by Brad Taylor
Ringo saw Jacob following the men with his eyes and said, “That’s right. Those are the chosen ones. Like me. The only Lost Boy helping out this mission will be Hussein. A true member of the Islamic State. Not some American surfer-boy imposter.”
Hussein snapped his head to Ringo and said, “What? I’m American too.”
“Yes, I know.” He gave his little arrogant smile and said, “If it were up to me, I’d leave you behind just because of your company, but your father’s Jordanian. Something that’s apparently going to be useful.”
Jacob said, “He can’t go with you. He’s with us. We need him.”
“For what? Cleaning our weapons? Cooking our food?”
Jacob saw his friend looking at him, Hussein’s eyes betraying panic at the words, realizing he was lost. Jacob said, “For . . . for the mission.”
Ringo laughed, and slapped Hussein’s back, saying, “Exactly right. The mission. The one you won’t be a part of.”
Jacob felt Hussein’s gaze on him, begging for help. It was all Jacob could do to physically restrain himself from killing Ringo outright.
13
Brett called, saying he was in position, but he was unclear how long he could remain. I looked at Knuckles, wearing a knit hat and a dreadlock wig, with his face, neck, and hands blacked out. I knew what he was thinking. If Brett is having trouble just standing around, how the hell am I going to last five seconds?
I keyed my radio and said, “What’s the issue?”
“Nothing big. The area’s just really rough, and the cockroaches are coming out now that the sun’s down.”
I winked at Knuckles and said, “Want me to send in your partner?”
“Hell no. I’d rather get beaten to death than be caught next to him in that ridiculous outfit. He looks like Dan Aykroyd on the train in Trading Places.”
Knuckles rolled his eyes. I studied him, and he did look a little like Aykroyd’s character. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to talk to anyone, and the whole idea was to prevent a random shanty-dweller from doing a double take at a white man wandering around the Kibera slums. It sounded stupid, but during the Rhodesian War a Special Forces unit called the Selous Scouts—arguably one of the best the modern world has ever seen—had done this very thing, infiltrating terrorist strongholds wearing greasepaint that made them look like the terrorists themselves.
We’d sent all of our data taken from Panda back to the Taskforce for analysis and learned that he was attempting to help the barbarians of ISIL increase their oil production, not with funds but with actual expertise. I’d recommended taking them off the board, and that had caused some consternation within the Oversight Council. Especially when I told them how I wanted to do it.
Retro came on. “Panda’s in position. Looks like the meeting’s a go.”
I said, “You clean? No issues?”
“No. We’re outside the ring of security, and Jennifer looks nothing like she did.”
We’d scrubbed everything associated with Panda from our entry earlier, and due to his huge electronic tether, could now follow his every move with Taskforce assets. Right after Jennifer’s little escapade in his room, we’d been forced to relocate to another hotel in the city center and stay as far away from Panda as possible, focusing on the five Nigerians. I’d come up with the plan to neutralize them, then Panda had initiated a meeting with the group’s leader.
I’d halted our operations, going back to the Taskforce and asking for a modification of the course of action. Asking to interdict the leader of the Nigerians after the meeting instead of my original plan. Simply removing all five would have been easiest, but we would lose valuable intelligence against the Islamic State. We might get information from the Saudis after they interrogated Panda, but it wasn’t a given, and even if we did, the information would always be suspect.
The last time we’d wholeheartedly trusted our Arab counterparts had been in late 2009, when Jordan had fed us an asset from inside al Qaida, who supposedly had a location to Osama bin Laden. The CIA had met him at a forward operating base in Afghanistan to debrief, eager to learn what he knew and never questioning his motivations for turning against his AQ masters. They completely relied on his vetting from Jordanian intelligence.
He had other plans.
He turned out to be a triple agent on a suicide mission. He exited his vehicle inside the perimeter of the base and detonated his vest, causing the largest single loss of CIA personnel in history.
I preferred a little ground truth to secondhand KSA intelligence, and had convinced the Taskforce to let me give it a try after this meeting. Panda might be a bigwig Saudi, preventing us from putting the screws to him, but the Nigerian was a nobody, and interrogating him could provide quality information. The problem was that only Retro remained clean. Everyone else on the team had been involved with the extraction of Jennifer.
We’d mulled over options, and Jennifer had convinced me that she was good to go also, since she’d had on a wig and fancy clothes when they’d met, and Panda had spent most of the time in the toilet. Today, she was back to being a dirty blonde, with her hair let down and covering her face, and had dressed blandly, with a set of glasses to further alter her appearance.
Retro’s call was letting me know they weren’t close to being burned. I clicked over to the command net, calling Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander, currently staged in a warehouse four miles away with the support team.
“Showboat, this is Pike. Conditions are set. Do we have execute authority?”
It wasn’t his official callsign, but the only time Blaine ever showed up for an operation was to control the endgame, so I liked poking him in the eye. In effect, he got all the glory without slogging through the work, something I always kidded him about.
“Pike, Showboat. Standby for Omega.”
The Taskforce called every stage of an operation a different Greek letter, starting with Alpha for the introduction of forces. Omega—the last letter—meant we were at an endgame. Ordinarily, we received Omega from the Oversight Council prior to an operation and that was it. We executed how we saw fit, then told them the results. In this case, I had Omega for my plan of removing the five, but given the size of the target, the fact that we’d just executed a separate Omega operation against Panda on Kenyan soil, and the curveball I’d thrown about taking the leader for interrogation, the Council had grown skittish. For the first time, they held execute authority in DC with Kurt. Which was cutting things a little close, to say the least.
Brett called. “Trigger. The men are headed to dinner. The leader’s on the move.”
We’d watched the group for three days, and they were extremely clannish. Everything they did, they did together, which had been the genesis of my plan. Right up until we’d gotten the intercept about a meeting.
On the team net I said, “Leader’s broken from the group?”
“Yep. He’s headed north. They’re headed east.”
North was to the Adams Arcade shopping area on Ngong Road, and to the coffee shop where Panda was sitting. Phase one’s a go.
I said, “Fall back. Meet us at the linkup. Dan Aykroyd here’s got the package ready.”
I put the van in gear, seeing Knuckles grimace. I called Blaine and said, “Do we have Omega for the leader? He’s on the move, and Panda is set.”
“Pike, they want to wait until after the meeting before giving you Omega on him. You report the situation, and then they’ll decide.”
“Damn it, Blaine, you know we can’t run an operation like that. I need execute authority before, so I can deal with any contingencies.”
“Then you don’t have it. Execute the original plan and let him go.”
Shit.
I said, “Okay, okay. I’ll send a SITREP when I have it.”
We continued south, and the area began to get seedy as we approached the infamous Kibera slums. Thankfully, the Nigerians were staying in a decrepit building on the outskirts and not in the shantytowns of the slum pro
per. If they had been, there was no way we could execute my plan. Kibera was a no-man’s-land of gangs, glue-sniffing youth, and splintered lives wreaking desperation.
Comprised of a rat-warren maze of houses built out of plastic, scrounged wood, and tin cans, Kibera was one of the largest slums in the world, jam-packed with an incredibly dense population that had nothing better to do than sit around and stare at whoever was around. Probing it would have been a nonstarter. Luckily, the Nigerians’ safe house was in a courtyard of broken concrete structures just north. It prevented us from driving right up, but at least we could infiltrate it on foot.
I saw a penlight flash and pulled over. Knuckles slid open the door, and Brett entered the van. He saw Knuckles and laughed, shaking his head. “You sure you don’t want me to do this on my own? I’ve done it plenty of times in the past.”
Brett was an old-school ground branch operative from the CIA, and had conducted some seriously hairy singleton operations in his career, but there was no reason to do that here. I wanted one Operator pulling security while another penetrated the house.
I said, “He’s going.”
“Okay, but he’s also carrying the dope. We get held up, and I’m leaving him behind, dumbass disguise and all.”
Knuckles scowled, not liking the mission at all. He held up a bag of what looked like balloons filled with brown sand, about thirty of them, each a half inch across. He said, “That’s not the plan. You carry the dope. I break inside.”
And that was the operation, in a nutshell. We were going to plant black tar heroin, ready for distribution, inside the shack the Nigerians were using, then alert the police. They’d be locked up indefinitely after the arrest, and no longer available to help the Islamic State. It seemed like a pretty simple plan to me, but man alive, trying to sell that to the Oversight Council was damn near impossible. I mean, it wasn’t like we weren’t walking outside the law anyway. You’d have thought I’d demanded to start selling heroin on the streets of DC to fund our own activities.
Eventually, since there weren’t a lot of options and it solved the problem neatly, Kurt had convinced the Council, and Blaine had flown over, illegally smuggling in heroin so that we could illegally plant it then illegally frame the Nigerians. Neat. At least, I thought it was. Blaine, on the other hand, was decidedly piqued when I’d met him in the storage facility.
He’d said, “You know how hard it was to get this? And how much trouble you’ve caused?”
I said, “Don’t blame me. Blame the Islamic State.”
14
Knuckles held out the bag and Brett said, “Why me?”
“Because you can run like a cheetah. I get caught, and I’m doing some serious explaining as it is with this paint on me. You get caught, and it’s because you wanted to.”
He was right in that assessment. Brett was somewhat of a freak of nature on foot, running faster than anyone I’d ever met. I said, “Look at it this way, if you did this as a singleton, you’d be carrying it anyway.”
He took the bag and our earpieces squelched. “Pike, Retro. Panda and the Nigerian have made linkup. Meeting ongoing, and he’s already passed some sort of package across.”
All right. Intel.
I said, “Sounds good. Keep us abreast of what’s happening. Drop team is on the way.”
I turned to the two cat burglars and said, “Get lost. You need to be in and out before the meeting breaks up. I need you for phase two.”
Brett slid the door open, saying, “See you on the back side.”
They disappeared into the darkness and I began readying the kit necessary for the takedown. Tasers, drugs, and flex ties.
I called Blaine, saying, “Meeting’s ongoing. We’ve got a lock-on to the target, as briefed. What’s the status with Omega?”
“What’s the status with the product?”
“Being executed now.”
He said, “Stand by.”
I sat in the van, listening to the cooling engine tick in the darkness, waiting. Resisting the urge to contact Retro or Knuckles to see what was going on. I saw two men coming down the street, barely visible and blending into the shadows. They stopped outside the van, whispering to each other.
Great. Just what I need. Someone looking for some hubcaps.
I leaned forward from the back, keeping to the shadows, and flashed the lights. They jumped like a firecracker had gone off behind them and scurried away, making me smile.
I waited another seven minutes, growing antsy. Finally, the command net came alive. “Pike, Showboat. You got Omega with a caveat.”
“Roger. What’s the caveat?”
“Everything has to be perfect. You have the target and can get him without drama.”
“That’s always a rule.”
“Pike, don’t push my buttons. This isn’t my first rodeo with you. Straight from the Oversight Council—if it smells even a little bad, you let him go to get wrapped up with everyone else.”
“Okay. Roger all. You set with the Nairobi cops?”
“That was a little too quick. You understand the intent?”
I heard the team radio squawk.
I said, “Sir, I got it. Gotta go. Team’s calling.”
I clicked off without waiting on him to reply and said, “Last calling station, this is Pike.”
“Pike, Retro. Meeting’s breaking up.”
“Already?”
“Yep. Leader’s standing up.”
Shit. “Does he have the package?”
“Yeah. It was one of those padded envelopes. He opened it. I saw an old-school flip phone and a notebook.”
“Keep eyes on. . . . Break, break, Knuckles, this is Pike. Status.”
“We haven’t gone in yet. Got some squatters drinking chang’aa.”
Chang’aa was an ungodly home brew that was about fifty percent alcohol and fifty percent formaldehyde, battery acid, jet fuel, or some other liquid. I said, “How long have you been watching?”
Knuckles said, “Since we got here. They’re blitzed, but conscious. Wait, one just fell over.”
“Ignore them. Get in. They’re too stoned to remember anything.”
“It would make more sense to just sit them out. A few more minutes, and they’ll both be sleeping.”
“I don’t have that time. Panda’s meeting’s breaking up.”
Brett came on. “If they intervene? What’s the ROE?”
“Prevent them from seeing Knuckles enter. Period. Just get in, now. The leader’s about to move and I can’t execute without you two.”
In a calm monotone I heard, “Roger all.”
By all accounts, I should have aborted the second phase, letting the leader go. The situation had already exceeded Blaine’s intent, but luckily, his idea of “perfect” and mine were two different things. I wanted the leader.
Jennifer came on. “Pike, Koko. Leader’s shaking hands. What’s the call?”
Koko was Jennifer’s callsign. Something she’d earned on a mission in Indonesia by annoying Knuckles with repeated stories about a talking gorilla.
I said, “We have Omega. No change to the plan. You guys lock the back door.”
She said, “I monitored last transmission. You have an assault element?”
“Not yet, but I will.”
I heard nothing for a moment, then a long-drawn-out “Roger that. . . .”
The problem with the two-phased operation was that I had to use the same team for both. I had planned it for a staggered execution, but now it had become simultaneous. Retro and Jennifer would do nothing but prevent the guy from escaping. Brett would drive the van, and Knuckles and I would do a rolling interdiction. But that was all dependent on having Brett and Knuckles. I couldn’t very well drive the van and assault.
Brett came on, breathing heavily, “Inbound, inbound, fire up the van. We’re dragging an anchor.”
I leapt into the driver’s seat, saying, “Where are you?”
All I heard was, “Coming out right where we ent
ered.”
Which was about a half mile down the road. I started driving, saying, “What’s up?”
“Gang territory. Chang’aa brewery.”
“Knuckles?”
He came on, sounding like he was breathing into a paper bag. “Can’t talk.”
I saw movement ahead, and recognized Brett in the headlights. I stomped the gas, reaching him just as Knuckles broke out of the close confines of the buildings. Brett jerked open the sliding door, and both spilled inside. I looked to my right and saw a pack of shouting youths waving sticks and running up the alley.
Brett slammed the door shut and shouted, “Go, go, go!”
I did, hearing something slam into the back of the van. I went about a quarter mile, circling back toward Ngong Road, then stopped. I turned around and said, “What the hell did you two chuckleheads do?”
Knuckles sat up, his dreadlock wig askew and his paint starting to run. He said, “I ought to kick your ass for making me wear this.”
I said, “Tell me you didn’t compromise the operation.”
Brett said, “No. That went fine. Drugs are in place. In fact, everything went fine right up until we were walking back through the neighborhood. A couple of thugs stopped us, demanding to know what we were doing in their AO. Apparently, there’s been some gang fighting between the various chang’aa brewers over turf. We just had the bad fortune to stumble into it.”
“And?”
Brett grinned. “And everything was going perfectly, right up until they shoved Knuckles. It was too dark to tell he was a cracker white boy, but his dreadlocks slipped. They saw that just fine.”
Knuckles said, “Tell him the rest, you shit.”
“What?”
Knuckles looked at me and said, “He took off running. Leaving me behind.”
Brett held up his hands, saying, “Just following orders. You said no fighting that would spike.”
I laughed and said, “All right, all right. Shake it off. Phase two is a go. We’ve got Omega and the leader’s on the move. Brett, take the wheel. Knuckles, get ready.”
