Harper shrugged. “Maybe we should go a few rounds, Louis. Best two out of three. I promise not to break too many bones. Better yet, why don’t I deal with your two flunkies? I’m sure we’ll be able to get the blood out of the carpet—eventually.” He paused. “I want you out of here, Louis. I don’t ever want to see you again, and if I do, I’ll break something on you.”
“Jim, we do have laws against such behavior,” he chided.
“Laws never bothered you before, Louis. In fact, nothing moral, or right, or good, or pure, ever bothered you.” He spat the last out like bitter peanuts.
Louis nodded again. “We need you, Jim. We need what you, and only you, can give us. We need you.”
“The last time you needed me, a whole bunch of people got killed. Good people got killed for very bad reasons.” He walked around the parent wall to the door and flipped the lock shut. “What did you ever tell those mothers as to why their sons came home in body bags?”
Louis turned to face Jim. “We told them—”
“We!” snapped Jim. “There’s nowe here, Louis. What didyou tell them? Did you go to their homes and knock on their doors? Did you fold up a flag and hand it to a young wife with a little child? Did you give a medal to a heartbroken father with some letter written by our President? Did you do that Louis? Didyou make the calls?”
A thought occurred to Louis. Maybe the truth would work with Harper. It was a rare concept for Louis Edwards; he would have to think about it before employing such a bold tactic. “No. I didn’t make those calls. A Marine Corp Major and a Chaplain made those calls. I did write the letters, and those boys did die for their country. They followed you, Jim, because they believed in you.”
Harper closed his eyes, not wishing to see those men. “They followed me for duty, honor and country. Nevertheless, somebody knew we were coming. Somebody told them where to find us. And they kept shooting.”
“You lived and a few others made it out. They lived because you brought them out, Jim,” he reminded. ”There were some who wanted to nominate you for the Medal of Honor. Of course, it was a black op and everything—big time presidential awards would be somewhat out of step for what never happened. You’re a hero.” He leaned back against the half wall. “Those boys you brought out alive, they’ll always remember you. And this time it’ll be different.”
Jim snapped his attention back to Louis. “This time? There is no this time. I’m not leading more men into another ambush. I’ve been there, and done that. Louis, I took ten men in and came out with three. One of them will never walk again.”
“Yes. One of the three you brought was Jonas. He works for me now. I think he’s trying to be like you.” He raised his hands in compromise.
“Tell him there are better things to strive for than to be like me. What use is there to have a past that you can’t share with your wife and kids because they might think you’re a monster once they know.”
“Jim, you knew the risks. There aren’t any guarantees in this life. You lost some men. You got the job done.”
Getting the job done was Edwards’ mantra. Jim had always gotten the job done—it’s just difficult living with yourself after some of the jobs. “I don’t do work like that anymore, Louis. So why don’t you take whatever it is you’re pushing and get out of here. I’m sure the Beltway crowd you work for these days will figure something out.”
Louis chuckled for the first time. “The Beltway crowd I work for would have a hard time finding Florida on the map if it didn’t have a lot of rich contributors. This isn’t for the Beltway crowd. It’s for the country. We need you because you’ve done it before. We can’t mess up on this.”
Louis had always been quick to wave God and country or honor and duty. Of course, those were just words to Louis. They were more than words to Jim. Throughout his career in the nether world known as Spec War, or black ops, or whatever euphemism was current these days, he had attempted to maintain a balance and a code of honor. Men followed Jim because they believed in his ability to lead them through the hard parts. His ability to lead and his self-confidence in his ability to survive were intangible assets men followed into the hardest battles.
Louis was very good at sending men to die. The part about holding them in your arms as the life left their eyes was something reserved to people like Jim. “Get out of here.” He flipped the lock on the door and shoved it open. “Go on. Get out of here.”
“It’s Iraq, Jim,” he said quickly. “Something happened last night. I think it’s something real bad and I need you to go back to Iraq. I don’t have time to plan a proper penetration. I need a team leader who can think on his feet and improvise a strategy.”
Harper paused, a war seemed to rage across his features. Slowly he let the door shut. He closed his eyes, trying to forget Iraq—a magic word of sorts—the cradle of civilization where the Tigris and Euphrates ran together, and maybe the location of Eden. Rocks, sand, pain, and blood blistered his memory from a ground war that lasted a lot longer than one hundred hours recorded on television. Special Forces had been in country for over six months before Stormin’ Norman sent the tanks over the dirt berms. There were subsequentin country penetrations required to monitor the Iraqi madman, and the terrible, bitter loss.
“You hunted Scuds in the desert. You wrecked communication centers for the Republican Guard. You penetrated their computer systems. You’ve gone in and out three times since the Gulf War. We may need to get back into their computer systems again. You know them. You coded a backdoor so we could watch what they were doing. Well, they’re doing something again.”
Jim slowly shook his head. Louis certainly sanitized what he had done. Getting into Iraq’s Data Center had been easy. Getting back out had cost him a friend. It’s hard to visit a gravesite in the middle of the desert for someone who should have never been there.
“They received something last night. We think it’s a chemical or nuclear weapon.”
* * * *
Jerry and Jim had just finished planting a series of special user accounts in Iraq military information systems. Jerry looked up from the terminal, sweat streaming down his face. His hands wrapped around the M-16 A2 as he observed the two dead technicians on the floor. Jim hurriedly typed in the last of the commands on the aging HP-3000 systems. They were a two-man penetration team attempting to infiltrate a major installation—madness.
The doors leading into the computer room slid open without warning. Jerry yelled something and charged, firing the M-16 from his hip. Jim rolled sideways, pulling the black Mossberg up and ready. Rifle shots whistled through the room hitting irreplaceable equipment. The zing of bullets coming too close brought an instant response as the Mossberg roared with its full 12 gauge fury. The firefight was over as quickly as it had started—three more dead men on the floor leading into the computer room.
Jerry had been hit twice in the chest by armor piercing rounds. The Kevlar vest stopped the first at the cost of a broken rib, but the second made it through. The wound made a sucking sound each time Jerry took a breath. Jim hefted his friend on one shoulder. They tottered drunkenly down the bunker’s long corridor. Thin trails of blood marked their exodus and alarms blared throughout the complex. A distant explosion rumbled through the compound—probably one of the charges they had set up wired into the alarm system.
They came to a corridor intersection and started towards the exit. They collided with an Iraqi fire team. Jim went sideways, burying an elbow in the first man’s ear. The Iraqi soldier’s head smashed against the concrete wall. He collapsed like a broken doll.
Jerry brought his Browning Hi Power to bear. He double tapped the soldier he was hanging onto. The much-maligned 9mm round is extraordinarily effective when jammed against someone’s stomach. Jerry jerked the trigger twice. His attacker staggered and pitched backward, carrying Jerry into the next soldier.
Jim turned to his next target. He sent a back leg front kick straight to the groin. His target forgot about holding his rifle
and concentrated on breathing. Jim latched onto the back of his head and drove his other knee straight into the Iraqi’s nose. A bloody explosion erupted as Jim’s second target tilted backwards.
Jerry was weakening quickly. His left hand clutched at the rifle of the final fire team member. The Iraqi was kicking violently to free himself from the two men on top of his legs. He never saw Jim’s boot reach out and shatter the base of his chin—lights out a fourth time.
Jim lifted Jerry bodily off the two Iraqi soldiers. “How we doing?”
“Never felt better,” he wheezed.
“Liar,” Jim hissed.
They started their run for the door. Before taking the last half stairway to the outside, Jim slid Jerry back to the floor. Sweat was streaming down Jerry’s face, and his lips seemed a bit blue. Jim pulled open Jerry’s combat blouse and pushed back the Kevlar vest. The puckered entry wound continued to leak and wheeze. “We’ve got to do something about this.”
Jerry nodded and smiled, “It ain’t pretty, Jim. I’ve lost a lot of blood.”
Jim cut apart the combat blouse into two bandages. Not the cleanest solution, but maybe enough to get them out. From his backpack, he pulled a roll of duct tape and wound his partner’s chest until the worst of the sucking sound was gone. They had lost their first aide kit sometime earlier.
“What have you got loaded in that thing?” He nodded to the Mossberg 590 12 gauge on the floor. It was a black, nasty looking weapon with a twenty-inch barrel, ghost ring sites, a pistol, and forend grips. The grips were specially angled to control the considerable recoil of full powered rounds.
“Rifled slug—seven of them.” A rifled slug is a chunk of lead weighing one and a half ounces. It has the diameter of a penny and it is a little more than an inch long with a muzzle velocity of 2700 feet per second. A Mossberg 590 is capable of bulls-eye shooting these slugs out to one hundred yards. The close quarter combat situations that Jim found himself in made these things one-shot showstoppers.
The door leading into the bunker began to open out. Both men twisted towards the unexpected intrusion. Jim grabbed the Mossberg off the floor. He pushed the safety forward with his thumb revealing the red fire dot, and fired before the door was half way open. The first shot deflected along the angle of the door crunching into and through someone standing to side of the door. It also forced the door open faster than expected for the second man up there.
Pump. Eject. Fire!
The second round caught the next Iraqi full in the chest. He disappeared from the frame of the doorway. The slug pancaked on the trauma plate of his flak jacket and hurtled him backward six yards. The door banged closed followed by a whump! The doorframe seemed to buckle inward.
“Sounds like a grenade, Jimmy.”
Harper nodded. “I think we need to leave.”
They scrambled to their feet and hobbled up the steps. Jim kicked open the door and they emerged into a rock strewn quarry. Saddam had hidden his most sensitive sites either in the open, behind the façade of palaces, or under the plentiful amounts of sand. Stealth was used to secure locations rather than high security, high profile installations. While this prevented frequent visits from the United States Air Force, it did raise certain security problems when ground teams penetrated installations.
The Republic Guard survived due to resource dispersal. Small four-man fire teams protected these installations. In the case of Saddam’s Data Center, they were committed piece meal. Unfortunately, they were still arriving.
They hobbled past two very dead soldiers and two others who looked close to death. Jim folded Jerry into the passenger seat of the Jeep before clambering in himself.
“Don’t you think I should drive—in case you need to shoot?”
Jim shook his head. He could see his friend was losing consciousness. The best hope he had was to exit them from the battlefield. He pumped another shell into the Mossberg, and flipped the safety back on. “I think you should try to sleep.” He gunned the Jeep and sped into the desert night.
Jerry died two days later in the desert between Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq. Jim buried him in a small grave under a cairn of stones. He said a prayer and marked the grave with a cross. It took another seven days on foot before Jim found a village in Jordan with a phone.
* * * *
“Look, Jim, I know this is a painful subject for you, but I really do need you. I don’t have any time to get someone else prepped for this kind of mission. You know the desert.”
Harper focused his eyes on Louis again.
“All right, Louis,” he said calmly.
Edwards stopped talking and stared. A smile began to curl under his fading mustache.
“This is what it’ll cost you.” He flipped the lock on the door shut again. “You’d better get something to write on, Louis, and you’d better have it all taken care of before you come to pick me up.”
“What exactly do you want?” He pulled out a notebook.
“One million dollars, tax-free, for Jerry’s widow, and full scholarships for his kids—you never took care of them after he died, now, we make it right. No strings attached. Jerry already earned it. For anybody going on this mission, same deal—this time the million and scholarships pay off in case of death or serious injury. That’s a phone call for you, Louis.” He pointed at the office. “Go on, make the calls while I change. I want confirmation faxed back to this number.” He started back towards the locker room, then turned back to Louis. “Don’t even think of double crossing me on this Louis. You’d never be able to run far enough to save your miserable hide.”
“Now Jimbo, I can’t exactly—”
“You’ve got ten minutes.” Jim turned and walked towards the end of the school.
CHAPTER SIX
Fao Peninsula, Iraq
Saturday, November 15, 1997
8:30 P.M. (GMT + 3.00)
The Al Faw oil depot sits on triangle shaped strip of land called the Fao Peninsula. It is the southernmost Iraqi outpost and serves as the final surface oil depot for the underground pipeline running from the massive Rumaila and Zubair oilfields. The pipeline runs parallel to the Tigris River as it races towards the Persian Gulf. Once out of land, the pipeline continues submerged to the twin oil terminals, Kohr al Amaya and Mina al Bakr.
It is amazing the sand is still gray and not blood red. Across the Fao Peninsula, the Iraq/Iran war extracted a two-year vengeance from the hapless people living there. The Iranians gained the peninsula, and the Iraqis were determined to regain the same piece of land. The cost was horrendous. At one point, the Iraqi army stored tens of thousands of corpses in huge refrigerators. To prevent an uprising against the regime during the Iraq/Iran War, the dead bodies were parceled out as carefully as any other rationed commodity. Saddam believed that if people learned the truth regarding the toll in human life, a revolution might have brought the regime down.
River traffic navigates north on the Tigris moving shallow draft boats from the Persian Gulf to as far north as Al Basra. Traditionally, Al Basra is Iraq’s port city, serving as the gateway to the Gulf. The Gulf War, and the resulting southern uprising, changed everything. The Republic Guard crushed the rebellion with murderous rage, leaving Iraq’s port city barely functioning. The port lies unused, and the city’s sewer system has never been repaired.
On the Tigris’ eastern bank lies Iran—sometimes ally and sometimes enemy. To the west is the waterway leading to Umm Qasr. It is a natural inlet between Kuwait and Iraq. The Raudhatain oil fields lay along the once contested border. Between Al Faw and Umm Qasr, there is nothing but rugged terrain, burnt out hulls, and craters left from the Gulf War.
During the Gulf War, carrier based aircraft used the same inlet leading to Umm Qasr to navigate towards targets in Kuwait and southern Iraq. The shoreline’s angle points like a dagger towards Al Basra, and the Tigris leads straight to the heart of Baghdad. Even when navigation computers failed in the shot up A-6Intruders , pilots still found their way home following the
inlet back to the waiting carriers. Had an amphibious landing taken place, as many speculated, part of it would have been against Jazirat Bubiyan—the island forming the eastern Kuwait border.
Tonight Al Faw took on a greater significance. A single lorry drove away from the populous riverbanks and into the desert night. A curious mixture of men rode into the darkness this night. Two sailors huddled in the rear of the lorry. Each was bound with heavy police-restraint handcuffs and leg irons. One was the hapless crane operator, who had killed several Chinese sailors the night before. His inattention with the crane and the ensuing panic left several men to the mercy of the sea. The other sailor was the first officer who had made the mistake of reporting the disaster.
Four members of the Special Republic Guard watched them. None of the soldiers spoke. They knew the price men paid for failure under Saddam’s regime. These men had failed on a particularly important mission. They had no need to know the specifics of the mission, and if the truth were known, they had no desire to learn further secrets of their masters. Knowledge could get a person killed. It certainly doomed these sailors. No one doubted the outcome of tonight’s activities.
The last two in the rear of the lorry were dressed in neoprene diving suits. In the dim light, they meticulously checked over their SCUBA gear, and the additional gear required for the salvage operation. An inflatable rubber raft, grappling hooks, lines, and underwater lamps lay in the far corner of the lorry. Each checked their weight belts, survival knife, regulator, and tanks. They would be operating underwater at night—something akin to near total blackness. Should the lamps fail, they might never find their way back to the surface from inside the ship’s hold.
Colonel Taha Duri sat in the passenger side of the lorry. He had no friends. Colonels of theAl Amn al-Khas —Iraq’s Special Security Service—were supposed to be feared, not liked. He understood better than most the shifting tides within Iraq’s security structures. It was like riding a wild horse through the night. He had learned to expect the unexpected. Betrayal and treason were always just beyond the horizon. A sharp knife between the ribs or a bullet in the back of the head often became a remedy for troublesome issues.
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