invasion of Iraq in ‘03. Since it wasn’t, he’s ecstatic, and is pushing for the ‘next step,’ whatever that is.”

  He stubbed out his second cigarette, and lit up a third. “This is where our opportunity comes in. Al-Khalidi’s holding a meeting to discuss the next stage. We don’t know what that is, but it apparently either involves AQAP, or he’s suspicious enough of his own people that he doesn’t want to meet where there are a lot of ears around, namely in Cairo. The meeting is apparently going in Yemen, in a small town outside of Aden, called, imaginatively, Little Aden. We don’t have a solid place yet, but I’ve looked at the imagery of the town. It’s not big. In fact, the Al-Hiswah power station is almost as big as the whole town. It should be possible to get in, kill or capture the attending jihadists, and get out.”

  There was a long moment of silence, each man in the tent thinking over what had happened, and what the Colonel
was offering. If the Lemonier hostage-taking really was just the first move in a new wave of attacks, we couldn’t really stand aside if we had a chance to take out the guy responsible.

  Of course, we weren’t technically soldiers anymore. We were contractors, guns-for-hire. If we wanted, we could walk away right now. There was no money in a raid in Yemen, and with the very real possibility that we wouldn’t get paid for the hard work and loss of the last month, that was a real concern.

  But, looking around at the rest, fresh from losing Tim, Rodrigo, and Hank to Al-Khalidi’s pals, I could see that none of us cared. Even Bob, who in the past would have been the first to argue for the money side, didn’t care. We had a shot at the guy responsible for the deaths of our friends, regardless of any wider geopolitical considerations, and we were going to take it.

  You fuck with us, you pay the bill.

  Alek turned back to the laptop. Tom was waiting impassively. “Give us all the targeting data you have,” Alek said. “I also need as up-to-date maps and imagery as you can get me, up to one hundred klicks from the town. I’ll check with Caleb and see if we’ve got the logistics to make the move to the Yemeni desert from here, or if we need more.”

  “You’ll have everything I can dredge up,” Tom said. “I might be able to get in touch with one of our previous clients with a ship in the area, in case we need a staging area for materiel.”

  The maps were already downloading. We started dropping our kit and getting to work.

  Chapter 30

  We had to do a little reorganizing. Alek’s team was desperately under strength, and while Caleb was also at half numbers, because half of his were still on the Lynch, we still needed them to hang back and run support. Without support, we probably would not make it out of Yemen.

  None of them were happy about it. They’d been stuck on the sidelines for this entire job, and we weren’t a very large company, so they’d known the guys we’d lost almost as well as we had. They were itching for some payback, but necessity can be a bitch.